He looked much younger than his twenty-one years. He might have been a giant twelve-year-old. He was another one who lived a somewhat routine life. Cathery's hours in the park might vary, but he was there each day, always sitting on the same bench. He must have been sitting there, only yards away from the murder site, during some part of the day his grandmother was murdered, Cathery was working at his portable chessboard, oblivious to other life forms on the planet. Two months ago, NYPD investigators had discovered that this oblivion worked both ways. The doormen and residents of the square were so accustomed to his presence, Cathery had become invisible to them. They could no more swear to his comings and goings than they could swear the fire hydrants had not been missing for a morning and then restored to their accustomed places in the afternoon.
The deceased Pearl Whitman had been Cathery's only alibi for the time of his grandmother's murder. Mallory wondered what Markowitz would have made of that. He had been no believer in coincidence. He might have wondered if Pearl Whitman had wavered in her testimony. Or was it just Cathery's hard luck that his alibi was the last victim?
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow knows.
Mallory smiled at the memory of the old radio program's opening line. Markowitz had never given up his lesson plans to inculcate her with a creative vision that could see around corners and beyond normal parameters. Her latest exercise in imagining was the thought that, if there were aliens among us, Henry Cathery would be one of them. His eyebrows were permanently surprised, and contradicted by his half-lidded lethargic eyes which rolled around in their sockets in a listless fashion. The mouth was small and fixed in the permanent moue of one who had recently stepped on a dog turd. He was also odd in his reclusive habits. There was a strange little relationship with a badly-dressed young woman who sometimes came to sit beside him and hold one-way conversations while he ignored her, but he had no real friends.
And neither did Mallory have any friends, not now that she and Charles were business partners.
If Markowitz had abandoned the FBI profile which Cathery fitted so well, he had not abandoned Cathery, but only saved him off to one side of the cork board in a class by himself. Cathery would have come into a large trust from his parents' estate whether the grandmother lived or died. He didn't fit the money motive quite so well as Gaynor.
She had fixed the blind spot for the NYPD surveillance team and parked closer to Jonathan Gaynor's building; A cab pulled to the curb four cars in front of her, and she made a note that the giantess and her small entourage had arrived an hour earlier this week. The boy was first to alight from the cab. Now the Dobermann puppy barked as a doorman joined the cabby in unloading the paraphernalia of bags and table, gramophone and boxes. When the giantess emerged from the back seat of the cab, Mallory matched the woman, stat for stat, against the computer-raided rap sheet of a high-tech con artist whose description listed height and weight, companions of boy and Dobermann. But not the same Dobermann. The rap sheets went back for years; this dog was not six months old.
So far, her only inroad on Gramercy Park was Charles's connection to Edith Candle, the woman in the SEC investigation on Whitman Chemicals, the woman who proved Markowitz's theory on the relatedness of every living being. Now, if she could only cultivate or terrorize the giantess, it could be her entree to the community. Perhaps with a light threat, the mere twist of an enormous arm, she could leave the car, the sidewalk, and move freely among the old women of old money.
She raised up the telescoping lens of her camera and focussed on the face of the giantess. This woman was not the fair mulatto Mallory had taken her for from the distance of the last sighting. The irises were dark with the cast of blue gunmetal, and sliding like oiled bearings within the Asian folds of her eyes. Her complexion was the olive tone of the Mediterranean. Her nostrils and lips were classic African. Today, her hair, long and reddish brown, was hanging in a straight fall below the cap of the scarf. How many races lived under that immense skin? She was the whole earth.
The giantess lit a black cheroot and called to the little boy, who moved towards her, walking as though his feet weighed twenty pounds, each one. The boy's hands hung at his sides, and his head lolled on his chest. What was wrong with him?
The giantess headed for the door to the apartment building. Beneath the long bright print of the dress, her impossibly tiny feet moved quickly along the sidewalk. The woman spoke Spanish to the cabby, French to the boy, and then chattered with the doorman in English. The babble ceased abruptly behind the glass door.
The warm sun on Mallory's face was suddenly blocked by shadow.
"Officer, I want you to arrest that person!"
What? Oh Christ, where had this woman come from?
Mallory looked up through the open car window at a pinch-faced matron in her middle fifties. The woman's hair was dark brown and unnatural for the lack of white strands to go with the sagging jowls and the puffy, lined eyes. The linen suit was Lord and Taylor, and the pearls were real.
"I said, I want that person arrested. Now!"
The woman pointed to the door which had enveloped the small troop of woman, boy and dog.
"Go get her," said the well-dressed matron in an authoritative voice accustomed to charging vicious dogs to eat delivery boys.
"I'm not a cop, lady."
"Oh, yes you are."
"Lady, I'm – "
"I did wonder at first. Your car used to be so neat. But those are take-out containers on the back seat, aren't they?"
Mallory turned around to look at the seat behind her. Newspapers and sandwich wrappers mingled with notebooks and cardboard deli containers, straws and sugar cubes, catsup and mustard packets, empty cartridge boxes and white plastic bags with the logo of the drugstore where she bought her film. A half-eaten sandwich showed dully through a layer of wax paper. How had it happened? she wondered, as if she had lost the memory of filling her car with the trash of the typical stake-out vehicle.
Why hadn't she just painted a damn sign on the side of the car? If this ever got back to Jack Coffey, he'd laugh his ass off. And then, he'd change her compassionate leave status to a fall suspension without pay, without badge and gun.
"I'm not a cop."
"And all those coffee cups. And your car is tan, isn't it? You're a cop, and if you don't arrest that woman, I'm going to report you. I know Commissioner Beale very well. We have the same dentist."
"I'm not a cop."
"So, you haven't been on stake-out every day this week and last week, too?"
Tm a private cop."
"Pardon?"
Mallory handed her a business card.
"See? Not a real cop. The commissioner wouldn't like it if I arrested somebody."
The woman stared at the card, and then her mouth hurried over to one side of her face in the slant line of the skeptic as she read the lines of maroon print.
"Discreet investigations? You call this discreet?"
Jonathan Gaynor, nephew of the late Estelle Gaynor, had just stepped out onto the sidewalk. Mallory switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. He had changed his clothes and donned a baseball cap, but from any distance, she could pick him out by the body language. He had the long-legged, no-bones gait of a scarecrow, and as he moved on down the sidewalk, he seemed blown along by the wind.
He was awkward but not unattractive. She favored fall beards and dark hair, and she would have found the lean, ruddy face very appealing if not for the possibility that Gaynor had gutted her old man and left him to die alone.