"Would you like to take a shot at Redwing? She's giving a seance tomorrow afternoon. You'd have to be pre-screened and approved. Would you be willing to call Mrs Penworth? She's hosting the seance. I got my invitation through her daughter. It might be better if you called Penworth directly. Maybe you could tell her you'd like to contact your dead aunt?"
"Seriously?" His elbow jerked back, and his startled leg connected with the low coffee table. A delicate crystal vase skittered to the edge of the table and hung there just over the wooden lip and above the unforgiving marble floor.
"I'm very serious," said Mallory. "If it wouldn't be too hard on you, it might help with the investigation."
"But why would you want me there?"
"I'd like to know if Redwing can tell me anything about your aunt that wouldn't be common knowledge."
"So you do think she's connected to the victims."
One leg intended to cross the other, but a misinformed knee made contact first with the crystal vase. The vase moved over the edge of the table on one rolling foot.
Mallory's hand shot out to catch it on its way to the floor. She set it back on the table in its original position.
"No. If there was a connection, we would have turned it up by now. I'm only collecting information wherever I can get it. There'll be four or five women there in your aunt's age bracket. She might have known some of them. I need a way to get your aunt's death on the same table with Pearl Whitman."
"Looking for common denominators? Very good. So you've passed yourself off as a bereaved survivor of Miss Whitman's?"
"No. I'm planning to raise Louis Markowitz from the dead. He was my father."
The vase fell to the floor and shattered into a hundred shards, all sharp as knives.
When Mallory pulled into the driveway, the old house fell far short of her imaginings after six weeks of neglect. The windows were all dark, and yet there was a lived-in look to the house and yard. There was nothing about the place to tell anyone how ruthlessly she had abandoned it. The grass had been recently cut, and the walk and porch were swept. It was that time when leaves were falling, but none had landed in this yard without being raked up and disposed of. This had to be Robin Duffy's work. She looked over to the house next door.
It wouldn't be the first time this neighbor had mowed the lawn for Markowitz who was sometimes so preoccupied with a single human hair found at a crime site that he didn't notice the grass growing in his own front yard. She wondered if Robin Duffy was also playing a game of make-believe. Did he curse Markowitz as he was mowing? Or did he break with custom this time?
Riker must have come through the back when he was last here. The police-department seal was intact around the frame of the front door. She peeled away the tape and fitted her old key into the lock.
If the yard had kept her illusions for her, the inside of the house told the truth. The door opened onto the smells of long-settled dust, stale air and the terrible empty silence of no one home. She flicked the wall switch, and the overhead light came on with a soft warm glow.
She stood by the love seat where Helen had done her mending in the evenings. The sewing basket was in its usual place. She had long ago come to terms with reminders of Helen. But she would not look at the overstuffed reclining chair where Markowitz had sat reading his paper every night save Tuesdays and Thursdays.
What must it have been like for him, being alone in this place. She knew she could never live here again. It had been hard enough after Helen's death.
She slowly gravitated to the kitchen, pulled along by memories of the only woman who had ever cared if her hair was combed and her nails were clean, if she had her milk money and a proper lunch to take to school. She remembered the kitchen as bigger. Perhaps she had always seen it through the eyes of the baby felon Markowitz had bagged.
"Whadaya think you're doin' kid?" he had asked, sitting back on his heels staring at her through the low window of the Jaguar which belonged to some sucker.
"Bug off old man, or I'll cut you," she had said.
He had brought her back to this house that night. Four tons of paperwork at Juvenile Hall didn't fit with his plans for a birthday party, he told her. Helen's cake had been sitting in the back of his car. It had a lemon smell, and Markowitz smelled of cherry-blend pipe tobacco.
The child in handcuffs had driven Helen wild. Poor Markowitz could not get them off fast enough to please his wife. And then young Kathy had been engulfed in the plump arms of a gentle woman who smelled of laundry soap, cleaning fluid and scouring powder. Beyond Helen were the smells of steamed vegetables and pot roast. And that night, young Kathy had smelled crisp clean sheets being pulled up around her face, and the smell of talcum powder as Helen leaned down to kiss her good-night.
Helen.
The house didn't smell like Helen anymore. There was dust over everything. Helen wouldn't have liked that.
Mallory climbed the stairs, heading toward the back bedroom which Markowitz had used as a den. She passed by her own room which contained all the furniture and belongings she had left behind. He had kept it the way she left it, against the day when she might want to come home again, she supposed. The door frame had the last notch of her growing years. The first notch was much closer to the floor. What a runt she had been at ten. How smug she had been at lying two more years onto her age.
Markowitz's den was disguised as the aftermath of a messy burglary, and she found nothing out of place. Riker had been careful to leave things as he found them. The bills were in the order of due dates, although a stranger would've assumed they had simply been dropped on the floor by the desk. His correspondence with the Old-time Radio Network lay on top of less important correspondence with the Internal Revenue Service. She picked up the metal waste-basket where he filed his credit-card receipts and his cancelled checks. Riker would have been through it, looking for a lead on BDA.
She began with the desk drawers, and an hour later, she had sifted down to the last drawer in a battered old filing cabinet to discover all her school report cards and her class photographs. She looked at the group shot from the private Manhattan day school which must have cost the old man a fortune in tuition. In that first photo, she was a stand-out, the only non-child in a sea of innocence. The old man had been right; she never was a little girl.
She was downstairs again, turning out the lights and fishing in her pockets for the car keys when she saw the pile of envelopes lying by the door under the mail slot. She leafed through the junk mail, almost passing over the flyer for the Brooklyn Dancing Academy.
BDA.
Riker said he'd been through every business listing in every telephone directory for all eight boroughs. Was he holding out on her?
She walked over to the table which held the telephone and the phone books. She held the heavy business directory cradled in one arm, tearing the pages as she riffled through them. There was no commercial advertising for the Brooklyn Dancing Academy. She checked the white pages – no listing. Riker was off the hook; his teeth were safe.
She walked slowly to Markowitz's chair and sank into it. Her hands ran over the worn leather of the arms, and she pressed her head deep into its back cushion. She was picking up a scent which had not been obscured by the layers of dust. A tobacco pouch lay open on the small table at her right. One hand drifted down to the pipe rack and her fingers grazed the smooth worn bowls of wood. She picked up the pipe with the carved face, his favorite because she had stolen it for his birthday in those early days when she still called him "'Hey, Cop". She held the pipe tight, her knuckles whitening as she closed her eyes, trying to imagine Markowitz in his young days.