You can dream, old man.
She had no intention of working Natalie Homer’s homicide. The trail was twenty years old and a cold one. She opened the door for Geldorf, then took his proffered keys and locked it.
‘The link is in the details.’ He struggled with the bulky carton as they walked toward the elevator. ‘I had complete control over my crime scene. No leaks to the media. You know how I pulled that off? I told a uniform to take bribes from the reporters. Well, this kid gets twenty bucks a piece from those bastards, then tells ‘em he found the woman swingin’ from a rope.’
‘So they figured it was a suicide.’ Mallory approved. It was always wise to tell the truth when you lied. ‘And Natalie Homer got lost on page ten.’
‘And just one newspaper, a couple of lousy paragraphs.’ He set down the box and pushed a button to call for the elevator. ‘So now you’ll wanna rule out the possible leaks. Lucky I saved my old case notes.’
Yeah, right.
‘You can handle those interviews,’ said Mallory. ‘I got you an assistant to go along as your badge.’ Then she would be rid of Geldorf and Duck Boy.
‘What about the big guy? Butler? Was that his name?’ Geldorf pulled out a card given to him an hour ago at the offices of Butler and Company.
‘Doctor Butler,’ said Mallory, though Charles had never used that title. ‘He’s a consulting psychologist with NYPD.’ Fortunately, there was no useful information on the business card to contradict that lie. ‘He’ll be working closely with you.’
Charles Butler wore a suit and tie, for this was a workday. Many thanks to Riker’s intervention, the tedium of a summer hiatus was finally at an end. He passed through the reception area of Queen Anne furniture and Watteau watercolors, then strolled down a short hall, leaving behind centuries of antique decor that separated the other rooms from Mallory’s domain of electronics, of plastic and metal and wire. Her private office at the rear of Butler and Company had some charming features. However, the tall arched windows were hidden behind cold steel blinds, and a plain gray rug strove to disguise the hardwood floor as concrete.
Her three computers sat atop workstations perfectly aligned at the center of the room, and all the monitors were lit. Square blue cyclops eyes focused upon the intruder, and Charles recalled his old dream of kicking in the glass and blinding the little bastards.
The free space of three walls was devoted to gray metal shelving units stocked with manuals lined up precisely one inch from the edge and software components keeping company with hardware. Mallory had refused his offer of paintings, preferring not to clutter the giant bulletin board that covered her fourth wall from baseboard to ceiling molding.
Sergeant Riker was still at work pinning photographs and papers to the cork surface. The detective had given Charles a new project, a present, actually two gifts: a twenty-year-old murder and a seventy-five-year-old man.
‘When will they be back?’
‘Half an hour, give or take.’ Riker sifted through the contents of a leather pouch and selected more papers. Handwritten notes and typed statements had been arranged on the wall in no particular order.
‘All this to pacify Mr Geldorf?’
‘Yeah,’ said Riker. ‘Think it might keep you busy for a while?’
‘Absolutely, and thank you.’ Charles was wondering how to broach another subject without seeming ungrateful. He decided that oblique angles were best. ‘After Louis died, did Mallory keep any of those old westerns?’
‘No!’ Riker dropped the pouch on the floor, then bent down to retrieve it.
‘What a pity.’ Charles faced the wall and studied a diagram of the murder victim’s apartment. ‘I wanted to read the books, maybe figure out what Louis saw in them. I suppose I can track down other copies, but that – ’
‘No, you can’t.’ Riker turned his back on Charles to pin up the full-color photograph of a gutted woman on a dissection table. ‘You can’t get ‘em anymore. Just cheap paperbacks. Nothing you’d find on a library shelf. ‘That’s what John Warwick said – almost the same words.’
Riker spread one hand flat on the cork and slowly leaned into the wall. He bowed his head, perhaps bracing for the accusations, a litany of deceits, years of lies, his own and Louis’s.
If that were true, he would wait forever.
Charles sat down at the edge of Mallory’s steel desk. He waited patiently until Riker turned round to face him, and then he smiled for the man. His inadvertently foolish expression had the same relaxing effect on the detective as it had had on John Warwick. ‘Perhaps you could just tell me what happened in the next book?’
‘Yeah, give me a second.’ Riker settled into a metal folding chair and remembered to exhale. He was obviously relieved, perhaps assuming that nothing more had transpired between John Warwick and a disappointed customer. ‘It’s been a while. You remember the plot of the first book?’
Charles nodded. ‘A fifteen-year-old boy shot a man in the street.’
‘An unarmed man. In the next book, you find out that cowboy had a gun after all, and it was a fair fight.’ Riker turned his head for one furtive glance at the office door. Assured that they were alone, he continued, ‘The kid took the other guy’s six-shooter ‘cause it was better than his old rusty one. But the sheriff never saw that second gun. The kid had it stashed in his belt before Peety got to the crime scene.’
Subsequently, Charles learned that the lawman had remained unaware of this exculpatory evidence – while the boy was growing into premature manhood as a fugitive.
‘Now they’re a year older,’ said Riker, ‘Sheriff Peety and the kid.’ And it was miles too late for the boy to clear his name. ‘Wichita won another gunfight and killed another man.’
Riker glanced at the door again, knowing that he would never hear Mallory coming up behind him. She was that quiet. He turned back to Charles and his story. ‘The kid’s name is no joke anymore. He’s a bona fide gunslinger, a real outlaw. At the end of the first book, the sheriff runs him right off the rim of a canyon, a three-hundred-foot drop. The kid was still in the saddle at the time. Down he goes, horse and all.’
‘But he survived.’
‘Yeah, the horse too. When the next book opens, the kid lands in the river, and the fall knocks him out. He gets washed ashore beside his half-dead horse. An Indian girl finds him and drags him back to her village. She’s his age, just sixteen. On the last page, the sheriffs chasin’ Wichita again, and the girl buys the kid some time. She throws herself under the sheriffs galloping horse.’ He splayed his hands to say, You see how it works? He tossed the leather pouch to Charles. ‘You and Geldorf can finish setting up the wall, okay? Play detective. Knock yourself out.’
Charles’s smile was brief, merely polite this time. The detective had made an interesting point, but the aspect of cliffhanger suspense did not explain why anyone would bother to read the novels twice. And young Kathy Mallory had read them again and again. Why?
The bookseller’s theory of a child needing comfort from a fictional world would not hold up. Charles glanced at the surrounding shelves of dry technical journals and reference books. Mallory never read fiction. Louis Markowitz had once told him what a fight it had been to instill a sense of make-believe in his foster daughter, and ultimately he had lost that battle. To Louis’s sorrow, she had remained a hardened realist throughout her childhood.
And though she had displayed an early penchant for cowboy movies, he had surmised long ago that it was largely for the companionship of Louis that the little girl had indulged the man in Saturday mornings of gunfights and cavalry charges. From what Charles knew of the early warfare between foster father and daughter, young Kathy would rather have died than admit to this need for his company. For all the years that man and child had known one another and loved one another, she had kept Louis at a distance, never addressing him in any form but Hey Cop and Markowitz.