Her gun returned to the shoulder holster as she stole back to the front room, not wanting to disturb him. There was just a little comfort in knowing he was there. Markowitz had said, go to Charles if she needed help, not if she wanted to use him and his connections. The old man would never have wanted her to drag him into this. She sat down on the couch. It was not the typically uncomfortable antique, but well padded and more like the furniture in the Brooklyn house. It was friendly in its response to her, plumping up around the slender outline of her body. She would have liked to stop here, to not move again. This night would not be over for a long time yet, and she was already flagging, eyes closing.
However she turned the thing over, she could not see what Markowitz had seen. Logic told her Coffey was right, and Markowitz had been caught out without a clue in hell as to who the perp was. But she continued to believe in Markowitz in the same way he had taught her to believe in the Shadow. Never mind logic. It only worked half the time, anyway. Her eyes closed.
She snapped awake when the couch rearranged its stuffing to accommodate another sitter. Charles was smiling at her. He had such a wonderfully loony smile. But now, his face was slowly changing to worry lines. What was he reading in her own face, she wondered? What had she given away to tell him something was wrong? Was there really any point in holding out on him? Could she? No, probably not.
"I gather the seance wasn't much of a success."
So, Edith had told him they were going to Gramercy.
And what else did he know? He could extrapolate volumes from near nothing.
"No, it wasn't. But I did have a nice chat with Markowitz."
Oh, she could see he didn't like that, not at all. There was more than worry in his eyes, but she could not account for it. Was he angry with her? Why?
"How did the medium know about you and Markowitz?" he asked.
His voice was very gentle. So she was not the one who angered him. Who then? Edith?
"I told her."
"That may have been a bad mistake. Did you tell Edith you were going to use Louis?"
"Yeah. I didn't have any choice. Gaynor thought it was a mistake, too." If Charles was her barometer, then Markowitz the dancing fool must be rocking and rolling in his grave. She was getting too messy, too noisy, telegraphing every damn move.
"Tell me what happened."
His hand was covering hers with the human warmth that Markowitz's last letter had promised. It had been so long since she'd been touched this way, she nearly didn't recognize the sensation. Go to him if you need help, said the Markowitz who lived inside her head with Helen, abiding in a detailed replica of the house in Brooklyn in the days when it gleamed with polish, and smelled of canned pine-trees.
She described the seance in every detail, the compulsive detail of habit. She only left out the part where she had been suckered into believing that it was Markowitz, simply because Redwing had looked and talked and acted like him, because Mallory had been one beat away from taking the chance to settle old business and say goodbye, and she had blown it. And hadn't that been the worst of it? Her eyes were open now. She had lost all the threads to make-believing and never would she get them back. She had seen the wires behind the works.
"Charles, how could she do him so well? She knew about the wounds. Nothing that specific was in the papers."
"That computer of yours has you blind-sided. With more field experience, you might have realized that quite a bit of data can be had through human networks. How many police officers were at the crime site, how many civilians, how many have wives, brother-in-laws, sisters, mothers, and who do those people talk to? If it all hangs on Markowitz's wounds, you have nothing. As to the impersonation, we've all seen Markowitz on television. He was on for days during the senate hearings. He signed two autographs one night when we were having dinner in Chinatown."
"And the boy imitating the slashed breast?"
"The boy was imitating a woman. He made a breast. Gaynor could hardly have seen it slashed. But that's not his fault. The more people you gather into one room, the more energy there is, and mass psychosis is more possible. You can be convinced you saw all sorts of things that never happened."
"All those old women knew about the link to the seance, and not one of them thought to call the cops. How do you figure that?"
"Well, as the woman said, it's miles more exciting than waiting to die in your sleep. You don't take anything at face value, do you?"
No, she did not. "Maybe something else frightened them more than the killer did."
"Fear of the police, for instance? You think these women are a gang of geriatric criminals?"
Well, Charles had one geriatric criminal in the family, didn't he? Edith did say you could get away with a lot when you were old. But that subject was forbidden.
"Maybe Redwing has some hold on them. She's good, Charles. You should have been there. And the Markowitz imitation was just too damn good. It took Markowitz an hour to die. Maybe Redwing had time to get to know him then."
"An incomplete portrait would have sufficed. Your memories of Louis rilled in whatever she missed. You did most of the work for her. Mediums depend on that. I've watched the best of them work. They put out half a general sentence, and the client fills in the blanks. Then the medium builds on the volunteered data. It's an art form. They're also guided by subtle nuances of facial expressions. Don't underestimate the power of an observant empathic to rip your mind inside out."
"I know she's mixed up in this."
"Perhaps, but I don't think she makes a good suspect. All the victims being tied to the seances doesn't make for a very smart set of murders. I believe Louis did say the killer was smart."
"Maybe she's so smart she'd figure it that way – like a double blind."
"No, too convoluted. She may be gifted, but there's no correlation between a gift and IQ points. Redwing intuits everything."
"What about Edith? How did she know her husband was going to die that particular night? Coincidence?"
Charles sat up straighter. His eyes wandered off to the side where he was looking at something in a memory. He turned back to her. "Edith predicted the date? Is that what she told you?" His hand withdrew its covering warmth. "Well then, you probably know more about the particulars than I do."
"She didn't make it up, Charles. I researched it in the periodicals section of the library. She knew the night he was going to die. She knew it days in advance. The neighbors confirmed it."
"It could easily be a coincidence that she guessed the night. It was a very dangerous trick. Death was always possible. He didn't drop down through a trap door in the stage, you know. He went into a tank of water, chained with iron and tied with rope. On the first night, the trick worked as it was supposed to. I went with my parents that night. I saw him struggling with the locks underwater, then working his way out of the ropes in full view of the audience. There was a large alarm clock on stage, set to go off at the limit of human endurance. The clock went off with an ear-splitting ring. And Max wasn't free yet. He hadn't managed to undo the last coil of rope in time, and for a while, he hung there in the water like a drowned man, and all the while the clock's alarm was screaming and the audience was screaming. Then suddenly, he burst out of the ropes and pushed off against the bottom of the tank and erupted into the air. It was an amazing stunt. It took all his concentration to slow his heart and his respiratory system while he worked the locks of the chains. One slip of the mind and there you go."
"Were you scared when you thought he'd drowned?"