Riker leaned forward, tapping his pencil on the notebook. "Is there any one thing they all had in common?"
"They were old."
"Thank you," said Riker.
"Ladies," said Coffey, in the same tone Riker had heard him use to address a field trip of third-graders, "do you realize that any one of you could be the next victim?"
"Well, it was something of a crapshoot at first," said the nodding woman. "But this time, we're fairly certain that Fabia's next. Show him the letter, Fabia."
The woman turned her small head down and had to lean over a bit to see beyond her large chest and into the purse on her lap. She produced a folded paper in a dramatic flourish. She was almost gleeful as Riker and Coffey read the lines that demanded her money and threatened her life.
Charles flipped through the library microfiche, rolling by the pages of thirty-year-old newspapers. Kathleen had been right. There it was on the cover of a major daily, a photograph of the hysterical widow, clinging to her husband's body.
The reporter for the Times speculated that Max might have survived, but the bus boy had broken the glass of the water tank when he saw Max was in trouble, remaining in the dead float well past the safety margin, one leg still bound to the weight at the bottom of the tank. The broken glass had cut him to shreds, severing every major artery. Onlookers had watched helplessly while he bled to death.
And now he noticed a new detail in the photograph. His own father's face stared out at him from the crowd of nightclub patrons in the background, a small cameo of horror and disbelief.
Charles understood those disbelieving eyes so well. As a child, it had been hard to believe that Max could ever die.
Nine-year-old Charles had been uncertain of Max's final exit from the world when he attended the funeral in the Manhattan cathedral. He had been holding tightly to his parents' hands as he entered that enormous place lit by a thousand candles, filled with a throng of mourners who had come to say goodbye to the master. Cousin Max lay at peace in a white coffin, dead, so the boy had been told. But Charles had held to the hope that this too was an illusion, another exit, but not the final one.
The cathedral ceiling was higher than heaven. The stained-glass windows and the candles had created a brilliant spectacle of unimagined space and beauty. The candles had gone out one by one, and by no human hand. Though windows kept their brilliance, the interior had dimmed to a ghostly twilight as the first magician had appeared in white top hat, and tuxedo with a flowing white satin cape. Out of this cape he had pulled a glowing ball of fire. Charles had seen this done on stage. It was one of Max's best illusions. The ball of fire left the magician's hand and floated over the coffin where Max slept on. A parade of men and women in white satin had come forward to circle the casket, which disappeared a moment later when they broke ranks and returned to their seats.
The casket had reappeared at the cemetery. Max's wand was broken over the open grave.
He remembered looking up to the sky, that perfect cloudless expanse of blue, as a thousand white doves took flight and blocked out the sun. He had heard the thunderous rush of wings rising, and felt their wind on his face and in his hair. When he looked down again, the coffin was gone, and a scattering of white rose petals covered the earth at the bottom of the open grave. The doves soared up and up, climbing to heaven, wings working with a fury, as though they carried a weighty burden with them, up and away. The little boy followed their flight with astonished eyes.
The advantage of a prominent nose was that it missed very little. Her perfume rose up in the elevator with him. Balancing two bags of groceries and a newspaper, he followed it down the hall. At the juncture of the two apartments, he turned away from his residence to open the office door; Mallory sat behind the desk in the front room, facing a bearded man whose gesturing put one waving arm perilously close to a delicate lampshade of glass panels. This could only be the sociologist from Gramercy Park, heir and murder suspect. He fitted Mallory's scarecrow description, but only in the looseness of his limbs and the awkward way they flew around without direction. His face was attractive, small regular features and warm engaging eyes. The beard suited him and saved him from the small nose which bordered on pug and would have made him an ageing boy for ever.
"Charles Butler, Jonathan Gaynor," said Mallory.
"It's a pleasure, Mr Butler."
"Charles, please."
"I love your windows," said Gaynor. "Do you know the period?"
"Thank you. The architecture is circa 1935."
This tall triptych of windows was more aesthetic than the rectangles of his apartment across the hall. Restored woodwork gleamed from the frames which arched near the ceiling. Mallory, behind the desk, was a dark silhouette in the center panel, softly back-lit by the gloaming light of the dinner hour.
Charles settled his grocery bags on the desk. "This room is unique. All the other windows in the building are the same period but not quite the same style."
"It's a remarkably quiet room, said Gaynor. "Doublepane glass in the windows?"
Charles nodded. At times the room was so quiet Mallory swore she could hear pins crashing to the floor, and the "Oh shit!"s of spilled angels.
"You know what these windows remind me of?" Gaynor's hand sent a pencil caddie flying to the carpet. He bent down to pick it up with a lack of self-consciousness which must have come from the habit of sending things accidentally away. "This whole room could be the set for The Maltese Falcon. It's vintage Sam Spade."
Charles sat on the edge of the desk and looked around the room with new eyes. When he had taken over this apartment for his office, he had been working on the theory that a room was a three-dimensional metaphor for a human life, and a basic element of harmony. Once he had the room, he believed his life would take on a new shape, the right shape this time around. Now it was a bit of a shock to realize that his ideal room was the stereotypical setting of murder investigations. But it was.
"I've persuaded Mallory to have dinner with me," said Gaynor. "Care to join us?"
Charles gathered up his grocery bags and moved to the door, looking back over one shoulder to say, "Oh, you're both invited to dinner at my place."
And the parade of three crossed the hallway.
The kitchen in his apartment was his favorite room these days. In the past year, he had grown accustomed to people dropping by at all hours. He welcomed company after all the years he had spent isolated in his room at the think-tank.
The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields played a Vivaldi mandolin concerto at a background level that facilitated conversation. Jonathan Gaynor made himself useful stirring the sauce for Swedish meatballs. Mallory perched on the counter top, sipping white wine to the left of Charles's chopping block, and he was unreasonably happy.
"It's wonderful," said Gaynor, sipping from the spoon. "Did your mother teach you how to cook?"
"Oh no," said Charles, smiling as he wept over the minced onions. "She only managed to cook one unburnt piece of toast in her entire life."
"Oh, right," said Mallory.
"Really, I was there that day, I remember the moment when it hit the top of the pile on the breakfast table. It was golden brown, the first I'd ever seen that wasn't black. I reached out to grab it, but my father got it first. He handed it back to my mother and said, "This one isn't burnt yet." She never missed a beat. She put it back in the toaster and burned it to a husk."
"All I ever had was boarding-school fare," said Gaynor, holding his empty wineglass to Mallory, who filled it. "Burnt toast would've been the highlight of the meal."