"So, you think Herbert has a gun," he said.

"How did you know that?"

"You know Martin Teller, lives across the hall from Herbert."

She nodded. "Of course."

"When I passed Martin in the hall this morning," said Charles, "it was hard to ignore the bulletproof vest, particularly on a warm day. Mallory has one, but she doesn't wear it to go grocery shopping. Ergo – Herbert."

"Martin's terrified of Herbert, I know that. But were you aware of the lipstick on Edith Candle's wall?"

"No. Was her apartment – "

"No vandalism, nothing like that. You knew about the fugues? She told me she'd known you all your life."

"Fugues?"

"The automatic writing?"

No he hadn't known. Edith had never used automatic writing in the magic act with Cousin Max. She had done a mind-reading act, he remembered that much. Something disturbing in a childhood memory began to emerge, some overheard conversation, but it was not the stuff that eidetic memory would help him with.

"Sometimes it's called trance writing," Henrietta was saying. "Edith was trying to wash the words off the wall when Martin came down to pick up his leftovers."

"His leftovers."

"He doesn't make much money from his art, not since the recession started. Edith gives him meals three times a week. She's been doing that for a few years now. So Martin just walked in on her when she was scrubbing the wall."

"Martin has a key to Edith's apartment?"

"Her door is never locked. You didn't know? You might talk to her about that. I've spent years trying to convince her it's dangerous. Strange people can always find a way into an apartment building, even one with good security."

"So it could have been vandalism."

"The writing? Oh, no. Edith does the writing, but she never has any memory of doing it."

"It's happened before?"

"Yes, but that was a long time ago."

And by her downcast eyes and shift of position, it was not open to discussion. Curious.

"What was written on the wall this time?"

"I don't know, and Martin won't tell me. You know Martin. It's a rare day if he says three words. The three he gave me were death, here, soon. I asked him if he was frightened of Herbert. He nodded and saved a word. That's all I know. Martin is a very fragile personality. And just the idea that Herbert might have a gun is making me a little nervous, too."

Mallory was standing over them. She had just materialized by the couch with two mugs of coffee and no warning.

"I'll fix that," she said, handing one mug to Charles and the other to Henrietta.

"No you won't. I'll handle it," said Charles. Herbert's paranoid little heart would not stand up to an interview with Mallory.

Henrietta sipped her coffee and smiled her thanks to the younger woman. "It might be a bad idea to approach Herbert directly. He's ripe for an explosion. I've seen it building up for a long time. His wife is divorcing him, and it's a pretty messy lawsuit. And then he got a lay-off notice at the end of September. I don't think he can handle one more thing, not a hangnail, not anything."

Charles looked up to Mallory, who seemed skeptical. "That's clear enough?" he asked.

"Yeah. He's a squirrel," she said.

Henrietta and Charles exchanged glances, silently approving Mallory's clarity and economy of words.

The phone rang. As he was rising and reaching towards the desk, Mallory beat him to it with no apparent effort at speed. It was disconcerting the way she moved about, or rather, disappeared from one spot and reappeared in another.

She picked up the receiver of the antique telephone.

Well, it was not altogether an antique anymore, was it?

He had been dismayed to find that she had rewired it and discarded the original base for one which accommodated a plug for an answering machine. And he only discovered the job when his incoming calls were ripped out of his mouthpiece and pulled into the desk drawer.

"Mallory and Butler… Hello, Riker. Hold on a sec."

She had to open the drawer to put the phone on hold. And now they both looked down on the blinking light-of four messages glowing inside the desk. If she was annoyed with him, it never showed as she walked back to her private office and pulled the door closed behind her.

He turned back to Henrietta. "Do you want me to speak to Edith?"

"No," she said, a bit too quick, too final, and in the attitude of absolutely not as opposed to no, I don't think so.

"Mallory, where've you been all day? I musta called a hundred times."

"Four times. Charles never looks for messages. He's pretending we don't have an answering machine."

"I got something," said Riker. "Gaynor and Cathery each have alibis for two of the murders, but together, they can't alibi all the murders."

"So? I'm not big on conspiracy theories if that's where you're going with this."

"Wait. Cathery can alibi his grandmother's murder, and Gaynor can alibi his aunt's murder – "

"Riker, I saw that movie too. It doesn't fit, not if Markowitz knew who the killer was. If the old man figured two suspects, he wouldn't have done the surveillance by himself. How could he?"

"You won't like the answer to that one, kid." "Give."

"Coffey doesn't think Markowitz worked it out. He figures the perp suckered Markowitz. The old man got killed because he didn't know who it was, never saw it coming."

"Oh, great detective work. Coffey was the one who figured Whitman for a snatch when a half-bright chimp could have told him she was meeting the perp at the scene."

"Hey, kid. This is Riker, here. I'm on your side, remember?"

"Anything turn up on the BDA in Markowitz's calendar?"

"Naw," said Riker. "Coffey's off that track. I'd do it on my own, but I got no leads. I've been through the old house in Brooklyn looking through his stuff. Nothing in the credit-card bills or the checkbook, but who knows. That little den of his looks just like his office. Easy to miss something in a mess like that. Maybe if you went through it? The door seals can come off anytime you want."

"Yeah, first chance I get."

When she hung up the phone, the first computer in the row of three was still screening the file on the old recluse in 3B. Charles had contributed very little information on Edith Candle in the past two weeks. He was a great respecter of privacy, and she had been unable to break him of this good quality.

Mallory looked up to the ceiling. She felt the old woman's presence before she heard the scrape of chair legs on the bare floorboards overhead. A blinking red light on the third terminal told her that Edith Candle was active again, powering up her computer and sending something out over the modem, that box which allowed the old woman to wander the electronic net from New York to the Tokyo Exchange and back again in seconds only.

Mallory picked up her test set, a black rotary dial with a handgrip. She dialed a number the telephone company used for maintenance checks as she rolled her chair over to the third terminal. Through the wires of the phone company which led into Candle's modem, Mallory climbed up into the computer one floor above her head and watched the screen that Candle was accessing in apartment 3B. The old woman wasn't following the stock-exchange figures tonight. She had patched into a small and remote commercial information network and was requesting a credit check. This J.S. Rathbone must be another wealthy spook groupy. She turned back to the third screen and watched the names of stock issues scrolling by as the credit-check service fed Rathbone's stock portfolio into Candle's computer in the apartment upstairs.

So far, none of the stock activity had shown up in mergers or hostile takeovers. However, Candle had remarkable luck in selling off stocks just prior to devastating drops in value. One of these drops had been brought on by the recall of a defective and dangerous product. Candle had sold her stock just prior to the information being made public. And she also had a streak of luck in making stock purchases before sudden booms in product development, also non-public information. One such purchase had resulted in stock prices doubling. Scores of these instances put Candle in the realm of world-class fortune-telling or insider trading. But there was no hard evidence. No single transaction matched the huge profits on the merger of Pearl Whitman's company.