He put the carton down again as a small brunette with nervous moves was looking up at Mallory and asking, ‘Forgive me for following you. Could I speak to you privately for just a moment?’

Mallory nodded to the doorman, who closed the door. The two women moved up the sidewalk and beyond the range of his hearing. The brunette was a tangle of loose wires. Her hands were flying. Mallory said a few words to the woman, and the brunette shook her head, eyes rolling in their sockets like startled marbles. Then the woman clutched her bag to her chest as though to fend off a weapon. She backed off a few steps and hurried down the sidewalk to a waiting cab. Mallory strolled back.

The carton was hoisted into the air once more.

The doorman had shut down his neon smile the moment Mallory turned her back. Now it was blazing again with the dazzle of every tooth exposed, and You’re my new best friend was in his eyes as they passed by him and into the lobby.

The lobby atmosphere was piped in from another century. While Mallory handed a letter to the concierge on the other side of a carved wood desk, Riker looked around at the hanging tapestries and the oil paintings. The elaborately patterned rugs had to be a year’s salary each. Plush green velvet wrapped the couches and chairs in conversational groupings. A woman passed through the lobby, wearing dark glasses on this overcast day to say, I’m a celebrity, and you’re not. A bank of stained-glass windows lined one wall. Patches of crystal and colors of brightness. Beneath the arched center window was a mural of running deer, running blind into the cruel joke of the blank wall adjacent to the painting.

Now the concierge was leading them to the elevator. It belonged in a 1930s black-and-white movie, an iron cage of scrollwork bars on the door, and an interior of gleaming wood with inlaid designs and parquet floor. They were handed into the care of an elevator operator and rode up, watching the floors drop away from them, and each one was different from the last.

The iron door opened on the third floor, and they walked down a hallway lined by soft glowing bulbs that would have been gaslight in the last century. The carpeting on this floor was an oriental pattern, and the walls were papered in money. Riker guessed he knew a good wallpapering job when he saw it. And money sat on a small table in the hallway, a vase holding a fortune in fresh-cut flowers. The scent of roses followed after him as Mallory fit her key in the lock and opened the door to the Rosens’ apartment.

He put the cartons down on the tiled floor of the entryway. ‘Okay, Mallory – the woman downstairs. Now what was that about?’

‘Sally Riccalo. She followed us over from the office. She’s a client with an interesting idea that her stepson wants to stab her with a flying pencil.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Charles’s style. I thought he only handled the academic bullshit. So who’s whacked? Her or the kid?’

‘Too early to tell. She looks scared enough.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I told her to get out of town.’

‘And she said?’

‘No.’

He looked around at the Rosens’ front room and wondered how the Rosens were reacting to the Spartan simplicity of Mallory’s apartment. In the front room was a museum of family photos. The family was everywhere, eyes of the children in the eyes of mothers and fathers, grandfathers, and on and on. And there was a toy some child had left behind on the couch. The fish in the large aquarium swam in quick schools of tropical colors. A small sticky palm print lay on the glass alongside the print of what must be the nose of a grandchild or great-grandchild. The only element out of character with this comfortable room of overstuffed furniture and silk flowers was the eye of the computer, lit and looking out through the partially opened doors of an oak cabinet.

While Mallory went exploring, Riker opened the cabinet door wide and peered at the screen. Inside the door was a simple instruction guide for computer illiterates like himself. He pushed a button, and the screen became a slow scrolling information sheet on scheduled maintenance, and now a notice of the tenants’ meeting to be held in the roof-top facility. This last item was tagged with an URGENT BUSINESS label and a request for full attendance at the meeting. More notes scrolled by, mentions of packages held at the lobby desk, and the minutes of the condo board’s last meeting.

The tap on his shoulder made him jump. Mallory stood behind him, smiling Gotcha. The games went on. The old man had taught her that one, too. For a heavyset man, Markowitz had made even less noise than Kathy when he crept up behind her. By the time she was thirteen, the old man could no longer do that. She had surpassed him in the creeping game. Between Markowitz and Mallory, he sometimes wondered who had been the worst influence on whom.

‘I found a room to set up in,’ she said.

He picked up the cartons and followed her into a small library. He settled them on the desk, and she began to unload the computer equipment and the Mini cam, the wiring and the works he couldn’t put a name to. Only the wiretap equipment was recognizable, and he averted his eyes from this, knowing there was no warrant.

Markowitz had not taught her this. Far from it – the old man had remained mechanically inept and computer ignorant until the day he died. The less Markowitz had known about what she was up to with her machines, the more secure he had felt in the NYPD pension plan.

Mallory stepped off the elevator at the penthouse level. She had traveled only a few steps into the room when heads began to turn. She was wearing the black suit she had worn to her father’s funeral. The skirt provided a rare outing for her legs, displaying athletic calves and well-shaped ankles tapering above high heels. A dozen pairs of eyes, male and female, followed after her as she passed through the gathering of perhaps forty tenants.

She paused now and then to admire a few of the art deco pieces scattered about the roof-top facility, and generally disapproved of the clutter of objects on pedestals and sideboards. But every travesty of decorators was forgiven when she lifted her face to the skylight which spanned the whole of the wide room. A waxing moon kept two stars for company. A filmy cloud raced across the glass, gaining on the moon, then killing its light.

‘Death becomes you, my dear,’ said a cultured, dulcet voice.

‘I’ve already heard that one today,’ said Mallory, turning to look down at a woman with black hat and a face that was pushing sixty, not in the wrinkles, but in the pulled-back skin of the too-manyith face-lift. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me how well preserved I am for a corpse.’

The older woman smiled a thin line of crimson lipstick. ‘You’ve got a smart mouth for a dead cop.’ And now the voice betrayed roots in Hell’s Kitchen when gangsters ruled, and the woman went up one notch in Mallory’s estimation.

‘I’m Betty Hyde.’

‘Mallory.’

‘Kathleen Mallory, isn’t it? Formerly of NYPD, currently of the consulting firm Mallory and Butler, Ltd. You’re staying in the Rosens’ apartment for the next ten days while your own condo is being redecorated. They’re old friends of your family, and you have their proxy to vote on the swimming pool in the basement. I have spies everywhere, my dear.’

But Mallory counted only two spies. The concierge knew she had the Rosens’ proxy, and Arthur the doorman had been fed the rest of the story.

‘And you sell gossip,’ Mallory countered. ‘Your column is syndicated in fifty papers around the country. You have a five-minute spot on Channel Two News. You’ve lived here for the past fifteen years. You have a full-size pool table in your apartment, and you change young men the way I change my blue jeans. You should pay your spies better, Miss Hyde. They have no sense of loyalty.’