‘She’s a breakable human being like the rest of us.’

‘Charles, we’ve all fallen into that trap. She’s so young, isn’t she? Just a kid. Of course you want to protect her. That perfect unlined face – eyes like an angel.’

Charles was still nodding in agreement as Riker leaned forward and shook his arm to call him back to the real world, the scary one that Mallory inhabited.

Riker raised his voice to say, ‘She’s got the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen. She gives normal people the shakes – even if they don’t drink as much as I do. She packs a monster gun, and you don’t. She’s a great shot, and you probably couldn’t load a gun without an owner’s manual.’

Now Riker leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk as he watched Charles trying to make logic work in tandem with the blind psychosis of having fallen in love with Kathy Mallory. He’d had occasion to wonder if Mallory understood how Charles felt about her. He was inclined to think she knew it and used it.

In a softer voice, he said, ‘I’m glad you stopped by, Charles. I hope this little talk has put things into perspective.’

As Charles pulled up in front of Robin Duffy’s house, he nearly put the car up on the curb, so startled was he by the lights of the menorah and the Christmas tree in the house across the street. The former occupants of that house, Louis and Helen Markowitz, were dead.

Robin, his host for the evening, was standing in the warm light of an open doorway. Charles crunched new snow as he crossed the narrow band of earth which lined the recently shoveled sidewalk. He hurried up the flagstone path to the door, and his hand was grabbed in a warm handshake. Robin had been Louis’s neighbor for more than twenty years.

Done with hellos, Charles turned round for a last look at the house of bright holiday lights.

Robin grinned. ‘Lifelike, isn’t it?’

Together, they walked into the warmth of Robin’s house, and the smell of pine needles warring with floral air freshener.

‘I can’t get Kathy to sell the place,’ Robin was saying as Dr Edward Slope stood up from the card table to clap Charles on the back.

‘Kathy’s the only Upper West Sider with a summer home in Brooklyn,’ said Edward. ‘I think she enjoys being perverse.’

‘But it’s not like she ever uses the place,’ said Robin. ‘She never comes by any more. So, I try to make it look like someone lives there. Lou put up a Christmas tree every year since Kathy came to live with them. It didn’t seem right with no Christmas tree.’

‘A Hanukkah bush,’ Rabbi David Kaplan corrected him as he entered the room from the kitchen, carrying a tray of sandwich makings. ‘Louis swore to me it was a Hanukkah bush.’

‘It does make the house look like a family lives there,’ said Charles, staring out the wide window of the front room.

‘I trimmed the tree with the original ornaments from that first Christmas,’ said Robin.

‘And the ornaments Kathy stole from the department store?’ asked Edward Slope as he cut the deck of cards.

‘Well,’ said Robin, who had been Louis Markowitz’s attorney as well as a friend, ‘Helen went back and paid for those, so technically – ’

‘Never mind,’ said Edward. ‘Pull up your chairs, gentlemen. Robin, tell him what else you did to the place.’

The four were seated around the card table, picking up the dealt cards and swapping mustard for mayonnaise, passing around meats and pickles, slices of white bread and slices of rye. The caps of beer bottles were pinging off the table top as Robin delivered a lecture on the technical intricacies of electronic lighting devices.

‘I bought timer lights for the lamps in all the rooms,’ he said as he threw down one card in hopes of drawing a better one. ‘The lights go off and on automatically at different times. I rigged the kitchen light to go off at 7:45. That’s when Helen usually finished cleaning up.’

‘Robin’s really into this,’ said the medical examiner, dealing out Robin’s card and two for the rabbi. ‘The Harvard Law School graduate finally found a set of timer lights with directions he could understand.’

‘My favorite is the light that goes on in Louis’s den after the evening news is over. It’s that window under the gable,’ said Robin, pointing his beer bottle toward the picture window of his living room to indicate the dark gable of the house beyond the glass. Now he picked up his new card and fit it into his hand.

Charles had no way to know if Robin had bettered his hand any. The man’s face gave away nothing. Yet everyone seemed to know what was in his own hand. Edward laughed out loud when he raised the ante on a bluff. Folding his cards in humiliation, Charles stared out the window at the row of blinking colored lights which trimmed the porch roof of Louis Markowitz’s house. ‘You know, for a moment, I thought Mallory had done it.’

‘The lights? You mean as a gesture of sentiment?’ Edward was studying Charles’s face over the tops of his cards, perhaps checking for signs of a fever.

Charles nodded, and Edward looked to the ceiling. ‘Charles, I’m telling you this as a friend – you’ve got to let go of this strange idea of the gunslinger with a heart of gold. I’m a doctor, you can trust me on this one. She has no detectable heartbeat.’

‘She loved Helen.’ Rabbi Kaplan perused his cards, and his sweet smile dissolved into the mask of the veteran poker player.

‘Okay, you got me there. She even loved Louis in her bizarre way.’ Edward folded his cards.

‘This speaks well for a heart,’ said the rabbi, laying down his cards next to Robin’s splayed hand, and simultaneously raking in the first pot of the evening. ‘Robin, the electric menorah in the window was a nice touch.’

Robin was dealing the next round of cards as Charles was asking, ‘Was she raised in both religions?’

‘Kathy has no religion,’ said Edward as he gathered up his cards. ‘We think she works for the opposition.’

‘The way you talk about her,’ said the rabbi. ‘She’s not a criminal.’

‘The hell she isn’t.’ Edward slammed his cards down on the table. ‘Now she thinks I’m going to steal for her. She wanted me to raid my investigator’s personal notes and give them to Charles. Too many leaks in the department, she says. You know she’s just bypassing Jack Coffey.’

‘Coffey should be grateful she works around him,’ said Robin. ‘If he learned anything from Markowitz, he’d never want to know what she was doing. You’re doing him a favor.’

Edward pulled a fold of papers out of his back pocket and pushed the wad across the table to Charles. ‘These are the investigator’s notes. No police request would have turned them up. If an investigator gives his notes to a case detective, he can wind up spending a few days in court defending things that were just idle thoughts and speculations. It’s a bit like reading a diary.’

Charles was looking down on a straight flush. The other players followed Edward’s suit and folded. How did they always know? The four quarters in the pot might represent his only win of the evening. ‘Did you find anything interesting?’

‘Not really. She wanted a report on the death of Judge Heart’s mother. I told her we don’t send ME investigators for a natural death if a doctor’s in attendance. She said, look again. Turns out we did send a man out, but it was the mistake of an inexperienced dispatcher. I also found ER hospital records for injuries to the old woman. Two broken bones were set in a one-year period. Old bones break easily. There’s nothing solid there. Tell her I’m not going to move for an exhumation on Judge Heart’s mother until she gets real evidence of foul play. You tell her that, Charles.’

Robin Duffy put an envelope on the table by Charles’s hand. ‘That’s the dirt on Eric Franz. It’s a transcript of the court session for the traffic accident that killed his wife. The Franzes were having an argument at the time of the crash. But according to witnesses, he didn’t help her into the path of the car, if that’s Mallory’s angle. He was at least three feet away from her throughout the argument and right up to the moment the car got her.’