Authors: Otto Penzler
The girl always stood beneath the great arch, pinning her hopes on a tip from a panhandler: Everyone in the world would pass by—so said the smelly old bum—if she could only wait long enough. The child patiently stared into a thousand faces, waiting for a man she had never met. She was certain to know him by his eyes, the same rare color as her own, and he would recognize Kathy’s face as a small copy of her mother’s. Her father would be so happy to see her; this belief was unshakable, for she was a little zealot in the faith of the bastard child.
He never came. Months passed by. She never learned.
Toward the close of this day, the child had a tired, hungry look about her. Hands clenched into fists, she raged against the panhandler, whose fairy tale had trapped her here in the long wait.
At the top of the rush hour, she spotted a familiar face, but it was the wrong one. The fat detective was seen in thin slices between the bodies of travelers. Though he was on the far side of the mezzanine, Kathy fancied that she could hear him huffing and wheezing as he ran toward her. And she waited.
Crouching.
One second, two seconds, three.
When he came within grabbing distance, the game was on—all that passed for sport in the life of a homeless child. She ran for the grand staircase, shooting past him and making the fat man spin. Sneakers streaking, slapping stone, the little blond bullet in blue jeans gained the stairs, feet flying, only alighting on every third step.
Laughing, laughing.
At the top of the stairs, she turned around to see that the chase was done—and so early this time. Her pursuer had reached the bottom step and could not climb another. The fat man was in some pain and out of breath. One hand went to his chest, as if he could stop a heart attack that way.
The little girl mouthed the words, Die, old man.
They locked eyes. His were pleading, hers were hard. And she gave him her famous Gothcha smile.
One day, she would become his prisoner—but not today—and Louis Markowitz would become her foster father. Years later and long after they had learned to care for one another, each time Kathy Mallory gave him this smile, he would check his back pocket to see if his wallet was missing.
So… obviously not one of the more charming sociopaths, the detective rarely feels the need to show her badge in order to gain respect—even in a truck stop:
Mallory carried her tray to the most remote table, aware that all the truck drivers were smiling her way. Their conversations had stopped, and now they stripped her naked with their eyes. They were so fearless in their sense of entitlement—as if they were ticket holders to a strolling peep show. Oh, if eyes could only whoop and holler. She set her knapsack on the table, then removed her denim jacket and draped it over the back of a chair.
“Oh, Lord,” said a passing waitress.
Sans jacket, Mallory displayed a shoulder holster and a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver. With the tight unison of chorus girls, the men turned their faces downward, as if finding their plates infinitely more fascinating.
Problem solved.
Only the waitress seemed to take the gun in stride, shaking her head, as if the lethal weapon might be some minor violation of a dress code.
This gambit has also proved useful in finding parking spaces anywhere in Manhattan and for upgrading hotel rooms elsewhere.
The denim jacket is not part of her usual wardrobe. Shopping at the Gap is Mallory’s idea of going in disguise. On a normal workday, she dresses well beyond the paycheck of a civil servant. In her partner’s opinion, she delights in leaving the impression that she might be a cop on the take. (This passes for a sense of humor in Mallory’s world.) A well-respected art critic once took notice of her outfit.
Though Mr. Quinn could not see the back pocket of her jeans, he knew a designer’s name would be embroidered there. A long black trenchcoat was draped over the shoulders of her blazer, which was cashmere, and her T-shirt was silk. He would have bet his stock portfolio that her curls were styled in a Fifty-seventh Street salon, but not dyed there, for this was that most unusual creature, a natural blonde. In every other aspect of her, a lifetime’s experience in stereotyping had failed him. He could not hazard her occupation or her exact status in the world. And then, as she drew closer, he realized that, if it was true that one could read another’s soul by the eyes—this young woman didn’t have one.
So, she gets on well with truck drivers and art critics, but she is not overly sentimental about children or puppy dogs. And frail little old ladies should never get between Mallory and a case. This is best illustrated with a grand dame of the New York ballet who mistook the young detective for a prospective student of the dance. Madame Burnstien was small and slight, hardly threatening. Her white hair was captured in a bun, and every bit of skin was a crisscross of lines. The only hand visible through the crack of the door was a cluster of arthritic knots wrapped round the cane.
“I’m Mallory. I have an appointment with you.”
“You are Rabbi Kaplan’s young friend?”
Mallory could not immediately place the woman’s accent, but then Anna Kaplan had said that Madame Burnstien hailed from too many countries to call one of them home. In youth, she had danced for the whole earth. Mallory could not believe this crone had ever been young.
“Rabbi Kaplan said you would see me.”
“I said I would look at you, and I have. You’re a beautiful child, but too tall. Go away now.”
The door began to close. Mallory shot one running shoe into the space between the door and its frame. The old woman smiled wickedly and showed Mallory her cane, lifting it in the crack-width to display the carved wolf’s head and its fangs.
“Move your foot, my dear, or you’ll never dance again.”
The cane was rising for a strike.
“Madame Burnstien, you only think I won’t deck you.”
The old eyes widened and gleamed. The smile disappeared and her brows rushed together in an angry scowl as the cane lowered slowly. There was exaggerated petulance in her cracking voice. “I like determination, child, but you waste my time. You’re still too tall.”
“Everybody’s a critic.” Mallory showed her the gold badge and ID. “I want to talk to you about Aubry Gilette.”
“I have many students. Aubry was a thousand dancers ago. What do you expect me to remember about one girl?”
“Oh, I think you remember her better than most. Don’t make me show the autopsy photo. You’re old. It’d probably kill you.”
And she has a grudge against nuns. Well, one nun. Mallory takes great pride in her enemies, and she is particularly proud of Sister Ursula. One night, she interrupted a poker game to ask a case-related question on religion. And here Rabbi David Kaplan points out that she has better sources for Roman Catholic dogma:
“Kathy, as I recall, you had four years of a very expensive Catholic school education. Go and ask Father Brenner. He’s semi-retired now, but I believe he’s filling in the vacation schedule at St. Jude’s this week.”
“Father Brenner and I aren’t exactly on friendly terms. Maybe you could ask him.”
“It’s been what, maybe ten years now? He’s not one to hold a grudge. It’s not as if you broke that nun’s leg.”
After Mallory left the room, the other poker players fixed upon the face of the rabbi in dead silence. He cast his sweet smile on each player in turn, which was easy because he was holding the best cards of the evening. But he never said another word about Kathy Mallory and the nun, not even when they withheld his sandwiches and beer for a time. He would not talk.
Why do people like this character? I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say it harks back to old high school issues of making the cut, and this idea works well on both sides of the gender divide. Let’s say that it was possible for you to meet her on the street or in a bar. Would Mallory talk to you? Would you even register as a solid object, or would she look through you? These are trick questions and very Darwinian in the sense of good survival instincts. Being ignored is actually your best possible outcome. If she’s interested, if she hurts you, then you’ve made the cut.
There are always questions about why she is the way she is. Well-intentioned (albeit delusional) fans long to pin down the exact moment in time when her mind went awry—so they can tweak her and fix her and ruin my career. More rational readers want me to do the mending. The nicest people ask (beg) for a kinder, gentler Mallory. I politely explain that if I give them what they ask for, I have no book. I’d like to say, “This is crime genre and not a damn soap opera.” (In person, I am polite. On the page—not so much.) Each novel was written to stand alone, and reading one out of order will in no way ruin the plot of any other book in the Mallory series—so you won’t be charting warm and fuzzy life-affirming changes in the character. However, gaining personal insight here and there creates the illusion of growth in a sociopath who cannot change what she is.
She has a partner named Riker, who keeps a very special rainy-day bullet in the nightstand by his bed, and he sometimes thinks of loading it into his gun. But he never speaks of this. There are no overt signs of his state of mind. And Mallory should be the last person on earth to intuit his suicidal ideation. And yet, there are nights when she parks her car in front of his apartment building and looks up toward the bathroom window and the glow of Riker’s plastic Jesus nightlight. When every light but this one has gone out, she drives away.
Perhaps her only clue to Riker’s sadness is in the chaos that he calls home. It’s best described by a character who once said to him, “You know why you don’t have cockroaches? Those genius bugs—they know it’s not safe to eat here.” Mallory, that neat freak who straightens pictures on other people’s walls, once broke into Riker’s apartment and cleaned it for him. She dragged her mop and bucket from room to room, stopping on the threshold of the bathroom, where exquisite good taste kicked in, and she wanted to trash that plastic Jesus nightlight. Instead she cleaned it and left it shining so that Riker would not stumble and fall in the dark.
So what’s in a name when it comes to dangerous pathology?
The pigeonholes that we make for people like Mallory are only for convenience’s sake. We are all special cases. I am sometimes asked, “How does a sociopath differ from a psychopath?” (Here you have to bear in mind that we live in an era of broadcast news that uses authors of techno-thrillers as weaponry experts to explain what’s going on in an actual war. And they have other fiction writers on standby if there’s a plague coming.) So I respond to the question from my audience. (What the hell. I can’t do worse than the amateur expert who sent America to the hardware store one day with the promise that duct tape would protect us from nuclear radiation.) I usually preface my remarks by warning people that the quacks on their favorite television shows cannot agree on this point of mental aberration. However, real doctors seem to have a consensus in their professional journals, which, alas, lack the credibility of the bestseller list.
It appears that there is no longer any distinction made between a sociopath and a psychopath. Based on research, I can tell you that those terms are used interchangeably in academic literature. And a quote from one psychologist of my acquaintance sums up modern policy on this matter: “Today’s sociopath is yesterday’s psychopath.” Putting rational thought to one side for the moment, common usage of these particular words carries more weight with the general public: Many people, with and without television credentials, see a sociopath as someone who can shoot a baby in the head and sleep through the night, and a psychopath as someone who can eat the face off a baby and sleep through the night.
Go with whatever definition makes you the most uncomfortable.
For some readers, Mallory is entirely too real. But I find that letters from mental patients are frequently the most insightful, and I welcome them. In my view, madness is a place. You go. You come back. And I think we all take turns being the mental patient. Without a touch of crazy, literature can be a desolate place. In the current climate of careful speech, even fearful speech, smoke-free film scripts, thought-free songs, and child-proof locks on American minds, the oft-repeated lament of the arts is “Where have all those wonderful madmen gone?”
The strong (and defective) character of Mallory may be what people remember best about these books. However, in a book where character is everything, you have nothing but an essay with no legs. The plot is the animation that runs you at gunpoint from cover to cover, sometimes at a heart-attack pace, a race to the end; and sometimes the plot is crawling, dragging its nails in the dark, coming up behind you… and then… at the end, you should be startled, and your next reaction should be “Oh, of course.”
Most important, the plot has to work with the protagonist. You will sometimes hear the literati say that they have no control over their characters, and they frequently alter a book because their protagonist would never do a thing like that. This should not happen in the crime genre, where there are promises to keep. The author must be in control of the material; this is the appeal, the draw, and the covenant with the reader. You should not be subjected to a thousand pages of angst, boring descriptions of the wallpaper, and the added misery of watching the protagonist boil eggs for breakfast. Instead, you are entitled to a sleek plot that will carry you somewhere, a plot with fangs and moving parts, a beginning, a middle, and a solid resolution.