Free Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell Page B

the sign of the cross—Sorry, Rabbi.”
    â€œThe things she’s done,” said Duffy, picking at his cards and trying to give the appearance that this was not a potential world-class poker hand. His dime grudgingly pushed into the small pile of coins.
    â€œRemember when she was a little kid,” said Slope. “And Helen enrolled her in the NYU computer courses for children?”
    â€œYeah,” said the lawyer. “Helen was so happy that day. Kathy had finally taken an interest in something legal. Do you remember the way Helen cried when the kid gave her that present? You know, the one she made at computer school?”
    â€œThat transfer from the savings and loan?” Slope pushed another nickel into the pot as the next card hit the table, faceup.
    â€œYeah.” Robin Duffy smiled, and then his mouth wobbled as he tried to take the expression back before it tipped his hand, which was somewhat improved by the card dealt him. “Kathy just couldn’t understand why Helen was crying. She figured anybody’d be thrilled to have an extra twenty thou in the checking account three weeks before Christmas.”
    â€œThen,” said Rabbi Kaplan, “Kathy figured, well, Helen is Jewish. Maybe different customs.”
    In the next four hours, Charles discovered that the game of poker could not be learned from a book, and that Helen had worked miracles with Kathy’s behavior. Within six months of foster care, the Markowitzes had been able to take the child into a store with them, and even turn their backs on her for whole minutes at a time—all because theft, petty or grand, made Helen cry. Helen had done so good a job that Kathy could now pass for a young lady in any company but this one. These men knew what she was: a born thief, a hard case with no intrinsic sense of right and wrong. Yet, of all the five billion on the planet, Louis Markowitz had loved her best.
    After the fiasco with Helen’s present, Louis had taken Kathy out of the computer course. The NYU instructor had been sorry to lose such a dazzling student. The bank transfer had been fixed, said the pale little man with the thick glasses. The bank didn’t even know the money was ever missing. So why pull the child out? he had asked, genuinely puzzled. It seemed to be upsetting the little girl, he said. ‘Look, she’s going to cry.’
    How could Louis have explained to that kind, soft-spoken, endlessly patient man that this was not a real kid he had by the hand. You could stick pins in Kathy all damn day long and she’d never, never cry. She had no soft spots.
    Later, she would cry for Helen and not stop crying for days, but that was still years and years away. These were the early days of life with the baby felon.
    Determined never to sic Kathy on civilians again, Louis brought her into work with him in the after-school hours and pointed at a row of computer terminals in the Special Crimes office. ‘This is crap,’ he explained to the skinny kid who didn’t even come up to his lapel pin in those days. ‘We don’t have genius programmers,’ he told her then, ‘no decent equipment. What we got won’t work half the time. And now I’ve got a PC that won’t work at all. You’re so smart? Fix it,’ he told her, ‘and you can play with that one.’
    One night, when she was only an inch taller, she crept into his office with a strange little smile. She dumped a load of printouts on his desk and crept silently away. Long after Helen had come to take the little angel home, Louis was still at his desk reading all the department dirt he ever imagined possible. The thief had cracked every high-echelon code in existence and raided Internal Affairs.
    A present.
    This had been Kathy’s longest lesson.
    The poker game had changed to a bastard version of five-card draw, with deuces wild if you held a queen, and jacks wild if you held a ten. And Charles