"The Man Who Lied To Women" - читать интересную книгу автора (O’Connell Carol)

CHAPTER 2

He had seen the magic bullet again. In dreams, he had watched its slow float from the mouth of the gun to his gut, watched it penetrate his flesh and make the blood fly.

On his way to the bathroom, Riker’s bare foot knocked an empty beer bottle to one side. He never felt the hard connection of flesh to glass, so vivid was the dream in front of his open eyes.

One day the booze would get him killed. His reflexes would not kick in when he needed them to save his sorry life. Awake or asleep, the magic bullet was always floating in the air just ahead of him.

But he and the bottle were an old married couple now. And he preferred the dream of the bullet to the vision of spiders which had come with his last attempt at divorce from alcohol.

How many years had it been? Thirteen years? At least that.

He had been going through withdrawal, strapped to a bed of delirium tremens, on the day Kathy Mallory crawled through the window of the clinic which did not allow children to visit by the front door. The little girl had hit the floor in her rubber-soled shoes and the eerie stealth of a born thief.

For one slow blink, the strange child had blended well with the tableau of spiders which crawled all over his body, the sheets and the walls. The largest of the spiders dangled from the ceiling, madly spinning its silken line, dropping ever closer to his face in an aerial ballet of eight black dancing legs. And then it danced upon his eyes while his arms were bound by thick leather restraints.

‘The spider! Get it off my eyes!’ he had screamed at Mallory, who was Kathy then. (Years later, when she joined the force, she would forbid him to use her given name.) Young Kathy had come close to the bed, peered into his eyes and pronounced them free of spiders. And then, she looked at him with such contempt. She was so close, he could see his own bug-size self twice-reflected in her eyes.

He had turned to the larger mirror on the hospital wall, the better to see what she had seen: his face bathed in sweat, awash in fear, and twitching. A slick of vomit trailed from his mouth to his chin. He slowly nodded his head in agreement with Kathy. He was so pathetic – even spiders would not live in his mind with him any more.

He remembered thanking God that Helen Markowitz had taught Kathy not to spit indoors. He could see it was in her mind to do it when she looked down at him. Instead, she had only turned around and left the way she had come, disappearing through the window. Then, small hands were gripping the sash, closing the window behind her, making no sound and leaving no trace of her unlawful entry.

After that day, after all the spiders had fled for a more upscale mental disorder than his own, he had not been successful in giving up the bottle, but made a point of never again losing face with Kathy. The unpitying brat had ended his days of public falling-down, crawling-home drunken binges. As drunks go, he had become semi-respectable, rarely stumbling, never reeling any more.

Even through his sunglasses, the light at the level of the sidewalk was painfully bright. He opened the passenger door of Mallory’s small tan car and climbed inside. He leaned toward the windshield, lowering his scratched green shades and squinting at the panorama of his neighborhood.

‘So this is morning.’

Dead silence from Mallory.

He had kept the punctuality freak waiting while he dressed and shaved. He was anticipating her slow burn as he shrugged down deep into the upholstery. Smiling affably, tying his tie, he waited for the sarcasm. Instead, she gunned the engine, ripped the car away from the curb and laid a streak of hot rubber on the street leading away from his apartment building.

Riker grabbed the dashboard, thinking this might keep his brains from sloshing around in his skull and stop the pain of the hangover.

‘Okay, Mallory. It’s gonna be a long day. Play nice.’

The car slowed down to a law-abiding pace, and her voice was deceptively civil when she said, ‘The uniforms came up dry with the doormen on the Upper West Side. She didn’t live in that neighborhood. Nobody could make the photographs.’

So she had started without him. What else might she have been up to? It was only 10:00 in the morning. Most days, he would just be opening his eyes at this hour and only thinking about rolling to the floor, and, if he landed with enough momentum, maybe continuing on to the bathroom.

In the tone of You got this coming to you, kid. he said, ‘If you’d had a few years in fieldwork, you’d know how hard it is for most people to ID a corpse from a morgue photo, even one without a damaged face. A mother could make the ID in a heartbeat, and maybe a close friend could do it – but a doorman? No way. So we still don’t know that she didn’t live in that neighborhood.’

Mallory’s expression in profile might read the venom of I’m going to get you for that, or the merely sarcastic Yeah, right. He was pretty confident it was one of those two things.

‘Where are we headed?’ he ventured, testing the atmosphere between them. ‘Going to Brooklyn?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to Brooklyn. Anna dropped the clothes off at a collection center. The center trucked them into the main clearing house in Manhattan. Anna’s bundle went to a women’s shelter in the East Village.’

‘So we’re going to a shelter? Mallory, I gotta go along with Coffey on this one. I just don’t see our Jane Doe in a women’s shelter.’

‘I’ve already been to the shelter. The cashmere blazer wasn’t on the inventory. Somebody lifted it at the warehouse. That’s where we’re going now.’

‘How do you know it wasn’t lifted at the shelter?’ Oh, stupid question. She had turned the place inside out, and probably alienated every -

‘A friend of Anna’s runs that shelter. She opened Anna’s bundle herself. No blazer. So we go to the clearing house and talk to everybody who handled it.’

Ten minutes rolled by on the road in companionable silence. That was one bright spot of doing time with Mallory, she made no small talk. If she opened her mouth, it was to take a swipe at him or make a point. When they pulled up alongside the warehouse, he picked his own words with careful timing. He put one hand on her shoulder before they entered the building.

‘Mallory, no cowboy shots this time out. I backed you with Coffey, but he was right and you know it. If you gotta spend a bullet, you do it right and you do it clean. Okay? School’s out.’

They passed through the lobby in a testy silence and rode up to the third floor in a gray metal box the size of a coffin. The elevator doors opened on to a single room the length and width of a city block. Irregular corridors, made of stacked packages and bundles, extended far into the illusion of converging parallels. Dust hung in the air around the forklift shuttling back and forth down the wide center aisle, picking up cartons as numbers were called out over a bullhorn in the hand of a man with bandy legs and a beer belly.

Mallory flashed her badge and fell into step with the man as he walked in the center aisle. Grimy light from never-washed windows gave the place a secondhand look to go with the smell of the clothing. Riker had worn such clothes as a child, and he could never lose that smell.

He followed behind Mallory, pulling out his notebook.

The bandy-legged crew chief was alternately calling out numbers from his clipboard and carrying on a conversation that Mallory was not listening to.

‘No one would touch one of those bundles,’ said the crew chief. ‘Who’s gonna risk a job for a crummy secondhand rag?’

Riker smiled. He guessed the rag in question had set Mallory back at least nine hundred dollars, if not more. Nothing but the best for Mallory. Helen Markowitz had seen to that, beginning in the early days when Riker was still allowed to call her Kathy. But despite the designer wardrobe Helen had lavished on the child, Kathy had gone everywhere in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirts.

Today, that wardrobe only varied in the tailored, gray wool blazer that bulged on the left as a warning that she carried a large gun in a shoulder holster. And she had traded her canvas tennis shoes for the most expensive leather running shoes God ever personally cobbled.

‘Who handled the bundles when they came in?’ she asked.

‘Could’ve been any one of eight guys,’ said the crew chief and then called out, ‘489,’ in the amplified scream of the bullhorn.

‘Get them out here, all eight of them.’

‘Look, honey, I’m always happy to cooperate with the cops, but I ain’t – ’

‘Did I ask you for cooperation? Get them.’

And now Riker could see that the crew chief was from the old school – no woman was going to dress him down and get away with it. The man turned on Mallory with all the indignation of a pit bull, lips parted to a display of teeth. And then, something in her face shut his mouth. Perhaps he had just remembered that he had come out this morning without a weapon.

He cleared his throat, lifted the bullhorn and barked off the names. The men came out of all the stacks with clipboards and pencils, sweat and curiosity, leers for Mallory, and puffs of cigarette smoke. They fell into a ragged line.

As she looked them over like a prospective buyer, the leers dropped away and Riker watched discomfort settle in. There was shifting of feet and the small talk of eyes between them. One man was sweating more than the rest, and his Adam’s apple had a life of its own. Mallory seemed to like this one with the red hair and freckles. Now she kept her eyes on him alone. His shoulders hunched, and his head lowered as he made himself smaller. His muscles were tensing, bunching through the thin cloth of his T-shirt.

Mallory turned to Riker and lifted her chin a bare quarter of an inch. She looked back to the redhead. Riker circled around to the right. As Mallory moved forward, the redhead balked and ran. Riker reached out to grab the T-shirt and missed. And now Mallory was pounding after the man, and Riker jogged behind her in the dust kicked up by her shoes.

‘Jimmy,’ the crew chief screamed, ‘come back here, you jerk! It’s only a secondhand sports coat!’

But Jimmy was out of earshot.

Jimmy Farrow was running as fast as he had ever run from a cop, and he’d outrun a few. He looked back to see the old guy turning red trying to keep up, but the woman was almost on top of him. Every time he chanced to look over his shoulder, she was right there, four feet behind and not even breathing hard, her blazer flapping open to expose a very big gun.

Oh, Christ, was she grinning? She was.

She stayed with him through the narrow streets, then across all the lanes of traffic on wide Houston, and over the courtyard wall of an apartment building in the West Village.

He made the leap of his life and hooked his hands on a fire escape. He hauled his body up and climbed the metal stairs. As he gained the next landing, he looked down through the grate. She was nowhere in sight.

He was looking up to the landing above when he was grabbed by the hair and pulled backward.

Where did she come from?

A kick to the inside of his knee and he was off balance, falling to the grate of the fire escape, rolling to the edge. Blood rushed to his head as he was leveraged over the side and dangling, arms waving in circles. He was looking down at the sidewalk three flights below. Twisting his head to look up through the grate, he could see her holding the back of his jeans and kneeling on his legs. He stopped struggling. If she let go, he was gone. She could dump him any time she wanted to.

‘So you stole the cashmere blazer and…?’

She eased off his legs and let him hang a little lower.

‘The jacket!’ he screamed. ‘That’s what this is about? That stupid sports jacket?’

‘You stole it, right?’

He saw the pavement come up a few more inches to meet him. A winter breeze chilled the sweat on his body and made him shiver.

‘Yeah, I did it! Okay?’

‘Didn’t she like it?’

What? Crazy bitch. What does she want?

‘Yeah, she liked it! She liked it just fine!’

He wondered if he might be right-side up after all, and it was the world that was upside down. The old cop was down below, snagging the ladder for the fire escape and lowering it down to the pavement. The old guy took his sweet time walking up the stairs, like it was nothing to see some poor bastard hanging in midair and pointed headfirst toward the cement.

Damn cops.

‘Mallory, don’t do this to me,’ said the old guy. ‘You don’t want Coffey on my ass, do you?’

And the woman said, ‘He won’t complain. I can do anything I want with him.’

‘You drop him, and that’s three days of paperwork.’

She loosened her grip. He dropped lower.

‘Okay, okay!’ screamed Jimmy Farrow. ‘I already told her I did it! Let me up!’

He was being hauled up by four ungentle hands. When he was right-side up and sitting down, the old guy took out his notebook. ‘You wanna make a statement, kid? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Yeah, okay. My grandmother’s Social Security check got screwed up this month. A neighbor bought her groceries for a few days till my mom could replace the money. I just wanted to give Amanda – she’s the neighbor. I wanted to give her something. It was my grandmother’s idea.’

‘Now let me get this straight,’ said the old guy, pen circling over his notebook. ‘First you give Amanda the blazer, then you killed her – and your grandmother made you do it?’

Oh, God, they’re both nuts.

‘I didn’t do anything to her. I just gave her the sports jacket.’

‘Were you very close to Amanda?’

‘No! I go to my grandmother’s building twice a week to sweep out the halls. My grandmother’s the super, but she’s not up to slopping all those floors and stairs any more.’

‘What a good boy you are,’ said the old guy. ‘Now, about Amanda?’

‘I see Amanda in the hall now and then, that’s all. She and my grandmother were real tight. Talk to the old lady.’

The old woman was waiting for them on the front steps of the building. Jimmy Farrow stood between two uniformed officers on the sidewalk, his head bowed and his hands cuffed behind his back. Riker climbed the steps behind Mallory and watched the old woman looking from Mallory to her grandson, lips slightly parted in disbelief.

‘Police,’ said Mallory, showing the ID card and shield. ‘You’re Mrs Farrow? This is your grandson?’

The old woman nodded, her eyes blinking rapidly.

Riker looked back to the sidewalk. The siren on the squad car had scattered most of the hookers like roaches, but now one came weaving back, too jazzed on crack to be afraid.

‘I want access to Amanda Bosch’s apartment,’ said Mallory.

‘Do you have a warrant?’ the old woman asked, automatically.

That was predictable to Riker. It was a neighborhood where such a phrase came tripping to the tongue, spoken even before that all-time favorite ‘I didn’t do it.’

‘She’s dead,’ said Mallory. ‘You think I need a warrant?’

Nicely worded, kid.

And the denial in the slow shake of the old woman’s head was also predictable. Such a thing could not be, said Mrs Farrow’s eyes. She pulled her thin sweater close about her neck, as though that would protect her from Mallory. She retreated two faltering steps. Mallory’s long reach put a photograph in the old woman’s face.

‘Is that her? Is that Amanda Bosch?’

Ease up, Mallory. We don’t want to kill a taxpayer.

Mrs Farrow stared at the image of the dead woman and crossed herself. Another protection failed her as Mallory put her face in the old woman’s face. ‘Is that her?’

‘Yes, yes. It’s Amanda Bosch.’

Mallory made a note, and Riker knew her meticulous report would read that positive ID was made at 10:56 am. That would make a department record for a corpse without prints.

They followed the old woman up the stairs and down the hail to the apartment at the end of the second landing. Mrs Farrow fumbled with the lock, but finally managed it. When the hand with the key ring came back to the old woman’s side, the keys jingled with the trembling.

Riker entered the apartment behind Mallory. Mrs Farrow hovered on the threshold for a moment and then melted away down the hall.

The first thing he noticed about the apartment was that it was clean. From where he stood, he could see through the sparkling galley kitchen and into the room beyond it. Spotless, smelling of cleansers and powders, all cleaned up for company. Or had the place been cleaned up for blood traces and prints?

The inside doorknob gleamed. He looked down and moved his head to see it from every possible angle. There might be latent prints on it, but he doubted it. Even Mallory was not so neat that she wiped the prints from her own doorknob when she left her apartment. He called through the open door to a uniformed police officer standing out in the hall with Jimmy Farrow.

‘Looks like this might be the original crime scene. Ask the old lady if you can use her phone to call the techs.’

‘Waste of time,’ said Mallory, bending low to approve the polish of a small table. Every surface was gleaming. ‘Very neat. If our guy gets off on a psycho defense, I may hire him to clean my condo.’

Markowitz had raised her right. She touched nothing, hands jammed into the pockets of her jeans as they continued the routine walk-through into the next room.

The back room was tiny, with only space enough for the single bed and the personal computer. She knew better than to touch it, but her hands pulled out of the pockets the moment she saw it. From now on, she would have no interest in anything else. She did not have her father’s mania for small details.

The door to the closet was ajar. Riker’s eyes adjusted to the dim light within until he made out the outline of the old-fashioned wooden cradle on the floor. So Amanda had purchased a cradle for the aborted baby, and then put the cradle away, out of sight, when the child was cut out of her.

He looked away.

He perused the bookshelf and found style guides and reference books: one on how to prepare a manuscript, another on writers’ markets. In this room, too, all the surfaces were cleaned. In the better light of two windows, he could see the scallops of sponge marks high on the wall. Had there been blood on the walls? Had Amanda managed to do some damage to him before he killed her?

‘Well, that tears it,’ he said, turning to Mallory, who was reading the label of a computer disk on the console shelf. ‘This has to be the crime site, and the bastard wiped it clean.’ He spoke on blind faith that she might be listening to him. ‘You know, this may be the end of the road, kid.’

She was pacing back and forth in front of the computer. She could hardly wait to get at it. He knew she was only holding off for a technician to tell her what she already knew – it had been wiped clean. She was ignoring everything else in the apartment.

Not the old man’s style.

Markowitz always had his investigators bring him every damned detail they could fit into a notebook or a plastic bag. She was letting every detail go by.

A uniformed officer appeared in the bedroom doorway. ‘There’s a crew in the area. They can be here in about fifteen minutes to a half hour.’

‘Thanks, Martin,’ said Riker.

If Mallory approved the cleaning job, it was a certainty they would find nothing. She had called it a waste of time, and she had called it right. Twenty minutes later, Heller, the senior man in Forensics, was sharing Mallory’s opinion. He stood in the center of the bedroom, his slow brown eyes wandering over every polished surface, and wincing.

As Heller pulled on his rubber gloves, the nod of his head sent another technician to the kitchen. A third man was already at work in the front room. A ricochet of flashbulb light found its way to the back of the tiny apartment. Heller, brush in hand, turned to the small nightstand by the narrow bed.

‘No. Do the computer first,’ said Mallory. ‘I need it.’

Perhaps another man with Heller’s years in the department might have bridled at a direct order from Mallory, who was younger than Heller’s youngest daughter. He only nodded, taking no offense, and set his kit on the floor by the computer.

A uniformed officer filled the bedroom doorway. ‘Your keystroker brought this over.’ He handed Mallory a leather case. She opened it to display a set of delicate tools and boxes of disks.

She turned to hover over Heller as he worked with the black powder.

‘Don’t get that crap in the keyboard,’ said Mallory. ‘And watch the vent – you don’t want it dropping in the vent.’

Riker had never seen Heller work so fast, anything to appease Mallory. And when he was done, he couldn’t get out of her way fast enough.

‘I’m going up to talk to the old lady and the kid,’ said Riker.

‘Right.’

She was on to the computer now. He was dead to her, as were the technicians who worked around her.

As Riker was closing the door behind him, Heller was working on the nightstand and bitching about the perp being a good-housekeeping fanatic, forgetting that only four feet away from him sat just such a fanatic, and she was armed.

‘Don’t bag that,’ said Mallory to Heller as he was trying to ease the card file off the small table next to the computer. ‘I need it. It’s a client list – all the people she did research for.’

‘You got your own tweezers in that kit?’ Heller asked, looking down into her case of tools.

She looked up at Heller. Did he think she didn’t know how to handle evidence? No. He was just doing his job. Markowitz had always coddled and petted Heller, even when he was giving the man fits, checking out details within details. And she needed this man.

‘Don’t worry about it, Heller. If his prints were on it, he wouldn’t have left it behind.’ She moved her chair to one side of the screen. ‘Here, look at this.’

Heller bent down to look at the lighted computer screen of white letters on a blue field. It was a list of names. He looked back to the exposed first card in the spindle.

‘You see? All the information on the first entry matches that card. You’re looking at an electronic copy of the card file. Someone logged on to this computer at least six hours after Bosch was killed. Whoever cleaned the apartment cleaned up the computer too. He deleted this file. I brought it back with a utility program. If I get lucky, that card file won’t be an exact match to the computer file.’

‘You think the guy might have removed his own card?’

‘I’d bet even money on it. Why would he delete the list if he wasn’t on it?’

Heller was nodding as he accepted a plastic evidence bag from a technician. He scribbled his initials on the label and turned back to face her.

‘We’re done here, Mallory. I can’t tell you much. The guy was tall. He’s got a long reach up that wall.’

‘How do you know he wasn’t standing on a chair?’

‘You can follow the track of the sponge along the wall. No stop and start motion to move a chair. He was walking along the length of the wall. I’d guess his height at six-one to six-three. And he’s a thorough bastard. We’re taking the rugs and the mattress into the lab. If there was any blood, we’ll find it. We pulled a few prints off the shoes and the belts. The prints probably belong to the victim.’

He looked up to the marks high on the wall. ‘Nobody that tall could have such small finger pads.’

Heller seemed to be casting for words.

‘Anything else?’

You wouldn’t hold out on me, would, you, Heller?

‘The guy’s weird,’ he said at last.

Heller leaned down and pulled out a drawer from the nightstand near the bed. It was empty; the contents had been bagged. He turned the drawer upside down and held it out to her. The pine scented cleaning solvent was still strong on the wood.

‘He cleaned all the exterior surfaces of the drawers,’ said Heller. ‘Now that’s weird. And it’s not like there was a blood bath here. There wasn’t. I’d get flecks, at least, with the light and the spray. But nothing. The guy’s just weird.’

‘You mean I’m looking for a psych profile based on a cleaning job?’

‘Could be. I saw something like this ten years back. Maybe your old man told you about it. The crime scene was already as clean as this one. They caught the bastard when he came back to the site to clean it again. There was a detective in the apartment when the perp showed up with rubber gloves, a bucket and a mop. They should all be so easy. That’s all I got.’

And, thank you, Heller, prompted the ghost of Markowitz who sat in an overstuffed armchair inside her brain.

‘Thanks, Heller.’

She smiled again and made a show of taking the tweezers out of her tool kit and carefully pulling back each card on the spindle, matching it to the files on her screen.

Heller and his men were gone when she was into the h’s. Missing was the card on Betty Hyde. According to the retrieved computer file, Hyde was a gossip columnist with a large syndication. Mallory didn’t need the file to know that the woman also did television spots on an evening news program. Her residence was the Coventry Arms, an upscale Upper West Side condominium.

Gold.

The address was a six-minute walk from the site in the park where the body was dumped.

A quick perusal of the electronic calendar told her that Betty Hyde used Amanda Bosch’s fact-checking services on an irregular basis. The notes on parties indicated something more social in the relationship.

Mallory recalled the face of Betty Hyde from the gossip columnist’s regular five-minute news segments. Hyde was vicious in her reporting of private lives. The woman would make a better victim than a suspect. When Mallory was done with the list, only the columnist’s card was missing from the hard copy. The address had to tie in.

Next, she went into a set of hidden subfiles. The security would be chimp-simple to crack, but why would Bosch need that kind of lock-out on a home computer? Was there someone else spending time in this apartment? It would hardly be Betty Hyde, whose tastes were radically different, judging by the address of a multimillion-dollar condo.

The computer was asking for a password. Mallory flipped through her software array with the eye of a burglar viewing her selection of prybars and glass cutters. She selected a disk and started up the program to bang down the door with a crashing cascade of every variable on a password. It was BOOK which unlocked the door, and now a novel came tumbling out.

Well, that fit nicely with the books on writers’ markets and the style guides which lined the bookshelves, and which were not part of a researcher’s trade.

‘No, you’re absolutely right, Mrs Farrow,’ said Riker. ‘She shouldn’t have talked to you that way. But you see, she lost her father recently, and she just hasn’t been the same since.’

Actually, there was no difference at all in Mallory.

‘Oh, that poor child,’ said Mrs Farrow.

Mallory was never a child.

Riker sat back in a well-padded chair upholstered in roses, and there were roses on the wallpaper and in the pattern of the rug. Roses even trimmed his coffee cup. He smiled at the old woman who lived in the apartment over Amanda Bosch’s.

‘I understand you’ve been having problems with your Social Security checks.’

‘Yes. Jimmy steals them and cashes them. I thought that was why you arrested him. His mother usually makes it up to me, but this month she was a little short. I’m not pressing charges. I never do. Amanda came up with groceries and helped me out with my medication. I told Jimmy if he didn’t pay Amanda back, I would put him in jail. Not that I would, you understand. So what does he give her? A secondhand sports coat with a cigarette burn on the sleeve.’

‘Do you know where Jimmy was on that morning?’

‘My grandson was right here in this apartment. His father dragged him over here to apologize to me at six in the morning. My son works nights, you see. Gets off at five. Well, when his wife finally told him about the check, he went crazy, my son did. And Mrs Cramer – she’s my neighbor down the hall. Oh, she’s such a sweet woman. Every morning since my last heart attack, Mrs Cramer comes by to check on me before she goes to work at the hospital. Well, she was here when Jimmy and his father came by. You can ask her – she’ll tell you the same. Then, we all went to mass together and sat down to breakfast at my son’s house. My son drove me home at noon.’

Riker looked at his notebook. It tied with what the kid had told him. He didn’t take the old woman for a good liar. Her eyes gave away every thought, every fear.

‘And your grandson was never out of your sight the whole morning?’

‘No. Father Ryan will tell you. He’ll remember. He was shocked to see Jimmy in church.’ She looked down at the hands in her lap, a collection of arthritic knots wrapped around a square tin box. ‘What are you going to do with my grandson?’

‘I’ll have a man drive him back to the warehouse.’

‘No charges?’

‘No.’

She pried open the box and rewarded him with sugar cookies.

‘I have a few more questions about Amanda,’ said Riker, with one hand in the tin.

‘I still can’t believe she’s dead. She was so young. Amanda was a good, gentle person. I can’t – ’ The rest of her words were too weak to find their way out of her throat. She was suddenly very tired, and it showed in the slump of her back and the sag of her shoulders.

‘I’d like to talk to some of the neighbors,’ said Riker. ‘Maybe they’ll remember seeing Amanda with a boyfriend. Hard to figure, isn’t it? Pretty young woman like that one, and no man in her life?’

Amanda had not started that baby without a man. Although it was the Christmas season, Riker required a few thousand years of distance from miracles. The old lady was keeping something back.

‘Well, the neighbors wouldn’t know,’ said Mrs Farrow. ‘They’re all working-class people in this neighborhood. They’re out of the building during the day, and all in bed at a reasonable hour. So they wouldn’t know.’

‘And you never heard the guy downstairs on a weekend, I bet.’

‘Well, no.’

She hunched her thin shoulders, and her chin dropped to her chest. She fixed her startled eyes on the carpet at her feet, understanding now what she had given away.

Riker smiled, and regarded the old woman as though she were made of precious stuff.

‘You know,’ said Riker, ‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead either, but I don’t think Amanda would mind. And I know you want to help us find the killer, don’t you? So, you figure the boyfriend is married, right?’

‘Amanda never talked about him, and he only came in the afternoon when no one was at home.’

‘But you heard them downstairs. You heard them together.’

And oh, what she had heard, said the nervous fidgeting of her fingers about the cookie tin. She would not meet his eyes.

Mallory scrolled through the lines of the novel, looking for anything out of place, any sign of a damaged file. The fire escape window was at her left. Beyond the glass pane, she heard a baby crying, and then the soft thudding on the glass. She turned to the window. Not a baby.

She was staring into a pair of slanted eyes as green as her own. The cat’s fur had been white, but now it was grayed with dust and dirt, and one ear was torn and bloody. Amanda Bosch must have been in the habit of feeding the stray.

‘Tough luck, cat, you’re on your own.’ She turned back to the computer and continued the scrolling, scanning the lines for gaps and odd characters, gleaning a little from the plot. One of the main characters lived in an expensive condo on the Upper West Side. Now that fit nicely with the missing file card bearing the address of Betty Hyde’s condo. The fictional man was a married cheat. Better and better. The cat would not shut up.

Mallory looked back to the window and tried to convey, by narrowing eyes, that the cat must stop, and right now, or she would dispatch it to kitty heaven. The animal misunderstood, its own eyes narrowing to the slits of I love you, too. Then the cat was on its hind legs, pawing at the glass with mewls of, Let me in, now, now, now.

Mallory raised the sash. But, before she could terrorize the small animal, it slipped under her arm and into the room, depositing cat hair on the sleeve of her blazer in passing. It ran through the galley kitchen and into the front room.

She shrugged. What the hell. Bosch was dead, the apartment was tossed, let the cat steal what it could. It was nothing to her.

It began the mewling again. Mallory looked at the cat with a new idea for making it shut up. A rare change of heart caused her to abandon that solution. The cat would have enough problems out on the street without a fresh injury.

She watched it hook a paw in the closet door and open it. After a brief search, it was out again and sniffing the floor. It came back to the bedroom to rub up against her leg. The plaintive meowing ceased, and the soft roar of purring began. Mallory repressed the urge to kick it. She pushed it off with her leg. And now the cat went to the bookshelf and knocked out the bottom cartons of computer ribbon to pull out the catnip toy.

Not a stray.

Mallory got up and walked into the galley kitchen. She looked in the cupboard. All the dishes were neatly stacked, but one seemed out of place, a bowl sitting on the dinner plates. Over the blue ceramic glaze, the word Nose was printed in gold letters. The cat was staring up at her, and now she noticed the long gray marking around the muzzle, a shading she had taken for dirt. It had the comic illusion of making the cat’s nose seem long and bulbous. Nose was well named.

It was mewling again. Mallory put one hand on her hip, drawing back the blazer to expose the bolstered gun, forgetting momentarily that this gesture would have no effect on a cat.

The cat stood up on its hind legs and twirled in a circle, dancing with delicate, practiced steps. Done with dancing, it sat quietly staring at the bowl in Mallory’s hand. And now the small animal had been further reduced in her eyes. The only thing a cat had going for it was the refusal to do stupid pet tricks. This one had copped out.

She opened a can of tuna, guessing food would keep it quiet. The cat ate as though it had been starved.

She went back into the bedroom and set the printer to spit out the cued-up files. And now she checked the closet and looked down at the cradle on the floor.

A cradle for an abortion!

She walked into the bathroom. In the closet under the sink was a long plastic box, the kind used for Kitty Litter. It was dusted with black powder, but there were no prints. The killer had cleaned the litter box.

This apartment was not the crime site; she knew that after a careful inspection of the other closets. She sniffed the insides of the closet doors for the familiar odor of the recent cleaning. He wasn’t cleaning up after a break-and-enter. This was a place where he had spent a lot of time. He was the one Amanda Bosch had locked out of her subfiles, her novel. She might have done that if he figured prominently in the book.

But he had left the card file behind. How convoluted was he?

Of course.

He had to leave the addresses of the clients for the police, so they wouldn’t have to go looking on their own, maybe asking for public assistance on the evening news. It fit. The park site where the body was found was only a few minutes’ walk from Hyde’s condo. It was the address he was hiding.

Now she went over the rooms of the apartment with greater care.

Details, said Markowitz from the room inside her brain which she had outfitted with his favorite chair, a rack of pipes and a pouch of cherry-blend tobacco. Details.

She went through the canned goods in the kitchen pantry. Two cans of fish, but no pet food. Well, some people were a little strange about animals. Now she found the vacuum in the living room closet and pulled it open. The bag was gone. Heller would have taken it. Around the insides of the vacuum cleaner she found cat hair.

The cat was rubbing up against her leg again, depositing more hair. It stood up on hind legs, soft paws on her jeans. Mallory bent down and picked up the cat’s paws.

No claws. Not an outside cat.

And that would explain the torn ear and the rest of the blood. Such a cat could not survive on the street. The animal had escaped when the killer returned. Or did he throw it out for a reason?

The cat had eaten its food with ravenous hunger, and now the bowl was licked clean. It must have gone without food for a long time. That would fit if the killer had returned to the apartment the day of the murder, the last date on the computer log.

Riker had never expected to see Mallory with a cat in her arms. Cats were the natural enemies of the compulsively neat. It had already deposited a mess of white hairs on her gray blazer. And most surprising, the cat was still alive. She set it down on the carpet beside her. The cat rubbed up against her leg, shedding more fur, and yet, she didn’t kill it.

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘The cat’s name is Nose. He lives here.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ He bent down to pet the cat. It shied around to the other side of Mallory’s legs. ‘So, what else have you got?’

‘This isn’t the crime scene,’ she said, pushing the cat off with one leg and uncharacteristic restraint. ‘The original crime scene is in the park. The perp lives in that neighborhood. Not likely he’d drag a dead body home to dump it. That’s where she had a meeting with him,’

‘A meeting? You got that off the computer?’

‘No. It rained that morning, and there’s no umbrella in this apartment. She had something on him, so she met him in the park and threatened him.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘She was a freelance researcher and fact-checker. It fits. So she threatened him, and he killed her. He panicked and ran. Later, he came back, dragged her deeper into the woods and worked her hands over with a rock to get rid of the prints. That bought him the time to come down here that night and clean up the evidence of a relationship with the victim. He lives at the Coventry Arms. I’m betting he’s married, and he’s over six-one. So what have you got?’

Riker smiled and slowly folded his notebook into his coat pocket. ‘The kid’s story checks out.’ He followed her into the bedroom. The floor was littered with rolling sheets of paper which were still pouring out the mouth of the machine on the shelf below the computer. She scanned the sheets until she found the one she wanted and ripped it free of the rolling paper.

He read the list of names.

‘First he deleted this client file. Then the jerk only took that one client address out of the card file. Bosch did occasional work for a gossip columnist, Betty Hyde. They also had a social relationship.’

‘So you figure Hyde is tied to it?’

‘No. Hyde hasn’t used Bosch’s service in two months.’

‘Maybe Amanda was in the neighborhood picking up more work from Hyde.’

‘No. Look at this.’ She ripped another sheet free of the roll. ‘This is her production schedule. There’s nothing on her calendar for Hyde’s projects. There’s even a note saying Hyde is out of the country. I checked it out with the paper and the airline. She’s due back in the country this afternoon.

‘Look at the billings on these accounts. Bosch logged in all her time – she never worked weekends. And she never made pick-ups. For the past two months, all her work was messengered in and out of this apartment.’

‘But the perp lives in the same building as Hyde?’

‘The fool only took one card away. Yeah. He lives in that building. He didn’t want the police coming back to that address asking questions. It’s like he left me a map.’

‘When Coffey hears this, he’s gonna scream like a woman in childbirth. It’s a little out of your neighborhood, kid, but you know the kind of people who live in that building.’

‘Helen grew up in a building on that block. Her sister Alice still lives there.’

‘It’s good you got those kind of connections, kid. You’re gonna need ’em if you step on any toes in the Coventry Arms. I didn’t know Helen came from money.‘

‘Helen’s people were well off, but not wealthy. It’s an odd mix in that neighborhood. You can have a woman on Social Security living in the same rent-control building with a society matron.’

‘How’s your Aunt Alice’s building situated? You think she might give us some space for surveillance?’

‘I don’t think so. I only met her once, and she didn’t like me.’

‘How could she not like you? What’s not to like?’

She was closed to him now, lost in the scrolling action of the computer which continued to spit paper.

‘So how come you never got along with Helen’s folks? I know they didn’t like Markowitz, but you?’

‘Aunt Alice just took a sudden dislike to me when I was a kid. She hasn’t spoken to me since.’

What had Mallory done to Aunt Alice?

Riker’s notebook lay open in his hand as he looked around the doctor’s private office. The room was thick with the scent and the green of living plants, some with delicate blooms. The doctor was also on the delicate side, and Riker pegged him for a gentle soul who trapped houseflies and released them out of doors. He felt sorry for the poor little bastard in the white coat, who was explaining to Mallory that he could not violate Amanda Bosch’s privacy, be she living or dead. The doctor would not tell her if Amanda did or did not have any sexually transmitted diseases. There was a principle of confidentiality here which he could never violate.

Mallory was tensing, and Riker guessed the doctor could not read the warning signs. This poor man’s career of sensitivity to women and their gynecological problems had not prepared him for this.

She was rising to a stand.

Too late, Doc.

Mallory slammed the autopsy photograph down on the blotter in front of the man, startling him. She leaned across his desk and pressed him deep into the cushions of his chair without laying a hand on him.

Not raising her voice, but ticking off the syllables in the even meters of a live time bomb, Mallory said, ‘Look at what that bastard did to her.’

These were not the pretty photographs the uniforms had shown to the doormen, the shots with the head wound and the damage of insects. This was the autopsy aftermath, the hardcore obscenity of a woman hollowed out like a bloody canoe.

Mallory never mentioned that a pathologist had done this. She let the good doctor run the course of his imagination which was draining his face of blood, bringing him to his feet and leading him to the door of the washroom.

Mallory settled down in her chair to wait out the noises of a man retching, splattering his lunch over water and porcelain. Her arms crossed and her mouth slanted down on one side to say she had expected more fortitude from a medical man.

When the doctor returned to his desk, he sat down slowly in the manner of one who had just aged thirty years and had suddenly become careful of his brittle bones. His soft white hands grasped one another for comfort.

He was Mallory’s creature now.

‘Did you know the father of the baby?’

‘No. She wouldn’t talk about him. I had the idea he was probably a married man.’

‘I want to know if any sexually transmitted disease could have been a motive. I don’t have all damn day to wait on lab results from the ME.’

‘No, nothing like that. I tested her for everything at her request. No disease of any kind. The pregnancy was compromising her health, but that was due to a physical defect of the uterus.’

‘Is that why she had the abortion? It was therapeutic?’

‘I have no idea why she aborted the baby. She wanted that child more than anything in the world. She had enormous difficulty conceiving because of the physical abnormalities. It was a chance in a million, her pregnancy.’

‘You did the abortion?’

‘No, it was done in a city hospital. She went into the emergency room complaining of bleeding and cramps. I got there as fast as I could. It wasn’t a hospital where I had privileges. And before they would even let me see her, it was over. It was done by a bad doctor with a cut-rate education. She was butchered.’

The doctor’s eyes slid over to the photograph on his desk as though he had second thoughts on the definition of butchery.

‘After the abortion, there was no possibility of another pregnancy. No amount of corrective surgery could have repaired the damage done to her.’

‘When was the abortion done?’

‘It was one week ago today. She cancelled two appointments with me, and I never saw her again. I called and left messages. She never called back.’

‘So she miscarried? Is that how it started?’

‘No. There was no miscarriage.’

‘You think she tried to abort herself?’

‘No, of course not. Nothing like that, but the fetus was definitely in danger. She hadn’t slept for days, or eaten. There was an enormous amount of pressure on her.’

‘What kind of pressure?’

‘I don’t know. When I saw her that night at the hospital, she wouldn’t tell me what had brought it on. I don’t know what the emotional trauma was. The doctor in attendance had given her the option of saving the baby. He said she screamed at him, “No! Cut it out of me!” The fool never took Amanda’s emotional state into consideration, he just went ahead and cut her.’

‘What kind of trauma would bring on the bleeding and the cramps?’

‘Oh, something that would cost her peace of mind and sleep. Bed rest was important. It isn’t unusual for some women with her medical profile to spend the entire pregnancy in bed.’

‘Give me the reasons why she might want to get rid of the baby,’ said Mallory. ‘I know she wasn’t a hardship case. I’ve seen her bank account.’

‘Maybe there was some disclosure about the baby’s father or his past, something that made her revolt at the idea of bearing his child. She was just entering the second trimester of the pregnancy. I have no idea when she told the father about it. He may have recently disclosed some genetic problem.’

‘But you would have done tests for that, right?’

‘She wasn’t a good candidate for amniocentesis. It was a very delicate pregnancy. I’d need a pretty good reason to put a needle into the womb to extract the necessary fluid. But Amanda never mentioned genetic problems, or any other problems. She was a very happy woman – before she lost the baby.’

‘Can you think of any other possibilities?’

‘Women will abort in cases of rape. Of course, that wouldn’t apply here, but it’s the fact that the man is so repugnant to them that makes them abort the issue of a rapist. The emotional trauma could have been caused by any number of things, but it would have to be something horrible to make her abort her child.’

The doctor’s face was set in real grief.

‘I liked Amanda very much.’ His eyes strayed back to the autopsy photos. He reached out and pushed them off the edge of his desk. ‘The bank account you mentioned – that was the down payment for a house. She wanted a house with a yard for the child to play in.’

At the end of the day, in Coffey’s office, which was still called Markowitz’s office, Riker was saying, ‘And the perp gets Mallory’s good-housekeeping commendation.’

Coffey turned to Mallory. ‘Did Forensics turn up anything?’

‘Heller’s team found a cap gun in the building trash bin. He thinks it’s tied to Bosch’s apartment.’

‘He got prints off it?’

‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s why he thinks it’s tied. The toy gun was wiped clean. It’s a replica of an old six-shooter.’

‘I didn’t know they still made cap guns like that.’

‘Only a few companies do,’ said Riker, looking down at his notebook. ‘But that won’t help. This one was manufactured thirty years ago. It might have belonged to the perp when he was a kid.’

‘You think he tried to scare her with it?’

‘Could be,’ said Riker. ‘You gotta wonder about a grown man who keeps his toys.’

A baseball with a Mickey Mantle autograph sat on the desk between them. Coffey smiled with no trace of ruffling, no rising to the bait. Riker shrugged.

‘What have we got on motive – anything?’

‘She had something on him and threatened him,’ said Mallory. ‘He panicked and killed her.’

‘Where is this coming from, Mallory?’

‘She was a researcher and a fact-checker. He was the father of her child – ’

‘You don’t know that.’ Or did she?

‘If he was the father of her child, it would make sense for her to check him out,’ said Mallory. ‘So she must have turned up something. It fits. No holes in it.’

‘But it’s a lot of supposition, isn’t it? Unless you were holding out on me. You wouldn’t do that, would you?’

Of course she would. He looked to Riker, and gave the man credit for not rolling his eyes.

‘No, I’m not,’ she said.

But Coffey decided she was seconds too late in saying it.

‘So you made an ID on the corpse. Good job, Mallory. But the Coventry Arms address is flimsy. I can’t interrogate these people based on what you’ve got – not without getting harassment complaints from the governor’s personal guest list. We’ve got zip for physical evidence. If the park is the crime site, the lack of an alibi for the six minutes it takes to do a murder won’t hold up in court. We’ve got a twenty-four-hour period where he could have gone into Bosch’s apartment. He didn’t even need to do the clean-up in one block of time. So we question every male in the building, and where does it get us? I can’t do that just because there’s a card missing from a file. We don’t know that Bosch didn’t toss out the address card herself. Maybe she dropped Hyde as a client.’

‘She didn’t toss the card. There are also cards in the hard copy file for inactive clients. This woman never tossed anything.’

Except a half-created baby.

‘It’s not enough to bring anybody in.’

‘I’m not asking you to bring anybody in. You could move me into the building,’ said Mallory. ‘One of those apartments has to be vacant. Somebody’s out of town, somebody’s relocated.’

‘So you think you can move into a sublet or a vacancy without alerting the suspect? We’re still getting calls from people who think you’re dead because they saw your face on TV.’

‘I know he’s tied to that building. If I can’t flush him out, I’ll never get him.’

‘You can’t catch them all, Mallory.’

‘The killer is in a circle that overlaps with Bosch and Hyde, and there are notes on a social relationship with Hyde. This woman might have introduced them, or maybe Bosch and the killer met while she was visiting Hyde. I know he’s tied to that address.’

‘You’re sure that Hyde doesn’t figure in this?’

‘I can place her in Australia on the day of the killing. No way she could get back in time. She’s over sixty and she won’t fit the height requirement.’

‘But it’s her name on the missing card. Hired talent maybe? The MO won’t fit a pro hit, but all hit men start out as amateurs.’

‘It won’t fit at all. Amanda Bosch had a personal relationship with her killer. She went to the park that morning to meet the perp. The murder wasn’t premeditated – no weapon was brought to the crime scene. He used a rock and his hands.’

‘Why don’t we invite Miss Hyde in for questioning? We could do the interview as a request for assistance.’

‘No. I don’t want to alert anybody to the death of Amanda Bosch. The rest of her clients are in midtown and the Village area. Her only connection on the Upper West Side was that building. It was only the address the perp wanted to hide.’

‘Mallory, you’ve got nothing solid. You don’t know that he lives in the Coventry Arms.’

‘I know where he lives because I know him. He spent a lot of time with the body, working her hands over, making pulp out of them. He took his time. After he got over the initial panic, he was comfortable in that place. It was close to home.’

Coffey slid a folder across the desk. It had Heller’s initials on it.

‘Heller’s backing you up on the park as the original crime scene. How’d you talk him into going back? They found the blood splatters on the underside of kicked over rocks by the water. He was in here half an hour ago. Says you authorized the overtime.’

‘That also backs up the Coventry Arms as the perp’s residence. He took the card to keep us from tracking her back to that address. Get me in there.’

‘Get me something solid, then we’ll talk about a surveillance nest.’

‘If you won’t do anything else to help me, at least don’t release the name of the victim. If I’m going to flush him out, I need that edge.’

‘You got my word. Nobody gets the name.’

‘Yeah, right. Thanks,’ she said, and the words for nothing remained unspoken and hanging in the air for minutes after she left the room.

Mallory stopped the car in front of the Coventry Arms and let the engine idle.

The century-old building was fortress-like and forbidding. The stucco edifice was dotted with window lights that blazed and lesser lights that only glimmered. Gables and plant-choked balconies relieved the flat plane of the building and the long line of its roof, and ivy twined up the walls far past the night-black leaves of ancient trees. The character of the windows varied from squares, rectangles and circles to the great arch of the center piece of stained glass. This window might have graced a cathedral, but the brilliantly colored imagery was older than the church.

She worked out the ancient mythology in the glass. The years spent at Barnard had not been a total waste of time. The figure of the woman in the window must be the goddess of spring. She was being carried in the arms of her lover, the god of the underworld, as he raced toward the edge of a cliff. The lovers were frozen forever in this act of murder and suicide, as they hurtled, full tilt, toward the edge of death, gateway to Hades and home.

The entrance to the building was the stone mouth of a behemoth, narrowing to a set of doors studded with copper ornamental friezes. In addition to the requisite doorman, there was a security guard on duty tonight, a recent adjunct to the age of rock stars and their building-storming groupies.

She had a badge in the back pocket of her jeans. She could enter the building any time she wished, talk to whomever she wished. She had the power, but she couldn’t use it, not yet. And she couldn’t sneak in. Coffey had been right to reject the surveillance nest, but for all the wrong reasons. It was better to go in with a blaze of neon lights. It was only the covert things that people found suspicious.

She drove past the Coventry Arms and toward the less famous building at the end of the block. She had visited this place only once in her life, yet her memory of it was vivid in every detail. She double-parked the car as she always did. It was easier for her to fix the parking tickets on the computer than to mark the car for the meter maids.

She handed her business card to the doorman when he asked whom she had come to visit and whom she might be.

‘Are you Mallory or Butler, miss?’

‘Tell her it’s Kathy, her niece.’

Not strictly true. Her adoption had never been formalized. She had refused to answer questions about her past or her parents. Without a trace on relatives, the paperwork could go no further. She had kept the legal status of a foster child, and there was no such thing as a foster aunt. But though there were a lot of Mallorys in the world, Alice’s only sister had only one child named Kathy.

The man replaced the house phone on its hook. He held the door open, and his smile was wide. Aunt Alice must be generous with her tips.

The night man at the desk was settling his own telephone on to its cradle and nodding tactful understanding of Mallory’s importance here as she passed through the lobby.

This was a place, not of extreme wealth, but of quiet money. The lobby furnishings were good, but not museum pieces. The passenger-controlled elevator ran with the smooth hum of good maintenance.

On her first visit, there had been an elevator operator. She remembered looking up at the man from her height of ten years old. She rarely saw such people any more. It was the human-expendable age of automation.

The elevator doors opened on to a floor of deep-pile beige rugs. The walls were papered in stripes of sedate taste. She didn’t need the apartment number. Memory led her to the door at the end of the hall. On her toes, she could not have reached the brass lion’s-head door knocker the first time she had come here with Helen.

The maid, the same maid, opened the door and stood back to allow her to pass into the foyer. Mallory followed the woman down the hallway, and here perception was altered again. This hall had seemed miles long when she was a child.

They passed by the music room and into wider space. The dimensions of this room had changed only slightly. It was not quite the grand ballroom of a child’s memory, but close. Bric-a-brac covered every table, and family photographs hung in clusters along every linear foot of the walls. She would have bet good money that not one stick of furniture had been moved in the past fourteen years. It was all dark wood and drapes of crimson. And shadows filled the corners, light glinting in reflection off some candy dish of silver, some ornament of gold.

The photographs and portraits went back many generations, so Helen had told her on their only visit. She remembered very little of that afternoon’s conversation. Alice had looked very much like her sister, and the strong family resemblance was also in the aged face of Helen’s mother. But that old woman’s skin was then already graying with the thing growing inside her, the same thing that would kill Helen years in the future.

The adults had bored her until they got on to the subject of Markowitz. Then she had listened, her small hands balling into fists. Markowitz might be a cop, but he was also her old man. She had risen off her chair in a burst of angry energy. Helen’s eyes had pushed her back down. Her small hands folded on her lap once again, and the child, who had recently been dining from garbage cans, neatly crossed her legs at the ankles as Helen had taught her to do.

‘So this is the best Louis could provide you with?’ said Helen’s sister Alice, whose voice had been on the rise for too long. And by young Kathy Mallory’s lights, it was too loud a voice to be using on gentle Helen Markowitz.

‘Not even a tie of blood but someone else’s castaway child, something out of the gutter.’

Helen’s mother had been quiet up to this point, and then the old woman stood up with difficulty, leaning on her cane and waving off the maid who rushed to her side. ‘Enough,’ she said, imperious in her tone, threats in her eyes. ‘Alice, what’s done is done.’

Alice began to rise, lips parting, and as Helen’s mother had waved off the maid, she waved Alice’s mouth shut. But too late; the damage had been done. Helen was crying, tears streaming down her face.

Kathy had gone after Helen’s sister with the propulsion of a bullet, shooting her face to within an inch of Alice’s. In a rush of menace, low tones working up from the gut, words carrying real weight and hatred, she said, ‘If you ever make Helen cry again, I’ll cut you at the knees, you cunt!’

‘Don’t say cunt, dear,’ Helen had said then, appearing behind the child and shunting small arms into the sleeves of a new winter coat. As they followed the maid down the long hallway, Kathy heard Helen’s mother laughing uproariously. She had tried to turn and go back with the intention of beating the old woman to a pulp, but Helen had restrained her. With Helen it usually took no more than a look or the lightest pressure to contain the small and continuous storm that was Kathy Mallory.

Fourteen years later, Mallory was back. Helen was four years in the ground, and she was looking into Helen’s eyes in the ruined face of Alice.

‘I thought you were dead,’ said Alice.

‘Well, I’m not,’ said Mallory.

Are you disappointed, Aunt Alice?

‘But I heard it on the evening news,’ she said, as though she had caught Mallory in a lie. ‘Well, no matter. It’s a bit late to be calling, isn’t it? And I mean that on several levels.’

‘I guess it has been a while,’ said Mallory. ‘I saw you at Markowitz’s funeral.’

On the day they had laid the old man in the ground, she had looked up to see Alice, a ghost of Helen in her likeness, hovering near the open grave. When she had looked back again, the ghost was gone.

‘I thought Helen would’ve wanted a member of the family there,’ said Alice. ‘I thought she would have liked that.’

‘She would have. Thank you.’

‘You haven’t changed so much since you were a little girl, but then, you never looked like a little girl. Your eyes were always more like an adult’s. What a disturbing child you were. Violent, rude, uncivilized.’

Mallory said nothing, took no offense; it was all true.

‘I know where you live now, Kathy. Only a few blocks from here, isn’t it? That condominium must have been very expensive. And I imagine the maintenance fees are rather high. Why are you here? You want money, I suppose.’

‘I don’t need money.’

‘Then what do you want?’ Alice leaned forward with a new intensity, a sudden burst of light in the watering blue irises. ‘What could you possibly want from me?’ Her voice was rising, wavering in the high notes, close to breaking. ‘You took my sister away from me! Did you know she never spoke to me again? Did you know how much I loved Helen?’

Alice rose out of her chair. The effort seemed to tax her. Was Alice dying of the same cancer that killed Helen? She looked thin and weary.

Alice’s supply of venom was exhausted. She sank down to the cushion of the chair and deeper. She cried, and Mallory waited it out, neither offering aid nor withdrawing, only waiting for it to be over with.

‘Why did you come? What do you want from me?’

‘I need your help.’

‘The Coventry Arms has quite a mix of people these days. The rock stars have loud parties, and so do the political people,’ said the old woman who must be in her late eighties.

‘There’s a television personality in the building and an actor,’ said the old woman’s husband, who had been introduced to Mallory as Ronald Rosen.

Mrs Rosen nodded. ‘It’s true. In my day, they would never allow theater people in a nice building.’

‘In your day, Hattie,’ said her husband, ‘gangsters were the aristocracy of the West Side.’ The old man turned to Mallory. ‘When I was a kid, we came up out of Hell’s Kitchen, same as your mother’s people. What a time to be alive. When I was a boy, I ran errands for Owney Madden, the Duke of the West Side. I saw two of his men shot down in the bootleg whiskey wars.’

Mallory was drinking tea out of a fragile china cup and facing the elderly Rosens, residents of the Coventry Arms. Alice leaned over and replenished the tea from an antique silver pot.

‘So you’re Helen’s daughter,’ said Mr Rosen. ‘You must take after your father’s side.’ Mrs Rosen kicked his shoe and he knew he had said something wrong, but not what. Apparently, it didn’t matter, for his wife resumed her good-natured smile.

‘We watched Helen grow up in this apartment, didn’t we, Alice?’ said Mrs Rosen. ‘Though we didn’t see her but three or four times after she married Louis Markowitz. I was at her funeral. What’s it been, Alice, three, four years since Helen died?’ Mrs Rosen turned back to Mallory. ‘I saw you there. I didn’t want to intrude. I spoke to Louis Markowitz in the reception line. He seemed like such a…’ She shot a look at Alice. ‘Oh, but I’m going on.’

‘Is Mallory your married name?’ asked Mr Rosen, who was again shown the error of his ways by a kick from Mrs Rosen, who undoubtedly knew the facts from Alice.

‘This is so exciting,’ said Hattie Rosen. ‘Just like television. Do you want us to use assumed names?’

‘Good idea,’ said Mallory. ‘And I’ll need a letter for the concierge – something to explain why I’m living in your condo.’

‘Of course,’ said Mr Rosen. ‘And we should say something about it to Arthur. He’s our doorman. I don’t like lying to Arthur.’

‘Stick with the truth,’ said Mallory. ‘But keep it simple. Tell him you’re leaving on urgent personal business, and I’m a friend of the family. I’ll take care of the lies.’

‘Did I mention that Ronald snores?’ asked Mrs Rosen. ‘We have separate bedrooms.’

‘My condo is a two bedroom with a view of the river and a 24-hour doorman,’ said Mallory. ‘Are there a lot of people in your building with personal computers?’

‘Everyone has a computer now – even us,’ said Mrs Rosen. ‘They wired the entire building for an electronic bulletin board.’

‘My wife uses the computer,’ said Mr Rosen. ‘What do I know from computers?’

‘So what’s to know? You only have to know where the on-switch is. You push a button and voilá, there’s the bulletin board for the building. You leave notes for the building management and the super, arrange for dog walking, vacation notice. You can even do your banking from the computer if you’re on-line with your bank. Now don’t you be afraid of it, dear. It’s only a machine. And the directions are written on the door of the console. You’ll pick it up easy. Oh, and the girl who cleans comes once a week. She has her own key, but you can trust her with your life. Sarah, I think. Ronald, is that her name? Sarah?’

‘I can move in tomorrow?’

‘Yes, but we have to be back in ten days for my cousin Bitsy’s golden wedding anniversary. We’ve invited a hundred people, dear. You understand. Now about your condo – it’s wired for cable TV?’

When the arrangements for the exchange of apartments had been completed, when the Rosens had gone, and she and Alice had said their strained good nights, Mallory was on her way to the door, passing slowly through the rooms of the apartment where Helen had grown up, taking in each detail.

She passed near the grand piano, which was covered with a tapestry throw and photographs, perhaps fifty, in small, ornate frames. All the faces were children’s. The portraits to the rear were dated by the clothing, and in front were the children only recently come to abide on the piano. Mallory found Helen’s photograph as a girl. It was placed toward the back with the children who had grown up and grown old. She picked it up and stared at Helen’s young face.

She was setting the picture back in its place when her hand froze, and her eyes locked on a frame in the middle rows. She recognized her own likeness staring out of the sea of brand-new eyes. It was a school photograph, taken a full year after the visit.

Her own portrait had neither pride of place, nor was it hidden, but fit well into its proper station among the generations, the family.