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

CHAPTER 4

For a full minute, Charles Butler had been standing by the door, listening to the scuffle of shoes in the outer hallway. By the light-footed pacing to and fro, he knew his visitor was a small person. And just now, somewhere between acute hearing and Zen, he detected the sound of someone standing on one leg and then the other. He politely waited until his visitor had resolved the hesitation and the door buzzer sounded.

Charles opened the door with his smile already in place, a genuine smile, for he liked small children.

‘Hello. So you’ve come early.’ A full hour early.

‘Yes,’ said Justin Riccalo, rocking on the balls of his feet. ‘I’m supposed to meet my parents here. My piano lesson was canceled, and I didn’t know where else to go.’

Not home? Was it possible he wasn’t welcome there?

As though the boy had read his mind, he said, ‘I don’t have my own key. I could go somewhere else. I’m sorry – ’

‘Don’t apologize. I was just on my way to the basement. I’d be happy to have some company. Do you like magic tricks?’

Justin’s response was not what he had anticipated. The rocking ceased as though his store of nervous energy had escaped from a hole which had suddenly deflated the boy. He was a slender child and if he deflated any more, he would be altogether gone.

‘Do I like tricks? Mr Butler, is this your subtle way of asking me if I can make a pencil fly?’

‘Not at all. I think you’ll like the basement.’

With only the lift of one slight shoulder, the boy made it clear that he didn’t care one way or the other.

Charles locked the office door, and they walked down the long hall toward the exit sign which led to the staircase. The boy looked back over his shoulder to the elevator, and Charles explained that stairs were the only way to the lowest level, and he hoped that Justin didn’t mind the walk. Justin trudged along at Charles’s side, walking as though his legs weighed fifty pounds, each one.

Apparently, stairs were a novelty for a child raised in a luxury highrise. When the door opened on to a spiral staircase of black iron, Justin held on to the rail and leaned far over the side. He seemed hypnotized by the winding metal. Bright lights glared at him from bare bulbs at each floor and twisted the shadows of the curling iron.

‘Awesome,’ said Justin, approving the tortured shapes of light and shadow. ‘This is a great old building.’

‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’

Charles led the way, and the boy followed, reluctant hesitance gone from his steps.

‘So what are we going to do down there, sir? You have some kind of spook meter you want me to stick my finger in?’

‘No, nothing that sophisticated. Usually, I just sit around and talk to the subject. Sometimes we do written tests.’

‘What kind of subjects do you specialize in? UFOs?’

‘Nothing that entertaining. Sorry. In my work, the subject is always a person with a unique gift. I find a way to qualify it, quantify it, and then I find a use for it. Lots of people are overdeveloped in some area of intelligence. Take my partner, Mallory. She has a natural gift for computers.’

‘Computers are only mechanical devices.’ Justin’s pronouncement had the peal of middle-aged absolutism, ‘Anyone with a manual can operate one.’

‘Well, Mallory doesn’t need manuals. She does things the designers never thought of. You would not believe the things she accomplishes at a computer.’

Oh, wait. Perhaps Mallory was not such a good role model for a small child.

‘But your partner’s gift already has an application.’

‘Yes. In most cases, I find people with gifts that have no apparent application, and I project the area they’ll do well in. Then I find them a place in a research project. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? But it creates a window for developers of new technology.’

‘All right, Mr Butler. Do you want to start without my parents?’

‘Oh, no. This excursion is just for the fun of it. I was on my way down here to look for an old record album that belonged to my cousin. He was a magician – Maximillian Candle. Have you ever heard of him? No, you wouldn’t have. It’s been a very long time since he was on the stage. Are you interested in magic? You didn’t say.’

They had reached the last floor, and Charles was working the lock on the door. Once inside, he felt at the top of the fuse box for the flashlight. He clicked on the beam and motioned for the boy to follow behind him. They made their way through a canyon of shadowy boxes and crates, old furniture and picture frames. He trained the flashlight beam through a myriad of draped furniture, ghosts of castaway items, boxes and mazes of trunks and cartons.

The pleated back wall was a paneled screen which ran the length of the basement. Charles inserted a key into another lock and this wall began to fold back on itself, a gigantic, silent accordion.

The cavernous space beyond was dimly lit by a wide back window high up on the basement wall. The bars on the window were Mallory’s work, as were the pick-proof locks installed throughout the building. She would have put bars on every window if he had allowed it. It had taken a long time to explain to her that he would rather be burgled than jailed in his own house.

Now the beam of his flashlight shone on a collage of bright satin and silk gleaming through cellophane wrappers. Sequins and rhinestones sparkled through the dust of garment bags which hung in a wardrobe trunk. A portion of the room was obscured by a large fire-breathing dragon on a tall rice-paper screen. A rack of sturdy shelving lined one wall with satin masks, top hats, a silver dove-load, giant playing cards, ornate boxes and small trunks each containing its own magic.

If it was the boy who made the pencils fly, this might be the outlet. The world could use a little more magic.

‘I’ll have a light on in another minute.’ Charles touched one finger to the top of a glass globe and the orb came to life, glowing with eerie pulsations as though light could breathe in and out.

He turned back to the boy, whose attention was focused elsewhere. ‘Oh, that’s Cousin Max.’

‘How do you do,’ said the boy to the severed head which perched on the wardrobe trunk. Justin looked from Charles to the waxwork. ‘It looks like you.’

‘I only wish. He died when I was about your age.’

Charles removed the head from the trunk and held it in one hand. It stared back at him with lifelike eyes and the expression of amazement Max always wore when he lived.

‘Cousin Max saved my childhood for me.’

‘How?’

‘Magic. He was a wonderful magician. Of course, the greatest magician who ever lived was Malakhai. He did an act with a dead woman, a ghost.’

‘Sure, Mr Butler. I think I see her coming now.’

‘No, really. Her name was Louisa. She died when she was only nineteen. She was one of those people I was talking about with extraordinary gifts that – ’

‘Louisa Malakhai? Louisa’s Concerto!’

‘Apparently you’ve learned something at school.’

‘No, I try not to learn anything at the Tanner School. It’s too risky. I’m not sure they know what they’re doing. My first stepmother used to play Louisa’s Concerto. Did you know her? Louisa, I mean?’

‘Well, yes and no.’

‘Do you know why she named the concerto after herself? Was it like a self-portrait in music?’

‘That’s not bad, Justin. In fact, it’s a good theory, but she had given the concerto another title. It was Malakhai who changed it after she died. So you’re familiar with the music.’

‘Not really. I only played the album once after my stepmother died. It was an old record that you played on a turntable like… like…’

‘Like in the olden days?’

‘Yes. It’s probably on disks now. But what we had was the record. My stepmother – the crazy one who killed herself – she loved that album. She used to listen to it all the time.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I never heard it all the way through. She played it when she was alone. She’d turn it off if anyone else was around, or she’d listen with the earphones. She said the concerto was haunted.’

‘Haunting?’

‘No, haunted. She said she could hear someone moving around in the music. Crazy, huh? Anyway, after she died, I was playing the record, and Dad ripped it off the turntable and destroyed it with his bare hands. When I backed out of the room, he was breaking the pieces of it into smaller pieces.’

Was it the screaming both man and wife had heard in the music? In that magic empty space, a different effect was worked on every ear. Once, he had heard Louisa screaming. Another time, after he had fallen into puppy love with the phantom woman, he heard her laughing. But all of that had taken place in the stage-dark atmosphere of a magic act. The air had been primed for the imagination to make whatever it would.

‘Louisa died young. The concerto was her only composition, all that Malakhai had with him when he came walking out of the end of the Korean War. He used it as the theme of every performance.’

‘Performance with a dead woman.’

‘Yes, an invisible dead woman. She handed him objects and did everything an assistant would do. When she handed him a prop, you watched it float from her hand to his. You never saw her hand, yet you believed, that’s how good the floating illusions were.’

‘Tricks. Wires and stuff.’

‘Ah, but Malakhai also knew how to create terror.’

Now he had Justin’s full attention.

‘He sent Louisa into the crowd. Members of the audience swore they felt her passing by them, the brush of her dress, the rush of air. Some recounted the scent of her perfume.’

‘How did he do that? What kind of gadgets did he use?’

‘There were no physical devices involved. By the time he sent her out among them, they had come to believe in her.’

‘The whole audience?’

‘Actually, it’s easier with a lot of people. Mass hypnosis to psychosis, the more the better. You can do quite a lot with that much energy in the room.’

‘But no one really saw her?’

‘Yes and no. He described her in such great detail, I can see her now. She wore the dress she died in. It was blue but for the red bloodstains.’

‘How did she die?’

‘No one ever knew. That was part of Louisa’s mystery. Some people said Malakhai had killed her. Other rumors had her shot for a spy. It was all very romantic. When I was your age and younger, I was in love with Louisa.’

‘So you were as crazy as Malakhai.’

‘I suppose I was. And you’re right – Malakhai had gone insane. It’s truly amazing what people will do for love -to keep it, to kill it, or avenge it. And some people even die for it.’

In the distraction of his compartmentalized brain, Charles speculated on what Amanda had done. ‘Cut it out of me,’ she had said to the surgeon, she who loved children. She had cut out the child that was barely begun. ‘So I gather,’ said the finished child who stood before him now, ‘that falling in love is not the bright side of growing up.’

Charles smiled. ‘The love of a child also leads to pretty strange behavior at times. The things people will do for their children.’

‘Or to their children.’

‘Yes, there’s that too.’

Amanda, why did you cut your baby away from you? Now he dragged his brain back to the case at hand. Had Justin been abused? Was that the link Mallory saw in the boy? There was something between them.

And he had his own common cord with the boy: Justin Riccalo did not have the conversation of a child. So he too had been raised among adults and shunned by the children who would have provided him with the bad habits and speech patterns of the normal boy which Charles had never been either.

He located the old record turntable, leaned down and blew away the worst of the dust. Now where were the records?

Ah, there they are.

He pulled the crate of old record albums out from under a table, sat down in the dust, and began to sort through them. The boy hovered over him, always in motion even when he was standing still.

‘So Justin, when the pencils aren’t flying, how do you get along with your stepmother?’

‘I don’t know her very well.’

‘I had the idea that your stepmother had known your father for quite a long time.’

‘I think they worked together once. I’m not sure. I think my real mother was alive then. I didn’t know her very well either.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I was at school most of the time. I started the usual progressive school crap when I was four. My parents realized that farming me out to after-school programs was more cost-effective than a nanny and less paperwork. Some nights I don’t get home till eight or nine o’clock. How did Malakhai make those people believe Louisa had touched them?’

‘The audience did it to themselves. They only had to know she was among them to complete the illusion, right down to imagining the tactile sensations.’

‘You think my stepmother is filling in the illusions? But the pencil – ’

‘The pencil was not her imagination. But after the trick is done, the imagination takes over. In Malakhai’s act, all the real magic was in Louisa’s music.’

Charles slid the record out of its ancient cover, and with the practiced handling of the audiophile from the age of dinosaurs and turntables, he slipped it on to the spindle.

Justin sat down on the backs of his heels. Nervous energy made it seem that he was set to spring, to push off from the cement floor and into flight. ‘You can get that on CD, you know.’

‘So you said. Hush. Listen.’

The volume was set too high. When the music rose up in a tidal wall, the large room was dwarfed by it, too small to contain it. Charles lowered the volume to a normal setting, but the concerto was undiminished, Louisa’s raw talent defying laws of physics to increase the power of her music in the lower registers of sound. This was truly magic.

And now Charles was lost again in childhood memories of Louisa in the blue dress with the red stains. The bloodstain turned his thoughts back to Amanda Bosch and the events of last night. Louisa and Amanda became entangled in his mind. Out of old childhood habit, his eyes closed as the music rolled over him, for Louisa was always created in darkness.

Justin’s stepmother had described the music well. It was haunted. Someone did move through the music, and in the empty space – this time she was crying.

Before the music could swell up again on the other side of the void, he opened his eyes and looked down at the boy, who was doubled over. Justin’s hands were pressed to his ears.

What do you hear in the void, Justin?

And now Charles was also frightened.

Amanda Bosch was standing over the boy.

She was rounded out in all three dimensions of his self-induced delusion, wearing the bloodstain on her brown blazer and the wound at the side of her head. She was reaching down to the boy curled at her feet.

Charles’s hand flashed out to knock the needle off the track. The record made a screeching noise as the needle tore across its surface, ripping the vinyl skin and ending its song.

Amanda was gone.

Well, if it isn’t the homicide dick to the rich and famous.

Riker grinned when he saw Detective Palanski, a beanpole in a black leather jacket and dark glasses. Palanski must think he was a damn movie star, wearing his shades indoors. The detective was sticking his pointy finger in the face of Martin, a uniformed officer with orders to keep everyone away from Jack Coffey’s office.

Well, no hotshot from the West Side was gonna take that from a uniform, said the jabbing finger in Patrolman Martin’s face.

It didn’t register with Palanski that Martin was a decade younger, more athletic, that he was squaring off, planting his feet like a boxer, not liking the finger in his face, not liking it at all. The young patrolman was holding his own bit of turf with a confidence lent him by Jack Coffey, who was in the habit of backing up his people. To his credit, Coffey had even backed Mallory when she was dead wrong.

Riker walked up to the duel of ‘I outrank you’ versus ‘I don’t give a shit’. He tapped Martin on the arm and nodded him away. Martin backed off to the door of Coffey’s office and folded his arms. Palanski turned on Riker with the wrath of an unnaturally tall nine-year-old. ‘My captain wants to know why your lieutenant is keeping this homicide case – the stiff in the park. You got no officer involvement.’

‘You don’t know that,’ said Riker, pulling out a cigarette and searching from pocket to pocket for matches.

Could Palanski have gotten wind of the Coventry Arms angle? Yeah, that was it. Now that the case was high profile, he wanted it back to cover ass on the botched job at the crime scene. There was no other explanation for a cop asking for more work when there was no shortage of dead bodies and open cases.

‘The stiff wasn’t Mallory,’ said Palanski. ‘I know that much.’

‘But you didn’t know it when you rolled the body.’ Riker lit his cigarette and let the barb sink in. He knew it had to be Palanski who leaked the premature identification to the press. Information was currency in New York City, and he figured Palanski was too ambitious and on the edge of dirty, if not gone over. He dressed too well for a cop supporting a wife, an ex-wife and two kids. Riker only supported the bottle, and he could not afford the pricey salon where Palanski had his hair, not cut please, but styled.

‘So, Palanski, if you thought it was Mallory, maybe the perp did too.’

Palanski lowered his sunglasses and leaned into Riker’s space. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Riker. I’m not buying it.’

And wasn’t it just a little strange that Palanski had been the first one on the scene when Amanda Bosch was found? A quick check of rosters had confirmed that the man was off duty that morning. Palanski must believe that uptown territory of wealth and fame was his own private preserve.

‘I could have Mallory talk to you if you like,’ said Riker, smiling amiably at this man whom he loathed.

‘No, I don’t – ’

‘No problem. It’s her case. You just tell her why you want to take it away from her.’

‘Listen up, Riker, I don’t – ’

‘Well, if it isn’t the devil in drag. Here she comes now.’

Palanski’s eyes did a little dance, and his head snapped around to see what might be coming up behind him. Mallory was indeed walking toward them and growing larger in the reflection of Palanski’s dark glasses. In place of her sheepskin jacket, a long black coat whipped around her heels. And, Riker noted, she was wearing her formal-wear black running shoes today.

What had Mallory done to Palanski? He must ask her sometime.

She was still advancing on them.

‘Never mind,’ said Palanski, turning back to Riker. ‘I’ll tell my captain you think it’s tied to one of your operations. He’ll buy that.’

And Palanski had managed to get all of that out as Mallory came abreast of them and stalked past with only a nod to Riker, leaving behind a suggestion of $80-an-ounce perfume. Palanski’s head swiveled after her. When Mallory was four steps beyond them and her back safely turned, Palanski made the sign of the cross to ward off evil which could not be killed by bullets.

Mallory stopped suddenly, as though this little act of heresy had been spoken aloud. She turned on one heel to face the man down, and Palanski’s finger froze at the last station of the cross.

Riker shook his head slowly. He had known Mallory for so long, and he knew her not at all. In her kiddy days, Markowitz had once described her as a short witch with the eyes of a mob hit man. All these years later, she still had the eyes of a killer. Innocent men, Jack Coffey among them, had stared into those eyes and thrown up their hands in surrender, assuming there must be a gun.

She only stared at Palanski for a moment before turning around and walking on, but his face paled as though she had found a way to suck the blood out of him without the necessity of sinking in her teeth.

Riker looked down at his own spread hand and wondered if a drink might stop that tremor.

Jack Coffey sat back and counted noses. Mallory was her punctual self, not a second before, nor a second after the hour, and Dr John J. Hafner was late.

‘What have you got, Mallory?’

‘Harry Kipling lied on his credit application at the bank. He’s trying to get credit in his own name. The banks keep turning him down because he keeps lying.’

‘Everybody lies to banks. That’s penny ante. What else have you got?’

‘He lies on his tax returns. He files as an individual, and not with his wife. IRS nailed him for an unreported income last year. And he has a growing stash of capital in a foreign bank.’

Coffey covered his face with one hand. ‘I hope we’re doing the background checks quietly?’ Translation – You steal the information, right? You never talk with humans, only machines, right?

‘Yeah, real quiet.’

He had to wonder whose computer she was accessing now. Had she found the back door to Internal Revenue? He would never ask. It might come in handy one day. The ghost of Markowitz was laughing at him as he framed this thought. Wasn’t corruption just awfully damned easy when Mallory was involved?

‘And the other suspects? What’ve you got now? Four altogether?’

‘I’m down to maybe three. My perp is tall. Harry Kipling is six-one.’

‘I’m afraid to ask how tall the judge is.’

‘Six-three, and he’s in the running.’

‘If you screw up with Judge Heart, you’re going to be lying under an avalanche of influence and called-in favors, you know that. What have you got on him?’

‘He beats his wife.’

‘Oh, great, just great. The President’s hand-picked champion of women’s rights. Shoot me, Mallory, shoot me now.’

‘Fits well, doesn’t it?’

‘If I may interject?’ Dr Hafner, the NYPD psychologist and the mayor’s golf buddy, walked into the office with no knock and no apologies for the lateness.

Coffey glanced up at Hafner, who went everywhere in the same insipid smile that said, I have all the answers and you don’t.

‘A wife beater fits this case better than you know,’ said Hafner, unbuttoning his suit jacket and pulling on the legs of his pants, a prelude to sitting down without creasing his expensive suit. The tailoring and material were rivaled only by Mallory’s long coat and blazer.

Hafner’s glasses were sliding down his nose; they always did that. Hafner was always pushing them up, always picking imaginary lint from his clothing and tapping his feet. And Coffey was always resisting the urge to lean across the desk and swat the man each time he had to suffer one of these appointments.

How was he going to keep Hafner from annoying Mallory? How to get Mallory to play nice as long as the mayor’s close friend was in the same room.

‘The judge is a Supreme Court candidate,’ said Coffey, smiling pleasantly. ‘I don’t want him to fit.’

You useless, pompous little twit.

Hafner adjusted his glasses. ‘You will note that Amanda Bosch carried no purse, no wallet. I don’t think it was stolen from the body. I’ve looked at the inventory of the apartment. Her credit cards and driver’s license were lying loose in a drawer, and she had no purses whatever. Women usually own a number of purses, one for dress one for – ’

‘Get to the point,’ said Mallory. It was an order.

Hafner pushed his glasses up, and the constant smile was even more patronizing, as though he thought this was an unruly child he was dealing with. ‘This lack of a purse is significant in the interpersonal dynamics of the relationship. People who don’t carry identification on their persons lack identities of their own. A woman of low self-esteem would gravitate toward a man who was habitually abusive to women.’

‘According to Mrs Farrow,’ said Mallory, leaning in for the first shot, ‘Bosch stopped carrying a purse after she was mugged three years ago. The robbery report is on the record. I sent it to you with all the rest of the paperwork. Do you read the reports we send you? And there are lots of women who prefer pockets to purses.’

Coffey watched Hafner’s eyes drop down to note that Mallory did not carry a purse. Now Hafner was scrutinizing her face, evaluating Mallory like a specimen. His eyes were gleaming, as though he had discovered a unique life form. He had.

‘Dr Hafner,’ said Coffey in his best damage-control tone, ‘do you think he’s likely to kill again?’

‘Oh, definitely. He may have killed many times. We don’t know that this is his first murder. I don’t think he’ll be able to stop himself.’

Coffey was thinking, Bullshit, and Mallory’s eyes were framing stronger language.

‘Go on, Dr Hafner,’ said Coffey.

You idiot, personal friend of the mayor or no.

‘The immaculate condition of the apartment is an example of ritualistic, compulsive behavior, the ultimate cleansing. Such compulsively neat individuals always have severe personality disorders.’

Coffey concentrated on Mallory. Her lips parted. For her, this was tantamount to an emotional outburst. And now he wondered what Hafner would make of Mallory’s compulsively neat and well-ordered environs. The computer room was spotless and kept that way by a civilian keystroker who feared for his life if dust should settle on the computer equipment.

‘So you think our man would fit the profile of a serial killer,’ said Coffey.

‘Highly probable. And I would be very interested in the formative years of all the suspects.’ Hafner was staring at Mallory as he said this. ‘Was there trauma? Abuse? Abandonment? Maybe a history as a runaway.’

Coffey sat back and studied Hafner. The man was just too damn fascinated by Mallory, openly examining her face as though gauging the effect of every word on her.

Hafner pushed his glasses up again. ‘The cleansing ritual may go hand in glove with compulsive punctuality.’

Coffey leaned forward.

Punctuality‘? Where was that coming from?

Perhaps Hafner had seen Mallory’s computer room after all, and more. Hafner could have accessed Mallory’s psych evaluation, which had been mandatory following the discharge of a weapon in the line of duty. This was not about the suspect. This pumped-up twit thought he was going to play with Mallory, to bait her like a lab animal.

Coffey looked to Mallory’s face, and he could see that everywhere he had gone with this idea, she had been there before him. Coffey sat well back in his chair and well out of the loop. Let the twit fend for himself. Whatever she did to Hafner, he had it coming. He communicated all this to her with the slight inclination of his head.

Sick him, Mallory.

‘Perhaps a visual aid would be useful,’ she said, her voice assuming the soft, deceptive notes of a civilized member of society.

Coffey watched her gun slide easily from the shoulder holster, and then he ceased to see it in the lacuna which was part of the cop’s blue wall of silence. He was blind to the gun – no, the damn cannon – not a police-issue revolver, but something that made substantially bigger holes.

‘Listen, fool,’ said Mallory, bringing her chair closer to Hafner’s, closing for the kill, and not a neat kill either. The gun that Coffey could no longer see was in her hand. ‘This was a spontaneous act,’ she said in even syllables. ‘The weapon was a rock. You had that information.’

She raised the gun, touched the metal with one long red fingernail, and the revolving chamber swung out of the armature. Her voice rolled on in velvet octaves which contrasted sharply with the deadly thing in her hands.

Hafner was a study in rigidity. A black fly whined past his head. He seemed not to notice. The glasses slid down his nose. He did not correct them.

‘He didn’t bring a weapon to the crime site,’ said Mallory. ‘He didn’t plan to kill Bosch that morning. When he did kill her, he panicked and ran. It took him more than thirty minutes to get his nerve back. You would have known that if you’d read the ME note on the body being moved.’

She emptied the bullets into her lap, and then inserted one bullet back into the gun and swung the chamber into place with a click.

The fly landed on Hafner’s cheek. He never moved to swat it, he never moved at all.

She smiled.

Coffey was fascinated by Hafner’s new role as Mallory’s mouse.

The fly whined off and landed on the wall beside Hafner’s head.

‘I figure he was more your type, Hafner – comfortable in a controlled situation. Prone to panic when things got out of his control. Like when he used that rock.’

She pointed the gun at the fly crawling about on the wall; the barrel was aiming over the bridge of Hafner’s nose.

She fired.

Hafner jerked backward. The click of the empty chamber had the effect of an exploded bomb. A wet stain was spreading out from his crotch. It took seconds for the man to adjust to the fact that he had not been hit and need not fall down, that he had merely wet his pants.

The fly was gone.

Coffey stared at the bare wall with wonder. Had the fly winged away, or was it lying at the baseboard, dead of a heart attack?

She dangled the gun for a moment and slowly brought it back to rest in her lap, the barrel carelessly pointing toward the sweating man in the chair close to hers.

Coffey could hear the man breathing. The glasses, greased with sweat, slid further down Hafner’s nose, off his face and landed on the floor at his feet.

‘He didn’t stalk her – he knew her well,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s why he came back to destroy her fingers, her prints. He figured it would buy him the time he needed to clean the apartment, to get rid of his own prints. A learning disabled twelve-year-old could have worked that one out.’

She leaned forward now, holding the gun casually, her arms propped on her knees. Her gun seemed only incidentally pointing toward the doctor’s crotch.

‘You’re an inept jerk, aren’t you, Hafner?’ She was nodding her head slowly, and he mimicked the motion, nodding his own head in agreement. His eyes twitched back and forth between her face and her gun.

‘And you’re not going to submit a bill for this crap, are you?’ She shook her head slowly from side to side, and in this way, she worked Hafner’s head in the same motion.

‘Good. You can go now.’

Hafner never moved or blinked.

‘Thank you for coming by, Dr Hafner,’ said Coffey in the manner of a wake-up call, rising, dismissing the mayor’s close personal friend. He was averting his eyes from the dark stain on Hafner’s trousers. He was not seeing the gun, which he had never seen, sliding back into the holster.

Now Coffey was smiling at Hafner’s back. Mallory was going to get clean away with this. What were the odds that Hafner would ever tell anyone she had made him pee in his pants?

The man was not quite out of the door when Mallory was rising to her feet saying, ‘I’m getting my own shrink. The department’s paying for it with what I just saved you on that idiot.’

‘Sit down. I’m not done with you yet.’ Before she could give him any grief, Coffey said, ‘I don’t care what kind of a busy day you have planned. Sit!’

She sat.

He had learned a lot from Riker. Anything passing for a polite request would have been considered a sign of weakness.

‘Let’s start with the cap gun Heller found in the trash. If it’s tied to the perp, then he might have premeditated the act. It’s possible he used it to threaten her into a private location to kill her.’

‘It was a – ’

‘Shut up, Mallory. You only take the bits and pieces that support your pet theory. You can’t know for a fact that he didn’t plan to kill her. The real facts are barer bones.’

‘Hafner doesn’t know – ’

‘I have no use for Hafner. I’ll sign off on your own shrink. But you open up to the possibility that the perp planned the kill, and maybe he’s killed before. And what about motive? She caught him out in some kind of a scam? Is that the story you want me to take to the district attorney?’

‘She was a researcher. If you’ve got the skills to check out the father of your baby, you do it. She got something on him. If she could find it, I can find it.’

‘You don’t even know that he was the father of the baby. You see what you’re doing?’

No, she didn’t see, didn’t hear. He was talking to the air.

‘You underestimate a perp and you’re dead. You’re hanging out there on your own.’ And that took guts, or maybe not. Perhaps she was merely fearless, and it was that which would get her killed – the lack of a healthy sense of fear.

‘Are we done?’

‘No, there’s just one more thing. Be careful you don’t shake out the wrong tree, Mallory. You may have more than one of them coming after you. I can see the lawsuits piling up now.’

Charles sat back in his chair and waited out the family ritual of Robert Riccalo admonishing the boy and the woman.

He didn’t like Riccalo.

The man craved a spotlight and a stage so he could strut up and down all morning and display his mind, his maleness, his ruthlessness. And then, after lunch, he would want to rule the world. The man’s eyes were black water. God only knew what was really under the surface, and God had probably shuddered and looked away quickly, only checking briefly to maintain His reputation for omniscience.

Now the man was leaning close to Justin, denying the child any possession of personal space. The boy turned to the woman. No help there. Sally Riccalo always avoided looking directly at Justin. And that was interesting.

‘Justin, this nonsense will end!’ the man was saying, booming, threatening.

The cat was backing away to a corner of the room. Nose didn’t like Robert Riccalo either. Charles smiled at Justin, and the boy seemed to take a little heart from that.

Mallory walked in, and all conversation stopped. The cat trotted up to her, eyes fixed on the one it clearly adored.

Mallory cut the small animal dead with a look. In tacit understanding, the cat backed up a few steps to sit down and love her from a safe distance. The purr was audible all over the room.

The purring stopped when the square wooden pencil caddie on the desk began to rock. The cat was under the couch before the caddie fell over on its side. A fury of color flushed Robert Riccalo’s face. His hand gripped his son’s arm, and the boy winced with the pain.

‘Not so fast,’ said Mallory, walking over to the desk. It was a command, and Riccalo seemed stunned to see his hand obey her, as it released the boy’s arm and fell back to his lap.

Mallory picked up the pencil caddie and righted it. ‘We’re accustomed to objects flying around the office. Aren’t we, Charles?’

And now a pencil came flying out of the caddie and aimed at Charles’s throat. Mallory’s hand shot out and intercepted it.

Charles swallowed. ‘Well, some of us are more accustomed to that sort of thing than others.’ Oh, fine. Now Mallory had added flying pencils to her private arsenal.

‘It happens all the time.’ Mallory was staring at the boy, who only showed curiosity. She walked behind Charles’s chair and another pencil flew out of the caddie and neatly into her hand. ‘Nothing to it.’

The boy was showing no reaction any more. Apparently he had grown bored with airborne pencils.

‘So it is a trick!’ said Riccalo, turning on the boy with a look which promised something nasty when they were alone again.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Charles. ‘But you see, so many things in the area of psychokinetics can be duplicated with illusion. That’s why it’s so difficult to test for a gift. It’s going to take a while is all my partner meant by that demonstration.’

He looked up to Mallory, willing her to nod and smile in agreement. Fat chance, said her eyes. He turned back to Riccalo. ‘We’re looking for something we can test. Come back after Christmas, and we’ll get into this in more detail.’

When goodbyes were said, a new date set, and the Riccalo family was through the door and gone, Charles turned around to find Mallory standing close behind him.

And this was another trick of hers which unsettled him. There was never any warning noise of footfalls. Sometimes he wondered if she just liked to see him jump outside his skin for a second or two. Nose trotted into the room to sit at her feet. When Mallory was around, he could at least keep track of the cat by the purring.

Mallory ignored the sound of the small, contented engine, and settled into a wingback chair with dancing Queen Anne legs. She nodded to the couch, beckoning Charles to sit down with her. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how I made the pencil fly?’

‘No, let me guess, all right?’ He was smiling as he sat down. ‘Every now and then I see a street vendor who still sells the Wonder Widow, a black rubber spider on a nearly invisible nylon string. When the vendor works the string, it looks like the spider is crawling along by itself. When a large crowd gathers, he makes the spider fly to the face of a victim, who invariably screams and then buys ten of them. Did you ever have a spider like that?’

Mallory nodded. ‘Riker gave me one when I was a kid. He said it was a souvenir from his last round of the DTs. And if I liked that one, he knew where he could get a million more.’

‘So you took a nylon thread from a stocking, attached it to something sticky, but not too sticky – maybe a small bit of tape dusted with lint or talc. Then you attached this sticky sliver of tape to the pencil. When you jerked the thread, the pencil was aloft and the sliver of tape came loose. So whoever picked up the pencil would find no evidence of the method. You maneuvered the direction of the pencil by angling the thread around my chair.’

‘Right. So, now at least we know how it’s being done. A kid could do it.’

‘Mallory, you’d make a terrible paranormal investigator. When I accepted the case, I let go of my preconceptions. Just because you duplicated the flying pencil, that doesn’t mean that was how it was done. This type of investigation must be conducted by gathering facts, and with no preconceived ideas about guilt or method.’

‘You’d make a bad cop, Charles. While you’re dicking around with empirical evidence, someone is going to get hurt or dead.’

‘Now you see, you’re doing it again. You develop a hunch and hang the evidence. Damn anyone who gets between you and your preconceived solution.’

Charles watched the cat curl up in a patch of sunlight at her feet. ‘However, you’re probably right about one thing. There’s an unhealthy dynamic in that family. I have no idea which one of them is doing it.’

‘Well, yesterday, the pencil flew at the stepmother. That’s something.’

‘It is easiest to make the pencil fly in your own direction, isn’t it?’ Though Mallory had rather neatly sent a pencil toward his own throat.

‘I wouldn’t rule out the stepmother. But with two women down, it seems more likely that she’s the new target. Either that or she wants to frame the boy.’

‘But for what reason? What a mess.’

‘What are you complaining about? You started out with a set of suspects and a walking, talking victim. I had to work at the park murder.’

‘Solved it yet?’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said, rising to a stand and placing one hand on the hip of the blue jeans, the soft material of the blazer falling back from the gun. ‘When is Henrietta coming?’

Before he could respond, the cat stood up on its hind legs. Charles watched Nose turn gracefully in a perfect circle, and then another. From Mallory’s expression, he gathered she had seen this trick before.

‘I think you’re supposed to give Nose a reward when he dances. He might have been trained that way. The dancing is in the novel.’

He walked over to the reception room desk, pulled the thick manuscript from the center drawer, and quickly thumbed through the first chapter. ‘Here – “He taught my cat to dance.” Seems he did that during a four-day weekend, early on in the relationship. You can’t take a work of fiction literally, of course. But the cat does dance.’

‘Four days? I thought it took longer to teach an animal tricks. Especially a cat.’

‘Not if you know what you’re doing and you don’t mind being ruthless with the animal. I expect he withheld food from Nose.’

Mallory turned her back on the cat, who was dancing still. ‘Well, he doesn’t have to do that for food any more.’

The cat dropped softly to ground as though she had commanded him.

‘So, Mallory, you were also right about the manuscript. It’s a matter of weeding the truth out of the fiction. Listen to this:

“When New York is covered with snow, it’s beautiful for all the minutes before you’re mugged, shot in the crossfire of a drug war, run down by a drunk, attacked by a psychotic who has forgotten to take his medication, sued by your landlord, threatened by the tax collector, bullied by the mouthy neighbor, bitten by the pet pit bull, surprised by rats running across your path with full-grown house cats clenched in their teeth, dive-bombed by pigeons, infested with mice and roaches, shorted by a payroll clerk… When the baby comes, I will take her away from here to a safe place where it’s beautiful all the time.”

‘The baby is in the last few chapters of the book. The female character doesn’t seem to have any emotional involvement with the man. The child is everything to her, all she cares about.’

Mallory nodded. ‘The baby might argue for Harry Kipling or Judge Heart. They’re both fertile. Maybe I should scratch the blind man off the list.’

‘You’re not serious? A blind man?’

‘He was blinded on the job. He was working for a newspaper then – huge settlement.’

‘I understand your love of the money motive.’ For this was her father’s influence at work on her; Markowitz had loved this motive best. ‘But the man is blind?’

‘Charles, I always took you for the politically correct type. I hope you’re not suggesting that blind people are too handicapped to kill right along with the rest of us.’

‘A blind man would never have returned to the crime scene. He’d have no way to know who might be watching.’

‘Suppose he panicked and did the murder, and then an accomplice came back and cleaned up after him?’

‘Seriously?’

‘No. I don’t think a blind man did this. You’re an expert on gifts. Tell me about the gifts that come out when a man loses his sight.’

‘Oh, that’s a myth,’ said Charles. ‘The blind do not have more acute senses of smell and hearing, if that’s what you mean. They merely have fewer distractions without the sense of sight. And there’s more dependence on the other senses, so they tend to pay more attention to them. Does he have a Seeing Eye dog?’

‘Yes. Everyone in that building has a dog.’

‘It is true that blind people are less likely to walk into plate-glass walls – the cane or the dog prevents that. A good dog will also watch traffic and lead the blind away from obstacles. The dog is the truly gifted partner in the relationship.’

‘What about a really good adaption to blindness?’

‘Well, some people do make an art form out of it. They look directly at you when you speak to them, trying to create the illusion of being sighted.’

‘Eric Franz doesn’t do that. But he does come across as the bastard child of Sherlock Holmes and Mrs Ortega with his acute senses bullshit. And he can find his way across a crowded room without touching anyone with his cane.’

‘Interesting.’

‘I think so. So I’m keeping him. Now I’ve got a blind man, a wife beater, and a beauty-and-the-beast combo.’

Charles stared at his hands. He had his own beauty-and-the-beast problems. He looked up to the antique mirror by the couch. No, his own story would be beauty and the clown. Her reflection moved behind his own. That incredible face did not belong in the same gilded frame with his own ridiculous ensemble of features. And if he didn’t get to the barber soon, his longish wavy hair might take on the character of a clown’s fright wig.

He turned to face her, and waved one hand toward the door near her chair. ‘Would you mind opening the door for Henrietta?’

And only now, the buzzer sounded.

Mallory stared at him. ‘One day, you must tell me how you do that.’

‘When Henrietta’s working, she’s nearly as punctual as you are. She’s joining us for lunch.’

Mallory opened the door to the psychiatrist from apartment 3A. Today Henrietta was dressed in her work clothes, a neat tailored suit and soft pastel blouse.

Charles left them to the business of the park murder and wandered into the kitchen. The cat followed him, knowing this was the place from whence all food flowed. Mallory had stocked the office refrigerator anew with all the makings of sandwiches. He pulled out a tray neatly prepared with every imaginable condiment, cheese and meat.

Henrietta walked into the kitchen as he was bending down to feed the cat a piece of pastrami. In the last twenty-four hours he had learned a lot about the cat’s likes and dislikes.

‘Hey, Nose, how are you?’ asked Henrietta.

Charles looked up. The cat did not.

Ten minutes later, Charles and Henrietta were seated at the kitchen table, drinking coffee to the music of purring which originated at Mallory’s feet. Mallory stood at the chopping block on the counter, slicing cheese. She looked down at the cat and seemed to be weighing the knife in her hand against the cat’s potential value.

Charles turned to Henrietta and asked, ‘Can you explain why the cat is so attached to Mallory? Nose won’t dance for me, and I’m the one who’s been feeding him.’

‘Does the novel tell you how the cat was trained?’

‘No, I just assumed it was food.’

‘Nose may have been trained with pain, and it could also be tied to visual cues. What happened to the cat’s ear?’

‘I didn’t do it,’ said Mallory, setting a plate of four varieties of cheese on the table alongside the rest of the sandwich makings. ‘It happened when Nose was loose on the street. The vet said the cat was otherwise well cared for.’

Charles nodded. ‘If the female character in the novel is Amanda Bosch, I don’t see her allowing the cat to be tortured.’

‘Her lover trained the cat to dance in four days,’ said Mallory.

‘If we can believe the novel,’ said Charles, to his immediate regret. Mallory didn’t like that. He could feel the tension crawling toward him from her side of the table. He filled Henrietta’s coffee cup. ‘The novel was started over a year ago. Signs of abuse might be gone by now.’

‘Then, most likely the cat dances to avoid pain.’ Henrietta was loading her sandwich with pastrami. ‘It’s like child abuse. The child may cling to the abusive parent. That’s why I wondered about the cat’s ear. Mallory bears a general resemblance to the victim. She’s probably triggering a memory.’

Charles took a string of beef from his own sandwich and dropped it into Nose’s open mouth. ‘But surely the cat knows its owner from Mallory.’ The cat returned to its steady occupation of shedding fur on Mallory’s jeans.

‘Animals can respond strongly to visual cues,’ said Henrietta. ‘I got my own cat from an animal shelter. I was walking by the cage, and the cat went berserk, paws reaching through the wire, crying nonstop. They told me the cat did that every time a woman with long dark hair walked by. So I went there for a dog and came home with a cat. It was instant love. Same as with Mallory and Nose.’

‘What else is in the novel?’ Mallory asked, pushing the cat away from her with one leg, love apparently always being one-sided with her.

‘Nothing that would isolate one of your three suspects,’ said Charles. ‘He doesn’t particularly like women, though he likes to make love to them. I don’t suppose that helps much. I have no idea what the lie might have been. There’s no clue in the manuscript.’

‘All three of the suspects could fit the profile of liars,’ said Mallory. ‘And they’ve all got something at stake. Judge Heart has a career to consider. Other nominations have failed because of reefers and illegal nannies. If she dug up something in his background, it wouldn’t have to be much to cost him the appointment. Harry Kipling has a rich wife and a brutal prenuptial agreement. Eric Franz was with his wife the night she was killed in the traffic accident. He might have had something to do with that.’

‘So what have we got?’ asked Charles. ‘A novel we can’t use in court and no physical evidence. There was nothing else turned up at the park site?’

‘Heller’s the best. If he can’t find another forensic detail, no one can.’

‘Well, there’s the cat,’ said Charles. ‘But, unless you think we can train Nose to bite the suspect on the leg in open court, the cat is worthless.’

‘No it isn’t.’ Mallory was staring down at the animal with an expression that gave her nothing in common with animal lovers. ‘I can use the cat and the book to flush him out. The tricky part is where I get him to incriminate himself.’

‘Any confrontation with this man is dangerous to you,’ said Henrietta. ‘If your theory is correct, he’s demonstrated his willingness to kill in order to protect himself.’

Mallory seemed unimpressed. ‘So? The perp I’m dealing with doesn’t have the nerve of the average psycho. It was a one-shot crime to cover another crime – all fear and panic.’

‘You can’t know that,’ said Henrietta. ‘It doesn’t matter that the murder wasn’t premeditated. He may have killed her a thousand times in his fantasies. He may be someone who knows her only as a service person, a maintenance man. And you can’t tell a sociopath from his appearance or public behavior. This man may very well have a dangerous pathology and still pass for a normal member of the community.’

‘A sociopath can’t pass for normal, not with everyone.’

‘Well, yes he can,’ Henrietta said with rare insistence.

‘No,’ said Mallory, with finality. ‘He can’t.’

Charles watched the sudden shock of understanding come into Henrietta’s eyes as she realized she was talking to someone with an inside view.

‘So now that we’ve established what he isn’t,’ said Mallory. ‘How much weight can I put on a lie as motivation? If I went into the lives of all the tenants in that building, I could dig up something on every one of them. What kind of lie pushes that kind of button? He panicked once. I want to make him do it again.’

‘It would depend on the lie,’ said Henrietta. ‘A person’s entire life can be structured on lies.’

‘What kind of buttons should I push? How do I scare him into talking?’

‘Fear might make him close up. Better to get him angry. A disclosure in anger is worth more. If we can assume he taught the cat to dance, we might consider control issues here. It’s the fount of the hatred of women and the most violent crimes against them. In that case, getting caught in any lie might have set him off. Which would you say was most prone to lying as a pathology?’

‘Everybody lies,’ said Mallory.

‘Surely not everyone,’ said Charles.

‘No, Charles. You don’t. But then you can’t lie, can you? You don’t have the face for it. Wait, I take that back. There’s the vase you rigged. That’s a lie by omission, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a common test situation.’

‘And?’

‘A lie by omission. I’ll bet Helen never lied.’

‘Well, Helen only lied out of kindness, but she was kind to a lot of people.’

‘Markowitz never lied.’

‘Oh sure he did. He lied like crazy. The old man was the best. I’ve heard him lie to the mayor, the commissioner. He lied every time he held a press conference. He lied – ’

‘All right. Everybody lies.’

As she carried the cat down the sidewalk between the garage and the Coventry Arms, she caught sight of the doorman reading the newspaper. A cab pulled up, and Arthur quickly removed his glasses, tucking them into the fold of the paper which lay on the shelf beneath the house phone. Arthur was smiling and opening the door of the cab when Mallory slipped through the door. As she passed by that shelf, she flipped back the fold of the paper.

Bifocals. An ugly little man who was too vain to wear his glasses in front of the tenants. Interesting.

She walked over to the wide lobby window which overlooked the sidewalk. Another tenant was walking toward the building. As Moss White, the talk show host, came abreast of the bench twelve feet before the door to the building, Arthur put on his wide smile.

Well, at least the man’s field of vision included the bench where Amanda had been sitting the day before she died.

Thoughts of Amanda Bosch rode up in the elevator with Mallory. What had the woman seen that day? What had upset her and made her run off? And how much value could she put on Arthur’s testimony if she needed him in court? She and Arthur must have another little chat, and soon.

When she walked in the door of the Rosens’ apartment, she had the feeling that there was someone else close by. Nose felt it too. The cat in her arms ceased to purr. It was kneading its clawless paws into her coat, looking everywhere.

Something in the bedroom was being moved. Now she heard the sound of the vacuum. She walked into the room to see the cleaning woman who must be the Rosens’ Sarah.

‘Oh, hello, miss.’ The woman switched off the vacuum, and now Mallory heard the sound of the flushing toilet in the bathroom. The door opened, and Justin Riccalo was standing on the threshold and looking up at her. He began a small smile; it died off as Mallory turned her back on him to face the cleaning woman.

‘I hope it’s all right, miss,’ said Sarah. ‘He was standing out in the hall waiting for you. He needed to use the bathroom. It is all right, isn’t it?’

‘Sure.’ Now she looked at the boy again. Lately, he was always in her mind on some level. She felt a tie to him without being able to name it, as though they had been through something together. It nagged at her, this feeling which occurred each time they met – a bizarre and twisted notion approaching dèjá vu. She knew where he had been, for she had been there before him.

‘Well, I’m done in this room,’ said Sarah, coiling the cord around her vacuum cleaner. Mallory and the boy continued to stare at one another in silence until the cleaning woman had shown herself out of the bedroom. ‘How did you get past the doorman, Justin?’

‘I walked in behind a man and a woman. I guess the doorman thought I belonged to them.’

‘How did you know I lived here?’

‘I looked it up in the phone book.’

No, said the slow shake of her head, that could not be. The vacuum cleaner began to drone and toil across the carpet of the front room.

‘Okay, I was with my stepmother when she followed you the other day.’

‘So that was you.’ She had felt him but not seen him. The stepmother had not explained the watcher who had occupied the space on the opposite sidewalk, a space which had been empty by the time she had turned round.

‘I gave the elevator man your name, and he took me to this floor. I ran into the cleaning woman in the hall. She was just going into your apartment. I told her you were expecting me.’

Now he seemed to be waiting for praise. She let him wait.

He jammed his hands into his down parka and rocked on the balls of his feet as he looked around the bedroom with its frilly four-poster canopy bed, the chintz and the bric-a-brac. ‘It’s not what I expected of you.’

All his confidence ebbed away in the ensuing silence.

Mallory was listening to the hum of Sarah’s vacuum cleaner. Mrs Ortega always cleaned one room at a time, and the front room already had the furniture polish and ammonia smell of a finished job.

The boy opened his mouth to speak. Mallory moved one finger up to silence him. He closed his mouth and turned to the sound of the vacuum in the next room.

When the vacuum stopped and the front door finally closed on the departing Sarah, he said, ‘I’ve got to talk to someone, but no one will listen to me.’

‘I’ll listen if you’re straight with me. Has your stepmother missed any nylon stockings recently?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Did she accuse you of taking it?’

‘Not yet. I found a mangled stocking wadded up in my dresser this morning. I didn’t take it, and I don’t know how it got there.’

What was the connection she felt to the boy? Something old. Half a memory. He was a liar, that might be part of it.

‘When you’re ready to tell me the truth about what’s going on, I’ll help you.’

‘You think I’m making the pencils fly, you and everyone else. Why? What do you really know about me? Nothing. Only what my father tells you.’

‘Oh, I know a lot about you, Justin. I know you’re smart enough to figure out how the tricks are done. But you won’t tell, will you? Either you do the tricks yourself, or you’re afraid of your father, or both. Or maybe your stepmother is doing it. Maybe you keep quiet about it because you like the idea of driving your old man straight up a wall.’

She looked at his clothes and his unmarred pink face, his unskinned knees. His running shoes were not new, but they weren’t dirty either.

‘You’re a loner. You have no friends, no sports to play.’

He stood very straight, shoulders pinned back.

‘You attended a military school.’ Good guess. His head was nodding. ‘And you’re holding out on me. If these stunts with the flying objects are your doing, I’m gonna find you out. You got that?’

‘What reason would I have to do it? You don’t know everything. You don’t know that all my mother’s money – ’

‘ – was left to you in trust. And your father controls the trust.’

‘He controls me too.’

‘So you’re ratting out your father, is that it? You know, if I’d been in your place, I would have targeted your old man. That bastard wouldn’t have lasted six seconds with me.’

‘He is a bastard. I really worry about my stepmother.’

Mallory only stared at him in silence to tell him she knew he was lying again.

‘Okay,’ said the boy. ‘She’s a dweeb.’

‘What was your real mother like?’

‘She was like my second mother, and my second mother was like my third. She was afraid of everyone and everything. My father has a type. Each one is a copy of the last one.’

‘Was your real mother afraid of you, too?’

The boy’s hands dove deeper into the pockets of his parka. She watched the frustration welling up in his eyes, and it was in the hunch of his shoulders and the rabbit teeth pressed down on his lower lip – frustration growing and growing, finally culminating and escaping in a sigh.

The cat padded into the room. It started toward her. She looked at it once to warn it away. Nose stopped a respectful distance from her and sat down beside the boy. Now two pairs of eyes were on her, both needy.

‘Don’t let the cat out when you go,’ she said, and turned her back on both of them, leaving the bedroom to walk down the short hallway to the den where her computer was waiting.

Too bad the cameras hadn’t been running. Maybe she should run a continuous tape against the possibility of another intrusion when she was not home.

The front door closed softly.

‘Charles, let me fix you a drink. No, really. Have one with me.’

Effrim Wilde opened the dark glass doors of a chrome-trimmed cabinet to gleaming glassware and a fully stocked wet bar. ‘Eleanor’s forbidden me to drink alone. She says it leads to alcoholism.’

He turned his back on Charles as though the recipe for whiskey and soda might be worth guarding.

‘Eleanor came back?’

‘Yes,’ said Effrim, rimming each glass with a twist of lemon and a loving smile. ‘She felt guilty about abandoning me to my cigarettes and whiskey and good food. She’s a saint, that woman. This past weekend, I didn’t have a single meal that didn’t taste like low-cal library paste.’

He handed one glass to Charles and carried the other to his own chair, which put three yards of plush carpet and four feet of dark glass desktop between them.

The office had been recently redecorated. The walls were a sickly yellow-green. How did Effrim stand it? Of course, he only spent a few hours of the day in this place. The rest of the time was spent in three-hour lunch seductions of grant committee chairmen and other sources of funding. The lines of the furniture were sharp. Every surface was cold metal and glass. The four wall hangings, all done by the same brutal hand, were abstracts of angry red shapes and a nervous, manic energy of black lines. Not Effrim’s style. This private office said more about Eleanor than Effrim.

‘Does Eleanor know you’re dabbling in bad magic acts?’

‘So you pegged the boy for a fraud?’ Effrim feigned surprise, but not well. ‘I hope the experience hasn’t been entirely worthless.’

‘It’s not entirely done with. I need some data from the research group.’

‘Ask my assistant. He’ll get you whatever you need. I suppose you’re shopping for a little something in the line of flying objects? You were right about the Russian data and the Chinese. Their methodology is a bit lax, isn’t it?’

‘I want the Chinese data on the succubus experiments.’

‘Is the boy branching out?’

‘No, but he’s led me along another line of investigation.’

‘I thought you were put off by the bizarre stuff. Anything in particular?’

Charles’s memory called up a page from a journal and displayed it on the wall by Effrim’s head. He scanned the lines. ‘There’s an experiment with an Asian monk who created a succubus under lab conditions. I want that one. His profile fits the stigmatic. The succubus, in front of witnesses, was seen to bruise the man’s flesh.’

‘Come back to work for me and I’ll get you all the cuckoo material you like.’

‘You still get the lion’s share of funding from sources like Riccalo’s employers? In addition to sitting on grant committees, Mallory tells me his other duties include real estate scams which bilk the elderly.’

‘Ah, but no arrests, indictments or convictions. By New York standards, this makes him a model citizen. Oh, Charles, we just never seem to agree on the Institute’s funding, do we? I’m stealing money from the bastard’s company. I should get a community service medal. But I can be flexible. Come back to work for us, and I’ll track down alternate funding.’

‘Thanks, I think I’ll just take the succubus material and run.’

‘You’re losing your mind out there among the tiny brains. But I’d be willing to trade any four good brains at the Institute for what’s left of yours. Come home, Charles. Come back inside where you belong. I’ll triple your project funding.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It’s cold out there, Charles.’

By ‘out there’, Effrim included all of real life beyond the isolation of the think tank. Charles surmised that Effrim had daily anticipated his prize freak would return home, beaten by the ordeal of making his way among people who found him eccentric and out of sync with the rest of them – which he was.

‘Will we be able to give a good report to the boy’s father?’

‘The boy’s father could very well be orchestrating this. I don’t trust Riccalo. And I have my doubts about you, too.’

An hour later, Charles was seated in his own front room and closing the file of succubus material. So, it was true; there was a link to the stigmata phenomenon exhibited by fanatics. The mental aberration of the succubus could work its effects on the body as well as the mind.

In the darkening room, a memory from his childhood came back to him in striking detail which included the succulent brown flesh of a roasted fowl. It was a goose, and it held a prominent position on the white lace tablecloth spread with fine china, gleaming silver and candlelight. Malakhai was seated at the dinner table beside the empty chair which beloneed to Louisa. The adults had been drinking wine and laughing with one another, accompanied by a lively recording of Mozart. The small child he had been was staring at Malakhai in the moment when Louisa kissed him. He had seen the imprint of her lips on the man’s face. Charles had rubbed his eyes with small hands, but not rubbed away the kiss which made the depression, the contour of her lips in Malakhai’s flesh.

Well, Amanda Bosch had created no physical phenomena yet. She was merely an image like a holograph. So he had a way to go before he became truly damaged. Amanda was not solid stuff, and he was not yet mad. He’d only made a clever moving picture, an odd extension of his eidetic memory.

Right.

The red light was flashing on the system alert box. So the judge was using his fax. The rewiring diverted the fax to her own machine. It was an application form for a new bank card. She scanned it into her computer and reset the type with a few alterations. After the lines for name and address, she typed in her own questions. Then she copied the letter for Harry Kipling, who also had a fax machine.

Now that she was getting to know them, she could tailor the terror to fit the man. What should she do to the blind man? According to the building super, his computer was rigged for a braille printer, but did he use it? She typed his message into the personal files: I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU. CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU SEE?

The purring at her feet annoyed her. She looked down at the cat, her eyes matching threats with the cat’s contented slits. And now a crash came from the kitchen. She felt for her gun, and the cat’s nose went up as it tested the air for what it could not see.

Gun drawn, Mallory walked into the kitchen and found the floor near the table littered with shatters and sparkles of glass and water. She checked every closet and room and then returned to the kitchen. She felt along every wet inch of the table top, searching for any small object which might do the job of the wooden match Charles had used to prime the vase in his office. There was nothing.

Well, the boy was smart, but not supernatural. So, the glass had simply fallen.

The unbeliever knelt down to the tiles with a dustpan and swept up the glass, and then mopped the floor and carefully wrapped the shards of the glass in plastic.

A barrage of soft thuds came from the next room. When she walked in, the cat’s body was arched, ears flattened, eyes round. It had knocked the bowl of fruit on to the carpet. An apple was rolling toward Nose, and the cat was backing up on tender feet as though the carpet might be on fire. Mallory snapped her fingers at the cat to get its attention. The cat ran the length of the room and leapt into her arms.

Another trick?

She put the cat down again and snapped her fingers once more. And the cat was in her arms.

What else can you do?

She dropped the cat, and crawled along the carpet, picking up the fallen fruit. The cat stayed beside her, loving up against her, mewling for some small attention, anything at all.

Mallory poured the wax fruit back into the bowl. Nose licked her hand, and she drew it back. Now she scanned the carpet and its recent proliferation of white cat hairs.

Houseproud Helen Markowitz would never have allowed an animal in the house, yet she had fed every stray that came through the yard. And for ten days of winter, a mongrel had lived in their garage, lapping up leftovers and licking Helen’s hand and adoring her with its great brown eyes.

Helen had shown young Kathy each scar of abuse on the animal’s pelt. You can learn a lot about people from their animals, said Helen. She had learned so much about the mongrel’s owner that she made no attempt to find him. Helen lost the tag on the dog collar and found another home for the animal with a family on the next block.

It’s not the dog who is lost, Helen had said. The one who abused this animal is lost.

Helen had never used the words of Kathy and Markowitz’s shared vocabulary: dirtball, scumbag, scum-sucker. The bastard who had split the dog’s pelt with kicks and broken its ribs, he was only lost to Helen.

Everyone has a dark side, Helen told her. When the dark kills off all the light of the soul, this is a lost person.

Small Kathy had figured, Naw, he’s a scumbag, and she knew the dog’s former owner deserved a few kicks to his own ribs. Her young sense of justice was very dark, and it had an elegant simplicity that was not much changed over the years. But, for Helen’s sake, she had tried to behave as though the light shone for her, too.

Mallory reached out one hand and gently stroked the cat’s head. Helen would’ve liked that.

The cat closed its eyes in contentment.

Duty done, she quickly withdrew her hand, wiped it on the leg of her jeans, and left the cat sitting in the middle of the living room, its eyes wide open now and looking everywhere for the vanished Mallory.

The Amanda Bosch file had an honored place in the top layer of the mess on Riker’s desk. He was rumbling through the contents of a lower drawer, fingers grasping what he thought were recent park site photos. But he had gone down too far in his haphazard method of filing, and now he held the snapshots he had taken at Kathy’s graduation from the police academy.

There was Helen Markowitz, smiling broadly, not realizing the cancer in her body was already planning to cut her life short in one more year. Markowitz had never really recovered from the loss. If not for Kathy, he might have followed Helen years sooner.

It had always angered Riker to think back on Helen’s death and how quietly she had gone to it, sedated, unprotesting. The hospital gurney wheels had whispered Markowitz’s wife into that sterile operating room, and only the body had come wheeling back to them. She had slipped under the surgeon’s knife and slipped away.

There should have been more noise to mark the event. In low tones, the doctor had told Markowitz and Kathy how sorry he was. Unspoken were the words, The show’s over. And so Markowitz and Kathy had sat together on a cheap plastic couch in the terrible silence of that waiting room, two unimportant people in the aftermath of an event which had not been properly called to an end. It was a play which tapered off to a mumble and had no curtain to tell the audience it was time to go home.

Riker, understood what Kathy meant when she had turned to him then and said, ‘This is a rip-off.’ It was.

Now someone was standing before Riker’s desk, not wanting to interrupt a thought, only politely waiting with just the minimum of shuffling noise to announce himself.

Riker only knew one person who was that polite. It was no surprise to look up into the smiling face of Charles Butler. And this was another reminder of an old friend. Markowitz’s smile had no such loony aspect, but, as with Charles, one tended to smile back, regardless of grim thoughts and small heartaches.

‘Pull up a chair, Charles. You waiting around for Mallory?’

‘No. Jack Coffey invited me in for a little chat about Amanda Bosch.’

‘He probably thinks Mallory’s holding out on him. She probably is. But then, to be fair, Coffey holds out on Mallory, and I hold out on both of them. We’re a very dysfunctional family, we three. You didn’t rat her out, did you?’

‘Of course not.’

So Mallory was holding out.

‘What can I do for you, Charles?’

‘Coffey tells me it was your idea to give this case to Mallory. May I ask why?’

‘Because of Amanda Bosch. When a kid dies young like that one, there ought to be some fanfare, you know? Sicking Mallory on the perp was the worst thing I could think of doing to him.’

‘But it’s dangerous.’

‘If she’s right about him, she only has to flush him out. If she’s wrong, she may have to shoot him.’

‘You’re not worried about her?’

‘No,’ he lied, because he really liked Charles.

‘But the way she’s going about it, she might as well – ’

‘We can’t put anybody in jail without evidence. Sometimes we know who did it, and we can’t touch him. People do get away with murder – I won’t tell you how often, but it happens. Now I’m betting this bastard doesn’t get away from Mallory. I’ve got a hundred bucks riding on the kid.’

‘But she’s hanging out there like a target.’

‘She is a target – she’s a cop. And she won’t give it up either. If you’re thinking she’d be safer with you in civilian life, just get rid of that fairy tale. This job gives her a rush. Now she’s got a lock on this case, and she’s flying. And what can you offer her, Charles?’

‘Nothing. I know that.’ Charles stared at his shoes for a moment. ‘But you’re looking for court supportable evidence against this man. Her methods aren’t strictly within the law, are they?’

‘I know she’ll break rules to get him, and this is what I’ve come to. I’m following Markowitz down the slow path of corruption. I’m copping to it, okay? You can have me arrested for it.’

‘Suppose she gets caught breaking the rules? What about her career then?’

‘Charles, you must know how Markowitz used her. I know the old man liked you and he trusted you, but I don’t think he shared much of the department dirt. If we did everything by the book, the results would look pretty poor. Mallory could get things for him, impossible things. He never asked how many laws she broke in a day. What she got by illegal means wasn’t evidence, nothing admissible in court, but it was stuff Markowitz could use to finesse a perp into a nervous breakdown. Mallory knows things about this killer. She has under-the-skin intimate knowledge. When she’s done with him, he’ll think she was there in his pocket when Amanda Bosch went down. Mallory will get him. I’m counting on it. She is a thing to behold.’

‘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.’

‘I would have thought she’d be more interested in the accident that blinded Franz,’ said Charles.

‘She was,’ said the doctor. ‘Eric Franz was blinded in an accident three years ago. The settlement was in seven figures. There was no apparent restoration of sight immediately following the corrective surgery, and he changed doctors before the next exam was scheduled. I have no idea who the new doctor was. His records were never forwarded.’

‘Is it possible that his sight was restored at some later date?’

‘The surgeon gave an 80/20 possibility, but it wasn’t in Eric Franz’s favor.’

‘There wouldn’t be much point in faking it,’ said Robin. ‘He was definitely blind when the court awarded the settlement. Even if the surgery had restored his sight, he would’ve kept the court award. And his wife’s life insurance benefit was donated to charity. I’d say the guy is squeaky clean. I don’t know where Kathy thinks she’s going with this one.’

‘So, Charles,’ said Edward, ‘do you know why Kathy didn’t drop by to pick up her own dirt?’

‘She said she couldn’t come tonight because she was barred from the poker game.’

Edward smiled. ‘Is that the story she gave you? She’s not here tonight because she wants to be legally one person removed from these records.’

‘Smart kid,’ said Robin, with some amount of paternal pride. ‘She learned that trick from Markowitz. No time lost with warrants, no paper trail for opposing counsel to follow.’

‘But she was barred from the poker game, wasn’t she?’

The other three players stared down at their cards. There were no volunteers.

‘Why was she barred from the game?’

Robin raised his head. ‘I’m still holding a grudge from her kiddy days. Markowitz used to bring her along if Helen was going out for the evening. The kid used to win so big, Markowitz had to buy her a little red wagon to carry home all the loot.’

The rabbi turned to Charles. ‘Her biggest win was thirty dollars in a penny-ante game. The legend grows.’

Charles shuffled the deck and dealt the first card to Rabbi Kaplan. ‘What was the real reason, Rabbi?’

‘Charles, such suspicions.’

The second card was dealt to the doctor.

‘I knew Mallory would be a bad influence on him.’

And the third to the lawyer.

‘She can’t play. It’s not fair. The little brat was born with a poker face.’

Charles sat in polite silence, holding on to the rest of the cards and waiting on a better answer.

‘Okay,’ said Robin. ‘Kathy was attending a private school, a girls’ school with young ladies who had never played poker. Kathy taught them the game.’

Charles dealt out the second round of cards.

‘She was bringing home three bills a week when Helen and Lou were called in for a little chat with the principal,’ said Edward.

And now all the cards were in play.

‘We thought it was great.’ Robin rearranged his hand. ‘The kid was champion poker material, and we took a lot of pride in that. But it upset Helen.’

‘And worse,’ said the rabbi, hardly looking at his cards.

Edward folded his hand and pushed the cards to one side of the table. ‘Lou didn’t want Kathy thrown out of school, so he took the fall for her. He told the principal it was a bad joke that had gotten out of hand, and Kathy couldn’t be expected to understand that what she was doing was wrong after he’d put the idea in her head.’

‘Louis was a gifted liar,’ said Robin. ‘He was so good that Helen bought the lie. It was the only rift between Helen and Lou, ever. Kathy knew it was her fault, but she didn’t understand why. And you know, it was a semi-honest racket. It wasn’t like she marked the cards or anything.’

‘She was just light years ahead of every child she fleeced,’ said Edward. ‘You never knew Helen. You don’t understand how it was between her and Lou. They held hands under the dinner table. They sat up and talked until two in the morning.’

‘So suddenly,’ said the rabbi, ‘there’s silence in the house. Helen believes that Louis has damaged Kathy. Louis was devastated, but he went on taking the blame for Kathy’s racketeering. Kathy felt the rift between them, the terrible silence. She came so close to understanding the difference between right and wrong.’

‘But then it slipped away from her,’ said Edward.

‘But she wouldn’t play poker again,’ said the rabbi. ‘Kathy barred herself from the game. It was her version of penance.’

‘You credit her too much. She’s a heartless little monster. She corrupts every – ’ Edward was interrupted by the loud jangle of the telephone.

Robin answered it and handed the receiver to Edward. When the doctor put down the phone, he turned to Charles. ‘My wife says Kathy left a message on our answering machine. She’ll pick up the folder herself.’

‘Kathy’s coming here?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Eight-thirty.’

‘It’s five past that now,’ said Charles. ‘Odd, she’s never late by even one minute.’

‘Oh, God, the lights!’ said Robin. ‘Kathy doesn’t know about the lights.’

And she was never, never late. They turned in concert to the window. Mallory’s small tan car was parked at the curb.

It was Edward Slope, her greatest detractor, who flew out the door, without his coat, to fetch her. He was down the flagstone path before the others could rise from the table.

Now three men congregated in the open doorway, unmindful of the chill night air. Charles stared at the back of the man running across the street.

Later it would hurt him to remember this small event with such great clarity. But there was a crystalline quality to a cold winter night. Even from the distance of a road’s width, no detail was lost to him, not the line of her cheek, nor the lamplight on her hair, nor the terrible stillness, the eerie quiet only broken by the footfalls of the doctor. There was Mallory, alone on a small field of new snow. But for the frost of her breath on the air, she was a statue in blue jeans, standing in the yard of the old house across the street. She was staring in the window at the Christmas tree and the menorah. And now her face turned upward as a window came to life on the second floor where Louis’s den was.

Slope came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. His voice was low, near a whisper. She never moved nor spoke to him, but only stared at the second-floor window, so entranced was she by the light.

An ex-partner was like an ex-wife, even if the partner had been a man – which Peggy was not, most definitely not.

He missed her sorely since her early retirement via a bullet in the lung. He missed her, though he saw her at least once a week, as though a night in the bar were a sacrament.

Riker’s eyes were on Peggy as she left him to run her white rag over the wet ring on the mahogany and pocket the change left by the last customer.

Age had hardly touched her, but only because she fought it off. Her hair was dyed a honey blonde to cover the gray, and her figure was only a little fuller at the hip and thigh. In the dim light and from the distance of the other end of the bar, she had changed not at all.

Oh, all those years ago when she was young, and he was younger, when he was still sober most of the day, when Peggy packed a gun and a shield. Now that was a time.

The matron draped on the stool next to his might be the only civilian in the bar tonight. The woman had that soft look, and she was staring at him with the disapproving eye of a taxpayer. Even in peripheral vision, the civilian was annoying him with her waving arms. The woman was making a damn point of waving the smoke away from her, and she had to reach into Riker’s own personal piece of the bar to do that.

‘Did you know that secondhand smoke kills non-smokers?’

‘Good,’ said Riker.

The woman picked up her purse and moved to the other end of the bar, and Peggy came back to him with a broad smile and a fresh beer.

‘So where were we, Riker?’

‘The early warning signs.’

‘Right, the early warning is in the money area. That would be a natural for Mallory. Have her check the credit card accounts for favourite bars and restaurants. A gym membership is a good giveaway. They like to keep in shape for the new one. Is the guy buying his own underwear? Something with a little flash? That’s another one.’

‘If there’s so many signals, how come the wives don’t catch on?’

‘They do. The husbands aren’t too quick to spot a cheating wife, but the wives always know what the husbands are doing. Even when they come in here and tell me that for years they had no idea. They knew what was going on – they knew from the beginning. It’s the blind spot that won’t let them acknowledge it. That damn blind spot. They’re staring straight at it, they can describe everything around it, but they don’t see it.’

‘Ah, Peggy. I can’t buy – ’

‘They rationalize it away. The amount of rationalization these women do is in direct proportion to what they’ve got to lose. With no kids and no mortgage, a woman can be pretty cynical about a cheating husband. With eight kids, she will sit down with the man and help him work out the lies she can believe in.’

Riker pulled out his notebook. A silver ornament on a chain was entangled in the spiral. It freed itself and dropped to the bar. Peggy picked it up. ‘So what’s with the Star of David? You’re an Episcopalian.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m an alcoholic.’

‘Ah, Riker, you’re dreaming those social-climbing dreams again. If you want to be an alcoholic you have to go to meetings.’ She handed him the six-pointed star.

‘Okay, I’m a drunk with aspirations.’ He stared at the star in his hand. ‘Lou Markowitz used to carry this around with him. Mallory thought I might like to have it.’

‘You sentimental slob.’

‘That’s what Mallory calls me, but she doesn’t think I’m sentimental.’ His pen hovered over the notebook. ‘Okay, markers for the runaround husband. Suppose he’s not a regular cheat, suppose it’s a first-time fling?’

‘He’ll start changing his habits. Maybe he walks the dog without being asked four times. Or he takes up a new sport for two – like tennis. Look for out-of-town trips that don’t match up with his job description, late hours at the office as a change in routine.’

‘Is he a good liar?’

‘Oh, they all think they’re great liars, but the wives have probably caught them in more lies than they can remember. It’s a pity you can’t just ask the wives. And a pity that most of them wouldn’t tell you.’

In Riker’s notebook, it said only DOGWALKING.

‘So, Riker, you think Mallory’s right about the perp? He panicked and ran?’

‘I think she underestimates him. She thinks the guy is a wimp who’d run if a mouse screamed.’

He liked it when they screamed. But he loved it when they howled.

Bitches. All women were bitches.

Did she think he would not recognize her as an enemy? How transparent and stupid she was.

He stood in the shower and let his hatred of her wash over him with the water. She was the enemy. He stepped from the shower, and water pooled at his feet as he rubbed a clear place on the glass. He stared at the mirror until his eyes seemed to float independent of his flesh.

What intelligence lay therein, what quickness of thought, thoughts running to the color red. But that insect in the background of his reflection crawling on the tiles, it marred his serenity. Better step on it quick. He did, and each time he did this, his enemy screamed and died. He beat her face in as he beat his pillow and then wondered why he could not sleep. When sleep did come, his dreams were all of death, angry death. Now the cancer of hatred was all, waking and sleeping. He was complete and invincible.

Mere humans had never proved a match for cancer. There was no cure.

With one long red fingernail, Mallory tapped the wad of papers which had traveled from Edward Slope’s hand to Charles and thence to her. She stared into the troubled face of a young investigator from the Medical Examiner’s Office. The man would not meet her eyes. His hands were worming around his coffee cup which had grown cold. A waitress was standing near them. Mallory waved her away.

‘Slope doesn’t figure you’re dirty, but I do. I know how much you have in your bank. I know every transaction in your stock portfolio, and I know your salary.’

‘Your old man never ratted on anybody.’

‘No, he didn’t. He just transferred them to hell. Most of them quit. They decided they’d rather live than do hard time in death precincts. I know that because I did the computer work for him. And what I did to them, I can do to you – and more. I can send you to a worse hell than early retirement on a partial pension.’

Ease up, Kathy, a memory of Markowitz cautioned her. If you scare them too much on tke first go-round, they go for a lawyer. You don’t want that.

She sat back in her chair. ‘I just wanted to give you a little something to think about over the holidays – give you a little time to go over your notes on the Coventry Arms visit. Merry Christmas. I’ll get back to you real soon.’

Nice touch, kid, said the memory of Markowitz which would not go to that part of the mind reserved for the dead.

Pansy Heart lay in her bed, watching him rise and walk back into the bathroom. She was imagining, for a few moments of quiet horror, that her husband crawled along on eight legs.

She was quiet for all the bathroom noises and the sheet rustling and the click of the bedside light switch. She sighed in the dark and wondered if he heard. And then she felt she could breathe again, breathe but not sleep. Not till she heard his own regular breathing and knew he would not wake until morning. And even so, she lay awake until the exhaustion of fear overtook her in the dark.

Angel Kipling looked up as Harry walked into the kitchen.

His face was still dazed from sleep. He hovered in the doorway as though debating whether this was safe ground or battle ground. Between coming and going, she nailed him with the first shot.

‘So what have you done now, Harry?’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry Kipling, opening the refrigerator and pulling out the leftover chicken from dinner.

She stared into his smiling face, and she wanted to hit him with a closed fist.

Pansy woke with a blow to her head. It was not a sharp blow but glancing. In the dim light of the bedroom, she saw the fist flying in the air, and her hand moved out to fend it off. It fell back to Emery’s side. She turned on the bedside lamp, and the pearls of night sweats glistened in the light. The longish hair was an aureole of gray spreading on the pillow around a face of eyes-closed anguish.

‘Emery, wake up!’

The brown eyes snapped open and looked into hers. She detected a wince, and she shrank back as if from an unkind word. He had trained her in that behavior, much the same as the dog had been trained. And what had he done to the dog? And why did he have to lie about it? What had he done?

‘Having a nightmare, Emery?’

Were you dreaming of Rosie or your mother?

‘Yes, a nightmare. I look in this hole and it’s alive with maggots, and I’m going into it. It’s all coming undone. Who’s doing this to me?’

If Pansy had believed in ghosts, she might have had an answer for that. It was the face of Emery’s mother she saw in the mirror across the room, and it was her own face.

The bouncer and the bartender each had the frowzy redhead by one flabby arm, and even so, she was giving them trouble as they led her out the door. The two large men had loud, hollered words with the woman on the sidewalk and out of Betty Hyde’s earshot.

Hyde looked around her, noting the rodent droppings on the floor. Definitely not an A rating from the Board of Health.

Reminders of her less accomplished relatives were on the faces of every drunk at the bar. Her glass had lipstick stains from the previous customer. The slatternly waitress had actually seemed amused when she complained, but a dollar bill had bribed the girl back to the table with a clean glass, and Hyde had slugged back the whole shot. With enough whiskey, anything could be borne.

She leaned forward as she spoke to the younger woman who sat on the other side of the small table.

‘Mallory, how do you find these places?’

Of course, she understood the logic. No one from the Coventry Arms was likely to wander in, not without their own private security. The bulge under Mallory’s coat could only be a gun. Now that was comforting.

‘Tell me more about Eric Franz,’ said Mallory.

‘Anything specific?’ And what did Eric have in common with a judge and a gigolo?

‘Are you sure he’s blind?’

‘Dead sure,’ said Betty Hyde.

‘How so?’

‘If the blindness was fraud – the wife didn’t know. How does a man keep a thing like that from his wife?’

‘Maybe she did know.’

‘No, Mallory. Annie believed he was blind.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Well, I did tell you his wife had an interesting sense of humor… for a bitch. She used to flirt with men in front of him. Nothing spoken – only the rubbing up, the nuzzling. What Annie did with other men were the sort of things Eric couldn’t see or hear. It was quite a show – the two of them in public. And there were other jokes at his expense, the faces she made, the obscene gestures. It was the darkest humor. You couldn’t look away. You couldn’t tell her to stop. You were a prisoner to every exhibition.’

‘Why did she hate him so much?’

‘Because he loved her so much – too much. If only he’d been rude to her occasionally, it might have gone a long way toward improving the marriage. She was that type.’

‘And his type? He was a doormat?’

‘A nice guy. But you’re right. She had nothing but contempt for him in all the time I knew them.’

‘Is that why they never had children?’

‘You know, there was a time when I could’ve sworn Annie was pregnant. She had that certain aura of impending motherhood. That special glow that comes from vomiting every morning. But then, when I saw her again, she was her old self – drop-dead gorgeous and frighteningly awake.’

‘You think she got rid of it?’

‘Abortion? Yes, I do, but there’s no way to confirm it. I pride myself in being a hardcase, but I can’t ask a blind man if his wife aborted their only child. Well, I could if it had the makings of a good story. Does it?’

‘Did you tell Eric I was a cop before I joined the consulting firm?’

‘No, dear. I only told him you might be interested in any little tidbits about the judge. But it was all over the news. Every channel said you were a dead cop.’

‘A fireman was killed on Monday. Do you remember the news story?’

‘Yes, he died saving an old man. It was a long story.’

‘What was the fireman’s name?’

‘I don’t remember… Oh, I see. Yesterday’s news – who remembers the details, the names and faces? But you, my dear, have a memorable face.’

‘And Eric Franz is blind.’

When she returned home, she hung up her clothes in the closet as Helen had taught her to do. The cat had already sensed her presence and was pounding its hello on the bathroom door with the soft thuds of paws. She pressed the play button on her answering machine, and went into the kitchen to open a can of tuna for her star witness.

It was Riker’s voice on the machine.

‘Mallory, do any of the suspects have a dog?’

Charles dimmed the lights of the front room and settled back on the couch, long legs splayed out in front of him. An early Christmas present from Mallory lay in the midst of its green velvet wrapping paper.

He was staring down at yet another of Mallory’s attempts to lure him into the current century. He had a remarkable record collection and the finest turntable money could buy, but he was a dinosaur in her eyes. It was not the music which counted with her, but the technology. Every old thing be damned, technology ruled.

He picked up her gift, the portable CD player. Did she really expect him to go about the streets wired up to the age of electronics?

How perverse was their gift giving. He gave her jewels in antique settings, which she never wore. She gave him expensive high-technology, which collected dust between visits from Mrs Ortega.

He pushed the button to open the top of the machine, just on the off chance she’d had the plastic cover inscribed with a sentimental message. He gave the same odds that two moons might appear in the sky tonight. A disk lay in the machine, ready to play at a touch. It was only a mild shock that it should be Louisa’s Concerto.

Could she have known about the ruined record in the basement? Probably not. More than likely, she had noticed the concerto was not included in his record collection after he had made a point of saying it was a popular recording for any classical music buff.

Earphones grew out of the small dark box in his hand. But he didn’t actually need the earphones, did he? The concerto was locked in his memory now and running through his conscious mind.

What had happened this afternoon had stunned him in the way cattle are stunned with a bat before they go into the slaughterhouse blades. He understood how it had happened. The music had always been a trigger in his childhood fantasies of Louisa. Now the concerto was keyed to his eidetic recreation of Amanda. She was archived in his freakish memory, and she would probably live there forever.

He didn’t want to touch on this again. The fear was real. It was no ghost story this, but something threatening to his mind.

Mallory would not be frightened so. And what exactly was he frightened of? It was only an illusion, wasn’t it? Something he had made with a child’s memory of a magic act and nothing more, a mere holograph of remembering. Malakhai’s magical insanity had been a gift of sorts, and that was his field, wasn’t it, exploring gifts. Furthermore, he had actually found a practical application for the old magician’s delusion. If Amanda was true to life, if he was faithful to her in creation, she might be able to tell him something useful to Mallory’s investigation. If Mallory could face bullets, he could face Amanda. It was not so insane. A mere conversation in the mind.

Memory led him back through the setup for the act. He was a child again. The conductor’s baton was rising as the concert hall quieted to heart-stopped silence. The concerto had begun. The inner music fled the confines of his braincase and rose around him in a wall of sound which opened on to bleak corridors filled with the scent of roses. The lull of music was the warning of the great dark hole which sprawled out before him. In that magic silence where the listeners placed the phantom notes rather than endure the emptiness, there he heard a woman keening, wailing for a death, softer now and coming toward him into the light.

She wore the clothes she died in, the blazer, the blue jeans and running shoes. His memory had faithfully recreated the stain on the material and the uglier stain of the golden hair where the wound matted it to wisps of red strings.

How did Malakhai begin? Oh yes. So simple.

‘Good evening, Amanda.’

She gave him a shy smile as she sat down in the chair opposite his own. There was a moment of relief when he realized his creation did not have the substance to make an impression in the plush upholstery. She rested her hands on the arms of the chair. He looked to the wall, further relieved because she cast no shadow to sit with his own.

‘Good evening, Charles.’

Her voice might be borrowed from Mallory, but in Amanda’s throat, the words were gentled. And gentle were her eyes.

‘Amanda, when I saw you this morning, standing over the little boy – ’

‘He was in pain,’ she said, looking down at the soft white hands folded in her lap. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

‘You only wanted to comfort him.’

‘Yes. Such a troubled little boy. I love children.’

‘I know. It’s difficult for me to understand why you changed your mind about the child you were carrying.’

She looked down to the floor for words, and not finding them there, she looked up with tears that were all too real to him. Her hands raised in a gesture of helplessness.

‘You wanted that baby very much, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. I planned my life around that child. The baby was the world to me, all that meant anything at all.’

‘Then why? Why did you do it? You asked the doctor to cut the child out of you. What was it about this man that was so horrible it made you abort his child?’

She rose gracefully and walked away from him, back into the shadows. Her gait was listless, tired. It had been hard work cutting a much-wanted baby from her womb, her life, her future – when she had one. Too hard on her.