The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  “We have a bulletin,” the broadcaster was saying. “A police officer has been murdered in Central Park. The victim is Sergeant Kathleen Mallory, daughter of the deceased Inspector Louis Markowitz, who gave his own life in the line of duty. Details of the murder are being withheld pending further investigation.”

  Charles looked across the table at the living, solid, three-dimensional Mallory as though he needed to verify her existence, needed to be sure his eyes were not in error before he could doubt the veracity of television. Suppose she had not been with him when he heard the news?

  They watched in silence. Much channel changing told them other news programs were also carrying the story.

  And now the phone was ringing in concert with the doorbell. The first of the condolence calls, he supposed. Mallory went off to answer the door as he picked up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Charles, this is Riker. Don’t you ever pick up the messages on your answering machine?”

  “Riker, is this about the report on Mallory’s death?”

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “I’m calling from the Medical Examiner’s Office. We’ve been trying to track down Mallory all day. Is she there? Could you put the little corpse on the phone?”

  Mallory walked back into the kitchen, followed by Dr. Henrietta Ramsharan of apartment 3A. Henrietta’s dark hair fell soft and loose around the shoulders of her denim shirt. She wore her after-hours faded jeans and the confusion of the eyes which came from having the door opened by a dead person.

  Lieutenant Jack Coffey was sitting at his own desk, but the desk was in Inspector Markowitz’s office. Though Louis Markowitz was dead, the old man would always be in command of the Special Crimes Section, and this would always be his office. Jack Coffey counted himself lucky that the paychecks were made out to himself. But just now, he was thinking of Markowitz’s daughter, Kathleen Mallory.

  Palanski’s report was sitting on his desk, replete with the crime-site preliminary faxed over from the West Side precinct. The fax photos were dark, but the light hair shone through the grainy shadows, and he could make out the outline of the slender body in the familiar jeans, running shoes and blazer. He only waited on the positive identification from a friend of the family to complete the report.

  No doubt Sergeant Riker would pull the pin after this one. Markowitz’s death had hit the man hard. Mallory’s death would be too much.

  Coffey turned off the lamp and braced his hands on the desk, as though a man of thirty-six needed this solid crutch to rise to a stand. He stared at the bulletin board on the back wall of the office and wondered if a little water on his face might make him feel less dead.

  Who could get so close to her that the bastard could hit her that way? No one. It could not be.

  But the evidence was sitting on his desk in black and white, and her pretty face was all over the television on every channel. And when he found the cop who leaked it to the media, one head was gonna roll.

  Ah, Mallory.

  If he could have her back for a few minutes, he would risk the sarcasm and the look that would neatly snip his balls for caring if she lived or died. Sucker, her eyes would say. He could almost see her standing there. He even imagined that he could smell her perfume. It was time to go home where the bottle was. He turned.

  “Oh, Christ!”

  He grabbed at the doorframe and missed, too slow with shock to fall immediately and catching himself on the second pass at something solid, which was the chair. His stomach shot up and then slammed back to where it belonged.

  Mallory stood in the doorway. Her gold hair was back-lit by the office lights beyond the door, and coming up behind her was a fluorescent, washed-out Riker.

  “I know,” said Mallory. “You thought it was me in the morgue.”

  “Well, Mallory,” said Riker, “he did and he didn’t. The lieutenant heard you were dead, but he knew you’d be back after sundown.”

  Riker ambled into the office behind Mallory and tossed his report on the desk. One beverage and two different types of food stains graced the front page.

  Coffey was staring at the report and looking for his voice as she sat down in the chair by his desk and stretched out the long legs that went on forever. Riker dragged another chair up to the desk, pulled out his notebook and leaned over to flick on the lamp. On the rear wall, Mallory was casting the reassuring shadow of a living woman.

  Coffey lowered himself into his chair. He was fighting down the gut flutters, one hand resting on his stomach, as though he could kill the internal butterflies by smothering them this way. “The corpse was wearing a brown cashmere blazer that was tailored for you, Mallory.”

  Riker looked at his notebook and nodded to her. “That was confirmed by your tailor on Forty-second Street. According to Palanski’s report, you’re the guy’s most memorable customer.”

  “Can you explain the blazer?” Ease up, Coffey told himself. She was not a suspect. Softening out of the interrogation mode, he added, “It’s the only lead we have.”

  “You’ll find Riker’s cigarette burn on the left sleeve,” she said, and not softly at all. “I got rid of it.”

  “You trashed it?”

  “No. I gave it to Anna Kaplan, Rabbi Kaplan’s wife. She collects clothing for the homeless.”

  He looked down at Riker’s report, reading through the orange sauce stains and one stain that damn well better not be beer. “According to the ME’s report, this is the body of a well-nourished female in her mid-twenties. No indication that she was homeless, no head lice, no bed-bugs.”

  He left out the feeding frenzy of maggots and beetles that would help to determine the time of death in the scavenging cycle of insects.

  “So?” Mallory shrugged. “Talk to Palanski. See what else he botched besides the ID on the corpse. What have we got so far?”

  Her question was well within the purview of a crimes analyst. He needed her back. How to get through this without antagonizing her, without falling into another round of one-upmanship which she always won. He scanned the lines of Riker’s report.

  “We know she had an abortion within ten days of death. The first wound was a frontal assault to the head. He was facing her. That could mean it was personal, someone she knew. Outside of that, we’ve got nothing,” said Coffey. “No witness, no weapon.”

  “It was raining yesterday morning,” said Riker, tapping the early homicide report on the corner of Coffey’s desk. “The rain would have washed away any physical evidence. If Heller couldn’t dig it up, it wasn’t there. The weapon could have been a rock, and that rock is at the bottom of the lake if the perp has half a brain. And that’s assuming she was killed in the park. We know the body was moved after death.”

  “We don’t have an officer involvement,” said Coffey. “If you’ve got nothing more to add to this report, I’m bouncing it back to the West Side squad tonight.”

  Mallory sat well back in her chair, eyes half-closed, looking nearly harmless. “With no prints, it’ll take them a month to ID that body—maybe longer or never. It’ll be a low-priority case. So, if the park was only the dump site, they’ll never find the kill site. They’re gonna blow it.”

  “I suppose you could do it better and faster?” And yes, he could see that was exactly what she thought.

  “You want me to?”

  “I want you to go back to your damn computer room.”

  “I’m still on suspension, and I’m considering a better offer.”

  Mallory rose from her chair, and in the next instant, he was looking at the back of her as she walked out of the room.

  “You know she’s right,” said Riker, leaning over in his chair, checking the door to be sure she was gone out of earshot. “The West Side dicks will lose it. The perp’s gonna get away with the murder.”

  “It happens. Nothing I can do about it.”

  “Give this one to Mallory.”

  “Her job description is crimes analysis and computers, not fieldwork.”


  “But she has worked in the field.”

  “Unofficially, and only because I had a shortage of warm bodies. If she wants to make it official, she has to go through the paperwork and put in some time with a partner. Now, who could work with her? And you’re forgetting this case is another precinct’s headache.”

  “Well, technically it’s still the property of Special Crimes. Why not give it to Mallory? Just give it to her, close your eyes and don’t ask her a lot of questions.”

  “Like Markowitz did?” When she broke six laws a day, breaking and entering other people’s computers, cutting corners, bypassing time-consuming channels and warrants—proving invaluable. “I should just let her run her own private police department? Is that the idea, Riker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But Markowitz didn’t want her to work the field. He all but padded the walls of that computer room. He spoon-fed her every detail of a case.”

  “I always thought he was wrong in that.” Riker lit a cigarette without asking if Coffey minded.

  Coffey minded, but bit it back. He’d grown accustomed to this game they played, needling within parameters that stopped just short of insubordination. And he had not yet thanked Riker for failing to call in the false ID from the morgue.

  “All this time, she could have been learning fieldwork so she could survive out there,” said Riker, exhaling a blue cloud of smoke. “Now it occurs to me that she’s got her own way of surviving, and it might be a better way. It’s a waste of talent to keep her in the computer room.”

  “It was letting her out of the computer room that got her suspended.”

  “That was a righteous shoot.”

  “You know better than that, Riker. If she’d killed the perp, I’d have no problem with that. But Mallory wanted to play with him.”

  “Whose call is that? Are you telling me that pack of idiots on the Civilian Review Board ruled against her?”

  “The Review Board commended her on restricting her use of force to shooting a gun out of a man’s hand. But then, they’re civilians, aren’t they? I’m the one who’s got a problem with the shooting. The perp aimed a gun at Mallory. She should’ve put that bullet in his heart. But if she’d just killed him, where would be the fun in that?”

  No comeback, Riker?

  Coffey mentally scratched one point for himself, but the big score would be in getting the last word. “Now I’ve got a backlog of cases, and she’s not replaceable on the computer. That’s it.”

  Coffey shuffled the papers on his desk, and then bowed his head to read them. Had a more sensitive human sat in Riker’s chair, he would have recognized this signal of dismissal. He was still seated when his superior looked up from the paperwork. Coffey’s glare was wasted on Riker, who seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts.

  “Riker, catch up to Mallory and tell her the suspension is terminated.”

  Riker nodded, but remained entirely too comfortable in his slouch to be going anywhere very soon.

  “If you don’t give Mallory something more interesting, she’ll walk,” said Riker, spilling out his words with the smoke in an economy of effort. “She’ll keep the consulting partnership with Charles.”

  “That setup is illegal as hell, and it’s gonna stop or I’ll take her badge,” he said, trying the lie out on Riker first, and wondering how Mallory would take it.

  “You can’t scare Mallory.”

  He hated it when Riker was right. If the department ever did enforce the regulations on moonlighting, there wouldn’t be three cops left to guard the city.

  “Are you volunteering to play wet nurse, Riker?”

  “Mallory doesn’t need me for that. She doesn’t need any human being on the planet. She came that way when she was a kid. Real self-sufficient little—”

  “I thought Markowitz was your friend, Riker. Are you trying to give that dead man a heart attack by putting his kid in the line of fire?”

  “If she hadn’t been his daughter, he would have used her right. He would have been ruthless about it.”

  Riker deposited an ash on the carpet. The whole world was Riker’s ashtray.

  “Why should I give her this one? The guy is brutal. He’s a psycho.” Coffey held up the morgue photo, and Riker turned his face to the floor. “First he smashes the woman’s skull in, and then he turns her head 180 till her neck snaps. How is Mallory going to—”

  “If you’re afraid she’s gonna shoot him in the hand, I think she’s learned her lesson.” He lifted his shaggy head to face Coffey with something approaching serious feeling. “Give her a chance.” Riker then shrugged his shoulders to show that this business really meant very little to him.

  And now Coffey realized it meant a great deal to Riker.

  “You know she’d have absolutely nothing to go on.”

  “That’s what she likes about it,” said Riker. “The first time you said that, her little monster eyes lit up like green candles. It’s enough to make you believe in hell.”

  “All we know about the perp is that he’s dangerous to women, and you want me to give him to Mallory.”

  Sure. Give a dangerous lunatic to the baby to cut her teeth on.

  “She’s perfect for this one.”

  “How do you figure?”

  While Coffey waited on an answer, he looked down at the report on his blotter and picked up a pencil to initial it. Riker slumped low in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. Coffey’s pencil snapped in two.

  “You know,” Riker drawled through the smoky haze, “even in the early days, Markowitz took a lot of pride in Mallory. He used to brag on her all the time. He said it wasn’t every father in the neighborhood who had a kid with the psych profile of a sociopath.”

  2

  DECEMBER 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So this is morning.”

  Dead silence from Mallory.

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

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

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

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

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