The Man Who Cast Two Shadows
Page 13
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 discs 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 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 onto 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 bean-pole 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 had 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 eighty-dollar-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 that 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.”
“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 with 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, prelude to sitting down without creasing his expensive suit. The tailoring and material were only rivaled 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—”