The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  Arthur pointed north. She wondered if he was aware of the fact that he was smiling as he warmed to the subject of the flying body.

  “Mrs. Franz landed on a southbound van. The van driver put his vehicle up on the curb and wrecked the awning support for the building next door. She fell off the van, and into the path of a vintage silver Jaguar. Her dress got snagged up in the rear wheels, and the Jaguar dragged her for maybe fifteen feet before he stopped.”

  Very confidential now, just between the two of them, “She was still breathing, Miss Hyde. That wasn’t in the papers either. She didn’t die until just before the ambulance arrived.”

  Betty nodded. Of course it would take at least three vehicles to kill Annie Franz. And it was so fitting that the last one was shaped like a silver bullet.

  “Did Mrs. Franz say anything before she died?”

  “I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the police department, or maybe that detective could help you. He was the first one on the scene. ‘Piece of luck,’ I think he said. He was just passing by, I believe. He gave her first aid while we waited for the ambulance.”

  “And what was Eric doing while this was going on?”

  “He was just standing there. He was in shock, of course. One of the uniformed police officers was trying to take a statement from him, but I think he was having trouble making sense of the whole thing. And that was when you came down and took him away from the policeman.”

  “Yes, he was in shock. Poor Eric,” said Betty. “It must have been so hard on him. If only he’d been able to see—”

  “—he could have saved her.”

  Mallory leaned down to the driver’s window of the cab. “This is police business. I’m commandeering the cab.”

  “No English,” said the driver.

  “Police!” Thrusting her shield and ID into the cabby’s face, she said, “Badge. So, now you know English.”

  As she was handcuffing the girl to the handle of the cab door, the cabbie was protesting in his native tongue, which had many accompanying hand gestures, and one of them was obscene in any language.

  Mallory crossed the street to the pay phone. After five minutes of conversation, she was back at the cab door, undoing the cuffs and giving directions to the driver.

  “No English,” he said.

  She opened the door and, jerking on the material of his coat, she spilled his short body out onto the street. “You want to ride in the backseat or the trunk? If you don’t tell me now, I’ll decide for you. Oh, and I noticed the hack license picture isn’t your face. Maybe this is a stolen cab.”

  “I guess I’ll ride in the backseat,” said the driver, rising to his feet and reaching for the handle of the back door. But Mallory and the girl were already in the front seat, and the cab was pulling away from the curb.

  “Why didn’t you call for a police car?” said the girl, who had been silent till now.

  “Paperwork,” said Mallory. “If we go through the paperwork, I have to turn you in. You’re already dope-sick. If I turn you in, you’ll be in custody when the real misery comes on. Is that what you want?”

  The girl turned her face to the window.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Mallory. “I want to know what kind of business you do with Palanski. He wasn’t meeting you in a public place for sex.”

  The girl kept her silence, pressing angry lips together—a prelude to a tantrum, and taunting evidence that this was still a child.

  “If you’re thinking Palanski will get you out, he won’t. He’ll be keeping a low profile for the next few days. And if you’re thinking he’ll kill you for talking, you’ve got good instincts. But I won’t let that happen.”

  “I suppose you want my life story, too. What’s a kid like me doing in a—”

  “No, I know your story. All the stories are the same. You can’t go home again.”

  Nothing passed between them until Mallory was taking the cab out of Manhattan through the twilight lamps of the Lincoln Tunnel.

  “It wouldn’t do any good to tell on him,” said the girl. “No one would take my word against a cop.”

  “You’re right about that. Palanski would say you were just an informant. He’d get off with a reprimand for not turning you over to Juvenile officers—unless there was someone else to corroborate your testimony.”

  “The johns would never talk. That’s nuts. Rich bastards, they’d—”

  And now she shut her mouth again, knowing she’d said too much. Mallory smiled. “Okay. Let’s see if I can work this out. Palanski lines up the johns for you. He does the background work, shadows them, gets to know their habits. Then he tells you where to plant yourself so they’ll run into you. Does he feed you lines, too, or do you know how to get them to take you home?”

  The girl’s head lolled to one side as she closed her eyes. “I give them all the same line—‘It’s cold, mister. Do you know how I can get out of the cold, and maybe get something to eat?’ Sometimes they just give me money. One of them tried to flag down a cop car, and I had to run for it. Palanski screws up sometimes. But you’d be surprised how many men want to take me out of the cold.”

  “Then Palanski shows up at the john’s door the next day, right? He shows them a mug shot and the date of birth. How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “And the johns pay up, and they pay well.”

  He wouldn’t even need to solicit the bribe. This was New York City, and they all knew the drill. The wallets had flown from their pockets, the money had spilled into Palanski’s outstretched hand, and he had tipped his hat and smiled on his way out the door.

  “Where are you taking me?” The girl’s eyes were open now and looking out the windows on a landscape that was not Manhattan anymore.

  “Someplace safe. A friend of mine arranged for you to spend a few days in the country. A few days is all I’m gonna need.”

  “I can’t go three days without a—”

  “I know.” Mallory reached inside her jacket and pulled out the three bags of white powder she had retrieved from the waters of Bethesda. She showed them to the girl and put them back in her pocket.

  By the time the car pulled into the circular drive, she knew the girl’s name was Fay, and Fay could never go home. If she did, her mother the drunk would beat her to death. Or perhaps the mother’s new boyfriend might get first dibs on the girl’s young body. Mallory pulled up in front of the large and graceful old building with a white Georgian facade. Edward Slope’s car was parked near the freestanding wooden sign.

  “Mayfair Research Facility? What kind of a place is this?”

  Mallory kept silent until she and the girl were in the lobby, which might have passed for the ground floor of a fashionable hotel. When the girl saw the first white-coated attendant, she tried to bolt. She pulled at Mallory’s hand, which would not release her. Now the attendant had Fay by both arms and was forcing her down the hall and away as she screamed out to Mallory. “You said you wouldn’t turn me in! You promised, you promised!”

  She broke free of the attendant and ran to Mallory. “We had a deal. You promised.”

  She was crying now, the garish makeup washing down her face like yesterday’s Halloween mask. She was stripped to childhood again. She wrapped her arms around Mallory’s waist as the attendant tried to pull her away.

  Dr. Edward Slope was glaring at Mallory. “I told you to prepare her for this. You never listen to me—or anyone else.”

  He sat down on his heels and gently turned the face of the child toward his own. “You think it’s going to hurt. It won’t. I want you to go with this man. You’re already feeling sick, aren’t you? Yes, I can see that. He’s going to give you something to take the pain away. It’ll never hurt you again. You have my word on that.”

  She loosened her grip on Mallory, but the look of betrayal remained. A deal had been broken. Nothing would change that, and they both knew it.

  When she was gone down the hall with the attendant, Slope turned
to Mallory. “There’s a limit to my influence here, but I pulled every string I could. I just hope you know what you’re doing. An underage Jane Doe is illegal as hell, so I’m passing her off as a relative incognito. She’s in the program, but only for the three days of detox. What then?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I just need her off the street for a couple of days. Oh, and I need a Polaroid of the kid. Can you manage that for me?”

  “Yes, of course. But what happens to the child when the three days are up?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got enough problems right now.”

  “Kathy, sometimes I think you’re growing into a real human being, and then you exasperate me this way. You got her this far, that’s good. But after the detox—what then? You can’t just dump off a little girl like she was a sack of potatoes.”

  “Doris does all the cooking in your house—that’s her job, right?”

  “What?”

  Mallory’s hands went to her hips. Her words had a cautioning edge. “If you’d ever tried to prepare a meal, you’d know what an art form it really is, making every dish come out at the same time.” Her voice was on the rise now, and angry. “Well, I’m cooking! I’ve got six dishes going at six different speeds, and they all have to be done at exactly the same time or the whole thing falls apart on me.” One long fingernail jabbed at his chest. “You go do your own damn job! Get off my back!”

  And the cook with a gun walked through the lobby and out the front door.

  Today Mallory had only one message for each of her suspects. She blocked out the bulletin board they would access on their screens and tapped in the code to call up the dummy board. It displayed only one sentence repeated over and over again: I HAVE A WITNESS.

  And that was no lie if cats counted.

  Though the hallway was generous in width, Pansy Heart pressed her body to the wall as her husband walked by. His face was red, his eyes hard, and he walked heavy on his feet, sending one fist to the wall a scant few inches from where she stood. In the room he had left, the computer screen was blank once more. What had been the message this time?

  A door slammed at the other end of the hall. She jumped as though she had trodden on a live wire. She gripped the edge of the hall table, feeling empty and airy inside, believing that she might fly upward without this solid anchor of oak. Her heart was knocking on the wall of her chest.

  It was natural to be thinking of her mother-in-law on that last day of the old woman’s life, in that moment when the organs were shutting down one by one. There had been an inner knowledge of impending death in the ancient eyes. Only minutes before, terror had lived in that deeply lined face. Then the lines had smoothed out, and in the eyes was, not peace, but triumph. And then her mother-in-law had died—escaped.

  Angel Kipling paced up and down the carpet before her husband Harry. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what this is about.” She held up the printout from the computer. A single sentence repeated one hundred times across the sheet. “A witness to what? What have you done?” Her voice was in the whining mode and threatened to climb into a scream.

  Harry Kipling was buttoning his shirt in front of the mirror. Now he sought out her reflection behind his own. “It’s not addressed to me, is it?”

  Angel’s lip was curling as he turned around to face her in the flesh. She placed her hands on her wide hips, and her robe fell open to display the ponderous breasts sagging against the thick body. His eyes dropped to the opening in the robe, and he quickly turned away from her. She winced as though she had been slapped.

  As he left the full-length mirror to examine his tie rack, Angel stood alone in the glass, staring at her reflection. She had not yet put on the armature of makeup, and her hair was wild with snarls.

  She closed the robe quickly and addressed her husband in a smaller voice this time. “It’s not another bank card scam, is it, Harry? You’re not having trouble living on your allowance money, are you?”

  It had cost her a fortune to clean up after his last foray into creative banking, that or face the scandal and the stockholders. And she had never believed the stolen money was gone, spent. Was he amassing capital for a getaway? No, he would never leave her. He would never stray far from the source of unlimited wealth.

  He ignored her and continued the business of tying his tie, an odd and useless preoccupation for a man who had no occupation, no business to conduct. And now she forgot that she was ugliest in the morning, most vulnerable without her magic makeup.

  “Answer me, you prick. You don’t want me to cut off your allowance again, do you?”

  “Angel, I have no idea what’s going on. It’s probably a prank. Some kid in the building.”

  “It’s another bank swindle, isn’t it? I thought I made it very clear what would happen if you tried this one more time. You won’t like being poor again, Harry.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  She pulled a crumple of computer paper from her robe pocket and thrust it at him.

  “This was faxed yesterday. It’s an application for a credit card, and the form is addressed to you.”

  “I haven’t applied for any credit cards.”

  “Read it!”

  He accepted the ball of paper and made a small production out of smoothing it over the surface of the bedside table.

  Under the heading of pertinent information, it read: First, tell us why you did it. Please print or type your confession in the space provided.

  He picked up the sheet of paper, bringing it close to his eyes, examining the logo of the credit card company, which appeared at the top of the page.

  The next line read: Does your wife know what you did? If so, we have provided additional space for her comments.

  Now he stared at the short list of questions:

  1. Why did you lie?

  2. Would you do it again if we gave you the chance?

  He lowered the page and then looked up as Angel paced back and forth across the rug with barely contained fury.

  “And now this message on the building bulletin board!” The words exploded from her mouth. “What does it mean?” She looked down at the most recent message, clutched in her hand. “ ‘I have a witness.’ A witness to what? Talk to me, Harry, or I’ll cut off your allowance, and then I’ll cut off your balls!”

  Eric Franz was slow to answer his door. Betty Hyde could hear him walking toward the foyer, a shuffle of hard soles on marble. When the door did open, he was looking over her shoulder, as though just missing her with his eyes. A sheet of paper was wadded in his hand. His face was a mask. The room behind him was dark but for the constant glow of the computer’s ever-open eye.

  “If she knew you were digging into her past, it could end your friendship,” said Rabbi David Kaplan.

  “I only want the connection between the boy and Mallory,” said Charles Butler.

  The rabbi’s den was a place where books lived. They were not kept to the shelves, but quietly gathered in stacks on every surface of the room, perched in groups of agreeable subjects. A single leather-bound volume lay open on the desk, patiently awaiting the rabbi’s return to the interrupted business of scholarship.

  “Perhaps the connection between them is only a simple commonality,” said the rabbi.

  “The difference in their backgrounds doesn’t leave room for much in common.”

  “All children have a commonality in innocence.”

  “I wouldn’t describe either of them as innocent. The boy talks like a forty-year-old man. And Mallory . . . is Mallory.”

  “Perhaps they share the innocence of good and evil.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard the word ‘innocence’ so connected with evil.”

  “Take Helen’s view of Kathy. Helen could see nothing bad in the child. Helen always said no one had ever explained the rules to Kathy, and she was close to the truth. These concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, heaven and hell—what is that to a child on the street, living by wit and
theft? When she first came to live with Louis and Helen, her behavior sometimes bordered on that of feral children raised apart from humans.”

  “What about the natural mother? Is it possible she abused her child? Perhaps that would explain a lot of the damage.”

  “Charles, I know nothing about the natural mother. Kathy has never once spoken about this woman.”

  “Suppose you had to speculate on her parents. Just based on what you know of her, what would you say?”

  “We assumed Kathy had been on the street for three or four years before Markowitz arrested her. She was a ten-year-old thief. She tried to lie her way to twelve, and Markowitz let her get away with eleven—but she stole that year.

  “Now we know she’d never been to a formal school. Helen had her evaluated at the Learning Center. But someone had taught her to read and write at a very early age. She also had an astonishing natural aptitude for mathematics. That was why Helen and Louis spent more than they could afford on private schools. They were afraid her gifts would wither in the public school system with one teacher to every fifty children.”

  The rabbi went to the shelf and took a box from among the books. From it he withdrew papers. “This is a sample of Kathy’s handwriting at ten. It’s not the hand of a child. Someone took great care with her, and very early on.

  “And then Helen evaluated her religious education. One day we took her with us to meet with Father Barry at the parish in the neighborhood. It was that time of year when we joined together to feed and clothe the poor. When Kathy saw the crucifix above the altar, she automatically made the sign of the cross. Helen took this as an omen, and she gave the Christians equal time in Kathy’s spiritual guidance. So someone had taught the child to make the sign of the cross.

  “From only this, I may deduce that someone spent an enormous amount of time with her. She was not unwanted or ignored, not considered a burden to her mother, but the focus of attention. And that person enabled Kathy to love Helen at first sight. I like to believe she must have been rather like Helen Markowitz, this special someone. Can you see this woman abusing her child? Or allowing anyone else to do it? I can not. This woman I know nothing about, I remember her in my prayers.”