The Man Who Lied To Women

by Carol O’Connell

  ‘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 spoonfed 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 been sitting 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,’ he said, 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,’ said Coffey, 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.’ Riker lifted his shaggy head to face Coffey with something approaching serious feeling. ‘Give her a chance.’ He 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.’

  CHAPTER 2

  21 December

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘So this is morning.’

  Dead silence from Mallory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He followed behind Mallory, pulling out his notebook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But Jimmy was out of earshot.

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

  Oh, Christ, was she grinning? She was.

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

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

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

  Where did she come from?

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

  ‘So you stole the cashmere blazer and…?’

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

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

  ‘You stole it, right?’

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

  ‘Yeah, I did it! Okay?’

  ‘Didn’t she like it?’

  What? Crazy bitch. What does she want?

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

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