The Man Who Lied To Women

by Carol O’Connell

  Damn cops.

  ‘Mallory, don’t do this to me,’ said the old guy. ‘You don’t want Coffey on my ass, do you?’

  And the woman said, ‘He won’t complain. I can do anything I want with him.’

  ‘You drop him, and that’s three days of paperwork.’

  She loosened her grip. He dropped lower.

  ‘Okay, okay!’ screamed Jimmy Farrow. ‘I already told her I did it! Let me up!’

  He was being hauled up by four ungentle hands. When he was right-side up and sitting down, the old guy took out his notebook. ‘You wanna make a statement, kid? Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Yeah, okay. My grandmother’s Social Security check got screwed up this month. A neighbor bought her groceries for a few days till my mom could replace the money. I just wanted to give Amanda – she’s the neighbor. I wanted to give her something. It was my grandmother’s idea.’

  ‘Now let me get this straight,’ said the old guy, pen circling over his notebook. ‘First you give Amanda the blazer, then you killed her – and your grandmother made you do it?’

  Oh, God, they’re both nuts.

  ‘I didn’t do anything to her. I just gave her the sports jacket.’

  ‘Were you very close to Amanda?’

  ‘No! I go to my grandmother’s building twice a week to sweep out the halls. My grandmother’s the super, but she’s not up to slopping all those floors and stairs any more.’

  ‘What a good boy you are,’ said the old guy. ‘Now, about Amanda?’

  ‘I see Amanda in the hall now and then, that’s all. She and my grandmother were real tight. Talk to the old lady.’

  The old woman was waiting for them on the front steps of the building. Jimmy Farrow stood between two uniformed officers on the sidewalk, his head bowed and his hands cuffed behind his back. Riker climbed the steps behind Mallory and watched the old woman looking from Mallory to her grandson, lips slightly parted in disbelief.

  ‘Police,’ said Mallory, showing the ID card and shield. ‘You’re Mrs Farrow? This is your grandson?’

  The old woman nodded, her eyes blinking rapidly.

  Riker looked back to the sidewalk. The siren on the squad car had scattered most of the hookers like roaches, but now one came weaving back, too jazzed on crack to be afraid.

  ‘I want access to Amanda Bosch’s apartment,’ said Mallory.

  ‘Do you have a warrant?’ the old woman asked, automatically.

  That was predictable to Riker. It was a neighborhood where such a phrase came tripping to the tongue, spoken even before that all-time favorite ‘I didn’t do it.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Mallory. ‘You think I need a warrant?’

  Nicely worded, kid.

  And the denial in the slow shake of the old woman’s head was also predictable. Such a thing could not be, said Mrs Farrow’s eyes. She pulled her thin sweater close about her neck, as though that would protect her from Mallory. She retreated two faltering steps. Mallory’s long reach put a photograph in the old woman’s face.

  ‘Is that her? Is that Amanda Bosch?’

  Ease up, Mallory. We don’t want to kill a taxpayer.

  Mrs Farrow stared at the image of the dead woman and crossed herself. Another protection failed her as Mallory put her face in the old woman’s face. ‘Is that her?’

  ‘Yes, yes. It’s Amanda Bosch.’

  Mallory made a note, and Riker knew her meticulous report would read that positive ID was made at 10:56 am. That would make a department record for a corpse without prints.

  They followed the old woman up the stairs and down the hail to the apartment at the end of the second landing. Mrs Farrow fumbled with the lock, but finally managed it. When the hand with the key ring came back to the old woman’s side, the keys jingled with the trembling.

  Riker entered the apartment behind Mallory. Mrs Farrow hovered on the threshold for a moment and then melted away down the hall.

  The first thing he noticed about the apartment was that it was clean. From where he stood, he could see through the sparkling galley kitchen and into the room beyond it. Spotless, smelling of cleansers and powders, all cleaned up for company. Or had the place been cleaned up for blood traces and prints?

  The inside doorknob gleamed. He looked down and moved his head to see it from every possible angle. There might be latent prints on it, but he doubted it. Even Mallory was not so neat that she wiped the prints from her own doorknob when she left her apartment. He called through the open door to a uniformed police officer standing out in the hall with Jimmy Farrow.

  ‘Looks like this might be the original crime scene. Ask the old lady if you can use her phone to call the techs.’

  ‘Waste of time,’ said Mallory, bending low to approve the polish of a small table. Every surface was gleaming. ‘Very neat. If our guy gets off on a psycho defense, I may hire him to clean my condo.’

  Markowitz had raised her right. She touched nothing, hands jammed into the pockets of her jeans as they continued the routine walk-through into the next room.

  The back room was tiny, with only space enough for the single bed and the personal computer. She knew better than to touch it, but her hands pulled out of the pockets the moment she saw it. From now on, she would have no interest in anything else. She did not have her father’s mania for small details.

  The door to the closet was ajar. Riker’s eyes adjusted to the dim light within until he made out the outline of the old-fashioned wooden cradle on the floor. So Amanda had purchased a cradle for the aborted baby, and then put the cradle away, out of sight, when the child was cut out of her.

  He looked away.

  He perused the bookshelf and found style guides and reference books: one on how to prepare a manuscript, another on writers’ markets. In this room, too, all the surfaces were cleaned. In the better light of two windows, he could see the scallops of sponge marks high on the wall. Had there been blood on the walls? Had Amanda managed to do some damage to him before he killed her?

  ‘Well, that tears it,’ he said, turning to Mallory, who was reading the label of a computer disk on the console shelf. ‘This has to be the crime site, and the bastard wiped it clean.’ He spoke on blind faith that she might be listening to him. ‘You know, this may be the end of the road, kid.’

  She was pacing back and forth in front of the computer. She could hardly wait to get at it. He knew she was only holding off for a technician to tell her what she already knew – it had been wiped clean. She was ignoring everything else in the apartment.

  Not the old man’s style.

  Markowitz always had his investigators bring him every damned detail they could fit into a notebook or a plastic bag. She was letting every detail go by.

  A uniformed officer appeared in the bedroom doorway. ‘There’s a crew in the area. They can be here in about fifteen minutes to a half hour.’

  ‘Thanks, Martin,’ said Riker.

  If Mallory approved the cleaning job, it was a certainty they would find nothing. She had called it a waste of time, and she had called it right. Twenty minutes later, Heller, the senior man in Forensics, was sharing Mallory’s opinion. He stood in the center of the bedroom, his slow brown eyes wandering over every polished surface, and wincing.

  As Heller pulled on his rubber gloves, the nod of his head sent another technician to the kitchen. A third man was already at work in the front room. A ricochet of flashbulb light found its way to the back of the tiny apartment. Heller, brush in hand, turned to the small nightstand by the narrow bed.

  ‘No. Do the computer first,’ said Mallory. ‘I need it.’

  Perhaps another man with Heller’s years in the department might have bridled at a direct order from Mallory, who was younger than Heller’s youngest daughter. He only nodded, taking no offense, and set his kit on the floor by the computer.

  A uniformed officer filled the bedroom doorway. ‘Your keystroker brought this over.’ He handed Mallory a leather case. She opened it to
display a set of delicate tools and boxes of disks.

  She turned to hover over Heller as he worked with the black powder.

  ‘Don’t get that crap in the keyboard,’ said Mallory. ‘And watch the vent – you don’t want it dropping in the vent.’

  Riker had never seen Heller work so fast, anything to appease Mallory. And when he was done, he couldn’t get out of her way fast enough.

  ‘I’m going up to talk to the old lady and the kid,’ said Riker.

  ‘Right.’

  She was on to the computer now. He was dead to her, as were the technicians who worked around her.

  As Riker was closing the door behind him, Heller was working on the nightstand and bitching about the perp being a good-housekeeping fanatic, forgetting that only four feet away from him sat just such a fanatic, and she was armed.

  ‘Don’t bag that,’ said Mallory to Heller as he was trying to ease the card file off the small table next to the computer. ‘I need it. It’s a client list – all the people she did research for.’

  ‘You got your own tweezers in that kit?’ Heller asked, looking down into her case of tools.

  She looked up at Heller. Did he think she didn’t know how to handle evidence? No. He was just doing his job. Markowitz had always coddled and petted Heller, even when he was giving the man fits, checking out details within details. And she needed this man.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Heller. If his prints were on it, he wouldn’t have left it behind.’ She moved her chair to one side of the screen. ‘Here, look at this.’

  Heller bent down to look at the lighted computer screen of white letters on a blue field. It was a list of names. He looked back to the exposed first card in the spindle.

  ‘You see? All the information on the first entry matches that card. You’re looking at an electronic copy of the card file. Someone logged on to this computer at least six hours after Bosch was killed. Whoever cleaned the apartment cleaned up the computer too. He deleted this file. I brought it back with a utility program. If I get lucky, that card file won’t be an exact match to the computer file.’

  ‘You think the guy might have removed his own card?’

  ‘I’d bet even money on it. Why would he delete the list if he wasn’t on it?’

  Heller was nodding as he accepted a plastic evidence bag from a technician. He scribbled his initials on the label and turned back to face her.

  ‘We’re done here, Mallory. I can’t tell you much. The guy was tall. He’s got a long reach up that wall.’

  ‘How do you know he wasn’t standing on a chair?’

  ‘You can follow the track of the sponge along the wall. No stop and start motion to move a chair. He was walking along the length of the wall. I’d guess his height at six-one to six-three. And he’s a thorough bastard. We’re taking the rugs and the mattress into the lab. If there was any blood, we’ll find it. We pulled a few prints off the shoes and the belts. The prints probably belong to the victim.’

  He looked up to the marks high on the wall. ‘Nobody that tall could have such small finger pads.’

  Heller seemed to be casting for words.

  ‘Anything else?’

  You wouldn’t hold out on me, would, you, Heller?

  ‘The guy’s weird,’ he said at last.

  Heller leaned down and pulled out a drawer from the nightstand near the bed. It was empty; the contents had been bagged. He turned the drawer upside down and held it out to her. The pine scented cleaning solvent was still strong on the wood.

  ‘He cleaned all the exterior surfaces of the drawers,’ said Heller. ‘Now that’s weird. And it’s not like there was a blood bath here. There wasn’t. I’d get flecks, at least, with the light and the spray. But nothing. The guy’s just weird.’

  ‘You mean I’m looking for a psych profile based on a cleaning job?’

  ‘Could be. I saw something like this ten years back. Maybe your old man told you about it. The crime scene was already as clean as this one. They caught the bastard when he came back to the site to clean it again. There was a detective in the apartment when the perp showed up with rubber gloves, a bucket and a mop. They should all be so easy. That’s all I got.’

  And, thank you, Heller, prompted the ghost of Markowitz who sat in an overstuffed armchair inside her brain.

  ‘Thanks, Heller.’

  She smiled again and made a show of taking the tweezers out of her tool kit and carefully pulling back each card on the spindle, matching it to the files on her screen.

  Heller and his men were gone when she was into the h’s. Missing was the card on Betty Hyde. According to the retrieved computer file, Hyde was a gossip columnist with a large syndication. Mallory didn’t need the file to know that the woman also did television spots on an evening news program. Her residence was the Coventry Arms, an upscale Upper West Side condominium.

  Gold.

  The address was a six-minute walk from the site in the park where the body was dumped.

  A quick perusal of the electronic calendar told her that Betty Hyde used Amanda Bosch’s fact-checking services on an irregular basis. The notes on parties indicated something more social in the relationship.

  Mallory recalled the face of Betty Hyde from the gossip columnist’s regular five-minute news segments. Hyde was vicious in her reporting of private lives. The woman would make a better victim than a suspect. When Mallory was done with the list, only the columnist’s card was missing from the hard copy. The address had to tie in.

  Next, she went into a set of hidden subfiles. The security would be chimp-simple to crack, but why would Bosch need that kind of lock-out on a home computer? Was there someone else spending time in this apartment? It would hardly be Betty Hyde, whose tastes were radically different, judging by the address of a multimillion-dollar condo.

  The computer was asking for a password. Mallory flipped through her software array with the eye of a burglar viewing her selection of prybars and glass cutters. She selected a disk and started up the program to bang down the door with a crashing cascade of every variable on a password. It was BOOK which unlocked the door, and now a novel came tumbling out.

  Well, that fit nicely with the books on writers’ markets and the style guides which lined the bookshelves, and which were not part of a researcher’s trade.

  ‘No, you’re absolutely right, Mrs Farrow,’ said Riker. ‘She shouldn’t have talked to you that way. But you see, she lost her father recently, and she just hasn’t been the same since.’

  Actually, there was no difference at all in Mallory.

  ‘Oh, that poor child,’ said Mrs Farrow.

  Mallory was never a child.

  Riker sat back in a well-padded chair upholstered in roses, and there were roses on the wallpaper and in the pattern of the rug. Roses even trimmed his coffee cup. He smiled at the old woman who lived in the apartment over Amanda Bosch’s.

  ‘I understand you’ve been having problems with your Social Security checks.’

  ‘Yes. Jimmy steals them and cashes them. I thought that was why you arrested him. His mother usually makes it up to me, but this month she was a little short. I’m not pressing charges. I never do. Amanda came up with groceries and helped me out with my medication. I told Jimmy if he didn’t pay Amanda back, I would put him in jail. Not that I would, you understand. So what does he give her? A secondhand sports coat with a cigarette burn on the sleeve.’

  ‘Do you know where Jimmy was on that morning?’

  ‘My grandson was right here in this apartment. His father dragged him over here to apologize to me at six in the morning. My son works nights, you see. Gets off at five. Well, when his wife finally told him about the check, he went crazy, my son did. And Mrs Cramer – she’s my neighbor down the hall. Oh, she’s such a sweet woman. Every morning since my last heart attack, Mrs Cramer comes by to check on me before she goes to work at the hospital. Well, she was here when Jimmy and his father came by. You can ask her – she’ll tell you the same. Then, we
all went to mass together and sat down to breakfast at my son’s house. My son drove me home at noon.’

  Riker looked at his notebook. It tied with what the kid had told him. He didn’t take the old woman for a good liar. Her eyes gave away every thought, every fear.

  ‘And your grandson was never out of your sight the whole morning?’

  ‘No. Father Ryan will tell you. He’ll remember. He was shocked to see Jimmy in church.’ She looked down at the hands in her lap, a collection of arthritic knots wrapped around a square tin box. ‘What are you going to do with my grandson?’

  ‘I’ll have a man drive him back to the warehouse.’

  ‘No charges?’

  ‘No.’

  She pried open the box and rewarded him with sugar cookies.

  ‘I have a few more questions about Amanda,’ said Riker, with one hand in the tin.

  ‘I still can’t believe she’s dead. She was so young. Amanda was a good, gentle person. I can’t – ’ The rest of her words were too weak to find their way out of her throat. She was suddenly very tired, and it showed in the slump of her back and the sag of her shoulders.

  ‘I’d like to talk to some of the neighbors,’ said Riker. ‘Maybe they’ll remember seeing Amanda with a boyfriend. Hard to figure, isn’t it? Pretty young woman like that one, and no man in her life?’

  Amanda had not started that baby without a man. Although it was the Christmas season, Riker required a few thousand years of distance from miracles. The old lady was keeping something back.

  ‘Well, the neighbors wouldn’t know,’ said Mrs Farrow. ‘They’re all working-class people in this neighborhood. They’re out of the building during the day, and all in bed at a reasonable hour. So they wouldn’t know.’

  ‘And you never heard the guy downstairs on a weekend, I bet.’

  ‘Well, no.’

  She hunched her thin shoulders, and her chin dropped to her chest. She fixed her startled eyes on the carpet at her feet, understanding now what she had given away.

  Riker smiled, and regarded the old woman as though she were made of precious stuff.