‘You don’t know that.’ Or did she?
‘If he was the father of her child, it would make sense for her to check him out,’ said Mallory. ‘So she must have turned up something. It fits. No holes in it.’
‘But it’s a lot of supposition, isn’t it? Unless you were holding out on me. You wouldn’t do that, would you?’
Of course she would. He looked to Riker, and gave the man credit for not rolling his eyes.
‘No, I’m not,’ she said.
But Coffey decided she was seconds too late in saying it.
‘So you made an ID on the corpse. Good job, Mallory. But the Coventry Arms address is flimsy. I can’t interrogate these people based on what you’ve got – not without getting harassment complaints from the governor’s personal guest list. We’ve got zip for physical evidence. If the park is the crime site, the lack of an alibi for the six minutes it takes to do a murder won’t hold up in court. We’ve got a twenty-four-hour period where he could have gone into Bosch’s apartment. He didn’t even need to do the clean-up in one block of time. So we question every male in the building, and where does it get us? I can’t do that just because there’s a card missing from a file. We don’t know that Bosch didn’t toss out the address card herself. Maybe she dropped Hyde as a client.’
‘She didn’t toss the card. There are also cards in the hard copy file for inactive clients. This woman never tossed anything.’
Except a half-created baby.
‘It’s not enough to bring anybody in.’
‘I’m not asking you to bring anybody in. You could move me into the building,’ said Mallory. ‘One of those apartments has to be vacant. Somebody’s out of town, somebody’s relocated.’
‘So you think you can move into a sublet or a vacancy without alerting the suspect? We’re still getting calls from people who think you’re dead because they saw your face on TV.’
‘I know he’s tied to that building. If I can’t flush him out, I’ll never get him.’
‘You can’t catch them all, Mallory.’
‘The killer is in a circle that overlaps with Bosch and Hyde, and there are notes on a social relationship with Hyde. This woman might have introduced them, or maybe Bosch and the killer met while she was visiting Hyde. I know he’s tied to that address.’
‘You’re sure that Hyde doesn’t figure in this?’
‘I can place her in Australia on the day of the killing. No way she could get back in time. She’s over sixty and she won’t fit the height requirement.’
‘But it’s her name on the missing card. Hired talent maybe? The MO won’t fit a pro hit, but all hit men start out as amateurs.’
‘It won’t fit at all. Amanda Bosch had a personal relationship with her killer. She went to the park that morning to meet the perp. The murder wasn’t premeditated – no weapon was brought to the crime scene. He used a rock and his hands.’
‘Why don’t we invite Miss Hyde in for questioning? We could do the interview as a request for assistance.’
‘No. I don’t want to alert anybody to the death of Amanda Bosch. The rest of her clients are in midtown and the Village area. Her only connection on the Upper West Side was that building. It was only the address the perp wanted to hide.’
‘Mallory, you’ve got nothing solid. You don’t know that he lives in the Coventry Arms.’
‘I know where he lives because I know him. He spent a lot of time with the body, working her hands over, making pulp out of them. He took his time. After he got over the initial panic, he was comfortable in that place. It was close to home.’
Coffey slid a folder across the desk. It had Heller’s initials on it.
‘Heller’s backing you up on the park as the original crime scene. How’d you talk him into going back? They found the blood splatters on the underside of kicked over rocks by the water. He was in here half an hour ago. Says you authorized the overtime.’
‘That also backs up the Coventry Arms as the perp’s residence. He took the card to keep us from tracking her back to that address. Get me in there.’
‘Get me something solid, then we’ll talk about a surveillance nest.’
‘If you won’t do anything else to help me, at least don’t release the name of the victim. If I’m going to flush him out, I need that edge.’
‘You got my word. Nobody gets the name.’
‘Yeah, right. Thanks,’ she said, and the words for nothing remained unspoken and hanging in the air for minutes after she left the room.
Mallory stopped the car in front of the Coventry Arms and let the engine idle.
The century-old building was fortress-like and forbidding. The stucco edifice was dotted with window lights that blazed and lesser lights that only glimmered. Gables and plant-choked balconies relieved the flat plane of the building and the long line of its roof, and ivy twined up the walls far past the night-black leaves of ancient trees. The character of the windows varied from squares, rectangles and circles to the great arch of the center piece of stained glass. This window might have graced a cathedral, but the brilliantly colored imagery was older than the church.
She worked out the ancient mythology in the glass. The years spent at Barnard had not been a total waste of time. The figure of the woman in the window must be the goddess of spring. She was being carried in the arms of her lover, the god of the underworld, as he raced toward the edge of a cliff. The lovers were frozen forever in this act of murder and suicide, as they hurtled, full tilt, toward the edge of death, gateway to Hades and home.
The entrance to the building was the stone mouth of a behemoth, narrowing to a set of doors studded with copper ornamental friezes. In addition to the requisite doorman, there was a security guard on duty tonight, a recent adjunct to the age of rock stars and their building-storming groupies.
She had a badge in the back pocket of her jeans. She could enter the building any time she wished, talk to whomever she wished. She had the power, but she couldn’t use it, not yet. And she couldn’t sneak in. Coffey had been right to reject the surveillance nest, but for all the wrong reasons. It was better to go in with a blaze of neon lights. It was only the covert things that people found suspicious.
She drove past the Coventry Arms and toward the less famous building at the end of the block. She had visited this place only once in her life, yet her memory of it was vivid in every detail. She double-parked the car as she always did. It was easier for her to fix the parking tickets on the computer than to mark the car for the meter maids.
She handed her business card to the doorman when he asked whom she had come to visit and whom she might be.
‘Are you Mallory or Butler, miss?’
‘Tell her it’s Kathy, her niece.’
Not strictly true. Her adoption had never been formalized. She had refused to answer questions about her past or her parents. Without a trace on relatives, the paperwork could go no further. She had kept the legal status of a foster child, and there was no such thing as a foster aunt. But though there were a lot of Mallorys in the world, Alice’s only sister had only one child named Kathy.
The man replaced the house phone on its hook. He held the door open, and his smile was wide. Aunt Alice must be generous with her tips.
The night man at the desk was settling his own telephone on to its cradle and nodding tactful understanding of Mallory’s importance here as she passed through the lobby.
This was a place, not of extreme wealth, but of quiet money. The lobby furnishings were good, but not museum pieces. The passenger-controlled elevator ran with the smooth hum of good maintenance.
On her first visit, there had been an elevator operator. She remembered looking up at the man from her height of ten years old. She rarely saw such people any more. It was the human-expendable age of automation.
The elevator doors opened on to a floor of deep-pile beige rugs. The walls were papered in stripes of sedate taste. She didn’t need the apartment number. Memory led her to the door at the end
of the hall. On her toes, she could not have reached the brass lion’s-head door knocker the first time she had come here with Helen.
The maid, the same maid, opened the door and stood back to allow her to pass into the foyer. Mallory followed the woman down the hallway, and here perception was altered again. This hall had seemed miles long when she was a child.
They passed by the music room and into wider space. The dimensions of this room had changed only slightly. It was not quite the grand ballroom of a child’s memory, but close. Bric-a-brac covered every table, and family photographs hung in clusters along every linear foot of the walls. She would have bet good money that not one stick of furniture had been moved in the past fourteen years. It was all dark wood and drapes of crimson. And shadows filled the corners, light glinting in reflection off some candy dish of silver, some ornament of gold.
The photographs and portraits went back many generations, so Helen had told her on their only visit. She remembered very little of that afternoon’s conversation. Alice had looked very much like her sister, and the strong family resemblance was also in the aged face of Helen’s mother. But that old woman’s skin was then already graying with the thing growing inside her, the same thing that would kill Helen years in the future.
The adults had bored her until they got on to the subject of Markowitz. Then she had listened, her small hands balling into fists. Markowitz might be a cop, but he was also her old man. She had risen off her chair in a burst of angry energy. Helen’s eyes had pushed her back down. Her small hands folded on her lap once again, and the child, who had recently been dining from garbage cans, neatly crossed her legs at the ankles as Helen had taught her to do.
‘So this is the best Louis could provide you with?’ said Helen’s sister Alice, whose voice had been on the rise for too long. And by young Kathy Mallory’s lights, it was too loud a voice to be using on gentle Helen Markowitz.
‘Not even a tie of blood but someone else’s castaway child, something out of the gutter.’
Helen’s mother had been quiet up to this point, and then the old woman stood up with difficulty, leaning on her cane and waving off the maid who rushed to her side. ‘Enough,’ she said, imperious in her tone, threats in her eyes. ‘Alice, what’s done is done.’
Alice began to rise, lips parting, and as Helen’s mother had waved off the maid, she waved Alice’s mouth shut. But too late; the damage had been done. Helen was crying, tears streaming down her face.
Kathy had gone after Helen’s sister with the propulsion of a bullet, shooting her face to within an inch of Alice’s. In a rush of menace, low tones working up from the gut, words carrying real weight and hatred, she said, ‘If you ever make Helen cry again, I’ll cut you at the knees, you cunt!’
‘Don’t say cunt, dear,’ Helen had said then, appearing behind the child and shunting small arms into the sleeves of a new winter coat. As they followed the maid down the long hallway, Kathy heard Helen’s mother laughing uproariously. She had tried to turn and go back with the intention of beating the old woman to a pulp, but Helen had restrained her. With Helen it usually took no more than a look or the lightest pressure to contain the small and continuous storm that was Kathy Mallory.
Fourteen years later, Mallory was back. Helen was four years in the ground, and she was looking into Helen’s eyes in the ruined face of Alice.
‘I thought you were dead,’ said Alice.
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Mallory.
Are you disappointed, Aunt Alice?
‘But I heard it on the evening news,’ she said, as though she had caught Mallory in a lie. ‘Well, no matter. It’s a bit late to be calling, isn’t it? And I mean that on several levels.’
‘I guess it has been a while,’ said Mallory. ‘I saw you at Markowitz’s funeral.’
On the day they had laid the old man in the ground, she had looked up to see Alice, a ghost of Helen in her likeness, hovering near the open grave. When she had looked back again, the ghost was gone.
‘I thought Helen would’ve wanted a member of the family there,’ said Alice. ‘I thought she would have liked that.’
‘She would have. Thank you.’
‘You haven’t changed so much since you were a little girl, but then, you never looked like a little girl. Your eyes were always more like an adult’s. What a disturbing child you were. Violent, rude, uncivilized.’
Mallory said nothing, took no offense; it was all true.
‘I know where you live now, Kathy. Only a few blocks from here, isn’t it? That condominium must have been very expensive. And I imagine the maintenance fees are rather high. Why are you here? You want money, I suppose.’
‘I don’t need money.’
‘Then what do you want?’ Alice leaned forward with a new intensity, a sudden burst of light in the watering blue irises. ‘What could you possibly want from me?’ Her voice was rising, wavering in the high notes, close to breaking. ‘You took my sister away from me! Did you know she never spoke to me again? Did you know how much I loved Helen?’
Alice rose out of her chair. The effort seemed to tax her. Was Alice dying of the same cancer that killed Helen? She looked thin and weary.
Alice’s supply of venom was exhausted. She sank down to the cushion of the chair and deeper. She cried, and Mallory waited it out, neither offering aid nor withdrawing, only waiting for it to be over with.
‘Why did you come? What do you want from me?’
‘I need your help.’
‘The Coventry Arms has quite a mix of people these days. The rock stars have loud parties, and so do the political people,’ said the old woman who must be in her late eighties.
‘There’s a television personality in the building and an actor,’ said the old woman’s husband, who had been introduced to Mallory as Ronald Rosen.
Mrs Rosen nodded. ‘It’s true. In my day, they would never allow theater people in a nice building.’
‘In your day, Hattie,’ said her husband, ‘gangsters were the aristocracy of the West Side.’ The old man turned to Mallory. ‘When I was a kid, we came up out of Hell’s Kitchen, same as your mother’s people. What a time to be alive. When I was a boy, I ran errands for Owney Madden, the Duke of the West Side. I saw two of his men shot down in the bootleg whiskey wars.’
Mallory was drinking tea out of a fragile china cup and facing the elderly Rosens, residents of the Coventry Arms. Alice leaned over and replenished the tea from an antique silver pot.
‘So you’re Helen’s daughter,’ said Mr Rosen. ‘You must take after your father’s side.’ Mrs Rosen kicked his shoe and he knew he had said something wrong, but not what. Apparently, it didn’t matter, for his wife resumed her good-natured smile.
‘We watched Helen grow up in this apartment, didn’t we, Alice?’ said Mrs Rosen. ‘Though we didn’t see her but three or four times after she married Louis Markowitz. I was at her funeral. What’s it been, Alice, three, four years since Helen died?’ Mrs Rosen turned back to Mallory. ‘I saw you there. I didn’t want to intrude. I spoke to Louis Markowitz in the reception line. He seemed like such a…’ She shot a look at Alice. ‘Oh, but I’m going on.’
‘Is Mallory your married name?’ asked Mr Rosen, who was again shown the error of his ways by a kick from Mrs Rosen, who undoubtedly knew the facts from Alice.
‘This is so exciting,’ said Hattie Rosen. ‘Just like television. Do you want us to use assumed names?’
‘Good idea,’ said Mallory. ‘And I’ll need a letter for the concierge – something to explain why I’m living in your condo.’
‘Of course,’ said Mr Rosen. ‘And we should say something about it to Arthur. He’s our doorman. I don’t like lying to Arthur.’
‘Stick with the truth,’ said Mallory. ‘But keep it simple. Tell him you’re leaving on urgent personal business, and I’m a friend of the family. I’ll take care of the lies.’
‘Did I mention that Ronald snores?’ asked Mrs Rosen. ‘We have separate bedrooms.’
‘Everyone has a computer now – even us,’ said Mrs Rosen. ‘They wired the entire building for an electronic bulletin board.’
‘My wife uses the computer,’ said Mr Rosen. ‘What do I know from computers?’
‘So what’s to know? You only have to know where the on-switch is. You push a button and voilá, there’s the bulletin board for the building. You leave notes for the building management and the super, arrange for dog walking, vacation notice. You can even do your banking from the computer if you’re on-line with your bank. Now don’t you be afraid of it, dear. It’s only a machine. And the directions are written on the door of the console. You’ll pick it up easy. Oh, and the girl who cleans comes once a week. She has her own key, but you can trust her with your life. Sarah, I think. Ronald, is that her name? Sarah?’
‘I can move in tomorrow?’
‘Yes, but we have to be back in ten days for my cousin Bitsy’s golden wedding anniversary. We’ve invited a hundred people, dear. You understand. Now about your condo – it’s wired for cable TV?’
When the arrangements for the exchange of apartments had been completed, when the Rosens had gone, and she and Alice had said their strained good nights, Mallory was on her way to the door, passing slowly through the rooms of the apartment where Helen had grown up, taking in each detail.
She passed near the grand piano, which was covered with a tapestry throw and photographs, perhaps fifty, in small, ornate frames. All the faces were children’s. The portraits to the rear were dated by the clothing, and in front were the children only recently come to abide on the piano. Mallory found Helen’s photograph as a girl. It was placed toward the back with the children who had grown up and grown old. She picked it up and stared at Helen’s young face.
She was setting the picture back in its place when her hand froze, and her eyes locked on a frame in the middle rows. She recognized her own likeness staring out of the sea of brand-new eyes. It was a school photograph, taken a full year after the visit.
The Man Who Lied To Women Page 6