Her own portrait had neither pride of place, nor was it hidden, but fit well into its proper station among the generations, the family.
CHAPTER 3
22 December
Riker made his way up the stairs of the animal hospital and into a wide waiting room the size of an auditorium. A pet shop smell mingled with odors of cleaning solvents, and a cacophony of barks and chirps emanated from every row of seats. Pet owners crooned to their jiggling, meowing, howling carrier boxes. Others clutched leashes, holding back dogs who would rather be elsewhere. The human noises were choruses of ‘poor baby’ and all its variations. These people, perhaps a hundred of them, were serious animal lovers.
So what was Mallory doing here?
Despite the crowding to standing room only, Mallory had half a row to herself. The cat sat on her lap and tried to lick her face. She stared down at the animal. With perfect understanding and the desire to go on living, the cat ceased its attempted licking and curled up on the legs of Mallory’s jeans. One ragged ear was drooping, the point of it all but severed.
The bird people cast their eyes nervously over the cat and hugged their carrier cages. The dog people were holding their leashes with a death grip, more than a little put out that Mallory had not disguised the cat as a box. Rules of etiquette were clearly being violated here, and they were not rules that Helen Markowitz could have imparted to Mallory, for theirs had been a house without pets.
Riker watched her for a minute more. She was detached from the cat, but the cat was very attached to her. He could hear the purring four rows away. Now Mallory’s head turned slowly until she was facing him, staring into his eyes.
A world-class spook that kid was. And he blamed Markowitz for that. There had been a limit to the kind of games one could play with a child who was not a child. The games Markowitz devised for her had developed ricochet vision. And he believed she could feel the rise in temperature when one more live body walked into a room.
She nodded to him. He moved past a dog and a parrot, another dog, a lizard and ten empty seats to sit down beside her.
He looked at the cat, who only looked to Mallory. ‘So you think the department’s gonna pay for the vet’s bill?’
‘Damn right. The cat’s a witness.’
‘Hey, this is Riker you’re talkin’ to.‘
‘The cat knows the perp, and the perp knows the cat.’
‘I think you’re pressing your luck, kid.’
Her eyes said, Don’t call me kid.
‘Coffey’s not too thrilled about the condo switch. Might have been good politics if you’d run the idea past him first.’
‘It’s none of his business where I live.’
‘Well, he had an interesting point. Amanda Bosch was your age, your style. Maybe she was a little shorter, but you’re definitely the perp’s type.’
‘I know that.’
Mallory’s face moved in tandem with the cat’s face. Two pairs of slanting eyes stared at him.
It was too early for a drink.
‘What name are you using?’
‘My own name.’
‘Risky, isn’t it? I only say that because your pretty face has been all over the television as a dead woman and a cop. Odds are he’s seen you. If he hasn’t, somebody’s gonna mention it to him.’
‘Good. Just wait till he sees the cat.’
‘You don’t know who he is. You’ll never see him coming.’
‘I’m not dealing with Professor Moriarty here. He’s a man who knows as much about computers as a secretary, maybe less. He’s a liar who got caught out. And he’s the panicky type.’
She leaned down to the canvas bag at the foot of her chair and extracted a manila file holder. ‘This is the list of tenants and their stats.’
He took the file and opened it, letting out a low whistle as he scanned the names of credit card companies, insurance companies and financial institutions. Well, this would explain the redness in her eyes; she’d been up all night breaking into computer banks. And then she’d probably been wading through that mess of paperwork pulled off Amanda Bosch’s computer – maybe five or six hundred pages she had neglected to mention in the apartment inventory.
How did she get the US Army info? It sometimes took him a week or more to pull personnel files.
‘What’s with the military service records?’
‘Physical stats – height and blood groups.’
‘Mallory, we didn’t find anything to type his blood group.’
‘He doesn’t know that. He drove himself nuts cleaning that place. The things he cleaned. He doesn’t sleep nights wondering what we might have found.’
He was looking at a list of units with more than forty-five names crossed off.
‘What are the cross offs?’
‘Most of them won’t meet the height requirement. And I crossed off all the single men and women. And the married man who made a fortune in software – he’d know you can delete a file, but you can’t erase it. He’d know the files could be restored. Cross off the apartments owned by corporations with three-day turnover – my perp was New York based. Then the vacant apartments are crossed off. What I’ve got left loosely fits the profile.’
‘What about this writer, Eric Franz? He’s single, isn’t he?’ He held up her fax of the vehicular accident stats dated to late November. ‘His wife died more than a month ago.’
‘The affair with Bosch started before that. A year or so – isn’t that what Mrs Farrow told you? And Bosch was more than three months gone with the baby before she aborted.’
A hungry looking sheepdog had made three rows of progress towards Mallory and the cat. His owner, an elderly woman, regained the leash and dug her heels into the linoleum to bring the dog to a choking halt.
‘Got any favorites?’
‘Yeah. I put stars by their names. Four of them don’t keep regular hours. That would leave them free for afternoons with Amanda.’
The sheepdog was gaining ground again, slowly dragging his owner behind him. Riker and Mallory exchanged glances.
‘If you shoot the dog, kid, you better kill the owner, too. If you let the old lady live, she’ll sue the city. Commissioner Beale won’t like that.’
Apparently, the cat had never seen a dog before. Nose was sitting docile on Mallory’s lap, only mildly curious about the large frenzied animal which was coming to eat him.
Riker resumed his reading. Mallory had a question mark by the name of Harry Kipling. A penciled note read: Connection to Kipling Electronics?
That name might give Coffey a few bad moments. High profile suspects were the worst. With any luck, Kipling would prove to be a computer freak, and thus beyond the pale. ‘How did you get a blood type on Kipling? There’s no Army record.’
She looked at him for only a moment, and he understood that this was not something he would want to know. And now it began to dawn on him that local hospital records must be a piece of cake after cracking the US Army computers.
‘Oh shit,’ said Riker. He was staring at two more high profile names on the list. One was a recent appointment to the US Supreme Court, and his Senate hearing was in progress. Another name was that of a prominent TV reporter who now had his own talk show every afternoon. These were two of the four bearing stars in the column.
When he looked up again, the crazed sheepdog had left the floor and was hurtling toward the cat. One of Mallory’s long legs was already curling back to kick the beast into the next world.
The door to Charles’s private office was closed on the low voices of moderate conversation. Mallory set the large canvas bag down on the desk in the front room. The cat stepped out of the bag and rubbed up against her arm as she opened the drawer to check the answering machine for messages.
Charles objected to the sight of modern conveniences among the antiques of another century, and so, she worked around him by hiding them out of sight. He was still unaware of the security system she had installed – she was that good at wiring.
She pushed the cat away and pressed the button to hear Coffey’s voice saying, ‘I want to talk to you the minute you get in. The minute! You got that, Mallory?’
Yeah, right.
A woman’s scream pierced the door to Charles’s private office. The cat flew off the desk.
She was through the door and into the next room with her gun drawn as a man’s voice was saying, ‘Justin, don’t!’
The only woman in the room was taking the quick breaths of hyperventilation. Her eyes bulged and her shoulder blades were nearly even with her ears. Her face was pale and she was shaking violently, all but her hands, which gripped the arms of the chair in the manner of a rocket pilot preparing for a maiden launch.
The man had turned from the boy and was barking at the woman now. ‘For Christ’s sake, Sally, pull it together. It’s only a damn pencil!’
‘It seems to like you, Sally,’ said the boy, who sat between them. ‘Why don’t you just give the pencil a name and take it for long walks in the park?’
‘That’s enough out of you,’ said the man to the boy.
Mallory looked down to the offending pencil lying in the woman’s lap and up to nothing sinister. But the woman was staring at it as though it might be a living snake.
Mallory turned. She had heard the gentle rocking before she saw the vase teetering on the edge of the bookshelf. The vase fell. She shot out one hand to catch it only a few inches above that section of hardwood floor not covered by the Persian rug.
Now the man was yelling at the boy again. ‘Justin, I told you to stop!’
The boy shrank back from the man. He turned to look over his shoulder at the vase in Mallory’s hand, and then at her gun as she replaced it in the shoulder holster. The woman with the fear of pencils was covering her mouth. Only Charles was not agitated. He was calmly watching all of them.
‘I didn’t do it,’ said the boy.
‘He didn’t topple the vase,’ said Charles. ‘Trains pass under this building all day long. The vibrations sometimes move objects around. That vase was very close to the edge.’
Mallory stood behind the small family and stared at Charles with naked incredulity. Hands clasped behind his head, he leaned back in his chair and smiled at her as though seven thousand dollars’ worth of fifth-century crockery had not nearly smashed into worthless shards.
‘The trains didn’t make the pencil fly,’ said the man in even tones which implied that Charles might be only half bright.
‘No, they didn’t. May I introduce my partner, Mallory?’
She walked over to the desk and faced the small family. While Charles made the formal introductions to the Riccalos, she checked out the boy first.
Justin Riccalo’s blond hair was slicked back, and his lips were parted to display two prominent front teeth. The total effect was that of a wet rabbit with freckles. He could only be eleven at the outside. He was a basic nerd in training, wearing the requisite plastic protector in the front pocket of his shirt, all lined with pens and mechanical pencils. His feet were tapping the floor, anxious to be gone, even if it meant leaving the body behind them. Electric-blue eyes danced in a rock’n‘roll of what’s over there, and now what’s over here, and what might be up on the ceiling?
Sally Riccalo, the highstrung brunette, had been introduced as Justin’s stepmother. Mallory could almost hear the tension humming through the woman’s thin body, as though she were wired up to a wall socket. Mrs Riccalo perched on the edge of her chair now, brown eyes wide and pleading, Don’t hurt me, to everyone who looked into them.
The father, Robert Riccalo, was a former military man. That much was in his close-cropped haircut and the squared shoulders. The man was standing at attention while sitting down. He was so large in the torso, he towered over the woman and the boy, but not Charles, to whom towering came naturally and apologetically.
When the boy faced his stepmother, his neck elongated and his eyes gave away some joke he’d told to himself. A nervous giggle was rising up in his mouth. The military man put one heavy hand on the boy’s slender shoulder and caused it to dip with the weight. When Justin looked to his father, his head tucked in like a turtle. And all the while, the blue eyes danced to alternating rhythms of fun and fear.
Now, the boy lifted his face to Mallory’s and a conspiracy of eyes began in silence. I know you, each face said to the other, though she and the boy had never met.
Charles’s eyes rolled back and forth between them, saying, Just a moment. Have I missed something here?
Another appointment was scheduled for the next day, and the small family trooped out, the father leading the charge, woman and boy following behind as his foot soldiers. When the door to the outer office closed behind them, Mallory turned on Charles, hefting the vase in one hand.
‘About those trains.’
‘That’s not the original. It’s a cheap copy. I rigged the vase myself. And it was the trains.’
He walked over to the bookcase and picked up a wooden kitchen match. ‘This primed one edge of the vase toward the natural pull of gravity. Any vibration would have knocked it down. I just wondered what the boy would do.’
‘And?’
‘It startled him with the normal reaction time. Justin has good reflexes. But he denied all blame for the pencil and the vase. That’s odd, you know. He insists he’s not doing anything. That’s not consistent with the profile of the average psychokinetic subject.’
‘And?’
‘Well, it makes the whole thing more interesting. Maybe he’s not the one who’s doing it. There’s a problem with the logic. He didn’t take credit, and yet he didn’t seem frightened by it. Like he’s used to seeing things fly around the house, almost bored by it.’
‘Well, try and work it out before wife number three goes down, okay?’ Mallory bent over the canvas bag on the desk in the front room.
The cat poked its head out from under the desk, whiskers twitching, testing the air for screams and other loud noises. With more assurance, it exited the underside of the desk and looked up at Charles, tilting its head to one side as though the bandaged ear was weighting it that way.
‘Hello,’ said Charles, bending down to pet it. The cat wriggled out from under his hand. It only had eyes for Mallory. It rubbed up against her leg, and she pushed it away.
‘The cat’s a material witness. Now I’ve already been through this with Riker. You laugh and I shoot you, it’s like that.’
‘What happened to the cat’s ear?’
‘I didn’t do it. Can you keep the cat for one night? I’m trading apartments with the Rosens today. I can’t take it back to my place.’
‘Of course.’
Mallory pulled the cat’s litter box out of the canvas bag, and then two tins of fish. ‘His name is Nose. Just keep him out of my office. I don’t want any fur in my computers.’
‘I’ll take him back to my place.’
‘Thanks. So, apart from the flying objects, how did the interview go? You know which one of them is doing it if it’s not the boy?’
‘I don’t know.’
She pulled a file out of the bag.
‘The first Mrs Riccalo died of a heart attack. But now that I’ve seen her husband, I have to wonder how much stress she was under and how much it would have taken to push her over the top. Here’s the hospital file.’
She handed it to him, and he hesitated for that moment when people are trying to decide how dirty an object might be before they touch it. Perhaps he was wrong to believe that every computer printout she gave him might be purloined.
‘You stole it, right?’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘But not this one.’
The second file she handed him had the NYPD stamp on the cover. He scanned the information which detailed the suicide report on the deceased second wife of Robert Riccalo. He flipped through the three-page report. ‘Well, the files list the suicide as a non-suspicious death.’
‘I may change that.’
‘W
hy?’
‘When you go through the suicide files, you find most jumpers are men. Women are less messy. And there was no note. They usually like to get even with their loved ones on the way out.’
‘Did the first two Mrs Riccalos have anything in common?’
‘They were both professionals and carried the normal amount of life insurance through their employers. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t another policy or two. I’m still working on it. Sally Riccalo is also carrying insurance through the financial house where she works as a systems analyst. According to her resumé, she and Robert Riccalo worked for the same company ten years ago when the first Mrs Riccalo was still alive. Interesting?’
‘We started out with a rather simple problem of flying objects. You don’t think murder is a bit of a stretch this early on? I suppose the insurance beneficiary was – ’
‘Robert Riccalo. He’s also the beneficiary of wife number three.’
‘But isn’t the spouse usually the beneficiary?’
‘Yes, but it’s usually the wife who collects. So now I’ve got one heart attack, one suicide, and wife number three looks like she’s ready to explode. She wouldn’t get that upset over one pencil. What else has been flying her way lately?’
‘Oh, a pair of scissors, some bits of glass.’
‘What’s the father’s take?’
‘Anger, disbelief. Only the stepmother seems to be a believer.’
‘He accused the boy of moving the vase. He sounds like a believer to me.’
‘No. The stepmother is the only believer in the paranormal. Mr Riccalo probably thinks the boy is doing it by trickery.’
‘One of them is. Are you sure it was your pencil that flew at her?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Charles, you’re a disgrace to Max Candle’s memory.’
‘The art of illusion is not genetic. Having a magician in the family tree doesn’t vouch for talent in the rest of the bloodline.’
‘You have a whole damn magic store in the basement. You could make an elephant fly with all that equipment.’
The Man Who Lied To Women Page 7