The Man Who Lied To Women

by Carol O’Connell

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Sergeant,’ said Charles. ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Is it still morning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll have a beer.’

  The vacuum cleaner was moving slowly toward them, sucking conversation out of the air. When Mrs Ortega shut off the machine and turned to the quieter activity of dusting, Charles handed Riker a cold beer.

  ‘What Mallory’s doing is rather dangerous, isn’t it? I’m surprised you’re going along with it.’

  ‘She has to do it this way, Charles. There’s no evidence, no weapon, no witness, no motive. Everyone who can hold a rock has the means. The crime scene is six minutes from the building. Even the doorman has opportunity. You see the problem? If she can’t flush him out and fast, he gets away with murder.’

  Charles’s brain was backing up in the conversation. No motive, did he say? Was it possible that Riker had not seen the manuscript that lay on the desk between them? As Riker’s eyes were settling on the ream of paper, some Mallory-guided instinct prompted him to call the man’s attention away from it.

  ‘You know, Markowitz wouldn’t like this at all. You’ll be close by her all the time, right?’

  ‘Like I said, Charles, I’m only along for the ride. She doesn’t need me. She’s not a kid any more, and she didn’t need anybody when she was one.’ He slugged back his beer.

  ‘But Louis always credited Helen with – ’

  ‘Helen could only see the good in Kathy, even when it wasn’t there. I remember how happy Helen was when Lou started bringing Kathy into work after school – it was the only way he could keep the kid from stealing New York. But Helen was only thinking about the positive role models of police officers.’

  ‘Apparently, she was right.’

  ‘And five days a week, the kid was surrounded by off-the-wall murders when other kids were out playing games.’

  ‘Didn’t Mallory ever play games with other children?’

  ‘She used to play with Markowitz. Now she plays alone.’

  ‘What sort of games did she like?’

  ‘I asked her once when she was maybe thirteen, what was her favorite. “Murder is the best game,” she says. I went all clammy. It was the way she said it. I asked Markowitz if he thought the kid was capable of killing. “Oh, yeah,” says Markowitz, like I’d asked him if Kathy could pitch a curve ball.’

  ‘That doesn’t tell me why you’re so confident that she can flush the killer out without getting hurt.’

  ‘If the suspects in this condo weren’t uptown taxpayers with good lawyers, we’d sweat the pack of them. Now when Mallory gets the perp, there won’t be any lawyers around. He’ll be under more stress than he’s ever known. He’ll flap his mouth with cameras rolling. The creeps always talk, even after we read them their rights. They lie, but they talk, they trip themselves up. If we don’t rush this perp, if a lawyer gets to him in time to shut his mouth, we lose him. No evidence, no case. It has to be quick. She has to flush him out fast and trip him up, or he gets away.’

  ‘But the danger.’

  ‘The biggest danger is that she stumbles over someone else’s dirty little secrets. You got the same percentage of scum in the Coventry Arms as you do in any tenement building.’

  Charles picked up a photograph that had wafted to the floor from Riker’s small pile of papers.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Amanda Bosch.’

  ‘But she looks nothing like Mallory. How did the mistake -?’

  ‘Well, she was alive when this shot was taken. Even I had to look at the body twice after the bugs had been at her.’

  ‘Have you notified her family yet?’

  ‘There’s no family alive to notify. Mallory liked that – less chance of a leak.’

  ‘What will happen to her?’

  ‘Her estate, whatever’s in her bank account, will go to the city tax office. The landlady will sell her stuff for back rent or put it out on the street. She’ll get a grave that no one will ever visit. And then she’ll be gone from the face of the earth. Or maybe not. Mallory could make her famous.’

  The cat sat down between them, ignoring both of them and picking at the bandage on its ear. Charles was reminded of something Louis Markowitz had said: living with Mallory was like having a wounded animal in the house.

  The building had been made to last and so it had, well into the twentieth century, and showed no signs of falling down at the cusp of the twenty-first. Dark wood beams and stucco facing rose for ten stories. The old West Side mansion would fit well with a gothic horror story.

  Riker put down the heavy boxes to pant for a moment. Mallory had just slipped the doorman a hundred dollar bill.

  The kid has style.

  Riker wondered how she was going to bury the money in the department expense account.

  As Mallory talked, the doorman smiled continuously, lips parting ever wider until they threatened to escape the margins of his face.

  ‘I’m expecting Amanda Bosch to drop by. Do you know her on sight?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the doorman, who was called Arthur. ‘Miss Hyde’s friend? Pretty young woman with sad eyes? I know her.’ Now the smile wavered. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘She was acting very strange the last time I saw her.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Maybe four or five days ago. She never came to the door. She just sat over there, very quiet, like she was waiting for someone.’ He pointed to the wrought iron bench twelve feet from the entrance. ‘I thought it was a bit odd because Miss Hyde was out of town. I’ve never known Miss Bosch to visit anyone else in this building. Then after a while, Miss Bosch stood up very quickly. She seemed agitated for some reason, and then she ran away. Very odd indeed.’

  ‘What set her off?’

  ‘No idea, miss. I was busy then, opening the door, getting a cab for a tenant, people were coming and going.’

  ‘Do you remember which people?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Tenants, visitors, children and dogs. Most of the tenants have dogs.’

  Riker was picking the cartons up from the sidewalk when Mallory turned her head quickly, eyes fixing on an empty patch of sidewalk across the street. Now what was that about?

  He wondered if it was not too early in the game for her to be watching her back. The murderer lived in this building, and only he would make the connection between Mallory and Amanda Bosch. But it was a woman walking fast toward them on this side of the street.

  He put the carton down again as a small brunette with nervous moves was looking up at Mallory and asking, ‘Forgive me for following you. Could I speak to you privately for just a moment?’

  Mallory nodded to the doorman, who closed the door. The two women moved up the sidewalk and beyond the range of his hearing. The brunette was a tangle of loose wires. Her hands were flying. Mallory said a few words to the woman, and the brunette shook her head, eyes rolling in their sockets like startled marbles. Then the woman clutched her bag to her chest as though to fend off a weapon. She backed off a few steps and hurried down the sidewalk to a waiting cab. Mallory strolled back.

  The carton was hoisted into the air once more.

  The doorman had shut down his neon smile the moment Mallory turned her back. Now it was blazing again with the dazzle of every tooth exposed, and You’re my new best friend was in his eyes as they passed by him and into the lobby.

  The lobby atmosphere was piped in from another century. While Mallory handed a letter to the concierge on the other side of a carved wood desk, Riker looked around at the hanging tapestries and the oil paintings. The elaborately patterned rugs had to be a year’s salary each. Plush green velvet wrapped the couches and chairs in conversational groupings. A woman passed through the lobby, wearing dark glasses on this overcast day to say, I’m a celebrity, and you’re not. A bank of stained-glass windows lined one wall. Patches of crystal and colors of brightness. Beneath t
he arched center window was a mural of running deer, running blind into the cruel joke of the blank wall adjacent to the painting.

  Now the concierge was leading them to the elevator. It belonged in a 1930s black-and-white movie, an iron cage of scrollwork bars on the door, and an interior of gleaming wood with inlaid designs and parquet floor. They were handed into the care of an elevator operator and rode up, watching the floors drop away from them, and each one was different from the last.

  The iron door opened on the third floor, and they walked down a hallway lined by soft glowing bulbs that would have been gaslight in the last century. The carpeting on this floor was an oriental pattern, and the walls were papered in money. Riker guessed he knew a good wallpapering job when he saw it. And money sat on a small table in the hallway, a vase holding a fortune in fresh-cut flowers. The scent of roses followed after him as Mallory fit her key in the lock and opened the door to the Rosens’ apartment.

  He put the cartons down on the tiled floor of the entryway. ‘Okay, Mallory – the woman downstairs. Now what was that about?’

  ‘Sally Riccalo. She followed us over from the office. She’s a client with an interesting idea that her stepson wants to stab her with a flying pencil.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Charles’s style. I thought he only handled the academic bullshit. So who’s whacked? Her or the kid?’

  ‘Too early to tell. She looks scared enough.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I told her to get out of town.’

  ‘And she said?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked around at the Rosens’ front room and wondered how the Rosens were reacting to the Spartan simplicity of Mallory’s apartment. In the front room was a museum of family photos. The family was everywhere, eyes of the children in the eyes of mothers and fathers, grandfathers, and on and on. And there was a toy some child had left behind on the couch. The fish in the large aquarium swam in quick schools of tropical colors. A small sticky palm print lay on the glass alongside the print of what must be the nose of a grandchild or great-grandchild. The only element out of character with this comfortable room of overstuffed furniture and silk flowers was the eye of the computer, lit and looking out through the partially opened doors of an oak cabinet.

  While Mallory went exploring, Riker opened the cabinet door wide and peered at the screen. Inside the door was a simple instruction guide for computer illiterates like himself. He pushed a button, and the screen became a slow scrolling information sheet on scheduled maintenance, and now a notice of the tenants’ meeting to be held in the roof-top facility. This last item was tagged with an URGENT BUSINESS label and a request for full attendance at the meeting. More notes scrolled by, mentions of packages held at the lobby desk, and the minutes of the condo board’s last meeting.

  The tap on his shoulder made him jump. Mallory stood behind him, smiling Gotcha. The games went on. The old man had taught her that one, too. For a heavyset man, Markowitz had made even less noise than Kathy when he crept up behind her. By the time she was thirteen, the old man could no longer do that. She had surpassed him in the creeping game. Between Markowitz and Mallory, he sometimes wondered who had been the worst influence on whom.

  ‘I found a room to set up in,’ she said.

  He picked up the cartons and followed her into a small library. He settled them on the desk, and she began to unload the computer equipment and the Mini cam, the wiring and the works he couldn’t put a name to. Only the wiretap equipment was recognizable, and he averted his eyes from this, knowing there was no warrant.

  Markowitz had not taught her this. Far from it – the old man had remained mechanically inept and computer ignorant until the day he died. The less Markowitz had known about what she was up to with her machines, the more secure he had felt in the NYPD pension plan.

  Mallory stepped off the elevator at the penthouse level. She had traveled only a few steps into the room when heads began to turn. She was wearing the black suit she had worn to her father’s funeral. The skirt provided a rare outing for her legs, displaying athletic calves and well-shaped ankles tapering above high heels. A dozen pairs of eyes, male and female, followed after her as she passed through the gathering of perhaps forty tenants.

  She paused now and then to admire a few of the art deco pieces scattered about the roof-top facility, and generally disapproved of the clutter of objects on pedestals and sideboards. But every travesty of decorators was forgiven when she lifted her face to the skylight which spanned the whole of the wide room. A waxing moon kept two stars for company. A filmy cloud raced across the glass, gaining on the moon, then killing its light.

  ‘Death becomes you, my dear,’ said a cultured, dulcet voice.

  ‘I’ve already heard that one today,’ said Mallory, turning to look down at a woman with black hat and a face that was pushing sixty, not in the wrinkles, but in the pulled-back skin of the too-manyith face-lift. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me how well preserved I am for a corpse.’

  The older woman smiled a thin line of crimson lipstick. ‘You’ve got a smart mouth for a dead cop.’ And now the voice betrayed roots in Hell’s Kitchen when gangsters ruled, and the woman went up one notch in Mallory’s estimation.

  ‘I’m Betty Hyde.’

  ‘Mallory.’

  ‘Kathleen Mallory, isn’t it? Formerly of NYPD, currently of the consulting firm Mallory and Butler, Ltd. You’re staying in the Rosens’ apartment for the next ten days while your own condo is being redecorated. They’re old friends of your family, and you have their proxy to vote on the swimming pool in the basement. I have spies everywhere, my dear.’

  But Mallory counted only two spies. The concierge knew she had the Rosens’ proxy, and Arthur the doorman had been fed the rest of the story.

  ‘And you sell gossip,’ Mallory countered. ‘Your column is syndicated in fifty papers around the country. You have a five-minute spot on Channel Two News. You’ve lived here for the past fifteen years. You have a full-size pool table in your apartment, and you change young men the way I change my blue jeans. You should pay your spies better, Miss Hyde. They have no sense of loyalty.’

  The woman widened her smile into a brilliant grin.

  ‘Call me Betty. Everyone does. I like your style, my dear. May I call you Kathy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Even better. Well, Miss Mallory – ’

  ‘Just Mallory. Amanda Bosch gave me your name as a reference.’

  She handed the woman a card, and Betty Hyde read the words aloud. ‘Discreet investigations? I love it.’

  ‘Our clients are government departments and universities, mostly research projects and evaluations. Do you have anything nice to say about Bosch? If we hired her services, she’d be working on sensitive material.’

  ‘I trust her with high-profile information, but I don’t trust anyone with the really good stuff. I do that research myself.’

  ‘I had the impression she hung out with you from time to time.’

  ‘Well, she does, or did, rather. She’s cut back on her activities for the past few months. I used to take her to parties. When I go fishing for young men, I need good bait. She attracts men nearly as well as you do.’

  ‘And in return, you introduced her to the right people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are any of the right people here tonight? Anyone else who could vouch for her?’

  Betty Hyde’s mouth curled up on one side in the attitude of All right, let’s assume I believe this charade. Mallory took stock of that attitude, and parried with a smile to say, Yeah, let’s just assume that.

  ‘I took Amanda to several gatherings in this very room. I imagine she’s met quite a few of the tenants. I don’t know which ones might have used her research services. Shall I introduce you around? And perhaps later you might accompany me to another party.’

  Mallory was looking over the smaller woman’s head, her eyes fixed on the man standing by the long buffet table.<
br />
  ‘I think I recognize Judge Heart from the Senate hearings.’ Mallory nodded toward a tall man, graying at the temples and wearing a well-tailored black suit. He dwarfed the thin woman who stood next to him. Her gray-blonde hair was pulled back in a severe bun at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Yes, that’s him. And that’s his wife, Pansy. See the invisible strings? She can never get more than three feet away from him.’

  Mallory did have the impression that he worked the woman like a puppet. Every utterance from his mouth called the woman’s face up to his with a smile that was too quick, too wide.

  Betty Hyde said in a lower voice, ‘When you get closer, tell me if that isn’t a bruise under her make-up.’

  ‘You’re kidding. I thought he was – ’

  ‘- riding into the Supreme Court nomination on his women’s rights position? Yes. Amusing, isn’t it? If I could nail him as a wife beater, I’d do it in a hot flash. If you hear anything, it’s worth gold, my dear Mallory. They live in the apartment above yours. Any screaming, the sounds of a woman’s soft body bouncing off the wall – I’d be interested in anything like that.’

  Hyde stared up at the younger woman, and her smile became a tight line as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other in the uncomfortable dance of waiting on Mallory. For a professional gossip, that drawn out silence would be like sunlight to a vampire.

  ‘I’ve already surmised that your condo isn’t being redecorated,’ said Hyde. ‘And Amanda Bosch is not taking on any new clients. If anything, she’s tapering off. I understand it’s a difficult pregnancy.’

  Hyde smiled again.

  And smiled.

  Mallory, from the school of Never Volunteer Anything, continued to stare down at Hyde. Her face gave away nothing.

  Hyde stopped smiling, and each woman squared off against the other, making measurements and mental notes, staking out the air between them with wires of tension. Hyde gave in first.

  ‘Never mind the research projects. You’re a private detective, right? It’s a logical career move for an ex-cop. Am I right?’