Mallory shrugged, and Hyde showed all of her teeth.
‘Now that you’ve moved into the private sector, let me give you a few helpful hints.’ She entwined her arm in Mallory’s and led her back to a corner of relative seclusion where only potted ferns gathered.
‘Mallory, people in your trade carry professional habits into what should be passing for social life. You don’t ask questions – you interrogate. You sound like a cop. Just smile a lot. These people love to talk about themselves. So, you’re working on a case, we’ve established that much. And we can definitely place it in the money set, can’t we? Did Amanda put you on to something? As if I thought you’d tell me. I also know how to protect sources, if you get my meaning.’
‘I think we can do business, Miss Hyde.’
‘Call me Betty.’
‘Over there, by the elevator – isn’t that Moss White, the talk show host?’
‘Yes, and the tan is real. He just got back from a week on location in California.’
‘What day did he come back?’
‘This morning.’
Scratch that one.
‘Which one is Harry Kipling?’
‘That one,’ said Hyde, indicating a good-looking man, black hair, blue eyes and tall. ‘He’s charming, but aside from his looks, he’s not remarkable. His wife is really miles more interesting. There she is. See that woman over there by the bookcase? Angel Kipling is a crime against Nature. All trolls are supposed to be short. She’s as tall as you are.’
‘You mean that middle-aged woman with the bad hair?’
‘I’ve always liked the phrase “a woman of a certain age”.’
‘The tall man with her – who is he?’
‘The blind man? That’s Eric Franz.’
‘He’s blind?’ Scratch that one, too.
‘Yes. Angel took away his dark glasses and the cane because she thought it might make him fit in better with the normal people. He’s terrified of her, so of course he never puts up any resistance. I think we’re all afraid of Angel. She’s one of those people who learned table manners late in life. She asks rude questions like how old are you, how much money do you make, and are those your own teeth. It’s hard on the nerves. A bit like a farting gorilla ripping through your peace of mind once a week or so. You never do get used to it.’
Mallory looked back to Harry Kipling. ‘It’s hard to see her and the husband as a couple.’
‘Because Harry is so ridiculously good-looking? Because Angel looks like she escaped from a hole in a Grimm brothers fairy tale? You might have something there.’
‘Makes you wonder what she has on him.’
‘I like the way your mind works, Mallory. Since you’re digging around anyway, dear, you might want to share with a new friend.’
‘Harry Kipling – is he one of the heirs to Kipling Electronics?’
‘No. Should I be wondering what these men have in common?’
‘What’s his story?’
‘The usual thing. He lives off his wife’s money and fobs himself off as an investment counselor. I doubt that he handles any of Angel’s money. I believe she gives him an allowance. All the charge accounts around town are in her name. Now you have to watch out for Angel. She was misnamed. She’s the heiress to Kipling Electronics. Her father started the company.’
‘And then he named it after his son-in-law?’
‘Harry took Angel’s family name. It was a condition of the prenuptial agreement. If you took more of an interest in gossip, you’d know that.’
‘What’s his real name?’
‘No one ever cared enough to wonder. If you’re thinking he might have an interesting past, I doubt it. Angel’s father would have had him checked out, and even checked behind his ears. Oh, hit the floor, Mallory, here comes the troll. She probably saw you looking at her husband. Did you bring a weapon, dear?’
In fact she had left her gun in the apartment.
Angel Kipling was crossing the floor in a straight line of terrible, sure purpose. As she neared them, Betty Hyde backed up slightly, unconsciously. Mallory didn’t.
The Kipling woman had a poor understanding of personal space. Now her face was entirely too close, and matching Mallory’s eye-level from a height of five-ten, plus high heels.
‘I understand you’re a friend of the Rosens,’ said Angel Kipling. ‘Is it true they keep a baby shark in their apartment?’ She looked down at the older woman. ‘Oh, hello Betty.’
Betty Hyde nodded to Angel and went through the introduction of, not Miss Mallory, but only Mallory.
Mallory could not take her eyes off the hairs extending from Angel Kipling’s upper lip. They were long like a cat’s whiskers, but not symmetrical. The body was a potato attached to toothpick legs and sausages for arms. The crown of her head was an interesting mix of three failed experiments in hair coloring, striping brown at the root into blonde and then black.
A wealthy woman with do-it-yourself hair. Interesting.
‘So tell me, Miss Mallory, what do you think of our building?’
‘Just Mallory.’
‘It’s an historical landmark, you know. Lillian Russel, the old-time actress, kept an apartment here so Diamond Jim Brady could visit her on the sly.’
‘And Dylan Thomas threw up on this rug,’ added Betty Hyde.
Angel Kipling looked down as though there might be a recent stain. She turned back to Mallory. ‘Let me introduce you to my husband.’
The troll put up a hand with one pudgy finger extended as though she were flagging down a taxi or a waiter. From across the room, Harry Kipling’s body assumed the stance of attention and hurried toward her.
‘Do you have children?’ asked Angel Kipling.
‘No, I don’t. Do you?’
‘Oh, there’s Peter, but he’s away most of the year.’ The tall man entered the small circle of women. ‘Harry, this is Miss Mallory. She’s staying in the Rosens’ apartment while they’re out of town. I heard Hattie Rosen was going to the Mayo clinic for cancer. Is that true? Miss Mallory -Kathy, right?’
‘Just Mallory.’ And how did Angel Kipling know her first name? Perhaps Angel’s spies were as well paid as Betty Hyde’s.
Angel Kipling turned to the tall man with the dark hair and the cobalt eyes. ‘I was just telling Kathy about our building.’
Harry Kipling was more than good-looking. His shoulders were broad, giving him the aspect of an athlete – good baby-making material. What was he doing with the troll? If he had married for money, he could have done better.
‘I use your wife’s computer chips,’ said Mallory.
‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know a computer chip from a potato chip. Investment is my line.’ His voice had a smoky quality, and it was seductive in the mellow notes.
Betty Hyde took Mallory’s arm and, smiling at the Kiplings, she led her away, saying, ‘You were staring too long at Harry. Don’t turn around. I think you’re his type. Of course, he’s a little old for my tastes. I never touch a man over thirty, and he’s almost forty. No, don’t turn around. I’m watching his wife. She’s drawing a bead on you. If looks were bullets, you’d be on the floor and bleeding from a hole between your pretty eyes.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Harry Kipling, catching up to them, sans Angel, who had gone back to terrorizing the blind man. ‘Didn’t you die on television the other night?’
‘Acting,’ said Mallory.
‘Oh, you’re an actress,’ said Kipling.
‘I thought you were a police officer,’ said Moss White, the talk show host, who had suddenly appeared at Kipling’s side. White was the stuff television executives swooned over. The mouth was full and sensual, and the softness carried into the liquid brown eyes. He was born for television.
‘So you’re an actress,’ said White. ‘God, they didn’t get anything right, did they? I wonder if we could discuss a guest appearance on my television show? It might be good for your career. Just a spot where you tell the viewing audience what it’
s like to be declared dead by the media. They thought you were dead when they found you in the park, right?’
She turned slowly to Harry Kipling, who was arranging his features into a piano’s worth of white teeth. His face had a rugged quality that made Moss White seem almost feminine by comparison.
Betty was pulling her away again, and they were drifting across the wide floor toward Judge Emery Heart, the candidate for the Supreme Court nomination.
‘Moss White has an accent,’ said Mallory. ‘England or Australia?’
‘Indiana. He spent six weeks in London, four years ago. He’s been talking that way ever since. Moss is a quick study. I paid a hundred an hour for my accent, and it took me years.’
And now Mallory and Hyde were standing before an austere man who might have stepped out of an ad for middle-aged upscale clothing.
‘Judge Heart, may I present Mallory, the well-known television personality?’
The judge gave off the unmistakable odor of a good politician. The smile was instant, and the brown eyes were intent. ‘Forgive me, I don’t watch very much television, Miss Mallory. What sort of program do you have?’
‘I was only on for five minutes. I played a corpse.’
The smile faltered for a moment while the judge’s appraising eye was reassessing her importance in the scheme of things. Now the smile was back with full force. ‘Well, they say there are no small parts. This is my wife, Pansy.’
Mallory turned to the small, anxious woman at his side. And yes, there definitely were strings that tied her to her husband.
‘Isn’t that right, Pansy?’ the judge prompted. ‘No small parts?’
The woman nodded automatically, stiffly. She smiled too quickly, and the sudden display of teeth was startling in the context of her eyes. And yes, there was a bruise below a heavy layer of make-up.
‘Do you have family with you, Miss Mallory?’ asked Pansy.
‘Just Mallory. No, do you?’
‘Well, Rosie’s been gone for a while – oh, don’t get me started. I cry whenever I think of our little Rosie. She’s such an angel. Emery taught Rosie to shake hands. Didn’t you, dear? Rosie is such a clever little thing, isn’t she, Emery? And she can sit up and beg.’
‘Rosie is a dog,’ said Betty Hyde, after drawing Mallory away with explanations of introductions promised elsewhere.
‘I think I worked that out,’ said Mallory.
‘Now let me introduce you to our resident Pulitzer Prize winner.’ Betty Hyde paused by a bookcase to retrieve a pair of dark glasses and a cane. ‘He’s marvelous with a cane in his hands. I just thought I’d give him a sporting chance to run for it before Angel comes back.’
‘I wonder why he doesn’t deck her.’
‘Unfortunately, Eric was well brought up. I thought you might find him interesting. He’s one of my best sources. People think nothing of what they say in Eric’s presence. They seem to lump all handicaps into one, taking him for deaf and learning disabled too.’ Now Betty Hyde placed one hand gently on the man’s arm to announce herself. ‘Hello, Eric. I’d like you to meet Mallory, a new resident.’
‘How do you do,’ said Eric Franz.
The man’s voice was cultured, but in this crowd that told her very little about his background. The lack of cane and glasses had the opposite effect of aiding the blind Franz to blend in. Here was a man with eyes out of focus and staring at nothing.
Betty Hyde slipped the cane into one of his hands and the glasses into the other. In the tone of conspirators, he asked, ‘What’s between me and the door?’
‘Four people I never cared for. Hit them with the cane if you can manage it.’
Dark glasses in place, he made a courtly bow to Mallory, missing her general direction by two feet. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’
He walked across the crowded floor with the confidence of a sighted man and hit no one on the way out. And there was time for Mallory to wonder if he wasn’t navigating entirely too well, and how he had been blinded, and how much insurance money had been involved, and if he had carried insurance on his dead wife.
‘He isn’t all the way blind, you know,’ said Betty. ‘He spots fakes and sharks in the dark – all the survival skill necessary to make it in New York City.’
Mallory knew Harry Kipling was watching her. She could see his dark hair in peripheral vision and saw his head turn as she crossed the room with Betty Hyde. She turned back to look at Kipling’s wife, who was following her husband’s every move. There was an expression of bitterness in the woman’s eyes. Now, all things flashed across the woman’s face – hate, anger, suspicion and hurt.
Not a happy marriage.
‘I know the lawyer who drew up their prenuptial agreement,’ said Betty Hyde, nodding to the Kiplings. ‘They have one child. The estate passes over the mother and goes to the son when he comes of age. I’ve only seen the boy once.’
‘I haven’t seen many children today.’
‘Most of the year, you won’t see any children at all. Children from this building are a new class of wealthy homeless people. They only come home from boarding school during the holidays. But if you really dislike your children, you can pay the school extra to keep them away from you for the entire year.’
‘Do the Hearts have children?’
‘Judge Heart has one child by another marriage, a daughter. I’ve never seen her in the flesh – only in publicity photos that ran in the Sunday supplement before the Senate hearings. I suspect they rented the girl for the photo sessions.’
‘Is there anything wrong with her?’
‘Like drug addiction, shoplifting? Oh, Mallory, that’s so common among this group, I wouldn’t stoop to writing about it.’
‘Could there be another reason why you never see her – something radically wrong with her?’
‘You mean something like a lockaway child, an embarrassment in the public eye? That’s an interesting angle. Leave it to me, dear. I’ll get back to you. It’s something you can only dig out of the right people. You won’t find it on any records, not with the money behind the judge.’
‘And the blind man? Eric…?’
‘Eric Franz? No, he and Annie never had any children, unless you count the guide dog. And the dog is such a sweet animal, it would be hard to believe it was Annie’s natural offspring.’
‘A bad marriage?’
‘It was no great love affair. Her idea of sport was to rearrange the furniture so he’d trip over it. And Eric used to tell their friends that Annie was feeding him dog food. Now that was his idea of a joke, but she probably did. She had a great sense of humor.’
He was a late visitor to the kitchen, and alone. He pounded his hand on the cutting board, and a bowl of fruit jumped and tilted over, rocking its apples to the table.
That bitch.
She knew what he had done and what he was. She knew things.
An apple was still rolling on the board, red as her lips were red. He held the ripe fruit in one hand and fumbled in the drawer for a paring knife. He stabbed the skin and watched the juice flow out. He stabbed it again and again. And now he sliced off the skin in slow peels, imagining the screams emanating from the mutilated fruit in his hand.
Bitch.
All women were bitches.
She was sitting in the Rosens’ library, facing her computer screen. It had taken five minutes to break into the guts of the building computer system – so much for security. Now she scrolled through the files on the tenants and made notes on access routes to bypass all but three computers.
She set up a dummy screen, and in the area of PERSONAL MESSAGES, she typed her own message, tailored only by the three different names, and otherwise the same. If her suspects didn’t check the bulletin board tonight, they would do so in the morning. Once the computer was accessed again, the fake board would disappear with no trace of tampering.
She picked through the building’s list of fax numbers. Two of the suspects had fax machines. That would come in handy. Af
ter a glance at the building schematic for the best route to the basement room where the phone lines were located, she picked up her flashlight and telephone kit.
Thirty minutes later, the elevator operator was carrying her up and out of the basement. The iron cage stopped at the lobby floor. A boy got on the elevator. He might be fourteen years old.
If Harry Kipling had played around, his wife had not. The boy had the same blue eyes and black hair, the same stocky build as the father. And now the boy was looking her up and down. His slow, widening smile was more of a leer.
She stared at the boy in the wordless disbelief of, You’re kidding, right?
The boy’s face went to a high red color, and he got off on the next floor, though it was not where he lived.
She wondered if womanizing might be genetic.
She continued on, watching the floors drop away. Looking up through the iron grille of the doors, she saw the tip of the white cane at the blind man’s feet. Eric Franz was standing by the elevator when the doors opened on the Rosens’ floor. As she stepped out of the elevator, he inclined his head. ‘Miss Mallory? I’ve been looking for you. Oh, I’m sorry, it’s just Mallory, right?’
‘Right,’ she said, after a hesitation.
‘It was your perfume,’ said Eric Franz in response to the question she was about to ask. He shrugged and smiled. ‘When you lose your sight, Nature gives you another gift, a heightened sense of awareness. Betty Hyde tells me you have an interest in the judge. So do I.’
‘Also professional? I work for a research group. I assume she told you that too.’
‘Yes, she did. But my interest in the judge is personal. I’m curious about an old incident. Being blind has its drawbacks, you know. There’s always missing information on some level. Take the day the medical examiner’s people showed up for the death of old Mrs Heart, the judge’s mother.’
‘Are you saying it wasn’t a natural death?’
‘Supposedly, it was a heart attack. Maybe it was, but I did wonder when the police detective came a half hour later. I was in the lobby when he said to the doorman -just the one word – “Homicide”.’
The Man Who Lied To Women Page 10