‘Well, yes he can,’ Henrietta said with rare insistence.
‘No,’ said Mallory, with finality. ‘He can’t.’
Charles watched the sudden shock of understanding come into Henrietta’s eyes as she realized she was talking to someone with an inside view.
‘So now that we’ve established what he isn’t,’ said Mallory. ‘How much weight can I put on a lie as motivation? If I went into the lives of all the tenants in that building, I could dig up something on every one of them. What kind of lie pushes that kind of button? He panicked once. I want to make him do it again.’
‘It would depend on the lie,’ said Henrietta. ‘A person’s entire life can be structured on lies.’
‘What kind of buttons should I push? How do I scare him into talking?’
‘Fear might make him close up. Better to get him angry. A disclosure in anger is worth more. If we can assume he taught the cat to dance, we might consider control issues here. It’s the fount of the hatred of women and the most violent crimes against them. In that case, getting caught in any lie might have set him off. Which would you say was most prone to lying as a pathology?’
‘Everybody lies,’ said Mallory.
‘Surely not everyone,’ said Charles.
‘No, Charles. You don’t. But then you can’t lie, can you? You don’t have the face for it. Wait, I take that back. There’s the vase you rigged. That’s a lie by omission, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a common test situation.’
‘And?’
‘A lie by omission. I’ll bet Helen never lied.’
‘Well, Helen only lied out of kindness, but she was kind to a lot of people.’
‘Markowitz never lied.’
‘Oh sure he did. He lied like crazy. The old man was the best. I’ve heard him lie to the mayor, the commissioner. He lied every time he held a press conference. He lied – ’
‘All right. Everybody lies.’
As she carried the cat down the sidewalk between the garage and the Coventry Arms, she caught sight of the doorman reading the newspaper. A cab pulled up, and Arthur quickly removed his glasses, tucking them into the fold of the paper which lay on the shelf beneath the house phone. Arthur was smiling and opening the door of the cab when Mallory slipped through the door. As she passed by that shelf, she flipped back the fold of the paper.
Bifocals. An ugly little man who was too vain to wear his glasses in front of the tenants. Interesting.
She walked over to the wide lobby window which overlooked the sidewalk. Another tenant was walking toward the building. As Moss White, the talk show host, came abreast of the bench twelve feet before the door to the building, Arthur put on his wide smile.
Well, at least the man’s field of vision included the bench where Amanda had been sitting the day before she died.
Thoughts of Amanda Bosch rode up in the elevator with Mallory. What had the woman seen that day? What had upset her and made her run off? And how much value could she put on Arthur’s testimony if she needed him in court? She and Arthur must have another little chat, and soon.
When she walked in the door of the Rosens’ apartment, she had the feeling that there was someone else close by. Nose felt it too. The cat in her arms ceased to purr. It was kneading its clawless paws into her coat, looking everywhere.
Something in the bedroom was being moved. Now she heard the sound of the vacuum. She walked into the room to see the cleaning woman who must be the Rosens’ Sarah.
‘Oh, hello, miss.’ The woman switched off the vacuum, and now Mallory heard the sound of the flushing toilet in the bathroom. The door opened, and Justin Riccalo was standing on the threshold and looking up at her. He began a small smile; it died off as Mallory turned her back on him to face the cleaning woman.
‘I hope it’s all right, miss,’ said Sarah. ‘He was standing out in the hall waiting for you. He needed to use the bathroom. It is all right, isn’t it?’
‘Sure.’ Now she looked at the boy again. Lately, he was always in her mind on some level. She felt a tie to him without being able to name it, as though they had been through something together. It nagged at her, this feeling which occurred each time they met – a bizarre and twisted notion approaching dèjá vu. She knew where he had been, for she had been there before him.
‘Well, I’m done in this room,’ said Sarah, coiling the cord around her vacuum cleaner. Mallory and the boy continued to stare at one another in silence until the cleaning woman had shown herself out of the bedroom. ‘How did you get past the doorman, Justin?’
‘I walked in behind a man and a woman. I guess the doorman thought I belonged to them.’
‘How did you know I lived here?’
‘I looked it up in the phone book.’
No, said the slow shake of her head, that could not be. The vacuum cleaner began to drone and toil across the carpet of the front room.
‘Okay, I was with my stepmother when she followed you the other day.’
‘So that was you.’ She had felt him but not seen him. The stepmother had not explained the watcher who had occupied the space on the opposite sidewalk, a space which had been empty by the time she had turned round.
‘I gave the elevator man your name, and he took me to this floor. I ran into the cleaning woman in the hall. She was just going into your apartment. I told her you were expecting me.’
Now he seemed to be waiting for praise. She let him wait.
He jammed his hands into his down parka and rocked on the balls of his feet as he looked around the bedroom with its frilly four-poster canopy bed, the chintz and the bric-a-brac. ‘It’s not what I expected of you.’
All his confidence ebbed away in the ensuing silence.
Mallory was listening to the hum of Sarah’s vacuum cleaner. Mrs Ortega always cleaned one room at a time, and the front room already had the furniture polish and ammonia smell of a finished job.
The boy opened his mouth to speak. Mallory moved one finger up to silence him. He closed his mouth and turned to the sound of the vacuum in the next room.
When the vacuum stopped and the front door finally closed on the departing Sarah, he said, ‘I’ve got to talk to someone, but no one will listen to me.’
‘I’ll listen if you’re straight with me. Has your stepmother missed any nylon stockings recently?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Did she accuse you of taking it?’
‘Not yet. I found a mangled stocking wadded up in my dresser this morning. I didn’t take it, and I don’t know how it got there.’
What was the connection she felt to the boy? Something old. Half a memory. He was a liar, that might be part of it.
‘When you’re ready to tell me the truth about what’s going on, I’ll help you.’
‘You think I’m making the pencils fly, you and everyone else. Why? What do you really know about me? Nothing. Only what my father tells you.’
‘Oh, I know a lot about you, Justin. I know you’re smart enough to figure out how the tricks are done. But you won’t tell, will you? Either you do the tricks yourself, or you’re afraid of your father, or both. Or maybe your stepmother is doing it. Maybe you keep quiet about it because you like the idea of driving your old man straight up a wall.’
She looked at his clothes and his unmarred pink face, his unskinned knees. His running shoes were not new, but they weren’t dirty either.
‘You’re a loner. You have no friends, no sports to play.’
He stood very straight, shoulders pinned back.
‘You attended a military school.’ Good guess. His head was nodding. ‘And you’re holding out on me. If these stunts with the flying objects are your doing, I’m gonna find you out. You got that?’
‘What reason would I have to do it? You don’t know everything. You don’t know that all my mother’s money – ’
‘ – was left to you in trust. And your father controls the trust.’
‘He controls me too.’
&nbs
p; ‘So you’re ratting out your father, is that it? You know, if I’d been in your place, I would have targeted your old man. That bastard wouldn’t have lasted six seconds with me.’
‘He is a bastard. I really worry about my stepmother.’
Mallory only stared at him in silence to tell him she knew he was lying again.
‘Okay,’ said the boy. ‘She’s a dweeb.’
‘What was your real mother like?’
‘She was like my second mother, and my second mother was like my third. She was afraid of everyone and everything. My father has a type. Each one is a copy of the last one.’
‘Was your real mother afraid of you, too?’
The boy’s hands dove deeper into the pockets of his parka. She watched the frustration welling up in his eyes, and it was in the hunch of his shoulders and the rabbit teeth pressed down on his lower lip – frustration growing and growing, finally culminating and escaping in a sigh.
The cat padded into the room. It started toward her. She looked at it once to warn it away. Nose stopped a respectful distance from her and sat down beside the boy. Now two pairs of eyes were on her, both needy.
‘Don’t let the cat out when you go,’ she said, and turned her back on both of them, leaving the bedroom to walk down the short hallway to the den where her computer was waiting.
Too bad the cameras hadn’t been running. Maybe she should run a continuous tape against the possibility of another intrusion when she was not home.
The front door closed softly.
‘Charles, let me fix you a drink. No, really. Have one with me.’
Effrim Wilde opened the dark glass doors of a chrome-trimmed cabinet to gleaming glassware and a fully stocked wet bar. ‘Eleanor’s forbidden me to drink alone. She says it leads to alcoholism.’
He turned his back on Charles as though the recipe for whiskey and soda might be worth guarding.
‘Eleanor came back?’
‘Yes,’ said Effrim, rimming each glass with a twist of lemon and a loving smile. ‘She felt guilty about abandoning me to my cigarettes and whiskey and good food. She’s a saint, that woman. This past weekend, I didn’t have a single meal that didn’t taste like low-cal library paste.’
He handed one glass to Charles and carried the other to his own chair, which put three yards of plush carpet and four feet of dark glass desktop between them.
The office had been recently redecorated. The walls were a sickly yellow-green. How did Effrim stand it? Of course, he only spent a few hours of the day in this place. The rest of the time was spent in three-hour lunch seductions of grant committee chairmen and other sources of funding. The lines of the furniture were sharp. Every surface was cold metal and glass. The four wall hangings, all done by the same brutal hand, were abstracts of angry red shapes and a nervous, manic energy of black lines. Not Effrim’s style. This private office said more about Eleanor than Effrim.
‘Does Eleanor know you’re dabbling in bad magic acts?’
‘So you pegged the boy for a fraud?’ Effrim feigned surprise, but not well. ‘I hope the experience hasn’t been entirely worthless.’
‘It’s not entirely done with. I need some data from the research group.’
‘Ask my assistant. He’ll get you whatever you need. I suppose you’re shopping for a little something in the line of flying objects? You were right about the Russian data and the Chinese. Their methodology is a bit lax, isn’t it?’
‘I want the Chinese data on the succubus experiments.’
‘Is the boy branching out?’
‘No, but he’s led me along another line of investigation.’
‘I thought you were put off by the bizarre stuff. Anything in particular?’
Charles’s memory called up a page from a journal and displayed it on the wall by Effrim’s head. He scanned the lines. ‘There’s an experiment with an Asian monk who created a succubus under lab conditions. I want that one. His profile fits the stigmatic. The succubus, in front of witnesses, was seen to bruise the man’s flesh.’
‘Come back to work for me and I’ll get you all the cuckoo material you like.’
‘You still get the lion’s share of funding from sources like Riccalo’s employers? In addition to sitting on grant committees, Mallory tells me his other duties include real estate scams which bilk the elderly.’
‘Ah, but no arrests, indictments or convictions. By New York standards, this makes him a model citizen. Oh, Charles, we just never seem to agree on the Institute’s funding, do we? I’m stealing money from the bastard’s company. I should get a community service medal. But I can be flexible. Come back to work for us, and I’ll track down alternate funding.’
‘Thanks, I think I’ll just take the succubus material and run.’
‘You’re losing your mind out there among the tiny brains. But I’d be willing to trade any four good brains at the Institute for what’s left of yours. Come home, Charles. Come back inside where you belong. I’ll triple your project funding.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s cold out there, Charles.’
By ‘out there’, Effrim included all of real life beyond the isolation of the think tank. Charles surmised that Effrim had daily anticipated his prize freak would return home, beaten by the ordeal of making his way among people who found him eccentric and out of sync with the rest of them – which he was.
‘Will we be able to give a good report to the boy’s father?’
‘The boy’s father could very well be orchestrating this. I don’t trust Riccalo. And I have my doubts about you, too.’
An hour later, Charles was seated in his own front room and closing the file of succubus material. So, it was true; there was a link to the stigmata phenomenon exhibited by fanatics. The mental aberration of the succubus could work its effects on the body as well as the mind.
In the darkening room, a memory from his childhood came back to him in striking detail which included the succulent brown flesh of a roasted fowl. It was a goose, and it held a prominent position on the white lace tablecloth spread with fine china, gleaming silver and candlelight. Malakhai was seated at the dinner table beside the empty chair which beloneed to Louisa. The adults had been drinking wine and laughing with one another, accompanied by a lively recording of Mozart. The small child he had been was staring at Malakhai in the moment when Louisa kissed him. He had seen the imprint of her lips on the man’s face. Charles had rubbed his eyes with small hands, but not rubbed away the kiss which made the depression, the contour of her lips in Malakhai’s flesh.
Well, Amanda Bosch had created no physical phenomena yet. She was merely an image like a holograph. So he had a way to go before he became truly damaged. Amanda was not solid stuff, and he was not yet mad. He’d only made a clever moving picture, an odd extension of his eidetic memory.
Right.
The red light was flashing on the system alert box. So the judge was using his fax. The rewiring diverted the fax to her own machine. It was an application form for a new bank card. She scanned it into her computer and reset the type with a few alterations. After the lines for name and address, she typed in her own questions. Then she copied the letter for Harry Kipling, who also had a fax machine.
Now that she was getting to know them, she could tailor the terror to fit the man. What should she do to the blind man? According to the building super, his computer was rigged for a braille printer, but did he use it? She typed his message into the personal files: I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU. CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU SEE?
The purring at her feet annoyed her. She looked down at the cat, her eyes matching threats with the cat’s contented slits. And now a crash came from the kitchen. She felt for her gun, and the cat’s nose went up as it tested the air for what it could not see.
Gun drawn, Mallory walked into the kitchen and found the floor near the table littered with shatters and sparkles of glass and water. She checked every closet and room and then returned to the kitchen. She
felt along every wet inch of the table top, searching for any small object which might do the job of the wooden match Charles had used to prime the vase in his office. There was nothing.
Well, the boy was smart, but not supernatural. So, the glass had simply fallen.
The unbeliever knelt down to the tiles with a dustpan and swept up the glass, and then mopped the floor and carefully wrapped the shards of the glass in plastic.
A barrage of soft thuds came from the next room. When she walked in, the cat’s body was arched, ears flattened, eyes round. It had knocked the bowl of fruit on to the carpet. An apple was rolling toward Nose, and the cat was backing up on tender feet as though the carpet might be on fire. Mallory snapped her fingers at the cat to get its attention. The cat ran the length of the room and leapt into her arms.
Another trick?
She put the cat down again and snapped her fingers once more. And the cat was in her arms.
What else can you do?
She dropped the cat, and crawled along the carpet, picking up the fallen fruit. The cat stayed beside her, loving up against her, mewling for some small attention, anything at all.
Mallory poured the wax fruit back into the bowl. Nose licked her hand, and she drew it back. Now she scanned the carpet and its recent proliferation of white cat hairs.
Houseproud Helen Markowitz would never have allowed an animal in the house, yet she had fed every stray that came through the yard. And for ten days of winter, a mongrel had lived in their garage, lapping up leftovers and licking Helen’s hand and adoring her with its great brown eyes.
Helen had shown young Kathy each scar of abuse on the animal’s pelt. You can learn a lot about people from their animals, said Helen. She had learned so much about the mongrel’s owner that she made no attempt to find him. Helen lost the tag on the dog collar and found another home for the animal with a family on the next block.
It’s not the dog who is lost, Helen had said. The one who abused this animal is lost.
Helen had never used the words of Kathy and Markowitz’s shared vocabulary: dirtball, scumbag, scum-sucker. The bastard who had split the dog’s pelt with kicks and broken its ribs, he was only lost to Helen.
The Man Who Lied To Women Page 15