The Man Who Lied To Women

by Carol O’Connell

  Everyone has a dark side, Helen told her. When the dark kills off all the light of the soul, this is a lost person.

  Small Kathy had figured, Naw, he’s a scumbag, and she knew the dog’s former owner deserved a few kicks to his own ribs. Her young sense of justice was very dark, and it had an elegant simplicity that was not much changed over the years. But, for Helen’s sake, she had tried to behave as though the light shone for her, too.

  Mallory reached out one hand and gently stroked the cat’s head. Helen would’ve liked that.

  The cat closed its eyes in contentment.

  Duty done, she quickly withdrew her hand, wiped it on the leg of her jeans, and left the cat sitting in the middle of the living room, its eyes wide open now and looking everywhere for the vanished Mallory.

  The Amanda Bosch file had an honored place in the top layer of the mess on Riker’s desk. He was rumbling through the contents of a lower drawer, fingers grasping what he thought were recent park site photos. But he had gone down too far in his haphazard method of filing, and now he held the snapshots he had taken at Kathy’s graduation from the police academy.

  There was Helen Markowitz, smiling broadly, not realizing the cancer in her body was already planning to cut her life short in one more year. Markowitz had never really recovered from the loss. If not for Kathy, he might have followed Helen years sooner.

  It had always angered Riker to think back on Helen’s death and how quietly she had gone to it, sedated, unprotesting. The hospital gurney wheels had whispered Markowitz’s wife into that sterile operating room, and only the body had come wheeling back to them. She had slipped under the surgeon’s knife and slipped away.

  There should have been more noise to mark the event. In low tones, the doctor had told Markowitz and Kathy how sorry he was. Unspoken were the words, The show’s over. And so Markowitz and Kathy had sat together on a cheap plastic couch in the terrible silence of that waiting room, two unimportant people in the aftermath of an event which had not been properly called to an end. It was a play which tapered off to a mumble and had no curtain to tell the audience it was time to go home.

  Riker, understood what Kathy meant when she had turned to him then and said, ‘This is a rip-off.’ It was.

  Now someone was standing before Riker’s desk, not wanting to interrupt a thought, only politely waiting with just the minimum of shuffling noise to announce himself.

  Riker only knew one person who was that polite. It was no surprise to look up into the smiling face of Charles Butler. And this was another reminder of an old friend. Markowitz’s smile had no such loony aspect, but, as with Charles, one tended to smile back, regardless of grim thoughts and small heartaches.

  ‘Pull up a chair, Charles. You waiting around for Mallory?’

  ‘No. Jack Coffey invited me in for a little chat about Amanda Bosch.’

  ‘He probably thinks Mallory’s holding out on him. She probably is. But then, to be fair, Coffey holds out on Mallory, and I hold out on both of them. We’re a very dysfunctional family, we three. You didn’t rat her out, did you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  So Mallory was holding out.

  ‘What can I do for you, Charles?’

  ‘Coffey tells me it was your idea to give this case to Mallory. May I ask why?’

  ‘Because of Amanda Bosch. When a kid dies young like that one, there ought to be some fanfare, you know? Sicking Mallory on the perp was the worst thing I could think of doing to him.’

  ‘But it’s dangerous.’

  ‘If she’s right about him, she only has to flush him out. If she’s wrong, she may have to shoot him.’

  ‘You’re not worried about her?’

  ‘No,’ he lied, because he really liked Charles.

  ‘But the way she’s going about it, she might as well – ’

  ‘We can’t put anybody in jail without evidence. Sometimes we know who did it, and we can’t touch him. People do get away with murder – I won’t tell you how often, but it happens. Now I’m betting this bastard doesn’t get away from Mallory. I’ve got a hundred bucks riding on the kid.’

  ‘But she’s hanging out there like a target.’

  ‘She is a target – she’s a cop. And she won’t give it up either. If you’re thinking she’d be safer with you in civilian life, just get rid of that fairy tale. This job gives her a rush. Now she’s got a lock on this case, and she’s flying. And what can you offer her, Charles?’

  ‘Nothing. I know that.’ Charles stared at his shoes for a moment. ‘But you’re looking for court supportable evidence against this man. Her methods aren’t strictly within the law, are they?’

  ‘I know she’ll break rules to get him, and this is what I’ve come to. I’m following Markowitz down the slow path of corruption. I’m copping to it, okay? You can have me arrested for it.’

  ‘Suppose she gets caught breaking the rules? What about her career then?’

  ‘Charles, you must know how Markowitz used her. I know the old man liked you and he trusted you, but I don’t think he shared much of the department dirt. If we did everything by the book, the results would look pretty poor. Mallory could get things for him, impossible things. He never asked how many laws she broke in a day. What she got by illegal means wasn’t evidence, nothing admissible in court, but it was stuff Markowitz could use to finesse a perp into a nervous breakdown. Mallory knows things about this killer. She has under-the-skin intimate knowledge. When she’s done with him, he’ll think she was there in his pocket when Amanda Bosch went down. Mallory will get him. I’m counting on it. She is a thing to behold.’

  ‘She’s a breakable human being like the rest of us.’

  ‘Charles, we’ve all fallen into that trap. She’s so young, isn’t she? Just a kid. Of course you want to protect her. That perfect unlined face – eyes like an angel.’

  Charles was still nodding in agreement as Riker leaned forward and shook his arm to call him back to the real world, the scary one that Mallory inhabited.

  Riker raised his voice to say, ‘She’s got the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen. She gives normal people the shakes – even if they don’t drink as much as I do. She packs a monster gun, and you don’t. She’s a great shot, and you probably couldn’t load a gun without an owner’s manual.’

  Now Riker leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk as he watched Charles trying to make logic work in tandem with the blind psychosis of having fallen in love with Kathy Mallory. He’d had occasion to wonder if Mallory understood how Charles felt about her. He was inclined to think she knew it and used it.

  In a softer voice, he said, ‘I’m glad you stopped by, Charles. I hope this little talk has put things into perspective.’

  As Charles pulled up in front of Robin Duffy’s house, he nearly put the car up on the curb, so startled was he by the lights of the menorah and the Christmas tree in the house across the street. The former occupants of that house, Louis and Helen Markowitz, were dead.

  Robin, his host for the evening, was standing in the warm light of an open doorway. Charles crunched new snow as he crossed the narrow band of earth which lined the recently shoveled sidewalk. He hurried up the flagstone path to the door, and his hand was grabbed in a warm handshake. Robin had been Louis’s neighbor for more than twenty years.

  Done with hellos, Charles turned round for a last look at the house of bright holiday lights.

  Robin grinned. ‘Lifelike, isn’t it?’

  Together, they walked into the warmth of Robin’s house, and the smell of pine needles warring with floral air freshener.

  ‘I can’t get Kathy to sell the place,’ Robin was saying as Dr Edward Slope stood up from the card table to clap Charles on the back.

  ‘Kathy’s the only Upper West Sider with a summer home in Brooklyn,’ said Edward. ‘I think she enjoys being perverse.’

  ‘But it’s not like she ever uses the place,’ said Robin. ‘She never comes by any more. So, I try to make it look l
ike someone lives there. Lou put up a Christmas tree every year since Kathy came to live with them. It didn’t seem right with no Christmas tree.’

  ‘A Hanukkah bush,’ Rabbi David Kaplan corrected him as he entered the room from the kitchen, carrying a tray of sandwich makings. ‘Louis swore to me it was a Hanukkah bush.’

  ‘It does make the house look like a family lives there,’ said Charles, staring out the wide window of the front room.

  ‘I trimmed the tree with the original ornaments from that first Christmas,’ said Robin.

  ‘And the ornaments Kathy stole from the department store?’ asked Edward Slope as he cut the deck of cards.

  ‘Well,’ said Robin, who had been Louis Markowitz’s attorney as well as a friend, ‘Helen went back and paid for those, so technically – ’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Edward. ‘Pull up your chairs, gentlemen. Robin, tell him what else you did to the place.’

  The four were seated around the card table, picking up the dealt cards and swapping mustard for mayonnaise, passing around meats and pickles, slices of white bread and slices of rye. The caps of beer bottles were pinging off the table top as Robin delivered a lecture on the technical intricacies of electronic lighting devices.

  ‘I bought timer lights for the lamps in all the rooms,’ he said as he threw down one card in hopes of drawing a better one. ‘The lights go off and on automatically at different times. I rigged the kitchen light to go off at 7:45. That’s when Helen usually finished cleaning up.’

  ‘Robin’s really into this,’ said the medical examiner, dealing out Robin’s card and two for the rabbi. ‘The Harvard Law School graduate finally found a set of timer lights with directions he could understand.’

  ‘My favorite is the light that goes on in Louis’s den after the evening news is over. It’s that window under the gable,’ said Robin, pointing his beer bottle toward the picture window of his living room to indicate the dark gable of the house beyond the glass. Now he picked up his new card and fit it into his hand.

  Charles had no way to know if Robin had bettered his hand any. The man’s face gave away nothing. Yet everyone seemed to know what was in his own hand. Edward laughed out loud when he raised the ante on a bluff. Folding his cards in humiliation, Charles stared out the window at the row of blinking colored lights which trimmed the porch roof of Louis Markowitz’s house. ‘You know, for a moment, I thought Mallory had done it.’

  ‘The lights? You mean as a gesture of sentiment?’ Edward was studying Charles’s face over the tops of his cards, perhaps checking for signs of a fever.

  Charles nodded, and Edward looked to the ceiling. ‘Charles, I’m telling you this as a friend – you’ve got to let go of this strange idea of the gunslinger with a heart of gold. I’m a doctor, you can trust me on this one. She has no detectable heartbeat.’

  ‘She loved Helen.’ Rabbi Kaplan perused his cards, and his sweet smile dissolved into the mask of the veteran poker player.

  ‘Okay, you got me there. She even loved Louis in her bizarre way.’ Edward folded his cards.

  ‘This speaks well for a heart,’ said the rabbi, laying down his cards next to Robin’s splayed hand, and simultaneously raking in the first pot of the evening. ‘Robin, the electric menorah in the window was a nice touch.’

  Robin was dealing the next round of cards as Charles was asking, ‘Was she raised in both religions?’

  ‘Kathy has no religion,’ said Edward as he gathered up his cards. ‘We think she works for the opposition.’

  ‘The way you talk about her,’ said the rabbi. ‘She’s not a criminal.’

  ‘The hell she isn’t.’ Edward slammed his cards down on the table. ‘Now she thinks I’m going to steal for her. She wanted me to raid my investigator’s personal notes and give them to Charles. Too many leaks in the department, she says. You know she’s just bypassing Jack Coffey.’

  ‘Coffey should be grateful she works around him,’ said Robin. ‘If he learned anything from Markowitz, he’d never want to know what she was doing. You’re doing him a favor.’

  Edward pulled a fold of papers out of his back pocket and pushed the wad across the table to Charles. ‘These are the investigator’s notes. No police request would have turned them up. If an investigator gives his notes to a case detective, he can wind up spending a few days in court defending things that were just idle thoughts and speculations. It’s a bit like reading a diary.’

  Charles was looking down on a straight flush. The other players followed Edward’s suit and folded. How did they always know? The four quarters in the pot might represent his only win of the evening. ‘Did you find anything interesting?’

  ‘Not really. She wanted a report on the death of Judge Heart’s mother. I told her we don’t send ME investigators for a natural death if a doctor’s in attendance. She said, look again. Turns out we did send a man out, but it was the mistake of an inexperienced dispatcher. I also found ER hospital records for injuries to the old woman. Two broken bones were set in a one-year period. Old bones break easily. There’s nothing solid there. Tell her I’m not going to move for an exhumation on Judge Heart’s mother until she gets real evidence of foul play. You tell her that, Charles.’

  Robin Duffy put an envelope on the table by Charles’s hand. ‘That’s the dirt on Eric Franz. It’s a transcript of the court session for the traffic accident that killed his wife. The Franzes were having an argument at the time of the crash. But according to witnesses, he didn’t help her into the path of the car, if that’s Mallory’s angle. He was at least three feet away from her throughout the argument and right up to the moment the car got her.’

  ‘I would have thought she’d be more interested in the accident that blinded Franz,’ said Charles.

  ‘She was,’ said the doctor. ‘Eric Franz was blinded in an accident three years ago. The settlement was in seven figures. There was no apparent restoration of sight immediately following the corrective surgery, and he changed doctors before the next exam was scheduled. I have no idea who the new doctor was. His records were never forwarded.’

  ‘Is it possible that his sight was restored at some later date?’

  ‘The surgeon gave an 80/20 possibility, but it wasn’t in Eric Franz’s favor.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be much point in faking it,’ said Robin. ‘He was definitely blind when the court awarded the settlement. Even if the surgery had restored his sight, he would’ve kept the court award. And his wife’s life insurance benefit was donated to charity. I’d say the guy is squeaky clean. I don’t know where Kathy thinks she’s going with this one.’

  ‘So, Charles,’ said Edward, ‘do you know why Kathy didn’t drop by to pick up her own dirt?’

  ‘She said she couldn’t come tonight because she was barred from the poker game.’

  Edward smiled. ‘Is that the story she gave you? She’s not here tonight because she wants to be legally one person removed from these records.’

  ‘Smart kid,’ said Robin, with some amount of paternal pride. ‘She learned that trick from Markowitz. No time lost with warrants, no paper trail for opposing counsel to follow.’

  ‘But she was barred from the poker game, wasn’t she?’

  The other three players stared down at their cards. There were no volunteers.

  ‘Why was she barred from the game?’

  Robin raised his head. ‘I’m still holding a grudge from her kiddy days. Markowitz used to bring her along if Helen was going out for the evening. The kid used to win so big, Markowitz had to buy her a little red wagon to carry home all the loot.’

  The rabbi turned to Charles. ‘Her biggest win was thirty dollars in a penny-ante game. The legend grows.’

  Charles shuffled the deck and dealt the first card to Rabbi Kaplan. ‘What was the real reason, Rabbi?’

  ‘Charles, such suspicions.’

  The second card was dealt to the doctor.

  ‘I knew Mallory would be a bad influence on him.’

  An
d the third to the lawyer.

  ‘She can’t play. It’s not fair. The little brat was born with a poker face.’

  Charles sat in polite silence, holding on to the rest of the cards and waiting on a better answer.

  ‘Okay,’ said Robin. ‘Kathy was attending a private school, a girls’ school with young ladies who had never played poker. Kathy taught them the game.’

  Charles dealt out the second round of cards.

  ‘She was bringing home three bills a week when Helen and Lou were called in for a little chat with the principal,’ said Edward.

  And now all the cards were in play.

  ‘We thought it was great.’ Robin rearranged his hand. ‘The kid was champion poker material, and we took a lot of pride in that. But it upset Helen.’

  ‘And worse,’ said the rabbi, hardly looking at his cards.

  Edward folded his hand and pushed the cards to one side of the table. ‘Lou didn’t want Kathy thrown out of school, so he took the fall for her. He told the principal it was a bad joke that had gotten out of hand, and Kathy couldn’t be expected to understand that what she was doing was wrong after he’d put the idea in her head.’

  ‘Louis was a gifted liar,’ said Robin. ‘He was so good that Helen bought the lie. It was the only rift between Helen and Lou, ever. Kathy knew it was her fault, but she didn’t understand why. And you know, it was a semi-honest racket. It wasn’t like she marked the cards or anything.’

  ‘She was just light years ahead of every child she fleeced,’ said Edward. ‘You never knew Helen. You don’t understand how it was between her and Lou. They held hands under the dinner table. They sat up and talked until two in the morning.’

  ‘So suddenly,’ said the rabbi, ‘there’s silence in the house. Helen believes that Louis has damaged Kathy. Louis was devastated, but he went on taking the blame for Kathy’s racketeering. Kathy felt the rift between them, the terrible silence. She came so close to understanding the difference between right and wrong.’

  ‘But then it slipped away from her,’ said Edward.