The Man Who Lied To Women

by Carol O’Connell

  ‘You truly believe someone in the Riccalo family is going to get hurt?’

  ‘Oh, sure. It’s coming. Count on it.’

  ‘There’s no supportable argument for that.’

  ‘So?’

  So, when did logic ever interfere with her train of thought? It was her method first to settle upon a target hypothesis and then to move toward it with great velocity, and let nothing get between her and it.

  An eye-blink ago, the space by Mallory’s feet had been empty, and now it was full of cat. Nose was picking up her bad habits.

  ‘Are you still planning to wrap up Amanda’s death by the twenty-sixth?’

  She nodded. ‘If I don’t move on it now, I’ll lose him. If I string him out too far, he might get to a lawyer before I can nail him.’

  ‘Lucky for you, all three suspects are spending the holidays in town.’

  ‘If one of them had left town, I would’ve crossed him off the list.’

  ‘But logically – ’

  ‘Logic only works on paper.’

  ‘Jack Coffey seems to think – ’

  ‘You talked to Coffey? You didn’t tell him about the novel, did you?’

  ‘No. Why didn’t you tell him? Why all the secrecy? You work with these people.’ No, wait, fool. She doesn’t. She works alone.

  ‘A cop is leaking information. I’m not taking any more chances.’

  ‘But you’re taking terrible chances. Suppose you’ve underestimated the murderer. Coffey says you underestimate every – ’

  Mallory’s posture was ramrod straight. Her chin lifted only a little.

  ‘I know this man. He cleaned that apartment over and over again. He cleaned things he couldn’t have touched. He had to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t miss anything. And so he can never be sure he didn’t miss something. He’s the only one who can tie me to Amanda Bosch, because he’s the only one who knows she’s dead, and that I was mistaken for her. He wants to run, but he can’t. He figures I know something, but he doesn’t know how much. It’s driving him crazy, me being here. Every message I leave on the computer puts him closer to the edge. He can’t leave. He was my prisoner the day I moved into this condo. He’s waiting for me to come and get him. Every knock on his front door is the end for him. When he can’t stand it any more, when he snaps, he’ll come to me. And I will pick that moment.’

  For the duration of her soliloquy, he could swear she never blinked her eyes. There was an edge to her voice. It was the sort of edge fools like himself were prone to falling off of, crashing as they fell, and proximity made him nervous.

  ‘Jack Coffey’s right, you know.’

  Nose locked eyes with him as though asking how he could have said such a thing out loud.

  ‘Coffey is?’

  ‘Well, yes, I think he is right about a few things.’

  The cat looked away, giving him up for dead.

  ‘And I’m wrong?’

  The measured weight of her words also carried the second question: Whose side are you on? For it would always be that way with her, this demand to choose up sides – her side versus the balance of the planet.

  ‘Mallory, if you string out all the facts, just the bare facts, they don’t amount to much of a portrait, certainly not what you’ve extrapolated. You can’t bet your life on it.’

  It was Nose who picked up the warning signs first, with an animal’s radar for the impending storm. He bristled and crept under the couch. And Charles was suddenly reminded of the old man in the park quoting from Revelations – warnings of earthquake, the dark of the sun.

  The long red fingernails disappeared into the duffel bag on the coffee table and emerged again with a small bundle of printouts sectioned off with paper clips. She selected one clipped bundle of sheets and held it up to him.

  ‘Okay, Charles. Let’s take a look at your own little problem with the flying objects.’ The light sheaf of papers hit the coffee table with real force. Her face was rigid.

  ‘These are the facts - my contribution to the partnership. Two women died. Two insurance companies paid off. A third woman is frightened, or at least she acts that way. The kid’s trust fund is down by a full third. The father is the executor of the trust. You might assume he just made bad investments because his own portfolio and accounts are also depleted, but that would be supposition, and I’m sticking to the facts. The stepmother is a computer programmer with a financial background. She has a FAX origin number, access to the executor’s signature and documents. She knew Robert Riccalo for ten years before she married him. Per your own notes, nothing flies unless the three of them are in the room. A pencil flew at the stepmother. Now it’s easiest to make the pencil fly to the person pulling the thread, but I made it fly to you, didn’t I?’

  Her voice was entirely too civilized, prompting the cat to stick its head out from under the couch.

  Where was all this background information coming from? As quickly as he framed that question, he filed it away among all the other unspoken, unanswered questions which were suspended from the rafters of his brain like bats sleeping in the dark. When she got information for him, he had ceased to ask where she got it, and he tried not to speculate on the source, setting his ethics adrift – becoming more like Markowitz.

  Another printout hit the coffee table with a hard slap. The cat was gone again.

  ‘The boy used to keep normal school hours. He had one after-school program to fill out the parent workdays,’ she said. ‘Now his hours are longer at the Tanner School. He sometimes goes six days a week without eating a single meal at home. The new stepmother arranged that. And Justin was right about all the wives being copies of one another. They all favored extended after-school programs. None of them wanted the kid around. The kid’s trust fund is down, and Dad’s in a hole. The new stepmother is top-heavy with insurance from her job. The natural mother had a history of heart problems. The suicidal stepmother had a brief psychiatric history. These are facts.’

  ‘I suppose the one with the psychiatric history saw things flying through the air?’

  ‘No way to know. It’s a fact that a shrink was observing her for signs of paranoia during a brief hospital stay. She didn’t leave a suicide note. The ME investigator tried to do the work-up for a postmortem psychological autopsy. He said the family never discussed flying objects with him. There’s the file on the woman’s death. There are personal notes in there about the kid. The word spooky is mentioned twice. I’m only repeating the facts.’

  There was a restrained violence to the words, a force being held in check. Though her anger was increasing in pent up energy, there were no signs in the cool mask of a face.

  ‘Well, the suicide rules out the insurance motive.’

  ‘No, Charles, in fact it doesn’t. Riccalo went to court to make them pay off. There was no suicide exclusion, and she had no psychiatric history at the time she took out the policy.’

  ‘And Robert Riccalo was the beneficiary.’

  ‘That’s a fact. The settlement was deposited into the boy’s trust.’

  ‘That sounds sinister.’

  ‘Let’s stick to the facts, Charles. The settlement barely covered the amount lost in bad investments the previous quarter. If that trust fund had dropped too low, it would have triggered a bank audit. He didn’t have much choice about depositing the money back into the trust. So, just at the right time, a heavily insured woman dies. I call that interesting.’

  ‘You have nothing to indicate foul play. As I understand it, there was no one in the house when it happened.’

  ‘That’s speculation. The department won’t check an alibi unless the case is written up as a homicide. If you stick to the facts, you have a logical case to fit any one of them. But, if instinct counts for nothing, how come I know the perp from the next victim, and you don’t?’

  The air between them was chill to dangerous. Even Malakhai in his debunking days would have found her quite unnatural in the world. All the good logic of his good brain excused
itself and went off to keep the cat company under the couch. Too late, he had come to believe in her as others might believe in magic.

  ‘Which one of them is doing it?’

  ‘Too bad I can’t tell you. I didn’t figure it out with logic, so it doesn’t count, does it?’

  ‘Which one? Who do you think it is.’

  ‘Oh no, Charles. I’ve seen the light. I’ve got religion. I’m only a cop, a detective. You’re the genius, and now that you have it trimmed down to logic and solid facts, the rest should be easy for you. Let me know if you ever work it out.’

  ‘But there’s a case to fit any of them. Logic – ’

  ‘Logic is your handicap, not mine. If logic is king, how come I know and you don’t? Have fun, Charles. Don’t forget to duck. Send postcards.’

  She began unpacking new boxes of disks from the duffel bag.

  ‘You make it sound like I won’t be seeing you for a while.’

  ‘I’ve got things to do.’

  He only turned his back for a moment, looking for something to say to her. When he turned back to face her, she was gone. The door to a back room was closing behind her, the cat was padding after her, and he was left to show himself out.

  ‘So, we’re still on for this evening, right?’ he called to her through the door to the back room.

  Silence.

  As he walked to the front door, he had to examine another set of facts. She had been right about the manuscript being autobiographical, certainly to the extent of the pregnancy and the dancing cat. And right about the meeting, the spontaneity of the act. He had closed the door behind him and was standing at the elevator when he thought to go back, to pound on her door and demand to know which one of them made the pencils fly.

  She knew.

  And only now he remembered the knife was still sitting on the coffee table. Why had she brought it back to the Rosens’ apartment? What had she been doing in the basement?

  Robert Riccalo still managed to dominate the large room, though he had retreated behind the financial pages of his newspaper, which obscured all but his trouser legs and the green leather of his chair.

  The chair was positioned like a throne and elevated above the cushions of the couch where his wife perched. Justin sat in a small wingback chair which might have been made with a child’s size in mind.

  The rustle of Robert Riccalo’s newspaper could be heard above the television chatter of a commercial for fabric softener. Every grunt or sigh from the throne called Justin’s eyes up and away from his book. Each time he looked up, he would catch his stepmother staring at him, finding Justin a hundred times more interesting than the television set which played on to no one.

  All three heads turned in the same direction when they heard the crash of glass in the next room. Robert Riccalo looked at his son, who scrunched down in the chair. Sally Riccalo was rigid as a board, sitting ramrod straight at the edge of the couch cushion, eyes fixed in the direction of the noise, her long thin nose pointing to it like a compass for things that went bump in the night.

  Robert Riccalo was first into the dining room. Pieces of blue glass lay on the marble tiles. Four of the longest shards were lined up in a row pointing toward the room he had just left. Now he turned quickly at the sound coming from his wife, who stood behind him. It was from deep inside of her, a squeak that escaped. Her eyes fixed on the bits of broken glass.

  Justin was last to enter the room as the first shard of glass was inching along the floor toward Sally Riccalo. She stood there paralyzed, unmoving. Now she broke formation and pointed at Justin. ‘It’s him, he’s doing this to me. He’s trying to kill me! It’s him!’ Her finger pointed at the boy, and Robert Riccalo turned to his son, thunder brewing in his eyes.

  Justin fled the dining room and ran down the hall to his own room. He turned the lock and strained to move furniture across the door.

  ‘Justin.’ his father bellowed. ‘Justin.’ The yelling was› coming closer. ‘Justin!’ Almost at the door now. The doorknob moved as the lock was tried. He listened to the large man turning on his heel, footsteps fading off to get the key. Then Robert Riccalo was back and fitting a key into the lock.

  Justin backed up to the far wall as the door cracked against the dresser and that heavy piece of furniture was being moved slowly, relentlessly out of his father’s way.

  It was the five-year-old who caught her attention when he yelled in anger, ‘I want to see the body!’ and now Mallory wanted to see it too. She walked toward the group of pedestrians clotting the sidewalk in front of the next building. The boy kicked the leg of a woman who held him by one arm. The woman was of a different color, and by her uniform, a different piece of the planet earth, one closer to the ground than the highrise strata where the child dwelled.

  ‘I will not go inside!’ said the child, balling his tiny fists.

  Now she noticed the long black coat of outstanding tailoring, even by Mallory’s standards. It was draped on the man who was pushing at the body with the tip of his umbrella.

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked the woman next to him, drawing back. ‘Is that why he smells?’

  ‘No,’ said another woman. ‘They all smell like that.’

  Mallory pushed through the small group to see the umbrella successfully rolling the stiff body of a man. The eyes were closed as if in sleep, and there was no trauma to the grimy face, no trace of insult at the prodding umbrella, for he was dead. The bottle by his side, the spill of vomit, and the ragged clothing told his story. He had crawled into the bushes late at night and frozen to death, too far gone with booze to seek better shelter. Or perhaps he had choked to death in the vomit. The third shift doorman, whose job in life was to drive off the poor, had probably been sleeping on duty or reading his paper when the man had taken refuge from last night’s snow beneath the slim cover of a bush.

  The child was looking up at Mallory, having ferreted out some authority in her. ‘Is the doorman gonna call the road kill wagon, like he did for the dog?’

  ‘What dog?’

  In the glee of a really great conspiracy, the boy said, ‘I saw a dog murdered. It happened right there.’ He was pointing to the curb. ‘I was upstairs – ’

  ‘How far upstairs?’

  The nanny stepped forward. ‘He lives on the tenth floor. He keeps going on about the dog, but I don’t know if he could have seen – ’

  ‘I did too see it! And I wasn’t on the tenth floor. She just says that so my parents won’t find out I was unsupervised,’ said the child, giving care to this last word, which was obviously a newly acquired tool to blackmail the nanny. That would explain why the nanny wouldn’t fight back. The kid had something on her.

  ‘I was standing in the hall on the third floor,’ he said. ‘I looked down, and the man was murdering the dog.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He strangled it. The dog pulled on the leash, and I guess he didn’t like that. He lifted the dog up by the choke chain. He lifted it right off the ground, and the dog was kicking and kicking. And then it stopped moving. It was dead. He kicked the body into the street. I wanted to go see the body, but the doorman wouldn’t let me. He said he was waiting for the road kill truck.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mallory looked to the nanny now. ‘When did it happen?’

  The nanny shrugged. ‘It never happened. He makes these things up.’

  ‘I don’t, I don’t!’ said the boy, with another well-placed kick to the woman’s leg.

  ‘Maybe I should talk to the doorman or his parents,’ said Mallory.

  ‘It was on the nineteenth,’ said the nanny, with instant recall. ‘The day it rained.’

  But neither doorman nor boy had been able to describe the dog. And Mallory knew the world would be a better place without the clutter of eyewitnesses.

  The door was open. Mallory shifted the bag of groceries to one hip and pulled out her gun. With the gun concealed by the bag, she pressed through the door a
nd into the apartment.

  The concierge was standing in the front room when she came through the foyer. Now all of the room was exposed and she could see Angel Kipling opening the closet door.

  ‘Looking for something?’

  The concierge spun around.

  ‘Oh, Miss Mallory, pardon the intrusion, but Mrs Kipling was sure she heard a scream coming from this apartment.’

  ‘It must have been the cat,’ said Angel. ‘Yeah, that’s it. Had to be. You always keep him locked up in there?’

  ‘It’s a big bathroom. I don’t want him shedding on the Rosens’ furniture.’

  When the concierge had excused himself and closed the door behind him, the woman turned on Mallory.

  ‘We got your message.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘Don’t be cute. I saw the setup in there.’ Kipling nodded to the door of the den, which was wide open. ‘Most of us only have the one computer. All the harassment comes over the computer. It explains a lot. So what do you want? How much?’

  ‘To keep quiet?’ Too good to be true. Pity the cameras weren’t rolling, but whatever Angel gave her couldn’t be used against the husband. ‘I’d rather deal with your husband.’

  ‘You’re dealing with him. I’m the husband in this relationship.’

  Advancing on Mallory, Angel Kipling opened her mouth to say more, but then she either lost her words or thought better of them. The woman backed up in the way of the cat when Mallory’s glare said, Enough. Kipling stiff-walked to the door and slammed it behind her.

  Mallory walked into the kitchen and set down the grocery bag. She laid the gun alongside it on the counter and put the perishables in the refrigerator. The phone rang. She let it. She put the butter away, and closed the door on the second ring. She walked into the front room in her own time with no hurried motions. The cat was pawing at the glass on the aquarium, maddened by the swim of fish, unable to get at them.

  ‘I know just how you feel,’ said Mallory. On the fourth ring, she picked up the receiver. ‘Mallory.’