‘It’s me, Justin. It wasn’t me that made the pencil fly.’
‘What?’
‘It wasn’t me. Will you help me?’
‘You know the conditions. When you’re ready to tell me the truth, I’ll help you.’
She heard the child’s sudden intake of breath, and then the connection was broken abruptly.
Justin was forgotten in the next minute. Through the open door to the back room of the Rosens’ den, she could see the vase falling from the small table, bouncing on the plush carpet, strewing yellow roses and water. Damn cat.
But now she heard Nose mewling from the room behind her. She stared at the roses until she was distracted by the warning light from her computer system. Another fax was coming in.
She brought the fax up on her monitor. It was addressed to Judge Heart. The logo bore the name of a law journal, and the text was a request for permission to reprint one of the judge’s papers in an upcoming edition.
She fed the fax into the graphics file where she cut and pasted the logo and signature on to a clean page. And then she typed her own text: ‘The journal is considering a manuscript, and we want to cover ourselves for libel. There are only a few little things to clear up. Is it true that you beat your wife on a regular basis? Is it true that your mother died of a savage beating?’
Then she sat down to a quiet hour of computer terror, tailoring new messages for the building bulletin board.
‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ said Riker as he approached Mallory’s door. Was that what he thought it was?
It was the genuine article all right. He pressed the buzzer and pounded on the door. ‘Mallory! You in there?’
When she opened the door, he grinned. Mallory would never know the relief that was washing through his system, shutting down all the reflexes that would have broken in the door if she hadn’t been quick enough to answer it.
He pointed to the large scrawled X on her front door. The marking could only be blood. They could both tell catsup from death.
‘Nice touch, Mallory,’ said Riker, walking past her and heading toward the phone on the table by the door. ‘A little ostentatious, but I like it. The perp knows your name, and where you live. That wasn’t enough? You thought he might lose his way?’
‘Definitely a squirrel,’ was all she said, still staring at the X.
‘Now let’s have another little talk about your pet theory. This guy’s stalking you. It doesn’t square with a frightened perp who kills in a panic and runs away. It’s a different game.’
‘Maybe it is. Or maybe somebody’s working with him?’
‘Okay. Two of the suspects are married. Say one of the wives is a different type of personality. More like yours. Either she’s a ballsy monster in her own right – ’
‘Or she does whatever she’s told.’
‘Still an open game, huh? Or maybe you’re shaking out too many trees. You had to scare all three of them? It never occurred to you someone else might come after you, maybe with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city?’ Or a weapon. He looked back to the door. ‘How long do you think it’s been there?’
‘It wasn’t there an hour ago when I got in.’
Riker was on the phone now, saying, ‘Ask Heller if he can get down here. Maybe we’ll get lucky. If the blood is human, it might be his.’ He put down the phone and turned to Mallory. ‘Time for backup, kid.’
‘Don’t call me kid. And I’m the low budget case, remember?’
‘You can’t stay here alone any more.’
‘I don’t have that high an opinion of the perp. Look at this.’ She pointed to the center of the bloody X on the door. ‘Feathers. Our fearless perp murdered a bird. So no backup. I’m not letting anybody screw this up for me.’
They were still playing ‘backup, no backup’ when Heller arrived with his kit and began to scrape the samples off the door. Riker was worn down to ‘okay, no backup’ when Heller left.
‘When do you figure to bag him?’
‘Maybe on Sunday.’
It figured that she would pick the day when God was resting, not looking – if she wasn’t lying to him again.
The cat was purring around Mallory’s legs as she holstered her gun. Mallory picked the cat up in her arms. Nose nuzzled her face, licking her skin with a pink sandpaper tongue, eyes closed slowly in the cat’s idea of a smile. Mallory walked to the door of the bathroom, held the cat out at arm’s length and dropped it on the tiles. The cat stood up and began to dance.
Riker whistled low. ‘Has he ever done that before?’
‘No.’
Kneeling down, she took the paws in her hands and put them firmly on the floor.
The cat purred at her, half closing its eyes again. She stood up, and now the cat’s eyes were open hurt as she was closing the door. What did I do wrong? asked a confusion of rounding eyes and jerking starts of the small head, the paws rising.
The door shut.
If only she had been a woman of standard intelligence and ambition. If only her countenance had not been the beautiful antithesis of his own clown’s face; if she had only been normal, he would have given her everything he had. But she was abnormal and deviant, and if she wanted it, he would give her everything he had.
He had known she wasn’t coming at only five minutes past the hour. Now he measured the passage of time by the ice melt in the silver bucket. The red wrapping on her gift looked pathetic to him now. Stupid box, ridiculous thing, sitting there all dressed up for a woman who didn’t care to open it. For an hour more, he stared at the door she would never knock on. And then, he was pulling on his coat and opening the front door, which he would not remember locking behind him, because he hadn’t. He passed through the halls and down the stairs and into the dark to walk and think.
The night was crisp and cold. To the north he could hear the bells of the convent on Bleecker Street, and to the west the bells of St Anthony’s. He was such a fool that he found the night romantic, though he had no one to share it with, and perhaps he never would.
Mallory was everything Riker said she was: no heart, no soft places he might reach. Of course she thought him a fool. Of course he was one. He always said the wrong thing. If only there were some aspect of her that was conventional, a bit of sure ground that he could understand.
The CD player slammed on his thigh from the deep pocket of his coat. He had thanked her for the gift, but never used it. Well, perhaps this bit of technology was the bridge to Mallory. He pulled it from his pocket, set the earplugs in place and pushed the play button. Music poured into the center of his skull and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. It was wonderful. It was all new again, this music he had carried in his head since childhood.
And something new had been added to his homemade madness.
For a moment, he forgot to breathe as he listened to that sound that was not music, and neither car horn nor church bell. He knew it was Amanda’s footstep behind him, even before she came abreast of him. A delusion with audible footfalls. Her tread was too light and a bit off stride, an as yet imperfect imitation of a living woman. He turned away from her and turned the music off.
The footsteps vanished.
He kept his eyes other-way directed and focused his concentration on Mallory.
She knew who made the pencils fly. Perhaps she also knew the dynamics of his small telekinetic family in a way that he could not. Was it signs of abuse she recognized in Justin? Or, as Justin had said, something she saw in the boy that she did not like in herself? Or was it something simple that allowed her to see what he could not? Something simple – the absence of a heart?
‘Sometimes they can’t love back,’ Amanda said, keeping time now with his own footsteps. His delusion had a near human persistence. Amanda had come back to keep him company for a while. He looked down at her sad face, and fear of her turned into curiosity.
‘You weren’t loved back either, were you?’
‘No.’
‘And when you came
to know this man, contempt killed what feelings you had for him. Am I right?’
‘Yes. But you will never have contempt for Mallory -it’s not the same. My contempt was for his weakness. She has a terrible strength that’s not quite in the normal scheme of things, and frightening sometimes, isn’t it? You’re lost, Charles. I was better off than you. It’s better to have a definite end to the loving.’
‘In the end, it was only the child you cared about.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why then, did you ask to have the child cut away from you?’
‘He lied to me.’
Her footsteps made less noise now, as she walked along beside a lonely man who cast one shadow for both of them. He had gone to no trouble to create her this time, and this should have worried him, but he was oddly glad of her company.
‘Do you know why she gave you my manuscript?’
‘So I could give it a thorough read, maybe find something of value to the investigation.’
‘You know she read every page before she gave it to you.’
‘Of course she did.’
‘It was the love of the child she couldn’t fathom. She couldn’t understand how I could want to build plans for a lifetime around the future of an unborn baby.’
‘But Mallory was a much loved child. Helen and Louis were devoted to her.’
‘Yes, after the damage had been done to her out on the street. What about Mallory’s own mother? How was a child so quick, so beautiful left wandering the streets? She was the child women pray for. How was she let go? If you’re still looking for the link to the boy, it might lie in her history. What do you really know about her early days?’
Charles sighed. ‘Mallory is an intensely private person. Her history was never open to discussion.’
‘If you could bend your mind outside the parameters of fact and logic, you might reach the conclusion that Mallory’s mother is dead, perhaps murdered.’
‘I think that’s a bit far-fetched, Amanda.’
‘Is it? She’s predicting violence in the Riccalo family. You see a link between her and the boy. They’ve both lost their mothers. Doesn’t it make you wonder? What sent her into the street, a small child on the run? What was she running from?’
‘Perhaps she was abused as a child?’
‘By her mother? No. She loved Helen on first sight. Someone taught her to trust women like Helen Markowitz the nurturer, healer of scraped knees, lover of children. Suppose Mallory saw her mother killed?’
‘Oh, this is absolute rot. There are no facts to support that line of reasoning. Next you’ll be telling me that Justin saw his mother die, and that’s the common bond, as though Mallory could read that in his mind.’
‘Maybe they read one another’s eyes. Don’t they both have the look of damage? Justin doesn’t behave much like a child, does he? He doesn’t have a child’s conversations. There’s another commonality. Mallory was the same way, wasn’t she?’
‘The purpose of creating you was to find out who killed you.’
‘Yes, but was that your idea? She only gave you my manuscript when she realized that once you had this intimate piece of me, you could do the succubus illusion.’
Could she be that convoluted? Mallory? Certainly. All those prompts about Malakhai? What else could that have been about? He’d been had.
Amanda nodded her understanding and walked ahead of him.
‘And what about you, Amanda?’ he called after her. ‘Who killed you? How could you be killed that way and why?’
‘He lied to me.’
He was too tired to sustain her and thus restrain her. Unable to keep her with him, he watched her go into the shadows. She was of such frail substance, she was killed by the first patch of darkness she encountered.
To be abandoned by two women in one day.
He stared at his shoes for a moment as he walked on, in and out of the light. Lost for a while in thoughts of Mallory, he meandered south and east for too many blocks into territory he was unsure of, unsafe in. When, at last, his eyes were looking outward again and he realized this, he found he didn’t care. And he was only dimly aware that the time was passing from Christmas Eve into Christmas morning.
He shuffled through the pile of newspapers close to the brick of a building wall, and then he went sprawling. The cement came up to meet his face with a hard hello. Something small and alive was squirming out from under his splayed legs.
She was standing in front of him now, and wearing a little red coat.
Oh, dear God, he had tripped over the body of a child. She must have been sleeping under the newspapers. He was staring into the smudged face of a little girl with matted hair and the biggest eyes he’d ever seen. She might be six or seven. The child was extending a cup to him. It was torn and jingled with change. It took him a moment to grasp the idea that the little girl was begging for money, that she was thin and shivering.
‘Where’s your mother? Why are you – ’
Now the child was backing away from him. Bright eyes, quick with intelligence, had sized him up for a non-donating type, and maybe an authority type, and possibly even a cop, or worse, a social worker. As quickly as he realized all of this was going on behind her eyes, he was watching the back of her as she slipped away in the dark.
He found his feet and gathered himself up to a stand and ran after her, pounding down the sidewalk, in and out of the black and bright zones of street lamps, intact and broken. In one of these dark patches, she had disappeared. He stopped to listen for her soft footfalls.
Silence.
Now a jingle.
He looked up to see her straddling the top of a chainlink fence, and he held his breath as she monkeyed down the links with amazing speed. He came up to the fence in time to see the small red coat flapping around a corner in the distance.
And now the child was altogether gone, and with her, a ghost of Mallory’s Christmas past.
Oh, fool.
His head bowed into the cold metal of the fence. His eyes closed tightly. His heart was breaking.
Fool.
Her eyes were not a Christmas green, nor the green of living things, but cold and, just now, eerie. The lights from the dashboard made them glitter in the shadows. They seemed lit from within, as though Mother Nature had thought to do something different with the makings of Mallory – to break up the monotony of stereotypes and throw an occasional scare into Riker.
‘You know, Mallory, if I thought you had a heart, I’d think you were worried about me offering myself for the holidays.’
Yeah, right, said the dip of her mouth on one side and no words necessary.
He closed the passenger door of her small tan car. ‘I won’t be a minute – just a few things to pick up for breakfast.’ He turned and walked toward the dim glow behind the plate-glass window of the bar. He peered in and waved one hand. Peggy leaned her broom against the bar and waved back to him. He ambled toward the front door.
The beer he’d already put away had numbed him. He was only dimly aware of the teenage boy thirty yards to his right. Now he looked casually toward the boy. The kid was looking in all directions, probably waiting for someone. Riker looked back to Mallory, who was lost in the darkness of the car. The bartender opened the door, and he walked in.
‘Who’s your friend, Riker?’ asked Peggy, looking over his shoulder.
Riker slowly turned his head to see the teenager behind him. Peggy was not so slow, not drunk at all, and she was backing up to the bar where she kept her shotgun. Too late for that now.
He was watching the boy reaching into his jacket, hand closing on the gun in his belt. Riker wondered if it would be the fast reflexes of youth that would kill him, or could he put it down to his own slowed reaction time – too much booze? Either way, the young thief would have him. All this was calculated in the second it took for the boy’s hand to pass into his jacket, just another second out of sixty.
The boy never got the chance to pull the gun. Suddenly, a rush of
manic energy with bright curls was pushing the boy through the open doorway, slamming him into the near table so hard Mallory nearly cut him in half at the gut level. She reached into the jacket and pulled out a.22 revolver. Now she was cuffing him and hustling him out of the door. Momentum, stunned wonder and pain had made the boy docile.
Riker never said a word to Peggy. He lifted his hands to catch the brown bag with his breakfast six-pack on the fly as he followed Mallory and her new pet out to the sidewalk.
Hey, what’s the deal here?
Mallory was pressing down on the boy’s head to ease him into the front seat of the car on the passenger side. Any kid who watched too much television would know the perp rode in the back of the car. What was she up to? She opened the back door of the car for Riker and said, ‘Sorry about the inconvenience, sir. I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can.’
Since when did Mallory ever call anybody sir! She hadn’t called him that even when he’d held the rank of captain. But that was one wife and how many bottles ago. He nodded and settled into the back seat to play out her game.
When Mallory was in the driver’s seat, she leaned over to the boy and said in a low voice, ‘It’s too bad you had to witness the deputy police commissioner drunk in an after-hours bar. I guess I’ll have to kill you. You understand, don’t you? It’s politics and nothing personal.’
As Mallory drove the streets, Riker watched the boy’s face. The kid was sweating, and his body was weaving between This is crap and true believing.
‘It’s a damn shame you had to pull this stunt on a night when a top cop is drunk in the back of my car. Yeah, I guess I’ll have to kill you.’
It was ludicrous, but now Riker realized that this boy was so young, it had not been so many years ago that he had bought into Santa Glaus and the Tooth Fairy. And then the kid had additional proof in Mallory’s eyes, the eyes of an assassin.
Yeah, the kid was buying it.
Riker felt a worry coming on in the pit of his stomach where he kept his ulcer. She hadn’t waited for the kid to pull the gun, to commit the crime. She hadn’t read the suspect his rights. She’d broken every rule, and now she was making up new ones to break.
The Man Who Lied To Women Page 22