‘True. He’s a smart old bastard. So why not him, you wonder. You always hear him bitching about her defects. He can see every scam coming, right?’
‘Right.’
‘In case you hadn’t noticed, she walks all over him. He’d break his Hippocratic oath for Mallory. And the rabbi would take her side against God’s.’
Riker finished his shot and poured another. His red eyes rolled up to Charles with a question which could only be And, what would you do for Mallory?
CHAPTER 6
25 December
All women are bitches.
Only death made them beautiful. That stunned look, when they knew death was coming, when they could see it, hear it coming for them. Only then did he respect them for this experience, this knowledge which had eluded him. To be dead, to be nothing, never to be challenged again.
To actually watch life leave the body was his obsession. But this, too, had eluded him. For in death, they might only have been asleep. The women had taken the secret with them. Bitches, unwilling to share. Perhaps one day, one of them would tell him what it was like as it was happening to her. Perhaps the next one.
He plotted against her as he opened his drawer to find his socks, as he pulled on his pants, as he buttoned his shirt. He schemed as he ate his morning meal and it went sour in his stomach. He kicked a small animal and heard his enemy screaming. He looked at sharp knives with longing and stuck one into a piece of fruit… many times. He killed her a hundred times a day, and the animals, the fruit and the insects all suffered for it.
Sandstone carvings graced the elaborate structures extending as curving arms from either side of the wide staircases running down into the plaza. The vast public space was presided over by a bronze angel high atop the Bethesda Fountain. Her wings were unfurled, her robes were rippled, and there was debate as to whether she danced or not.
From the cover of high ground and stonework, Mallory looked down at the man in the plaza. He was the only one walking the paving stones, casting a weak shadow from the morning sun riding low in its winter orbit. He checked his watch and sat down on the edge of the fountain’s wide pool. The Angel of Bethesda loomed behind him, some twenty feet or more above his head. The waters of the ancient biblical Bethesda were said to have healing powers. Mallory figured those waters would be wasted on a sick bastard like Palanski. The things she suspected him of were a crime in every philosophy under heaven.
Mallory lifted the antique opera glasses to her eyes. Bored silly by opera, she had finally found a practical use for this gift from Charles. She cared nothing for the delicate settings of tiny pearls and precious stones; it was the resolution of the lenses she approved of. She could pick out the mole on one side of Palanski’s face. And now she scanned the rest of the plaza. The sky was overcast, blunting the sun and giving its light an eerie quality as it flooded the stone floor. There were only occasional moments when the sun could create a shadow, and then the clouds would thicken and uncreate it.
Now a woman passed near Mallory’s position. Mallory turned to see the back of her walking along the path leading to the wide staircase. The woman’s carrot-red hair was piled on top of her head. She was small, only five foot – if that, and thin. A short, leather hooker skirt rode high above the bare goose-flesh legs. The backs of her knees bore the bruises of the needle, another trademark of a hooker.
The woman passed behind a bank of decorative stone which obscured half the staircase, protecting her from Mallory’s view. As the small prostitute cleared this facade, Mallory raised her binoculars to her face.
Not a woman.
Beneath the penciled dark eyebrows, the eyeliner and the smear of red lipstick that was her mouth, was the face of a child. How old could she be? Twelve or thirteen years? The light brown eyes had the look of a stunned animal. Her face was in a junkie sweat, though the air was cold and her thin close-fitting jacket could offer little warmth.
Mallory slipped the opera glasses into her pocket and wondered how long it had been since the baby whore last had a fix of the needle.
Palanski rose to a stand as the girl made her way down the stairs and along the wide stone floor. Her hand rose in a vague gesture of recognition and then fell back to her side.
Mallory slipped along the footpath leading down into the plaza on Palanski’s blind side. She was in the open now with no cover as she silently walked the stones. Skirting the fountain, she was moving faster now.
The little prostitute took no notice, legs in motion, but mind in limbo, eyes blank and staring at nothing, moving slowly toward Palanski, whose hand delved into his pocket and produced the lure.
In a sudden cloudbreak, the bronze angel cast a long shadow across the pool of water, the tips of its wings lighting on the stone under Mallory’s running feet. The little girl was within two yards of Palanski when Mallory rushed the child and gripped her by one arm, which was bone thin beneath the light material of the sleeve. When the girl looked up, a badge was thrust in her face. The girl, body and soul, crumpled under Mallory’s hand in the same dispirited resignation of her older peers, her sisters, the adult whores. For this was part of the job, wasn’t it – the arrest.
Palanski was gaping at Mallory as she pocketed her shield. His eyes were panic wide and disbelieving. He took one step forward. Instinctive reflex sent her free hand to the holster inside her jacket. He stopped dead. She watched his darting eyes and knew he was framing the story to explain this away. As his mouth opened, Mallory said, ‘Don’t even think about lying to me. I know what you did.’
Palanski turned, willing his feet to move at first, trapped on his toes for a full second, then breaking into a jog and now sprinting across the plaza.
Three packets of jettisoned white powder floated on the fountain’s waters.
‘You better run, you son of a bitch!’ Mallory’s scream echoed off the stones of the cold and desolate plaza, wherein she kept company with a blind bronze angel and a small child with faraway eyes.
Betty Hyde waited by the entrance as Arthur opened the door for an elderly tenant and her dog, then a woman with groceries and a man with a briefcase, the last stragglers of the morning. She looked across the street to the place which had been bloodied more than a month ago on the night Annie Franz was run down by a drunken driver.
Now there was no more traffic through the door to the Coventry Arms. Arthur had his smile in place as she walked over to him.
‘Good morning, Miss Hyde.’
‘Good morning, Arthur. Lovely day, isn’t it?’
A fifty dollar bill found its way from Betty’s purse into Arthur’s pocket in the New York sleight of hand which out-of-towners mistook for a handshake.
‘Yes, ma’am, it is indeed a lovely day.’
‘Correct me if I’m mistaken, but didn’t you switch shifts with Bertram on the night Mrs Franz died? I seem to remember you were on duty that night.’
‘Yes, Miss Hyde, you have a good memory.’
‘So you must have seen the whole thing.’
‘I saw everything, every detail. I was able to give the police a complete description of the drunken driver and the numbers on the license plate. They caught him within the hour, you know. It happened right over there.’
Arthur pointed to the park side of the street and continued in the well-worn patter of a tour guide. ‘It was 2:15 in the morning, and Mrs Franz was a little unsteady on her feet. I’m not saying she was drunk, mind you.’
No, Arthur would never say that. Betty nodded her encouragement to go on.
‘Well, they were arguing again.’
There had been no argument in Eric’s version when she had given him shelter from the press and the police. She had called her own personal physician to treat him for shock. In Eric’s version, he and Annie had been discussing the first draft of his new book.
‘She thought it was the best thing I’d ever written.’
And that same line had found its way into subsequent interviews with Eric on the talk show
circuit – circus -following the death of his wife.
‘So the argument’s getting pretty loud by now,’ said Arthur. ‘She stumbled back a bit. And then she was standing in the street.’
‘Annie said she had dropped her purse in the street. She went back to get it,’ Eric had told her, tears streaming down his face. Behind him was the 1.5 million dollar view from her apartment, the skyline and the blue-gold spectacle of dawn, as he described the sickening sound of his wife’s body hitting the car.
Arthur was now slipping into the mode of a broadcaster describing a sporting event instead of a death.
‘So, he’s still on the sidewalk. He’s looking straight at her, and right into the lights of the oncoming car. I remember the look on his face with the headlights shining in his eyes as the car is coming to kill his wife. It would have been so weird if you didn’t know Mr Franz was blind. He was three feet away, but that was close enough to pull her back, or at least warn her. But he couldn’t know the car was coming because he couldn’t see.’
‘Did the police ever ask you about it?’
‘Yes, ma’am, a few questions. I talked to the uniformed officers, and then later, a detective – tall thin fellow. But at the time, they were all more interested in the hit-and-run vehicle.’
And the police had not paid him for the entire monologue, the blow by blow account on the death of a woman Arthur must have hated as much as he liked Eric Franz. Everyone liked Eric.
‘Later, the detective came back to ask if I could corroborate the statements of the other drivers. You know, there were three vehicles in all. But of course the papers got it all wrong. Well, she had her back turned when the drunk’s car ran her down. She flew about twenty feet in that direction.’
Arthur pointed north. She wondered if he was aware of the fact that he was smiling as he warmed to the subject of the flying body.
‘Mrs Franz landed on a southbound van. The van driver put his vehicle up on the curb and wrecked the awning support for the building next door. She fell off the van, and into the path of a vintage silver Jaguar. Her dress got snagged up in the rear wheels, and the Jaguar dragged her for maybe fifteen feet before he stopped.’
Very confidential now, just between the two of them, ‘She was still breathing, Miss Hyde. That wasn’t in the papers either. She didn’t die until just before the ambulance arrived.’
Betty nodded. Of course it would take at least three vehicles to kill Annie Franz. And it was so fitting that the last one was shaped like a silver bullet.
‘Did Mrs Franz say anything before she died?’
‘I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the police department, or maybe that detective could help you. He was the first one on the scene. “Piece of luck,” I think he said. He was just passing by, I believe. He gave her first aid while we waited for the ambulance.’
‘And what was Eric doing while this was going on?’
‘He was just standing there. He was in shock, of course. One of the uniformed police officers was trying to take a statement from him, but I think he was having trouble making sense of the whole thing. And that was when you came down and took him away from the policeman.’
‘Yes, he was in shock. Poor Eric,’ said Betty. ‘It must have been so hard on him’. If only he’d been able to see – ‘
‘ – he could have saved her.’
Mallory leaned down to the driver’s window of the cab. ‘This is police business. I’m commandeering the cab.’
‘No English,’ said the driver.
‘Police!’ Thrusting her shield and ID into the cabby’s face, she said, ‘Badge. So, now you know English.’
As she was handcuffing the girl to the handle of the cab door, the cabbie was protesting in his native tongue, which had many accompanying hand gestures, and one of them was obscene in any language.
Mallory crossed the street to the pay phone. After five minutes of conversation, she was back at the cab door, undoing the cuffs and giving directions to the driver.
‘No English,’ he said.
She opened the door and, jerking on the material of his coat, she spilled his short body out on to the street. ‘You want to ride in the back seat or the trunk? If you don’t tell me now, I’ll decide for you. Oh, and I noticed the hack license picture isn’t your face. Maybe this is a stolen cab.’
‘I guess I’ll ride in the back seat,’ said the driver, rising to his feet and reaching for the handle of the back door. But Mallory and the girl were already in the front seat, and the cab was pulling away from the curb.
‘Why didn’t you call for a police car?’ said the girl, who had been silent till now.
‘Paperwork,’ said Mallory. ‘If I go through the paperwork, I have to turn you in. You’re already dope sick. If I turn you in, you’ll be in custody when the real misery comes on. Is that what you want?’
The girl turned her face to the window.
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Mallory. ‘I want to know what kind of business you do with Palanski. He wasn’t meeting you in a public place for sex.’
The girl kept her silence, pressing angry lips together – a prelude to a tantrum, and taunting evidence that this was still a child.
‘If you’re thinking Palanski will get you out, he won’t. He’ll be keeping a low profile for the next few days. And if you’re thinking he’ll kill you for talking, you’ve got good instincts. But I won’t let that happen.’
‘I suppose you want my life story too. What’s a kid like me doing in a – ’
‘No, I know your story. All the stories are the same. You can’t go home again.’
Nothing passed between them until Mallory was taking the cab out of Manhattan through the twilight lamps of the Lincoln Tunnel.
‘It wouldn’t do any good to tell on him,’ said the girl. ‘No one would take my word against a cop.’
‘You’re right about that. Palanski would say you were just an informant. He’d get off with a reprimand for not turning you over to Juvenile officers – unless there was someone else to corroborate your testimony.’
‘The Johns would never talk. That’s nuts. Rich bastards, they’d – ’
And now she shut her mouth again, knowing she’d said too much. Mallory smiled. ‘Okay. Let’s see if I can work this out. Palanski lined up the Johns for you. He does the background work, shadows them, gets to know their habits. Then he tells you where to plant yourself so they’ll run into you. Does he feed you lines too, or do you know how to get them to take you home?’
The girl’s head lolled to one side as she closed her eyes. ‘I give them all the same line – “It’s cold, mister. Do you know how I can get out of the cold, and maybe get something to eat?” Sometimes they just give me money. One of them tried to flag down a cop car, and I had to run for it. Palanski screws up sometimes. But you’d be surprised how many men want to take me out of the cold.’
‘Then Palanski shows up at the John’s door the next day, right? He shows them a mug shot and the date of birth. How old are you?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘And the Johns pay up, and they pay well.’
He wouldn’t even need to solicit the bribe. This was New York City, and they all knew the drill. The wallets had flown from their pockets, the money had spilled into Palanski’s outstretched hand, and he had tipped his hat and smiled on his way out the door.
‘Where are you taking me?’ The girl’s eyes were open now and looking out the windows on a landscape that was not Manhattan any more.
‘Someplace safe. A friend of mine arranged for you to spend a few days in the country. A few days is all I’m gonna need.’
‘I can’t go three days without a – ’
‘I know.’ Mallory reached inside her jacket and pulled out the three bags of white powder she had retrieved from the waters of Bethesda. She showed them to the girl and put them back in her pocket.
By the time the car pulled into the circular drive, she knew the girl’s name was Fay, and Fay coul
d never go home. If she did, her mother the drunk would beat her to death. Or perhaps the mother’s new boyfriend might get first dibs on the girl’s young body. Mallory pulled up in front of the large and graceful old building with a white Georgian facade. Edward Slope’s car was parked near the freestanding wooden sign.
‘Mayfair Research Facility? What kind of a place is this?’
Mallory kept silent until she and the girl were in the lobby which might have passed for the ground floor of a fashionable hotel. When the girl saw the first white-coated attendant, she tried to bolt. She pulled at Mallory’s hand, which would not release her. Now the attendant had Fay by both arms and was forcing her down the hall and away as she screamed out to Mallory. ‘You said you wouldn’t turn me in! You promised, you promised!’
She broke free of the attendant and ran to Mallory. ‘We had a deal. You promised.’ She was crying now, the garish make-up washing down her face like yesterday’s Halloween mask. She was stripped to childhood again. She wrapped her arms around Mallory’s waist as the attendant tried to pull her away.
Dr Edward Slope was glaring at Mallory. ‘I told you to prepare her for this. You never listen to me – or anyone else.’
He sat down on his heels and gently turned the face of the child toward his own. ‘You think it’s going to hurt. It won’t. I want you to go with this man. You’re already feeling sick, aren’t you? Yes, I can see that. He’s going to give you something to take the pain away. It’ll never hurt you again. You have my word on that.’
She loosened her grip on Mallory, but the look of betrayal remained. A deal had been broken. Nothing would change that, and they both knew it.
When she was gone down the hall with the attendant, Slope turned to Mallory. ‘There’s a limit to my influence here, but I pulled every string I could. I just hope you know what you’re doing. An underage Jane Doe is illegal as hell, so I’m passing her off as a relative incognito. She’s in the program, but only for the three days of detox. What then?’
The Man Who Lied To Women Page 24