The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Read online

  “Well, Rosie’s been gone for a while—oh, don’t get me started. I cry whenever I think of our little Rosie. She’s such an angel. Emery taught Rosie to shake hands. Didn’t you, dear? Rosie is such a clever little thing, isn’t she, Emery? And she can sit up and beg.”

  “Rosie is a dog,” said Betty Hyde, after drawing Mallory away with explanations of introductions promised elsewhere.

  “I think I worked that out,” said Mallory.

  “Now let me introduce you to our resident Pulitzer Prize winner.” Betty Hyde paused by a bookcase to retrieve a pair of dark glasses and a cane. “He’s marvelous with a cane in his hands. I just thought I’d give him a sporting chance to run for it before Angel comes back.”

  “I wonder why he doesn’t deck her.”

  “Unfortunately, Eric was well brought up. I thought you might find him interesting. He’s one of my best sources. People think nothing of what they say in Eric’s presence. They seem to lump all handicaps into one, taking him for deaf and learning-disabled, too.” Now Betty Hyde placed one hand gently on the man’s arm to announce herself. “Hello, Eric. I’d like you to meet Mallory, a new resident.”

  “How do you do,” said Eric Franz.

  The man’s voice was cultured, but in this crowd, that told her very little about his background. The lack of cane and glasses had the opposite effect of aiding the blind Franz to blend in. Here was a man with eyes out of focus and staring at nothing.

  Betty Hyde slipped the cane into one of his hands and the glasses into the other. In the tone of conspirators, he asked, “What’s between me and the door?”

  “Four people I never cared for. Hit them with the cane if you can manage it.”

  Dark glasses in place, he made a courtly bow to Mallory, missing her general direction by two feet. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  He walked across the crowded floor with the confidence of a sighted man and hit no one on the way out. And there was time for Mallory to wonder if he wasn’t navigating entirely too well, and how he had been blinded, and how much insurance money had been involved, and if he had carried insurance on his dead wife.

  “He isn’t all the way blind, you know,” said Betty. “He spots fakes and sharks in the dark—all the survival skills necessary to make it in New York City.”

  Mallory knew Harry Kipling was watching her. She could see his dark hair in peripheral vision and saw his head turn as she crossed the room with Betty Hyde. She turned back to look at Kipling’s wife, who was following her husband’s every move. There was an expression of bitterness in the woman’s eyes. Now, all things flashed across the woman’s face—hate, anger, suspicion and hurt.

  Not a happy marriage.

  “I know the lawyer who drew up their prenuptial agreement,” said Betty Hyde, nodding to the Kiplings. “They have one child. The estate passes over the mother and goes to the son when he comes of age. I’ve only seen the boy once.”

  “I haven’t seen many children today.”

  “Most of the year, you won’t see any children at all. Children from this building are a new class of wealthy homeless people. They only come home from boarding school during the holidays. But if you really dislike your children, you can pay the school extra to keep them away from you for the entire year.”

  “Do the Hearts have children?”

  “Judge Heart has one child by another marriage, a daughter. I’ve never seen her in the flesh—only in publicity photos that ran in the Sunday supplement before the Senate hearings. I suspect they rented the girl for the photo sessions.”

  “Is there anything wrong with her?”

  “Like drug addiction, shoplifting? Oh, Mallory, that’s so common among this group, I wouldn’t stoop to writing about it.”

  “Could there be another reason why you never see her—something radically wrong with her?”

  “You mean something like a lockaway child, an embarrassment in the public eye? That’s an interesting angle. Leave it to me, dear. I’ll get back to you. It’s something you can only dig out of the right people. You won’t find it on any records, not with the money behind the judge.”

  “And the blind man? Eric . . . ?”

  “Eric Franz? No, he and Annie never had any children, unless you count the guide dog. And the dog is such a sweet animal, it would be hard to believe it was Annie’s natural offspring.”

  “A bad marriage?”

  “It was no great love affair. Her idea of sport was to rearrange the furniture so he’d trip over it. And Eric used to tell their friends that Annie was feeding him dog food. Now that was his idea of a joke, but she probably did. She had a great sense of humor.”

  He was a late visitor to the kitchen, and alone. He pounded his hand on the cutting board, and a bowl of fruit jumped and tilted over, rocking its apples to the table.

  That bitch.

  She knew what he had done and what he was. She knew things.

  An apple was still rolling on the board, red as her lips were red. He held the ripe fruit in one hand and fumbled in the drawer for a paring knife. He stabbed the skin and watched the juice flow out. He stabbed it again and again. And now he sliced off the skin in slow peels, imagining the screams emanating from the mutilated fruit in his hand.

  Bitch.

  All women were bitches.

  She was sitting in the Rosens’ library, facing her computer screen. It had taken five minutes to break into the guts of the building computer system—so much for security. Now she scrolled through the files on the tenants and made notes on access routes to bypass all but three computers.

  She set up a dummy screen, and in the area of PERSONAL MESSAGES, she typed her own message, tailored only by the three different names, and otherwise the same. If her suspects didn’t check the bulletin board tonight, they would do so in the morning. Once the computer was accessed again, the fake board would disappear with no trace of tampering.

  She picked through the building’s list of fax numbers. Two of the suspects had fax machines. That would come in handy. After a glance at the building schematic for the best route to the basement room where the phone lines were located, she picked up her flashlight and telephone kit.

  Thirty minutes later, the elevator operator was carrying her up and out of the basement. The iron cage stopped at the lobby floor. A boy got on the elevator. He might be fourteen years old.

  If Harry Kipling had played around, his wife had not. The boy had the same blue eyes and black hair, the same stocky build as the father. And now the boy was looking her up and down. His slow widening smile was more of a leer.

  She stared at the boy in the wordless disbelief of You’re kidding, right?

  The boy’s face went to a high red color, and he got off on the next floor, though it was not where he lived.

  She wondered if womanizing might be genetic.

  She continued on, watching the floors drop away. Looking up through the iron grill of the doors, she saw the tip of the white cane at the blind man’s feet. Eric Franz was standing by the elevator when the doors opened on the Rosens’ floor. As she stepped out of the elevator, he inclined his head. “Miss Mallory? I’ve been looking for you. Oh, I’m sorry, it’s just Mallory, right?”

  “Right,” she said, after a hesitation.

  “It was your perfume,” said Eric Franz, in response to the question she was about to ask. He shrugged and smiled. “When you lose your sight, nature gives you another gift, a heightened sense of awareness. Betty Hyde tells me you have an interest in the judge. So do I.”

  “Also professional? I work for a research group. I assume she told you that, too.”

  “Yes, she did. But my interest in the judge is personal. I’m curious about an old incident. Being blind has its drawbacks, you know. There’s always missing information on some level. Take the day the medical examiner’s people showed up for the death of old Mrs. Heart, the judge’s mother.”

  “Are you saying it wasn’t a natural death?”

  “Suppose
dly, it was a heart attack. Maybe it was, but I did wonder when the police detective came a half hour later. I was in the lobby when he said to the doorman—just the one word—‘Homicide.’ ”

  “That wouldn’t make sense if she died of a heart attack.”

  “It is interesting, isn’t it? And now I expect you’ll want me to describe the police officer?”

  Mallory smiled. Yeah, right.

  “He was tall and thin.” And as though Franz had read the expression on her face, he hurried on to answer her next unasked question. “He made long strides. He knocked into me. I remember saying to him, ‘What are you—blind?’ I never miss an opportunity to use that line. When he knocked into me, there wasn’t much bulk to him. He apologized, and judging by his accent, he was originally from Brooklyn. Oh, and he wore too much after-shave. It was a very expensive brand. And his coat was made of leather.”

  “You mentioned the ME investigator.”

  “Oh, that man was already up there in the judge’s apartment. The Hearts’ family doctor was there too. I was sitting in the lobby waiting for a friend who was detained in traffic. All of them trooped past me.”

  The detective could only be Palanski. Palanski again. He was the closest thing NYPD had to an ambulance chaser.

  The mouse crept silently across the kitchen floor, mindful of the giant’s blue pajama legs. Its small eyes were filled with the reflected crumbs of a golden croissant. It snatched up the bread and scurried back to its hiding place beneath the refrigerator, where it sat feeding in the dark, insanely pleased with itself.

  Charles watched the cream bubble over a blue gas flame and wondered how many days the mouse might have left in this world. Mrs. Ortega had tried repeatedly to murder it with traps, to break its back with a broom, and to poison it. So far, the savvy city mouse had eluded her with supernatural skill, and gained Charles’s respect. But Mrs. Ortega was also a mythic creature in her own right. However quick the mouse might be, Mrs. Ortega was sure to be close behind it, broom held high.

  The mouse was as good as dead.

  The coffee dripped its rich brown juices down into the carafe. The heady aroma wafted high up to the fifteen-foot ceiling of the kitchen and beyond the appreciation of the mouse and the man.

  Charles carried his coffee into the front room and set it down beside the bulky manuscript. He cleared his mind of all but the task at hand.

  One thing became clear to him in the first twenty pages of text: If Amanda Bosch was the female character, she had no capacity for self-delusion. He ceased to speed-read and slowed down to a human pace, for this was very human material—Amanda awakening from a bad dream and finding it there beside her in her bed.

  The male character of the novel seemed not to know or care about the rules between men and women when they became lovers. The woman wondered why he came back time and again. He showed so little interest in the affair once the conquest of her had been made.

  The excuses he gave to explain his infrequent need of her were insulting. Yet she did not end the affair, telling herself it was better to be touched by this cold and dispassionate man than never to be touched at all. This, she realized, must be what it was like to feel as a man did when he separated the act from the partner. She never asked about his wife, fearing that he had never felt anything for her, either, nor for anyone. He could make love to a woman better than any man she had ever known, yet he did not like women.

  When they were together, in warm weather and cold, the bedding would always be soaked with sex and sweat. They went swimming in the fluid off their bodies, plunging down and rising up in the water that streamed off their flesh. He would make her come first, insisting on it, manipulating her body. And when she came, he took a technician’s pride in this job well done. There was a perverse coldness in the very heat of the act.

  He would be dressed when she came out of the bathroom, where she had been emptying out his sperm and flushing it away to the sea. She would watch his back as he walked to the door, reciting the litany of excuses, not turning to say goodbye, and never a kiss, as though to teach her not to set too much store by this attachment which was detachment.

  She would strip the wet bedding off the mattress and lay it out to dry in the air—the heat of July the first time, and the winter now. It was better than nothing, she told herself, knowing it was not.

  Charles looked away from the manuscript to a clear place on the wall beside his chair. Eidetic memory called up the photograph of Amanda Bosch which Riker had shown him only once. His vision was a perfect reproduction, even to the smudge and crease at the upper left-hand corner of the print. Her sad eyes stared at him. The expression was in the very shape of her eyes, a sadness fashioned in her mother’s womb.

  He felt that he knew Amanda Bosch so well, he might have had a dialogue with her and predicted the answers to nearly every question.

  If he only had her back to life for a minute’s work.

  But only Malakhai could have pulled off that stunning trick—to blend the device of dialogues and the illusion of a woman with uncanny, unerring faithfulness to life.

  He had often thought of Malakhai over the years, the elderly magician and his strange creation. What a mad idea.

  And yet.

  The manuscript did promise an exquisite problem in mental construction. It could be done. The manuscript’s narrative was no mere imitation of life, it was Amanda’s mind at work. With only the manuscript and the photograph, the old man could have done this. But the old magician was insane, and far from here in mind and body.

  It was a lunatic idea, and he must let it go.

  He turned back to the manuscript, but the face of Amanda would not leave him. Eidetic memory had called it up, and his mind’s eye could not send it away. It swam over the text. His thoughts ran strongly with Malakhai now, as he stared into Amanda’s eyes.

  Oh, Malakhai, how do you like your last days, old man? Are you still in love with Louisa? Still crazy? And does that dead woman share your bed tonight?

  He stared at the telephone. With one call he might have an audience with the greatest magician who ever lived. Cousin Max had said there was none better, cracked brain or no. What would he say to Malakhai? “Excuse me for presuming on family connections, but I have a small problem with a dead woman of my own. How do I go about becoming as mad as you are? Or am I half the way gone already?”

  He shook his head slowly from side to side. This was no kind of dabble for an amateur in the art of illusion. He must not forget what the mental construction of a succubus had cost Malakhai, who was a master. He turned back to the manuscript. It was that time of night, he supposed, when mad ideas seemed the most wonderful.

  He was an hour into his reading when a noise called his attention away from the pages. He was unaccustomed to company at this hour. He had forgotten about Nose. Now he watched the cat a scant few inches from his slippers.

  The fact that Nose was declawed had hampered the animal only slightly. A small brown mouse had wriggled free of the clawless paws only to be captured more firmly in rows of sharp white teeth. Charles silently rooted for the mouse. The cat’s teeth crunched down on small bones. The mouse cried. It was not a squeak; the tiny animal was crying.

  The cat looked up at him, very Mallory in the color and the aspect of its eyes.

  He reached down with the good intention of taking the mouse away to kill it quickly. The cat emitted a low warning growl, and the tail began to switch and threaten as his hand hovered near the mouse.

  Back off, said the cat’s eyes. It’s my toy, not yours.

  Angel Kipling gathered the quilted silk of her robe closer about her person, as though the room might be cold. It was not.

  She sat before the computer, transfixed by what was written there in the personal-message file. She could see her husband in the reflection of the dark screen behind the green letters. A tiny replica of Harry floated toward her from deep inside the box of glowing letters. Now she could feel the heat of him standing close b
ehind her chair.

  “Angel, what’s wrong?”

  “Oh nothing, Harry.” She continued to stare at the screen. At last, she said, “It’s a personal message. I think it must be for you.”

  She rose from her chair and walked slowly in the direction of her own bedroom, where she slept alone. She turned to see him bending over the computer monitor, reading the message which filled the scrolling screen and repeated endlessly: YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR . . .

  He only wanted to be where the cat was not feeding on the mouse. He unlocked the door of the office across the hall from his residence, and at the touch of a button, the reception room filled with soft colored light from antique shades of stained glass. The ancient woodwork of furniture and tall arched window frames gleamed and lustered.

  He wandered into the back room which was Mallory’s office and another planet. The wall switch filled this room with harsh light, bright as day, and brought him rudely and solidly into the age of electronics. Machines gleamed and stared at him with dead, gray terminal eyes. The beige metal knights of the New Order formed a row of perfect symmetry. A wall of manuals faced a wall of equipment, and no speck of dust dared light in this place, for fear of Mallory the Neat.

  The corkboard which lined the rear wall was an even more ruthless departure from his own world of antiques and all things civilized. If murder be Mallory’s religion, the ghastly collage of this wall was a shrine to Amanda Bosch, a Madonna without a child.

  When had Mallory accomplished all of this? Did she never sleep?

  There were photographs of Amanda’s apartment, her person, and samples of her handwriting. Mallory’s precision in the neat placement of every item was overridden by the softer personality of Amanda. The shot to his heart was the picture of the old wooden cradle Amanda had purchased for her unborn child.

  He looked at the autopsy photos and looked away. The crime-site photos were more palatable. But every artifact of the death had become intensely personal, for now he knew this woman as few people could have known her in life.