The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Read online

  He wished he could wire Mallory into his delusion of Amanda and remove himself from the game. And a game it was to Mallory. Murder was the best game.

  Now she was unloading a pack of tapes from the morning’s scavenging. “Something on television could have tipped her. The judge had a lot of airtime in the past two weeks.”

  Could it be that simple? A clue in Amanda’s last days? They were spent in the upheaval of the lie: lack of sleep, anxiety and guilt from the abortion.

  He walked the length of the cork wall at the back of the office. This was not Louis Markowitz’s style. All the tiny little detailing was missing. Mallory’s quick brain could not stop for the minutiae which had been Louis’s obsession. He had to keep reminding himself that she was not obliged to be a copy of her father. Now he read the interview with the doorman.

  “What’s this about?”

  “It looks like that’s the day she finally snapped. The doorman said she was agitated. Then she went home, obsessed about it, and that same night she logged onto her computer. Maybe she was working late to get her mind off it. But the book was about him, wasn’t it? That’s when the YOU LIAR outburst occurred.”

  She fed one tape to the VCR. “These are all the broadcast cuts from the past two weeks.”

  The first tape was a press conference. Judge Heart’s stage presence was commanding, and he seemed to know it. He singled out women reporters for questions, and looked into the eyes of each one as though she might be the center of his universe.

  Even more entertaining were the tapes on the Senate hearings for Judge Heart’s nomination to the highest court in the land. Mallory’s candidate for wife beating was rambling on and on about his concern over sexual harassment in the workplace. The senator from Maine was nodding in approval of each lie he fed her on his empathy for women and the need to protect them.

  Charles was wondering what might draw Amanda to this man. Power had its attractions, he supposed, and fame. And Heart’s intelligence was undisputed.

  “The judge is always in the paper. Pretty dry stuff—coverage on the hearings, pictures of candidate and family. Did I mention that I think he killed his elderly mother?”

  “Slope ran that by me at the poker game. He’s not convinced. There’s no evidence. It’s pure speculation.”

  “Sometimes speculation is all you ever get to work with, Charles. And you did ask me to keep an open mind about the possibility that he had killed before. A mother killer. You think that might put a woman off having a baby, just on the off chance that matricide was genetic?”

  “Perhaps. By your description, Harry Kipling seems harmless enough.”

  “And he’s just the type to panic. All the testosterone in his marriage is Angel’s.”

  They sat in silence throughout an hour of Mallory fast-forwarding tapes and stopping the action to have a closer look. Over the two weeks of tape, he noted a growing tension in Heart.

  “Now watch the judge lie to this reporter.”

  A young woman approached him, smiling brightly, and the judge beamed down on her with his most avuncular smile. He was the man every boy and girl wanted for a daddy.

  “I’m going to wrap this up on the twenty-sixth,” said Mallory. “And this conversation is between us, not us and Coffey and Riker.”

  “How can you orchestrate the day? You don’t even know which one it is.”

  “Oh, not just the day. I can even plot the moment roughly.”

  “How?”

  “I was always in charge of him, Charles. When I get him on camera, I start pushing his buttons. I’ve got the usual buttons for Franz and Kipling. I’m going to get the judge in motion by telling him that I’m going to get the paperwork to dig up his mother.”

  “Slope won’t support—”

  “I don’t need Slope’s permission to dig up a dead mother.”

  Indeed, she didn’t seem to need anyone. “You have a favorite, don’t you?”

  She ignored this.

  “I’m going to wrap him up for the DA on the day after Christmas.”

  “Is it me you’re wrapping up?” asked a small voice behind them.

  Justin Riccalo stood in the doorway. The boy was staring from one to the other. “Is it me?”

  “Does that worry you?” asked Mallory. She didn’t wait on his answer, but turned her back on the boy. “Charles, when little kids can just walk into the building, I’d say we had a security problem.”

  Charles looked down at the boy. “How did you get in, Justin? Why didn’t you use the intercom?”

  “I walked in with an old man on crutches. He dropped his package, so I carried it in for him. It seemed kind of silly to go back outdoors and use the intercom. It’s cold out there.”

  “Mugridge let you in?” Mallory seemed skeptical—and with good reason. The elderly Mugridge was the most security-conscious person in the building.

  “Yes, ma’am. I did knock on the office door. You probably didn’t hear me.”

  “There’s a buzzer on the door,” said Mallory.

  In an effort to ward off any further interrogation by Mallory, Charles ushered the boy into his own office and pulled the door shut.

  “Mallory hates me, doesn’t she, Mr. Butler?”

  “She’s suspicious of everyone, even me. Don’t take it personally. What can I do for you, Justin?”

  “I wondered if we could go back to the cellar.”

  “I didn’t think you would want to. Not after—”

  “Yes, I would. I think I do like magic after all.”

  “Your parents don’t mind you missing a morning of school?”

  “School’s out. It’s Christmas vacation.”

  Of course. It was Christmas Eve. Where was his mind?

  “Well, I’ll just give them a call to let them know where you are.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that. I’m supposed to be at the Tanner School right now.”

  “But you just—”

  “I am on Christmas vacation. The Tanner School is warehousing me for the day. It’s a holiday program for working parents. My parents are doing the cocktail circuit this afternoon. Every corporation in town is having their Christmas parties. So they think I’m at school.”

  The boy sat on the edge of the straight-back chair, his wriggling feet not quite touching the carpet. His hands gripped either side of the wooden seat, as though unsure of the chair’s intention to remain stationary.

  “I see.” How would Robert Riccalo react to his son’s truancy? Not well. “You know, I did want another chance to talk to you alone. I have an idea that your parents make you a little nervous.”

  “You have a gift for understatement, Mr. Butler. They both drive me right up the wall. Your partner makes me nervous too. She thinks I’m doing it. You don’t believe in this levitation crap, do you?”

  “Oh, I don’t believe anyone is levitating anything. Humanity has enough bizarre problems without dragging in the occult. Parapsychology is a nonscience as far as I’m concerned. But I do think one of you is rather good at illusion.” Or maybe not. Even if it was a slipshod job, who looks for the obvious thread when a sharp object is flying toward them?

  “I’m betting on my stepmother.”

  “But she seems to be the target.”

  “I think she’s using this to turn my father against me. He doesn’t even like me anymore. He avoids looking at me. And she’s already gotten to your partner. One day, I saw Sally talking to her on the street. I know she turned Mallory against me.”

  “Where was this?”

  “In front of her apartment house, the Coventry Arms.”

  “Your stepmother followed her there?”

  “Yes. She made me wait in the car down the block, but I followed her. I know what she’s trying to do to me, and no one will believe me.”

  “Justin, I really am on your side.” The boy seemed unconvinced. “I know something that will cheer you up.” Charles gathered up his house keys from the drawer of the desk. “Let’s go d
own the basement. But no music this time—only magic.”

  As they walked into the hallway, Mallory was disappearing into the elevator with no goodbye, no I’ll see you this evening. She was not usually inclined to unnecessary words. But she never missed appointments. The sun might not come up in the morning, but Mallory would come back at eight of the clock for dinner.

  Now, in some part of his brain, he was recalling each bit of small talk on the subject of Malakhai, and wondering what to make of this deviation in her.

  He and the boy walked down the hall in the silence of their separate thoughts. Charles looked down on Justin, who was clearly miserable. But not frightened. This time, the boy led the way down the winding staircase to the room below, drawn along by the stored remains of Maximillian Candle’s Traveling Magic Show.

  When the wall partition was pulled to one side, Justin was first in, not waiting for the light of the globe to go exploring. The dull light caught up to the wandering boy and cast a fuzzy moving shadow on the trunks of props and costumes.

  “Oh, cool!” said Justin from the other side of the tall Chinese screen. And he knew the boy had discovered the guillotine. But as Charles rounded the panels of rice paper, he could see it was the knife set that had Justin’s attention. Charles touched another globe, and another light came to life as the boy was staring at the rack of knives.

  He looked up at Charles and then to the old, much punctured red-and-white bull’s-eye which was propped on an antique easel. One hand reached out to the knife rack, hovering tentatively, as his eyes shot up to Charles to ask permission.

  He nodded. “You will be careful with them, won’t you?”

  Justin picked up the first knife and missed the target, though it was large and close.

  “Don’t feel bad. It takes a bit of practice. Max had many years of practice.”

  “I can tell,” said the boy, approaching the target, which was pocked with scars. His finger traced the outline of a human body surrounding the area free of knife holes. “That was where his assistant used to stand, right?”

  “Right.”

  “He cut it close, didn’t he? I can see the holes of the knife points between the fingers. Can you do it?”

  “Yes I can. Once, when I was your age, I stood in the target center. It was a birthday present from Max.”

  “You’re kidding. Weren’t you scared?”

  “No. Then Max gave the knives over to me, and he stood in the center of the target.”

  “So you can do it. Really?”

  “Really.”

  The boy moved into the center of the target and flattened out on the rings of the bull’s-eye. “Do it. I trust you. Go ahead.”

  “Actually, you would only have to trust me not to let go of the knives. The blades come out of the target, they don’t go into it. You pretend to throw the knife, but you really drop it into this pocket.”

  He turned a small table so Justin could see the black velvet bag which hung just below the tabletop. He pointed to the black lever by one leg, and the wire trailing away from the table and toward the target.

  “The trigger for the knives is in the foot pedal. See? Then the hilt of the blade springs out from inside the target with a spring-load. But the audience sees what it’s conditioned to see. A knife is thrown, and a knife appears on the target. It would take me a few minutes to set the springs. It’s perfectly safe once you know how the trick is done.”

  If Justin was the one who rigged the flying objects, this might be a practical application for his gift. He was wondering how he was going to sell a future in the magic trade to the boy’s father, when Justin walked away from the target, all interest in it lost.

  The boy looked up to the guillotine. “And that’s only a trick too, right?”—as if he were asking if this was only another lie, a cheat.

  “Yes, sorry. It has a fail-safe mechanism. It’s wicked-looking, but harmless.”

  As a child, Charles remembered being enthralled by the trickery, not the danger. Justin was of an opposite bent. He seemed disappointed at the lack of danger. Perhaps the magic trade was not the right area for Justin’s intellect. Whose, then? The stepmother? The father?

  “Justin, I know you’ve been told what your IQ is. Have you given any thought to the future, what you might do with it, how you might develop it?”

  “What’s to develop? A brain is a brain. And if you believe me when I tell you I don’t make things fly around the house, then I don’t have any talent, either.”

  “Well, you might have a talent for observation and deductive reasoning. That’s something we can test for. And it might even be fun. Suppose I help you figure out how the objects fly. Then you’ll know what to look for. So you work with me for a while, and we’ll help each other. Deal?”—as Mallory would put it.

  “Deal,” said the boy, his small hand thrust into Charles’s for a handshake.

  “Good.” He was lifting a black ball with holes in it from a box at his feet. “This was one of the few floating illusions in Max’s act. It only takes a few minutes to set it up.” Where was the fluid container?

  He found the bottle he sought in a neighboring box covered with dust. While Charles pondered the shelf life of chemicals, Justin was examining another box, and apparently he had tripped the spring, for now bright-colored scarves exploded from the box, shooting straight up and then billowing out, flowing onto the floor in a loam of silk.

  Justin was trying to smash the scarves back into the box as quickly as he could pluck them from the air. He looked over his shoulder to Charles, guilt and apology on his face, and fear was there too. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Justin. Just let them be. There’s no harm done, really.”

  “You’re not angry with me?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You know your partner hates me.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” He trained the beam to another dark quarter of the basement, searching out a track-line post. Ah, there it was, and it was still set with the running wires. “Now why would Mallory hate you?”

  “My father says people hate other people for what they hate in themselves.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s sometimes true. But what might that be in Mallory’s case?” Matches? Oh, yes. He pulled an old box from the chest of drawers in the open steamer trunk.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know much about her.”

  “Well, she’s a loner, like you,” said Charles, disappearing into the dark at the edge of the globe’s small circle of light, and then reappearing with empty hands. “She doesn’t mix well with people.”

  Other qualities in common? He had to wonder. There was something between her and the boy, a mutual understanding he could not understand.

  “All right, Justin. Ready?”

  The boy nodded.

  Now there was a bright flash of light, and a glowing ball of flames was hurtling straight toward them. It stopped three feet short of its targets, man and boy, and then rose over their heads and was extinguished in the darkness beyond them.

  Justin whistled and clapped his hands.

  “Now that’s a flying object,” said Charles. “And miles more fun than pencils, don’t you think? It runs on a track of wire. It’s the only floating illusion I know, but there are crates full of books on magic if you want to look through them.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the less I know about this stuff, the better off I am. Why did everyone assume I made the pencils fly?”

  “Well, when teams go out to investigate the odd ghost story or some other instance of paranormal activity, they usually discover the origin of the event behind a neighbor’s garage in the form of three small children laughing their tails off.”

  “But this isn’t funny. Sally’s gone nuts. I can’t sit in the same room with her, she’s such a basket case. And she’s always staring at me. It just never lets up. Every time something happens, we’re all together, but I get the blame.” Justin kicked at a box. “It isn�
�t fair. I need somebody on my side. Somebody has to listen to me.”

  As Charles was facing the boy, they both heard the noise to the left. Charles turned to see the knife sticking out of the target, the blade still wafting with the vibration.

  Justin’s eyes were wide this time. This was no flying pencil, no ball on a wire.

  “Now you’ll never believe me,” said the boy. He turned and ran in an uncoordinated, jagged stagger, out of the circle of light and into the dark, hitting against cartons and trunks in his mad flight, his wild search for a way out, for the light of an exit. His thin, flailing arms were poor versions of moth wings.

  Memory guided Charles through the darkness and swiftly to the door. He opened it to a rectangle of bright light. In a moment, the boy was through it and flying up the stairs, shoes slapdashing the ironwork. On the top landing, Justin fell. Charles lifted him to an upright stand and held him by the shoulders.

  “Are you all right?” No, he could see that the boy was not all right. Justin’s eyes were filling up with tears. The child slumped against his chest, and Charles held him until the racking stopped.

  Captain Judd Thomas of the West Side precinct sat dead center in the hierarchy of arranged chairs in Jack Coffey’s office. The captain was wearing his diplomatic smile, just enough teeth showing to say he wanted to keep this meeting friendly, no blood drawn, not today.

  “Palanski wants in on this case.”

  “I don’t think so, Judd,” said Jack Coffey, who was overworked, understaffed, and only wanted the meeting done with. All of this was in his face, the shadows of too little sleep, the lines of too much stress.

  “Palanski has a way of getting information from these people.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Mallory.

  Captain Thomas’s tiny eyes became even smaller as he turned on her. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Mallory rose from her chair and left the room so quickly there was no time for Coffey to threaten her with a look that promised charges of insubordination, charges that would have meant nothing to her.

  Riker smiled.

  Coffey was looking at Captain Thomas with something approaching temper in his eyes, but not crossing the line with the words.