The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Page 6

  “I don’t think so. I only met her once, and she didn’t like me.”

  “How could she not like you? What’s not to like?”

  She was closed to him now, lost in the scrolling action of the computer, which continued to spit paper.

  “So how come you never got along with Helen’s folks? I know they didn’t like Markowitz, but you?”

  “Aunt Alice just took a sudden dislike to me when I was a kid. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”

  What had Mallory done to Aunt Alice?

  Riker’s notebook lay open in his hand as he looked around the doctor’s private office. The room was thick with the scent and the green of living plants, some with delicate blooms. The doctor was also on the delicate side, and Riker pegged him for a gentle soul who trapped houseflies and released them out of doors. He felt sorry for the poor little bastard in the white coat, who was explaining to Mallory that he could not violate Amanda Bosch’s privacy, be she living or dead. The doctor would not tell her if Amanda did or did not have any sexually transmitted diseases. There was a principle of confidentiality here which he could never violate.

  Mallory was tensing, and Riker guessed the doctor could not read the warning signs. This poor man’s career of sensitivity to women and their gynecological problems had not prepared him for this.

  She was rising to a stand.

  Too late, Doc.

  Mallory slammed the autopsy photographs down on the blotter in front of the man, startling him. She leaned across his desk and pressed him deep into the cushions of his chair without laying a hand on him.

  Not raising her voice, but ticking off the syllables in the even meters of a live time bomb, Mallory said, “Look at what that bastard did to her.”

  These were not the pretty photographs the uniforms had shown to the doormen, the shots with the head wound and the damage of insects. This was the autopsy aftermath, the hard-core obscenity of a woman hollowed out like a bloody canoe.

  Mallory never mentioned that a pathologist had done this. She let the good doctor run the course of his imagination, which was draining his face of blood, bringing him to his feet and leading him to the door of the washroom.

  Mallory settled down in her chair to wait out the noises of a man retching, splattering his lunch over water and porcelain. Her arms crossed and her mouth slanted down on one side to say she had expected more fortitude from a medical man.

  When the doctor returned to his desk, he sat down slowly in the manner of one who had just aged thirty years and had suddenly become careful of his brittle bones. His soft white hands grasped one another for comfort.

  He was Mallory’s creature now.

  “Did you know the father of the baby?”

  “No. She wouldn’t talk about him. I had the idea he was probably a married man.”

  “I want to know if any sexually transmitted disease could have been a motive. I don’t have all damn day to wait on lab results from the ME.”

  “No, nothing like that. I tested her for everything at her request. No disease of any kind. The pregnancy was compromising her health, but that was due to a physical defect of the uterus.”

  “Is that why she had the abortion? It was therapeutic?”

  “I have no idea why she aborted the baby. She wanted that child more than anything in the world. She had enormous difficulty conceiving because of the physical abnormalities. It was a chance in a million, her pregnancy.”

  “You did the abortion?”

  “No, it was done in a city hospital. She went into the emergency room complaining of bleeding and cramps. I got there as fast as I could. It wasn’t a hospital where I had privileges. And before they would even let me see her, it was over. It was done by a bad doctor with a cut-rate education. She was butchered.”

  The doctor’s eyes slid over to the photograph on his desk as though he had second thoughts on the definition of butchery.

  “After the abortion, there was no possibility of another pregnancy. No amount of corrective surgery could have repaired the damage done to her.”

  “When was the abortion done?”

  “It was one week ago today. She canceled two appointments with me, and I never saw her again. I called and left messages. She never called back.”

  “So she miscarried? Is that how it started?”

  “No. There was no miscarriage.”

  “You think she tried to abort herself?”

  “No, of course not. Nothing like that, but the fetus was definitely in danger. She hadn’t slept for days, or eaten. There was an enormous amount of pressure on her.”

  “What kind of pressure?”

  “I don’t know. When I saw her that night in the hospital, she wouldn’t tell me what had brought it on. I don’t know what the emotional trauma was. The doctor in attendance had given her the option of saving the baby. He said she screamed at him, ‘No! Cut it out of me!’ The fool never took Amanda’s emotional state into consideration, he just went ahead and cut her.”

  “What kind of trauma would bring on the bleeding and the cramps?”

  “Oh, something that would cost her peace of mind and sleep. Bed rest was important. It isn’t unusual for some women with her medical profile to spend the entire pregnancy in bed.”

  “Give me the reasons why she might want to get rid of the baby,” said Mallory. “I know she wasn’t a hardship case. I’ve seen her bank account.”

  “Maybe there was some disclosure about the baby’s father or his past, something that made her revolt at the idea of bearing his child. She was just entering the second trimester of the pregnancy. I have no idea when she told the father about it. He may have recently disclosed some genetic problem.”

  “But you would have done tests for that, right?”

  “She wasn’t a good candidate for amniocentesis. It was a very delicate pregnancy. I’d need a pretty good reason to put a needle into the womb to extract the necessary fluid. But Amanda never mentioned genetic problems, or any other problems. She was a very happy woman—before she lost the baby.”

  “Can you think of any other possibilities?”

  “Women will abort in cases of rape. Of course, that wouldn’t apply here, but it’s the fact that the man is so repugnant to them that makes them abort the issue of a rapist. The emotional trauma could have been caused by any number of things, but it would have to be something horrible to make her abort her child.”

  The doctor’s face was set in real grief.

  “I liked Amanda very much.” His eyes strayed back to the autopsy photos. He reached out and pushed them off the edge of his desk. “The bank account you mentioned—that was the down payment for a house. She wanted a house with a yard for the child to play in.”

  At the end of the day, in Coffey’s office, which was still called Markowitz’s office, Riker was saying, “And the perp gets Mallory’s good-housekeeping commendation.”

  Coffey turned to Mallory. “Did Forensics turn up anything?”

  “Heller’s team found a cap gun in the building trash bin. He thinks it’s tied to Bosch’s apartment.”

  “He got prints off it?”

  “No,” said Mallory. “That’s why he thinks it’s tied. The toy gun was wiped clean. It’s a replica of an old six-shooter.”

  “I didn’t know they still made cap guns like that.”

  “Only a few companies do,” said Riker, looking down at his notebook. “But that won’t help. This one was manufactured thirty years ago. It might have belonged to the perp when he was a kid.”

  “You think he tried to scare her with it?”

  “Could be,” said Riker. “You gotta wonder about a grown man who keeps his toys.”

  A baseball with a Mickey Mantle autograph sat on the desk between them. Coffey smiled with no trace of ruffling, no rising to the bait. Riker shrugged.

  “What have we got on motive—anything?”

  “She had something on him and threatened him,” said Mallory. “He panicked and killed her.”<
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  “Where is this coming from, Mallory?”

  “She was a researcher and a fact checker. He was the father of her child—”

  “You don’t know that.” Or did she?

  “If he was the father of her child, it would make sense for her to check him out,” said Mallory. “So she must have turned up something. It fits. No holes in it.”

  “But it’s a lot of supposition, isn’t it? Unless you were holding out on me. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  Of course she would. He looked to Riker, and gave the man credit for not rolling his eyes.

  “No, I’m not,” she said.

  But Coffey decided she was seconds too late in saying it.

  “So you made an ID on the corpse. Good job, Mallory. But the Coventry Arms address is flimsy. I can’t interrogate these people based on what you’ve got—not without getting harassment complaints from the governor’s personal guest list. We’ve got zip for physical evidence. If the park is the crime site, the lack of an alibi for the six minutes it takes to do a murder won’t hold up in court. We’ve got a twenty-four-hour period where he could have gone into Bosch’s apartment. He didn’t even need to do the cleanup in one block of time. So we question every male in the building, and where does it get us? I can’t do that just because there’s a card missing from a file. We don’t know that Bosch didn’t toss out the address card herself. Maybe she dropped Hyde as a client.”

  “She didn’t toss the card. There are also cards in the hard copy file for inactive clients. This woman never tossed anything.”

  Except a half-created baby.

  “It’s not enough to bring anybody in.”

  “I’m not asking you to bring anybody in. You could move me into the building,” said Mallory. “One of those apartments has to be vacant. Somebody’s out of town, somebody’s relocated.”

  “So you think you can move into a sublet or a vacancy without alerting the suspect? We’re still getting calls from people who think you’re dead because they saw your face on TV.”

  “I know he’s tied to that building. If I can’t flush him out, I’ll never get him.”

  “You can’t catch them all, Mallory.”

  “The killer is in a circle that overlaps with Bosch and Hyde, and there are notes on a social relationship with Hyde. This woman might have introduced them, or maybe Bosch and the killer met while she was visiting Hyde. I know he’s tied to that address.”

  “You’re sure that Hyde doesn’t figure in this?”

  “I can place her in Australia on the day of the killing. No way she could get back in time. She’s over sixty and she won’t fit the height requirement.”

  “But it’s her name on the missing card. Hired talent maybe? The MO won’t fit a pro hit, but all hit men start out as amateurs.”

  “It won’t fit at all. Amanda Bosch had a personal relationship with her killer. She went to the park that morning to meet the perp. The murder wasn’t premeditated—no weapon was brought to the crime scene. He used a rock and his hands.”

  “Why don’t we invite Miss Hyde in for questioning? We could do the interview as a request for assistance.”

  “No. I don’t want to alert anybody to the death of Amanda Bosch. The rest of her clients are in midtown and the Village area. Her only connection on the Upper West Side was that building. It was only the address the perp wanted to hide.”

  “Mallory, you’ve got nothing solid. You don’t know that he lives in the Coventry Arms.”

  “I know where he lives because I know him. He spent a lot of time with the body, working her hands over, making pulp out of them. He took his time. After he got over the initial panic, he was comfortable in that place. It was close to home.”

  Coffey slid a folder across the desk. It had Heller’s initials on it.

  “Heller’s backing you up on the park as the original crime scene. How’d you talk him into going back? They found the blood splatters on the underside of kicked-over rocks by the water. He was in here half an hour ago. Says you authorized the overtime.”

  “That also backs up the Coventry Arms as the perp’s residence. He took the card to keep us from tracking her back to that address. Get me in there.”

  “Get me something solid, then we’ll talk about a surveillance nest.”

  “If you won’t do anything else to help me, at least don’t release the name of the victim. If I’m going to flush him out, I need that edge.”

  “You got my word. Nobody gets the name.”

  “Yeah, right. Thanks,” she said, and the words for nothing remained unspoken and hanging in the air for minutes after she left the room.

  Mallory stopped the car in front of the Coventry Arms and let the engine idle.

  The century-old building was fortresslike and forbidding. The stucco edifice was dotted with window lights that blazed and lesser lights that only glimmered. Gables and plant-choked balconies relieved the flat plane of the building and the long line of its roof, and ivy twined up the walls far past the night-black leaves of ancient trees. The character of the windows varied from squares, rectangles and circles to the great arch of the centerpiece of stained glass. This window might have graced a cathedral, but the brilliantly colored imagery was older than the church.

  She worked out the ancient mythology in the glass. The years spent at Barnard had not been a total waste of time. The figure of the woman in the window must be the goddess of spring. She was being carried in the arms of her lover, the god of the underworld, as he raced toward the edge of a cliff. The lovers were frozen forever in this act of murder and suicide as they hurtled, full tilt, toward the edge of death, gateway to Hades and home.

  The entrance to the building was the stone mouth of a behemoth, narrowing to a set of doors studded with copper ornamental friezes. In addition to the requisite doorman, there was a security guard on duty tonight, a recent adjunct to the age of rock stars and their building-storming groupies.

  She had a badge in the back pocket of her jeans. She could enter the building anytime she wished, talk to whomever she wished. She had the power, but she couldn’t use it, not yet. And she couldn’t sneak in. Coffey had been right to reject the surveillance nest, but for all the wrong reasons. It was better to go in with a blaze of neon lights. It was only the covert things that people found suspicious.

  She drove past the Coventry Arms and toward the less famous building at the end of the block. She had visited this place only once in her life, yet her memory of it was vivid in every detail. She double-parked the car as she always did. It was easier for her to fix the parking tickets on the computer than to mark the car for the meter maids.

  She handed her business card to the doorman when he asked whom she had come to visit and whom she might be.

  “Are you Mallory or Butler, miss?”

  “Tell her it’s Kathy, her niece.”

  Not strictly true. Her adoption had never been formalized. She had refused to answer questions about her past or her parents. Without a trace on relatives, the paperwork could go no further. She had kept the legal status of a foster child, and there was no such thing as a foster aunt. But though there were a lot of Mallorys in the world, Alice’s only sister had only one child named Kathy.

  The man replaced the house phone on its hook. He held the door open, and his smile was wide. Aunt Alice must be generous with her tips.

  The night man at the desk was settling his own telephone onto its cradle and nodding tactful understanding of Mallory’s importance here as she passed through the lobby.

  This was a place, not of extreme wealth, but of quiet money. The lobby furnishings were good, but not museum pieces. The passenger-controlled elevator ran with the smooth hum of good maintenance.

  On her first visit, there had been an elevator operator. She remembered looking up at the man from her height of ten years old. She rarely saw such people anymore. It was the human-expendable age of automation.

  The elevator doors opened onto a floor of de
ep-pile beige rugs. The walls were papered in stripes of sedate taste. She didn’t need the apartment number. Memory led her to the door at the end of the hall. On her toes, she could not have reached the brass lion’s-head door knocker the first time she had come here with Helen.

  The maid, the same maid, opened the door and stood back to allow her to pass into the foyer. Mallory followed the woman down the hallway, and here perception was altered again. This hall had seemed miles long when she was a child.

  They passed by the music room and into wider space. The dimensions of this room had changed only slightly. It was not quite the grand ballroom of a child’s memory, but close. Bric-a-brac covered every table, and family photographs hung in clusters along every linear foot of the walls. She would have bet good money that not one stick of furniture had been moved in the past fourteen years. It was all dark wood and drapes of crimson. And shadows filled the corners, light glinting in reflection off some candy dish of silver, some ornament of gold.

  The photographs and portraits went back many generations, so Helen had told her on their only visit. She remembered very little of that afternoon’s conversation. Alice had looked very much like her sister, and the strong family resemblance was also in the aged face of Helen’s mother. But that old woman’s skin was then already graying with the thing growing inside her, the same thing that would kill Helen years in the future.

  The adults had bored her until they got onto the subject of Markowitz. Then she had listened, her small hands balling into fists. Markowitz might be a cop, but he was also her old man. She had risen off her chair in a burst of angry energy. Helen’s eyes pushed her back down. Her small hands folded on her lap once again, and the child, who had recently been dining from garbage cans, neatly crossed her legs at the ankles as Helen had taught her to do.

  “So this is the best Louis could provide you with?” said Helen’s sister Alice, whose voice had been on the rise for too long. And by young Kathy Mallory’s lights, it was too loud a voice to be using on gentle Helen Markowitz.

  “Not even a tie of blood but someone else’s castaway child, something out of the gutter.”