The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Read online

  Helen’s mother had been quiet up to this point, and then the old woman stood up with difficulty, leaning on her cane and waving off the maid who rushed to her side. “Enough,” she said, imperious in her tone, threats in her eyes. “Alice, what’s done is done.”

  Alice began to rise, lips parting, and as Helen’s mother had waved off the maid, she waved Alice’s mouth shut. But too late; the damage had been done. Helen was crying, tears streaming down her face.

  Kathy had gone after Helen’s sister with the propulsion of a bullet, shooting her face to within an inch of Alice’s. In a rush of menace, low tones working up from the gut, words carrying real weight and hatred, she said, “If you ever make Helen cry again, I’ll cut you at the knees, you cunt!”

  “Don’t say cunt, dear,” Helen had said then, appearing behind the child and shunting small arms into the sleeves of a new winter coat. As they followed the maid down the long hallway, Kathy heard Helen’s mother laughing uproariously. She had tried to turn and go back with the intention of beating the old woman to a pulp, but Helen had restrained her. With Helen it usually took no more than a look or the lightest pressure to contain the small and continuous storm that was Kathy Mallory.

  Fourteen years later, Mallory was back. Helen was four years in the ground, and she was looking into Helen’s eyes in the ruined face of Alice.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Alice.

  “Well, I’m not,” said Mallory.

  Are you disappointed, Aunt Alice?

  “But I heard it on the evening news,” she said, as though she had caught Mallory in a lie. “Well, no matter. It’s a bit late to be calling, isn’t it? And I mean that on several levels.”

  “I guess it has been a while,” said Mallory. “I saw you at Markowitz’s funeral.”

  On the day they had lain the old man in the ground, she had looked up to see Alice, a ghost of Helen in her likeness, hovering near the open grave. When she looked back again, the ghost was gone.

  “I thought Helen would’ve wanted a member of the family there,” said Alice. “I thought she would have liked that.”

  “She would have. Thank you.”

  “You haven’t changed so much since you were a little girl, but then, you never looked like a little girl. Your eyes were always more like an adult’s. What a disturbing child you were. Violent, rude, uncivilized.”

  Mallory said nothing, took no offense; it was all true.

  “I know where you live now, Kathy. Only a few blocks from here, isn’t it? That condominium must have been very expensive. And I imagine the maintenance fees are rather high. Why are you here? You want money, I suppose.”

  “I don’t need money.”

  “Then what do you want?” Alice leaned forward with a new intensity, a sudden burst of light in the watering blue irises. “What could you possibly want from me?” Her voice was rising, wavering in the high notes, close to breaking. “You took my sister away from me! Did you know she never spoke to me again? Did you know how much I loved Helen?”

  Alice rose out of her chair. The effort seemed to tax her. Was Alice dying of the same cancer that killed Helen? She looked thin and weary.

  Alice’s supply of venom was exhausted. She sank down to the cushion of the chair and deeper. She cried, and Mallory waited it out, neither offering aid nor withdrawing, only waiting for it to be over with.

  “Why did you come? What do you want from me?”

  “I need your help.”

  “The Coventry Arms has quite a mix of people these days. The rock stars have loud parties, and so do the political people,” said the old woman who must be in her late eighties.

  “There’s a television personality in the building and an actor,” said the old woman’s husband, who had been introduced to Mallory as Ronald Rosen.

  Mrs. Rosen, called Hattie, nodded. “It’s true. In my day, they would never allow theater people in a nice building.”

  “In your day,” said her husband, “gangsters were the aristocracy of the West Side.” The old man turned to Mallory. “When I was a kid, we came up out of Hell’s Kitchen, same as your mother’s people. What a time to be alive. When I was a boy, I ran errands for Owney Madden, the Duke of the West Side. I saw two of his men shot down in the bootleg whiskey wars.”

  Mallory was drinking tea out of a fragile china cup and facing the elderly Rosens, residents of the Coventry Arms. Alice leaned over and replenished the tea from an antique silver pot.

  “So you’re Helen’s daughter,” said Mr. Rosen. “You must take after your father’s side.” Mrs. Rosen kicked his shoe and he knew he had said something wrong, but not what. Apparently it didn’t matter, for his wife resumed her good-natured smile.

  “We watched Helen grow up in this apartment, didn’t we, Alice?” said Mrs. Rosen. “Though we didn’t see her but three or four times after she married Louis Markowitz. I was at her funeral. What’s it been, Alice, three, four years since Helen died?” Mrs. Rosen turned back to Mallory. “I saw you there. I didn’t want to intrude. I spoke to Louis Markowitz in the reception line. He seemed like such a . . .” She shot a look at Alice. “Oh, but I’m going on.”

  “Is Mallory your married name?” asked Mr. Rosen, who was again shown the error of his ways by a kick from Mrs. Rosen, who undoubtedly knew the facts from Alice.

  “This is so exciting,” said Hattie Rosen. “Just like television. Do you want us to use assumed names?”

  “Good idea,” said Mallory. “And I’ll need a letter for the concierge—something to explain why I’m living in your condo.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Rosen. “And we should say something about it to Arthur. He’s our doorman. I don’t like lying to Arthur.”

  “Stick with the truth,” said Mallory. “But keep it simple. Tell him you’re leaving on urgent personal business, and I’m a friend of the family. I’ll take care of the lies.”

  “Did I mention that Ronald snores?” asked Mrs. Rosen. “We have separate bedrooms.”

  “My condo is a two-bedroom with a view of the river and a twenty-four-hour doorman,” said Mallory. “Are there a lot of people in your building with personal computers?”

  “Everyone has a computer now—even us,” said Mrs. Rosen. “They wired the entire building for an electronic bulletin board.”

  “My wife uses the computer,” said Mr. Rosen. “What do I know from computers?”

  “So what’s to know? You only have to know where the on-switch is. You push a button and voilà, there’s the bulletin board for the building. You leave notes for the building management and the super, arrange for dog walking, vacation notice. You can even do your banking from the computer if you’re on-line with your bank. Now don’t you be afraid of it, dear. It’s only a machine. And the directions are written on the door of the console. You’ll pick it up easy. Oh, and the girl who cleans comes once a week. She has her own key, but you can trust her with your life. Sarah, I think. Ronald, is that her name? Sarah?”

  “I can move in tomorrow?”

  “Yes, but we have to be back in ten days for my cousin Bitsy’s golden wedding anniversary. We’ve invited a hundred people, dear. You understand. Now about your condo—it’s wired for cable TV?”

  When the arrangements for the exchange of apartments had been completed, when the Rosens had gone, and she and Alice had said their strained good nights, Mallory was on her way to the door, passing slowly through the rooms of the apartment where Helen had grown up, taking in each detail.

  She passed near the grand piano, which was covered with a tapestry throw and photographs, perhaps fifty, in small, ornate frames. All the faces were children’s. The portraits to the rear were dated by the clothing, and in front were the children only recently come to abide on the piano. Mallory found Helen’s photograph as a girl. It was placed toward the back with the children who had grown up and grown old. She picked it up and stared at Helen’s young face.

  She was setting the picture back in its place when her han
d froze, and her eyes locked on a frame in the middle rows. She recognized her own likeness staring out of the sea of brand-new eyes. It was a school photograph, taken a full year after the visit.

  Her own portrait had neither pride of place, nor was it hidden, but fit well into its proper station among the generations, the family.

  3

  DECEMBER 22

  Riker made his way up the stairs of the animal hospital and into a wide waiting room the size of an auditorium. A pet shop smell mingled with odors of cleaning solvents, and a cacophony of barks and chirps emanated from every row of seats. Pet owners crooned to their jiggling, meowing, howling carrier boxes. Others clutched leashes, holding back dogs who would rather be elsewhere. The human noises were choruses of “poor baby” and all its variations. These people, perhaps a hundred of them, were serious animal lovers.

  So what was Mallory doing here?

  Despite the crowding to standing room only, Mallory had half a row to herself. The cat sat on her lap and tried to lick her face. She stared down at the animal. With perfect understanding and the desire to go on living, the cat ceased its attempted licking and curled up on the legs of Mallory’s jeans. One ragged ear was drooping, the point of it all but severed.

  The bird people cast their eyes nervously over the cat and hugged their carrier cages. The dog people were holding their leashes with a death grip, more than a little put out that Mallory had not disguised the cat as a box. Rules of etiquette were clearly being violated here, and they were not rules that Helen Markowitz could have imparted to Mallory, for theirs had been a house without pets.

  Riker watched her for a minute more. She was detached from the cat, but the cat was very attached to her. He could hear the purring four rows away. Now Mallory’s head turned slowly until she was facing him, staring into his eyes.

  A world-class spook that kid was. And he blamed Markowitz for that. There had been a limit to the kind of games one could play with a child who was not a child. The games Markowitz devised for her had developed ricochet vision. And he believed she could feel the rise in temperature when one more live body walked into a room.

  She nodded to him. He moved past a dog and a parrot, another dog, a lizard and ten empty seats to sit down beside her.

  He looked at the cat, who only looked at Mallory. “So you think the department’s gonna pay for the vet’s bill?”

  “Damn right. The cat’s a witness.”

  “Hey, this is Riker you’re talkin’ to.”

  “The cat knows the perp, and the perp knows the cat.”

  “I think you’re pressing your luck, kid.”

  Her eyes said, Don’t call me kid.

  “Coffey’s not too thrilled about the condo switch. Might have been good politics if you’d run the idea past him first.”

  “It’s none of his business where I live.”

  “Well, he had an interesting point. Amanda Bosch was your age, your style. Maybe she was a little shorter, but you’re definitely the perp’s type.”

  “I know that.”

  Mallory’s face moved in tandem with the cat’s face. Two pairs of slanting eyes stared at him.

  It was too early for a drink.

  “What name are you using?”

  “My own name.”

  “Risky, isn’t it? I only say that because your pretty face has been all over the television as a dead woman and a cop. Odds are he’s seen you. If he hasn’t, somebody’s gonna mention it to him.”

  “Good. Just wait till he sees the cat.”

  “You don’t know who he is. You’ll never see him coming.”

  “I’m not dealing with Professor Moriarty here. He’s a man who knows as much about computers as a secretary, maybe less. He’s a liar who got caught out. And he’s the panicky type.”

  She leaned down to the canvas bag at the foot of her chair and extracted a manila file holder. “This is the list of tenants and their stats.”

  He took the file and opened it, letting out a low whistle as he scanned the names of credit card companies, insurance companies, and financial institutions. Well, this would explain the redness in her eyes; she’d been up all night breaking into computer banks. And then she’d probably been wading through that mess of paperwork pulled off of Amanda Bosch’s computer—maybe five or six hundred pages she had neglected to mention in the apartment inventory.

  How did she get the U.S. Army info? It sometimes took him a week or more to pull personnel files.

  “What’s with the military service records?”

  “Physical stats—height and blood groups.”

  “Mallory, we didn’t find anything to type his blood group.”

  “He doesn’t know that. He drove himself nuts cleaning that place. The things he cleaned. He doesn’t sleep nights wondering what we might have found.”

  He was looking at a list of units with more than forty-five names crossed off.

  “What are the cross-offs?”

  “Most of them won’t meet the height requirement. And I crossed off all the single men and women. And the married man who made a fortune in software—he’d know you can delete a file, but you can’t erase it. He’d know the files could be restored. Cross off the apartments owned by corporations with three-day turnover—my perp was New York based. Then the vacant apartments are crossed off. What I’ve got left loosely fits the profile.”

  “What about this writer, Eric Franz? He’s single, isn’t he?” He held up her fax of the vehicular accident stats dated to late November. “His wife died more than a month ago.”

  “The affair with Bosch started before that. A year or so—isn’t that what Mrs. Farrow told you? And Bosch was more than three months gone with the baby before she aborted.”

  A hungry-looking sheepdog had made three rows of progress toward Mallory and the cat. His owner, an elderly woman, regained the leash and dug her heels into the linoleum to bring the dog to a choking halt.

  “Got any favorites?”

  “Yeah. I put stars by their names. Four of them don’t keep regular hours. That would leave them free for afternoons with Amanda.”

  The sheepdog was gaining ground again, slowly dragging his owner behind him. Riker and Mallory exchanged glances.

  “If you shoot the dog, kid, you better kill the owner, too. If you let the old lady live, she’ll sue the city. Commissioner Beale won’t like that.”

  Apparently, the cat had never seen a dog before. Nose was sitting docile on Mallory’s lap, only mildly curious about the large frenzied animal which was coming to eat him.

  Riker resumed his reading. Mallory had a question mark by the name of Harry Kipling. A penciled note read: Connection to Kipling Electronics?

  That name might give Coffey a few bad moments. High-profile suspects were the worst. With any luck, Kipling would prove to be a computer freak, and thus beyond the pale. “How did you get a blood type on Kipling? There’s no Army record.”

  She looked at him for only a moment, and he understood that this was not something he would want to know. And now it began to dawn on him that local hospital records must be a piece of cake after cracking the U.S. Army computers.

  “Oh shit,” said Riker. He was staring at two more high-profile names on the list. One was a recent appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, and his Senate hearing was in progress. Another name was that of a prominent TV reporter who now had his own talk show every afternoon. These were two of the four bearing stars in the column.

  When he looked up again, the crazed sheepdog had left the floor and was hurtling toward the cat. One of Mallory’s long legs was already curling back to kick the beast into the next world.

  The door to Charles’s private office was closed on the low voices of moderate conversation. Mallory set the large canvas bag down on the desk in the front room. The cat stepped out of the bag and rubbed up against her arm as she opened the drawer to check the answering machine for messages.

  Charles objected to the sight of modern conveniences among
the antiques of another century, and so she worked around him by hiding them out of sight. He was still unaware of the security system she had installed—she was that good at wiring.

  She pushed the cat away and pressed the button to hear Coffey’s voice saying, “I want to talk to you the minute you get in. The minute! You got that, Mallory?”

  Yeah, right.

  A woman’s scream pierced the door to Charles’s private office. The cat flew off the desk.

  She was through the door and into the next room with her gun drawn as a man’s voice was saying, “Justin, don’t!”

  The only woman in the room was taking the quick breaths of hyperventilation. Her eyes bulged and her shoulder blades were nearly even with her ears. Her face was pale and she was shaking violently—all but her hands, which gripped the arms of the chair in the manner of a rocket pilot preparing for a maiden launch.

  The man had turned from the boy and was barking at the woman now. “For Christ’s sake, Sally, pull it together. It’s only a damn pencil!”

  “It seems to like you, Sally,” said the boy, who sat between them. “Why don’t you just give the pencil a name and take it for long walks in the park?”

  “That’s enough out of you,” said the man to the boy.

  Mallory looked down to the offending pencil lying in the woman’s lap and up to nothing sinister. But the woman was staring at it as though it might be a living snake.

  Mallory turned. She had heard the gentle rocking before she saw the vase teetering on the edge of the bookshelf. The vase fell. She shot out one hand to catch it only a few inches above that section of hardwood floor not covered by the Persian rug.

  Now the man was yelling at the boy again. “Justin, I told you to stop!”

  The boy shrank back from the man. He turned to look over his shoulder at the vase in Mallory’s hand, and then at her gun as she replaced it in the shoulder holster. The woman with the fear of pencils was covering her mouth. Only Charles was not agitated. He was calmly watching all of them.