The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Page 8

  “I didn’t do it,” said the boy.

  “He didn’t topple the vase,” said Charles. “Trains pass under this building all day long. The vibrations sometimes move objects around. That vase was very close to the edge.”

  Mallory stood behind the small family and stared at Charles with naked incredulity. Hands clasped behind his head, he leaned back in his chair and smiled at her as though seven thousand dollars’ worth of fifth-century crockery had not nearly smashed into worthless shards.

  “The trains didn’t make the pencil fly,” said the man in even tones that implied that Charles might be only half-bright.

  “No, they didn’t. May I introduce my partner, Mallory?”

  She walked over to the desk and faced the small family. While Charles made the formal introductions to the Riccalos, she checked out the boy first.

  Justin Riccalo’s blond hair was slicked back, and his lips were parted to display two prominent front teeth. The total effect was that of a wet rabbit with freckles. He could only be eleven at the outside. He was a basic nerd in training, wearing the requisite plastic protector in the front pocket of his shirt, all lined with pens and mechanical pencils. His feet were tapping the floor, anxious to be gone, even if it meant leaving the body behind them. Electric-blue eyes danced in a rock’n’roll of what’s over there, and now what’s over here, and what might be up on the ceiling?

  Sally Riccalo, the high-strung brunette, had been introduced as Justin’s stepmother. Mallory could almost hear the tension humming through the woman’s thin body, as though she were wired up to a wall socket. Mrs. Riccalo perched on the edge of her chair now, brown eyes wide and pleading, Don’t hurt me, to everyone who looked into them.

  The father, Robert Riccalo, was a former military man. That much was in his close-cropped haircut and the squared shoulders. The man was standing at attention while sitting down. He was so large in the torso, he towered over the woman and the boy, but not over Charles, to whom towering came naturally and apologetically.

  When the boy faced his stepmother, his neck elongated and his eyes gave away some joke he’d told to himself. A nervous giggle was rising up in his mouth. The military man put one heavy hand on the boy’s slender shoulder and caused it to dip with the weight. When Justin looked to his father, his head tucked in like a turtle. And all the while, the blue eyes danced to alternating rhythms of fun and fear.

  Now, the boy lifted his face to Mallory’s and a conspiracy of eyes began in silence. I know you, each face said to the other, though she and the boy had never met.

  Charles’s eyes rolled back and forth between them, saying, Just a moment. Have I missed something here?

  Another appointment was scheduled for the next day, and the small family trooped out, the father leading the charge, woman and boy following behind as his foot soldiers. When the door to the outer office closed behind them, Mallory turned on Charles, hefting the vase in one hand.

  “About those trains.”

  “That’s not the original. It’s a cheap copy. I rigged the vase myself. And it was the trains.”

  He walked over to the bookcase and picked up a wooden kitchen match. “This primed one edge of the vase toward the natural pull of gravity. Any vibration would have knocked it down. I just wondered what the boy would do.”

  “And?”

  “It startled him with the normal reaction time. Justin has good reflexes. But he denied all blame for the pencil and the vase. That’s odd, you know. He insists he’s not doing anything. That’s not consistent with the profile of the average psychokinetic subject.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it makes the whole thing more interesting. Maybe he’s not the one who’s doing it. There’s a problem with the logic. He didn’t take credit, and yet he didn’t seem frightened by it. Like he’s used to seeing things fly around the house, almost bored by it.”

  “Well, try and work it out before wife number three goes down, okay?” Mallory bent over the canvas bag on the desk in the front room.

  The cat poked its head out from under the desk, whiskers twitching, testing the air for screams and other loud noises. With more assurance, it exited the underside of the desk and looked up at Charles, tilting its head to one side as though the bandaged ear was weighting it that way.

  “Hello,” said Charles, bending down to pet it. The cat wriggled out from under his hand. It only had eyes for Mallory. It rubbed up against her leg, and she pushed it away.

  “The cat’s a material witness. Now I’ve already been through this with Riker. You laugh and I shoot you, it’s like that.”

  “What happened to the cat’s ear?”

  “I didn’t do it. Can you keep the cat for one night? I’m trading apartments with the Rosens today. I can’t take it back to my place.”

  “Of course.”

  Mallory pulled the cat’s litter box out of the canvas bag, and then two tins of fish. “His name is Nose. Just keep him out of my office. I don’t want any fur in my computers.”

  “I’ll take him back to my place.”

  “Thanks. So, apart from the flying objects, how did the interview go? You know which one of them is doing it if it’s not the boy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She pulled a file out of the bag.

  “The first Mrs. Riccalo died of a heart attack. But now that I’ve seen her husband, I have to wonder how much stress she was under and how much it would have taken to push her over the top. Here’s the hospital file.”

  She handed it to him, and he hesitated for that moment when people are trying to decide how dirty an object might be before they touch it. Perhaps he was wrong to believe that every computer printout she gave him might be purloined.

  “You stole it, right?”

  “Right,” she said. “But not this one.”

  The second file she handed him had the NYPD stamp on the cover. He scanned the information which detailed the suicide report on the deceased second wife of Robert Riccalo. He flipped through the three-page report. “Well, the files list the suicide as a nonsuspicious death.”

  “I may change that.”

  “Why?”

  “When you go through the suicide files, you find most jumpers are men. Women are less messy. And there was no note. They usually like to get even with their loved ones on the way out.”

  “Did the first two Mrs. Riccalos have anything in common?”

  “They were both professionals and carried the normal amount of life insurance through their employers. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t another policy or two. I’m still working on it. Sally Riccalo is also carrying insurance through the financial house where she works as a systems analyst. According to her résumé, she and Robert Riccalo worked for the same company ten years ago when the first Mrs. Riccalo was still alive. Interesting?”

  “We started out with a rather simple problem of flying objects. You don’t think murder is a bit of a stretch this early on? I suppose the insurance beneficiary was—”

  “Robert Riccalo. He’s also the beneficiary of wife number three.”

  “But isn’t the spouse usually the beneficiary?”

  “Yes, but it’s usually the wife who collects. So now I’ve got one heart attack, one suicide, and wife number three looks like she’s ready to explode. She wouldn’t get that upset over one pencil. What else has been flying her way lately?”

  “Oh, a pair of scissors, some bits of glass.”

  “What’s the father’s take?”

  “Anger, disbelief. Only the stepmother seems to be a believer.”

  “He accused the boy of moving the vase. He sounds like a believer to me.”

  “No. The stepmother is the only believer in the paranormal. Mr. Riccalo probably thinks the boy is doing it by trickery.”

  “One of them is. Are you sure it was your pencil that flew at her?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Charles, you’re a disgrace to Max Candle’s memory.”

  “The
art of illusion is not genetic. Having a magician in the family tree doesn’t vouch for talent in the rest of the bloodline.”

  “You have a whole damn magic store in the basement. You could make an elephant fly with all that equipment.”

  “Not really. Max had some brilliant illusions, but his specialty was defying death. It was Malakhai who could really make things move through the air, and nothing as clumsy as a flying pencil. He was the greatest illusionist who ever lived.”

  “Malakhai? The debunker?”

  “Well, debunking the paranormal frauds came later in life, after he retired from the stage. Before you were born, Malakhai did an act with his dead wife. . . .You seem skeptical. No, really. She was his assistant.”

  “His dead assistant?”

  “Oh yes, it was only after she died that she went into the magic act with Malakhai. When she was alive, she was a composer and a musician.”

  “What did he do, have her stuffed?”

  “No, she never appeared to the audience in the flesh. It was always understood that she was there, and yet not there—dead but not entirely gone, if you follow me. Well, after the audience got comfortable with the idea that she was not only invisible but dead, things began to float through the air as she handed him one thing and another.”

  “He’d fit in nicely with our family of the flying pencils. So that’s why Malakhai got into parapsychology?”

  “Oh, no. He’s the sworn enemy of parapsychologists. Every time they think they’ve discovered paranormal ability, he drops by to blow them out of the water and expose another scam.”

  “Are you thinking of calling him in for this one?”

  “For flying pencils? Hardly. And it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to disturb him. Malakhai’s in his seventies now. He and Louisa are living in quiet seclusion.”

  “Louisa?”

  “That’s his dead wife. If you cared less for computers and more for classical music, you would know her name. Louisa’s Concerto was her only composition, but it was brilliant. No classical collection is complete without it. The concerto was played during every performance. Oh, it was no act on the stage. Perhaps I should have mentioned that. No, Malakhai lived with her, talked with her, slept with her. He only created the flying-object illusions in the act so the audience could see her too.”

  “And this guy, this loon, debunks the paranormal?”

  “Yes, as madmen go, he’s quite functional. He always owned to the fact that he created his own madness. He knew there was no supernatural aspect to Louisa.”

  “Yeah, right. How did he get so crazy?”

  “Well, Louisa died very young. She wrote this splendid concerto, and then she died. He’d known her since she was a child, and he couldn’t quite let her go—so he reconstructed her.”

  “Again, please?”

  “He re-created her from memory, from intimate knowledge of her. It’s been done before, but the practice has been limited to remote Asian monasteries. The documented succubi created by monks were fashioned of pure imagination. Malakhai’s creation was based on a living woman—that was one difference. He knew Louisa so well. He knew what her response would be in every given situation. Then he constructed a faithful model of her. And after a while, he could not only hold conversations with her, but see her and touch her. It was a feat of immense concentration. You see, it has to be fanatically faithful to the living woman, to react in the same—”

  “But it’s a trick.”

  “An illusion, a great illusion, and of course, delusion, but it was a piece of art as masterful as Plato’s Dialogues. And a lot of us do it to some small extent. Don’t you sometimes wonder what Markowitz would do or say in certain situations?”

  She turned her face to the window, and he mentally slapped himself silly for crossing the line into her personal feelings, for he was one of the few who believed she might possess them.

  “Another distinction between Malakhai and the monks was that they called up their illusions and sent them away. Louisa was Malakhai’s constant companion. She still is.”

  Mallory turned back to him, and he watched the busy-work of her good brain through the static distraction of her eyes.

  “But this Malakhai—he’s definitely crazy, right?”

  “Oh yes, definitely. But it takes quite a good brain to go quite that crazy. When you consider the amount of concentration necessary to maintain a three-dimensional delusion—”

  “And when he talked with her, she answered the way she did when she was alive, even if the question was new?”

  “Oh, yes. Perversely, truth and logic were the glue of the delusion. She couldn’t respond in any way that was untrue to the living woman.”

  “Could you do it? Could you have a conversation with a dead woman?”

  “Malakhai and Louisa grew up together. What she would say, in any given situation, was predictable to him. He knew her mind, her most private thoughts. I don’t know anyone that well.”

  Certainly not you, Mallory.

  “Would you have to be crazy to create a thing like that?”

  “You would have to possess, at the very least, the insanity that goes with falling in love. A woman once told me that people in love were certifiable. I believe that. Malakhai reached across all the zones of reason to bring Louisa back. Now that’s the kind of love insanity is made of. He may be insane, but he’s also brilliant and rather charming. Whenever I stayed with Cousin Max, Malakhai and Louisa would come to dinner.”

  “Did the dead woman have a good appetite?”

  “As a child, I was never sure. There was always magic going on at Max’s house. They would set a plate for her and pour the wine, and during the course of the evening, the plate and glass would be emptied. The food and wine was probably spirited away in moments of distraction, I knew that, but part of me always believed in Louisa.”

  “Did you ever try the three-dimensional illusion?”

  “Delusion. No. Why would I? Why would anyone want to cross over that border?”

  Except for love.

  She was reaching down into the canvas bag, and then he noted the hesitation of a second thought as her hand pulled back empty. Now she turned to him. “I wish I had Amanda Bosch back for just five minutes.”

  “The lady by the lake, I presume.”

  “Yes, I think I’ve got a motive,” she said, bending again to dip into the bag. She pulled a manuscript out and sat down behind the desk, riffling through the pages, extracting one paper-clipped section.

  “I pulled this off Bosch’s computer. By the log-on time, this is the last file she ever updated. She’s been working on this book for almost a year. It’s a novel, but I don’t think it’s all fiction.”

  “Art is lies that tell the truth. Who said that?”

  “You’re the one with the computer-bank memory.”

  “Eidetic memory, and it doesn’t work like a computer. I can’t cross-index things the way you do with your machines.”

  “Here, cut to page 254 of chapter seven. Go to the last paragraph. Remember, she updated this the day she died.”

  He looked down at the page and read: “ ‘He was leaving again, going through the litany of each thing he had to do, all more pressiYOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR.’

  “I see what you mean,” said Charles. “It’s not a part of the text. More like an emotional outburst at the keyboard.”

  “Right. I caught that as I was printing out the file. I only had time to scan pages here and there, checking for file damage. It’s almost seven hundred pages. I’m pretty sure my perp is in there in detail, but you’re the only human I know who can read at the speed of light. I just don’t have the time. Could you take a look at it and make notes on the parts that ring true?”

  “Of course.” Charles seemed only to be glancing at the pages of the manuscript as he turned the sheets one after the other, yet he was reading every word and catching Mallory in a lie. He had noted the redness of her eyes, and now
he found the reason for it in the indents of thumb and forefinger which marked the base of each page she had read before him. After a few minutes’ cursory reading, he looked up at her.

  “I wonder what his lie was. She’s characterized him as a married man from the onset. So that can’t be it.”

  “It won’t be in the manuscript. I’m guessing she caught him in a recent lie.”

  “That’s an interesting possibility. You think he might have been cheating on the woman he was cheating with?”

  “That wasn’t it. I think the only use she had for this man was getting pregnant. But then she aborted the baby. I’ve got a problem with a lie as a murder motive, but it’s all I’ve got. Amanda Bosch was a professional researcher. She might have done a background check on him. It’s a reasonable assumption since he’s the father of her baby. So she caught him out in a lie.”

  “Well, that won’t narrow the field by much. There are as many categories of lies as there are people.”

  “Too bad your old friend Malakhai can’t reconstruct Amanda and ask her what the lie was. If I don’t wrap this up fast, the perp will get away with her murder. When you finish with the manuscript, just leave it in my office.”

  “All right, but I wouldn’t count on this too much if I were you. I don’t think a writer draws on life to a greater extent than an actor does when he fleshes out a role. The actor doesn’t act his life, and I suspect, even when a writer does an autobiography, he doesn’t write his life.”

  “And this last bit of type—the LIAR lines you call an emotional outburst? Who is she screaming at if not the character in the book?”

  “All right, I’ll read it with that in mind.”

  “Are you going to the poker game tomorrow night?”

  “Of course.” The poker game was the highlight of his week. He had inherited his chair in the game from Inspector Louis Markowitz, and with that chair came three friends. Each new friend was something precious to him, as though in the gathering of people he could make up for a life of isolation in academia and think tanks. “If I didn’t show up for the game, they’d expect me to send them a check for the usual losses. That’s only fair, I suppose. I wouldn’t want them to suffer financial damage by my absence.”