The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Page 9

  “Charles, one day I’ll sit down with you and teach you how to beat those guys at poker.”

  But that would not be today. She was ticking off items in a notebook, and even at half the room’s distance, he could see a great many unchecked items yet to go. He turned to the window and looked down to the street two floors below. “Actually, Rabbi Kaplan says my consistent losses speak well of me.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “What? And ruin his reputation—spoil the good name of Kaplan the Cryptic? No, I think I’m supposed to work it out.” His eyes were still on the street below, following the progress of a familiar figure in a shapeless winter coat. He turned to face her. “All right, you know, don’t you?”

  “The rabbi was complimenting your honesty, Charles. Poker is a liar’s game. Tomorrow night, I want you to get something off Slope and Duffy.” And now she made a check by one more item, which must have been himself. “I gave both of them shopping lists, things I need to get without going through Coffey or Riker.”

  “You know, Mallory, there are other police officers on the force besides yourself. They tend to think of themselves as members of a team.”

  “Yeah, Riker has the same idea.” There was an edge to her voice, more impatience than anger. “He thinks he’s my coach.”

  Here, Charles would like to have said something in Riker’s defense, for he liked the man very much, but there were perils to even giving the appearance of choosing any side but hers. In all their conversations, he seemed always to be seeking safe ground with her. “Why don’t you come to the game with me? Rabbi Kaplan speaks highly of you as a born card shark.”

  “I can’t. I was barred from the game when I was thirteen.”

  A key was turning in the lock, and as the door opened, the hose of a vacuum cleaner preceded the small dark head of Mrs. Ortega.

  This precluded Charles asking any personal questions like, “What in God’s name did you do to those people to get barred from the poker game?”

  Mrs. Ortega stopped suddenly, eyeing the cat, perhaps with a view to skinning it and making a purse of the pelt. In her oft-expressed view as a professional cleaning woman, the only good fur shedder was a dead one. The cat rubbed up against Mallory’s jeans, and now that Mrs. Ortega associated the cat with Mallory, she looked at the younger woman with surprise and something less than her former respect for a fellow believer from the Church of Immaculate Housekeeping.

  Mallory handed the woman a twenty-dollar bill, with the silent understanding that she knew the cat fur would make extra work. Mrs. Ortega pocketed the bill and cast a kinder eye on the cat.

  The buzzer went off, loud and irritating. Mallory put up her hand to stop Charles on his way to the door.

  “Okay, who is it?”

  “Riker,” he said, without the usual split second of hesitation.

  He opened the door, and there stood Riker in all his slovenly glory. Mallory’s jaw jutted out. Charles could see she wasn’t buying this. No way could he have known who was on the other side of the door. She too could recognize the polite light buzzer style of Henrietta Ramsharan of the third floor, and the sharp raps of the musician on the first floor. But Riker had no style in any sense of that word, not in any aspect of his life.

  “Hi, Charles,” said Riker. He nodded to Mallory, and made an exaggerated bow to Mrs. Ortega, who screwed up her face and walked into the next room muttering something that might have been “damn cops.”

  “You called Charles to tell him you were coming and when,” said Mallory to Riker. Then she looked at Charles for confirmation, not believing for a moment that he could’ve known by any other means.

  Charles smiled and shook his head. There were limits to what he could discern from knocks, but in truth, Riker had never called him; he had seen the sergeant’s arrival from the window. And now he had his first breakthrough in the art of poker as he decided not to enlighten her. His mind was racing on to new hopes of being the big winner in tomorrow’s game as Riker was settling into the deep padding of the couch.

  Riker pulled a crumple of papers from the inside pocket of his overcoat and spread them out on his lap in an attempt to smooth out the damage. The first page was a map of the park with yellow lines drawn in two areas. He looked up at Mallory, who was still glaring at Charles.

  “Heller pinpointed the exact site where Amanda fell. The guy’s a genius. He took soil samples down to the Department of Agriculture. The dirt in the wound was full of microscopic critters that won’t live in the shadow areas like the wooded patch where we found Amanda.” Riker dangled a cigarette from his lip and fished his pockets for a match. “Heller says he’s gonna write a monograph and give you half the credit, Mallory. So, you ready to take a look at the crime scene now?”

  “What for?” She picked up the sheet with the yellow markings. “I can read a map.”

  “Hey, Mallory, I’m just along for the ride, okay? But most of us like to swing by the crime scene, maybe take a look at the place where the victim died.”

  “Waste of time. I read the report. Forensics has been over the ground and probably ten or twelve cops with big feet. What am I gonna see?”

  “You never know, kid.” A match sparked in his hand; the flame died in a cloud of exhaled smoke.

  “Don’t call me kid.”

  Mrs. Ortega returned to the front room and was plugging in the vacuum cleaner. Riker smiled at the woman.

  “You know, Mrs. Ortega, we got a suspect here you’d really appreciate. All we know about the bastard is that he lives in a luxury condo, and he can clean an apartment like a pro.”

  “Then he wasn’t born no rich kid.”

  “Huh?”

  “Rich kids aren’t raised right. You can tell if they earn their money or get it the easy way. Mallory knows from clean.” She turned to Charles. “Now your mother never let your feet touch the ground. You had live-in help when you were growing up. How do I know that? You don’t know what steel wool is, or what it’s for. I can always tell when you clean up after a meal in the office kitchen, and when it’s Mallory. Mallory was raised right.”

  “But this man who was raised right is a killer,” said Charles in a somewhat defensive tone.

  “So? You think Mallory carries a gun for ballast in the wind?” Mrs. Ortega leaned on the vacuum hose and wagged her finger at Charles. “You can always tell the rich kids born with money. If the husband or the wife splits, they go off their feed for a week. You can tell how upset they are by the stock of booze and pills. But if the cleaning woman leaves them, their whole world falls apart. They go back to living like animals. So chances are, your guy wasn’t born with money.”

  Mallory was nodding as the woman said this. Mallory deferred to Mrs. Ortega in all things regarding cleaning solvents and the chemistry of stains. Mrs. Ortega might be the only human Mallory ever deferred to.

  “You can tell a lot about a person’s character from the way they clean and what they keep,” said Mrs. Ortega, waxing on in a rare philosophic mode.

  “You know,” said Riker, turning to Charles, “I asked Mrs. Ortega to clean my apartment about a year ago. She made the sign of the evil eye and turned her back on me. Now I figure I’m lucky she never saw it.” A gray log of ashes fell from his cigarette and crumbled down the front of his suit as his arms shrugged out of his overcoat.

  “I don’t have to see your apartment, Riker.” Mrs. Ortega cast an appraising eye over his rumpled suit and scuffed shoes. “You’ve got at least three bags of garbage piling up in the kitchen. The sheets haven’t been changed in a month, and there are beer bottles under the bed. There might be two clean dishes in the cupboard. You’re real comfortable with spiders, and you’re seeing a woman tonight.”

  Three heads turned to Mrs. Ortega.

  “How did you know about the woman?” asked Riker.

  “This morning you used a can of cheap spot remover. I can see the powder rings around the stains from here. You don’t usually get that fancy.”


  Mallory nodded her respects to Mrs. Ortega and headed for the door to her private office. “I have to pack my equipment. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “It’s good to see you again, Sergeant,” said Charles. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “Is it still morning?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll have a beer.”

  The vacuum cleaner was moving slowly toward them, sucking conversation out of the air. When Mrs. Ortega shut off the machine and turned to the quieter activity of dusting, Charles handed Riker a cold beer.

  “What Mallory’s doing is rather dangerous, isn’t it? I’m surprised you’re going along with it.”

  “She has to do it this way, Charles. There’s no evidence, no weapon, no witness, no motive. Everyone who can hold a rock has the means. The crime scene is six minutes from the building. Even the doorman has opportunity. You see the problem? If she can’t flush him out and fast, he gets away with murder.”

  Charles’s brain was backing up in the conversation. No motive, did he say? Was it possible that Riker had not seen the manuscript that lay on the desk between them? As Riker’s eyes were settling on the ream of paper, some Mallory-guided instinct prompted him to call the man’s attention away from it.

  “You know, Markowitz wouldn’t like this at all. You’ll be close by her all the time, right?”

  “Like I said, Charles, I’m only along for the ride. She doesn’t need me. She’s not a kid anymore, and she didn’t need anybody when she was one.” He slugged back his beer.

  “But Louis always credited Helen with—”

  “Helen could only see the good in Kathy, even when it wasn’t there. I remember how happy Helen was when Lou started bringing Kathy into work after school—it was the only way he could keep the kid from stealing New York. But Helen was only thinking about the positive role models of police officers.”

  “Apparently she was right.”

  “And five days a week, the kid was surrounded by off-the-wall murders when other kids were out playing games.”

  “Didn’t Mallory ever play games with other children?”

  “She used to play with Markowitz. Now she plays alone.”

  “What sort of games did she like?”

  “I asked her once when she was maybe thirteen, what was her favorite. ‘Murder is the best game,’ she says. I went all clammy. It was the way she said it. I asked Markowitz if he thought the kid was capable of killing. ‘Oh, yeah,’ says Markowitz, like I’d asked him if Kathy could pitch a curve ball.”

  “That doesn’t tell me why you’re so confident that she can flush the killer out without getting hurt.”

  “If the suspects in this condo weren’t uptown taxpayers with good lawyers, we’d sweat the pack of them. Now when Mallory gets the perp, there won’t be any lawyers around. He’ll be under more stress than he’s ever known. He’ll flap his mouth with cameras rolling. The creeps always talk, even after we read them their rights. They lie, but they talk, they trip themselves up. If we don’t rush this perp, if a lawyer gets to him in time to shut his mouth, we lose him. No evidence, no case. It has to be quick. She has to flush him out fast and trip him up, or he gets away.”

  “But the danger.”

  “The biggest danger is that she stumbles over someone else’s dirty little secrets. You got the same percentage of scum in the Coventry Arms as you do in any tenement building.”

  Charles picked up a photograph that had wafted to the floor from Riker’s small pile of papers.

  “Who is this?”

  “Amanda Bosch.”

  “But she looks nothing like Mallory. How did the mistake—?”

  “Well, she was alive when this shot was taken. Even I had to look at the body twice after the bugs had been at her.”

  “Have you notified her family yet?”

  “There’s no family alive to notify. Mallory liked that—less chance of a leak.”

  “What will happen to her?”

  “Her estate, whatever’s in her bank account, will go to the city tax office. The landlady will sell her stuff for back rent or put it out on the street. She’ll get a grave that no one will ever visit. And then she’ll be gone from the face of the earth. Or maybe not. Mallory could make her famous.”

  The cat sat down between them, ignoring both of them and picking at the bandage on its ear. Charles was reminded of something Louis Markowitz had said: Living with Mallory was like having a wounded animal in the house.

  The building had been made to last and so it had, well into the twentieth century and showed no signs of falling down at the cusp of the twenty-first. Dark wood beams and stucco facing rose for ten stories. The old West Side mansion would fit well with a gothic horror story.

  Riker put down the heavy boxes to pant for a moment. Mallory had just slipped the doorman a hundred-dollar bill.

  The kid has style.

  Riker wondered how she was going to bury the money in the department expense account.

  As Mallory talked, the doorman smiled continuously, lips parting ever wider until they threatened to escape the margins of his face.

  “I’m expecting Amanda Bosch to drop by. Do you know her on sight?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the doorman, who was called Arthur. “Miss Hyde’s friend? Pretty young woman with sad eyes? I know her.” Now the smile wavered. “Is she all right?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “She was acting very strange the last time I saw her.”

  “When was that?”

  “Maybe four or five days ago. She never came to the door. She just sat over there, very quiet, like she was waiting for someone.” He pointed to the wrought-iron bench twelve feet from the entrance. “I thought it was a bit odd because Miss Hyde was out of town. I’ve never known Miss Bosch to visit anyone else in this building. Then after a while, Miss Bosch stood up very quickly. She seemed agitated for some reason, and then she ran away. Very odd indeed.”

  “What set her off?”

  “No idea, miss. I was busy then, opening the door, getting a cab for a tenant, people were coming and going.”

  “Do you remember which people?”

  “No, I don’t. Tenants, visitors, children and dogs. Most of the tenants have dogs.”

  Riker was picking the cartons up from the sidewalk when Mallory turned her head quickly, eyes fixing on an empty patch of sidewalk across the street.

  Now what was that about?

  He wondered if it was not too early in the game for her to be watching her back. The murderer lived in this building, and only he would make the connection between Mallory and Amanda Bosch. But it was a woman walking fast toward them on this side of the street.

  He put the carton down again as a small brunette with nervous moves was looking at Mallory and asking, “Forgive me for following you. Could I speak to you privately for just a moment?”

  Mallory nodded to the doorman, who closed the door. The two women moved up the sidewalk and beyond the range of his hearing. The brunette was a tangle of loose wires. Her hands were flying. Mallory said a few words to the woman, and the brunette shook her head, eyes rolling in their sockets like startled marbles. Then the woman clutched her bag to her chest as though to fend off a weapon. She backed off a few steps and hurried down the sidewalk to a waiting cab. Mallory strolled back.

  The carton was hoisted into the air once more.

  The doorman had shut down his neon smile the moment Mallory turned her back. Now it was blazing again with the dazzle of every tooth exposed, and You’re my new best friend was in his eyes as they passed by him and into the lobby.

  The lobby atmosphere was piped in from another century. While Mallory handed a letter to the concierge on the other side of a carved wood desk, Riker looked around at the hanging tapestries and the oil paintings. The elaborately patterned rugs had to be a year’s salary each. Plush green velvet wrapped the couches and chairs in conversational groupings. A woman passed through the lobby, wearing dark gla
sses on this overcast day to say, I’m a celebrity, and you’re not. A bank of stained-glass windows lined one wall. Patches of crystal and colors of brightness. Beneath the arched center window was a mural of running deer, running blind into the cruel joke of the blank wall adjacent to the painting.

  Now the concierge was leading them to the elevator. It belonged in a 1930s black-and-white movie, an iron cage of scrollwork bars on the door, and an interior of gleaming wood with inlaid designs and parquet floor. They were handed into the care of an elevator operator and rode up, watching the floors drop away from them, and each one was different from the last.

  The iron door opened on the third floor, and they walked down a hallway lined by soft, glowing bulbs that would have been gaslight in the last century. The carpeting on this floor was an oriental pattern, and the walls were papered in money. Riker guessed he knew a good wallpapering job when he saw it. And money sat on a small table in the hallway, a vase holding a fortune in fresh-cut flowers. The scent of roses followed after him as Mallory fitted her key in the lock and opened the door to the Rosens’ apartment.

  He put the cartons down on the tiled floor of the entry-way. “Okay, Mallory—the woman downstairs. Now what was that about?”

  “Sally Riccalo. She followed us over from the office. She’s a client with an interesting idea that her stepson wants to stab her with a flying pencil.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Charles’s style. I thought he only handled the academic bullshit. So who’s whacked? Her or the kid?”

  “Too early to tell. She looks scared enough.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her to get out of town.”

  “And she said?”

  “No.”

  He looked around at the Rosens’ front room and wondered how the Rosens were reacting to the Spartan simplicity of Mallory’s apartment. In the front room was a museum of family photos. The family was everywhere, eyes of the children in the eyes of mothers and fathers, grandfathers, and on and on. And there was a toy some child had left behind on the couch. The fish in the large aquarium swam in quick schools of tropical colors. A small sticky palm print lay on the glass alongside the print of what must be the nose of a grandchild or great-grandchild. The only element out of character with this comfortable room of overstuffed furniture and silk flowers was the eye of the computer, lit and looking out through the partially opened doors of an oak cabinet.