All women are bitches.
Only death made them beautiful. That stunned look, when they knew death was coming, when they could see it, hear it coming for them. Only then did he respect them for this experience, this knowledge which had eluded him. To be dead, to be nothing, never to be challenged again.
To actually watch life leave the body was his obsession. But this, too, had eluded him. For in death, they might only have been asleep. The women had taken the secret with them. Bitches, unwilling to share. Perhaps one day, one of them would tell him what it was like as it was happening to her. Perhaps the next one.
He plotted against her as he opened his drawer to find his socks, as he pulled on his pants, as he buttoned his shirt. He schemed as he ate his morning meal and it went sour in his stomach. He kicked a small animal and heard his enemy screaming. He looked at sharp knives with longing and stuck one into a piece of fruit… many times. He killed her a hundred times a day, and the animals, the fruit and the insects all suffered for it.
Sandstone carvings graced the elaborate structures extending as curving arms from either side of the wide staircases running down into the plaza. The vast public space was presided over by a bronze angel high atop the Bethesda Fountain. Her wings were unfurled, her robes were rippled, and there was debate as to whether she danced or not.
From the cover of high ground and stonework, Mallory looked down at the man in the plaza. He was the only one walking the paving stones, casting a weak shadow from the morning sun riding low in its winter orbit. He checked his watch and sat down on the edge of the fountain’s wide pool. The Angel of Bethesda loomed behind him, some twenty feet or more above his head. The waters of the ancient biblical Bethesda were said to have healing powers. Mallory figured those waters would be wasted on a sick bastard like Palanski. The things she suspected him of were a crime in every philosophy under heaven.
Mallory lifted the antique opera glasses to her eyes. Bored silly by opera, she had finally found a practical use for this gift from Charles. She cared nothing for the delicate settings of tiny pearls and precious stones; it was the resolution of the lenses she approved of. She could pick out the mole on one side of Palanski’s face. And now she scanned the rest of the plaza. The sky was overcast, blunting the sun and giving its light an eerie quality as it flooded the stone floor. There were only occasional moments when the sun could create a shadow, and then the clouds would thicken and uncreate it.
Now a woman passed near Mallory’s position. Mallory turned to see the back of her walking along the path leading to the wide staircase. The woman’s carrot-red hair was piled on top of her head. She was small, only five foot – if that, and thin. A short, leather hooker skirt rode high above the bare goose-flesh legs. The backs of her knees bore the bruises of the needle, another trademark of a hooker.
The woman passed behind a bank of decorative stone which obscured half the staircase, protecting her from Mallory’s view. As the small prostitute cleared this facade, Mallory raised her binoculars to her face.
Not a woman.
Beneath the penciled dark eyebrows, the eyeliner and the smear of red lipstick that was her mouth, was the face of a child. How old could she be? Twelve or thirteen years? The light brown eyes had the look of a stunned animal. Her face was in a junkie sweat, though the air was cold and her thin close-fitting jacket could offer little warmth.
Mallory slipped the opera glasses into her pocket and wondered how long it had been since the baby whore last had a fix of the needle.
Palanski rose to a stand as the girl made her way down the stairs and along the wide stone floor. Her hand rose in a vague gesture of recognition and then fell back to her side.
Mallory slipped along the footpath leading down into the plaza on Palanski’s blind side. She was in the open now with no cover as she silently walked the stones. Skirting the fountain, she was moving faster now.
The little prostitute took no notice, legs in motion, but mind in limbo, eyes blank and staring at nothing, moving slowly toward Palanski, whose hand delved into his pocket and produced the lure.
In a sudden cloudbreak, the bronze angel cast a long shadow across the pool of water, the tips of its wings lighting on the stone under Mallory’s running feet. The little girl was within two yards of Palanski when Mallory rushed the child and gripped her by one arm, which was bone thin beneath the light material of the sleeve. When the girl looked up, a badge was thrust in her face. The girl, body and soul, crumpled under Mallory’s hand in the same dispirited resignation of her older peers, her sisters, the adult whores. For this was part of the job, wasn’t it – the arrest.
Palanski was gaping at Mallory as she pocketed her shield. His eyes were panic wide and disbelieving. He took one step forward. Instinctive reflex sent her free hand to the holster inside her jacket. He stopped dead. She watched his darting eyes and knew he was framing the story to explain this away. As his mouth opened, Mallory said, ‘Don’t even think about lying to me. I know what you did.’
Palanski turned, willing his feet to move at first, trapped on his toes for a full second, then breaking into a jog and now sprinting across the plaza.
Three packets of jettisoned white powder floated on the fountain’s waters.
‘You better run, you son of a bitch!’ Mallory’s scream echoed off the stones of the cold and desolate plaza, wherein she kept company with a blind bronze angel and a small child with faraway eyes.
Betty Hyde waited by the entrance as Arthur opened the door for an elderly tenant and her dog, then a woman with groceries and a man with a briefcase, the last stragglers of the morning. She looked across the street to the place which had been bloodied more than a month ago on the night Annie Franz was run down by a drunken driver.
Now there was no more traffic through the door to the Coventry Arms. Arthur had his smile in place as she walked over to him.
‘Good morning, Miss Hyde.’
‘Good morning, Arthur. Lovely day, isn’t it?’
A fifty dollar bill found its way from Betty’s purse into Arthur’s pocket in the New York sleight of hand which out-of-towners mistook for a handshake.
‘Yes, ma’am, it is indeed a lovely day.’
‘Correct me if I’m mistaken, but didn’t you switch shifts with Bertram on the night Mrs Franz died? I seem to remember you were on duty that night.’
‘Yes, Miss Hyde, you have a good memory.’
‘So you must have seen the whole thing.’
‘I saw everything, every detail. I was able to give the police a complete description of the drunken driver and the numbers on the license plate. They caught him within the hour, you know. It happened right over there.’
Arthur pointed to the park side of the street and continued in the well-worn patter of a tour guide. ‘It was 2:15 in the morning, and Mrs Franz was a little unsteady on her feet. I’m not saying she was drunk, mind you.’
No, Arthur would never say that. Betty nodded her encouragement to go on.
‘Well, they were arguing again.’
There had been no argument in Eric’s version when she had given him shelter from the press and the police. She had called her own personal physician to treat him for shock. In Eric’s version, he and Annie had been discussing the first draft of his new book.
‘She thought it was the best thing I’d ever written.’
And that same line had found its way into subsequent interviews with Eric on the talk show circuit – circus -following the death of his wife.
‘So the argument’s getting pretty loud by now,’ said Arthur. ‘She stumbled back a bit. And then she was standing in the street.’
‘Annie said she had dropped her purse in the street. She went back to get it,’ Eric had told her, tears streaming down his face. Behind him was the 1.5 million dollar view from her apartment, the skyline and the blue-gold spectacle of dawn, as he described the sickening sound of his wife’s body hitting the car.
Arthur was now slipping into the mode of a broadcaster describing a sporting event instead of a death.
‘So, he’s still on the sidewalk. He’s looking straight at her, and right into the lights of the oncoming car. I remember the look on his face with the headlights shining in his eyes as the car is coming to kill his wife. It would have been so weird if you didn’t know Mr Franz was blind. He was three feet away, but that was close enough to pull her back, or at least warn her. But he couldn’t know the car was coming because he couldn’t see.’
‘Did the police ever ask you about it?’
‘Yes, ma’am, a few questions. I talked to the uniformed officers, and then later, a detective – tall thin fellow. But at the time, they were all more interested in the hit-and-run vehicle.’
And the police had not paid him for the entire monologue, the blow by blow account on the death of a woman Arthur must have hated as much as he liked Eric Franz. Everyone liked Eric.
‘Later, the detective came back to ask if I could corroborate the statements of the other drivers. You know, there were three vehicles in all. But of course the papers got it all wrong. Well, she had her back turned when the drunk’s car ran her down. She flew about twenty feet in that direction.’
Arthur pointed north. She wondered if he was aware of the fact that he was smiling as he warmed to the subject of the flying body.
‘Mrs Franz landed on a southbound van. The van driver put his vehicle up on the curb and wrecked the awning support for the building next door. She fell off the van, and into the path of a vintage silver Jaguar. Her dress got snagged up in the rear wheels, and the Jaguar dragged her for maybe fifteen feet before he stopped.’
Very confidential now, just between the two of them, ‘She was still breathing, Miss Hyde. That wasn’t in the papers either. She didn’t die until just before the ambulance arrived.’
Betty nodded. Of course it would take at least three vehicles to kill Annie Franz. And it was so fitting that the last one was shaped like a silver bullet.
‘Did Mrs Franz say anything before she died?’
‘I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the police department, or maybe that detective could help you. He was the first one on the scene. “Piece of luck,” I think he said. He was just passing by, I believe. He gave her first aid while we waited for the ambulance.’
‘And what was Eric doing while this was going on?’
‘He was just standing there. He was in shock, of course. One of the uniformed police officers was trying to take a statement from him, but I think he was having trouble making sense of the whole thing. And that was when you came down and took him away from the policeman.’
‘Yes, he was in shock. Poor Eric,’ said Betty. ‘It must have been so hard on him’. If only he’d been able to see – ‘
‘ – he could have saved her.’
Mallory leaned down to the driver’s window of the cab. ‘This is police business. I’m commandeering the cab.’
‘No English,’ said the driver.
‘Police!’ Thrusting her shield and ID into the cabby’s face, she said, ‘Badge. So, now you know English.’
As she was handcuffing the girl to the handle of the cab door, the cabbie was protesting in his native tongue, which had many accompanying hand gestures, and one of them was obscene in any language.
Mallory crossed the street to the pay phone. After five minutes of conversation, she was back at the cab door, undoing the cuffs and giving directions to the driver.
‘No English,’ he said.
She opened the door and, jerking on the material of his coat, she spilled his short body out on to the street. ‘You want to ride in the back seat or the trunk? If you don’t tell me now, I’ll decide for you. Oh, and I noticed the hack license picture isn’t your face. Maybe this is a stolen cab.’
‘I guess I’ll ride in the back seat,’ said the driver, rising to his feet and reaching for the handle of the back door. But Mallory and the girl were already in the front seat, and the cab was pulling away from the curb.
‘Why didn’t you call for a police car?’ said the girl, who had been silent till now.
‘Paperwork,’ said Mallory. ‘If I go through the paperwork, I have to turn you in. You’re already dope sick. If I turn you in, you’ll be in custody when the real misery comes on. Is that what you want?’
The girl turned her face to the window.
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Mallory. ‘I want to know what kind of business you do with Palanski. He wasn’t meeting you in a public place for sex.’
The girl kept her silence, pressing angry lips together – a prelude to a tantrum, and taunting evidence that this was still a child.
‘If you’re thinking Palanski will get you out, he won’t. He’ll be keeping a low profile for the next few days. And if you’re thinking he’ll kill you for talking, you’ve got good instincts. But I won’t let that happen.’
‘I suppose you want my life story too. What’s a kid like me doing in a – ’
‘No, I know your story. All the stories are the same. You can’t go home again.’
Nothing passed between them until Mallory was taking the cab out of Manhattan through the twilight lamps of the Lincoln Tunnel.
‘It wouldn’t do any good to tell on him,’ said the girl. ‘No one would take my word against a cop.’
‘You’re right about that. Palanski would say you were just an informant. He’d get off with a reprimand for not turning you over to Juvenile officers – unless there was someone else to corroborate your testimony.’
‘The Johns would never talk. That’s nuts. Rich bastards, they’d – ’
And now she shut her mouth again, knowing she’d said too much. Mallory smiled. ‘Okay. Let’s see if I can work this out. Palanski lined up the Johns for you. He does the background work, shadows them, gets to know their habits. Then he tells you where to plant yourself so they’ll run into you. Does he feed you lines too, or do you know how to get them to take you home?’
The girl’s head lolled to one side as she closed her eyes. ‘I give them all the same line – “It’s cold, mister. Do you know how I can get out of the cold, and maybe get something to eat?” Sometimes they just give me money. One of them tried to flag down a cop car, and I had to run for it. Palanski screws up sometimes. But you’d be surprised how many men want to take me out of the cold.’
‘Then Palanski shows up at the John’s door the next day, right? He shows them a mug shot and the date of birth. How old are you?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘And the Johns pay up, and they pay well.’
He wouldn’t even need to solicit the bribe. This was New York City, and they all knew the drill. The wallets had flown from their pockets, the money had spilled into Palanski’s outstretched hand, and he had tipped his hat and smiled on his way out the door.
‘Where are you taking me?’ The girl’s eyes were open now and looking out the windows on a landscape that was not Manhattan any more.
‘Someplace safe. A friend of mine arranged for you to spend a few days in the country. A few days is all I’m gonna need.’
‘I can’t go three days without a – ’
‘I know.’ Mallory reached inside her jacket and pulled out the three bags of white powder she had retrieved from the waters of Bethesda. She showed them to the girl and put them back in her pocket.
By the time the car pulled into the circular drive, she knew the girl’s name was Fay, and Fay could never go home. If she did, her mother the drunk would beat her to death. Or perhaps the mother’s new boyfriend might get first dibs on the girl’s young body. Mallory pulled up in front of the large and graceful old building with a white Georgian facade. Edward Slope’s car was parked near the freestanding wooden sign.
‘Mayfair Research Facility? What kind of a place is this?’
Mallory kept silent until she and the girl were in the lobby which might have passed for the ground floor of a fashionable hotel. When the girl saw the first white-coated attendant, she tried to bolt. She pulled at Mallory’s hand, which would not release her. Now the attendant had Fay by both arms and was forcing her down the hall and away as she screamed out to Mallory. ‘You said you wouldn’t turn me in! You promised, you promised!’
She broke free of the attendant and ran to Mallory. ‘We had a deal. You promised.’ She was crying now, the garish make-up washing down her face like yesterday’s Halloween mask. She was stripped to childhood again. She wrapped her arms around Mallory’s waist as the attendant tried to pull her away.
Dr Edward Slope was glaring at Mallory. ‘I told you to prepare her for this. You never listen to me – or anyone else.’
He sat down on his heels and gently turned the face of the child toward his own. ‘You think it’s going to hurt. It won’t. I want you to go with this man. You’re already feeling sick, aren’t you? Yes, I can see that. He’s going to give you something to take the pain away. It’ll never hurt you again. You have my word on that.’
She loosened her grip on Mallory, but the look of betrayal remained. A deal had been broken. Nothing would change that, and they both knew it.
When she was gone down the hall with the attendant, Slope turned to Mallory. ‘There’s a limit to my influence here, but I pulled every string I could. I just hope you know what you’re doing. An underage Jane Doe is illegal as hell, so I’m passing her off as a relative incognito. She’s in the program, but only for the three days of detox. What then?’
‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I just need her off the street for a couple of days. Oh, and I need a Polaroid of the kid. Can you manage that for me?’
‘Yes, of course. But what happens to the child when the three days are up?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got enough problems right now.’
‘Kathy, sometimes I think you’re growing into a real human being, and then you exasperate me this way. You got her this far, that’s good. But after the detox – what then? You can’t just dump off a little girl like she was a sack of potatoes.’
‘Doris does all the cooking in your house – that’s her job, right?’
‘What?’
Mallory’s hands went to her hips. Her words had a cautioning edge. ‘If you’d ever tried to prepare a meal, you’d know what an art form it really is, making every dish come out at the same time.’ Her voice was on the rise now, and angry. ‘Well, I’m cooking! I’ve got six dishes going at six different speeds, and they all have to be done at exactly the same time or the whole thing falls apart on me.’ One long fingernail jabbed at his chest. ‘You go do your own damn job! Get off my back!’
And the cook with a gun walked through the lobby and out the front door.
Today Mallory had only one message for each of her suspects. She blocked out the bulletin board they would access on their screens and tapped in the code to call up the dummy board. It displayed only one sentence repeated over and over again: I HAVE A WITNESS. And that was no lie if cats counted.
Though the hallway was generous in width, Pansy Heart pressed her body to the wall as her husband walked by. His face was red, his eyes hard, and he walked heavy on his feet, sending one fist to the wall a scant few inches from where she stood. In the room he had left, the computer screen was blank once more. What had been the message this time?
A door slammed at the other end of the hall. She jumped as though she had trod on a live wire. She gripped the edge of the hall table, feeling empty and airy inside, believing that she might fly upward without this solid anchor of oak. Her heart was knocking on the wall of her chest.
It was natural to be thinking of her mother-in-law on that last day of the old woman’s life, in that moment when the organs were shutting down one by one. There had been an inner knowledge of impending death in the ancient eyes. Only minutes before, terror had lived in that deeply lined face. Then the lines had smoothed out, and in the eyes was, not peace, but triumph. And then her mother-in-law had died – escaped.
Angel Kipling paced up and down the carpet before her husband Harry. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know what this is about.’ She held up the printout from the computer. A single sentence repeated one hundred times across the sheet. ‘A witness to what? What have you done?’ Her voice was in the whining mode and threatened to climb into a scream.
Harry Kipling was buttoning his shirt in front of the mirror. Now he sought out her reflection behind his own. ‘It’s not addressed to me, is it?’
Angel’s lip was curling as he turned around to face her in the flesh. She placed her hands on her wide hips, and her robe fell open to display the ponderous breasts sagging against the thick body. His eyes dropped to the opening in the robe, and he quickly turned away from her. She winced as though she had been slapped.
As he left the full-length mirror to examine his tie rack, Angel stood alone in the glass, staring at her reflection. She had not yet put on the armature of make-up, and her hair was wild with snarls.
She closed the robe quickly and addressed her husband in a smaller voice this time. ‘It’s not another bank card scam, is it, Harry? You’re not having trouble living on your allowance money, are you?’
It had cost her a fortune to clean up after his last foray into creative banking, that or face the scandal and the stockholders. And she had never believed the stolen money was gone, spent. Was he amassing capital for a getaway? No, he would never leave her. He would never stray far from the source of unlimited wealth.
He ignored her and continued the business of tying his tie, an odd and useless preoccupation for a man who had no occupation, no business to conduct. And now she forgot that she was ugliest in the morning, most vulnerable without her magic make-up.
‘Answer me, you prick. You don’t want me to cut off your allowance again, do you?’
‘Angel, I have no idea what’s going on. It’s probably a prank. Some kid in the building.’
‘It’s another bank swindle, isn’t it? I thought I made it very clear what would happen if you tried this one more time. You won’t like being poor again, Harry.’
‘I haven’t done anything.’
She pulled a crumple of computer paper from her robe pocket and thrust it at him.
‘This was faxed yesterday. It’s an application for a credit card, and the form is addressed to you.’
‘I haven’t applied for any credit cards.’
‘Read it!’
He accepted the ball of paper and made a small production out of smoothing it over the surface of the bedside table.
Under the heading of pertinent information it read: First, tell us why you did it. Please print or type your confession in the space provided.
He picked up the sheet of paper, bringing it close to his eyes, examining the logo of the credit card company, which appeared at the top of the page.
The next line read: Does your wife know what you did? If so, we have provided additional space for her comments.
Now he stared at the short list of questions:
1. Why did you lie?
2. Would you do it again if we gave you the chance? He lowered the page and then looked up as Angel paced back and forth across the rug with barely contained fury.
‘And now this message on the building bulletin board!’ The words exploded from her mouth. ‘What does it mean?’ She looked down at the most recent message, clutched in her hand. ‘ “I have a witness.” A witness to what? Talk to me, Harry, or I’ll cut off your allowance, and then I’ll cut off your balls!’
Eric Franz was slow to answer his door. Betty Hyde could hear him walking toward the foyer, a shuffle of hard soles on marble. When the door did open, he was looking over her shoulder, as though just missing her with his eyes. A sheet of paper was wadded in his hand. His face was a mask. The room behind him was dark but for the constant glow of the computer’s ever-open eye.
‘If she knew you were digging into her past, it could end your friendship,’ said Rabbi David Kaplan.
‘I only want the connection between the boy and Mailory,’ said Charles Butler, The rabbi’s den was a place where books lived. They were not kept to the shelves, but quietly gathered in stacks on every surface of the room, perched in groups of agreeable subjects. A single leather-bound volume lay open on the desk, patiently awaiting the rabbi’s return to the interrupted business of scholarship.
‘Perhaps the connection between them is only a simple commonality,’ said the rabbi.
‘The difference in their backgrounds doesn’t leave room for much in common.’
‘All children have a commonality in innocence.’
‘I wouldn’t describe either of them as innocent. The boy talks like a forty-year-old man. And Mallory… is Mallory.’
‘Perhaps they share the innocence of good and evil.’
‘That’s the first time I’ve heard the word innocence so connected with evil.’
‘Take Helen’s view of Kathy. Helen could see nothing bad in the child. Helen always said no one had ever explained the rules to Kathy, and she was close to the truth. These concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, heaven and hell, what is that to a child on the street, living by wit and theft? When she first came to live with Louis and Helen, her behavior sometimes bordered on that of feral children raised apart from humans.’
‘What about the natural mother? Is it possible she abused her child? Perhaps that would explain a lot of the damage.’
‘Charles, I know nothing about the natural mother. Kathy has never once spoken about this woman.’
‘Suppose you had to speculate on her parents. Just based on what you know of her, what would you say?’
‘We assumed Kathy had been on the street for three or four years before Markowitz arrested her. She was a ten-year-old thief. She tried to lie her way to twelve, and Markowitz let her get away with eleven – but she stole that year.
‘Now we know she’d never been to a formal school. Helen had her evaluated at the Learning Center. But someone had taught her to read and write at a very early age. She also had an astonishing natural aptitude for mathematics. That was why Helen and Louis spent more than they could afford on private schools. They were afraid her gifts would wither in the public school system with one teacher to every fifty children.’
The rabbi went to the shelf and took a box from among the books. From it he withdrew papers. ‘This is a sample of Kathy’s handwriting at ten. It’s not the hand of a child. Someone took great care with her, and very early on.
‘And then Helen evaluated her religious education. One day we took her with us to meet with Father Barry at the parish in the neighborhood. It was that time of year when we joined together to feed and clothe the poor. When Kathy saw the crucifix above the altar, she automatically made the sign of the cross. Helen took this as an omen, and she gave the Christians equal time in Kathy’s spiritual guidance. So someone had taught the child to make the sign of the cross.
‘From only this, I may deduce that someone spent an enormous amount of time with her. She was not unwanted or ignored, not considered a burden to her mother, but the focus of attention. And that person enabled Kathy to love Helen at first sight. I like to believe she must have been rather like Helen Markowitz, this special someone. Can you see this woman abusing her child? Or allowing anyone else to do it? I can not. This woman I know nothing about, I remember her in my prayers.’
‘May I take that to mean you think the woman is dead?’
‘What else could separate such a woman from her child?’
‘I’m going to bring down the judge.’
She thought that might make his little eyes spin around.
Mallory stared at the ME investigator across the same table in the same coffee house where she had first hooked him. She had left him just enough time to let his own imagination do all the work for her, and then she had reeled him back in. That was the old man’s style, and it had worked well.
Tkank you, Markowitz.
‘Heller lives for his work, and there’s none better. If he knew you were walking evidence out of the crime scenes, he’d hunt you down and put a bullet in you. So you walk the evidence. You give it to a cop, and you’re one person removed from the crime of blackmail.’
‘You’ve got nothin’ solid, Mallory. If you did – ‘
‘I’ve got reports on three suicides with no notes left behind. That’s what tipped me. You were the ME investigator on all three scenes. Who did the notes implicate? What embarrassing details were in them? Suicides just love to unload before they cross over. I imagine you’ve carted out other souvenirs, maybe a few photographs of married men? Love letters? What else? In the case of the judge’s mother, you obstructed a homicide investigation. You kept quiet about evidence of murder. Palanski showed up because you called him in. You had to. No way you could hand him the old lady’s body. So now I’ve got the two of you in the same room of a dirty operation. But this time you covered up a murder.’
‘No, it was battery maybe, but not homicide. And the battery wasn’t all that recent. She had a split lip, but it had healed some. Maybe it was a day old. And there was a bruise on the side of her face, but it was at least two days old, and that didn’t kill her either. Her own doctor was there. You can ask him. She did die of natural causes.’
‘But the marks would’ve been embarrassing to the judge, right? So Palanski shows up, and he takes over and works the judge. Am I right?’
The ME investigator would not meet her eyes. She looked down to the paper napkin in his hands. He was shredding it to moist confetti. He opened his mouth to speak, but she dared not give him time to say he wanted a lawyer. She slammed her open hand down on the table, and his mouth closed as he jumped in his chair, nerves shot to hell.
‘Your biggest problem is that your partner is stupid. He buys stock, bearer bonds, and the idiot thinks nobody can trace them because the deals are cash. Every cash transaction is logged just like the credit transactions. All his financial activity is on computer. Did you know that Palanski’s been cheating you on the cuts?’ No, she could see he hadn’t known.
‘The way you handled your cut of the payoffs was only a little brighter.’ She thumbed through the sheaf of papers on the table till she found the one she wanted. She set this in front of him. ‘This is a record of all the cash deposits you made into your mother’s bank account. But you have power of attorney on that account, so you’re tied up by computer transactions too. Your mother’s entire legal income is Social Security, and yet she has this fantastic bank account. Still, Internal Affairs would never have tipped to that. Oh, but that fool Palanski.’
‘You won’t get anything on him without me testifying on the payoff.’
‘I won’t hurt you. A deal is a deal. I’m going to let you rat on yourself and Palanski. You know the drill. The first one to turn state’s evidence gets immunity.’
Nose was paroled from the bathroom for the evening. He purred around Mallory’s legs as she put the bullets into the speedloader for her revolver.
She faced the foyer mirror and thought of visual cues. She looked down at the cat and closed her long and narrow eyes to suspicious slits. Nose began to dance. The cue for the dancing, what was it? A muffled noise called her eyes up to the ceiling. The sounds upstairs were unmistakable. Plush carpet and thick insulation could not block out the scream. Now furniture was being turned over. Feet pounded into the front room above her head. She followed the sounds, eyes to the ceiling. She stopped by the phone in the living room.
She tapped keys on the building computer and scrolled through the list of tenants until she had Betty Hyde’s number. More furniture was moving. A dial tone. Another scream.
‘Hyde residence,’ said a foreign voice. ‘Put Hyde on the phone. Tell her it’s Mallory and it’s urgent.’
Telephone pressed between shoulder and ear, she opened the closet door and pulled out the heavy sheepskin jacket to hide the bulge of the gun. The jacket was bulky enough to interfere with action, but she was not ready to show her hand or her gun in public, for this was the visual cue to call the lawyer. She was slipping into the sleeves of the coat when Betty Hyde came to the phone. ‘Mallory, darling, I thought you’d never call.’
‘Meet me at Judge Heart’s apartment. I’ll be there before you. Stay back, all right? Stay the hell out of my way.’
She took the stairs three at a time. She noted the three locks as she neared the door. Most people only used one lock until they were in for the night. It was early yet. The main lock was the flimsiest. But the thick door was too formidable to break down. She banged on the door with her fist and pressed the buzzer. ‘Open up!’ Now there was dead silence within. And maybe a dead woman?
She banged on the door again. ‘Open up or I’ll call the police!’ Magic words for the man in the public eye.
She heard heavy footsteps on the tiles of the foyer beyond the door, and then the sound of the lock being undone, the latch chain being slipped into its notch. The door opened a crack, and she was looking into the cold eyes of Judge Heart just above the length of gold chain which bound the door to its frame.
She smiled politely, stepped back and kicked the door at the center, breaking the latch chain and knocking the man off balance. She pushed past him and entered the apartment.
Pansy Heart was in the corner of the front room, trying desperately to crawl into the pattern of the rug and disappear. Her nose was bleeding, her lip was split and the side of her face was already beginning to swell.
Behind her, the judge was screaming, ‘You have no right!’
Mallory turned on him. ‘I’m taking her out of here. Don’t give me any trouble.’
His face had gone to purple rage as he advanced on her. With a quick, sure kick, she put her foot into his groin and watched his skin drain of color as his eyes bulged out with surprise and pain. He slipped down to one knee. Pansy Heart was crying softly. Mallory pulled the woman up and walked her toward the door, one arm supporting the smaller woman about the tiny waist.
Betty Hyde stood in the doorway. Her eyes were fixed on Pansy Heart’s ruined face, and her mouth was suppressing a smile.
‘I’ll take care of her,’ she said, putting her arms around the crying woman as Mallory stepped back. ‘Come with me, Pansy. You need a doctor, dear.’
The judge was getting to his feet. He was clumsy and slow about it as both hands were clutching his groin. Mallory tucked a foot under his unbending legs and tripped him, sending his face into the corner of a heavy oak table and giving him his own bloody nose.
Pansy Heart looked back at her husband as though awaiting further orders. Then she yielded to the gentle force of Betty Hyde, who was propelling her through the door and into the hall.
The gossip columnist was on her way to an interview with this battered woman, and nothing but a joint act of Congress and God would have stopped her. Mallory wondered if she had done the judge a favor by preventing him from getting between Hyde and his wife.
Mallory set a tray of teapot and cups down on the table, and then she let her eyes roam the generous front room of Betty Hyde’s apartment. It was a copy of the Rosens’ only in the architecture. The decorator had been a pro. She knew Charles would have appreciated the American and British antiques masterfully woven with the modern pieces. The front room was open and airy, without bric-a-brac. It was gracious living without souvenir or sentiment or any heart to it at all. Mallory approved.
The judge’s wife was sitting in an early-American rocking chair, holding a cold compress to her swelling face. Betty Hyde sat on a footstool and gently pushed on the armrest of Pansy’s chair, rocking, lulling the crying woman. Entangling her gaze with Pansy’s, Hyde crooned soft words, smiling, eyes gleaming, playing the good nurse.
Mallory handed a cup of tea to the judge’s wife. The woman smiled her gratitude and accepted the tea with a nervous clattering of the china. She seemed even more fragile than the delicate Old Willow teacup.
Mallory leaned down until her eyes were level with the woman, who had ceased her crying and now looked up at Mallory with absolute trust.
‘Mrs Heart, were you at home the night the judge beat the crap out of your mother-in-law?’
The woman’s eyes were startled wide, and it seemed that her thin shoulders were being pressed to the back of her chair. Then her head dropped to her chest, and her entire body wilted. Now Pansy had been assaulted for the second time in one night.
Mallory eased back, lifted a cup from the near table and began to stir her own tea.
‘Did that old woman scream as loud as you did?’
The sobbing began again, racking the smaller woman’s leaf-light body.
Betty Hyde rolled her eyes. She rose from the footstool and led Mallory back to the kitchen.
‘That was brutal, Mallory. One day we must have a long talk about your style – I think I could learn from you. Are you just fishing, dear, or do you have something more on the bastard?’
‘I’ve got copies of the hospital records during the years Judge Heart’s mother lived with them. There’s another file with his wife’s hospital records. He probably didn’t kill the old lady with a beating, but if you want to get to the judge, I would suggest applying a little pressure on his mother’s doctor – you might want the old woman’s body exhumed. The DA is a good political animal. You might approach him with the word coverup and then explain that a high-profile case might be good for his career. And leave my name out of it.’
‘Understood. And what can I do for you, Mallory?’
‘Milk Pansy for everything you can get. At the tenants’ meeting, she said her dog was gone. Is it dead?’
Betty turned to the woman in the other room. Pansy had ceased her crying now and sat quietly staring into her teacup. Hyde raised her voice to ask, ‘Pansy, you still have a dog, don’t you, dear? Rosie, isn’t it?’
Pansy Heart turned to face Betty with a look of mild surprise. ‘Yes, Rosie is at the animal hospital. I don’t know when she’ll be coming home. She’s very sick.’
Mallory found something familiar about the tone of voice. It was the practiced way the woman said the words. She was lying.
Well, everybody lied.
Mallory strode back into the front room and leaned down with both hands on the arms of the rocking chair. Pansy looked up, and her hand started to rise to ward off a blow. It was an instinctive reflex.
‘Your dog is dead, isn’t it?’
The woman was flying apart from the center. One hand flashed out and sent the teacup and saucer crashing to the floor. Her eyes were slipping into shock.
‘When did the dog die?’
And now the words came out in a gush of hysteria. ‘I don’t know! I haven’t seen Rosie for days. My husband took her out for a walk, and she never came back again. He said she was at the vet’s.’
‘But you called the vet and the dog wasn’t there, right?’
Pansy was nodding. Quiet now. Shock was doing its calming work.
Mallory turned away and left Hyde to clean up the damage, this puddle of a woman in the middle of her floor.
Edward Slope took his seat at the table. ‘Stop apologizing, Charles.’
‘But I only meant to leave a message on your office machine. I would never have dragged you away from your family on Christmas night.’
‘But I wasn’t with my family, Charles. I was catching up on a backlog of autopsies. Christmas is my busy season. So why the secrecy? Has the little brat asked you to break the law?’
Charles had never been able to win at poker. He didn’t have the face to run a bluff, or so Edward Slope had reminded him once a week. So how to begin this foray into lying, which was Mallory country and an uncharted place he had never been to?
‘I had a few words with Riker last night,’ said Charles. ‘I know Kathy witnessed a murder when she was a child.’ And that was true, wasn’t it? Riker’s reaction had confirmed it, certainly. And his reaction to discussing the matter with Edward Slope had suggested that Edward could tell him what Riker would not.
The doctor sat back in his chair and went through the stalling mechanics of removing his glasses and cleaning them. ‘So Riker told you about that?’
Charles nodded, and in that nod he told his first lie of the evening. He was practicing at Mallory’s religion of Everyone Lies.
Forgive me, Edward my friend, for my trespasses against thee.
Slope restored his glasses to the bridge of his nose. ‘When I asked Riker, point blank, if he had ever seen any of the films, he denied it. You haven’t mentioned this to anyone else, have you?’
‘No,’ said Charles, with the sudden realization that somehow he had just betrayed Riker. Forgive me, Riker, for I’m about to trespass some more. Charles settled the napkin on his lap, not wanting to meet the eyes of the man he could not beat at poker. ‘Riker wouldn’t go into any detail about the film.’ And that was true. No, it was not. It was deception. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’s not supposed to know the film existed. But apparently Riker did know about it. There’s no other way he could have known about the murder. I gather this is important, or he wouldn’t have hung himself out to dry that way.’
‘It’s very important.’ If he was right about the connection between Mallory and Justin, a child was at stake.
‘Markowitz swore to me that Riker had never seen the film. And we destroyed it that night. It wouldn’t make sense for him to tell Riker after the fact, not if you knew Markowitz’s style. Do you understand that, technically, this knowledge could make you an accessory?’
Charles nodded. Another lie. No, I don’t understand. And only a second has gone by and now I’ve somehow betrayed Markowitz too.
‘Markowitz would never have shown it to anyone else. This was Kathy’s history, and he protected it. He wouldn’t have risked the feds seeing Kathy on tape, interrogating her. He only showed it to me because he wanted to close out the case. He needed a positive identification based on a scar. The original wound was on the film. Did Riker give you any background on the case?’
‘Not much.’
‘The FBI came into Special Crimes Section when a body turned up in Manhattan. The remains had the trademark wounds of a pair of serial killers operating up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Markowitz turned up a lead on one of the killers, and the feds botched the arrest. They sent five men to arrest the suspect, and the man was killed in a shoot-out.’
‘Markowitz must have been furious.’
‘He was. He flushed the feds out of Special Crimes as though they were so much vermin. He took over the site of the shoot-out and recovered a cache of film. It took him a long time to go through all the reels. He did it himself. It was so brutal, he said he didn’t want to burn out his detectives. But really, he was a bit like Kathy, always keeping something back. All he shared with the others was a splice that showed the face of the second killer.
‘I know you’ve heard the story of how Markowitz took Kathy in. Well, he did arrest Kathy for breaking into a car. And Helen was adamant about keeping the child – that was all true. But the real reason he wouldn’t turn Kathy over to Juvenile Hall was because he recognized her. She’d been several years younger when the film was made. But who could forget that face?’
‘So she had seen the murder, and he wanted her as a material witness?’
‘No, they’d already found the location of the film set. Several years had gone by, and the site was cold. It was another four years before Riker made the arrest on the second man and killed him.’
‘But it was in the line of duty, wasn’t it?’
‘That was Riker’s story. One thing that worked in Riker’s favor at the hearing was that the FBI had killed the man’s accomplice during an arrest. Markowitz took the position that Riker had done the same thing it took five agents to do – no more, no less. And Markowitz swore under oath that he had been the only one to view the films. So LA couldn’t take it as a case of a cop cracking up and taking vengeance for the victims. And since Riker had killed the suspect with his fists and not his gun, Internal Affairs and the DA came to the conclusion that death was not premeditated, that it occurred while resisting arrest.’
‘That would seem reasonable.’
‘At the time, it did. I backed their conclusion. To my knowledge at the time, Markowitz was the only one who knew the personal connection of the film. So now it seems that Markowitz lied to me. Well that was typical. He wouldn’t have told me the truth if it made me an accessory after the fact. And he was probably feeling part of the blame for what Riker had done. You know, personal detachment is everything in police work.’ And Riker loved Kathy.
‘Kathy doesn’t know about the film. Markowitz wanted it that way. You can never tell her about this evening. That’s understood?’
‘Of course.’
‘Markowitz warned me, said I didn’t have to sit through the entire thing. He told me I’d regret it if I did. But I was so confident in my own professional detachment, I took it for a challenge. I had to view the film because Riker had made such a mess of the man’s face, Markowitz couldn’t identify the victim from the driver’s license photo, and there were no prints on file. He asked me to make the ID based on the scar from a wound the victim received in that film.’
‘Tell me about the film.’
‘After I tell you, you will wish I hadn’t. I guarantee that. Shall I go on?’
This was his last chance to be an honest man, the man Edward Slope thought he was dealing with.
‘Yes, go on.’
‘Do you know what a snuff film is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a film of the torture and murder of a human being. A little something for the ultimate film buff – the freak. Most of the victims are children. Any child you see on the streets of New York can be turned into some kind of currency.’
Slope waved down a passing waiter to order a double scotch. He turned back to Charles. ‘I can’t do this sober. Are you sure you want to hear all the details?’
‘Quite sure.’
Not at all sure. I have nightmares enough. No. Go on. I deserve this.
‘When the film opened, the children, a boy and a girl, were asleep on the floor of a cage. It wasn’t a fancy production. It was shot in a warehouse with only one set. I believe the children were drugged. The little boy was just coming out of it. Maybe that’s why they took him first. The little girl wasn’t moving at all. It was Kathy, of course. You knew that.’
Charles nodded.
Another lie, and another bad dream due for penance.
‘She could only have been eight years old when the film was made. She’d apparently been on the street for a while by then. She was wearing a grimy T-shirt and jeans that were miles too big for her. I remember her telling me once, that she’d always stolen the jeans closest to the door of the shop, so she didn’t always get a great fit.’
A waiter hovered over the table to deposit a glass which Edward grabbed up at once. He drank quickly.
‘She was only wearing one shoe, and one foot was bare. Well, they took the boy out of the cage and started to work on him. I made Markowitz turn off the volume, but I can still hear the child screaming. You don’t need to know what they did. But he lived quite a while before they were finished with him. And all the while, the cage was in view to one side of the screen. Kathy never moved, never opened her eyes. I watched her the whole time they were torturing the little boy.’
Oh, God. No, wait. I’m a visitor in Mallory’s church tonight, and God is not here.
‘Then it was Kathy’s turn.’
I don’t want to hear any more of this.
‘One of the men opened the door of the cage and lifted her out. She was dead weight in his arms.’ Edward ran one hand through his hair, and then drank from the glass as though with a terrible thirst.
‘You know what I remember most vividly? The one small shoe and the little bare foot. Isn’t that absurd? Kathy slept on as he laid her down on the mattress that was bloodied from the body of the little boy. They had just rolled him off to one side. So much blood.’
Charles watched the rapid movement of Edward’s eyes and realized that the man was watching the film all over again. Edward’s hands covered his face for a moment, and his next words were muffled.
‘Oh, Christ! Isn’t it just a wonderful world for children, Charles?’
Charles began to rise from his chair, leaning toward his dinner companion. Edward put up one hand.
‘No, I’m all right. Sit down, Charles. I’m sorry.’
And after another moment, the reel in the doctor’s eyes rolled on again.
‘And then the man bent over her. Suddenly, Kathy was awake. Not just coming around from the drug, but wide awake. She’d been shamming sleep – that was obvious – waiting out the murder, picking her moment. And then she was all over the man and all teeth and snarls like an animal. Her little thumbs stabbed at his eyes. That one veered off with both hands to his face. Blood was streaming out between his fingers. You can guess at the damage she did there. And then the cameraman was on her. She closed her mouth on his bare arm and bit off a chunk of the flesh. A chunk of flesh, Charles. And she spat it out on the floor.’
Charles looked into the shattered lenses of Edward’s eyes. The doctor was in the moment. It was happening all over again.
‘And now the men are screaming, lights are being overturned, the camera is lying on the floor. The closing shot is Kathy hightailing it down a dark hall and away from the light, running like the devil, with one shoe off and one shoe on.’
He had liked that stupid look of surprise in the moment she realized she would die. Best of all, he liked the look of her when she was dead, all lines of hostility smoothed out. The only good bitch was a dead bitch. Mallory would be no different.
The two grapes were squashed beneath his thumbs, but slowly in the delicious destruction of the orbs, the breaking of the skin, flattening of membranous flesh therein, the feel of the cold destroyed tissue. Each was a green eye to him. And now he drew his thumbs back from the cutting board. Staring at them, mashed, split, she was blind to him.
‘She wouldn’t press charges,’ said Betty Hyde, setting her coffee mug on the counter top in the Rosens’ kitchen. ‘I don’t suppose you have any more proof on the beating of his mother? I’ve got a very vague column for the morning edition. My editor won’t let me use any names till we exhume the body – and that’s in the works. I also have a young reporter waiting to ambush the judge outside the building tomorrow. You know the sort of thing… “Is there any truth to the rumor that you beat your elderly mother to death?” ’
‘Did Pansy give you anything?’
‘No. Poor Pansy. I’ve never seen that kind of pain close up. She’s gone back to him.’
‘She’s up there now? She’s crazy.’
‘She says he’s always very contrite after he beats her. She’s not afraid of him right now. She thinks she can work this out.’
‘You know he’s going to kill her the next time.’
‘Does she have to file the complaint? Couldn’t you do it? In addition to the humane aspects, I’m thinking of libel laws. An editor won’t touch it without a police report, and there isn’t one.’
‘I didn’t witness the beating. If she says she fell down, the law agrees with her.’
Mallory’s face was devoid of all expression as she folded her arms and looked down at Betty Hyde. Hyde fought off the startling illusion that Mallory had grown taller in the passage of seconds. Now Mallory leaned down, and Hyde stepped back until she was pressed against the kitchen counter.
‘You’re holding out on me. What have you got on Eric Franz?’
It was late to be calling on the neighbors. But then, she had taken Eric in on the night Annie died. It was late then too. Tit for tut, my dear.
When Eric answered the door, he was pulling his robe closed about his waist, and staring into the air over her left shoulder.
‘Eric, it’s Betty. Can we talk?’
He stepped back from the door and waved her into the room. It was black until he said, ‘Oh, sorry,’ and pressed the light switch. She shouldn’t have been surprised to see the room unchanged. It had been little over a month since Annie died. Although gone was the bad joke of their framed wedding portrait with crayon cuckold’s horns drawn on the head of his likeness.
They were hours and bottles into the wine rack when Eric lost control.
‘Are you crazy? Annie would never have stayed with me those last three years if not for the blindness. No, actually it was the insurance money that changed her mind about divorcing me. And then I had the success of the books and the prizes. But if I had been sighted, she would have left me in a minute and taken a large settlement. But she couldn’t leave a blind man, could she, not a socialite like Annie. What would the neighbors think?’
The latch lowered, and the door opened with a gentle push. He prowled through the dark rooms until he found her. Her long slender body was stretched out on the bed. Her hair had a glow to it, as though she had found a way to trap sunlight, to bring it indoors with her and keep it alive in the night.
He lay down beside her with animal stealth and rolled on to his back and into sleep, four feet paddling the air, chasing mice across his dreams.
It was the cold metal of the gun against his nose that woke him to the bright light of a lamp. He looked at the tip of the gun, and it was necessary to cross his eyes to do this. Weary and unsteady on the bedding, he rose to his hind legs and began the dance. But she was already gone, having slipped from the bed and into the dark of the next room, preceded by the gun in her hand.
He thudded down to the floor and padded after her as she searched behind each door. She stopped awhile by the bathroom door. He rubbed his head against one of her bare feet, which did not love him back but pushed him away. Her hand depressed the latch on the door. She pressed on it again and again.
She looked down at him and whispered, ‘Are you that smart?’ which he, more or less correctly, interpreted as ‘Good boy,’ and he began to purr.
Now he was being picked up in her arms, luxuriating in the warmth of her skin. And then, he was falling toward the tiles of the bathroom floor. The light went out, the door slammed, and he sat alone in the dark, wondering what he had done wrong this time.
Mallory, the consummate liar, had barred herself from the poker game for the damage of a lie. How perverse and convoluted was her code of what passed for honor.
Charles had learned to lie and betray in one night. Oh wouldn’t Mallory be proud of how far he’d come, how low he’d sunk.
No, no she wouldn’t. One did not do such damage to people in Mallory’s orbit. But she would never know what he had done. Even if he was in the confession mode, he was bound by Slope to keep silent. A lie of omission.
As Riker had once explained to him, her history belonged to her alone. She would hate this intrusion, this conspiracy of knowledge. Slope would never discuss this evening with Riker. The lies and betrayal would go unnoticed. And so there were more lies by omission.
He didn’t have the luxury of barring himself from the poker game. Questions would be asked, she would ferret out the answers, more damage would be done. Once a week, he would be reminded of his crimes, sitting across a card table from Edward Slope.
And he could not confess to Riker either, not without the web spreading. He only wished he were a practicing Catholic so he could confess to someone.
The pattern of his web had become too intricate. Sleep was lost in the tangle of the weave. But finally, sleep did come for him, all in visions of a little girl running in the dark, pursued by things which were darker still and might be spiders. And when she slipped in the blood of his dreams, he snapped awake.
His mind flooded with music to kill the images and thoughts created by a night of lies, and now his penance was in the room with him. He shut his eyes and tried to end the music. But he could hear the light steps of Amanda’s feet all around his bed.
‘Interesting, isn’t it,’ said Amanda. ‘She was able to pretend sleep while another child was being murdered.’
No, please, I don’t want to think about that.
‘Oh, Charles, you’ll never stop thinking about that. It wasn’t the reaction you’d expect from a small child, was it?’
Since when was Mallory predictable?
He kept his eyes closed, in hopes of minimizing the damage to his mind. He didn’t know how to send her away. Perhaps the delusion would pale without the reinforcement of sight.
But no. She continued to pace, footsteps growing heavier, waiting on her answer as a solid woman would do.
Addressing his words to the ceiling, he said, ‘It wasn’t Mallory’s mother who was killed in the film. You were wrong about that angle.’
‘Was I?’ Amanda’s pacing stopped for a moment. ‘She never moved the entire time a child was being tortured. She played dead.’
‘She might only have been paralyzed with fear. There are no facts to support – ’
‘Logic and facts have failed you, Charles. You had a qualified medical examiner as a witness to the film. She was playing dead. Where did she learn that? Maybe she’d had some practice witnessing another bloody murder. Maybe that’s what happened to her mother, and to Justin’s mother.’
He rolled over to face her, this woman who was not there, yet he kept his eyes closed. ‘Amanda, this is ludicrous. Justin’s mother died of a heart attack. That’s a fact. Now the aspect of child abuse makes more sense. That’s what Mallory would see in the boy. She would recognize the signs of an abused child. Even Mallory could not divine a murder through the boy’s eyes.’
Strains of the concerto meandered through his brain. He recited the Greek alphabet in a whisper. The music fled; Amanda remained to pace the floor around his bed. Her footsteps were heavier now. He opened his eyes to faint moonlight and the stronger light of street lamps pouring through his bedroom window. He turned his face to the opposite wall, where his ultimate nightmare was moving across the wallpaper. Amanda had learned to cast a shadow.