The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  “You’re not serious? A blind man?”

  “He was blinded on the job. He was working for a newspaper then—huge settlement.”

  “I understand your love of the money motive.” For this was her father’s influence at work on her; Markowitz had loved this motive best. “But the man is blind.”

  “Charles, I always took you for the politically correct type. I hope you’re not suggesting that blind people are too handicapped to kill right along with the rest of us.”

  “A blind man would never have returned to the crime scene. He’d have no way to know who might be watching.”

  “Suppose he panicked and did the murder, and then an accomplice came back and cleaned up after him?”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. I don’t think a blind man did this. You’re an expert on gifts. Tell me about the gifts that come out when a man loses his sight.”

  “Oh, that’s a myth,” said Charles. “The blind do not have more acute senses of smell and hearing, if that’s what you mean. They merely have fewer distractions without the sense of sight. And there’s more dependence on the other senses, so they tend to pay more attention to them. Does he have a Seeing Eye dog?”

  “Yes. Everyone in that building has a dog.”

  “It is true that blind people are less likely to walk into plate-glass walls—the cane or the dog prevents that. A good dog will also watch traffic and lead the blind away from obstacles. The dog is the truly gifted partner in the relationship.”

  “What about a really good adaptation to blindness?”

  “Well, some people do make an art form out of it. They look directly at you when you speak to them, trying to create the illusion of being sighted.”

  “Eric Franz doesn’t do that. But he does come across as the bastard child of Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Ortega with his acute senses bullshit. And he can find his way across a crowded room without touching anyone with his cane.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I think so. So I’m keeping him. Now I’ve got a blind man, a wife beater, and a beauty-and-the-beast combo.”

  Charles stared at his hands. He had his own beauty-and-the-beast problems. He looked up to the antique mirror by the couch. No, his own story would be beauty and the clown. Her reflection moved behind his own. That incredible face did not belong in the same gilded frame with his own ridiculous ensemble of features. And if he didn’t get to the barber soon, his longish wavy hair might take on the character of a clown’s fright wig.

  He turned to face her, and waved one hand toward the door near her chair. “Would you mind opening the door for Henrietta?”

  And only now, the buzzer sounded.

  Mallory stared at him. “One day, you must tell me how you do that.”

  “When Henrietta’s working, she’s nearly as punctual as you are. She’s joining us for lunch.”

  Mallory opened the door to the psychiatrist from apartment 3A. Today Henrietta was dressed in her work clothes, a neat tailored suit and soft pastel blouse.

  Charles left them to their business of the park murder and wandered into the kitchen. The cat followed him, knowing this was the place from whence all food flowed. Mallory had stocked the office refrigerator anew with all the makings of sandwiches. He pulled out a tray neatly prepared with every imaginable condiment, cheese and meat.

  Henrietta walked into the kitchen as he was bending down to feed the cat a piece of pastrami. In the last twenty-four hours, he had learned a lot about the cat’s likes and dislikes.

  “Hey, Nose, how are you?” asked Henrietta.

  Charles looked up. The cat did not.

  Ten minutes later, Charles and Henrietta were seated at the kitchen table, drinking coffee to the music of purring which originated at Mallory’s feet. Mallory stood at the chopping block on the counter, slicing cheese. She looked down at the cat and seemed to be weighing the knife in her hand against the cat’s potential value.

  Charles turned to Henrietta and asked, “Can you explain why the cat is so attached to Mallory? Nose won’t dance for me, and I’m the one who’s been feeding him.”

  “Does the novel tell you how the cat was trained?”

  “No. I just assumed it was food.”

  “Nose may have been trained with pain, and it could also be tied to visual cues. What happened to the cat’s ear?”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Mallory, setting a plate of four varieties of cheese on the table alongside the rest of the sandwich makings. “It happened when Nose was loose on the street. The vet said the cat was otherwise well cared for.”

  Charles nodded. “If the female character in the novel is Amanda Bosch, I don’t see her allowing the cat to be tortured.”

  “Her lover trained the cat to dance in four days,” said Mallory.

  “If we can believe the novel,” said Charles, to his immediate regret. Mallory didn’t like that. He could feel the tension crawling toward him from her side of the table. He filled Henrietta’s coffee cup. “The novel was started over a year ago. Signs of abuse might be gone by now.”

  “Then most likely the cat dances to avoid pain.” Henrietta was loading her sandwich with pastrami. “It’s like child abuse. The child may cling to the abusive parent. That’s why I wondered about the cat’s ear. Mallory bears a general resemblance to the victim. She’s probably triggering a memory.”

  Charles took a string of beef from his own sandwich and dropped it into Nose’s open mouth. “But surely the cat knows its owner from Mallory.” The cat returned to its steady occupation of shedding fur on Mallory’s jeans.

  “Animals can respond strongly to visual cues,” said Henrietta. “I got my own cat from an animal shelter. I was walking by the cage and the cat went berserk, paws reaching through the wire, crying nonstop. They told me the cat did that every time a woman with long dark hair walked by. So I went there for a dog and came home with a cat. It was instant love. Same as with Mallory and Nose.”

  “What else is in the novel?” Mallory asked, pushing the cat away from her with one leg, love apparently always being one-sided with her.

  “Nothing that would isolate one of your three suspects,” said Charles. “He doesn’t particularly like women, though he likes to make love to them. I don’t suppose that helps much. I have no idea what the lie might have been. There’s no clue in the manuscript.”

  “All three of the suspects could fit the profile of liars,” said Mallory. “And they’ve all got something at stake. Judge Heart has a career to consider. Other nominations have failed because of reefers and illegal nannies. If she dug up something in his background, it wouldn’t have to be much to cost him the appointment. Harry Kipling has a rich wife and a brutal prenuptial agreement. Eric Franz was with his wife the night she was killed in a traffic accident. He might have had something to do with that.”

  “So what have we got?” asked Charles. “A novel we can’t use in court and no physical evidence. There was nothing else turned up at the park site?”

  “Heller’s the best. If he can’t find another forensic detail, no one can.”

  “Well, there’s the cat,” said Charles. “But unless you think we can train Nose to bite the suspect on the leg in open court, the cat is worthless.”

  “No it isn’t.” Mallory was staring down at the animal with an expression that gave her nothing in common with animal lovers. “I can use the cat and the book to flush him out. The tricky part is where I get him to incriminate himself.”

  “Any confrontation with this man is dangerous to you,” said Henrietta. “If your theory is correct, he’s demonstrated his willingness to kill in order to protect himself.”

  Mallory seemed unimpressed. “So? The perp I’m dealing with doesn’t have the nerve of the average psycho. It was a one-shot crime to cover another crime—all fear and panic.”

  “You can’t know that,” said Henrietta. “It doesn’t matter that the murder wasn’t premeditated. He may have killed her a thousand times in his fantasie
s. He may be someone who knows her only as a service person, a maintenance man. And you can’t tell a sociopath from his appearance or public behavior. This man may very well have a dangerous pathology and still pass for a normal member of the community.”

  “A sociopath can’t pass for normal, not with everyone.”

  “Well, yes he can,” Henrietta said with rare insistence.

  “No,” said Mallory, with finality. “He can’t.”

  Charles watched the sudden shock of understanding come into Henrietta’s eyes as she realized she was talking to someone with an inside view.

  “So now that we’ve established what he isn’t,” said Mallory. “How much weight can I put on a lie as motivation? If I went into the lives of all the tenants in that building, I could dig up something on every one of them. What kind of lie pushes that kind of button? He panicked once. I want to make him do it again.”

  “It would depend on the lie,” said Henrietta. “A person’s entire life can be structured on lies.”

  “What kind of buttons should I push? How do I scare him into talking?”

  “Fear might make him close up. Better to get him angry. A disclosure in anger is worth more. If we can assume he taught the cat to dance, we might consider control issues here. It’s the fount of the hatred of women and the most violent crimes against them. In that case, getting caught in any lie might have set him off. Which one would you say was most prone to lying as a pathology?”

  “Everybody lies,” said Mallory.

  “Surely not everyone,” said Charles.

  “No, Charles. You don’t. But then you can’t lie, can you? You don’t have the face for it. Wait, I take that back. There’s the vase you rigged. That’s a lie by omission, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a common test situation.”

  “And?”

  “A lie by omission. I’ll bet Helen never lied.”

  “Well, Helen only lied out of kindness, but she was kind to a lot of people.”

  “Markowitz never lied.”

  “Oh sure he did. He lied like crazy. The old man was the best. I’ve heard him lie to the mayor, the commissioner. He lied every time he held a press conference. He lied—”

  “All right. Everybody lies.”

  As she carried the cat down the sidewalk between the garage and the Coventry Arms, she caught sight of the doorman reading the newspaper. A cab pulled up, and Arthur quickly removed his glasses, tucking them into the fold of the paper which lay on the shelf beneath the house phone. Arthur was smiling and opening the door of the cab when Mallory slipped through the door. As she passed by that shelf, she flipped back the fold of the paper.

  Bifocals. An ugly little man who was too vain to wear his glasses in front of the tenants. Interesting.

  She walked over to the wide lobby window which overlooked the sidewalk. Another tenant was walking toward the building. As Moss White, the talk show host, came abreast of the bench twelve feet before the door to the building, Arthur put on his wide smile.

  Well, at least the man’s field of vision included the bench where Amanda had been sitting the day before she died.

  Thoughts of Amanda Bosch rode up in the elevator with Mallory. What had the woman seen that day? What had upset her and made her run off? And how much value could she put on Arthur’s testimony if she needed him in court? She and Arthur must have another little chat, and soon.

  When she walked in the door of the Rosens’ apartment, she had the feeling that there was someone else close by. Nose felt it too. The cat in her arms ceased to purr. It was kneading its clawless paws into her coat, looking everywhere.

  Something in the bedroom was being moved. Now she heard the sound of the vacuum. She walked into the room to see the cleaning woman who must be the Rosens’ Sarah.

  “Oh, hello, miss.” The woman switched off the vacuum, and now Mallory heard the sound of the flushing toilet in the bathroom. The door opened, and Justin Riccalo was standing on the threshold and looking up at her. He began a small smile; it died off as Mallory turned her back on him to face the cleaning woman.

  “I hope it’s all right, miss,” said Sarah. “He was standing out in the hall waiting for you. He needed to use the bathroom. It is all right, isn’t it?”

  “Sure.” Now she looked at the boy again. Lately, he was always in her mind on some level. She felt a tie to him without being able to name it, as though they had been through something together. It nagged at her, this feeling that occurred each time they met—a bizarre and twisted notion approaching déjà vu. She knew where he had been, for she had been there before him.

  “Well, I’m done in this room,” said Sarah, coiling the cord around her vacuum cleaner. Mallory and the boy continued to stare at one another in silence until the cleaning woman had shown herself out of the bedroom.

  “How did you get past the doorman, Justin?”

  “I walked in behind a man and a woman. I guess the doorman thought I belonged to them.”

  “How did you know I lived here?”

  “I looked it up in the phone book.”

  No, said the slow shake of her head, that could not be.

  The vacuum cleaner began to drone and toil across the carpet of the front room.

  “Okay, I was with my stepmother when she followed you the other day.”

  “So that was you.” She had felt him but not seen him. The stepmother had not explained the watcher who had occupied the space on the opposite sidewalk, a space which had been empty by the time she had turned round.

  “I gave the elevator man your name, and he took me to this floor. I ran into the cleaning woman in the hall. She was just going into your apartment. I told her you were expecting me.”

  Now he seemed to be waiting for praise. She let him wait.

  He jammed his hands into his down parka and rocked on the balls of his feet as he looked around the bedroom with its frilly four-poster canopy bed, the chintz and the bric-a-brac. “It’s not what I expected of you.”

  All his confidence ebbed away in the ensuing silence.

  Mallory was listening to the hum of Sarah’s vacuum cleaner. Mrs. Ortega always cleaned one room at a time, and the front room already had the furniture-polish and ammonia smell of a finished job.

  The boy opened his mouth to speak. Mallory moved one finger up to silence him. He closed his mouth and turned to the sound of the vacuum in the next room.

  When the vacuum stopped and the front door finally closed on the departing Sarah, he said, “I’ve got to talk to someone, but no one will listen to me.”

  “I’ll listen if you’re straight with me. Has your stepmother missed any nylon stockings recently?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Did she accuse you of taking it?”

  “Not yet. I found a mangled stocking wadded up in my dresser this morning. I didn’t take it, and I don’t know how it got there.”

  What was the connection she felt to the boy? Something old. Half a memory. He was a liar—that might be part of it.

  “When you’re ready to tell me the truth about what’s going on, I’ll help you.”

  “You think I’m making the pencils fly, you and everyone else. Why? What do you really know about me? Nothing. Only what my father tells you.”

  “Oh, I know a lot about you, Justin. I know you’re smart enough to figure out how the tricks are done. But you won’t tell, will you? Either you do the tricks yourself, or you’re afraid of your father, or both. Or maybe your stepmother is doing it. Maybe you keep quiet about it because you like the idea of driving your old man straight up a wall.”

  She looked at his clothes and his unmarred pink face, his unskinned knees. His running shoes were not new, but they weren’t dirty, either.

  “You’re a loner. You have no friends, no sports to play.”

  He stood very straight, shoulders pinned back.

  “You attended a military school.” Good guess. His head was nodding. “And you’re holding out on me. If these stun
ts with the flying objects are your doing, I’m gonna find you out. You got that?”

  “What reason would I have to do it? You don’t know everything. You don’t know that all my mother’s money—”

  “—was left to you in trust. And your father controls the trust.”

  “He controls me, too.”

  “So you’re ratting out your father, is that it? You know, if I’d been in your place, I would have targeted your old man. That bastard wouldn’t have lasted six seconds with me.”

  “He is a bastard. I really worry about my stepmother.”

  Mallory only stared at him in silence to tell him she knew he was lying again.

  “Okay,” said the boy. “She’s a dweeb.”

  “What was your real mother like?”

  “She was like my second mother, and my second mother was like my third. She was afraid of everyone and everything. My father has a type. Each one is just a copy of the last one.”

  “Was your real mother afraid of you too?”

  The boy’s hands dove deeper into the pockets of his parka. She watched the frustration welling up in his eyes, and it was in the hunch of his shoulders and the rabbit teeth pressed down on his lower lip—frustration growing and growing, finally culminating and escaping in a sigh.

  The cat padded into the room. It started toward her. She looked at it once to warn it away. Nose stopped a respectful distance from her and sat down beside the boy. Now two pairs of eyes were on her, both needy.

  “Don’t let the cat out when you go,” she said, and turned her back on both of them, leaving the bedroom to walk down the short hallway to the den where her computer was waiting.

  Too bad the cameras hadn’t been running. Maybe she should run a continuous tape against the possibility of another intrusion when she was not home.

  The front door closed softly.

  “Charles, let me fix you a drink. No, really. Have one with me.”

  Effrim Wilde opened the dark glass doors of a chrome-trimmed cabinet to gleaming glassware and a fully stocked wet bar. “Eleanor’s forbidden me to drink alone. She says it leads to alcoholism.”