He turned his back on Charles as though the recipe for whiskey and soda might be worth guarding.
“Eleanor came back?”
“Yes,” said Effrim, rimming each glass with a twist of lemon and a loving smile. “She felt guilty about abandoning me to my cigarettes and whiskey and good food. She’s a saint, that woman. This past weekend, I didn’t have a single meal that didn’t taste like low-cal library paste.”
He handed one glass to Charles and carried the other to his own chair, which put three yards of plush carpet and four feet of dark glass desktop between them.
The office had been recently redecorated. The walls were a sickly yellow green. How did Effrim stand it? Of course, he only spent a few hours of the day in this place. The rest of the time was spent in three-hour lunch seductions of grant committee chairmen and other sources of funding. The lines of the furniture were sharp. Every surface was cold metal and glass. The four wall hangings, all done by the same brutal hand, were abstracts of angry red shapes and a nervous, manic energy of black lines. Not Effrim’s style. This private office said more about Eleanor than Effrim.
“Does Eleanor know you’re dabbling in bad magic acts?”
“So you pegged the boy for a fraud?” Effrim feigned surprise, but not well. “I hope the experience hasn’t been entirely worthless.”
“It’s not entirely done with. I need some data from the research group.”
“Ask my assistant. He’ll get you whatever you need. I suppose you’re shopping for a little something in the line of flying objects? You were right about the Russian data and the Chinese. Their methodology is a bit lax, isn’t it?”
“I want the Chinese data on the succubus experiments.”
“Is the boy branching out?”
“No, but he’s led me along another line of investigation.”
“I thought you were put off by the bizarre stuff. Anything in particular?”
Charles’s memory called up a page from a journal and displayed it on the wall by Effrim’s head. He scanned the lines. “There’s an experiment with an Asian monk who created a succubus under lab conditions. I want that one. His profile fits the stigmatic. The succubus, in front of witnesses, was seen to bruise the man’s flesh.”
“Come back to work for me and I’ll get you all the cuckoo material you like.”
“You still get the lion’s share of funding from sources like Riccalo’s employers? In addition to sitting on grant committees, Mallory tells me his other duties include real estate scams which bilk the elderly.”
“Ah, but no arrests, indictments, or convictions. By New York standards, this makes him a model citizen. Oh, Charles, we just never seem to agree on the Institute’s funding, do we? I’m stealing money from the bastard’s company. I should get a community-service medal. But I can be flexible. Come back to work for us, and I’ll track down alternate funding.”
“Thanks, I think I’ll just take the succubus material and run.”
“You’re losing your mind out there among the tiny brains. But I’d be willing to trade any four good brains at the Institute for what’s left of yours. Come home, Charles. Come back inside where you belong. I’ll triple your project funding.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s cold out there, Charles.”
By “out there,” Effrim included all of real life beyond the isolation of the think tank. Charles surmised that Effrim had daily anticipated his prize freak would return home, beaten by the ordeal of making his way among people who found him eccentric and out of sync with the rest of them—which he was.
“Will we be able to give a good report to the boy’s father?”
“The boy’s father could very well be orchestrating this. I don’t trust Riccalo. And I have my doubts about you, too.”
An hour later, Charles was seated in his own front room and closing the file of succubus material. So it was true; there was a link to the stigmata phenomenon exhibited by fanatics. The mental aberration of the succubus could work its effects on the body as well as the mind.
In the darkening room, a memory from his childhood came back to him in striking detail which included the succulent brown flesh of a roasted fowl. It was a goose, and it held a prominent position on the white lace tablecloth spread with fine china, gleaming silver and candle-light. Malakhai was seated at the dinner table beside the empty chair which belonged to Louisa. The adults had been drinking wine and laughing with one another, accompanied by a lively recording of Mozart. The small child he had been was staring at Malakhai in the moment when Louisa kissed him. He had seen the imprint of her lips on the man’s face. Charles had rubbed his eyes with small hands, but not rubbed away the kiss which made the depression, the contour of her lips in Malakhai’s flesh.
Well, Amanda Bosch had created no physical phenomena yet. She was merely an image like a holograph. So he had a ways to go before he became truly damaged. Amanda was not solid stuff, and he was not yet mad. He’d only made a clever moving picture, an odd extension of his eidetic memory.
Right.
The red light was flashing on the system alert box. So the judge was using his fax. The rewiring diverted the fax to her own machine. It was an application form for a new bank card. She scanned it into her computer and reset the type with a few alterations. After the lines for name and address, she typed in her own questions. Then she copied the letter for Harry Kipling, who also had a fax machine.
Now that she was getting to know them, she could tailor the terror to fit the man. What should she do to the blind man? According to the building super, his computer was rigged for a braille printer, but did he use it? She typed his message into the personal files: I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU. CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU SEE?
The purring at her feet annoyed her. She looked down at the cat, her eyes matching threats with the cat’s contented slits. And now a crash came from the kitchen. She felt for her gun, and the cat’s nose went up as it tested the air for what it could not see.
Gun drawn, Mallory walked into the kitchen and found the floor near the table littered with shatters and sparkles of glass and water. She checked every closet and room and then returned to the kitchen. She felt along every wet inch of the tabletop, searching for any small object which might do the job of the wooden match Charles had used to prime the vase in his office. There was nothing.
Well, the boy was smart, but not supernatural. So, the glass had simply fallen.
The unbeliever knelt down to the tiles with a dustpan and swept up the glass, and then mopped the floor and carefully wrapped the shards of the glass in plastic.
A barrage of soft thuds came from the next room. When she walked in, the cat’s body was arched, ears flattened, eyes round. It had knocked the bowl of fruit onto the carpet. An apple was rolling toward Nose, and the cat was backing up on tender feet as though the carpet might be on fire. Mallory snapped her fingers at the cat to get its attention. The cat ran the length of the room and leapt into her arms.
Another trick?
She put the cat down again and snapped her fingers once more. And the cat was in her arms.
What else can you do?
She dropped the cat, and crawled along the carpet, picking up the fallen fruit. The cat stayed beside her, loving up against her, mewling for some small attention, anything at all.
Mallory poured the wax fruit back into the bowl. Nose licked her hand, and she drew it back. Now she scanned the carpet and its recent proliferation of white cat hairs.
House-proud Helen Markowitz would never have allowed an animal in the house, yet she had fed every stray that came through the yard. And for ten days of winter, a mongrel had lived in their garage, lapping up leftovers and licking Helen’s hand and adoring her with its great brown eyes.
Helen had shown young Kathy each scar of abuse on the animal’s pelt. You can learn a lot about people from their animals, said Helen. She had learned so much about the mongrel’s owner that she made no attempt to fin
d him. Helen lost the tag on the dog collar and found another home for the animal with a family on the next block.
It’s not the dog who is lost, Helen had said. The one who abused this animal is lost.
Helen had never used the words of Kathy and Markowitz’s shared vocabulary: dirtball, scumbag, scum-sucker. The bastard who had split the dog’s pelt with kicks and broken its ribs, he was only lost to Helen.
Everyone has a dark side, Helen told her. When the dark kills off all the light of the soul, this is a lost person.
Small Kathy had figured, Naw, he’s a scumbag, and she knew the dog’s former owner deserved a few kicks to his own ribs. Her young sense of justice was very dark, and it had an elegant simplicity that was not much changed over the years. But for Helen’s sake, she had tried to behave as though the light shone for her, too.
Mallory reached out one hand and gently stroked the cat’s head. Helen would’ve liked that.
The cat closed its eyes in contentment.
Duty done, she quickly withdrew her hand, wiped it on the leg of her jeans, and left the cat sitting in the middle of the living room, its eyes wide open now and looking everywhere for the vanished Mallory.
The Amanda Bosch file had an honored place in the top layer of the mess on Riker’s desk. He was fumbling through the contents of a lower drawer, fingers grasping what he thought were recent park-site photos. But he had gone too far in his haphazard method of filing, and now he held the snapshots he had taken at Kathy’s graduation from the police academy.
There was Helen Markowitz, smiling broadly, not realizing the cancer in her body was already planning to cut her life short in one more year. Markowitz had never really recovered from the loss. If not for Kathy, he might have followed Helen years sooner.
It had always angered Riker to think back on Helen’s death and how quietly she had gone to it, sedated, unprotesting. The hospital gurney wheels had whispered Markowitz’s wife into that sterile operating room, and only the body had come wheeling back to them. She had slipped under the surgeon’s knife and slipped away.
There should have been more noise to mark the event. In low tones, the doctor had told Markowitz and Kathy how sorry he was. Unspoken were the words The show’s over. And so Markowitz and Kathy had sat together on a cheap plastic couch in the terrible silence of that waiting room, two unimportant people in the aftermath of an event which had not been properly called to an end. It was a play which tapered off to a mumble and had no curtain to tell the audience it was time to go home.
Riker understood what Kathy had meant when she turned to him then and said, “This is a rip-off.” It was.
Now someone was standing before Riker’s desk, not wanting to interrupt a thought, only politely waiting with just the minimum of shuffling noise to announce himself.
Riker knew only one person who was that polite. It was no surprise to look up into the smiling face of Charles Butler. And this was another reminder of an old friend. Markowitz’s smile had no such loony aspect, but, as with Charles, one tended to smile back, regardless of grim thoughts and small heartaches.
“Pull up a chair, Charles. You waiting around for Mallory?”
“No. Jack Coffey invited me in for a little chat about Amanda Bosch.”
“He probably thinks Mallory’s holding out on him. She probably is. But then, to be fair, Coffey holds out on Mallory, and I hold out on both of them. We’re a very dysfunctional family, we three. You didn’t rat her out, did you?”
“Of course not.”
So Mallory was holding out.
“What can I do for you, Charles?”
“Coffey tells me it was your idea to give this case to Mallory. May I ask why?”
“Because of Amanda Bosch. When a kid dies young like that one, there ought to be some fanfare, you know? Sicking Mallory on the perp was the worst thing I could think of doing to him.”
“But it’s dangerous.”
“If she’s right about him, she only has to flush him out. If she’s wrong, she may have to shoot him.”
“You’re not worried about her?”
“No,” he lied, because he really liked Charles.
“But the way she’s going about it, she might as well—”
“We can’t put anybody in jail without evidence. Sometimes we know who did it, and we can’t touch him. People do get away with murder—I won’t tell you how often, but it happens. Now I’m betting this bastard doesn’t get away from Mallory. I’ve got a hundred bucks riding on the kid.”
“But she’s hanging out there like a target.”
“She is a target—she’s a cop. And she won’t give it up, either. If you’re thinking she’d be safer with you in civilian life, just get rid of that fairy tale. This job gives her a rush. Now she’s got a lock on this case, and she’s flying. And what can you offer her, Charles?”
“Nothing. I know that.” Charles stared at his shoes for a moment. “But you’re looking for court-supportable evidence against this man. Her methods aren’t strictly within the law, are they?”
“I know she’ll break rules to get him, and this is what I’ve come to. I’m following Markowitz down the slow path of corruption. I’m copping to it, okay? You can have me arrested for it.”
“Suppose she gets caught breaking the rules? What about her career then?”
“Charles, you must know how Markowitz used her. I know the old man liked you and he trusted you, but I don’t think he shared much of the department dirt. If we did everything by the book, the results would look pretty poor. Mallory could get things for him, impossible things. He never asked how many laws she broke in a day. What she got by illegal means wasn’t evidence, nothing admissible in court, but it was stuff Markowitz could use to finesse a perp into a nervous breakdown. Mallory knows things about this killer. She has under-the-skin intimate knowledge. When she’s done with him, he’ll think she was there in his pocket when Amanda Bosch went down. Mallory will get him. I’m counting on it. She is a thing to behold.”
“She’s a breakable human being like the rest of us.”
“Charles, we’ve all fallen into that trap. She’s so young, isn’t she? Just a kid. Of course you want to protect her. That perfect, unlined face—eyes like an angel.”
Charles was still nodding in agreement as Riker leaned forward and shook his arm to call him back to the real world, the scary one that Mallory inhabited.
Riker raised his voice to say, “She’s got the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen. She gives normal people the shakes—even if they don’t drink as much as I do. She packs a monster gun, and you don’t. She’s a great shot, and you probably couldn’t load a gun without an owner’s manual.”
Now Riker leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk as he watched Charles trying to make logic work in tandem with the blind psychosis of having fallen in love with Kathy Mallory. He’d had occasion to wonder if Mallory understood how Charles felt about her. He was inclined to think she knew it and used it.
In a softer voice, he said, “I’m glad you stopped by, Charles. I hope this little talk has put things into perspective.”
As Charles pulled up in front of Robin Duffy’s house, he nearly put the car up on the curb, so startled was he by the lights of the menorah and the Christmas tree in the house across the street. The former occupants of that house, Louis and Helen Markowitz, were dead.
Robin, his host for the evening, was standing in the warm light of an open doorway. Charles crunched new snow as he crossed the narrow band of earth that lined the recently shoveled sidewalk. He hurried up the flagstone path to the door, and his hand was grabbed in a warm handshake. Robin had been Louis’s neighbor for more than twenty years.
Done with hellos, Charles turned round for a last look at the house of bright holiday lights.
Robin grinned. “Lifelike, isn’t it?”
Together, they walked into the warmth of Robin’s house, and the smells of pine needles warring with floral air freshner.
“I can’t get Kathy to sell the place,” Robin was saying as Dr. Edward Slope stood up from the card table to clap Charles on the back.
“Kathy’s the only Upper West Sider with a summer home in Brooklyn,” said Edward. “I think she enjoys being perverse.”
“But it’s not like she ever uses the place,” said Robin. “She never comes by anymore. So, I try to make it look like someone lives there. Lou put up a Christmas tree every year since Kathy came to live with them. It didn’t seem right with no Christmas tree.”
“A Hanukkah bush,” Rabbi David Kaplan corrected him as he entered the room from the kitchen, carrying a tray of sandwich makings. “Louis swore to me it was a Hanukkah bush.”
“It does make the house look like a family lives there,” said Charles, staring out the wide window of the front room.
“I trimmed the tree with the original ornaments from that first Christmas,” said Robin.
“And the ornaments Kathy stole from the department store?” asked Edward Slope as he cut the deck of cards.
“Well,” said Robin, who had been Louis Markowitz’s attorney as well as a friend, “Helen went back and paid for those, so technically—”
“Never mind,” said Edward. “Pull up your chairs, gentlemen. Robin, tell him what else you did to the place.”
The four were seated around the card table, picking up the dealt cards and swapping mustard for mayonnaise, passing around meats and pickles, slices of white bread and slices of rye. The caps of beer bottles were pinging off the tabletop as Robin delivered a lecture on the technical intricacies of electronic lighting devices.
“I bought timer lights for the lamps in all the rooms,” said Robin as he threw down one card in hopes of drawing a better one. “The lights go off and on automatically at different times. I rigged the kitchen light to go off at seven forty-five. That’s when Helen usually finished cleaning up.”
“Robin’s really into this,” said the medical examiner, dealing out Robin’s card and two for the rabbi. “The Harvard Law School graduate finally found a set of timer lights with directions he could understand.”
The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Page 16
