The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  She knew.

  And only now he remembered the knife was still sitting on the coffee table. Why had she brought it back to the Rosens’ apartment? What had she been doing in the basement?

  Robert Riccalo still managed to dominate the large room, though he had retreated behind the financial pages of his newspaper, which obscured all but his trouser legs and the green leather of his chair.

  The chair was positioned like a throne and elevated above the cushions of the couch where his wife perched. Justin sat in a small wing-back chair which might have been made with a child’s size in mind.

  The rustle of Robert Riccalo’s newspaper could be heard above the television chatter of a commercial for fabric softener. Every grunt or sigh from the throne called Justin’s eyes up and away from his book. Each time he looked up, he would catch his stepmother staring at him, finding Justin a hundred times more interesting than the television set, which played on to no one.

  All three heads turned in the same direction when they heard the crash of glass in the next room. Robert Riccalo looked at his son, who scrunched down in the chair. Sally Riccalo was rigid as a board, sitting ramrod-straight at the edge of the couch cushion, eyes fixed in the direction of the noise, her long, thin nose pointing to it like a compass for things that went bump in the night.

  Robert Riccalo was first into the dining room. Pieces of blue glass lay on the marble tiles. Four of the longest shards were lined up in a row pointing toward the room he had just left. Now he turned quickly at the sound coming from his wife, who stood behind him. It was from deep inside of her, a squeak that escaped. Her eyes fixed on the bits of broken glass.

  Justin was last to enter the room as the first shard of glass was inching along the floor toward Sally Riccalo. She stood there paralyzed, unmoving. Now she broke formation and pointed at Justin. “It’s him, he’s doing this to me. He’s trying to kill me! It’s him!” Her finger pointed at the boy, and Robert Riccalo turned to his son, thunder brewing in his eyes.

  Justin fled the dining room and ran down the hall to his own room. He turned the lock and strained to move furniture across the door.

  “Justin!” his father bellowed. “Justin!” The yelling was coming closer. “Justin!” almost at the door now. The doorknob moved as the lock was tried. He listened to the large man turning on his heel, footsteps fading off to get the key. Then Robert Riccalo was back and fitting a key into the lock.

  Justin backed up to the far wall as the door cracked against the dresser and that heavy piece of furniture was being moved slowly, relentlessly out of his father’s way.

  It was the five-year-old who caught her attention when he yelled in anger, “I want to see the body!” And now Mallory wanted to see it too. She walked toward the group of pedestrians clotting the sidewalk in front of the next building. The boy kicked the leg of a woman who held him by one arm. The woman was a different color, and by her uniform, a different piece of the planet Earth, one closer to the ground than the high-rise strata where the child dwelled.

  “I will not go inside!” said the child, balling his tiny fists.

  Now she noticed the long black coat of outstanding tailoring, even by Mallory’s standards. It was draped on the man who was pushing at the body with the tip of his umbrella.

  “Is he dead?” asked the woman next to him, drawing back. “Is that why he smells?”

  “No,” said another woman. “They all smell like that.”

  Mallory pushed through the small group to see the umbrella successfully rolling the stiff body of a man. The eyes were closed as if in sleep, and there was no trauma to the grimy face, no trace of insult at the prodding umbrella, for he was dead. The bottle by his side, the spill of vomit, and the ragged clothing told his story. He had crawled into the bushes late at night and frozen to death, too far gone with booze to seek better shelter. Or perhaps he had choked to death on the vomit. The third-shift doorman, whose job in life was to drive off the poor, had probably been sleeping on duty or reading his paper when the man had taken refuge from last night’s snow beneath the slim cover of a bush.

  The child was looking up at Mallory, having ferreted out some authority in her. “Is the doorman gonna call the roadkill wagon, like he did for the dog?”

  “What dog?”

  In the glee of a really great conspiracy, the boy said, “I saw a dog murdered. It happened right there.” He was pointing to the curb. “I was upstairs—”

  “How far upstairs?”

  The nanny stepped forward. “He lives on the tenth floor. He keeps going on about the dog, but I don’t know if he could have seen—”

  “I did too see it! And I wasn’t on the tenth floor. She just says that so my parents won’t find out I was unsupervised, ” said the child, giving care to this last word, which was obviously a newly acquired tool to blackmail the nanny. That would explain why the nanny wouldn’t fight back. The kid had something on her.

  “I was standing in the hall on the third floor,” he said. “I looked down, and the man was murdering the dog.”

  “How?”

  “He strangled it. The dog pulled on the leash, and I guess he didn’t like that. He lifted the dog up by the choke chain. He lifted it right off the ground, and the dog was kicking and kicking. And then it stopped moving. It was dead. He kicked the body into the street. I wanted to go see the body, but the doorman wouldn’t let me. He said he was waiting for the roadkill truck.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mallory looked to the nanny now. “When did it happen?”

  The nanny shrugged. “It never happened. He makes these things up.”

  “I don’t, I don’t!” said the boy, with another well-placed kick to the woman’s leg.

  “Maybe I should talk to the doorman or his parents,” said Mallory.

  “It was on the nineteenth,” said the nanny, with instant recall. “The day it rained.”

  But neither doorman nor boy had been able to describe the dog. And Mallory knew the world would be a better place without the clutter of eyewitnesses.

  The door was open. Mallory shifted the bag of groceries to one hip and pulled out her gun. With the gun concealed by the bag, she pressed through the door and into the apartment.

  The concierge was standing in the front room when she came through the foyer. Now all of the room was exposed and she could see Angel Kipling opening the closet door.

  “Looking for something?”

  The concierge spun around.

  “Oh, Miss Mallory, pardon the intrusion, but Mrs. Kipling was sure she heard a scream coming from this apartment.”

  “It must have been the cat,” said Angel. “Yeah, that’s it. Had to be. You always keep him locked up in there?”

  “It’s a big bathroom. I don’t want him shedding on the Rosens’ furniture.”

  When the concierge had excused himself and closed the door behind him, the woman turned on Mallory.

  “We got your message.”

  “What message?”

  “Don’t be cute. I saw the setup in there.” Kipling nodded to the door of the den, which was wide open. “Most of us only have the one computer. All the harassment comes over the computer. It explains a lot. So what do you want? How much?”

  “To keep quiet?” Too good to be true. Pity the cameras weren’t rolling, but whatever Angel gave her couldn’t be used against the husband. “I’d rather deal with your husband.”

  “You’re dealing with him. I’m the husband in this relationship.”

  Advancing on Mallory, Angel Kipling opened her mouth to say more, but then she either lost her words or thought better of them. The woman backed up in the way of the cat when Mallory’s glare said, Enough. Kipling stiff-walked to the door and slammed it behind her.

  Mallory walked into the kitchen and set down the grocery bag. She laid the gun alongside of it on the counter and put the perishables in the refrigerator. The phone rang. She let it. She put the butter away,
and closed the door on the second ring. She walked into the front room in her own time with no hurried motions. The cat was pawing at the glass of the aquarium, maddened by the swim of fish, unable to get at them.

  “I know just how you feel,” said Mallory.

  On the fourth ring, she picked up the receiver. “Mallory.”

  “It’s me, Justin. It wasn’t me that made the pencil fly.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t me. Will you help me?”

  “You know the conditions. When you’re ready to tell me the truth, I’ll help you.”

  She heard the child’s sudden intake of breath, and then the connection was broken abruptly.

  Justin was forgotten in the next minute. Through the open door to the back room of the Rosens’ den, she could see the vase falling from the small table, bouncing on the plush carpet, strewing yellow roses and water.

  Damn cat.

  But now she heard Nose mewling from the room behind her. She stared at the roses until she was distracted by the warning light from her computer system. Another fax was coming in.

  She brought the fax up on her monitor. It was addressed to Judge Heart. The logo bore the name of a law journal, and the text was a request for permission to reprint one of the judge’s papers in an upcoming edition.

  She fed the fax into a graphics file, where she cut and pasted the logo and signature onto a clean page. And then she typed her own text: “The journal is considering a manuscript, and we want to cover ourselves for libel. There are only a few little things to clear up. Is it true that you beat your wife on a regular basis? Is it true that your mother died of a savage beating?”

  Then she sat down to a quiet hour of computer terror, tailoring new messages for the building bulletin board.

  “Oh sweet Jesus,” said Riker as he approached Mallory’s door. Was that what he thought it was?

  It was the genuine article, all right. He pressed the buzzer and pounded on the door. “Mallory! You in there?”

  When she opened the door, he grinned. Mallory would never know the relief that was washing through his system, shutting down all the reflexes that would have broken in the door if she hadn’t been quick enough to answer it.

  He pointed to the large scrawled X on her front door. The marking could only be blood. They could both tell catsup from death.

  “Nice touch, Mallory,” said Riker, walking past her and heading toward the phone on the table by the door. “A little ostentatious, but I like it. The perp knows your name, and where you live. That wasn’t enough? You thought he might lose his way?”

  “Definitely a squirrel,” was all she said, still staring at the X.

  “Now let’s have another little talk about your pet theory. This guy’s stalking you. It doesn’t square with a frightened perp who kills in a panic and runs away. It’s a different game.”

  “Maybe it is. Or maybe somebody’s working with him?”

  “Okay. Two of the suspects are married. Say one of the wives is a different type of personality. More like yours. Either she’s a ballsy monster in her own right—”

  “Or she does whatever she’s told.”

  “Still an open game, huh? Or maybe you’re shaking out too many trees. You had to scare all three of them? It never occurred to you someone else might come after you, maybe with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city?” Or a weapon. He looked back to the door. “How long do you think it’s been there?”

  “It wasn’t there an hour ago when I got in.”

  Riker was on the phone now, saying, “Ask Heller if he can get down here. Maybe we’ll get lucky. If the blood is human, it might be his.” He put down the phone and turned to Mallory. “Time for backup, kid.”

  “Don’t call me kid. And I’m the low-budget case, remember?”

  “You can’t stay here alone anymore.”

  “I don’t have that high an opinion of the perp. Look at this.” She pointed to the center of the bloody X on the door. “Feathers. Our fearless perp murdered a bird. So no backup. I’m not letting anybody screw this up for me.”

  They were still playing “backup, no backup” when Heller arrived with his kit and began to scrape the samples off the door. Riker was worn down to “okay, no backup” when Heller left.

  “When do you figure to bag him?”

  “Maybe on Sunday.”

  It figured that she would pick the day when God was resting, not looking—if she wasn’t lying to him again.

  The cat was purring around Mallory’s legs as she holstered her gun. Mallory picked the cat up in her arms. Nose nuzzled her face, licking her skin with a pink sandpaper tongue, eyes closed slowly in the cat’s idea of a smile. Mallory walked to the door of the bathroom, held the cat out at arms length and dropped it on the tiles. The cat stood up and began to dance.

  Riker whistled low. “Has he ever done that before?”

  “No.”

  Kneeling down, she took the paws in her hands and put them firmly on the floor.

  The cat purred at her, half closing its eyes again. She stood up, and now the cat’s eyes were open hurt as she was closing the door. What did I do wrong? asked a confusion of rounding eyes and the jerking starts of the small head, the paws rising.

  The door shut.

  If only she had been a woman of standard intelligence and ambition. If only her countenance had not been the beautiful antithesis of his own clown’s face; if only she had been normal, he would have given her everything he had. But she was abnormal and deviant, and if she wanted it, he would give her everything he had.

  He had known she wasn’t coming at only five minutes past the hour. Now he measured the passage of time by the ice melt in the silver bucket. The red wrapping on her gift looked pathetic to him now. Stupid box, ridiculous thing, sitting there all dressed up for a woman who didn’t care to open it. For an hour more, he stared at the door she would never knock on. And then, he was pulling on his coat and opening the front door, which he would not remember locking behind him, because he hadn’t. He passed through the halls and down the stairs and into the dark to walk and think.

  The night was crisp and cold. To the north he could hear the bells of the convent on Bleecker Street, and to the west the bells of St. Anthony’s. He was such a fool that he found the night romantic, though he had no one to share it with, and perhaps he never would.

  Mallory was everything Riker said she was: no heart, no soft places he might reach. Of course she thought him a fool. Of course he was one. He always said the wrong thing. If only there were some aspect of her that was conventional, a bit of sure ground that he could understand.

  The CD player slammed on his thigh from the deep pocket of his coat. He had thanked her for the gift, but never used it. Well, perhaps this bit of technology was the bridge to Mallory. He pulled it from his pocket, set the earplugs in place and pushed the play button. Music poured into the center of his skull and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. It was wonderful. It was all new again, this music he had carried in his head since childhood.

  And something new had been added to his homemade madness.

  For a moment, he forgot to breathe as he listened to that sound that was not music, and neither car horn nor church bell. He knew it was Amanda’s footstep behind him, even before she came abreast of him. A delusion with audible footfalls. Her tread was too light and a bit off stride, an as yet imperfect imitation of a living woman. He turned away from her and turned the music off.

  The footsteps vanished.

  He kept his eyes other-way directed and focused his concentration on Mallory.

  She knew who made the pencils fly. Perhaps she also knew the dynamics of his small telekinetic family in a way that he could not. Was it signs of abuse she recognized in Justin? Or, as Justin had said, something she saw in the boy that she did not like in herself? Or was it something simple that allowed her to see what he could not? Something simple—the absence of a heart?

  “Sometimes they can’t
love back,” Amanda said, keeping time now with his own footsteps. His delusion had a near-human persistence. Amanda had come back to keep him company for a while. He looked down at her sad face, and fear of her turned into curiosity.

  “You weren’t loved back either, were you?”

  “No.”

  “And when you came to know this man, contempt killed what feeling you had for him. Am I right?”

  “Yes. But you will never have contempt for Mallory—it’s not the same. My contempt was for his weakness. She has a terrible strength that’s not quite in the normal scheme of things, and frightening sometimes, isn’t it? You’re lost, Charles. I was better off than you. It’s better to have a definite end to the loving.”

  “In the end, it was only the child you cared about.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, then, did you ask to have the child cut away from you?”

  “He lied to me.”

  Her footsteps made less noise now, as she walked along beside a lonely man who cast one shadow for both of them. He had gone to no trouble to create her this time, and this should have worried him, but he was oddly glad of her company.

  “Do you know why she gave you my manuscript?”

  “So I could give it a thorough read, maybe find something of value to the investigation.”

  “You know she read every page before she gave it to you.”

  “Of course she did.”

  “It was the love of the child she couldn’t fathom. She couldn’t understand how I could want to build plans for a lifetime around the future of an unborn baby.”

  “But Mallory was a much loved child. Helen and Louis were devoted to her.”

  “Yes, after the damage had been done to her out on the street. What about Mallory’s own mother? How was a child so quick, so beautiful, left wandering the streets? She was the child women pray for. How was she let go? If you’re still looking for the link to the boy, it might lie in her history. What do you really know about her early days?”