The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  “So, your small friend had a little red coat that didn’t quite fit, right? Mismatched shoes and socks, matted brown hair, and light-colored eyes?” Riker did a double take on the next line. “She was unwashed, malnourished, but excellent motor skills, good reflexes, three feet, six inches tall, approximately seven years old, and in a big hurry?”

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “And she had head lice, Charles. You left that out. I found her. You done good. You scared the little brat right into a shelter for runaways. They know this kid as a regular. She came in with big eyes and gave them this fairy story about being chased by a giant. I guess that was you.”

  “I didn’t mean to frighten her.”

  “Good thing you did. She’ll get a hot meal and a bed.”

  “What else can I do?”

  “Nothing, Charles. You’ll never see that kid again. You’ll never find out what happened to her. I won’t even give you the name of the shelter, because a deal is a deal. Normally, they won’t tell us anything at all. You see, we hold the legal position that the kid belongs to the parent. The shelters sometimes take the view that the kid will live longer if we butt out. But this supervisor owes me one. So, with the understanding that we never had this conversation, I tell her about my crazy friend who wants to turn NYPD upside down to keep a kid off the street on Christmas morning—and she asks me how tall you are.”

  “I’m a fool.”

  “Don’t ever change.”

  “I’ve ruined your holiday.”

  “My wife left me on Christmas Day. It isn’t much of a holiday for me. Let me buy you a drink.”

  “I insist on paying.”

  “No, my treat. I’m gonna get you the best scotch money can buy. Come with me.”

  They passed through the swinging doors that led down the familiar corridor on the way to Special Crimes Section. When Markowitz was alive, Charles had been this way many times—up the narrow staircase and into the cavern of dimmer lights and dead quiet, broken now by the plaintive ringing of a single telephone. Two detectives sat alone in separate pools of light on the other side of the wide room. One lifted his head and waved to Riker.

  Riker opened the door to Jack Coffey’s office, which had once been Markowitz’s office. He sat down in the chair behind the desk and seemed at home as he pulled out a wire, jiggled the lock on the bottom drawer of the desk, and extracted a bottle and a half-empty package of plastic cups.

  Charles folded his long frame into the opposite chair, smiling and utterly companionable in this small criminal activity. He accepted one of the poured shots and lifted his paper cup in a toast. “Merry Christmas, Riker.”

  “Merry Christmas, Charles.” Riker downed his shot and smiled. “So what’s the problem between you and Mallory? Anything I can help you with?”

  “We had an argument at the wrong time. She’s not speaking to me. Did she tell you about the Riccalo boy?”

  “Flying objects, and no hands in play? Yeah.”

  “There’s something she sees in the boy that I can’t see. Something like a memory, a kinship or a likeness. I need to know what the link is. But she’s not talking to me anymore. What should I do? Apologize?”

  “Oh no. Worst possible idea. You don’t ever want to lose face with her. Never show a weakness.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “What makes you think there’s a tie?”

  “Well, it’s not logical of course, I’ve got nothing to support the idea, but I do believe she sees something of herself in the boy.”

  “You mean the kid’s a monster?”

  “I was thinking along the lines of abuse. Do you know what her past was like before she went to live with Louis? Any clue at all?”

  “Markowitz did wonder about it. He spent a lot of time trying to trace her. Helen was hot to adopt the kid. But Mallory wouldn’t cooperate, not even for Helen. She would have died for Helen, but never told her a thing. After a while, Markowitz and Mallory came to an understanding. It was her history, not his. And he backed off.”

  “Did he ever speculate on it?”

  “He respected the kid. Whatever he figured out, he never let on, never shared.”

  “You think child abuse could’ve been a factor in her early history?”

  “If anyone had tried to abuse her, the bastard could’ve figured on losing an arm. . . . No, Charles. You only think I’m kidding. I watched her grow up.”

  “But surely—”

  “When Markowitz pulled the kid off the street, he recognized her position on the food chain—she was a baby predator. Mallory may rack up suspensions, but she’ll never lose her job with NYPD. None of us could stand the strain of having her on the other side. All you need is a few simple rules—don’t ever let her down, don’t ever rat her out, and don’t ever trust her.”

  Was Riker changing the subject, or was this his imagination?

  “I need her connection to the boy. This is very important.”

  Riker pulled out his wallet, which was falling apart at the creases, and slid a photograph out of the cracked plastic holder. “Maybe you’ve seen this before. It’s the one Markowitz always carried. That’s what the brat looked like at ten. See anything familiar?”

  Charles stared at the photograph. She had been so defiant when she posed for it. Yes, there was an unsettling aspect of the boy in Mallory, that same look of damage.

  “Riker, do you think it’s possible that Mallory witnessed a murder when she was a child?”

  Riker spilled a portion of his drink, and it was not from lack of coordination. Wasting liquor was a breach of Riker’s religion.

  Curious.

  Riker reached down into the drawer and pulled out a brown bag, upending it and spilling a passel of deli napkins on the desk. He kept his eyes down as he mopped the desk with the napkins, buying the time to recompose. Now he shrugged as he looked up at Charles. “She was out on the street for years. She could’ve seen a murder, I guess. She never said.”

  “Perhaps I should ask Edward Slope. He’s known her as long as you have.”

  And now something in Riker’s face said he wished Charles wouldn’t do that.

  What might Riker be holding out on him?

  Charles looked down at a roll of paper in the path of the spreading puddle. He picked it up. It was a computer printout, and scrolling on forever, the words said: I PROMISE TO SHOOT TO KILL. I PROMISE TO SHOOT TO KILL, line after line. Charles held the roll up to Riker.

  “What lunatic did this?”

  “Mallory,” said Riker. “Turns out the kid has a sense of humor after all. Coffey reamed her out, and she dropped that on his desk the next day.”

  “Why is Coffey angry with her for not killing the mugger? He was holding a gun on an elderly man, and she—”

  “Coffey figured she was playing with the perp, and she was. I backed her on that one, but Coffey was right. She screwed up. When you draw a gun to shoot an armed perpetrator, you’re trained to shoot for the widest part of the body, the best shot you can place to stop the perp cold.”

  “That sounds pretty brutal.”

  “It is. You may only have that one chance to save your life. And every civilian in the area is in your care when you draw that gun. From the moment she arrived on the scene, that old man, the victim, was in her care. If she’d blown the shot, the old man would’ve taken the bullet after hers.”

  “All the people on the Civilian Review Board—”

  “Yeah, the Review Board, the city’s grand experiment with amateurs. So this week, Mallory’s a hero. But if the perp isn’t happy with the crook of his little finger after the surgery on his gun hand, he’ll sue the city for a million dollars. It happens. Your high-minded civilians will remember they’re also taxpayers. They’ll turn on her. Every one of them will curse her for not killing the perp, because dead men don’t sue. I love this town.”

  “What am I going to do about her? She knows something crucial about Justin, but she won’t talk to me.”


  “Learn to think like Mallory.”

  “How can I? I don’t have an underprivileged childhood to draw on, and I still don’t know much about hers.”

  “Charles, you’re a very smart man. I think that’s why Lou asked you to look after her. Now think. She’s too old to need a nanny, right? The old man figured you were the only one with a prayer of outsmarting her. He left her to you, not one of his old cronies like Doc Slope.”

  “Yes, he would have been my choice. Edward Slope is a very intelligent man.”

  “True. He’s a smart old bastard. So why not him, you wonder. You always hear him bitching about her defects. He can see every scam coming, right?”

  “Right.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, she walks all over him. He’d break his Hippocratic oath for Mallory. And the rabbi would take her side against God’s.”

  Riker finished his shot and poured another. His red eyes rolled up to Charles with a question which could only be And what would you do for Mallory?

  6

  DECEMBER 25

  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 stair-cases 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 gooseflesh 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 Bertrum 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 two-fifteen in the morning, and Mrs. Franz was a little unsteady on her feet. I’m not saying she was drunk, mind you.”

  No, Arthur w
ould 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 gave 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 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.”