The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  “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 coffeehouse 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.

  Thank 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 stocks, 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 her legs as Mallory put the bullets into the speed-loader 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 brass 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,” Betty 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 w
oven 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 ‘cover-up’ 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 to 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 wa
s 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 IA 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.”