But there was still the problem of the gun.
She picked up the phone and dialed Charles from the bedroom. “I’m in a big hurry, Charles. Go to the center drawer in my desk and get the old Long Colt. And bring the box of ammo with it. You’ll have to turn off the—” She lowered the phone at the sound which may or may not have been the cat. Now she set the receiver back on its cradle to stifle Charles’s loud repeated “Hello?” coming from the mouthpiece.
She left the bedroom, quickly, silently gliding down the short hallway to the den. She flipped the array of switches for the cameras, backup tapes and audio.
She entered the front room to find the cat crawling under the couch and Harry Kipling standing in the center of the room. The cap gun was lying on the coffee table.
How much time would it take Charles to get to her with the real gun?
“You left your door open,” said Kipling. “That was careless.”
She had meant to make his access easy, but she had planned to have a gun in her hand when he came through the door. It was an odd moment to be thinking of Riker’s I-told-you-so grin. Too late for backup, and Charles was miles from here.
The cameras were rolling.
There was time to wonder if Coffey would catch her in this screwup, or could she lie her way out of it.
Max Candle’s knife lay on a shelf of the bookcase behind Kipling. Had he seen it? Originally, she had planned to steer him to it, so he would have a weapon in his hands in the event the cameras should catch her blowing away a taxpayer. But that plan had been contingent on having a gun in her own hand. And where was he hiding her gun?
Kipling was still staring at the cap gun on the table.
“You recognize it, Harry? It’s the same toy gun you used to teach the cat to dance. Now Nose only has to see a gun and he dances. Was it the noise of the caps? Did you fire that toy close to his head to make him dance?”
And now the cat began to snore.
Charles was closing the door to his apartment. So that was it? I’m in a hurry! Bring me a gun! How many weapons did she need all at once? She had a rather large gun and a sharp knife in her possession now. But who was he to question Mallory, he who kept company with a dead woman.
He was crossing the hall to the offices of Mallory and Butler, Ltd., wondering which of all the stupid things he had said, which had made her the most angry. He had accused her of lack of logic, and of underestimation of—
Oh, fool.
She had questioned him about a blind man. Not too quick to underestimate that suspect, was she? And now she was gathering more weapons. No lack of caution there. Where was his own logic?
Perhaps he had gotten everything wrong, genius that he was. What had possessed him to take Coffey’s side in this? At the time, it had made some sense, but now? Maybe Coffey had only feared she was too fixed in her knowledge of the suspect. Riker had been right to caution him. He should have shown her more respect. He must not let her down now.
He unlocked the door to Mallory’s private office and strode quickly to her desk. The center drawer was locked.
Now that was a snag. He had no keys for drawers. Mallory must assume that everyone was as gifted as she in the art of breaking and entering. He picked up the letter opener he had given her. It was the only object in the room not manufactured in the current decade. In fact, it dated back to another century. He only hesitated for a moment, hefting the irreplaceable piece in his hand. Then he inserted it into the space above the drawer and used force to pry the metal open.
An earsplitting squeal was the first warning, followed by a cascade of bells, giant bells, gongs in hellish amplification. This must be Mallory’s idea of accommodating his aversion to high technology. She had wired the office for an alarm, and in place of an annoying beep or a siren, she had worked in his recordings of church bells. And now he was inside the bell tower, inside the bells themselves.
He put up his hands to cover his ears. He would altogether lose his ears if he stayed much longer. He could turn it off, but there was not time enough to hunt the wiring from the drawer before serious damage was done to him. And the speakers might be anywhere in the myriad of electronic equipment. There could be no direction to sound when one’s head was itself the clapper of a monster bell.
He opened the wooden case nested in the center drawer, and there was Markowitz’s old .38 Long Colt, gleaming with Mallory’s good housekeeping, which extended into the barrels of antique guns. He picked up the revolver and the ammunition box and ran for the door. The peal of the church bells from hell followed him down the stairs and into the street, where every window had a head sticking out of it.
He put out his hand to flag down a cab, silently begging forgiveness from the neighbors.
Kipling walked back to the front door and locked it. “I don’t think we want to be disturbed right now.”
What would Charles do when he met with a locked door? He had the size to kick it in, but he would not know how.
“How did you get onto it?” Harry Kipling lowered himself to a straight-back chair and motioned her to another.
She remained standing.
He leaned back in the chair, lifting its front feet off the rug and rocking on the two back legs, staring absently into space. His face was drawn, dramatic in the hollows below the high cheekbones where afternoon shadows followed the contours. He seemed tired, at the point of giving in or giving up. “What mistake did I make?”
“You made a lot of them,” said Mallory. They had been tap-dancing for ten minutes now. Where was the gun? It could be hidden in his belt at the small of the back. He had not yet looked directly at the knife with the crest of Max Candle.
“How much do you want?” Kipling smiled. “This is a simple case of extortion, am I right?”
“What’s it worth to you, Harry?”
“What’s my marriage worth? Call my wife’s accountant. I don’t have all day for this. How much do you want to keep it quiet?”
“Why did you do it?”
“Desperation. If you want the sordid details, you’re not getting them. Just tell me how much money you want.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
She would not allow her eyes to travel back to the knife, to give it away. But she knew she could have it in her hand in a heartbeat if she only had the advantage of position. The chair and the rocking Kipling blocked the way.
Moving in slow silence, she angled around Kipling, who was holding the cap gun in his hand, examining it as a curiosity. She could see him in profile now. There was no gun concealed in the small of his back. He was dressed in a polo shirt and close-fitting slacks. There was no place on his person to conceal a large weapon.
So where was her damn gun?
“So I had a relationship with Amanda Bosch—Now how much do you want? How much not to tell my wife?”
“Well, there’s a bit more to it than just the relationship with Amanda.”
“You’ve only got me on one woman. If you believed there were others, you would have said so before now. I’m not going pay the moon for this. Now how much do you want?”
“Did I mention that I knew Amanda? I know you lied to her, and she caught you on it.”
“But there were so many lies.” By the way he smiled, he seemed to take some pride in that.
“I’m talking about the lie that made her abort her baby. Does that narrow it down for you?”
“That particular lie isn’t worth any cash to me. I don’t think you did know her. I think you’re a crooked cop. The news said you were a cop, and the daughter of a cop. Was your father crooked too? Does it run in the family?”
“Let’s say I learned a lot from my old man. If I never knew Amanda, how do I know what tipped her off to the lie, what made her snap?”
She had not been a world-class poker player for nothing. Helen always wanted her to have a fine education, and now the weekly poker games of childhood were paying off.
“Amanda was sitting on a bench outside the building on the
day before she died, the day before she called you on the big lie. She never went up to the door, she just watched. It was a busy day for the doorman. People were coming and going, tenants, kids, dogs. Then she saw—”
“Let’s not get too dramatic, shall we? She saw Peter and she knew he wasn’t adopted. You know, until then, I always thought it was a blessing that he looked like me and not Angel.”
Still holding the cap gun in the palm of his hand, Kipling stood up and crossed over to the bookcase. He leaned against the shelf where Max Candle’s knife was sitting. He was only inches from it.
“So it is a shakedown. If you know her, you know she was only using me for genetic material. She didn’t ask me if I wanted to make another brat, did she?”
“She didn’t know that she could make one. It was a miracle pregnancy according to her doctor. So then you lied to her.”
“Yes. I told her the genetic stew was botched. What of it? I told her it would be a monster, that all my children would be monsters—things growing on their outsides that really should be on the insides, missing their little eyes and little hands, little things like that. So what? That’s not a crime. A cop wouldn’t have any interest in that. This is a shakedown. Now how much do you want to make this nasty little business go away?”
“It was a stupid lie, wasn’t it? You had to know she’d catch you in the lie when she saw your son.”
“What were the odds they would ever meet? Most of the year, my son is away at school. There are camps in the summer. My wife has no maternal instincts. Peter looks so much like me, Angel hates the sight of him. He’s rarely around.”
“But Amanda saw him. That’s why she forced the meeting in the park.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We only met at her place.”
“I know you met her in the park. You don’t have to talk to me. You could remain silent. If you say anything, it could be used against you in a court of law.”
“Are you reading me my rights? Still playing cops and crooks, are we? Next you’ll be telling me that if I can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed for me. You’re no more a cop than I am. Did they kick you off the force? You’re a cheap little hustler, aren’t you? There’s no law against cheating on your wife. Maybe the two of you are thinking in terms of a multimillion-dollar civil suit? Well, forget it.”
Mallory shrugged. His constitutional rights were recorded on camera. His arm leaned on the shelf of the bookcase, close to the knife, only inches from it. It was working so well. The only snag was that she didn’t have the gun. What had he done with it?
“You met her in the park. She called you on the lie. She had just killed her child, thinking it was a monster, but it wasn’t. She aborted it for nothing. She was so angry. You panicked when she threatened to tell your wife what a monster you were. She was going to do it then, wasn’t she? Right that minute. Then you killed her.”
“So Amanda was the woman in the park killing. No wonder you thought you were going to score big. Cheating and murder. Has it occurred to you she knew more than one man in this building, that someone else killed her?”
“No. It never did, not from the beginning.”
“If it was me, I’d take the subway,” said Amanda, taking a long drag on her cigarette.
Charles stared at her. There was no music in the cab. Perhaps it was the stress that had triggered the delusion this time.
Now he realized that there were flaws in his construction, glitches in the mechanics of freak memory, for every now and then, Amanda’s blue eyes would slip into Mallory green.
“Amanda, you’re not allowed to smoke in this cab. See the sign? Perhaps you—”
“I ain’t smoking, buddy,” said the cabdriver. “And the name is Fred.”
Amanda smiled and continued to hold the cigarette. “One of the perks of being dead—no fear of lung cancer. But if it bothers you, I’ll put it out.”
He couldn’t smell the burning weed, and neither did the swirling blue smoke sting his eyes. That was a good sign. He was not altogether crazy. The gun pressed into his leg, and he removed it from his pants pocket and shifted it into his coat.
“So, what’s with the gun?”
“Mallory needs it.”
“What did you say?” asked the cabdriver.
“Nothing.”
“Take the subway,” said Amanda. “Just on the chance that she needs it in a hurry. This traffic is the pits.” She stared out the back window at the still life of motionless vehicles trailing behind them.
“I’m sure we’ll get moving soon,” said Charles, waving his hand at the phantom smoke swirling around the interior of the cab. “You know, the cigarette smoke does bother me. The cab is full of—”
The cabdriver turned around to say, “For the last time, pal, I’m not smoking.”
And now the cab was filled with smoke that was not real, but which obscured every real thing. He was engulfed in the smoke, panic was rising.
Steady now. It’s not real.
But then he turned to Amanda, who was blurred by the thickening blue clouds of his delusion, and he realized he was getting lost in this very cramped space which was his mind.
“Please stop! Stop it!”
“Okay, that’s enough,” said the driver. “Out of my cab, fella. Now!”
“Cheating on my wife doesn’t make a good motive for murder.”
“Oh, sure it will. I like it. Money motives are the best. According to your father-in-law’s will, you don’t inherit if your wife dies. Smart old man, your father-in-law. And you don’t get alimony if she divorces you for cause. And that, incidentally, is the clause that hangs you—you couldn’t afford to get caught in the act.”
“You can’t possibly base a murder motive on the possibility that she wouldn’t overlook one small indiscretion. You’d be laughed out of court. Everybody cheats.”
And everybody lies.
“You mean the way she overlooked your embezzlement? I found the transactions in the company computer. She covered the sale of the stock you didn’t own, and she covered the collateral loan on the condo. She wouldn’t haul you in court for that. It might make the stockholders nervous to find an embezzler in the family. But I’m betting she’d haul you in for adultery.”
“The threat of divorce is still a weak motive for murder.”
“Is it? If Angel divorces you, you get nothing. You even had to agree to give custody of your own child to another relative in the event of your wife’s death. That’s how much the old man trusted you.”
Kipling was backing off in the body language, regrouping for another tack. “My wife is rather cold. She never lets me touch her anymore. I had to have a woman on the side. But I certainly didn’t kill Amanda.”
She had always known it would be something simple, and disappointing. Now there was only the tedium of letting him flap his mouth, catching him in the lies while the camera was rolling. He was exhibiting all the signs of the liar. He explained too much, emoted too much. And now he was going on and on about the tragic death of Amanda and his own, more important tragedy.
All his life, he’d been waiting on opportunity, which had arrived in the shape of an heiress. And now, when he was set for life, it was all falling apart on him, everything unraveling, and he could not, would not see it. The lies didn’t work anymore, and yet he kept on lying.
“Amanda made the decision to have an abortion,” he said.
Butchery, Mallory silently translated.
“It’s unreasonable to blame me.”
She was going to tell your wife.
“Eventually, Amanda saw it my way.”
Stunned with a rock, and bleeding.
“I loved Amanda. I love all women.”
To death.
And here, Mallory interrupted him. “Your blood type is B positive.”
Kipling tightened all the muscles of his face.
“You killed her by the water, and then you ran away. You came back later and smashed up he
r hands. You took some time with that.”
“I suppose you were there when this fantasy supposedly happened?”
Mallory smiled.
At a dead run, Charles took the stairs leading down below the level of the sidewalk. He was half falling down them, as others were shouldering up the narrow stairway. At the booth, he made a frantic exchange of coins for tokens. The man behind the bulletproof window busied himself with some bit of paperwork and then began to slowly count out a packet of dollar bills. He never looked up, never responded to the crazed knocking on the glass, which sounded the panic of the oncoming train which Charles would miss without the token. The train pulled in as the token clerk was pushing a coin under the partition.
Charles turned into the crush of disembarking strap-hangers to plant his coin in the slot and hurry through it. He ran at the train. The doors were closing, and he put his hand inside and pressed them open again with the aid of an electronic eye which had not kicked in until Charles felt real pain. He squeezed in among the press of other passengers, who looked up at him as though his size were something he was guilty of.
Now the train was in motion and the public address system was making an announcement to the passengers. He couldn’t make out the individual words among the garble of mechanics and the garble of a man who was eating his lunch as he addressed the riders over the loudspeaker in what was obviously his second, and recently acquired language.
“What is he saying?” Charles asked a woman who had the bored look of having been this route many times. The woman only shrugged.
It was Amanda, by his side, who answered his worst fears. “He’s saying what they always say. No matter where you’re going, you can’t get there from here.”
When the train did stop again, he discovered the local had turned into an express. Guessing by the lynch mob attitude of other passengers, who were far more irritated than the shrugging woman, this change of route was a whim of the engineer. When he saw the light of day and the first street sign, he knew he was miles out of his way, and he began to run.
“You were standing down by the water when she nailed you on the lie. She was going to give your wife all the evidence she needed to divorce you for cause. You panicked and grabbed her by the arm. First you stunned her, and then you killed her. Then you ran away . . . like the dog.”
The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Page 28
