The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  Before she and the boy hit the carpet, she had the gun in her hand.

  “Nice going . . .” she said, pinning the boy neatly under one leg and looking up at Charles.

  His gun hand dangled by his side, but his grip was tight and the trigger finger continued to spasm and click the misfires. And then the ammo box fell from Charles’s other hand, seal unbroken.

  “You’ve never loaded a gun, have you, Charles?”

  “No, no I never have.”

  So he had gone up against the boy with no bullets in the gun, no cover, and no hesitation. And the empty gun had to be the explanation for the lack of hesitation. He couldn’t have fired so fast, not looking at the child in his sights. Civilians were not constructed that way. Charles was the soft and civilized type; such things were not done in his world. So, with his own peculiar courage and backward thinking, he had risked his life to draw fire and buy her time.

  Now Riker and Martin were coming through the door, Martin first, Riker panting behind him, guns drawn. They stared at the hog-tied Kipling and the boy pinned under Mallory.

  Riker hunkered down beside her, panting from the run upstairs, fishing for his irons. In another moment, the boy’s hands were cuffed behind his back.

  “How did you get here so fast?” she said. It was an accusation.

  “Well, Charles caught my eye when he streaked by the car.” Riker pulled a small device from one ear. “Oh, I’ve been listening in. I planted a highly illegal bug in the apartment the last time I was here. I’ve learned a lot from you, kid.” And now he fingered the fallen drapes on the floor. “Very messy, Mallory. This is so unlike you.”

  Martin holstered his gun. “The reception kept going in and out. Most of the time, all we could hear was this noise like a little engine. So Riker tells me it’s a cat snoring. He thinks I’ll buy anything.”

  Riker nodded her attention toward Charles. “You think you could stop him from clicking that thing? It’s getting on my nerves.”

  Mallory stood up and moved quickly to Charles. She used force to pry his fingers off the gun, and then she closed her hand over his to stop the finger from its spasmodic firing of a gun that was no longer there.

  Charles’s eyes were locked with the boy’s. Justin was still and quiet, turning his eyes away from Charles to look inward. And it was only a little disturbing that he pouted like a real child, an angry child.

  Martin was standing over the hog-tied Kipling. “Is he dead?”

  “No,” said Mallory. “He fainted when the gun went off.”

  Riker and Mallory exchanged words without words. Do I know my perps? she asked with only the lift of her chin. Damn straight, he said with one thumb up.

  Martin was fishing out his cuffs.

  “Naw,” said Riker, putting up one hand to stay Martin. “I don’t think the cuffs could improve on Mallory’s knots. Let’s carry Kipling out through the lobby like that.”

  Martin grinned. “Yeah, I like it.” Now Martin stabbed his finger at the blood splatters on the carpet. “So, who took the hit?”

  His answer was crawling slowly across the rug, pulling itself along by its front paws, crying and making its way to Mallory. At last, it lay at her feet, bleeding on her white running shoes.

  “What happened to the cat?”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Mallory.

  “Mallory, you’re going to love this.”

  Betty Hyde slipped the videocassette into the VCR. The picture was of the judge on the steps of the Coventry Arms. He was flanked by an escort of two uniformed police officers. A young woman reporter was thrusting a microphone in his face and asking him if it was true that the district attorney was planning to exhume the body of his mother.

  Then the judge advanced on the woman. One fist knocked the microphone out of her hand and the other fist was flung at the cameraman. The camera lay on the sidewalk shooting the feet of the officers scuffling with the feet of the judge, dragging him back from the feet of the woman reporter. The audio portion was a woman’s screams of “You’re hurting me, you son of a—”

  “About that police escort with the judge,” said Hyde. “I don’t suppose you could explain that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mallory lied. “I heard a rumor that some ME investigator implicated a detective in an extortion racket. I think they just wanted to ask the judge if he had any information on the case. But you didn’t get that from me.”

  “Of course not. Thanks for the judge on a platter,” said Betty Hyde. “Not that I’m greedy, but did you dig up anything else that was interesting?”

  “No,” Mallory lied again as she continued her packing.

  “Well, I did. You were right, Mallory. I was holding out on you. Eric Franz is not blind.”

  Mallory pressed out the wrinkle on a T-shirt before she folded it into her duffel bag. “Eric Franz told you that?”

  “Oh no, he denied it for several hours. Actually, he spent most of that time getting drunk and reminiscing about Annie. That’s the strange part—he really did love her. But the accident was certainly murder if he was sighted, and he didn’t—”

  “If Franz didn’t confess to you, then where is this coming from?”

  “I told you I have spies everywhere.”

  Mallory folded a pair of blue jeans into the duffel and slowly zipped it shut. “Arthur, right? He was on duty the night of the crash. Is he the one who told you Franz killed his wife?”

  “Well, no. Arthur doesn’t know Eric can see. He only said that if Eric had been able to see, he could have saved his wife. But Eric’s version of the accident doesn’t match. Eric lied.”

  “How much did you pay Arthur?”

  “Fifty dollars.”

  “Well, you probably got the full treatment. I only gave him twenty.” Mallory opened the flap pocket of the duffel and rummaged until she found the file she was looking for. “Arthur told you he gave the plate number to the police, and they caught the guy in an hour, right?”

  “Right, but—”

  Mallory held up a sheet of paper. “This is the accident report. He did give them a plate number, but it was the wrong plate. And they didn’t pick up the hit-and-run driver until seven A.M. The driver was parked outside of his own local garage, sleeping off the drunk, waiting for the shop to open so he could have the dent removed from the fender. There was still blood on the car. A meter maid caught him.”

  “But Arthur described—”

  “And did he tell you the part about the little silver Jaguar? It was a gray Ford. Nothing like a Jag, but it makes a better story for the money.”

  “He saw a fight between the Franzes.”

  “Across the street? I don’t think so.” She selected another sheet of paper from the file. “This came off his optometrist’s computer. Arthur does fine for the first twelve feet—without his glasses. So all you’ve really got is a case of the blind contradicting the blind. But even if Arthur’s vision had been twenty/twenty, it probably would have been the same story. Any cop could have told you eyewitnesses are the least reliable evidence you can have. If your case hangs on a witness, you’re dead meat in a courtroom. And the testimony you have to pay for is the worst. I don’t think you’d make it as a detective. Don’t give up your day job.”

  “I’ve been had, haven’t I? You steered me into Eric Franz to keep me away from Kipling, didn’t you?”

  “You’ve got the judge’s head, and you’ve got an exclusive story on Amanda’s murder. So you don’t have anything on Eric Franz. Two out of three isn’t bad.”

  “I owe you one, Mallory.”

  “You owe me a lot more than that. If you’d printed any of that crap on Franz, you’d be in the middle of a lawsuit and looking for another job.

  Out on the sidewalk, Eric Franz stopped a moment to talk to her. He lowered the dark glasses and stared at her as a sighted person would do. His face looked sleep-starved and pained.

  “I understand we have some business to transact. I gather the computer messages w
ere yours? You’ll be contacting me again?”

  “No,” said Mallory. “We have no business, you and I. I don’t think we’ll ever meet again.” She pulled out her shield. “I’m only a cop, and you didn’t break any laws.” None that she could prove. He was just a little crazy. Charles could explain it better—he was good at guilt.

  She had neglected to mention to Betty Hyde that the doorman had been wearing his glasses that night. Arthur had only made all the mistakes of the average eyewitness with good eyesight.

  The doorman had seen the lights of the oncoming car shining on Eric’s face. In that bright light, the doorman would have seen the proximity of the man who watched his wife cut down in the street. Like Cora, Arthur had witnessed a murder without realizing it.

  But it was not the cold-blooded murder that good cases could be built around. It had been a crime of passion just as surely as if he had caught her in bed with another man and shot her dead. There were moments in everyone’s life when they should not have a gun in their hands. She had understood the moment of the kill. Eric Franz had been presented with two thousand pounds of speeding metal. And for lack of a warning, Annie Franz had died.

  Mallory watched the faux blind man walk away with his dog. She would always wonder what it was like to live in that charade of darkness, unable to leave it for an unguarded hour. It had crossed her mind to finesse him into a breakdown, but what would be the point? What fresh hell could she have added? And what for? This man was doing his own version of hard time.

  Markowitz would have let Franz walk away. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she knew.

  Epilogue

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Jack Coffey had seen the tape version of Judge Emery Heart attacking a reporter. Who had not? It had run continuously on all the news channels for the past five days.

  At that moment, the real live version of the judge was cooperating nicely with Internal Affairs. The judge was singing to IA and the DA, ratting out Palanski for an extortionist, and supporting the allegations of an ME investigator.

  The exhumation order for the body of an elderly woman was the currency for the judge’s testimony. Exhuming the judge’s mother would not have led to a murder charge according to Mallory, and unlike Riker, Coffey did trust her—now and then.

  And with only the prompt of a photograph from the ME’s office, Palanski was confirming that the judge was a woman beater. Palanski was also taking revenge on his ex-partner in extortion—the ME investigator who was sitting in yet another room, happy in the ignorant fairy tale that immunity as a state’s witness might protect him from a charge of tax evasion. It wouldn’t. Once the trial was over, the treasury agents would be waiting for him in the wings, their mouths hanging open and sloppy with saliva. And when Palanski finished a long sentence for extortion, the T-men would get him, too.

  And nowhere in this chorus of singing rats was there any trace of the music director. One day he would teach Mallory to trust him, and then he would ask her how she had pulled that off—and she would tell him to go to hell.

  Coffey looked down at the snapshot in his hand, the one that had so frightened Palanski. It was an innocent picture—a sweet kid with wavy tumbles of carrot-colored hair. She was standing in front of a Christmas tree in the chief medical examiner’s home. The protecting arm of Doris Slope was draped across the girl’s shoulders. The photograph had come to him with a brief, cryptic note from Dr. Edward Slope and no mention of Mallory.

  He lit a match under the photograph—per Slope’s request. Now Special Crimes was completely out of the loop, and Mallory had never been in it.

  Later in the day, when Riker caught the news on Palanski, he would only know that Mallory had held out on him.

  Well, everybody held out. Everybody lied.

  He and Riker would never discuss the possibility that Mallory had brought down another cop. She had covered her tracks, always one person removed in the chain of evidence.

  And in his hand, awaiting his signature, was the final paperwork to wrap up no less than three homicides. It was a rare, sweet day.

  Like Malakhai’s delusion, his own had required him to be faithful to the logic of his creation. Amanda would not come back again; he knew that. She was a woman who loved children.

  How mad was he? He touched the button to the CD player, and the real and solid music which Mallory had given him swelled up and out from the center of his consciousness. His eyes were cast down at the desk, and his head slowly bowed. When the music ended, he sat quietly in the gloaming, the after-dinner hour when the office shadows were the deepest.

  But now, in sidelong vision, he saw the woman taking shape in the darkness, coming to life for him, walking toward him into the light.

  Mallory.

  She sat on the edge of his desk and waited until he lifted his face to hers.

  “Justin is going to a funny farm for the very rich. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “You think it’ll do much good?”

  “No. I think he was born that way.”

  “Still, he’s only a child.”

  “A killer.”

  A child.

  “What did the district attorney think of your camera work?”

  “He was thrilled. Two killers, and three murders on one roll of tape. What a saving for the taxpayer.”

  He couldn’t make out her face in the gathering darkness, but thought she was smiling.

  “The Civilian Review Board might think I shot the cat,” she said. “But they haven’t charged me yet.”

  He smiled too, though against his will and against his state of mind.

  “Well, you’ve got the video.”

  “I don’t have those last few minutes on tape.” Which was Mallory’s way of saying she had erased the part where he had opened fire on a little boy, and therefore, it had never happened. Every now and then, she surprised him with unexpected insight and delicacy.

  “That took balls, Charles. Faking him out with an empty gun.”

  She eased off the desk and padded out of the room, followed by the cat, which made more noise on its feet, less graceful now with the weight of its new bandage. A trace of perfume lagged behind, and it was a few minutes more before Mallory was altogether gone.

  In the romantic literature of another age, a woman might have asked, “Wouldst thou slay a dragon for my sake?” But the world had changed, was changing still, and the monsters were cruelly deceptive in their different faces. In the bizarre romance near the edge of a new century, Mallory might ask, “Wouldst thou slay a child for my sake?”

  She had a code of sorts, and never would she ask, but the question would always hang between them. And if he could ever bring himself to it, he would tell her yes—for he had believed the gun was loaded when he shot the boy, and shot to kill—for Mallory’s sake.

  SPECIAL EXCERPT

  Kathleen Mallory returns in a brilliant new thriller by Carol O’Connell ...

  SHELL GAME

  Now available from Jove Books

  Here’s a special excerpt from this powerful novel, featuring “the strougest new detective of the decade” (Kirkus Reviews) ...

  prologue

  The old man kept pace with him, then ran ahead in a sudden burst of energy and fear—as if he loved Louisa more. Man and boy raced toward the scream, a long high note, shriek without pause for breath, inhuman in its constancy.

  Malakhai’s entire body awoke in violent spasms of flailing arms and churning legs, running naked into the real and solid world of his bed and its tangle of damp sheets. Rising quickly in the dark, he knocked over a small table, sending a clock to the floor, shattering its glass face and killing the alarm.

  Cold air rushed across his bare feet to push open the bedroom door. By the light of a wall sconce in the outer hallway, he cast a shadow on the bedroom floor and revolved in a slow turn, not recognizing any of the furnishings. A long black robe lay across the arms of a chair. Shivering, he picked up the unfamiliar garment and pulle
d it across his shoulders like a cape.

  A window sash had been raised a crack. White curtains ghosted inward, and drops from a rain gutter made small wet explosions on the sill. His head jerked up. A black fly was screaming in circles around a chandelier of dark electric candles.

  Malakhai bolted through the doorway and down a corridor of closed rooms, the long robe flying out behind him. This narrow passage opened onto a parlor of gracious proportions and bright light. There were too many textures and colors. He could only absorb them as bits of a mosaic: the pattern of the tin ceiling, forest-green walls, book spines, veins of marble, carved scrolls of mahogany, and swatches of brocade.

  He caught the slight movement of a head turning in the mirror over the mantelpiece. His right arm was slowly rising to shield his eyes from the impossible. And now he was staring at the wrinkled flesh across the back of his raised hand, the enlarged veins, and brown liver spots.

  He drew the robe close about him as a thin silk protection against more confusion. Awakenings were always cruel.

  How much of his life had been stripped away, killed in the tissues of his brain? And how much disorientation was only the temporary companion of a recent stroke? Malakhai pulled aside a velvet drape to look through the window. He had not yet fixed the day or even the year, but only gleaned that it was night and very late in life.

  The alarm clock by his bed had been set for some event. Without assistance from anyone, he must recall what it was. Asking for help was akin to soiling himself in public.

  Working his way from nineteen years old toward a place well beyond middle age, he moved closer to the mirror, the better to assess the damage. His thick mane of hair had grown white. The flesh was firm, but marked with lines of an interesting life and a long one. Only his eyes were curiously unchanged, still dark gunmetal blue.

  The plush material of the rug was soft beneath his bare feet. Its woven colors were vivid, though the fringes showed extreme age. He recalled purchasing this carpet from a dealer in antiquities. The rosewood butler’s table had come from the same shop. It was laid with a silver tray and an array of leaded crystal. More at home now in this aged incarnation, Malakhai lifted the decanter and poured out a glass of Spanish sherry.