Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

‘Mallory, you’ve got nothing solid. You don’t know that he lives in the Coventry Arms.’

‘I know where he lives because I know him. He spent a lot of time with the body, working her hands over, making pulp out of them. He took his time. After he got over the initial panic, he was comfortable in that place. It was close to home.’

Coffey slid a folder across the desk. It had Heller’s initials on it.

‘Heller’s backing you up on the park as the original crime scene. How’d you talk him into going back? They found the blood splatters on the underside of kicked over rocks by the water. He was in here half an hour ago. Says you authorized the overtime.’

‘That also backs up the Coventry Arms as the perp’s residence. He took the card to keep us from tracking her back to that address. Get me in there.’

‘Get me something solid, then we’ll talk about a surveillance nest.’

‘If you won’t do anything else to help me, at least don’t release the name of the victim. If I’m going to flush him out, I need that edge.’

‘You got my word. Nobody gets the name.’

‘Yeah, right. Thanks,’ she said, and the words for nothing remained unspoken and hanging in the air for minutes after she left the room.

Mallory stopped the car in front of the Coventry Arms and let the engine idle.

The century-old building was fortress-like and forbidding. The stucco edifice was dotted with window lights that blazed and lesser lights that only glimmered. Gables and plant-choked balconies relieved the flat plane of the building and the long line of its roof, and ivy twined up the walls far past the night-black leaves of ancient trees. The character of the windows varied from squares, rectangles and circles to the great arch of the center piece of stained glass. This window might have graced a cathedral, but the brilliantly colored imagery was older than the church.

She worked out the ancient mythology in the glass. The years spent at Barnard had not been a total waste of time. The figure of the woman in the window must be the goddess of spring. She was being carried in the arms of her lover, the god of the underworld, as he raced toward the edge of a cliff. The lovers were frozen forever in this act of murder and suicide, as they hurtled, full tilt, toward the edge of death, gateway to Hades and home.

The entrance to the building was the stone mouth of a behemoth, narrowing to a set of doors studded with copper ornamental friezes. In addition to the requisite doorman, there was a security guard on duty tonight, a recent adjunct to the age of rock stars and their building-storming groupies.

She had a badge in the back pocket of her jeans. She could enter the building any time she wished, talk to whomever she wished. She had the power, but she couldn’t use it, not yet. And she couldn’t sneak in. Coffey had been right to reject the surveillance nest, but for all the wrong reasons. It was better to go in with a blaze of neon lights. It was only the covert things that people found suspicious.

She drove past the Coventry Arms and toward the less famous building at the end of the block. She had visited this place only once in her life, yet her memory of it was vivid in every detail. She double-parked the car as she always did. It was easier for her to fix the parking tickets on the computer than to mark the car for the meter maids.

She handed her business card to the doorman when he asked whom she had come to visit and whom she might be.

‘Are you Mallory or Butler, miss?’

‘Tell her it’s Kathy, her niece.’

Not strictly true. Her adoption had never been formalized. She had refused to answer questions about her past or her parents. Without a trace on relatives, the paperwork could go no further. She had kept the legal status of a foster child, and there was no such thing as a foster aunt. But though there were a lot of Mallorys in the world, Alice’s only sister had only one child named Kathy.

The man replaced the house phone on its hook. He held the door open, and his smile was wide. Aunt Alice must be generous with her tips.

The night man at the desk was settling his own telephone on to its cradle and nodding tactful understanding of Mallory’s importance here as she passed through the lobby.

This was a place, not of extreme wealth, but of quiet money. The lobby furnishings were good, but not museum pieces. The passenger-controlled elevator ran with the smooth hum of good maintenance.

On her first visit, there had been an elevator operator. She remembered looking up at the man from her height of ten years old. She rarely saw such people any more. It was the human-expendable age of automation.

The elevator doors opened on to a floor of deep-pile beige rugs. The walls were papered in stripes of sedate taste. She didn’t need the apartment number. Memory led her to the door at the end of the hall. On her toes, she could not have reached the brass lion’s-head door knocker the first time she had come here with Helen.

The maid, the same maid, opened the door and stood back to allow her to pass into the foyer. Mallory followed the woman down the hallway, and here perception was altered again. This hall had seemed miles long when she was a child.

They passed by the music room and into wider space. The dimensions of this room had changed only slightly. It was not quite the grand ballroom of a child’s memory, but close. Bric-a-brac covered every table, and family photographs hung in clusters along every linear foot of the walls. She would have bet good money that not one stick of furniture had been moved in the past fourteen years. It was all dark wood and drapes of crimson. And shadows filled the corners, light glinting in reflection off some candy dish of silver, some ornament of gold.

The photographs and portraits went back many generations, so Helen had told her on their only visit. She remembered very little of that afternoon’s conversation. Alice had looked very much like her sister, and the strong family resemblance was also in the aged face of Helen’s mother. But that old woman’s skin was then already graying with the thing growing inside her, the same thing that would kill Helen years in the future.

The adults had bored her until they got on to the subject of Markowitz. Then she had listened, her small hands balling into fists. Markowitz might be a cop, but he was also her old man. She had risen off her chair in a burst of angry energy. Helen’s eyes had pushed her back down. Her small hands folded on her lap once again, and the child, who had recently been dining from garbage cans, neatly crossed her legs at the ankles as Helen had taught her to do.

‘So this is the best Louis could provide you with?’ said Helen’s sister Alice, whose voice had been on the rise for too long. And by young Kathy Mallory’s lights, it was too loud a voice to be using on gentle Helen Markowitz.

‘Not even a tie of blood but someone else’s castaway child, something out of the gutter.’

Helen’s mother had been quiet up to this point, and then the old woman stood up with difficulty, leaning on her cane and waving off the maid who rushed to her side. ‘Enough,’ she said, imperious in her tone, threats in her eyes. ‘Alice, what’s done is done.’

Alice began to rise, lips parting, and as Helen’s mother had waved off the maid, she waved Alice’s mouth shut. But too late; the damage had been done. Helen was crying, tears streaming down her face.

Kathy had gone after Helen’s sister with the propulsion of a bullet, shooting her face to within an inch of Alice’s. In a rush of menace, low tones working up from the gut, words carrying real weight and hatred, she said, ‘If you ever make Helen cry again, I’ll cut you at the knees, you cunt!’