Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

The only woman in the room was taking the quick breaths of hyperventilation. Her eyes bulged and her shoulder blades were nearly even with her ears. Her face was pale and she was shaking violently, all but her hands, which gripped the arms of the chair in the manner of a rocket pilot preparing for a maiden launch.

The man had turned from the boy and was barking at the woman now. ‘For Christ’s sake, Sally, pull it together. It’s only a damn pencil!’

‘It seems to like you, Sally,’ said the boy, who sat between them. ‘Why don’t you just give the pencil a name and take it for long walks in the park?’

‘That’s enough out of you,’ said the man to the boy.

Mallory looked down to the offending pencil lying in the woman’s lap and up to nothing sinister. But the woman was staring at it as though it might be a living snake.

Mallory turned. She had heard the gentle rocking before she saw the vase teetering on the edge of the bookshelf. The vase fell. She shot out one hand to catch it only a few inches above that section of hardwood floor not covered by the Persian rug.

Now the man was yelling at the boy again. ‘Justin, I told you to stop!’

The boy shrank back from the man. He turned to look over his shoulder at the vase in Mallory’s hand, and then at her gun as she replaced it in the shoulder holster. The woman with the fear of pencils was covering her mouth. Only Charles was not agitated. He was calmly watching all of them.

‘I didn’t do it,’ said the boy.

‘He didn’t topple the vase,’ said Charles. ‘Trains pass under this building all day long. The vibrations sometimes move objects around. That vase was very close to the edge.’

Mallory stood behind the small family and stared at Charles with naked incredulity. Hands clasped behind his head, he leaned back in his chair and smiled at her as though seven thousand dollars’ worth of fifth-century crockery had not nearly smashed into worthless shards.

‘The trains didn’t make the pencil fly,’ said the man in even tones which implied that Charles might be only half bright.

‘No, they didn’t. May I introduce my partner, Mallory?’

She walked over to the desk and faced the small family. While Charles made the formal introductions to the Riccalos, she checked out the boy first.

Justin Riccalo’s blond hair was slicked back, and his lips were parted to display two prominent front teeth. The total effect was that of a wet rabbit with freckles. He could only be eleven at the outside. He was a basic nerd in training, wearing the requisite plastic protector in the front pocket of his shirt, all lined with pens and mechanical pencils. His feet were tapping the floor, anxious to be gone, even if it meant leaving the body behind them. Electric-blue eyes danced in a rock’n‘roll of what’s over there, and now what’s over here, and what might be up on the ceiling?

Sally Riccalo, the highstrung brunette, had been introduced as Justin’s stepmother. Mallory could almost hear the tension humming through the woman’s thin body, as though she were wired up to a wall socket. Mrs Riccalo perched on the edge of her chair now, brown eyes wide and pleading, Don’t hurt me, to everyone who looked into them.

The father, Robert Riccalo, was a former military man. That much was in his close-cropped haircut and the squared shoulders. The man was standing at attention while sitting down. He was so large in the torso, he towered over the woman and the boy, but not Charles, to whom towering came naturally and apologetically.

When the boy faced his stepmother, his neck elongated and his eyes gave away some joke he’d told to himself. A nervous giggle was rising up in his mouth. The military man put one heavy hand on the boy’s slender shoulder and caused it to dip with the weight. When Justin looked to his father, his head tucked in like a turtle. And all the while, the blue eyes danced to alternating rhythms of fun and fear.

Now, the boy lifted his face to Mallory’s and a conspiracy of eyes began in silence. I know you, each face said to the other, though she and the boy had never met.

Charles’s eyes rolled back and forth between them, saying, Just a moment. Have I missed something here?

Another appointment was scheduled for the next day, and the small family trooped out, the father leading the charge, woman and boy following behind as his foot soldiers. When the door to the outer office closed behind them, Mallory turned on Charles, hefting the vase in one hand.

‘About those trains.’

‘That’s not the original. It’s a cheap copy. I rigged the vase myself. And it was the trains.’

He walked over to the bookcase and picked up a wooden kitchen match. ‘This primed one edge of the vase toward the natural pull of gravity. Any vibration would have knocked it down. I just wondered what the boy would do.’

‘And?’

‘It startled him with the normal reaction time. Justin has good reflexes. But he denied all blame for the pencil and the vase. That’s odd, you know. He insists he’s not doing anything. That’s not consistent with the profile of the average psychokinetic subject.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it makes the whole thing more interesting. Maybe he’s not the one who’s doing it. There’s a problem with the logic. He didn’t take credit, and yet he didn’t seem frightened by it. Like he’s used to seeing things fly around the house, almost bored by it.’

‘Well, try and work it out before wife number three goes down, okay?’ Mallory bent over the canvas bag on the desk in the front room.

The cat poked its head out from under the desk, whiskers twitching, testing the air for screams and other loud noises. With more assurance, it exited the underside of the desk and looked up at Charles, tilting its head to one side as though the bandaged ear was weighting it that way.

‘Hello,’ said Charles, bending down to pet it. The cat wriggled out from under his hand. It only had eyes for Mallory. It rubbed up against her leg, and she pushed it away.

‘The cat’s a material witness. Now I’ve already been through this with Riker. You laugh and I shoot you, it’s like that.’

‘What happened to the cat’s ear?’

‘I didn’t do it. Can you keep the cat for one night? I’m trading apartments with the Rosens today. I can’t take it back to my place.’

‘Of course.’

Mallory pulled the cat’s litter box out of the canvas bag, and then two tins of fish. ‘His name is Nose. Just keep him out of my office. I don’t want any fur in my computers.’

‘I’ll take him back to my place.’

‘Thanks. So, apart from the flying objects, how did the interview go? You know which one of them is doing it if it’s not the boy?’

‘I don’t know.’

She pulled a file out of the bag.

‘The first Mrs Riccalo died of a heart attack. But now that I’ve seen her husband, I have to wonder how much stress she was under and how much it would have taken to push her over the top. Here’s the hospital file.’

She handed it to him, and he hesitated for that moment when people are trying to decide how dirty an object might be before they touch it. Perhaps he was wrong to believe that every computer printout she gave him might be purloined.

‘You stole it, right?’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘But not this one.’

The second file she handed him had the NYPD stamp on the cover. He scanned the information which detailed the suicide report on the deceased second wife of Robert Riccalo. He flipped through the three-page report. ‘Well, the files list the suicide as a non-suspicious death.’

‘I may change that.’

‘Why?’

‘When you go through the suicide files, you find most jumpers are men. Women are less messy. And there was no note. They usually like to get even with their loved ones on the way out.’