Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

‘Mallory, if you string out all the facts, just the bare facts, they don’t amount to much of a portrait, certainly not what you’ve extrapolated. You can’t bet your life on it.’

It was Nose who picked up the warning signs first, with an animal’s radar for the impending storm. He bristled and crept under the couch. And Charles was suddenly reminded of the old man in the park quoting from Revelations – warnings of earthquake, the dark of the sun.

The long red fingernails disappeared into the duffel bag on the coffee table and emerged again with a small bundle of printouts sectioned off with paper clips. She selected one clipped bundle of sheets and held it up to him.

‘Okay, Charles. Let’s take a look at your own little problem with the flying objects.’ The light sheaf of papers hit the coffee table with real force. Her face was rigid.

‘These are the facts - my contribution to the partnership. Two women died. Two insurance companies paid off. A third woman is frightened, or at least she acts that way. The kid’s trust fund is down by a full third. The father is the executor of the trust. You might assume he just made bad investments because his own portfolio and accounts are also depleted, but that would be supposition, and I’m sticking to the facts. The stepmother is a computer programmer with a financial background. She has a FAX origin number, access to the executor’s signature and documents. She knew Robert Riccalo for ten years before she married him. Per your own notes, nothing flies unless the three of them are in the room. A pencil flew at the stepmother. Now it’s easiest to make the pencil fly to the person pulling the thread, but I made it fly to you, didn’t I?’

Her voice was entirely too civilized, prompting the cat to stick its head out from under the couch.

Where was all this background information coming from? As quickly as he framed that question, he filed it away among all the other unspoken, unanswered questions which were suspended from the rafters of his brain like bats sleeping in the dark. When she got information for him, he had ceased to ask where she got it, and he tried not to speculate on the source, setting his ethics adrift – becoming more like Markowitz.

Another printout hit the coffee table with a hard slap. The cat was gone again.

‘The boy used to keep normal school hours. He had one after-school program to fill out the parent workdays,’ she said. ‘Now his hours are longer at the Tanner School. He sometimes goes six days a week without eating a single meal at home. The new stepmother arranged that. And Justin was right about all the wives being copies of one another. They all favored extended after-school programs. None of them wanted the kid around. The kid’s trust fund is down, and Dad’s in a hole. The new stepmother is top-heavy with insurance from her job. The natural mother had a history of heart problems. The suicidal stepmother had a brief psychiatric history. These are facts.’

‘I suppose the one with the psychiatric history saw things flying through the air?’

‘No way to know. It’s a fact that a shrink was observing her for signs of paranoia during a brief hospital stay. She didn’t leave a suicide note. The ME investigator tried to do the work-up for a postmortem psychological autopsy. He said the family never discussed flying objects with him. There’s the file on the woman’s death. There are personal notes in there about the kid. The word spooky is mentioned twice. I’m only repeating the facts.’

There was a restrained violence to the words, a force being held in check. Though her anger was increasing in pent up energy, there were no signs in the cool mask of a face.

‘Well, the suicide rules out the insurance motive.’

‘No, Charles, in fact it doesn’t. Riccalo went to court to make them pay off. There was no suicide exclusion, and she had no psychiatric history at the time she took out the policy.’

‘And Robert Riccalo was the beneficiary.’

‘That’s a fact. The settlement was deposited into the boy’s trust.’

‘That sounds sinister.’

‘Let’s stick to the facts, Charles. The settlement barely covered the amount lost in bad investments the previous quarter. If that trust fund had dropped too low, it would have triggered a bank audit. He didn’t have much choice about depositing the money back into the trust. So, just at the right time, a heavily insured woman dies. I call that interesting.’

‘You have nothing to indicate foul play. As I understand it, there was no one in the house when it happened.’

‘That’s speculation. The department won’t check an alibi unless the case is written up as a homicide. If you stick to the facts, you have a logical case to fit any one of them. But, if instinct counts for nothing, how come I know the perp from the next victim, and you don’t?’

The air between them was chill to dangerous. Even Malakhai in his debunking days would have found her quite unnatural in the world. All the good logic of his good brain excused itself and went off to keep the cat company under the couch. Too late, he had come to believe in her as others might believe in magic.

‘Which one of them is doing it?’

‘Too bad I can’t tell you. I didn’t figure it out with logic, so it doesn’t count, does it?’

‘Which one? Who do you think it is.’

‘Oh no, Charles. I’ve seen the light. I’ve got religion. I’m only a cop, a detective. You’re the genius, and now that you have it trimmed down to logic and solid facts, the rest should be easy for you. Let me know if you ever work it out.’

‘But there’s a case to fit any of them. Logic – ’

‘Logic is your handicap, not mine. If logic is king, how come I know and you don’t? Have fun, Charles. Don’t forget to duck. Send postcards.’

She began unpacking new boxes of disks from the duffel bag.

‘You make it sound like I won’t be seeing you for a while.’

‘I’ve got things to do.’

He only turned his back for a moment, looking for something to say to her. When he turned back to face her, she was gone. The door to a back room was closing behind her, the cat was padding after her, and he was left to show himself out.

‘So, we’re still on for this evening, right?’ he called to her through the door to the back room.

Silence.

As he walked to the front door, he had to examine another set of facts. She had been right about the manuscript being autobiographical, certainly to the extent of the pregnancy and the dancing cat. And right about the meeting, the spontaneity of the act. He had closed the door behind him and was standing at the elevator when he thought to go back, to pound on her door and demand to know which one of them made the pencils fly.

She knew.

And only now he remembered the knife was still sitting on the coffee table. Why had she brought it back to the Rosens’ apartment? What had she been doing in the basement?

Robert Riccalo still managed to dominate the large room, though he had retreated behind the financial pages of his newspaper, which obscured all but his trouser legs and the green leather of his chair.

The chair was positioned like a throne and elevated above the cushions of the couch where his wife perched. Justin sat in a small wingback chair which might have been made with a child’s size in mind.

The rustle of Robert Riccalo’s newspaper could be heard above the television chatter of a commercial for fabric softener. Every grunt or sigh from the throne called Justin’s eyes up and away from his book. Each time he looked up, he would catch his stepmother staring at him, finding Justin a hundred times more interesting than the television set which played on to no one.