Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

She smiled politely, stepped back and kicked the door at the center, breaking the latch chain and knocking the man off balance. She pushed past him and entered the apartment.

Pansy Heart was in the corner of the front room, trying desperately to crawl into the pattern of the rug and disappear. Her nose was bleeding, her lip was split and the side of her face was already beginning to swell.

Behind her, the judge was screaming, ‘You have no right!’

Mallory turned on him. ‘I’m taking her out of here. Don’t give me any trouble.’

His face had gone to purple rage as he advanced on her. With a quick, sure kick, she put her foot into his groin and watched his skin drain of color as his eyes bulged out with surprise and pain. He slipped down to one knee. Pansy Heart was crying softly. Mallory pulled the woman up and walked her toward the door, one arm supporting the smaller woman about the tiny waist.

Betty Hyde stood in the doorway. Her eyes were fixed on Pansy Heart’s ruined face, and her mouth was suppressing a smile.

‘I’ll take care of her,’ she said, putting her arms around the crying woman as Mallory stepped back. ‘Come with me, Pansy. You need a doctor, dear.’

The judge was getting to his feet. He was clumsy and slow about it as both hands were clutching his groin. Mallory tucked a foot under his unbending legs and tripped him, sending his face into the corner of a heavy oak table and giving him his own bloody nose.

Pansy Heart looked back at her husband as though awaiting further orders. Then she yielded to the gentle force of Betty Hyde, who was propelling her through the door and into the hall.

The gossip columnist was on her way to an interview with this battered woman, and nothing but a joint act of Congress and God would have stopped her. Mallory wondered if she had done the judge a favor by preventing him from getting between Hyde and his wife.

Mallory set a tray of teapot and cups down on the table, and then she let her eyes roam the generous front room of Betty Hyde’s apartment. It was a copy of the Rosens’ only in the architecture. The decorator had been a pro. She knew Charles would have appreciated the American and British antiques masterfully woven with the modern pieces. The front room was open and airy, without bric-a-brac. It was gracious living without souvenir or sentiment or any heart to it at all. Mallory approved.

The judge’s wife was sitting in an early-American rocking chair, holding a cold compress to her swelling face. Betty Hyde sat on a footstool and gently pushed on the armrest of Pansy’s chair, rocking, lulling the crying woman. Entangling her gaze with Pansy’s, Hyde crooned soft words, smiling, eyes gleaming, playing the good nurse.

Mallory handed a cup of tea to the judge’s wife. The woman smiled her gratitude and accepted the tea with a nervous clattering of the china. She seemed even more fragile than the delicate Old Willow teacup.

Mallory leaned down until her eyes were level with the woman, who had ceased her crying and now looked up at Mallory with absolute trust.

‘Mrs Heart, were you at home the night the judge beat the crap out of your mother-in-law?’

The woman’s eyes were startled wide, and it seemed that her thin shoulders were being pressed to the back of her chair. Then her head dropped to her chest, and her entire body wilted. Now Pansy had been assaulted for the second time in one night.

Mallory eased back, lifted a cup from the near table and began to stir her own tea.

‘Did that old woman scream as loud as you did?’

The sobbing began again, racking the smaller woman’s leaf-light body.

Betty Hyde rolled her eyes. She rose from the footstool and led Mallory back to the kitchen.

‘That was brutal, Mallory. One day we must have a long talk about your style – I think I could learn from you. Are you just fishing, dear, or do you have something more on the bastard?’

‘I’ve got copies of the hospital records during the years Judge Heart’s mother lived with them. There’s another file with his wife’s hospital records. He probably didn’t kill the old lady with a beating, but if you want to get to the judge, I would suggest applying a little pressure on his mother’s doctor – you might want the old woman’s body exhumed. The DA is a good political animal. You might approach him with the word coverup and then explain that a high-profile case might be good for his career. And leave my name out of it.’

‘Understood. And what can I do for you, Mallory?’

‘Milk Pansy for everything you can get. At the tenants’ meeting, she said her dog was gone. Is it dead?’

Betty turned to the woman in the other room. Pansy had ceased her crying now and sat quietly staring into her teacup. Hyde raised her voice to ask, ‘Pansy, you still have a dog, don’t you, dear? Rosie, isn’t it?’

Pansy Heart turned to face Betty with a look of mild surprise. ‘Yes, Rosie is at the animal hospital. I don’t know when she’ll be coming home. She’s very sick.’

Mallory found something familiar about the tone of voice. It was the practiced way the woman said the words. She was lying.

Well, everybody lied.

Mallory strode back into the front room and leaned down with both hands on the arms of the rocking chair. Pansy looked up, and her hand started to rise to ward off a blow. It was an instinctive reflex.

‘Your dog is dead, isn’t it?’

The woman was flying apart from the center. One hand flashed out and sent the teacup and saucer crashing to the floor. Her eyes were slipping into shock.

‘When did the dog die?’

And now the words came out in a gush of hysteria. ‘I don’t know! I haven’t seen Rosie for days. My husband took her out for a walk, and she never came back again. He said she was at the vet’s.’

‘But you called the vet and the dog wasn’t there, right?’

Pansy was nodding. Quiet now. Shock was doing its calming work.

Mallory turned away and left Hyde to clean up the damage, this puddle of a woman in the middle of her floor.

Edward Slope took his seat at the table. ‘Stop apologizing, Charles.’

‘But I only meant to leave a message on your office machine. I would never have dragged you away from your family on Christmas night.’

‘But I wasn’t with my family, Charles. I was catching up on a backlog of autopsies. Christmas is my busy season. So why the secrecy? Has the little brat asked you to break the law?’

Charles had never been able to win at poker. He didn’t have the face to run a bluff, or so Edward Slope had reminded him once a week. So how to begin this foray into lying, which was Mallory country and an uncharted place he had never been to?

‘I had a few words with Riker last night,’ said Charles. ‘I know Kathy witnessed a murder when she was a child.’ And that was true, wasn’t it? Riker’s reaction had confirmed it, certainly. And his reaction to discussing the matter with Edward Slope had suggested that Edward could tell him what Riker would not.

The doctor sat back in his chair and went through the stalling mechanics of removing his glasses and cleaning them. ‘So Riker told you about that?’

Charles nodded, and in that nod he told his first lie of the evening. He was practicing at Mallory’s religion of Everyone Lies.

Forgive me, Edward my friend, for my trespasses against thee.

Slope restored his glasses to the bridge of his nose. ‘When I asked Riker, point blank, if he had ever seen any of the films, he denied it. You haven’t mentioned this to anyone else, have you?’

‘No,’ said Charles, with the sudden realization that somehow he had just betrayed Riker. Forgive me, Riker, for I’m about to trespass some more. Charles settled the napkin on his lap, not wanting to meet the eyes of the man he could not beat at poker. ‘Riker wouldn’t go into any detail about the film.’ And that was true. No, it was not. It was deception. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’s not supposed to know the film existed. But apparently Riker did know about it. There’s no other way he could have known about the murder. I gather this is important, or he wouldn’t have hung himself out to dry that way.’