Carol O’Connell: The Man Who Lied To Women

‘You can’t scare Mallory.’

He hated it when Riker was right. If the department ever did enforce the regulations on moonlighting, there wouldn’t be three cops left to guard the city.

‘Are you volunteering to play wet nurse, Riker?’

‘Mallory doesn’t need me for that. She doesn’t need any human being on the planet. She came that way when she was a kid. Real self-sufficient little – ’

‘I thought Markowitz was your friend, Riker. Are you trying to give that dead man a heart attack by putting his kid in the line of fire?’

‘If she hadn’t been his daughter, he would have used her right. He would have been ruthless about it.’

Riker deposited an ash on the carpet. The whole world was Riker’s ashtray.

‘Why should I give her this one? The guy is brutal. He’s a psycho.’ Coffey held up the morgue photo, and Riker turned his face to the floor. ‘First he smashes the woman’s skull in, and then he turns her head 180 till her neck snaps. How is Mallory going to – ’

‘If you’re afraid she’s gonna shoot him in the hand, I think she’s learned her lesson.’ Riker lifted his shaggy head to face Coffey with something approaching serious feeling. ‘Give her a chance.’ He then shrugged his shoulders to show that this business really meant very little to him.

And now Coffey realized it meant a great deal to Riker.

‘You know she’d have absolutely nothing to go on.’

‘That’s what she likes about it,’ said Riker. ‘The first time you said that, her little monster eyes lit up like green candles. It’s enough to make you believe in hell.’

‘All we know about the perp is that he’s dangerous to women, and you want me to give him to Mallory.’

Sure. Give a dangerous lunatic to the baby to cut her teeth on.

‘She’s perfect for this one.’

‘How do you figure?’

While Coffey waited on an answer, he looked down at the report on his blotter and picked up a pencil to initial it. Riker slumped low in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. Coffey’s pencil snapped in two.

‘You know,’ Riker drawled through the smoky haze, ‘even in the early days, Markowitz took a lot of pride in Mallory. He used to brag on her all the time. He said it wasn’t every father in the neighborhood who had a kid with the psych profile of a sociopath.’

He had seen the magic bullet again. In dreams, he had watched its slow float from the mouth of the gun to his gut, watched it penetrate his flesh and make the blood fly.

On his way to the bathroom, Riker’s bare foot knocked an empty beer bottle to one side. He never felt the hard connection of flesh to glass, so vivid was the dream in front of his open eyes.

One day the booze would get him killed. His reflexes would not kick in when he needed them to save his sorry life. Awake or asleep, the magic bullet was always floating in the air just ahead of him.

But he and the bottle were an old married couple now. And he preferred the dream of the bullet to the vision of spiders which had come with his last attempt at divorce from alcohol.

How many years had it been? Thirteen years? At least that.

He had been going through withdrawal, strapped to a bed of delirium tremens, on the day Kathy Mallory crawled through the window of the clinic which did not allow children to visit by the front door. The little girl had hit the floor in her rubber-soled shoes and the eerie stealth of a born thief.

For one slow blink, the strange child had blended well with the tableau of spiders which crawled all over his body, the sheets and the walls. The largest of the spiders dangled from the ceiling, madly spinning its silken line, dropping ever closer to his face in an aerial ballet of eight black dancing legs. And then it danced upon his eyes while his arms were bound by thick leather restraints.

‘The spider! Get it off my eyes!’ he had screamed at Mallory, who was Kathy then. (Years later, when she joined the force, she would forbid him to use her given name.) Young Kathy had come close to the bed, peered into his eyes and pronounced them free of spiders. And then, she looked at him with such contempt. She was so close, he could see his own bug-size self twice-reflected in her eyes.

He had turned to the larger mirror on the hospital wall, the better to see what she had seen: his face bathed in sweat, awash in fear, and twitching. A slick of vomit trailed from his mouth to his chin. He slowly nodded his head in agreement with Kathy. He was so pathetic – even spiders would not live in his mind with him any more.

He remembered thanking God that Helen Markowitz had taught Kathy not to spit indoors. He could see it was in her mind to do it when she looked down at him. Instead, she had only turned around and left the way she had come, disappearing through the window. Then, small hands were gripping the sash, closing the window behind her, making no sound and leaving no trace of her unlawful entry.

After that day, after all the spiders had fled for a more upscale mental disorder than his own, he had not been successful in giving up the bottle, but made a point of never again losing face with Kathy. The unpitying brat had ended his days of public falling-down, crawling-home drunken binges. As drunks go, he had become semi-respectable, rarely stumbling, never reeling any more.

Even through his sunglasses, the light at the level of the sidewalk was painfully bright. He opened the passenger door of Mallory’s small tan car and climbed inside. He leaned toward the windshield, lowering his scratched green shades and squinting at the panorama of his neighborhood.

‘So this is morning.’

Dead silence from Mallory.

He had kept the punctuality freak waiting while he dressed and shaved. He was anticipating her slow burn as he shrugged down deep into the upholstery. Smiling affably, tying his tie, he waited for the sarcasm. Instead, she gunned the engine, ripped the car away from the curb and laid a streak of hot rubber on the street leading away from his apartment building.

Riker grabbed the dashboard, thinking this might keep his brains from sloshing around in his skull and stop the pain of the hangover.

‘Okay, Mallory. It’s gonna be a long day. Play nice.’

The car slowed down to a law-abiding pace, and her voice was deceptively civil when she said, ‘The uniforms came up dry with the doormen on the Upper West Side. She didn’t live in that neighborhood. Nobody could make the photographs.’

So she had started without him. What else might she have been up to? It was only 10:00 in the morning. Most days, he would just be opening his eyes at this hour and only thinking about rolling to the floor, and, if he landed with enough momentum, maybe continuing on to the bathroom.

In the tone of You got this coming to you, kid. he said, ‘If you’d had a few years in fieldwork, you’d know how hard it is for most people to ID a corpse from a morgue photo, even one without a damaged face. A mother could make the ID in a heartbeat, and maybe a close friend could do it – but a doorman? No way. So we still don’t know that she didn’t live in that neighborhood.’

Mallory’s expression in profile might read the venom of I’m going to get you for that, or the merely sarcastic Y eah, right. He was pretty confident it was one of those two things.

‘Where are we headed?’ he ventured, testing the atmosphere between them. ‘Going to Brooklyn?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to Brooklyn. Anna dropped the clothes off at a collection center. The center trucked them into the main clearing house in Manhattan. Anna’s bundle went to a women’s shelter in the East Village.’