‘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.’
‘Did the first two Mrs Riccalos have anything in common?’
‘They were both professionals and carried the normal amount of life insurance through their employers. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t another policy or two. I’m still working on it. Sally Riccalo is also carrying insurance through the financial house where she works as a systems analyst. According to her resumé, she and Robert Riccalo worked for the same company ten years ago when the first Mrs Riccalo was still alive. Interesting?’
‘We started out with a rather simple problem of flying objects. You don’t think murder is a bit of a stretch this early on? I suppose the insurance beneficiary was – ’
‘Robert Riccalo. He’s also the beneficiary of wife number three.’
‘But isn’t the spouse usually the beneficiary?’
‘Yes, but it’s usually the wife who collects. So now I’ve got one heart attack, one suicide, and wife number three looks like she’s ready to explode. She wouldn’t get that upset over one pencil. What else has been flying her way lately?’
‘Oh, a pair of scissors, some bits of glass.’
‘What’s the father’s take?’
‘Anger, disbelief. Only the stepmother seems to be a believer.’
‘He accused the boy of moving the vase. He sounds like a believer to me.’
‘No. The stepmother is the only believer in the paranormal. Mr Riccalo probably thinks the boy is doing it by trickery.’