‘Just Mallory. No, do you?’
‘Well, Rosie’s been gone for a while – oh, don’t get me started. I cry whenever I think of our little Rosie. She’s such an angel. Emery taught Rosie to shake hands. Didn’t you, dear? Rosie is such a clever little thing, isn’t she, Emery? And she can sit up and beg.’
‘Rosie is a dog,’ said Betty Hyde, after drawing Mallory away with explanations of introductions promised elsewhere.
‘I think I worked that out,’ said Mallory.
‘Now let me introduce you to our resident Pulitzer Prize winner.’ Betty Hyde paused by a bookcase to retrieve a pair of dark glasses and a cane. ‘He’s marvelous with a cane in his hands. I just thought I’d give him a sporting chance to run for it before Angel comes back.’
‘I wonder why he doesn’t deck her.’
‘Unfortunately, Eric was well brought up. I thought you might find him interesting. He’s one of my best sources. People think nothing of what they say in Eric’s presence. They seem to lump all handicaps into one, taking him for deaf and learning disabled too.’ Now Betty Hyde placed one hand gently on the man’s arm to announce herself. ‘Hello, Eric. I’d like you to meet Mallory, a new resident.’
‘How do you do,’ said Eric Franz.
The man’s voice was cultured, but in this crowd that told her very little about his background. The lack of cane and glasses had the opposite effect of aiding the blind Franz to blend in. Here was a man with eyes out of focus and staring at nothing.
Betty Hyde slipped the cane into one of his hands and the glasses into the other. In the tone of conspirators, he asked, ‘What’s between me and the door?’
‘Four people I never cared for. Hit them with the cane if you can manage it.’
Dark glasses in place, he made a courtly bow to Mallory, missing her general direction by two feet. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’
He walked across the crowded floor with the confidence of a sighted man and hit no one on the way out. And there was time for Mallory to wonder if he wasn’t navigating entirely too well, and how he had been blinded, and how much insurance money had been involved, and if he had carried insurance on his dead wife.
‘He isn’t all the way blind, you know,’ said Betty. ‘He spots fakes and sharks in the dark – all the survival skill necessary to make it in New York City.’
Mallory knew Harry Kipling was watching her. She could see his dark hair in peripheral vision and saw his head turn as she crossed the room with Betty Hyde. She turned back to look at Kipling’s wife, who was following her husband’s every move. There was an expression of bitterness in the woman’s eyes. Now, all things flashed across the woman’s face – hate, anger, suspicion and hurt.
Not a happy marriage.
‘I know the lawyer who drew up their prenuptial agreement,’ said Betty Hyde, nodding to the Kiplings. ‘They have one child. The estate passes over the mother and goes to the son when he comes of age. I’ve only seen the boy once.’
‘I haven’t seen many children today.’
‘Most of the year, you won’t see any children at all. Children from this building are a new class of wealthy homeless people. They only come home from boarding school during the holidays. But if you really dislike your children, you can pay the school extra to keep them away from you for the entire year.’
‘Do the Hearts have children?’
‘Judge Heart has one child by another marriage, a daughter. I’ve never seen her in the flesh – only in publicity photos that ran in the Sunday supplement before the Senate hearings. I suspect they rented the girl for the photo sessions.’
‘Is there anything wrong with her?’
‘Like drug addiction, shoplifting? Oh, Mallory, that’s so common among this group, I wouldn’t stoop to writing about it.’
‘Could there be another reason why you never see her – something radically wrong with her?’
‘You mean something like a lockaway child, an embarrassment in the public eye? That’s an interesting angle. Leave it to me, dear. I’ll get back to you. It’s something you can only dig out of the right people. You won’t find it on any records, not with the money behind the judge.’
‘And the blind man? Eric…?’
‘Eric Franz? No, he and Annie never had any children, unless you count the guide dog. And the dog is such a sweet animal, it would be hard to believe it was Annie’s natural offspring.’
‘A bad marriage?’
‘It was no great love affair. Her idea of sport was to rearrange the furniture so he’d trip over it. And Eric used to tell their friends that Annie was feeding him dog food. Now that was his idea of a joke, but she probably did. She had a great sense of humor.’
He was a late visitor to the kitchen, and alone. He pounded his hand on the cutting board, and a bowl of fruit jumped and tilted over, rocking its apples to the table.
That bitch.
She knew what he had done and what he was. She knew things.
An apple was still rolling on the board, red as her lips were red. He held the ripe fruit in one hand and fumbled in the drawer for a paring knife. He stabbed the skin and watched the juice flow out. He stabbed it again and again. And now he sliced off the skin in slow peels, imagining the screams emanating from the mutilated fruit in his hand.
Bitch.
All women were bitches.
She was sitting in the Rosens’ library, facing her computer screen. It had taken five minutes to break into the guts of the building computer system – so much for security. Now she scrolled through the files on the tenants and made notes on access routes to bypass all but three computers.
She set up a dummy screen, and in the area of PERSONAL MESSAGES, she typed her own message, tailored only by the three different names, and otherwise the same. If her suspects didn’t check the bulletin board tonight, they would do so in the morning. Once the computer was accessed again, the fake board would disappear with no trace of tampering.
She picked through the building’s list of fax numbers. Two of the suspects had fax machines. That would come in handy. After a glance at the building schematic for the best route to the basement room where the phone lines were located, she picked up her flashlight and telephone kit.
Thirty minutes later, the elevator operator was carrying her up and out of the basement. The iron cage stopped at the lobby floor. A boy got on the elevator. He might be fourteen years old.
If Harry Kipling had played around, his wife had not. The boy had the same blue eyes and black hair, the same stocky build as the father. And now the boy was looking her up and down. His slow, widening smile was more of a leer.
She stared at the boy in the wordless disbelief of, You’re kidding, right?
The boy’s face went to a high red color, and he got off on the next floor, though it was not where he lived.
She wondered if womanizing might be genetic.
She continued on, watching the floors drop away. Looking up through the iron grille of the doors, she saw the tip of the white cane at the blind man’s feet. Eric Franz was standing by the elevator when the doors opened on the Rosens’ floor. As she stepped out of the elevator, he inclined his head. ‘Miss Mallory? I’ve been looking for you. Oh, I’m sorry, it’s just Mallory, right?’
‘Right,’ she said, after a hesitation.
‘It was your perfume,’ said Eric Franz in response to the question she was about to ask. He shrugged and smiled. ‘When you lose your sight, Nature gives you another gift, a heightened sense of awareness. Betty Hyde tells me you have an interest in the judge. So do I.’
‘Also professional? I work for a research group. I assume she told you that too.’
‘Yes, she did. But my interest in the judge is personal. I’m curious about an old incident. Being blind has its drawbacks, you know. There’s always missing information on some level. Take the day the medical examiner’s people showed up for the death of old Mrs Heart, the judge’s mother.’