The woman passed behind a bank of decorative stone which obscured half the staircase, protecting her from Mallory’s view. As the small prostitute cleared this facade, Mallory raised her binoculars to her face.
Not a woman.
Beneath the penciled dark eyebrows, the eyeliner and the smear of red lipstick that was her mouth, was the face of a child. How old could she be? Twelve or thirteen years? The light brown eyes had the look of a stunned animal. Her face was in a junkie sweat, though the air was cold and her thin close-fitting jacket could offer little warmth.
Mallory slipped the opera glasses into her pocket and wondered how long it had been since the baby whore last had a fix of the needle.
Palanski rose to a stand as the girl made her way down the stairs and along the wide stone floor. Her hand rose in a vague gesture of recognition and then fell back to her side.
Mallory slipped along the footpath leading down into the plaza on Palanski’s blind side. She was in the open now with no cover as she silently walked the stones. Skirting the fountain, she was moving faster now.
The little prostitute took no notice, legs in motion, but mind in limbo, eyes blank and staring at nothing, moving slowly toward Palanski, whose hand delved into his pocket and produced the lure.
In a sudden cloudbreak, the bronze angel cast a long shadow across the pool of water, the tips of its wings lighting on the stone under Mallory’s running feet. The little girl was within two yards of Palanski when Mallory rushed the child and gripped her by one arm, which was bone thin beneath the light material of the sleeve. When the girl looked up, a badge was thrust in her face. The girl, body and soul, crumpled under Mallory’s hand in the same dispirited resignation of her older peers, her sisters, the adult whores. For this was part of the job, wasn’t it – the arrest.
Palanski was gaping at Mallory as she pocketed her shield. His eyes were panic wide and disbelieving. He took one step forward. Instinctive reflex sent her free hand to the holster inside her jacket. He stopped dead. She watched his darting eyes and knew he was framing the story to explain this away. As his mouth opened, Mallory said, ‘Don’t even think about lying to me. I know what you did.’
Palanski turned, willing his feet to move at first, trapped on his toes for a full second, then breaking into a jog and now sprinting across the plaza.
Three packets of jettisoned white powder floated on the fountain’s waters.
‘You better run, you son of a bitch!’ Mallory’s scream echoed off the stones of the cold and desolate plaza, wherein she kept company with a blind bronze angel and a small child with faraway eyes.
Betty Hyde waited by the entrance as Arthur opened the door for an elderly tenant and her dog, then a woman with groceries and a man with a briefcase, the last stragglers of the morning. She looked across the street to the place which had been bloodied more than a month ago on the night Annie Franz was run down by a drunken driver.
Now there was no more traffic through the door to the Coventry Arms. Arthur had his smile in place as she walked over to him.
‘Good morning, Miss Hyde.’
‘Good morning, Arthur. Lovely day, isn’t it?’
A fifty dollar bill found its way from Betty’s purse into Arthur’s pocket in the New York sleight of hand which out-of-towners mistook for a handshake.
‘Yes, ma’am, it is indeed a lovely day.’
‘Correct me if I’m mistaken, but didn’t you switch shifts with Bertram on the night Mrs Franz died? I seem to remember you were on duty that night.’
‘Yes, Miss Hyde, you have a good memory.’
‘So you must have seen the whole thing.’
‘I saw everything, every detail. I was able to give the police a complete description of the drunken driver and the numbers on the license plate. They caught him within the hour, you know. It happened right over there.’
Arthur pointed to the park side of the street and continued in the well-worn patter of a tour guide. ‘It was 2:15 in the morning, and Mrs Franz was a little unsteady on her feet. I’m not saying she was drunk, mind you.’
No, Arthur would never say that. Betty nodded her encouragement to go on.
‘Well, they were arguing again.’
There had been no argument in Eric’s version when she had given him shelter from the press and the police. She had called her own personal physician to treat him for shock. In Eric’s version, he and Annie had been discussing the first draft of his new book.
‘She thought it was the best thing I’d ever written.’
And that same line had found its way into subsequent interviews with Eric on the talk show circuit – circus -following the death of his wife.
‘So the argument’s getting pretty loud by now,’ said Arthur. ‘She stumbled back a bit. And then she was standing in the street.’
‘Annie said she had dropped her purse in the street. She went back to get it,’ Eric had told her, tears streaming down his face. Behind him was the 1.5 million dollar view from her apartment, the skyline and the blue-gold spectacle of dawn, as he described the sickening sound of his wife’s body hitting the car.
Arthur was now slipping into the mode of a broadcaster describing a sporting event instead of a death.
‘So, he’s still on the sidewalk. He’s looking straight at her, and right into the lights of the oncoming car. I remember the look on his face with the headlights shining in his eyes as the car is coming to kill his wife. It would have been so weird if you didn’t know Mr Franz was blind. He was three feet away, but that was close enough to pull her back, or at least warn her. But he couldn’t know the car was coming because he couldn’t see.’
‘Did the police ever ask you about it?’
‘Yes, ma’am, a few questions. I talked to the uniformed officers, and then later, a detective – tall thin fellow. But at the time, they were all more interested in the hit-and-run vehicle.’
And the police had not paid him for the entire monologue, the blow by blow account on the death of a woman Arthur must have hated as much as he liked Eric Franz. Everyone liked Eric.
‘Later, the detective came back to ask if I could corroborate the statements of the other drivers. You know, there were three vehicles in all. But of course the papers got it all wrong. Well, she had her back turned when the drunk’s car ran her down. She flew about twenty feet in that direction.’
Arthur pointed north. She wondered if he was aware of the fact that he was smiling as he warmed to the subject of the flying body.
‘Mrs Franz landed on a southbound van. The van driver put his vehicle up on the curb and wrecked the awning support for the building next door. She fell off the van, and into the path of a vintage silver Jaguar. Her dress got snagged up in the rear wheels, and the Jaguar dragged her for maybe fifteen feet before he stopped.’
Very confidential now, just between the two of them, ‘She was still breathing, Miss Hyde. That wasn’t in the papers either. She didn’t die until just before the ambulance arrived.’
Betty nodded. Of course it would take at least three vehicles to kill Annie Franz. And it was so fitting that the last one was shaped like a silver bullet.
‘Did Mrs Franz say anything before she died?’
‘I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the police department, or maybe that detective could help you. He was the first one on the scene. “Piece of luck,” I think he said. He was just passing by, I believe. He gave her first aid while we waited for the ambulance.’
‘And what was Eric doing while this was going on?’
‘He was just standing there. He was in shock, of course. One of the uniformed police officers was trying to take a statement from him, but I think he was having trouble making sense of the whole thing. And that was when you came down and took him away from the policeman.’