‘A sociopath can’t pass for normal, not with everyone.’

‘Well, yes he can,’ Henrietta said with rare insistence.

‘No,’ said Mallory, with finality. ‘He can’t.’

Charles watched the sudden shock of understanding come into Henrietta’s eyes as she realized she was talking to someone with an inside view.

‘So now that we’ve established what he isn’t,’ said Mallory. ‘How much weight can I put on a lie as motivation? If I went into the lives of all the tenants in that building, I could dig up something on every one of them. What kind of lie pushes that kind of button? He panicked once. I want to make him do it again.’

‘It would depend on the lie,’ said Henrietta. ‘A person’s entire life can be structured on lies.’

‘What kind of buttons should I push? How do I scare him into talking?’

‘Fear might make him close up. Better to get him angry. A disclosure in anger is worth more. If we can assume he taught the cat to dance, we might consider control issues here. It’s the fount of the hatred of women and the most violent crimes against them. In that case, getting caught in any lie might have set him off. Which would you say was most prone to lying as a pathology?’

‘Everybody lies,’ said Mallory.

‘Surely not everyone,’ said Charles.

‘No, Charles. You don’t. But then you can’t lie, can you? You don’t have the face for it. Wait, I take that back. There’s the vase you rigged. That’s a lie by omission, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a common test situation.’

‘And?’

‘A lie by omission. I’ll bet Helen never lied.’

‘Well, Helen only lied out of kindness, but she was kind to a lot of people.’

‘Markowitz never lied.’

‘Oh sure he did. He lied like crazy. The old man was the best. I’ve heard him lie to the mayor, the commissioner. He lied every time he held a press conference. He lied – ’

‘All right. Everybody lies.’

As she carried the cat down the sidewalk between the garage and the Coventry Arms, she caught sight of the doorman reading the newspaper. A cab pulled up, and Arthur quickly removed his glasses, tucking them into the fold of the paper which lay on the shelf beneath the house phone. Arthur was smiling and opening the door of the cab when Mallory slipped through the door. As she passed by that shelf, she flipped back the fold of the paper.

Bifocals. An ugly little man who was too vain to wear his glasses in front of the tenants. Interesting.

She walked over to the wide lobby window which overlooked the sidewalk. Another tenant was walking toward the building. As Moss White, the talk show host, came abreast of the bench twelve feet before the door to the building, Arthur put on his wide smile.

Well, at least the man’s field of vision included the bench where Amanda had been sitting the day before she died.

Thoughts of Amanda Bosch rode up in the elevator with Mallory. What had the woman seen that day? What had upset her and made her run off? And how much value could she put on Arthur’s testimony if she needed him in court? She and Arthur must have another little chat, and soon.

When she walked in the door of the Rosens’ apartment, she had the feeling that there was someone else close by. Nose felt it too. The cat in her arms ceased to purr. It was kneading its clawless paws into her coat, looking everywhere.

Something in the bedroom was being moved. Now she heard the sound of the vacuum. She walked into the room to see the cleaning woman who must be the Rosens’ Sarah.

‘Oh, hello, miss.’ The woman switched off the vacuum, and now Mallory heard the sound of the flushing toilet in the bathroom. The door opened, and Justin Riccalo was standing on the threshold and looking up at her. He began a small smile; it died off as Mallory turned her back on him to face the cleaning woman.

‘I hope it’s all right, miss,’ said Sarah. ‘He was standing out in the hall waiting for you. He needed to use the bathroom. It is all right, isn’t it?’

‘Sure.’ Now she looked at the boy again. Lately, he was always in her mind on some level. She felt a tie to him without being able to name it, as though they had been through something together. It nagged at her, this feeling which occurred each time they met – a bizarre and twisted notion approaching dèjá vu. She knew where he had been, for she had been there before him.

‘Well, I’m done in this room,’ said Sarah, coiling the cord around her vacuum cleaner. Mallory and the boy continued to stare at one another in silence until the cleaning woman had shown herself out of the bedroom. ‘How did you get past the doorman, Justin?’

‘I walked in behind a man and a woman. I guess the doorman thought I belonged to them.’

‘How did you know I lived here?’

‘I looked it up in the phone book.’

No, said the slow shake of her head, that could not be. The vacuum cleaner began to drone and toil across the carpet of the front room.

‘Okay, I was with my stepmother when she followed you the other day.’

‘So that was you.’ She had felt him but not seen him. The stepmother had not explained the watcher who had occupied the space on the opposite sidewalk, a space which had been empty by the time she had turned round.

‘I gave the elevator man your name, and he took me to this floor. I ran into the cleaning woman in the hall. She was just going into your apartment. I told her you were expecting me.’

Now he seemed to be waiting for praise. She let him wait.

He jammed his hands into his down parka and rocked on the balls of his feet as he looked around the bedroom with its frilly four-poster canopy bed, the chintz and the bric-a-brac. ‘It’s not what I expected of you.’

All his confidence ebbed away in the ensuing silence.

Mallory was listening to the hum of Sarah’s vacuum cleaner. Mrs Ortega always cleaned one room at a time, and the front room already had the furniture polish and ammonia smell of a finished job.

The boy opened his mouth to speak. Mallory moved one finger up to silence him. He closed his mouth and turned to the sound of the vacuum in the next room.

When the vacuum stopped and the front door finally closed on the departing Sarah, he said, ‘I’ve got to talk to someone, but no one will listen to me.’

‘I’ll listen if you’re straight with me. Has your stepmother missed any nylon stockings recently?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Did she accuse you of taking it?’

‘Not yet. I found a mangled stocking wadded up in my dresser this morning. I didn’t take it, and I don’t know how it got there.’

What was the connection she felt to the boy? Something old. Half a memory. He was a liar, that might be part of it.

‘When you’re ready to tell me the truth about what’s going on, I’ll help you.’

‘You think I’m making the pencils fly, you and everyone else. Why? What do you really know about me? Nothing. Only what my father tells you.’

‘Oh, I know a lot about you, Justin. I know you’re smart enough to figure out how the tricks are done. But you won’t tell, will you? Either you do the tricks yourself, or you’re afraid of your father, or both. Or maybe your stepmother is doing it. Maybe you keep quiet about it because you like the idea of driving your old man straight up a wall.’

She looked at his clothes and his unmarred pink face, his unskinned knees. His running shoes were not new, but they weren’t dirty either.

‘You’re a loner. You have no friends, no sports to play.’

He stood very straight, shoulders pinned back.

‘You attended a military school.’ Good guess. His head was nodding. ‘And you’re holding out on me. If these stunts with the flying objects are your doing, I’m gonna find you out. You got that?’

‘What reason would I have to do it? You don’t know everything. You don’t know that all my mother’s money – ’

‘ – was left to you in trust. And your father controls the trust.’