Shadow Dancers (16 page)

He was a short, slight, swarthy young man in his late twenties, with bad skin and a mop of oily hair teased forward into a frisette that drooped on his forehead. He wore sandals and a pair of khaki shorts with a T-shirt that read “I brake for anything.”

“How many miles she got on her?” Pickering asked. “‘Bout a hundred and eighty. Runs like a top. Mechanic says she’s good for another fifty.”

“You must take pretty good care of her.”

“Nothing special.” Krause spat into the gutter. “Tune-up twice a year. Oil and lube. Sparks and points. Don’t put much mileage on it. Just city driving, you know.”

“You keep it on the street?” Mooney asked.

“In this neighborhood? Are you kidding? You keep a car like this on the street overnight, you’re lucky you find the cigarette lighter when you come back in the morning. I garage it down on Webster.”

“Body’s in great shape for a car twenty-six years old,” Pickering remarked.

Flattered by the attention, Krause warmed to his subject. “She gets washed once a week, simonize twice a year. I take it to an auto body guy on Sedgwick Avenue cuts out all the rust soon as it appears.”

“You married, Irwin?” Mooney asked.

The question caught the young man off guard. “Married?”

“That’s right. Are you?”

The smile of moments earlier still lingered, but the young man was flustered. “Who, me? No.”

“You go out a lot, Irwin? You like the ladies?”

Krause grew defensive. “What the hell’s that got to do with car insurance?”

“Nothing personal.” Mooney made a series of calming gestures with his hands. “Just inquiring if you use the car for social purposes. Like going out with the gals. That affects the insurance rates, you know.”

A wary, stealthy look crept into the young man’s face. “You guys ain’t gonna raise my insurance, are you?”

“No, no.” Mooney calmed him again. “Nothing like that. We got nothing to do with rates. This is all done on a strictly anonymous basis. No names, or nothing like that. We’re just interested in the answers. We don’t file your name with the report.”

The look of sharp suspicion still lingered about the young man. “Oh, okay,” he muttered doubtfully. “What kind of work you do, Irwin?” Mooney asked. “I’m a bus driver.”

“Bus driver.” Pickering laughed. “I would’ve never taken you for that.”

Irwin Krause grew increasingly displeased with the tone of the interview. “Well, that’s what I happen to do. I drive a bus for the MTA. I drive six days a week. That’s how come my idea of fun is not spending a lot of time driving around in this thing.” He indicated the shiny green vintage Dodge with a nod of his head.

“You don’t like driving, Irwin?”

“I hate it. How would you like it if you hadda push a bus around Manhattan six days a week?”

“What is your idea of fun?” Mooney asked.

Irwin Krause frowned and shook his head. “This is the funniest damned survey I ever heard.”

Mooney sensed the young man’s increasing suspicion. “Reason I ask is that since you don’t use your car for business but only recreational purposes, it helps us to know the sort of things you do with the car.”

Once again, Mooney’s quick fix had mollified him somewhat. “Well, I take it out to the beach weekends, and sometimes on a Saturday night I drive it into the city. Like when I’ve got a date and all. But otherwise …”

“You never take it outta town?” Pickering asked.

“Like I say” — young Krause was beginning to show signs of exasperation — “I drive a bus all week long. It’s no big pleasure for me getting behind the wheel on a weekend. Also, this baby breaks down somewhere upstate in the mountains, I can’t find no parts for it. I can’t find no mechanic who knows the machine.”

Mooney and Pickering exchanged glances.

“You got any criminal record, Irwin?” Mooney asked suddenly, seeing agitation leap back into the young man’s eye. “This is just for the M.V.B. records. Just a formality. We try to keep tabs on all criminal types still on the road.”

Krause’s look of skepticism had turned to one of hurt.

“It’s for your own safety, Irwin,” Pickering assured him.

“Sure. I see,” Krause agreed, more mystified than ever. “No, I got no criminal record.”

“Get me a make on this guy, Lopez,” Mooney said to the driver when they’d settled back in the car. He handed him a small profile card with pertinent data he could flash instantly over the car’s radio to the National Crime Center in Washington.

“That old Dodge was in beautiful shape,” Pickering said. “The grille was just the sort of thing that old Wisdo babe was talking about.”

“Too pale, though.”

“Too what?”

“Too pale,” Mooney growled. “The green was too pale. She was talking about a darker green.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me.” Mooney glowered out into the street.

“He’s the right physical type, though,” Pickering added hopefully.

“All depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you’re talking about the dark-complected character or the fair-haired one. Did you happen to notice Krause’s front teeth at all?”

“Straight. Perfectly straight.”

“Probably the only thing straight about him.”

The police driver up front half-turned in his seat. The action caused his jowly face to redden. “On that Krause guy …”

“Yeah?”

“He was jugged a couple of times for driving under the influence. No prior criminal record.”

FERRIS KOOPS WATCHED THE TRAIN GLIDE
slowly over the track, then rock and sway gently into the little station. It was a freight train with an engine and a coal tender, with six cars coupled behind that. There was a boxcar, two flatcars, two oilers, and a caboose tagged on at the end with a Great Northern Railway shield stenciled on its side.

Ferris pressed closer, inching his way forward to a better vantage point. At the station the steam engine hooted. A puff of smoke rose from its stack as an automated delivery arm poked out from inside a baggage room, dropped a sack of mail onto one of the flatcars, then retracted itself. The engine hooted again, a low, wistful moan, the big drive wheels spun slowly, and the train chugged out of the station.

Farther up the track it slowed to permit a five-car passenger train to pass in front of it, then switched onto a shallow elevated track leading into a tunnel that wound its way beneath a papier-mâché mountain.

Ferris watched the tail of the caboose vanish into the dark maw of the tunnel. A smile of near childlike delight transported his features. In his early twenties, he didn’t appear to be much beyond some of the older children swarming about him. His presence there at that moment in a crowd comprised mostly of children tended to heighten the impression of extreme youth.

It was 5:45
P.M.
, fifteen minutes before closing time at the F.A.O. Schwartz toy emporium. Though the sun was still up, it had already swung well to the west and appeared to have gotten itself tangled in the soaring new construction in the vicinity of Columbus Circle. It was at a point that could be described as neither daylight nor dusk, but somewhere just between, when the first few streetlamps have turned on, appearing white and ineffective in the dwindling daylight.

Ferris had wandered into the famous toy shop from the street. Having no place to go and nothing in particular to do, he stood outside the big display windows for twenty minutes or so, watching electric robots blink and lurch about. Beside that was a window full of animated Mother Goose characters reenacting their little tales.

More than he loved toys, Ferris loved children. Among them, he enjoyed a serenity and sense of well being he seldom experienced in the presence of adults. It brought him back to his own childhood. Christmas mornings. Toys beneath a tree. Thanksgiving Day parades. Halloween trick-or-treating. Ice-skating in the park, at the Wollman Memorial Rink. The building he’d grown up in was just across the street from there on upper Fifth Avenue. Standing at the window of his bedroom, he’d had an unimpeded view of the zoo at the south end of the park and of the Delacorte Theater and the ice rink farther north.

The room he had in those years was full of toys. Bookshelves from ceiling to floor were lined with volumes of children’s classics sitting side by side with regiments of lead soldiers, kites, model ships and planes, bubble pipes, wind-up gymnasts, model vintage sports cars — all things to delight a child.

Ferris had never been to regular school like other boys and girls. The doctors had said he could never go. In a physical sense, he was perfectly healthy. But early on, in the first or second grade, his teachers had discovered that he was unable to learn at the same rate as other children. Learning what to do with numbers and letters for Ferris, hard as he tried, was an insurmountable task.

Even as he struggled to overcome his deficit, receiving special coaching, his reading level failed to advance at the same rate as other children’s.

Concerned, his parents brought him to a special clinic where batteries of tests were administered, and it was quickly discovered that Ferris was largely incapable of any sustained concentration. A learned clinician there had informed the Koopses one gray, icy February morning that the part of Ferris’s brain associated with cognitive skills was apparently underdeveloped. This might be due to some longstanding heretofore undiagnosed hormonal dysfunction, or more likely the result of a brief period of oxygen deprivation during birth. This was not retardation in the truly crippling sense, the doctor hastened to add, but all the same, the sad outcome that had to be faced was that Ferris would be afflicted with learning deficits throughout the course of his life.

On the other hand, Ferris had excellent muscle coordination. He was articulate with an extraordinarily large vocabulary (which appeared to fly in the face of the learned clinician’s findings), and showed every indication of growing into a charming and comely young man.

But still, the doctors assured Mr. and Mrs. Koops that Ferris would never be normal. As he grew older he would give the appearance of normality. He could dress and wash, feed himself and attend to all his bodily needs, to be sure. He could even learn to read and write. Up to a point. But as for taking his place in the world — marriage, job, family — that, unhappily, seemed doubtful.

Shortly after (Ferris was only seven when that cruel verdict was handed down), the Koopses’ fortunes began to founder. Several imprudent investments, coupled with one sizable loss in the market, all but decimated their savings. The need for ready cash compelled Mr. Koops to sell off some extremely valuable real estate holdings and liquidate his once-prosperous importing business, all at prices drastically disadvantageous to him.

Several weeks later Mr. Koops died of a massive coronary, and his wife remarried, many said with indecent haste. Sometime before his demise, however, Koops had set terms in his will to provide, not luxuriously, but more than adequately, for Ferris’s needs throughout the remainder of his life.

That would have been all well and good had things gone the way Mr. Koops imagined they would. He didn’t count on Mrs. Koops remarrying quite so quickly after his death, nor could he have possibly foreseen that his wife’s new husband, a widower in his late fifties with enviable social connections and smart friends in high places, had little room in his life for a seven-year-old slow learner who required tutors and constant supervision.

Never a strong-willed person, Mrs. Koops soon bowed to pressures to institutionalize Ferris. “After all,” her new husband assured her, “these people are professionals. They’re trained to handle people like Ferris.”

Ferris hovered round the Schwartz windows until closing time, then with a few other stragglers drifted out into the pale purple dusk of 57th Street, where the stores were now all lit. Office buildings were disgorging people onto the streets. Crowds brushed past the lagging, meandering youth, scurrying for subways and buses, rushing off to social engagements, family, and friends.

Ferris Koops had no place to go. He had not eaten in seventy-two hours except for occasional fruit drinks taken at outdoor stands. For all that, he was not conscious of being hungry, and even if he were, he had not at that moment the financial wherewithal to attend to the problem. The proceeds from the check that arrived every two weeks from the offices of a law firm on Madison Avenue had a way of disappearing almost the moment it was cashed.

He carried in his pocket some food vouchers entitling him to hot meals at various welfare shelters. The absence of means, coupled with no prospects of obtaining any until the arrival of the next check, held little in the way of fear for him. Since his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, he had been largely on his own, working in a desultory fashion at a number of jobs too inconsequential to enumerate. Suffice it to say, he never worried for his next meal, and as for shelter, he had a tiny apartment on the Upper East Side, the rent for which was paid directly by the law firm serving as executors of his small estate.

It was toward the park he walked now, moving along in his wayward, dreamy fashion, destinationless, with an odd little smile curling at the corners of his mouth.

The streetlamps were all lit now along Fifth Avenue. He wended his way north, moving up the west side of the avenue, right along the shallow stone wall enclosing the park. Pausing for a moment to rub the pinkish muzzle of one of the horses from the hansom cabs, he chatted amiably with the driver, then continued up Fifth Avenue. The route took him past the Sherry Netherland, past the Frick, the French Embassy, the Metropolitan, and the Guggenheim, his sneaker-shod feet gliding aimlessly toward a specific place he had in mind but wasn’t yet quite aware of.

Several blocks beyond the Guggenheim, his pace finally slackened then came to a halt across from a large, thirty-story, dun-colored, nineteen-fifties apartment house. Just behind him stood a bench against the park wall. He sat there for a while, watching people going in and out of the building. Businessmen returning home from work nodded to a liveried doorman and spun through the revolving front doors. Couples emerged from within on their way to social engagements all around town. The doorman hailed them cabs, doffing his cap when he’d closed the cab door behind them. A young woman emerged with a brace of Afghans on a single leash. A florist’s truck double-parked in front while the driver made deliveries.