Shadow Dancers (18 page)

“Sure. More than a couple of times. That’s right. But I don’t mean just that. I mean, long before. I had a good look at this fellow across the way down there on the corner. I know him from somewhere. Don’t ask me where. I just can’t place it.” Mr. Carlucci slapped his head hard, nearly dislodging his doorman’s cap. It was his way of jarring loose his impacted memory.

A look of mounting curiosity bloomed in the young man’s features. “How long ago?”

“Oh, way back. Way back, Mr. Hoskins.”

“How long you been working as doorman here?”

“Forty years.” A look of almost childlike pride suffused the old gentleman’s face. “I come here forty years ago, last Sunday. They give me a big party, Mr. Rothstein.”

“Mr. Rothstein?”

“Mr. Rothstein and his partners. The landlords here. They own the building. They own lotsa buildings in the area. Your finest addresses. All carriage trade. Eight sixty Fifth. Nine seventy-two Madison. Six sixty Park. I mean the best. Your top of the line. Fine gentleman, Mr. Rothstein. They give me a big party here. Champagne. Hors d’oeuvres.”

“Forty years is a long time on one job,” the young man remarked.

Mr. Carlucci glowed with satisfaction. “How old you think I am?”

“Fifty. Maybe, tops, fifty-five.”

“I’m gonna be seventy in another two weeks.”

“Seventy?” The young man stood back and reexamined the doorman in the bright warm lights from the lobby. “You don’t look any seventy to me.”

The doorman flung his chest out and pounded it, attesting to his general soundness. In the next moment he grew suddenly downcast. “Gonna have to retire now. Law says you gotta retire at seventy.”

“Did you tell any of this to the police?” the reporter asked, sensing that Mr. Carlucci was on the verge of one of those dizzying flights of circumlocution.

Mr. Carlucci appeared puzzled. “What?”

“That this guy who was here the other night had been around here before, and that you think you recognize him from maybe someplace else? You didn’t say that to the police?”

The old man shook his head vehemently. “No — that’s just it. Like I told you. None of this ever hit me till maybe two, three days after the police come up here to question me. They questioned me maybe two, three hours.”

“And you never called them back to tell them?”

“No. Should I?” Mr. Carlucci was suddenly alarmed as if told he’d violated the law. “I mean, it all come back to me in a kind of flash days later. But I never thought to call the police ‘cause I still can’t even place the guy. You don’t think they could give me trouble?”

“No.” Mr. Hoskins waved the possibility aside, banishing all of the old man’s anxieties in a trice. “Forget it.” But even as he spoke, something shrewd and a bit calculating hardened the young man’s dark pleasant features. “As a matter of fact, I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t mention any of this to anyone. Like, I mean, other reporters … By the way, any other reporters come up here to interview you?”

“Sure. Sure.” Mr. Carlucci’s eyes widened. “Day after the incident I had four fellas up here, all standing in line just waiting to talk to me. Poor Miss Bender.” His eyes suddenly glistened. “I can still hardly believe it. What a lovely young lady. Always smiling. Always laughing. Always give me a hundred dollars at Christmas. Fifty bucks when I go on vacation … Didn’t you read none of them articles?”

“Course I read them. That’s how I got your name and address.” The reporter seemed irritated by even the mere suggestion that he hadn’t. “But you’re certain you never told these reporters or the police anything about recognizing this guy or anything?”

“Nothing. Like I told you, I didn’t remember it then. Just like I told my missus the other night — this guy’s face keeps flashing through my head. I know him from somewhere.”

Mr. Hoskins put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and looked around to make certain they were not being overheard. “This could be a big opportunity for me.” The reporter’s eyes opened wide to emphasize the point. “Very big.”

“Sure. Sure.” Mr. Carlucci lowered his voice to demonstrate that he grasped the importance of the point.

“You understand?”

“Sure, I understand.”

“I mean, what you told me here tonight. This could be a big break. Like a scoop for me over all the other papers.”

Mr. Carlucci’s excited laugh conveyed an air of conspiracy. He winked. “Sure. This could be your big break. I like to see a young fellow like you get ahead.”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“Sure, sure.”

“If you say this guy comes back here from time to time …”

“That’s right.” Mr. Carlucci’s head nodded with each affirmation.

“How often would you say he comes back?”

“Oh, jeez.” The old man drew back, somewhat astonished by the question. “I couldn’t say.”

Catching the disappointment in the reporter’s eye, he grew apologetic. “Nothing regular, see? Just from time to time, is all. He’ll just come and stand out there across the street, or sit on the bench, is all.”

“You’re sure it’s the same guy?”

“Oh, sure. Like I tell you, I know the face from somewhere. That drawing the police artist made in the papers: that don’t look nothing like him. The artist come up here to talk to me.” Mr. Carlucci’s chest was swelling again. “I give him the whole description. Perfect.” He threw his hands up in a gesture of Italian futility. “It don’t look nothing like him, what he drew. How could they go so wrong?”

The reporter’s youthful geniality appeared to slip and now he bore down. “This guy … does he always come at night, or does he sometimes come in the day?”

“Always dusk,” Mr. Carlucci fired back without hesitation. Smiling, he held both hands up to the sky as if to indicate the precise conditions of light. “And he’ll sit over there on that bench, third from the corner. Or else he’ll stand right out at the curb and stare up at the building. Reason I notice him is ‘cause Mr. Rothstein always tells us to be on the watch for people like that — strangers who look like they don’t belong here, like they’re casing the joint.”

“Look,” said Mr. Hoskins. “If I were to come up here a couple of nights a week for the next month or so, and just sort of sit out there myself…”

“Yeah?”

“Like I was taking the air.”

“Sure.” Mr. Carlucci winked as he caught the drift of the young man’s plan.

“What I need from you …”

“Yeah?”

“Is that you just pay no attention to me. Ignore me. Right?”

“Right,” said the old man with great enthusiasm, but it was clear that he was slightly puzzled.

“Unless he shows up.”

The light went on in the old gentleman’s eyes. “Okay. Sure. Now I get you.”

“If I’m just sitting there and he shows up, just step off the curb, and wave your hand and whistle sort of like you’re hailing a cab for someone. Like that.” The reporter did it several times just to show him.

“Sure.” Mr. Carlucci giggled gleefully. “Sure.”

“Are we in business? Do we have a deal?”

“Sure. You bet, young fella. I wanna get this creep bad as you. Poor Miss Bender. Lovely young lady. Give me a hundred dollars every Christmas.” His voice trailed off in a little whine, but Hoskins headed him off before the lamentations could begin anew.

“And not a word to any reporters or the police.”

“Not a word.”

“This is our little secret.” Hoskins pumped the old man’s rough, red paw. “I’ll be back up here tomorrow around dusk.”

“That’s right, Mr. Hopkins. You bet. Around dusk.”

“Now I want to take a walk through the park along the same path that young woman walked that evening. See if I can learn something. We’re gonna nail this guy, Mr. Carlucci. You and me …”

“Oh, I wanna get that son of a bitch, you’ll pardon the expression.”

“I understand what you’re saying. Believe me, I feel that way too. I’ve got to go now,” the young man said and pointed across the brightly lit, heavily trafficked avenue. “You say she walked the dog right through that entrance there?”

“That’s right. Right through those two stone columns and started north.”

“Okay.” Hoskins patted the old man’s arm. “Here I go.”

The young man started off into the crowded, dazzling night.

“Carlucci,” the old man shouted after him. “You remember how to spell it?”

Long after the reporter had left, Mr. Carlucci wondered about him. Something about the young man troubled him — troubled him to the point of distraction. He wondered why in heaven’s name a nice-looking young fellow like that, a reporter and all that for a big-time city newspaper, couldn’t spend some money and get his teeth fixed.

Warren Mars moved into the darkness of the park where a few joggers and dog walkers straggled home through the quickening shadows. Still smoldering at the impertinence of this person who had the temerity to imitate him, he now felt a sudden elation at what he’d learned from the doorman. His feet trod north up the winding bench-lined walk, along the same fateful course taken by Caroline Bender nearly a week before.

Several days earlier when the TV people and all the press had proclaimed that the infamous Dancer had struck again in Central Park, Warren had flown into a rage. Oddly enough, he was not half as troubled by the fact that he’d been wrongly accused of crimes he hadn’t committed as he was by the idea that someone out there was imitating him. That infuriated him. He felt personally violated as if someone, some perfect stranger out there, was attempting to steal his identity.

News of the murder of the Bender girl in Central Park, found naked and crammed down a sewer and attributed to him, caused in him something akin to self-righteous indignation. Someone had copied his method in an attempt to cash in on all of the celebrity he’d achieved over the past year or so. Why the police couldn’t see how vastly different these crimes were in both style and execution was a mystery to him. An infuriating mystery at that.

He, Warren, had never sexually abused anyone for mere fleshly gratification. The “sexy” stuff for him was secondary. Strictly kid stuff. For him it was the lucre, the potential for sizable financial gain that drew him to the hunt. When he’d done the Bailey girl, he’d taken jewelry and cash. He was a professional. He could never be deflected by kid’s play. This stranger, this impostor, never took anything from his victims. He was in it just for kicks. There was no art to what he did, no premeditation prior to execution. All of his actions had a spur-of-the-moment quality about them, sheer impulse. They were artless, whereas he, Warren, gave a good deal of attention and planning to the task at hand. Everything was worked out in advance to the last detail. That’s why he’d succeeded so stunningly. He liked to be called the Shadow Dancer. That was poetic and a bit creepy. But this
poseur
, this cheap impostor, grieved him greatly.

He’d brooded about the situation for days after the discovery of the girl in the sewer. And the more he brooded, the more he became convinced that this stranger, whoever he was, had to be eliminated. And if the police were going to be so inept and dim-witted in the matter, he’d have to go out and do something about it himself.

After watching the newscasts and reading all the coverage in the press, the idea of going up to see the doorman struck him as the most obvious way to begin. The thought of getting into a suit and a tie and passing himself off as a reporter from an out-of-town newspaper seemed to him a natural.

It had gone well. Better than he’d hoped for. But he’d never expected the bonus at the end when the old man confided to him that this stranger, this other Shadow Dancer, had visited that same spot, had sat on that very same bench across the way from 860 Fifth Avenue on not one but on frequent occasions. Well, if that were so, wouldn’t it also follow that he’d return there again? Obviously, it was some sort of compulsion that drew him there. Some need to return to the same spot again and again. The fact, too, that the old man not only recognized this stranger, but felt certain that he knew him from some earlier period, was luck beyond his wildest dreams.

Striding north up the winding, tree-lined path, Warren still felt anger, but along with that, an exhilaration — the sort of exhilaration hunters feel when they sense they’re closing in on their quarry.

Walking that fateful path at dusk now in the park, Warren Mars imagined himself to be that blond stranger. Moving perhaps in that person’s very steps, he trod lightly through the heat-muffled darkness of an August night, pursuing some fleeting evanescent shape that receded seductively into the shadows before him. So vivid, in fact, was his impression of the event that it seemed to him that he was now about to reenact it himself.

The small dog straining on the leash tugged the girl forward. Each time the dog would stop to sniff a place, then relieve himself, Warren, too, would stop, and hang back, breathless in the shadows.

Warren could feel excitement rise between his legs as he trod north up the park path, now virtually deserted. He tried to imagine where this stranger first accosted the girl. How did he do it? Did he attempt to strike up casual conversation to disarm her, to overcome whatever apprehension she might have felt at the approach of a stranger on a deserted park path at night? Or, did he merely come up behind her and take her brutally, dragging her off into the bushes, forcibly tearing her clothes from her, then ravishing her as the yapping little terrier, which had broken free during the attack, darted wildly about under the lampposts, dragging his leash behind him?

Warren envisioned all of that. He’d even selected what he thought to be the most likely site for the assault: a small knoll at the top of a shallow acclivity, all bowered in dogwood and twice-blooming crab.

At a certain point he saw with brilliant clarity the two figures suddenly merge in the dark. Instantly, he himself became one of those figures. There was a small startled scream — not a scream actually, but the beginning of it — quickly muffled — and then the stricken sounds of one living thing succumbing to another, while the bushes in the area of the attack swayed and rattled violently back and forth as if driven by wind. Then all was still. There was the awful panicky flutter of wings, and then resignation.