Shadow Dancers (2 page)

“Where do you think she got it?” Mooney asked. “Nearby.”

“That figures. If it were done elsewhere, he’d have had to drag her all the way down here through the park.”

“Probably nabbed her walking one of those footpaths up near the street.”

“Or right off the street,” Pickering said. “The Sixtieth Street entrance is just a couple of hundred feet up from here.”

Konig nodded. “Son of a bitch could’ve been lurking right up there. Nabbed her when she passed. Dragged her off into the bushes, strangled her, then lugged her down here and tossed her into the drain.”

“Then jumped in after her?” Mooney inquired.

“Why would he do that?”

“Beats me, but he had to. There’s the pretty drawings down there. Then he climbed back out on those iron rungs set into the wall.”

“And that rock,” Konig mused.

“What about it?”

“The fact that she’s still holding it.”

“So?”

“Suggests she was still alive when she got down here.”

Silently, they pondered the riddle.

“Well,” Konig sighed, “I can’t do anything more here now.” He’d started to shove his gear back into the bag.

Mooney stirred, brooding about something. “He hadda be awful strong to lift that grate by himself.”

Konig gazed up at him in the beam of Pickering’s light. “Who says he was by himself?”

“I don’t know. I just assumed it. What makes you think he wasn’t?”

“That’s the difference between you and me, Mooney. I don’t assume things.” Konig was binding the girl’s hands together and bandaging them with a light gauze in order to keep them clean and undamaged until he had a chance to remove the gunk beneath the fingernails and get it under a microscope.

“Any other clothing besides the stocking?” he asked.

“They’re scouring the area now.”

“I’d be surprised if they didn’t find it scattered right around here someplace — in the bushes,” Konig said, snapping his bag shut.

“I’d be surprised if they did,” Mooney said.

Konig cocked a brow at him.

“If like you say,” Mooney went on, “she’s been dead three days, the park workers would’ve turned the stuff up by now.”

“Could’ve been buried,” Konig shot back. He had little patience for opinions that failed to coincide with his own.

“I don’t think so,” Mooney remarked calmly. “But that’s the difference between you and me, Chief. I assume things.”

Pickering started to laugh, then caught Konig’s frown and broke off fast.

The M.E. wobbled to his feet. “Okay — wrap it up and ship it downtown. I should be back to you with something in a few days.”

* * *

“I’d never bet a filly against a colt,” Patsy Duffy said. He raised the shaker above his shoulder and proceeded to bash the mixture inside into pulpy submission.

“How come?” Mooney asked.

“They’re the weaker sex. A good filly can’t beat a good colt.” Duffy drained off the foaming Manhattan into a cocktail glass.

“Who said?” Mooney asked. “You just say that ‘cause trainers in the States won’t run a filly ‘gainst colts. In Europe, fillies beat colts every day. Orchid’s a filly and right now she’s the best horse in Europe. It’s no big deal for a filly to win the Arc de Triomphe. Happens all the time. Gimme another cherry, will you?”

Duffy dropped a pair of maraschino cherries into the detective’s glass, then turned to ring up someone’s tab seated beside him. Mooney watched the bartenders work for a while, then looked around the room. They were stacked three-deep at the bar that night. All waiting for tables.

Mooney sat at the bar of the Balloon watching the crowds come and go. For him, there was nothing quite like a good New York steak house. Particularly on a Friday night, normally a payday for most. People were relaxed then, or just beginning to get that way about the dinner hour. There’s no school in the morning, and even if people are feeling battered and awful from the week’s horrors, they’re still feeling pretty good.

If Mooney happened to feel a certain proprietary fondness for this place, it was no great surprise. His wife owned it. The Balloon or, more accurately, Fritzi’s Balloon, sat up in the East Eighties in a turn-of-the-century brownstone with a bright striped canopy that ran from the entrance right out to the street. On either side of the big glass revolving doors, a pair of wrought-iron jockeys holding flickering lanterns stood guard in their track colors, welcoming the hungry, well-heeled Upper East Side crowd arriving in cabs for dinner. In a matter of a dozen years or so, the place had become a New York institution — right up there with the likes of Keene’s, Crist Celia’s, and Smith and Wolenski.

Fritzi Mooney had built it from scratch with her first husband, Nick Baumholz, a wealthy contractor who wanted to give his wife something to do. Baumholz died a few years later, leaving Fritzi to run the place by herself. It was her vision and imagination that had turned it into the booming success it eventually became.

Then she met Mooney. He was in his late fifties at the time. A confirmed, unregenerate bachelor, it was his first trip to the altar. All of his buddies on the force laughed. There was a lottery to see if it would last one week, one month, or one year. Defying all the odds, they were still together after four years, embarrassing all of their betting friends who said they’d be lucky if it went two rounds.

The Mooneys shared a mutual passion. That was the ponies. They loved horse racing to distraction. They only went to the flats. They had no use for the trotters. They had a clubhouse box at Belmont and the unlimited use of a close friend’s at Aqueduct, as well. They went each weekend to one or the other with near hieratic zeal. For vacations, they went nowhere that could not provide them a fast, first-rate track.

When they got married, as a sort of wedding present, they bought themselves a yearling. They called him Gumshoe, undoubtedly out of some sort of affectionate deference to Mooney. The colt made them a small bundle and, shortly, they purchased a second thoroughbred — Wizard. When either of their “kids,” as they called them, were running, they’d both drop work at any time and dash out to the track just to jump and scream and cheer them on.

“You know Sausalito?” Mooney asked Duffy when he returned.

“Sure. The two-year-old.”

“Right. Now there’s a filly ran six furlongs at Gulf Stream in 1:09
⁴
⁄
₅
. The last stakes for colts was run 1:10
²
⁄
₃
. She’d eat up those colts in the Hutcheson.”

“What colts in the Hutcheson?”

Mooney turned, and there was Fritzi in a full-length scarlet skirt, a cream silk blouse with a spray of violets at her throat, and glowing as though she’d just stepped from a hot bath. She threw an arm across his shoulder and pecked his cheek. “You smell like a zoo. Where’ve you been?”

“Down a sewer.”

She shrugged and made a queer face at Duffy. “What’s he drinking?”

“Just a tot of bourbon, Fritz. It’s his first. Honest.”

“That’s a hundred fifty calories. Don’t give him any more.”

Mooney groaned. Having suffered a mild heart attack several years before, he was on a fairly strict diet. Still, he couldn’t bear having others decide for him what he would eat and what he would drink.

There was a great burst of laughter as a big, splashy crowd wheeled in through the revolving glass doors. It was a crowd Fritzi loathed, but they spent like Arabs and so she was all smiles and gliding toward the door to greet them.

“Hey,” Mooney called after her. “When do we eat?”

“Maybe around ten, when it starts to clear out.”

“I can’t wait to no ten o’clock. I’m starving now.”

“Can’t be bothered now. Go on in the kitchen and have them fix you something.”

“I don’t wanna eat in the kitchen.”

“Got no tables now. Have Gino set you up at the bar.” She turned and in the next moment she was swallowed up in a swirl of color and motion. There was a great deal of kissing and laughter and bogus hilarity. Fritzi was snapping her fingers and Otto, the maître-d’, came rushing toward them, bowing and scraping and flashing his dentures.

Mooney muttered some oath and tossed off the last of his Jack Daniel’s Manhattan. The place was going full tilt now. Four bartenders could scarcely keep up with it.

No sooner were they set out than the bowls of chips and the big wheels of cheddar cheese and the platters of fresh, iced crudites disappeared and had to be replaced. Steaks and chops sizzled On the open grates. Big standing rib roasts turned on the spits above them. The great stone hearth in the main room crackled blue and orange flames, filling the air with the tangy scent of hickory and well-cured apple wood. Corks popped. Creaking trolleys of beef and Yorkshire pudding tottered up and down the narrow aisles. On the walls, hung between a series of staggered flambeaux, were portraits of some of the noblest bloods of racing history — Bold Venture, Citation, Northern Dancer, Proud Clarion, Riva Ridge, Secretariat, Foolish Pleasure, Seattle Slew.

People laughed loudly, counting all the money they’d made, or claimed they’d made, in the market that week. It was a pretty sight. Life was sweet, Mooney thought, at least for the moment. The trap drain he’d been rummaging in behind the zoo just a few hours before seemed very far away.

“… HEART, 300 GRAMS. MYOCARDIUM PRESENTS
a red-brown homogeneous color. No evidence of hemorrhage or scar. Valves not remarkable …”

The hiss of coffee steamed on an old Bunsen burner. An old Regulator clock on the wall ticked hollowly through the vacant shadows.

Konig struck a match and relit the cold, fuming stump of his cigar. A coil of blue smoke drifted lazily ceiling-ward. He was hungry, but he had little appetite for dinner and no one with whom to eat it even if he had. It was nearly ten
P. M.
He was ready by then to quit, but the prospect of the long drive home to Riverdale was disheartening.

He returned to writing his protocols. There were three left to go. His stubby, graceless fingers fumbled over the typewriter keyboard. The stump of cigar planted dead center in his mouth made his eyes squint in an effort to elude the smoke.

… Stomach contains approximately 200 cc’s of grayish fluid. Particles of undigested food within. Gastric mucosa not remarkable.... Kidneys weigh 200 grams together and show smooth dark surface. Ureter normal. Bladder contains approximately 400 cc’s of clear yellow urine. Anus dilated and containing a large amount of green feces....

Paul Konig had been a New York City medical examiner for slightly more than thirty years. He’d started in the days of Bancroft and caught the eye of city dignitaries in the period of Eisler, his predecessor, whose somewhat flamboyant reign was prematurely terminated by his penchant for selling medical opinion to the highest bidder. Suddenly Konig, not quite thirty, found himself in a highly visible, highly influential position.

Over the past three decades he’d distinguished not only himself but the office as well. Aside from the fact that he was Chief M.E. in the world’s most powerful city, he carried on a notable career as a writer and lecturer. His opinions on criminal matters were eagerly sought by judicial authorities all over the world. He wrote textbooks on the subject of forensic pathology, and his classes at the university were always oversubscribed. Getting into his course was like getting a ticket to the hottest show on Broadway.

His face was seen frequently in the newspapers and on the six
P.M.
news. His photograph was always being snapped with the mayor. He was greatly admired but not much liked. For a man in a highly political job, he had a well-documented dislike of politicians. He couldn’t be wheedled or bamboozled by ambitious district attorneys eager to chalk up a string of impressive convictions against the day they ran for some more exalted office. Konig had no friends in government and liked things that way. In his personal catechism, anyone with too many friends in public office bore watching.

People who knew Konig in the early days when his beloved Ida and his daughter Lolly were still alive maintain that he was lighthearted and fun. But that was before the horrific tragedy that had started with the girl’s kidnaping and ended in her death at the hands of her captors. It was a celebrated case, made all the more so by the fact that the chief medical examiner was her father.

But yes, in the early days there’d been that part of him that was lighthearted and fun. In those halcyon times he could recite Shakespeare by the ream and sing Verdi arias in a credible tenor. Not so today.
Morose
and
disagreeable
were some of the more tactful adjectives one was apt to hear now when people spoke of the chief medical examiner.

There was little doubt, however, that he was the best in the business. From the point of view of detective work, which for an M.E. is all that really counts, Konig was right up there with the legends, Spillsbury and Halperin. On a tough job, having him on your team made all the difference. He could read the riddle of a corpse the way most people read a grocery list.

“
BRAIN
: Chloroform 38.7%.” Konig glanced down at the toxicological report, scribbled there in dark, glyptic figures. “Ethanol not detected.

Lung: Chloroform. 3.8% (GC)

Blood: Acidic drugs. Not detected. Spectrophotometry.

Basic drugs. Not detected. Gas Chromotography.

Chloroform. 17.2% (GC)

Bile: Chloroform. 8.65 mg% (GC)

Acidic and basic drugs not detected. (TLC)

Cause of Death: Acute chloroform poisoning. Unintentional suicide.

Konig glanced up at the old Regulator wall clock, still counting its drowsy, monotonous tick into the hollow, dusty vacancies, its gold pendulum drifting behind the glass window. The door to the outside corridor was open. The air of desertion about the place seemed total. The grim daily tide of mortality had rolled past his door for that day, but in Konig’s head the clatter of rushing footsteps still rang on the cold tile floors. The unoiled wheels of gurney carts bearing their grisly cargo toward the freight elevators still echoed squeals down the airless, empty hallways. Except for the handful of night porters and attendants on duty somewhere about the building, Konig had the place to himself.