Shadow Dancers (23 page)

She could see he was in pain. “What’s wrong, Sonny? You ain’t hurt yourself?”

“It’s nothing, I said. Get out.”

She watched him for a while, writhing and wincing. Her pity quickly waned and sharp disapproval crept across her wizened features. “You in some kind of trouble, I bet.”

“No trouble. I’m in no trouble. Get out of here.”

He bounded up and started toward her. But the old lady, frightened as she was, stood her ground. Exasperated, Warren wheeled and stomped off.

“Where you going?” she called after him.

“Out. Anywhere, out of here.”

“Better not. Better lay low till things cool down.”

He wheeled and started back toward her. “Things? What things?”

She grinned at him, showing her yellow stumps of broken teeth.

“What things?” he bellowed again.

She could tell he was frightened. “Oh, come, Sonny. Papers this morning are full of you.”

“Papers? What papers? What the hell are you talking about?”

She made that disagreeable sound, somewhere between a screech and a sucking noise, that was intended for a laugh. “What’d you do to that poor lady up in Westchester? So bad, the newspapers wouldn’t hardly talk about it.” The screech again, high and stridulous, like a broken fiddle. “You are a caution.”

He came at her fast, taking her by both arms above the elbows, as if he intended to shake her. His eyes were open wide and he spun his head from side to side. “Hey, listen. That wasn’t me. You hear? That wasn’t me.”

He was near panic and that pleased her. She liked it when he was frightened. He was more manageable then. “You don’t have to have secrets with me, Sonny. We got no secrets.”

“I didn’t do this thing, I tell you. I swear, I had nothing to do with it.”

She nodded her old gray head sagely. “It’s got all your marks on it, Warren. The naughty pictures on the walls. The funny stuff with the lady.” She leered at him merrily. “You better get rid of that car. Police are gonna trace it right to you.”

At the mention of the word
car
, his face brightened. “That’s right. The car. News said just now it was a green Pontiac they found. You know I don’t have no Pontiac.”

“What’s the difference? They’re lookin’ for a green car. You got a green car.”

“It’s not my car.” He pounded the top of a battered old chifforobe, then winced. “My car’s no crummy Pontiac. You know that.”

Doubt passed like a film across her eyes for the first time that morning.

“Don’t you see?” he rattled on, bent on his own vindication. His voice half-jeered, half-pleaded. “Can’t you see? It’s some other guy just imitating me.”

She watched him warily for a while, her head cocked to one side like an edgy hound, something spiteful glinting in her eye. “What are you telling me, Sonny?”

“I’m telling you the truth. Some other guy’s been out there going around doing my thing. He uses all my stuff. Then the cops hang it on me.”

“How do you know? What proof do you have?”

“How do I know?” He gaped at her furiously. “I know it’s not me these jokers are talking about on the TV.” Suddenly, as if a dam burst, the story of the building on upper Fifth Avenue and the doorman and his nightly twilight vigils all came flooding out. Standing there before her, he had the look of a small boy confessing mischief to a stem mother. When it was all over, he felt an immense sense of relief, almost gratitude. Shortly, he was eating out of her hand like an affectionate but chastened puppy.

“For the next few weeks,” Suki went on sternly, “I want no more funny stuff.”

“Funny stuff” was her euphemism for sexual activity. “Stay here. Lie low. I don’t want you going out.”

As she laid the law down to him, she felt a surge of confidence return with the reassertion of authority over him. That gnawing sense of uneasiness she’d been feeling over the past several weeks, with all of his talk about “clearing out” — that was over now. She knew he’d never go.

“Don’t worry your head no more on this score,” she lectured him. “We’ll figure out what to do about this other fellow when the time comes. Now come down.” She tugged his ear playfully. “Come have a bowl of Suki’s good hot soup.”

Several nights later, Ferris Koops watched the gray-white figures flicker across the TV screen. The disturbingly graphic accounts of the slaying in Westchester County had sickened him, but he was unable to avert his eyes from the horror of it.

During the almost daily accounts of it, they had flashed on the screen clips of the house and the basement where the grim discovery had been made. The camera had shown splashes of blood on the basement floor, then swung around the walls to show momentarily that ghastly graffiti scrawled in jagged broken letters of pink crayon.

All the while he watched it, he was unaware that beads of sweat had erupted on his forehead and that his heart thumped wildly in his chest. How awful. How horrible. How could people do such things? One human being to another. Ferris tried to imagine the man who’d wreaked such havoc on a poor defenseless individual. What sort of person could be so vicious? So unfeeling?

Ferris again made an effort to conjure up a picture of this person in his mind. Where was he? Far off in some remote northern suburb, or nearby in the city, perhaps only one or two blocks away from where Ferris lay now on the narrow cot of his stifling single-room efficiency apartment just east of First Avenue.

The thought of that sent a chill shuddering through him. He knew there were people like that in the world. His mother had told him all about them. They were crazy, twisted people who did horrific things, sometimes out of desperation, but more often out of a desire for the perverse pleasure they derived from inflicting pain. They were sick people with badly deranged minds who desperately needed help.

Ferris would have liked to help these people. If he could have been a psychologist or a counselor of some sort, he would have happily committed his life to such work. He knew that his natural affection for people afforded him a special affinity for troubled souls. Ferris felt that he had simply to look into a person s eyes to know at once if that individual was troubled or at peace.

It occurred to Ferris that he had an overwhelming need to meet this man the newspapers called the Shadow Dancer. As admittedly repugnant as all of his acts were, Ferris had a desire to sit him down, take him by the hand, and tell him that he was not a beast — not a detestable subcreature, as they liked to call him. He was a human being, like anyone else, with feelings and definite needs. All of his impulses were not destructive. He was capable of kindness and generosity. Even acts of great nobility. If he could just tell this man that, and then share with him whatever he had, in the way of material comforts and friendship, he felt certain that this poor deranged soul would be well on his way to recovery.

Outside in the street it was dark. Ferris’s apartment was on the second floor and the light from the streetlamp shined directly in his window. The window was open and he could hear people passing back and forth below in the street. Across the way, the lights from a small fish restaurant twinkled with a vague blur. A large red neon fish in its window blinked bulging eyes on and off in the hazy closeness of the evening. People kept arriving and departing. He could hear their laughter, hear them hailing cabs, and hear car doors slamming, as they pulled away from the curb.

Sometimes he liked to draw a chair up to the window, and with the lights out in his room and his elbows resting on the concrete sill, he would watch the comings and goings with a sense of quiet joy — these trivial, wholly unremarkable daily transactions of mortal affairs.

What of that poor man, the Shadow Dancer? he thought once more. He imagined the poor creature crouching somewhere in darkness, hungry, frightened, cowering in some rank corner from his pursuers whom he could not hope to elude much longer.

It was nearly eleven
P.M.
Shortly there would be more news. He had an urgent need to hear more about the Shadow Dancer. Ever since those ghastly murders had started over a year ago, Ferris had read everything that had been written. He’d watched each news account on TV. He kept a scrapbook of clippings and knew by heart almost everything down to the most minute details of the case.

When he flicked the late news on, they were already discussing the murder in Westchester. A mob of reporters swarmed around the chief of detectives and a big, hulking gray-haired man, a lieutenant, who was in charge of the case. They had just come down from New Rochelle where they’d been conferring with the police.

Ferris knew the lieutenant. His name was Mooney. He’d seen him several times before on TV. He had even written his name down someplace. Beside him stood the chief of detectives. His name was Mulvaney. He looked tired and harried. Ferris could tell he was nervous, trying to respond to the barrage of reporters’ questions fired at him from every direction.

“Mooney?”

“Uh huh.”

“You still up?”

“If I wasn’t, I am now.” The voice came muffled from beneath the covers.

“Come on. You know I didn’t wake you.”

“If you’re so sure, then why bother asking?”

The question gave her pause but not for long. “You’ve been tossing and thrashing for the last three hours.”

“Something I ate.”

“You hardly ate a bite all day.”

“Then maybe it’s something I didn’t eat.” He ground his head deeper into the pillows.

“I don’t like the way you’re looking these days. What’s bothering you? This Shadow Dancer business?”

“How come you always ask questions if you know the answers to them? That’s how you pick horses, too. You ask me who I like in the fifth someplace. Then after I tell you, you go out and bet some other nag.”

Fritzi flicked on the light, then slipped from beneath the sheets and into a robe. “How about some eggs?”

“Eggs? It’s three
A.M.
, for God’s sake.”

“Come on. We’ll have an early breakfast.”

“An early breakfast? We just had supper.”

She yanked the bedsheets down, exposing the sprawling, tangled dishevelment of the figure below. “Come on, Mooney. Get up. I’m starved.”

She hauled him to his feet, bundled his big, hulking shape into a robe, then steered him out like a small tug guiding a liner through the obstacles and hidden perils of some treacherous shoals. In the kitchen, she sat him down at the long white slab of marble that served as their breakfast table. She put up a pot of coffee and proceeded to melt margarine in a skillet. She prepared bacon and toast, all the while maintaining a virtually unbroken line of breezy chatter. She talked about their horses, their trainer, races coming up in which they planned to participate. She talked about an aunt in Milwaukee, her father’s ancient sister, Em, whom she’d been thinking about and wanted to visit before “anything happened.”

She broke off abruptly at that point as if all of the foregoing chat had been nothing but a prelude to more pressing matters. “Mulvaney’s been at you pretty hard, I guess.”

Mooney’s drowsy eyes rose from the depths of his coffee mug. “He threatened to pull me off the case couple of weeks ago. Gave me ninety days to finish the job.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“What’s to tell?”

Fritzi slid a plate of bacon and eggs before him. “Be the best thing.”

He glared down into his plate and shook his head despairingly. “Look at this now. Fake yolkless rubber eggs and vegetarian bacon.” His tongue slipped queasily between his lips.

“I didn’t give you high cholesterol and a coronary. I’m just here to make sure you don’t get another.”

Mooney groaned and picked up his fork. She sat down across from him and proceeded to spread margarine on his toast.

“Papers say this thing up in Westchester was pretty foul.”

Mooney made a sour face and forked egg into his mouth.

“Sure looks a lot like all the others though,” Fritzi continued. “All that biting stuff. And the funny pictures and numbers on the walls.”

Mooney bit down on a corner of jellied toast and proceeded to chew thoughtfully. “Not the car though. That’s the only thing that don’t fit. This latest was a green Pontiac. They found it on the West Side Drive.” “How come they’re so sure it was the same one used in New Rochelle?”

“One of the neighbors identified it. Saw it in front of the house. Even remembered part of the plate number. Got any more of that carrot bacon?”

“It’s not carrots.” She speared several pieces onto his plate. “It’s made of—”

“Don’t tell me. I’d rather not know.”

“What’s wrong with Pontiacs? You don’t think the real Shadow Dancer drove a Pontiac?”

“We’ve already got a make on his car. Got if off a pretty reliable source. It’s a Mercedes. A sixty-eight. That’s why I say the cars are the only thing that don’t fit.”

“Did it ever occur to you the same guy might change cars for each job?”

Mooney pushed his empty plate away and rubbed his sleepless eyes. “It never occurred to me.” His eyes drooped and he appeared to doze off.

“Okay. It’s just a suggestion.”

“Don’t ask dumb questions. Of course we figured that. Any guy in his right mind, knocking off a different dame every five, six weeks, is not gonna use the same car each time.”

“But this guy isn’t in his right mind.”

“Bingo,” Mooney mumbled and patted his stomach. The sky outside the kitchen window above East 78th Street had begun to glow with faint streaks of pink. Fritzi rose and started to carry dishes from the table to the sink. “So what are you chaps doing about all this?” Mooney’s eyes had closed and he was drowsing once more at the table.

“Mooney? Did you hear me?”

“Oh, Fritz. For God’s sake, it’s four-thirty in the morning.” He wobbled to his feet and flicked out the kitchen light. “Let’s go to bed. It’s getting early.” Mooney slipped back beneath the cool sheets and turned on his stomach. Almost at once he began to snore. Fritzi lay frowning and agitated, propped on a pair of goosedown pillows. She stared disapprovingly down at the slumbering form beside her.

“Hey, Mooney. I almost forgot.” She elbowed his ribs. The gray tousled head rose sleepily. “Hey, Mooney.” He moaned. “Is this because you want me to die, Fritzi?”