Shadow Dancers (33 page)

Mooney knew he was there against the wishes of her doctor and without authorization from the department. The breach of regulations in this instance seemed justified. If Ferris Koops was in any way implicated in the Dancer killings, Mooney was not yet ready to set him free. True, he had no trump cards in his hand with which to make a strong case for holding him. But the outcome of his meeting with Claire Pell could very well change all that.

“How do you spend your time?” he asked, full of bogus concern while watching for the propitious moment in which to spring.

She smiled wearily, miles ahead of him, knowing precisely where he was attempting to lead her.

“I read a lot. Do crossword puzzles. The television. I keep busy.”

“Beautiful place you’ve got here,” Mooney went on with desperate cheer. “I like the way you’ve fixed it up.”

“My daughter helped. She’s a designer, you know. Actually, she’s a housewife, but she does a bit of designing on the side. She’s got a real flair.”

“Great to have a talent like that,” Mooney replied with feeble enthusiasm.

They lapsed into another silence. Mooney ransacked his brain for some conversational key with which to adroitly unlock the gates barring the way to discussion. Curiously enough, it was she who finally gave it to him. “I couldn’t very well go back to the old house.”

“Of course not,” he agreed.

“To have to sleep in that room again.”

“You did the right thing.”

Mooney watched her rise and stroll toward the large picture windows fronting the bay. He rose and followed her. Together they stood staring out over the flat brown swampland that crept out in tufts and hummocks toward the choppy waters of the inlet. “Beautiful view,” he rattled on breezily. “You’ll enjoy that terrace in the summer.”

It was then she turned and gazed at him ruefully. “You know, lieutenant, I’m not supposed to talk with you. My doctor said …”

“Yes,” he murmured. “I know what he said. If I were him, I’d say the same. He’s doing his job. He’s looking out for you.”

“And you?” She stared at him pointedly. “Who are you looking out for?”

With all of the evasions and circumlocutions that had preceded the moment, the directness of her question took his breath away. Before he could reply, she’d answered it for him. “For yourself, of course.”

His smile grew a bit more strained. “I have my job to do, too.”

“Of course,” she replied and turned back to the vast prospect of sky and water beyond the glass. They both grew quiet again, absorbed in the stubborn progress of a small trawler bouncing its way over the choppy waters heading out to sea.

“What exactly is it you want of me?” she asked. There was nothing of ill will in her tone, but it did suggest she wished to terminate their meeting as quickly as possible. She turned and moved a trifle unsteadily back to her chair.

He followed her there and sank into a soft, infinitely yielding divan beside her. “I’d like to show you a picture.”

Her back stiffened and her eyes shifted sidewards, as if she were regarding him from beneath her lashes. “What sort of picture?”

“It’s a photograph. A young man. All I want you to do is tell me whether or not you’ve ever seen him before.” He watched her, her gaze riveted to the floor, deeply aware of some sort of struggle going on behind the pale, waxen oval of her face. An audible acceleration in her breathing was the prologue to her reply. “I don’t want to see any pictures, lieutenant.”

“I can appreciate that. All the same —”

“My doctors have said —”

“I understand. Believe me, I wouldn’t have bothered you today if I didn’t feel this was absolutely crucial.”

“And is this picture … this man … is he supposed to be the one …”

“Possibly.”

“I don’t want to see that man again.” Her voice suddenly rose. “I never want to ever—”

“I understand,” he said softly, using his voice to assuage her. “I have this man in custody now. Based on what you might possibly tell me here today, I must either release him or hold him, pending further investigation. So this is quite important.”

“Why do you believe this is the man?” Her manner had grown a trifle waspish and peremptory.

“For a variety of reasons that may sound vague to you and possibly just coincidental. I’ve been close to this case for over a year now, and, quite honestly, I still can’t answer these questions to my own satisfaction.”

In the next moment, he withdrew an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. He watched her eyes follow his hand to the point where it stopped and held the envelope dangling between two fingers.

She stared at it, slowly shaking her head back and forth. “I can’t.”

“It would make all the difference.”

“I’m sorry.” She suddenly rose. “I really can’t.”

He watched her move off again, aware of some quiet struggle raging within the taut, narrow frame.

“My husband’s been gone four months now,” she suddenly announced. “There isn’t a day goes by I don’t think of him.”

“I can appreciate that,” Mooney replied. He couldn’t think of much more to say.

“I want to go away from here,” she chattered on, almost irrelevantly, struggling to regain equanimity through her voice alone. “I don’t care for this apartment. I hate this apartment. I want to go away. Someplace warm. Maybe South Carolina. I have family there. Would you like some coffee?” she asked suddenly, bolting for the kitchen. “I have some fresh.”

“No, thank you.”

She looked distraught. “Neither do 1.1 drink too much coffee.”

“I can’t handle the caffeine,” Mooney offered sympathetically.

“It’s not the caffeine with me. It’s the acid.” She patted the area just below her breastbone. Her eyes strayed back warily to the envelope dangling from Mooney’s hand.

“My husband was a very fine man,” Claire Pell went on, visibly subduing the demons leaping inside her. “A gentleman of the old school. People adored him. He built up a very successful printing business before he retired. He was also quite an accomplished musician. A violinist. I don’t suppose you knew that?”

“No, I didn’t,” Mooney murmured, at a loss.

Her eyes glistened vividly out of the chalky pallor of her face, her gaze transfixed on the small white paper rectangle. “I suppose I owe this to Martin.” Her searching, frantic eyes looked up at him for confirmation.

“And to eighteen others as well,” Mooney wanted to add, but resisted the impulse. He held his breath, watching her with the same morbid fixity with which one watches a high-wire act that’s about to get into trouble. From the appearance of self-possession he encountered on first entering the room, what confronted him now appeared unstable and unpredictable. Oh, God, he thought to himself, don’t let her pop now. Not now.

“If it were the other way around, I’m sure Martin would never have expected this of me,” she continued, while backing away from him. “He would not have wanted to put me through this.”

“Probably not,” Mooney readily conceded. Inside, he was crumbling, the specter of Sylvestri panting down his back.

“I don’t think so, either, lieutenant.” Her back stiffened. “I’m sorry. I just can’t, and let’s leave it at that.”

She wheeled off again toward the windows, then just as abruptly turned back. “If I were to look at that face again …” Something caught in her throat.

“It’s okay. I understand.”

He had the impression she’d been disappointed by his patience and sympathy. It was as though she’d wanted him to quarrel more about it, to press the point. To get away from him, she started for the front door. He shuffled after her like a large, docile bear.

“Well, wherever you go,” Mooney said as they stood in embarrassment at the open door, “I wish you the best of luck.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s very kind of you.”

Her hand rose to take his. It was his right hand, the one still holding the envelope. He made to shift it to his left but before he could, she snatched it, tore the envelope open, turned half away, and plucked the mug shot out. Mooney lurched for the empty envelope fluttering downward to the carpet. From a point beneath her waist, he had a sharp prospect of Claire Pell glaring down at the photo. There was something hard and unrelenting in her eyes. For what seemed an agonizingly long time, he held his breath. In the next moment, she laughed aloud, relief and color suffusing her features. “I’ve never seen this man before in my life.”

He called the office from a public phone booth in a small stationery store downstairs. Pickering’s voice snarled with exasperation. “That prick Drummond’s been on the phone every half hour since you left. They’re pressing charges of illegal detention.”

“Tell Drummond to hold his water. We’re releasing Koops. We don’t have a thing we can hold him on, but let’s keep a tail on him all the same.”

Driving up West Side Drive that evening, Warren had become increasingly uneasy. He was certain he was being followed. The garage attendant had been too friendly. Why had he told him so much? The panic he felt in his haste to get away from the city had unnerved him. The thought of the police coming to Bridge Street, the awful certainty that they’d traced him there through his car, and, most unsettling of all, this Koops person who went about imitating him represented something potentially disastrous. Though he’d steered clear of Bridge Street for several days, sleeping in a succession of seedy transient hotels, the knowledge that he should have been far from the city by this time wore heavily on him. To delay any longer was reckless.

Though it was cool, even cold, in the car, Warren could feel sweat trickling beneath his clothing. He switched on the radio, playing it very loud to drive the demon thoughts out of his head. But then Suki came crowding in, muscling aside the shattering decibels. It was she, he was suddenly convinced, not the auto body shop, who had betrayed him to the police.

The flat, dark sheet of river, sliding past on his left, flashed and shimmered with lights from large housing complexes across the water on the Jersey shore. Farther north, up around the Cloisters, a sky bathed orange in the haze of incinerator smoke and neon lights heightened his sense of flight from some approaching cataclysm.

All the way up from lower Manhattan a part of his mind — that part not preoccupied with his own swirling terrors — had been watching license plates, tallying up their numbers, studying the frequency of their patterns for some hint of what augured for his future. At the beginning of his flight, when he’d first rolled up the ramp at 49th Street onto the West Side Drive, the pattern that had asserted itself was distinctly bad. By and large there was a preponderance of three-digit numbers all adding up to the inauspicious twelves or sevens, or, worse yet, the doomed sixteens that he feared so much. Between 49th Street and Riverdale he had added up so many license plates that the act itself had become compulsive to the point of involuntary reflex. He could no lunger stop himself. Numbers racketed about in his head at a fearful speed. At a certain point, as he struggled to add every set of figures that came within his gaze, he had the sensation that he was watching a Ping-Pong ball bouncing back and forth over a net at ever-increasing speeds. At last the ball had become a white blur. It was an image from which he could no longer avert his gaze.

In time, the need to compute every series of numbers he saw induced in him a mental numbness behind the eyes and a drowsiness, as if he’d been hypnotized. At last he had to roll down the windows and open the dash vents and gulp air to keep himself awake.

Weary as he was, still he couldn’t stop himself from counting. After a while he made a concerted effort to avoid seeing numbers, raising his gaze above the level of the car plates ahead. For a time this worked, but if he relaxed his concentration for even a moment, his head would droop to a more normal, less unnatural, position and there would be the numbers again, flashing at him like some remorseless taskmaster: 286 WCD … 322 FLV … 606 WDH … 421 DOV.

At Hawthorne, where he turned onto the Taconic, his hands cramped from grasping the wheel so hard. The air rushing through the open vents and windows was nearly frigid, but he was in a sick sweat. Near Peekskill, he was overcome with an uncontrollable desire to sleep. The effect of adding numbers, endless numbers rapidly, shouting them out loud as if in defiance of someone or something only he could see, had increased the speed of the small white dot jumping back and forth behind his eyes. It made his head swim and his temples throb.

He thought of pulling off onto one of the grass shoulders beneath a tree and then sleeping. But if he did, he knew he risked attracting the attention of the troopers, who plied regularly up and down the parkways at night, looking for just that sort of thing.

North of Claverack he pulled off the parkway onto a service road where he found a diner. There, he drank three cups of coffee and ate a stalish sticky doughnut that tasted of lard and left a queasy-making taste on his tongue.

He still wasn’t at all sure where he was going. He had a direction. Suki had said north, but as of yet he had no specific destination. Possibly Canada, as the old lady had suggested, crossing over at Niagara. He wasn’t convinced that was wise. True, the customs people were lax at the border crossings. Very seldom did the Canadian customs ask for identification when you entered, nor did U.S. customs when you came back in. But, occasionally, they could surprise you, if they didn’t like your looks. It was precisely the kind of surprise he wished to avoid. He didn’t have the sort of papers that could stand up to close scrutiny.

At Chatham he headed briefly west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, then north on the New York State Thruway. The large infusion of caffeine kept him going until Albany, where at last he turned off the Thruway at a Ramada Inn, rented a room, and fell into bed with his clothing on.

Six hours later he awoke with a shaft of sunlight poking its way through a frost-rimmed window. He rose and moved toward it. Standing there in his rumpled clothing, peering out beyond a cloverleaf to the parkway already teeming with traffic, he etched the word
chaos
with his fingernail on the frozen pane.