Shadow Dancers (38 page)

Hanging over the edge of the platform, Michael Mancuso sent his great orange blooms wafting skyward. Still the boots didn’t move. They merely waited, patient, unquestioning, detached from any living thing. An entity unto themselves. It then occurred to him that the boots had something to do with him — with his being there. Someone had come out to where he was working and was waiting for him with instructions or, possibly, a message.

Rising slightly from the planks, he half-turned his back and glanced up. A figure was standing there. The sun streaming directly over his shoulders made of him mostly a blur. But from what he could see, it was a man in a blue hardhat staring down at him from behind a welder’s mask. The sun streaming into Michael’s eyes gave the masked, helmeted figure an unearthly look, rather like a comic strip sci-fi conception of a humanoid from a distant planet.

Certain this person was waiting there to tell him something, Michael started to rise. It was at that moment the boot rose too, coming down hard on his chest, knocking the air from him and pinning his back and shoulders to the platform. As alarming as that gesture was, he still couldn’t imagine what this individual behind the green plastic visor had in mind.

Michael started to squirm beneath the boot. That only caused the boot to bear down harder. He felt the air suck from his lungs. Panicking, he struggled to rise.

Why did no one come and help him? Couldn’t they see? Then he realized that he’d been working on a side of the building that was mostly complete. Only a few stray workers were still about the area, putting the finishing touches on their work. Most of the other activity was going on around the corner on the northeast side of the building.

Recognizing his peril, Michael started to shout. He thought for a moment that the noise alone would frighten the man. But instead of turning and fleeing, his boot retracted slowly, then came back with a mighty force, crashing into his ribs. The impact of the blow spun him around, propelling him somewhat closer to the edge. When he raised his arms to protect himself, the welding gun flew out of his hand and shot out over the edge. He made a lunge as if to grab it, but missed. The boot came again. This time it landed squarely in the groin, doubling him up in exquisite pain.

Both of his legs now dangled over the edge. In trying to protect himself, the glove of his right hand had slipped off and he held precariously to the platform with his bare hands, clinging to a rickety brass guardrail.

By then he was fully panicked and shouting at the top of his lungs. But the wind howled well above the volume of his cries. The boot rose again and came down with crushing weight on his face. The
coup de grace
was the descent of the boot with its studded sole, grinding his frozen hand against the rail.

Letting go was easy, he thought. Scarcely aware that lie was airborne, that he had started his long tumbling, descent, the last thing he saw and heard before his eyes went black was the gay, red and white stripes of the kangaroo cranes on the roof and the sound the wind made whistling through them.

The phone had started to ring shortly after she’d gotten home that evening. The first call was from the job when they’d told her there d been an accident. Right after that the police called and asked her to come down to an address on First Avenue in the Thirties. They said it was Bellevue. They wouldn’t give her any details, only repeated what the foreman at the site had said. Simply that there’d been an accident.

By that time her heart was beating wildly in her chest. But since they’d described it as an accident, she still didn’t believe that it was anything dire. The doctor that afternoon had told her she was pregnant, probably within the seventh week of her first trimester.

When she reached First Avenue and 31st Street, she discovered that the address the police had asked her to come to was not the hospital, but the medical examiner’s office. At that point, she still didn’t realize that it was the morgue.

She was met there by a kindly, solicitous plainclothes-man who spoke to her in a low voice. He interviewed her in a large room at a desk surrounded by a half-dozen other desks. People were moving all about. Phones rang constantly. There were several men there, too, from the construction site, also answering questions.

In a voice that seldom rose above a whisper, the detective informed her that indeed there had been an accident. Mickey Mancuso had fallen to his death from a girder seventy floors above the street. The papers sent over to the morgue from the union local had designated her, as his fiancée, sole beneficiary. There were papers to sign: payroll slips, insurance forms, whatnot. She would, of course, have to identify the body.

She sat there, mute, stunned, hands folded in her lap, comprehending very little. She thought she should be crying, but instead, she sat blank and nodding, watching the lips of the detective move as he rattled off in hushed tones a multitude of things that would have to be attended to.

“Seven weeks, I should judge,”
the doctor’s jovial voice rang inside her head.
“Possibly eight. Now I’d like you to …”

“It’s a damned shame to have to put you through this,” the detective murmured apologetically. They stood in a bare green room that smelled of fresh paint. There was nothing in it but a long pane of horizontal glass beyond which could be seen the inside of an elevator shaft, steel cables swaying lightly on their anchors.

He pressed a small red button beside the window. Instantly, she heard the high whirr of a motor and watched the cables rise up through the shaft. Her knees started to buckle beneath her.

In the next moment, a steel table rose up to the level of the window and halted there. It was only the head she saw. The rest of it lay beneath a white sheet.

It was not his face, she thought. The awful rictus of death had transformed it into something else. The thing lying there under the sheet had nothing to do with him. She didn’t know this person. But it was clearly Mickey. The sheet that so carelessly draped him was spattered with blood. She could tell from the way he lay there that the wreckage beneath was considerable.

She’d taken all of that in within a glance. In the next moment, she whirled sharply away from the glass, as if to erase the image forever from her mind.

She felt the detective’s hand graze her shoulder lightly. “Is it him?”

She nodded and stumbled blindly toward the door and out of the room. There were more people there now. More talk of the accident. Mickey’s friends from the site, saying what a “damned shame,” and what a “damned good guy” he was.

A representative of the union was there. He took her aside and told her that the funeral would be paid for. They would see to all the details. His voice dropped respectfully when he told her that there was life insurance and that she would be entitled to some pension benefits as well. Nothing grand, of course, but good old Mick had wanted to be certain that all was taken care of when they’d gotten engaged.

It was nearly ten
P.M.
when she got back home. Letting herself into the tiny apartment, she half-expected to find him there, sitting in a sleeveless undershirt on the seedy old Morris chair with a beer in his fist, watching the hockey game.

Still, she couldn’t quite grasp what had happened. She was never one to drink. Possibly a glass of wine on the rare occasion. But that night she poured herself a stiff scotch and drained it off neat in a single gulp. Then she poured another.

She turned off the light and sat for a while in his chair, big and floppy and reassuring, sipping her scotch, hearing his voice all about the apartment. “Hey, Janine. Where are the Band-Aids?” Smelling his smells — the good musk of sweat raised at honest endeavors, the scent of talcum, freshly laundered undershirts, and cheap colognes.

Figures drifted all about her. Voices from earlier that day — the doctor, the detective, the foreman from the site — whispering all about her.

Still huddled in the dark, she sipped her drink, then rose to put on the television. It was right there on the eleven o’clock news. Right at the top. Construction worker falls to his death on 61st Street, and the mayhem it caused during rush hour. There were clips showing police cars, ambulances, spectators milling about a humped, formless shape beneath a tarpaulin hastily drawn across it.

It was all a blur to her. She couldn’t connect any of it with Mickey. Then, suddenly, the reporter’s voice, which up until that moment had been no more than a dim, distant hum, rose, penetrating her consciousness.

“… Police had formerly been characterizing the death as an accident, but only moments ago, Channel Two has learned that a worker on the site, after hesitating several hours, had come forward to disclose that he’d witnessed the incident, and that it wasn’t an accident. The victim had been pushed.”

She listened, horrified, unbelieving, as the reporter described how the witness had seen a man in a blue hardhat and welder’s mask go out on the plank where Mickey had been working and kick him two or three times until he’d fallen over the edge. The man who’d witnessed the incident had been standing on another platform a hundred or so feet off, separated by a yawning gulf of freezing air. He watched, horrified in disbelief, as the body tumbled headfirst into the yawning chasm below.

He shouted at the man in the welder’s mask, who’d turned the moment the body had pitched over the side and dashed into one of the freight elevators. He followed, but by the time he’d gotten down to the ground floor, the man had already disappeared.

The witness, who wished to remain nameless, claimed that he’d not immediately reported what he’d seen out of fear. Working on construction sites all of his life, he knew that such jobs were full of rivalries and vendettas, competition between unions, kickback squabbles. Lots of hotheads worked around these places. Men came and went all the time, and, most of all, they had a way of settling scores among themselves without outside interference.

The man had known Mickey Mancuso for a few years and knew him to be clean. They used to eat lunch together periodically, and it was not until he’d gotten home that night and blurted out to his wife what he’d witnessed that he decided to inform the police. He did so, but, unfortunately, he was unable to provide them with any clues to the murderer’s identity.

Janine listened, numb and stunned, to the report. At first, when the detective at the morgue told her what had happened on the site that afternoon, she had no trouble accepting the fact that it was an accident. Mickey, she knew, was an exceptionally careful person. But accidents on construction sites do happen, even to the most circumspect. This new disclosure, however, made far more sense. And while the police remained in the dark as to the murderer’s identity, she unfortunately did not. She knew only too well the masked figure’s identity. She knew the old Warren Mars style. Hadn’t he even told her what would happen if she failed to comply with his wishes?

She sat mute and crumpled in her chair for an hour more before the television, watching phantom figures drift across her screen. At a certain point, she rose unsteadily, threaded her way through the darkened room to the kitchen, and poured herself another scotch. She carried it back out to the living room, where once again she resumed her place in Mickey’s chair.

Bringing the drink to her lips, her hand shook to the point where she had to put the glass down. In the next moment, her whole body was convulsed in waves of tremors. She had the feeling that she’d lost physical control of her body.

Then it seemed to her that she’d fallen asleep. When she awoke it was several hours later. She was still in the chair. The glass had fallen to the floor. The TV was still on, but there was no longer any picture and no sound, only the blank lighted screen with a grainy, pin-striped pattern wiggling through it.

She had a headache and her mind was muddled from the effect of three scotches. She’d been dreaming, She couldn’t recall the details of the dream; only the tag end of it was she able to retrieve. The final image was that of birds diving through soft, fleecy clouds.

Curiously, she was not thinking of Mickey at all. It was slightly past two
A.M.
, and she couldn’t quite recall why she was sitting in the chair at that late hour and not in bed. There was work in the morning. She’d better get to bed.

She started to her feet. Then, coincident with that motion, she heard a sound. It was a soft, barely audible noise, at the front door, the sort of thing one barely notices unless it’s pointed out. Yet, there was something singular about this sound. It consisted of fight, metallic clicks occurring in rapid succession — rather like the sound of blinds through which a breeze is blowing, only more rapid, and the rhythm far more regular.

It went on like that for nearly twenty minutes, the tapper content merely to stand out there in the hallway, taunting her. For that’s what it most assuredly was, taunting. If there’d been any urgency about it, any genuine purpose, whoever it was would have rung the bell, or called her up on the phone. No, this was taunting, of the most perverse sort. Adolescent mischief with an edge of genuine horror. And she knew very well who it was.

Then, abruptly, the sounds stopped. She covered the space between herself and the door in three swift steps and put her ear to it just in time to hear footsteps retreating down the carpeted hallway to the elevator. She waited there, breathless, until she heard the whirr of the elevator through the wallboard, the door sliding open, then closing, and once again the high whirring sound.

She sank to her knees and slumped against the door, where she sat for some time, the chill metal of the door seeping through the thin material of her blouse. Her limbs shook so badly that she thought she would blow apart.

The next day she disconnected her phone and turned oil the refrigerator. She called her employers and resigned over the phone, giving no specific reason for her notion. Finally, she threw some articles of clothing into a bag and paid her rent for the next three months.

Janine McConkey had few close friends, but the closest she ever had to a real friend lived in a suburb of Philadelphia and that was where she was heading now. Not at a leisurely pace. Not by an orderly route. But in headlong retreat with all due dispatch.