Shadow Dancers (46 page)

Mr. Harley Armstead was a spry, elfin figure of some seventy years, with ruddy cheeks and vivid blue eyes that twinkled out at you from behind a pair of rimless spectacles. About him was that air of amiable incompetence, characteristically marked by a great deal of bustling about to no apparent purpose. He fussed with odds and ends on his desk which was covered with unattended papers and bills and all of the sooty paraphernalia of pipe smoking. As he spoke he kept tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with a large, flat thumb, the nail of which had turned a cobalt blue, no doubt from some inadvertent hurt he’d managed to inflict upon it himself.

“I knew it was him the moment I saw him,” Mr. Armstead proclaimed when they’d settled into a pair of commodious wing chairs. “That picture flashed on the television and I turned to Mrs. Armstead right then and there and said, ‘Martha, that’s Ferris.’ They kept calling him Warren — Warren something or other …”

“Mars,” Mooney offered.

“That’s right, Mars. But I knew it was Ferris soon as I saw him. And then I knew I just had to talk to someone.”

A drab, grayish lady in a white matron’s gown tottered in and set down a tray of coffee before them. While she served, Armstead continued to strike matches, intending to light his pipe but invariably failing to do so. Mooney had started a game of watching the match burn down until it reached the old man’s thumb, at which point he would blow it out with a quick nervous huff.

“Must be a good sixteen, seventeen years since he was here,” Armstead continued when the woman had left. “He was about seven when he matriculated. We didn’t learn much from the parents. All we had was a doctor’s report that claimed he was in sound health, but hinted at some evidence of mental retardation. I tell you, I never thought much of that report. I didn’t think he was retarded. Not one bit. Possibly a bit muddled. A little vacant and remote. In his own little world, you know. Frightened and confused, maybe. But not retarded. I know retarded. I’ve dealt with it all my professional life. That boy wasn’t retarded. Upset, yes. Frightened and confused, yes. And why wouldn’t he be?” Armstead waved his pipe at Mooney as though it were a conductor’s baton. “He’d lost a father and a mother in the space of a few months. As I understand it, the father was a fairly prominent financier who’d made a series of bad investments and more or less died from the shame of it. The mother …” Armstead paused and smiled slyly. “Well, I met her once. A handsome lady. Socialite. Glamorous, you know. Came up here to see me about Ferris and look the place over. Stayed about twenty minutes. She remarried in what folks of my vintage like to call ‘indecent haste.’ Three months later, I guess it was, to an older man. A widower. Well-off with his own children grown and out of the house, but still young enough for his head to be turned by an attractive, well-connected woman. Too old, though, to want to start raising a child again.

“As I understand it, they argued about it until it became the sticking point of the arrangement. Almost queered the deal for a time. There were no relatives with which to place the child. Either she gave the boy up for adoption or placed it in a foster home, or no deal. The old boy made it abundantly clear. To make a long story short, she capitulated, and, in the end, they settled on Branley. People call us a warehouse for well-to-do kids with families comfortable enough to pay a large annual tuition for the privilege of depositing unwanted, problem kids and forgetting about them with a clear conscience. Well, I suppose there’s some truth to that. I don’t pretend that we’re a first-rate preparatory school. But we are home to these kids. The only home they have. Mrs. Armstead and myself are mother and father to them. We love each and every one of them just as if they were our own. We feel no shame about what we do here. We teach them. Right up to the limits of their ability. You ask them, if you think not.”

Armstead sighed and gazed with sudden unaccountable sadness out the window through which was clearly visible the sight of the young boys racing up and down the soccer field. “Anyway, we were talking about Mrs. Koops.”

He struck another match and inhaled fiercely, his veined cheeks inflating and deflating like a bellows until at last a cloud of blackened smoke straggled listlessly from the bowl. But no sooner had he lit it than he forgot about it, distracted by the image of Mrs. Koops drifting back at him across the span of years. “She sent him toys and candy for birthdays and Christmas. Never failed. But she never came to visit him.”

“How long was he here?” Mooney asked.

“I’m coming to that.” Armstead waved the pipe at him impatiently. “Ferris was peculiar. I don’t deny that. Kept to himself. Didn’t get on with the other kids. They recognized there was something funny about him and were perceptive enough to let him be. He couldn’t concentrate in class. He was hyperactive, but unlike most hyperactive kids, he wasn’t a discipline problem. The house psychiatrist here at the time diagnosed him as borderline autistic, with decided aspects of genius. He had phenomenal powers of memory. He could recall whole series of numbers made up of a dozen digits, glance at three, four of them, then after a moment recite them back to you by heart without a mistake.”

Mr. Armstead shook his head, and, for a moment, his eyes appeared to mist behind the rimless lenses. “A sad, morose child, I’d say, who preferred to keep to himself. The only relationships he could handle were with small animals — pet mice, birds, cats, to which he was invariably kind.” Armstead looked up, suddenly recalling Mooney. “Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten your question. I’m coming to it.”

The twinkle had reappeared in his eyes and he chuckled to himself. “After Ferris had been here about three months, we noticed a change in him. From a child who, to all outward appearances, was relatively placid, he suddenly became subject to fits of violence. One moment he’d be working quietly by himself on a jigsaw puzzle or an airplane model, and the next he’d be up on his feet, shouting, running, bouncing off the furniture, flinging everything within reach about the room. Eventually, those episodes increased in frequency and intensity. They became destructive. Frighteningly so. And the destruction was always aimed at himself. He’d been abandoned by his parents, and, as he saw it, he was responsible for that abandonment. There was something not quite right with him, he figured, and he believed that it was because of this that his father died and his mother remarried and left him. To his way of thinking, it was all his fault.

“One morning, after he’d been here, roughly, I’d say, five months, he didn’t show up at breakfast. I sent someone back to his room to check. All of his belongings were there, but there was no sign of him. We made a search of the campus and the surrounding woods. Not a trace of him about. We notified the mother first, and then the state police.”

“Did the mother seem concerned?”

“Yes, I’d say so.” Armstead sucked noisily at his pipe stem. “But she didn’t offer to come east. She was living out in Chicago at the time, and I guess Poughkeepsie seemed a long way off.”

“What about the police?” Mooney asked.

“Nothing. We waited and waited. They combed the entire area and posted notices in town. But they never found a sign of him. The family, of course, was fairly influential, and enough pressure was brought to bear so that federal investigators finally entered the search. Photos were sent out to police departments and missing persons bureaus all round the country. Pretty soon we started to get calls and messages with sightings from just about everywhere. We checked them all. The police never found him and, after a year or so, they pretty much gave up.”

“Did they close the case?”

“Not officially, but in point of fact, the investigation was over.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing at all. That’s if you mean, did they find Ferris.”

A long, uneasy silence settled over the room as the two men regarded each other through the slanting rays of morning sunlight. The sharp, exultant shrieks of youthful soccer players drifted in from the rolling fields outside.

Vaguely miffed, Mooney wondered why he’d taken the trouble to drive up at all. For all he’d learned, the whole matter could have been transacted over the phone.

Armstead appeared to sense his disappointment. “That’s the truth of it, I’m afraid. We didn’t see Ferris again, until years later.”

Mooney looked up, still frowning. “So, you did see him again?”

“He came to visit me.”

Suddenly animated, Armstead brandished his pipe. “Just walked in on me one afternoon.”

“Did he say where he’d been?”

“All over. Just drifting from one place to the next. Looked pretty tatty and down at the heels, but just as cheerful and polite as ever. Said he was broke. Needed work. I gave him some money and asked him if he was aware there was a trust fund in his name. He didn’t know what I was talking about. Wasn’t exactly sure what a trust fund was, so I told him, and gave him the name of the law firm who’d been appointed trustees of his father’s estate. I knew them since all of Ferris’s expenses here were paid through them. He went to see them, and I guess he never had any serious money problems after that. Never thought about him again until last night and that news show.”

“That law firm didn’t happen to be Wells, Gray,” Mooney asked dryly.

“That’s right. That’s the one. How’d you know?”

“We’ve had occasion to deal with them.”

Armstead appeared to be impressed by that. “Well, that’s the firm, all right.”

“How long ago was it that he came back here, would you say?”

Armstead’s eyes closed again and the head tilted. “Let me see now … that would be nineteen and eighty-one. June or July, I’d say.”

“Roughly six years ago,” Mooney suggested. “The name Griggs mean anything to you? Donald Griggs?” The name appeared to draw a blank, but in the next moment the old man’s face lit up. “Oh, sure — local fellow. Some story about him. Disappeared from here about —”

“Six years ago.” Mooney flicked back through his pad. “June fourteenth, nineteen eighty-one, is when your local police reported him missing.”

“That sounds about right,” Armstead nodded earnestly. “Nice family. Didn’t know them well. Wife and three kids. Salesman, he was, if memory serves me. Just drove off one day. Never come back. Local papers were full of it. Why do you ask?” Then suddenly the drift of Mooney’s thought struck him. “You’re not suggesting there’s some connection between Ferris and the disappearance of Griggs?”

Mooney nodded wearily. “It’s a long story. Has something to do with a car. Someday when this is all over, I’ll tell you about it.”

Later, Armstead saw him to the door. They stood there for a while chatting. Then Armstead placed a frail trembling hand on Mooney’s shoulder. “Could that poor boy really have done all these awful things they say he’s done?”

Mooney shrugged and smiled wearily. “We’ll know soon enough, won’t we?”

“THIS IS THE LAST ONE I HAVE.”

“Let’s give it a shot, anyway.”

Rollo Pickering sighed and hunched above the oak refectory table mounded with books and records and papers culled from the archives over the past five hours at the City Bureau of Deeds and Instruments.

“If it’s not here … ,” Mr. Lydecker, the city archivist, said.

“Then it’s not here,” Pickering grudgingly assented. By that time, he was more than willing to concede the fact. He’d been there since nine
A.M.
, when the doors had opened.

The offices of the New York City Bureau of Deeds and Instruments were located at the bottom of Water Street, a few blocks west of the river. Occupying a full floor of a badly deteriorating old commercial building dating back to the late nineteenth century, the offices and archives were a drab, depressing affair. Pickering had sat in a long succession of such drab municipal offices in his time. Broken furniture, flaking paint, burst upholstery, the air stale with the smell of decades of dust undisturbed. They were all pretty much the same. As a civil servant himself, such offices and the drab phlegmatic people who occupied them filled him with uneasiness. It was as though he could look down the long corridor of years and see a chilling vista of what lay ahead.

The room he sat in was small and stuffy. It smelled of mold and desiccation. Motes of dust drifted like timeless galaxies through the cramped, unventilated space. Behind them was a warehouse of paper. It divided itself into aisles giving onto a shadowy prospect of floor-to-ceiling clutterment: records, deeds of transfer dating well back into the eighteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of crumbling old manila folders tied up with tatty faded ribbon and stacked perilously one atop the other sagged on shelves that threatened imminent collapse. It was a windowless place where sunlight never strayed.

Each time they pulled out a folder, puffs of dust rose like vengeful wraiths. Pickering coughed. By then his throat was parched. Mr. Lydecker, however, seemed impervious to dust. Having occupied that airless space for nearly forty years, he was no longer discernibly old or young. Dust had effaced all of the usual clues to age. Indeed, the vague shape that slouched up and down those sloping aisles in baggy tweeds seemed more an outline of airy ectoplasm than anything comprised of flesh and blood.

In the five hours Pickering had been there, they’d so far managed to locate a copy of the deed to the house on Bridge Street. That had been perfectly simple and straightforward. Mr. Lydecker had put his bony, clawlike hands on that at once. A largish parchment embossed with a city stamp and a notary’s seal, it showed the provenance of the house to date from somewhere in the early 1830s, when one Joshua Crane had built it, going right up until the 1940s, when a Mr. Frederick Klink purchased it for the slightly less than lordly sum of $6,000. But it was the architect’s blueprint, the official record of construction, that continued to elude them.

“Trouble is,” Lydecker went on, tunneling through quaking columns of paper as he spoke, “those days, folks weren’t required to file blueprints of new construction. The bureau didn’t exist then and what filing and recordkeeping they did was of a fairly casual order. Of course, we do have architectural plans dating back to that period, but no one is sure exactly where they are. I’m just one man here,” he explained somewhat defensively. “They took my assistant from me last year. Budget cuts, you know. Ah …” The high, stridulous voice trilled as he plucked a crumbling parcel from one of the bins and blew the dust from its wrappings. “Hello — what have we here?”