Shadow Dancers (6 page)

“Or GYN. What’s wrong with GYN?”

“Are you trying to say I’m a lousy pathologist?”

“You’re okay.”

“Then this must have something to do with the fact that I’m a woman.” She said it to him just as though she’d said it to him a thousand times and always in precisely the same manner.

“You’re never going to get anyplace here.”

“I could bring you up on charges for even suggesting that.”

“I’d deny I’d ever said it.”

“Anyone who’d ever worked with you would know damned well you said it. It fits you like a glove.”

“Pediatrics is where you belong.”

“Spend the rest of my life pushing rubella vaccine and baby aspirin? Christ.
You
go into pediatrics. Look, I’m busy. Is there anything wrong with that report?”

“Not at all,” Konig said, his voice hoarse and weary. His eyes studied the vivid pattern of blood spattered up and down her white surgical smock. “I’m only saying it would be more appropriate for a lady than spending her life in this goddamned abattoir.”

“First of all, Doctor, don’t say
lady.
Say
woman.
And second of all, I like abattoirs. I’m at home in abattoirs. I find them exhilarating. I’m not a gynecologist. I’m not a pediatrician. Frankly, I loathe little folk.”

“You must be abnormal. What woman doesn’t love kids?”

“This woman.” Her voice was close to a shout. “So kindly have the decency to permit me to be my own abnormal self. At least, in this line of medicine I can’t hurt anyone.”

Konig sighed and raised his hands like a man defeated. “I hate to see a good baby doctor go to waste.”

The remark, for all of its typical condescension, astonished her. All she could manage by way of response was to stare at him and shake her head despairingly.

He watched impassively the small, wiry frame as it marched toward the door. She moved stiffly erect, struggling to keep her shoulders back. “Oh, Winger,” he called somewhat tauntingly, “one other thing. On that new Torrelson job out in Douglaston. What about those bite marks?”

“It’s all in the protocol, Doctor. We’ve seen those same bite marks before.”

Konig’s face was full of the kind of strained forbearance he would never have sat still for at the hands of a male subaltern. “I’m aware we’ve seen bite marks before,” his voice croaked wearily. “What I’m asking is, did you take an impression of these?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You didn’t?” There was an edge to his voice that gave her pause.

“There didn’t appear to be any reason. I —”

Konig lowered his head into his palms and slowly rubbed his eyes. “It was an incisor, wasn’t it?”

“The left lateral.”

“Notice anything unusual in those bite marks around the breast?” He continued to rub his eyes but looked up when it appeared no answer was forthcoming. “Something different from the other bites we’ve seen?” The first thing he saw was her staring down at him, a startled, wary look in her eye, as if he’d reminded her of something she, too, had noted but had been lax enough to forget.

“Now that you mention it, there was. The skin around the bite marks was …”

“Jagged? Shredded?”

“For Chrissake, you don’t have to lead me by the hand.” Her voice dropped with contrition. “It was shredded, as if …”

“The incisor that made the marks was …”

“Broken, okay?” she snapped crossly. “Will you please let me come to my own conclusions?”

“Well, good God then, stop dancing around it. Come to the point instead of standing there, hemming and hawing. Right. Those incisor impressions around the aureoles were abraded and broken. Very astute observation, Doctor.” He beamed at her with an air of triumphant spite. “Now will you kindly go get an impression made? And I’ll lay you odds that when you get the prints back from Odontology, you’ll find that at least a third of that left incisor is gone.”

Rumpled and depleted in her bloodied smock, the young woman stared back at him dismally, then turned abruptly and left.

(1) Hank of laundry rope, 7 feet, 6 inches.

(2) Can of Red Devil spray paint. Alizarin Crimson.

(3) No prints. Assailant probably wore gloves.

(4) Bloodstains.

Mooney scribbled hastily into his note pad, then glanced down at the long jagged line of spattered blood not far from his feet. Surrounding it nearly completely was a police artist’s chalk drawing scrawled on the concrete basement floor. It showed a rudimentary outline of where a body had lain three days before. The chalk outline had the crude look of a petrograph drawing found on a cave wall. It was situated a foot or two from a washer-dryer arrangement where the assault had taken place. The bloodstains, absorbed now into the whitish concrete, had bleached out to a pale orange. Unlike the vivid shapeless splashes characteristic of typical assaults with knives, these were composed of a series of jagged peaks and troughs.

This was arterial bleeding from a thin slash made by a long razorlike blade that had not only severed the carotid artery but nearly severed the head as well.

Whoever wielded that blade, Mooney thought, did it with impressive skill. No newcomer to the art. And that red, unbroken, sawtooth signature of blood suggested that all the while the victim was bleeding to death on the basement floor, her assailant had subjected her dying body to some final horrific outrage.

“… Broken central and left lateral incisors,” Konig had bawled at him over the phone earlier that morning so that he had to hold the receiver away from his ear. “Look for some creep with broken teeth. Central and left lateral incisors.”

“What else?”

“What else?” There was a stunned pause. “Isn’t that enough? What the hell you want me to do? Come down there and draw you a picture?”

Mooney ignored the tirade. “Those footprints all over her face …”

“What about them?”

“There were bootprints all over the face and chest. Like he used her face for a doormat.”

Mooney listened to the agitated breathing on the other end, attributing the momentary pause to a cigar being lit. “We’ve got bootprints with the girl up in the park too.” The reply came at last without much enthusiasm. “Could be the same guy.”

“Any identification on her yet?”

“We’ve X-rayed the skull and we’re running fingerprints and dentition through the computer.”

“So far no one’s come in lookin’ for anyone sounds like her,” Mooney said. Konig muttered something incomprehensible, his thoughts already moving elsewhere. “I’ve got to go now.”

“Listen — I need —”

“Not now,” Konig bawled. “I’m busy.”

“These broken teeth. I could use —”

“In a day or two. I’ll call you when I’ve got something.” The phone banged down, leaving in its wake the dying thunder of the M.E.‘s voice ringing in his ear. “Fuck off, old gas bag,” Mooney muttered and smashed the phone down.

He looked up, startled to see Pickering standing there watching him with an odd expression. He wondered if the younger man had caught him muttering to himself. “Well?”

“Nothing, Frank. Not a trace of it.”

“You look out back?”

“Out back. Out front. In between. Even across the street. There’s an empty lot there. Lotta rubble and junk, but no knife, no razor. Nothing you’d imagine could cut a head off.”

Mooney stared down at the little pad he’d been scribbling notes in. “Swell. What about the neighbors?”

“Lady next door thinks she saw a car parked out front that morning around eleven
A.M.
”

The pencil ceased. “What kind of car?”

“Green, she thinks.”

“Green, she thinks.” Mooney shook his head despairingly.

“Saw it from the front window. Doesn’t know the make. Wasn’t close enough to catch a plate number.”

“She didn’t happen to see the guy?”

“Nope.”

“Course not,” Mooney muttered. “Why would she?” lie enjoyed magnifying the hopelessness of everything. “I’ll talk to her.”

“I wouldn’t advise it, Frank. Least, not now. She’s blubbering too much.”

“Good. I’ll give her more to blubber about.”

She was a diminutive, dried-out little creature of sixty or so, with a pinched, anxious face and an overbite. She had a way of looking almost chronically fretful. Eyes red, a handkerchief wadded into one fist, she sat slumped at her kitchen table, fidgeting with a salt cellar. Mooney sat across from her before a cup of untouched coffee she’d poured him while Pickering hovered about somewhere over his shoulder in the shadows behind them. Rolling the salt cellar back and forth in her hand, she gave the impression of a squirrel rolling nuts in its tiny, prehensile claws.

“Please. Please don’t ask me any more about it. I can’t bear to …” She crammed the crumpled handkerchief against her mouth and made a wet, whimpering sound. “I appreciate that, Mrs. …”

“Wisdo,” she whimpered.

“Mrs. Wisdo. But if you could just think back. Try to remember.”

She shook her head at the shadowy outline of Pickering in the corner. “I’ve already told the other gentleman.”

“I realize you don’t know the make of the car or any of the numbers on the plates. You say it was green?”

“That’s right. Green.”

“Light or dark?”

“Light.”

Mooney started to write in his pad.

“No, wait.” She stopped him. “Maybe not exactly light.”

“Dark, then?”

“No, not dark.”

Mooney felt a flush of heat rise from beneath his collar. Only ten
A.M.
on a crisp spring morning and already his shirt was damp. He tried to engage her again, but his mind was not entirely there. It was about sixteen miles south and east of there, out at Belmont in the paddocks where he knew Fritzi to be.

“Any special detail about the car you might recall?” Mooney persisted with stiff civility. “Like, was it a two-door or a four-door? Maybe it was a convertible.”

“A convertible?” Mrs. Wisdo looked at him as though he’d asked her to state some arcane formula in quantum mechanics. “No … I don’t … I don’t think so.”

“Did it look new or old, this car? Was it banged up or in good condition?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I don’t know what it was. I told the other man —”

“Yes, I know what you told him.”

She broke off wailing, something sparking in her eye. “But it did look shiny and bright.”

“It did?”

“Yes. It did.”

Pen poised, Mooney regarded her with cautious hope. “You’re sure?”

Her nods momentarily ceased their frantic motion. The salt cellar dangled in midair. “Yes, I’m sure. It was bright and sunny that morning. I have a distinct impression of sunlight flashing off all of this chrome. There was a great deal of bright shiny chrome.”

Mooney’s ears cocked. “Where? The bumper? The lenders? The grille? Where?”

“The grille.” Finally involved, Mrs. Wisdo had forgotten to whimper. “That’s right. It was the grille. I’m sure now. It was a big grille.”

“Big, what way?” Pickering drifted out of the shadows. “Big horizontal? Or big vertical?”

Baffled, she looked at Mooney.

“What he means is, was it wide this way or tall that way?” Mooney indicated with his hands what he meant.

“Oh, right. I see.” She glowed. “Was it wide or tall?” She gnawed her thumbnail while she pondered that. “Well, it was tall. This way. Vertical.” She demonstrated with her hands. “It was a tall, very shiny grille.”

“Good.” Mooney scribbled the words into his pad. “A green car. Not necessarily dark or light green. Medium.”

“Right.” Her head nodded eagerly. “Medium.”

“With a shiny, vertical grille.”

“Right.”

“What about an emblem on top of the grille? A statuette? Maybe a circle or a square or an animal or something?”

It had all been a bit too much for Mrs. Wisdo. She suddenly remembered to grieve again. Another wail
^;
went up. “I don’t know. Please … I don’t know. Poor Marie. Poor, dear Marie. Oh, how she loved her garden.”

Mooney rose, frowning his displeasure. “Okay. That’s fine, Mrs. Wisdo. You’ve been very helpful. We’ll be in touch if we need anything more.” He shoved the pad back into his inside pocket, and, snapping the crumpled fedora back on his head, he started out. Pickering fell into lock-step behind him. Even as the door closed behind them they could hear a resumption of the terrified, baleful whimpering.

“Well, at least we know it was a late model,” Pickering said as they moved down the flagged walk.

“Oh, yeah? How do we know that?”

“She said it was shiny and bright.”

“Lots of guys have old cars they keep shiny and bright. And big vertical grilles they hardly make anymore. Not since the forties, anyway. Too expensive to produce. Maybe some foreign cars still had ‘em as late as the sixties and early seventies. And who knows if this light green, dark green, medium car even belonged to the j guy. Most likely he just glommed it for this job.”

They’d reached the foot of the walk where a patrol car with Mooney’s old Buick parked behind it waited. “Check with the M.V.B. when you get back. See what’s been stolen lately that’s green, vintage sixties or seventies.” Mooney lumbered into the Buick and sank heavily behind the wheel. Pickering leaned on the sill of the car window and peered in. “I don’t have too much faith in this old dame, Frank.”

“Who would? She’s ditsy. Tells me the day was bright and sunny. I already checked the weather bureau. They say it was cloudy and overcast all day.”

“So wherefore the bright, shiny grille, pray?”

“You tell me. But check it out anyway. Oh — and one more thing. Pull every mug shot you can find on guys with broken front teeth and a history of sex offenses.”

A soft, piteous moan issued from somewhere deep within the younger man. “Who said anything about broken front teeth?”

“The M.E. saw something funny in those bite marks.” Mooney flicked the ignition on and gunned the accelerator. “I’ll speak to you tonight. You oughta have something by then.”

Pickering made a pained, puzzled face. He sighed, contemplating the deadly hours of search that lay ahead of him in the photo morgue. “Where are you going? The ponies?”

Seeing the resentment in his eyes, Mooney winked. “That’s our little secret, isn’t it, Rollo?”