The Shadow Man (6 page)

Dr. Laidelier had, as usual, left his office door open. As he sat at his desk, studying a stack of vouchers by the narrow beam of a bullet-shade lamp, he became aware of someone standing just inside the doorway, watching him. He ignored this insubstantial figure on the fringe of his vision and finished reading about the purchase of sides of beef for the sanitarium kitchen.

When he pinched the bridge of his nose in weariness and then looked up, he saw that his visitor was Joseph Morgan. Probably Morgan wanted to talk with him again about reshuffling the night hours of the security force.

“It’s late, Joseph,” Dr. Laidelier said. In the harsh light from the lamp, his eyes were invisible, in deep shadow beneath his prodigious gray eyebrows.

“I’ve been doing some investigating,” Morgan said. He walked farther into the office and stood with a calm hand resting lightly on a chair.

Laidelier motioned for him to sit down. “Investigating?”

“Asking some questions in town,” Morgan said, choosing to remain standing. “I thought, just for possible reference, it might be a good idea to check out some of what Senator Andrews mentioned.”

“The senator is still a comparatively young man, Joseph. I got the impression that he was unduly upset with himself over the death of a friend.”

“He is a U.S. senator, though. And he was a friend of Larsen.”

Dr. Laidelier pushed his glasses higher up onto his nose and studied Morgan. The coolly competent security chief didn’t seem to be in any sort of an agitated state. He was merely doing his job, prudently touching bases.

“Martin Karpp told me that Larsen claimed he got a threatening note at his motel,” Morgan said. “Signed Paul Liggett.”

Dr. Laidelier’s only indication of surprise was a shifting of his long frame in his chair. This must be the evidence Andrews had mentioned.

“I talked to the desk man at the Clover Motel,” Morgan said. “He remembers a message for Dr. Larsen. He says the doctor read it right there at the desk and seemed to be rattled. Larsen grilled him on who had delivered the message, but the desk man hadn’t been on duty when it came. The girl who had been at the desk said she’d been busy when the message was given to her by a man to put in Larsen’s box. She could only describe the man as kind of stockily built. She barely glanced at his features and doesn’t remember a thing about them, not even the color of his hair.”

“Did Dr. Larsen mention that Paul Liggett’s name was on the note?” Dr. Laidelier asked.

Morgan did sit down now as he shook his head. “No. The motel people are certain that he didn’t mention who it was from. Maybe somebody was joking with Larsen. Or maybe Larsen was joking with Senator Andrews. But we can be certain of one thing: whoever’s signature was on it, there was a note.”

“Very well,” Dr. Laidelier agreed patiently, “there was a note.”

“Then I went to the Chicken Barn,” Morgan went on.

“Chicken coop, you mean?”

“Barn,” Morgan said. “It’s a restaurant right outside of town. They told me at the motel that Dr. Larsen always ate supper there. I asked all the employees if they could remember anything unusual about Dr. Larsen. I found out that a waitress had told Larsen about a man coming into the restaurant looking for him, and Larsen seemed to get upset, especially when the waitress described the man.”

“And whose description was it?” Dr. Laidelier asked, anticipating the answer.

“I don’t know,” Morgan said.

“Didn’t you ask the waitress?”

“No, I got all this secondhand. The waitress is dead.”

“Ah,” Dr. Laidelier said, as if at last his keenest interest had been aroused. “Dead how?”

“She fell down the cellar stairs in her house,” Morgan said. “Broken neck.”

Both men sat quietly for a while, not looking at one another. Morgan began to drum on the arm of his chair with the knuckle of his right forefinger, the same monotonous tapping, over and over.

Finally Dr. Laidelier asked, “Did you discover anything else?”

“No,” Morgan said, stopping the tapping, “that’s all.”

“Any conclusions?”

“Not firm ones. I just thought you should know about what these people told me.”

“It could pertain,” Dr. Laidelier said. “You don’t think Martin Karpp, or some part of Martin Karpp, is leaving the sanitarium and terrorizing the countryside, do you?”

“Of course not,” Morgan said. “That’s the one thing that can be ruled out. As far as I’m concerned, the matter’s closed. It closed with Dr. Larsen’s death. I was only satisfying curiosity and tying loose ends.”

“Which is as it should be,” Dr. Laidelier said.

Morgan stood up and walked to the door. “At least we know that Senator Andrews is on the level, not inventing a reason to scrutinize us.”

“I never suspected that,” Dr. Laidelier said, and he hadn’t.

“I did, I’ll admit,” Morgan said. “I guess I’m too much of a skeptic.”

“That’s your job,” Dr. Laidelier reassured him.

Morgan smiled. “It is at that. Good night, Doctor.”

After Morgan had left, Dr. Laidelier switched off the lamp and walked from his office. He strode down a corridor, opened a door with a large key from the ring on his belt and began making his way across the narrow stretch of grass to his bungalow that was located on the sanitarium grounds behind the main building.

There was no sound other than the doctor’s rustling footsteps in the black grass, no normal background trill of crickets. Pesticides had eliminated most of the insects on the grounds. It was best that way. The inmates were extraordinarily inventive with insects.

Inside his bungalow, Dr. Laidelier relaxed with his nightly glass of port before bed and thought about what Joseph Morgan had told him. There were, the doctor decided, a good many rational explanations for what Morgan had found out. A practical joke. Then someone happening to resemble Martin Karpp—at least to the waitress—when he asked for Dr. Larsen in the restaurant. Or perhaps Larsen had wanted to perpetrate a joke and laid the groundwork for it. Or maybe Larsen had been setting himself up for a lucrative book of some sort to be marketed to the occult-hungry public. Larsen hadn’t seemed like such a man, but who could tell? And the waitress’s death? An accident. The simplest, and therefore probably correct, answer.

Dr. Laidelier savored the last sweet sip of port and decided to go to bed. Without thinking about it, he crossed the room and locked the front door.

A step away from the door, he stood still and smiled. Usually he left the door unlocked. At this time of night, all the patients were in their quarters, behind brick walls, and no one other than Security was on the grounds.

Dr. Laidelier thought about unlocking the door, if only to prove something to himself. Then he decided that was reactive and unnecessary. Whether the door was locked or unlocked was unimportant, after all.

As he ambled into his bedroom he was chuckling, chiding himself. He had studied in Berlin under Steinmetz. Dr. Steinmetz, though quite cognizant of the power of mind over body, did not believe that a man could walk through solid walls.

And neither did any of his disciples believe that.

Music blared from the open doorway of the Metropole, spilling out over the sun-warmed street to lose itself in the din of Times Square. A huge bearded black man stood outside the doorway, glibly trying to entice passersby inside. A large percentage of the people on the crowded sidewalk were tourists, some of whom paused and gawked in through the door at the two topless dancers gyrating almost mechanically on the lighted bartop stage, but the fast-talking, cajoling barker was having no luck in attempting to get someone actually to walk inside and spend money for a drink.

“Topless!” the bearded man yelled at Andrews, as if he himself couldn’t quite believe it. “Step on in an’ check’em out!”

Andrews, the waist-length jacket he had bought unbuttoned over his black turtleneck sweater, stood for a moment beneath the lighted marquee that was blinking futilely against the bright daylight. He could see the shimmering, spotlighted flesh of one of the dancers as she strutted back and forth on the bar, her lean body jerking almost casually in rhythm with the repetitious, high-decibel drumbeat. Her ribs showed, and her frantically jiggling bare breasts were small; it occurred to Andrews that such constant dancing would melt away every inch of excess weight from a woman.

“Check it out up close, brother!” the bearded man invited through a jovial, lascivious grin. He appeared slightly surprised when Andrews walked past him and inside.

As Andrews slid into one of the booths along the wall, his eyes became accustomed to the dimness and he saw that there were only three other customers, one of whom had his head resting on the bar, his eyes closed, his mind oblivious to the spiked high heels that cavorted sometimes inches from his tousled hair and empty glass. One of the dancers, the lean brunette he’d seen from the sidewalk, caught Andrews’ eye and smiled as she went into a series of bumps to keep up with the gradually increasing mad tempo of the drums. Andrews smiled back. He couldn’t help but think of the many Washington columnists who would love to see him now. How the media could distort. How they could separate the public man from the private.

A waitress appeared alongside the booth, and Andrews ordered a scotch and seltzer. He watched the brunette and her tiny blond partner dance out of sync as the music’s tempo became even more driving and demanding. He wondered if the brunette was Leola Raymond.

She wasn’t. When the waitress arrived with Andrews’ drink, she told him in answer to his question that Leola Raymond was the tiny blonde, and that she was due to take a break at the end of this number.

Andrews turned his attention to Leola Raymond, who was graceful but not highly trained as a dancer. She had a massive mop of wavy blond hair that flounced about as she danced, making her delicate features appear almost absurdly doll-like.

“Will you tell her I’d like to talk with her when she’s finished?” Andrews asked the waitress.

She withdrew one of the swizzle sticks that were laced in the wide network of her black stockings and set it down daintily on the napkin next to Andrews’ drink. “The girls here don’t fraternize,” she said.

“I don’t want to fraternize any further than talking to her about a mutual friend, L. C. Chambers. Will you tell her that?” He slipped a five-dollar bill into the waitress’s hand, which was amazingly convenient. “Tell her my name is Anderson.”

The waitress barely glanced at him. “I’ll tell her, Mr. Anderson.”

Andrews’ glass was empty by the time the drums ceased their relentless beat and the dancers left the stage. He hoped that Leola Raymond would have enough breath left to talk if she did agree to see him. He ordered another drink and asked the waitress to bring one of whatever Leola usually liked.

“She ain’t allowed,” the waitress said. “But I told her what you asked.”

Andrews nodded and waited.

Ten minutes later Leola Raymond walked fully dressed to his booth. Though she still wore her high-heeled shoes, she appeared shorter than she had onstage, maybe only about five feet tall. The lithe hips that had gyrated so rapidly were now covered by a black skirt of some kind of velvety material, and beneath a white long-sleeved blouse was not the slightest hint of breasts. She might have been twelve years old but for the unnerving directness of her blue eyes and the controlled stiffness of her delicate face. Andrews stood without speaking, and she nodded and sat down, as if it had all been choreographed.

He lowered himself back into the booth. “They told me you couldn’t drink on the job,” he said.

She nodded again. It was a triumph over gravity that her piled blond hair stayed in place; it appeared soft, unmolded by hair spray. “I don’t drink anyway.”

“Harry Jennings, over at the Bayon Lounge, suggested I talk to you,” Andrews told her. “He said you might know some things about Martin Karpp. Or L. C. Chambers, as you knew him.”

In the dim light her smile seemed to jump across the table. “Chambers I knew, but I didn’t know Martin Karpp. And my Chambers wouldn’t have shot somebody—not for any political reason.”

“When he was arrested, is that the first you heard of Karpp?”

“It sure was. Far as I knew, L. C. Chambers was exactly what he seemed, a big, happy kinda guy that had made his pile and liked good times. I liked good times too, so we got together and had ’em.”

“Why ‘liked’?”

The child’s body squirmed beneath the blouse and skirt. Andrews noticed now the protrusion of her nipples beneath the thin white material, rising and falling with her breathing or her heartbeat.

“I got more serious about L.C. than I let on,” she said, “even to him. When it happened—when he shot Drake and got arrested and it came out—it was like the world turned around and kicked me in the box again, only this time harder than ever, so as to show me things would never change, only look like they were gonna. After that and a few other things happened, times didn’t seem so good anymore no matter what I did.”

Andrews found himself trying to guess her age in the faint light. Without being too obvious he looked at her neck, the backs of her hands, the traces of makeup-smoothed facial lines. Thirty at least, he decided. And she must have gotten there in a hurry. He was curious. “Where are you from?” he asked. “You don’t have a New York accent.”

“Chicago. The windy city.” A smile. “Maybe that’s why I liked L.C.”

“He talked a lot?”

“About everything. About what he owned, what he was gonna buy.” A laugh broke from her. “And he was a god damn cook in a ptomaine house a couple of blocks from here!” She studied her thin hands, pale against the dark table. “Hell, if he’d told me, I was to the point I wouldn’t have much cared.”

“It wasn’t the way you might think,” Andrews said, suddenly feeling sorry for her. “He wasn’t pretending to be somebody else in order to impress you; he
was
somebody else. And more than one person. The doctors
do
know that; his case isn’t the only one of its kind.”

“I know. Since L.C., I read about others. That woman who was all those people, most of the time not even remembering. She had a shitty childhood like me.”

“So did Martin Karpp.”

The music began again, the monotonous, driving drumbeat. The brunette was dancing again on the bar-level stage, elbows back, breasts thrust forward, eyes straight ahead and gazing at nothing. The drunk at the bar had come around and was staring up at her as if confused by her presence but reluctant to leave.

“Did Dr. Larsen talk to you?” Andrews asked Leola. It was difficult to be understood through the music. She cupped a hand to her ear and he repeated the question.

She shook her head no and mouthed, “I have to get back now.”

“Can I talk to you again?” Andrews asked, almost shouting.

She hesitated, then plucked a ball-point pen from his shirt pocket and scribbled a phone number on the napkin beneath his drink. As she stood to leave, she took the pen again and wrote beneath the number “Mostly during the days.” She walked away without smiling, dark skirt swaying as if blown by the music.

Andrews sat and finished his drink. A man and a woman stepped through the door, saw the topless dancer, exchanged glances and went back out into the shadowless glare of daylight. They looked like solid, upstanding citizens, Andrews thought. Voters. He wondered if he was out of his mind doing what he’d been doing the past several days. Maybe he was developing another personality himself. There were moments lately when he didn’t at all see himself as a U.S. senator. The blood in his veins flowed too fast and too hot for grave deliberation and reasoned debate, for the pragmatic subtleties of the office. Maybe he should get back to the perceptible realities of his life, phone Judy Carnegie and let her know how to reach him in case anything urgent occurred. He needed a connecting thread. A touchstone.

But she would wonder what he was doing at a place like the Hayes. What he was doing in that area of Manhattan. She would worry. She wouldn’t understand or approve of what he was doing because of Dana Larsen’s death. Judy Carnegie: a cool mind and a fervent player of the game. Andrews rattled the ice in his empty glass. Maybe she should be the senator.

Leola Raymond was onstage again, dancing with the same amicable, bored expression as her partner’s. Andrews looked at her pampered, almost translucent flesh and thought of Pat Colombo. Then, despite himself, he thought of Ellen. Ellen was built somewhat like Leola. That thin, only taller and without the impression of child-woman fragility.

Leola’s mascara-widened blue eyes rotated in their sockets like the mechanical eyes of a mannequin, and deadpan she returned Andrews’ stare. He nodded to her, then got up and made his way out, accompanied by the eerie knowledge that he was walking stride for stride in the footsteps of Martin Karpp.