Shadow Dancers (32 page)

“Down here.” Ferris pointed with his finger at the ground as if to clarify the question. “Oh, you mean down here?” A radiance illuminated his youthful features. “I used to live down here. Bight there in that house.” His longish finger waved excitedly at the ramshackle brick Federal nearly eclipsed by the shadows of the encroaching warehouses and factories.

Borelli stared doubtfully across at the crumbling, near derelict structure. “You lived over there?”

“Right. With my mom and dad. Lived there the first seven years of my life.” Ferris beamed with pride.

“Then what happened?” Borelli inquired.

“My dad died and my mom remarried.”

“That’s when you moved up to Eighty-first?”

“There were some other places before that,” Ferris said. “Not so nice.” The smile on his face never wavered as he recited a litany of woe.

“Where were some of these other places?” Borelli asked while he flipped incuriously through the grimy wad of papers Ferris had provided him.

The young man closed his eyes in an effort to recall. When he opened them again he looked apologetic.

“You don’t recall?” Borelli regarded him skeptically. “People don’t usually forget where they lived.”

“It’s not that far back, Ferris,” Officer Carpenter pressed him. “Try and remember.”

Ferris stared blankly down at his shoes as if stalling for time. The two plainclothesmen waited patiently.

“Tell you what we re gonna do, Ferris.” Officer Borelli’s voice rang with hearty goodwill. “This area’s not exactly the best area to stroll around in after dark, recapturing boyhood memories. What d’ya say we run you up to Eighty-first Street?”

“I’d sure appreciate that,” Ferris replied full of earnest gratitude. He was excited at the prospect of riding in the unmarked police car with the two plainclothesmen.

“But first, we gotta make a little stop at the precinct house. Want to ask you a few more questions. Check a few things out.”

“Sure. Great.”

“Just routine stuff.” Borelli patted him on the arm and opened the back door. “Hop in.”

“He says he lived there as a kid.”

“You check it out?”

“At the Bureau of Deeds … Klink bought it forty-five years ago from a party name of Blaylock. No record of any Koops ever having lived there.”

“Nothing in the archives?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Could be his family rented the place from the former owners.”

“I asked about that.”

“What’d he say?”

“Nothin’. Just smiled at me, funny like.”

“Smiles a lot, this Koops.”

“And nods his head,” Pickering added dryly. “He likes to nod his head.”

“A flake.”

“Right off the wall, Frank. Believe me.”

Both men nodded sagely. It was early morning at Manhattan South. The squad room, full of smoke and noise, clattered with the motion of the first shift muster. Names fired back and forth in the morning roll call. Chairs scraped across the floors. Shoes scuffled. Lockers clanked open and shut in the noisy corridors where men shed uniforms for street clothes and indulged in sophomoric joshing peppered with epithets, prior to going home.

Under the watchful, slightly anxious gaze of Rollo Pickering, Mooney affixed his signature to a sheaf of dusty reports with the busy, distracted air of a man who’d already forgotten what had just been said. “And no prior police record?” Mooney suddenly asked; all the while his pen continued to scratch fitfully across the reports.

“None.”

“How long he say he lived up on Eighty-first Street?”

“Two years in January. Landlord confirms it. Says he’s an ideal tenant.”

“That just means he pays the rent on time. Sits still for all the increases.”

“That’s about it,” Pickering assented. He had no heart left for disputation. “Frank, this kid ain’t the Dancer.”

“Who said he was?” Mooney’s hand rose mechanically to accept a mug of coffee from a rookie patrolman. “The point is, what the hell was he doing out there on Bridge Street, three nights in a row?”

Mooney drank coffee and returned to his reports, while Pickering mulled the question over in his head.

“Drifting. Wandering. Who knows? His lawyer says he’s a bit simple.”

“What’s the lawyer’s name again?”

“Drummond.”

“Drummond?” Mooney glanced up. “Haven’t I heard that name somewhere before?”

“Probably. He’s one of the top piranhas for Wells, Gray.”

Mooney whistled. “Wells, Gray, eh? That’s pretty big league for a flake. Where does this kid get the bread to retain a gilt-edge shyster outfit like Wells, Gray?” Pickering suppressed an urge to scream. “I already told you, Frank. They’re trustees of Koops’s annuity. Apparently, old man Koops was pretty well-heeled. Lost a fortune in real estate at the end of his life and died of a broken heart. He left the kid pretty well off. No fortune, mind you, but enough to take care of himself for the rest of his life.”

“What does Drummond say?”

“Drummond was in here last night, spouting the Constitution and the New York State Penal Code.”

“What’s he think about our holding him? You didn’t say he was a suspect in this Dancer thing?” Mooney glared up at him sharply.

“All I told him was he was picked up for loitering and acting in an irrational manner in the streets.”

Mooney made a face of despair.

“Drummond wants him out. Says we’ve got no reason to be holding him.”

“He’s right. We don’t.” Mooney scratched off his signature on the final report and shoved the whole stack of them aside with a grunt of disgust. “What about prints?”

“We took a set when we booked him. Drummond nearly hit the ceiling when he heard that.”

“Let him scream. It’s routine.” Mooney was up and moving. “How soon can you throw together a lineup?” Pickering’s eyes traveled to the ceiling. “Gimme an hour or so.”

“You got it. In the meantime, send a car up to Washington Heights. Pick up Berrida and bring him down here.”

“What about the Pell dame?”

“No go. I’ve been on that for a week. The doctors still won’t permit it. Have the photographers get me a couple of mug shots before we release him. I’ll take them out to Rockaway myself.”

Galvanized by the older man’s sudden momentum, Pickering started out the door at a dash.

“Hey, Rollo,” Mooney called after him. “What about the teeth?”

“Whose teeth?”

“Koops’s, dummo.” Mooney glowered. “The incisors? The front teeth. Remember?”

“Oh.” Comprehension flooded the detective’s face. “Straight as an arrow, Frank. Pretty as pearls.” Pickering shrugged gloomily. “Sorry.”

“Look close. You gotta be sure now.”

“I’m lookin’. I’m lookin’.”

Though the temperature in the street was in the thirties, and not much higher indoors, Hector Berrida was in a sweat. Unaccustomed as he was to the presence of uniformed police all around him, he felt a certain pressure to oblige.

“What d’ya see?” Pickering asked.

Hector Berrida glared hard through the big one-way picture window, his neck thrust a good way forward from the rest of his body. The object of his attention was a lineup of ten men standing before a blank wall, with nothing but a series of black horizontal lines spaced at intervals up the wall’s length to indicate the height of each subject. From where he stood they gave the impression of ten cardboard silhouettes in a shooting gallery.

“Well?” Pickering persisted.

“I’m lookin’. I’m lookin’.”

“Take your time, Hector. We can’t afford mistakes.” Mooney spoke with reassuring calm.

“One guy says hurry. The other guy says take your time. I’m tryin’, man. I’m doin’ my best.”

“Is there any one of them at least looks familiar?”

A vein throbbed visibly at Berrida’s throat. “I don’t know.” His voice quavered with fretfulness and doubt. In his mind he thought he knew what they wanted, and he feared what they might do if he failed to comply. Experience had informed him that that was the way it was with cops.

“That night you bought that amplifier,” Mooney prodded delicately. “You said you got a good look at the guy.”

“Sure, sure,” Berrida agreed eagerly. “I was lookin’ at him face to face. Close as you’re to me, right now. Close as that.”

“What time of the evening was it, Hector?” Mooney asked.

“Right after supper. Seven o’clock, or so.”

“How much light was there in the street?” Pickering asked.

“It was summer,” Mooney reminded him. “Early June. At that hour there must’ve still been light.”

The nodding of Berrida’s head was in direct ratio to his degree of agitation. “Sure — there was plenty of light. I could see him. No trouble, man. No sweat.”

“Clear?”

“Clear. Like you and me, now.”

“Okay.” Mooney patted the young man’s shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t look at me. Look at those guys out there.” Mooney flung an arm out at the window.

Berrida’s frightened eyes returned to the glass, swarming across it right to left and back again. Painfully conscious of all the uniformed personnel about him, the stenographer taking down his every word, he felt a pressing need to come up with some kind of a response. “That guy. Over there on the right. Maybe …”

“Which one? The far right?”

“No. Not him. Next to him.”

“The dude in the chino vest?” Pickering asked.

“Yeah. That could be something like him.”

“Something like him.” Pickering bristled with scorn. Ferris Koops was positioned about seven men down, a good way over on the other side.

Mooney was aware of time running out, as well as of the costly talent of expensive law firms at that very moment drafting scorching depositions against the city. He sighed. “Look again. Once more, Hector. Just to be sure.”

Berrida could see something in the detective’s eyes that told him he’d failed. Beneath the beehive Afro cut, sweat glistened on his brow. Sitting cross-legged, his sharply pointed patent-leather shoe elevated as the toe pumped up and down like a piston. The hurt, anxious gaze still swept back and forth across the glass at the lineup of faces — all different but somehow exasperatingly alike. The context in which they appeared made them all very similar. The framing of the picture provided by the window gave it the posed, static look of a class graduation photograph.

“Maybe that other guy.” Berrida’s gaze seized on a darkish, Hispanic-looking young man whose features wore the expression of sullen boredom typical of the street-hardened, socially disenfranchised.

“Which other guy, Hector?”

“The Spanish guy,” Berrida said, with a note of regret. He felt like a traitor, but he was certain that particular response would get him out of there faster.

Mooney sighed and snapped his file folder shut. “Okay, Hector. You can go now.”

Berrida looked wary. “That’s it?”

“That’s it, Hector. We’ll be in touch if we need you again.”

The young man looked back and forth at each of them distrustfully. He was certain there was more to come. He sat there for a moment, waiting for it. When nothing happened, he rose, or rather bounced, to his feet, shifting there hesitantly. “Okay?”

“Okay, Hector.” Mooney nodded slowly. “Right through that door there at the rear. The sergeant’ll show you out.”

When the young man had gone, Pickering flicked a switch and spoke into a microphone with speakers on the other side of the glass. “Okay. That’s it. Sweep ‘em out.” In the next moment, a burly sergeant appeared. They could hear the loud clap of his hands on the other side of the glass and watched the line face left and straggle off.

Mooney and Pickering sat unspeaking in the darkened little room, their feet propped up on the ledge projecting out from beneath the glass.

Pickering cleared his throat uneasily. “Well, what now?”

“You got me those mug shots?”

“Out there on your desk. Looks like Koops is in the clear.”

“Who says?”

Pickering’s troubled gaze searched the older man’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means that Koops is not the dark, romantic-looking one. But he sure as hell could be the pale blond wispy one the Bailey kid described, as well as the guy the doorman up at Eight Sixty Fifth Avenue described in the Bender job.” Mooney stared gloomily out at the vacant lineup room where the indirect fluorescent lighting cast a harsh, ghostly blue sheen over the emptiness. “I haven’t given up on Koops yet. I still can’t figure what the hell he was doing out in front of fourteen Bridge Street three nights in a row — the same address as the one on the registration for our missing Mercedes. Too much of a coincidence.”

The door behind them opened suddenly, spotlighting them in a shaft of mote-filled light from the outer room. “Phone call out here for you, lieutenant,” a desk sergeant barked at them.

“Who is it?” Mooney barked back.

“Guy called Drummond.”

“Jesus,” Mooney moaned. “The Wells, Gray piranha. Tell him I’m out.”

“Where are you?” the sergeant inquired.

“I’m in Rockaway. On a job. Not expected back for the rest of the day.”

The door closed with an emphatic click and once again the two detectives were alone in the gray darkness behind the glass.

“You going out to see the Pell dame?” Pickering asked.

“You betcha.”

“What about that snotty doctor?”

“What about him?”

“Hasn’t he put the kibosh on all interviews?”

“I don’t recall his saying that.” Mooney’s smile was slightly askew as he started out.

“Want some company?” Pickering called after him.

“This one I think I better do myself.”

“What about Drummond?”

“Tell him there’s a hitch in the paperwork. It’s just a formality. Don’t release Koops till you hear from me.”

YES, SHE WAS LOOKING SO MUCH BETTER, HE
heard himself say. A vast improvement since the last time. And the new apartment was a fine idea. Spectacular view out over Jamaica Bay on one side to the spangled waters of the Bockaway inlet on the other.

His mind obsessed with Koops and his ferocious attorneys, Mooney fidgeted in his chair, desperate to get beyond the chatty amenities.

Claire Pell, on the other hand, was not. She knew the purpose of his visit, and, firmly but graciously, she dug herself in to forestall anything substantive in the way of talk. She had made progress toward a modest recovery over the past several months since the “incident,” as it was now referred to. Her move to the bright new high-rise condominium, not far from the old house, but seemingly universes away, had been felicitous. Once again she was sleeping through the night and could hold down food. Her physicians were not yet ready to risk a relapse by exposing her to interrogation by the police.