Shadow Dancers (13 page)

The ceiling was low, with stout old joists and beams projecting downward, so that people, even those of average height, had to stoop in order to pass through safely.

She had taken Warren by the hand (Suki’s hands were rough and hot as an oven) and proceeded to lead him far back into the cellar — so far back he couldn’t see his hand before him. As she tugged him along, the boy kept bouncing off boxes and cartons, at one point barking his shin painfully on a dilapidated old chifforobe stored below ground for years. Shortly, tears were brimming in his eyes.

He kept stumbling and tripping. He couldn’t help thinking that there was something angry in the way she pulled him along. He imagined he’d done something wrong, and now she was going to turn him over to those bad “evil” things she said abided down there. At just about that time, he reasoned, there were one or two things he’d been up to that might make her want to do something like that. He wondered if the old lady had found out about them. The thought of it half-scared the child out of his wits.

Just when he thought they could go no farther, they came on another passage off to the right. This one seemed to plunge back even deeper. Suddenly they stopped. In the next moment he felt her fumbling about beneath her skirts. He heard a quick scratching sound on the wall beside him and suddenly a match flared into vivid illumination. She pulled a candle from inside her copious skirts and lit it, then crammed the light into his tiny fist. “Now you hold that, sonny.”

Before them stood a huge hooped barrel, brimming over with colored glass, old bronze and pewter candelabra, cheap bric-a-brac, and a variety of other trash. The barrel weighed well over a hundred pounds.

Grunting like an old sow, Suki wrapped her arms around the middle of it, as though she were hugging someone, and wrestled it off to one side.

“Now hold that candle over here.” She yanked his trembling hand and planted it in midair about two feet or so off the ground.

Right under their feet, where the barrel had stood, was a great, heavy iron lid planted in the earth. A manhole cover, it was, just the same sort of thing you see up on the street. This one had a lot of ridges in it, all set in a pattern of concentric circles. In the center of those ever-diminishing circles, the whiskered, hoary face of a bearded old patriarch was stamped. That, in turn, was ringed by the words:

Baynes Iron Foundry

Erie County, 1862

Buffalo, New York

In years to come, all throughout the most turbulent times of his young adulthood, when it became urgent for Warren to conjure up the face of God, it was the face of this bearded patriarch struck on a sewer lid that sprang most quickly to his mind.

By then Suki had a crowbar, which she kept nearby. With that she wheezed and puffed and finally prised the lid out of the earth. Then, with a final heave that made the ground crumble beneath it, and dry earth spill inward about the hole, she jimmied it off to one side. Almost at once a puff of something cold and damp, like someone’s bad breath, rose out of the earth. It smelled of moisture and sewage and something rotting. From somewhere below he could hear the sound of rushing water. That was followed by a quick scurrying noise like that of dry leaves rattling over the pavement.

Suki snatched the candle from him and grabbed his hand. “Come on.”

His heart beat wildly. “Where?”

“Down.” She pointed with the guttering flame to a steep ladder descending into the earth.

“No,” he whined, imagining the “bad” and “evil” things awaiting him below there. He dug his heels into the ground, struggling against her greater strength.

“Never you mind that now,” she snapped and yanked him down into the earth behind her.

“WHO SAID THAT?”

“The chief of detectives.”

“Mulvaney? Go on. Mulvaney never said that. He made a statement to the press, but he never said we had a make on the car.”

“He said you had a green car with ‘distinctive features.’”

“Distinctive features’?” Mooney laughed. “That’s a big, vertical grille. Could be any of a half-dozen makes. What else did he say?”

Mooney stood outside on the pavement of East 84th Street in front of Fritzi’s Balloon. He’d just stepped out of a squad car that had dropped him off and was instantly besieged by hordes of reporters. A TV mobile unit was double-parked on the street while lines of backed-up, horn-honking Friday night traffic tried to get past.

Cameras and reporters weren’t Mooney’s strong suit. He did his best to affect a jaunty manner, but as the questions pelted him, he looked increasingly like a large bear treed by a pack of shrieking hounds.

“The car parked in front of the Torrelson residence that morning was green. A neighbor saw it. That’s all we know about it. We can’t even say for sure that was the vehicle the perpetrator came in.” He heard himself say that distinctively police word and felt embarrassed for having said it. “We don’t have an operator description. We don’t have a plate number, and we sure as hell don’t know enough about the grille or any other distinguishing marks to put a make on it. We think that it was an older vintage car in very good shape. We re checking with the Motor Vehicle Bureau and our own records to see if there’s any recently stolen vehicle fits that description.” He started to turn to go in but was again besieged by a barrage of new questions. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Fritzi and a bunch of his cronies all gathered at the front window to watch the press put him through his paces. Their presence there made him even more self-conscious.

“What’s this business about the assailant’s teeth, Frank?” the
Daily News
man asked.

Mooney shrugged and made a “who knows?” expression. “Only that teeth marks were found on some of the victims’ bodies.”

“The others had no teeth marks?”

“None that we know of.”

“So those murders could have been committed by someone else? A copycat maybe?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Mooney shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

A disembodied arm to which a CBS microphone was attached appeared out of the crowd and thrust the microphone beneath his nose. “There’s a rumor going around that this Shadow Dancer guy you’re looking for has two broken front teeth.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Mooney repeated evasively, his head starting to pound. “It’s just another possibility we re looking at.”

“What about the numbers, Frank?” the ABC man asked him. “Anybody figured out the numbers yet?”

“We’ve had mathematicians look at them … all kinds of experts. Nobody seems to know exactly what they mean. Or, if they mean anything at all.”

“They say you’ve finally got an ID on the girl found up in the park last month,” the
Times
reporter said. “Is there enough yet to confirm whether or not she was also a victim of this guy?”

Mooney paused. He felt his mind go blank and his vision momentarily blur. A wall of faces undulated like large underwater ferns before him. He was aware of a sharp impulse to turn and run.

“First of all, we re not sure who we re talking about — the Dancer or the copycat. There are some similarities,” he began haltingly, stalling to regain his thread of thought. “But there are dissimilarities, too. The other twelve attacks all took place in the victims’ homes. This one happened out-of-doors.”

“Who was she, Mooney?” one of the TV reporters asked. The cameras rolled in behind him. “Can you tell us something about her?”

“Only that she was a young woman working for a book agency here. Just out of school. It was her first job.”

“What about that Howard Beach job last week? Was that the Dancer, too?” another reporter shouted. “Could well be. We re looking into that now.”

A burst of three more questions, all shouted simultaneously, followed. Mooney flung his hands up in despair. “That’s it, guys. I told you all I know. That’s it for now.”

He swung his large square shoulders around and proceeded to wend his way through the crowd toward the revolving glass doors.

“Shit.” Warren Mars slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Son of a bitch.” Envy fueled with rage welled up in him as he watched the big detective turn his back on the crowd and swing through the big glass doors of the Balloon.

“Shit,” Warren muttered again and banged off the television, nearly dislodging it from the table. Who was this person, this copycat they all talked about? He’d love to get his hands on this slimy weasel who went about imitating him. Stealing his act. No sooner do you have success, he smoldered, than all these second-raters crawl out from under the rocks trying to rip you off. Doing your number. They might as well be in your bank account, for Chrissake.

Warren had been watching this character’s activity, whoever he was, for almost a year. He’d been reading about him in the newspapers and following his progress on the TV, and now when they were all starting to talk about a “pattern” and to take Warren seriously, that’s when this creep moved in, jealous for a piece of the action himself.

Now, the more attention Warren got, the bolder this copycat character seemed to get; the more he seemed to hover over Warren, following behind him, dogging his footsteps. Sometimes when Warren read about a new crime in the newspapers attributed to the Dancer that he knew he’d had nothing to do with, he’d go nearly crazy with rage.

Warren sprawled on his narrow bed beneath the grimy, rain-streaked cupola. The back of his head started to pound as the thought of this copycat gnawed at him and he tried to imagine ways of ferreting him out.

But shortly he was thinking about the TV news he’d just seen, and his dark mood shifted quickly. He was tickled and flattered by it. “They were talking about me. I’m the star of all this.” He laughed out loud. His face flushed with delighted embarrassment, like a person shown old snapshots of someone he didn’t recognize and then told it was himself.

He rose from the rumpled bed and prowled restlessly about the tiny room. Still full of the broadcast and the detective and all those reporters asking questions about him, he couldn’t get over the thought of the thousands of others glued to their TV screens just to see and hear about him. It wasn’t this copycat they were interested in; it was him.

He’d stumbled on the newscast quite by accident. He’d been watching a film,
Private’s Progress
with Ian Carmichael and Terry-Thomas — one of his favorites. He’d seen it seven times but had finally grown bored with it. He flicked the switch and there, suddenly, was this man — big and disheveled and undoubtedly tough — with all these reporters swarming like gnats about him. They were all shouting at once and talking about
him.

At first it was fright that he felt. He’d imagined they’d found something. There’d been a break. He’d been sloppy and had made a mistake. When it became apparent that he hadn’t, that they were as much in the dark as ever, he relaxed and started to enjoy the interview. He liked to hear all the various theories. Sometimes it made him laugh out loud. He was greatly flattered that he could be the focus of so much speculation amongst such seemingly important people.

About the detective, the man in charge of the investigation, he felt a nagging ambivalence. Initially, he disliked the man. Number one, he was the law, and that was reason enough to despise him. Number two, he was Warren’s adversary, the man whose principal responsibility was to seek him out, identify him, and ultimately, put him away where he could no longer harm anyone.

Oddly, however, he wished the man were more impressive. Mooney didn’t strike him as somehow important enough. He felt that the job, particularly the spectacular nature of it, warranted someone more imposing than this coarse, unkempt man who answered questions in a slow, halting way. Warren would have been happier with someone more suave and better dressed. Something more along the lines of William Powell doing his Nick Charles number.

All of this antipathy came at the beginning of the broadcast and in a great rush. Then gradually, the more the detective spoke, the more he felt his feelings swing the other way. He was flattered now to think that this grizzled old cop whom reporters addressed by his first name and cameras filmed could be interested in him. He liked Mooney’s sly smile and the low growl of his voice, that slightly unshaven look, just a tad this side of disreputability. The slow, halting manner of his replies he now took to be shrewdness and caginess; an angler skillfully playing the fish nibbling at the end of his hook.

Warren suddenly felt an unaccountable rush of affection for the man. He imagined they could find much to talk about together. He was sure they had lots in common. He’d love to sit and talk with the detective about some of his cases. There was a thing or two he could tell him about the way things really worked in this city. Things this cop and all the police never suspected and would give their eyeteeth to know.

It would be fun to know this Mooney. He knew there were things he could tell him in the strictest confidence, at which the cop wouldn’t bat an eye or think any the less of him for it.

As he lay back on his pillow, the pounding in his head subsided and he grew drowsy. It occurred to him he hadn’t slept in sixty hours. He’d been up and driving and going about his business all that while. Making his way in the world, just like everyone else.

His eyes fluttered and started to droop. He felt a blessed loosening of the limbs and a letting go. The feeling he experienced almost every waking moment of each day, that someone, something, was pursuing him, some faceless, nameless something he could never identify, for he could never glance back over his shoulder in time to see it — that feeling now at least for the time being had begun to subside.

His eyes closed. The sounds of the old woman moving about in the kitchen below wafted upward through the thick, musty attic air.

That night he dreamed of tall buildings, huge, untenanted shafts of steel and glass, with the sun slanting blindingly off them. Amid them, needle-pointed spires soared dizzyingly upward into a vault of cloudless, enamel-blue sky. Across the spangled water of the harbor, Sweet Liberty, with torch-bearing arm raised on high, watched like a
magna mater
over the dreaming city.