Shadow Dancers (28 page)

The two detectives moved on the step outside, each deferring to the other, until finally Mooney mumbled something and stepped into the rank shadows.

“Not used to strangers comin’ through here.” Suki led them in through the front hallway. She dragged a foot behind her as though she were lame. In the last several minutes she’d grown more stooped than ever.

“I’ll bet,” Mooney replied. He trod cautiously around the dried cat stools and assorted mess littered over the floors. A fetor of something sweet and rotten hung in a haze above the little sitting room into which the old woman led them.

With a crooked, trembling finger, she indicated a pair of frayed Morris chairs, their seats sprung and the gray horsehair innards spilling out. “Have a seat.”

Mooney scowled down at the chair and waved the suggestion aside. “How long you been here, mother?” Suki let herself slowly down with a groan onto a four-foot bundle of old
Life
magazines trussed up with clothesline. “Maybe forty-five years now. Come here with my husband, nineteen forty-two.”

Pickering consulted his pad. “His name was Klink?”

“Fred Klink. Friends called him Freddy. Left me this place when he died so’s I’d never be out on the street. I own it free and clear.” The old lady’s back stiffened as she proclaimed this and she glowered straight at Mooney. “Bank’d just love to take it from me. Let ‘em try. They’ll rue the day.”

Something in the way she’d said it made Mooney believe they would. Even though the sun was shining outside, it was dark in the room. One of the windows was cracked and had been covered over with a sheet of corrugated cardboard. The other three were grimed, almost glazed hard with a coating of soot.

“How old’s this place?” Mooney gazed up at the wormy timbered beams that braced the sagging ceiling.

“‘Bout a hundred and fifty years. Built during the Polk administration.”

“Didn’t think there were too many more of these around,” Pickering said.

“There aren’t,” the old lady snapped back with that edge of pride and defiance. “President Polk took tea here once,” she boasted.

“How much land you sitting on, mother?” Mooney inquired.

“Near three acres.”

Pickering whistled. “Three acres in the financial district. No wonder the bank wants it. You must be some kind of millionaire.”

“If I am, sonny, I sure got nothin’ to show for it.” She made a short, gruff noise that might have been a laugh.

“That’s for sure,” Mooney mumbled.

“Beg pardon?”

“Nothing. Just thinking aloud. You here all by yourself?”

“That’s right. Been that way since Mr. Klink, God rest him, passed on.”

“The name Donald Briggs mean anything to you?”

“Who?”

“Briggs. Donald Briggs.”

She cocked an eye at him, her tongue darting across her lips. “Briggs? No. Can’t say it does. Should it?”

Mooney moved across to the window and peered out through the grimy panes. “You got a garage here? A car?”

She started to laugh, then broke off suddenly as though she’d thought better of it. “Do I look like the sort drives a car?”

Mooney regarded her through the dim, rancid air. “I get your point.... Mind if we have a look around?” She looked back and forth from one to the other of them, wariness gathering itself about her like a cloak. “Wouldn’t make no difference if I did, would it?”

“You’ve got a right to insist on a warrant,” Pickering said. “We don’t have one with us now, but we can get one in twenty-four hours.”

“Don’t bother on my score, sonny.” She groaned and rose creaking to her feet. “Just don’t make a mess of things,” she said and hobbled out.

The two men stood alone in the room, gazing about in dismay at the filth and disorder.

By then Mooney had given up all real hope of finding anything there. Driving up to the house that day, they’d scoured Bridge Street for a vintage Mercedes of any color and found no sign of one. There was no garage to the house, not even a driveway. Nor was there anyplace around back where a car might be driven and concealed from the street.

Pickering was discouraged, too. You could see it in the young man’s face, lined and tired — looking a bit sheepish and contrite. Though he’d not discussed it with Mooney, he’d already come to many of the same conclusions regarding the house and its peculiar owner. Their “look around” was just that. Perfunctory and glum, as though they were merely going through the motions in order to file a report. They prowled through the lower floor, peering into rooms, skirting litter and cartons, opening closets reeking of camphor and mold that hadn’t been opened for years.

Their way took them through the old lady’s kitchen where, amidst the yowling of hungry cats, Suki was sorting foliage and botanical specimens, tagging each and dropping them into canisters and old jam jars, their contents identified in spidery ballpoint letters on dirty strips of adhesive tape.

On the stovetop, a huge old dented caldron simmered with a thick vapory fluid. It had formed a frothy scum at the top, lapping at the pot rim like a crater full of lava about to blow. The haze above the room was choking, causing the two detectives to seek relief in the upper reaches of the house. They found nothing on the second floor more controversial than the dusty old room beneath the eves where Suki dwelled in awesome disarray. His big pawlike hand covering his mouth and nose, Mooney pondered the massive wooden headboard of the bed, with its grotesque gargoyles staring down at him like demon totems. They moved through the room like swimmers breaststroking, pushing aside cobwebs, making their way to the door.

There were two additional rooms on the second floor and a dank privy with a cracked commode and a ring of filth at its bottom. At the place where it was anchored to the floor, water leaked out, a brownish, lackadaisical trickle.

The doors to the other two rooms were closed. When opened, they revealed no more than additional storage space used to warehouse cartons and boxes of clothes, stacks of old newspapers, some dating back to the forties.
Life
magazine with the smiling ghostly portraits of the great and near-great leaped up at them out of the shadows. Charles Lindbergh. Pierpont Morgan scowling above his huge red, tumid nose. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in three-quarter profile, dapper in a soft gray fedora, a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth. Winston Churchill, cigar in mouth, a pug dog on his arm, a twinkly curmudgeon. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio in the blissful first blush of early matrimony.

There was electricity but no lamps, only some ceiling fixtures, mostly without bulbs, to illuminate the upper stories. They groped about in the dense shadows, colliding with boxes and strips of flypaper dangling from the ceiling, still covered with the dried husks of their hapless victims.

“Let’s get the hell out of this.” Mooney swatted a lacy cobweb draped in his path.

Out on the landing, just before they were about to go down, they saw the little extension ladder leading up to the cupola room.

Pickering glowered up through a mote-filled sunbeam.

“What do you suppose that is?”

“More shit.”

“Better have a look, anyway.”

Because of the glass cupola and the lack of a window to ventilate the area, the room above was nearly twenty degrees warmer than those on the first and second stories.

Covering their mouths and noses from the dust and smell of sour bedding, they stepped in. Mooney’s eyes ranged up the walls and ceiling, then dropped to the bed. “Who the hell sleeps here?”

“The old dame, probably.”

“I thought she slept in the bedroom downstairs.” Mooney opened the closet and gazed at the clothing hanging there. “Don’t look like old lady’s clothes to me.”

Pickering gazed blankly back at him. They stood there a moment pondering the question.

“Let’s get out of here before we’re cooked alive.” Mooney started to back down the extension ladder, which swayed ominously beneath his weight.

Down in the kitchen again, Mooney asked the old lady, “Who sleeps in the little room up under the dome?”

“I do,” Suki replied instantly.

“Then who sleeps in the big bedroom on the second floor?”

“I do. Used to be Mr. Klink’s room and mine before he died. I still use it from time to time. When the mood suits me.”

“Whose clothing was that hanging in the closet up there?” Mooney asked.

“Mr. Klink’s — I keep everything of his just as he left it.” She looked at them smiling as though pleased with the facility of her reply, then changed the subject quickly. “You boys find what you’re lookin’ for?”

“There a cellar here?” Mooney asked, ignoring her question.

“Sure.”

“Where’s it at?”

“Under your feet, just like any other.”

Mooney scowled at her. “How do we get to it?”

“Little door just under the stairs.”

“Anything down there?” Pickering asked.

“Just the same as up here.”

“Oh?” Mooney grumbled. By that time he was smoldering. “We’ll have a look, anyway.”

“No lights down there,” Suki said. “Better take this.” She took a candle and a holder from the shelf above the stove and lit the wick from the gas flame. Then she led them out to the cellar stair.

The two men had to stoop beneath the shallow lintel of the little doorway, then trundled down the narrow stone stairs.

Once at the bottom, they stood in the damp, strangely icy air with the candle flame guttering before them. Mooney held it above his head and peered into the cluttered murkiness. A thin veil of light filtered down from the grimy little half-windows set in the stone foundation above them. “God,” the detective muttered, “would you believe this?”

Pickering kicked disconsolately at something on the floor.

“Cold as a crypt down here.” Mooney started to edge his way between a pair of broken old chifforobes, one listing dangerously on only three legs. At the sound of something scurrying over the dirt floor, he lunged back. “Rats,” he snarled at the unwelcoming shadows. “I’ve had it. Let’s blow this joint.”

Upstairs, the old lady was still puttering about with her phials and canisters when the two detectives reappeared. She made a point of ignoring them as she went about pouring a sticky amber philtre from one beakered vessel into another.

“You’ve got no garage around the back?” Mooney asked.

“I said I didn’t before.”

Mooney whisked cinder dust from his shoulders.

“You sure you don’t know no Donald Briggs?” Pickering asked a little hopelessly.

“Name means nothin’ to me.”

The two men hovered there uncertainly as though unsure where to proceed next.

“That all?” Suki helped them along.

Mooney shrugged his shoulders. “I guess so. By the way, you’ve got rats in your cellar.”

“Always had,” Suki replied phlegmatically. “They don’t bother no one. Besides, they nourish the cats.”

There seemed little more to say. Abject, the two detectives skulked out and down the weedy brick walk to where the unmarked squad car awaited them.

“Ditsy,” Pickering muttered when they’d settled back in their seats.

Mooney sat grim and unspeaking, watching the sooty, humped skyline of Bridge Street roll past the window.

“Never saw nothin’ like that,” Pickering went on, full of childish wonder.

“What the hell was she cooking in that pot?”

“Looked like a mess of grass to me.”

“Did you get a whiff of it?” Mooney asked.

“All I could smell was cat piss all over the place.”

Mooney stared out the window, watching the tide of life teeming up and down Pine Street. “I smelled it, all right.” His voice was quiet, expressionless. “Smelled medicinal. Earthy. Herbal. I’ve smelled something like that before. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Pickering was unimpressed. Mooney went on ruminating aloud. “She took the lid of that pot off to stir it. That’s when I got a blast of it. Made me a little dizzy for a second.”

The car moved north, through the choked and snarling late-afternoon traffic.

“You didn’t happen to get a look at her eyes, did you?” Mooney asked suddenly.

The question brought Pickering up. “Looked like curdled cheese to me.”

“I bet that old dame is on something. She was flying.”

“On a broomstick, if you ask me.”

“Looked like she was brewing a mess of pot there. Whatever kind of junk it is, she’s on it, too.”

“Did you believe her?” Pickering asked.

“About this Briggs character?” Mooney reflected. “I don’t know. Could be. Sure as hell wasn’t no Mercedes parked out front. The clothes in that attic closet didn’t look like her old man’s clothes, either.”

They were moving up Chambers Street toward Nassau, making their way to Police Plaza.

“What am I supposed to tell Mulvaney?” Mooney asked. He appeared uneasy at the prospect of reporting another “no progress” to the chief of detectives. He was sorely aware that by then, he’d used up nearly half of the ninety days allotted to him to close the case, and that Eddie Sylvestri, hot and eager, was waiting in the wings.

“Tell him about the auto body shop and the line we got on the car,” Pickering suggested. “Tell him about Berrida and the description we got on the guy who sold him the software components. Tell him to hold his water, is what I say.”

“You tell him that.” Mooney scowled out the window. “What about the old lady just now?”

“Sure. Tell him all that. Sounds like progress, even if it’s not. What about the stuff we got from the M.E.?” Mooney made a disparaging sound with his lips. “He knows all of that by now. The broken front teeth. The fix on the blood types. The conflicting descriptions.”

“And still he’s not satisfied?”

“What’s to be satisfied? We’ve known all that for weeks.”

They sat there smoldering in stalled traffic while horns blared all about them. “How do you like that old dame?” Mooney asked suddenly. “Living like a hedgehog in that dump. Owns three acres of New York’s financial district.”

“Rich as Croesus.” Pickering laughed. “Living in a shit house.”

“Let’s run a check on that registration you got from the body shop.”

“We already did. How d’ya think we got to Bridge Street?”