Shadow Dancers (36 page)

“Anybody watching Koops?” Mooney inquired, after they’d conferred.

“Who?”

“Koops. You remember. The kid we picked up on Bridge Street. The lineup?”

“Oh, sure.” Mulvaney sounded puzzled. “What about him?”

“What’s he been up to?”

“How the hell should I know? We pulled our tail off him the day we released him.”

“But I asked expressly —”

“To put a stake on him. I know. And I told you, I checked with our lawyers. They said absolutely not.” Mooney had to restrain himself from shouting. “I don’t see that at all.”

“You don’t? Was there any positive witness identification of Koops?”

“No.”

“Was there a prior arrest record?”

“No.”

“Did Washington show fingerprints or a possible alias on this kid?”

“No.”

“Then there was no legal basis to hold him. Right?”

“Right, but —”

“No buts, Frank. Our own counsel is scared stiff of this fancy-pants law firm that represents Koops. This Drummond has a reputation as a real flamethrower. Add to that, one day after we released Koops, the ACLU got on his case. All I need now is that crowd breathing down my neck. I can just see the headlines: ‘
POLICE CHARGE RETARDED YOUTH AS DANCER SUSPECT, THOUGH ADMIT NO EVIDENCE.
‘ ” Mulvaney’s snarl trailed off into bitter laughter.

“I’ve got a feeling about this Koops kid. Something about him …”

“You keep saying that, but you can’t tell me what.”

“I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. But there’s something there.” Even as he spoke he could hear how lame it must sound. “Why the hell would Koops wind up down on Bridge Street, watching that house night after night? You know where we got the address of that house?”

“Sure. Off the registration you got in the auto body shop from the alleged car of this alleged Dancer, who allegedly resided there at one time, but of whom you could find no real trace when you searched the alleged premises. Am I right, Frank, when I say this Bridge Street connection is pretty thin?”

“Okay,” Mooney conceded feebly. “But doesn’t it strike you just a bit odd this kid would be watching that particular house?”

“What’s odd about it? Nothing odd. That house is in the heart of the financial district. Thousands of people pass it every day. Why not Koops?”

“First of all, it wasn’t in the day. It was at night. Second, he didn’t just walk past it. He stood out in front of the place three nights in a row before they picked him up. That doesn’t sound like no coincidence to me.”

“Look, Frank.”

Mooney could sense the impatience in the chief of detectives’ voice.

“I’m telling you, we’ve got nothing on this kid. No justifiable basis for placing him under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance.”

“I grant you that.”

“But still you’ve got this bee in your bonnet about Koops being the copycat of the Dancer.”

“Or the Dancer himself. Why couldn’t he be?”

“Are you suggesting Koops and the Dancer know each other? A couple of old buddies trying to outdo each other on the just-for-kicks scale?”

“I didn’t say they know each other, but it sure looks like they’re watching each other pretty closely.”

“Why?” Mulvaney’s jaw jutted forward. “Just ‘cause we find this flake Koops down on Bridge Street watching some old fleabag house?”

Mooney’s face flamed with exasperation. “All I’m saying is if we’d kept a tail on Koops, like I asked, we’d have had an answer — the classic laboratory control situation. There’s a copycat factor operating here. That’s clear as day. And just on the outside chance that Koops is the copycat and had tried something while the Dancer was temporarily off stage up in New England, we could’ve learned a great deal. Now that opportunity is lost.”

There was another pause while each of them waited for the other to speak. It was Mulvaney who finally broke the silence. His voice was quiet and carried with it a note of weariness. “Look, Frank, I appreciate what you’re saying. But I’m not particularly impressed by it. I had no objection to keeping a tail on Koops. But I had no choice other than to act on the advice of our counsel. I was told expressly and in no uncertain terms to cool it. From our point of view and the D.A.‘s point of view, Koops is clear. Now forget it.”

The cast-iron lid with the portrait of the bearded man imprinted on its center rotated left, then right. It made a scraping, grinding sound as the rotation continued.

At last the lid rose, coming from a corner as if it were on a hinge. Bits of dirt and gravel rained downward along the edges. From beneath the partially elevated corner, a pair of hands appeared, raising the lid above the head that followed. Grunts and gasps whispered through the darkened cellar. A sharp clank resonated loudly as the lid, falling backward, struck the iron crowbar leaning against the wall behind it.

An oath, half whisper, half snarl, ripped through the rank shadows. This was followed by the emergence of a stooped figure rising out of the earth, beating dust and dirt from its arms. Warren Mars was home.

Recalling his hasty departure from Bridge Street with police searching the house, he thought it prudent to arrive the way he had departed that night nearly three months before. Through the tunnel. Taking no chances that the house might still be under surveillance.

Though it was early afternoon, the cellar was almost pitch-dark. Groping and fumbling his way up the stairway, the only light he had by which to orient himself was from the narrow little rectangular windows set into the foundation at ground level. The accumulated mud and grit of years had spattered the panes with a brown scurf and rendered them nearly opaque. All that penetrated them now was a pale gray diffusion of light.

Warren groped and fumbled across the cluttered dirt floor, winding his way through a precarious tangle of crates and barrels. Furiously, he swiped the filaments of broken cobwebs from his hair and pushed forward to the stone stairs leading up into the house.

At the top of the stairs he pushed the door open a crack and peered out, uncertain what he might encounter there. Since it was barely two
P.M.
, he expected Suki to be home, puttering in her kitchen or, possibly, even still asleep upstairs. The house, however, was strangely still. The solitary mewling of a cat somewhere in the upper reaches only served to emphasize the silence.

Then there was the smell. When he poked his head through the door, it struck him with almost palpable force. Like walking into a wall. There were times when he imagined that the smell was inside him, in his head, so sharp and pervasive that it permeated his skin and clothing. No amount of soap or scrubbing could cleanse him of it. It was a smell he had committed to memory. Thousands of miles away from it, he could summon it up and replicate it in his head, dismantle it into its component parts: mildew and rot, old threadbare fabric, clogged drains and broken plumbing, food decomposing on unwashed dishes, cat urine, and the sweetish fetor of uncollected trash. A vast medley of putrescence and mold.

She was not in the kitchen when he walked in there. Nor was she upstairs in her bedroom still asleep. She was nowhere in evidence, and, when he called out to her several times, the sound of his voice, tremulous and childlike, echoed back to him through the dusty vacancies. Something about it made him strangely uneasy. It was not her style to be out in the daytime, in broad daylight. She was a nocturnal creature. She shunned the sun, only feeling comfortable beneath streetlights and the moon.

It irritated him that she was not there to greet him after his long absence, particularly since his trip home had scarcely been pleasant. It had been fraught with peril and risk and there’d been a few close calls. Worst of all was the loss of his beloved Mother, and then he’d had to come home on a deliberately circuitous route that had taken him on dirty uncomfortable buses as far west as Schenectady and as far south as Atlantic City. All to evade what he felt certain was a police tail just behind him.

In addition to which, he had a deep, unsightly scratch on his face that had begun to fester beneath the Band-Aids he’d hastily applied after his brief scuffle with the hapless young man who’d been imprudent enough to offer him a ride. Now to return home after twelve weeks only to find there was no one to greet him was just about the last straw.

Warren started to prowl through the house, all the while growing increasingly infuriated with Suki’s absence. What right had she to be out at this time? Immediately, he suspected treachery. Perhaps she’d spoken to the police, had told them all she knew, then went off with them to some undisclosed “safe house” where she’d reside in perfect safety until they’d have him in custody. By the time he’d climbed up to the little attic room beneath the cupola, he was seething.

Eyes blazing, he banged into the room, half expecting to find her there. When he didn’t, it pleased him in that it served to heighten his sense of betrayal. He could imagine the most elaborate forms of treachery going on behind his back just then.

When he’d entered, he came fast through the door, as if intending to surprise a thief. But there was nothing there — nothing but the old familiar symmetry of light, shape, and shadow.

Sun streamed through the cupola glass overhead and the room was beastly hot. He stood there for a time, fists clenched, breathing hard and feeling a bit at a loss. The moment, with its anger and disappointment, cried out for some sort of action. What form exactly, he didn’t know.

When at last he could accept the fact that he was alone, he started to move quickly about the room. First in short, fierce thrusts, snarling half-turns, as if still challenging the disagreeable state of things presented him there at that moment. His eyes ranged avidly over the place. Something about the appearance of things, something vague and intangible, felt altered. It was not alteration in some minor way, either, but in some large, irrevocable way that he found threatening.

The more he spun and thrust and jerked about, like a child blindfolded in a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, the more he was gripped with the growing conviction that something significant had occurred in his absence. And yet, for all of its significance, whatever it was, it remained to him stubbornly elusive.

He recalled having fled the room that day several months ago. Suki had awakened him, informed him there were police on the street out in front of the house. He had gone in haste, he recalled. The room that he left was in a state of great disorder. The room as it appeared now was a model of decorum. The bed had been made. The various odds and ends of his clothing — socks and underwear, discarded sneakers — generally strewn about, were nowhere to be seen. Left in their place was an order he was not accustomed to. More than anything, it was this that filled him with a growing sense of estrangement.

In the next moment his eye glimpsed a corner of the closet. It was the single closet in the room and the door of it stood slightly ajar. The quick glimpse he had of the interior was just a narrow wedge of it, the part just visible where the door hung open. Gazing at it, he knew at once there was something awry.

He stood there baffled by the peculiar unfamiliarity of the image, his head tilted sideways as if to see it from another perspective. It was then that it occurred to him that the closet was empty.

Something inside him seemed to snap. In the next moment, he lunged at the door, yanking it open. He’d not been mistaken. The closet, nearly full to capacity when he’d left, now stood cold and bare. All of his clothing was gone. The plain pine bar from which shirts and trousers had hung was stripped, the wire hangers on it clanging lightly against each other.

A rickety wicker chair stood within arm’s length. Warren grabbed it, dragging it across the uncarpeted floor and banging it down beneath the ceiling light fixture. Scrambling up onto it, his hands tore at the frosted globe of the fixture as he struggled to unscrew it from its cheap brass housing.

Then, suddenly, the globe was off in his hands, dust rising slowly from inside it. He turned it upside down and shook it. From within it, the desiccated husks of moths and flies drifted languidly down onto the floor beneath the chair. Other than that, the globe was empty. But there was no need for him to dismantle the fixture to know that. He’d known it the moment he’d scrambled up on the chair, or, possibly, before that when he’d had his first glimpse of the empty closet. He knew what he’d sought there was gone. And he knew who took it. In point of fact, he’d been evicted and all of his belongings confiscated.

A rosy flush flamed across his throat and cheeks. There was a sense of uncomfortable congestion in his chest, as if he had to cough badly. When he tried to cough, it was more like a scream that emerged, a kind of strangled yawp that finally broke from his mouth.

When he leaped from the chair, he gave the peculiar impression of being in flight. The recoil of the leap sent the chair hurtling backward, crashing against the wall. Clattering down the stairs, muttering obscenities, he could still hear it echoing through the empty house.

Suki Klink toddled up the walk to her house on Bridge Street. She hummed an old Irish jig as she went. The wind blustering at her back propelled her along, billowing her multifold skirts about her. The night’s pickings had been exceedingly good. The rusty old shopping cart with its wobbly wheels that she pushed before her was filled to overflowing with the assorted treasures gleaned from her rummagings. Aside from the usual complement of old magazines and plastic deposit bottles, she’d also managed to salvage from dozens of trashcans about the terminal several pairs of discarded shoes; a macramé holder for hanging plants; a beaded cushion, punctured and nearly eviscerated of its soiled stuffings; a vase of plastic poppies; a tire iron; and a red rubber enema bag. In the days ahead, she would manage in her canny way to convert it all to cash.

Through the bitter, blustery early morning, she could hear the wind soughing out of the west over the choppy waters of the Verrazano inlet. She watched it lean heavily on the old azaleas and frozen rhododendrons around the porch, cuffing them harshly and rattling their dry branches against the house.