Shadow Dancers (40 page)

“Remarkable.” Konig winked at his young assistant. “Isn’t that remarkable, Dr. Winger?” He turned back to Mooney.

“Would you care to point out for us now, lieutenant, what characteristics are common to all three views?” Mooney glowered. He appeared to be swelling when he stooped once more to the viewing box and squinted at the illuminated images floating there.

He studied the slides for a moment, twisting his lips from side to side as he did so. Then, standing erect once more and straightening his shoulders, he spoke: “On the outside I see four consecutive studs worn flat on all three sides. On the inside shank, separated by a channel in the vicinity of the vamp, I see two more worn studs, separated by one that appears not at all worn.”

Konig and Dr. Winger stood silently by, their arms folded, appearing mildly amused.

“Splendid,” the M.E. enthused. “In that case, Dr. Winger, would you kindly produce the fourth specimen?”

The young woman withdrew another slide from her desk drawer and mounted it in a conspicuous position amid the other slides on the light box. “This one is a photo of the boot sole markings we found on Michael Mancuso’s right hand.”

“Michael who?”

“Mancuso.” She smiled at Mooney. “The gentleman you saw laid out there a few minutes ago. Would you care to examine the red circled markings I’ve indicated here?” Mooney and Pickering exchanged quick glances. It was the first time during the course of their interview that Mooney betrayed confusion.

“Take it from me, lieutenant, he was a prince. Everyone here was crazy about him. He was a sweetheart.”

“No enemies? No grudges? No gambling debts?”

“Clean. Mickey was clean. Absolutely spotless. If I ever find the son of a bitch …”

The wind up on the seventieth floor of the partially completed United Mercantile Building whistled through the naked beams and girders. They were standing in the protective lee of a canvas tarpaulin wrapped three quarters of the way around the structure. The winds pummeling it from outside caused it to billow and flap, periodically producing a loud, concussive sound not unlike a cannon shot.

“Believe me,” Mr. Gus DeAngeles, the construction foreman, went on, “I never had this kind of thing happen to me on any kind of job I ever ran before. We don’t tolerate that kind of thing up here. Ask anyone. Troublemakers, I don’t tolerate. I see a troublemaker, I throw him the hell out. He can’t work for me.”

“Then you’re pretty sure this guy up on the platform with Mancuso was not one of your people?” Pickering asked.

“Never. Could never be. Like I say, how this
strónzo
ever got up here on the site without a pass, I don’t know. But I’m sure as hell gonna find out, and there’s gonna be hell to pay for some poor son of a bitch. You better believe it. And I still haven’t forgotten that puss-head who stood around up here with his fingers up his ass and watched.”

Suddenly caught up in a swirl of emotions, Mr. DeAngeles looked away. “You already talked to Pendowski, I s’pose.”

“You mean the electrician who witnessed it?”

“That’s right.”

“We spoke to him.” Mooney nodded. “He told us essentially the same story he told the guys from Midtown North. It checks out all right.” Mooney stared off at the Jersey skyline so as not to see the teary red eyes of Mr. DeAngeles.

“That kid was just like my own.” The foreman sniffled noisily. “I treated him like he was one of my own kids. I knew his dad, Vinnie. Was a welder, too. Used to work with me over the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Sweetheart of a guy. A real gent. And you know, the kid was just about to get married.”

“That’s rough,” Pickering commiserated, putting on his best long face.

“Planning a Christmas wedding, they were.” The foreman flapped open a crumpled red handkerchief and honked loudly into it.

“Weren’t having no troubles, were they?” Mooney inquired. “No little lovers’ spats?”

“Nothing. Nothing like that.” Mr. DeAngeles banished the notion with an abrupt chopping motion in the frigid air. “These kids were crazy about each other.”

“What’s her name?”

The foreman’s mouth dropped open in puzzlement. “Who?”

“The girl. Mancuso’s girl.”

“Oh.” There was a pause as Mr. DeAngeles resonated into his handkerchief again.

The two detectives watched while he attempted to dredge the name up from the past. “Ain’t that funny? It’s right on the tip on my tongue. Jean. Jane, something. How do you like that? I just saw her yesterday. We was all over to the morgue together. Identifying the remains …”

The mere mention of the word was too much for the man. His eyes filled again. “Oh shit.
Man naggia mia.
Ain’t this somethin’? You gotta forgive me, goin’ on this way. Thirty years I’m doin’ this work, I never seen nothin’ like this.”

Mooney waited patiently for him to regain his composure. “You were about to tell me the girl s name.”

“The girl? Oh, sure, the girl. I got it right over here in some papers. What’s she got to do with it?”

“Probably nothing.” They started toward a little cubicle, hastily erected and comprised of a desk, a chair, files, and a telephone. “But it wouldn’t hurt to talk with her.” They crowded into the breezy little area, with its desktop littered with ashtrays and paper coffee cups. Mr. DeAngeles, too big for his chair, took his place behind the desk with sudden pomposity. “Couple of weeks ago he asked me to switch the beneficiary on his union life insurance policy.”

Mooney’s ears perked. “He did?”

“From who to who?” Pickering followed up quickly. “To this girl I was telling you about. The one he was marrying. He switched it from his mother.”

The foreman hunched above his file drawers, riffled through them quickly. “Yeah, sure. Here it is. Michael Mancuso, as policy owner, to Janine McConkey, as sole beneficiary. That’s capital M, small
c.”
The foreman spelled it out with agonizing deliberation.

“Got an address on that, too?” Mooney asked. He was shivering in the blustery, frozen air and anxious to be gone.

“Sure. That’s one twelve East One Hundred and Third Street. But take my word for it: these kids are clean. Both of them.”

“Sure,” Mooney said, extending his hand. “Thanks for your time.”

“Very nice people. Very quiet. Never had no problems with them. Respectable. Polite. Always paid their rent on time.”

The building manager at 103rd Street and Madison Avenue on the fringes of Carnegie Hill was a dignified black gentleman by the name of Mr. Tudor. They sat in the tidy coziness of his ground-floor office, drinking coffee as an electric floor heater hissing away warmed their frozen feet.

“It’s a coincidence your coming in here just now,” Mr. Tudor continued. “I just found this on my desk this morning.”

He slid a small white envelope across the desktop toward Mooney. The detective picked it up, holding it tentatively between two fingers. “Is it okay if I read it?”

“If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have offered it.” Mr. Tudor’s toothy smile glowed warmly.

Inside, Mooney found the check with three months’ rent and a letter of sketchy explanation. When he finished, he stared up at the building manager. “She left in an awful big hurry, didn’t she? She give any reason? She leave a forwarding address? Anything?”

“All I know is what you got right there in your hand.”

“From the letter it sounds like she plans to be back in, maybe, three months.”

“Sounds that way. Awful business the way that boy died like that. I guess it shook her up pretty bad.”

“I guess so.” Mooney nodded and there was a somber moment of obligatory silence to acknowledge the awfulness of things in general. “Still,” Mooney persisted, getting back to the nitty gritty of business, “she was sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy, a hundred thousand bucks, face value. And she did pull out of here awful fast.”

“Could be she just went off to stay with relatives awhile.” Mr. Tudor preferred a more charitable explanation.

“Or could be she was scared of something and had to get out quick,” Pickering suggested.

They were silent for a moment, all of them regarding each other warily.

“I don’t suppose we could have a look at the apartment?” Mooney asked.

“I’m not supposed to let anyone into any apartment without authorization from the tenant direct.”

“Or a warrant from the district attorney’s office,” Mooney added pointedly.

Mr. Tudor caught the implied threat in the detective’s voice.

“I could have one in twenty-four hours,” Mooney went on solicitously, full of sympathy for Mr. Tudor’s predicament. “But it’s a shame to lose time while the trail’s hot.” The building manager frowned his disapproval. “That girl’s done nothing wrong. You’re wasting your time, lieutenant.”

“Maybe,” Mooney conceded. “But I’m still gonna have a look at that apartment to put my own mind at rest. Either now or twenty-four hours from now.”

“She’s not a suspect, is she?”

“Not in this Mancuso business, which isn’t in my jurisdiction anyway. But she may very well be in something else I’m working on at the moment, and which I’m not at liberty to disclose. So, as of now, I’m treating Miss McConkey as a suspect.”

Mr. Tudor looked back and forth from Mooney to Pickering, his face marked clearly with the conflict he was trying to resolve. At last he spoke: “Let me make a call, will you?”

While they sat there across from him, he called the landlord’s office, explained the situation, and was granted permission to open the apartment.

Several minutes later they had ascended in a rickety coffinlike elevator to the sixth floor and were rummaging about in the cramped confines of the little studio dwelling.

It consisted of a single room and a kitchenette. It took them barely any time to go through it. As they went about their work, Mr. Tudor hovered in the background, clearly uneasy with the part he was playing there.

She had undoubtedly left in a great hurry. The drawers were still full. Food had been left in the refrigerator, which was still cool, even though it had been disconnected.

Mooney had started with the closets, Pickering with the drawers. There was one large, battered old chifforobe. The upper two drawers contained male clothing: socks, handkerchiefs, underwear, etc.; the lower two were female.

Pickering discovered nothing there and moved on to a desk. The top drawers contained bills, check stubs, and a stack of American Express receipts bound with a thick rubber band. There were, in addition, pens and pencils and paper clips.

The drawers on either side of the well were filled with manila folders upon the front of which a variety of categories had been entered in large bold capital letters:
HOUSE PAPERS, PERSONAL PAPERS, INCOME TAX
. One had been designated
WEDDING PAPERS
and contained contracts executed with a catering hall in Brooklyn, two airline tickets to Bermuda, blood tests from the Board of Health, and various related documents. Sifting through it all, Pickering had found nothing.

Meanwhile, Mooney had moved on into the kitchen where Pickering joined him, followed by Mr. Tudor, looking quite glum by then.

Mooney at that moment was going through the upper cabinets. Pickering turned his attention to the lower ones. For the most part, they contained no more than the most prosaic of cooking utensils: pots and pans, cookie sheets, Pyrex plates, several Mason jars. As he went about his work, Pickering had been kneeling, his knees feeling the effect of cramp. Mooney had quit the upper cabinets and was back in the living room running his big, meaty hands beneath upholstery cushions and drapery cornices.

Just on the verge of quitting, Pickering’s wrist happened to dislodge a copper omelet pan from its place, revealing beneath it a small square of crumpled white paper that had been folded neatly into eighths. He unfolded it and proceeded to read the writing that appeared there. A minute or two later he was back out in the living room, flagging it excitedly at Mooney.

“Dear Janine,” Mooney started to mumble half beneath his breath. “I still think of you. Don’t be scared. Not in the bad old way, but the way it was …”

When he finished reading he looked up, the crumpled square of paper trembling in his hand.

Pickering was grinning broadly. “Did you get a load of the handwriting?”

Mooney gazed back at him blankly, not answering the question. Instead, he shot back, “Let’s get an all-points out on this McConkey kid right away.”

ARLETTE COLES MOVED SMARTLY DOWN
Smith Street in the Marble Hill section of Brooklyn. Despite the fact that it was two in the morning and the streets were deserted, she was not uneasy. It wasn’t her custom to be uneasy. In her time, she’d been in a lot more questionable situations and always managed to come out on both feet.

A striking, statuesque black woman, she’d never married and did not regret the fact. For a girl who’d barely finished high school, at thirty-six she’d come a considerable way. Having served two years in Panama with the U.S. Army, she’d parlayed her mustering-out pay into a prosperous little beauty salon in this rapidly gentrifying area and was looking for another location to open up a second.

If she had one great passion in life, it was ballroom dancing, which was frequently the cause for her arriving home at such late hours. She was an assiduous participant in dance competitions all about the city.

That morning the sound of her heels with the metal taps on the toes rang through the vacant streets. Her shoes made rapid, vibrant clicks on the concrete, almost as though they were still joyously battering the dance floor. If she was feeling particularly good that evening, she had reason to. She’d come off with the second prize trophy (a twelve-inch dipped bronze figurine of a fandango dancer) in a hotly contested tango competition.

The trim little brownstone, enclosed by its freshly painted white wrought-iron fence, that served as her home glowed its welcome to her at the top of the hill. She’d just purchased it the year before from its former owner with a 40 percent down payment to the bank and a twenty-year mortgage.

For a child who’d grown up in hard times with no advantages other than loving parents who’d been able to bequeath her only a strong sense of her own personal worth, Arlette had done herself proud.