Shadow Dancers (8 page)

They were standing in a stairwell on the thirtieth floor of 430 West 57th Street.

“This the only stairwell on the floor?” Mooney asked. “That’s right. That’s the way they built them in nineteen twelve. Nowadays the fire code insists on a fire exit as well.”

Mooney gave the doorknob several sharp twists. “And the door’s always kept locked on the stairwell side like this?”

“If it wasn’t, we’d have every creep on Fifty-seventh Street flitting around up here. As it is …” His voice trailed off and he glanced at the two policemen uneasily. “I guess I don’t have to tell you people.”

Mooney sensed in the small, dapper figure before him another solid citizen, eager to inform a member of the local constabulary how badly they were doing their job.

“That washroom she was going to at the time …” He doodled in his pad. “That’s the only one on this floor?”

“Only women’s room. There’s a men’s room too. There are just eight tenants on the floor. You can’t get into them without a key.”

“Then he must’ve come up on the elevator,” Pickering said, “since those stairwell doors are always locked.”

Crane nodded. “I’d say so. Must’ve been just getting off the elevator when she stepped out of the office on her way to the washroom.”

“And that’s when he grabbed her and pulled her in here?”

“That’s essentially it. At least, that’s the story she told the police afterward.”

“He must’ve had to go all the way back down the steps, thirty flights to get out, since he couldn’t get back into the hall through this door,” Pickering added thoughtfully.

Mooney stared upward into the shadowy well soaring thirty more flights above them. “Nobody heard anything?”

“Only after. When he’d left. Then we heard her screaming and pounding on the door to get back into the hall.”

“Probably kept her quiet with that knife.”

“It was a big knife, she said.”

Mooney nodded. “We have a description of it.”

“It was awful,” Crane said, and for the first time that morning, he appeared shaken. “Clothes torn. Pretty well banged up. Hysterical.”

“Anyone else get a look at him besides her?” Mooney asked. “What about the elevator man?”

“We haven’t had an elevator operator here for twenty years. These things are all automatic now.”

“But you’ve got a dispatcher downstairs,” Pickering said.

“We always have one or two on duty. But they don’t notice who comes or goes.”

“No strange, odd-looking characters?”

Crane’s features formed a funny, pained expression. “Ever get a load of some of these messengers that promenade around the city nowadays?”

“I get your point,” Mooney snapped, dismissing the line of questioning.

“She gave a fairly good description to the police, though,” Crane added.

Mooney sighed and flicked several pages back in his pad. He started to read aloud. “Blond hair. Caucasian. Average height — five eight, five nine — weight approximately a hundred fifty pounds. Wore a full-length, dark-brown leather coat over jeans. A Basque shirt. Was extremely polite.
Apologetic
was Miss Bailey’s word.” Mooney snapped the pad shut. “I guess that’s about it.” They started back slowly up the steps through the airless, dimly lit stairwell.

“She never did make an identification, did she?”

Crane took out a key and proceeded to unlock the hall door.

“The chief at Midtown South said she came down to a couple of lineups with guys pretty much fitting that general description and with known records for sex offenses. She couldn’t recognize anyone. Just too jumpy by then, I guess.”

They stepped back out onto the floor and strolled toward a door with Crane, Poole, Inc., and Member SAR, ILAA stenciled in black letters on a frosted glass window.

“Christ, wouldn’t you be?” Crane fretted. “Young kid like that. Right out of school. Twenty-two years old. First job in New York. Assaulted in a goddamned stairwell at knife point. Then suddenly she starts seeing this guy in all kinds of places. Outside on the street when she goes out to lunch. Lurking in doorways near her apartment. Clearly following her around. Just waiting for a chance to grab her again. And each time she calls the police they don’t do a damned thing.”

Mooney sighed. He could see where this was leading. “It’s a big city, Mr. Crane. Lot of funny people walking around off the leash, as you say. The police answered her calls three times. Never found anything.”

“Well, if it takes them twenty minutes to get over here, of course —”

“They were there inside of five to six minutes each time.”

“That isn’t what she said.”

“I’ve got the operations reports right here.” Mooney spoke with gruff persistence. “The girl herself claimed she’d only get quick glimpses of the guy, then he’d be gone.”

“All right,” Crane conceded. “All right.” His head drooped and he appeared momentarily contrite. “It’s just a damned shame when people get into trouble in this city, real trouble, and go to the police. The police don’t exactly break their necks to help.”

“She could’ve just been imagining things,” Pickering said reasonably. “She was in a pretty bad state of mind by then.”

By that time Mr. Crane was grinding his teeth. “I hope you didn’t say that to her parents when they came down to identify the body.” He yanked open the door to his office. “Has anyone spoken to her family?”

“I did.” Mooney’s voice was barely a whisper. “Thanks very much for your help.” Mooney thrust a hand toward him. Crane stared at the big red paw for a moment as if faintly repelled by it. At last he thrust out his hand begrudgingly.

Mooney shook the limp, bony hand. “Just one more thing, if you don’t mind. Miss Bailey — she didn’t happen to say anything about this fellow’s teeth?”

Crane stared at him, bemused.

“Did she say they were stained or broken? Anything like that?”

He considered that a moment, then shrugged. “No. Nothing like that at all.”

I still think of you. Don’t be scared. Not in the bad old way, but in the way it was (or in the way I used to think it was) before all that … business. I regret it now. My memory of things is shot. Today, for a change, it’s okay, and I see your face … actually see it. But only when I say your name. Will you believe there are days when I can’t get your face into my head? Try as I may to dredge it up … use tricks like imagining you the way you looked at certain times, all I can manage is a land of fuzzy outline, all runny and plugged with light, like a photo over-exposed.

My life is still pretty much the same. I drive around all day and sometimes all night. I eat in the car and sleep in it. I let it take me where it wants. Sometimes we go for hours, up and down the state. All the way to the border on up into Canada. We cruise around up there a bit, then turn back.

We play a game together, Mother and me, in which I try to guess where she’s taking me while she tries to keep from me our destination. Sometimes she surprises me, but mostly in the end I figure her out. Sometimes we’ll go for hours, stopping maybe just for gas, then start again. No food. No sleep. Happy as larks, we two. Not on pills like in the bad old days. Just on myself. Me and Mother. Mother sends her best. She turned 160,000 miles the other day, and still pretty as when I first saw her. Then it was you and me and her. The Holy Trinity, we used to say. I sometimes think, if things were different, if the past weren’t what it was, we could … still … But no, I’m older now and I know better.

My routine is still … well, you know … pretty much the same. Like what it was when we were together. I look for places with a window open, or a door half-shut. Like where someone has just gone in, but not yet closed the door. Like maybe someone with packages they haven’t yet put down. That’s the easiest. I’ve gotten so I can tell when a window or a door is unlocked, even when it isn’t open. I can even tell fifty or a hundred feet off, or whizzing by at sixty in a car on the speedway, if a window is unlatched.

It’s gotten to be a kind of instinct with me. I can always tell if something’s gonna be good. You look at a place and you can pretty much tell from the condition of things outside what you can expect once you get in. Like, how recent it’s been painted, if the lawn’s mowed, if the shades are up or down in the middle of the day, or if the mailbox is so jammed that all the mail and newspapers and stuff are scattered on the ground around it.

You’d be amazed what you can tell from the garden, from plants and things. Folks who’ve got a lot of bread to stick in the ground also have a lot of great stuff sitting around inside, just waiting for someone like me. Tires, VCRs, PCs, cameras, super audio stuff. Stuff like that you can just throw in the trunk of your car and turn over quick for cash, no questions asked.

I don’t feel bad about things I’ve done. I feel good about them. Not everyone could’ve done those things. Not everyone has the guts for it. I’m no different from all the others. God made me just the way He made them. So He must’ve had some reason for putting me here. I do what I’ve been put here to do. Everything is preordained. The pattern is all in the numbers, and I’m as much a victim of that as all those who chance to cross my path.

So I don’t apologize for a thing. I’m proud. It’s the Lord’s work I do. That’s what Suki says and I believe her. The Lord chose me to do that work and I’m gonna damned well do it the best way I know how. When He thinks I’ve gone too far, He’ll let me know.

The one thing that still bothers me, Janine, is that you’re the only other person on this earth who really understands me. Knows my work and my
special
calling. You and me, Janine, we go back a long ways. I know that if I had trouble. Not just ordinary trouble, but big bad trouble, I know you’d be the only one in this world I could turn to. And even though we haven’t spoken to each other in two years (next March 12th will be two years exactly), I know I can still trust you.

But sometimes late at night I can be lying in bed unable to sleep, and my mind running 150 miles an hour. You can’t imagine the stuff that flies through your head nights like that. But sometimes, when I’m feeling a little down, and off my mark, the thought does cross my mind … what if Janine … what if some night with some guy, Janine.... Like, you know what I’m saying. Just the thought of it …

“… gets me crazy. And if I ever believed that was the case, long as we’ve been friends and all that, I’d have to come and do something about it. …”

Her voice trailed off. She’d been reading it aloud. Not actually aloud, but with her lips forming each word under her breath, but hearing his voice pronounce them. The voice was inside her head, quiet and slow and slightly singsong, the way he had, with that oddly British inflection of his. She wondered where he got it from. Certainly not that scruffy crowd they ran with in the old days when she first knew him. More probably, it came from watching old British movies. The same ones, over and over again:
David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice
,
The Lavender Hill Mob, Brighton Rock.
He loved
Brighton Rock,
particularly the character of Pinkie. He was a great mimic and could recite by heart most of the major roles in those films. It had got so that he would speak that way without his even knowing he was doing it. There were times, she knew, he would stay up all night, watching those films on a VCR, one after the other. Watching them with some secret solitary delight, seeing them each time all new and fresh as though he were just watching them for the first time.

He was no more British than she, of course. That was just some kind of make-believe in his head. He was a city rat, like her, right out of one of those unclaimed litters. They lived in the rubble of basements and condemned buildings. They ran in packs and battened on refuse and whatever they found that hadn’t been nailed down. They were a sort of nomadic tribe in those days, roving, predatory, homeless, orphaned, made up chiefly of those who’d fled domestic situations out of a strong sense of their own self-preservation. “Bug life,” the police in the station houses used to call them during the periodic roundups and the appearances in juvenile court, with the judges and lawyers and social workers and other functionaries all going through the solemn charade of administering a system virtually bankrupt of any solution to their problems.

“… friends and all that, I’d have to come and do something about it.”

She read the words again. This time more slowly, aware of the slight breathlessness she felt, and of the cold numb spot about the size of a quarter that had risen like a moon on her forehead.

It was his handwriting, all right, a calligraphy such as one seldom sees in the course of normal daily commerce. Those small, crimped, penciled figures, looking as though each had been wrought with a chisel. Each figure precisely the same height, all slanted at precisely the same angle, descenders and ascenders all matching perfectly, each with a tiny serif at the bottom and all unattached, but yet close enough to read as a whole. Marshaled one against the other, they gave the impression of tiny toy soldiers massed in perfect formation.

Holding the paper up to the light, she could see that each character had been drilled into it under the exertion of a hard, fierce pressure, so that the back of the paper could have been read like braille. A kind of barely contained rage seemed to emanate from the tight little whorls and bumpy elevations — a rage that belied the soft, cajoling words indited on them. Looking at the page as a whole, it had the look of something curiously antique, a kind of cuneiform graven on an ancient scroll.

She became slowly aware of an odor rising off the sheet, a rather good piece of heavy, tea-tinted paper. He’d always had a taste for good things. Maybe that was his trouble. It was a faint smell, redolent of earth and roots and cellars — a smell buried deep within her memory. It conjured up in her mind dark, bad images, murky subterranean places where unpleasant things were wont to occur.

Over the past several years, she’d been able to put all of those memories out of her head. Not out entirely. Never that, of course. That, she knew, was impossible. But shunted off to the side, at least, in a way that permitted her to get on with some semblance of a normal life. She might go through days, weeks, even months, without once thinking about it, only to wake some night, sitting bolt upright in bed, bathed in a cold, clammy sweat and trembling all over.