The Shadow Man (2 page)

He unlocked the door and got behind the steering wheel. The car’s interior smelled damp, mildewed. It was difficult to see out through the mist on the windshield.

Larsen started the engine and switched on the wipers. A double arc of clear glass looking out on a vast black sky appeared before him. He put the car into reverse and turned in the seat to back from his parking slot.

Even over the sound of the engine, Larsen could hear the shrill, constant scream of insects coming from the woods near the motel cabin. He drove from the parking lot faster than he intended, causing the car’s tires to fling gravel against the inside of the fenders in a mad drumbeat. He glanced at his watch and told himself that he had plenty of time to make his flight.

In the shadows beneath the trees, a square-shouldered, oddly intense figure stood motionless in the tall, damp grass, facing the receding car. The car’s twin taillights seemed to draw closer together, then appeared to merge and wink out as the car rounded a distant curve and disappeared. But the figure stood for some time longer, staring fixedly in the same direction.

Andrews watched from behind his desk as Judy Carnegie showed Dana Larsen into his office. Larsen cast his kindly, professional charm like lamplight on Judy, who was smiling as she left the two men alone.

“It’s good of you to make time to see me,” Larsen said, as he and Andrews shook hands. Larsen’s hand was moist but cool. As he sat in a chair near Andrews’ desk, his eyes took in the veined marble clock on a bookshelf. It was ten fifteen; he was fifteen minutes late for his appointment. “My flight was one of those stacked up at Dulles,” he said by way of explanation.

“I’d have waited around,” Andrews said casually, to put Larsen at ease. He sensed an uncharacteristic tension in his old friend. “Besides,” he added, “I knew it was important, or you wouldn’t have made the trip.”

For an instant Larsen seemed vaguely embarrassed, as if suddenly doubting the propriety of his visit. “It’s about my series of talks with Martin Karpp,” he said hesitantly.

“I assumed it would be. How’s the research going?”

“Karpp has given me insights that are imperative for any sort of in-depth study of multiple personality. And he talks quite freely, referring to his other selves in the third person and taking our discussions seriously enough. Progress is being made.”

“Can I get you a bourbon on the rocks?” Andrews asked.

Larsen looked astounded. “Jesus, Jerry, it’s only a little past ten in the morning!”

Andrews grinned. He’d known that Larsen was a teetotaler. But something had been needed to break the shell of “U.S. Senator” around Andrews that he found often kept even long-time friends like Dana Larsen from freely communicating.

Larsen seemed a bit more at ease as he realized he’d been the victim of psychology—his game—and returned Andrews’ grin. He removed his dark-rimmed glasses and absently polished the lenses with a wrinkled handkerchief. “You’re in the right business, Jerry. It’s good that you never continued, trying to become an engineer.”

“I didn’t really want to study engineering,” Andrews said. “It was that postgraduate instructor in trig, the one with the great figure. But don’t tell my political opponents. We’re not supposed to experience those urges.”

Larsen said suddenly, “There’s something about Karpp—”

Andrews raised a hand palm out, as if in casual self-defense against a thrown object. “Please, Dana, don’t tell me you’ve learned something new and important about the Hugh Drake assassination. A dozen witnesses in that shopping center crowd saw Karpp squeeze the trigger. And the crime’s been investigated and reported upon by everybody but the SPCA.”

“Of course Karpp’s guilty.” Larsen seemed irritated now. “It isn’t that.” Parchment flesh beneath his left eye was drawn nerve-tight as if by thread and needle, causing Andrews’ own eyes to water. “I received a written message at my motel last week from Paul Liggett.” He paused and stared at Andrews.

Andrews explored his mental file for a face to put with Liggett’s name, could come up with none.

“Liggett is one of Karpp’s six personalities,” Larsen explained.

Andrews remembered then from the relentless media coverage following Karpp’s arrest. He sat back in his swivel chair, hearing its faint squeak. Puzzlement always prompted caution in him. That was a prerequisite for political survival. “What sort of message?”

“A warning, strongly suggesting that I leave the Carltonville area.”

“Could Karpp somehow have sent it from the asylum?”

“I’m told that’s impossible,” Larsen said. “I believe it. When Karpp so much as has a bowel movement, it’s X-rayed.”

Larsen seemed so serious that for a moment Andrews thought he’d meant what he said.

“The note was delivered to the motel desk,” Larsen went on. “No one seems to have seen who left it there.”

“So it’s some local weirdo’s attempt at a joke,” Andrews suggested.

“I don’t think so, Jerry. It disturbed me, because the day before, when I’d come back to my motel cabin after my interview with Karpp, I got the impression that someone had been there in my absence.”

“Impression?”

“A general feeling that things weren’t exactly as I’d left them. Ashtray a few inches to one side on the desk; suitcase at a slightly different angle on the chair; clothes hanging in the closet where I’d left them, but not quite the way they were on the hangers.”

“That could be either imagination or maid service,” Andrews said.

“The maid had already been there that morning. And there’s more. Yesterday the waitress at the restaurant where I usually ate supper told me someone had been in earlier asking for me. She described Martin Karpp.”

“Generally or specifically?”

“Generally,” Larsen conceded.

“What does Karpp say about all this?”

“I haven’t seen him since I talked to the waitress, but I’m sure his reaction would be much as it was when I asked him about the Paul Liggett message. He wasn’t at all surprised that Liggett was active outside the asylum walls. You must remember, to Karpp, Liggett is a separate entity with his own life.”

That thought somewhat boggled Andrews’ mind. “But the trial made Karpp fully aware of his various personalities.”

“Karpp is, to say the least, ambiguous about that. He’s an ambiguity in a lot of respects. How much of it is feigned—if any—is difficult to perceive.”

Andrews clasped his hands behind his head, leaned farther back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. There were no answers written on the finely cracked pale plaster; there hadn’t been any yet. The swivel chair squealed gratingly as he lowered his gaze and sat forward to rest his elbows on the desk.

“What are you trying to tell me, Dana?” he asked softly. “That one of Karpp’s personalities is moving around in flesh and blood form outside the asylum walls and threatening you?”

“I don’t know,” Larsen said. He nervously adjusted his glasses with a tap of his forefinger at the bridge of his nose. “That’s what bothers me. I’m a practical man, a scientist. This seems to go beyond the realm of logical theory, both in what’s been happening and in my primal, dominantly emotional reaction to it. That’s why I’m concerned, why I’m here.”

“What can I do?”

“You can make
sure
there’s no possible way Karpp could be slipping out of that asylum.”

“Slipping out? My God, Dana, it’s a maximum-security federal institution!”

“That’s what they say there, Jerry. And I’ll admit security’s tight. But it isn’t like a genuine federal prison.”

Andrews tapped a pencil on his desk pad, staring at the faint series of dots the point was leaving. “Do you really think Karpp could be getting out?”

“No.”

“But you might be wrong.”

Larsen nodded. “It’s a world full of variables. And right now I don’t know what else to do about the situation.” He shifted his weight in his chair, crossing his legs to reveal a pattern of creases from when he’d sat during his flight and through time circling Dulles International. “I thought you ought to know about the matter, unexplainable as it is.”

“I’m glad you came,” Andrews told him, meaning it.

“I’m not a man who believes in premonitions, not without provable basis, but I have a bad feeling about this.”

“I can see that. I’ll look into it, Dana, I really will.”

Larsen stood, rubbed his hands together as if he were unexpectedly cold. “I know you’re busy—”

“The hell with that,” Andrews said. “Lunch is open.”

“Thanks,” Larsen said, “but I’ve got a flight out at twelve twenty. I made it a turnabout trip so I could get back as soon as possible.”

“You’re going back? To the asylum?”

“Just for a few more days. I have to finish up. Then I’ll go to New York and organize what I’ve got.”

Andrews didn’t know exactly what to say. He still wasn’t sure in what light he should view Larsen’s visit. “I’d be careful—feeling the way you do.”

“There’s probably nothing to be careful of,” Larsen said, but his smile was stiff. “Talking to you has made me feel easier.”

“But not foolish, I hope.”

“No, not foolish. I had confidence that you’d understand. You inspire that sort of confidence, you know.”

“It brings votes,” Andrews said. He didn’t know himself whether he was joking. “You’re right about it being a world of variables. Take care, Dana.”

“Always.” Larsen shook hands again with Andrews and walked from the office. Andrews heard him chat briefly with Judy Carnegie before leaving.

For a few minutes Andrews sat thinking about what Larsen had told him. Then Judy knocked lightly on the door and poked her head into the office. “That meeting with the finance committee is in five minutes, Senator.”

Good God, five minutes!

Andrews rose from his desk, slipped his coat on and straightened his tie.

“Write me a reminder to talk to someone about the Belmont sanitarium in New York,” he said to Judy, as he snatched up his attaché case and hurried from the office. He almost snagged his coattail as he closed the door.

In the press of activities during the remainder of the day, he forgot about Dana Larsen.

As Andrews was leaving his office in Washington, in Carltonville, Gabe Beecher, manager of the Chicken Barn restaurant, wearily set his tenth order of the scrambled eggs with diced ham special in front of a waiting customer.

“Where’s Carla today?” the customer, a ruddy farmer named French, asked as he salted his eggs.

Gabe wiped his hands on a towel that was tucked in his belt. “Didn’t show up this mornin’ is all I know.”

“Sick, I guess,” French said.

Gabe shrugged narrow, muscle-bunched shoulders. “Couldn’t say. She ain’t called in yet.”

Emma, the part-time waitress, smiled a toothy goodbye to the last of the breakfast crowd except for French and walked over to perch on a counter stool. “If you want,” she said to Gabe, “I’ll run on over to Carla’s place and see if she’s sick or something. There must be some reason she didn’t answer her phone or call in to let you know what was happening.” It was obvious from Emma’s tone that she hoped Carla’s reason wasn’t adequate. Carla was Gabe’s half sister, but Emma liked to think that business was thicker than blood. And everyone knew that she was a better waitress than Carla, who tended to spill things and act overly secure in her job. What Carla didn’t know about was the night Emma had spent with Gabe in Tarrytown.

“Tell you what,” Gabe said, pulling the towel from his belt and tossing it onto the counter, “you stay here awhile extra and handle the late customers, and I’ll run over to Carla’s.”

“Sure,” Emma said, sliding down off the stool and smoothing her waitress uniform skirt. “Glad to.” It might be better that way. Gabe might catch Carla by surprise, before she’d had time to make up some excuse for just plain oversleeping.

Gabe studied Emma as he tucked in his shirt before leaving. In a lot of ways, he regretted that night they had spent together. Emma thought now that she had some sort of permanent claim on him. And it was ugly the way she kept trying to cut up Carla behind her back. Poor, clumsy, gentle-hearted Carla, whose only transgression was that she stood between Emma and where Emma wanted to go. Emma was a problem for Gabe. He wanted her in bed, but not in any other way. But he wanted her in bed badly.

“Back in fifteen minutes,” he said, moving to the door.

Emma stuck a pencil into the wave of her butterscotch blond hair and nodded. “You’re in good hands,” she said. She gave him a smile that meant something.

Gabe jogged across the highway in the backwash of a speeding semi that blasted its air horn at him. He walked about a quarter of a mile, then strode down the grass-inundated lane to the clapboard two-bedroom house with its green-painted foundation. Carla shared the house with another girl, Lila English. But Lila was gone now, visiting a distant relative in Alaska—or so she said. Carla had hinted at a boyfriend in Buffalo.

Gabe stepped up onto the iron-railed plank porch and knocked. He got no answer. He knocked again, waited, then twisted the knob and found the door unlocked.

At that moment Gabe felt a prickle of dreadful certainty whose very lack of foundation scared him. He was sure that something was wrong, unnaturally wrong, inside the house. He couldn’t say how he knew, but by all of his faith in God and the Virgin, he knew. He pushed open the door and stepped into the house.

As soon as he was inside, he saw the door to the basement hanging wide open. He was drawn to the darkness beyond the door.

Quiet. Everything was so quiet. Even the floor beneath his feet didn’t creak in the slightest.

When Gabe switched on the basement light, he was so positive of what he’d see that he wasn’t really surprised.

Carla, clad in her disheveled yellow uniform, lay sprawled at the bottom of the basement stairs. The instant he saw her, Gabe knew she was dead. Her head was turned impossibly far to one side, her eyes open, as if over her shoulder she were surveying in alarm the jagged run in the panty hose on her long, exposed leg.

“Carla!” Gabe called instinctively. Then, knowing she was dead, he stepped back in the irrational fear that she might answer. The fear bored its way into the pit of his stomach and made him nauseated and dizzy.

For a long time he stood gazing down the sloping tunnel of the stairwell. At the other end, Death seemed to have created a dark vacuum, gently, somehow enticingly, drawing him. The perfect stillness of Carla amazed and fascinated.

Gabe backed away slowly, pausing between steps, gaining strength with distance. He turned and made his way to the phone on the table in the tiny entrance hall and awkwardly dialed the first number he could think of, the restaurant number. Emma answered.

“I ain’t gonna be back for a while,” Gabe told her. “And I ain’t feelin’ so well. You do me a favor, will you, and phone the law and send them on over to Carla’s place?”

“Sure,” Emma said, sounding surprised and curious. “What’s Carla done now?”

Gabe leaned weakly against the wall and stared out the door at the brightness of the sun on green shrubbery. Over and over in his mind, Carla was stumbling and pitching headfirst down the basement stairs, frightened and screaming.

“What Carla’s done,” he told Emma, “is had herself a fatal accident.”

He was vaguely aware of Emma hanging up.