The Shadow Man (21 page)

‘Ahh, I believe so. Thank you, Detective.’

‘Well, you take a look. Then I’ll answer any questions, if I can. Deaths like these, they all seem to pretty much get lumped together, understand? It’s hard to remember specifics. You want coffee?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, I’ll be back in a bit.’

He stood up and left Winter holding the file. For a moment the older man hesitated, just letting his fingers creep across the rough brown paper, like a blind man

reading braille. He thought of all the case files he’d stuffed with photographs, reports, summaries, and evidence in all his years, and he smiled, delighted to have one in his hands again. He lifted it, measuring its weight. Not much, he thought. Then, with an eagerness that he knew was completely inappropriate, but which he was incapable of denying, he unsnapped the rubberized cord holding it together and looked inside.

He went to the crime scene photos first. There were only a half-dozen eight-by-ten glossy color pictures, perhaps a tenth of what there would have been in a homicide scene. The two most prominent pictures showed an elderly man slumped backward in a brown leather desk chair, his arms thrown out to the sides, almost as if in astonishment. Blood had dripped down between his eyes, from a gunshot wound in his forehead, staining the collar of his sport shirt. There was a clear splatter pattern on the wall behind Herman Stein, marred by flecks of brain and bone. Stein’s eyes were open in death, beneath a scarlet and gunpowder-blackened entry wound. His mouth was slightly open, as if in wonderment. He had been nearly bald, with just a few tufts of white hair around his ears. The blood streaking his face made him seem like a gargoyle. Simon Winter studied the pictures carefully.

Tell me something, he said inwardly.

He flipped to another picture. This showed a large .38 caliber pistol dropped to the floor beneath Stein’s outflung hand. This was followed by a close-up of Stein’s face. Then there was a photograph of an electric typewriter next to the desk. In the platen of the machine was the suicide note. Another close-up picture showed that Rabbi Rubinstein’s memory was accurate.

Simon Winter read: ‘I am tired of life and miss my beloved Hanna and am going to join her now.’

He put the photographs aside and turned to the detective’s summaries. There was a brief description of the scene, and a list of neighbors who had related the facts of Mr Stein’s most recent depression. There was a telephone number for Stein’s next of kin, a son with the unusual name of G. Washington Stein, and an address at a large New England university. He flipped through the autopsy protocol, which described a most obvious death. There is little medical surprise in what happens when a .38 caliber soft-nosed bullet is fired from a point-blank range into a person’s forehead. Blood toxicology was negative, save for traces of ibuprofen - arthritis, Simon Winter thought immediately. Winter saw a short notation on an additional form, mentioning the rabbi’s visit to Detective Richards, and he saw a copy of Stein’s letter. There was no mention of its contents in any of the detective’s conclusions, which were simple: suicide due to mental depression and age.

They would have written the same about me, he thought.

Then he nipped through the file another time, trying to find something. Other than the mention in his own letter, there was nothing linking Herman Stein to Der Schattenmann.

Simon Winter frowned, just as Detective Richards returned holding a cup of coffee.

‘Not much, huh?’ said the younger man.

‘No, not much.’

‘Case like this,’ Richards continued, ‘we don’t really go hunting about for a whole lot. This was pretty much a textbook suicide. A man with no known enemies - even his neighbors said that he was always friendly and polite. History of depression since his wife died a half-dozen years ago. I found some mood-elevating drugs in the bathroom cabinet. That’s in the report–-‘

The detective sighed, then continued.

‘And he left a note. A note and a single gunshot wound to the head. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist—’

‘The gun, did it belong to Stein?’

‘Uh, no. Or, at least, no record. No registration. Just another illegal weapon. Must be millions of them in Dade County. I wrote down the serial number….’

Simon Winter copied that figure. ‘Any ballistics reports? Fingerprints?’

‘What for?’

‘Did the cleaning woman ever say she’d seen the weapon before. Or somebody else, you know, to put it in his possession?’

The young detective flipped quickly through the reports.

‘Nothing here. But that wouldn’t be so unusual. Most folks don’t want the cleaning woman to know where they keep their gun. It’ll get stolen.’

‘True enough,’ Simon Winter said. Then he asked: ‘The position of the deceased, it didn’t bother you some?’

‘How so?’

‘Well, you’re gonna shoot yourself, I guess usually you’d put the gun up like this …’

He made his hand into a pistol and held it to the side of his head.

‘Or like this…’

Again he demonstrated by putting his index finger into his mouth.

“Sure,’ Richards replied. ‘That’s what I’d expect. Never wanted to kill myself, so I never gave it much thought.’

‘But holding a large handgun up against your own forehead, like Stein did, that’s sort of unusual. I mean, ve got to hold it out there, and then pull the trigger, what, with your thumb maybe, to get enough strength.’

‘Yeah. I can see that. What’s your point?’

‘It’s just unusual.’

‘Well, suicide is suicide. I mean, he coulda jumped. Lived way up on the tenth floor of that condo. Or swum out into the ocean. It’s only a block away. Or walked in front of a bus. We’ve had all of those. So, yeah, maybe holding that big old thirty-eight like that wasn’t how you or I might have done it, but hey, different strokes.’

Richards looked over at Simon Winter closely. ‘You got some expertise in this sort of thing, Mr Winter?’

‘Used to be a cop. City of Miami. Retired years ago.’

‘Hey, my old man was a city cop. Took one in the leg, though, back in the late Sixties. Had to retire too.’

Winter thought for an instant, and then recalled a heavyset man with a florid face.

‘I remember. Bank robbery, right? He chased the guy for six blocks, bleeding all the way. Finally got him.’

‘Hey, that’s right.’ The young detective brightened. ‘Damn. You got some memory’

‘How’s your dad now?’

‘Still runs a fishing boat down in Islamorada. Lotsa cold beer and gals who like to get an altogether tan. Has it pretty good.’

‘I’m glad to hear that.’

‘Hey. Mr Winter, you want me to copy all this stuff for you? Maybe then you’ll think of something else.’

‘That would be great. But one other quick question …’

‘Sure. Fire away.’

‘The gun. You found it right beneath his hand, right?’

‘Yeah. Right there. One bullet gone. Five more in the cylinder.’

‘But wouldn’t the force of the shot, and his hands flinging backwards …’

Simon Winter demonstrated slowly, throwing his hands

out wide and leaning back in his seat.

‘… Well, wouldn’t you expect the gun to be a bit farther away?’

The young detective smiled. ‘You’re still pretty sharp, Mr Winter. Yeah, I might… if it were some little twenty-two or twenty-five. But that old thirty-eight musta weighed a ton. Big as a brick. It wasn’t gonna travel far.’

Simon Winter nodded. ‘Place was all locked up when the cleaning woman came?’

‘Yup. Like I said. She let herself in with a passkey. No mystery there.’

Simon Winter nodded. ‘I’d still like those copies.’

‘No problem. You just keep them to yourself. They’re official police documents. Understand?’

‘Hey, the rules haven’t changed that much since I sat behind a desk like yours.’

Detective Richards laughed and walked off to a copying machine while Winter sat waiting, thinking of the last moments of Herman Stein. It’s all absolutely clear cut and correct, he concluded - and all totally screwed up and impossible. Both at the same time.

It took him several efforts to penetrate the telephone switching system at the University of Massachusetts; each time he’d dialed Professor G. Washington Stein’s direct extension, he slid inexorably into telephone limbo. It was not until he managed to get the secretary in the English Literature Department that he was able to get connected. He hated making this sort of phone call; had hated making them when he’d been a detective. But he took some relief from the thought that months had passed since Herman Stein’s death, and perhaps some of the rawness of that single gunshot wound had scabbed over. ‘Professor Stein?’

‘Yes. No extensions. Final papers are due Wednesday. Who is this, please?’

‘Professor, my name is Simon Winter___’

‘You’re not a student?’

‘No. I’m an investigator. I’m calling from Miami.’

‘An investigator? And what are you investigating?’

Winter paused, trying to think of a concise answer to that question. He couldn’t think of one.

‘Professor, I apologize for coming to you on a difficult subject, but just prior to his death, your father wrote a letter to my’ - he hesitated, trying to think of a word to describe the three old and frightened people in the rabbi’s apartment - ‘my clients….’

‘My father wrote a letter? To whom?’

‘A rabbi he didn’t know. Another man who’d lived in Berlin during the war until being caught up and shipped to a concentration camp.’

‘I see. A letter to a man he didn’t know? What was in it?’

‘He said he’d recognized a man he had not seen since—’

‘The war.’

‘That’s right. This man—’

‘The Shadow Man,’ the professor interrupted coldly.

Winter’s heart jumped. ‘That is correct.’

Professor Stein seemed to be gathering his breath, and for an instant the telephone line was silent. Then he continued, dryly:

‘My father often saw Der Schattenmann, Mr Winter. He saw him in his dreams, and then they turned to nightmares and he would awaken shouting, yelling, sweating, and it would take my mother hours to calm him. He saw him in lines at the bank and movie theater crowds and rolling a grocery cart down the aisles of the supermarket. He saw Der Schattenmann in the cars that pulled past us

on the freeway and waiting at the local bus stop. Once I took him to a baseball game at Fenway Park, and he saw Der Schattenmann in the rest room. Another time he spotted him in the crowd at a New York Knicks game we were watching on television. The Shadow Man was everywhere, Mr Winter. Everywhere in my father’s imagination.’

Simon Winter slumped down in his chair. He was sitting in his own living room, centered on his worn sofa, a pad of paper and several sharpened pencils in front of him on the table, and he suddenly felt as if he was ridiculous.

‘So,’ Winter started hesitantly, ‘if just prior to his death—’

‘He told someone he’d seen Der Schattenmann? This would be only slightly unusual, Mr Winter.’

‘Slightly?’

‘Yes. The only thing out of the ordinary, is that almost always -I can’t think of a different occasion that I know of - he would call me, or my brother or sister, with the news of the sighting. And it would be one of us who would go over the circumstances and the memories and slowly, but certainly, talk him out of what he thought he saw. I cannot recall him ever contacting a stranger.’

‘You don’t think he ever truly saw—’

Again the professor interrupted. ‘No. But I spoke with him a day before his death, and he didn’t mention anything to me. He was upset. More nervous, more anxious, more depressed than I’d ever heard him before. But he kept speaking about our mother, not Der Schattenmann. I think he might have mentioned him, if he’d seen him.’

‘So you could calm him and talk him out of what he thought he saw?’

‘Correct.’

‘Did he seem scared?’

The professor paused, then replied: ‘Perhaps. Perhaps you could add fear into the mix of all the things he was feeling. I remember I was worried, and I called my siblings, and we decided one of us should go down to Miami and visit him, but, of course, by the time we got it all worked out, it was too late.’

Again the professor hesitated, before adding: ‘Do I sound cold, Mr Winter? Unfeeling?’

‘No,’Winter lied.

‘It’s an odd thing, Mr Winter. To hate someone you love for doing something to themselves. You feel so many things.’

‘I’m sorry to bring it up like this.’

‘No, it’s all right. In a funny way, it is easier to talk with a stranger than someone you know. Did you ever meet my father, Mr Winter?’

‘No.’

‘He was an unusual man.’

‘How so?’

‘He felt debts. He was constantly trying to repay debts.’

‘Money?’

‘No. Debts of the soul, Mr Winter.’ The professor laughed, as if recalling something amusing. ‘I’ll give you an example, Mr Winter. My full name is George Washington Woodburn Stein. Not your run of the mill, ordinary name, huh?’

‘No.’

‘I shall tell you the story of how I got my name, and that will help you understand my father a little bit. He was caught, along with my aunt, uncle, and grandparents, in 1942. They were underground in Berlin….’

‘Der Schattenmann?’

‘Yes. He recognized my uncle, or so my father said. Spotted him in a bunker during an air raid.’

‘And?’

‘What do you think, Mr Winter? The Gestapo came. Took them away. They all died in the camps.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘My father, however, he managed to survive. He was seventeen by the time the war was closing down. Of course, all hell was breaking loose near the end. The S.S. guards marched them all from camp to camp as the front kept changing. I suppose, in their own way, these were as terrible as anything else that had taken place. To have survived so far, through so much, only to be driven into exhaustion with Allied troops only miles away. My father said so many were dying then, just dropping by the side of the road, almost as if the mere hope of survival could kill you.’

‘He lived.’

‘Yes. But only barely. He said he collapsed in a barracks. It was night and they had marched dozens of useless, absurd miles. Marching to die. They hadn’t eaten in days. Typhus, the flu, pneumonia - you name it - was killing them, one right after the other. They could hear artillery in the distance, and he once told me that the sound was like hundreds of people knocking on the great doors of Heaven. He expected to die. When he awoke in the morning, he said he was surprised to see sunlight, and he knew it would be the last time he would see the day, so he crawled from his bed - not a bed, really, a slab of wood in one of the barracks - out the door, knowing that an S.S. guard would shoot him before he got too far, but that it would be worth it, just to feel the sunlight on his face one last time. But the guards had fled during the night. The camp was quiet, save for the sounds of astonishment and death. My father crawled out into the assembly yard. Arbeit Macht Fret. That was the slogan. He said he decided he