The Shadow Man (22 page)

would wait there for his own death. Seventeen, Mr Winter. Seventeen, and waiting in the sunlight to die.’

The professor took a deep breath over the phone.

‘I loved my father,’ he said. ‘But you know, sometimes it seemed as if from the age of seventeen on, he was always waiting to die.’

The professor hesitated, recalling another memory, then added: ‘When he moved to Miami Beach, that’s what he said. He still wanted to die in the sun. It seemed the right place for him.’

‘But your name?’ Simon Winter asked.

‘He said he fell asleep as the sun rose over him. And after a while he heard an angel speaking above his head. He always said he was so surprised, because the angel spoke in English. My father knew English, because he had grown up in … well, that’s another story. But he knew the language, and he said he heard the angel say: “But here’s one that’s alive …” and he opened his eyes expecting to see Heaven, but instead he looked up into the face of Sergeant George Washington Woodburn. A very black face, Mr Winter. A black angel. Sergeant Woodburn was with the Eighty-eighth Tank Battalion. You know what they nicknamed themselves? “Eleanor Roosevelt’s niggers,” but that’s another story too. And so, Herman Stein, my father, he reaches up and touches this Sergeant Woodburn on the cheek and asks, “Have I died?” and Sergeant Woodburn, he says, “No, son, and you ain’t.” My father always thought this was so funny, later. The sergeant spoke with as thick an Alabama accent as you can imagine, and it had been probably five or six years since my father had heard a word of English, and that was always refined, British, you know very, very upper crusty sort, but he said he could recall every word that sergeant said. So Sergeant Woodburn, he reaches down and picks up my father and

carries him right through the camp, shouting “Medic! Medic!” and my father always said all he could remember was these strong arms holding him - he only weighed sixty pounds - and this great black man crying for a doctor and saying, “You ain’t dyin’ boy. No sir. You ain’t gonna die…’

The professor’s voice seemed thick with emotion.

‘So Sergeant Woodburn carries my father to an aid center and a doctor, all the time saying over and over: “You ain’t dying, no sir.” And when he awakens again, he’s in a hospital, and that is how he lives. And that is how I came to be named for Sergeant George Washington Woodburn. When I was growing up, every couple of years my father and mother would pack us all in the family car and we would drive down to Jefferson City, Alabama, to visit the Woodburns. He became fire chief. Raised six sons, the youngest is a graduate student right here at the university. We’d have these reunions and my father and Chief Woodburn would always tell the same story. And they’d joke, and laugh, and the Chief would try to pick my father up in his arms like he did that day, but he couldn’t anymore, and everyone would laugh. He passed away himself just a little over a year ago. We all went to his funeral. Jefferson City, Alabama. It was very hot and my father cried for hours. We all did.’

The professor took another deep breath. Simon Winter could hear tears gathering in his voice.

‘My father, you see, Mr Winter, he understood debts.’

Winter did not know exactly what to say. He was fortunate, however, because the professor did not seem to be finished.

‘I’m rambling,’ he said. ‘I apologize.’

‘No, not at all. Was your father in academics, like you?’

George Washington Woodburn Stein laughed quickly,

as if relieved to be heading in a different direction. ‘Oh, no, not at all! He was a jeweler. The family, in Berlin, had been antique jewel merchants. That was why he’d learned English as a young child. And French as well. They traveled extensively. Very cosmopolitan. They were amongst those Jews in Germany that simply couldn’t perceive the extent of the evil about to be delivered to them. The family tree went back centuries. My grandfather must have thought he was more German than the people who finally shipped him to his death.’

‘A jeweler?’

‘Correct. A man of incredible precision, when he was working on stones. My father had a delicacy, a gift. He was an artist of the exact, Mr Winter. He loved jewels, because they lasted forever, he said. Like a play by Shakespeare -that’s my field - or a painting by Rembrandt, or a Mozart piano concerto. Immortal, he would say. The stones are of the earth, and they can live an eternity. Stones were alive, to him. They had personalities and character. He would speak to the settings, as he crafted them. He had hands like a surgeon’s - that’s what my sister became. Eyes like a sharpshooter. Even at the end of his life, his vision was extraordinary—’

The professor hesitated, a catch in his voice tripping his last words.

‘Something is wrong?’ Simon Winter asked.

‘Well, yes and no.’

‘Something is bothering you?’

‘Yes. Mr Winter, I don’t know if—’

He stopped.

Winter probed gently: ‘What is it, Professor Stein?’

The voice on the other end of the telephone was hesitant. ‘I don’t know you, Mr Winter. I cannot see your face. I am reluctant to speak of doubts with a stranger.’

The professor’s language was oddly stilted, increasingly formal.

‘I am an old man too,’ Winter said abruptly. ‘Like your father. I am an old man who was once a detective, and I have been asked by some other old people to find out if this man, this Shadow Man, is actually here on Miami Beach. They are frightened and don’t yet have an answer to their fear, professor. They don’t know whether to believe your father when he told them he’d seen Der Schattenmann. They do not want to believe he is here. But then, there was another sighting. And another death. And that is why I called you.’

‘Another?’

‘Yes. Only this was a murder.’

‘Someone was killed? But how?’

‘A breakin. Apparently a narcotics addict.’

‘So, not anyone like the Shadow Man?’

‘That’s the belief.’

‘And the connection to my father’s death?’

‘Only this: Both your father and this other person believed they spotted the Shadow Man shortly before their deaths.’

The professor hesitated. Surprise lingered in his voice. That is remarkable.’ He paused again, then added: ‘You know, that’s the sort of thing my father would have enjoyed, Mr Winter.’

‘Enjoyed?’

‘Yes. He was a tremendous fan of mystery writers. I don’t know exactly how he acquired this taste, but he did. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and P. D. James. He was particularly fond of Harry Kemelman’s series about the rabbi who investigated crimes. Do you know those?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘They’re actually quite intriguing. He forced me to read some once, right about the time I received my doctorate. Said I was in imminent danger of becoming dull. Too many learned, academic texts. Too much studying. I remember him shoving an armful of paperback novels at me and telling me that they were filled with quandaries and MacGuffins and red herrings. I have to admit they are very clever.’

The professor returned to silence. Finally, he said: ‘Ask your questions, Mr Winter. Then I will explain what is bothering me.’

Simon Winter took a deep breath. ‘The gun. He committed suicide with a thirty-eight–-‘

‘My father abhorred weapons, Mr Winter. I was surprised to learn he had one. He was a gentle man. But it was Miami, and it is a violent place, so I suspected he simply hadn’t told anyone.’

‘The position he killed himself…’

‘Yes. A gunshot right above the eyes. That upset me, Mr Winter. My father loved his eyes. They were the avenue to his art. I never thought he would do anything to damage them.’

‘I see …’

‘And another thing. The way the Miami Beach police described how he held the pistol…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it would have been hard for him. His hands, you see. All those years working with fine jewelry. All those precise carvings. All those delicate touches. His hands had grown arthritic. Pulling a trigger, especially with his thumb, would have been extremely painful.’

‘You said this to the police?’

‘Of course. But they pointed out that he’d been depressed and lonely and people in a suicidal frame of

mind overcome physical limitations. That, I imagine, is true.’

The two men waited, as if expecting the other to fill in the silence on the phone line.

‘What else?’ Winter finally asked.

‘It was probably nothing, but it truly disturbed me.’

‘What?’

‘The police didn’t attach any importance to it, but you know, families look at these things differently….’

‘What is it, Professor?’

‘The suicide note.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, it was written in my father’s style. Direct. To the point. I told you, precise. It was exactly what he would have written if he were about to kill himself. He had long ago made his peace with his children. We knew he loved us. He knew we loved him. There wasn’t anything to add to that, unless he was going to go on and on, and that wasn’t his style, Mr Winter. No, he was direct. Direct and concise.’

‘I see.’

‘No,’ the professor said abruptly, ‘you don’t see. The note. The goddamn note …’ Bitterness scored the professor’s voice. Still, he maintained a certain pedantic approach. ‘What is a suicide note, Mr Winter? A message. A final statement. Last words. There may only be a few words involved, but they are crucial, are they not?’

‘Of course.’

‘So, you accept the postulate that he was trying to say something. That this was his last message to me, and my brother and sister and his grandchildren, whom he loved. And through all his sadness and loneliness, despite all our efforts to include him, still this was his final statement on this earth.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then tell me why,’ the professor asked slowly, his own voice deep with renewed despair and confusion, ‘tell me why after all those years of marriage, he would not place the final h on my mother’s name?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Hannah, with an h, Mr Winter. Not Hanna. My beloved Hannah … but misspelled. Misspelled by a man of exactness and precision. So, you tell me, Mr Winter. What message is in that omission? Does it say something to you?’

It did. But Simon Winter did not reply to the professor’s anguished questions.

The plan was simple: Sergeant Lion-man was to be the uniform. He would knock once, announce, then step aside while a detective borrowed from the Beach robbery division took out the dead bolts with a swing or two of a sledgehammer. The detective was a part-time bodybuilder nicknamed the Lumberjack and accustomed to being called in on arrests that needed the quick destruction of a locked door. Then, when the door was open, Walter Robinson would lead the arrest team into number 13.

In a perfect world, Espy Martinez thought, the suspect will be groggy with drugs or sleep, then disorientated by noise and fear. He should be meek, passive, and willing to surrender without a struggle.

She sat in the dim rear seat of an unmarked police car, staring out across the nighttime black-and-gray-tinted universe of the decrepit housing project. She had never been to anyplace like the King Apartments, especially not in the hours after midnight. Streetlights carved pathetic slices of the night away, as if by holding out a tiny portion of the darkness, they could delay the decay that constantly chewed at the edges of the low-slung, three-story buildings. Despite the hour, she could still hear an occasional shouted obscenity and a child’s haphazard cries. A

moment after they had arrived, she thought she’d heard a stray gunshot coming from someplace beyond the fringe of the streetlights, whining past, like a lost evil thought. She could just barely make out a graffiti message spray-painted on one tan wall of the apartments: 22 sharks rules. She assumed this was the street gang that extorted money from businesses and controlled the drug trade on Twenty-second Avenue.

In a perfect world, she thought again.

Then she shivered, despite the festering heat.

Walter Robinson turned, right at that moment, and saw her look up at him expectantly. ‘You sure you want to be here?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘It’s my job.’

‘Your job is to put this Leroy Jefferson away. Your job is in a courtroom, starting tomorrow morning when we arraign the bastard for Sophie’s murder, wearing a sharp blue pin-striped suit and carrying that big old leather briefcase and saying “Your Honor this and Your Honor that and the State requests no bail be set…” You don’t have to be here,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘No. I do. I want to be here.’

Robinson smiled gently and waved his hand in the direction of the King Apartments. ‘Espy, why in this entire godforsaken world would anyone want to be here, if they didn’t have to?’

He grinned at her and she smiled back.

‘Ahh,’ she said, ‘your point is well taken.’ Then she thrust the smile aside and added quietly, ‘I just need to see things through. All the way through. From start to finish. Beginning to end. It’s my nature.’

‘Well, if you insist…’

‘I insist.’

‘… Then you wait here until we have the cuffs around

him. You come up and watch me giving him his rights. Maybe we can avoid the usual police brutality charges from the public defender’s office if you witness the arrest.’

Again she nodded. Walter Robinson looked at her closely and wondered what it was that she was trying to prove. It was certainly not to impress him, he thought. She had already managed that. But he realized there was some other agenda working within Espy Martinez, and he suspected it would not be too long before he discovered what it was. He continued to watch as she turned her head just slightly, her eyes sweeping across the open courtyard of the King Apartments. For an instant he allowed himself to fix on her profile, the curve of her hair as it swept down next to her cheek, and the girlish way she pushed it back. Then he turned in his own seat and removed his pistol. He checked the clip on the nine-millimeter, then double-checked to see if he had his spare.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Which one is it?’ she asked.

He glanced up at the King Apartments. ‘Last one on the left, near the stairwell. Second floor.’