The Shadow Man (48 page)

would never authorize this sort of potential wild goose chase.’

‘Do you think it is?’

‘No. Because nothing in this case is as it seems. So, go find this old man and talk to him. Can you fly out today?’

‘There’s an afternoon flight that connects in London. I can sleep on the plane.’

‘Talk to him, then come back. Maybe you’ll get a name, and all I’ll have to do is look the bastard up in the phone book, get a nice arrest warrant, and everyone can go back to working normal hours.’

‘Nothing in the world is ever that easy. What will you do while I go gallivanting about Europe?’

‘Well, right now, I’m going over to see our main witness. I got a message that there’s some problem with Jefferson.’

‘Mr Leroy fucking Jefferson. What sort of problem?’ ‘Won’t know until I get there. He’s probably complaining because crack cocaine prices went up while he was in jail and he wants to hold me personally responsible. Going right now. Let me know when your return flight arrives and I’ll meet you. And let me know what this guy says. What was he, a Nazi?’ ‘A Nazi and a cop.’

Walter Robinson smiled. ‘Hell. That’s what every punk we arrest and every lawyer who represents them accuses us of being. It might be interesting to meet someone who actually was.’

Early dawn light seemed to chase him across the causeway, dogging his steps as he drove from the Beach to Liberty City and the King Apartments. The routine fatigue of a night spent in the presence of unremarkable death made him feel as if his reactions had slowed and his thinking dulled, almost like a man close to the legal point of

intoxication, but not quite. He had a certain lightheadedness, which made his concentration wander. He wished he were joining Espy Martinez at the airport, but realized this was impossible. And he had a vague, unfocused fear that seemed to halo his thoughts whenever he worried about Frieda Kroner and Rabbi Rubinstein. He had only partially heeded Simon Winter’s suggestion that they be left without police protection. He had ordered a pair of unmarked cars manned by officers out of uniform to watch their apartments. He did not know for certain whether the Shadow Man was stalking them, but he suspected he was, in a steady, unimpulsive way. Still, even if so, he had the sense that he was making progress; he had a picture and a description and a witness and the partial thumbprint as evidence. Enough for a conviction. Now, all that remained was a name, and he thought that would arrive soon enough, especially after they set in motion Winter’s scheme to flush the Shadow Man from hiding.

So, if not altogether confident, he at least felt things were in hand, and he yawned once or twice and rubbed his forehead as he rolled slowly down Twenty-second Avenue and turned toward Leroy Jefferson’s home.

He saw the gathered police cruisers first; this made all the exhaustion flee from his eyes. Then he spotted the crime scene technicians’ van, which gave him an electric shock of anxiety. He pulled his car to the curb sharply and pushed his way through a small gathering of the curious, the pale early morning light giving their skin a wan, lukewarm pallor. He waved at the uniformed officers holding the crowd back on the sidewalk and hurried toward the apartment building. He ignored the dilapidated elevator, choosing instead to bound up the exterior stairs.

He saw Juan Rodriguez and Lionel Anderson standing amidst a half-dozen other policemen outside the door to

Jefferson’s apartment. There were several plainclothes men working the area, one with a fingerprint kit, going over the door.

Sergeant Lion-man saw him first and directed a small, helpless gesture at the apartment.

‘Where’s Jefferson?’ Walter Robinson demanded. ‘Inside,’ Anderson replied. ‘What’s left of him.’ Rodriguez stepped aside, to allow him to enter the room. ‘Watch your step, Walt, amigo. There’s blood pretty much every fucking place.’

The light pouring through the doorway glinted off the tubular steel frame of the wheelchair. There was a thick, stifling sense of warmth and blood, a mustiness in the air as if the room had been superheated by both the tropical summer and murder. Robinson moved slowly toward the body; he forced himself to compartmentalize, to try and see every single detail inside the room in separate and complete fashion; Jefferson’s eyes remained open; he’d watched his own murder. Robinson shuddered and stared hard at the duct tape that encircled Jefferson’s wrists, and saw that a second strip had been placed across Jefferson’s mouth, to keep him silent. The gray tape was streaked with vibrant red around the edges, caked up at the corners of his mouth. His eyes took in a sea of deep crimson blood that stained the floor beneath the chair. He saw that the bandages on Jefferson’s ruined knee were ripped and torn, and he thought it obvious that Jefferson had known real pain in his last moments.

He felt an odd combination of sadness and anger. He wanted to curse at Jefferson, to grab him by the shoulders and shake him back to life. Instead, he swore beneath his breath, a quiet flood of obscenities as he took in the murder scene and felt all the confidence he’d had on the drive across the bay unraveling.

A flashbulb went off, and Robinson saw the medical examiner lean down next to the body and gently lift the dead man’s head, examining a long scarlet slice in the skin of the throat.

‘Is that what killed him?’ the detective asked.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. Hard to say,’ the medical examiner replied, shaking his head.

‘What, then?’

The medical examiner stood up slowly. ‘I think he drowned.’

‘Drowned? How?’

‘Cut someone in the throat just right, tip the head back, and it just pours back down the airways, filling the lungs. Not a nice way to go. Takes a few minutes. Don’t lose consciousness. But that’s just an educated guess for right now. Look at this guy. He’s been sliced up like someone took a Cuisinart to him. A lot of little cuts that won’t kill you.’

A detective moving near the side of the room looked up. ‘Sort of like one of those late night television commercials, you know? For the Veg-O-Matic. Slices, dices, chops -whatever.’

A couple of cops laughed, and continued inspecting the room.

‘Your witness, right?’ the medical examiner asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Not anymore. What was it, a drug case? I haven’t seen this sort of thing since the late seventies, when the Colombians and the Cubans were arguing about who owned the cocaine trade. They were partial to knives. Especially those electric ones - you know, the type your mother-in-law gives you for Christmas. They used to like to use those on each other. Slowly. Not exactly what your mother-in-law had in mind.’

‘No, not a drug case. A murder investigation.’ ‘Really? I’d swear it was a drug case. You don’t usually see somebody get tortured like this if the general idea is to shut them up. Usually just a nice quick bullet.’ ‘This isn’t the usual sort of case.’

‘Well, somebody sure took their sweet time about all this. Somebody who sure enjoys their work.’

Before he could reply, one of the other detectives joined in. ‘Hey, Walt, you know we found some crack cocaine spread around. Just a little, you know. And this guy had a long history of burning other dealers. I mean, maybe he was helping you, but he sure had a lot of bad-ass enemies out here in the real world. A lot of guys capable of carving up old Leroy there without too much thought and not a whole lot of concern over the poor slob. The guy he was helping you on, you sure that dude knew enough to come over here and do him like this?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t think he knew anything about Jefferson.’

‘Well, Jefferson made the paper the other day. Maybe that tipped him off.’

‘I still don’t see how he made the connection. Shit.’ ‘This guy you’re looking for … he a black guy? On the Beach?’

‘No. He’s a white guy. An old white guy’ A couple of the other detectives working the room stopped when they heard this. One shook his head in an exaggerated fashion.

‘You think an old white guy came down here to the jungle in the middle of the night and did this? Not fucking likely,’ the detective said. ‘I mean, don’t want to rain on your parade, Walt, but an old white guy? Down here? After dark?’

‘No. I think he did.’

‘Well, maybe. Maybe once in a zillion years some old-timer could come down here and not get taken off himself. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but hey, Walt, get real. My money is on the neighborhood crack distributors. This looks like the sort of thing they’d get hot for.’

‘Have you got any witnesses?’Robinson asked, ‘Anybody in the building see or hear anything?’

The detective smiled. ‘In the King Apartments? Somebody see something and then tell us about it? Forget it. And anyway, after what they did to Leroy, here, do you think someone else is going to be real interested in shooting their mouth off, and maybe taking their turn trying to explain why they talked to the cops to someone as handy with a knife as the psycho that did this?’

Robinson shook his head, and thought: It’s useless.

He stepped away from the macabre tableau in the center of the room, and leaned up against a wall, thinking that he was completely, totally certain that the Shadow Man had found a way into the apartment, and was waiting for Jefferson, and that each slice in the junkie’s body was like some exotic signature that only he could read. He recognized a fundamental truism in the responses of the other policemen: It didn’t make sense that an elderly white man from Miami Beach would come to the center of the inner city to kill a low-life junkie and wannabe drug dealer, but he was certain that was what had happened. He also knew that anyone killing Leroy Jefferson was likely to get away with it. No one cared much about Leroy Jefferson either in life or death.

He took a deep breath.

Leroy Jefferson is merely dead, he told himself. The detectives working the case will shake a few informants, try to play one gang against another, see if they can’t come up with a name that way. But they aren’t really going to care, any

more than he would. They’ll maybe put in a little extra effort because he was a State’s witness, but they understand the drill. You play on the fringe, you got to accept what’s coming to you, and there was no one in the world who would say that, in a perverse way, Leroy Jefferson, Leroy fucking Jefferson, hadn’t gotten precisely what the heavens were always expected to deliver to him. He’d only received it a little slower and more painfully than was the norm. A bullet in a drive-by shooting would have been statistically more appropriate. He thought there hadn’t been much to like about Leroy Jefferson, but more, he hated how close they were, just as the murdered man had said. Could it have been me? Walter Robinson asked himself. If I’d taken a wrong step, made a bad decision, then I might have ended up like this: no suit, no badge, no lover, no future.

He looked over at the body and thought: No matter how far you travel away from this, it will always be there. It was like staring into a nightmare, one that was much closer to him than the vision the old couple laying peacefully on their bed had created earlier in the morning. He tried to imagine himself and Espy Martinez, old, together and drinking champagne as they swallowed handfuls of sleeping tablets.

Walter Robinson let out a long, slow sigh. He felt an abrupt chill, almost as if some bizarrely lost cold wind had singled him out from all the other policemen processing the room. He looked up toward the open eyes of Leroy Jefferson and thought: Was he waiting here for you when I dropped you off? He knew the answer to this.

He remembered his offer to accompany Jefferson to the apartment, and in that second he imagined himself reaching for his weapon as the Shadow Man reached for him. He wondered: Would I have made it?

He did not think so.

He asked himself: Would he kill a cop too?

Again the answer was yes. He did not think the Shadow Man cared the slightest for the ordinary conventions of criminality, which held out that killing policemen was a considerably worse crime than eviscerating a drug-dealing State’s witness.

He will kill anyone whom he perceives as a threat.

Robinson shuddered involuntarily, then looked around the room to see if any of the other policemen had seen the quiver in his shoulders. His eyes met Sergeant Lion-man’s, and for just an instant the two of them locked, and the burly policeman nodded in understanding. Robinson breathed in hard, and saw the medical examiner hover again around the dead man’s body.

One of the other detectives saw the same. ‘What’s so interesting, Doc?’ he called out.

The medical examiner was a small, bookish man, with delicate features and a bald spot on his head that glistened with sweat. He sometimes whistled while he worked on a body, a detail that caused no end of amusement amongst homicide detectives.

‘I was just looking at this tape around the victim’s lips,’ he replied. ‘Very strange.’

‘What’s so strange?’ the detective asked. The other men stopped working and looked his way.

‘Well, for one thing, I don’t understand all this blood caked up here and here. See, if the killer put the tape on his mouth to shut him up, then cuts his throat so’s he drowns, well, all the blood would be where most of it is. There wouldn’t be any on his mouth. Gravity, you know. Liquid flows downhill.’

‘So, what are you saying?’ Walter Robinson heard someone ask.

‘I’m saying, something else caused this blood.’ ‘Maybe he smashed him in the mouth before slapping on the tape?’

‘Maybe. But no other external signs of a beating. Just signs of knife work.’

The medical examiner whistled for a moment, a vaguely recognizable tune from a Broadway show. Then he reached out and put his fingers around the edge of the tape.

‘Just can’t stand waiting,’ he said quietly. ‘Never could, even when I was a kid. Birthdays. Christmas. Always wanted to see what was inside those packages.’ As he said this, he ripped the tape from the dead man’s lips. It made a sucking sound.

The other men turned and looked. For a moment Robinson’s vision was obscured by the medical examiner’s body.

‘I’ll be damned.’ The medical examiner stepped back. ‘Well, I guess it’s safe to say that someone was displeased with the victim’s conversational style.’