The Shadow Man (5 page)

Miami Beach - why, the place is positively thick with them. And they all look alike too. And maybe he thought you were someone he knew, because of the way you stared, and that’s why he looked back so carefully. And when he realized you weren’t familiar, why, to save you the embarrassment, he just walked away. Happens all the time. Go through life meeting hundreds of folks, and so it’s not unreasonable to get mixed up every once in a while. But she did not feel mixed up. Why here? she asked. I don’t know.

Why would he come here? I don’t know. What will he do? I don’t know. Who is he? She knew the answer to this question, but she would not

articulate it to herself.

She tried to take charge of her emotions as they catapulted about the small apartment. She decided that in the morning, she would go over to the Holocaust Center and speak with the people there. They were always so kind, even the young ones, and so interested in everything she had to say, she was sure they would listen to her once again. They would know what to do. She felt immediately better.

That’s a good plan, she told herself.

Sophie Millstein picked up the telephone and dialed the

Holocaust Center number. She waited until the taped

answering machine had completed its recitation of operating hours, and then, after hearing the signal beep, said into

the phone: ‘Esther? This is Sophie Millstein. I need to talk

to you, please. I will come by today, in the morning, and

talk a bit about how I was arrested. Something has

happened. I was reminded …’

She stopped, not knowing how much she could explain. In her hesitation, the tape machine ran to its end, beeping and disconnecting her. She held the phone out, considering calling and adding to her message, then deciding not to.

She hung up, feeling better.

She went to the front window and just slid a corner of the curtain back, peeking out once again, as she had earlier when she’d watched Simon Winter depart. She saw the lights were off in his apartment. For a moment she watched the courtyard, straining her eyes to see past to the street. A car went by rapidly. She caught a glimpse of a couple walking swiftly down the sidewalk.

She abandoned the front, then walked to the rear patio door, checking, just as Simon Winter had, to make sure it was locked. She gave the sliding door a little shake. Lamenting the flimsy lock, she decided another thing she could do in the morning was to call Mr Gonzalez, the owner of the Sunshine Arms. I’m old, she thought. We’re all old here, and he really should install better locks and maybe one of those fancy alarm systems like the one my friend Rhea has over at the Belle Vue. All she has to do is push a button and the police are called, just like magic. We should have something like that, she thought. Something modern.

She glanced outside again, but saw nothing save darkness.

Mr Boots was at her feet.

‘See, kitty. Nothing for you to worry about.’

The cat did not respond.

She felt exhaustion battling with fear within her. For a moment she allowed herself to think that perhaps the elderly complex her son was trying to persuade her to

move into wouldn’t be such an awful idea.

But like everything else, she decided it could wait until the next day. She reassured herself with a mental list of the things she would have to do in the morning: call Mr Gonzalez; purchase a new can opener, an electric one; call her son; visit the Holocaust Center; talk to the rabbi and Mr Silver and Mrs Kroner; and meet with Simon Winter and make a decision. A busy day, she thought. She stepped into the small bathroom and opened her medicine cabinet. Lined up at attention were a number of medications. Something for her heart. Something for her digestion. Something for her aches and pains. In a small container near the end of the shelf was what she was searching for: something to help her sleep. She poured a single white pill into her hand and swallowed it without using any water.

‘There,’ she said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘Now, maybe ten minutes and you’ll be out like a light.’

She hurried into the bedroom and slipped out of her clothes, taking the time to carefully hang her dress in the closet and drop her undergarments in a white wicker hamper. She slipped on a rayon nightgown, adjusting the frilly part near her neck. She remembered it was one of Leo’s favorites, and that he’d teased her and called her sexy when she wore it. She missed this. She had never thought herself sexy, but she’d liked it when he’d teased her, because it made her feel desired, which was pleasurable. She glanced at her husband’s picture one last time, then slid under the thin covers. She could feel a warm, dizzying sensation moving through her body as the sleeping pill took effect.

The cat jumped up on the bed next to her.

She reached out and stroked it.

‘I was mean to you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry Mr Boots. I just need to sleep.’ He curled next to her.

She closed her eyes. It was all she wanted in the entire world, she thought: a single, restful evening of comforting, dreamless sleep.

Night like a box closed around Sophie Millstein. She did not even stir several hours later, when Mr Boots suddenly rose up, back arched, spitting and hissing in hasty cat-fear at the harsh and heartless sounds of intrusion.

It was already nine minutes after midnight and Miami Beach 911 operator Number 3 was irritated that her shift replacement was delayed for the third time that week. She knew Number 17’s toddler had been ill with bronchitis, but still, nine minutes was nine minutes, and she wanted to get home so that she would not be completely exhausted when her own son awakened her as he did almost every morning by banging his way around the small bathroom and kitchen of her home in Carol City. One of the advantages, she knew, of teenage, was a certain oblivious-ness to racket. So she counted the minutes, adding Number 17’s tardiness to the drive across the beach, over the causeway, past downtown and up onto the expressway, skirting Liberty City, until finally reaching the small house she owned in a dusty part of the county that was neither city nor suburban, a lower-middle-class enclave that offered modest safety and slightly less heartbreak than the world barely a mile or two away. The trip would take her just under an hour in her eight-year-old Chevy.

To her right and left, numbers 11 and 14 had already settled into the nightly routine. Number 11 was moving a hook and ladder company to a third-story apartment fire just off Collins-Avenue, and Number 14 was patching a

state trooper through to wants and warrants as he chased a big BMW across the Julia Tuttle Causeway, It had been a tiring night: a convenience store robbery, a reported rape, a fight outside a nightclub. Plenty for her to do, nothing she thought that would make the papers in the morning. Number 3 looked up, craning her neck away from the bank of phone lines, looking for Number 17.

She was still looking when the light on the board in front of her blinked red, and without thinking, she punched the connection and spoke, sounding machinelike and well-drilled.

‘Miami Beach Fire, Police and Rescue.’

As she heard the first words, she knew it was an old person’s voice:

‘Ohmigod, please send the police right away! Somebody’s killed her! Oh, poor Mrs Millstein! An ambulance! Send help! Please!’

Cutting through hysteria was her job.

‘Yes, ma’am. Right away. Give me an address.’

‘Yes, yes, oh, the Sunshine Arms, 1290 Thirteenth Court. Hurry, please …’

‘Ma’am, what sort of assistance do you need? What has happened?’ Number 3 remained perfectly even-toned in her questions.

‘We heard a noise, my Henry and I, and he went down to check it out and Mr Finkel went too and she was dead! Oh my goodness, what’s the world coming to? Send the police. Please. Someone’s killed her. Oh my lord, what are we coming to?’

‘Hold the line please …’ Number 3 left the woman on an open line while she punched another button: ‘Any officer. Possible ten-thirty, 1290 Thirteenth Court. Code is Three. People on scene. Patrol sergeant, please respond …’ She punched a second button, connecting

herself to an ambulance crew. ‘We have a ten-thirty at 1290 Thirteenth Court, but there are elderly people involved. Drive by. See if any need assistance.’ This wasn’t precisely procedure, but Number 3 had been a 911 operator on the Beach for over a decade, and she knew that more than once the sound of sirens and excitement strained fragile heart muscles.

Number 3 then calmly reconnected herself to the frantic woman on the open line.

‘Ma’am, help is on the way. An officer should be right there. And I’ve notified Rescue as well.’

‘He saw him, my Henry did, running out the back. A black man and Henry chased him to the alley, he did, but then he got away and I called. Oh, poor Mrs Millstein!’ ‘Ma’am, is the perpetrator still on the scene?’ ‘What? The who? No, he ran away down the alley.’ ‘Ma’am, hold on. I will need your name and address.’ Again she left the caller on the open line, as she dialed another number.

‘Beach Homicide. This is Detective Robinson.’ ‘Detective? This is Operator Three down in 911. I do believe your slow night is about to pick up. We just got a call, possible ten-thirty at an apartment complex called the Sunshine Arms in South Beach. Uniforms are en route, but maybe you want to send someone over there before they make a mess of things.’

Walter Robinson recognized the voice. ‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘my night wouldn’t be complete without a call from you.’

Number 3 smiled, wished for an instant that she were younger and sexier, and that her husband wasn’t at home snoring in the big double bed they owned, then replied: ‘Well, Detective, it’s complete now. I’ve got a hysterical old woman on the open line, saying the perpetrator just fled the scene. Maybe you can hurry and get lucky.’

‘Luck,’ Robinson answered, ‘is something in short supply in this world.’

Number 3” nodded. She looked up and saw Number 17 entering the phone room, looking sheepish and apologetic for being late.

‘Well, Detective, if you don’t need luck…’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t need it, Lucy. I just said there wasn’t much of it available. Especially late at night in the city.’

‘Amen,’ said Number 3 as she disconnected the detective and heard a distant siren come over the open line, its insistent wail rising above the teary sobs of the elderly woman.

Walter Robinson put the phone back on its cradle and wrote down the address on a piece of scratch paper, thinking to himself that it was hot outside, a nasty, thick, clutching oily heat that threatened to rob his lungs of air. He knew already what he would find when he exited the cool, sterile interior of the homicide offices. A world compacted by stifling humidity, weighing on his chest like a tight jacket. He took a deep breath and shoved the legal textbooks he’d been studying into a drawer, then reached for a portable radio phone resting in an electric charging device on the corner of his desk. He said to himself: this is an awful night for anyone to have to die.

Robinson, aged less by years than a steady dosage of street cynicism, twenty credits shy of a law degree which he thought was his ticket out of police work, drove fast through the pale yellow sodium vapor lights that gave the city its otherworldly nighttime glow. Although he did not think of himself as a native Miamian - that was a category reserved for slow-drawling crackers and rednecks from the southern part of Dade County - he had been born and

raised in Coconut Grove, the son of an elementary school teacher.

His middle name was Birmingham, though he never used it. It was too difficult to explain to the primarily white and Hispanic membership of the Beach force why he had been named, at least in part, after a city. His mother was a distant cousin to one of the children killed in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, so, when he was born shortly thereafter, she had vented some of her frustration by naming him after the Alabama city, giving him a reminder, she often informed him, so that he would not forget where he had come from.

Forgetting where he had come from, however, did not seem such a terrible thing to Walter Robinson. He had never been to his namesake in Alabama, and didn’t particularly like returning to the part of the city where he’d grown up. The Grove is a curious section of Miami. By accident of time and development, one of the city’s worst slums butted directly up against one of its most affluent areas, creating a constant ebb and flow of fear, anger, and envy. Robinson had lived with all those sensations, and didn’t particularly enjoy reminding himself of them.

And, despite eight years in the Miami Beach department, first in uniform and then three with a gold shield, he didn’t consider that home either. He thought his rootless-ness unusual, was slightly bothered by it and generally tried to ignore it.

He pulled down Thirteenth Court and spotted the cruisers parked outside the Sunshine Arms. He was pleased to discover that uniformed officers had already stripped ubiquitous yellow police-line tape around much of the area. He got out of his unmarked car and walked past a small group of elderly people gathered into a corner of the courtyard. A patrol sergeant greeted him by name

as he approached the apartment building, and he nodded his response:

‘So, what have we got?’

‘Elderly victim, in the bedroom. Signs of forced entry in back. A patio door, you know one of those sliding ones that my six-year-old could break in …”

‘I know the type. Signs of struggle?’

‘Not too much. But looks like the perp grabbed everything he could before the neighbors got there. He must have run when he heard them come poking around. One of them, a Mr Henry Kadosh, upstairs apartment, chased the perp out to the alley, got a pretty fair look. His wife called 911.’

‘And?’

‘Black male. Late teenage to mid-twenties. Five feet ten to six feet. Slight build, maybe 175 pounds. Wearing high-top sneakers and a dark T-shirt.’

‘Sounds like me,’ Walter Robinson said. ‘I know somebody’s gonna say “But they all look so much alike” before I clear this scene.’ He imitated an elderly person’s voice as he spoke.