by Lutz, John
Shadowtown
An Oxman and Tobin Mystery
John Lutz
THE CAST
E. L. Oxman
Jennifer Crane
Art Tobin
Smiley Manders
Lana Spence
Delia Lane
Zachary Denton
Arthur Sales
Roger Maler
Linda Beller
Midge Brown
Harry Overbeck
Sy Youngerman
Brian King
Mayor Carl Smith
Jean Richards
Mrs. Lois Smith
Shane Moreland
Manny Brokton
William Coats
Louie Carter
Burt Lassiter
Lance Jardeen
Marv Egan
Calvin Oaks
Brad Gaines
Phil Malloy
Vince McGreery
Myra Deeber
Ernie Dickerson
Edgar Grume
Izzy Singer
Murray Felstein
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.
T. S. Eliot
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting,
’Twas only that when he was off, he was acting.
Oliver Goldsmith
Scene 1
Vincent McGreery—11:00 P.M.
He strolled halfway down the alley where little Ivy Ingrams had attempted abortion with a wire clothes hanger, only to lose her own life while her baby lived. Then he opened the door to Delia Lane’s luxurious living room, where she’d seduced her best friend’s teenage son, made phone calls revealing her sister’s lesbian affair with the mayor’s wife, and romped with the mayor himself in wild semi-nude ecstasy on her polar-bear rug while hidden cameras whirred. The mayor had hanged himself when Delia threatened to send the videotapes to the city council.
McGreery closed the door on the Lane residence, then stepped through a wall into Roger Maler’s country cottage and swept the yellow beam of his flashlight around. Maler, the town’s most eligible bachelor, had enjoyed some high times here.
Everything looked okay, as it had every night since retired New York cop Vince McGreery had been working as a watchman for Shadowtown Productions, Incorporated. The job paid nicely for this kind of work; McGreery knew several fellow retired policemen who wished they could do as well. The Shadowtown paychecks, plus his monthly pension checks, provided more than enough money for a sixty-eight-year-old former traffic patrolman and his wife, Annie. They still had their health, and their house out in Teaneck was paid for. Neither longed for travel or new sights. They often told each other there was plenty they hadn’t seen in New York. But they never went to see any of it, choosing instead to spend evenings—days, since McGreery had landed the Shadowtown job—with only each other in their modest brick house with the daffodil-strewn backyard. They hadn’t been out to dinner in months, or to the theater in years. The quiet life; that was for McGreery and his Annie. McGreery had seen more than enough mayhem during his days on the force.
All McGreery had to do now was to look in on the Park Avenue apartment, and he could return to the well-lighted, cozy office and settle down with the mystery novel he was reading. Since retiring from the force, he’d become quite a fan of mystery fiction. He didn’t like to read the occult stuff, though—all that supernatural malarkey. McGreery had had enough of nightmares when he was a kid and read too many scary stories and gone to ghoul and ghost movies. “It’s tough enough living in the real world,” his father had told him, “without borrowing trouble from your imagination and reading about things that don’t exist.” The old man was right, as usual. And McGreery had grown up to be a practical man who scoffed at, or observed with amused tolerance, the otherwise sensible people who fell victim to fortune tellers, phony mediums, and specialists in exorcising demons.
The Park Avenue apartment was a set that was no longer used. It had been the daytime home of Edgar Grume, a lothario who also happened to be a vampire, one with a power over women that enabled him to seduce a long string of willing and winsome young actresses who’d found brief fame on Shadowtown. And some of the victims had been established stars; falling victim to Edgar Grume had become a sort of running gag with show-business personalities. Rock stars and movie stars had exposed their lovely necks to Grume’s fangs. Of course, McGreery had never witnessed any of this. It was Annie who was the soap-opera fan, and who daily filled in McGreery on what had happened in that insular little TV world while he’d been sleeping away the afternoon.
Edgar Grume had been lured to the dark bedroom of a sister of one of his victims and then destroyed by flashbulbs, intermittently decomposing before the audience’s eyes with each brilliant eruption of light as the terrified but determined lass tripped her camera’s shutter over and over. In the morning, they found her dead from shock, her hair as white as McGreery’s. (So Annie said.) And on the floor by the window was only a small mound of dust that the maid wondered about briefly and then swept up and deposited with the trash. Ashes to ashes.
In the corpse’s hand was a camera loaded with film that, when developed, turned out to be only snapshots of the empty bedroom.
McGreery had laughed when Annie told him that; he could have predicted it. Everyone but Annie knew vampires didn’t appear in mirrors or on film.
Thousands of letters had poured into Shadowtown Productions’ mail room after Edgar Grume’s death. There must have been something about the toothsome seducer that had touched women’s hearts.
Everything was dusty and in order in Grume’s swank apartment with its brass-embellished coffin resting on a table near the console TV. It was a real coffin, on loan from a mortuary in Queens. McGreery wondered when someone would come to pick it up. The Grume set would have been struck a long time ago if Shadowtown were pressed for space. But the huge warehouse the company had bought and then converted into a shooting stage enabled them to shuffle sets and props into dark corners and forget them. The show was high in the ratings, so the emphasis was on keeping up momentum rather than on squeezing pennies.
McGreery played his yellow flashlight beam over the modern furniture, the ceiling-to-floor red drapes, the bar in the corner where nighttime victims had gotten deliciously drunk on bourbon-colored tea before death by erotic transfusion. Some vampire, McGreery thought, his flesh-padded, seamed face widening in a smile. He ambled stiffly down the hall toward the prop room, which he’d glance into on his way to the office. His rheumatic knee was bothering him tonight. Bothering him more and more lately.
As he walked, he aimed the flashlight out in front of him at a downward angle. At his age a man had to be careful; one simple tumble he would have laughed at in his youth could now fracture a hip and lay him up for months. He would have turned on the lights to check the stage area, but there was some illumination here from outside streetlights, filtering in through the high slit windows. No point in walking around flipping switches on and off. And the main switch lighted the place up too bright for McGreery’s aging eyes. Anyway, it would have been a waste of electricity for the ten minutes he spent on his initial round. At 3:00 A.M., in four hours, he’d make his detailed check of the place; that’s when he always lit up the old warehouse like a partying cruise ship.
The prop department was a long, narrow room that had been created inside the warehouse with two-by-four framing and drywall. It had no ceiling of its own, and there was no lock on the hollow-core door.
McGreery opened the door, poked his head in, and swept the flashlight beam around the racks of clothes, the makeup tables, and full-length mirrors. This was the costume department, too. The fitting-room
door at the opposite end of the room was open. He aimed his light in there briefly, then closed the prop-room door and continued down the hall, pushing through the darkness.
His office was off the reception area of Shadowtown Productions’ suite of offices in the north end of the building, close to the copy machines, desktop computers, and typewriters that would be a break-in artist’s prime targets. On the sound stage itself, the studio, where the soap opera was “live-taped” every weekday, the company’s main concern was the prevention of vandalism.
As he passed the row of dressing rooms along the hall, McGreery paused and cocked his head to the side.
A sound. He thought he’d heard something. There. Again. The faint scuff of a sole on cement. That was a sound any retired cop would recognize.
Except for the sets themselves, and the offices, most of the old building had concrete floors.
McGreery turned and started walking slowly back toward the sound stage. He wore soft-soled shoes and made very little noise.
He paused at the prop-room door, listening.
There was the sound again. Not from the prop room but ahead of him, where the set was arranged for tomorrow’s indoor shooting after the picnic scene. In the park tomorrow, after packaged delicacies and iced champagne, Delia the ballbreaker was going to warn her lover, Roger Maler, to stay away from his college-age girlfriend.
It was probably something totally innocent that McGreery had heard. There was no reason yet for alarm, to suspect that someone had broken in. The sound might have been that of a precariously balanced object falling; a stack of papers slipping off the edge of a desk or table might make the same noise as they slid to the floor. Or it might have been McGreery’s imagination. No sound. Nothing at all.
No, not nothing. McGreery stopped fooling himself. He knew he’d heard something. Probably somebody.
There was nothing in the alley other than some glued-down crumpled newspapers, and a row of metal trash cans that Special Effects had aged and battered.
Nothing in bitchy Delia Lane’s plush living room.
Nothing in the resort cottage. Or in the Park Avenue apartment.
McGreery sighed long and loud and removed the heel of his right hand from where it had been resting on the butt of his holstered revolver. What the hell, maybe he hadn’t heard anything after all. Old ears played tricks, sometimes heard sounds from memory as well as reality. The rhythm of his heart slowed, and he sidestepped a camera dolly, turned, and walked through the dimness back toward the offices.
That’s when it opened the door and stepped out of Delia Lane’s living room.
McGreery could only manage a startled “Wha—”
His mind whirled. This creature coming toward him must have been hiding in there. But where? McGreery thought he’d looked everywhere. Behind the drapes! That was the only possible place!
That information did McGreery no good now. His heart seemed to swell to ten times its size and battered at his chest like a wild thing desperately seeking escape. He fumbled with his holster, but a jolt of pain in his left armpit caused him to breathe in harshly and hunch over in terror. He forgot about the gun, and, for an instant, even about his fear of what he’d seen. The pain crept down his arm, so excruciating that it paralyzed the left side of his body. An iron grip closed on his chest and tightened. He realized what was happening. Everybody McGreery knew over sixty understood the symptoms.
Heart attack! He was having a heart attack!
The thing moved toward him, into slightly brighter light, and McGreery saw that what had appeared to be a huge dark bird with folded wings was actually a man wearing a long black cape. McGreery tried to take a step backward, managed only a clumsy lurch. The pain, the fear, rooted him where he stood.
The man in the cape made a deft circling motion with both hands. He was holding a piece of cord, McGreery saw, and stretching it taut to test its strength.
“Please!” McGreery hissed through grinding teeth.
His heart exploded over and over, driving him against the wall with pain. In a daze, he saw the man in the cape make a quick movement toward him with the cord, felt something brush the back of his neck.
And suddenly McGreery couldn’t breathe. He tried again to fumble the revolver from its holster, but his limbs wouldn’t function as he wished; they merely flapped around in stiff, awkward movements, his fingers spread wide and useless, as if they belonged already to death. He could hear cartilage popping softly in his throat as the cord dug into his neck. My God! …
But it was the viselike pain in his chest that consumed McGreery, that drew him from life into darkness. In the dim, failing light he saw his assailant’s lips curl away from white teeth in what might have been a smile or a sneer.
Fangs! Holy Jesus, the bastard had fangs! Fangs moving nearer, seeming to lengthen, as McGreery sank to the floor and the caped figure bent over him. Nearer.
That was Vincent McGreery’s final vision, and almost his last wild fragment of thought.
Fangs!
He was swirling lightly into nothingness when he heard the voice: “Vincent? Are you there?” Annie’s voice?
Annie? …
“Shadowtown” Episode No. 342 (In Reruns)
Edgar Grume glided nearer to the bed and smiled down at his victim-to-be. She was a buxom, dark-haired woman, lying rigid in alarm with her eyes wide, unable to believe Grume was there, in her own bedroom. Behind her the window was open, its filmy white curtains swaying gracefully in the night breeze.
Then a curious thing happened. As she met Grume’s stare her fear seemed to disappear. His eyes were as gentle as they were hypnotic. Her sensuous mouth softened; the glistening pink tip of her tongue emerged and slid slowly across her upper lip.
“That’s right, my darling,” he told her in a soft voice. He didn’t want to wake her husband, sleeping beside her. “There’s nothing to fear. What’s about to happen is a gift, from each of us to the other.”
Still with her eyes locked to his steady gaze, she slowly ran her fingertips over her bare throat and down to where her half-exposed breasts swelled firmly above her thin nightgown. Her nails left scratches on her smooth flesh.
“I’ll take from you what I must have,” Grume told her. “And in return I offer you eternity, life for as long as time. Control of others. I’ll give you another world. Another world, my darling, right here in this one.”
He concentrated his gentle stare for the close-up, then moved toward the side of the bed. Gradually, so gradually.
The woman did that thing with her tongue and upper lip again, then returned his smile and raised pale arms to embrace him as he leaned over her.
Cut to the sleeping husband.
Fade to commercial.
Scene 2
E. L. Oxman—12:45 A.M.
“I thought I heard something,” Zachary Denton said. “I called McGreery’s name: ‘Vincent.’ I wanted to tell him I’d forgotten something and returned to the office to get it. Didn’t want to surprise him. He didn’t answer.” Zachary hunched his bony but wide shoulders forward, as if to shelter his tall, lean body. “Guess somebody else surprised him.”
NYPD Detective Sergeant E. L. Oxman listened quietly, his blue eyes patient in a face that gave away nothing. He was a fortyish, sandy-haired man, average size yet taller than he appeared, not fat, but with a thickset, deceptively powerful shambling quality about him. Because of his sometimes phlegmatic mannerisms, and his name, Oxman was often thought of as a plodder. But usually it was calmness and not slowness that was evident in Oxman. And he was plodding only in that he was painstakingly methodical; when he hung a collar on a suspect, it stayed.
He’d taken this squeal at home last night. His superior at the Twenty-fourth Precinct, Lieutenant Smiley Manders, had awakened him with the call.
Oxman was dragged from sleep by the jangling phone next to the bed. As he groped for the receiver with his right hand, he tried to glance at the luminous dial of his watch. But his left hand and
wrist, and the watch, were pinned out of sight beneath Jennifer, who hadn’t been awakened by the sound or his movement.
“We’ve got a homicide, Ox,” Manders said in his sepulchral voice. The voice matched his basset-hound face. He was called Smiley precisely because his features seldom defied gravity and shaped a smile.
“I’m not on duty,” Oxman said. “Didn’t you notice the shift schedule?” But he knew Manders had noticed. The lieutenant’s sad brown eyes noticed everything.
“This one’s practically around the corner from you,” Manders said, “so I’m giving it to you and Tobin.”
“Damn near everything in the Two-Four is in my neighborhood,” Oxman said. He was living now with Jennifer in her apartment on West Ninety-eighth, near the turgid Hudson and Riverside Park. Oxman had been instrumental in solving a mass-murder case in this neighborhood last year. That was how he’d met Jennifer, how he’d eventually gotten his divorce, how …
Manders interrupted his thoughts. “Sorry, Ox, but it’s you and Tobin. Possible bad PR in this one; I need my best.”
Departmental politics. Oxman hated them, and seldom played them or bent to them. That was why he was still a sergeant after two decades on the force. Manders could accommodate the politicos somehow without giving them an important part of himself. That was a talent not everyone had.
“A night watchman at Shadowtown Productions was killed a few hours ago,” Manders said.
Oxman searched his mental file, came up blank. “What the hell is Shadowtown Productions?”
“You never heard of ‘Shadowtown’?”
“No, is it near Buffalo?”
“It’s a soap opera, Ox. One of the most popular on afternoon television. My wife watches it, her sister watches it, everybody female and most males watch it.”
“I don’t watch it,” Oxman said. “Never heard of it till just now.”
“They shoot the show over in an old converted warehouse off Riverside Drive; probably pumped a million dollars into the ramshackle joint, though you wouldn’t know it from the outside. But the inside is lined with plush offices, dressing rooms, and all the claptrap that goes with shooting a major-league TV production. Boom mikes, lights, cameras, cardboard walls.”
