Shadowtown

by Lutz, John

But she knew that alone she might not want to survive.

  She sat down at her drafting board, took a sip of coffee, and set the cup on its cork coaster. She had an uneasy feeling about this murder Oxman was investigating. She didn’t know why. At least the poor old watchman hadn’t had fang marks on his neck. Anyway, Jennifer didn’t believe in vampires, or werewolves, or the Yellow Brick Road.

  Well, maybe the Yellow Brick Road. Sometimes. She smiled, thinking of Oxman last night in bed, before they’d slept. She and Ox were, in the vernacular of soaps and singles bars, good together.

  Before starting to work, she looked at her wristwatch, then set its alarm.

  At ten o’clock, she’d call Myra Deeber.

  E. L. Oxman—7:40 A.M.

  Tobin was at his desk in the squad room when Oxman arrived at the Twenty-fourth. He was engrossed in paperwork and had his white shirt-sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened. Muscle and tendon played along his. dark forearms as he shuffled the report he’d just finished typing from his almost illegible longhand. Tobin, usually neatly if conservatively dressed, looked unkempt for this time of the morning. Even his tie was wrinkled.

  “Sleep at all last night?” Oxman asked, sitting on the edge of Tobin’s gray metal desk.

  Tobin glowered up at him, his intense brown eyes puffy and pink-rimmed. “I stayed up a while after I got home, E. L. Went over my notes from that ‘Shadowtown’ thing, thought about it.”

  A Narcotics officer names Jameson walked past and waved to Oxman. Oxman waved back. “And?”

  “I figure a loony broke in there to act out his fantasy, got surprised and panicked, then killed the watchman.”

  “Why?”

  Tobin looked irritated. “Hell, I don’t know. Embarrassment, maybe. How would you feel if somebody walked in on you while you were dancing around a dark studio playing vampire?”

  “Okay,” Oxman said, “this should be easy. We question everyone till we get a suspect who blushes easily, and we know we got our perp.”

  “You be pokin’ fun, Elliot Leroy.”

  Oxman stood up from the desk edge and sighed. He knew it was time to back off when Tobin lapsed into his self-deprecating parody of street-black dialect. “Yeah, I guess I am. I just can’t buy embarrassment as a motive for murder. A guy who lives in enough of a dream world to put on his own private show, it seems to me he’d run if he were surprised.”

  “People panic,” Tobin said, “and act unreasonably.”

  “I think if he panicked he’d bolt, even if the watchman had his gun out of its holster, which he hadn’t.” Oxman shifted the bulk of his own holstered .38 Police Special. “You had coffee, Art?”

  Tobin nodded. “But I’ll have another cup if you’re buying.”

  Oxman went into the precinct lounge, a tiny green room near the booking area, and coaxed two cups of coffee from the balky vending machine, black for him, cream and sugar for Tobin. Jameson the narc was in the lounge, seated at the Formica table and sipping what looked like hot chocolate but might have been anything.

  “Heard you were up late last night, Ox.”

  Oxman nodded. “Or early. Depending on how you look at it.”

  “Need any advice in dealing with these show-biz types, just let me know.”

  “You’ve dealt with TV celebrities?”

  “Sure, Ox. I’m in Narcotics. There’s enough snow drifting around in show business in this town to start a ski resort. Part of that kind of life. I never had anything to do with soap-opera stars, though. But their kind are all the same; things won’t be easy for you.”

  Oxman shrugged. “I think we’ll wrap up this one soon. It’s not all that complicated.”

  “They can put on a show,” Jameson warned, as Oxman was walking out balancing the steaming coffee cups. “Remember, Ox, they’re all actors.”

  Oxman wasn’t impressed. Some of the best actors he’d seen had never been onstage or before a camera.

  “Manders wants you,” Tobin said, when Oxman had returned to the desk.

  Oxman nodded, but instead of leaving for Manders’s office, he picked up Tobin’s typed report and read it. Oxman knew most of it, but he hadn’t been on the scene when Tobin had questioned the co-producers and set designer.

  There was nothing startling in the report. Zachary Denton was on the scene when Tobin had arrived, had in fact interrupted the murderer. Sy Youngerman and Harry Overbeck had been phoned at home and had rushed right to the studio. It hadn’t taken them long. Overbeck lived on Central Park South, Youngerman on West End Avenue. However, reading further, Oxman saw that both men had been at a cocktail party at Youngerman’s place. Great. They could alibi each other, along with any of Youngerman’s other guests.

  Oxman scratched his chin. On the other hand, West End was near enough so anyone could have slipped away unnoticed from the party for a while, then returned after killing McGreery. Not much time for a costume change in that scenario, but there was no guarantee the killer had been dressed like a vampire, or had even worn a black cape. Denton might very well have been mistaken about that. An eyewitness account in a dim warehouse didn’t count for much.

  A button on Tobin’s phone went into a riot of blinking. He lifted the receiver. “Yes, sir,” he said, “he’s right here now.” He hung up and said, “Manders again, Ox.”

  Oxman laid the McGreery homicide report on a clear corner of Tobin’s cluttered desk, then crossed the squad room and walked down the short hall to Smiley Manders’s office.

  Manders was seated at his desk, his hands laced behind his head, his eyes lightly closed. For a moment Oxman thought he might be practicing yoga, then he realized that wasn’t likely in a harried police lieutenant who existed on a pizza-and-cigarette diet. More likely he was enduring pain while waiting for his antacid to work.

  When Oxman shut the door behind him, Manders’s eyes sprang open. He seemed startled; he might actually have been dozing.

  “Didn’t hear you come in, Ox.” His hands came out from behind his head and he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. He’d been up late last night, too, and he looked tired, but Oxman knew Manders often looked weary when he wasn’t. “The McGreery murder,” Manders said in his rusty-nail voice. “How do you read it?”

  “Kind of early to get any kind of reading,” Oxman said. “We need some facts.”

  Manders lit a cigarette, coughed violently, then balanced it on the lip of a glass ashtray. He delicately picked some tobacco crumbs off the tip of his tongue and rolled them between his thumb and forefinger. “Tobin thinks it was just some nut-case the watchman disturbed play-acting.”

  “It’s possible,” Oxman said. “You know how it is; most anything’s possible in Manhattan.”

  “Yeah. Was anything missing from the studio?”

  Oxman shook his head. “Nothing appears to be so far. The show’s producers looked around last night and said everything seemed to be in place. They’re gonna check more carefully this morning.”

  “The lab isn’t finished with comparisons,” Manders said, “but it appears there aren’t any fingerprints we wouldn’t expect to find at the scene. Of course, it’ll take a while to identify some prints. Lots of people come and go in a place like that.”

  “Was the killer wearing gloves?” Oxman asked. The lab must have gotten that far.

  Manders drew on his cigarette, then locked down at it as if dismayed that he was trapped by the filthy habit. He exhaled lustily and squinted through the smoke. “We can’t even be sure of that, Ox, but it would seem so. Do vampires wear gloves?”

  “I don’t know,” Oxman said. “Guess I’ll have to watch some late movies to find out.”

  “Or some ‘Shadowtown’ tapes.”

  Oxman cringed.

  “Actually,” Manders said, “it looks like a simple B and E where the perp got interrupted before he had a chance to steal anything. Then he lost his head and killed the watchman.”

  “That’s the way I see it,” Oxman said, not sure if he did see
it that way. Not sure if Manders did. This one wasn’t quite right for a breaking-and-entry murder. Or maybe that was just the show-biz flavor making it seem as if there should be some sort of complicated plot.

  “Get statements from the rest of the cast and crew and whoever else over there you need to talk with,” Manders said. “We’ll have to treat this one with a little care. You can understand why.”

  “Our friends the media?”

  Manders nodded and drew again on the hated cigarette. “A contact at the Post tells me this afternoon’s edition is gonna have a spread on the McGreery killing, playing up the soap-opera bit, the guy in the cape who was supposed to have been seen. But if we do our work quickly and neatly, the whole matter’ll blow over in a few days.”

  “You think we’ll find out who killed the watchman in a few days?” Oxman asked, astounded.

  “I think that in a few days we’ll get as far as the facts lead us and we’ll realize the killer will probably never be caught. This is just another one of those panicky, spur-of-the-moment homicides that won’t be cleared up until we happen to arrest somebody on an unrelated charge and he gives information in order to buy less prison time. That might be years from now, if at all.”

  “You really believe that?” Oxman asked. He knew it was probably true, but he’d never heard Manders take a defeatist line. Or maybe Manders was simply being a realist.

  “The captain believes it,” Manders said. “Probably as firmly as I do.”

  And Oxman understood. Politics again. A bad mix with police work, but one that persisted. Probably this really was a simple matter of a burglar surprised before he could do his work, then panicking and taking out the watchman. That was what the people from the top on down were telling themselves as they pulled strings to get this case as wrapped up as possible as soon as possible. A murder that would probably go unsolved like a lot of others carried open on the books. Probably.

  That wasn’t good enough for Oxman. Or Manders. Which was why Manders had assigned Oxman and Tobin to the case. He could give them all the innuendo that was passed down to him, play the game like a good soldier, and Oxman and Tobin would still go out and try to solve the crime no matter where it led them. Manders could maintain his political capital this way, and even increase it if Oxman and Tobin got lucky and solved the watchman’s murder. McGreery had been a cop until recently; the department owed him more than a politically expedient rollover.

  “Keep me informed on this one, Ox,” Manders said. But not too informed.

  Oxman nodded and left the office, hearing Manders choking on smoke again behind him.

  Oxman filled in Tobin on what Manders had said. He knew Tobin wouldn’t like it. Tobin figured it was politics that had kept him down in rank, a black man who’d joined the department too early to be regarded as one of the new minority hotshots. Tobin was one of those few who’d paid their dues long before the expression became popular, and now he had to stand back and watch younger, less capable men receive the benefit of his endurance. Some of the younger blacks assumed Tobin must have been an Uncle Tom to have survived on the force all those years, never guessing that Tobin had gone a longer, tougher route than they could imagine and had kept himself his own man in the bargain. Now here he was, in a department that had finally opened real opportunities for blacks, and he was enough of a fixture to be ignored. He was typecast and forgotten, a nonperson again. Tobin was bitter about that and figured he had a right to be. Oxman had never told Tobin he thought he might have a point.

  “Politics is shit, Ox!”

  “We agree. Let’s ignore politics. You go to the ‘Shadowtown’ studios and talk to the rest of the people over there, and I’ll meet you soon as I can.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “I’m going to read your report, carefully. Then I’m going to see a woman who knows and loves soap operas.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to find one,” Tobin said. He got up to let Oxman take his seat behind the desk. They used each other’s desks indiscriminately; no professional secrets among partners.

  As Tobin was walking away, Oxman heard him mutter, “Fuckin’ politics!”

  Myra Deeber lived in the west Seventies, in a large brownstone that had been converted into small apartments. Oxman buzzed her on the intercom and identified himself, and she told him to take the elevator up; her place was at the end of the third-floor hall.

  The old building hadn’t been kept up well, or modernized. The tiny elevator squealed and rocked its way to the third floor. It stopped and its dented steel doors hissed open, leaving a step up of almost a foot. Oxman made a mental note to take the stairs on his way out.

  At Deeber’s apartment door he knocked, flashed his smile and his shield at the peephole, then stood listening while locks clicked, chains rattled, and bolts slid free. If a fire ever broke out in the Deeber apartment, Myra might burn to death at the door trying to work the locks in time to get out.

  She opened the door and stared out at him for a moment, a tall woman in her late forties, lean from the waist up, but with a wide and fleshy lower body. As if somehow there’d been a mix-up and the physiques of two different people had been fitted together. There was a concave tightness about her jaw that suggested she wore badly fitted dentures. She was one of those women who, when dressed up, would be reasonably attractive, but who took on age and harshness without makeup and in ordinary clothes and natural light. Her face was lined as if she’d known pain, but her violet eyes were hopeful.

  “A solid, kind cop with sex appeal,” she said, smiling at him. “That’s how you were described. Jennifer’s doing okay. She deserves it.”

  “I agree,” Oxman said. Then he grinned, momentarily ill at ease. “I mean, she deserves to be doing okay.”

  Myra Deeber laughed and stepped back to let him enter the apartment. The place was a mess. Magazines were spread around the sofa, chairs and floor. Through a doorway Oxman could see unwashed dishes stacked precariously on the sink counter, next to a glass of milk and a plate containing a huge, half-eaten wedge of pie. Apparently Myra liked to eat. A gray cat lounged on the windowsill near a dead flower in a red plastic pot. The air was motionless and stale. The cat didn’t seem to give a damn.

  “Sit down, please,” Myra said, sweeping a magazine off the sofa and onto the floor.

  Oxman noticed it was a magazine devoted entirely to soap operas. Most of the magazines here were soap-opera oriented, some of them the chronicles of particular shows. “Will Lance Love Rhea Her Way?” was the caption on the nearest glossy cover. “Shana Chooses Gang Rape over Loneliness” was the lead for another story. The women on the covers all looked as if they’d just been done over at the makeup counter at Bloomingdale’s; the males all looked as if they’d just stepped from the menswear section of a J. C. Penney catalog.

  Myra sat down in a well-worn recliner and said, “Sorry, I didn’t have time to tidy up. Jennifer just called a little while ago and said you were coming. She said you needed to know about soap operas. That right?”

  “One soap opera, actually,” Oxman said. He noticed that Myra’s recliner faced a huge RCA console TV whose cabinet appeared to have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The set had to have been expensive, a stretch for her budget.

  “One soap’s pretty much like any other,” Myra said. “Television’s a flat world without much innovation.”

  “Then why do you watch it?”

  Myra shrugged her bony shoulders. “The soaps are a world I can turn off. And it’s nice to be part of the everyday existence of people with more problems even than old Myra.”

  “Not so old,” Oxman said.

  “Nice of you to say, Sergeant Oxman, but I’m past it. At least I feel I’ve turned a corner and can’t go back. Hell, I’m not so sure I even want to go back. Men. All that pain. It’s better maybe to tune in on it every afternoon, and then tune out.” She traced a fingertip over one of her meaty thighs.

  “‘Shadowtown’ is the soap I need to know about
,” Oxman said. He didn’t want to listen to any more of Myra’s self-pity and rationalization. But he wondered how many other people watched soap operas for the vicarious emotional wrenches that were disturbingly real, then reassuringly synthetic. For too many people life was a bad dream without escape; but life on the TV screen could offer that escape, in both directions. From this world, then from that one. Turn a knob, punch a button. Like travel through space and time, in and out of minds.

  “‘Shadowtown’ is a juicy show,” Myra said. “Right now, Delia’s making it with Roger Maler.”

  “Delia the bitch?”

  “Check,” Myra said, nodding. “Roger’s every middle-aged woman’s dream, the town’s handsome bachelor without any kinks. What Delia’s trying to do, secretly, is get him to admit he fathered young Ivy Ingrams’s baby. Ivy was the sweet ingénue. She’s dead.”

  “I heard,” Oxman said, resisting the urge to add, “Sad …”

  “The thing is, Roger is the father, and he’s arranged for this young couple to adopt the child from the foster home. What Delia wants is to find out for sure that he’s the legal father, then she can force him to take the child himself and later turn it over to her.”

  “How can she force him?”

  “She knows about Roger and the mayor’s wife.”

  “I thought the mayor’s wife was dead,” Oxman said. “Along with the mayor.”

  “This is the new mayor,” Myra said. “His wife and Roger go way back, and took up where they left off a year ago. She and Roger were involved in a holdup in Miami and owe some drug dealers a lot of money.” She waved a hand aimlessly. “But all that’s really irrelevant. The question is, will Delia get the baby so she can give it to a man who wants to sell the child to a couple in Connecticut who’re willing to pay fifty thousand dollars. The fifty thousand Delia owes this man from the time she was a high-priced call girl in Miami.”

  “Let me guess,” Oxman said.

  Myra’s gaunt face lit up; she was into it, all right. “Exactly,” she said, “the same man Roger owes money to, but neither Roger nor Delia know they’ve got this creep in common. He figures this is the only way he’ll get any money out of Roger, and when he’s through using Roger and Delia for that, then he’ll get even with Delia. Or thinks he will. Delia always comes out on top.”