Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  When they got married, as a sort of wedding present, they bought themselves a yearling. They called him Gumshoe, undoubtedly out of some sort of affectionate deference to Mooney. The colt made them a small bundle and, shortly, they purchased a second thoroughbred — Wizard. When either of their “kids,” as they called them, were running, they’d both drop work at any time and dash out to the track just to jump and scream and cheer them on.

  “You know Sausalito?” Mooney asked Duffy when he returned.

  “Sure. The two-year-old.”

  “Right. Now there’s a filly ran six furlongs at Gulf Stream in 1:09 4⁄5. The last stakes for colts was run 1:10 2⁄3. She’d eat up those colts in the Hutcheson.”

  “What colts in the Hutcheson?”

  Mooney turned, and there was Fritzi in a full-length scarlet skirt, a cream silk blouse with a spray of violets at her throat, and glowing as though she’d just stepped from a hot bath. She threw an arm across his shoulder and pecked his cheek. “You smell like a zoo. Where’ve you been?”

  “Down a sewer.”

  She shrugged and made a queer face at Duffy. “What’s he drinking?”

  “Just a tot of bourbon, Fritz. It’s his first. Honest.”

  “That’s a hundred fifty calories. Don’t give him any more.”

  Mooney groaned. Having suffered a mild heart attack several years before, he was on a fairly strict diet. Still, he couldn’t bear having others decide for him what he would eat and what he would drink.

  There was a great burst of laughter as a big, splashy crowd wheeled in through the revolving glass doors. It was a crowd Fritzi loathed, but they spent like Arabs and so she was all smiles and gliding toward the door to greet them.

  “Hey,” Mooney called after her. “When do we eat?”

  “Maybe around ten, when it starts to clear out.”

  “I can’t wait to no ten o’clock. I’m starving now.”

  “Can’t be bothered now. Go on in the kitchen and have them fix you something.”

  “I don’t wanna eat in the kitchen.”

  “Got no tables now. Have Gino set you up at the bar.” She turned and in the next moment she was swallowed up in a swirl of color and motion. There was a great deal of kissing and laughter and bogus hilarity. Fritzi was snapping her fingers and Otto, the maître-d’, came rushing toward them, bowing and scraping and flashing his dentures.

  Mooney muttered some oath and tossed off the last of his Jack Daniel’s Manhattan. The place was going full tilt now. Four bartenders could scarcely keep up with it.

  No sooner were they set out than the bowls of chips and the big wheels of cheddar cheese and the platters of fresh, iced crudites disappeared and had to be replaced. Steaks and chops sizzled On the open grates. Big standing rib roasts turned on the spits above them. The great stone hearth in the main room crackled blue and orange flames, filling the air with the tangy scent of hickory and well-cured apple wood. Corks popped. Creaking trolleys of beef and Yorkshire pudding tottered up and down the narrow aisles. On the walls, hung between a series of staggered flambeaux, were portraits of some of the noblest bloods of racing history — Bold Venture, Citation, Northern Dancer, Proud Clarion, Riva Ridge, Secretariat, Foolish Pleasure, Seattle Slew.

  People laughed loudly, counting all the money they’d made, or claimed they’d made, in the market that week. It was a pretty sight. Life was sweet, Mooney thought, at least for the moment. The trap drain he’d been rummaging in behind the zoo just a few hours before seemed very far away.

  TWO

  “… HEART, 300 GRAMS. MYOCARDIUM PRESENTS a red-brown homogeneous color. No evidence of hemorrhage or scar. Valves not remarkable …”

  The hiss of coffee steamed on an old Bunsen burner. An old Regulator clock on the wall ticked hollowly through the vacant shadows.

  Konig struck a match and relit the cold, fuming stump of his cigar. A coil of blue smoke drifted lazily ceiling-ward. He was hungry, but he had little appetite for dinner and no one with whom to eat it even if he had. It was nearly ten P. M. He was ready by then to quit, but the prospect of the long drive home to Riverdale was disheartening.

  He returned to writing his protocols. There were three left to go. His stubby, graceless fingers fumbled over the typewriter keyboard. The stump of cigar planted dead center in his mouth made his eyes squint in an effort to elude the smoke.

  … Stomach contains approximately 200 cc’s of grayish fluid. Particles of undigested food within. Gastric mucosa not remarkable.... Kidneys weigh 200 grams together and show smooth dark surface. Ureter normal. Bladder contains approximately 400 cc’s of clear yellow urine. Anus dilated and containing a large amount of green feces....

  Paul Konig had been a New York City medical examiner for slightly more than thirty years. He’d started in the days of Bancroft and caught the eye of city dignitaries in the period of Eisler, his predecessor, whose somewhat flamboyant reign was prematurely terminated by his penchant for selling medical opinion to the highest bidder. Suddenly Konig, not quite thirty, found himself in a highly visible, highly influential position.

  Over the past three decades he’d distinguished not only himself but the office as well. Aside from the fact that he was Chief M.E. in the world’s most powerful city, he carried on a notable career as a writer and lecturer. His opinions on criminal matters were eagerly sought by judicial authorities all over the world. He wrote textbooks on the subject of forensic pathology, and his classes at the university were always oversubscribed. Getting into his course was like getting a ticket to the hottest show on Broadway.

  His face was seen frequently in the newspapers and on the six P.M. news. His photograph was always being snapped with the mayor. He was greatly admired but not much liked. For a man in a highly political job, he had a well-documented dislike of politicians. He couldn’t be wheedled or bamboozled by ambitious district attorneys eager to chalk up a string of impressive convictions against the day they ran for some more exalted office. Konig had no friends in government and liked things that way. In his personal catechism, anyone with too many friends in public office bore watching.

  People who knew Konig in the early days when his beloved Ida and his daughter Lolly were still alive maintain that he was lighthearted and fun. But that was before the horrific tragedy that had started with the girl’s kidnaping and ended in her death at the hands of her captors. It was a celebrated case, made all the more so by the fact that the chief medical examiner was her father.

  But yes, in the early days there’d been that part of him that was lighthearted and fun. In those halcyon times he could recite Shakespeare by the ream and sing Verdi arias in a credible tenor. Not so today. Morose and disagreeable were some of the more tactful adjectives one was apt to hear now when people spoke of the chief medical examiner.

  There was little doubt, however, that he was the best in the business. From the point of view of detective work, which for an M.E. is all that really counts, Konig was right up there with the legends, Spillsbury and Halperin. On a tough job, having him on your team made all the difference. He could read the riddle of a corpse the way most people read a grocery list.

  “BRAIN: Chloroform 38.7%.” Konig glanced down at the toxicological report, scribbled there in dark, glyptic figures. “Ethanol not detected.

  Lung: Chloroform. 3.8% (GC)

  Blood: Acidic drugs. Not detected. Spectrophotometry.

  Basic drugs. Not detected. Gas Chromotography.

  Chloroform. 17.2% (GC)

  Bile: Chloroform. 8.65 mg% (GC)

  Acidic and basic drugs not detected. (TLC)

  Cause of Death: Acute chloroform poisoning. Unintentional suicide.

  Konig glanced up at the old Regulator wall clock, still counting its drowsy, monotonous tick into the hollow, dusty vacancies, its gold pendulum drifting behind the glass window. The door to the outside corridor was open. The air of desertion about the place seemed total. The grim daily tide of mortality had rolled past his door for that da
y, but in Konig’s head the clatter of rushing footsteps still rang on the cold tile floors. The unoiled wheels of gurney carts bearing their grisly cargo toward the freight elevators still echoed squeals down the airless, empty hallways. Except for the handful of night porters and attendants on duty somewhere about the building, Konig had the place to himself.

  As a younger man he’d enjoyed working there late at night. Mostly it was the solitude he loved, the sense of proprietorship he felt when only he was there. King of the Underworld. Lord Chancellor of the Necropolis sort of thing. When he worked late into the night now, it was scarcely out of love for the job or devotion to duty. Now it was more out of a fear of having to go home, to face the infinitely more terrifying silences of the big old Norman Tudor, with its turrets and arches and towers, planted like a stone fortress high above the banks of the Hudson.

  Built by a charming, megalomaniacal broker in the twenties, who went out the window in the thirties, it was later purchased by Konig for a song and a down payment borrowed from his father-in-law, then paid back to the penny in one year’s time at 4 percent, considered regal in those days.

  He had little heart for it now — to prowl from floor to unlit floor through the far reaches of the night, with nothing but a grail of moonlight illuminating the empty halls and rooms, left precisely as they were when those who’d formerly occupied them were still in residence.

  The chairs and beds and settees were all still there, untouched, unused, still breathing some aura of their former occupants. The drawers and wardrobes were still hung with garments not worn for seven years. An air of strange expectancy clung to them as though they awaited some corporeal presence to reanimate them.

  In the conservatory, Ida’s piano, massive in its shadowed corner, still bore on its stand the music she played in those final, pain-racked days when she could neither sleep nor even lie comfortably in bed. Nights there had been since, when he imagined that fingers swept over the keyboard and he could hear the ghostly plangencies of some sad old Chopin mazurka.

  Not far down the corridor was Lolly’s room, with the desk where, as a child, she had labored over geometry and Latin. The bookshelves still sagged with every book she’d ever owned — the Babars and Madeleines, cheek by jowl with the Dostoyevskys and Gides, no order or method to any of it; just a joyous tumult of things. Just as she was in life, with that exasperating, endearing air of cheery, whirlwind chaos.

  “Christ,” Konig muttered and pushed his chair back. Wobbling to his feet, he rocked from one foot to the other as though trying to restore circulation there. He brushed a trail of old cigar ash from his vest and rubbed his eyes where the thin crescent imprint of his glasses rimmed the bottom of the sockets. Reaching back, he started to pour another cup of coffee from the pot on the Bunsen burner. All that it yielded was a tepid trickle of dregs.

  “Christ.” He yanked his trenchcoat from the hanger and blundered into it like a man fending off an imaginary assailant. Even as he went, barging down the empty halls, something tugged at him, some nagging sense of incompletion. It was no mystery to him, yet try as he did to resist, the strong, familiar undertow drew him down the narrow, winding spiral stair into the basement of the building.

  If it had been quiet above, it was virtually cryptlike below, the sort of silence born of cold, municipal green tile and overheated laboratory machinery now stilled and cooling for the night.

  A mere several hours before, these same narrow aisles had teemed with humanity — pathologists and students, police reporters and dieners. Gurneys spattered with gore clogged the aisles, waiting to be rolled up to the tables; people shouted at the top of their lungs, outraged at one another, pleading for assistance where none was readily available.

  Now, only a single light bathed the scene in an eerie bluish glow. The smell of formalin was suffocating. The still tables were all empty and scrubbed. Stored in the two big purring refrigerated lockers was the daily harvest of man-made carnage, the carcasses of the hapless and itinerant, the criminal and mad, and those whose only blame was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The refrigerators hummed softly. Like a bank of mailboxes, each carried on its face a small white identification card bearing the name of the present occupant — a brief, hand-scribbled epitaph: “Dankworth, Charles. Caucasian. Age 32.” “Lenz, Mildred. Caucasian. Female. Age 71.” “Carver, Thomas. Black. Male. Age 2.” “Guzman, Jesus. Male Hispanic. Age 17.”

  Konig’s eyes swept down the white ID tags until at last they fastened on what he’d been seeking. “Female. Caucasian. Identity unknown. Age approx. 22-25 years.”

  The drawer wheeled out beneath a slight exertion of his fingers, gliding smoothly over rollers. It was the hair he saw first. Thick, luxuriant, chestnut. The motion of the rollers caused it to shift from her face. In life, no doubt, it had descended to a point well below the shoulders, doubtless one of her most striking features. In death it was mud-streaked, plastered hard in stiff clots against the skull from having lain partially submerged in cistern water for several days.

  Next came the face. The eyes not fully closed, a glint of irides showing beneath the bruised lids, the young woman appeared to be wincing as if in fretful sleep, the murderous image of her own destroyer still implanted on the retina. A pretty face, Konig thought. Even somewhat more than pretty. The sort of face that is noted and remarked upon where people gather. The features were framed within a soft oval; the nose a thin blade, the cheeks high; the chin tapering to a graceful cleft. There was an icy, rather patrician air about those features, flawed only by a mouth a bit too sumptuous and full. Possibly even a bit coarse.

  Lying there in the cold impersonality of that drawer, she seemed to him smaller than she had several hours before at the bottom of the drain. Diminutive and doll-like, she was a child tucked in safely for the night.

  Konig’s practiced eye quickly picked out the purplish lividity creeping outward from beneath the shoulders and back where the still, unpumped blood had succumbed to the pull of gravity. The inexorability of nature’s laws triumphed over all. Air pressure, fluid pressure, pounds per square inch will have their way. Only some persistent fiction of man himself still bothers to deny that simple autonomy, still pretending he can manipulate the basic physics to his own advantage. The gods know better.

  To the large white toe, looking grotesque and a trifle comical, another white tag was affixed. This one was typed in square black capital letters bearing the words IDENTITY UNKNOWN. Tomorrow, when she’d be wheeled into one of the suites and hoisted onto the table, the sheets unceremoniously withdrawn to reveal the frail, battered nakedness below, they would know more. With several deft strokes, the scalpel would rise to flay the body open. In that moment, whatever semblance of a living, sentient being once inhabitating that fragile shell would quickly vanish. Something else would appear in its place. An abstraction reduced to the cold scrutiny of parts and mere function. The terminology of an auto shop.

  Scanning the cadaver, Konig’s eye quite unexpectedly picked up something it had missed during the initial examination. In the sewer it had been dark and he’d missed the thick clot of dried gore in the vicinity of the right temple. But where the hair had displaced itself with the sliding motion of the opening drawer, the ear now stood exposed. The whole lower half of it had been neatly scissored off.

  THREE

  March 17, 1986. Crider, Dale, 33. Stabbed to death in her Richmond Hills home on Village Drive. Was studying flower arrangement. Killed approximately 2 A.M. Bite marks on breasts, abdomen, and inner thighs. Numbers and pornographic doodles scrawled on walls. Sizable amount of cash and jewelry taken. Dark-haired youth, medium height, medium weight, age early twenties, seen fleeing site. Murder weapon not recovered.

  April 18, 1986. Pillari, Mario, 64, and wife, Maxine, 59. Both found dead in their semi-detached home on Case Street, Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Pillari, retired investment counselor. Liked to garden. Wife was an attorney. Sang in a choir. Bite marks on breasts and b
uttocks. Pornographic drawings and numbers found on walls. Murder weapon, knife. Probably six-inch blade, serrated. Not recovered. Cash and silver service taken. No witnesses.

  May 19, 1986. Katz, William, 52. Wife, Marilyn, 49. Stabbed to death at their home on Stevens Street, Forest Hills Gardens. He was a retired sales manager. She worked for a bank. Drawings and number series scrawled on walls. Died between 4 and 5 A.M. Bite marks on breasts and inner thighs of wife. Cash and various hi-fi and computer equipment taken. No weapon recovered. Dark-haired youth, approximate age 22-25, seen loitering about earlier in evening.

  June 1, 1986. Bell, Mabel, 52. Widow. Lived alone in her home on Kappock Street, Riverdale section of Bronx. Knife wounds found about the body. Death attributed to strangulation by ligature. Usual pornographic doodles and numbers. Bite marks found at usual sites. Jewelry and cash taken. Robbery apparent motive, preceded by sexual attack. No weapon recovered. No eyewitnesses.

  June 30, 1986. Wheatley, Gail, 32. Special education teacher for the retarded. Found dead from slashed throat in her home on Dell Place, Manhasset. Attack occurred between midnight and two A.M. Sexual attack preceded killing. Small child of approximately two years old also found dead in home. Personal computer, digital tapes, and VCR taken. Usual drawings and numbers. Usual bite marks. No weapon recovered. No eyewitnesses.

  Mooney’s eyes grew heavy. His cramped, aching legs stretched beneath the sheets. He glanced down at the drowsy figure lying there beside him, a warm emanation of soap and skin, the scent of moisturizers rising all about her. It was near midnight. Unable to sleep, he’d whiled away the restless hours reading from the small ringed notebook he used to record pertinent data for all the cases in which he was involved. The one he was presently engrossed in appeared under the single heading SHADOW DANCER, actually his sole preoccupation these days, since the case during the past six months had been elevated to priority status.