Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  For a small, practically wild child, unaccustomed to any fixed regimen, it was a lark. It provided a sense of security unfamiliar to him, and, to his delight, he never had to attend school. Suki wouldn’t permit it, maintaining that the moment she registered him for classes, some do-gooder social worker would undoubtedly come down to Bridge Street and carry him off. Clap him in an institution or some foster home where they’d bang him around as an integral part of his rehabilitation. Nevertheless, the old lady had a high regard for education and insisted that the boy learn to read and write. Accordingly, she taught him herself. Her methods were unorthodox, to say the least, and she was a difficult taskmaster. She made him add sums and write his alphabet over and over again, banging his knuckles with a steel ruler until he’d gotten everything correct. Later on, she brought stacks of scrounged newspapers home with her at night, and he would have to read them aloud to her.

  All in all, it wasn’t bad, and the boy didn’t seem unhappy. But still, from time to time, with no apparent warning and for no evident cause, a profound gloom would descend upon him. At such times he would grow listless and remote, withdrawing to his room like a sick cat, and keep to himself for days on end.

  This despondency was invariably attended by a series of daydreams, no less vivid than they were rambling. The content of them was always the same. The setting was a large, rather grand house in some undefined location. Only two people appeared to inhabit the daydream — himself and an ethereally beautiful lady, all attired in the pristine white of the fairy godmother in a book of children’s tales. He would be seated on her lap. She would whisper in his ear and tickle him. They would giggle and laugh and delight one another all day with jokes and riddles and drawing pictures with crayons. She would hug him and mess up his hair and stay with him all day. Then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as she’d appeared, she would go. Shortly, the cloud would lift and soon he was his old self once more. He would wander downstairs and into the kitchen where Suki puttered about. She’d be waiting for him there with a bowl of junket or a small cup of chocolate pudding. So it had been since childhood, and so it still continued, only now these sulks would take the form of disappearances from the house of two to four weeks’ duration.

  It was therefore not unnatural that over the years Warren had developed a strong sense of attachment to the old lady. But along with that came a decided edge of resentment. From childhood on, he’d always given her his “fair share” of the night’s take. But now, at twenty-two, he was into far more profitable ventures, and her unceasing demand for tithes had begun to rankle.

  Aside from the gold-mine property she occupied on Bridge Street, Suki was a rich woman. Warren always said she had the first dime she’d ever stolen. Her instinctive antipathy to banks caused her to keep sizable sums of money in old pots and tins hidden around the house. A great deal of it was hoarded down in the abandoned sewer line beneath the house. The line was part of a network of tunnels, some of them one hundred years old or older, that ran, roughly, from 14th Street south to the tip of Manhattan Island. They were not made of brick like the present-day sewer lines, but of clay. Time and hard use had badly undermined them, so that over the years the city had replaced most of them with modern systems. The old ones, like the one running beneath Bridge Street, had simply been sealed off. That’s when they became an ideal spot for Suki to store her rich cache of “collections.”

  The house on Bridge Street was a queer sort of place. Wedged in between factories and warehouses, grimy, soot-stained commercial buildings, the tiny red-brick Federal was something of an anomaly. “Built during the 1840s,” Suki liked to say, “during the Polk administration,” as if that carried a great deal of weight with the world.

  It was a three-story structure with long, high windows of a noble scale, in perfect proportion with the house. There was a cellar and an attic and a tangled, unattended stretch of garden out back with a statue of Diana with a cracked nose and a missing ear. It leaned off to one side, half in, half out of the ground, looking as if a mere whisper might send it toppling.

  At the front of the house and running around one side was a big old porch with crumbling banisters and paint peeling from its ceiling and floor. Several of its original pine planks were sprung. At its corners stood a few cast-iron pots in which Suki at one time had planted flowers. Now they sported little more than weeds and the occasional parched sprig of geranium.

  In the back, at the bottom of the garden, was a graveyard where the old lady would bury her cats. All about the house dwelled myriad cats, drawn there by the sweet fetor of fresh garbage Suki strewed about for them.

  At the very top of the house, at its apex, was the glass, boxlike cupola. From there one could look out on Battery Park and see the Verrazano Straits, the squat, humped outline of Staten Island slumbering like a whale in the hazy distance. At night there was the Statue of Liberty all lit up. It was up there where Warren retreated after the rigors of his various “enterprises.”

  There was little in the way of furnishings inside the house. What there was of it was a congeries of abandoned things Suki had plucked out of the dumps or off the streets, where they’d been left for the sanitation people to pick up.

  The old lady slept on the second floor in a dark, curtained room that smelled faintly of mushrooms. The curtains were never drawn and sunlight seldom strayed into those dark precincts. In the center of the room, occupying most of the livable space, was a big old dark wood bed with an immense headboard, upon which a bestiary of creatures had been carved. Deer, bear, stags, ferrets, and ravening wolves slinked through a gnarled, twisted forest fashioned out of Bavarian oak.

  As a child, left alone for long periods in that house, Warren would steal up to the old lady’s bedroom and stare in rapt wonder at those carvings. The bed had been sent over from Germany by Mr. Klink’s family on the occasion of his first marriage, some forty years before he’d met and married Suki. Generations of Klinks had slept and procreated and died in that bed.

  Now there were at least ten pillows on the bed and Suki slept beneath nearly as many blankets. They gave the appearance of a small, steep slope. Even in the dead of summer when the house was an oven and there was no air to breath, Suki reposed beneath that unwholesome weight. She slept in all of her clothing as well. In fact, rarely did she take her clothing off, except to bathe, and that was none too often. Her reluctance to disrobe had nothing to do with reasons of modesty or laziness. She argued, and with some merit, that if there were ever a fire, being dressed at all times meant that she could get out fast with just about everything she owned, including the stash in the basement, for they had agreed that in the event of such an emergency, they would flee the house from there.

  Once, when Warren was about nine or ten, Suki took him down into the cellar. She’d always told him never to go down into the cellar alone. There were bad things there. Evil things. If he went down there himself, they would get him.

  But on this particular occasion, she took him down herself. It was a dark, cramped, dirty hole of a place. The only illumination came from two narrow rectangular windows set just above ground in the stone foundation. Years of grime and muddy winters had rendered the glass in those windows nearly opaque. What light filtered through had the gray, lugubrious look of perpetual dusk.

  The ceiling was low, with stout old joists and beams projecting downward, so that people, even those of average height, had to stoop in order to pass through safely.

  She had taken Warren by the hand (Suki’s hands were rough and hot as an oven) and proceeded to lead him far back into the cellar — so far back he couldn’t see his hand before him. As she tugged him along, the boy kept bouncing off boxes and cartons, at one point barking his shin painfully on a dilapidated old chifforobe stored below ground for years. Shortly, tears were brimming in his eyes.

  He kept stumbling and tripping. He couldn’t help thinking that there was something angry in the way she pulled him along. He imagined he’d done something wrong, and no
w she was going to turn him over to those bad “evil” things she said abided down there. At just about that time, he reasoned, there were one or two things he’d been up to that might make her want to do something like that. He wondered if the old lady had found out about them. The thought of it half-scared the child out of his wits.

  Just when he thought they could go no farther, they came on another passage off to the right. This one seemed to plunge back even deeper. Suddenly they stopped. In the next moment he felt her fumbling about beneath her skirts. He heard a quick scratching sound on the wall beside him and suddenly a match flared into vivid illumination. She pulled a candle from inside her copious skirts and lit it, then crammed the light into his tiny fist. “Now you hold that, sonny.”

  Before them stood a huge hooped barrel, brimming over with colored glass, old bronze and pewter candelabra, cheap bric-a-brac, and a variety of other trash. The barrel weighed well over a hundred pounds.

  Grunting like an old sow, Suki wrapped her arms around the middle of it, as though she were hugging someone, and wrestled it off to one side.

  “Now hold that candle over here.” She yanked his trembling hand and planted it in midair about two feet or so off the ground.

  Right under their feet, where the barrel had stood, was a great, heavy iron lid planted in the earth. A manhole cover, it was, just the same sort of thing you see up on the street. This one had a lot of ridges in it, all set in a pattern of concentric circles. In the center of those ever-diminishing circles, the whiskered, hoary face of a bearded old patriarch was stamped. That, in turn, was ringed by the words:

  Baynes Iron Foundry

  Erie County, 1862

  Buffalo, New York

  In years to come, all throughout the most turbulent times of his young adulthood, when it became urgent for Warren to conjure up the face of God, it was the face of this bearded patriarch struck on a sewer lid that sprang most quickly to his mind.

  By then Suki had a crowbar, which she kept nearby. With that she wheezed and puffed and finally prised the lid out of the earth. Then, with a final heave that made the ground crumble beneath it, and dry earth spill inward about the hole, she jimmied it off to one side. Almost at once a puff of something cold and damp, like someone’s bad breath, rose out of the earth. It smelled of moisture and sewage and something rotting. From somewhere below he could hear the sound of rushing water. That was followed by a quick scurrying noise like that of dry leaves rattling over the pavement.

  Suki snatched the candle from him and grabbed his hand. “Come on.”

  His heart beat wildly. “Where?”

  “Down.” She pointed with the guttering flame to a steep ladder descending into the earth.

  “No,” he whined, imagining the “bad” and “evil” things awaiting him below there. He dug his heels into the ground, struggling against her greater strength.

  “Never you mind that now,” she snapped and yanked him down into the earth behind her.

  PART II

  ELEVEN

  “WHO SAID THAT?”

  “The chief of detectives.”

  “Mulvaney? Go on. Mulvaney never said that. He made a statement to the press, but he never said we had a make on the car.”

  “He said you had a green car with ‘distinctive features.’”

  “Distinctive features’?” Mooney laughed. “That’s a big, vertical grille. Could be any of a half-dozen makes. What else did he say?”

  Mooney stood outside on the pavement of East 84th Street in front of Fritzi’s Balloon. He’d just stepped out of a squad car that had dropped him off and was instantly besieged by hordes of reporters. A TV mobile unit was double-parked on the street while lines of backed-up, horn-honking Friday night traffic tried to get past.

  Cameras and reporters weren’t Mooney’s strong suit. He did his best to affect a jaunty manner, but as the questions pelted him, he looked increasingly like a large bear treed by a pack of shrieking hounds.

  “The car parked in front of the Torrelson residence that morning was green. A neighbor saw it. That’s all we know about it. We can’t even say for sure that was the vehicle the perpetrator came in.” He heard himself say that distinctively police word and felt embarrassed for having said it. “We don’t have an operator description. We don’t have a plate number, and we sure as hell don’t know enough about the grille or any other distinguishing marks to put a make on it. We think that it was an older vintage car in very good shape. We re checking with the Motor Vehicle Bureau and our own records to see if there’s any recently stolen vehicle fits that description.” He started to turn to go in but was again besieged by a barrage of new questions. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Fritzi and a bunch of his cronies all gathered at the front window to watch the press put him through his paces. Their presence there made him even more self-conscious.

  “What’s this business about the assailant’s teeth, Frank?” the Daily News man asked.

  Mooney shrugged and made a “who knows?” expression. “Only that teeth marks were found on some of the victims’ bodies.”

  “The others had no teeth marks?”

  “None that we know of.”

  “So those murders could have been committed by someone else? A copycat maybe?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Mooney shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

  A disembodied arm to which a CBS microphone was attached appeared out of the crowd and thrust the microphone beneath his nose. “There’s a rumor going around that this Shadow Dancer guy you’re looking for has two broken front teeth.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Mooney repeated evasively, his head starting to pound. “It’s just another possibility we re looking at.”

  “What about the numbers, Frank?” the ABC man asked him. “Anybody figured out the numbers yet?”

  “We’ve had mathematicians look at them … all kinds of experts. Nobody seems to know exactly what they mean. Or, if they mean anything at all.”

  “They say you’ve finally got an ID on the girl found up in the park last month,” the Times reporter said. “Is there enough yet to confirm whether or not she was also a victim of this guy?”

  Mooney paused. He felt his mind go blank and his vision momentarily blur. A wall of faces undulated like large underwater ferns before him. He was aware of a sharp impulse to turn and run.

  “First of all, we re not sure who we re talking about — the Dancer or the copycat. There are some similarities,” he began haltingly, stalling to regain his thread of thought. “But there are dissimilarities, too. The other twelve attacks all took place in the victims’ homes. This one happened out-of-doors.”

  “Who was she, Mooney?” one of the TV reporters asked. The cameras rolled in behind him. “Can you tell us something about her?”

  “Only that she was a young woman working for a book agency here. Just out of school. It was her first job.”

  “What about that Howard Beach job last week? Was that the Dancer, too?” another reporter shouted. “Could well be. We re looking into that now.”

  A burst of three more questions, all shouted simultaneously, followed. Mooney flung his hands up in despair. “That’s it, guys. I told you all I know. That’s it for now.”

  He swung his large square shoulders around and proceeded to wend his way through the crowd toward the revolving glass doors.

  “Shit.” Warren Mars slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Son of a bitch.” Envy fueled with rage welled up in him as he watched the big detective turn his back on the crowd and swing through the big glass doors of the Balloon.

  “Shit,” Warren muttered again and banged off the television, nearly dislodging it from the table. Who was this person, this copycat they all talked about? He’d love to get his hands on this slimy weasel who went about imitating him. Stealing his act. No sooner do you have success, he smoldered, than all these second-raters crawl out from under the rocks trying to rip you off. Doing your number. They might as well be
in your bank account, for Chrissake.

  Warren had been watching this character’s activity, whoever he was, for almost a year. He’d been reading about him in the newspapers and following his progress on the TV, and now when they were all starting to talk about a “pattern” and to take Warren seriously, that’s when this creep moved in, jealous for a piece of the action himself.

  Now, the more attention Warren got, the bolder this copycat character seemed to get; the more he seemed to hover over Warren, following behind him, dogging his footsteps. Sometimes when Warren read about a new crime in the newspapers attributed to the Dancer that he knew he’d had nothing to do with, he’d go nearly crazy with rage.

  Warren sprawled on his narrow bed beneath the grimy, rain-streaked cupola. The back of his head started to pound as the thought of this copycat gnawed at him and he tried to imagine ways of ferreting him out.

  But shortly he was thinking about the TV news he’d just seen, and his dark mood shifted quickly. He was tickled and flattered by it. “They were talking about me. I’m the star of all this.” He laughed out loud. His face flushed with delighted embarrassment, like a person shown old snapshots of someone he didn’t recognize and then told it was himself.

  He rose from the rumpled bed and prowled restlessly about the tiny room. Still full of the broadcast and the detective and all those reporters asking questions about him, he couldn’t get over the thought of the thousands of others glued to their TV screens just to see and hear about him. It wasn’t this copycat they were interested in; it was him.

  He’d stumbled on the newscast quite by accident. He’d been watching a film, Private’s Progress with Ian Carmichael and Terry-Thomas — one of his favorites. He’d seen it seven times but had finally grown bored with it. He flicked the switch and there, suddenly, was this man — big and disheveled and undoubtedly tough — with all these reporters swarming like gnats about him. They were all shouting at once and talking about him.