Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  Pickering stood there, baffled and furious, looking alternately at the door, then back at Mooney. At last, defeated, he shrugged and slumped back down into his chair, his capitulation complete.

  Mooney never bothered to acknowledge the concession. The thought of Eddie Sylvestri dogging his tracks was a sharp goad. His hands moved ceaselessly, like a poker dealer’s, flicking mug shots into three distinct piles: probable, improbable, and impossible. “So tell me once more,” he said after a while. “What exactly do we have on these Shadow Dancer guys?”

  Outside on 48th Street, fire engines wailed westward toward some cataclysm on the river. Pickering sighed, pulled out a small pad from his inside pocket, and, in a voice husky with fatigue, proceeded to read. “Suspect A: Dark. Slender. Caucasian. Possible Hispanic. Age, twenty-three to twenty-six. Height, five eight to five ten. Possible broken right front and right lateral incisor. Operates a medium/dark green car. Possible vintage, sixties or early seventies.” He flicked the pad shut. “That all?” Mooney asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “What about Suspect B?”

  Pickering flicked forward to the next page. “Suspect B: Fair. Slender. Caucasian …”

  “No busted front teeth?”

  “No—that’s the dark, slender Caucasian. Possible Hispanic.”

  “Two different guys with almost identical M.O.‘s. One copycatting the other. With the exception of the Bailey kid, all private or semi-detached homes. Residential suburbs. Forced entry through windows or side doors. Sexual assault often followed by theft. Electronic stuff. Audios. Hi-fi’s, PC’s mostly. Some jewelry. Cash, wherever available.”

  They stared at each other, grasping for anything possibly overlooked.

  “That it?” Mooney asked.

  “That’s all I got.”

  Mooney shot a long, disdainful look at his partner. “Add to your list one additional item.”

  Pickering’s brow rose, curiosity sparking his drowsy, crumpled features.

  “One of the suspects is sterile. I got that straight from the M.E. today.”

  Pickering frowned, then laughed as if he suspected a joke. “A sterile rapist.”

  “That’s right, Rollo. Just think how mad that makes him. Hand me that stack of shots, will you?”

  Suki Klink bent over in her garden in the rear of the old house on Bridge Street. To call it a “garden” would be perhaps misleading. It was actually a plot, nearly a full square acre with a clean, unimpeded prospect of the Hudson sliding seaward off Battery Park.

  The plot was not cultivated in any formal sense of the word. There were no beds of annuals and perennials, no rows of flowers set in some orderly procession, descending in size, or displayed by color. What there was, was simply a tangle of weeds and overgrowth permitted to run rampant. In the midst of it all stood the dung-spattered statue of Diana with a missing nose, and not far from that a cracked birdbath devoid of water. Crickets and grasshoppers darted ceaselessly in and out of the gaping fissures of its cracked basin.

  As unlikely a garden as it was, the old woman still referred to it as the “garden” and insisted on working it as one. On weekend mornings she would rise early and don her gardening clothes: sneakers, a floppy straw bonnet, and a patched and badly faded old denim worksuit.

  Bending over nearly in half from the waist, her wimpled head hanging almost perpendicular to the earth, she moved through the tangled clutter like some creature browsing on the forest floor. To the untutored eye, her “garden” was little more than an untidy jumble of weeds and thistles, cockle burrs left to their own devices, and the general chaos of untrammeled nature.

  To Suki Klink, however, it was a laboratory of herbs, roots, and rare and exotic medicinal plantings she’d sought out in the wooded parks and open sand lots of the city, then carefully transplanted to her own backyard where they would always be close at hand. An amateur herbalist of considerable skill, she could not only brew salubrious teas with her own chamomile and chickory, but treat warts and chilblains and whip up various decoctions to relieve itching and reduce fevers.

  With the tall spikes of purple loosestrife, through which she moved so that they leaned over with the forward motion of her body, she could conjure up muscle relaxants and infusions for diarrhea. There was fumitory for skin eruptions; long, feathery stalks of fairy wand for use as a diuretic; celandine for the treatment of ringworm from which she suffered chronically.

  There were clover and moneywort, and moonseed, which she used to compound a root extract for treatment of constipation. There was senna and white mustard and pokeberry, dill and great patches of dodder — a vast and wondrous pharmacopeia. All of this she cultivated and collected in old jam jars and mayonnaise bottles, all carefully labeled and tagged, then cataloged on long yellow legal pads, upon which she’d record the location in her garden and precise therapeutic use. For every specimen, she produced a credible and generally quite attractive hand drawing, also kept in neat files.

  Then, too, there were the other roots and herbs, those less talked of but perhaps more carefully attended to. These were the plants Suki liked to think of as those associated with her “dark practices.” This latter type were invariably planted along a gentle slope that descended toward the river. Though she prized them highly, she planted them far from the house so that in the event city inspectors or lawyers or even the police came poking about, their discovery or connection with her would not be easy to establish.

  Of these there were nightshade and witches’ bells, her prize Pareira specimens which she’d procured at the Botanical Gardens and from which she’d learned the relatively simple process of extracting curare from the long woody stems of the vines. She had her own ongoing full-time supply of cannabis and peyote buttons from mescal cactus she grew indoors, both of which she had a fondness for but no dependence on. She was for too clever for that.

  At the farthest fringes of the garden several wild plants grew, out of which the old lady could fabricate sleeping potions. There was also a particularly virulent strain of henbane, highly toxic in certain dosages, but in smaller, more measured preparations a powerful hallucinogen of the hyoscyamine family, to which she was particularly drawn.

  There were nights, particularly in the winter, when even for her it was too cold to be on the streets. Nights such as that, when the world was too much with her, when the icy blasts of January, aching bones, and simple weariness had brought her to her bed early, when the bleak reality of her situation would press in upon her like unwanted ghosts, she would brew a small infusion of henbane, steeping its leaves into her midnight tea, and carry it back up to bed with her.

  In short order a series of bright, multicolored pin-wheels would spin before her eyes. The everyday drabness of her surroundings would be transformed from dense mauves and sooty grays to a dazzling kaleidoscope of colors and patterns. The wood bestiary of the headboard above her would proceed to move in a woozy dance. The eyes of the carved beasts would glow like burning coals. The music from her Walkman headphones would amplify itself tenfold until she could experience the sounds as if she were no longer merely just listening to them but curiously inside the sound, peering out.

  The high point of such episodes was when the music would take tangible shape before her eyes. It appeared in the form of long, unbroken, undulating threadlike lines. They would hang in midair like brightly colored ribbons, threads and filaments of wavering living matter dancing ceaselessly in ever-shifting patterns before her. These patterns were not superficial but multilayered and of ever-deepening complexity. Like a dark, trackless forest, they lured you into them until you were hopelessly lost. Suki had permitted herself to go just so far into that forest and no farther. By administering her dosages carefully, she held the key to her freedom. She was canny enough to realize that if she succumbed entirely to the strong, dark pull of that forest, followed it down into its very heart, she would find things she didn’t care to find. There were few things that terrified Suki. Her own potential f
or madness was at the top of the list.

  Still bent over double in her garden, she moved along, dragging a big old burlap sack behind her. She rambled through the tall, gently nodding canes of horseweed, bullrush, cattails, and Indian pipe, snipping blossoms and leaves with small scissors, rooting up various rhizomes, studying them briefly under a glass, then stuffing them into a mothy canvas sack.

  Moving through the tall canes, she made her way down from the house toward the river, followed by a horde of mangy stray cats. They stuck to her heels, gamboling in the tall weeds, lunging at butterflies, and pouncing on the occasional hapless small mice and birds that crossed their paths.

  Tonight she would work at her various infusions and medicaments. She’d been away from it too long, and now she felt the need of practicing the old art again. There were things that worried her, things that Warren had said that had unsettled her far more than she was willing to admit.

  Krause, Irwin ………………Dodge 1961, green

  Mercado, Hector…………Pontiac 1963, green

  Nudleman, Arthur…………Cadillac 1959, green

  Quodomine, Malcolm……Pontiac 1962, green

  Rossman, Betty Jean………Nash 1959, green

  Starr, Mrs. Diane………Chevrolet 1960, green

  Teleford, Seton………Oldsmobile 1976, green

  “Scotch that. Seventy-six is too recent.”

  “How come?”

  “‘Cause by then the grilles are all mostly horizontal. Keep going.”

  Pickering looked up from his list and gazed at the square, rumpled figure seated beside him. They sat in the rear of an unmarked police car, moving through the late-aftemoon traffic congestion of Webster Avenue beneath the Elevated in the West Bronx. “Are you listening?”

  “Sure,” Mooney replied and settled back more deeply in his seat.

  “That’s funny. I got the impression you were asleep.”

  “That’s odd. What gave you that impression?” Pickering shrugged. “I don’t know. The closed eyes, I guess. And the light snore.”

  Mooney cocked a brow and stared at his partner out of a single opened eye. “Just keep reading, will you?”

  The younger man sighed, appealing to heaven with his eyes. “Frankly, I don’t see what for. That car… that is, assuming we’re ever gonna be able to identify the right green car with a vertical grille …”

  “Vintage sixties through the early seventies. Looking all shiny and new,” Mooney added. His eyes remained shut. The lids fluttered lightly as the car bounced along over the cobbled street and turned off Webster heading west toward Sedgwick.

  “Okay,” Pickering conceded. “Assuming you got all that. That car’s either been stolen —”

  “We already checked that out, dummo, and it hasn’t been. At least, no one’s come up with a stolen’ report on it yet. Keep reading.”

  Pickering grumbled and swatted at a fly that had come along for the ride. “Umberto, Oswaldo … Hudson nineteen fifty-seven, green. Hey, remember the Hudson?”

  “Sure. Looked like a bathtub upside down. What was the grille like, again?”

  “Big. Lotta chrome. I guess you could call it vertical.”

  “Sedgwick Avenue, Lieutenant,” the police driver up front called. “What’s your number, again?”

  “Seven eighty-four,” Mooney said. He sat up, pushing his hands back through his thick, gray hair. “Oughta be right up ahead on the left.”

  The car cruised slowly up the block of nineteen-thirties six-story apartment buildings. Most of them had been abandoned and gutted by vandals. Trompe l’oeil still lifes of drapery and flower pots had been stenciled onto aluminum sheets and hammered over the gaping, punched-out windows as a neighborhood beautification project. The buildings that were still occupied had gone pretty much to seed. Once it had been a fairly stable middle-class neighborhood, mostly Jewish, with a sprinkling of Irish and Italian congregating on the fringes where it started to spill over into Dyckmans. Now it was a seedy, vaguely disreputable melange of red and brown brick apartment houses in which residents, primarily black and Hispanic, lived behind barred windows and triple-locked doors, as terrified of thieves as they were of their next-door neighbors.

  Jammed in tight between these huddled, crumbling structures was a patchwork of bodegas, car washes, muffler-repair shops, open-air fruit and vegetable markets, beer and soda discount distributors, and check-cashing establishments where you could cash a check and play a number at the same time.

  “That’s it, seven eighty-four. Right up there on the left.” Mooney thrust his finger over the driver’s shoulder to point the way. “Who we looking for here, now?” Pickering consulted his list of printed names again. “Krause, Irwin. Dodge, nineteen sixty-one. Green.” The squad car slid past a double-parked paneled dry-cleaning van and slipped into an open spot before a fire hydrant in front of the building.

  Mooney sighed and straightened his tie. Looking at the clutter of brimming trashcans accumulated at the curb, he made a face of distaste, pushed the door open, and lumbered out onto the street.

  “Where’d you find this, Irwin?”

  “Got it off a mechanic. Friend of mine in Long Island.”

  “Oh, yeah? How long ago?”

  Irwin Krause scratched his chin and rolled his eyes skyward. “Hadda be a good ten years.”

  “And it’s a sixty-one Dodge?” Mooney asked.

  “That’s right. One of the best they ever made.” Pickering strolled around to the driver’s side. “That the original color?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “Never had it repainted, or anything?”

  “Never. That green you see there, that’s it. Hey, listen, what’s all this about, anyway?”

  Pickering cleared his throat. “Like I told you on the phone. We’re running this survey for the Motor Vehicle Bureau. They wanna know how many automobiles, twenty-five years or older, are still on the road.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Irwin Krause made an odd face. “How come?”

  “Insurance.” Mooney stepped in quickly when Pickering proved too slow on the reply. “We re doing it for the Insurance Institute of America. The IIA, you know?”

  “Sure.” Krause nodded, appearing too dazed to be sure of anything.

  “Statistical study and all that,” Mooney rattled on. “Sure.” The expression on Mr. Krause’s face remained unchanged, but for the moment he was placated.

  He was a short, slight, swarthy young man in his late twenties, with bad skin and a mop of oily hair teased forward into a frisette that drooped on his forehead. He wore sandals and a pair of khaki shorts with a T-shirt that read “I brake for anything.”

  “How many miles she got on her?” Pickering asked. “‘Bout a hundred and eighty. Runs like a top. Mechanic says she’s good for another fifty.”

  “You must take pretty good care of her.”

  “Nothing special.” Krause spat into the gutter. “Tune-up twice a year. Oil and lube. Sparks and points. Don’t put much mileage on it. Just city driving, you know.”

  “You keep it on the street?” Mooney asked.

  “In this neighborhood? Are you kidding? You keep a car like this on the street overnight, you’re lucky you find the cigarette lighter when you come back in the morning. I garage it down on Webster.”

  “Body’s in great shape for a car twenty-six years old,” Pickering remarked.

  Flattered by the attention, Krause warmed to his subject. “She gets washed once a week, simonize twice a year. I take it to an auto body guy on Sedgwick Avenue cuts out all the rust soon as it appears.”

  “You married, Irwin?” Mooney asked.

  The question caught the young man off guard. “Married?”

  “That’s right. Are you?”

  The smile of moments earlier still lingered, but the young man was flustered. “Who, me? No.”

  “You go out a lot, Irwin? You like the ladies?”

  Krause grew defensive. “What the hell’s that got to do wi
th car insurance?”

  “Nothing personal.” Mooney made a series of calming gestures with his hands. “Just inquiring if you use the car for social purposes. Like going out with the gals. That affects the insurance rates, you know.”

  A wary, stealthy look crept into the young man’s face. “You guys ain’t gonna raise my insurance, are you?”

  “No, no.” Mooney calmed him again. “Nothing like that. We got nothing to do with rates. This is all done on a strictly anonymous basis. No names, or nothing like that. We’re just interested in the answers. We don’t file your name with the report.”

  The look of sharp suspicion still lingered about the young man. “Oh, okay,” he muttered doubtfully. “What kind of work you do, Irwin?” Mooney asked. “I’m a bus driver.”

  “Bus driver.” Pickering laughed. “I would’ve never taken you for that.”

  Irwin Krause grew increasingly displeased with the tone of the interview. “Well, that’s what I happen to do. I drive a bus for the MTA. I drive six days a week. That’s how come my idea of fun is not spending a lot of time driving around in this thing.” He indicated the shiny green vintage Dodge with a nod of his head.

  “You don’t like driving, Irwin?”

  “I hate it. How would you like it if you hadda push a bus around Manhattan six days a week?”

  “What is your idea of fun?” Mooney asked.

  Irwin Krause frowned and shook his head. “This is the funniest damned survey I ever heard.”

  Mooney sensed the young man’s increasing suspicion. “Reason I ask is that since you don’t use your car for business but only recreational purposes, it helps us to know the sort of things you do with the car.”

  Once again, Mooney’s quick fix had mollified him somewhat. “Well, I take it out to the beach weekends, and sometimes on a Saturday night I drive it into the city. Like when I’ve got a date and all. But otherwise …”

  “You never take it outta town?” Pickering asked.

  “Like I say” — young Krause was beginning to show signs of exasperation — “I drive a bus all week long. It’s no big pleasure for me getting behind the wheel on a weekend. Also, this baby breaks down somewhere upstate in the mountains, I can’t find no parts for it. I can’t find no mechanic who knows the machine.”