Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  Mooney and Pickering exchanged glances.

  “You got any criminal record, Irwin?” Mooney asked suddenly, seeing agitation leap back into the young man’s eye. “This is just for the M.V.B. records. Just a formality. We try to keep tabs on all criminal types still on the road.”

  Krause’s look of skepticism had turned to one of hurt.

  “It’s for your own safety, Irwin,” Pickering assured him.

  “Sure. I see,” Krause agreed, more mystified than ever. “No, I got no criminal record.”

  “Get me a make on this guy, Lopez,” Mooney said to the driver when they’d settled back in the car. He handed him a small profile card with pertinent data he could flash instantly over the car’s radio to the National Crime Center in Washington.

  “That old Dodge was in beautiful shape,” Pickering said. “The grille was just the sort of thing that old Wisdo babe was talking about.”

  “Too pale, though.”

  “Too what?”

  “Too pale,” Mooney growled. “The green was too pale. She was talking about a darker green.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me.” Mooney glowered out into the street.

  “He’s the right physical type, though,” Pickering added hopefully.

  “All depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you’re talking about the dark-complected character or the fair-haired one. Did you happen to notice Krause’s front teeth at all?”

  “Straight. Perfectly straight.”

  “Probably the only thing straight about him.”

  The police driver up front half-turned in his seat. The action caused his jowly face to redden. “On that Krause guy …”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was jugged a couple of times for driving under the influence. No prior criminal record.”

  THIRTEEN

  FERRIS KOOPS WATCHED THE TRAIN GLIDE slowly over the track, then rock and sway gently into the little station. It was a freight train with an engine and a coal tender, with six cars coupled behind that. There was a boxcar, two flatcars, two oilers, and a caboose tagged on at the end with a Great Northern Railway shield stenciled on its side.

  Ferris pressed closer, inching his way forward to a better vantage point. At the station the steam engine hooted. A puff of smoke rose from its stack as an automated delivery arm poked out from inside a baggage room, dropped a sack of mail onto one of the flatcars, then retracted itself. The engine hooted again, a low, wistful moan, the big drive wheels spun slowly, and the train chugged out of the station.

  Farther up the track it slowed to permit a five-car passenger train to pass in front of it, then switched onto a shallow elevated track leading into a tunnel that wound its way beneath a papier-mâché mountain.

  Ferris watched the tail of the caboose vanish into the dark maw of the tunnel. A smile of near childlike delight transported his features. In his early twenties, he didn’t appear to be much beyond some of the older children swarming about him. His presence there at that moment in a crowd comprised mostly of children tended to heighten the impression of extreme youth.

  It was 5:45 P.M., fifteen minutes before closing time at the F.A.O. Schwartz toy emporium. Though the sun was still up, it had already swung well to the west and appeared to have gotten itself tangled in the soaring new construction in the vicinity of Columbus Circle. It was at a point that could be described as neither daylight nor dusk, but somewhere just between, when the first few streetlamps have turned on, appearing white and ineffective in the dwindling daylight.

  Ferris had wandered into the famous toy shop from the street. Having no place to go and nothing in particular to do, he stood outside the big display windows for twenty minutes or so, watching electric robots blink and lurch about. Beside that was a window full of animated Mother Goose characters reenacting their little tales.

  More than he loved toys, Ferris loved children. Among them, he enjoyed a serenity and sense of well being he seldom experienced in the presence of adults. It brought him back to his own childhood. Christmas mornings. Toys beneath a tree. Thanksgiving Day parades. Halloween trick-or-treating. Ice-skating in the park, at the Wollman Memorial Rink. The building he’d grown up in was just across the street from there on upper Fifth Avenue. Standing at the window of his bedroom, he’d had an unimpeded view of the zoo at the south end of the park and of the Delacorte Theater and the ice rink farther north.

  The room he had in those years was full of toys. Bookshelves from ceiling to floor were lined with volumes of children’s classics sitting side by side with regiments of lead soldiers, kites, model ships and planes, bubble pipes, wind-up gymnasts, model vintage sports cars — all things to delight a child.

  Ferris had never been to regular school like other boys and girls. The doctors had said he could never go. In a physical sense, he was perfectly healthy. But early on, in the first or second grade, his teachers had discovered that he was unable to learn at the same rate as other children. Learning what to do with numbers and letters for Ferris, hard as he tried, was an insurmountable task.

  Even as he struggled to overcome his deficit, receiving special coaching, his reading level failed to advance at the same rate as other children’s.

  Concerned, his parents brought him to a special clinic where batteries of tests were administered, and it was quickly discovered that Ferris was largely incapable of any sustained concentration. A learned clinician there had informed the Koopses one gray, icy February morning that the part of Ferris’s brain associated with cognitive skills was apparently underdeveloped. This might be due to some longstanding heretofore undiagnosed hormonal dysfunction, or more likely the result of a brief period of oxygen deprivation during birth. This was not retardation in the truly crippling sense, the doctor hastened to add, but all the same, the sad outcome that had to be faced was that Ferris would be afflicted with learning deficits throughout the course of his life.

  On the other hand, Ferris had excellent muscle coordination. He was articulate with an extraordinarily large vocabulary (which appeared to fly in the face of the learned clinician’s findings), and showed every indication of growing into a charming and comely young man.

  But still, the doctors assured Mr. and Mrs. Koops that Ferris would never be normal. As he grew older he would give the appearance of normality. He could dress and wash, feed himself and attend to all his bodily needs, to be sure. He could even learn to read and write. Up to a point. But as for taking his place in the world — marriage, job, family — that, unhappily, seemed doubtful.

  Shortly after (Ferris was only seven when that cruel verdict was handed down), the Koopses’ fortunes began to founder. Several imprudent investments, coupled with one sizable loss in the market, all but decimated their savings. The need for ready cash compelled Mr. Koops to sell off some extremely valuable real estate holdings and liquidate his once-prosperous importing business, all at prices drastically disadvantageous to him.

  Several weeks later Mr. Koops died of a massive coronary, and his wife remarried, many said with indecent haste. Sometime before his demise, however, Koops had set terms in his will to provide, not luxuriously, but more than adequately, for Ferris’s needs throughout the remainder of his life.

  That would have been all well and good had things gone the way Mr. Koops imagined they would. He didn’t count on Mrs. Koops remarrying quite so quickly after his death, nor could he have possibly foreseen that his wife’s new husband, a widower in his late fifties with enviable social connections and smart friends in high places, had little room in his life for a seven-year-old slow learner who required tutors and constant supervision.

  Never a strong-willed person, Mrs. Koops soon bowed to pressures to institutionalize Ferris. “After all,” her new husband assured her, “these people are professionals. They’re trained to handle people like Ferris.”

  Ferris hovered round the Schwartz windows until closing time, then with a few other stragglers drifted ou
t into the pale purple dusk of 57th Street, where the stores were now all lit. Office buildings were disgorging people onto the streets. Crowds brushed past the lagging, meandering youth, scurrying for subways and buses, rushing off to social engagements, family, and friends.

  Ferris Koops had no place to go. He had not eaten in seventy-two hours except for occasional fruit drinks taken at outdoor stands. For all that, he was not conscious of being hungry, and even if he were, he had not at that moment the financial wherewithal to attend to the problem. The proceeds from the check that arrived every two weeks from the offices of a law firm on Madison Avenue had a way of disappearing almost the moment it was cashed.

  He carried in his pocket some food vouchers entitling him to hot meals at various welfare shelters. The absence of means, coupled with no prospects of obtaining any until the arrival of the next check, held little in the way of fear for him. Since his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, he had been largely on his own, working in a desultory fashion at a number of jobs too inconsequential to enumerate. Suffice it to say, he never worried for his next meal, and as for shelter, he had a tiny apartment on the Upper East Side, the rent for which was paid directly by the law firm serving as executors of his small estate.

  It was toward the park he walked now, moving along in his wayward, dreamy fashion, destinationless, with an odd little smile curling at the corners of his mouth.

  The streetlamps were all lit now along Fifth Avenue. He wended his way north, moving up the west side of the avenue, right along the shallow stone wall enclosing the park. Pausing for a moment to rub the pinkish muzzle of one of the horses from the hansom cabs, he chatted amiably with the driver, then continued up Fifth Avenue. The route took him past the Sherry Netherland, past the Frick, the French Embassy, the Metropolitan, and the Guggenheim, his sneaker-shod feet gliding aimlessly toward a specific place he had in mind but wasn’t yet quite aware of.

  Several blocks beyond the Guggenheim, his pace finally slackened then came to a halt across from a large, thirty-story, dun-colored, nineteen-fifties apartment house. Just behind him stood a bench against the park wall. He sat there for a while, watching people going in and out of the building. Businessmen returning home from work nodded to a liveried doorman and spun through the revolving front doors. Couples emerged from within on their way to social engagements all around town. The doorman hailed them cabs, doffing his cap when he’d closed the cab door behind them. A young woman emerged with a brace of Afghans on a single leash. A florist’s truck double-parked in front while the driver made deliveries.

  Lights shone in all the windows of the building, casting a glow of warm radiance down onto the street. There was an air of holiday gaiety and excitement about it all, a sense of some impending joy. He could not say why, but what he felt just then was a curious sort of exultation.

  He rose and walked to the edge of the curb and stared up at the building. Eyes scanning the face of the structure, he counted fourteen floors up and eight windows to the right, ending at a corner window. Seventeen years before, he’d stood behind the glass panes of that window and gazed out at the onrushing magical night. It spread like an inkstain across the woody rolling hills of the park.

  He knew, of course, that he was staring up at the window of what was once his own bedroom. Four windows to the left of that were the big four-pane casements of his parents’ bedroom. The lights in there were on now and the shades drawn. He was aware of a momentary darkening motion drifting behind them and knew that people walked there. He liked to play a game in which he imagined that his own mother and father moved there now behind the drawn shades, and that they were waiting for him. He felt a rush of warmth and love rise fast and hard in him, settling finally in his throat and causing an ache there.

  He was aware suddenly of the doorman out front, watching him intently. There was something wary, even slightly belligerent in his gaze. He’d encountered that sort of look from doormen before — and police. He’d always seemed to elicit that same response from uniformed people. It alarmed him and he was about to move off. Just then, a young woman in a flannel jogging outfit emerged from the revolving doors with a small King Charles terrier on a leash.

  The doorman tipped his hat to her. Ferris heard her voice carry across the narrow strip of avenue where taxis and buses and private cars rolled endlessly.

  There was something warm and friendly in that husky, laughing voice. Ferris watched her with growing fascination as she walked to the end of the block, waited for the light to change, then crossed toward him, the small yipping terrier straining at its leash.

  On the west side of the avenue where Ferris stood, thirty or so feet down from him, was an entrance to the park. It was into that entrance that Ferris watched the young woman disappear.

  It occurred to him with rather startling urgency that he had to speak with her. He wanted to say hello and tell her that as a small child he’d lived in the same building she lived in now. Possibly even in the same apartment. Was that her window at the corner on the fourteenth floor?

  How odd. What a coincidence. How long had she lived there? Maybe they’d all lived there together at the same time. Had she known his parents? Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Koops. He was a tall, dignified-looking gentleman. “My mom was small and pretty.”

  In the next moment, Ferris was moving off into the park after the gray figure up ahead receding quickly into the gathering dark. By that time, in his surging joy at the prospect of a reunion with someone he might have known as a child, he’d completely forgotten the doorman, who watched him as he struck off after the girl.

  FOURTEEN

  “YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TO SPEAK LOUDER,” Mooney shouted into the phone, but that was only because Konig was shouting at him. “We got a lousy connection.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “We just left the park. I’m up on Fifty-eighth and Third.”

  “Sounds like you’re at the bottom of the Hudson Tube.”

  “I’m on a pay phone. There’s a construction job going on right over my head. Speak louder, will you?”

  “Was there anything in the drain?”

  “What?”

  “The drain. The goddamned drain. Did you find anything?”

  Mooney held the receiver away from his ear until he’d finished ranting. “Nothing special. Pretty much the same sort of thing as the Bailey job. Only this time the drain wasn’t so deep. It was easier locating the body. And the dog —”

  “Dog? What dog?” Konig bellowed. “Will you speak up, for Chrissake?”

  “She was walking a dog. The doorman found the dog wandering out on the street, trailing his leash. That’s how he knew something had happened. He watched her walk into the park with the dog, then saw this guy follow her in.”

  “He saw the guy?”

  “Right.” Mooney’s head had started to pound just talking to the man. “He’d been standing across the street, watching the building. Looked kind of suspicious, the doorman said. It wasn’t dark yet and all the building lights were on. He got a good look at the guy. We have a fairly detailed description.”

  “Does it match up with any of the others?”

  “This one looks like the fair-haired, slender one.” There was a pause and Mooney could hear him breathing heavily. “You got anything for me?”

  “She’s still on the table now,” he snapped. “But I can tell you right now, she’s covered with bite marks.” Mooney caught his breath. “Where?”

  “Breasts and genitals.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “That’s good news. Here’s the bad. We did a couple of quick impressions.” Mooney could hear him shuffle some papers on his desk, then start to speak again as though he were reading from a report. “Bite marks in evidence here show no indication of either a broken front or broken left lateral incisor.”

  Mooney stared bleakly into the black perforations of the speaker.

  Konig didn’t wait for him to reply. “And something else
… We took a load of semen samples out of her.” He paused, drawing it out for maximum effect while Mooney waited with his head pounding. “Yeah?”

  “The samples we took from Torrelson and the Pell woman and a few of the others were deader than old custard. The stuff we sucked out of this gal — what’s her name?”

  “Bender. Carol Bender.”

  “Bender. Right. This semen was jumping with live sperm. So all I can say now for sure is you’ve got two suspects: one with broken front teeth and azoospermia, and another with straight, sound teeth and fertile as a fruit fly. One blood type looks like an AB pos, and I can’t say about the other.”

  “One dark, one fair,” Mooney added softly to himself. “We know all that.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Konig boomed heartily. Mooney could hear satisfaction brimming over in his voice. “Sounds to me like a couple of lads who are reading each other’s press and trying to outdo one another.” Mooney stared at the receiver, then made a face back at a man outside the booth waiting to use it. “This job gets more unpleasant by the minute,” he said.

  “That’s what adds zest to life, my friend. You wouldn’t want them all to be too easy, would you?” Konig crowed like a cock and the phone clicked off.

  Outside on the street the noise level was like the inside of a boilerworks. They were digging a foundation right outside of the phone booth. The machine-gun rattle of compressor drills banged through Mooney’s pounding head. In the squad car Pickering was just signing off on the car radio. “What’s up?” Mooney snapped, sliding into the back seat beside Pickering.

  “Mulvaney wants us to come in right away.”

  “Shit.”

  “Commissioner just had him on the carpet for two hours. CBS ran an editorial last night calling for the old man’s resignation.”