Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  Mr. Berrida took the paper from Mooney, squinted down at it, and considered it for a moment or two. At last he shook his head. “No, man. This don’t look nothin’ like the guy.”

  “So what do we have now?” Mooney asked when they’d settled back in the squad car waiting below in the street. “A ‘sixty-eight Mercedes. Model two twenty. Green.”

  “Maybe green,” Mooney grunted. “Maybe blue. Maybe pink. Maybe tan. Who knows?”

  “I gotta hand it to you, Frank. Your hunch on the age of the car.”

  “So what? The list we got from the M.V.B. didn’t have a single Mercedes that vintage, let alone green. So where are we exactly?”

  The ignition turned over and the squad car wheeled slowly out from the curb. At the end of the block they turned right onto Amsterdam Avenue. Outside, in the teeming streets beyond the windows, Mooney’s eyes caught the sullen, resentful expressions of pedestrians watching them as they rolled past.

  “Could be one of two things,” Mooney continued. “One, this car is either registered out of state; or two, and this is the worst possible scenario, it’s stolen and unregistered, with stolen New York plates.”

  “The blue on white plates sort of make it sound like the second to me, Frank.”

  “If it’s blue on white the way Berrida says, it sounds like it could be New York. If it’s the other way around, it’s Connecticut or also maybe a half dozen other states with the same color combination. Once a stolen alarm goes out on a car, it’s in the computer. It’s tricky getting it re-registered, but it can be done.”

  “A guy that changes the color of his car on a fairly regular basis could just as easily be stealing plates and changing them every few months, too.”

  Pickering had quickly picked up Mooney’s line of reasoning. “Meaning, he uses the car on the job and keeps changing the physical appearance and the plates to foil identification.”

  “Doesn’t that sound logical to you?”

  They were silent as the car wheeled and bounced through the puddled ruts of the Harlem River Drive, then swung directly onto the FDR Drive.

  “Soon as we get down to the station, let’s have a check run on all out-of-state plates, colors blue on white. Let’s also check the white on blue. Berrida didn’t sound too sure exactly what he saw, but I think he was favoring New York. When you get that, let’s ask for M.V.B. checks in all those states. See if they’ve got a registered ‘sixty-eight Merc two twenty still running around loose out there, or if they’ve got a stolen report out on one.”

  “Green?”

  “Any color,” Mooney snapped. “I’ll give you five-to-three odds what you got here is a stolen vehicle, unregistered with stolen plates. Guy’s probably got a set of twenty different stolen plates, all different states, in the trunk.”

  Pickering whistled beneath his breath.

  They pulled off the FDR Drive at the 49th Street exit and rolled up the ramp onto First Avenue. The street-lamps were on and early-evening strollers moved phantomlike through the stagnant mists of puddled streets.

  “This color thing, Frank,” Pickering fretted. “It still bothers me.”

  “I’m coming to that.” Mooney clapped a mentholated cough drop between his lips. “The more I hear about this guy, the more it sounds like he’s some kind of car nut. Not too many guys in his line of business will depend on a twenty-year-old antique, even if it is a Mercedes. He’s more into the aesthetics and the image of the thing than its performance. Probably washes it twice a week, tune-ups and oil change every three months.”

  “And paint jobs …”

  “I’m comin’ to that.” Mooney ground the cough drop noisily between his teeth. “Say he paints this car every couple of months. Probably right after he does a job. That’s not aesthetics. That’s self-preservation. It’s dumb enough using the same car over and over again on each new job. Soon as the papers and the TV start shouting about a green getaway car, you can bet that little two twenty is on its way to the paint shop for a rinse and dye.” Pickering brooded awhile, staring out the window at the tawdry jitterbug of lights illuminating the West Forties. “Somehow I get the feeling you’re about to ask me to do something distinctly unpleasant.”

  “You got it, pal.”

  “Like go through the Yellow Pages …”

  “Bingo. Clairvoyant, you are. Go through the NYNEX. Check out every auto paint shop. Particularly those that specialize in custom jobs for expensive foreign automobiles. No schlock shops. Ask each of them if they’ve sprayed a sixty-eight Merc in the last couple of months and for who. And tell all of them if a green ‘sixty-eight Merc should come in to be sprayed a different color, let us know immediately.”

  “This guy could be doing his own paint jobs, Frank. All it takes is a spray gun and a can of paint.”

  “And a lot of know-how not to mess up the chrome and the glass.” Mooney waved the thought aside with an abrupt chopping motion of his hand. “No, our guy loves this baby too much to take a chance on messing her up himself.”

  The car moved west across 49th Street, nosing its way through the heavy theater-hour congestion. Between Ninth and Tenth Avenue, they pulled up at last to the old station house in the middle of the block.

  “There are probably a couple of hundred auto body shops in the city, Frank.”

  “I’ve only got eighty-one days, pal,” Mooney brooded. “Actually, now eighty. I can get us a few extra hands from Mulvaney. We’ll split it up between us.”

  Getting out of the car, he turned and winked at Pickering, slumped there in the shadows. “Not a word of this ‘sixty-eight Mercedes business to any of the buzzards upstairs.”

  SIXTEEN

  “PARDON ME. IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?”

  “No, it’s —”

  “Hello, Janine.”

  At first she didn’t recognize him. He wore a suit and tie. His hair (that’s what threw her) seemed somewhat shorter than usual. He might have been a junior trainee at a bank or at any one of a dozen or so of the big multinational corporations with headquarters in the area.

  “Hello, Warren.” She nearly choked trying to say it, then smiled queasily up at him. He was smiling at her, carrying a plastic tray on which sat a plate mounded with salad. In addition, there was a roll and a glass of milk.

  They were in a salad bar over in the East Sixties, one of those places where you help yourself to as much salad as you like, choose from any one of a dozen dressings, and grab a seat at any one of the tables available.

  “I thought I recognized you,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I Work around the corner.”

  “Oh, you do?”

  His reply was full of surprise, as if he hadn’t really known. But, of course, she’d thought she’d seen him on at least three occasions, hovering about outside at six P.M., when she left the building where she worked. “Gosh, you look great.”

  “You, too.” She smiled dismally, conscious of the tremor in her voice. “What brings you around here?”

  “I’m looking for a job.”

  “A job?” She nearly laughed aloud, then quickly covered her mirth, assuming a more serious air. But it was too late, he’d caught the smile. Something like a frown crossed his face, then he laughed. “I know what you’re thinking, Janine. That asshole, looking for a job. A real job. When did he ever work? Right?”

  She smiled, wary of all that disarming good humor and self-effacement. “Right.”

  “Well, you’re absolutely right,” he said, applying a large dollop of blue cheese dressing to his salad. “Hey, isn’t this place great? You eat here a lot?”

  He watched her closely, scrutinizing her every mood. “Truth is,” he went on cheerily, forking salad into his mouth. “I’ve changed quite a bit since I saw you last, Janine. Since when you and me were running together. You get my letter?”

  “I got it.” She nodded uneasily.

  He chewed his salad, watching her expression carefully for some indication of what she might be thinking
. “Truth is” — he lowered his voice — “I haven’t stopped thinking about you for two years, Janine.”

  “Look, Warren —”

  “You and I go back a long ways, Janine. There’s a lot of history between us.” He smiled. It nearly made her sick to see that smile, so bright, so loving, so ineffably innocent and childlike. So very lethal. She knew that smile all too well. As a child he’d used it to get things he wanted, to disarm unwitting strangers, while she snatched their purses or bags or whatever. She used to love his smile when she was a child because it took away the fear that was with her day and night. He was like a big brother. He made her feel wanted and special and safe. When she was a child, she would do anything for the reward of that smile. But now she distrusted it. It frightened her and made her want to get up and run.

  “Warren,” she started tentatively, weighing the wisdom of saying what she was about to say. “Warren, tell me I’m not crazy. I have seen you around here, haven’t I? I mean, like a couple of times over the past few months. Right?”

  At first he feigned surprise, then appeared to think better of it. He laughed aloud with his mouth filled with salad. “I guess I’ve been up around this way a few times.”

  “Looking for me?”

  A look of unaccustomed soberness brought his chewing to a sudden stop. “Right. To see you.”

  The sound of it and the look of him just then made her blood freeze. All of that coyness and fake laughter just dropped from him and he was deadly serious. “I been sick to see you again, Janine.”

  She had a pretty good idea by then where all of this was leading.

  “We should’ve never busted up,” he went on.

  She started to shake her head back and forth. “Warren …”

  “I made a mess of things, Janine. I did some really dumb things. If I’d still been with you, I’d never —”

  “Don’t say that, Warren. We did plenty of dumb things when we were together.”

  “No,” he said, almost physically pushing back with his hands the inexorable logic of her words. “No.”

  “We had to split.” She heard her voice pleading far away outside herself. “If we hadn’t, God knows where we’d be today. In jail or dead.” She had a strong impulse to stand up and walk away quickly and never look back. Instead, she sat there glued to her seat, legs leaden, heart banging wildly in her chest, watching him chew his salad while he considered all of her arguments. He wiped a smear of dressing from the corner of his mouth. “Janine, I’ve been thinking about us. I’ve been thinking real hard about us.” He wadded the napkin in his fist with such sudden force it made her flinch. “I wanna leave Suki.”

  The full significance of that disclosure came to her slowly, but at last terrifyingly. It was not merely the fact that the old woman represented the only family, hence stability and restraint, in his life; it was more surely the girl’s realization that he had reached some juncture in his life where his needs now compelled him to abandon one form of security for another. It was the latter part that froze her blood. There was little doubt she was the alternative he’d chosen.

  “Why?” she asked in a dry, slightly choked whisper. ” ‘Cause,” he said, and his manner was so frighteningly plausible. ” ‘Cause I don’t want to do what I’ve been doing anymore. I want something normal now.” He said the word as though it were a magic incantation. “Suki’s crazy. You know that as well as me, Janine. And she makes me crazy. I do crazy things cause of Suki. I mean, she doesn’t tell me to do them, but I know she wants me to, and so I just do them. Then after I do them, I can’t remember why I did them. It’s like she controls me in some way. Just pushes buttons someplace and I start to move. That scares me, Janine. That scares me a lot.”

  “But why? What’s Suki got to do with what you do?” His brow furrowed and his eyes rose ceilingward, evading hers. He gave the impression that he was reaching far out for something well beyond him. ” ‘Cause all my life, ever since I was a kid and came to live with Suki, she’s always made me feel I owe her something. Like I’ve got some big debt to pay back. And the only thing Suki wants from me is more stuff. Get my meaning?”

  “More stuff she can sell for cash?”

  “You got it.” He winked slyly at her. “Suki’s bad for me, honey.” He hadn’t called her that in years. He laid his hand, which was cold now, across the back of hers. Instinctively, she recoiled, but still she was afraid to withdraw it. “Now I want to leave her and change my life.”

  The chill of his hand and the sudden sickening intimacy of his manner revolted her. An image of her past life with Warren flashed in her head. A seedy little room with an unmade bed, an electric coil to cook over, living out of a battered suitcase in some rat-infested, junkie-ridden, single-occupancy dive on the Upper West Side. Bare lightbulbs hanging from extension cords drooping like vines from ceiling outlets. Corridors you wouldn’t care to walk down at any time of the day or night. Licey beds, milk containers on a window ledge, flyblown toilets with cracked, leaky commodes ringed with the fecal stains of former occupants. And then the police. Life with Warren meant living in shadows, constantly hiding from the police.

  She’d had enough of that. She’d come too far, pulled too hard, sweated blood to leave all that behind and bring some semblance of normalcy to her days. Now suddenly a whole new way of life — not grand by any means, but better by far than anything she’d ever known or even dared to hope for — was almost within her grasp.

  “Warren.” She struggled to control her voice. “If you’re thinking about wanting to move back with me …”

  He nodded, smiling with almost irrepressible delight. “Warren, I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “I know,” he said, still holding her hand. “I’ve seen him come out of your apartment house.”

  A fist closed over her heart. But of course he would know where she lived and with whom. He would know everything down to the last detail. “Mickey?”

  “Mickey Mancuso. Isn’t that his name?” His smile had an edge of triumph to it. She knew it was intended not only to impress her with his cleverness, but to frighten her as well.

  “I want to tell you something, Janine. I want you to know I don’t blame you. I don’t hold a thing against you. Not a bit. We’d split. You were alone. All fair and square. Perfectly natural you’d look around for someone else. But now, honey, I want you to —”

  “Warren, please.”

  “— drop him.”

  Her jaw fell and she sat there, watching him while he resumed chewing his salad. “Warren …” She could barely get the name out.

  “Drop him, Janine,” Warren repeated, the smile more angelic than ever. “Tell him it’s over now. Done. Finished. Tell him to go.”

  “Warren …”

  “You do as I tell you, Janine.”

  “Warren …”

  He started to rise.

  “Warren. Wait a minute, for Chrissake.” She tried to pull him back down in his seat. “Warren. Mickey and I are engaged.”

  The smile never wavered, but something like a cloud passed across his eyes. It passed quickly, but she was certain she saw there that vulnerable, hurt look she recalled so well from their stormy, wayward past; a clear echo of the same expression he bore as a seven-year-old street arab.

  It was gone as quickly as it had come, and there was the smile again, beaming and replete with love. So fast had it shifted that for a moment she thought she’d merely imagined the other.

  “Like I say, Janine,” he went on. “I’m not angry about any of that. I’m willing to forgive and forget.”

  “Forgive?” she gasped. “Were getting married Christmas.”

  “No harm done. Water under the bridge. You just get rid of him now. See?” He was still smiling at her. ” ‘Cause if you don’t, I’m gonna have to do something about it myself.”

  She sat there long after he’d gone, staring at the tray of salad he’d been eating. Lettuce leaves and bits of carrots and celery were strewn all about th
e plate and off it, as if some small, wild creature had pastured there.

  She was numb. Her mind whirled. The quiet din of people eating about her magnified to a deafening roar. None of what had happened seemed real. It had an air of something dreamlike, from which she had just awakened, confused and unsettled. Where he’d sat, some aura of that smile still persisted in midair above the place; that oddly disturbing smile she had been so fond of as a child. Now it struck her as furtive and sly, as if all kinds of nasty thoughts were going on behind it.

  For a woman well into her sixth decade of life, Suki Klink retained remarkable powers of physical dexterity. When she had a mind to, she could move fast. Impelled by instinct, keen as a famished alley cat, she made straight for the little eyrie planted beneath the glass cupola at the top of the house.

  Warren was away now, presumably off on one of his little “jaunts,” and the need had come urgently over her to have a look about upstairs. Periodically, she did this when he went off and was not expected back for some time. Without closely examining her motives for these periodic searches, she liked to think of them as intelligence-gathering missions. Devoted to him as she was, with a loose cannon like Warren lurching about in one’s life, it behooved her to know precisely where he was and what he was about at all times.

  She moved now like a small cyclone through the little cupola room at the top of the stairs. With her multitudinous flowing skirts ballooning out behind her, she gave the appearance of being in flight, and while the frantic action of her search appeared to wreak havoc, when she’d finished ransacking a specific area, it was as if nothing, save possibly the most gentle breeze, had ever stirred there.

  She tore blankets back, poked beneath mattresses, ran her stubby, grime-streaked fingers along the springs, rifled through the closets and drawers, all with the grim single-mindedness of a hungry ferret.