Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  Mooney’s drowsy eyes rose from the depths of his coffee mug. “He threatened to pull me off the case couple of weeks ago. Gave me ninety days to finish the job.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “What’s to tell?”

  Fritzi slid a plate of bacon and eggs before him. “Be the best thing.”

  He glared down into his plate and shook his head despairingly. “Look at this now. Fake yolkless rubber eggs and vegetarian bacon.” His tongue slipped queasily between his lips.

  “I didn’t give you high cholesterol and a coronary. I’m just here to make sure you don’t get another.”

  Mooney groaned and picked up his fork. She sat down across from him and proceeded to spread margarine on his toast.

  “Papers say this thing up in Westchester was pretty foul.”

  Mooney made a sour face and forked egg into his mouth.

  “Sure looks a lot like all the others though,” Fritzi continued. “All that biting stuff. And the funny pictures and numbers on the walls.”

  Mooney bit down on a corner of jellied toast and proceeded to chew thoughtfully. “Not the car though. That’s the only thing that don’t fit. This latest was a green Pontiac. They found it on the West Side Drive.” “How come they’re so sure it was the same one used in New Rochelle?”

  “One of the neighbors identified it. Saw it in front of the house. Even remembered part of the plate number. Got any more of that carrot bacon?”

  “It’s not carrots.” She speared several pieces onto his plate. “It’s made of—”

  “Don’t tell me. I’d rather not know.”

  “What’s wrong with Pontiacs? You don’t think the real Shadow Dancer drove a Pontiac?”

  “We’ve already got a make on his car. Got if off a pretty reliable source. It’s a Mercedes. A sixty-eight. That’s why I say the cars are the only thing that don’t fit.”

  “Did it ever occur to you the same guy might change cars for each job?”

  Mooney pushed his empty plate away and rubbed his sleepless eyes. “It never occurred to me.” His eyes drooped and he appeared to doze off.

  “Okay. It’s just a suggestion.”

  “Don’t ask dumb questions. Of course we figured that. Any guy in his right mind, knocking off a different dame every five, six weeks, is not gonna use the same car each time.”

  “But this guy isn’t in his right mind.”

  “Bingo,” Mooney mumbled and patted his stomach. The sky outside the kitchen window above East 78th Street had begun to glow with faint streaks of pink. Fritzi rose and started to carry dishes from the table to the sink. “So what are you chaps doing about all this?” Mooney’s eyes had closed and he was drowsing once more at the table.

  “Mooney? Did you hear me?”

  “Oh, Fritz. For God’s sake, it’s four-thirty in the morning.” He wobbled to his feet and flicked out the kitchen light. “Let’s go to bed. It’s getting early.” Mooney slipped back beneath the cool sheets and turned on his stomach. Almost at once he began to snore. Fritzi lay frowning and agitated, propped on a pair of goosedown pillows. She stared disapprovingly down at the slumbering form beside her.

  “Hey, Mooney. I almost forgot.” She elbowed his ribs. The gray tousled head rose sleepily. “Hey, Mooney.” He moaned. “Is this because you want me to die, Fritzi?”

  “I just remembered. Some guy came in tonight. Sat at the bar awhile.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Said he was looking for you.”

  “He didn’t find me.” Mooney burrowed his face into the pillows.

  “Said he saw you a couple of times on TV, out in front of the place. Said he wanted to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Good.” Mooney began to snore.

  “Nice-looking young guy. Kind of cute in that sort of dark, Latino way.”

  “Hope you didn’t do nothin’ to embarrass me,” Mooney croaked feebly.

  She punched him lightly on the back. “He said he wanted to talk to you about the case.”

  Sprawled beneath the sheets, the pillow planted atop his head, Mooney appeared to have dropped back off. Fritzi sat there for a while, propped against the headboard, watching him. There was a troubled, somewhat baleful look on her face.

  In the next moment, she felt stirrings and grumblings rising from the mattress beside her. It was Mooney, struggling to disentangle himself from the entrapment of twisted bedding. At last, he sat halfway up, propped on one elbow. “What else did he say?”

  “I already told you. Said he wanted to talk to you about the case.”

  “What case?”

  “What case?” Fritzi slapped her forehead. “This thing we re discussing for the last hour. The Shadow Dancer, naturally.”

  “Oh?” Mooney flopped back down.

  “Said he had a theory about all this.”

  “Just what we need. Another theoretician. He leave his name?”

  “Nope. Said he’d drop back some other time.” Mooney started to snore again.

  “He might have something useful to say. You never can tell.”

  “Sure. You bet.”

  “Aren’t you even a little curious?”

  “I’ve had hundreds of calls from people, all with some cockamamie theory about this case. They’re all sure they know the guy.”

  “Did I say he said that?” Fritzi protested. “He just said he wanted to talk to you about the case.”

  “I can’t wait to hear.”

  She watched him slip off to sleep again, or seem to, until suddenly he bolted back up into a sitting position. As he spoke, rapidly and out of breath, he started to shake her. “Listen, that thing I told you about our having a make on this Mercedes, and all. Don’t breathe a word of that to a soul. You hear? That’s not for public consumption.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Female. Age 14. Attempted self-abortion by syringing. Perforated uterus. Extensive abdominal septicemia. Tenderness in Pouch of Douglass. Blood urea 256 mg percent. Death by …

  Victim. Male child. Age 2. Poorly nourished but not emaciated. Numerous contusions on body including nine on forehead. Back of knee joints, outer side of right thigh marked by patterned bruises in the form of small circles arranged in equilateral triangles. Mother admitted having ‘chastised’ the child with leather belt, roughly 1W wide, studded with brass cones set in form of equilateral triangles. Cause of death, compression of brain as a result of bilateral subdural hemorrhage …

  Konig glanced up into the musty stillness of his office. There was a look of puzzlement on his face as if surprised to find himself there so early on a Sunday morning. A shaft of mote-filled sunlight crossed his desk and fell against his back like a warm hand. Before him in a sloping pile was a stack of protocols awaiting his review — the chronicles of last week’s carnage in the city. Some two hundred or so reports, all illuminated in meticulous and grisly detail. After thirty years of service in the medical examiner’s office, he was sometimes tempted to conclude that all the methodology of homicide (and he knew it intimately and by heart) was repetitive and even boring. But every now and then, something would come along so breathtakingly original in approach, so ingenious in cruelty, in its sheer nastiness, as to renew his faith in man’s unflagging creativity in this area.

  He rose, rubbing his eyes and prowling the perimeter of his cluttered office, restless as a penned horse, as if seeking something he couldn’t quite recall. He moved slowly, placing one foot gingerly before the other to avert as much as possible the daggers of chronic sciatica stabbing up and down the length of his leg. It gave him the appearance of a man walking uphill into a strong wind.

  Everything about his dress that morning was clean and fresh, yet he conveyed an impression of dishevelment. There was about him the weariness of eons, along with the resignation of those who’d long ago abandoned all hope. But in spite of that, there remained that air of angry intransigence about him that suggested something ap
proaching dignity.

  In the clutterment of his bookshelves, with an order discernible only to him, the bleached skulls of seabirds sat amid musty old tomes of long-out-of-print textbooks he had authored; human organs and small appendages floated in formalin in rows of glass canisters like the canopic jars of the ancient Egyptians. His eyes scoured the shelves until at last they lighted on the small article he’d been seeking, an electric coil upon which he could brew one of the endless cups of black powdered coffee that kept him galvanized throughout the day.

  Puttering about in the debris of the drawers, he fished out a plastic spoon and a cracked mug ringed with the brownish patina of decades. He heated water in a small alembic over his coil and drummed his desk distractedly as he waited.

  Part of the morning ritual was the first cigar, which he unwrapped from its cellophane, bit off its tip with a deft, fastidious snap, then lit. Not eager to return to protocols, he dallied instead over the weekend mail, reading halfheartedly as he stirred freeze-dried coffee into the mug of boiling water. Shortly he rose, and with the cigar screwed tightly into the center of his mouth, he wandered forth into the corridor outside his office.

  It was slightly past ten A.M. on an early September Sunday. The light streaming in from 31st Street outside had the sort of dazzling clarity that comes only with lowered temperatures and little humidity. The tops of trees visible from the corridor windows were still in leaf, still green but brightly tinged with red and russet hues. The muted sounds of street traffic drifted up from the world below.

  Above the corridors where he walked there hovered the sort of silence that bespeaks eternity and all final things. Even the sound of one’s own breathing seemed intrusive there. Walking down the corridor, he was slightly appalled at the sound of his own slurred footsteps ricocheting off the tiled walls and vinyl floors. Limping stiffly, he carried his cup awkwardly before him like a libation bearer. As well as he knew those corridors, at that moment he felt a curious estrangement from them. The solitary look of his appearance in that large and seemingly empty building imparted to his movements the stilted, rather dreamy quality of the somnambulist.

  His way took him past the spectroscopy labs, the toxicology and ballistics departments, then on into an intersecting corridor containing a row of additional office suites in which colleagues, deputies, and young assistants had their offices. Had anyone stopped him then and asked where he was going, he would, doubtless, have been at a loss to say.

  Paul Konig was a man given to walking as a form of problem solving. Desk work, to his way of thinking, was the place to execute mechanical chores. Locomotion, however, was reserved for the intuitive part of his job, the truly inspired part, although he himself would never have agreed to such a distinction. He was a trained scientist and as such had an unyielding reverence for hard scientific method. Observation. Quantification. Trial and error. Verification. Those were his watch words. He hammered them hard at his students three days a week at the university. He professed a strong antipathy for intuition along with the current rage for gurus within the scientific community who’d built up a following by practicing it.

  Yet, whenever the chief medical examiner was prowling the labyrinthine corridors of the New York City Coroner’s Office, it was generally when the scientific method had all but exhausted itself, and he had no recourse but to revert to some “less reliable mode.” It was here where some of his best work was done.

  Just about to end his prowl and turn back to the gloomy prospect of writing protocols, a scattering of faint, indeterminate sounds caught his attention.

  At first he thought it was a stray cat or, possibly, mice foraging brazenly in one of the offices. Rodents were not at all uncommon in the medical examiner’s office. These noises, however, consisted of tappings and the tentative clicks of a hard object being pushed or rolled along a desktop.

  The noises seemed to be coming from a point down the corridor and nearly fifty feet directly ahead of him. He paused, straining his ears. The more he listened to the noises, the more they seemed the work of some human agency. Prudence urged that he return to his office and notify the security people down front, then bar himself behind his door and wait there until help arrived.

  Prudence, however, had never been the chief medical examiner’s strong suit. Dismissing all danger, he plunged forward, grasping his coffee mug, brandishing it slightly above his head as though it were a weapon. The closer he came, the more insistent grew the noises. From where he stood they gave the distinct impression of someone rifling through files or a drawer.

  Six feet from the opened door of the last office at the end of the corridor, he stopped again in a half-crouch, craning his neck, gathering strength for the final push. He took a deep breath and proceeded to count inwardly to ten. At six, he could contain himself no longer and lunged forward. Eyes blazing, he wheeled into the office.

  There was no light on inside. Sun streamed into the office from a large picture window facing the rear of the building. Momentarily blinded by the light, he saw nothing but a whirr of black spots flying before his eyes. With a slight change of physical position, the glare dissolved and suddenly he could see the blurred outline of a person, seated faceless, at the desk.

  There was a shriek and the squeal of a chair skidding violently backward. The sound of it rent the quiet, Sabbath hush of the building. Everything suddenly exploded into wild, frenetic motion.

  “Good God!”

  Konig gaped at the figure, half-seated, half up on its feet, shouting at him. The hand brandishing the mug dripped hot, spilled coffee over his wrist. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I work here!” Joan Winger shouted. The chair behind her had toppled and she was backing perilously toward it. She looked at him as though he were possessed by demons. “Will you kindly put that mug down. I don’t relish the thought of being skulled by it.”

  He glanced at the mug above his head. The sight of it poised there suddenly embarrassed him. His wrist and shirt cuff dripped coffee. He was overcome with a sense of ludicrousness, like some overly sober and upright citizen inadvertently caught in a beer hall with a party hat tilted askew on his head. “You scared the hell out of me,” he blustered.

  “I’m not exactly enchanted by your sudden appearance, either.”

  “I’m working here.”

  “Well, so am I, for Chrissake.”

  “This is Sunday,” he thundered at her as though it were an accusation.

  “For you, too, right?” she shot back. “I’ve just as much right to come in here on a Sunday as you, don’t I?” The reasonableness of the question appeared to baffle him. He grumbled something and cleared his throat. His hand and shirt sleeve continued to drip coffee. “Well, of course …”

  “Now, if you’d be so kind as to permit me to get back …”

  “Sure,” he mumbled. “Go ahead.” He half-turned, then turned back. Suddenly he was all curiosity. “What are you doing, anyway?”

  Something vulgar leapt to her tongue but then died there. Instead she frowned. “If you must know, I’m running a second battery of tests on those semen smears we took off of Bender and Torrelson.”

  He appeared troubled. “Why?”

  “Because I’m not entirely satisfied with the reliability of the Florence technique.”

  “I told you to try the gel diffusion, didn’t I?”

  “Okay — I’m trying it. Now if I can just get the one to corroborate the other …”

  Konig gazed at her, looking somewhat crazed. Wisps of hair stuck out from the side of his head. His tie was askew and his shirt collar poked above his jacket lapels. “What grouping systems are you using?”

  “Both the ABO and the GM,” she fired back at him, curt to the point of rudeness. She wanted to get back to work and she didn’t bother to conceal the fact that she considered him an intrusion.

  “Fine,” he murmured, starting to back out. “Fine. All right, then.”

  She stooped to pick up her chair, then w
atched him collide with the corner of a table.

  He winced as the pain stabbed up his aching leg. “Are you all right?” she asked, more exasperated than concerned.

  “Fine. I’m fine.” He brushed the incident aside with a sweep of his arm. At the door, he still appeared baffled, casting about with a fretful air for some reason to remain. “What reagents are you using?” he resumed the interrogation.

  “Iodine and potassium iodide.”

  “And distilled water?”

  “I didn’t intend to take it from the tap,” she snapped, regretting at once the sarcasm. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean …”

  “Fine. Perfectly all right. I shouldn’t have … I suppose you’ve heard?”

  “What?”

  “They got the car used in the Wybnishinski job.”

  “Yes. I know. On the West Side Drive. I heard.” By that time she was bristling with impatience. “Did they get prints?”

  “Mooney doesn’t think so. And certainly not if it’s like any of the others. We should know in a day or so. I’ve got a preliminary report from the Westchester Coroner’s Office.”

  “Anything there?” She displayed no real curiosity, but in point of fact, she was listening keenly.

  “Looks like our boy, all right. Bite marks. Wall doodles.”

  “Semen?”

  “Plenty — and the stuff they got from the vaginal aspirate was live.”

  “They make a blood type?” she asked, still cool and incurious.

  “AB pos,” he replied, watching her intently. “If you care to see the report, it’s on my desk.” He gazed around the office, somewhat at a loss. “I’d be happy to help you run those gel diffusions.”

  The long, weighty pause telegraphed the answer that followed. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to run them off myself.”

  “Fine. Right you are.” He laughed feebly, wondering why he felt so whipped and hangdog. He hovered at the threshold, his gnarled, freckled hand patting the doorjamb. “Sorry the way I busted in on you like that. I thought you were a …”