“You asked me to run a check on the Briggs registration we got from the auto body shop.”
“Oh — right. What’s up?”
“This town happens to be where the Briggs trail ends.”
A flutter of interest elevated Mooney’s mood. “You find him?”
“Not exactly. I found his wife instead.”
Outside the sooty windows of Manhattan South, the quick dusk of autumn had descended. Where drab, gray daylight had hovered moments before, there was now the harsh white glare of neon contrasted starkly against the urban night.
“Where is he?” Mooney snapped.
“I’m getting to that.” Crammed into a tiny, airless phone booth on the main street in downtown Pawling, Pickering ground his teeth and struggled to keep his voice under control. “I ran that Briggs registration back through the M.V.B. like you told me.”
“So?”
“So, the closest thing the computer had to a Donald Briggs was a Donald Griggs, Ten Porter Road, Pawling, New York.”
“With a stolen ‘sixty-eight Merce two twenty.”
“Color, sky blue.”
“Hmm,” Mooney reflected. “What about the ID number?”
“That’s what’s interesting. It’s exactly the same as Briggs except for one digit.”
“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. It’s the last digit. Right?”
“You got it, Frank.” Pickering felt the excitement rising. “The final digit in Griggs’s registration was a one. With Briggs it was a seven. All the other numbers are identical.”
“See that,” Mooney gloated. “Was I so dumb, after all?”
“I gotta hand it to you, Frank. If nothing else, we got us a car thief.”
“You been over to this Griggs already?”
“Over and back.”
“And you met the wife?”
“I already told you I did.”
“What’s the story on this guy?” Mooney snarled.
“That’s just it. I can’t tell you. Nor can his wife. He disappeared six years ago, along with the Mercedes. Neither of them has been heard from since. His wife still has a reward posted for ten grand to anyone with information leading to his whereabouts.”
“What about the law?” Mooney asked. “What do they say?”
“I spoke to the Putnam County sheriff about an hour ago. They closed the books on Griggs last year.”
Mooney frowned into the receiver. He waited for an ambulance siren to wail past his window before responding. “What’s he look like, this Griggs?”
“I thought that for a minute, too, Frank. You’re barking up the wrong tree. His wife showed me a photo. Griggs was a big, shaggy, dopey-looking character with a soft face and a double chin. If he were alive today, and nobody up here thinks he is, he’d be fifty-one. Not exactly our dark, young romantic poet or our fair-haired lad, either.”
“You talk to the state up there?”
“I spoke with the chief at the troopers barracks in Brewster. They never found the car. They never found a trace of the guy. Griggs was a paint and hardware salesman. Used to travel Putnam, Westchester, and Dutchess. The chief told me he knew him pretty well. Nice, easygoing sort of guy. Family man. Church deacon. A regular Mr. Responsibility. One fatal flaw.”
“Yeah?” Mooney hung there, waiting.
“Griggs had a penchant for picking up hitchhikers. Just for company on the territory. No kinky stuff. Least none that they’re talkin’ about.”
“And the chief figures one day he stopped for the wrong guy?”
“More or less.”
“More more than less.” Mooney pushed for clarification.
“You got it the first time, Frank.”
Feet up on the desk, Mooney stared out the window where theater marquees glared out into the tawdry night. “Maybe we got ourselves a bit more than a car thief.”
“Maybe.” Pickering paused. “What I can’t figure, though, is the registration part. Griggs’s registration was never renewed after seventy-six, when he disappeared. The Briggs registration I picked up in the auto body shop was current. Up to date with the Bridge Street address.”
“But the name was changed from Griggs to Briggs. Just a one-letter change. Like the one-digit change on the V.I.N. Don’t that suggest something to you?”
“Sure,” Pickering snapped back, but he wasn’t at all sure what it was. “I can see that. You change just one letter or a number on the registration, you throw the whole computer off…”
“Smart, Rollo. Now, why would somebody want to do that?”
“Well, like if you wanted to re-register a stolen car …”
“Very good. Excellent. I’m impressed,” Mooney taunted his young partner heartlessly. “Now, if you intended to re-register this so-called stolen car, why would you do it in a name that sounds almost like the original owner’s name?”
An icy wind soughed around the phone booth, a pale, orange beacon of illumination in an otherwise darkened street. “I don’t know,” Pickering sighed dismally. “Tell me.”
Mooney held the phone in the crook of his shoulder and doodled on a pad. “Okay. I’ll tell you what our guy’s done. Could be one of three things: (A) Either he’s driving round in a stolen, unregistered car. We know that’s not so because we’ve got a copy of an up-to-date, legit registration on that car from the auto body shop.”
“Besides, that would be dumb,” Pickering added. “He couldn’t get new plates or inspection stickers, or insurance. Sooner or later they’d pick him up.”
“Right. So now we’ve got alternative (B). He’s reregistered the car in a different name. That’s tricky and risky, but it’s possible. You go find yourself a new ID number, maybe off a wreck or from a legit car with no stolen tag out on it, preferably the same make and model as the one you glommed. Next, you go find yourself some phony papers. Fraudulent documents. A title sheet. Importation papers. That’s easy. They’re all over the street. Or, you go to a shady printer or some guy with a copying machine. Tell ‘em what you want. They’ll make it up for you. Then, go find yourself some inspection stickers for the window. Easy again. Go to a gas station where they know you. When you got all that together, go down to your local M.V.B. and re-register the car in whatever name you want. You still there, Rollo?”
“I’m still here,” Pickering shivered, feeling the cold seeping upward through the soles of his shoes.
“But if you’re really clever,” Mooney went on, warming to his subject, “if you really got some smarts, you do what our boy here did.”
“Alternative (C)?” Pickering could barely suppress the excitement in his voice.
“Right. First off, when you steal the car, you manage to steal the registration along with it.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“Then, instead of going the risky route of trying to re-register a stolen vehicle in person, you just mail the registration in to your local M.V.B. Tell them they’ve misspelled your name and would they be good enough to correct it. Griggs to Briggs. Brown to Crown. Whatever. One letter. Easy enough. A computer error. Happens all the time. And, oh, by the way, while they’re correcting that little error, would they also be good enough to change the address on the registration. You’re moving down from Pawling to the city. Fourteen Bridge Street. Please make all necessary changes. They even include a couple of blank lines for you to correct any mistakes they’ve made on the spelling of your name or address. You send along your phony title of ownership or your fake importation documents just so’s everything looks legit. Three weeks later they send you back your corrected registration, with a new name and a new address.”
“But you’ve still got the same ID number as the stolen car.”
“You wouldn’t want to ask them to change that or else they would start asking questions. What you do there is change the ID number yourself. With a Mercedes the ID’s on the pillar doorpost on the driver’s side. Take it into a machine shop where, once again, maybe they know you, and ask them to change the V.
I.N. That’s where the last digit comes in. That’s the easiest one to file off and restamp with a new number. In this case, it was a snap. All they had to do was stamp the little horizontal bar onto the one. Lo and behold, you’ve got a seven where there used to be a one, and also now you’ve got a whole new ID number. You give your machinist pal fifty bucks. He winks and looks the other way and you’re in business. Now when the M.V.B. sends you back your corrected registration, you make that little change yourself on the last digit with a ballpoint that has the same color ink as your registration. It’s so tiny maybe one cop in a hundred would catch it, if you happened to get stopped.”
“Clever.” Pickering nodded wearily. “So now you’ve got a new registration with a new ID number, a new address and a new name with just one small change.”
“Right. And that one small change is enough to throw off the computer if it just happens to be looking for the car you’re driving. And now, without having had to actually re-register the car, you’ve got the computer reregistering it for you automatically, sending you an updated registration, new plates. The insurance company can’t wait to insure you. They’re panting after your premiums. You’re legit.”
The process had gradually become clear to Pickering, but still there were loose ends that nagged at him. “Okay. Okay. But I still can’t figure how come Griggs’s car didn’t show up on the M.V.B. list they furnished us of stolen vehicles, vintage late sixties or early seventies. Mrs. Griggs assured me they reported it stolen.” Mooney sighed wearily. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you, Rollo. All my efforts to make you a savvy first-class detective seem futile. Number one, we asked them to look for cars that were dark green. This one, you tell me, was baby blue. Number two, and most importantly, the NYSPIN computer doesn’t carry stolen data indefinitely. After about five years it spits it out like old chewing gum and the matter is forgotten. Griggs, you say, disappeared six years ago.”
Pickering gnawed the inside of his lip. His feet hurt and he was cold. Having felt elated before his call to Mooney, what he now felt was dismay. “I don’t know, Frank. It’s plausible, I guess. But I still don’t get it. Why would a supercautious guy like this Dancer provide a legitimate address on his registration?”
“‘Cause it’s not his address.”
“No,” Pickering unhappily conceded. “I guess not. Not with that old broad. That’d be too spooky.”
“Could be one of two things,” Mooney went on. “He either pulled the address out of the phone book, or he lives someplace else and just uses the address as a mail drop.”
“With the consent of the old broad?”
“Would have to be, wouldn’t you say?” Mooney hesitated. “Or, could be he lives there off and on. Just uses the place as a crash. She said the clothing in that upstairs closet had belonged to her old man who died twenty years ago, but the clothes I saw there, even the quick glance I had, didn’t look no twenty years old.”
There was a lengthy pause as each of them listened to the other’s breathing.
“So,” — Pickering continued to spin his hypothesis out to its logical conclusion — “when the old dame told us there’s no Donald Briggs living there, she was telling the truth.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Mooney smiled slyly. “No Briggs and no Griggs, either. The guy who crashes there from time to time has another name entirely. And that one he’s not sticking on no car registration and leaving around at auto body shops.”
“Clever old babe.”
“Not clever enough,” Mooney snapped. “Now we watch that place like hawks.”
“Four nine three two … five one seven eight … six four three four … four six two five … four three one …”
The numbers rose like incantations with a faint humming sound and moved through the room, which smelled of mushrooms and damp earth. Suki lay in the big old oak bed beneath the wood headboard with animals, predatory and grotesque, grinning down upon her like illustrations in an old edition of Grimm.
She lay at the bottom of a mound of blankets (not blankets really, more just a hill of undifferentiated rags). There was no illumination in the room other than a stump of tallow mounted in a jam jar with a wick of flame that guttered from the currents of icy air that crept in over the sill and through the cracked window panes that rattled and whistled in their frames.
The temperature in the room was only several degrees above that of the outside. A wind buffeting in off the river gnashed about the eaves. Periodically, a loose shutter banged at the rear of the house.
Insulated with several coats and dresses, Suki lay drowsy from long draughts of one of her herbal infusions, mumbling numbers to herself of some arcane and mystical origin. Plugged into her ears were the Walkman earphones. Planted like a root dead center in her mouth was a stump of fuming weed that smelled vaguely of punk. A cup of something hot and pitchy black beside the tallow and the toothglass on her night table sent wisps of steam curling ceilingward.
Balanced on the old woman’s chest was a thickish volume with a ragged antique binding out of which she read by means of a pair of eyeglasses she’d found in a trashcan in the Bowery and used as a magnifying glass. One of the lenses was cracked and one of the temple cables was held on by a wad of dirty adhesive. The lens refraction combined with the black smoke from her cigarette made her squint as she alternately read and mumbled numbers from which she believed she could divine the future. That was the way she’d taught Warren to add and prophesy the future, too.
“Nine three two four … one eight oh one … one seven two five …” Her voice trailed off in little gasps and wheezes as the narcotic properties of her herbal brew took a slow but commanding hold of her.
The numbers she mumbled came from the book she’d been reading — one of her grimoires, as she liked to call them, one of the cherished volumes she used in order to penetrate the mysteries she believed governed all life. These mysteries were the spirits dwelling on some elevated plane that could be reached only by means of the powerful draughts she confected nightly out of herbs grown in her own garden and compounded in accordance with some ancient formula.
The numbers stumbling off her tongue were interchanged with letters that would form words that translated into messages from the spirits dwelling in the higher plane. This was the technique of the tetragrammaton taught to her by Mr. Klink, who had been a third order Rosicrucian. She, in turn, had passed it on to Warren when she’d first brought him to Bridge Street as a homeless waif.
At seven years he could not add a column of numbers or sign his name. It was by means of this system that she taught him, imbuing him, as she did, with her own obsession for an unseen world. He was an eager pupil and learned his lessons well.
Barely audible, the numbers spilled from her lips along with tiny bubbles of saliva. The voice droning through her earphones was that of a late-night talk-show host who made a specialty of putting on the air what he called “night people.” They came there to share with others of like predilections their strange and mostly bizarre encounters in the realm of the extrasensory.
The flickering candle beside her bed cast gloomy undulating shapes on the walls and ceilings of her room. She had by then succumbed to the effects of her “tea.” It coursed through her limbs, exerting in her a tide with a strong pull. It moved from the extremities into her legs and arms, and from there into her head, which had begun to spin pleasantly, changing the focus of her eyes and distorting whatever she looked at.
One of the properties of her “tea” — one she counted most salubrious — was the power of the brew to transform her immediate surroundings; to disorient her to the point where she was transported to some place, far away and far above the drab, prosaic setting of her daily life.
The feeling was pleasant. Even beyond pleasant. But the psychic journey she had to make in order to reach there was terrifying, full of peril and risk that lay in the vast, twilight landscape stretching between one realm and the other.
The voice inside
her earphones droned on somewhat louder. Its point of origin seemed to be inside her head. Its resonance seemed to vibrate in the bones of her skull. It carried with it the terrifying, yet oddly pleasurable, sensation that the bones of her skull were about to shatter.
The flame beside her bed transformed itself magically from a small, lambent shaft to the point where it loomed large as a wall oven. It was full of crevices and fissures, hues of purple and green, into which one might walk without fear of injury. Beyond there, she could enter into some cavernous place, vast and silent, fashioned of ice like a frozen waste. It was there in those labyrinthine, tunneled corridors, noiseless and unpeopled, that she liked to wander endlessly, seemingly directionless, but drawn irresistibly as if by a magnet to some specific destination.
Soon there would be a buoyancy to her step as if the leaden weight of her legs were suddenly freed of the force of gravity. A blaze of light somewhere up ahead emitted a peculiar glow, an unearthly effulgence coming from no human agency or recognizable source.
It was toward that light she walked, free of all the encumbrances of daily life. She went barefoot in a plain dress of white cotton. She was neither cold nor hot. Temperature appeared to be no factor here. Gazing at ordinary objects — rocks, water, the foliage of trees — her perceptions of things were magnified a hundredfold. She would see objects as though they were beneath the lens of a microscope, in infinite detail. A molecule of dust would divulge within itself a universe of intricate detail.
Noises heard could be anatomized as though their component parts would split and divide, each then listened to individually. The most simple, scarcely audible sound — the falling of a sheet of paper onto the floor or the passage of air in a corridor — took on exquisite proportions. All sights, sounds, odors of things were immense yet simple, quickly revealing their structural composition. And all the while, something inside her continued to open and expand. She could feel herself filling like a vessel with an awareness of things she could have scarcely imagined. The gnawing rat of daily worry, the ceaseless scramble and grubbing about for sustenance was shed like an old skin, and, for that time at least, she was at peace.
Shadow Dancers Page 24
