Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  Mooney sneered at the bird and took his place grumblingly at the table. In a burst of lively chatter intended to distract him from his woes, Fritzi poured coffee and set a stack of flapjacks before him.

  She kept the chatter up. Mostly it was about horses, primarily their own. The talk was almost entirely one-sided, intended to divert Mooney from his morbid thoughts. He scarcely replied, only sat there picking morosely at his pancakes and occasionally nodding at some remark.

  She didn’t expect much more. She knew the depth of his disappointment and hurt, but she refused to acknowledge any of that to him. “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Mooney. You’ve done a great job.”

  He gazed up at her sourly. “I’ve never been bounced from a case before.”

  “That’s their tough luck.” She poured him fresh coffee. “And their bad judgment.”

  “My luck, Sylvestri’ll wrap the whole thing up in the next forty-eight hours. After I’ve done all the dirty work.”

  “Let him. You don’t need that. It’s his headache now. Just think, Frankie, my young buck: in another nine months or so you’re going to be free as the wind. I’ve been giving it some thought. Don’t think I haven’t. You and I are going to take six months off and do the world. Go to the race tracks everywhere. Deauville. Longchamp. Aberdeen. Baden Baden. Ascot. Chantilly. Down Royal. Del Mar. Disconnect the phone. Sleep late every morning. Do nothing. Answer to no one.”

  Glowing with enthusiasm, she brought her chair up beside him and threw an arm round his burly shoulders. “How does that strike you?”

  “Wonderful,” he grumbled.

  “Wonderful,” Sanchez assented.

  “My heart’s all a-twitter,” Mooney sneered.

  Sanchez nodded. “Twitter. Twitter.”

  Fritzi flung her hands up in despair. “Now, look, if you’re going to sit around here sighing and moaning…”

  “I like to sigh and moan.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel good.”

  “It does,” he snapped with finality and rose.

  “Do you hate your job?” she asked suddenly.

  “I despise it. Everyone there’s a lackey and a twit.” Swelling dangerously in his rage, he glared at her. “Why the hell should that turd Sylvestri get all the glory?”

  “Ah, so it’s glory we’re after? You never told me that. You always scoffed at glory.”

  “What’s wrong with glory? I did all the damned work. Now he just walks in and —”

  “You’re still on the case, aren’t you?”

  “Sure. But under him. That’s as good as being off it. He’s not there to give me opportunities.”

  Fritzi rose and started to clear the dishes. “Why should he give you opportunities? Would you give him any if the tables were turned? The answer to your problem, my friend, is quite simple.”

  “Oh, yeah? What is it?”

  “Make your own damned opportunities.”

  He looked at her quizzically.

  “Or just go out and take them,” she continued hotly. “Just don’t sit around waiting for Sylvestri to hand you something. He won’t. You’re still on the case, aren’t you? What does it matter if he’s the big honcho, or you? Honestly” — she started to load the dishwasher — “men are such babies. Go out, for Chrissake, and get that goddamn Dancer and stop worrying about fancy titles.”

  “Fancy titles.” Sanchez’s voice echoed hollowly through the bright Sabbath sunlight.

  Later that morning Fritzi went out to Mass. While proclaiming to the world her unyielding agnosticism, one of her secret pleasures in life was regular attendance at late Sunday morning Mass at St. Patrick’s. She’d long since given up trying to get Mooney to attend with her. His reaction to the business of institutional religion was mostly to scoff.

  Left to himself that Sunday morning, his ego badly bruised, his funk deepened. Slumped in the battered old Morris chair, morose and fretful, he wondered why this struggle with Mulvaney and Sylvestri over the conduct of a police investigation that he’d failed to conclude successfully should so mingle itself with bitter memories of other, past failures, and why he should now reprove himself for the way things had turned out.

  Mulvaney, Sylvestri, Fritzi, and the faceless Shadow Dancer all rose now like troubled specters in Mooney’s roiled brain, all somehow bound together in the hapless, drifting investigation of eighteen brutal slayings that had dragged on for two long years. Circumstances and plain bad luck had conspired to defeat him, Mooney told himself, while at the back of his mind he wondered what part dumb pride and lack of resolve had played in his failure. Whatever it was, the sense of defeat was immense.

  Such were the gloomy thoughts that whirled about him that Sabbath morning like a plague of gnats. When Fritzi returned shortly after Mass, she found him unshaven, still in his pajamas and robe, seated in the old Morris chair where she’d left him, and glaring straight ahead at the phantoms still lingering in the sun-flooded room.

  By six that evening, she’d convinced him to shave and dress, tempting him with an early supper at Pearl Wong’s, a favorite haunt of theirs, prior to reporting to the Balloon for the Sunday evening rush.

  Pearl herself met them at the door and personally supervised their dinner. They supped on hacked chicken, velvet shrimp, lobster in its shell, followed by Pearl’s own crispy orange beef.

  But not even all of that largess could rouse Mooney from his despair. The specters of the afternoon still plagued him. Fritzi watched him pick disconsolately at his food.

  “I said a little prayer for you at Mass this morning,” she remarked.

  “Who’d you pray to? Mulvaney? The commissioner?”

  “To Baumholz,” she beamed brightly. “I thanked him for being savvy enough to make all that money in the market.”

  “And for leaving it to you. No strings attached.”

  “No strings attached.” She nodded with great contentment.

  Mooney’s chopsticks speared glistening slivers of beef.

  “So?”

  “So, that means we’ve got all this, if you’ll pardon the expression” — her voice dropped and she gazed quickly around — “‘fuck-you’ money. Anytime you want to leave the force, Mooney. When you feel you’ve had a bellyful …”

  Mooney lowered his eyes and pried intently at a lobster claw.

  Her head tilted and she smiled across at him archly. “Baumholz told me to tell you not to worry. He’ll take care of everything.”

  “I feel better already,” Mooney said, spooning black bean sauce over his rice.

  “In a tight spot, Baumholz was always a good one to have in your corner.”

  “Next time you talk to him, please convey my warmest regards.”

  “Baumholz is very fond of you, Frank.”

  “And I of him,” Mooney assured her with great solemnity. If she could handle this with a straight face, he was determined he could too. “Didn’t I marry his old lady, and luck into a warm, cozy spot beside her in bed? I sure hope Baumholz doesn’t resent me.”

  “Resentment,” Fritzi assured him grandly, “was not in the man’s makeup.”

  Mooney laid his knife and fork down very deliberately beside his plate. Then, clasping his hands before him, he fixed her icily. “Can we quit all this cute stuff now?”

  “Sure. But wouldn’t you like to hear what Baumholz advised?”

  Mooney pulled a long, suffering face. “Okay. Tell me. I’m all ears.”

  “I can’t. He told me not to tell you. He wants it to come as a surprise.” She was deadly serious as she informed him of this.

  Mooney started to puff and swell ominously. Then, catching the glint in her eye, he laughed in spite of himself.

  She’d broken his gloom for the moment.

  “Sweet revenge, old pal,” she said.

  He raised his glass and touched it to hers. “Sweet revenge.”

  That evening before bed he went up on the roof of their building. Hunched above the shallow parapet in his fleece-
lined jacket, he watched the stars wheel overhead in the bright December sky. Off to the west, Orion hung above the Jersey Palisades and in the east he saw the rising Pleiades.

  Nothing much had really happened to dispel his gloom, yet, inexplicably, in that moment, he felt a weight lift from his heart. With the rising of the Pleiades he sensed some coming shift in his fortunes for the better.

  Fritzi was still off at the Balloon and wouldn’t be home for several hours. Feeling curiously at peace and looking forward to the morning, he went to bed. No sooner had Mooney laid his head on the pillow than it was morning and the phone was ringing by his head.

  “Where are you?” Pickering asked.

  “In bed. Where the hell would I be at this hour? Where are you?”

  “In the office. Throw some clothes on and get down here. Everything’s popping.”

  Still drowsy, Mooney stared mystified into the receiver. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “We got McConkey. But I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I’ll just turn the matter over to Sylvestri.”

  “You got who?”

  “McConkey. You heard me. She just breezed in here on a bus from Philly.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “Listen, Frank.” Pickering’s voice dropped sharply. “I can’t hold her here too long without notifying Sylvestri. But we’ve got an out. She came in here asking specifically for you.”

  Mooney waited, his mind alert and speeding. Pickering rushed on.

  “Seems she saw you on the TV down in Philly. Asked for you by name. She’ll talk only to you.”

  Mooney was still frowning into the receiver.

  “Frank,” Pickering whispered once more. “You still there?”

  “I’m here,” Mooney said, throwing his bulky calves from beneath the blankets. “Listen, if Sylvestri calls, tell him nothing. Hold on to her. I’ll be right down.” Mooney bounced out of bed with a shriek of joy. “Praise be, Mr. Baumholz. You’re my man.”

  She looked small and tired and very frightened. She was pretty, Mooney thought, but not in any obvious way. Her clothing was rumpled and her hair straggly. She looked haggard and gray the way people look when they’ve sat up in a bus all night. They feel dirty and their mouths taste awful.

  She was drinking coffee from a paper container when Mooney came in. Holding a sugar doughnut in her hand, she sat there as if it were some encumbrance she couldn’t quite figure out what to do with.

  Pickering was there with several others moving around her in the office. “I’ll take it from here,” Mooney said. “Everyone clear out. Rollo, you stay.”

  When the others had all shuffled out, he closed the door behind them, then crossed back to where the girl sat miserably in her raincoat with the doughnut in her lap.

  “I’m Lieutenant Mooney,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied, and he thought she was about to cry. He reached for the doughnut.

  “Would you like me to take that?”

  She smiled crookedly and surrendered the doughnut to him like a docile child. He put it down on the table beside her.

  “I’m glad you came in by yourself, Janine. You had us all a bit worried.”

  No sooner had he said the words than she dissolved in tears. They watched her quietly, not speaking, waiting for the racking sobs to end.

  “Let it out,” Mooney said. “Let it out.” His hand rose to pat her quaking shoulders, but shrank somewhere just short of contact. “Let it all out.”

  It took several minutes and then it was over. She looked up at him, her tear-washed cheeks glistening in the dirty gray morning sunlight.

  “You think you can tell us about it now?” Mooney asked, his voice unnaturally soft.

  She gaped at him for a querulous moment, then in a small, tired voice she proceeded to speak. “His name is Warren Mars … ,” she started hesitantly, and, as she did, Pickering’s pen began to scribble into his pad.

  She told a story of two children — waifs, runaways, one five, the other seven — and how they’d found each other in an abandoned tenement building in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen.

  At first, she said, they came together out of a mutual need for survival. Later, it became something else — a strong emotional tie, possibly romantic … at least she thought so when they were young. She couldn’t be certain now.

  She told them about Martinez, the crazed janitor who’d refused to leave the building after both the landlord and the city had condemned it. A fiery little Chilean, he had an incendiary temper and had gathered about himself a band of waifs and castoffs, keeping them imprisoned in the basement of the tenement, letting them out early each day to steal, to hustle, to sell themselves in the West Side tenderloin. At night, when they returned and brought him money, he fed them. When they came back with nothing he menaced them with razors and locked them in a dark basement coal bin for hours. His name was Martinez, and all of his foundlings were somehow christened “Mars” by the other kids in the neighborhood, she explained.

  “You don’t happen to know what Warren’s real name is,” Mooney asked.

  She looked at him blankly and shrugged. “To me, it’s always been Mars.”

  In her tired, expressionless voice, she related a chronicle of adolescent crime — muggings, break-ins, addiction to cocaine at fourteen.

  “It was when Warren started the really bad stuff that I got out,” she said, gazing red-eyed up at Mooney.

  “You left him?”

  Her eyes opened wide. “You don’t leave Warren. You run away and hope he doesn’t notice it.”

  “He came after you the other night though?” Mooney asked.

  She nodded blankly. Then she told them how, after she’d run away from Warren, she hadn’t seen him for years, but that she continued to get letters from him. As often as she moved, changed addresses and jobs, somehow he always found out where she was. She told them how she’d earned a diploma in a high school equivalency program at night. How she got off drugs in a rehabilitation program and got a job. How she’d met Mickey Mancuso.

  “He’s the guy fell off of the construction site up on Sixty-first?” Mooney asked.

  Again she nodded in that childish way and told them how she felt responsible for Mancuso’s death, since Warren had more or less told her that he intended to kill him if she didn’t break it off herself.

  “I never loved Mickey, you know. I never loved him.” She said it over and over again, flailing herself with the words. “I guess I liked him. He liked me a whole lot more. I didn’t ask for that. It was Warren that really got to me. But scared the hell out of me, too. Maybe that was the big turn-on for me.”

  Her eyes glistened. A narrow band of white, the reflection of an overhead fluorescent, shimmered on the surface of her pupils. “I guess that’s maybe why I feel so lousy now. I mean, about Mickey and all. He was too good to me. Too kind. I could’ve never given it back to him the same way. Why did he have to go and die? For some dumb bimbo who really didn’t care that much? I guess with Mickey I was just looking for a quick fix.” She started to cry again. Hot, stinging tears washed her cheeks and eased the fear and grief she’d bottled up inside for so long. Then she broke off suddenly and looked up at them. “How did you put all this together?”

  “There were things the medical examiner found on your friend’s body that he also found on the bodies of several of Warren’s other victims.”

  “So you went up to my apartment?”

  “Mr. Mancuso’s boss gave us the address.”

  “I figured that,” she said listlessly. “And you searched it?”

  Mooney’s eyes studied her face for the intent behind the question. “You’re not angry that we did?”

  She shrugged with indifference. “It doesn’t matter anymore. You found the letter, I s’pose?”

  “In the kitchen cabinet,” Mooney said, pulling it out of his desk drawer. He pushed it across the desk toward her.

  She glanced down at it with the same tir
ed indifference.

  “Are you sorry you came in?” Mooney inquired.

  She looked at him blankly, then shook her head slowly back and forth. “Now that it’s all over, I’m glad.”

  She picked up the doughnut and started to nibble at it. Pickering poured her fresh coffee. When she attempted to swallow some, she started to choke and cough. In the next moment, she was crying again, wiping crumbs of sugar from her lips. “This time, he’ll kill me,” she said. “He’ll know I’ve been here and he’ll kill me for sure.”

  “No, he won’t,” Mooney said. “He won’t be able to get near you. As of now, you’re in protective custody until we get him. But we’ll need your help.”

  She gazed back and forth at them questioningly. “Where can we find him?” Pickering asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know was the old place.”

  Mooney leaped at it. “What old place?”

  She appeared confused. “Way downtown. You know, the financial district.”

  Mooney’s eyes narrowed and he glanced at Pickering. “Not Bridge Street?”

  “That’s it,” she said, a momentary spark animating her. “Bridge Street. That’s it.”

  “Briggs.” Both Mooney and Pickering blurted the name out at once, as if in a race to proclaim it to the world.

  Mooney thumped his forehead. “Briggs is Warren Mars.”

  “That ditsy old broad.”

  “Suki,” he snapped at Pickering. “The old bag lady. That was her name.”

  “How’d you find her?” Janine asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Mooney said. “Something to do with car registrations.”

  “Then we picked up a guy who looked like he was casing the place.” Pickering continued the thread of events. “For a time, he looked like a suspect. Turned out to be nothing.”

  Mooney pulled out the mug shot of Koops from his desk drawer. “He’d been hanging around out in front of that Bridge Street house three nights in a row. We thought it was funny. So we picked him up. Brought him in. Name’s Ferris Koops.”

  He pushed the mug shot toward her. She lifted it from the desktop with the faintest curiosity, looked at it a moment, then frowned. “What’d you say his name was?”