Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Did the mother seem concerned?”

  “Yes, I’d say so.” Armstead sucked noisily at his pipe stem. “But she didn’t offer to come east. She was living out in Chicago at the time, and I guess Poughkeepsie seemed a long way off.”

  “What about the police?” Mooney asked.

  “Nothing. We waited and waited. They combed the entire area and posted notices in town. But they never found a sign of him. The family, of course, was fairly influential, and enough pressure was brought to bear so that federal investigators finally entered the search. Photos were sent out to police departments and missing persons bureaus all round the country. Pretty soon we started to get calls and messages with sightings from just about everywhere. We checked them all. The police never found him and, after a year or so, they pretty much gave up.”

  “Did they close the case?”

  “Not officially, but in point of fact, the investigation was over.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing at all. That’s if you mean, did they find Ferris.”

  A long, uneasy silence settled over the room as the two men regarded each other through the slanting rays of morning sunlight. The sharp, exultant shrieks of youthful soccer players drifted in from the rolling fields outside.

  Vaguely miffed, Mooney wondered why he’d taken the trouble to drive up at all. For all he’d learned, the whole matter could have been transacted over the phone.

  Armstead appeared to sense his disappointment. “That’s the truth of it, I’m afraid. We didn’t see Ferris again, until years later.”

  Mooney looked up, still frowning. “So, you did see him again?”

  “He came to visit me.”

  Suddenly animated, Armstead brandished his pipe. “Just walked in on me one afternoon.”

  “Did he say where he’d been?”

  “All over. Just drifting from one place to the next. Looked pretty tatty and down at the heels, but just as cheerful and polite as ever. Said he was broke. Needed work. I gave him some money and asked him if he was aware there was a trust fund in his name. He didn’t know what I was talking about. Wasn’t exactly sure what a trust fund was, so I told him, and gave him the name of the law firm who’d been appointed trustees of his father’s estate. I knew them since all of Ferris’s expenses here were paid through them. He went to see them, and I guess he never had any serious money problems after that. Never thought about him again until last night and that news show.”

  “That law firm didn’t happen to be Wells, Gray,” Mooney asked dryly.

  “That’s right. That’s the one. How’d you know?”

  “We’ve had occasion to deal with them.”

  Armstead appeared to be impressed by that. “Well, that’s the firm, all right.”

  “How long ago was it that he came back here, would you say?”

  Armstead’s eyes closed again and the head tilted. “Let me see now … that would be nineteen and eighty-one. June or July, I’d say.”

  “Roughly six years ago,” Mooney suggested. “The name Griggs mean anything to you? Donald Griggs?” The name appeared to draw a blank, but in the next moment the old man’s face lit up. “Oh, sure — local fellow. Some story about him. Disappeared from here about —”

  “Six years ago.” Mooney flicked back through his pad. “June fourteenth, nineteen eighty-one, is when your local police reported him missing.”

  “That sounds about right,” Armstead nodded earnestly. “Nice family. Didn’t know them well. Wife and three kids. Salesman, he was, if memory serves me. Just drove off one day. Never come back. Local papers were full of it. Why do you ask?” Then suddenly the drift of Mooney’s thought struck him. “You’re not suggesting there’s some connection between Ferris and the disappearance of Griggs?”

  Mooney nodded wearily. “It’s a long story. Has something to do with a car. Someday when this is all over, I’ll tell you about it.”

  Later, Armstead saw him to the door. They stood there for a while chatting. Then Armstead placed a frail trembling hand on Mooney’s shoulder. “Could that poor boy really have done all these awful things they say he’s done?”

  Mooney shrugged and smiled wearily. “We’ll know soon enough, won’t we?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “THIS IS THE LAST ONE I HAVE.”

  “Let’s give it a shot, anyway.”

  Rollo Pickering sighed and hunched above the oak refectory table mounded with books and records and papers culled from the archives over the past five hours at the City Bureau of Deeds and Instruments.

  “If it’s not here … ,” Mr. Lydecker, the city archivist, said.

  “Then it’s not here,” Pickering grudgingly assented. By that time, he was more than willing to concede the fact. He’d been there since nine A.M., when the doors had opened.

  The offices of the New York City Bureau of Deeds and Instruments were located at the bottom of Water Street, a few blocks west of the river. Occupying a full floor of a badly deteriorating old commercial building dating back to the late nineteenth century, the offices and archives were a drab, depressing affair. Pickering had sat in a long succession of such drab municipal offices in his time. Broken furniture, flaking paint, burst upholstery, the air stale with the smell of decades of dust undisturbed. They were all pretty much the same. As a civil servant himself, such offices and the drab phlegmatic people who occupied them filled him with uneasiness. It was as though he could look down the long corridor of years and see a chilling vista of what lay ahead.

  The room he sat in was small and stuffy. It smelled of mold and desiccation. Motes of dust drifted like timeless galaxies through the cramped, unventilated space. Behind them was a warehouse of paper. It divided itself into aisles giving onto a shadowy prospect of floor-to-ceiling clutterment: records, deeds of transfer dating well back into the eighteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of crumbling old manila folders tied up with tatty faded ribbon and stacked perilously one atop the other sagged on shelves that threatened imminent collapse. It was a windowless place where sunlight never strayed.

  Each time they pulled out a folder, puffs of dust rose like vengeful wraiths. Pickering coughed. By then his throat was parched. Mr. Lydecker, however, seemed impervious to dust. Having occupied that airless space for nearly forty years, he was no longer discernibly old or young. Dust had effaced all of the usual clues to age. Indeed, the vague shape that slouched up and down those sloping aisles in baggy tweeds seemed more an outline of airy ectoplasm than anything comprised of flesh and blood.

  In the five hours Pickering had been there, they’d so far managed to locate a copy of the deed to the house on Bridge Street. That had been perfectly simple and straightforward. Mr. Lydecker had put his bony, clawlike hands on that at once. A largish parchment embossed with a city stamp and a notary’s seal, it showed the provenance of the house to date from somewhere in the early 1830s, when one Joshua Crane had built it, going right up until the 1940s, when a Mr. Frederick Klink purchased it for the slightly less than lordly sum of $6,000. But it was the architect’s blueprint, the official record of construction, that continued to elude them.

  “Trouble is,” Lydecker went on, tunneling through quaking columns of paper as he spoke, “those days, folks weren’t required to file blueprints of new construction. The bureau didn’t exist then and what filing and recordkeeping they did was of a fairly casual order. Of course, we do have architectural plans dating back to that period, but no one is sure exactly where they are. I’m just one man here,” he explained somewhat defensively. “They took my assistant from me last year. Budget cuts, you know. Ah …” The high, stridulous voice trilled as he plucked a crumbling parcel from one of the bins and blew the dust from its wrappings. “Hello — what have we here?”

  It was a thick bundle, wrapped in tarpaper, swollen large around the middle and bound by what appeared to be old shoelaces. Someone had scrawled the dates 1820-1840 in bl
ack crayon across the front.

  “This may be something.” The archivist’s tremulous fingers undid the bindings with a solicitude that was oddly touching. About it was a sense that he felt it to be almost a desecration to rouse such old documents from the sleep of centuries.

  “Just exactly what do you hope to find here?” Lydecker asked, his fingers riffling gently through the crumbling, faded papers he’d uncovered.

  Pickering made a pained expression. It made him look a trifle distraught. “I don’t know. I guess I just need some idea of the layout of the place.”

  “Such as whether or not there are exits and entrances to the place not visible from the outside?” Lydecker inquired shrewdly. He didn’t wait for an answer but plucked a thin sheaf of clipped papers from the stack. It had been part of a bundle of fading, dog-eared parchment bound together by some loosely tied brown twine. The words “CRANE, BRIDGE STREET” had been scrawled across its front.

  “Ah — perhaps this is something.” Mr. Lydecker carefully separated it from the rest of the papers in the bundle, carrying it forward to the oak refectory table where they’d been working. Pickering shifted papers and cleared a space on the big wood surface while the archivist laid the documents down, spreading them out side by side.

  “Well, there’s your blueprint,” Mr. Lydecker proclaimed. “Not much of a blueprint as contemporary plans go, but that’s what the place looked like a hundred and fifty years back.”

  Not knowing exactly what he was looking for, and feeling Mr. Lydecker’s eyes on him, Pickering felt somewhat at a loss. The archivist had devoted five hours to the search. It did seem only fitting that something tangible should come of it.

  Pickering bent above the blueprint and tried to appear deeply absorbed. There was, as Lydecker had indicated, nothing much to it. It consisted of four fairly unprepossessing sheets of parchment, raggedy with water stains. Time had turned them the color of weak tea. In the lower right hand corner, the original builder had drawn a rudimentary compass rose consisting of crossed arrows pointing N, S, E, and W, thus orienting the house.

  Each sheet showed an elevation from a different side of the structure, plus a rather basic floor plan for each story. The handwriting on it was in ink and executed in an ornate, curly scrawl that looked Gothic and was all but illegible. It was full of figures and degree marks surrounded by innumerable arcane references to “rods,” “chains,” and “links.”

  Pickering could make neither head nor tail of it. The tiny runic symbols swam before his eyes. But the single part of it that was intelligible to him made it abundantly clear that other than the front or side entrances, both of which he knew about, there was no other way in or out of the house.

  Clipped to that was another document showing a plan for an extension to the house, submitted to the City Architectural Review Board in July 1878 by its then owner, a Mr. Mortimer Tyler, but never executed.

  A sixth sheet of parchment was a new plan, drawn up in 1910 during the Taft era. William Gaynor was then mayor of New York. Lydecker explained that it was a plan for revision, submitted to the board for approval. But for the life of them, they couldn’t see how it differed from the first in any substantive way to justify filing for a revision.

  They put the three plans side by side on the table and compared them meticulously. To both of them, the plans appeared to be identical. The more they studied them, the deeper was their puzzlement.

  “Can you see any difference?” Pickering asked. Lydecker shook his head, clearly perplexed. “There has to be something different here, otherwise no revision would have been submitted.”

  Pickering was tired. He’d not eaten all day, and by that time he was discouraged and more than just a little inclined to cash in his chips. “You have a Xerox machine here?” he asked.

  “An old cranky one. But it works well enough.”

  “Can I get a copy of these three plans?”

  Lydecker appeared just as discouraged as the detective. “Why not? Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  Mr. Lydecker was as good as his word. He was back in little more than two minutes, grinning with a strange, sly delight. He was carrying the Xeroxed copies in his hand and flung them down at Pickering with a triumphant clap. “I’ve got it.”

  Pickering wasn’t exactly certain he knew what it was Mr. Lydecker had.

  “It was right there in front of us all the time.” His long, bony finger pointed to a broken fine shaded by hatchures, indicating the cellar level. “See that?”

  “See what?”

  “That broken line. Runs under the central elevation.” Pickering gazed up at him in blank bewilderment. “It’s a sewer line. That’s why they had to file a revision. They put in a sewer line under the house. Little stairway here runs right into it from the cellar.”

  Pickering rubbed his chin thoughtfully as his eyes followed the path of the broken line. “Where does it go?”

  “See for yourself.” Lydecker flared impatiently. “Out to the river. Easiest place for them to discharge the effluents.”

  Pickering’s eyes swarmed over the parchment. “But where on the river? I don’t see.”

  “There’s probably a drain someplace there. No doubt not far from the house itself.” Moving more swiftly than his wont, Lydecker strode across the room to a wall where a large topographical survey map of lower Manhattan hung. Pickering followed at his heels.

  “Could be any of a number of places along the Hudson littoral in that vicinity.”

  “Along the what?”

  “The shoreline,” Lydecker snapped.

  “Who’d you suppose could tell me where that sewer line comes out?”

  “Well, I couldn’t. But I know just the fellow who could. Frank Merton. Chief engineer over at the Bureau of Sanitation and Sewer Maintenance.”

  Pickering’s heart leaped hopefully. “Can we call him?” Lydecker checked his watch, then rose. “It’s three-thirty. He may be gone.”

  It took him several calls, but at last he located the chief engineer. The conversation seemed to go on interminably. Pickering’s nervous fingers drummed the table as they chatted and laughed and traded municipal gossip. At last, Lydecker hung up the phone with a flourish and came back to where Pickering waited.

  “Battery Park,” he proclaimed, like a man who’d solved the riddle of the Sphinx. “Runs right down to the foot of Bridge Street beneath the park and discharges through a drain cap into the river, just north of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.”

  Pickering made a humming sound through his nose. His mind was racing. “You suppose I could get into that sewer?”

  “Merton says that line was sealed off and abandoned fifty years ago. It was installed in the early nineteen hundreds. Sewers of that vintage are made of clay. About four to five feet in height. Same in diameter. Merton claims those tunnels were abandoned because they were in poor condition. Too dangerous and costly to maintain.”

  “I have to get down into that line.”

  “Be a bit dicey, I’d imagine. Particularly if it hasn’t been maintained in nearly a half century. You might get in through the trap drain.”

  “Would I need authorization?”

  “Probably. But who’s talking? I’m not.” The dusty, baggy figure of the archivist suddenly brightened with the smug satisfaction of the man who feels he’s done his job for the day.

  He found the drain almost immediately. Just as Lydecker had said, it stood hard by the river, nearly directly on a line with the bottom of Bridge Street.

  For obvious reasons, Pickering wished to stay well away from Bridge Street. For one thing, the place was crawling with Sylvestri’s men — some in mufti going up and down the block; others concealed with cameras in offices and rooms across the way from the Klink house. For another, Pickering had no authorization to be out pursuing the case on his own. But most important, if Koops was still actually inside the house, he was no doubt watching the street as intently as Sylvestri’s men were watching the house. Moreover, Koo
ps now knew Pickering by sight from the several interrogations he’d undergone at police headquarters. He would certainly recognize him if he were to stroll past.

  It was principally that line of reasoning that made Pickering park his car behind 14 Bridge on Pearl Street, then walk across Battery Park in the direction of the river.

  The drain itself was not large — a square cast-iron grating of four feet by four feet that stood upright on its end, implanted into a small hill that dropped sharply from the park to the river. The water itself was no more than a few feet from the grating.

  Pickering stepped gingerly downhill, the soles of his shoes sinking into the muddy earth. The air wasn’t cold, but a brisk wind blew off the river and carried on it a strong tidal smell. A long, low-slung tug plied northward against a swift current, whitecaps bursting into spray before its stubby prow. Bits of broken timber flowed past and a white condom undulated lazily in the water near the shore.

  Pickering stood for a time, his back to the water, trousers ballooned and buffeted by the wind, regarding the drain. On closer inspection he found that the earth about it was damp and soft. It bore the impression of recent shoe prints. Even the claw marks of gulls that had used the strip as a promenade were still discernible in the mud around it.

  When he approached the grating, however, he discovered that while the earth in front of it was wet, that which lay directly beneath it was dry and crumbling. The grating itself was heavy, but when he took hold of its bars and jiggled it, he found that it moved in its housing. The earth beneath it spilled freely down onto his shoes, giving the impression that the drain was not fixed permanently in the ground and that it had recently been moved.

  Pickering stooped and peered between the rusty interstices. They consisted of small squares, no more than three or four inches on each side. Beyond the grating he could see a dark clay tunnel, roughly the same height and width as the grating out of which the dark, cool smell of mold issued.