Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Merton understands that.”

  “Good. Just so he understands.”

  Mooney had run out of things to complain about and by that time he sensed that the two of them had reached a point of sharp mutual dislike. “Go get yourself a cup of coffee,” he grumbled, making a stab at reconciliation. “I don’t want any. You get a cup of coffee.”

  Mooney sat there unmoving, glowering at the dark square afloat in the void. For the past three hours or so, pelted by sleet and a biting wind, his cramped legs aching, he had lapsed into one of his deep funks.

  One minute past midnight. A new day. It may as well have been April Fool’s Day. No one felt himself more the butt of some cosmic joke than he did, sitting there in icy grass and damp clothing, shivering hard by the riverside waiting for water to rise in an abandoned sewer line. That day in Newsweek, an exclusive story had revealed how the poor benighted police, after having the Shadow Dancer in custody, had released him. The New York press had begun to write funny editorials about the ineptitude of the N.Y.P.D., comparing them to the Keystone Kops, and Mooney and Pickering, though mercifully unnamed, to Laurel and Hardy. The commissioner was grinding his teeth and even Sylvestri, the wunderkind, was trying to distance himself from the investigation.

  When, two hours later, the water started, he didn’t even know it. Wrapped in gloom and feeling sorry for himself, he thought he’d been listening to the river. He paid no attention to the sound until he felt icy water seeping into his shoes and creeping up around his pant leg. The shock of cold startled him and brought him halfway up out of the grass until he saw at once that he was standing in the midst of a wide, dark, spreading puddle. “Hey, Rollo —”

  “I see. I see.” The voice came back at him in an excited whisper.

  They had no time after that even to consider what was happening, because what happened, happened far too fast. Mooney had barely time to yank the. 38 caliber police special from his holster when a dark shape borne on a tide of gushing water hurtled out from the center of the square.

  Even as Mooney watched the dark outline emerge from the drain, it appeared to crouch suddenly and then leap forward, not at a run but at a charge, moving on a line directly at Mooney, as though the hunted knew exactly where his tormentors lay.

  From where Mooney hunkered low in the grass, he was certain he’d been detected. Now he was about to be attacked. Rushing toward him, the black shape loomed larger and larger, gradually taking on human form. He could hear the hard crunch of feet on gravel, then the grunt and labored breathing of exertion quite near him. Something like panic rose in Mooney’s throat as he suddenly stood up out of the grass. His mouth opened and formed the word Koops, but no sound came. Nothing came except air.

  “Koops.” This time he heard his voice boom and carry across the vacant park. The onrushing figure shuddered to a full stop. With a narrow band of spongy earth no more than ten feet between them, Mooney was still unable to see the face. But in the stance, the quick tilt of the head sidewards, he could read puzzlement and surprise. As they stood there, gaping at each other, each waiting for the other to declare himself, Pickering made his move.

  They heard him before they actually saw him. The fast, clattering steps pounding up the thawing earth sounded like some large, frenzied animal.

  “Grab him,” Mooney shouted, then lunged forward himself.

  The dark figure whirled just in time to step aside gracefully as Pickering hurtled past. With his fingers only inches from Koops’s ankles, Pickering hit the earth, settling down on it with a soft groan.

  Mooney came next. He moved out of the grass with the slow, ponderous motion of a man wading hip-deep in water. His gun out, waving it above his head, for one awful moment, he’d almost taken aim and fired.

  By that time Pickering had scrambled back up onto his feet. Koops was now standing at a point approximately equidistant between the two of them, looking back and forth from one to the other with a curious air of detachment. His trousers, sodden with sewer water, clung to his legs. There was a blur of motion as the three moved about in a slow, stilted dance, feinting and jabbing at the cold air like pugilists trying to get the feel of the ground beneath their feet.

  “Grab him,” Mooney snapped, then lunged again. Koops turned in time to see the other detective lumbering out of the shadows. Like a matador, he executed a graceful turn, then bolted.

  With the two of them coming at him from either side, he could go neither right nor left. Directly in front of him was the short, steep slope into which the drain had been built. The only alternative route still open to him was the river, and he took it.

  Too stunned to react, they watched him charge toward the water, then dive. They heard the splash without actually seeing it. Then came the sound of the first strokes, rapid and frantic. In moments they’d lost sight of him in the murky night.

  “Good Christ, he’s in the water!” Pickering shrieked.

  Suddenly they were both clambering down to the river, shouting all the way, “Koops.” Mooney stood at the water’s edge, bellowing into the foggy night, the tips of his shoes sinking slowly into the mud. “Koops. Koops.” The cold spray off the river hit his face, and he could feel the chill, wet sensation of water seeping into his shoes.

  In the next moment, something dark and large hurtled past. There was a second splash. Mooney bellowed at the whitish trail plowing over the water. “Rollo! You goddamned fool! Rollo!” He started up the shoreline, waving his arms frantically, like a man with his clothing on fire. “Rollo! Koops! Rollo! Shit.”

  The police launch arrived shortly after sunrise. It glided noiselessly through the Arthur Kill and slid up abreast of Bridge Street, dropping anchor some fifty yards offshore, roughly opposite where they’d gathered near the drain outlet.

  The wind had dropped and so had the tide. The water lay still and flat, gray as a sheet of tin. The wreckage of an orange crate and a few bits of Styrofoam litter bobbed dispiritedly on the surface. The launch anchored offshore enveloped in vapory mist had a rather ghostly appearance. Gulls wheeled and shrieked above it as if in anticipation of something about to happen.

  From where he stood, Mooney watched the divers strap on cylinders of oxygen and adjust their face masks. For the past several hours, special units of men had been scouring the shoreline north and south of the drain cap where Ferris Koops had disappeared into the frigid river waters several hours before.

  Mooney knew how scant the possibility was that they would find him. At that hour and in that churning mist above the river nothing would have been easier than for a man in the water to drift a hundred yards or so down-tide, scramble ashore, and vanish cleanly into the night.

  No one knew that better than Mooney, or understood its consequences more fully. Not only had he headed the investigation that had apprehended the infamous Dancer, then incomprehensibly let him go; now here he was scouring the riverbank where only hours before the Dancer had been trapped out in the open between two seasoned detectives, literally inches away from capture, but had once again given them the slip.

  Mooney tried not to imagine how that would play in the morning papers. Silently, he watched one of the divers in full wet suit hoist a leg over the taffrail, climb down the ladder, and slip without a ripple beneath the surface of the brown, oily water.

  The search went on for several hours. New men kept coming out with new equipment. Additional small police craft continued to arrive until shortly a small armada of boats floated in a rough semicircle offshore. Four or five police dinghies powered by outboards had deployed themselves closer in toward land. They trolled up and down in long sweeps and ever-decreasing concentric circles, casting large dragnets out behind them and hauling them in almost at once. A police helicopter, like a large dragonfly, circled low overhead.

  Up on the shore several crime site unit specialists were moving in and out of the sewer drain. With big, glowing lanterns atop their blue metal riot helmets, they kept bringing boxes and crates up from below.


  Shortly after seven A.M., two network camera crews were setting up on the shoreline and already panning the site. The reporters huddled in their vans, squatting on coils of electrical cable and drank endless coffee out of paper cups.

  The sun was by then full up. It glinted off the long steel arch of the Verrazano Bridge and spangled the waters of the Arthur Kill beneath it. Even at that early hour the commuter traffic from the Staten Island side had started to build, moving toward the city with a weary resignation.

  Somewhere about 9:15, the head of a diver popped to the surface about seventy yards south of the launch. He raised his thumb out of the water and pumped it in the air several times. Mooney could hear the low throb of the diesels suddenly turn over and accelerate. He watched the launch’s prow turn slowly like a needle on the face of a dial and nose its way slowly downstream toward the diver.

  There was a noticeable stir on the bank, as if everyone there had sensed that something important was about to happen. In a single motion the crowd surged downriver toward the point where the launch had anchored. One of the crew on deck was leaning over the rail, the better to hear the diver talking to him from the water.

  The launch made several short maneuvers while the dinghies, like small white ducks, had Circled in noiselessly around it. The torso of the diver appeared to rise halfway out of the water then, with a barely perceptible flip, slipped back under.

  Pickering stood beside Mooney but slightly to the rear of him. Together they waited. By that time, Pickering had been to headquarters, changed into dry clothing, and come right back. Joan Winger had come down from the M.E.‘s office to conduct the initial examination of the body, if, indeed, there was to be one. To Mooney’s small satisfaction, Sylvestri was not there. He’d been called to a triple homicide in Bryant Park, so he was spared the embarrassment of having to view the spectacle of the “Little Lieutenant” strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage.

  Suddenly, the diver’s head, sleek and smooth like that of an otter, reappeared on the surface. With one arm he waved, while with the other he appeared to be dragging something just beneath the surface of the water.

  Three or four of the dinghies quickly converged around him. Men with long grappling poles stood in the stem and poked at a dark object trailing behind the diver. In the next moment, the diver appeared to detach himself from the thing he was dragging behind him and swam toward the launch.

  Whatever it was he’d brought up from the bottom was now being towed toward shore by a pair of dinghies that had it firmly secured on grappling hooks between them. When the dinghy hulls scraped up along the bottom, near the water’s edge, eager hands seized their prows and hauled them up onto the narrow strip of land. The crisp air was suddenly full of the sound of rock and gravel grinding beneath the aluminum keels. The dark bundle they’d towed in tossed and rolled with a slow, sullen motion in the shallow foam between them.

  In water it appeared inoffensive enough — possibly a bundle of old discarded clothing. Once up on the shore, however, it took on an entirely different appearance. Parts of human anatomy began to appear from within the bundle, flashes of white — a hand, an ankle, a foot inside a sodden boot.

  They turned the body over, causing the head to make a sudden sidewards pitch. In the next instant, the face rolled skyward, purple and twisted in the rictus of death. Beneath the dripping outer garments, the body had begun to swell with gases. Clots of hair plastered like worms on the forehead leaked tiny rivulets of black rinse onto the face and throat. Where the eyelashes had been dyed, the rinse had run down into the sockets of the eyes, ringing them in lurid black.

  Joan Winger stood beside Mooney, gazing down at the object at her feet. She appeared numb and shaken. “Is that it?” she asked.

  Mooney looked up, uncertain if the question had been addressed to him, or to some larger entity beyond themselves. “Is that all?” she asked again. There was an air of dismay about it, as though she couldn’t associate the limp, bloated thing at her feet with all the fuss and furor of the past twenty-one months. All of that savage frenzy; a city fixated on rampaging violence, paralyzed with fear. And the cause of it all, this poor, sodden lump of inoffensive rags, trickling a thin blackish stream of hair dye down into the damp earth around it.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’d like to release it to the press this morning. Any problems with that?”

  Mooney pondered a moment.

  “You seem troubled,” Paul Konig said. “Something still bothers you?”

  They were in the M.E.‘s big, cluttered office, overlooking the East River, where just then a bright red tug was plying upwind through the choppy current.

  “I understand all of it,” Mooney said, unconvincingly. “I mean, I think I do.”

  “The body you hauled out of the river yesterday is Ferris Koops,” Joan Winger said. “Take my word for it.”

  “I have no quarrel with that,” Mooney assured her. “You’ve got your blood types matched. You’ve got the bite impressions matched.”

  “We’ve even got the bridgework,” Konig said expansively. He was in an exceptionally good mood that morning. “It was recovered from the apartment on Eighty-first Street.”

  “We’ve also matched fingerprints from Bridge Street with some of those found in the burned-out Mercedes up in New Hampshire, and on the pink Crayola we found in the Coles house,” Joan Winger added.

  “If that isn’t enough,” Konig glowed, “we can even match those boot prints we took off the face of the construction worker — what was his name?”

  “Mancuso,” Mooney murmured.

  “Right. Mancuso — with the boots we pulled off this guy from the river.” Konig chuckled. He seemed more pleased with himself than ever. “I get the impression something’s bothering you, Mooney. Don’t fret it. This is Koops. A hundred percent guaranteed.”

  Mooney flicked back and forth through his pad. Konig and Joan Winger watched and waited until he found the entry he was seeking.

  “Way back, from the very start of all this,” Mooney began slowly, carefully formulating his rebuttal, “you were both convinced we had a copycat situation.”

  “So were you,” Konig reminded him.

  “Granted,” Mooney conceded. “At least, pretty well convinced. You remember that every blood and semen sample we were able to lift at a crime site was an AB pos. But we also had two different sets of bite imprints, one with busted front teeth, the other straight.”

  “We understand that now,” Konig said.

  “Granted. Ferris Koops had a removable partial bridge. But at the time, we didn’t know that —- and that was throwing me, too. Now we know all about that. But one thing here” — Mooney tapped the page of his pad with his pencil — “still points to the possibility of two different guys. Ferris and a copycat of Ferris.”

  Dr. Winger brightened noticeably. She started to laugh. “Oh, you mean the azoospermia?”

  Mooney frowned. “Right. The two different sperm samples. To me that still says two different guys.”

  The point appeared to please Konig mightily. “You do pay attention, don’t you, Mooney?”

  Mooney’s frown deepened.

  “Dr. Winger. Will you kindly clear up this little matter and put the lieutenant’s mind at ease.”

  The young woman pushed a fluttery hand through her disheveled hair, causing it to tumble in a wave along the line of her cheekbone. She looked almost pretty that morning. “You’re absolutely right, lieutenant. The sperm samples we were able to retrieve from at least six crime sites were of two different types — one normal, one azoospermic. One fertile, one infertile. Sure, that was one of the principle reasons we all leaned toward the copycat theory.”

  “Then yesterday we did the autopsy,” Konig said. “Ferris Koops was a cryptorchid,” Dr. Winger pronounced softly.

  Mooney’s gray, tousled head turned slowly to regard her.

  �
��A cryptorchid.” The young woman repeated the word slowly, with deliberation, as though she were spelling the word out for him. “Put simply, our autopsy disclosed that Koops suffered from a condition that’s relatively rare.”

  “The frequency of occurrence is, roughly, one out of a thousand infants.”

  “What is it?” Mooney pressed him.

  “It’s an undescended testicle,” Konig explained. “It can be bilateral. But, mostly, it’s on one side.”

  “It’s easily correctable at an early age,” Dr. Winger continued. “Simple surgical procedure, and if done soon enough, the child suffers no testicular abnormalities in later life.”

  “Okay,” Mooney growled, “but what does all this have to do with —”

  “Let the girl finish, will you, Mooney,” the M.E. snapped, then caught the disapproving glance of Dr. Winger. “I mean, let Doctor Winger finish what she started to explain.”

  There was an awkward silence while the young woman tried to recapture the thread of her thoughts. Then she was speaking again. “As I was about to say, if not corrected, however, the undescended testicle atrophies. Since sperm is produced by the testes, a male adult with only a single working testicle naturally won’t have the same output of spermatozoa as a male with a full working set. While cryptorchids can produce fertile sperm with a single normal testicle, very often it’s not as sperm-rich as that of the normal male. And it will take a cryptorchid longer to replace fertile sperm after ejaculation than it will a normal male.”

  Mooney kept his eyes riveted to the young woman’s. “Meaning?” he inquired.

  “Meaning, that it’s not at all uncommon for a male afflicted with this condition to suffer periodic infertility. One of the findings of our autopsy revealed that Ferris Koops had this condition.”

  Mooney glared back and forth from one of them to the other. “Dark, sterile? Fair-haired, fertile? I don’t buy that. That’s a bit too pat.”

  Konig puffed amiably at his cigar. “I agree, and yet given the forensic evidence …”