A Cry of Shadows

by Ed Gorman

  "All right."

  "You don't say nothin' to Miss Daily."

  "Got it."

  Hesitation. "So you'll pay me the two hundred?"

  "If I like what I see."

  "Seven o'clock on the corner of St. Mark's. My name's Conroy."

  "Conroy."

  "Seven."

  "Right."

  "And two hundred."

  "Two hundred. Right."

  From three o'clock till five o'clock I tried Brian Ingram's house fifteen times. Patience is not one of my primary virtues. No answer. A married woman suddenly widowed would have many friends to turn to and many duties to carry out, not least among them choosing a funeral parlor, casket, and church, at which tasks Mrs. Ingram was probably busy right now.

  After work, I went back to my room to see how my new friend the kitty was doing. She had apparently gotten used to the place, sitting on a cushion on the wooden rocker right in front of the TV set, as if waiting for me to come home and turn the thing on.

  I stirred the sand in her litter box, poured out fresh milk and dry food into adjoining bowls, and then went into the john for a quick shower. Tonight I wore my gray tweed suit, knowing that somehow I'd end up at the Avanti. Maybe I was becoming a swell and didn't even know it.

  I tried the Ingram woman again but again no answer.

  Before leaving, I sat on the cushion in the rocker with the kitty in my lap. The front room was dark except for street light against the frosted windowpane. Wind came howling, sounding lonely, and from downstairs faintly you could hear Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas" on the radio. I wondered what my kids were doing. I wondered what Donna was doing. I stroked the kitty. She climbed up the front of my suit and nuzzled me with her tiny wet pink nose and then licked me a few times idly on the jaw with her little sandpaper tongue. I gave her a soft hug—I could feel her ribs and that almost scared me she was so delicate and then the phone rang. I set the kitty down carefully and she cried as if she'd been deserted and, hell, I did feel as if I'd deserted her and then I got the phone.

  "Jack?"

  "Yes."

  "This is Gwen Daily. You were at St. Mark's—"

  "Sure, Gwen."

  "Something's happened."

  "Oh?"

  "Did you by any chance talk to a man named Albert Conroy tonight?"

  I thought about it and decided to tell her. "I talked to a Conroy. I'm not sure his first name was Albert. Why?"

  "He's in the hospital."

  "What happened?"

  "I'm not sure, but it appears that somebody struck him on the head with something heavy."

  "He's dead?"

  "No, but he has a very bad concussion."

  "Can he tell the police who struck him?"

  "He won't. He's very reticent about everything."

  "I guess I'm not sure why you called me."

  "Because on his bed I found a piece of paper with your name and number on it."

  "I see."

  "That's all you have to say?"

  The kitty stood on the cushion looking at me and crying her tiny cry. In the silver frosted light, she looked even more frail.

  "You sound as if I hit him, Gwen."

  "No, I'm not accusing you of that, but I would like to know what the hell's going on. I'm not big on subterfuge, Jack."'

  "He called me."

  "Conroy called you? For what?"

  "He wanted to sell me a piece of information."

  "Information about what?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "What did you tell him?"

  "I agreed to meet him on the corner at seven o'clock."

  "This really irritates me, Jack."

  "I figured it would."

  "I'm in charge here. The least you could have done was inform me about the call."

  "I apologize."

  "It really makes me very angry."

  I didn't say anything for a time, just listened to the kitty mewl.

  "I'm sorry I got so angry."

  "That's all right," I said. "I would have been angry, too." I laughed. "Would now be a good time to ask you a favor?"

  "What kind of favor?"

  "I'd like to look through his belongings."

  "Conroy's?"

  "Right."

  "What for?"

  "I'm not sure. Maybe I'll stumble across what he wanted to sell me."

  "You'd recognize it?"

  "Maybe. I assume it has to do with Coburn's murder."

  "What would Conroy know about that?"

  "That's what I'd like to find out."

  Pause. "You want to come over, then?"

  "I'd appreciate it."

  "Right away?"

  "Soon as I can get there."

  Now she laughed. "I can't believe I'm letting you do this after you were such a shit to me. You really owed me a call about Conroy."

  "I know."

  "I must really like men who treat me badly. You know?"

  "Well," I said, "we all have to like somebody."

  Halfway to St. Mark's, I pulled into a drive-up phone, deposited a quarter, and on the second ring got a female voice that I had every reason to believe was Mrs. Brian Ingram's.

  "Yes?"

  "Are you Mrs. Ingram?"

  "Yes."

  "First of all I want to apologize, Mrs. Ingram. I know this is a bad time to call."

  "Who is this, please?"

  "My name is Jack Dwyer. I'm a private investigator. There's no reason you should know me."

  "What is it you'd like? Oh—just a minute, Mr. Dwyer." In the background, I heard her giving two youngsters directions about lighting the Christmas tree, telling them which plugs went where. When she came back, she said, "The girls insist that they light the tree themselves. That's part of the fun, I suppose." She sounded lovely and exhausted. I wanted to give her the same sort of hug I'd given the kitty earlier this evening. "May I ask you a question, Mr. Dwyer?"

  "Of course."

  "Do you know anything about my husband's death?"

  "If you're asking me who killed him, Mrs. Ingram, I'm afraid I don't have any idea."

  "I guess I've learned two things in the past twenty-four hours."

  "What things, Mrs. Ingram?"

  "That ordinary, middle-class people like Brian really do get murdered. And now I've learned that private investigators exist outside of TV programs." She cupped the phone. I heard her say, "It looks beautiful, girls," and then to me, "How may I help you, Mr. Dwyer?"

  "I would like to come over and talk to you for a while."

  "Tonight?"

  "I'm afraid it should be tonight."

  "You sound very urgent about something."

  "I'm working on something that may or may not have some bearing on your husband's death, Mrs. Ingram."

  "His parents aren't dealing with it well at all. His father had a stroke last spring and his mother has rheumatoid arthritis."

  "I'm sorry."

  "The doctor gave his father a sedative last night and it made his whole mouth break out."

  I sighed. You don't die alone; in very real ways, you take many others with you.

  "I'm sorry to have to ask you this."

  "The house is a mess."

  "That's fine."

  "When were you thinking of coming over?"

  "How does an hour and a half sound?"

  "Could you make it two hours?"

  "All right."

  "I can get the girls to bed and make a pot of tea. Do you like tea, Mr. Dwyer?"

  "Very much. Especially on cold winter nights."

  "You'll have some identification?"

  "I'll do better than that, Mrs. Ingram."

  "Oh?"

  "I'll give you a phone number to call. It belongs to a man named Edelman who's a detective on the city police force. He'll vouch for me."

  "That's very courteous of you, Mr. Dwyer."

  I gave her the number and drove over to St. Mark's.

  Chapter 21

  The ar
omas of steam-table food hung on the air. In a large barren room perhaps two dozen men sat on the floor watching three different television sets, two of which were tuned to different channels. In one small cubicle a counselor of some kind tried to calm down a man who was deeply aggrieved. In a lounge area two men sat at opposite ends of a sofa smoking cigarettes and disregarding each other utterly. One of the men was carrying on a conversation with himself; he went so far as to laugh sharply at certain of his own remarks. I suspected this was all pretty much a typical night for St. Mark's.

  Gwen Daily was in her office. She was working her way through a stack of forms. She was also sitting directly beneath the NO SMOKING PLEASE sign and inhaling deeply of a filter cigarette.

  The floorboards squeaked as I reached the threshold. She looked up. "Fast trip."

  "Light traffic."

  She shook her head. "I just got a call from the hospital about Conroy. They expect him to be in there for two weeks."

  "But he still won't talk about who did it?"

  "He's scared." She wore a bulky blue sweater and looked almost like a sorority girl. She bit at one of her fingernails and said, "Whether we like to admit it or not, there are some real predators in this place. Conroy obviously believes that whoever did this to him can do it to him again."

  "So obviously he did find something."

  "Obviously." She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up. She wore snug jeans. Her hips and her bottom looked wonderful. She was aware of my glimpse and said, "I wish my new friend was as appreciative as you."

  "That'll teach you to go out with blind guys."

  "Chivalrous," she said, and poked me in the ribs. "I like that."

  I followed her out of the office and down the corridor to the doors leading to the sleeping area.

  As she put her hand on the knob, she said, "Do you have any idea what you're looking for?"

  "No. Do you?"

  "Uh-uh."

  "We make a great team."

  The men not watching television or sitting in the lounge were already in their beds for the night. They would be of various kinds—men so hassled by the streets and the cold weather that they didn't want to leave the snugness of their beds; men afraid of other human beings, even those in the shelter; men given to the kind of brooding that teetered on madness, obsession, I suppose—the inability to let go. I could tell you a few things about that myself.

  They watched us as we worked our way up the aisle between the cots and the air mattresses. It was like a big boot-camp barracks, but untidy and slightly sour-smelling, and the men who watched you weren't farm kids with dreams of booze and hookers dancing in their heads but fearful old men of various ages long past hope or any real solace.

  One of them, who was bent over straightening up his bedclothes, bumped me when I passed him. "Sumbitch," he said, jerking up to glare at me. He said this without benefit of teeth, not even false ones.

  "Calm down, Peter," Gwen Daily said. She reached out and touched him near an open sore on the tip of his elbow. "And I've told you, you go down the street to the infirmary and have them take care of that okay?"

  But he was still glaring at me, the way drunks do in taverns when they're about ready to square off.

  "Peter. Do you hear me?"

  She was half-shouting at him.

  "Peter. Do you hear me?"

  She poked him in the elbow. For a scrawny, bent old fart his rage had a certain crazed majesty and I knew if I punched him hard he'd withstand it and punch me right back.

  "You lie down, Peter. And right now, do you hear me?" Something got through to him finally because the glazed glare left his gaze. He blinked and said, "Sumbitch."

  "You lie down there, Peter. Do you hear me?"

  "Yes'm," he said, all of a sudden the docile boy.

  We went on down the aisle to Conroy's bed.

  "Schizophrenic," she said. "In and out of the mental hospital, but they won't keep him long enough to do him any good." I saw then, abruptly, like an insight in a novel, how much she cared for this job. Nothing dramatic, but the real thing, and I liked the hell out of her just then and gave her a little hug.

  "You might have made a good nun after all, Daily, you know that?" I said.

  She shook her head. "I just feel so sorry for most of them. And there's almost nothing I can do."

  Conroy's cot was near the back, in the shadows, flush against a brick wall that felt like forty below to the touch.

  There was nothing remarkable about it. Like most of the cots, it was swaybacked from too many bodies for too many years. The bedclothes—stained but clean sheets, pillows greasy from hair oil, and prison-rough woolen blanket—were in tangles. A single white work sock dangled off the paint-chipped metal tubing that passed for a headboard. On the wall above the board was taped—black electrical tape; nothing fancy here —a fading photograph of a young man in an Army uniform. A private. The young man was alone, smoking a cigarette in the fashion of James Dean, and leaning against a 1954 Ford Fairlane. You wondered what sad trail had led Conroy from that Fairlane to this homeless shelter these long and inexplicable years later.

  "He was a handsome man," Gwen Daily said.

  "Not anymore, I take it?"

  She traced a line with a bitten fingernail down her cheek.

  "Knife scar. I think it happened in prison. Armed robbery, I think the charge was." She shrugged. "Today he just drifts." I saw it sticking out from beneath his bed. Just a corner of it.

  "He's got some kind of suitcase down there," I said. "I'll need your permission to check it out."

  "That's why we're here. Be my guest."

  I got down on my hands and knees and pulled the suitcase out. It was cardboard and had been taped over and over, almost neurotically, with the same black electrical tape that fastened Conroy's photograph to the wall. At the latches, the tape had been cut so the two halves could be opened. I got it up on the bed and got it open and looked inside.

  Mostly it was underwear stained yellow and brown in the appropriate places but bleach-washed so it could be worn again and again. There were two wrinkled Hustler women of their respective months, really lewd stuff that brought a prim grimace to Gwen Daily's tiny Catholic-girl mouth, and a half-filled bottle of Aqua Velva green and a cheap hairbrush and comb set and a blue necktie twenty years old but with a kind of obstinate dignity, the kind farmers wear around sunburned necks to bury their dead.

  Under the underwear, I found the photograph. At first I recognized neither person. I just stared at it. It was black and white and had been folded in the middle for a long time because some of the coating had become minuscule flakes. It showed two men, one maybe forty, the other maybe twenty, standing in front of a river. The older man had his arm around the younger man. You could see they were both straining to smile at the instructions of the person taking the picture. There was nothing notable about the way they were dressed—clean casual clothes neither expensive nor shoddy. It was the same with their haircuts and their demeanor. Nothing special. Despite the fact that there was no particular resemblance between the two, you sensed that they were father and son.

  "May I see?"

  I handed her the photo.

  She picked the older man off right away. "It's Karl."

  "Is he is the priest? The one always quoting the Bible?"

  "Yes." She stared at the photo again and shook her head. "It really is Karl."

  "Have you recognized the boy yet?"

  "No."

  "Look closely. And put forty pounds on him."

  "My God."

  "Exactly."

  "But it can't be."

  "It is."

  "But Karl and Richard—"

  "Karl must be Richard's father," I said. Then, "Is Karl here?"

  "I saw him earlier."

  "You want to help me round him up?"

  "Of course." She looked at the photo again. "But why would Conroy have this?"

  "I suppose he thought the police would be interested in it. Whi
ch would make it worth money to somebody—namely me. I'm sure he took it from Karl and I'm sure it was Karl who beat him up. And now I can see why Conroy won't talk. Karl is a pretty spooky guy."

  "Karl and Richard," she said again, amazed.

  I was amazed, too. I just managed to hide it better.

  There were corners and rooms and closets and hideouts in the old church nobody but Gwen Daily could possible know about. We went into places that were dark, we went into places that were damp, we went into places that were freezing—anywhere Karl might be hiding. He would have to consider the possibility that Conroy would lose his fear and start talking to the police and that the police in turn would come for him. Being Richard Coburn's father didn't necessarily make him a murder suspect but it at least made him suspicious, particularly since he'd been caught a few times hanging around the back door of the restaurant.

  We didn't find him.

  We spent an hour—I called Brian Ingram's wife and told her I'd been detained—and we didn't find him at all.

  We ended up back in Gwen's office.

  "My God, how it must have hurt Richard."

  "His father being a derelict?"

  "Yes. His pride. If any of his society friends had ever found out—"

  "Karl may have killed him."

  "But why?"

  "Lots of reasons. Maybe Karl threatened to expose Richard in some way. From my two encounters with him, Karl didn't strike me as particularly stable. In fact, he struck me as insane."

  She sighed. "He's another one who belongs in a mental hospital but they won't take him, of course. 'Not enough funds for people like him.' They'll wait till he kills somebody and—" Then she caught herself. "He really could have killed

  Richard, couldn't he?"

  "Yes."

  "Should we call the police?"

  "Not yet. See if he comes back tonight. If he does, leave a message with my answering service. I'll call my beep and come over right away."

  "You have a beeper?"

  "Yup."

  "Somehow I can't imagine you with a beeper."

  "I have a beeper and I wear Hush Puppies sometimes. Brown ones."

  She laughed. "Now, that I'll never believe." She had the photograph spread out on the desk before her. "I'm trembling." The laughter was long gone now. "Poor Richard," she said.

  "That's encouraging," I said.