Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  It was in the ceiling light fixture that she found it. She had not been looking for anything specifically. It was only an instinct, sharp and palpable as a tooth pain, that had informed her that if she looked, she would find something. Instinct in a creature of Suki’s somewhat unorthodox lifestyle was an instrument honed to the sharpness of a razor. Once again that instinct had not misled her. It was a small flannel sack you closed and opened with a drawstring. The name of a Forty-seventh Street jewelry shop had been stenciled on it in flowing white cursive.

  She tugged the string, slowly pulling it open, tipping it, and letting the contents tumble out into her slightly palsied palm. Gems and pretty baubles held little place in the old lady’s scheme of things. It was only what they could be converted to on the open market that earned her true esteem.

  Here were clasps and pins, an old cameo brooch rimmed in eighteen-carat gold, along with a rather good Rolex watch apparently in working condition. There was, in addition, a silver pendant with gold putti encircled with baguettes. It was an unusual piece, ornate and fussy, of Italian design. Quite distinctive in its way.

  Squinting, she held the pendant up to the sunlight streaming through the cupola glass. Where it struck the baguettes, it broke into prismatic bands of color flashing behind her on the white plaster walls.

  “Souvenirs he’s got for himself,” she murmured while her crooked fingers lifted the pendant and rotated it slowly in the shaft of sunlight, making it flash and sparkle like some living thing. “Souvenirs of all his merry pranks.” She laughed softly to herself, but even a creature such as Suki, so inured to the darker side of things, experienced a vague shudder of distaste, thinking of the fate of the former owners of all those glittering little bits of glass fanned out in her palm.

  Squeamishness of that sort was generally not long-lived in Suki. She could always rationalize crime, even brutal crime, in terms of some vague, retributive social theory. Everyone had to live, didn’t they? What she couldn’t dispel quite so easily was the unpleasant awareness, growing stronger each day, that Warren was holding out on her, that he was gathering riches all the time, cadging it away and not counting her in for her share. If he had a little sack here, why not in other places as well?

  In the past she had only asked her fair share of things. That had been roughly fifty percent. When Warren was a small child and just starting out, it was more like a hundred percent. But that was when he was a mere acolyte, serving his internship at her feet. Then he was still small enough to push around. As he grew older, more wily and adept, and the takes grew more sizable, she’d naturally expected her percentage to drop as the value of his booty increased.

  But now it had become increasingly clear that Warren had been cultivating his own garden, picking up riches here and there and storing them like a squirrel preparing for a shift in seasons. What was Warren’s shift of seasons to be? Her tawny cat’s eyes narrowed to thin slits that sank into the quivering roses in her knobby cheeks. It, made her appear like a gypsy before her crystal ball, attempting to pierce the veil of the future.

  What she saw there was disquieting. All of his recent talk about “clearing out” she’d rashly discounted. But now with tangible evidence glittering in her palm suggesting that he might be piling up wealth against just such a day, she was forced to reconsider the situation.

  He’d been strange over the past several months. There was no denying that. He was not his usual self. Restlessness and dissatisfaction were his daily moods. There was about him the sense of a chapter coming to a close while he waited for another to begin. She knew exactly where she’d figured in the former chapter but had no idea where she fit in the one to come. The possibility that she might not fit in at all had not occurred to her.

  Suki had grown so accustomed to Warren’s presence over the years that life without him seemed too unlikely a thought to even entertain. They were all the family either of them had. Whatever their life together was, they were at least a unit — a symbiosis of need and circumstance, each nourishing the other. Despite all of Warren’s tantrums and threats, she could never permit that to change.

  She chuckled softly to herself, replacing the little sack of jewelry in the ceiling fixture. Setting the room back in perfect order, she assured herself that nothing would change. Nothing could ever alter the condition of their lives together, she told herself. But still, far away at the distant rim of her consciousness, something stirred, some faint alteration of light, a hint of something unwanted and unsavory approaching them with no total shape as yet to define it.

  When she left the small room in the attic that morning and locked the door behind her, she was a bit unnerved.

  “Don’t tell me you’re getting up again.”

  “I am.”

  “Jesus. You’ve been up and down five times in the last hour.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She listened to him lying there in the dark for a while, quiet, as if he’d exhausted their talk. Shortly, he grunted, rolled over, and proceeded to snore.

  “Well, I’m not fine,” she said. She waited for him to respond. When nothing came, she said it again, but this time louder. “I’m not fine.”

  He rolled back over, sat halfway up, and peered at her in the dark.

  “I’m not fine, Mickey. I’m sick. I’m sick to my stomach.”

  “Must’ve been the sausage in the linguini,” he murmured drowsily. “Wait a minute. I’ll get you an Alka-Seltzer.”

  He started out of bed but she pulled him back. “I don’t need no Alka-Seltzer, Mickey. It’s not my stomach. My stomach’s fine. It’s something else.”

  She said it with just the right note of portentousness. She felt him turn again in the dark and peer at her. Then the light switched on.

  “It’s him,” she said, looking directly at him.

  “It’s who?”

  “It’s him. Warren. The one I told you about.”

  “Oh, the creep. What about him?”

  Her mouth was dry. She felt her jaws moving ponderously, unanchored and uncontrolled, lifting up and down with no sound coming from them. Then came the tears bursting from her eyes, coursing down her cheeks, followed next by the sobs — deep, inconsolable rales that conveyed a sense of profound distress.

  He pulled her roughly to him, smothering her face in the coarse cotton of his pajama top. “Hey, what is this? If that guy’s done anything …”

  “I don’t want you to do nothing, Mickey.” Her fingers fluttered nervously at the buttonholes of his pajama top. “It’s nothing he did, see. It’s more like what he said.” Then it all came out, bursting from her as though she were regurgitating something. It came in fragments and snatches, seemingly incoherent and disconnected. Meaning only emerged from it toward the very end.

  “Hey, wait. Now wait. Just a minute.” With his hands he tried physically to slow her tirade. “You’re telling me he said you gotta leave me.”

  The jaws worked fitfully. “That’s right.” The words emerged at last, followed by another volley of sobs.

  “Shhh,” he tried to subdue the awful spasms, placing a hand over her mouth. “For Chrissake — shhh. The neighbors’ll think I’m whaling the hell out of you.”

  “Mickey — I’m scared.”

  “Where is this Warren guy? Tell me. I’ll cream him.” She tried to push him back into bed. “No, no. I don’t want you going near him. He’s crazy.”

  “I know he’s crazy. That’s why I’m gonna twist his head off. He didn’t touch you, did he?”

  “No. I told you he didn’t.”

  “Where does he live?”

  She flung her hands up in the air. “I don’t know.” Another high, keening wail, the sound of pure fright, tore from her. “Somewhere way downtown. I don’t know. He lives with this old lady.”

  “His mother? He lives with his mother?”

  “No. Some old bag lady. She raised him. She’s crazy, too. T
he both of them are loons. Right around the bend. I met her once in Grand Central Station. You can’t believe what she is.”

  “You ever been to her place?”

  “Never.” She was annoyed by the implication. “She doesn’t like him to bring anyone around. Particularly girls. So he doesn’t. I think he’s ashamed to bring friends anyway. I’m telling you, it’s crazy.”

  He thought about it while she watched him, sniffling and fretting. At last he spoke: “I tell you what we re gonna do.”

  Cold terror stamped her face. “I’m not going to the police, Mickey. I’m not gonna start with that.”

  “Who said anything about the police?”

  “He’s crazy. If he ever heard I went to the police …”

  “Forget about the police,” he snapped angrily. “This guy is just blowing hard.”

  “No, no. This is no bluff. Believe me. When he says —”

  “From now on you don’t leave or return here alone. I’m gonna take you to work in the morning and I’m gonna bring you back home at night. I’m gonna meet you for lunch at noon. We’ll see about this Warren. We’ll see if he takes a hint. ‘Cause if he don’t, I’m gonna cream him.”

  He brought his palm down flat on the night table with a sharp crack. She lay trembling against him, whimpering into his pajama top.

  “Mickey, promise me you won’t go near him. You don’t know him the way I know him. He’s not like anyone else you know. He’s nuts. He believes in demons and devils. He reads all kind of crazy stuff on things like magic and numbers. He believes he can tell the future by numbers. He’s done stuff…” She jammed the knuckle of her fist into her mouth and bit down hard to keep from starting to sob again. “He’s done stuff… I mean, all kinds of stuff. Stuff you wouldn’t believe. I can’t tell you. Just don’t you go near him, Mickey. Now, I’m telling you. He’s dangerous. And he’s watching us. He knows this house and where I work. He knows my telephone number at work. He’s already called me there.”

  “He called you there?”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “How did he get the number?”

  “I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t know. Probably just followed me to the office one morning. Watched me get on the elevator. He knows you, too, Mickey. He knew your name. Don’t ask me how. He snoops around. He has his way of finding things out.”

  “When he calls you, what does he say?”

  “Nothing. I just hear him breathing over the phone. I know it’s him. He does it to scare me.”

  “To scare you?” A shrewd smile creased the young man’s features. He reached up and turned off the light. “Okay, Janine. You can forget about Warren now. Leave Warren to me.”

  She was up again at once, pleading with him in the darkness. The lights from the street below pierced through the louvered blinds of the tiny bedroom, throwing bars of vivid white against the walls.

  “Mickey, you promised me. You promised.”

  “I know what I promised.” The young man spoke quietly, but with a note of grim resolve in his voice. “I’m not gonna go out lookin’ for trouble. But if he comes sucking around here lookin’ to bother you, I’m gonna twist his head off.”

  “Well, our friend Berrida really picked a doozie for a color combination. In all, there are eighteen states with a combo of blue and white.”

  “Blue on white or white on blue?”

  “Both combined.”

  A weary sigh issued from somewhere deep inside Mooney. “Okay,” he growled. “Better start with the blue on white since I think that’s what Berrida was leaning toward.”

  “Blue on white. Okay. Got a pencil?”

  “Yeah. Shoot.”

  “License plates. Blue letters on a white field: South Carolina. Illinois. Tennessee. Alabama. Ohio. Virginia. Kentucky. West Virginia. Georgia. Both Montana and Mississippi are blue on white with red trim. Minnesota is dark blue on a pale gray that reads almost white. And then, of course, there’s yours truly, the Empire State, New York.”

  “Those are all the blue on white?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Now give me all the white on blue. Just for the record.”

  “Right.” Pickering attempted a feint at enthusiasm. “License plates. White letters on a blue field: That’d be Connecticut. Nevada. Kansas. Rhode Island. Both Jersey and California are a pale yellow on blue, which might easily be confused for white in a poor light.”

  “Such as dusk. We already figured that.”

  Pickering nodded. “Right. We already figured that.”

  “Is that it?” Mooney’s eyes ranged up and down the list. “That’s it, Frank.”

  “Okay. Send out a general all-points to the M.V.B.s for every one of those states. Check to see if any one of them still has a ‘sixty-eight Mercedes two twenty active in their files.”

  “Green?”

  “Green. Pink. Orange. Any color. Next, find out if any of those M.V.B.‘s has a stolen tag reporting for a ‘sixty-eight Mercedes two twenty.”

  “This is gonna take time, Frank. We’re talking eighteen, nineteen states here.”

  Mooney grinned fiendishly. “Everything takes time, my friend. Time’s the key player in the game. Time is what wins the horse races.”

  Pickering made a faint groaning sound and started for the door.

  “Hey,” Mooney shouted after him. “What’s happening with those auto paint shops?”

  “There’s only about three hundred fifty of them in the city. What d’ya think’s happening? We’re checking. Gimme a break. We’ve got a half-dozen guys out on this thing. We’ve only just started.”

  Mooney made a quick computation in his head. “I figure each man oughta be able to cover at least ten shops a day. That comes to sixty shops a day total. I figure you need, maybe, five, six days to cover the field. Get me an answer by Thursday.”

  Pickering’s shoulders drooped in a suit too large for him. It was not yet eight A.M., and he already had the winded, somewhat depleted look of a dog who’d been running hard.

  “So long, Rollo.” Mooney waved.

  Pickering sighed and hobbled out the door.

  PART III

  SEVENTEEN

  WARREN MARS HAD BEEN GOING DUTIFULLY up to 860 Fifth Avenue for nearly three weeks. He went at dusk each day with dogged, uncomplaining regularity. Arriving there, he would nod unobtrusively to Mr. Carlucci, the building doorman, then take up his seat on the bench across from the building. By now it had taken on something of the air of ritual, something he and Mr. Carlucci carried out each evening with a kind of priestlike solemnity.

  So far, for all of their persistence, nothing had occurred. No one had appeared on the street near the bench to stare up at the building. For Warren, it was not unpleasant. Nor did the demand on his time appear to annoy him. He liked sitting there in the gathering dusk of upper Fifth Avenue with the thick bank of foliage exhaling its sweet, grassy breath behind him. The sleekly elegant comings and goings of conspicuously privileged people, bustling off in expensive cars to smart parties and expensive restaurants, pleased him. He enjoyed observing the grand, self-important air of opulence on display there. It was a far cry from the sort of life he knew and understood, but he felt no sense of resentment or disadvantage for its being so. Oddly enough, he felt a distinct sense of superiority to these people. His view of them was that of spoiled children, a bit selfish and overindulged, showy about their possessions, and totally mindless of the deprivation of others. But he bore them no malice. Paradoxically, it all seemed quite familiar to him, as though he himself were, and indeed had always been, very much a part of it.

  Three weeks was certainly not a long time to have waited for something tangible to happen. Warren was a reasonable fellow. If life had taught him anything, it was how to wait. He sat on the bench now, legs crossed at the knee, looking relaxed and rather debonair. He had taken to dressing up for the occasion — looking the part, more or less, of a real big-city reporter on a big story. To him it had
all the feeling of a mystery film in which he played the hero. As in all good mystery films, he had no doubt that all that was necessary was for him to wait and, inevitably, his quarry would appear. It was virtually guaranteed. Eventually, this stranger would show and Warren would be there to greet him.

  At eight-thirty sharp, as dusk succumbed to darkness, Warren rose, stretched his legs, waved to the nervously vigilant Mr. Carlucci, and strolled off into the night.

  “And what about the suicide over on the West Side?”

  “The cardiologist?”

  “Right. The goddamned insurance company’s been after me all morning.”

  “Well, it sure looks like suicide. Blood, urine, brain tissue loaded with pentobarbital. Was there a policy?”

  “Huge. And he was up to his ears in debt. Liked to go to the casinos. Leaves a wife and four kids. What about the Ortega job?”

  “We lifted a slug out of the parietal lobe. Forty-five caliber. Went to ballistics this morning.”

  “And Bender?”

  Joan Winger smiled oddly, as if there were a tinge of perverse satisfaction in what she had to disclose. “We’ve got an AB pos.”

  Something sparked in Paul Konig’s bleary, drooping eyes. “You’re sure?”

  “Course I’m sure. We got it on a semen smear we took off her.”

  “A week ago you were telling me we had an azoospermia running loose.”

  “That was last week. This week we don’t.” She appeared delighted by his puzzlement. “This week we’ve got Shadow Dancer II, dancing right behind Shadow Dancer I.”

  He put a sheaf of reports down, folded his arms, and glared at her in expectation.

  “Look at it this way,” she went on eagerly. “Dancer I is an azoospermia. Dancer II has enough motile sperm zipping around inside him to impregnate the Rockettes. Dancer I is dark, possible Hispanic. Dancer II is fair. From the tooth imprints we’ve lifted off all these cadavers so far, Dancer I looks like he has broken incisors; II looks to have nice straight, even teeth. II is an AB-pos blood type, and I’m willing to lay odds that I is an AB pos also.”