Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  Pickering regarded him with sympathy. “Can I borrow this here?” He held up the invoice.

  “Be my guest.”

  “Thanks. I’ll send it back. Oh, listen. One more thing. Is it okay I use your phone for a minute?”

  “Sure,” Mr. Pagano mumbled sadly. “Just don’t call China.” In the next moment he passed through a side door and suddenly reappeared as one of the rubber-shawled moonwalkers on the other side.

  Pickering snapped up a nearby telephone directory and flipped quickly through the pages. Under the section devoted to federal departments, he quickly located the number for central headquarters of the New York City Post Office. He dialed and asked to be connected with their special tracking unit. He identified himself to a Mrs. Sternhagen, informed her that he was a New York City detective, and gave her his shield number. Then he explained his problem, provided her with the letters he had, and gave her the zip code.

  Mrs. Sternhagen sounded maternal and concerned.

  “Will you be there a few minutes?” she asked.

  “If you say so.”

  “Give me your number. I’ll get right back to you.”

  She was as good as her word. In five minutes she rang back. “The only thing we’ve got in that postal zone with six letters looking like what you’ve got is either Beaver or Bridge Street. Both are down around the financial district. But since Beaver ends with an r, not an e, offhand, I’d say what you’ve got looks more like Bridge.”

  “Offhand, I’d say you were right.” The detective scribbled both street names on a scrap of paper before him. “God bless,” he said and hung up.

  In the next moment he was lunging for the front door. Half in, half out, he stood straddling the threshold, peering back into the shop as if he’d forgotten something. He lunged back into the shop and tore open the door leading into the painting area. He poked his head in, then snatched it back at once. It was like entering Hell. Gales of atomized paint drove him backward, leaving behind a thick dusting of gray spray on his collar and sleeves. He ducked back quickly, closing the door partially for protection. “Hey, Pagano,” he shouted above the roaring compressors.

  Attired in overalls, mask, and goggles, the beleaguered Italian shuffled toward him, ghostlike, seemingly from out of nowhere.

  “It’s Bridge Street,” Pickering bellowed at him, his voice rising above the gale from within. “Fourteen Bridge Street.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE MOMENT SHE SAW THE UNMARKED CAR turn the corner and cruise into the street, Suki Klink knew it was the police. Years of staying out of the path of the law gave her long antennae and keen instincts. She watched the car from her kitchen window and knew that something was up. Even unmarked cars driven by the police had a certain unmistakable swagger to them. They never had much chrome on them, either.

  The car crept slowly down the street so that she could see the people inside, their heads swiveling about, as if they were looking for something in particular. An address. She didn’t have to be told. She knew it was 14 Bridge Street. She had that sort of prescience one associates with the old, the deranged, and the persistently hunted.

  Even before the car drew to a halt at the foot of the weedy old brick walk, she was up the stairs, skirts flying behind her, flinging into Warren’s room and shaking him wildly. He’d come in early that morning and had slept through most of the day.

  “Get up. Get up,” she hissed, spittle flying from between her teeth. “They’re here, for Chrissake. They’re here.”

  Wound in his sheets, Warren turned, cocking a bleary eye up at her. “What?”

  “They’re here, for Chrissake. The cops. The goddamn cops.”

  She started to haul him up and had him halfway out of bed before he came fully awake.

  “Who?”

  “The cops. I told you to lay low, didn’t I? Christ, you never listen, do you? You always know better than anyone. Go down now. Quick. Quick, goddamn it. Into the tunnel.”

  By then he was wide awake, grabbing trousers and struggling into shoes. He stumbled as she pushed him out the bedroom door and down the stairs. Outside, she could hear voices on the walk as she whirled backwards into the little turret room, bowing, stooping, lunging, and whisking away every sign of its occupant strewn carelessly about.

  The way down to the basement was through a small door behind the stairs. No sooner had it closed behind Warren than the rusty old cast-iron knocker clanked hard against the front door.

  Suki stood at the cellar door, her back to it, halfcrouched in the shadows, waiting several moments until she heard the sound of Warren’s scurrying steps receding back into the farthest reaches of the cellar.

  “Coming. Coming,” she hollered at the knocker as it sounded again. Even as she approached the door, her step slowed and her shoulders stooped as she underwent the miraculous transformation of aging in the course of a few moments.

  The two plainclothesmen standing out front on the porch were detectives. She knew that at once. They were of a type she knew all too well. This was no social call. She knew that, too. They were not out there raising money for the policeman’s ball. “This fourteen Bridge Street?” the younger man asked, but she was looking at the tall, white-haired one, peering down at her disapprovingly.

  “Says so right out front on the mailbox, don’t it?” she snapped back.

  “You Mrs. Klink?”

  “I go by that name.”

  One of them flashed a shield. “My name’s Sergeant Pickering. This here is Detective Lieutenant Mooney.”

  Suki’s gaze traveled slowly up the big, steeple-like figure. Its shoulders blocked the sunlight from her doorway. The face she saw at the top of the shoulders wore a pinched expression, as if its owner smelled something disagreeable.

  “May we come in?” Pickering asked.

  She chewed on her tongue, stalling for time and hoping that Warren was already out and into the abandoned sewer line beneath the house. “Suit yourself,” she muttered, none too graciously, and stood aside.

  The two detectives moved on the step outside, each deferring to the other, until finally Mooney mumbled something and stepped into the rank shadows.

  “Not used to strangers comin’ through here.” Suki led them in through the front hallway. She dragged a foot behind her as though she were lame. In the last several minutes she’d grown more stooped than ever.

  “I’ll bet,” Mooney replied. He trod cautiously around the dried cat stools and assorted mess littered over the floors. A fetor of something sweet and rotten hung in a haze above the little sitting room into which the old woman led them.

  With a crooked, trembling finger, she indicated a pair of frayed Morris chairs, their seats sprung and the gray horsehair innards spilling out. “Have a seat.”

  Mooney scowled down at the chair and waved the suggestion aside. “How long you been here, mother?” Suki let herself slowly down with a groan onto a four-foot bundle of old Life magazines trussed up with clothesline. “Maybe forty-five years now. Come here with my husband, nineteen forty-two.”

  Pickering consulted his pad. “His name was Klink?”

  “Fred Klink. Friends called him Freddy. Left me this place when he died so’s I’d never be out on the street. I own it free and clear.” The old lady’s back stiffened as she proclaimed this and she glowered straight at Mooney. “Bank’d just love to take it from me. Let ‘em try. They’ll rue the day.”

  Something in the way she’d said it made Mooney believe they would. Even though the sun was shining outside, it was dark in the room. One of the windows was cracked and had been covered over with a sheet of corrugated cardboard. The other three were grimed, almost glazed hard with a coating of soot.

  “How old’s this place?” Mooney gazed up at the wormy timbered beams that braced the sagging ceiling.

  “‘Bout a hundred and fifty years. Built during the Polk administration.”

  “Didn’t think there were too many more of these around,” Pickering said.


  “There aren’t,” the old lady snapped back with that edge of pride and defiance. “President Polk took tea here once,” she boasted.

  “How much land you sitting on, mother?” Mooney inquired.

  “Near three acres.”

  Pickering whistled. “Three acres in the financial district. No wonder the bank wants it. You must be some kind of millionaire.”

  “If I am, sonny, I sure got nothin’ to show for it.” She made a short, gruff noise that might have been a laugh.

  “That’s for sure,” Mooney mumbled.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking aloud. You here all by yourself?”

  “That’s right. Been that way since Mr. Klink, God rest him, passed on.”

  “The name Donald Briggs mean anything to you?”

  “Who?”

  “Briggs. Donald Briggs.”

  She cocked an eye at him, her tongue darting across her lips. “Briggs? No. Can’t say it does. Should it?”

  Mooney moved across to the window and peered out through the grimy panes. “You got a garage here? A car?”

  She started to laugh, then broke off suddenly as though she’d thought better of it. “Do I look like the sort drives a car?”

  Mooney regarded her through the dim, rancid air. “I get your point.... Mind if we have a look around?” She looked back and forth from one to the other of them, wariness gathering itself about her like a cloak. “Wouldn’t make no difference if I did, would it?”

  “You’ve got a right to insist on a warrant,” Pickering said. “We don’t have one with us now, but we can get one in twenty-four hours.”

  “Don’t bother on my score, sonny.” She groaned and rose creaking to her feet. “Just don’t make a mess of things,” she said and hobbled out.

  The two men stood alone in the room, gazing about in dismay at the filth and disorder.

  By then Mooney had given up all real hope of finding anything there. Driving up to the house that day, they’d scoured Bridge Street for a vintage Mercedes of any color and found no sign of one. There was no garage to the house, not even a driveway. Nor was there anyplace around back where a car might be driven and concealed from the street.

  Pickering was discouraged, too. You could see it in the young man’s face, lined and tired — looking a bit sheepish and contrite. Though he’d not discussed it with Mooney, he’d already come to many of the same conclusions regarding the house and its peculiar owner. Their “look around” was just that. Perfunctory and glum, as though they were merely going through the motions in order to file a report. They prowled through the lower floor, peering into rooms, skirting litter and cartons, opening closets reeking of camphor and mold that hadn’t been opened for years.

  Their way took them through the old lady’s kitchen where, amidst the yowling of hungry cats, Suki was sorting foliage and botanical specimens, tagging each and dropping them into canisters and old jam jars, their contents identified in spidery ballpoint letters on dirty strips of adhesive tape.

  On the stovetop, a huge old dented caldron simmered with a thick vapory fluid. It had formed a frothy scum at the top, lapping at the pot rim like a crater full of lava about to blow. The haze above the room was choking, causing the two detectives to seek relief in the upper reaches of the house. They found nothing on the second floor more controversial than the dusty old room beneath the eves where Suki dwelled in awesome disarray. His big pawlike hand covering his mouth and nose, Mooney pondered the massive wooden headboard of the bed, with its grotesque gargoyles staring down at him like demon totems. They moved through the room like swimmers breaststroking, pushing aside cobwebs, making their way to the door.

  There were two additional rooms on the second floor and a dank privy with a cracked commode and a ring of filth at its bottom. At the place where it was anchored to the floor, water leaked out, a brownish, lackadaisical trickle.

  The doors to the other two rooms were closed. When opened, they revealed no more than additional storage space used to warehouse cartons and boxes of clothes, stacks of old newspapers, some dating back to the forties. Life magazine with the smiling ghostly portraits of the great and near-great leaped up at them out of the shadows. Charles Lindbergh. Pierpont Morgan scowling above his huge red, tumid nose. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in three-quarter profile, dapper in a soft gray fedora, a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth. Winston Churchill, cigar in mouth, a pug dog on his arm, a twinkly curmudgeon. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio in the blissful first blush of early matrimony.

  There was electricity but no lamps, only some ceiling fixtures, mostly without bulbs, to illuminate the upper stories. They groped about in the dense shadows, colliding with boxes and strips of flypaper dangling from the ceiling, still covered with the dried husks of their hapless victims.

  “Let’s get the hell out of this.” Mooney swatted a lacy cobweb draped in his path.

  Out on the landing, just before they were about to go down, they saw the little extension ladder leading up to the cupola room.

  Pickering glowered up through a mote-filled sunbeam.

  “What do you suppose that is?”

  “More shit.”

  “Better have a look, anyway.”

  Because of the glass cupola and the lack of a window to ventilate the area, the room above was nearly twenty degrees warmer than those on the first and second stories.

  Covering their mouths and noses from the dust and smell of sour bedding, they stepped in. Mooney’s eyes ranged up the walls and ceiling, then dropped to the bed. “Who the hell sleeps here?”

  “The old dame, probably.”

  “I thought she slept in the bedroom downstairs.” Mooney opened the closet and gazed at the clothing hanging there. “Don’t look like old lady’s clothes to me.”

  Pickering gazed blankly back at him. They stood there a moment pondering the question.

  “Let’s get out of here before we’re cooked alive.” Mooney started to back down the extension ladder, which swayed ominously beneath his weight.

  Down in the kitchen again, Mooney asked the old lady, “Who sleeps in the little room up under the dome?”

  “I do,” Suki replied instantly.

  “Then who sleeps in the big bedroom on the second floor?”

  “I do. Used to be Mr. Klink’s room and mine before he died. I still use it from time to time. When the mood suits me.”

  “Whose clothing was that hanging in the closet up there?” Mooney asked.

  “Mr. Klink’s — I keep everything of his just as he left it.” She looked at them smiling as though pleased with the facility of her reply, then changed the subject quickly. “You boys find what you’re lookin’ for?”

  “There a cellar here?” Mooney asked, ignoring her question.

  “Sure.”

  “Where’s it at?”

  “Under your feet, just like any other.”

  Mooney scowled at her. “How do we get to it?”

  “Little door just under the stairs.”

  “Anything down there?” Pickering asked.

  “Just the same as up here.”

  “Oh?” Mooney grumbled. By that time he was smoldering. “We’ll have a look, anyway.”

  “No lights down there,” Suki said. “Better take this.” She took a candle and a holder from the shelf above the stove and lit the wick from the gas flame. Then she led them out to the cellar stair.

  The two men had to stoop beneath the shallow lintel of the little doorway, then trundled down the narrow stone stairs.

  Once at the bottom, they stood in the damp, strangely icy air with the candle flame guttering before them. Mooney held it above his head and peered into the cluttered murkiness. A thin veil of light filtered down from the grimy little half-windows set in the stone foundation above them. “God,” the detective muttered, “would you believe this?”

  Pickering kicked disconsolately at something on the floor.

  “Cold as a crypt down here.” M
ooney started to edge his way between a pair of broken old chifforobes, one listing dangerously on only three legs. At the sound of something scurrying over the dirt floor, he lunged back. “Rats,” he snarled at the unwelcoming shadows. “I’ve had it. Let’s blow this joint.”

  Upstairs, the old lady was still puttering about with her phials and canisters when the two detectives reappeared. She made a point of ignoring them as she went about pouring a sticky amber philtre from one beakered vessel into another.

  “You’ve got no garage around the back?” Mooney asked.

  “I said I didn’t before.”

  Mooney whisked cinder dust from his shoulders.

  “You sure you don’t know no Donald Briggs?” Pickering asked a little hopelessly.

  “Name means nothin’ to me.”

  The two men hovered there uncertainly as though unsure where to proceed next.

  “That all?” Suki helped them along.

  Mooney shrugged his shoulders. “I guess so. By the way, you’ve got rats in your cellar.”

  “Always had,” Suki replied phlegmatically. “They don’t bother no one. Besides, they nourish the cats.”

  There seemed little more to say. Abject, the two detectives skulked out and down the weedy brick walk to where the unmarked squad car awaited them.

  “Ditsy,” Pickering muttered when they’d settled back in their seats.

  Mooney sat grim and unspeaking, watching the sooty, humped skyline of Bridge Street roll past the window.

  “Never saw nothin’ like that,” Pickering went on, full of childish wonder.

  “What the hell was she cooking in that pot?”

  “Looked like a mess of grass to me.”

  “Did you get a whiff of it?” Mooney asked.

  “All I could smell was cat piss all over the place.”

  Mooney stared out the window, watching the tide of life teeming up and down Pine Street. “I smelled it, all right.” His voice was quiet, expressionless. “Smelled medicinal. Earthy. Herbal. I’ve smelled something like that before. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  Pickering was unimpressed. Mooney went on ruminating aloud. “She took the lid of that pot off to stir it. That’s when I got a blast of it. Made me a little dizzy for a second.”