“Fingerprints, dentition, serology,” Joan Winger threw in for good measure.
“… there’s not a chance in ten million that Koops and Mars aren’t the same individual. But I agree with you, Mooney,” Konig rattled on. “The amazing thing is that the periods of fertility and sterility coincide perfectly with the shifts in character.”
“How can you explain that?” Mooney asked.
Konig grinned above the smoldering stump of his cigar. “I can’t.”
“Possibly the fact that he was far more sexually active in the Mars mode than he was as Koops,” Joan Winger speculated aloud. “That alone could have made him more apt to be azoospermic during the Mars periods.”
“Or possibly this is some aspect of his particular psychopathology.” Konig scratched his chin while the other two regarded him questioningly. He continued: “The mysterious transforming power of the mind over matter. The force of self-delusion. The degree of self-disguise.” Something approximating doubt flickered in Konig’s eye, then was gone in a trice. Once more he was all grins and affability. He wagged a stubby finger at Mooney. “But so far as pinning down your boy’s identity,” he went on, “the sperm’s a relatively minor detail when stacked up against all the major ones we’ve nailed him on. Take my word for it, Mooney. This is your ‘Dancer.’ Him and him alone. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
The huge grin on Konig’s face widened as he watched Mooney try to absorb all that had been said.
“Does that answer your question?” Dr. Winger inquired.
For a moment it appeared it didn’t, but then something in Mooney relented.
“I guess so,” he sighed, tapping his pad and flicking it shut. “So much for Ferris Koops, alias Warren Mars, alias the Shadow Dancer, or whatever. I guess you can go ahead now and have your press conference.”
Shortly after Mooney left, Paul Konig and Joan Winger stood about in her office. Konig pretended to busy himself by continuing to study the slides of boot prints stuck up on the light box. “Amazing,” he murmured to himself. “You really did a remarkable job here.”
“Oh, well, that …” She frowned, checking telephone messages left on her desk. It was her way of trying to discourage the type of conversation she both anticipated and dreaded would follow.
“Well, I just want to go on record as saying you did one hell of a job on this.”
“Fine.” She was glancing over a toxicological report and looked up at him over the rim of her glasses. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
She returned to the report, hoping he would go. But when it became apparent he had not yet finished, she looked up again.
“I really must apologize.”
“There’s no need to. We have a small personality conflict. That’s perfectly normal in many professional relationships.”
“No, no.” He flung his hands up angrily. “The conflict was all on my side. My fault. You understand?”
“Okay. Fine.” She wanted to stop him before he could go on. But there was no stopping him now.
“It’s just that — that I look at you,” he went on blusteringly, “and I see my own kid.” He looked at her, trying to gauge her reaction. “Not that you resemble her at all. You don’t. But when I look at you, I see her. You understand?”
She nodded. “I understand.” Her reply was barely a whisper.
“I’ve been mean and bitchy to you.” He looked around, casting about for words. “It’s just that having you around here all the time is …”
She knew he was about to say “painful,” but couldn’t bring himself to utter the word.
“… uncomfortable,” was the word he finally settled for. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair to you. I haven’t been fair. I’ve tried to make you feel that it was your overall competence as a pathologist that I was objecting to. That was a lie, Joan. My lie. I didn’t know I was lying at the time. I do now. You’re a superb pathologist. Crackerjack practitioner. I’ve given you nothing but grief since your appointment here, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
THIRTY-NINE
“CAPOTE’S THE BEST HORSE RUNNING TODAY.”
“Who said? If you ask me, that colt was a two-year-old champion by default last year. He’s never run in even mildly respectable time.”
“Eight’ll get you five, he’ll be one hundred percent ready for the Derby off two races. If he runs like I figure he will in the Wood, finishes well and runs in the top three, that means he’s ready.”
“Ready for nothing. He was a seven to five favorite in the Gotham Stakes nine days ago and barely managed to drag his ass in fourth, nine and a half lengths out in his debut as a three-year-old.”
The talk was loud and spirited at the bar that night at the Balloon. Patsy was shaking drinks and Mooney was surrounded by his old crowd.
The evening news had been full of the Shadow Dancer case. Clips of the river, Suki Klink, the Bridge Street house, the apartment on 81st Street dominated the screen. Over and over again with tireless obsession, they showed the picture of men in dinghies with grappling hooks towing the body to shore. The New York Post ran huge cover portraits of Ferris Koops in death, small black rings circling his eyes.
There was a rush to give interviews, particularly by people barely associated with the case, but all, nonetheless, eager to grab off some small patch of glory for its resolution. The mayor, looking more relaxed than he’d looked in months, congratulated the commissioner, who congratulated the force in general for its “fine cooperative effort.” The networks trotted out one psychologist after the next. All of them lent their windy expertise to the enigma of the “multiple personality.” Speaking specifically about Koops, they illuminated his particular psychosis in easy lay terms for the masses. It all sounded astute and quite impressive, particularly from individuals who’d never spent a minute in Koops’s company. You had to wonder why it had taken so long to bring the case to a successful conclusion.
Paul Konig and Joan Winger were interviewed and confirmed that the body recovered from the river that morning was indeed that of Ferris Koops and that known physical characteristics of the Dancer did coincide with those of the cadaver.
Sylvestri gave an interview on the six o’clock news, in which, in all modesty, he implied that in the several weeks’ time he’d been assigned to the case, more progress had been made toward its resolution than in all twenty-one months prior, when the investigation had first begun. But it lacked conviction, and several times during the course of the interview he gave conflicting versions of the story and seemed confused about key details of the case.
The interview that was shown most frequently was the on-site one with Mooney himself. It had taken place that morning after the body had been retrieved from the icy waters of the river. As the senior officer there, he was bombarded with questions from news and television reporters, all clamoring for information.
Weary from his all-night vigil on the river, he fielded questions with his usual testy forbearance, then startled everyone, including himself, by crediting Detective Sergeant Rollo Pickering with having broken the case with his discovery of the abandoned sewer line running beneath the house on Bridge Street. He said nothing of the fact that it was he who had sent Pickering up to the city registry and the municipal archives on the keen hunch that just such a hidden passage might actually exist.
Instantly, Pickering became the man of the hour. Mulvaney, looking dismayed and uncomfortable, was interviewed at Police Plaza. He declared that Pickering would be decorated for valor and, almost certainly, promoted to the rank of lieutenant.
On the six o’clock news, Pickering described the discovery of the tunnel, the long vigil of the night before, and how he had dived into the icy water in pursuit of the fleeing Dancer. Whether by oversight or design, he never once mentioned Mooney or any part the veteran cop had played in the resolution.
Mooney took all of that quite philosophically. For him, it was reward enough to have deprived Sylvestri of much of the glory of the final victory.
The phone had started to ring shortly after Mooney arrived at the Balloon that evening. Everyone had seen the six P.M. news and his interview on the river. The calls were from colleagues on the force, old cops he’d worked with, now retired, and beloved track cronies. Mostly, they were of a congratulatory sort. They kept coming in. After a while, Mooney declined to take any more, instructing Patsy to say he’d left for the evening. What he’d neglected to tell anyone that evening was that in accordance with his deal with Mulvaney, he’d tendered his resignation in a terse, but thoroughly civil cable to the commissioner that day.
He took a quiet supper with Fritzi at an inconspicuous rear table after the dinner rush. They drank a good bottle of Bordeaux and spoke little. She could see that he was tired but still keyed up from the day’s events. But she couldn’t say if the source of that excitement was elation or anger. She knew there was reason for both.
“How did you figure it all out, Mooney?” she asked.
“I didn’t. Baumholz did it for me. He appeared in a dream and told me.”
“So now you’ve become a mystic. Soon you’ll want to go to church with me.”
“That’s not mysticism. It’s old age and fear of death. It’s only when you’re thirty-five that you can afford the luxury of that good old American pragmatism.”
“Are you pleased?” she asked and refilled his glass. “Is it a relief?”
He sipped his wine and thought a moment, then nodded. He was more relieved than he could say. “Yes. But not for the reasons you think.”
“Not sweet revenge?” she smiled at him archly.
“I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t … but it’s not that entirely.”
“Then it’s about your retiring.”
His jaw dropped. “Who told you that?”
“No one. I could see it when you came in tonight. It was all over your face.”
“How did I look?”
“A little on edge, but very happy.”
They were both silent for a while.
“I’d been thinking about it a long time, Fritz.” He clung to her hand as if he were shaking it. “I figured I just don’t want to wait around another nine months for a few extra bucks in my pension check.”
“I don’t blame you. Life’s too short. I’d rather you spend that nine months with me. I don’t care to share my time with Mulvaney and Sylvestri.”
“A marriage made in heaven,” Mooney quipped. “They deserve each other.” Fritzi agreed, and suddenly they were both hooting wildly at the image of those two locked in poisonous embrace over the next decade.
“I don’t mean I’m gonna sit around on my duff for a year and a half and just metabolize,” Mooney went on. “I can teach at the police college. I can do consultantships for corporations. I can even become a private gumshoe.” He grew excited at the prospect even as he spoke. She calmed him down with a firm pat on the back of his hand. “Or, you could do nothing for a while, which would suit me just fine. Why think about it now? We’ve got plenty, Frank, and that means you have all the time in the world to decide.”
The notion of a world in which he had “plenty of time” was one he’d never been in a position to entertain. As he thought about it then, the prospect was disquieting. He was prepared to live with a bit of uncertainty for a while. All he knew for sure was that never again would he work for anyone other than himself.
Later, he went out to the bar. The Christmas tree and wreaths shimmered there festively. He joined old friends for drinks. Track cronies — Billy Ange, Hy Wershba, Teddy O’Malley. They drank stingers and talked about great old champions: Sea Biscuit, Cannonade, Foolish Pleasure, Gato del Sol, Spend A Buck — the names rang down like thunderclaps. They spoke of turf and odds and handicaps and legendary jockeys: Cordero, Shoemaker, Laffitt Pincay, Jr., and Pat Day. They evoked days of past glory and shattering defeats, the proud unconquerable spirit of noble mounts, sires and dames, scions with class bloodlines who never compromised.
They were loud and raucous. They drank to the new year and to Mooney’s impending liberation. People standing nearby at the bar watched them and eavesdropped on their conversation. Mooney laughed out loud that evening several times, out of sheer joy. Out of relief. The old dread, the vague, gnawing, ceaseless discomfiture seemed past. Yet, the face of Ferris Koops remained, still present in his mind’s eye. It was not the bloated mask with the grotesque ringed eyes he’d seen that morning, but, rather, an image of the small outcast child, cowering alone all by himself in a tony institution for the unwanted offspring of the well-to-do, locked in the basement of a derelict tenement in Hell’s Kitchen, and then the grimy little nomad, foraging with other nomads through the trash baskets of Grand Central Terminal after some small scrap of survival.
That evening before he went to bed he lugged his old telescope and tripod up to the roof. With the 500 X power lens, he scanned the April night sky to make certain that the universe was still there, all intact. There was Cassiopeia up to the north and Draco trailing like a long snake directly overhead. Behind him, Bootes flew like a great kite with brilliant Arcturus glittering in its tail, and there the rainy Pleiades had risen behind him in the east. They had promised a shift in fortune, and they had delivered. Everything appeared to be in order. Everything was in its place, all of his coordinates and guide-posts, the old tried-and-true friends of his troubled youth. They were all still there, shining down, timeless, imperturbable, scarcely deigning to note all the ceaseless fret and turmoil of mortal man below.
That night he slept the untroubled dreamless sleep of infants.
EPILOGUE
EIGHT MONTHS LATER, MOONEY HAD OCCASION to be passing through Grand Central. It was at the end of one of those dog-day August afternoons. The city had sweltered under a blazing sun that had hammered mercilessly down for nearly a week. Daily, New York had suffered from hundred-degree temperatures, water shortages, drought alerts, and brownouts from record power demands.
Along with thousands of other limp and dazed commuters, Mooney descended the escalator, conveyed downward into the churning inferno below. Before him, a blur of stagnant motion shivered equivocally like a mirage in the desert. His damp seersucker suit clung to his back and the calves of his legs. His wet inner thighs chafed as he walked. The air inside the terminal was sour and suffocating. It smelled like the meaty breath of a bear that had recently fed.
Mooney was not rushing for a train (he pitied the poor beggars who were), but merely taking a shortcut through the terminal out to Lexington Avenue. At the foot of the escalator, his eye was drawn to a noisy flurry of activity outside of Zaro’s, where people lined up to buy breads and rolls and fast foods to take home for supper. Somewhere toward the rear of that line, but clearly separate from it, he glimpsed what appeared to be a dark, spreading stain just to the right of Track 28.
Whatever it was, it caught his eye and held it until, from all of that welter of chaos, a form gradually emerged. It was a person of indeterminate sex, perched atop a mound of odd bundles and packages.
At that distance, Mooney couldn’t make out the features of the person seated there. Still, he was struck by a sense of unmistakable recognition. As uncomfortable as he was in damp clothes and with chafed inner thighs, curiosity drew him closer to the place. Sure enough, it was Suki Klink. She’d taken up her old hunting grounds again outside Track 28, where weary commuters lurched and staggered out to the platform for the 5:40 to Poughkeepsie.
Swaddled in layers of clothes in that suffocating heat, she appeared to be enormous. Far heavier than he’d recalled. The apple-red cheeks seemed to have inflated to the point where the eyes had sunk into barely perceptible creases just above them. Now, there were only the sparse eyelashes to indicate the place they’d once occupied.
She sat amid bundles and packages, shopping carts stacked with magazines, newspapers, deposit cans and soda bottles, all of the detritus of an “all-disposable” civilization. The impression she conveyed, however, was not one of squalor, but r
ather something regal, on a grand scale, rather like a pasha presiding over a vast desert kingdom. She was wearing dirty white anklets and her swollen ulcerous legs stuck out from beneath layer upon layer of voluminous skirts.
She scarcely deigned to look up when he greeted her. The second attempt he made, he leaned down and stared directly into her face. “How are you, Mrs. Klink?” he asked. This time she stirred. It was like waking a drowsing lizard. Her head rose, her eyes cracked open, and a red tongue darted out across her lower lip. The movement was immense and stately, like that of a slightly crapulous Buddha.
“Remember me? Lieutenant Mooney. I came to visit you over on Bridge Street.”
The eyes embedded deep within the doughy flesh were bemused and shrewdly wary. “You a cop?”
Mooney laughed. “Used to be. Retired now. How’ve you been?” He glanced around at the assorted bundles. “Looks like times are pretty good for you.”
“You the son of a bitch who got Warren?” Her voice was full of reproach.
“If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been somebody else. He was a naughty boy.”
“I don’t say he wasn’t.” She hastened to cover the impression she’d conveyed. “I don’t blame you. Not one bit. I’m glad you got him. He was bad. Did bad things.” Her great girth stirred and the bundles shifted beneath her. “That’s not the way I taught him. I tried to teach him right.”
Mooney nodded sympathetically. “Sure you did.” She watched him intently, as if trying to gauge the sincerity of his reply. In the next moment, the florid skin above the cheeks stretched into a smile. Yellow stumps of teeth showed beneath the rubber blue lips. She grinned. “You hear about me?”
“No. should I have?”
“Sold my place on Bridge Street.”
“No kidding? To the bank? I know they were after it.”
“Well, they got it.”
“I’m sorry,” Mooney said, and he genuinely was. He hated to see banks win anything. The notion of that old ramshackle hovel plunked right down smack in the midst of the financial district, like a huge wen on the smooth marmoreal nose of American corporate grandeur, pleased him mightily. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
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