Shadow Dancers (22 page)

“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.

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.”

By that time the red flush had spilled over Konig’s collar and was surging upward into his cheeks. “You bring me that Dancer I blood type. You show it to me. I want it here.”

Ferris Koops drove north on the Hutchinson River Parkway. He’d just passed through the little toll booth at Pelham and was meandering his way through the fringes of Mount Vernon where the pretty little Tudor houses staggered along the service lanes of the Parkway gave the impression of a toy village. It made him think of the little toy towns set up around the model train tracks in the big festive displays at Schwartz’s.

It was nearly the end of August. Ferris drove along, enjoying the good, hot feeling of sun beating down on his elbow sticking out the open window. He was going nowhere in particular.

He liked to drive, although he had no license to do so. When he was about seventeen, he took several driving lessons, but he’d never been able to pass the test. It was not the mechanical part of the test that stymied him but the written part. He’d taken it several times, studying hard before each exam and always certain he knew the answers. But then when it came to actually taking the test, something always happened and all the knowledge that he’d committed to memory would flee his head like a flock of startled sparrows.

It was pure chance that he found himself in this car, driving north into Westchester County on this dazzling summer day. Leaving his small efficiency walk-up apartment on East 81st Street that morning, he’d come down into the street wondering how he might occupy his time for the rest of the day. The evening before, he had cashed the check that came to him biweekly from the law firm on Madison Avenue. With money in his pocket and the long day stretching out before him, he had not the vaguest notion of what he would do until it was evening again and he could go home.

Suddenly there was the car. It was double-parked right near the curb in front of the building, its motor running and no one in it, as if the driver had just parked for a moment and dashed in someplace on a quick errand.

He had no recollection of how it happened, but the next thing he knew, he was in the car behind the wheel and driving out onto First Avenue. It scarcely occurred to him that he had done anything illegal. Had anyone proposed such a thing to him, he would have been appalled at the mere thought of it. But it was such a pretty car, deep green and spiffy bright, a late-model Pontiac coupe in spanking good condition. Just the sort of car they talked about on the TV — the green car of that strange fellow who went about doing awful things. He hated that person, whoever he was. He believed that individuals like that ought to be taken off the streets and put away forever so that people would never again be hurt by them.

He’d read all the stories about that person. How he’d cruise about in his green car up and down the highways, looking for a house, a person, something that looked “easy,” and then he’d move in. He would do horrible things to the people unlucky enough to be found there when he arrived. Then afterward, when he’d finished, he would steal things like televisions and cameras, computers and tape decks.

Driving along up the Hutchinson River, Ferris listened to music on the radio (a Bach fugue) and thought about that man. Deep within the mesmerizing repetitions of the music, he could almost imagine what the fellow looked like and what he might feel just cruising about all by himself, on possibly just such a fine morning as this — driving along, listening to music in just such a spiffy little green car as this. It seemed to him that the more he thought about the man, the more excited he became.

In the area of New Rochelle, he turned off at the Webster Avenue exit, with no idea why he did so, except that, possibly, the pretty little homes in the lightly wooded area looked so cozy and welcoming.

In the next moment he found himself rolling slowly up and down the little secondary road parallel to the Parkway and peering into all the little houses and yards, strangely silent now and devoid of people at that early hour of the day.

“Westchester state troopers said the body had been mutilated. Pathologists at the Valhalla Medical Center had indicated that there were signs that Mrs. Wybnishinski, a forty-three-year-old widow who lived alone in the modest two-story stucco dwelling, had been sexually assaulted. The coroner’s office reported evidence of bite marks all over the body, and the throat had been slashed. In addition, she’d been disemboweled with what police believed to be a large kitchen knife with a serrated blade. So far all attempts to turn up such a knife in the area have failed.

“The body was discovered by Mrs. Wybnishinski’s sister, Mrs. Clara Purse, who said she grew suspicious when she was unable to reach her sister by phone for three days. Normally, it was her custom to speak with her sister at least once a day.

“The partially clad body was discovered in the basement. The house had apparently been ransacked but nothing was taken. The car driven by the intruder, a nineteen eighty-five green Pontiac Firebird, was recovered late today on the West Side Drive. In a strikingly similar incident occurring in the Douglaston section of Queens, New York, earlier this year, witnesses also implicated a green car.

“Since early last year, fourteen incidents, each involving breaking and entering with intent to rob, also involving sexual assault, have occurred. Seventeen people have already died, including an infant. One woman, Mrs. Claire Pell of Howard Beach, New York, survived the attack only because a newspaper delivery man showed up at the precise moment of the attack.

“Tying yesterday’s brutal slaying of Mrs. Wybnishinski closer to the so-called Shadow Dancer murders was a crude drawing in large pink crayon letters scrawled on the basement wall directly above where the body was discovered. Police described the drawing as phallic in nature and signed, ‘The Monster of Chaos.’ Similar drawings signed in precisely the same way have been discovered at several murder sites around the New York area earlier this year. New Rochelle and New York City police are coordinating their investigations.”

Warren Mars slammed a fist down hard on the top of the TV. The picture shuddered, sending a series of jagged white lines radiating outward in waves from the center of the screen. He snapped off the set and started to prowl about the little room, muttering a low stream of epithets. In the next moment he swung his fist blindly, as if striking some invisible assailant. The wall before him appeared to sag, then buckle inward. Something inside his hand felt as though it had exploded. He yowled with pain.

“Hey, hey.” There was a great banging outside. Suki Klink flung open the door, her eyes wide and swiveling wildly about, as if she half-expected to find someone else there. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Sounds like you’re killing somebody up here.”

Ignoring her, Warren sat bent over the edge of the bed, his aching fist cradled in his lap for comfort. “Shit.”

“What’s ailing you?” Suki snapped, a look of flustered petulance about her.

“Get out of here,” he fumed, still bent over, grinding his fist into his lap. “Get the hell out …”