The Shadow Man (9 page)

The information Larsen had begun to compile, Andrews expanded. There were long lists of habits, hangouts, acquaintances and marked peculiarities of L.C. Chambers, Jay Jefferson, Willy Bennet, Alan Hobson, even Karpp himself. Each personality seemed, while often diametrically opposed to another, to be supportive of some of the other personalities. Intriguing also was the way Karpp occasionally had talked of one or more of his other personalities to friends, who never dreamed that Karpp was in truth talking about his corporeal self. Karpp, or whoever he happened to be at the moment, knew, of course. There was too much evidence of existence left behind by his various selves for him not to know. And apparently more and more often he remembered the specifics of what he did as those separate selves.

Gradually Andrews was gaining insight into the splintered agony and multifaceted evasions of Martin Karpp. And he was becoming, for reasons imprecise to him, increasingly fascinated and fearful.

Vincent Grammo locked the door to his electronics shop, then pulled down and locked the steel mesh guard of the sort that most New York merchants use to discourage theft. He glanced up at the night sky, visible in a rectangular patchwork above the building tops, and saw no stars. He sniffed rain in the air, so he hurried toward his subway stop. Better to wait underground in the emptiness of the station than to be caught in a shower. He was sure it wasn’t quite cold enough to snow.

This was influenza weather, the time of year he hated. He turned up his collar as he walked, sidestepping puddles as if they were perilous pits.

Within five minutes Grammo had descended to the tiled cavern of the station, purchased his token and pushed his way through the turnstile. There were three other passengers waiting for the subway. One was a down-and-out-looking man in a ragged red jacket. The others appeared to be like Grammo, businessmen heading home late after a rough day trying to stay afloat in the heavy seas of taxes, high interest rates and entangling government regulations.

The approaching growl of the subway sounded from the dark distances of the tunnel. A faint vibration played beneath Grammo’s soles and he instinctively leaned forward to see the train.

It was on him quickly, and with a squeal and a hiss glided to a stop. Its doors slid open to allow admittance into the wide, brightly lighted cars. The car nearest Grammo was empty. He got in quickly, walked across the car to the uncomfortable plastic bench adorned with graffiti and gratefully sat down. His legs needed the rest, even after the short walk from the shop. He was past fifty now; age worked its mischief on a man with merciless, slow deliberation, toying grimly with the doomed.

As the train lurched into motion and accelerated, Grammo happened to glance out the window toward the platform he’d just left. His mouth fell open and he surprised himself with his own choked, startled cry.

For just an instant, before the platform had flashed out of sight outside the subway windows, Grammo had seen a figure standing near the turnstiles. A figure instantly familiar in its distinctive square-shouldered blockiness, strikingly eerie in its stillness.

For a moment Grammo had thought it was a man-sized cardboard cutout, an advertisement. But he knew it hadn’t been that at all. He’d only hoped. The man had been wearing one of those flattish cloth caps, just as had Alan Hobson in the dead, deceptive past.

Grammo sat back and let the steady rocking of the car and the clacking of the rails soothe him. Metronome morphine. According to the percentages, even Vincent Grammo, worn down by time and molded by the pettiness of others, might have a near-perfect double, or at least one so similar that he’d be mistaken at a glance for Grammo. Especially if he wore some similar article of clothing. Say a certain kind of cap. That guy who’d been at the shop, Gerald Anderson, had planted ideas in his mind, that was all. Sometimes a person saw what he expected.

Still, Grammo might as well tell Anderson what—or who—he’d thought he’d seen on the subway platform. If Grammo could find the slip of paper with Anderson’s scribbled phone number.

He would search for the number, but not very hard. It really wasn’t that important, when he stopped to think about it. He didn’t want it to be important.

The subway rushed on through its tunnel of blackness. Vincent Grammo picked up a folded
Times
someone had left behind and began reading about unexpected things that had happened to others.

Vincent Grammo had been home and asleep for hours when Leola Raymond arrived at her apartment after getting off work at the Metropole. She shut the door, sighed in breathless soprano exaggeration, and with a dancer’s grace kicked off her shoes. They landed in darkness at opposite ends of the room. Her feet hurt, and she was hungry as well as exhausted. She reached for the switch to the secondhand floor lamp near the door.

The shabby apartment winked into illumination. It was messy: magazines scattered on the floor, dirty glasses standing like neglected chessmen on the coffee table, a noticeable layer of dust on the screen of the old black-and-white TV that received only two channels. Beyond an open doorway was an unmade bed, at the foot of which lay a bundle of unwashed clothes that Leola hadn’t found the time to lug to the laundromat. Like many attractive women, she was sloppy with her belongings, fastidiously neat with her person.

She strolled with a smooth, splay-footed gait into the tiny kitchen, and by the light from the open refrigerator made a sandwich of bologna and mustard and poured some milk into a glass that she noticed for the first time was cracked. It took her only a few minutes to finish her snack, so she left the refrigerator door hanging open until she’d deposited the milk-filmed glass on the small drop-leaf table. Then she casually swung the door shut, transforming the kitchen from dim to dark, and walked toward the bathroom. The refrigerator clicked on and hummed behind her, as if trying to communicate some parting message.

In the bathroom, Leola deftly turned on the water in the tub, knowing from practice the exact position of the hot and cold faucet handles for a lukewarm mix. She unzipped her dress, let it drop to the floor and kicked it into a corner. Panty hose and panties came off next, then she sat nude on the cool edge of the tub and studied her feet. Her toenails needed polish again, and hard ridges of callus were forming along the edges of her insteps and her heels. A girl had to take care of her feet, especially in a job like Leola’s. She stood up, got an emery board from the medicine chest, then sat back down and idly began filing her calluses. After her bath she would repaint her toes. If she wasn’t too tired. She remembered that Jerry Andrews—Senator Jerry Andrews—was due here at nine the next morning—rather, later this morning. She stopped filing and absently ran her fingertips along the inside of a bare thigh. Andrews was kind of stimulating in a going-to-gray sort of way.

Leola tossed the emery board up onto the washbasin and watched with disappointment as it teetered and dropped onto the discolored linoleum floor. She knew that by now the tub would be filled to the proper level, so she stood, bent over and rotated the faucet handles until the rushing jet of water was reduced to a twisting trickle that quickly disappeared.

She stepped into the tub and lowered herself gradually, scooting her buttocks down on the smooth porcelain until the warm water reached her armpits. Leola moaned almost sensuously as her exhausted body, which had danced relentlessly through most of that evening, responded to the encompassing, penetrating warmth. Her muscular right leg twitched involuntarily as it relaxed.

Leola was reaching for the soap when she thought she heard a soft creaking sound from outside the bathroom, a sound that momentarily made her bath water seem cold. Frantically she tried to remember if she’d bolted the hall door. Her memory played back conflicting versions of her entrance into the apartment. She sat very still, as if posing for an elegant nude portrait, listening, listening...

She heard nothing.

“Hello?” she called, in a voice whose loudness sprang at her.

After almost a full minute of silence, she let out a long breath and reached again for the soap.

Then the angle of light subtly changed in the bathroom. She knew without looking that the door had opened.

When she did look, she immediately recognized the moment she had dreaded.

“Oh, God, make it quick at least!” she said, and pressed herself back and up against the surface of the tub, so that if at all possible her hair would remain unmussed.

At five minutes to nine, Andrews knocked on the door to Leola Raymond’s apartment and got no response. He decided to wait until exactly nine o’clock before either leaving or knocking more loudly. Leola might be getting dressed, or she might have stepped out. Andrews leaned against the wall opposite her door and began whistling tonelessly under his breath.

A door down the hall opened, and an obese woman wearing red boots and a tentlike yellow coat walked toward Andrews on her way to the stairs. As she drew nearer, she glowered at him as if questioning his presence and warning him that she would stand for no nonsense.

Andrews, feeling suddenly awkward and as out-of-place as she implied, gave her a reflex rigid smile meant to put them both at ease. “I’m looking for Miss Raymond,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where she is.”

The woman looked away from him and continued walking. He heard the wooden stairs strain beneath her passage as she descended out of sight. Far below Andrews the front door opened with a blast of rushing air and noise, then closed again to silence, like the airlock of a spaceship. He decided to knock again on Leola’s door.

Still no response. Maybe she was still deep in sleep, unable to hear. Andrews did have an appointment for nine o’clock. He glanced again at his watch, knocked three times with increasing loudness. Then he tried the door.

Unlocked. He entered, calling Leola’s name, and then closed the door behind him.

The apartment was a mess, a silent, apparently vacant jumble of dirty dishes, strewn magazines and discarded articles of clothing. Housekeeping obviously wasn’t one of Leola’s accomplishments.

“Leola?” Andrews’ voice seemed muffled in the sunny, coldly silent apartment. He could see the bed in an adjoining room, unmade and empty. She must have gotten up. He took a few steps, looked into the kitchen. More dirty dishes, the remains of a TV dinner that might have been days old. He walked to another door and opened it. It was to the bathroom.

For a minute that was hours long, Andrews stood numbly in a rictus of revulsion and stared. Leola was sitting up in the bathtub, her lips barely parted, her eyes half open and glistening in the sunlight quietly blasting through the shadeless opaque window. On the linoleum beside the tub was what looked like a rust-stained razorblade. The water in the tub was thick and red, and it was its stillness and the stillness of the startlingly pale Leola that was horrible. She reminded Andrews of some terrible morsel grotesquely half-submerged in cherry Jell-O.

Bile rose in a bitter rush to the back of his throat and he turned away, staggered from the bathroom. He leaned over and supported himself on the back of the sofa with trembling outstretched arms, using all his willpower to keep from vomiting. He stared at his hands; concentrating on every tiny mark and contour of flesh, and let the vivid image of what he’d just seen fade around the edges until it was bearable.

Then he went to the telephone and called Amos Franks.

“It isn’t suicide,” Andrews told Franks, after Leola’s body had been removed. “It was made to look like it, but she didn’t kill herself.”

Franks was making some final notations in a leather-covered note pad. “You might be right,” he said. The fingerprint man finished and left, waving a casual goodbye. Franks and Andrews were alone now. “Know where he’s hurrying off to?” Franks asked.

“Where?”

“Lunch.”

Andrews stared at him.

“I mention that to help put this thing in perspective,” Franks explained. “You’re not used to violent death, much less the kind of violent death that leaves loose ends. We are.”

“You’re not telling me you’re going to call this a suicide, are you, Amos?”

“Nope. Too much coincidence now. But I am telling you we’re not going to rule out suicide.”

“What about a note?”

Franks appeared pained. “What note? You think all suicides leave a note so things will be tidy for us? It’s not that way, Senator.”

“Three people involved with Martin Karpp have died within the space of two weeks.”

“Which is why we’re going to start digging,” Franks said, “even though we don’t have much of a shovel. And which is why you should go back to Washington, Senator.”

Andrews grinned with realization. “It would be too big a coincidence if I were killed, wouldn’t it?”

Franks nodded. “If there is something going on here, that might be precisely why you haven’t been killed. The death of a U.S. senator would make big, big waves. A doctor, a bartender, a topless dancer, they make ripples. Ripples don’t last as long or reach as far as waves. Ripples don’t swamp boats.”

“Then I’m safe. Why should I return to Washington?”

“Because you’re less safe every day. They can’t let you snoop around very much longer.”

“They?”

“If there is a they. I never was much of a believer in the conspiracy theory. I’ve seen people killed on the spur of the moment over a stolen parking space.”

“What about Martin Karpp?”

“What about him?” Amos Franks asked, irritated. “He’s either here or he’s there. Just because some baretitted bimbo claims she saw him last night doesn’t mean he’s here in the city. On the other hand, the fact that he’s under lock and key in a maximum-security institution means he
isn’t
here in the city.”

“She wasn’t what you said, Amos.”

Franks couldn’t keep a dull gleam of surprise from his eyes. “All right, Senator.”

“And she saw him. She ought to recognize a man she’s been to bed with!”

“Don’t bet on that,” Franks said. “She was mistaken, Senator. That’s all there was to that. Because that’s all it could have been.”

“Amos,” Andrews said, “I like you and respect your ability, but there are certain well-traveled and restrictive channels to your reasoning.”

“Fish don’t fly,” Franks said, “and if they could, I bet they wouldn’t swim so well.”

Andrews walked to a window and stared out at a weathered brick wall beyond the dark iron railing of a fire escape. What Amos had implied was true: the very thoroughness and reliance on firm facts that made him good at his job worked against him in something as vague and unusual as what was happening. He had only grisly results to work with, signposts to nowhere. The victims in question were not unlike hundreds of other victims he’d seen during the course of his career. Andrews could expect bureaucratic competence and sympathy from Amos, nothing more.

But Andrews did know someone who could both swim and fly. And burrow.

He said goodbye to Franks and walked out of the death-tainted normalcy of Leola Raymond’s apartment. As he left the building, he expected to see some of the other tenants in the halls or gawking from behind partially opened doors. But the halls, and the sidewalk in front of the building, were empty. In this neighborhood, no one was interested. They had already begun to forget Leola Raymond.