The Shadow Man (5 page)

Andrews didn’t want to risk a breaking-and-entering charge, so he went to see Captain Amos Franks immediately after checking into his New York hotel. Franks hadn’t been keen on Andrews snooping about, but he was either too considerate or too wise to try to prevent it. With barely concealed reluctance, he’d given Andrews a key to Dana Larsen’s apartment. There was something in Franks’ demeanor that suggested to Andrews that he wouldn’t have turned over the key if the case had been anything but a virtually closed file.

Larsen had lived alone in a condominium unit on the twentieth floor of a West Fifty-seventh Street building not quite plush enough to employ a doorman. When Andrews pushed on the door, it swung open stiffly onto stale air and unmistakable emptiness. It was as if the possessions of the dead had taken on the peculiar blankness of the dead. The shelves of books and knickknacks, the tables, chairs, opaque-screened TV—all seemed to be nonfunctional museum pieces, for observation only. Maybe what gave that impression was the faint layer of almost imperceptible dust over everything. Maybe it was something else.

Andrews stepped inside and closed the door.

For a while he simply wandered from room to room, getting the feel of the place, trying without realizing it to put himself back in time, in Dana Larsen’s shoes.

But there was no real key to the man here, or to the life that he had led. Only a morbid quietude. A distant uncle in Ohio was to arrange for the removal of Dana’s effects, Franks had said. The police had made their cursory examination; other than that, everything in the apartment was as Dana had left it, expecting to return to sit down, to walk about, to work, to eat, to watch TV, to sleep, to wake.

One of the two bedrooms had been converted into an office. Andrews entered the room, glanced about at glass-fronted bookcases, a gray file cabinet, a fancy mahogany desk with ball-and-claw feet, a low table with a portable electric typewriter on it. By the Touch-Tone white desk phone was an automatic answering device. Andrews sat down at the desk and played the tape, but no one had left a message for Dana.

Andrews sat back. Was that normal? Surely the police had investigated the answering device, and they seemed to consider it so. But at least some of Dana’s old calls should be on the tape.

Then Andrews reminded himself that Dana had been away from home for quite a while before his death. Possibly his acquaintances in the city didn’t realize he was back. Or it was possible that he had been there to answer whatever calls had come in and seldom used the answering device. It wasn’t activated now, as a matter of fact.

Andrews began to go through Dana’s desk. He found only the expected papers, receipts and unpaid bills, along with some notes and a first-draft typed bibliography on the multiple personality phenomenon. There was nothing on Martin Karpp.

After replacing things as they were in the desk drawers, Andrews got up and walked to the filing cabinet near the window. He was glad to find that Dana had arranged things alphabetically. Under “Multiple Personality” were several file folders, also arranged alphabetically. Andrews leafed through the index tabs to “K.” There was no file for Martin Karpp.

Andrews slid the file drawer shut on its smooth casters and stood staring out the window, down at the stream of early-evening, miniaturized Manhattan traffic. The rushing, horn-punctuated sound of the ritualistic turmoil wafted up to him. On the opposite side of the street two men had hurried for the same empty cab and now stood apparently arguing. The cab pulled away and left them both standing. From his observation point, it was impossible for Andrews to judge their reaction.

Almost as impossible as it was for him to try to judge Dana’s past actions and reactions.

Then Andrews remembered the brief span of long-ago time when he and Dana had roomed together in college. And he remembered where Dana had put those few things he especially wanted withheld from prying eyes.

In the office closet Andrews found the set of golf clubs. In college, the golf bag had been a tattered canvas affair. This bag was of two-tone blue vinyl. But like the old one, it would be too bulky, unconcealable and obviously inexpensive to interest a sneak thief.

Andrews wrestled the bag from the closet and removed the clubs. There was a honeycombed plastic surface near the mouth of the bag that kept the club shafts separated. Andrews hooked his fingers through two of the holes and pulled until the separator slid out. Then he turned the empty golf bag upside down.

Dana’s notes on Martin Karpp fell out onto the carpet.

Andrews stayed in Dana Larsen’s office well past suppertime, reading about Martin Karpp. Some of the material was familiar, publicized as soon as the media had dug into Karpp’s background immediately after Hugh Drake’s murder. Andrews read again about the death of Karpp’s parents in an auto accident when he was an infant, then the orphanage when he was two, followed by the inhuman sexually brutal treatment given him by his foster parents, who finally were prosecuted. But not until Martin Karpp, writhing and helpless physically and mentally, finding no escape outward, had escaped inward.

At first Karpp had experienced what he thought of as blackouts, until the evidence of his other selves became overwhelming even to him. Then those other selves intruded into his consciousness, took on individuality and substance there. By the time he was eighteen he came to know them, accept them, the various splintered refugees from himself, of himself.

They had names. There was Alan Hobson, who stole. Willy Bennet, who sometimes thought he was a woman. L.C. Chambers, successful businessman and big spender who had run up debts all over Manhattan. Paul Liggett, in many ways the most real of Karpp’s involuntarily fabricated identities. And of course Jay Jefferson, social conscience and political firebrand who had slain a potential president. All of them, in their way, seemed to have led better lives than Martin Karpp, who lived out his solitary agony in a room in a small West Side walk-up and worked long hours as a short-order cook at Haskell’s Hamburger Emporium on East Fortieth. Until a twitch of his finger on a trigger had brought him infamy.

Most of Karpp’s identities had artistic talent. Interspersed with the notes were drawings or copies of paintings done by them. Some of the artwork seemed normal enough, even reassuringly unimaginative. Some of it conveyed a sense of madness, of fierce loneliness that pulled at the heart.

The light outside had failed. Andrews didn’t remember switching on the shaded desk lamp, but he had done so unconsciously as he read Dana’s notes. The windowpane across the room gave back a two-dimensional image of a man hunched over a desk, absorbed in the disarray of papers spread before him. For an instant Andrews felt a disturbing sense of unfamiliarity with the man in the windowpane.

Andrews watched the man raise his left arm and turn his wrist. Then he looked away from the window at his watch. Nine twenty-five. He was tired. His back ached. He was hungry.

Arranging the notes Dana had printed on yellow legal-size paper into a reasonably neat stack, Andrews wrapped a thick rubber band around them, folded them once and attempted to tuck them into his sport coat pocket. They wouldn’t fit. He spotted a brown vinyl portfolio near the typewriter on the table, unfolded the notes and slid them inside.

With the portfolio tucked beneath his arm, he switched off the desk lamp, maneuvered his way through the darkened apartment and out into the hall.

It was easy enough to get a cab at that time of night. Andrews climbed in and gave the driver the address of his hotel. What was called for now, Andrews decided, as the cab nosed pugnaciously out into traffic, was a thick steak at the hotel restaurant, a long, relaxing shower and some deep sleep. The cab edged forward like an eager predator, seemed to sense an opening in the traffic and sprang to fill the gap. Andrews’ shoulder blades pressed into the worn, firm upholstery of the rear seat.

He hadn’t any suspicion that he’d been watched.

The Dionysus Club was exclusive and expensive. For the price, it guaranteed absolute privacy for any number of activities. Millikin had been bringing Ellen Andrews here for over a year.

On the bed in the mirrored room, she lay sprawled limply on her back beside him, one leg crooked to the side so that it lay across both of his. Millikin’s eyes dispassionately surveyed her nude form, the high, firm breasts that seemed as young as she would like to be, the washboard ripple of her ribs, the long legs spoiled by knees that were unfortunately knobby. There were a few more purplish webs, like faint ink marks, just beneath the surface of the flesh on her right leg, where more tiny blood vessels had ruptured. It was something you seldom saw on a younger woman, Millikin mused in his post-coital rumination.

Ellen hadn’t seemed her usual voracious self this time, he thought. She had tried, but even the various devices furnished by the management had failed to arouse her to the intensity Millikin knew she possessed. He looked up and observed them in the mirrored ceiling: two very middle-aged people, a woman kept a lean, marred version of youth by constant dieting, and a paunchy gray-haired man whose once athletic body had taken on the consistency of pale putty despite the frequent use of sunlamps. He looked away.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said, to take his mind off what was bothering him.

“Nothing important,” Ellen answered beside him.

He ran his fingertips over her bare, cool shoulder. “Still, something...”

In the quiet room, he could hear her breathing with a bellows regularity. That, too, bothered Millikin, as if it were a reminder of their mortality.

“A man came to the house to see Jerry,” she said. “He told me he had an appointment, but I’m sure he didn’t. I’m sure he really knew Jerry wasn’t home. I can tell when men lie.”

Millikin propped himself up on one reddened elbow, causing a series of slight swaying motions in the water-bed. “So what did he want?”

“He wanted to know where Jerry was. I told him New York. He asked where specifically, but I said I didn’t know.”

“Do you?”

“No. And I don’t particularly care.”

“Then?” Millikin asked.

“Then? He went away.”

“Why should that disturb you?”

“He never left a name. If he really had an appointment, he’d surely have left his name.”

“But you already told me you were sure he was lying about that.”

“Yes, and there’s something else. I remember seeing him some years ago, when Jerry was a representative, at one of those dull, formal Washington functions. He stuck in my memory because someone told me he was a spy. Just like that, they said he was a spy. I assumed with the CIA.”

Now Millikin understood.

“What if they’re checking on Jerry?” Ellen said. “What if they find out about us, make it all public? Jerry would almost have to divorce me then. He’d have no reason not to.”

Millikin lay back on the bed and thought for a moment. “Probably there’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “And even if someone did discover our arrangement, Jerry now has the clout to be able to keep it quiet.”

“No one has that much clout if the media gets hold of it.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Millikin told her. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be the end of things for you if Jerry did throw you out. Worse things could happen.” He reached back to a master control panel and threw a switch that brought soft music into the room.

“Worse things might,” Ellen said. She rose and began to dress.

Andrews wasn’t known in New York. And if someone did think he looked familiar, they wouldn’t expect a U.S. senator to be staying at the Hayes Hotel. Still, to be on the safe side, Andrews had signed himself in as Gerald Anderson and paid in advance.

Located near the theater district, the Hayes had once been one of Manhattan’s better hotels. Vestiges of elegance haunted the vast lobby, with its ornate brass bank of elevators, its inlaid marble floor that showed where the new red commercial fiber carpet didn’t cover. The sweeping stairway leading to the mezzanine, where the banquet rooms were, was a tarnished work of art. Off one side of the lobby was the hotel lounge, a place of dimness, red padded leather and ancient glossy walnut, where beneath a once resplendent chandelier sat a jukebox and a Wonder Woman pinball machine. Off the opposite end of the lobby was the hotel’s relatively new restaurant and coffee shop. It was clean, gave prompt service and provided simply cooked, overpriced meals.

Andrews had finished his sirloin steak. He sat now sipping coffee and gazing out the window at the passing pedestrians and cab-dominated traffic. He hadn’t yet gone up to his room and still had the vinyl portfolio with him, resting on the chair next to his. He put down his coffee cup in its chipped saucer, reached over and opened the portfolio.

He withdrew the sheet of paper that most interested him—the list of people who had touched one or another of Karpp’s separate personalities, not suspecting that they knew only a fragment of a man. Their names were listed neatly in a column, and after each name was their former relationship with the identity they’d known. In some cases there were addresses to go with the names.

Another sheet of paper listed each of the Karpp identities along with personality traits, habits and known activities. Andrews absently accepted a refill of coffee from a tired-looking waitress as he studied the papers before him. His heart, he was surprised to notice, was beating rapidly. For the first time he began really to understand Dana Larsen’s fascination with his object of study. There were alluring shadows here where realities overlapped. There were unsettling implications.

Tomorrow Andrews would speak with some of the people who had each known one of the various pseudonymous Martin Karpps. That was something Dana Larsen probably hadn’t had a chance to do before death interrupted him. Andrews glanced up and saw that the weary waitress, balancing two tall cocktails on a small red tray, was threading her way among the tables and would pass near him. Looking at her reminded him how tired he was. He signaled for the check.

The next morning Andrews awoke at a few minutes past nine and blearily looked around in temporary disorientation at the mottled green walls, thick flowered drapes and traditional plain furniture. The ceiling was high and cream colored. The paint was beginning to peel. Outside in the hall a maid was pushing a linen cart with a squeaky wheel. Andrews remembered that he was at the Hayes Hotel.

He showered, toweled dry, then went down to the coffee shop. It was crowded and bright. He had a bacon omelette with toast and coffee before leaving for his first stop.

The Bayon Lounge was still in business at the same location. Feeling somewhat like a detective in a hackneyed private-eye novel, Andrews walked into the lounge, which was barren of customers, sat at the bar and asked the bartender if he knew Harry Jennings.

A fictional private eye never had it so easy. The bartender was Harry Jennings.

“Do you remember Martin Karpp?” Andrews asked.

Jennings, a large, balding man with a fogged left eye, grinned his professional warm grin. “Well, yes and no,” he said. He was seated on a high stool by the cash register.

“I’m helping somebody who’s doing research into his case,” Andrews said. He thought about ordering a drink, but it was too early.

“You ain’t government then?”

“No. Just an interested party.”

“There was enough government investigators around here four years ago to scare away damn near all our business. I wouldn’t want that to be starting again. I own part of the place now.”

“Congratulations. But tell me about Karpp,” Andrews urged.

“You mean L. C. Chambers. That’s the only name I ever knew him by, until he shot Drake and got himself arrested. In here he never talked politics, only business. What the stock market was doing, rising interest rates, that sort of bullshit. And he dressed like Madison Avenue Ike, all scrubby and pinstripe.” Jennings got down off the stool and turned out to be much shorter than he’d appeared sitting. He poured two cups of coffee from the glass pot of a pour-through brewer and placed one on the bar before Andrews. “Cream? Sugar?”

Andrews said no to both and thanked him for the coffee though he’d already had two cups this morning.

“What in particular do you want to know about... Chambers?” Jennings asked, stirring powdered cream in his cup.

“I don’t really know,” Andrews said, “so tell me anything that comes to mind.”

“Chambers came in here off and on for over a year, full of tall talk, running up a big bar bill. Now and then he’d pay it off in a chunk from money he got somewhere. But usually it was big talk and on the tab.”

“Was he usually alone?”

“When he came in. But he came in mostly to see Leola Raymond, and often as not they left together. She was impressed by all his talk. She was nothing but surprised when it turned out he was a fry cook over on Fortieth and not Mr. Success.” Jennings sipped his coffee and grimaced as if it had burned his tongue. “Maybe you want to talk to Leola.”

“Definitely. Do you know where I can find her?”

“She don’t come in too often anymore, but I hear she’s working as a topless dancer over at the Metropole.”

“Did the FBI talk to her four years ago?”

Jennings smiled and climbed back onto his stool near the register. “They talked to
everybody
within five blocks of here. They talked to the rats in the walls!”

“Has anybody else asked you about Karpp lately?”

“Nope. He’s like yesterday’s newspaper. Our crowd keeps current.”

Andrews thanked Jennings again for the coffee and started to leave.

“Hey, mister,” the bartender called, “will you ever see Karpp?”

“I might,” Andrews said, his hand on the doorknob.

“Tell him Harry Jennings said hello.” A white grin shot through the dimness. “I kinda liked L. C. Chambers. Everybody did.”

Andrews’ next stop was at a renovated brownstone on the East Side. In the airy vestibule, he saw that Norris Kelly occupied the second floor. He pressed the button by the new brass mailbox and intercom.

“Who?” an electronically nasal voice inquired.

“My name is Gerald Anderson,” Andrews said. “I need to talk to Norris Kelly.”

“About?”

“A matter concerning an old friend of his—Willy Bennet.”

A ten count passed, then a buzzer sounded deafeningly and Andrews pushed open the door to the stairs and trudged up thick blue carpeting.

A medium-height, wiry man with a head of frizzy reddish hair was waiting for him in an open doorway at the top of the stairs. He was wearing faded, skin-tight jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt open to the waist to reveal several gold chains looped about his neck. “I’m Norris Kelly and step right in,” he said with a puzzled smile.

The interior of Kelly’s home obviously had benefited from the touch of a professional decorator. The blue carpet on the stairs extended throughout as far as Andrews could see. The walls were pale blue, the furniture expensive white French provincial. On each side of a small white brick fireplace were shelves displaying glistening crystal figurines illuminated by subtle backlighting. Cream-colored ceiling-to-floor drapes across a wide window held the harsher reality of the city at bay.

“A beautifully done room,” Andrews said.

Kelly’s smooth, symmetrical features expressed deep pleasure as he nodded acceptance of the compliment.

“You mentioned Willy Bennet,” he said. He limped slightly as he crossed the room and motioned for Andrews to sit on a sofa upholstered in a delicate brocade. As if suddenly conscious of his limp, he sat down himself in a wing chair facing the sofa, pausing just long enough for Andrews to sit first so that decorum had been preserved.

“Or Martin Karpp,” Andrews said. “I’m helping someone do some important research on the subject of multiple personality.”

Kelly crossed his legs at the knees and tilted his head. “But aren’t we all multiple personalities, really?”

“Not like Martin Karpp, I’m afraid.”

“Are you working with Dr. Larsen’s project?” Kelly asked.

Andrews nodded.

“He was here just last week to talk with me about Willy. I was distressed to read of his death.”

“He was a fine man. Everyone who knew him was distressed.”

“You in particular, judging by the way you uttered that stock but heartfelt eulogy.”

For some reason Andrews was irritated by Kelly’s quick and accurate perception of his feelings. “Could you go over with me what Dr. Larsen asked you about Karpp?” he said.

“Well, the doctor was interested in our relationship. I told him it was a sometimes thing that started the night I brought Willy here to do some renderings.”

“Renderings?”

“Drawings of my conception of how I wanted this at-the-time dreadful place to look,” Kelly explained. “I decorated it myself, with Willy’s assistance. He had—has—a great deal of artistic talent, you know.”

“What else about Willy did you and Dr. Larsen discuss?”

“The more intimate aspects of our relationship,” Kelly answered without a hint of hesitation. “There was nothing... unusually unusual about it. Except for now and then. Once, when I disturbed him in the predawn hours, Willy acted as if he were someone else altogether, as if I were someone else. He said some terrible things to me. I didn’t understand that then. I almost do now.”

“What sort of terrible things?”

“Regarding my sexual preference. Our sexual preference, actually.”

“Where did you meet Willy Bennet? And how?”

“At the Clarion Bar on West Fifty-seventh. He was drinking by himself and seemed lonely. I knew why he was there, of course, why everyone was there who was drinking alone. So I joined him.”

“Did anyone else in the, er—”

“Gay community?”

“Yes. Did anyone else know Willy?”

“I don’t think so. But that isn’t all that uncommon, society being what it is.”

“What did you and Willy talk about most of the time?”

Kelly waved an arm in a graceful, encompassing arc. “This place, mainly. It didn’t take long for Willy to become as enthusiastic as I about it.”

“Did he ever hint that he might want to move in with you?”

“God, no! It wasn’t like Willy to hint at anything. If he’d wanted to he’d have asked directly, and he never did so.”

“Did you ever offer?”

“Once. Willy said no, tactfully.”

“Did Dr. Larsen happen to mention to you where he’d been, whom he’d talked to besides you?”

“Sorry.” Kelly shook his head no. The reddish frizz rippled like sun-touched resilient wire. “We kept to the immediate subject.”

“Did he happen to say anything that struck you as odd, as if he might be in some sort of trouble?”

“Nothing whatsoever.” Kelly arched an eyebrow neatly yet unaffectedly. “You don’t suspect... ?”

Andrews shrugged. “Dr. Larsen drowned. He’d also suffered a fractured skull. That’s all anyone knows.”

“Of course. Well, I never thought about something like that.” Kelly laced long fingers, made a steeple and raised it to the tip of his chin in contemplation. “I really wish I could recall something that might help you, but I can’t.”

Andrews stood up and smiled. “Thanks for trying, anyway.”

Kelly rose and trailed him to the door with the slight limp. It was evident now that beneath his tight jeans one leg was considerably thinner than the other, suggesting the result of a long-ago illness.

Andrews opened the door to the stairs.

“Mr. Anderson,” Kelly said wistfully beside him, “this might sound naive, but do you think there’s a chance that Willy might ever come back?”

“About as much chance as there is of Dr. Larsen coming back,” Andrews said, and watched Norris Kelly nod grimly. Andrews turned away from such naked grief. He descended the plush, blue-carpeted stairs, that possibly Willy Bennet had suggested, and pulled open the heavy door to the street.