The Shadow Man (7 page)

Harry Jennings took a few moments of his free time away from mixing drinks to wipe down the bar hastily near the table-order serving area. The Bayon Lounge was crowded, as it usually was on Friday nights, with a combination of out-of-towners and the local regulars. Plenty of talk, plenty of laughter and plenty of drinking. Jennings liked it that way. If the Bayon thrived, he figured to get an automatic raise soon through the deal he had with majority owner Jack Mannering.

Sonya, the barmaid, glided up, adjusted her almost non-existent skirt and yelled “Piña colada!”

Jesus, Jennings thought, that must be the fiftieth piña colada of the evening. He turned to the backbar, reached for the Bacardi and set about building the drink. He hoped the same customer hadn’t ordered all fifty.

Jennings had the drink mixed in less than a minute, handed it over to Sonya and rang up the sale. Something—he wasn’t sure what—made him think about L. C. Chambers as he worked behind the bar. He wondered if the guy who had been in the other day, Anders or Anderson, had found out what he needed to know.

What could you say about Chambers? Who would suspect a friendly, self-important and smooth Mr. Success like L.C. could turn out to be a Martin Karpp, political assassin? Of course, to believe the headshrinkers and this guy Anderson, L.C.
was
L.C., at least when he was being L.C. Confusing.

Through the grayish haze of tobacco smoke, Jennings saw the short, thickset figure of Jack Mannering approaching the bar. Mannering was dressed sharply as usual, wearing a dark suit and flashing his gold cuff-links. Ever since the price of gold had skyrocketed, Mannering had taken to wearing tons of the stuff. As he rested his elbow on the bar, his sleeve rode up to reveal a gold wristwatch. He wore a gold pinky ring on each hand as well as his customary diamond on his left ring finger.

“Profitable night, heh?” he said, smiling his crooked, yellowish smile. Almost a gold smile.

“Busy as hell,” Jennings said. “You’d think the drinks were free.”

Mannering’s smile lost candlepower. “Just so they ain’t.” No doubt who owned the biggest piece of the place. He fired up a long cigar to add to the almost solid haze of smoke. “Did a guy come around to talk to you about Martin Karpp?” he asked.

Jennings nodded. “A few days ago. Anderson was his name.”

“Anderson wasn’t the name of the guy who came in here and asked me a lot of questions,” Mannering said. “Come to think of it, he never left a name. At least not one I can recall.”

“There was a doctor, a psychiatrist, that came around before Anderson,” Jennings said. He interrupted the conversation to put together two scotch and waters. When he returned, he said, “He was doing research of some kind on whatever ailed L. C. Chambers.”

“My man never mentioned being a doctor,” Mannering said. “But it don’t matter. What matters is I want you to be uncooperative if anybody else comes in prying about L. C. Chambers or Karpp or whoever or whatever he is.”

Jennings frowned as Sonya placed an order slip on the bar. “How uncooperative?”

Mannering looked at him and shrugged. “Just don’t remember anything. That ain’t a crime. Four years ago, when Drake was shot and killed, it wasn’t a week before everybody from the press to the CIA started coming in here asking questions. The trouble is, none of them bought drinks. The whole deal wasn’t good for business. It brought in a few touristy types, but it scared away a lot of the regulars. And all these official job-doers can be a pain in the ass.”

“That I remember,” Jennings said. He handed Sonya’s scrawled order slip to the part-time bartender, who was looking desperate about falling behind in his work.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” Mannering said. “You know what I mean? Just play dumb.”

“No problem there, boss.”

Mannering looked at Jennings and winked, grinning as he stood away from the bar. “I’ve always known better, Harry.”

“Regular?” Jennings asked, inquiring whether Mannering wanted his usual Smirnoff’s on the rocks with a twist of lime, ignoring the compliment.

“Not tonight, Harry.” Mannering lifted a gold-adorned hand in a parting wave, turned and disappeared into the haze and milling mass of customers.

Probably going out to get some breathable air, Jennings thought, and wished he could do the same. Instead, he turned to the backbar to help catch up with the drink orders. He understood what Mannering meant about the official nosy Petes who might come in snooping about Karpp all over again. But he didn’t see why he had to be uncooperative with everyone else who might ask about the matter. Still, if Mannering wanted him to be dumb, dumb he would be and then some. He was smart enough to do that.

Jennings was setting three martinis on the serving bar when for some reason a man’s voice seemed to disengage itself from the steady buzz of lounge chatter, as occasionally a voice will do in a crowded place. “Sorry,” the voice said, “my mistake,” as if its owner might be apologizing for stepping on someone’s toe.

Idly Jennings glanced in the general direction of the voice. He almost dropped the glass he was holding as he glimpsed a squarish, broad-shouldered figure squeezing through the crowd and heading for the door.

Jennings swallowed. “Chambers!” he murmured, without realizing he’d spoken.

But it couldn’t be. Jennings blinked. The figure was gone.

Had the voice that attracted Jennings’ attention been Chambers’? What precisely had it said? He tried to recall the voice exactly and couldn’t pin it in his memory. For that matter, he couldn’t exactly recall the voice of L. C. Chambers. It had, after all, been four years since he’d heard it.

But there was an uncanny familiarity about the figure he’d glimpsed. It was almost as if his thoughts had summoned it from the past. The grayish tobacco smoke in the lounge seemed suddenly to become a frosty, chilling fog. Maybe something like that actually had happened. Why not? There were creepy things happening in this world every day, so why not to him?

Sonya crossed his line of vision, waving a fistful of orders and rolling her eyes. He was aware of her placing the orders on the bar, hurrying away with a tray of mixed drinks.

Jennings realized he was standing motionless. Time to get busy. Customers were waiting. He told himself that he was imagining things because of his conversation with Mannering. Imagination could be a sonofabitch.

Shaking his head, he neatly flipped a jigger of bourbon into the glass he was holding and concentrated on his work, his work and nothing else. Ice, liquor, soda, twist of lime or lemon. He let the part-time man handle the beer.

Within a hectic half hour he forgot about L. C. Chambers. Almost.

Where were the last few days taking him? Andrews wondered as he hailed a cab in front of the New York Public Library and gave the driver the address of Bargain Electronics. Like almost everything else that formed the basis of his recent movements, he’d gotten the address from Dana Larsen’s notes.

Andrews had spent the last six hours at the library, poring over what scant material he could find on multiple personality. He had absorbed everything available on the subject, from Mendell’s
Theories on Fragmented Personalities
to the popular literature
Three Faces of Eve
and
Sybil.
The phenomenon was still relatively new to psychiatry, not nearly so well understood as most of the more common mental abberations.

What Andrews had gotten the most of for his effort was eyestrain. Not to mention an aching back from studiously bending over a library table. He consoled himself with the idea that some bit of information he’d picked up that now seemed irrelevant could in the future become important if not pivotal. That was often how thorough research on any subject paid dividends.

But he had to admit that his hours of study had left him more disoriented than enlightened. And for some reason he kept thinking about Dana Larsen and the extraordinarily high suicide rate among psychiatrists.

The taxi turned several corners and was neatly threading its way through jammed and angry traffic. Horns blasted occasional tuneless fierce music that was met with indifference. Andrews sat in the back of the cab and watched the throngs of pedestrians.

Outside the cab, the elegantly dressed strolled blindly past blind beggars in front of exclusive shops. Tourists with 35-millimeter cameras ignored a drunk leaning in a doorway as they walked with eyes raised, looking for a good shot for future slide shows at home. Andrews had been to Manhattan many times, but never before had he noticed the vivid contrasts, the shades of unreality. It was as if he were just beginning to discover the dark side of some moon.

“Which side of the street?” the cabbie asked, interrupting Andrews’ disconcerting reverie.

“Over there on the right, by the place with the sign that looks like a radio.”

Andrews paid the cabbie and got out onto the sidewalk. He stood looking at Bargain Electronics. Two angled show windows led like the gleaming walls of a funnel back to an open door. Behind the windows were glittering displays of radios, tape players, TVs, video recorders, cameras and accessories, calculators, typewriters, apparently anything that plugged into an electrical outlet or was powered by batteries. Andrews walked between the banks of dials, aerials, lenses, knobs and glistening plastic, into the similarly cluttered interior of the overstocked shop.

A few customers were poking about a merchandise table in the rear, and a swarthy young man was seated behind a counter watching them with something like contempt.

“Are you Vincent Grammo?” Andrews asked him.

The youth didn’t bother looking at Andrews. “In the back,” he said. “You want him?”

“I need to talk with him.”

The man still hadn’t budged, still stared at the shop’s clientele with venomous dark eyes. “Sellin’?” he asked Andrews.

“No, I just want to talk with Grammo. Tell him I’m here. My name’s Anderson.”

But apparently the counterman had pressed a button that sounded a buzzer somewhere in the rear of the shop. A short, potbellied man in his late fifties, with graying hair and classic Latin features tugged at by age, stepped from a doorway that had been concealed in the paneling. He looked about curiously.

“Wants to talk to you,” the youth behind the counter said, jerking a thumb in Andrews’ direction in a gesture somehow disdainful.

Andrews stepped over to Grammo and offered his hand. “About Alan Hobson,” he said. Grammo shook the hand and exerted a slight pressure in the direction of the other end of the long counter, where they could talk privately. Both men walked as far as possible while still being separated by the counter and stopped near a bright yellow display of Kodak film.

“You FBI?” Grammo asked. He braced his elbows on the counter. He was the perfect height for that.

“No,” Andrews said, “I’m helping to do some research into Martin Karpp.”

“You mean Hobson. That’s who he was to me, so that’s how I think of the poor bastard. Did you know Dr. Larsen?”

“Very well,” Andrews said.

“He was in here about a week ago, asking about Hobson. Next thing you know I pick up the paper and he’s dead. Drowned.”

“I know,” Andrews said. “What did Dr. Larsen ask you about? So we aren’t covering the same ground.”

“Just generally about Hobson. Nothing specific I can recall. He was supposed to come back so we could talk again. Said he might work his information into a book. Christ, you can make a million dollars that way nowadays, providing you can’t write.”

“When did you realize Hobson had been stealing from you?” Andrews asked.

Grammo shook his head and exposed Hollywood-perfect teeth in a grin. “Never. Not until it came out he was Martin Karpp, and when they searched his apartment after the shooting and discovered all the stock from here. That’s when I found out. He had a method of doctoring the invoices. Mind you, I’d have caught on to it eventually. Would have had to. But he got away with over three thousand dollars’ worth retail in the six months he worked here.”

Andrews understood now where “L.C. Chambers” had gotten his good-time money.

“Them other guys he talked about, I figured they were real,” Grammo remarked ruefully. “You never do really know anybody, I guess, maybe not even yourself.”

“Other guys?”

“Sure. Chambers, Liggett. And the queer, Bennet.”

“What about Jay Jefferson?”

“That’s who Karpp claimed he was when he killed Drake, ain’t it?”

Andrews nodded.

Grammo rubbed his square chin. “Yeah, I think he mentioned that name too. Hell, seems to me he even mentioned Martin Karpp, but I ain’t sure. He didn’t talk about these ‘people’ a lot, you know. But when he did, it was as if they was casual acquaintances.”

“Did Dr. Larsen mention anyone else he’d talked to? Anyone he planned to talk to, or where he was going?”

“No, we just talked for a while about Hobson.”

Andrews continued to probe, attempting to find out what Dana Larsen had discovered or tried to discover, searching for some link with death by drowning in the Hudson River. “Tell me more about Alan Hobson,” he said.

Grammo was eager to talk about his now infamous ex-clerk. “He only worked here part time, in the evenings. He said he had some other job, but to tell you the truth I forget where. It wasn’t his real job as a cook, though. I’d have remembered that.” Grammo shrugged. “Hell, you’d have figured him for normal. A nice kid, actually. Didn’t know a lot about electronics, but I figured he was eager—and, yeah, honest. Clean-cut, they used to call kids like that.” Grammo straightened his stocky body and squinted his bullfighter’s eyes. “I don’t know what surprised me most, that he was Karpp or Jefferson or whoever the hell and had shot Drake, or that he’d been stealing from me. I mean, the stealing was more personal.”

“But you don’t sound as if you hold a grudge.”

“Hell, the man was sick. I got a sister been committed since she was twelve. Head injury from an accident. I understand.”

Four young Puerto Ricans entered the shop, suddenly filling it with movement and noise. One of them had a portable tape player slung over his bony shoulder by a wide colorful strap. The deep throb of a bass and the wail of a clarinet blared from the oversized speaker. They began to browse, moving to the beat of the music, fingering merchandise nervously.

“Anything else?” Grammo asked Andrews.

Andrews said there wasn’t.

Grammo yelled, “Shut that damn thing off, hey?” as he moved down the counter toward the four boys. They ignored his request and exchanged a few probably disdainful remarks in Spanish.

“You got any leftover cassettes?” one of the boys asked.

“Get fucked,” replied the swarthy youth behind the counter.

As Andrews walked from the shop, Vincent Grammo was trying to make peace and sell a tape cassette. The music was still blaring at top volume, maybe even louder than before. Buyer enjoyed a certain advantage over seller.

When he returned to his hotel room, Andrews saw immediately that the brown vinyl portfolio containing Dana Larsen’s notes was gone from where he’d left it on the desk. He cursed himself aloud, unmercifully and artfully, for not being more careful.

But no one was supposed to know he was here. No one!

His heart seemed to double-pump as it responded to a jolt of adrenaline. Quickly he went to the door and threw the bolt to lock it even against a hotel pass key.

The telephone rang.

Andrews let it jangle three times before snatching up the receiver and pressing it to his ear hard enough to cause pain. “Hello!” The mocking click and buzz of a severed connection was his only answer.

He replaced the receiver slowly, as if handling explosives. Why would anyone call him and then hang up? To make sure he was in his room?

Of course it might have been the hotel management, a mistake, a switchboard plug in the wrong socket, a visitor in the lobby who’d used a house phone and dialed the wrong room and hung up. There were a lot of innocent explanations for the phone call. Andrews couldn’t accept any of them.

He grabbed his sport coat and left the room. The hall was empty. He walked toward the elevators, then past them to a corner near a window and an obviously artificial plant whose pot had been used frequently for a trash receptacle. He stood partly concealed and watched the elevators. If anyone did get out on this floor and walk to the door to his room, Andrews would be able to get into the elevator and descend before whoever it might be would have a chance to react and run down nearly the entire length of the hall to try to stop him.

Five minutes passed, not easily.

Then Andrews heard the thumping and grinding of the old elevator rising toward the twentieth floor. He licked his lips and waited, hoping the elevator would ascend past him to one of the floors above.

It stopped.

Cables thrummed softly within the shaft as the elevator adjusted to be level with the hall floor, and the sliding doors opened with a ratchety hiss.

Andrews pressed himself back out of sight until he heard the elevator doors close. Then he peered around the corner and saw that a woman was walking along the hall toward his door. She was a tall woman, wearing a stylish green dress and carrying a large paper bag of the sort department stores give customers. The bag crackled briskly with each of her steps.

She didn’t stop at Andrews’ door. Instead she walked all the way to the end of the hall, took a key from her purse, opened another door and disappeared inside her own room.

The hall was quiet again.

Andrews realized that his jaw was aching from the pressure of clenching his teeth. He told himself to relax. If anyone was coming up after him they would have been here by now. But to be on the safe side, he’d wait another ten minutes.

As time slowly edged the hands of his watch, Andrews heard elevators pass the twentieth floor several times. But none again stopped to deliver a passenger.

Andrews decided it would be safe to return to his room now, but he didn’t feel like going there. Instead he took an elevator down to the lobby and went out for a walk.

It was much cooler outside, and the side of the street he walked was deeply shadowed. With only his sport coat for extra warmth, he was uncomfortable. He kept to the curb side of the pavement, staying in the midst of the flow of pedestrians going in his direction. Around him voices were discussing jobs and romances and petty despairs. Snatches of private lives. Andrews felt again that almost panicky sense of detachment he’d experienced earlier that day.

He forced calm on himself and considered his options. It would be pointless to change hotels. Whoever was watching him would simply pick up his trail again when he continued to dig into Dana Larsen’s activities the week before Dana’s death, then follow him to his new hotel.

The thing to do was to stay where he was but make sure that he was secure. Check the room whenever he entered, get a good secondary lock, a traveler’s lock, for the door. And when he was out he’d leave a paper match stuck between door and frame, so that if anyone entered it would drop onto the hall carpet. He’d seen that done several times in movies and on TV. The thought of giving up and returning to Washington occurred to Andrews but was quickly rejected. His fear and his determination were increasing in direct proportion to each other. This current was not too swift for him; he would swim farther.

He knew that his present attitude had literally gotten him into deep water before. Every strong swimmer who ever drowned stroked under that same misconception. Perhaps even Dana Larsen.

It was time to seek advice, Andrews decided, as well as reassurance.

When he got back to his room, he would phone Pat Colombo for both.