The Shadow (9 page)

Margo’s expression was wistful. “A man, Dad. And I’m probably never going to see him again.” She took a bite of the apple.

“Why not?”

“It’s just something I know. But while we were together I had the feeling that I could sense what he was feeling, and he could sense what I was feeling.”

Was it telepathy, she wondered, or was her imagination getting away from her? Who had picked up whom in the Cobalt Club? And whose impulse had she been following when she hurried into his arms—his or her own? It was all too confusing. But she couldn’t get Lamont Cranston out of her thoughts; he was there, haunting the space behind her closed eyes like some specter.

Margo heaved a dramatic sigh. “Now I’m completely and utterly depressed.”

A calculation on one of the chalkboards had caught Lane’s eye, and he was staring at it. ‘That’s nice, dear,” he remarked.

She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled to herself, recalling how frustrated her mother used to get with him.

The Hotel Monolith had been the talk of the town while it was being built. Designed by one of the city’s finest architectural firms and financed by the city’s most colorful developers, the twelve-story edifice had been called “an Industrial Moderne masterpiece” by critics. Plans called for an Egyptian Revival façade and lobby, with gilded columns, elaborate cornices, and balustraded balconies, and—contained within a cylindrical, rooftop rotunda—the Moonlight Café, whose dark blue ceiling was to feature an artificial moon among a starfield of tiny white bulbs.

But the hotel had never opened. Events took a tragic turn when the owner went bust in the Crash and later committed suicide. After languishing for two years, the Monolith was put up for sale and purchased by a wealthy Asian, who announced plans to complete it but had ended up razing it. One day the building was there, the next day it wasn’t, almost as if it had vanished. Now the lot on which it had stood, on the northeast corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue, was filled with rubble and garbage that had yet to be removed, and encircled by a high, wire-mesh fence topped with strands of barbed wire. Though why anyone would wish to venture inside was anyone’s guess.

Nicky Dano, a ferret-faced hackie in the employ of Bluebird Taxi, normally didn’t question his fares about why they wanted to go to a particular place, but there was something about the bearded Chinaman who had waved him down fifteen minutes earlier, up near the Museum of Art and Antiquity. First off, what was the guy doing out on the streets at that hour of the morning? Then there was his getup—the shoulder-length, jet-black hair and the Oriental silk cape and skirt that made him look like he’d just stepped out of some Charlie Chan movie. All the way downtown, the guy’d been mum, but it was like his silence had filled up the whole cab. Nicky was glad to be giving him the air. Still, he couldn’t resist asking.

“You sure it’s one
-five-
eight Second Avenue you want, pal?”

The guy surveyed the vacant lot from the backseat. “That’s correct.”

“Suit yourself,” Nicky said, shrugging and glancing at the meter. Because of the chill, he was wearing a brimmed cap and fingerless gloves. “That’ll be four forty-five,” he said, figuring a large tip for himself.

The man opened the driver’s side door, as if he hadn’t heard.

Nicky glanced at the rearview mirror. “What’s the matter, Charlie, you don’t parlay English? I said—” He met the man’s gaze in the mirror and had a sudden change of heart. “I said, this one’s on me . . . figuring the lateness of the hour and such.” Then, by rote, he reached across the front seat for his clipboarded call sheet and began to jot down the address.

“What are you doing?” the Asian asked as he was about to exit the car.

Nicky didn’t even look at him. “Just writin’ down the drop-off address, angel.”

“You mean to say that you’re recording my destination?”

“Taxi commission rale and company policy.”

The man fell silent. When he had climbed from the cab, he stood by the driver’s window for a long moment, staring at something down the street. “Your auto needs fuel.”

Nicky glanced at him. He knew that wasn’t the case, but something made him check the fuel gauge. The gauge read close to full, but Nicky felt a sudden need to top it off just the same.

“Geez, I do need gas,” he heard himself say. He wedged his pencil behind his left ear. “Thanks.”

He wanted to ask the costumed Asian how he could have seen the gauge from all the way in the backseat, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. In any case, there was an open filling station not three blocks away, a track from Johnsen Fuel conveniently backing up to the pumps.

Nicky grew increasingly eager to fill the tank. He revved the engine higher and higher until the motor was protesting and the cab was shuddering; then he dropped the car into gear with a crunch of gears and squealed down the street, passing by the vacant lot, heading straight for the fuel track.

Nicky didn’t see his former passenger’s mouth twist into a strange smile, or hear the alarmed shouts of night owls walking near the filling station. He didn’t feel the impact, either, or the searing heat of the ensuing explosion, that threw the taxicab high into the air, incinerating the station attendants, the driver of the fuel truck, and a few of the bystanders.

Before fire engines had even been dispatched to the scene, Nicky was dead, the call sheet that recorded Shiwan Khan’s destination curled and withering in the flames.

There were times when the years of apprenticeship he’d endured in Tibet weren’t worth a plugged nickel.

He had dragged himself upstairs from the mansion drawing room to the master bedroom, only to find that, despite his best efforts, sleep refused to be courted that night. The face in the fireball vexed him. And, too, there was Margo Lane, stuck in his thoughts like a phonograph needle in the grove of a disk. His life had no room for friends or lovers like Lane. His life as The Shadow, that was.

Just now he was sitting in bed beneath a comforter, his head resting against the headboard, a clothbound book in his hands. He had on pajamas and a silk robe, patterned in shades of brown and gold. The book was a recent edition of
A Tale of Two Cities.
As to why he had chosen that particular book from the library’s hundreds of volumes, he couldn’t say.

Ten blocks to the south, Margo Lane, outside the bedcovers in a peach-colored nightgown and a short-sleeved, sheer chiffon robe trimmed at the hem in white fox fur, also had an edition of the Dickens classic in hand. It was close to four
A.M.
when she had returned from her father’s lab, but even then she couldn’t sleep.

The bedroom was small and tidy. The wallpaper was a busy fern motif, and above the bed hung two framed prints of seashells. The night table supported a simple lamp with a fringed shade. Margo stopped reading long enough to take a cigarette from the case on the night table . . .

Just as Cranston was doing the same. He closed his gold case, setting it down on the nightstand’s marble top, touched a gold lighter to the tip of the cigarette, and took a puff.

Margo exhaled smoke; then, vaguely dissatisfied . . .

Cranston stubbed out the cigarette in a glass ashtray. He returned his attention to the novel but soon gave up and tossed the book aside. The worst of times, yes, he could see that; but when was it ever the best of times? He reached for the light switch . . .

And Margo turned her light off.

But sleep continued to elude him. He tried facing left, then rolled over onto his right side, facing the expanse of empty bed.

As if to accommodate him, Margo shifted position, staring into the predawn darkness of the room.

“Someday,” she whispered.

B
y sunrise the following morning the receiving entrance of the Museum of Art and Antiquity had become a crime scene. Three hours later the area was still cordoned off by a snarl of cars belonging to police officers, detectives, forensic specialists, reporters, and photographers, frustrating the efforts of truck drivers to deliver their loads, and of numerous assistant curators, anxious about those same deliveries.

Commissioner Barth had arrived at just past nine o’clock to lord over the activity. In and of itself, the apparent suicide of a security guard wasn’t an event that would garner much attention from the tabloids. But this one—carried out in a museum, and under suspicious circumstances—was just the sort of lurid incident that could quickly become a front-page item in
The Classic
or
The Standard.
And Barth wanted to make certain that his name received frequent mention.

The triple-bayed receiving area was bustling when he entered. Cops in long black coats and shields were milling about, interviewing witnesses and picking over the straw-strewn floor in search of clues. While Barth watched, one of them draped a jacket over the corpse, whose bald head lay at the center of a small lake of coagulated blood. Police photographers wielding box cameras were snapping shots from every conceivable angle, and two medics wearing Red Cross armbands were standing by, waiting to carry the body out to the dead wagon.

Barth was dressed in a dark blue chesterfield and sporting a snappy fedora. Seeing him, a sergeant hurried over to give him the scoop.

The witnesses, Newboldt and Berger, had been thoroughly questioned, though in fact they hadn’t actually seen Nelson trigger the .38 round that killed him. And while their story was consistent with the evidence, certain things didn’t add up.

For starters, the casket, or coffin, or whatever it was. The shipper, the Integrity Transfer Company, didn’t have a listed address in New York, or anywhere in Jersey or Connecticut. And yet the customs form indicated that the coffin had arrived in New York by ship, from Shanghai. The customs number on the shipping invoice matched that on the crate, which had been cleared through customs by someone who’d passed himself off as the curator of the museum. The crate had been opened for inspection, but the bogus curator had argued vehemently against opening the coffin itself, insisting that the 800-year-old mummy it contained would literally disintegrate if exposed to the air.

Nonetheless, the coffin had been opened, examined for contraband, and cleared. Interviewed over the phone, the inspector whose signature was on the form recalled clearing the coffin but claimed to have no recollection of examining the interior.

But where, in any event, where was the mummy?

And why had Nelson—thought not to have been the bravest or brightest on the block—decided to open the thing?

Accepting for the moment that someone had concealed him or herself inside the coffin, the obvious question was: to what end? Alternatively, the coffin could have contained valuable contraband, which could have been hurried out of the receiving area during Newboldt and Berger’s absence. Either way, poor Nelson might have been murdered, or even forced to shoot himself.

Powder burns on Nelson’s right temple verified that the gun had been discharged at point-blank range, but you usually didn’t find the heater in the suicide’s hand, as had happened with Nelson.

Even so, there was little to support the murder angle: no signs of a struggle, no second set of prints on the .38, no evidence that anyone had entered the area through one of the bays, all of whose roll-away doors were padlocked
from the inside.

So, until further evidence came to light, the detectives in charge of the case were forced to accept that Nelson had opened the coffin deliberately; then . . . what? Croaked himself on realizing that he’d disobeyed Newboldt’s instructions?

The curator himself had admitted to “sensing a presence” when he and Berger had reentered the area, though he hadn’t been able to elaborate on just what that presence may have been.

As for the coffin, several museum experts were in agreement that it was certainly ancient and possibly genuine. However, as to whether it had once held the body of Genghis Khan, no one could say until the interior was tested for specimens of skin, hair, fabric, and whatever else. Since Genghis Khan’s burial site had never been located—officially—some felt that the priceless silver coffin delivered to the museum may have been used to mislead any would-be grave robbers roaming Outer Mongolia in search of plunderable tombs.

The sergeant finally got around to apprising Barth that Detective Joseph Cardona had been placed in charge of the investigation.

The commissioner’s only response was, “That one, huh? He’s a joke.”

In point of fact, Inspector Cardona, the only son of a veteran cop, was renowned for his investigative skills. Then assigned to the Twenty-sixth Precinct, he had been on the force for almost fifteen years and was rumored to wear his Police Positive in a custom-designed shoulder holster. Tall, muscular, and square-jawed, Cardona’s well-known knack for blending effortlessly into any crowd or background rendered him a near perfect surveillance operative. If he could have been said to have a distinguishing characteristic, it would have to be the large, red-stoned ring he always wore on the third finger of his right hand. When people inquired about the ring, he fed them a story.

Cardona had observed Barth’s arrival but was in no mood to talk to him. Given the many unanswered questions attending the security guard’s apparent suicide and the suspicious delivery of the silver coffin, Barth was low down on Cardona’s list of priorities. While the commissioner was being briefed, Cardona made an unnoticed exit from the receiving area and walked straight for his car.

He drove south along Broadway, then took Seventh Avenue south to Twenty-third Street, in the heart of Chelsea—a district of warehouses, lofts, and import concerns—where he found a parking space in front of a tavern near the Lyric Theater. He then crossed the street to the Jos. R. Hunter Building, which he entered through the street-level offices of Lewis and Lewis, Chartered Accountants. Once inside the building, he continued down the first-floor hallway, past offices on both sides, until he reached a door whose pebbled glass panel said “B. Jonas” in black hand-painted letters.