Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

“You trust this?” he questioned.

“Completely and absolutely.”

He whispered back at her, “Then we’ll start in the showers so the girls can’t see what we’re doing.”

“Agreed,” Matthews said.

“And Matthews, just for the record: If we strike out, you never talked me into doing this. If I get tagged as a ghostbuster, I’ll never live it down.”

“I was told this room was probably a salting room at one point,”

Matthews said, explaining the large drain in the shower room’s brick floor at which LaMoia was staring intently.

“Or a stable or carriage house,” LaMoia suggested. “You put a drain in a basement, Matthews, especially one close to water, as we are here, and you’re going to have water in your basement. Fact of life.”

“Meaning?”

“If the Sarge wasn’t all hot and heavy about these EMTs mentioning the Underground, then maybe I wouldn’t go there.

But a drain in a basement? I don’t think so. I think this thing was at ground level at some point.”

She looked around, studying the shower room’s old stone walls. Gray mortar, added sloppily in the not-too-distant past, lay frozen where it seeped from the seams. “You’re saying it isn’t dirt on the other side of these walls?”

“I’m saying the Sarge is trying to make a connection between a possible underground section of the old city and Hebringer and Randolf. He’s the one who put a bug in my ear. Now you raise the possibility of a peeper down here, and I gotta go with that, with you, because you’ve got this thing-you know what I mean? — and I’ve gotta take this wherever I can take it, as stupid as it may seem.”

“I’m not saying it’s stupid, John.”

“I am, Matthews. It is stupid. But to overlook it? That’s even stupider.”

“There’s no such word.”

“Yeah? Well, at the end of this there may be,” he said. “Stay tuned.”

The cast-iron drain, twelve inches across, was positioned directly in the center of the large room. Some white PVC plastic pipe had been suspended from the stone ceiling as temporary plumbing to supply the shower water. The space smelled of young women, shampoo, and soap, nothing like a men’s locker room, and this made LaMoia uneasy. In all his vast experience with women, he had never entered a girls’ locker room.

“Turn out the lights,” he instructed.

Matthews obeyed without comment, without interrupting his train of thought, ushering the room into total darkness-the only sounds the steady, rhythmic splash of water dripping from the showerheads. That, and LaMoia’s shallow breathing.

“How ’bout a flashlight?” she whispered expectantly, even a little anxiously.

Instead, LaMoia struck a match, shadows jumping and bending across the crumbling brick walls. The room was set into motion as he moved carefully along the far wall, the match held close to the bricks and mortar. The flame burned brightly at first, then shrank, the shadows fading, and LaMoia tossed it to the floor. He lit another. The dripping water mimicked a heart beating. LaMoia worked the flame high to low, left to right, his own pagan ritual. The fire flickered, danced, and then blew out, enveloping them in darkness once again.

“Bingo,” LaMoia said softly.

With another lit match, he tested the same spot again-a slice of mortar about shoulder height. Again, long shadows raked the walls as the small flame first flickered and then was extin-guished.

Matthews asked, “Why keep putting the match out? What’s the point?”

“It’s not me,” LaMoia answered. “It’s wind.” He held another match between them so they could see each other, but the effect was disorienting. Now the shadows waved and commingled on the floor. “There’s a hole poked through the mortar here,” he said, pointing, “and here. Peepholes, Matthews. Not ghosts. Not goblins. Dirty old men, I’m guessing. And maybe one much younger. One with a thing for a very pretty cop.”

She crossed her arms against the chill. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “We’d better call SID.”

“Let’s wait on that. It may be nothing,” LaMoia suggested, much to her obvious consternation. He stepped forward and whispered into her ear, “He may be watching.”

Twenty minutes later LaMoia had marked with chalk another four such rents in the mortar, all with unobstructed views of the shower stalls where the young women had bathed themselves.

He made one last test alongside the brick wall that faced the cot where Matthews and Margaret had spoken. The match’s flame blew out.

He and Matthews met eyes, hers filled with alarm. “Sometimes I hate being right,” she said.

One of the girls asked what was going on, and LaMoia vamped, saying he was a city engineer checking “structural consistencies of the chemical compounds used in the mortar mixture.” This seemed to satisfy the girl and confuse her as well.

“You’re working a little late, aren’t you?” He answered, “I’m volunteering my time, young lady. I haven’t been home for dinner yet.” “You’re pretty buff for an engineer,” she said. This, from a seventeen-year-old with a tattoo. LaMoia mugged for Matthews, shutting her up before she leveled him with another sarcastic remark. They reconvened outside the Shelter’s main door, in a musty basement hallway that was part of the church.

“I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, arms crossed tightly.

“That is so disgusting … so invasive … so awful!”

“So common,” he said. “Guys start poking holes in walls when they’re about eight, Matthews.”

“You?”

“Don’t ask. The point now is to find these bastards-because these aren’t prepubescent kids who don’t know any better. These are pervs, cave-dwelling troglodytes that deserve to have their equipment surgically removed.” He looked around somewhat frantically. “Give me the dime tour, would you? These guys are on the outside of these walls, and we gotta find out how the hell they got there.” He added, “Now, while we can still rain on their parade.”

The Second Presbyterian Church that hosted the Shelter in its basement labyrinth remained open from 6 A.M. to midnight seven days a week, hours the Shelter kept as well. Matthews led LaMoia back to the bottom of an extremely old stone staircase that they’d descended on their way in. A few thousand runaways had traveled this same route over the last year.

“After this we’re gonna want to take a lap around the block,”

he said, “looking for jimmied doors, storm drains, basement windows-something with access to whatever’s on the other side of these walls.” The walls had been constructed of large stone and whitewashed. “But even though we gotta do that, my money’s on the Blessed Virgin-or whatever the flock this particular set of bells is called-because with them leaving the doors open all hours, the bums have got all sorts of access. One door somewhere down here, a few loose stones is all it would take.”

“You’re a real poet, you know that?”

“Do we know where either of these doors lead?” They were heavy doors, old and of dark wood and cast-iron hardware. Me-dieval, like something from a castle dungeon. One sat at the end of a small dead-end hallway; the other was set into what appeared to be an exterior basement wall. Both doors were locked.

“We do not,” she answered, emphasizing their partnership.

“There’s a lot of history down here. A lot of mystery, too.”

He pointed out that both doors had locks that would likely open with skeleton keys.

She said, “Which speaks to the age of this place.”

“I was thinking more like how tough they’d be to pick,” he snapped sarcastically. He turned to face her. “We’ve got two choices here: We can talk to the holy roller, whoever’s in charge, or, it being midnight, I can do my thing and we can be through either of these doors in about three minutes.” He produced a Leatherman utility knife. “Don’t leave home without it.”