Shadowtown

by Lutz, John

“Is okay for keeping out pesky insurance salesmen,” Oxman interrupted. He stood up. “Try to get some sleep now,” he advised. “We’ll talk to you again in the morning.”

  “It won’t be easy to sleep. I’ll have to phone for some prescription pills.”

  “Make sure they’re left downstairs, so they can be brought up by the man on duty.”

  “Don’t worry, Ox, I’ll be careful.” For a moment she seemed about to cry, then she composed herself. “I thought this was all over. I mean, after Burt Lassiter was found …”

  “We thought it was over, too,” Tobin said.

  Oxman stepped close to rest a hand on Lana’s shoulder. She was trembling, or his hand was. “It’ll be all right,” he assured her, in a not very professional tone.

  Tobin had moved to the door and was out of earshot. “Why did you want to see me tonight?” Oxman asked Lana.

  “I wanted to thank you. I guess that turned out to be premature. But it was damned lucky.”

  Oxman remembered the vanilla lushness of her body beneath the sheer nightgown. How had she intended thanking him?

  Tobin was waiting for him in the hall. Oxman nodded to Lana and backed out of the apartment. “Lock your door,” he reminded her. He wondered if she’d intended locking it with him inside the apartment tonight. The black widow spinning her web for another blissful victim.

  As he closed the door behind him, she was getting up from the sofa to obey his instructions, showing a lot of leg where the robe gapped.

  “We better leave by a side door,” Tobin said, as Oxman walked beside him toward the elevators. “The media’s gotten wind of this and they’ve assembled downstairs with all their electronic shit.”

  Oxman grunted agreement. He didn’t feel like facing a horde of persistent journalists pounding him with questions he couldn’t or didn’t want to answer.

  “Back in the pressure cooker,” Tobin remarked.

  “And at a higher temperature.”

  They stood and waited for the elevator. Oxman’s legs were throbbing and felt as if they weighed several hundred pounds each.

  “Maybe this case is simpler than we think. E.L.”

  “How so?” Oxman asked.

  “Maybe we’re dealing with a genuine vampire.”

  Oxman looked at Tobin. Tobin wasn’t smiling. Swell.

  The elevator arrived, its doors growled open, and Oxman stepped inside. “Coming?” he asked Tobin. “Or are you going to fly?”

  They managed to avoid the media, but they had to walk down a dim, littered alley and around the block to get to their cars.

  On the sidewalk, Oxman and Tobin agreed to let the case sleep for the night. They’d meet at the Two-Four tomorrow morning to suffer through the wrath and agony of Smiley Manders, then they’d drag out the file on “Shadowtown.” They’d start over.

  The rain had stopped; no need for the wipers. As Oxman drove away from the apartment building and made a left to get to the transverse at Ninety-sixth Street, he saw a tall figure stride down the sidewalk and turn the corner.

  Oxman hit the accelerator, swerved to avoid a delivery van, and then drove slowly down the dark street where he’d seen the man.

  The street was empty except for a shabbily dressed bearded guy rooting through a wire trash container.

  Oxman drove around the block and back to Ninety-sixth. The figure he’d glimpsed hadn’t worn a cape. It had, in fact, been dressed in slacks and a light-colored Windbreaker. But Oxman was reasonably sure of the identity of the lanky, striding form:

  Zachary Denton.

  Harry Overbeck—11:40 P.M.

  “Lana,” Overbeck said into the phone, “I heard it on the news while I was waiting to watch Johnny Carson. Good Lord! Are you all right?”

  “Of course I am,” she said. “As if you cared.”

  Overbeck felt a rush of relief. He cared not about Lana Spence, but about her continued existence and ability to act. “Shadowtown” could ill afford to lose its resident vixen. The character the audience loved to hate and envy. And sometimes emulate. Delia Lane—Lana—had even inspired a line of designer fashions. The country was teeming with Delia Lanes.

  “What did the newscast say, Harry? I haven’t even seen a reporter. The police wouldn’t let them upstairs.”

  Stupid cunt! “Haven’t talked to the media? Listen, Lana—”

  She laughed. “It’s all right, Harry, sweet, I’ll hold an ‘impromptu’ press conference tomorrow in the lobby. The show will reap the benefits of the publicity. Now, what did the newscast say?”

  Overbeck smiled faintly. “Aging actress Lana Spence claims to have been threatened by a vampire at her apartment in Manhattan. Police Detective E. L. Oxman arrived on the scene and scared the supernatural creature away! Or something like that, Lana.”

  “You bastard, Harry.”

  Overbeck’s grin widened. He did hate this bitch, he realized. When he let his emotions about her really run, he was surprised at their depth. She’d used him, dumped him, spread terrible rumors about him—and now he needed her. Only the spiraling numbers in his bank account and mutual-fund statements made the situation at all bearable.

  “The news also mentioned that you’d identified the vampire as Edgar Grume,” he said. “Did you say that?”

  She didn’t answer right away. “Not exactly.” Her voice sounded strange. Scared, Overbeck suddenly realized. That wasn’t like her. He’d never heard Lana sound frightened unless she was faking it.

  “What did you say to the police, Lana?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember exactly. But, Harry, so help me it did look like Grume.”

  “Like Allan Ames, you mean.”

  “Of course like Allan! I’m not going crazy, Harry.”

  “You saw his face?”

  “Not really. He held his cape over most of it.”

  “Christ!” Overbeck said.

  “The light seemed to bother him.”

  “Of course.” He wanted to sound skeptical, make her feel he wasn’t taking her seriously. In the vampire, or whoever was pretending to be a vampire, Lana had finally encountered a man she couldn’t bend to her will. That was something about all of this that Overbeck enjoyed immensely.

  “He had a knife, Harry.”

  Overbeck sobered. That she’d seen a knife was serious; it posed a definite threat to the show. “The news didn’t mention that,” he said.

  “Maybe the cops didn’t tell the reporters about the knife.”

  “How’d Oxman scare the guy off?”

  “Grume—I mean the vampire—heard the elevator arrive a moment after I opened my apartment door. Either that or the light made him run. Oxman saw him and chased him. Did everything but fly after him.”

  “Your hero, huh?”

  “Yes, that’s what he is.” She sounded indignant, defensive. “There are real-life heroes, Harry.”

  “There’s no such thing as real life,” Overbeck said, wondering about Lana and Oxman. Did she have her hooks out for that poor cop? If so, he wouldn’t have a chance. Big soap-opera star beds average working cop. Big soap-opera stars did that sometimes, Overbeck knew. For erotic sport. And Mr. Average, whoever he happened to be, almost always tumbled for the rich and famous. People like Lana knew how to use the magic that came with fame.

  On the other hand, there was something different about Oxman. A steadiness. An equilibrium not easily upset. If he were an actor, Overbeck would have cast him precisely as what he was: a resolute police detective, the modern-day, big-city Mountie who always got his man. A sort of shorter, stockier Randolph Scott.

  “What was Oxman doing at your apartment?” Overbeck asked.

  “I was going to thank him for what he did for me. Be polite to him, shake his hand. Then we were going to sample some coke and fuck our brains out.” She laughed, knowing she’d shocked Overbeck. Knowing, he suspected, that she could still evoke a pang of jealousy in him, a reminder that a piece of him was hers forever because he was foolish enough in the cent
er of his being not to want it otherwise. She could have him again, she was letting him know. What was left of him now that he’d experienced and then lost her. If the black widow thought there was something more of him to nourish her or her career, she could have it. On a whim.

  She was wrong about that, Overbeck told himself. Goddamn her, she was wrong! He was ashamed of his anger. He fought it down. “I assume the police protection is back on for you,” he said in his normal voice.

  “Is it ever,” Lana said. “I’m guarded like little Miss Fort Knox.”

  Worth more gold to me than to yourself, Overbeck thought. He couldn’t wait to see how high the show’s ratings would soar after tonight’s incident at her apartment. Lana was one of life’s users, so Overbeck had no compunctions about using her. In fact, other than that he had to see her, talk to her, every day, he rather enjoyed using Lana Spence to further his own career. His turn now.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” he said, in an unctuous tone he didn’t try to disguise. She knew what he really thought of her. Good. He wanted it that way.

  “What’re you going to do now, Harry?”

  “Go to bed, I guess. I saw the news, Lana, and I was worried about you and just wanted to make sure you were okay and you’d be at the studio for tomorrow’s taping. The scene with the Louis Carter character is tomorrow, when he arrives from Miami and puts pressure on Delia to work harder on Roger Maler. It’s a pivotal scene, Lana.”

  “I’ll be there, Harry. See you then. Good night.”

  “Night, Lana.”

  “And Harry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shove the phone up your fat ass.”

  Overbeck felt himself flush with surprise and rage. “What the hell was that for, Lana?”

  “For that ‘aging actress’ remark.” She slammed the receiver down hard enough to hurt his ear.

  Overbeck hung up his phone slowly and then walked into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk. A pain in his jaw made him realize he was clenching his teeth.

  He sat at the table and gulped down the milk without tasting it, too furious with Lana to know whether what he was drinking was hot or cold. She really was a despicable bitch. In what she called “real life,” as well as in “Shadowtown.”

  It was too bad so many people needed her.

  In so many ways.

  Scene 4

  E. L. Oxman—1:10 A.M.

  Oxman saw the tall, lanky form of Zachary Denton cross the shadowed street and head toward the entrance to Denton’s apartment building. Denton was wearing dark slacks and a light-gray Wind-breaker, indicating that he was indeed the figure Oxman had seen earlier that night near Lana Spence’s apartment.

  Denton had been leaving the area only about an hour after Oxman had chased but lost the man in the vampire costume who’d brandished a knife when Lana had opened her door to him. It was possible that the man in the vampire getup had been Zach Denton, and that he’d taken refuge near the apartment building, hidden his costume somewhere, then tried to get home unnoticed.

  Oxman sat in his car and watched Denton glance up and down the street, then push open the door and disappear into the foyer.

  After a few minutes, during which Denton would have made his way upstairs to his apartment, Oxman got out of the car and walked to the building entrance. The air smelled fresh after the recent rain, but Oxman barely noticed. He was thinking only about Zachary Denton.

  When he knocked on Denton’s apartment door, he heard a woman’s voice inside. But it was Denton who opened the door.

  He was obviously surprised to see Oxman. His features lost all composure for an instant, then they set in lean, unreadable planes and sharp angles. Young Abe Lincoln about to put one over on Douglas.

  “Hello. I, uh, was just about to go to bed,” he said.

  “You been home all evening?” Oxman asked.

  Denton’s eyes narrowed and grew cautious. “That sounds like a line from ‘Shadowtown,’ Sergeant.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Well, yeah, I’ve been home most of the evening. Bonnie will verify that.” He moved back and motioned with a hand for Oxman to enter. A come-in-if-you-must gesture.

  “Bonnie would be lying,” Oxman said, stepping inside the apartment. He looked around: It was the kind of apartment he would have figured for Denton. The furniture was modern and color-coordinated in beiges. The walls were decorated with framed prints of what Oxman was sure were famous paintings. It all blended together smoothly, like the components of a stage set.

  The girl named Bonnie went well with the rest of the room. She was small, with red hair and considerable breast development. In her late twenties, probably. She was wearing a short bathrobe, floppy green slippers, and a frightened expression. The robe’s sleeves were short and loose, kimono-style; Oxman saw dark bruises on her arms, like acid stains just beneath the flesh.

  “What would I be lying about?” she asked.

  “About the whereabouts of your friend Denton here, for the past several hours,” Oxman said.

  “How would I know where Zach’s been?”

  “Go back into the bedroom,” Denton told her. He was rattled. His protruding Adam’s apple bobbed and he ran his hands nervously over his thin hips.

  Bonnie smiled at Oxman and backpedaled on her green slippers into the bedroom and closed the door.

  “Obedient,” Oxman commented. “Train her yourself?”

  “Have you been watching my apartment?” Denton asked. He seemed to have decided to put on the irate-citizen act.

  “Only since I saw you near Lana Spence’s apartment this evening.”

  Denton arranged his long, craggy features into an expression of innocence. “Something wrong with me being in the neighborhood?”

  “Why did you tell me you were home most of the evening, when actually you walked through that door only minutes before I knocked on it?”

  “‘Most of the evening’ doesn’t necessarily mean the last part of the evening, Sergeant.”

  “The part of the evening I’m interested in,” Oxman said, “is around ten o’clock. You were at Lana Spence’s place then.”

  “I thought you said you saw me outside her building.”

  “I might have seen you inside,” Oxman said.

  “You didn’t.” Denton began to pace, his long arms swinging loosely. As he took a few strides this way, then that, he kept his eyes fixed on Oxman. They were direct, appraising eyes; you had to look closely to see the cruelty in them, like a shifting dim light far back of the irises. Something intense lived there, watching like a carnivore for weakness. “I went to see Lana; that much is true. I got to her place, but I didn’t go upstairs.”

  “Why not?”

  “There were police cars parked out front. Then I heard more sirens, and fire engines arrived. They wouldn’t have let anyone into the building then.”

  “You thought there was a fire?” Oxman asked.

  “No,” Denton said. “There were too many police there for the primary reason to be a fire. I figured Lana might be involved, but either way there was no sense in me sticking in my nose. So I turned and walked to a bar, had a few drinks, then came home.”

  “I believe the part about the bar,” Oxman told him. “There’d be plenty of witnesses, I’m sure, who’d say you were drinking there tonight. Though they’d be confused about the time. But what did you do with the vampire costume before you went there?”

  Denton didn’t answer. He crossed his arms and smiled his handsome smile. “Look, Sergeant, let’s drop the pretense and the bullshit. You know I’m Jennifer’s former husband, and there was a time when I wasn’t quite in control of myself. That cost me a lot. It cost me Jennifer. But it’s all over and I’m trying to live it down. It’s too late after the offense for you to be badgering me about it.”

  “Jennifer went to ‘Shadowtown’ to talk to you,” Oxman said.

  Denton shrugged. “That was her idea. And not a bad one. It’s time for us t
o forgive each other.”

  Oxman felt a rage beginning to boil inside him. “What has she done that requires your forgiveness?”

  “That’s a private matter,” Denton said.

  “So’s beating a woman until you cause her to have a miscarriage.”

  Denton appeared uncomfortable, as if his clothes had suddenly begun to make him itch. “I told you, that’s all over.”

  “Maybe something like that is never over for some people. And maybe there are certain people it simply doesn’t bother. It might have been over for you a day after it happened. But it wasn’t you who suffered pain and lost a baby.”

  “I get a definite impression, Sergeant, that because of who I am you’ve singled me out for persecution.”

  “I haven’t singled you out,” Oxman said. “And you haven’t told me what you were doing outside Lana Spence’s apartment, either.”

  “I said I was on my way to talk to her when I saw the commotion, the police and all.”

  “Talk to her about what?”

  “Tomorrow’s taping. There are a few special props she needs to know about.”

  “Why wouldn’t you wait to tell her in the morning?”

  “She arrives for a scheduled scene late sometimes. The truth is, the great Lana Spence comes and goes almost as she pleases, except for the time slots of the actual taping. I couldn’t count on her showing up early enough to provide time for instruction.”

  “What kind of instruction?”

  “There’s a scene where a car’s supposed to turn over. She has to know just how we’re going to shoot it. We won’t use a double, and she’ll be in the mock-up car as we vibrate it and then tilt it on a hydraulic jack. We’ll do the rest with camera work and stock footage, the car spinning and tumbling down a cliff. She has to learn how to make it appear as if she jumps free just before the car goes over.”

  Oxman watched Denton carefully. He seemed confident of his story, and if this was a lie, it was an elaborate one.

  The trouble was, Denton was right about Oxman singling him out, and Oxman knew it. Not that Oxman had acted on that personal perspective. Not yet. He would have arranged a conversation as soon as possible with anyone from “Shadowtown” he’d seen in the vicinity of Lana Spence’s apartment tonight. But he did want Denton to develop into the main suspect, and Denton was looking better all the time for that distinction.