Shadow Games

by Ed Gorman

  SHADOW GAMES

  By Ed Gorman

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Ed Gorman

  Cover Design by David Dodd

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  ALSO FROM ED GORMAN & CROSSROAD PRESS:

  NOVELS:

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Tom Piccirilli)

  Nightmare Child

  Voodoo Moon

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  For Martin H. Greenberg

  A special thanks to Larry Segriff for his editorial work.

  —EG

  "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous."

  —Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

  My cousin Bobby Driscoll won a special Academy Award in 1949. He was a fine child actor. While this novel is in no way about him, it is about the sad ends met by some of Hollywood's most talented teenagers.

  Introduction to Shadow Games

  Some books come real easy and some are pure plain hell.

  According to the calendar I keep, I spent four months in 1991 writing Shadow Games. The first draft came out to 382 pages. I threw them all away.

  The second draft came to 401 pages and took six-and-a-half weeks to write. I threw it away.

  The third draft ran to 367 pages and it was this one I submitted to the editor. I'd spent 16 weeks on the third go-round.

  While I haven't kept any correspondence about the book, I do recall that my editor wanted several changes.

  This was an editor I liked. We'd worked on two previous books of mine and his suggestions had significantly improved both of them. But on this one his suggestions didn't seem appropriate. This was a very special book to me so, in the end, in a mutually amicable fashion, my agent withdrew the novel from consideration.

  Why was Shadow Games so important to me?

  In 1949, a twelve-year-old child star named Bobby Driscoll won a special Oscar for appearing in the Cornell Woolrich film The Window.

  Bobby was my first cousin. I had a special relationship in that I spent much of my youth walking in his shoes—literally. We were the same size so quite frequently I received boxes of clothes and shoes from Hollywood. As befitting a star, Bobby had a big budget for clothes and I was one of the main beneficiaries. He had to stay fashionable so I got his cast-offs.

  Bobby's most notable successes were with Disney. Among other films, he did Song of The South, Treasure Island and was the voice-over for Peter Pan. In a nine-year period, he earned more than a million dollars, which was unheard-of for a child star in those days. (All this said, my favorite Bobby-picture remains The Window. Somewhere in the Gorman family vault is a photo of Bobby, co-star Barbara Hale and author Cornell Woolrich on the set.)

  Unfortunately, Bobby came to a grim end. Though he married and fathered three children, he got into drugs and crime, and ended up in prison. He finally headed east to do stage work that was very well reviewed but was not enough to support him financially. Two children found his corpse in an abandoned tenement. He died of a methadone reaction. He'd been trying to kick junk. He was buried in a pauper's grave without anybody knowing who he'd been. Only after an intensive search by his mother and a private investigator was the body located and returned to California for proper burial.

  That's why Shadow Games was so important for me.

  For, though it was not about Bobby in any specific way, its theme was child stardom and I had certain things I wanted to say and I wanted to say them my way.

  The problem was, my editor had been correct. Not even the third draft of Shadow Games was quite right.

  I set the book aside and started writing another. This one went quickly and well and sold for decent money and for a time I forgot about Shadow Games, knowing I'd probably go back to it someday but not sure when.

  At this point I met a young local writer named Larry Segriff. I'd read some of his stories and was impressed. He knew what he was doing. He was also a house husband with two beautiful little daughters and a few free hours a day on his hands. I asked if he wanted to be my assistant—go through manuscripts, handle correspondence, things like that—and luckily he said yes.

  One day, he asked me if I had any more manuscripts for him to read and I told him about Shadow Games.

  He took it home and called me a few days later and said he'd made a lot of notes on how he felt the book should be edited and could he bring them over.

  Well, he brought them over and proceeded to turn Shadow Games into a novel that was a whole lot better than I'd been able to make it on my own.

  I spent a month following his editorial advice, sent the new manuscript to London where my agent was waiting for it, and we sold it in (I believe) three days. A few months later The London Sunday Times gave it a rave review and thereby got me launched, for the first serious time, in Europe.

  Thank you, Larry, very much.

  Even the people who like Shadow Games—and not everybody is up for its dark and occasionally grisly humor—see why it's had such a hard time selling to the big commercial publishers in the states. The protagonist doesn't appear until near the end of the first act; you are asked to understand (though not sympathize with) a pretty repellent character, namely Cobey Daniels; and the ending is a knife-twist of icy rage. Not exactly the kind of strong-heroine-fights-insurmountable-odds-and-brings-peace-and-immortality-to-the-civilized-world book that those big commercial places are looking for. And yet it has found a growing audience in Europe. Not only have the reviews been good, it has also generated a lot of mail from people who have found it not just darkly amusing but oddly tender in places, too. They also seem to like my take on the lower echelons of show business. I worked for a time in a syndicated television and got to include a lot of war stories here.

  It's only natural for a writer to like some of his books better than others. Thanks to Larry Segriff, I like Shadow Games quite a lot and hope you will, too.

  —Ed Gorman

  July 18, 1994

  THE COBEY DANIELS STORY

  "I know a lot of people think I'm a goody-goody because of my role on the show. Well, what's wrong with being a clean-cut, all-American teenager?"

  Cobey Daniels, interviewed in Teen Scene, August, 1984

  (Reporter) The police are saying that you pulled a knife on the waitress because she wouldn't serve you liquor. Any comments?

  (Cobey) Yeah, just one. Why don't you fuck off, you asshole?

  Cobey Daniels responding to KABC-TV reporter, May, 1985

  Cobey: I'm an alcoholic. I can't touch the stuff. It's poison to me. Literally.

  Cobey Daniels,

  interviewed in Rolling Stone,

  "Notes from the Asylum," November, 1988

  1985

  PROLOGUE

  I

  Just before three that afternoon, on a cool spring day in Miami, Florida, it became quite apparent that the girl—a fourteen-year-old named Kimberly Conners—really was missing. Wh
ich was just what her mother had been insisting to the officials of Windmere Mall for the past hour-and-a-half.

  The usual proceedings then took place.

  Kimberly's name was put on the loudspeaker every five minutes ("Would Kimberly Conners please come to the mall offices right away") and the mall security force, overweight people in starchy blue uniforms and thick-soled earth shoes for comfort, were given her description and told to look hard for her.

  The trouble was, her description—"five-three, one hundred pounds, long, blonde hair, blue eyes, white blouse, designer jeans, argyle socks, penny loafers and a pretty face"—could easily fit at least two hundred girls who happened to be roaming around the mall just now.

  Because today was the day when the nation's hottest teen star, Cobey Daniels, the main attraction on NBC's number one sitcom, Family Life, was making three appearances at Windmere Mall.

  He'd already done one earlier in the day, just before noon, and security had been awful: thirty-eight hundred teenage girls trampling anything in their way to get closer to the small, makeshift stage set up in the center of an open area. Mothers had gotten trampled, little brothers had gotten trampled, merely curious sales clerks had gotten trampled, and certainly security personnel—God, they only made minimum wage—had gotten trampled.

  All so these crazed, hormonal, shrieking little girls could rush the stage and literally tear at the clothes of a handsome, blond, icily grinning, blue-eyed heartthrob who was lip-synching to his new number one record, "Won't You Be My Special Baby?"

  In the midst of the melee, several ten- and eleven-year-old girls acquainted themselves with sexual frenzy—and liked the feeling so much that they decided to come back for more, meaning the four o'clock performance Cobey was scheduled to put on.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this had been Kimberly Conners, who'd slipped away from her mother so she could get a better position near the stage.

  Now, nobody had seen Kimberly for the past three-and-a-half hours and talk—whispers, really—had turned to the sonofabitch who'd come into a similar Florida mall last year and taken a three-year-old boy right from the men's room while his dad was in one of the stalls. The bastard had then driven the poor little tyke out to the Keys and molested him and then disemboweled him...

  Kimberly's mother was trying real hard not to think about this incident.

  Kimberly's mother was trying to convince herself that Kimberly was here somewhere, just wandering around and spending some of the hundred dollars she'd gotten from Grammy Levin last birthday.

  Around three o'clock, Mrs. Conners called her husband at work. He was an architect and always busy and occasionally hostile when he came on the phone. She didn't like to trouble him unless absolutely necessary. She considered this absolutely necessary.

  She explained to him about Kimberly.

  Within a minute-and-a-half, he was sliding behind the wheel of the new, blue, family Buick and heading straight for Windmere Mall.

  II

  In both grade and high school, Sharon Marie Bowers had been known as "Hairy Sherry" because of the undue amount of silky, black hair that covered her arms and put a faint, Hitlerian mustache on her upper lip. Her parents, who were working class, determined to spend all their money if necessary to help their only child. They heard how she sobbed at night after a day of teasing at school, and there's nothing more heartbreaking than hearing such sobbing from the child you love. There's also nothing that makes you feel more helpless.

  Thus began a quest that went on for eleven years and ended in failure.

  At twenty-four, Sharon Marie Bowers still had all her silky hair, though thanks to the option of long-sleeved shirts that the folks at Federal Security gave their guards, at least nobody had to gape at her arm hair.

  There just wasn't much she could do about the mustache despite her best efforts with razors and a myriad of creams.

  But you couldn't call Sharon Marie unhappy. True, she didn't have a boyfriend, but she did have a nice, seven-year-old Pontiac rag-top that she took out to the summer park and buffed in the summer sun, and she was newly elected captain of her credit union's bowling team, and her collection of country-western CDs kept growing.

  So, despite the way she sometimes twitched and shuddered when she recalled the chant of "Hairy Sherry," and despite the fact that she needed to lose sixty or seventy pounds, and despite the fact that some of the other security guards usually got the more convenient hours, Sharon Marie Bowers was a happy woman, even when people occasionally hinted that she might be gay. Sharon Marie was rip-snortingly hetero and just waiting for this crew-cuffed guy at the bowling alley to let her prove it.

  She would be even happier by the time this day—April 28—had passed.

  Because Sharon Marie Bowers not only found Kimberly Conners, she may also have saved her life.

  III

  Any way you looked at it, the whole thing was pretty crazy and after about two hours Kimberly started to realize just how crazy it was.

  Just before he'd rushed through the doors that took him to the maze of back hallways that wound through the mall, Cobey Daniels had paused a moment—just a fraction of a second, really—and looked right at Kimberly.

  Right at her.

  With the full force of his blue eyes.

  With the full force of his white-capped grin.

  With the full force of his number-one-teen-idol aura.

  And his eyes and his lips and his aura had said: follow me, Kimberly Jane Conners. Follow me into the hallway here and beautiful times will befall us. I promise you.

  So, trance-like, she did just that.

  She pushed past the screaming, jumping, jostling, pushing girls and, somehow, shoved, angled, wriggled and willed herself past the throng and into the hallway where Cobey stood waiting for her.

  He didn't say anything.

  He simply took her hand and led her away.

  She had no idea where they were going and it took nearly fifteen minutes to get there. Obviously, Cobey had scoped this whole place out. He knew just which way a given hallway wound, and just where it ended.

  His destination was a large, locked door behind an upscale dress shop. Cobey, wouldn't you just know, had a key.

  He took her inside.

  In the spill of light from the hallway, she saw a dozen mannequins. Some were only heads and shoulders. Some were full-bodied and, curiously, obscene. Their eyes stared, dead but knowingly, at Kimberly. They seemed to sense something that she didn't.

  Cobey, ever the clown, went over to one of the full-bodied mannequins and slid his arm around her shoulder, letting his fingers come dangerously close to the modest rise of her breast.

  "Meet my best girl," he laughed. "Isn't she pretty?"

  Kimberly giggled nervously.

  Cobey's eyes rose from the mannequin's breast then and looked right at Kimberly. "But she isn't half as pretty as you," he said, with knee-weakening simplicity.

  From his back pocket, he took a small silver flask, uncapped it, and sipped deeply from it. Kimberly could smell the bourbon fumes all the way over on the other side of the room.

  Cobey came over to Kimberly then and took her hand. In that moment, she knew why he'd brought her here, and knew that she would do whatever he asked. Whatever...

  He took her to him gently and touched his lips to hers. "I'm glad you came with me, Kimberly," he said, softly. "We're really going to enjoy ourselves. I promise you."

  And, with that, he reached behind her and gave the door a push.

  Except for a single, dusty bar of golden sunlight coming through a small, oblong window high up on the west concrete wall, the storeroom was dark and quiet.

  Without another word, Cobey went over and grabbed a handful of heavy, wine-colored drapes and then spread them out like a bed on the floor.

  He sat down and raised his hand to her.

  She took it and Cobey guided her down to the drapes.

  When her neat little bottom had snugged into a comfo
rtable position on the drapes, Cobey leaned over and kissed her, just the way she'd always dreamed he'd do.

  Within a minute-and-a-half, his right hand was inside her white blouse and liberating one of her small, sweet breasts from her bra.

  Kimberly Conners was so excited—and so terrified—she thought she might, literally, pass out.

  "I wish you'd just touch it, Kimberly. Just once."

  "I—I'm scared."

  "I thought you liked me."

  "I do."

  Cobey laughed. "It won't bite you."

  "I know."

  He laughed again. "And I keep it real clean. I take it out and wash and wax it every day."

  That one made Kimberly laugh, too, the idea of taking it out and washing and waxing it...

  They'd been in the storeroom a couple of hours, now. She'd had no idea that you could just keep doing things to each other without ever doing IT. They hadn't done IT yet and Kimberly sincerely hoped they never would, because now some of the headiness had worn off and she realized that she was a) going to be in very big trouble with her parents, her mom in particular, and b) Cobey was starting to scare her and she wasn't sure why.

  He had felt her breasts and kissed them and licked them flickingly; and he had put his hand down between her legs and kept it there for a very long time; and he had then pushed her down on the floor and slid on top of her and begun to work and pump in the way of somebody who was making love.

  She stopped him at one point and said that she was a virgin and scared of all the bleeding and maybe this wasn't a really good idea.