Shadow Games

by Ed Gorman

  Cobey turned off the light and got beneath the covers. The sheets stank of sweat and jism. He didn't care. He just wanted to sleep. He was tired of trying to make sense of things. Things made so sense at all.

  Finally, fitfully, he slept...

  3

  By the time Anne came awake in the morning, Puckett was not only up but dressed and opening the door for the bellhop who wheeled in a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and two large pots of coffee—Puckett was a caffeine junkie. And the day itself was just as invigorating, one of those sudden spring days in the Midwest that hit the high eighties. It was already seventy-six degrees and sunny.

  While Anne was in taking a shower, Puckett called the Los Angeles office of his investigation service. Since it was only seven o'clock there, Puckett left a message for an operative named Kevin McCoy. A former assistant to a gossip columnist, McCoy was the best "backgrounder" on the staff—meaning that with his computer and phone skills, he was able to learn more than any other six operatives pounding the pavement. Or had been, anyway.

  A year ago, McCoy had told everybody at the office that he had AIDS. He had lost a lot of strength in the ensuing months and was now working out of his apartment and phoning in for messages...

  After hanging up, Puckett read a few more of Anne's pen-name articles. They were first-rate, all of them.

  When Anne came out of the bathroom, her copper hair was dark with water and her white terry cloth robe was almost blinding in the sunlight.

  Over breakfast, she said, "You sure you want to get involved?"

  Puckett smiled. "Cobey needs all the help he can get, and you're forgetting that I used to be a cop myself—I know how their minds work. They've already got Cobey convicted."

  "How about the case you were working on?"

  "I've already arranged for somebody else to tail my wandering husband."

  He finished his coffee, stood up, went over and kissed her on her freckled cheek and said, "He really does need some help. I want to talk to the people around him. See what they know."

  She took his hand and held it tight to her cheek. She felt soft and warm, and he felt a desire that was a mixture of sweet affection and rampaging lust.

  "I know you're right, Puckett," she said. "It's just that I won't have much time to spend with you."

  "I'll keep checking in."

  "Promise?"

  "Promise."

  Then he got out while he still could.

  4

  When Cobey got up, the first thing he did was take out the Lady Clairol and rinse his hair several times until it was a deep black, far different from his usual blond look. Then he took a shower, cold water being the only type offered, so cold that his balls shrank up and he shivered as he toweled off.

  Then he put on the sad, cheap, vinyl jacket and the dark glasses and then he kind of assumed (good old Actors' Group method training coming in handy here) the punk stance of a Slavic kid from the inner city, nowhere near as cool as his black counterparts, just some blown-out high school dropout hanging out in pool halls and comic book stores busting his ass for nickel-and-dime day labor jobs, and maybe thinking vaguely of joining the Army if he could get them to give him one of those equivalency tests.

  There. Cobey had created a new persona for himself. He packed up all his stuff and shoved it into the paper sack and left the room. He'd rather sleep in an effing alley than in this place again.

  He left the motel and started walking. It was sunny and warm and he wasn't quite sure where he was. All he knew was that there were a lot of dead and dying factories around him, rusted monuments to the good old days when a lunch bucket life had had dignity and meaning, the same kind of lunch bucket life Cobey's father, a factory worker, had enjoyed. But now...

  He found this tiny-ass tavern where the sign advertised Blatz beer (what a name, Blatz, it sounded like a fart) and, incredibly enough, breakfast and lunch and where, incredibly enough, the breakfast was good, if you didn't mind a few cockroaches running back and forth on the bar. He had four eggs over-easy and tried not to notice as the six old guys across from him, drinking Blatz in mugs and chain-smoking cigarettes, watched him with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. They weren't sure where this kid fitted in—shit, he left his sunglasses on even inside this dingy place—they just knew he didn't fit in here. He ate fast and left fast.

  He was thankful for the sunlight.

  He spent the next hour-and-a-half walking.

  The sun started getting warm and the surroundings started getting pretty. Old Victorians, newly refurbished, Yuppie land. After where he'd spent last night and just had breakfast, he was jubilant at seeing cliché Yuppie mothers transporting their cliché Yuppie children around in their cliché Jeeps and vans.

  He found a small shopping center with a clean, sunny restaurant and he bought a Tribune and went in there and had himself a second breakfast, this one without the cockroaches. All the people looked smart and clean and attractive. He didn't ever want to go back to last night's motel, and he wondered now if he hadn't taken some kind of Rod Serling diversion from reality last night and checked into some other dimension, some motel hell for real.

  The Chicago police were playing it very coy for the newspaper people.

  They admitted that, yes, Cobey Daniels had abruptly left a meeting in which a Detective Cozzens had been asking the young star questions about the woman's head discovered in a refrigerator, but the Chicago police were in no way trying to intimate that he was a bona fide suspect. They just wished ole Cobey would give them a call and then maybe they could all go out and have burgers or something.

  Right, you bastards, he thought. You'd put my ass in jail and then plant me in the electric chair about a week later.

  Somewhere in the middle of his fourth cup of coffee, he decided to give it another try. He'd tried it last night but then he'd gotten scared and given up.

  Now, feeling better, feeling more confident, some food in his belly and a pretty decent disguise hiding his real identity, he got up and paid his bill and asked the waitress for some extra change. Then he went out to the center of the mall where there was this long line of pay phones and he went over and looked up the right number.

  He called and asked for Mr. Puckett's room and then he waited.

  He waited a long time. The phone rang maybe twelve times. Nobody home. He hung up.

  He had to talk to Puckett, had to. Puckett was his only hope.

  He looked out at the mall, all the happy women shopping, and he wondered with sudden bitterness and high, pure terror, how the hell he'd ever gotten here.

  He was a former teenage TV star, he wasn't any killer.

  Or was he?

  He fled the mall, going God-only-knew-where.

  5

  Wade Preston had spent the past week trying to get out of it, but in the end, he relented and said he'd show up to meet his fan club, as they'd requested, at eleven a.m. sharp. On the way over, he thought of excuses he might use to leave his fan club early.

  He smiled bitterly to himself. A few days ago he'd given Anne Addison a key to his yacht on the off chance that she'd use it some night. That would be a good excuse to leave—a beautiful woman waiting for him on his boat.

  These fans probably didn't think the Marshal ever got his ashes hauled, the dumb bastards.

  They were the usual geeks and freaks—and Wade Preston, the last of the cowboy heroes, had to force a smile when he saw the pack of them moving toward him in the lobby of the suburban hotel.

  The one in front, the one who had the full cowboy outfit on—including brown leatherette chaps and a silver belt buckle the size of a hubcap and this huge, six-pointed town marshal badge on the breast of his leatherette vest—this guy had to weigh in at four hundred pounds, including all twenty-seven of his chins, and he of course was the spokesman for the whole group.

  "Happy sunsets, Marshal!" the man cried across the lobby.

  A dapper young man in a blue lawyer's suit, hundred dollar r
azor cut, and mean, blue gaze was waiting for a bellhop to take his bags upstairs. He smirked at the geeks, and his sneer said it all too well: how pathetic all this sort of thing was—THE WADE PRESTON FAN CLUB, CHICAGO CHAPTER, as read the sign one of the geeks carried—and then he was joined by a pretty, young girl whom he was probably bopping. She sneered in much the same way he had. Grown people carrying on this way. My God.

  The Starlight Hotel and Lounge was out near Skokie, and at eleven in the morning the lounge was mostly occupied by salespeople. In the old days, it would have been mostly men here, but now that Xerox and IBM and the big pharmaceuticals hired fifty percent women, Happy Hour places like this rang with female laughter, the women just as hard and frantic and vulgar as their male counterparts. One more reason Wade Preston was against libbers, as he still called them. Why would women—clearly the superior of the two sexes—want to be like stupid, boorish men?

  "Marshal Drake, it sure is good to meet you," said the fat man as he grabbed for Preston's hand.

  "Why not just call me Wade?" Preston said, blushing.

  "That's my real name. 'Marshal Drake' was just in the show."

  The guy looked crushed. "Uh, sure," he said. "Sure."

  Then the others encircled him.

  Thank God only one of them was fully in costume. The others wore just bits and pieces, Stetsons or tinny little badges or western string ties over their plaid, working class shirts.

  A skinny woman with badly discolored teeth leaned in and planted a big, wet, smacking kiss right on his cheek. "I've wanted to do that for twenty-five years!" she said.

  The others giggled and applauded and patted both the woman and Wade Preston on the back.

  "I'm Keeny!" she cried. "I'm the secretary of the Chicago Chapter of the Wade Preston Fan Club."

  Keeny. God, even their names were strange.

  Preston forced another smile. "How nice for you."

  The pretty girl serving as hostess for the lounge glanced over from her post. She gave Preston a look of some sympathy, obviously seeing that Preston thought all this was just as pathetic as she did. They were members of the same club, the pretty girl and Preston—the club of good looking people whose appearance was negotiable currency in virtually any country.

  Preston had only recently started doing these fan club gigs because the word in Hollywood was that westerns—after the success of Eastwood's The Unforgiven—were getting hot again. Wade Preston owned seven years of Town Marshal (full color and an impressive lineup of guest stars) and he planned to make several million syndicating them to local stations.

  And this, alas, meant promoting the series and turning up at these fan club functions again, something he'd refused to do for the past fifteen years. It was one thing to send all the geeks and freaks a nice little tax-deductible semi-annual newsletter, and put in an appearance at the Western Jamboree of former western stars (most of whom were fairies and drunks or both), and always sign the glossies the fans sent in and mail them back at his own expense.

  But now here he was, actually meeting the bastards. Seeing them in all their sad shabbiness.

  "You ready to go in...Wade?" Keeny or Kenny or Kitty or whatever-the-fuck-her-name-was said.

  "Go in?"

  She nodded with her white cowboy hat with the name Marshal Drake spelled out in spangles on the front. "We rented a room special for this afternoon. I mean, we all chipped in."

  And it was then that the woman in a wheelchair produced from beneath the blanket covering her lap a cap pistol and began firing it into the air.

  A handsome couple in the lobby jerked about, startled, at the sound of the cap pistol. At first, they looked terrified—face it, in our society today, most of us know that violence can come anyplace, anytime—and then, seeing the geeks and freaks gathered like puppies around Wade Preston, they frowned with great, theatrical displeasure.

  And it was then that the door to the private conference room opened and the theme from Town Marshal blared forth on a warbling sound track.

  And the old broad in the wheelchair let go with the cap pistol again.

  And the woman with the discolored teeth started planting big, wet, sloppy kisses all over his face again.

  And one of the men in the background, one of the men who hadn't spoken before, said in the terrible, trembling voice of the stutterer, "W-we s-sure I-love y-you Marshal D-Drake!"

  And then he was pushed forward into the room where the Town Marshal soundtrack continued to warble ("He's the man with the gun/the man who won't run/Town Marshal/Town Marshal").

  The old broad took two more quick shots just before they got him inside and closed the door.

  Preston squared his shoulders and put a manly grin on his face. He'd agreed to give them an hour, but he was damn sure going to leave sooner if he could.

  Chapter Seven

  Cobey's Tapes

  In re: Wade Preston

  The thing was, how I came to find out about what Wade Preston was really up to, was total fucking convoluted coincidence, the kind that story editors chew writers' asses off for (and I should know, having tried to sell scripts to those faggot bastards when I first got out of the asylum).

  Total coincidence.

  As in: The year is 1989. I've been out for about a year, and I'm doing the strip. Sunset Strip, of course, and by "doing" I am talking all the reds and blues and yellows and uppers and downers and sideways I can get my sweaty little hands on...because the night before, on CBS, there's this TV movie and in it, with a two-line part, is Tim Flowers.

  TIM-FUCKING-FLOWERS!

  The same kid, six years earlier, I bumped out of the No 1 slot as America's cuddliest-cutest teenage TV star.

  His show had been off the air less than four years...and this following a seven year run at the top...and the best gig he can find is two lines on a TV movie?

  At least I didn't drink.

  I don't give myself much credit for anything...but at least I didn't drink.

  I just got up and turned off the TV and sat in the dark for a long, long time.

  Someday, sooner than later, I was going to be Tim Flowers. Two lines on a TV movie...and then maybe a life-long gig at some Porsche dealership along with two or three other well-kept has-beans, all those upper class bitches finger fucking themselves on the way home from flirting at the dealership...

  Sometime around midnight—and I'm not proud of this, believe me—I called Mindy. The fag hag with all the underground connections...

  Back in the days of radicalism, Mindy once hid out for an entire year two campus SDSers who were wanted by the federales for blowing up a science department back in the Midwest.

  After radicalism, Mindy settled her sights on groupiedom and fag hagdom and you never knew who you'd see at Mindy's little house in Coldwater Canyon, her father being able to supply her with plenty of jack, owning as he does the second largest investment banking company in the world.

  Anyway, I needed Mindy's blend of sex (not with Mindy, of course, but with one of her minions—Mindy's Minions, pretty good, huh?), one of those hot, crazed little Sunset street girls that she never seemed to run out of...one of her Minions...and lots of her red/blue/yellow mind-blowers...and lots of her good grub. Mindy can cook her considerable ass off.

  A retreat at Mindy's spa is what I needed...and since the flesh is weak...it's exactly what I ordered up, too.

  And, at first, it was nice.

  When I got there, it was already like three o'clock in the AM. The Whole Sick Crew was there—the people may change but the roles they play are the same. This was Mindy's version of the Ark, I guess: two of everything—a lesbian couple; a gay couple; two bikers with two biker chicks with the four of them wearing matching leather outfits; two punk-type musicians from the same band, one with a safety pin in his nose and the other with one glass eye; and two of Mindy's own girlfriends, the wan and severely beautiful Barnard or Smith types that Mindy always goes for—having never been allowed to be a member of this particular c
lub, Mindy seems in equal parts to lust after and loathe these girls...

  And there was some kind of 1968 rave-up going on...the music ear-splittingly high...and running to the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Cream and, the only stuff I liked, some chunky, funky music from Credence Clearwater for lowborn white niggers such as myself...

  And everybody's reminiscing about peace marches and draft card burning and what a pig Nixon was and how one of them once dropped some acid into this cop's Pepsi without him knowing...and this wedding ceremony one dewy dawn when everybody (bridegroom-minister-all-the-guests) stood buck ass naked in the splendiferous morn with this flute and guitar music making even the forest animals get groovy...and how this was a fucking racist-homophobic-male-chauvinist-capitalist-pig society and maybe Charlie Manson was a fucking psycho but at least his heart was in the right place...

  And on and on and on.

  A circle jerk for an entire generation.

  And, finally, the reds and blues having kicked in, I went searching through the back bedrooms—I'd had enough of the tears and rage and pride of the Woodstock generation. You never knew what you'd find. Not at Mindy's, you didn't.

  And I lucked out.

  There was this street chick sleeping in a single bed. I say street chick, because the first thing I did was check through her clothes to see if she was a narc. There was a famous incident at Mindy's where this narc had had so much acid that he'd gone over to the other side.

  I say street chick, because her jeans and her GRATEFUL DEAD T-shirt and little white bikini underwear were all filthy, especially the latter.