Shadow Games

by Ed Gorman

  He tried to scream for help but somehow no sounds came.

  He tried to push away from her but somehow there was no place to go.

  He was seven years old and swimming in a municipal pool with his cousin Harry; he was eleven years old and hitting the winning home run in a softball game; he was twenty-two and making love to his wife on their wedding night. He was—

  He was dying, and reviewing his life in the process.

  He was beyond pain now as he slid down the refrigerator, coming to sit almost comically on the floor, legs spraddled, palms turned outward.

  This time, she put the butcher knife right in the center of his forehead and left it there.

  He didn't mind. There were only moments left before all history came crashing down, all life, all human utterance and aspiration, gone forever, his life gone forever. He was about to learn the answer to the question most fervently asked by each generation: Is There Life After Death?

  No, he didn't mind at all.

  He just sat there, bleeding, dying.

  Waiting, but for what he was not sure...

  5

  When she was done vomiting, she went back down the hall to the kitchen and took another look at him. Even with the stench, even with the steaming blood, there was something dreamy and unreal about it, just as there had been something dreamy and unreal about killing Beth, and she had to be sure, as if she'd just awakened from a terrible sleep, had to make sure that it really had happened.

  Detective Cozzens had fallen over on his side. He looked like a drunk in a high school sketch. Even the butcher knife handle protruding from his forehead had a certain loony quality to it.

  She touched trembling fingers to her face. She was afraid she was going to be sick again. But she was glad she'd come back here. The night she'd killed Beth Swallows here, she'd dropped an earring and had to flee just as Cobey was starting to wake up, the earring falling down a floor grate. Tonight, she'd opened the grate and found the earring lodged down there where the police hadn't searched...

  She began to back slowly out of the kitchen, the image of the dead detective receding, receding.

  She was afraid now, and confused, and the taint of blood was high and hot in her nostrils.

  She moved through the shadows of the apartment until she found the same window she'd come in.

  Then she was gone; gone...

  Chapter Eighteen

  1

  Clouds of steam rolled and tumbled within the narrow glass shower stall. The pink and appealing flesh of Anne Addison was lost somewhere inside.

  As always, hot soapy water gave her the feeling she sought, one of cleansing not only her body but her soul as well.

  She parted her legs, working the bar of Dove high up the sleek inside of her thigh. She was careful not to touch herself sexually, because the notion of sex would again ignite memories she was constantly trying to forget.

  She hummed to herself, an old show tune. In both high school and college she'd been in many plays, always minor roles, limited by the fact that her voice was terrible. But in the shower...

  She smiled to herself and soaped her face once again, long fingers tapering down the luxurious angles of her cheekbones.

  She enjoyed holding her face up close to the shower nozzle, the pain almost pleasure. She closed her eyes, letting the steady blast of the shower numb her face, push her off into some other world where there were no memories, no regrets, no guilt...

  Five minutes later, her right hand groping out of the shower door and snatching a big, nubby, pink towel from the rack, she heard the phone ring out there in the darkness of the hotel room.

  She had to rush through the shadows to the phone.

  Now, towel-wrapped in the shadows, Anne shivered, goose bumps hard as BBs covering her body.

  "Hello?"

  Long silence.

  "Hello?" Anne's irritation clear in her tone.

  Long silence.

  "Hello."

  Then, "Anne?"

  "Yes."

  "It's me. Cobey."

  "Cobey! God." Her gaze fixed on the neon green and yellow raindrops sliding down the window. "Where are you?"

  "I need to talk to Puckett, Anne."

  "Puckett? God, Cobey, it's me, Anne."

  "Anne, please, listen. Don't get your feelings hurt as usual."

  Anne's anger was swift and certain. It lent her body a genuine warmth, dispelling the trembling effects of the goose bumps. "Are you going to start calling me overly sensitive again, Cobey, the way you used to before—"

  Then she fell silent. As did Cobey.

  She'd almost said it, almost given voice to the terrible incident that had ended their nine-month romance the time Cobey disappeared.

  She said, "I'm sorry, Cobey."

  "I know. It's just the way you are, Annie."

  Annie. God, every time he'd called her that during their time together she'd gotten positively girly and weak. There had been a time when the most romantic word ever uttered was her own name coming from the sensual lips of Cobey Daniels.

  "Annie."

  "Yes?"

  "I need to talk to Puckett. I really do."

  "Where are you?"

  "I'd rather not say."

  "You don't trust me?" The hurt tone was back in her voice again.

  "It's not that, it's..." He sighed. "Of course I trust you, Annie."

  "Good. Because I trust you."

  "Then you don't think I killed Beth?"

  "No, I don't."

  "It's great to hear you say that, Annie. It really is." A pause again. "I'm over near the Daley Center. You know where that is?"

  "Yes. Of course."

  "I'm in a phone booth." The pause again. "I don't know what to do, Annie. I was hoping that Puckett could help me."

  "I could help you."

  "Oh, no, Annie, I don't want to get you involved in this. You're—" He stopped himself.

  "I'm what?"

  "Oh, Annie, I wasn't going to say anything terrible."

  "No?"

  "Just what were you going to say?"

  "Annie, let's not argue. I—"

  "Just tell me what you were going to say."

  "Jeez, Annie, this is how you always get."

  "Then let me say it for you. You don't want me to help you because I'd just get overly emotional and end up going into one of my depressions. And maybe I'd even start drinking again."

  "I wasn't going to say that, Annie. I mean, you do get upset about things very easily, but I'd never say you were going to start drinking again. I know you've kicked it and you'd never—"

  "I'll be there in half an hour."

  "What?"

  "Half an hour. In a cab. Now, tell me exactly where you are."

  "But, Annie, I—"

  "I want to know exactly where you are. I want to help you. Aren't we still friends?"

  He didn't say anything for a time. Then, in little more than a whisper, "You really still think of us as friends? After what happened and all?"

  "Still friends, Cobey. Still friends."

  "You know," he said, "at least once a day I think about that. Sometimes, I even have nightmares about it. I wake up covered in icy sweat and I'm screaming and I—"

  "I've forgotten about it."

  "You have? Really?"

  "It's in the past, Cobey. I just look to the future."

  "But you were so angry. I thought—"

  She was in control of herself again. For a long moment, thinking about what had happened there at the end of her nine month time with Cobey... Well, thinking about it all again, she'd started to lose it. Felt the old rage once more.

  But now...

  She stood in the shadows, slender and lovely inside the nubby towel, watching the neon-tinted raindrops, and said, "Tell me where you are, Cobey. The longer you're out on the street, the better your chances of getting caught."

  "You're sure you want to get involved?"

  "Oh, yes," Anne said. "Yes, Cobey, I wan
t to get involved."

  So Cobey, sounding relieved at the prospect of a friend helping him out, told Anne again where he was.

  Exactly where he was.

  Ten minutes later, her hair still wet beneath the suede, turquoise beret she wore, she reached the elevator.

  Two-and-a-half minutes after that, she was stepping into a Yellow cab that smelled of defroster heat and cigar smoke.

  I'm coming to you, Cobey, she thought.

  After all this time, I'm finally coming to you.

  The cab pulled away.

  Anne leaned her head back and closed her eyes as if she were praying.

  The time was finally here. At last; at last.

  2

  She was gone.

  Puckett stood just inside his hotel room looking at the dark, empty room, the only light coming from the rain-dappled window. No place is lonelier than an empty hotel room, especially on a rainy night.

  She was gone and something was wrong. That, Puckett was certain of.

  He should have come back to the room earlier but instead he'd made the rounds of the discos where Cobey was known to hang out. He hadn't turned up anything.

  He closed the door behind him and started to walk toward the window. Halfway there, he noticed the curled, wet leaves on the rug.

  He bent down, knees cracking, and picked up one of the birch leaves. The dampness gave it the slick feeling of a fish.

  So she had gone out tonight and then come back.

  And had now gone out again.

  All he could think of was that Cobey had called while he was out and that Anne had taken the call and had gone off somewhere to help Cobey.

  Nothing else made sense. Not at this hour.

  He stood up, looking at the antiseptic, lonely room. He wanted to hear her laugh, feel her hug him in that urgent, girlish way of hers, as if she were clinging desperately to him for support. He enjoyed being needed. It made him feel that he belonged to somebody.

  He went over to the bed, sat down on the edge and started to pick up the phone when he noticed the stack of magazines with Anne's pen name material in them.

  He flipped on the goose neck lamp on the ledge between the two beds and picked up the phone.

  He dialed the desk, giving his name and room number when a male voice answered. He asked the clerk if he'd happened to see Anne recently.

  "I've just come on duty, sir, but Michael is still here. He was on since three this afternoon. Let me go ask him."

  "Thank you."

  As he waited for the clerk to return, Puckett thumbed through the magazines. Each of Anne's pen name articles was flagged with a yellow sticky on the title page. He was struck, first, by the fleeting nature of fame as represented by these glossy pages. More than half of the "hot" stars that Anne had written about a few years ago were not working much these days.

  He smiled at some of the pen names: Amy Conners, Rachel Forrest, Evelyn Day, Dorothy Todd. If all else went bad for Anne, she always had a future as a bad check artist. She was good at inventing names.

  The clerk came back on. "Sorry I took so long."

  "I appreciate your trouble."

  "Michael did see her leaving. About an hour ago, he said. He also saw her leave earlier in the evening."

  "The last time he saw her—did he see her get into a cab or anything?"

  "Yes. A Yellow cab. He thinks it was Marty's."

  "Marty's?"

  "Marty Gresham. He usually parks out front. His brother is a bellman here and so they kibitz a lot."

  "Is Marty out there now?"

  "Just a second. I'll check."

  The desk clerk went away, came back. "Not yet. I can call you as soon as I see him, though."

  "I'd appreciate it."

  And then, sitting there on the edge of the bed, the name came back to him, one of the pen names she'd used on her articles. Evelyn Day. Something familiar about that...

  The name teased at his mind but bore no meaning. Evelyn Day. Why did that seem familiar?

  He went in the bathroom and cleaned up. Hot water and soap felt good on his beard-stubbled face. He splashed on Brut and then did his pits and rolled on some new deodorant.

  All the time he kept waiting for the phone to ring.

  All the time he kept thinking about the name Evelyn Day. Why did that sound familiar?

  He went out to the room and started looking for notes. Maybe she'd left him one and he just hadn't stumbled across it yet. This was unlike her, taking off this way with no kind of note.

  He was on the third dresser drawer when he remembered why the name Evelyn Day sounded so familiar to him. A burning sensation started in his stomach and began working up his chest. Icy sweat dappled his long arms and his sloping, muscular back.

  He turned his head to look at the phone, praying for it to ring.

  3

  At this time of night, the only people moving inside the Daley Center were the security guards. Otherwise, the windows in the vaulting white building sitting in the middle of the large plaza were dark.

  Outside, hiding behind the enigmatic Picasso sculpture that Chicagoans had been arguing about for long years, Cobey Daniels searched the street for any sign of a taxi.

  He still wished he'd been able to get hold of Puckett instead of Anne. After everything that happened...

  Several years ago, one of the big, slick, entertainment magazines had assigned Anne to write an article about Cobey. He'd been out of the asylum for less than a year and was doing bit parts at the time. Lilly had taken an instinctive dislike to the woman. Apparently, she'd sensed intuitively that there was a strong attraction between Anne and Cobey.

  On the night of Anne's last interview with Cobey, after two weeks of her following him around like a valet, she invited him out to dinner and he accepted. They drove out to Malibu on one of those Technicolor evenings that recalled a fifties musical, impossibly gorgeous, impossibly romantic...

  Not much later that evening, Cobey called Lilly and told her that he wouldn't be able to keep his weekend mall gig. He said he'd just come down with the flu and would be staying in his apartment.

  Lilly, of course, didn't trust him. She drove over to his apartment at once and found him gone. She spent the entire weekend frantically phoning his place and driving over there on the off-chance that he'd returned and simply wasn't answering his phone.

  Meanwhile, Cobey and Anne flew to Las Vegas for the weekend, following a chance remark by Cobey that he'd always wanted to see if the place was just as tacky as everybody said. It was—but it was also exciting as hell.

  It was, perhaps, the finest weekend of Cobey's life and, by the end of it, he was in love with Anne Addison. True, she was a few years older than he and true, the loss of her son frequently sent her into deep depressions. But she was funny and tender and gentle, and she gave him the best silken sex he'd ever had. They quickly developed a mutual need that bordered on a sick kind of dependency, but if either noticed it at this juncture, they said nothing. They just accepted the dependency as part of their relationship—quick jealousies, constant phone calls if they were apart for even an afternoon, and incessant reassurances that she really truly loved him and that he really truly loved her.

  Cobey lost all interest in his career. He started canceling publicity dates, on the set he was forlorn because Anne wasn't around, and he was constantly battling both Lilly and Wade, who saw his career starting into a serious decline. He even did the most unexpected thing, quit drinking.

  Lilly set private detectives on them, but the detectives were unable to learn Anne's identity. Cobey and Anne took child-like delight in eluding the detectives, in setting traps for them, in planting false clues.

  And then one day Cobey was gone.

  Lilly called the police and a nationwide search was set in motion for the TV star.

  Cobey and Anne, hair dyed, had rented a farm in Pennsylvania under a false married name. Cobey loved Pennsylvania, especially the steep, wooded hills and mountains. If any
thing, the relationship between the pair was stronger and more fulfilling than ever. Anne and Cobey would spend their lives together. That went without saying.

  And then the spells came.

  At least, that's what Cobey called them. Anne had started having nightmares about her little boy running out into the street and being struck and killed by the car. She'd started seeing his death as somehow her fault, even though, in reality, there had been nothing she could do to prevent it.

  Cobey got her to a shrink, an irony not lost on him—crazed Cobey taking someone else to a psychiatrist. For a time, Anne was better.

  And then one morning, dawn still muzzy in the dusty farmhouse window, the boards of the floor cold on the white pads of her soles, she stood looking out at the ground fog that was now touched with gold as the sun rose to take the sky, and said, "I'm pregnant."

  He watched as she turned to him, startled by the look on her face. No surprise, no joy; only a somber, even anxious look.

  "Don't you see what this means?" she said. "It means God is giving me another chance. I didn't take care of my first son, but he's giving me another chance to take care of this one. Don't you see that, Cobey?"

  She came over to the bed and fell into his arms, where they stayed the rest of the morning. He was going to be a father. Cobey Daniels. Punk of punks, assbandit of assbandits, a father if-ya-could-fer-God's-sake-believe-it.

  The next two months were out of a sentimental forties romance movie—maybe one with June Allyson. Cobey was a big fan of old movies, always wondering what it would have been like to screw those older actresses. Cobey played the attentive expectant father, Anne the lovely, serene expectant mother. And then one afternoon, a late rainy afternoon when he'd gone off to do the grocery shopping, he stopped in a bar and—just some wild, irresistible hair up his ass-had a couple of drinks and came home in the only mean mood he'd ever shown Anne...

  Terrified that something had happened to him, she was hurt and angry when she saw why he was late. She slapped him hard across the face and then he just reacted. Didn't plan to. Didn't want to. Immediately wished he hadn't.