A Cry of Shadows Page 2

  Chapter 3

  Two mornings later, so early and so cold the solitary window of my apartment was silver blue with frost, I rolled out of the cocoon of the covers, reached up with a naked, hairy arm and grabbed the telephone that was performing with such aggravating urgency.

  "Dwyer?"

  "Umm-hmmphf."

  "You're still asleep, aren't you?"

  "Was asleep. Past tense."

  "Do you know who this is?"

  "Of course I do."

  "I mean, I know it's your day off but I thought I'd better call you anyway."

  It's difficult to dislike Bobby Lee. A bottle blonde who still affects something resembling a beehive, a woman of small but substantive sweet charms and an enormous chest usually swathed in T-shirts bearing the visage of popular country western stars, a curiously prim Southern Baptist who will laugh at a joke she considers "naughty" but literally cry if you use the F-word in front of her ("You have no respect for women," she once furiously told our boss)—Bobby Lee is the closest thing I have to a real friend at the American Security Agency.

  I got up and reached for a cigarette. Reflex. I'd given up devil weeds three years earlier. I think I was still mad about it.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "You know that restaurant you went to the other day to check out the security system?"

  "Right."

  "Wasn't that guy's name Coburn?"

  "Right. Richard Coburn."

  "Somebody murdered him."

  "Huh?"

  "Last night."

  "They're sure it was murder?"

  "Shot in the back in the parking lot while he was getting into his car."

  "Have they arrested anybody yet?"

  "Not yet." Pause. "Maybe you should call your detective friend Edelman at the police station."

  "What would I tell him?"

  "Maybe you know more than you think?"

  I laughed. "With me, it's always the other way around, Bobby Lee. I know much less than I think."

  She giggled. "I won't give you an argument there."

  "God," I said, trying to imagine the big, angry man dead. I'll bet it took him a while to die. I'll bet he didn't die easily, either. "In the parking lot."

  "In the back."

  "God," I said again, and thought of the woman slapping him.

  "Well," Bobby Lee said, "I just thought I'd tell you. What made me think of it was that your time sheet came across my desk this morning. It had his name on it for billing."

  "Thanks for telling me."

  "What're you going to do today?"

  "Some Christmas shopping, I guess. And Chrissie's supposed to call me today."

  "Well, have a nice time."

  My son and daughter—Rob and Chrissie—are seventeen and fifteen respectively. Both are in high school, both have long since adjusted to the divorce that brought them a new stepfather (actually not a bad guy despite my first impressions), and both make the same effort to remember my birthday as I to remember theirs. While it's not an ideal situation—I've always wondered if their mother and I tried hard enough to make the marriage work—we love and respect each other, and are genuinely interested in each other, and hearing from either or both of them always has a way of making even a glum day better.

  Half an hour after Bobby Lee's call, I was in the bathroom shaving when the phone rang. Towel around my widening middle, I went out to the living room and picked up the phone, laying a few inches of foamy white shaving soap along the black receiver.

  "Hi, Dad. Calling at a bad time?"

  "Not at all, Chrissie."

  "So how are things going?"

  "Pretty good."

  "How's Donna?"

  "Out of town is how Donna is."

  "You miss her?"

  "Sure."

  "She's nice. I like her"

  "I know you do and I appreciate that." Pause. "But why do I have the feeling that we're not really talking about what you want to talk about?"

  "God, Dad. ESP." She laughed. "It's the cake."

  "Cake?"

  "I was baking you this birthday cake as a surprise. Just kind of experimenting before I made you the real one."

  "Oh, sweetheart. You don't need to go to all that trouble."

  Pause. "It didn't turn out so well." Pause. "Actually, it's the worst cake I've ever seen or tasted. Kenny wouldn't even eat it."

  Kenny is their collie, notorious for eating whatever you put in front of him.

  "So Rob's going to make you one," she said. "He's actually much better in the kitchen than I am."

  "That's all right, honey. You're a lot better at history than he is."

  "Yeah, and that really came in handy while I was making your cake." She laughed. "Maybe I'll be better when I take home ec next year. That's why Rob's so good. He took home ec last year."

  "Are we still going to the movie next week?"

  "God, I hope so. I've been planning on it all month."

  When she was a little girl, I took her and Rob without fail to The Lady and the Tramp every Christmastime. These days, I took Rob to his own type of holiday movie—usually a Star Trek or some other action movie—but I took my little girl to Lady.

  "Don't worry about the cake, hon. You'll get better at baking. You'll see."

  Rob grabbed the phone then and said, "Wait'll you taste mine, Dad! Mine can actually be ingested by human beings!"

  I heard them wrestling around for the receiver and then Chrissie, triumphant, said into the phone, "I'm glad one of us is mature around here, aren't you, Dad?"

  She said a few more things about school and we hung up.

  Chapter 4

  I wore Reeboks and I wore my long underwear because the big glass doors at the front of the Quality Mart Discount Store were always opening and closing and I wore my only good tweed jacket and the blue oxford button-down shirt Chrissie bought me a few months ago. Chrissie and Rob were now two days gone on their skiing trip and I wanted badly to talk to them, not to interrupt their lives in any way, just to say hi and tell them that I missed them and that I loved them. Maybe Calvin Conway, the feckless sneak thief I'd busted half an hour earlier, was right. Maybe this eighteen-shopping-days-before-Christmas jazz was getting to me after all.

  There was no employee lunchroom at Quality Mart. You ate in the tiny "restaurant" that smelled of grease and seemed to be populated almost exclusively by overweight ethnic grandmas made even stockier by their bulky winter coats and all their GI Joe and Barbie-and-Ken-doll packages. These were the women you saw at the drunkard's mass, the early one before first light, and most of them were long widowed and bereft of children except for mandatory holiday calls and you wondered what they did with themselves all day and what if any were their joys and you hated yourself for feeling superior to them when they in fact knew what mattered and you probably didn't know at all.

  She was waiting for me in a booth next to a big gaudy sign that advertised corn dogs. I recognized her immediately. She was even more beautiful than I recalled and I found myself disliking her just as much.

  She watched me walk over to her.

  "I called your company and badgered them into telling me where I'd find you. I finally told them that I planned to spend a lot of money with them and they relented. I hope you don't mind."

  "I'm sorry about your husband."

  "Yes. Aren't we all?"

  I wasn't sure how to respond. Most wives don't make sarcastic remarks about husbands three days dead. I shook my head and said, "You're a peach, Mrs. Coburn."

  She frowned. "The police have a suspect, in case you're interested. A black boy named Earle. He didn't do it." Then, "Are you going to sit down, Mr. Dwyer?"

  I sat down. When the waitress came I ordered a cheeseburger and fries and a Diet Pepsi. When she went away, the bereaved widow said, "Did you see her sweat?"

  "It's hot in here. Plus it's packed and she's busy. And she's probably working for minimum wage and worrying about her three kids at home." I shook my hea
d. "Jesus."

  "Is it asking too much that people stay dry while they're serving me?"

  "How nice for you," I said. "To live in a universe where people who work hard don't sweat."

  She stared at me. Much as I disliked her, I couldn't help but note again how lovely she looked in her wine-colored turtleneck and brown suede car coat, with her tumbling blond hair and her full, cruel, erotic mouth. She was the prize all the rich boys would lay their lives down trying to win.

  She said, "If I eat a corn dog, will you like me any better?"

  "Maybe."

  "It's worth a try, then."

  So she had a corn dog. She ate it tentatively, as if afraid to know what might be inside.

  "This is ducky," she said, her cute little white teeth soiled with flecks of corn dog.

  "I heard they make them with real dogs," I said.

  She said, "This must be a Pekingese. Very tough." After another bite, "Don't you think I'm trying hard to be a good sport?"

  "A veritable saint."

  "Do you really hate me all that much?"

  "Probably not all that much."

  "Then why don't we try to be pleasant with each other?"

  "Pleasant it is, then."

  "Really, Mr. Dwyer?"

  "Really."

  She said, "I notice you're not eating a corn dog."

  "You think I'd eat something like that?"

  She smiled. "I'll bet you raised your share of hell when you were a boy."

  "I sure tried."

  "You were probably one of those boys from the West Side who always tried to get my attention at the movie theater on Saturday afternoons."

  "John Agar double features."

  "Really. I could never figure that out. If they wanted me to be nice to them, why weren't they nice to me?"

  I shrugged. "You probably scared them."

  "But I was a girl."

  "Doesn't matter. In fact, the scariest people I knew growing up were girls. Nothing can intimidate you like beauty."

  "Really?" she said around her corn dog. "I'm learning some things here today, aren't I?"

  I leaned forward. "Who are you betting on, Mrs. Coburn?"

  She set the corn dog down and finished swallowing and said, "Do you mean who do I think killed Richard?"

  "Right."

  "I'm not sure. I just know it wasn't Earle." She put her head down and stared at the remains of her corn dog. She lifted her head and said, "Something you said a little while ago really pissed me off."

  "I see."

  "Don't you even want to know what it was?"

  "I suppose when I said you were a peach."

  She was angry. She calmed herself enough to speak. "I'm not a 'peach,' Mr. Dwyer. We didn't have a good marriage and it wasn't my fault. I only went to bed with other men because I was bored or because Richard had hurt me in some way."

  "And Richard went to bed with other women—"

  "Because he was very macho about conquest. Very macho." She shook her head. "Except with me. We didn't make love for the last year of our marriage. He couldn't. He tried a few times but he couldn't quite do it. Then he very gallantly told me that he was just fine when he was with other women—just so I'd know that he was a real he-man. So don't get sanctimonious about my marriage, Mr. Dwyer. All right?"

  "I apologize."

  She laughed. "Maybe to go along with your contrition you should try a corn dog."

  "I don't think so."

  "A drink, then?"

  "At noon hour?"

  "You're such a prig, Mr. Dwyer. Lots of people have drinks at noon."

  "Not people I know."

  "Oh, yes, Dwyer the monk. It seems to me that if I could survive a corn dog, you could survive a drink."

  "Well . . ."

  "God, Mr. Dwyer, I'm not going to steal your cherry or anything. I'd like a drink."

  So we went and had ourselves a drink.

  Chapter 5

  "So do you like arresting shoplifters?"

  "Not particularly."

  "I wondered. I wouldn't like it either."

  "Really?"

  "Believe it or not, Mr. Dwyer, sad stories get to me. And I'll bet they're full of sad stories. Shoplifters, I mean."

  "Fortunately for my delicate sensibilities, most of the people I bust are professionals. Very few people shoplift to get the essentials. Busting professionals doesn't bother me at all."

  She raised her vodka gimlet and took a tidy sip. We were in a small shopping-mall bar, the sort where middle-class housewives and insurance salesmen come blinking in out of the daylight to be lost in the beery darkness. The only constant light is the rotating Bud clock suspended by a fancy gold chain from the ceiling. The jukebox runs to Engelbert Humperdinck. People kept coming in from outside, stamping snow off their feet.

  "You must be very versatile."

  "Why's that?" I asked, sipping my shell of Hamm's.

  "Because the other day you were at the restaurant checking our security system and today you're arresting shoplifters."

  "Which is what I usually do. Shoplifters. I was out at the restaurant the other day because the boss is on vacation in Bermuda until after the first of the year. Because I'm the only guy on staff who used to be a real cop, I cover a lot of bases for him."

  She lighted a hundred-millimeter cigarette and inhaled deeply. You could almost hear the cancer cells applauding. "We never did get around to discussing it, my husband and I."

  "Discussing what?"

  "What you found."

  "I didn't find anything."

  "Nothing?"

  She seemed quite surprised and that made me curious. "What did you think I'd find, Mrs. Coburn?"

  "Deirdre sounds so much better tripping off the tongue than Mrs. Coburn. I sound like a cleaning woman. 'Oh, Mrs. Coburn, and don't forget to take out the garbage, will you, dear?"

  "I thought we weren't going to irritate each other anymore. At least not on purpose."

  "Did that irritate you?"

  "Kind of, yeah. I had an aunt who was a cleaning woman."

  "Aren't we the sensitive one, though."

  I said, "What did you think I was going to find?"

  "In the alley?"

  "Yes."

  "I wasn't sure."

  "Who killed your husband?"

  "My, you're really going to press me, aren't you?"

  "You have some idea of who killed your husband. Otherwise you wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of looking me up."

  "The police think it's Earle. Poor Earle."

  "But you don't think so."

  She smiled emptily at me. "No, I suppose I don't."

  "So who killed him, Mrs. Coburn?"

  "Now you're trying to irritate me, aren't you?" She tapped a long, perfect red nail on the edge of her glass. On the jukebox Nat "King" Cole started singing "The Christmas Song." I got sentimental but I wasn't sure about what. Maybe just his great voice.

  She looked up at me. "I think it was that bitch Jackie."

  "I don't know who she is."

  "She was behind the bar when you were there the other day."

  "Oh. Right. Her." I remembered the gorgeous brunette. "Why would she kill him?"

  "She bought into the restaurant several weeks ago—her father had died and left her some money—and they hadn't been getting along very well, she and Richard. They disagreed on a lot of management practices."

  "You'd better think over what you're saying. You're making a very serious charge."

  "She did it." She sighed and stared into her drink made silver in the backlight of the jukebox. "I'll pay you your normal rate."

  "You want me to prove that Jackie killed him?"

  "Yes."

  "What if it turns out not to be Jackie?"

  She raised her head and smiled. "Then you won't get a bonus." She paused. Smiled. There was a little warmth in this one. "I've already sent a check to your office. Two thousand dollars. That should get us started."

 
"I have a question for you."

  "I may not have an answer."

  "Your husband's partner seemed very upset the other day when he found out that I'd been looking around the building. I got the sense that he was hiding something—the same sense I got from your husband. Or maybe you're hiding something, Mrs. Coburn?"

  She laughed and I realized then that she was slightly drunk. There was something melancholy about her being drunk in the middle of the afternoon in the company of a man who didn't like her. Something lonely that threatened to make her human to me. "I guess you'll just have to find out for yourself, Mr. Dwyer, won't you?"

  I started to say something but then I decided to let "The Christmas Song" finish. I drank the rest of my shell.

  "Did you ever read The Great Gatsby, Mr. Dwyer?"

  "Several times."

  "That was our problem. My husband and I."

  "What was?"

  "He came from a poor background and wanted to prove to the world that he was this wonderful, successful man. He really was Jay Gatsby. Unfortunately for both of us, I wasn't Daisy Buchanan."

  The words had the feeling of a set piece, something she'd many times told lovers in many bars to assuage her guilt over adultery.

  The front door opened and a big fat Santa Claus came in. He sat at a stool directly across from us and took off his hat and his fake white hair and his fake white beard. He was bald. He stuck a cheap cigar in his mouth and lighted it.

  The bartender asked him, "How's it going today, Santa?"

  Santa laughed and said, "This is one of them days when I feel sorry for child molesters. Gimme a double, Sammy, quick, okay?"

  She said, "I wonder what I'll do Christmas. You know, I hadn't even thought of that till right now. Both my parents are dead."

  She sounded drunk and sorry for herself, a state I was not unfamiliar with, and if I didn't quite like her a lot at least now I liked her a little.

  "You're not so bad," I said.

  "Do you mean that?" she said.

  "C'mon," I said, "I'll walk you to your car."

  Chapter 6

  After work I went home, showered quickly, put on my good blue suit, a white shirt with a gold tie bar, a deep red Wembley tie that had been my father's and was now back in style again, and my good black oxfords. In the bathroom mirror, I looked closely at my hair and decided it wasn't yet time for Grecian Formula, which my agent had lately been suggesting.