Cast of Shadows - v4 (30 page)

There are thousands of views of Lake Michigan from the city, but none quite like that from Abbott’s, the pricey glass-enclosed two-story restaurant a hundred yards out on Navy Pier. From the right table at Abbott’s you felt surrounded by water, protected by it. Davis had hoped for, asked for, and received such a table, and was so comforted by the environs he had to be cajoled by the waiter into finally opening his menu.

The dress Joan wore was black — her little black one, he presumed — and she was as stunning in it as it was stunning on her. It was difficult to tell, in fact, whether she or the dress benefited more from the pairing. Davis had seen her in dresses before, at holiday parties and professional functions, and once by coincidence at the symphony, a night Jackie had been unnecessarily rude to Joan and her date, leaving Davis alone with them at intermission, stammering to cover his jealousy and embarrassment. For all he knew this might have been the same dress she wore that evening, but tonight she wore it specifically for him, specifically to please him, and he was suddenly ashamed of his brown suit, not because it wasn’t flattering, but because he had given so little thought to putting it on.

“Frankly, I’m surprised you wanted to be with me tonight,” she said after the waiter had refilled their glasses with pricey sparkling water and then drifted out of earshot.

“Who else?” he asked, almost suavely.

“On the night before your sentencing? I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just surprised.” Her smile was self-conscious.

“I don’t have many friends anymore, to be honest.” Davis realized almost immediately how unseductive that sounded, and also how true it was. “I’ve seen enough of Graham the last few months. My next-closest friend is Walter Hirschberg, I suppose, and I’m not sure this would be the most comfortable evening to spend with an ethicist.”

“Well, even if I was at the top of a short list, thank you.”

“Not at all.”

“And not just for dinner.”

Davis was foolishly optimistic about her intentions.

“Thank you for keeping me out of it,” she said, reaching over and brushing his hand. “They might have been easier on you if you offered them something. Given me up. Many people would have, to save themselves.”

“I’m hardly worth saving,” Davis said. “Besides, you had nothing to do with it. If anything, I used you. They should tack time
onto
my sentence for that, not shave it off.”

Joan retracted her hand and placed it over the pearls at her neck. “I thought you said you wouldn’t have to go to prison.”

“Graham doesn’t think so, but there’s always a chance. It’s actually mandatory in the guidelines, but he thinks they’ll suspend it.”

“And then?”

He let a sip of Shiraz trickle down the back of his throat. “Put it behind me.”

“Really?” she asked. “Put it all behind you?” She had her hair up for the night, but it refused to be contained. Long, wavy tendrils hung down past the corners of her brown eyes to her cheeks.

“It’s been ten years since I did it. A fifth of my life. The
worst
fifth of my life. I made a lot of other people miserable or worse. Including you. For all I know, the guy who killed Anna Kat is dead or rotting in jail by now, anyway. Odds are, he is. It’s time for me to stop caring and see that the next fifth of my life is better. I don’t have many fifths left.”

“Don’t be ashamed of what you tried to do,” Joan said. “It was stupid.” She looked at him honestly. “But you did what you did because you loved Anna Kat. And what happened to Jackie wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes. It was.”

“No. God, Davis. I don’t want to speak ill of her, but she was deeply troubled.” A pair of waiters arrived with their plates and Davis and Joan gazed at each other in silence until they were alone again and she was able to finish the thought. “Did you know Jackie slashed the tires on my car?”

“No! When?”

“Maybe four months before she passed away. It was parked in the driveway of my condo. On a Tuesday night. I found it the next morning.”

“How do you know it was her?”

“She didn’t try to hide it. She came to my house the next day and warned me to stay away from you. I told her there was nothing going on, which was a lie, I guess, but nothing
sexual
was going on.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“Oh,
really,
Davis. Call the cops on your wife?”

“You should have told me…”

She puffed her lips. “That would have been worse.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Joan allowed herself a breather for a few bites of pumpkin ravioli. “So, was there something going on?”

Davis squinted. “What? With you and me?”

“With you and anyone. I mean, the woman was suspicious about
something
. She might have been unbalanced, but I don’t think it came from nowhere.”

The restaurant was full now, and the late setting sun reflected against the glass of downtown in an orange glow. “Yeah, well,
nowhere
was kind of a theme with Jackie.”

Joan whispered, “Even I wondered about you once. That day at the Finns’ house.” She took a sip of Chardonnay and said, almost inaudibly, “Maybe I was just jealous, too.”

“I remember,” Davis said. “But no. I never cheated on Jackie.”

“See? You always had that perspective. Take care of the people closest to you. At all costs.”

“I wanted to once,” he told her.

“Cheat? Really?” she said, mouth full, somehow unsuspecting. “When?”

“Brixton,” he said.

She nodded, slowly, sincerely. He didn’t feel bad for having said it.

After dinner, they walked to the end of the pier to enjoy the blackness over the lake. To their left was Festival Hall, part of the original pier built in 1916. He and Jackie had been married there, in the Grand Ballroom, and it suddenly struck Davis as inappropriate that he should be here with Joan. Some subconscious gremlin had caused him to make reservations at Abbott’s, where he and Jackie had celebrated a handful of their early anniversaries (although the restaurant had another name then). It was impossible that this wouldn’t have occurred to him before now, impossible that he couldn’t have seen how callous it was to be here with Joan on what amounted to, if he was being honest with himself, their first date — his first date with the woman Jackie had accused of threatening their marriage. And although Jackie might have been half crazy, about that she was at least half right.

For that reason, demonstrating what he recognized as too-little-too-late respect for the memory of his wife, Davis didn’t take Joan’s hand as they walked, and if she had expected him to, she didn’t show it. Joan, her fingers holding a light black sweater over her bare shoulders, seemed content, commenting on the wonderful smells of the shore and the pleasant breeze and the number of children about at so late an hour.

At the tip of the pier stood a crowd of maybe thirty people, staring off into the darkness. In the back a young man in shorts hopped on his toes for a better view, but all Davis could see from his six feet three inches was a couple of midsized boats — not pleasure craft, but not the massive party-and-tour yachts that docked here in the summer, either — about seventy-five yards out. They were working boats, with electronic gear and a radio dish and men in uniform scurrying on deck and men in diving gear going over the side.

“What happened?” Davis posed the question to the back of the crowd, offering it to anyone who thought they knew the answer.

“They found another girl,” somebody said without turning around. “Another dead girl.”

Davis pushed the remains of an overcooked chicken back and forth across the heavy white Prince Hotel Palm Springs catering plate. He knew he was being watched, and the scrutiny had poisoned his appetite. Every one of the three hundred or so doctors and researchers and ethicists in this room probably brought with them to this conference an opinion, rumor, or assumption about Davis Moore. He still wasn’t comfortable with the kind of celebrity he had become.

His difficulties with the Lake County state’s attorney had resolved themselves much as Graham had promised. Davis pled to a misdemeanor and paid an affordable fine, was sentenced to seven days in jail, suspended, and worked at a free clinic on Chicago’s West Side every Tuesday for six months. Martha Finn followed up with a civil suit, which Graham settled out of court for less than $75,000. Following his community service, the Congressional Board of Oversight and the AMA suspended his license for another four months, a slap on the wrist considering the full menu of their options.

When the suspension was up, however, he didn’t return to the clinic. The Chicago dailies lost interest in him after Ricky Weiss was sentenced, but the stalking charges against him became front-page news in the suburban papers. That brought him notoriety, and not just the shaming kind he expected. People sympathized with him. He had lost his daughter and his wife, and for the love of God he’d been shot himself by a religious zealot, and maybe he
had
crossed some ethical lines with his mysterious “study” of Justin, but no one suggested he’d been a danger to the boy, no one except for Martha Finn in her restraining order (which remained in place until Justin was eighteen).

In place of his practice, Davis accepted generous fees to speak at seminars and dinners and fund-raisers. He became a regular pundit on the Sunday television roundtables as the violence at fertility clinics became more intense and the ethics of cloning were debated with increased frequency on the front pages of newsweeklies. At the age of fifty-six and with no patients of his own, Dr. Davis Moore had become cloning’s most distinguished spokesperson.

Of course, he could never admit publicly the real reasons he quit his practice. For one, he was exhausted, weary of the violence that had now taken four of his close friends in the profession, and too tired to cope with new clinic security — the armed guards, the gated parking garage, the metal detectors, the name badges, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the drills, the threats, the bimonthly evacuations and the subsequent “all clear’s.” Even here at the conference uniformed guards stood by the exits, making and remaking every attendee, memorizing faces, and quantifying risk.

Davis also felt guilty. Guilt over the bodies of Anna Kat and Jackie and even Phil Canella, whom he never even met. Guilt over the trauma he’d caused the Finn family. Guilt over Justin, a boy who never should have been, and guilt over Eric Lundquist’s discarded DNA, the blueprint of a boy who should have been but never was.

The conference was sponsored by the California Association of Libertarian Scientists. Traditionally, they lobbied Congress on any issue related to “researcher rights,” but over the past year, as the anti-cloners in Washington gained support (up to forty-three percent in some polls), CALS had become almost exclusively a cloning advocacy group.

“Our guest tonight has made many sacrifices in the name of science,” began the introduction from a Berkeley-educated medical doctor named Poonwalla. “He has been persecuted, prosecuted, and has even taken a bullet for the causes all of us in this room hold dear. But you can’t keep a good man down, especially a good man who has right-thinking, free people like you on his side. Ladies and gentleman, from Chicago, Dr. Davis Moore.”

Davis stood up and smiled and shook hands with Dr. Poonwalla. As he took a breath and began, Davis thought of three true statements: This speech wasn’t especially good. He was a hypocrite for giving it. This audience would love it.

“There is a computer game, maybe some of your kids play it. Actually, about forty percent of the adults in this room play it every week, if the adults in this room are typical and the statistics I read in the paper are worth a damn. Worldwide, they say five thousand new players sign up every day. The game is called Shadow World.”

A murmur of recognition pulsed from table to table. Everyone had heard of Shadow World. It was the most popular multiplayer game in America. At several tables, husbands elbowed wives and wives elbowed husbands as if to say,
He’s talking about you, hon
. Couples who played the game together, and there were many, squeezed hands.