Shadow Games (24 page)

The thing most curious about Boyle is his enthusiasm for hookers. Here's a very hetero guy with matinee-idol looks, a gym-perfect body and a very charming manner. He has dozens of girls to choose from, yet he spends a lot of his time with very young hookers. "Pure ones," he calls them, high school queens just out here from Nebraska or Colorado, working for "modeling" agencies to pay the rent. At a cast party one night, one of his chippies noted how many people were drinking Perrier instead of alcohol. She laughed. "That's a good thing. Customers come a lot faster that way."

But, and this is pure Boyle, rather than just pumping them and forgetting them, he pumps them and...tries to save their souls.

Tries to convince them to go back to Nebraska and give up the hills of Hollywood.

I guess I would be moved by all this—I mean, it is a nice thing to do to talk a girl out of being a prostitute—if I didn't know deep down that "saving their souls" was just part of a sexual game he likes to play with hookers.

Boyle is a tricky one.

You have to watch him.

Oh yeah.

1

T
he gray limestone and stained glass windows of the Second Presbyterian Church were even more beautiful than Puckett had expected.

They sat for a long time in the rear of the church, watching the way the sunlight played through the windows, vivid on one piece of glass for a time, then exploding elsewhere a few moments later.

Anne held his hand for a long time. "Do you feel holy, Puckett?"

"No. But I wish I did."

"I wish I did, too..."

A
fter dinner at the
Ristorante
Italia, they went back to Puckett's room. As soon as they closed the door, the phone started ringing.

Puckett ran to it.

He recognized the voice immediately. "Where are you?"

Cobey
told him.

He asked Puckett to meet him there in half an hour.

"I'll be there," Puckett said, and hung up.

"Is he all right?" Anne asked.

"He sounds exhausted and scared. About what you'd expect, I guess."

"Do you want me to go?"

"You mind if I take it alone? It'll probably be easier."

She smiled. "The code of the private eye?"

He smiled back and kissed her. "Yeah, something like that, anyway."

2

A
fter hanging up,
Cobey
leaned his head back against the grimy glass of the phone booth and closed his eyes.

He stayed this way, taking deep, relaxing breaths, reciting again and again the mantra he'd gotten from his long-ago sessions on Sepulveda Boulevard in the true ways of the soul, and wishing he could clearly remember the night he'd awakened and found Beth's head in the refrigerator.

But Puckett would be here soon. Puckett would be able to help...

If he could recall the night exactly, maybe he could recall seeing the murder take place...or the murderer escape... Again, his mind returned to the fact that Lilly had just appeared at Beth's apartment that night. He couldn't remember calling her. How had she known to be there, known he needed help?

He opened his eyes.

Across the street, in the rain, a bulky man in an overcoat stood watching him. Only the man's eyes, which seemed the emerald color of a tiger's, were bright, the rest of the man's face was lost in shadow.

Suddenly,
Cobey
felt self-conscious, as if the booth were a display case.

Yes, it's me,
Cobey
Daniels, wanted for murder...

The phone booth reeked of piss and cheap wine.
Cobey's
nose was running. And his scalp had started to itch, apparently in some kind of reaction to the Lady Clairol he'd used yesterday morning.

The man dropped his cigarette in the gutter, then shoved both hands into his overcoat pockets.

He stood still, just watching
Cobey
.

And then he started across the street toward the booth.

The neighborhood was mostly warehouses and old shops. There was no traffic on the rain-slick street.

Just the man walking, walking, his footsteps echoing off the dark, empty warehouses.

Walking.

And then
Cobey
got scared.

He wasn't sure why. It was just some sense that this man was somebody
Cobey
didn't want to know, somebody who meant him harm.

Cobey
opened the creaking door.

The night air was cold, his breath silver.

The man, head down in the mist, kept walking, walking, his footsteps louder now.

Cobey
glanced up and down the dark street.

If the man had confederates anywhere, they were well hidden.

The man raised his head abruptly. His bright eyes stared right at
Cobey
. "That phone working?"

"Yes."

"Good. Have to call the wife."

The man nodded and brushed past
Cobey
, leaving the younger man to stand in the middle of the street. The street light waved in the wind, scattering blanched light across the pavement.

Cobey
turned around and watched the man go in the booth.

When the light came on, the door closing,
Cobey
saw that the man was both older and heavier than he'd first appeared.

Even from there,
Cobey
could hear the metallic clank of the change dropping in the telephone.

And then he thought:
What if he's recognized me? What if he's calling the cops?

Cobey
felt sick and scared and cold again; and utterly, utterly baffled.

This was a nightmare, right? Some kind of horrible drug dream he was having?

The man opened the door abruptly and stared out of the phone booth, his eyes still seeming to glow.

"You got a match, son?" he said.

Cobey
knew, then. This man was the enemy. The enemy.

He couldn't wait for Puckett now. By the time Puckett got here, this man would have arrested him.

Then he was running; running, the flapping of his soles on the wet pavement fading, fading as the man started talking on the phone.

Cobey
was gone; gone...

I

A
lbert Kemper, the manager of the apartment house in which Beth Swallows had been killed, was reading
Penthouse
when he thought he heard the noise upstairs. The time was 8:15 PM.

It was his habit, once he'd gotten every possible moment of pleasure from looking at the ladies, to go to the front of the hefty, glossy magazine and begin to read the articles. While his wife was alive, he hadn't dared bring the magazine home. His wife had been overly sensitive to any attention he paid to females, even ones in magazines. And a girlie magazine... But, as he thought this, he felt guilty. He loved his wife even now, and did not mean to dishonor her memory...

Overall,
Penthouse
was a pretty good magazine, journalistically speaking, one of the last refuges of liberalism. Kemper, though he was variously disenchanted with feminists, blacks, gays and foreigners, still called himself a liberal, even if, in his most secret heart, he was in fact something of a reactionary these days.

The noise caused him to set down his magazine—he was halfway through an article on which congressmen had
mistresses on their payrolls. He looked up into the gloom of his ceiling.

Albert Kemper always read in the same armchair. With the same floor lamp spreading a bright coin of light in a small area encompassing the chair. The rest of the room was dark.

As he looked up now, he thought of two things: the torn, bloody head of Beth Swallows in the refrigerator and the fact that the police had sealed off Beth's apartment. Nobody was permitted in there, not even Albert Kemper, retired English teacher and apartment house super.

But he was sure the noise had come from Beth's apartment.

Sure of it.

He set the magazine down on the white doily that covered the surface of the stand. Following surgery years ago, his wife, Marjorie, had taught herself to crochet and it had been their joke that her enthusiasm would someday lead her to crochet such things as a refrigerator and a car. Kemper put his hands on his knotty knees and stood up.

His first impulse was to pick up the phone and call Detective Cozzens. Hadn't the detective told him to do just that?

The problem was, what if he was wrong?

On a windy night, in an apartment house usually noisy at this time of night anyway, how could he be sure that the sound had come from Beth's apartment? And who would be up there, anyway? The killer? Unlikely. For what reason?

He stood in the darkness surrounding the glowing chair, thinking.

Maybe it would be a waste of time to go up there at all. Maybe his hearing had just been playing tricks on him. Neither his vision nor his hearing were all that wonderful these days.

Then he sighed, drew tight his brown cardigan with the two buttons missing—he'd been not only a chauvinist but an obstinate one; even with Marjorie gone all this time, he still hadn't learned how to sew, pricking himself every time he
tried, and the button falling off right away the few times he'd succeeded—and went out into the hall.

VCRs competed with each other up and down the hallway. In the last five years, home videos had become the dominant form of entertainment, some people bringing home one or two at a time, others bringing home six or seven for a long weekend. A few apartments still watched regular television, though. As he neared the staircase, a human laugh came up over the inhuman laugh of the soundtrack, while in another apartment a popcorn maker simulated the sound of a Tommy Gun on the old
Untouchables
show.

The stairs were wearying. This was a big place, long out of fashion, of course, but the size guaranteeing each renter real privacy.

When he was halfway up, he saw Cosgrove, his newest tenant, coming down the stairs with a smiling, blonde woman walking in front of him single file. Cosgrove should have been the one smiling. As far as Albert Kemper was concerned, Cosgrove bore no resemblance whatsoever to Prince Charming, yet at least three times a week he sported a very nice looking woman. And a different one each time, too. He was this doughy Irish guy with a lot of greasy black hair and a somewhat sinister, film noir mustache. He always wore dark, double-breasted suits and bright silk ties. His success with women proved that the world was a mysterious and ultimately incomprehensible place.

The blonde smiled her empty blonde smile for Albert Kemper and kept on walking.

"Hey, Pops, how they
hangin
"?" Cosgrove said as he passed Kemper. He smiled his empty nightclub smile, obviously taking pleasure in the fact that calling Kemper "Pops" irritated and humiliated the guy. Then, "Hey, what's going on in that apartment where the chick got killed?"

Kemper froze on the stairway. "What?"

"Yeah, me "n Denise here were just
leavin
" the apartment when we heard some kinda noise in there. Right, Denise?"

Denise nodded. Damn, she was good looking.

"What kind of noise?" Albert Kemper said.

"Who knows from noise? Just—noise."

"Like something falling maybe," Denise said.

Cosgrove shrugged. "Yeah, like somethin"
fallin
" maybe."

 
"I'll check it out," Albert Kemper said.

Cosgrove laughed. "Hey, maybe it's a ghost in there
movin
' around, right, Kemper?"

Denise shuddered. Cosgrove winked at Albert Kemper. They were both, or so thought Cosgrove, in the same club, with ladies far too frail to ever join.

"Stuff like that really scares me!" Denise said on the way down the stairs.

Albert Kemper walked in the opposite direction. When he reached the second floor, he started thinking about strange noises and how they affected him. They scared him, too.