The Hidden Man (16 page)

“All right, you knew that she cut her hair. That was enough to tell you what?”

“Nothing. It was the fact that she was hiding it from everyone that was the mystery for me. Randall, we both know that she is completely closed off to me, but we also both know that she is floundering around without any real direction. You’ve been so good to her, and I know she probably wouldn’t be alive without you. But you haven’t been able to guide her in being a woman. Who could expect you to?”

She had nailed him. Like mounting a bug on a straight pin. Part of his sensitivity over the topic of his adopted children was his fear that he had not done enough for them. He could not deny that Vignette had lacked a woman’s guidance throughout her life. There must have been things that he could have done to help her develop social skills, if he had possessed them himself.

“So I paid one of the boys who works for the concierge at the Fairmont to carry along a description of Vignette and wait outside your house early in the morning, and stay there until she came out.”

“You
paid
someone to—”

“Well, I wasn’t going to do it, was I?”

“It doesn’t seem—”

“
And
he followed her to the police training ground, watched her duck into an alley and come out wearing a man’s clothing! Ha! She must have had someplace to hide a bag, back there.”

“You knew.” Blackburn could hardly react.

“Women sense things, Randall. Surely you realize that.”

“Not just women.”

She sighed. “Yes, I know about Shane. The point is that I found out about Vignette’s reckless and immature little game. I give her points for initiative, and all. But please, Randall, she could hardly have considered the possible impact on you.”

“Well, office politics is not something she…”

She flashed him a coquettish smile. “So, then, don’t you want to have someone in your life like me, who is there to consider what it could do to your career if a certain person pushed her little joke, or little experiment, or whatever she wants to call it?”

“But Janine. Why not just come to me? Or even, even just go to Vignette herself, if you didn’t want to bring me in on it? Why not just go and appeal to her?”

“Oh, my goodness, do you hear yourself, Randall? You want me to go and make an appeal to her? She is nineteen years old, an adult in most ways, and insists on behaving the way she does. What appeal can I make to her? Tell me!”

“She deserved to be treated with more kindness than to betray her like that.”

“Excuse me! I would only ‘betray’ her if I failed to address her predicament. It is so clear that what she needs is to be thoroughly exposed to an atmosphere where she can absorb important social skills. She would’ve never listened to a suggestion from me, especially about such a thing as working in the Ladies’ Hospitality League. But I was positive that she would be more receptive after her careless little game was exposed. It was her sense of being chastised that made her agree to go along. You can see that, can’t you?”

It hit him like a brick. He did see it. She was right. Not only that, but he had been pleasantly surprised when Vignette agreed to work with her. So why did he feel that he was being robbed, somehow, at that moment? Each little point that Miss Freshell brought up made sense to him. Still, it all felt wrong.

The problem was that he had gone to the Fairmont Hotel that evening already filled with suspicion that she had been deceptive and manipulative with him. He arrived determined that if it was true, he would break off his engagement with her. The simple truth was that he could not abide the thought of her lying to him in such a way—especially involving Vignette.

But now his momentum had dissipated. He was stuck in his position, while Miss Freshell, it seemed, was not done with hers.

“Randall, look me in the eye and tell me that you would have been able to convince her to even
try
this arrangement, if I had merely come to you, and then we ‘simply asked’ her? What would be her motivation to cooperate? But now, after being discreetly but very definitely exposed, she is temporarily embarrassed enough to
try
this.”

“Did you think nothing at all about the risks of doing it this way?”

“I did. And I thought about the risks to her of continuing on her unworkable path until something really dreadful came of it.”

“You’ve really got that much concern for someone who treats you the way she does?”

Miss Freshell smiled one of her good smiles.

“No, Detective. My concern is for
you.
I know that you will be happy if she pulls herself together and makes a place for herself in the world. I also know that she has you so tightly wrapped around her finger that you’d have never stood up to her, without this.”

He had one last objection before he would be out of ammunition.

“…You tricked her, Janine.”

She deflected that one with a gesture that actually reminded him of swatting away a pesky fly. “What I did was to ‘trick’ her into a whole new chance at life. You’re welcome.”

Randall dropped his head, beaten.

She reached for him and lightly drew her fingers across his cheek. “So tell me, do I know my fiancé, or do I not? This is the kind of thing that a good woman wants to do for her man, Randall. Make his life better. Naturally, Vignette can’t appreciate what I’ve done, now. But by the time that the exposition closes down, she will have had almost a year of association with women who will set a sterling example for her in terms of personal decorum. They can also help her.”

“Yes, but—”

“
Help her,
Randall. Help her as she goes along in life. Have you thought about that? You seem to want to see her as still being just a girl, but she can hardly stay at home forever.”

That one stopped him cold. Blackburn sighed, angry with himself and with the situation, furious at his inability to land a blow on the truth. He hated what Miss Freshell had done, but he also understood her reasons. He hated the way that she did it, but he also had to admit that it would not have worked if she had told either of them first.

It was demoralizing to still feel so angry with her without understanding why. But Miss Freshell seemed to sense everything that was going through him. She reached across the table to take both his hands in hers.

“A single woman’s social contacts are priceless to her, Randall. I doubt that a man as independent as you are can begin to grasp what that means for her. They can make all the difference in the quality of her future. Now, I understand that this inheritance of theirs won’t do much more than keep body and soul together, correct? Didn’t you tell me that?”

He felt himself blush. It was incredible. She had been dishonest, manipulative, and conspiratorial with both him and Vignette, and nevertheless she had just convinced him of the perfect sense in all of it.

The question that challenged him was simple. How important were his personal opinions about the way that things ought to be done? How important were they, compared to a plan of action that wound up helping Vignette to learn things that she needed to know and he could never hope to teach her?

In his judgment, he still owed her for her adolescence. He had skated past her change from a girl into a woman. She just never seemed to have any questions about it. He knew that she was not taught about that sort of thing in their private school classes, beyond general biology. At the time he had been grateful to have an excuse to dodge the thorny issue. Now it shamed him to realize that.

He never asked himself why a young girl expressed no curiosity about her body or about sex, when she felt so completely free to talk about any other thought that breezed into her head. Why had he not wondered a bit more about that?

Since Miss Freshell had caught him red-handed at being a fool, then was he also a fool for thinking of breaking it off with her? Perhaps the sense of strangeness that caused him such concern was just his own reaction to the way that life was like, with a woman. After all, was there anything that he knew less about?

For years he had been listening to the married officers complaining about their wives, trying to figure out how to deal with the women in their families, trying to figure out what they wanted. Was that this?

The answer was clear. As long as Miss Freshell’s motives were pure and her aims were achieved, who was he to say that she had to do things in the same way that he did?

He had been a colossal idiot.

Blackburn’s sense of honor left him so embarrassed by his mistake that he dared not proceed to the second issue, about what she could possibly have to do with him being assigned to guard James “J.D.” Duncan. With a trace of dread, he suspected that there would turn out to be another obvious explanation, one he failed to see until it was pointed out to him.

He could not stop himself from raising his eyes to meet hers. On its own, his face formed into a rueful smile. He had no thought of doing it; it seemed to happen by itself.

Immediately, Miss Freshell’s eyes revealed that she saw and understood. In acknowledgment, she knitted her brow in a sympathetic pull to the middle and offered him a sexy pout.

And now that he had indicated that he was coming around to her way of thinking, Blackburn immediately felt the momentum begin to build. The tide soon lifted them off that momentary sandbar and the evening’s energy wave began to pick up speed.

The rest of the meeting, which he soon realized was now a full late-night dinner, went by as smoothly as spun silk. He noticed that she ordered more than she was likely to eat, and that all of it was from among the most costly selections on the overpriced menu. Still, his conscience bothered him so much over his unfounded anger and suspicion of her that it never occurred to him to object.

Neither Blackburn nor Miss Freshell was looking across the dining room in the direction of the stairway coming up from the grand lobby, so neither saw Duncan stroll up the stairs and into the restaurant. He intended to have a quick late dinner alone, mostly ignoring the food and using the drinks to counteract the remains of the elixir, then retire up to his suite. He walked along with his habitual tunnel vision firmly in place. J.D. had long since found that if he looked straight ahead while he walked and did not meet anyone’s eye—and perhaps pretended to be just a touch hard of hearing—he seldom had to endure gushing conversation from civilians. He was in no shape for it.

A busy waiter passed by him just as a fork fell from the waiter’s tray. It landed near Duncan’s foot, and was just enough to cause Duncan to glance in the waiter’s direction, next to the table where Detective Blackburn and Miss Freshell sat profile to him.

He recognized her immediately, felt a quick impulse to start in her direction, but stopped in his tracks as he realized who was with her. Detective Blackburn was there, even though she had assured Duncan that Blackburn was revolted by extreme luxury and would never step inside such a place. Hadn’t she said that?

Duncan could not deny that his memory for immediate things was eroding, such as being able to recall where he had just come from. But his memory for things that stretched out over time was still fairly good, and his relationship with Janine Freshell had gone on long enough for him to remember it well.

He had also not forgotten her engagement to the detective. The practiced showman kept his face entirely neutral while he flicked his gaze away from their table and smoothly turned around, back toward the stairs. He tapped his head as if he had just forgotten something, in case anybody watching was curious about his change of direction. Then he walked out of the restaurant.

There were other places to pretend to eat and actually drink: smaller places, within a couple of blocks from the hotel. The wise choice was to go someplace where there was no risk of Detective Blackburn spotting him and somehow connecting Duncan with the woman that the bigger and much younger man was supposed to marry.

Policemen, he reminded himself, were famously vindictive about such things.

Vignette stepped out of Miss Freshell’s suite and quietly closed the door. Then she fixed her face with an expression of benign affability and focused her eyes straight ahead with such intensity that nobody would think of speaking to her. She remained protectively masked all the way back to the lobby, out the door, passing the glorious doormen with a playful wave and striding off into the night.

Vignette could have grabbed a cable car right there, but instead she started off down the hill, moving at a steady little dogtrot that she called her “city stroll.” She could do it for long blocks, even up most hills. And if she could have done it unencumbered by the long skirt, she would have happily darted in and out among the other pedestrians. Weaving circles and figure eights in the air all around them, she would be like a thieving swallow who has just picked up something very bright and shiny indeed.

THE NEXT DAY

THE FAIRMONT HOTEL—HIGH ATOP NOB HILL

“W
HO KNOWS WHY
the forgetting occurs?” Dr. Alzheimer had rhetorically asked. He continued, with a sly grin that kept you from knowing if he was making a joke or not, “Perhaps the victim of this malady will first begin forgetting those things that he or she considers beneficial to forget. Who can say? Underneath all manner of social expectation, cultural taboo, religious conviction, and even the individual ego itself: hard truth. Bitter, like the inside of a rotting nut. The husband who no longer remembers his wife. The wife who cannot recall her children. The businessman who forgets his partner. The doting grandfather or grandmother who remembers none of the family at all. Hard and bitter truth. But then,” he added with a mischievous grin, “who can be certain? Perhaps only random memories, dying.”

J.D. sat in a chair on his ornately tiled balcony, nude underneath the bedspread that was wrapped around him. He fought the urge to turn around to make sure that nobody was sneaking up on him. He had already checked several times. Some ghastly thing made of fear and dread had him in its grip. Somebody was coming after him. He felt it. He could not get any clarity about it, but the feel of it was strong despite the gray stuff. The mist…not clouds…fog.

The dread of it came from his inexplicable conviction that he deserved to be hunted down. Why? He pressed his memory hard. Why would he deserve it? Even his worst audience humiliation gags were tame, compared to anything that would set somebody off on a path of vengeance. He was gentler with them than he had been with his own ferry…funny
…family.
His own family.

What then? No answer. Nothing. He looked out to sea. From the top floor of this hilltop hotel, the ocean was a broad expanse that filled the western horizon. The view was spectacular, even for one in his state. His suite’s main balcony was so well enclosed on both sides, and so protected from above by its overhanging roof, that he felt like an isolated dweller in a floating cave. As always, the site of an open ocean filled him with a sense of hope, a feeling of new departures on fresh journeys. The sensation was a welcome relief from the turmoil churning inside him.

But it was gone in seconds, and the grim truth was left facing him.
The elixir is not working anymore.
He counted it up: six words. Six words put him on a short road to a permanent end. He still felt the physical stimulation of the powder, but the clarity that had always come along with it was now frequently missing. The fog stood in its place.

Worse: In recent weeks he had been finding that the clarity borne by the elixir seemed to arrive only to tease him. The clarity would descend, and in a flash he would see complete answers to problems that had seemed insurmountable, only moments before—but then the clarity would simply vanish.

With every passing day, it came less often. Even when it did, it was a flimsy clarity that tended to snuff out like a candle flame, all on its own.

As soon as that happened, there was the fog again. And each time, the fog was thicker by another degree and it took him longer to battle his way through. Now, whether he was growing a tolerance for the elixir or whether his malady was simply advancing, the loss of clarity was hard upon him. He stared again at the blue strip of Pacific, but this time took no comfort. The loss of his clarity was the same for him as the loss of a violinist’s hands. He might plug along and survive, but James “J.D.” Duncan would be gone forever, fodder for the dustbin.

How bad was he? He tried to think back to the way that he was during his European tour, when he first went to see a doctor in Munich for slight memory problems. He was referred by another physician who had read of this doctor’s work in the field of memory and thought.

On the day that he first went to Dr. Alzheimer, he had not yet suffered any visits from the fog. His problem was just a growing tendency to forget things from a few moments before. His lifelong absentmindedness had expanded to interfere with the substantial memory work that was required for his performances. Back then, he thought that losing a trigger phrase once every week or two was a big problem. Now he longed for such a mild condition.

There was no real way to measure the change, but he could no longer doubt that he had reached substantial mental impairment. How long could he keep up the charade?

He had two days until his next round of performances. All he wanted to do during that time was to hide in his floating cave, and for those two days at least, to be safe from making a fool of himself and protected from exposing this terrible and growing weakness.

The last of the late afternoon sunlight was creeping up the wall while Shane slept sitting up in a chair, still holding a screwdriver in his hand. The disassembled parts of a brand-new seventy-eight-RPM record player were scattered on the floor around him. He had just brought it home from the exposition the day before, and wanted to figure out how it produced sound, but soon discovered that the question was more interesting than the many components of the answer.

He was still sleeping when a repeater bell began to ring. Just as he awoke and began trying to figure out what the ringing bell meant, he heard Randall’s muffled voice.

“This is Detective Blackburn.”

The telephone. Even half awake, Shane realized that he had never heard Randall answer a telephone before. So that was how he did it. Which meant that Shane could answer with “This is Shane Nightingale” if the thing rang while he was there alone. He filed it in his memory with a small sense of relief. Answering the telephone: one less thing.

He drifted in and out of sleep for another half hour or so, surfacing just long enough to track Randall’s progress: water running, the thumping of closet doors, Randall’s footsteps down the hallway and at the front door, the door closing, the lock being turned from outside.

He would get up in another minute or two, he told himself. It was so pleasant to float between waking and sleeping. The range and speed of his thoughts in that half-waking state were joyous for him. Anything he thought about seemed to spring up all around him, as if he had been magically transported. He often thought that if he could somehow play a game of chess in this particular state of mind, he would be hard to beat. He could see so many steps ahead, like the best champion players. It was almost like looking into the future.

In that fluid state, he could visualize points of connection between almost any two people, places, or things, just by thinking about it. He could perceive patterns that would completely escape him, otherwise.

He saw, as if for miles ahead, the broad layout of his own life. Things that happened months ago or years ago displayed points of connection with his current position, so that he not only saw all the forces that had propelled him to this specific point of his life, but also many of the opportunities that he missed the first time. Tiny signs or clues that had moved in front of him unnoticed now came back to him with a vengeance.

And with that, the realization seized him in a strangler’s grip: right there in the restaurant. He had missed one. Just the other day. He was all glossed over, as usual, and his brain was thus slow enough that his memory recorded what his attention itself did not register.

The man alone at the table—he was the sole customer at The Sea Mist when James Duncan dropped in at the end of Shane’s shift. Duncan was so full of fear and suspicion that Shane had allowed it to distract him. Now, a quick reread of his own neglected memory confirmed that the lone customer had been doing a good job of pretending not to pay attention, while watching everything Duncan did.

The clues had all been there. Shane missed them by being too lost in his own thoughts. He shook his head in frustration. There had been too much anger hiding behind the lone customer’s expression. His eyes were flint hard. Unlike some audience admirer who just wanted to eavesdrop on the showman, this man had been sitting on a steam pipe of emotion. The customer had a tall and broad-shouldered physique—a remarkable-looking man. His icy stare was as penetrating as the one on Duncan’s posters, but the intensity of this one was sour. There was filthy energy behind it.

Every homicide case that Shane had helped Randall to crack over the past nine years had a perpetrator with eyes that looked like that. Even back in the Nightingale house all those years ago, as a terrified boy paralyzed by mortal dread, he had peeked out from his hiding place to catch a glimpse of the killer’s eyes. They were the same. Eyes so hard that they looked like stones. That kind of perpetrator might have a smooth face and project an innocent attitude, but the eyes were like flat rocks.

Shane had never asked anyone else if the similarity was obvious to them. It was the same with any of the heightened perceptions that he had inherited from his terrible day and a half in the Nightingale house. There, he was force-fed an education in human evil by the nonstop diatribe of the family’s slow killer, and he had learned far too much about the darkness of human nature.

He sensed that to talk about such things at all was to invite questions. The trouble was that all the answers pointed to the same shattering event. After nine years, not a soul alive knew what happened in the Nightingale house but him, and he hoped to die that way. If he should live to a hundred and ten, he yearned to die with the intact secret of his frozen cowardice in that place.

His soul had been so thoroughly tarred by shame while he hid in that little pantry, pissing himself and listening to the sameness of the infantile babbling to which Mrs. Nightingale and both of Shane’s adoptive sisters were reduced, one by one. There was no way to get the tar off.

The legacy of knowing, however, was also his remnant of those crimes. It aided him as often as the grimness hit. Now, because of it, he was certain that the man in the restaurant posed an active danger to Duncan.

In the next instant he wondered what he was supposed to do with a piece of information like that. What did he really have, anyway? One, somebody was angry with James Duncan, and two, this somebody had been in The Sea Mist, glaring at him.

So what? If the man had been casing the place, then he now knew how to smoothly move through that environment, just as Tommie Kimbrough had done in the days before he struck at the Nightingales. With that, Shane realized that of course the man was there doing reconnaissance. It had only been a watchful exercise at the time, which was why Shane got no sense of immediate danger. There had not been enough to puncture his daydreaming state.

Now with Duncan already as jumpy as he was, Shane decided to keep the realization to himself. He could just keep an eye out for the man. If he ever showed up around any of Duncan’s performances, then Randall could pull him aside and check out his story.

He left it at that.