There Fell a Shadow (24 page)

That night, I made love as I hadn't in years. The rhythms of it were fierce, almost primal. The heat of it coursed through me like a river of blood. Chandler cried out to me again and again, and again and again I came into her with a fever I'd almost forgotten.

I ached when I woke up the next morning. Saturday morning. I ached all over. My legs hurt from running in the park. My gut hurt from where Watts had slugged me. My nose and forehead stung. When I breathed deeply, my lungs felt like there were pins in them.

I ached, too, with the deep, pleasurable ache of last night's love. But when I reached out for Chandler, she wasn't there. The other side of the bed was empty.

I made a low, guttural sound of pain as I forced myself to roll out from under the covers. I fit my legs into my pants and pulled the waistband up around me. Gingerly, stiffly, I walked into the other room.

She was there. She was curled up on the easy chair, where Paul had sat last night. She was wrapped in my bathrobe. It billowed around her. She stared into space, sipping occasionally from a mug of coffee.

We'd left the window open. There was only a faint smell of stale smoke under the fresh, dry chill of the air that filled the room.

Chandler barely glanced up at me when I came in. I remembered the thoughts that had gone through my mind as we'd clung to each other in the dark last night. I felt guilty, as if she knew what I'd been thinking. I avoided looking at her and went into the kitchen.

She'd left the coffee on for me. I poured some into a mug. McKay had given me the mug for my last birthday, my forty-sixth. It was black, with the words
SHUT UP
in white letters on the side.

I walked to the kitchen doorway, leaned against the jamb. Chandler sat there, still staring into space. I watched her.

“What did you think of me before we … before we were lovers?” she said softly. She sipped her coffee, staring into space. I didn't answer. She said: “You must have thought I was a terrible old spinster woman. Prim and nervous and living alone with my cat.”

“No,” I lied. “I didn't think that. That's dumb.”

She paid no attention. “I suppose I had … turned into that. An old maid, I mean. I guess I was all … shut up in myself. I guess I still am.”

“I'm no better,” I said.

“Maybe.” Chandler stared off thoughtfully. “Maybe we have too much in common in a way. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“I mean, ever since I lost my parents … my mother, really … ever since she died … it's been very … very hard for me to … to be close … close to anyone.”

I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

“And you … since your daughter died …”

“I know,” I said.

Finally she raised her eyes to me. Those sad eyes with so many people's sad stories in them. She listened to them well at her suicide hot line. She listened as people on the brink reached out to her. She and her volunteers listened as people wandered through the caverns of themselves, searching for their long-buried reasons to live. She had traveled through all those other people's caverns, and that's not an easy thing to do. But it's easier than some things. It's easier than traveling through your own.

“Sometimes,” she said, still softly, “when you wouldn't call … all those weeks when you wouldn't call, I would feel … relieved. Sometimes … Do you understand? Can you understand that?”

A pack of cigarettes lay on the desk. I went to it. Set my mug down, hoisted a butt, lit it. I hacked on the first tug of smoke, but I fought to keep the next one down.

“I would feel relieved,” said Chandler. “Because it's … it's hard. Trying to … get close, be close. It's hard, and it's … painful. For a while, there at the beginning, it looked like we were going to make it, didn't it? It looked like …” Her voice trailed off.

“Yes,” I said. “It did.”

“But now …”

“Since that night. Since that night I had that dream.”

The words seemed to startle her, as if I'd stolen them directly from her mind. “We just can't. Can we, John? We just can't do it. Be close, I mean. Either of us. Maybe that's why we picked each other. Maybe we recognized that somehow from the start.”

I studied the floor. “Maybe,” I said.

“You know …” For the first time, I heard a trace of tears in her voice. Under her voice, where it would not give her away. “You know, I think you're one of the most remarkable people I've ever met.”

I made a noise at her. I was thinking: Colt. Colt knew. Colt knew me from the beginning. He must've taken one look at me—one look heightened maybe by the liquor. Heightened by his annoyance at striking out with Lansing, his jealousy … But he must've taken that one look at me and pegged me dead to rights. He must've been some reporter if he could see that deep that fast. What could he have told me about the others? About Holloway and Wexler and Paul and Robert Collins? About the way they felt about Eleanora? About the way
she
felt? Surely she must have been the key to it somehow. The way she affected all of them. Otherwise, why hadn't Wexler told me about seeing her? Or had Paul lied about it? I didn't know. What would Colt have been able to tell me if he could talk to me still as he had that night in his hotel?

While I considered it, Chandler was saying: “You really are remarkable. You're … brave is the only word I can think of. I mean, I look at you, at the way you are, and I think … I think you must hurt terribly sometimes … that you must hurt so that you can barely stand it. But then you just … you just keep on … you keep on doing whatever it is you're doing … getting your story, doing your job, or whatever. And sometimes … I mean, sometimes, I look at you—I look at you doing that—and I think: there's something … something just not quite nice about this man. Something … But then maybe it takes that … that distance. For you to do your job every day. I don't know.”

I was only half listening. My mind was elsewhere. I was wondering—trying to imagine—what Colt could have told me about Eleanora. And then, as Chandler spoke, I thought of the one person who might be able to answer that. I thought of the one person who might be able to speak for Colt even now.

That's what I was thinking up until then. Up until Chandler spoke those last words: “I don't know.” That's when she started to cry.

I had never seen her cry before. Not for herself anyway. She wasn't very good at it. She didn't just open up and let go of it the way some women can. It chugged out of her painfully. She coughed, trying to fight it back. The tears barely crested her cheeks before she wiped them away as if they angered her.

I took a step toward her. She looked up at me. I stopped.

“Last night …” she said. “Last night, when we were making love … over and over when we were making love …” She buried her face in her hands and cried: “You called me Eleanora.”

I
stood at the window and watched her go. She hailed a cab at the curb. I kept watching as the cab carried her off into the light stream of Saturday morning traffic. I watched the people passing back and forth on the sidewalk with their newspapers under their arms.

The air coming in from the window was as clean as it gets in Manhattan. I could even smell Christmas in it, the scent of the oncoming cold. I plucked my latest cigarette from my lips and jammed it out in the ashtray on my desk. I felt empty inside. I did not think I would see Chandler Burke again.

I decided to stop thinking about it. I decided not to think at all. I made a couple of phone calls, then climbed into a clean suit and went downstairs. I walked to the donut store on the corner of Lexington. I bought myself some breakfast in a bag and carried it to the local garage. There, I had the attendants exhume my old maroon Dart, the Artful Dodge.

I munched my donut as I left town. I tore a hole in the cap of my coffee cup and sipped from it, steering with one hand. The Dodge and I rolled over the bridge and out of the borough. We headed down to the Long Island Expressway. I kept not thinking. I kept the radio on.

I turned off the L.I.E. and headed into the little brick neighborhoods of Queens. Small trees lined the roads here. Two-story, two-family houses stood close together behind the trees. They were squat brick structures with white curtains shifting at the windows. When I turned a corner, I could see small, square backyards fenced in with chain link behind them. I could see laundry fluttering back there.

Valerie Colt's house was no different from the others. Two stories of brick. A concrete walk out front. A square of grass out back. As I came up the walk, I could see the blue light of the television flickering behind the white curtains. I could hear bangs and sharp voices and canned laughter. The kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Mrs. Colt opened the door for me. I'd called to let her know I was coming. She was dressed for the occasion in jeans and a pink blouse that set off her red hair. She still wore too much makeup where the wrinkles gathered at her mouth and eyes.

She let me in and led me through a modest kitchen. I glimpsed the kids through a doorway on the right. A boy and a girl, stretched out on their bellies, chins in hands, eyes on tube. Mrs. Colt took me down a hall into a cramped living room. On one wall, glass doors looked out on the backyard. The grass was dead out there. The lone tree was bare and gray. There wasn't much light coming in. The room seemed dank and shadowy.

She pointed me to a wooden chair. She took the sofa. She folded her hands between her knees. She leaned forward, watched me with her sharp, bright eyes. “You said on the phone you had some questions you wanted to ask.”

“Yes,” I said. I hesitated. I wasn't really sure now why I had come. “I thought maybe you could give me some … some idea, some insight into the way your husband thought.”

Mrs. Colt leaned forward a little more. “Thought about what?”

I ran a hand up over my head. “Mrs. Colt, I've been looking into your husband's murder,” I said. “And the more I find out, the more I become convinced it had something to do with the time he spent in Sentu.”

She was too smart for that. The corner of her lips curled. “That's not what you mean, is it? Not really. You don't mean something to do with Sentu. You mean something to do with Eleanora. Don't you?”

I didn't answer. I didn't have to.

Then she startled me with a quick peal of laughter. The sound ran up the scale and drifted away like the last chord of a song. When she laughed like that, I could imagine her as a young girl. An easy, spirited kind of girl who could do things to you with a backward glance. I could see the girl that Colt had fallen for.

“I need to know more about her,” I said. “Are you sure she's dead? Was there anyone else who … who felt about her the way your husband did? Anyone who might have fought with him for her? Do you know if she … if she …?”

“If she loved Tim back?” said Mrs. Colt. The laugh was still in her voice.

I nodded. “Yes.”

Mrs. Colt smiled wryly at me. She stood up. “Mr. Wells, as it just so happens, I can give you everything you want.” In one corner, there was a small writing desk. It was covered with papers. They lay loose all over the surface, disorganized. But the one she wanted was right on top.

She handed it to me. A crumpled piece of blue stationery. Cheap paper but elegant somehow, womanly. The handwriting was a woman's, too. Neat and swift and small. A schoolgirl hand. The ink was faded. At the edges of the letter, there were white patches blotting out some of the words. Constant fingering had worn away the surface of the paper.

I glanced up. Mrs. Colt was walking away from me slowly. Her hips swung haughtily as she walked. She turned smartly and settled on the sofa again. She propped her elbows on her knees, folded her hands under her chin. She watched me, smiling. That wry, bitter smile.

For a long time, I could not look at the page in my hand. I knew what it was. I suppose it was what I'd come to find. But I could not look at it. I felt the paper under my fingers. I imagined her touching it, holding it like I was. I lowered my eyes and read.

My dearest love,

Tonight, I think the end is very near. In a week, certainly no more than two, the rebels will be upon us, and so will the holocaust. The city will be put to the torch, the people put to the sword. My small enterprise—which has thrived amidst the day-to-day corruption of the government—will no doubt be among the first “reforms” of the new regime. I, who have seen and survived such reforms before, feel somehow certain that I shall not survive to see another.

I have been wondering—on this warm summer's night to which you have so unchivalrously left me—I have been wondering why I should feel my fate so heavily. The scrape is similar to others I've been in, the odds of escape the same. Why should I feel doomed this time of all others? Why no hope from your ever-hopeful Eleanora?