There Fell a Shadow (8 page)

“How you feeling?” they said again and again.

Again and again, I told them, “Fine.” My voice was already beginning to recover.

They peppered me with questions. For a while I entertained them with tales of the battle. For a while longer, I griped about the hospital. They shook their heads in wonder at my bravery, resilience, toughness, integrity, decency, Americanism, and good breeding. Then they returned to work. Even McKay had to answer a phone call. In the end only Lansing remained.

I was leaning against my desk. She was standing right before me. I could smell her. She smelled good. She was wearing pale pink slacks and a striped pullover shirt. She looked good. She looked bright and new. But her eyes filled as I studied her. She put one hand up to her mouth. I saw the fingers trembling.

“Stop that,” I said.

“You look dead,” said Lansing.

“I'm okay. I need a shower and a change of clothes, that's all.”

“You should be home. You should be resting.”

“Yeah. The doctor says I should give up cigarettes and liquor, too.”

She bit her lip, took a breath. “Silly doctors. What'll they come up with next?”

“Crazy, isn't it?” I looked around me at the huge expanse of a room. “Anything going on?”

“Oh God, Wells,” Lansing said. “The place is a madhouse.”

“What else is new?”

“I mean it. Go home and get some rest.”

“He's playing this big, huh?”

I faced her again. Caught her swiping at the corner of one eye with a finger. She nodded. “Half the room's working on Colt, the other half's doing the snow.”

“Blizzard Hits As
Star
Newshound Routs Assassin?”

She nodded. “He wants you to write your part of the story, too. Exclusive: How I Fought A Killer And Found God. He's been calling your apartment to see if you're back yet. He keeps telling everybody that Wellsey won't let him down.”

I cringed. “He's calling me Wellsey again?”

“Head for the hills.” She tried to smile, but it stuck as she looked into my battered face.

I pushed on quickly. “What happened to the tiger banner?”

“Sandler.” Sandler was one of The People Upstairs. The big-boss types we rarely got to see. “Rafferty got fed up,” Lansing said. “He sort of quietly let it drop to Sandler what was happening down here. About a half hour later, Sandler came down and casually asked to see your Borough Prez banner. Cambridge turned beet red. You should have seen him. He …”

It was a game try, but she couldn't finish. Her lips started to tremble. She turned away, her face to her shoulder.

“Come on, Lancer, knock it off,” I said.

“You look dead,” she whispered. “You look just dead.”

I reached for her shoulder, thought better of it. My hand fell to my side. I stood there stupidly.

Robert Cambridge called to me from across the room. The sound of his voice made every aching part of me ache even more.

“Wellsey! Wells, Wells, Wells.”

Lansing stiffened. With a quick toss of her hair, she walked away from me. She didn't look back. She didn't speak another word.

“Wellsey, I knew you'd come in! I knew those old doctors at that old hospital couldn't hold an old bird dogger like you.”

I gritted my teeth. I prepared the semblance of a smile. I turned to greet him. He looked tall and trim in a dark blue suit. His round face was damned near cherubic with its welcoming grin. His dark hair dangled rakishly on his brow. His face was tan, of course. That winter tan of his never ceased to amaze me.

He swung his hand around in a broad arc to clasp my shoulder. He squeezed it, sending radiants of pain up the back of my neck. His expression turned serious. He considered me.

“So—you look good,” he pronounced. One guy to another. Cambridge is nothing if not one of the guys.

“Thanks, Bob,” I said manfully. “I feel just grand.”

He tapped my shoulder. I fought back a shriek. “You know, the other papers, the radio and TV people, they've been calling here for hours. They all want to interview you. They even asked to talk to Lansing and McKay.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You know what I said? I said: Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em. Let 'em quote a police spokesman. I mean, do you work here or what?”

He laughed. I made a noise.

“So, uh, Johnny,” he went on. “You gonna write me an exclusive on your little brush with death?” He smiled deprecatingly as he said this: just another brush with death, old sport.

“You betcha, Bobby,” I said.

“Good, good.” He slipped his arm full around my shoulders now. He smelled better than Lansing. “Now, I'm going to have Wally Wilkinson write the lede …” I cleared my throat. Wilkinson was a reporter Cambridge had just hired out of California. He was, as Cambridge himself might have said, ‘with the program.' Relatability was his life. When the Chinese pandas came to the Bronx, for instance, he volunteered to cover it. On the other hand, he wouldn't have recognized a hard news story if it sat on his eyelids. Cambridge continued: “What I want from you is a fast, tight sidebar on the actual events as you experienced them. Do you see what I'm getting at?”

“Gee,” I said, “I think so.” After a quarter century in the business, I really felt I was beginning to catch on.

Encouraged by my quick intelligence, the managing editor gave me a little more to handle. “Don't be afraid to express your feelings. Your shock at seeing Colt killed. Your fear at being stalked by an assassin. Your sense of—of—triumph when you realized you had survived. Am I giving you a sort of idea of what I'm looking for here?”

“It's beginning to take shape for me, Bob,” I said hoarsely. I coughed. My throat was tightening again.

“Good!” Cambridge said. He slid his hand off my shoulder, slapping my back as he went. This time, I could not suppress a groan of pain. “Think you can have that on my desk by five? Give me a chance to look it over before I pass it on to Rafferty.”

I hesitated. This was a little tricky. Cambridge had edited my copy before. Made it more relatable. In one instance, he had made it so relatable that I was nearly sued by an entire county. In the wake of this experience, he and I had come to certain understandings. He was allowed to tell me how to write my stories beforehand. I was allowed to ignore him. He was allowed to make suggestions on the finished copy. I was allowed to stick two fingers up his nose and yank hard if he changed any of it. Normally, all went well. He worked on making the newspaper relatable. I worked on making the newspaper a newspaper. Lately, however, it seemed to me that this arrangement was beginning to weigh on his sense of authority. Added to that, he couldn't be too happy about Sandler forcing him to banner my Borough Prez story. I feared for the life of my sidebar if Cambridge got his hands on it before the city editor did.

“Well,” I said finally, with a manly chuckle. “I'll sure try, Bob. I'm still feeling a little low, truth be told, but I'll do the best I can.” I whipped out a cigarette, lit it, took a drag. I blasted the smoke out in a great haze that spread over us both. Cambridge paled. He does not like cigarettes. He worries about my health, he says. I took another drag.

Undaunted, he pressed the point. “You know, it's only quarter to three now.… I just want a sense of how to coordinate the whole layout that we're doing, so if you don't mind I'd appreciate it: on my desk by five.” He paused. Grinned through another smoky blast. “Okay, guy?”

“Uh …” I said.

“Yo, Pop, you got a visitor!”

The call came from the copyboy, Alex. He calls me Pop. Charming kid. I left Cambridge eagerly. I returned to the glass doors. Alex was there. He pointed me out to a woman who'd just come in. She was small and slender, almost lost in her big cloth overcoat. I guessed she was thirty-five or so. Every year of it was written on her pale face in lines that were carved deep into the corners of her mouth and eyes. Still, it was not an unattractive face. It was pert and sharp, with birdlike features under red hair cut short and bobbed. Her green eyes were bright and clear and intelligent. They followed Alex's gesture quickly. They measured me with a single glance.

She extended her hand. I took it. The skin of her palm was dry and cold. Up close, I saw she had too much lipstick on. She wore too much blush, and her cheeks seemed feverishly bright.

“Mr. Wells?” she said. She spoke crisply. She seemed to be forcing her smile.

“I'm Wells.”

She took another deep breath. “My name is Valerie Colt,” she told me. “I'm Tim's wife.”

“T
hey made me come in to identify the body,” she said. She pushed out a sad laugh. “I hadn't seen him in over a year, I didn't know if I'd recognize him.”

We were in my cubicle now. I'd pulled an extra chair in there for her. I was seated against one wall, leaning forward, my elbows on my knees. She was seated across from me, leaning back, her head resting against the divider. Between us, my Olympia—the last typewriter in the place, I think—was almost buried under a mass of pink notes headed “While You Were Out.” A metal ashtray was balanced precariously on top of these.

Mrs. Colt closed her eyes wearily. “Poor Tim,” she said. “He didn't have anyone else.”

I took out my cigarettes. I jerked one between my teeth. I slid another one out for her.

“You were divorced?” I said.

She nodded, waving off the cigarette. “Five years now,” she said. As I went to put the pack away, she reconsidered, reached for them. I shook one out for her. “I shouldn't really,” she told me. “The kids don't have anyone else.”

“How many kids?” I held my lighter up for her. She leaned into it. The flame light ran red through the lines beneath her makeup.

She leaned back again, her head to the divider. She blew smoke at the fluorescent lights. “Two,” she said. “A boy and a girl. Six and seven.”

“That's a lot to handle alone,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered quietly. “It's a lot to handle. Alone.”

I watched her. I waited. I wondered why she'd come.

Her next words seemed to answer the question. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am that you got hurt.” She smiled. It was a tired smile. “Someone always has to—had to—do that with Tim. Apologize, I mean. People got hurt when they were around him. Someone had to … do the niceties, you know? Offer the apologies. Pick up the pieces.”

“Someone like you,” I said.

She took a long drag of smoke, thinking. She let the smoke out with the single word: “Yes.”

“Even now.”

She nodded. “Even now. I mean, he just kept on, didn't he? All that charm. All that intensity. He was like … a magnet.”

I didn't answer. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what she wanted.

‘‘I mean,'' she continued, “he just kept on charming people and running off on his dangerous adventures and … and people followed him. Cameramen always wanted to work with him. Officials always wanted to talk to him. Women always wanted to … to be with him. They followed him. And somehow … somehow, they always got hurt. They got shot or … or arrested or …” She lowered her gaze to me. “… or abandoned,” she said. “And he just kept on, unhurt, untouched, as if he were under some kind of invisible protection. Until now.” Her eyes blurred as the tears welled suddenly.

“You must have loved him very much,” I said. It sounded lame even to me.

“Oh!” With a short, quick, stabbing motion, she killed her cigarette in the ashtray between us. “Oh, I know what you're thinking,” she said. “Poor woman. Poor woman carrying a torch for a man who ditched her five years ago. A man who was never really there to begin with, always … always off somewhere, some other country, never … Damn.” She had laid her purse down next to the chair. She reached for it quickly now, unsnapped it, brought out a tissue. She dabbed at her cheeks with an expert gesture, caught the tears before they carried her mascara away in black streams.

“I wasn't thinking that at all,” I lied.

She snuffled once. “Do you know where I live, Mr. Wells?” she said. “Do you know where I live with my two children? I live in one-half of a brick house in Astoria. One bedroom. One bathroom. A yard no bigger than a square of carpeting. I'm a teller for a bank out there. I can just barely afford what I've got. Between the rent and the day-care … he never …”

I crushed out my cigarette carefully, slowly, watching my hand, giving her time to recover.

“And now that he's gone, I'm sure there's nothing left for me. I'm sure he spent it all on … the fine hotels and the fine food and the fine liquor that the … the sources and the women liked.” A lock of red hair fell forward on her brow. She brushed it back impatiently. The motion brought her face up again. She looked at me blankly, as if something had just dawned on her. “You won't write this, will you? I didn't mean …”