She began to cry very hard now, the tears spilling down the sides of her face, dampening her pillow. She took a Kleenex from the box beside her bed. She held it to her nose. She thought about the man she knew as Frank, about the times she had had with him and she cried even harder and she thought, Damn him. God damn him, because of the way he had been with her just now. Standing there in his room and just staring at her, clueless and uncaring. He had been so different with her before, she thought, when they were lying together, when they were talking together in the dark.
Her crying began to slow. She crumpled one Kleenex and took a fresh one from the box, held that one against her runny nose. After a while, she crumpled that one and took another, then another and soon there was a collection of crumpled Kleenexes on the bed where the mattress sagged from her weight. She lay there staring at the ceiling and she thought about how different it had been before, about the things Frank had said to her, the sweet, soft things. Were they all lies? He had said such soft things and asked her questions about her life and listened to her as if he cared? Was it all phony, all an act? The way he had been concerned about what was happening to her, about what Chris was doing—he was always asking about that. He was always asking about Chris and his secret meetings with Bernie Hirschorn. In fact, every time they had been together they had somehow gotten around to talking about that. Every time.
Kathleen made a dull noise, stifling her runny nose. Without really realizing it, the tone of her thoughts had shifted. There was something…something that felt wrong to her now somehow. It was almost as if some kind of venom had entered her bloodstream, a cloudy venom spreading through her, making everything feel cloudy and wrong. Every time she had been with Frank, she thought, they had talked about Chris and Hirschorn. They had talked about them all the time. Frank had urged her to listen in on their conversations. You have to find out what they’re up to, he’d said. To protect yourself. That’s what he’d said, she remembered it clearly. And she had done exactly what he told her to do. She had listened in on Chris’s conversations as much as she could. And then the next time she and Frank were together, well, she would tell him about what she had heard. And if she didn’t tell him, he would ask her about it. Every time. Kathleen had thought Frank was helping her. She had thought he was concerned for her because of Chris and what he was getting himself into. He wanted her to find out more about the situation—to protect yourself. That’s what he’d said.
Her eyes shifted back and forth now as if she were reading her own thoughts up there on the ceiling. Things were beginning to seem different to her, everything was. She was angry. Frank was leaving her and she was angry at him and now the things he’d said to her just seemed different. That cloudy venom of suspicion kept spreading through her. Spreading and spreading and suddenly she thought: Wait a minute, what if…?
Her heart turned—that’s what it felt like. It felt as if all at once her heart turned dark and sour and ashen in her chest. What if…?
She sat up on the bed, her knees bent in front of her. Her lips parted. Her teary eyes, grown wide, kept moving back and forth, back and forth. Her streaked, tear-mottled face hung empty with shock and confusion. Too many thoughts, too many images, memories, all coming at once. The way Frank had ridden so conveniently out of the south. The way Ray had arranged it so he would rent the house from her. The way he had made a move on her so quickly…Yes, it had made her feel good at the time. She had felt flattered that he wanted her at the time. But now, now all at once, with the anger and the venomous suspicion in her, she began to wonder about it. And she began to wonder about some of the things he’d said…I’m worried about you, Kathleen, I’m worried about what’s going on in your house. It had sounded sweet, it had sounded romantic to her. You ought to make sure you know what they’re saying. To protect yourself. It had sounded as if he was concerned. She had thought he felt protective toward her, the way guys were supposed to feel, the way they felt about girls in the movies. But now…
Now all at once, all those things he’d said sounded wrong. They sounded like…well, they sounded kind of like bullshit. In fact, now she thought about it, now that she was angry and she really thought about it, they sounded like just exactly the same sort of bullshit men had been handing her all her life, the same stuff she had been falling for all her goddamned life.
Kathleen sat up in the puddle of Kleenex that had collected around her on the bed. She put her hand on her stomach. She felt sick, physically sick, as if she were going to throw up. She couldn’t make sense of things. Too many thoughts.
And then, in a kind of lightless flash, all of the thoughts became one thought:
What if he’s a cop? That’s how it came to her, just like that. What if he’s a cop and he’s after Hirschorn, after Hirschorn and Chris…?
She made a strangled noise, a strangled “Oh…” as if she had been punched. She felt exactly as if she had been punched. She felt sick and winded.
Quickly, she swung her legs off the edge of the bed, sat on the edge of the bed. Crumpled Kleenexes spilled to the floor at her feet. She stared urgently in front of her.
“Oh my God, oh my God!” The words came out of her in a tearful squeak. “What’ve I done?”
Then she heard a footstep. She turned.
Chris was standing in the doorway.
Thirty-Four
Chris took one long look at her. His wife, sitting on the edge of the bed, crying on the edge of the bed. “What?” he said. “What is it?”
“Oh God, Chris,” she blurted out. “Don’t kill me. I think I did a really stupid thing.” She covered her mouth with both hands. Her eyes filled again. She looked at him over her fingers. She knew she shouldn’t just blurt it out like that, she should think first, try to consider what was best. But she couldn’t think. She was too sick and ashamed and angry—starting to get really angry now at how she’d been used and betrayed. And here was her husband, who might be in real trouble—she might’ve gotten him into real trouble—and she had to do something. She had to warn him, tell him. She lowered her hands. “I swear to God I didn’t mean it,” she said. “He tricked me. The fucker! The fucker!”
Chris’s mind, meanwhile, had been working too. Things had been happening and he’d been thinking and worrying. He had gotten a call from Hirschorn’s office this morning. Not from Hirschorn himself but from that little faggot guy, that secretary, Wellman or whatever his name was.
“There’s been a delay,” Wellman had said. “Mr. Hirschorn wants you to wait for his call.”
What delay? What call? What kind of delay? Wellman wouldn’t tell him anything. And when Chris tried to call the inside number, there was nothing, just a machine, just Wellman’s voice. “Leave a message and Mr. Hirschorn will get back to you.”
So Chris was worried. His mind was turning over and over. And when he came into the room, when he saw the look on his wife’s face, when he saw the crumpled Kleenexes on the floor, he was suddenly alert. The first thought that occurred to him was that this—his crying wife—was part of what was happening.
“What,” he said again, drawing out the word. “What did you do?”
“Oh God, Chris,” she moaned. “Please don’t kill me. I thought he was just being nice. You know? Asking questions. Like he was concerned about me.” She had to tell it differently from how it really was, of course. She couldn’t just tell him that she and Frank had been sleeping together. “It was like you said,” she went on, finding her way. “It was just like you said all along, Chris. You were so right. He was sniffing around me. But not the way you thought, he didn’t want what you thought. Oh God, Chris, I am so, so sorry. I was worried, y’know. You wouldn’t tell me anything and I was worried about you and I just thought…”
Chris clenched his fists at his sides. The muscles in his bare arms knotted. The bruise on his face where Bishop had hit him had grown yellow but the purple came back into it until it was livid and horrible. Oh, he was more than worried now. He was frightened now,
good and frightened. But of what? What the hell was she saying? “Damn it, Kathleen. Just tell me, willya. Just tell me what happened. What did you do?”
And she did. She left out the part about sleeping with Frank but she told him all the rest. How she had listened in on his conversations with Hirschorn and passed the information on to Frank. The names she had heard, the hints she had picked up, everything.
“And I think…I think he might be a cop, Chris,” she said when she was finished. “I’m so sorry.”
Chris’s mouth had come open while she talked. It hung open now. “What?” he whispered.
She pounded her knee with her fist. “Damn it! Damn it! I think he might be a fucking cop.”
The big man shuddered as the fear exploded inside him, tightened around him. He felt as if he was choking on it. “A cop?” he barely managed to say. A cop. If that was true, if it was true and Hirschorn found out about it…
Quickly, he stepped to the window. He stared through the trees at the house across the way. Behind him, Kathleen was wiping the tears from her face, making noises, blowing her nose.
“Is he there now?” Chris asked her. “Kennedy. Is he over there now?”
She nodded. He had to glance back to see it. “Yeah. I mean, I guess. Is his bike still there?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess he is.”
Chris stared out the window. Stared at the house. Then a thought struck him and his eyes flicked to the street in front. Just a small stretch of it was visible at this angle between the houses, through the trees. He eyed it nervously. Did Hirschorn know? he wondered. Did Hirschorn already know? Were they already coming for him? Were they already on their way?
Chris’s mouth went very dry. He dragged his hand across it. No. No, Hirschorn couldn’t know yet. Why would he? He stared at the house again, up at the upstairs window, the bedroom window. He was sick and strangling on his fear but his voice was steady, soft, distant, as if it were someone else who was speaking for him.
“I gotta get over there,” he said. “We’ve gotta get that son of a bitch to go out so I can get over there. I mean, I gotta. I gotta find out what the hell is going on.”
Thirty-Five
Just then, Weiss found the shop he wanted. He was rapping on the glass door. Pressing his nose to the cold surface of it to peer inside. MOSTLY YOU, the place was called. WIGS AND HAIR EXTENSIONS. The sign said it was closed for lunch until two o’clock. But Weiss had been in the coffee shop across the street and seen the man go in.
The shop was on the border of the Haight. Right between a smoke shop that served the last of the local stoners and a Century 21 that catered to the incoming gentry. Another investigator would’ve felt less eager coming here, would’ve figured it was just another stop in a long, half-hopeless canvas of the city’s stores. But Weiss, with his weird instincts for other people’s minds, had gotten used to being right about such things. He knew he was getting close.
He knuckled the glass again. A round white face appeared mistily in the shop’s inner gloom. The man in there put on a mime show, shaking his hands, tapping his wristwatch: We’re not open yet, go away. Weiss rapped heavily again, insistent. Rolling his eyes heaven-ward, the man inside came toward him down the aisle.
The man in the wig shop was the owner, it turned out. Patrick Fandler. What Weiss thought of as a standard-issue city homosexual: crew cut, hipless, blandly handsome, the slacks and pullover painted on.
“What does the little sign tell us?” he said, annoyed, as he cracked the door open. “Lunchy-time. It’s only a wig store, after all. Whatever you need, I’m sure it can wait.” Then, taking a glance at Weiss’s sloppy salt-and-pepper hair: “Or maybe not. I wouldn’t want to turn away an actual emergency.”
Weiss pushed a card through the crack in the door. “My name is Weiss. I’m a private detective.”
“Are you? Just like in the movies?”
“Pretty much. Except not. Could I come in and ask you a couple of questions?”
Fandler considered the card another moment. “Mi casa es su casa,” he said then, and he stepped back and pulled the door wide.
Weiss followed the man up the aisle to a counter in the back. The remains of a tuna salad sandwich sat in its wrapper atop a display of weaving extensions. The bizarrely curled stretches of brown and blond hair lay under the glass like the trophy tails of hunted animals. Weiss set the photograph of Julie Wyant down on top of them.
Patrick Fandler took a single glance. “Oh yes,” he said. “I could never forget that hair.”
Weiss nodded. He had hoped for as much. No one, as far as he was concerned, could ever forget that hair. He kept his hangdog expression in place but he could feel his inner systems ratcheting up. He was excited.
“And that face!” Fandler went on. “She was so beautiful she almost made me wish I was a lesbian.”
Weiss lowered his chin by way of acknowledging the joke. “This is about three months ago?” He wanted to be sure.
“Yes, about then.”
“And did she buy anything?”
“Well, yes, that’s why I remember. She bought a wig.”
Weiss managed to keep his deadpan. But he had to breathe deep to steady himself. “A wig.”
“Yes, and I mean, why would a girl with hair like that want to cover it with a wig?” said Fandler.
“Right,” said Weiss. And he thought, She’s alive. He was sure of it, suddenly, standing there in the little shop. Julie Wyant was still alive. She had faked her suicide, disguised herself with the wig and run away.
“She bought three, now I think of it,” said Fandler. “One blond, two brunettes, one with sort of auburn highlights. She tried them on right in here.”
He led the way down a narrow aisle to a curtain. Pulled the curtain back. Weiss looked into a cluttered changing room. A stool, a vanity table, a lighted mirror. He gazed at them. The stool, the mirror. She had sat right there. She had looked at herself right there. It made his old heart go thumpety-thump just to think about it. And she was still alive.
“She said the funniest thing,” said Fandler.
Weiss glanced at him. “Yeah?”
“She was trying on the blond one I remember. I just gave a little peek in to see how she was making out, you know. And she was studying herself, turning this way and that with the wig on. So I said, ‘Is everything all right?’ And she looked just…so sad, for a moment. So terribly sad. There were absolute tears in her eyes. And she said to me—I remember this so clearly—she just looked right at me in the mirror and said, ‘Well…I’m still me anyway.’”
Weiss turned again to look at the stool, at the mirror. Thinking about her, his heart thumping.
“‘I’m still me,’” Fandler repeated softly.
Jarring, Weiss’s cell phone rang. He blinked, came to himself. Drew it from his jacket pocket.
“This is Weiss,” he murmured.
“It’s Ketchum,” said the Inspector’s voice. “Get over to SFO jig time. I just got you in to see the Identity Man.”
Weiss only nodded. Slipped the little phone back into his jacket. Stood another second, staring at the vanity table.
I’m still me, he thought.
Julie Wyant was alive.
Thirty-Six
Just a couple of hours later, Weiss was looking out the window of a twin-propeller de Havilland as the plane descended through a thin mist. Below, there was nothing but forest—blue-green forest, and the sparkling sea.
“I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you here, Weiss,” muttered Ketchum in the seat beside him. “I had to call in favors on this I haven’t even done yet. Had to practically get down on my knees to the FBI and I hate those Feeb motherfuckers.”
His complaints fell away to inaudible muttering. Which was fine. Weiss wasn’t listening anyway. He went on looking out the window, his nose propped on his fist. Outside, the last tendrils of mist parted. There was the airfield up ahead, two crossed runways at the ocean’s e
dge.
Shadowman. The mist in Weiss’s mind—the swirl of impressions, facts, deductions—was parting too, the sense of everything coming clearer to him. The urgency he felt was now almost frantic—as frantic, anyway, as his sturdy nature would allow. Like the video loop of Julie Wyant beckoning, his fantasy repeated itself almost obsessively. Running up the stairs. Kicking in the locked door. The girl lying on the bed. Every second counted.
Shadowman.
“Oh, man, and I hate this shit,” Ketchum started up again a while later, when they were off the plane, when Weiss was guiding their rented Cavalier up the coast road. “Look at this.” He gestured at the windshield. On the other side of the windshield was a spectacle of surf and stone, sunlight through spindrift, a sky of robin’s-egg blue above the winding highway. “These back roads. Make me sicker than the damn plane…”
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