Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  “How’s your better half?” Ben said to Rutledge.

  For instance, Ben knew Rutledge was cheating on his wife, Carol; had been for at least three years. Ben stumbled upon Rutledge and his mistress fogging up the windows of his six-year-old Mercedes, parked on a newly paved cul-de-sac of recently framed tract homes. A blonde, of course, radiating the forced sexual brightness of plastic surgery and makeup.

  “Carol’s wonderful,” Rutledge said, patting Ben on the shoulder. “I’m a lucky man.”

  “Nice to know happy marriages still exist.”

  “Put a little weight on?” Rutledge said, gesturing toward Ben’s belt. “You still swimming?”

  Rutledge had been the water polo coach when Ben was on the swim team and had since risen to AP by being a lousy political science teacher and a suck-up to the superintendent.

  “I’m allergic to chlorine.”

  Rutledge laughed, lines fissuring his tanned face.

  “Sixty-two,” Helen said.

  “What?”

  “The field trip,” she said. “Sixty-two.” She handed Rutledge a printed list.

  “Great,” he said. “Couldn’t survive without you, Helen.”

  When Rutledge was gone, Helen laughed. “That man is proof cream doesn’t rise to the top.”

  Rutledge was smarter than she gave him credit for. He knew when to ignore things that would cause trouble, especially trouble for him. Ignoring things was half the battle in this world, three-quarters of the battle when you rose to positions of power.

  “Any of these kids have boyfriends?” Ben said.

  “Of course not,” she said, smiling. “We don’t have those here.”

  “Let’s pretend we’re in the real world.”

  “Oh,” she said, turning the sheet around to him. “That place.”

  She put her finger on the paper.

  “Neil Wolfe. I don’t know about a boyfriend, but it would be him if it was anyone. He’s polite, stares at the ground a lot, dyed his hair to match his shoes once. Tries to disappear but wants to be seen, too.”

  “A lot of six-period absences,” Ben said, noticing the A’s dotted beneath the dates.

  “He doesn’t seem to like shop.”

  Ben wrote the kid’s name down on his legal pad, jotted down the time and the number of absences: seven in the last five weeks.

  “I need one more thing,” he said to Helen. “Is there a Mexican kid on the swim team?”

  “Two of them,” she said.

  “The best one?”

  “Lucero Vega,” she said.

  For a moment, the name brought the kid to life in Ben’s mind—sewed up his chest cavity, blew air into his collapsed lungs, stood him six foot three from toe to crown. Ben remembered holding his daughter for the first time in the hospital fourteen years ago, when he first whispered her name and she became Emma Eunice Wade. Those five syllables animated her with the beginnings of her personality. The dead boy’s mother had had the same moment seventeen years before, when the promise of a new life seemed endless.

  “They talk about Lucero,” Helen said, “like they talked about you. State, nationals, who knows what else.”

  “I’ve got to show you something, Helen,” he said. “It’s not pretty, but I need you to look at it, all right?”

  He felt terrible asking this of her. When Helen’s son was killed, there was nothing to identify, just his dog tags, one edge of the metal melted and cooled like scarred skin. She wore the tags around her neck, tucked beneath her peach blouse. She had picked up a bag of pieces and ash at El Toro Marine Base and buried that.

  “We found a kid the other morning, in a strawberry field.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “That serial killer?”

  “We don’t know,” he said. “Looks like he could have shot himself.”

  Her eyes fluttered and filled with tears.

  “One of ours?” she said, grabbing a package of tissues.

  “That’s why I need you to look,” he said. “No one’s identified him yet. His parents are illegal. They’re scared to come forward.”

  From his wallet pocket he pulled the autopsy photo, pilfered from the evidence file at the station, and held it out to her. When she saw it, she sucked air through her teeth.

  “Is that Lucero?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, pushing the picture away, looking at Ben now. “There wasn’t someone else to ask?” she said, the tone in her voice changing. “I’m the only one here who could do that?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I trust you.”

  She cracked a teary smile.

  “Something’s wrong about this kid’s death,” he said.

  “He’s seventeen years old. Of course there’s something wrong.”

  “I mean, there’s something else behind it.”

  “Gangs?” she said. “Rutledge and Mr. Perry keep talking about Hispanic gangs.”

  “No,” he said. “Love, I think. Or something like it.”

  He asked for Lucero’s address and Helen pulled the file. “Fourteen seventy-six El Ranchero Road, number four.”

  A condo complex off Margarita Avenue.

  “Someone’s going to call here, asking about this,” Ben said. He would have liked to keep this under wraps until he sorted it all out, but another day or two of the boy’s absence and people would start putting two and two together. “Daniela Marsh, from the World News. I want you to tell her his name, okay, but keep me out of it.”

  She nodded. “Now get out of here,” she said, anger still in her voice. “I’ve got things to do.”

  He touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry about Paul,” he said. “Your son was a good kid. Always polite, never pulled anything with me.”

  “They’re all good kids,” she said. “Just confused.”

  —

  HE FOUND NEIL Wolfe leaning against the metal fence of the swim complex, a cigarette dangling from his fingers. The fence jutted from the top of a landscaped hillside that overlooked the pool, and people often stopped here to watch the tournaments when they were out walking their dogs or finishing a jog around the man-made lake in the adjacent park. Through the fence, Ben watched the lines of swimmers slice through the water. The pool was packed. Swimming was more popular than football at the high school, infinitely more popular than basketball. On meet days, for the last two decades, people turned out and filled the bleachers to watch.

  The kid glanced his way, took a drag of the cigarette, and then blew the smoke above his head.

  “You a truant officer or something?”

  “Nope.”

  “Only truant if I miss the whole day,” he said. “I’m only cutting class now.”

  “Truant if you’re off campus, missing any of your classes.”

  Diamonds of sunlight danced off the surface of the pool. The wind carried the droplets kicked up by the swimmers, a haze of chlorinated water darkening the cement deck on the west side of the pool. The coach was sitting down at the lifeguard bench, a bullhorn resting on his lap, his back to the fence.

  “Well, I’m on campus,” the kid said. “So I’m simply late to class.”

  “Very late,” Ben said. “It’s an issue for the assistant principal.”

  The kid looked at him for a moment, taking Ben in. Neil’s hair was peroxide white, the tips dyed green.

  “I know you,” Neil said. “There’re pictures of you all over the walls in the men’s locker room. Hall of Fame–type stuff. Medals with your name on them, trophies with your name on them, race caps with your number.”

  “I won a few races when I was your age,” Ben said.

  The coach called out something on the bullhorn, the wind carrying the words west, away from them. The swimmers lined up on the wall, their heads bobbing up and down, their mouths wide open as if they were fish gasping at the air.

  “I can’t stand that asshole,” the boy said. “Any city statute against cursing?”

  “Not yet,” Ben said. “But I’d have a
few things to say if I was your father.”

  “Come on over,” the kid said. “And the two of you can have a scolding party.”

  “Someone told me you’re polite.”

  He laughed. “Keep quiet, get left alone.”

  The kid took a drag. He had small hands.

  “There is a statute against underage smoking,” Ben said. “Got a fake ID, or do you go to the Taiwanese place on University Ave.?”

  “The cabinet above my mother’s Crock-Pot,” he said.

  “Convenient.”

  The coach called out on the bullhorn again, and the swimmers dove beneath the water, dolphin-kicking into the butterfly.

  “What’s your beef with the coach?” Ben asked.

  “He likes to be in people’s business,” the kid said. “Thinks he’s cool shit, you know, because he’s coached a couple Olympians. Thinks he’s down with the common student and all that.”

  “What business is that?”

  “Forget it,” Neil said. “I like watching boys in Speedos. That’s what you’re going to say, right?”

  “Nope,” Ben said, looking at him now. In high school, Ben remembered, he’d broken a kid’s nose for calling him a fag. He was sixteen, about the same age as Neil. “Wasn’t even thinking it.”

  It happened on the sidewalk off campus after school, and the kid and his buddies were coming toward him, hogging the cement. When Ben passed, they bumped shoulders and the kid spit the word at him, and Ben spun and clocked him square in the face. “How’s that for a fag?” he said to the kid, whose blood was dribbling onto the pavement. The kid and his friends never said anything to him again. Fags didn’t crush people’s faces, everyone knew that.

  “Thanks for that, then,” Neil said, flicking the cigarette butt on the ground and heeling it dead with a ratty two-tone skate shoe. Vans, Ben noticed.

  Three kids had fallen back in the butterfly, one of them simply bobbing his head in the water, his nose and mouth just barely above the surface. The coach climbed around the edge of the pool, got down on his knees, and started laying into him.

  “Your friend’s not there,” Ben said.

  Neil straightened his back. “What friend?”

  “Lucero.”

  The boy stared at Ben, sizing him up.

  “I know,” he said, letting his shoulders drop. “He hasn’t been around for a few days.” He lit another cigarette. “Are you immigration, then? You sent him back?”

  “No,” Ben said. God, he hated this part of the job. “Kid, I’m sorry. He’s dead.”

  Neil’s face fell apart, just collapsed. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus.”

  —

  “GET ME OUT of here,” Neil had said. “Please, just get me out of here.”

  And Ben did, the kid in the back of the cruiser, curled against the doorframe, crying all the way down to the beach. Ben had parked the cruiser on a bluff overlooking Crystal Cove, and that’s where they stood now, Neil grasping the wire fence between barbs, sucking in the salted air, trying to calm down. If this kid was involved in Lucero’s death, he was earning an Academy Award for this performance.

  “He did it himself, right?” Neil asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Ben said.

  The surfers were out, black wet-suited bodies on white arrows carving the face of hollowed-out waves. Ben leaned against the hood of the car, the heat of the engine burning through his pants. It was hot as hell this afternoon, the basin sky like a magnifying glass for the sun. Out beyond the beach, a band of smog, pushed offshore by the wind, hovered like an approaching dust storm.

  “How?” Neil asked.

  Ben didn’t say anything.

  “Please tell me how.”

  “He was shot.”

  “Did it hurt?” Neil said. “I mean, would it hurt?”

  “No,” Ben said. It must have hurt, at least for a moment, at least for that flashing second. Maybe it hurt for a few minutes, in the twilight of the heart winding down. But that’s not what this kid needed to hear. “I don’t think so.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t, really,” Ben said. “I’ve seen men shot, though.” The armed man running out of the 7-Eleven on Wilshire. The laid-off middle manager holding the vice president and his secretary hostage in Century City. The dealer at the party in North Hollywood. “In the right place, it seems to be over immediately.”

  “Was he shot in the right place?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said.

  The boy nodded and turned away to face the ocean and smog. “Can I see him?”

  “You don’t want to.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want,” he said, his frail profile framed by the ocean. “People are always telling me what I want and don’t want, and they don’t have a fucking clue.” He turned to look at Ben, his face all kid—pimpled, flushed red cheeks. “I want to see him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said, “but I won’t do that.”

  Two military jets swooped down the coast, afterburners shooting blue flame. Probably back from target practice, bombing the hell out of San Clemente Island. They banked left over Laguna and thundered low into the canyon toward the base.

  “Were you in love with him?” Ben said, as gently as he could.

  “I don’t know.” Neil finished one cigarette and lit another. “I just liked him. He had a cowlick on the back of his head. It always stuck up, even after he got out of the pool. That made me smile.”

  “Were you sleeping with him?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  “A common one when death is involved, especially a violent one.”

  Neil hesitated, looking down the coast where the swells stacked up. Ben gave him a few moments and watched two surfers catch the same wave. When the first one cut back across the face, he shoved the other off his board. The second one went backward into the maw of the tube, sucked down below. The first one rode the wave to the rocks and flipped out the backside. There was about to be a fight. Stupid kids.

  “He was Catholic, you know,” Neil said. “He hated himself for it, said it was a sin, said it was disgusting. I asked him if that meant he thought I was disgusting. He said no, but I didn’t believe him. He was disgusted by me and by himself, but we were still us, you know, didn’t matter how much we hated it.”

  “I have to ask again,” Ben said. “I’m sorry. Were you sleeping together?”

  “We kissed,” he said quietly. “We were too scared to do anything else. You get told your whole life something’s wrong with you, you start believing it.” He laughed bitterly. “I mean, that’s what they want, right? To make you hate yourself out of being this way? Shit, I get it, I get what they do, but it’s still working on me.”

  “You and Lucero were fighting, then?”

  “No,” Neil said. “We were supposed to go to the movies tomorrow night, Aliens. I was going to pay because he didn’t have any money. His parents pick strawberries and tomatoes.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you told them yet?” the boy said, turning to look at him.

  “They know.”

  “Jesus,” he said, turning back to the ocean. “I hate his mom, but I still feel bad for her.”

  “You’ve met her?”

  “No,” Neil said. “Lucero wouldn’t let me. He said she would be ashamed of him, of us.”

  Neil drew on the cigarette. Below him, in the water, the second surfer threw a punch from his perch straddling his board. The first surfer threw one back, but he fell into the water, and the second surfer pressed the man’s head into the water. He let him up, though, and the first surfer, spitting something at the second surfer, turned and paddled his board to shore.

  “He used to bring me strawberries,” Neil said. “He’d stuff them into a pocket in his backpack and give them to me between classes.”

  Through the cruiser’s open window the radio called out a robbery, a gas-station holdup, out near Jo
hn Wayne Airport.

  “She found out, didn’t she?” Neil said.

  “His mother?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She found out about us, that’s why he did this.”

  “There was that man who found you two together in the orange grove. You think he said something to Lucero’s mother?”

  “You talked to that guy?” Neil said. “He said he wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “He didn’t know someone was going to get killed.”

  Neil thought about it for a moment. “No,” Neil said. “He didn’t tell her. That guy was cool. He’d warn us if someone was coming, and we’d hide.”

  “You know his name?”

  “No one ever tells you their name over there.” The kid stubbed out the cigarette against the guardrail. “It was that fucking swim coach. He told her.”

  “Lucero’s coach knew about you two?”

  “We screwed up,” he said. “The coach keeps this condo near the school. Supposedly rents it out, but it’s still full of his stuff, and nobody’s been renting it since I’ve known about it. Lucero mowed the lawn for him, cleaned the windows, kept it up, you know. He had a key, and sometimes we’d meet up there, pretend it was ours.” His voice cracked. “It was stupid fantasy bullshit.”

  “Doesn’t sound stupid to me.”

  “What’s with you, man?” the boy said. “I mean, like anyone else in this town would laugh at that, call me a faggot.”