“Jimmy Spears grew up here in Brixton. Davis Moore thinks Jimmy Spears killed his daughter. Ricky thinks Moore is gonna, I don’t know, get revenge or something.”
“No shit?” Big Rob wished Philly were here, then looked down at his mostly naked body and at Peg half covered by a sheet and he almost laughed. “No shit.”
Peg continued. Big Rob recognized the tired, relieved – almost tearful – tone of a confession. “After Moore used Ricky to track down Spears, he sent some guy here – a private eye with a gun, to kill Ricky, and Ricky… well, Ricky wrestled the gun away from him. Here at the trailer. Then the detective started running. He ran to his car.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I saw it. He came here to kill Ricky.” Then, in a confused and tired lapse that shattered Big Rob’s most fragile hope, “It was self-defense. I saw it.”
“Self-defense. I believe you. Anybody would,” Big Rob said. His heart was beating at a speed that would terrify his doctor. “What did Ricky do with the gun?”
Peg climbed out of bed and opened the sliding closet door. On tiptoe, she reached up to a high shelf and pushed aside a number of boxes and single shoes. In the moonlight, the skin on her back was shiny like wet sand. She turned around and presented the gun to him carefully, at arm’s length.
“It’s okay.” Big Rob hooked his pinky through the trigger guard and checked to see if the safety was on, and he set it on top of his folded pants. He took her in his arms and she squeezed him. Her hands were sweaty against his back. Later, remembering this, he would cry.
“So you’re gonna help us?” she asked, sniffling into his ear. “You’re gonna help me and Ricky get our money?”
What could Big Rob say except yes?
That’s when her hand went under the waistband of his boxers.
Big Rob closed his eyes and coaxed himself to the finish. Toward a greater end.
– 42 -
Barwick kept her apartment dark and cool. A friend in Arizona often asked why she lived in Chicago, why she put up with those Northern winters, but Sally never understood the question. With layers, it was easy to escape the cold, and snow was only a temporary nuisance, like boxes piled in a hallway. Northern winters were preferable to Southern summers – which were unrelenting and bright and hot. You could hide your worst flaws in the short, cold days of winter, but the Southern heat and sun only exposed your worst features to the world. Even now, as spring intruded, Sally, with drawn shades, made her home a bunker from the early mornings and lengthening afternoons.
She turned on her computer and with a keystroke rejected an offer to enter Shadow World, which she had just started playing in the past week. She had heard about the game from a friend and although it wasn’t exactly a mainstream phenomenon, the alternative press had been raving about its potential. She understood the appeal. Being inside the game was like being in one of her dreams.
Sally opened her word processor and began a letter to Martha Finn.
She told Martha who she really was. What her job was. What she had done. She said she was sorry. That she had accepted the assignment without realizing they would become friends. That once she started the lies – the most necessary tools of her business – it became impossible for her to stop them.
A man is dead now, and I don’t yet know if I have any culpability for his murder, Sally wrote. I once asked that same man about conflicts of interest in our profession. Philly told me, “Lawyers have conflicts of interest, Barwick. Not us. We’re more like priests. The husbands confess to us. The wives confess to us. We hear their worst secrets. Act on their worst impulses.”
You deserved less cynical consideration from me, Martha. You are a good person, far better than me. You have a wonderful son, destined for wonderful things. Even now it is easy for me to imagine him as an older boy, as a man. A man of duty and great responsibility. I have not only betrayed you, my friend, I have betrayed Justin. I will live with that pain all my life.
When my boss returns from his business trip I am quitting. Leaving this job for good. All I have to show for my falsehoods are dead colleagues and lost friends. There must be a better living in honesty, a better way to pursue the truth than through lies.
She printed the letter and signed it, then stuffed it in an envelope, which she addressed and stamped and left on a tiny sideboard that flanked her door. She deleted the original from her hard drive so it could never be edited, never be changed.
– 43 -
Davis left work at about ten o’clock. He liked coming home after Jackie had gone to bed but before she had gone to sleep. In the darkness of their bedroom, lying in their king-sized bed like parallel lines, never touching, they could talk. They could discuss the highlights of their days and the miscellaneous nuisances of their lives – bills, home repair, social obligations, and so forth. All of that was harder in the light of downstairs. Except for the bedroom and sometimes the dining room, the rest of the big house had become like a time-share in which they both lived, but never together.
He ate an unbruised portion of banana from a bowl and then walked upstairs. The stereo was tuned at high volume to a classical station. Haydn’s Twenty-second Symphony, he realized, and was amazed he recognized it. Davis preferred jazz, but he and Jackie had season tickets to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and went often, even over the last few years. Davis didn’t hate his wife. Their marriage had just lost its tolerance for long silences. At Symphony Center, silence was never an issue.
The door to the bathroom was open three inches and the light was on. Davis sat on the bed, dropped his head between his hunched shoulders, and put his palms flat atop the comforter.
The boy. Christ. The boy.
Davis had decided his path in the first year of medical school, but he told his mother and father that he planned to be a surgeon. His father was never churched, but he was a devout believer. An engineer, he taught his children that the purpose of life was to discover God from the inside out. The old man loved science, especially physics. The language of God was not Aramaic, or Latin, or Hebrew, or Arabic, he used to say, usually with a dismissive wave at a church or a Bible. The language of God, he’d say, is mathematics. When we reconcile the randomness of the universe with the precision of its rules, when we can see no contradictions in the chaos of nature and the equations of natural law, then we will understand his hows and whys.
Niles Moore believed God wanted us to deconstruct the world, to lay it in pieces across the kitchen table and, in doing so, understand him.
Davis believed that, too, which is what drew him to genetic research and, when Congress and a friendly administration assented, to fertility. For him, cloning was never about playing God. It was about replicating God’s work, following the blueprints of God’s greatest achievement and creating life.
The old man wouldn’t see it that way. The old man, back when cloning was only a possibility that made half the electorate excited for mankind and the other half afraid for their souls, thought that scientists who pursued human cloning were not observing nature but foiling it.
And so the deception throughout medical school – an easy enough thing considering the years of study and residency, unobserved outside the hospital. When he went into practice, it was more difficult.
By that time, Davis, privately (never to his patients), had become an agnostic. He had lost his faith like so many, gradually, slowly coming to the conclusion that his father’s God had not lived up to expectations. Davis didn’t blame his lack of faith on a godless universe – he still believed in some sort of power – but on the ridiculous demands religion placed on God. Omniscience? Omnipotence? Omnipresence? How could anyone who believed in a God like that not be disappointed with the world?
Jackie was still in the bathroom.
He had a sudden, horrible feeling.
Many times Davis had found his wife passed out in the bathroom – on the toilet, in the tub, under the sink – and had to undress her and put her to bed. He never resented her more than when pulling
a nightgown over her limp, sour-smelling body, and he never felt less culpable for her unhappiness.
He walked to the bathroom door and kicked it open, gently, with the toe of his right shoe.
“Jackie?” he called to her, hoping she would answer, hoping she would give him some indication, even a sentient grunt, that she could walk on her own, any gesture at all to demonstrate that she was capable of reclaiming some dignity tonight.
The bathroom was barely lit by thick purple candles that smelled like berries – cherries, it seemed to him, although he guessed it was blueberry or boysenberry the makers intended. The faucet dripped like an abandoned metronome keeping time atop a silent piano. On the tile next to the tub was a mostly full glass of white wine and an empty brown prescription bottle with JACKIE MOORE written at the top of the label and DAVIS MOORE typed at the bottom. The tub was half filled with lukewarm water and displaced almost to the point of overflowing by 115 pounds of naked lifelessness.
For the second time in his life, but not the last, Davis stood over the hollow body of a person he had once loved.
Justin at Nine
– 44 -
Folks had called Sam Coyne many cruel names as a child, but none had stung him more than “mama’s boy.” Perhaps it was the insinuation that he was weak, or maybe he simply didn’t want to be identified so closely with his gregarious and eccentric parents, but all these years later he was still reluctant to ride with his mother to the store when she asked. Running errands with his mom around town, around Northwood, where he grew up, made him self-conscious.
“Heck, Ma,” he said, trying not to whine. “Why don’t you make me a list? I’ll go get it myself. Save you the trip.”
“Jesus, Sam,” she said. “You’re thirty years old. The other boys won’t make fun of you when they see you with your mom.”
“It’s not that,” he muttered. But of course it was, and when he thought about it again, he realized how ridiculous he was being. Maybe it was his thirtieth birthday (for which his buddies from the law firm had surprised him with an expensive hooker at the Drake) or maybe it was just being home for the weekend, but Sam was having a tough time accepting himself as an adult. He looked at people in their early twenties and was convinced they were older than he. He always assumed certain kinds of celebrities – athletes, for instance – were older, and he suffered tiny spasms of panic when he read that this shortstop or that seven-foot center had a birth date ten years later than his.
“Anyone new in your life?” Mrs. Coyne asked from the passenger’s seat as he backed out of the driveway, where, in an earlier family car, Sam had accepted a blow job from a cheerleader named Alex who also had a twin brother named Alex, a fact that Sam couldn’t put out of his mind through the duration of the act.
“No,” Sam said. In truth there were many new anyones – Samantha, Joanne, Tammy, the hooker at the Drake – and he knew them all about equally well. When he called a girl for a date it had more to do with matching her preferences to his mood – this one’s a baseball fan, that one likes to be bent over a leather chair – than it did with any desire to advance a relationship. Unless a woman was especially good at scratching that month’s sexual itch, he usually let pass just enough time between dates so that she and he were starting over each time. It kept complications at bay.
Sal Faludi had been butcher to Northwood for all of Sam’s life and longer. He was in the shop every day, commanding about fifteen employees in a downtown space that over the years had expanded across four storefronts. Rare were the times when you didn’t have to wait your turn at Faludi’s. On summer Saturday mornings like this one, you took a number. Sam’s was seventy-four.
When Sam was in high school, he and the others would sometimes leave campus for lunch and they would usually end up here. When the weather was nice, Sal set up tables made from black steel mesh on the sidewalk, and the kids would each grab a sandwich from the deli and race for one of the al fresco seats.
“Sixty!” Sal called out.
A pretty young woman, about Sam’s age or a little older, pushed open the glass door with her rear end and her shoulders. Sam noticed the appealing shape of her right away, even before she turned around to reveal her white teeth and giant eyes. She had a brown grocery bag in her left arm and was holding the hand of a boy – seven, eight, nine, ten years old, somewhere in there, Sam thought – with her right. The woman smiled curiously at Sam, who was staring, and said hello to Sam’s mother before looking away and taking a number from the big snail-shaped dispenser.
“Oh, good!” Sam’s mother said, pinching his arm. “Sam, look!” She took two long steps and a graceful skip to the woman’s side and she pulled the woman and the boy back in Sam’s direction. “Martha!” Mrs. Coyne said. “This is my son, Sam. The one I’ve been telling you about all these months.”
“You know, I was wondering.” Martha laughed. “I see what you mean. Hello, Sam.” She let go of the boy’s hand long enough to shake Sam’s. The boy looked into each of their faces and sighed politely. This turn of events wouldn’t get him out of the store any sooner.
Sam was gracious and puzzled, quietly assuming his mother was matchmaking again. If that were the case she had done better than usual, except for the presence of a child, which triggered an automatic preemptory challenge for him as far as dating was concerned. This Martha was extremely pretty. She had short, reddish blond hair with fashionable bangs that transcended the common suburban bob. Her lips were full and her neck was long. Her eyes were so large and green they reminded Sam of sexy girls in comic books. She wore a green sleeveless top with narrow openings for her thin and angular gym-toned arms. Under a long abstract leaf-patterned skirt he could make out shapely athletic legs. He liked the way her head tilted when she said hello. The shy but confident way she shook hands. The silent manner in which she respected (and received respect from) her little boy. She must have been young when she had him, he thought.
“Sam, I’ve mentioned Martha to you a hundred times,” his mother said. “We’re always running into each other downtown. Little Justin here looks exactly like you did when you were his age.”
Right, Sam thought. The little boy. The bastard child his father was always kidding him about. Nope, it wasn’t his. Sam couldn’t remember every woman he’d slept with, but he would have remembered Martha. Now imagining her, flesh against flesh, he chuckled and looked at the boy’s face for the first time. Yeah, he supposed he had once looked like that. A little. Not so much that his mother should have been going on and on about it for the last year. But then, one never sees himself, or remembers himself, exactly the way others do. Self-recognition is a sign of intelligence, his freshman psychology professor had claimed. Only advanced mammals are capable of looking in a mirror and acknowledging the image there is their own. But the mirror also distorts. How many times have you heard people say, That’s a terrible picture of me, when the photo, in fact, is quite accurate? We disavow the correct images of ourselves because they don’t match against the idealized snapshots we all carry in our heads.
“Well, I’ll be,” Sam said.
Mrs. Coyne opened her purse. “A month ago I started carrying this old picture around so I could show it to you when we ran into each other, and then I haven’t seen you since. Isn’t that always the way?” She made paddling motions inside the huge bag, pushing aside innumerable contingency items like lip balm and pens and tissues and the keys to her sister’s house in Rockford.
“Here,” Mrs. Coyne said, her fingers on something. “Oh, yes. This.”
Sam and Martha huddled close for a better look while Justin stared out onto the sidewalk. The photo of Sam was taken when he was about eight years old. It was winter and Sam was dressed in snow pants and a parka and he was holding a sled. He wasn’t wearing a cap, but Sam wondered why his mother chose this photo to demonstrate his youthful resemblance to Martha’s son when she could have picked from dozens of others, in which he was not so obscured by nylon and fleece. He guessed
it was because the house in the background showed off the Christmas lights his parents were so famous for in their neighborhood. Looking at it, however, he had to admit the resemblance to Justin was startling. They had the same blond hair (although young Sam’s had been shorter), similar cheekbones, the same chin.
“Wow!” Martha grinned, pulling away from the photo and then bending back down for a better assessment. “Justin, take a look,” she said. “Look at Mr. Coyne when he was your age. He looks just like you.”
“Wow,” Justin said flatly, blinking at the photograph. There was a moment of curiosity, when his eyebrows curled, indicating to Sam that the boy saw the resemblance, but it also was apparent that Justin wanted no part of a conversation that would keep him out shopping with his mother longer than necessary. Sam sympathized.
Martha handed the photograph back to Mrs. Coyne and looked Sam in the eyes. “Well, he has a lot to look forward to if he grows up as handsome as you.”
Flirtatious, Sam thought.
“Seventy-four!” Sal cried out.
Sam held out his ticket. “Here,” he said to Martha. “I’ll trade you. It looks like Justin would like to get this over with.”
Martha raised her eyebrows. “That’s kind, but you don’t have to.”
Mrs. Coyne stopped Martha’s hand as she tried to give the ticket back. “Take it. Really. We’re in no hurry.”
“Gosh,” Martha said. “Thank you so much.”
“Divorced,” Sam’s mother whispered to him, in answer to an unasked question, after Martha had waved good-bye and disappeared toward the checkout.
Cast Of Shadows Page 19