Cast Of Shadows

by Kevin Guilfoile

  Big Rob stood nervously behind his desk. Sometimes the cases just solve themselves, he thought. But he was also a man who believed in earning his fee.

  At five o’clock he was loitering outside the glass doors engraved with the names Ginsburg and Addams and hopped on a descending elevator with a gaggle of G amp;A secretaries. They ranged in age from about twenty to about fifty-five, none of them wore a wedding ring, and they seemed a little happy and loud to be headed for a train home. “I just made fifteen thousand dollars without doing a damn thing,” Biggie announced to the cab as it descended past the twelfth floor. “And I’d like to spend a good chunk of it tonight getting beautiful ladies drunk.” The secretaries whooped and hollered.

  The next day he called Philly’s old buddy Tony Dee at Mozzarell. “Tony, how’d you like to do me favor? For old times’ sake. For Phil Canella’s sake.”

  Tony Dee laughed. “What you want?”

  “How far back do your reservation books go?”

  “I got ’em all the way back to the day I opened,” Tony said.

  “And credit card records?”

  “The same. My accountant says I should get rid of ’em. What do you think?”

  “I think you should toss ’em,” Biggie said. “But only after I get a good look.”

  On the bench in the middle of the roundabout Big Rob kissed the sides of a strawberry ice cream cone and pinned an envelope under his left thigh to protect it from the cool autumn breeze. He waited about five minutes before Davis Moore appeared. He also had an ice cream cone. Vanilla.

  “Hey, we had the same idea,” Biggie said, waving his napkin around as a stand-in for his devoured cone. Davis sat down and they didn’t look at each other or say anything right away, as if they had no business, as if this meeting were only chance, just a couple of men deciding to get in one last ice cream before the weather turned cold. Big Rob’s clients always acted like this. Secretive. Paranoid. He guessed they saw characters in their position act this way on television, and most people had no other frame of reference for the detective business. Biggie always indulged them.

  “His name is Sam Coyne,” Big Rob said. Davis looked puzzled. “Coyne. Cash. You said it was something like Cash, so I connected the dots.”

  “How do you know it’s him?”

  Big Rob pulled the summary page of the Moore file out of the envelope and read from it. “Samuel Coyne. Grew up in Northwood. Parents still live here. He was recently named partner at the law firm Ginsburg and Addams. Leases a tricked-out BMW, always black. Has a reputation among his adversaries and peers for being a ruthless sonofabitch, and among his female coworkers for being both a slut and into the rough stuff. No criminal record. Six years ago – that’s in the time frame you specified – he dined here at Northwood’s finest restaurant, Mozzarell. Ordered the expensive wine.”

  “Was he with Martha Finn?”

  “Reservation was for two.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. His parents live here.”

  “You’re right,” Big Rob said.

  “Do you have a photo?”

  “I do.” Big Rob reached again into the envelope and retrieved an original of the photograph that had appeared in Northwood Life. He’d paid a twenty-three-year-old copy editor fifty bucks for it so Moore wouldn’t think he was charging him 15K for clipping articles out of the local paper.

  Davis stared at it and nodded, and the empty, narrow bottom of his cone scratched the sides of his throat as he swallowed it nearly whole. “You’re right. It’s him.” There followed an uncertain pause. Biggie knew it as the transition when the detective’s responsibility became the client’s. Except for an inheritance case here and there and the really messed-up revenge divorces, no one who hired him really wanted to hear the information he provided. Biggie was the finder of bad news, and now that it was his, Davis Moore was going to have to figure out what to do with it.

  “Dr. Moore,” Big Rob said, “if you don’t mind me asking, and please don’t tell me if it’s something I don’t wanna know, but what are you gonna do to this guy?”

  Davis took the envelope and began examining the rest of the contents for himself. “Nothing. Probably.”

  “I only ask because of Ricky Weiss. When he thought your man here was Jimmy Spears, he said you were gonna kill the guy. That’s why he said he killed Philly. He was scared of you.”

  “Ricky’s the killer,” Davis said. “Not me.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figure, too. But if I find myself on a witness stand at somebody’s future murder trial, I want to be able to say that I asked. That my conscience is clean. Within reason, I mean.”

  “You did, and it is,” Davis said. “Shall we get your money?”

  The two of them walked to Lake Shore Bank, where Davis had opened up an account fifteen years ago to finance his investigation into Anna Kat’s death. He had kept a slush fund here to hide traveling expenses, as well as a reserve of reward money, from Jackie. He never closed the account and meant to tell Joan about it several times, but he never did. For a while he thought he might use it to surprise her with a trip or a car or a spectacular piece of jewelry. The current balance was $56,533.21.

  It took about half an hour for the manager to fill out the paperwork and get all the necessary approvals for a cashier’s check of that size. Big Rob and Davis waited wordlessly in a small cubed office belonging to an account manager, who brought them coffee and an assortment of cookies on a small plate. Despite the odd half walls surrounding them, on which the gray carpet from the floor seemed to be crawling toward the ceiling like ivy, voices in this place, with its high ceilings and broad tiles and marble counters and hushed tones, would carry.

  When it arrived, Biggie folded one of the easiest checks of his career under his green windbreaker and into the pocket of his short-sleeved dress shirt, and they walked out the west-facing front door into the early evening, where the sun shot rays parallel to the ground and directly into their eyes. Big Rob put on his sunglasses and held out his hand to indicate the close of the deal.

  “There’s one more thing in there I didn’t tell you about,” Biggie said as his fingers wrapped around the doctor’s palm. “You’ll read it yourself when you go through that file, but I wanted to say it.” He set his left hand on Davis’s shoulder and put his mouth close to the man’s ear, but he didn’t whisper. This wasn’t so much a secret as a confidence: “Coyne and your daughter were in the same class at Northwood East.”

  Davis watched the detective walk away. He didn’t know how he should feel, nor could he diagnose the pain in his stomach. He had an envelope with a name and a photograph, and he’d thought it would make him happy to know the truth at last, but it made him anxious, not glad. Anna Kat had been murdered by someone she knew. Perhaps even a friend. The last thing she would have felt was not just horror and pain, but betrayal as well.

  – 67 -

  It had been thirteen weeks since Justin received his last Shadow World news alert. Eight killings in four months, and then nothing. No stabbed or strangled avatars discarded in the alleys or in the back rooms of bars or in dirty Lincoln Avenue motel rooms. Justin hadn’t played the game at all in two months except to check in on his avatar and to celebrate his Shadow mother’s birthday.

  Tuesday morning, dressed for school in jeans and a black T-shirt, he poured dry cereal in a bowl and pawed through the mess of bills and home magazines and catalogs on the kitchen counter.

  “What are you looking for, hon?” Martha asked.

  “The paper,” Justin mumbled.

  “The Tempo section is on the table there,” she said.

  Justin kept shoving aside piles of old paper. “Nuh-uh. The front page.”

  Martha sighed. “You shouldn’t read this stuff. You get so worked up.” She opened a baseboard cabinet where she kept the big pots and removed the folded Tribune section. “But I guess I can’t keep it from you. The radio, the television, the Internet. God knows what you talk about in school.” />
  Justin sat down and flattened the paper on the table. The headline read: DAMEN AVENUE DEATH

  Cops say woman, 23, could be first Wicker Man victim in six months

  Justin read the story quickly. She was found behind a French restaurant. Strangled and stabbed. Raped. Body left in the rain. No prints, no DNA. Police guessed time of death was between 2 and 4 a.m. Justin agreed: it was the Wicker Man, all right.

  The story continued with as many details about the victim as they could gather. She was from downstate. A student at DePaul. She had eaten at the restaurant with friends earlier in the evening. None of them were considered suspects. Not much more than that. This edition had been distributed electronically (and printed directly in the homes of subscribers on large-format paper), but the reporter still would have had only an hour or so to file the story.

  At the end of the article was an editorial note in italics: “Sally Barwick helped with the reporting on this story.”

  Hunh.

  He put on his coat and kissed his mother good-bye. “Finish your cereal, you have time,” she said.

  “Gotta be in early today,” he told her as the kitchen door shut behind him. “There’s a science lab I need to finish before class.”

  Martha sighed. She felt certain that was a lie.

  When he’d gone three blocks on his bike, Justin turned right where he should have turned left and circled back to Stone Avenue. The last few mornings he worried he had been looking at the wrong window. What if Dr. Moore had left him the signal days or weeks ago and he’d missed it somehow? He paused his bike a few houses down and scanned every upstairs window, eight of them across the face of the large Prairie home. In the upper-right quadrant, underneath a flat, protruding eave, there was a window separated into eight panes. A piece of white paper had been taped inside the bottom left pane and the curtains behind it had been pulled shut.

  Justin picked his feet off the ground and propelled himself forward. Finally. The waiting had been horrible. With no word from Dr. Moore and nothing going on in Shadow World, his life for the last few weeks had been practically suspended.

  He endured his morning classes – English, calculus, history – and rushed across the main building to get to fourth-period computer science early. He was only the sixth person to arrive. Now he just had to remember which boxes were still live with the game.

  Shadow World had become so popular that Northwood East (and hundreds of other schools across the country) had to ban students from playing it during school hours. It was too big a distraction. Teachers tried to be diligent about deleting the software from hard drives and networks on campus, but the kids wanted to play more than the teachers wanted to stop them, and Justin could almost always find a machine with an undetected installation. He sat in the back left seat and searched the computer there. Nothing. He slid over to the next chair and tried again. This time he found it in a hidden folder, nested deep in the directory and renamed “HISTOR~.” An indifferent teacher conducting a half-assed search would never have found it.

  The students were mostly in their seats now. They were supposed to be working on independent programming projects, so their teacher, Mrs. Biden (too old to know how to do anything useful on a computer, the students all agreed), made a few brief announcements and then urged them to work quietly, as she always did. Justin had already finished his assignment, or nearly anyway, and he called it up on the screen so he could switch to it in a keystroke if someone walked behind him. Then he logged on.

  The game downloaded the time from a government lab, consulted his schedule, and figured out he should be in this classroom. Fourth period was an hour long, followed by lunch, which was also an hour. He had a forty-minute study hall for sixth period and had already put in a request to spend his free period here in the computer room. That meant he had two and a half hours. He hoped it would be enough.

  Typing every word he wanted his avatar to speak (at school he couldn’t use the headset or the teachers would bust him in a second), Shadow Justin told his Shadow teacher he wasn’t feeling well, and she excused him to the nurse’s office. His avatar ducked out the doors by the gym and took a shortcut through the woods toward downtown Northwood, jogging along a path of mud and dead grass. An early snow had covered the ground a week before but it had melted from even moderately traveled places and the game reflected the messy result even along this out-of-the-way trail. He couldn’t risk getting his bike from the rack. Someone in the game would see him. Looking around the room he guessed there were three others playing at the same time, and their online alter egos were no doubt skipping out on school as well.

  In fifteen minutes he was on a train headed into the city. Other suburbs rolled past as the light midday ridership boarded and disembarked. At Northwestern station he got off the train and passed an arcade on Washington. He wondered what it would be like to go inside and play a coin-operated video game through his computer. Some other day.

  Speed was the thing, so Justin hailed a cab and took it to Tribune Tower, just north of the Chicago River. The sidewalk in front of the Gothic stone building on the east side of Michigan Avenue was active with reporters and other workers from the paper returning from the field or heading out to lunch. Twin revolving doors, framed in glass and wood and set inside the elaborately carved stone edifice, sucked men and women into the building at the same rate they pushed them out.

  The lobby was several stories high and the walls lined with a variety of reflective stones. A security guard sat at a marble half-moon desk, checking people as they came in. Two banks of elevators were behind them, and over the elevators was an engraved quote from Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the first publisher of the Tribune.

  “Guard, I’m here to see Sally Barwick,” Justin typed when he came to the front of the short line. “She’s expecting me.” That was a lie.

  “Your name?” the guard asked.

  “Justin Finn.”

  The guard touched a directory screen in front of him. “Sally Barwick. She’s on the fourth floor. Let me call up and see if she can come get you.” He appeared to be listening to the phone ring over the handset, and he waved Justin aside so he could help the next person. If Sally wasn’t playing the game at the moment, he would no doubt tell Justin to come back later. No good.

  The elevator dinged and a half dozen people stepped off while a crowd of avatars pushed forward, preparing to squeeze in. Shadow Justin quietly joined them and the back of the guard’s head was pinched away by the closing elevator doors.

  It took only a few minutes of navigating the paths between cubicles up and down the fourth-floor newsroom to find Sally’s desk. Her avatar was typing diligently at her keyboard, working on a story.

  “Sally?” Justin said.

  Shadow Sally looked up. She didn’t appear to recognize him. “I’m sorry. I’m very busy. Perhaps you can come back later and we can talk.” A programmed response. Weird.

  If she was signed out of the game, her avatar should have been gray and lethargic. When a person was logged off, the player’s avatar went on auto-pilot, performing typical functions in a robotic torpor. If, in Shadow World, the person had a job in a cotton-ball factory, the avatar would continue to make cotton balls in the player’s absence. A player could leave simple instructions – take the five-fifteen train, make a TV dinner, go to bed at eleven – and until the player returned to the game, the avatar would have minimal contact with other players. It would even turn a washed-out blue color so others would know that interaction was discouraged. Sally’s avatar had a normal complexion, but clearly real Sally wasn’t in control.

  Justin typed, “Sally, will you be coming online for lunch?”

  “That’s impossible to say,” Shadow Barwick said. “If you would like to leave me a note, I will see it when I am less busy.”

  “Sally, fine,” Justin typed. He found a piece of paper and a pencil on her desk and wrote:

  SALLY, I’M AT THE BILLY GOAT. PLEASE MEET ME. I’LL BE THERE UNTIL 1
P.M. JUSTIN

  Sally acknowledged the note when he set it in front of her, but the avatar did not read it. Instead she went back to typing an imaginary article about an imaginary subject no one would ever read.

  Justin rode the elevator back down to the street and walked past the security guard, who seemed unconcerned that he’d lost track of Justin only a few minutes before. He must be a program-operated character, Justin thought. The program lets you get away with much. Real players do not.

  He crossed the street, descended a concrete staircase to Lower Michigan Avenue, and walked into the Billy Goat Tavern. He ordered a hamburger, chips, and a cola and found a wobbly table with a view of the door.

  The real Billy Goat wasn’t much to look at, and the Shadow Billy Goat reflected that. A long L-shaped bar had been built along two walls, and several televisions hung above it, showing highlights from last night’s Bulls game. The chairs were the institutional kind, with hollow aluminum frames and vinyl seats and backs with a faux wood finish. The linoleum floor was old and dirty. Frames on the walls held photographs, some autographed, of the Shadow Billy Goat’s celebrity patrons. These celebrities fell into three categories – people who were famous in the real world but mostly unknown inside Shadow World; people who led anonymous lives in the real world but who had become famous inside Shadow World; and people who were famous in the real world as well as in Shadow World. Most of those in this last group were True-to-Lifers, extreme celebrity egotists who were unsatisfied with the adoration they received from actual people. They needed the love and attention of a whole other universe. Some of them were intriguing, however, like the current and popular Chicago news anchorwoman whose Shadow World character had left journalism to become a world-famous concert cellist. Now that was cool, Justin thought.