Cast of Shadows - v4 (24 page)

When the bar closed, Big Rob was the first to offer her a ride home, and when she accepted, the other girls retreated into the darkness of the parking lot behind the echoes of coy good-byes. Big Rob helped Peg into the front passenger seat of his van, and by the time he walked around to the driver’s side, she was already in a light sleep. He stroked her hair and she stirred.

“Are you going to invite me back to your motel room?” Peg asked, her eyelids heavy from drinking and napping.

Big Rob had known from the purposeful way her hand had repeatedly touched his knee in the bar that he would have no problem getting her alone. The trick would be keeping her awake, and he knew one method of doing that was a way frequently practiced between strangers in motels. But he was convinced something had happened at Ricky Weiss’s house, and his offer to drive her home was, first and foremost, an attempt to see the crime scene without a warrant.

“I sort of have a roommate,” he said. “Budget cuts at the home office and all.” She frowned. “Can we go to your place?”

Peg endured a sudden spasm down her spine and knocked her head against the window. “Ow,” she said. “I’m married, you know.”

Big Rob turned away. It seemed chivalrous to him. “Is your husband home?”

“No.”

“Will he be home tonight?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“Well, then.”

Big Rob had driven past Ricky’s trailer a dozen times, and he steered the van toward it in silence. Careless. He was only a mile away when Peg said something.

“How do you know where I live?” she asked.

“I don’t,” Biggie said. “It’s a small town. I figured you’d say something if I was going the wrong way.” In her condition, this seemed reasonable. “Is this right?”

“Left up here,” she said, tucking a finger under his shirt sleeve and rubbing the cotton between her fingers. “So what did you say your name was again?”

“Biggie.” He grinned and Peg covered her mouth at the delightful naughtiness of it and them.

They parked in the street and tiptoed in exaggerated silence to her aluminum door. Big Rob expected the place to be messy, but when they pushed themselves inside he found it to be just the opposite, and it struck him that a clean trailer almost seemed kind of upscale — like someplace a movie star passes her time between takes.

They stood there in the space between the spotless kitchen and tidy living room like, well, actors who’d forgotten their lines. The air was a stale combination of chlorine and air freshener. “Do you have anything to drink?” Big Rob asked. As full of liquids as they were, Peg laughed, chose two cans of beer from the refrigerator, and pointed him toward the couch.

He sunk into the sofa as delicately as he could. She put a bony knee against a cushion and, still holding both cans, pressed her open mouth against his. She folded herself into his lap and abandoned the beers to the black-painted coffee table.

He endured their fumbling embrace for ten minutes or more, even enjoyed it in spite of himself. Peg was not the prettiest woman to have sat on Big Rob’s lap over the last twenty years, nor was she the homeliest. He put her in the middle somewhere. Around fifth. But Peg had information about Philly, she may even know something about Philly’s death, and the crazed probing of his teeth and gums by her tongue seemed more than inappropriate. It seemed like betrayal.

But then, James Bond had sexed bad women, hadn’t he? Women who were spies, who were plotting to kill him, who had killed his friends. Hadn’t he? Big Rob was almost sure, although he couldn’t name the films in which it had happened. The early Connerys and the later Moores all ran together in his head even at the most ordinary and sober times. But he was certain James Bond had sexed evil women and allowed himself to enjoy it. Toward a greater end.

His hand reached for the front button of her jeans. At some point in the next hour, they moved to her bed.

Finally, between oddly configured and suffocating clenches during which there was circumstantial evidence of her climaxing, but before he had done the same, Big Rob said to her, “Hon, I can’t lie to you.”

She gave him a puzzled and tired look. “Baby, lie to me,” she said. “Please lie to me.”

“No,” Big Rob said. “This isn’t a game.”

She grunted. Peg wanted to reciprocate, quickly, and go to sleep. But Big Rob knew there would never be a better time to interrogate this witness than right now.

“Something you said. About a Chicago doctor.”

Peg’s eyes snapped open. Her teeth set but didn’t quite meet, the result of an uncorrected, genetic asymmetry.

“I’m looking for a doctor and it sounds like he could be the same man,” Big Rob said.

She squinted into the darkness and imagined a path from the bed to the door.

“It’s okay. Maybe we can help each other.”

She relaxed some and sat up against the headboard. “What do you mean?”

Big Rob backed off the bed and found his pants. He pulled out the illustration that Jackie Moore had sent Philly. “Do you know who this man is?”

She took it and turned on the light. “Oh, fuck,” she said.

“What is it?”

Her mind sorted the possibilities like an old mail machine. “You know Davis Moore?”

“I do,” Big Rob said. “I mean, I know who he is.”

“Fuck,” she said again. Big Rob didn’t know if she was going to say anything else.

“Look, I don’t want your money. Your big payday. You and Ricky. I just want to know who the guy in the picture is and what he has to do with the doctor. Like I said. Maybe we can help each other.”

“So you’re saying, I help you, and you’ll let Ricky and me sell our story to the magazines?”

“Magazines?” Big Rob said.
That was their big plan?
“Sure. I’ll drive you right to
Vanity Fair
’s front door, if that’s what it takes. Look, you said yourself you were waiting for something to happen so you could cash in on your story. Maybe I can help move things along a little bit.”

Peg was very tired and still a little drunk. Given the events of the last hour, the heavy, shirtless man in her bedroom had gained her trust. “That’s Jimmy Spears.”

“The football player?” Big Rob looked at the drawing again. He knew of Spears — he played for the Dolphins. Or maybe the Falcons. He’d heard the name a hundred times since he started coming to Brixton, but like most football fans, he wouldn’t know what the guy looked like without a number and name on his back.

“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.

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.

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?