Shadow Games (10 page)

"If you wouldn't mind."

"Something's wrong here, isn't it?"

"What makes you say that, Mr. Kemper?"

"I guess I believe in what my students call 'vibes.' You know, when you instinctively sense something."

"And you instinctively sense something?"

"Yes. Yes, unfortunately, I do."

"So do I," Cozzens said, and moved from the doorway into the apartment proper.

There were two closets in the living room. Cozzens checked them both. They were full but orderly, one smelling
of moth balls, the other of dust. In the latter closet, he found examples of things that said the Swallows girl probably got a great deal of exercise. There was a tennis racquet, a softball bat, a pair of white ice skates and a grass-stained volleyball.

While Cozzens did this, Kemper, ever the English
prof
, checked out her bookcases. "She's even brighter than I thought."

"How's that?"

"Henry James."

"Oh, yes, Henry James," Cozzens said, remembering a literature course at the University of Illinois in which he'd had to slog through a novel by Henry James. He'd liked Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather, but he'd never developed a taste for Henry James. He'd always supposed this marked him as a peasant for sure.

"Of course, she's got a lot of trash here, too, a lot of self-esteem books and things like that.
Tell Them The Lord Says To Shove It
. My God."

Cozzens said, "Why don't we try the bedroom?"

"Detective Cozzens?" Kemper said.

"Yes?"

"I don't know how I'll handle it if we find— Well, if something happened here. I mean, you're used to it, I suppose, but—"

"That's a myth, Mr. Kemper."

"A myth?"

"About cops being used to it."

"Really?"

"Nobody ever gets used to it, Mr. Kemper." Cozzens offered a sad smile. "Being good professionals, we just have to pretend we do."

Cozzens went into the bedroom.

Kemper stood in the doorway, watching him.

The room was small and sun-splashed. A very sweet scent of sachet lay agreeably on the air. The motif was pink and almost aggressively girlish, as if the Swallows woman were
trying to recapture her lost teen years. On the neatly made bed, three plump teddy bears sat watching Cozzens with bright button eyes. Between a wicker chaise lounge and a rocking chair sat a huge teddy bear, one as big as most four-year-olds. He had a jolly smile but curiously melancholy eyes.

"My stomach is in knots," Kemper said from the doorway. "I'm afraid..." He was much less talkative up here than he'd been downstairs.

He let his voice trail off.

There were also two closets in this room, one containing good but not expensive clothes, the other holding skiing gear on which she'd obviously spent a good deal of money.

Cozzens closed the door.

"I guess that leaves the bathroom and the kitchen," Kemper said. His voice was shaking. He obviously sensed they were getting closer to finding something he dreaded.

Cozzens led the way into the bathroom.

He took one look at it and saw that it had been cleaned recently. There was a residue of scrubbing compound on the curving white bowl of the sink. In the sprightly yellow waste can next to it, he found an empty container of Windex and Lysol liquid disinfectant. There was also a rolled lump of dirty rags. The discoloration on them looked all too familiar to Cozzens.

He was careful not to touch anything.

The bathroom was small, tiled in mint green, with opaque sliding shower doors on the tub and two different cabinets on the wall.

It smelled of disinfectant, water and, faintly, of the mildew that always accrues in rooms where water is used frequently without benefit of sunlight to dry it.

He took a pencil and used it to slide back one of the doors on the tub.

A gray bath mat lay on the ribbed floor of the tub. A brown container of Vidal Sassoon shampoo stood in one
corner. A festive yellow bottle of discount conditioner stood in the other.

The tub had been thoroughly cleaned. Suspiciously so.

Not even when Cozzens got down on a knee and looked carefully at the floor of the tub did he see so much as a single hair.

Cozzens stood up.

"I guess that leaves the kitchen," Kemper said, still clinging to his familiar position in the doorway of the bathroom.

When Cozzens turned to look at him, he saw that fear had given the aging Kemper the look of a frightened little boy.

"You don't have to go with me to the kitchen, Mr. Kemper."

"I've gone everyplace else. I may as well."

Cozzens studied him a moment.

To judge Kemper by the book, he was behaving suspiciously. By rights, he should even be a suspect in case something had happened to the Swallows woman.

But somehow Cozzens didn't think so. Here was a gentle, civilized little man for whom violence was an abstraction, something he mostly read about and heard about. Now, he was confronting it in his own life, and it was terrifying him.

They went into the kitchen, Cozzens leading the way as usual.

The scent of blood was overwhelming here, even though none could be seen, even though somebody had scrubbed the hell out of this room.

The kitchen was done in black and white tiles with two small aluminum sinks side-by-side. Continuing around the corner of the L-shaped kitchen, he saw a nice, big, imposing refrigerator with a juice dispenser built into the door. There were also two closets, one on either side of the refrigerator.

Cozzens opened the door of the closet on the right.

Propped up against the back of the closet was the naked body of a young white female.

Her head had been chopped off, leaving only a raw, scabbed, bloody hole in the center of her shoulders.

"You found something, didn't you, Detective Cozzens?" Kemper said from behind him.

"Right. I found something, Mr. Kemper."

"It's pretty bad, isn't it?"

"It's very bad, Mr. Kemper. You should stay back."

"Sometimes I hate the world we live in. The things people do to each other."

"So do I, Mr. Kemper," Cozzens said, and quietly closed the closet door.

He looked at the refrigerator.

He had this hunch, this cop-hunch, was all, figuring he knew where he'd find the head that had been severed from the body.

He stood staring at the refrigerator, gulping down bile. He didn't turn around to speak.

"Mr. Kemper?"

"Yes?"

"Why don't you go wait in the living room?"

"You think there's something in the refrigerator?"

"I'm afraid there probably is."

"I don't understand. If you found something in the closet, then what could possibly be in the—"

"Just go in the living room, Mr. Kemper."

"All right. I mean, if you want me to."

"I want you to."

"If there's anything I can do, you just holler."

"I'll just holler."

"I'll be in the living room, then."

"Thank you, Mr. Kemper."

Kemper went away, size seven feet padding softly back toward the sunlight and bird song.

Leaving Cozzens here to take out his clean, white handkerchief and move his hand toward the handle that would open the big, softly thrumming machine.

He opened the door and stared right at the Swallows woman.

All the blood and other goop was covered lightly with silver frost. Somebody had turned the cold up to high to cut down on the smell. There was even frost on the edges of her false eyelashes.

The curious thing was, even now he could see that she'd been a nice-looking woman. A fine, high forehead that bespoke intelligence, large blue eyes, a patrician nose and a full, slightly heavy mouth that suggested sensuality. Her hair was blonde and shoulder-length. She'd probably had many boyfriends.

He closed the door and went back to the living room. Kemper was staring at her books again.

When he heard Cozzens coming into the room, he said, "You look pale, Detective Cozzens."

"I feel pale, Mr. Kemper."

"Bad?"

"Beyond bad, Mr. Kemper." Cozzens nodded to the hallway. "Let's close things up here for now. I'd like to go downstairs and use your phone, if you don't mind."

"Are you going to tell me about it?"

"Maybe in a few minutes, Mr. Kemper."

"I guess you fellows really never do get used to it, do you?"

"No," Cozzens said. "No, I guess we never do."

They closed up the apartment and went downstairs and Cozzens used Kemper's phone to call all the appropriate people.

1

F
orty years ago, back in the days when names such as Hecht and MacArthur and Algren and Sandburg had been a source of pride to every literate Chicagoan, the Template Theater had been a very special place. Tennessee Williams had tried out several of his more successful one-act plays here. Olivier, on tour, had stopped by to see an old friend and had been talked into giving a reading. Several New York theater critics—in those halcyon days when NYC still had several theater critics—pronounced the place a "Midwestern Mecca."

Alas, those days were long gone, as Puckett and Anne learned when they walked into the place three hours after finishing an early dinner. The interior was scuffed and dusty, the small lobby area even displayed a few pieces of graffiti which had stubbornly resisted scrubbing. The theater itself was chilly, the seats squawked and squeaked from lack of care, and the stage lighting could most charitably be described as "adequate."

The crowd almost made up for this. To judge by all the minks on the ladies and the fancy Armani suits on the men, this was the opening night of a long-awaited Broadway
blockbuster. The crowd chattered and
chittered
and laughed as if they were on display for the cameras of
Time
magazine and
Entertainment Tonight
.

Once they were seated, Anne said, "Look at the crowd."

"I am. I can't believe it."

"They must really want to see the show. To come to a place like this."

Puckett, who'd done a little reading about the Template Theater, felt a certain amount of pity for the shabby old place. "Helen Hayes performed here," he said.

"She did?"

He nodded. "And Arthur Miller first tried a one-act version of
Death of a Salesman
here."

"That's incredible."

Puckett made a sour face. "And, unfortunately, nobody seems to give a damn. Not the way they've let everything go to hell."

A few years ago there had been serious talk about refurbishing this place. No longer. The recession had taken care of that. When you have five thousand people waiting in a single, unending line for three hundred minimum wage jobs, a city has other things to worry about than taking care of some once-proud old warhorse of a local theater.

Puckett understood this. But it didn't make looking around at this sad, dignified, relic of a theater any easier.

The play started twenty minutes later and, right from the start, Puckett saw why critics liked it so much.

Cobey
narrated the entire play from stage right, frequently stepping into scenes center stage. In this respect, it was very much like
Our Town
. The play detailed, with great, sour humor and bawdy glee, the travails of a child TV star. The script was merciless on TV execs and their minions—and just as merciless on minimally talented children who let their modest ability go to their heads. And
Cobey
certainly hadn't spared himself.

In the guise of Randy, the dictionary meaning of which was not lost on Puckett,
Cobey
showed himself to be quite a jerk. Here he literally threw money at a pregnant girl who said she was carrying his child; there he got a scene-hogging co-star fired; here he sat in a small living room with his parents and listened with obvious and vast indifference as his father told him that he was dying of cancer.
Cobey
was deep into contract negotiations and didn't have time for such trifles as worrying about his old man; there he seduced a very young girl, in a scene that eerily paralleled the troubles he'd had in that Florida shopping mall.