Shadow Games (27 page)

He should have come back to the room earlier but instead he'd made the rounds of the discos where
Cobey
was known to hang out. He hadn't turned up anything.

He closed the door behind him and started to walk toward the window. Halfway there, he noticed the curled, wet leaves on the rug.

He bent down, knees cracking, and picked up one of the birch leaves. The dampness gave it the slick feeling of a fish.

So she had gone out tonight and then come back.

And had now gone out again.

All he could think of was that
Cobey
had called while he was out and that Anne had taken the call and had gone off somewhere to help
Cobey
.

Nothing else made sense. Not at this hour.

He stood up, looking at the antiseptic, lonely room. He wanted to hear her laugh, feel her hug him in that urgent, girlish way of hers, as if she were clinging desperately to him for support. He enjoyed being needed. It made him feel that he belonged to somebody.

He went over to the bed, sat down on the edge and started to pick up the phone when he noticed the stack of magazines with Anne's pen name material in them.

He flipped on the goose neck lamp on the ledge between the two beds and picked up the phone.

He dialed the desk, giving his name and room number when a male voice answered. He asked the clerk if he'd happened to see Anne recently.

"I've just come on duty, sir, but Michael is still here. He was on since three this afternoon. Let me go ask him."

"Thank you."

As he waited for the clerk to return, Puckett thumbed through the magazines. Each of Anne's pen name articles was flagged with a yellow sticky on the title page. He was struck, first, by the fleeting nature of fame as represented by these glossy pages. More than half of the "hot" stars that Anne had written about a few years ago were not working much these days.

He smiled at some of the pen names: Amy
Conners
, Rachel Forrest, Evelyn Day, Dorothy Todd. If all else went bad for Anne, she always had a future as a bad check artist. She was good at inventing names.

The clerk came back on. "Sorry I took so long."

"I appreciate your trouble."

"Michael did see her leaving. About an hour ago, he said. He also saw her leave earlier in the evening."

"The last time he saw her—did he see her get into a cab or anything?"

"Yes. A Yellow cab. He thinks it was Marty's."

"Marty's?"

"Marty Gresham. He usually parks out front. His brother is a bellman here and so they kibitz a lot."

"Is Marty out there now?"

"Just a second. I'll check."

The desk clerk went away, came back. "Not yet. I can call you as soon as I see him, though."

"I'd appreciate it."

And then, sitting there on the edge of the bed, the name came back to him, one of the pen names she'd used on her articles. Evelyn Day. Something familiar about that...

The name teased at his mind but bore no meaning. Evelyn Day. Why did that seem familiar?

He went in the bathroom and cleaned up. Hot water and soap felt good on his beard-
stubbled
face. He splashed on Brut and then did his pits and rolled on some new deodorant.

All the time he kept waiting for the phone to ring.

All the time he kept thinking about the name Evelyn Day. Why did that sound familiar?

He went out to the room and started looking for notes. Maybe she'd left him one and he just hadn't stumbled across it yet. This was unlike her, taking off this way with no kind of note.

He was on the third dresser drawer when he remembered why the name Evelyn Day sounded so familiar to him. A burning sensation started in his stomach and began working up his chest. Icy sweat dappled his long arms and his sloping, muscular back.

He turned his head to look at the phone, praying for it to ring.

3

A
t this time of night, the only people moving inside the Daley Center were the security guards. Otherwise, the windows in the vaulting white building sitting in the middle of the large plaza were dark.

Outside, hiding behind the enigmatic Picasso sculpture that Chicagoans had been arguing about for long years,
Cobey
Daniels searched the street for any sign of a taxi.

He still wished he'd been able to get hold of Puckett instead of Anne. After everything that happened...

Several years ago, one of the big, slick, entertainment magazines had assigned Anne to write an article about
Cobey
. He'd been out of the asylum for less than a year and was doing bit parts at the time. Lilly had taken an instinctive dislike to the woman. Apparently, she'd sensed intuitively that there was a strong attraction between Anne and
Cobey
.

On the night of Anne's last interview with
Cobey
, after two weeks of her following him around like a valet, she invited him out to dinner and he accepted. They drove out to Malibu on one of those Technicolor evenings that recalled a fifties musical, impossibly gorgeous, impossibly romantic...

Not much later that evening,
Cobey
called Lilly and told her that he wouldn't be able to keep his weekend mall gig. He said he'd just come down with the flu and would be staying in his apartment.

Lilly, of course, didn't trust him. She drove over to his apartment at once and found him gone. She spent the entire weekend frantically phoning his place and driving over there on the off-chance that he'd returned and simply wasn't answering his phone.

Meanwhile,
Cobey
and Anne flew to Las Vegas for the weekend, following a chance remark by
Cobey
that he'd always wanted to see if the place was just as tacky as everybody said. It was—but it was also exciting as hell.

It was, perhaps, the finest weekend of
Cobey's
life and, by the end of it, he was in love with Anne Addison. True, she was a few years older than he and true, the loss of her son frequently sent her into deep depressions. But she was funny and tender and gentle, and she gave him the best silken sex he'd ever had. They quickly developed a mutual need that bordered on a sick kind of dependency, but if either noticed it at this juncture, they said nothing. They just accepted the dependency as part of their relationship—quick jealousies, constant phone calls if they were apart for even an afternoon, and incessant reassurances that she really truly loved him and that he really truly loved her.

Cobey
lost all interest in his career. He started canceling publicity dates, on the set he was forlorn because Anne wasn't around, and he was constantly battling both Lilly and Wade, who saw his career starting into a serious decline. He even did the most unexpected thing, quit drinking.

Lilly set private detectives on them, but the detectives were unable to learn Anne's identity.
Cobey
and Anne took child-like delight in eluding the detectives, in setting traps for them, in planting false clues.

And then one day
Cobey
was gone.

Lilly called the police and a nationwide search was set in motion for the TV star.

Cobey
and Anne, hair dyed, had rented a farm in Pennsylvania under a false married name.
Cobey
loved Pennsylvania, especially the steep, wooded hills and mountains. If anything, the relationship between the pair was stronger and more fulfilling than ever. Anne and
Cobey
would spend their lives together. That went without saying.

And then the spells came.

At least, that's what
Cobey
called them. Anne had started having nightmares about her little boy running out into the street and being struck and killed by the car. She'd started seeing his death as somehow her fault, even though, in reality, there had been nothing she could do to prevent it.

Cobey
got her to a shrink, an irony not lost on him—crazed
Cobey
taking someone else to a psychiatrist. For a time, Anne was better.

And then one morning, dawn still muzzy in the dusty farmhouse window, the boards of the floor cold on the white pads of her soles, she stood looking out at the ground fog that was now touched with gold as the sun rose to take the sky, and said, "I'm pregnant."

He watched as she turned to him, startled by the look on her face. No surprise, no joy; only a somber, even anxious look.

"Don't you see what this means?" she said. "It means God is giving me another chance. I didn't take care of my first son, but he's giving me another chance to take care of this one. Don't you see that,
Cobey
?"

She came over to the bed and fell into his arms, where they stayed the rest of the morning. He was going to be a father.
Cobey
Daniels. Punk of punks,
assbandit
of
assbandits
, a father if-ya-could-
fer
-God's-sake-believe-it.

The next two months were out of a sentimental forties romance movie—maybe one with June Allyson.
Cobey
was a big fan of old movies, always wondering what it would have been like to screw those older actresses.
Cobey
played the attentive expectant father, Anne the lovely, serene expectant mother. And then one afternoon, a late rainy afternoon when he'd gone off to do the grocery shopping, he stopped in a bar and—just some wild, irresistible hair up his ass-had a couple of drinks and came home in the only mean mood he'd ever shown Anne...

Terrified that something had happened to him, she was hurt and angry when she saw why he was late. She slapped him hard across the face and then he just reacted. Didn't plan to. Didn't want to. Immediately wished he hadn't.

He raised his hand and brought it down in a chopping motion against the side of her face, brought it down with an obscene grace and power, brought it down hard enough to send
her slamming backwards into the spindly coffee table, and falling over it, her thin arms windmilling, her face sweet and vulnerable and terrified. And he tried to grab her, oh, God, he tried so hard, but it was too late, her head banging against the hard corner of the couch arm, her torso folding in half as her bottom slid between the coffee table and the couch.

He was next to her in seconds, helping her up, crying out crazily
I'msorryPmsorrylimsorrylimsorry
and kissing her face and wailing some insane animal wail and seeing in nightmare truth what booze did to him every time he touched a single flicking drop. And then she ran to the bathroom and started throwing up and he came in and got down on his knees next to her at the bowl and said, "Is the baby all right? Is the baby all right?" with that same loony repetition panic always induced in him.

She looked at him and said, "I don't know. I don't feel very well and I'm scared. You hurt our baby! You hurt our baby!"

And then he got her in on the bed and she began sobbing so hard the mattress squeaked with the rhythms of lovemaking. He went in and sat down next to her and gently touched a hand to her tear-soft, tear-warm cheek.

By now the rain was coming down hard outside. He lay down next to her in the dark bedroom, the small lamp out in the living room the only light in the entire farmhouse and she cried softly for an entire hour. He said nothing. He just smelled the damp, cold rain and smelled the dark consuming night and smelled the tart whiskey on his breath. Then he went to sleep.

He heard her, several hours later, screaming in the shadowy bedroom, standing over him and looking down at him. At first, coming up from the depths of sleep, he was disoriented and unable to tell what she was pointing at and screaming about. But then he rolled over and felt the sticky, bloody mess beneath him on the bed and knew instantly that she'd had a miscarriage.

She kept screaming and pointing and screaming and pointing until all he could think of to do was get her in the shower and run the water so cold that it brought her back to at least a semblance of sanity...

Four nights after this, she packed her bags and left in the middle of the night. He didn't hear from her for a week and he started drinking again. He managed to get his hands on twenty Halcyon pills and considered downing them along with a pint of Old Crow. Good-fucking-bye and good-fucking-riddance. But the night he considered this, his phone rang near midnight and she said, "Sparks, Nevada, if you're interested," and then hung up.

Late the next dusty afternoon,
Cobey
stood on the runway in Sparks. By nightfall, at his paternal and adamant insistence, they were living in a nice, middle-class apartment where hubbies ran to accountants and ad men and
wifies
ran to school teachers and travel agents.