There Fell a Shadow (26 page)

T
he Artful Dodge was waiting at the curb. I jumped in. I peeled away into the traffic with an explosion of black exhaust. I turned the corner, leaving rubber on the road behind me. I ran the lights until I hit Madison Avenue, going uptown.

The avenue stretched away before me in the clear blue day. The buses crowded the right lane, coughing their way from stop to stop. Cars and taxis wove up the left lane. Not many. Just the first of the morning's Christmas shoppers.

I set my palm at the center of the car's wheel, ready to lean on the horn. I hit the gas. The Artful Dodge roared and groaned its way up to forty. Cars—cabs mostly—bunched around me, then fell away. More bunched around me. We raced and swerved together in a little clot for about a block or so. I swung the wheel this way and that, going for the daylight between the yellow cabs. I spat ahead of the pack again. Cars dropped back on either side of me. The office towers and shops with their wreaths and lights and trees all melded in a colorful blur.

Intersections came and went. I leaned on the horn. I made it wail as I rocketed under red lights and in front of oncoming cars. I left a trail of screeching brakes and shrieked curses behind me.

All that time, I waited for the sound of a siren. I kept glancing in my rearview mirror, hoping for the sight of a flasher. Hoping for some enterprising patrolman to come after me for reckless driving. I saw the green street signs rushing past me. I saw the numbers on them rise into the sixties, into the seventies. Not a patrol car in sight. Not even a traffic agent to pull me over. This is a very dangerous city.

The posh shops of the eighties streamed by. The traffic seemed to dissipate. Eighty-fifth Street. The Artful Dodge shot forward like a bullet, her old engine straining. Eighty-seventh, Eighty-eighth. I had my eyes glued to the black and battered Manhattan pavement. Ninetieth.

I wrenched the wheel.

It was a one-way street in the wrong direction. I didn't even look. I hauled the wheel over like I was turning a great schooner in the middle of an empty sea. The world spun at the windows. The old car turned so fast under me it seemed to lift into the air. For a moment I was certain the spinning world would roll and I'd be spilled out into a roaring, tumbling, shattering explosion.

But she held the road, the old Dart. She held the road for dear life. Her rear tires flew wide. I fought with the wheel, muscled them straight. The Dodge righted herself onto Ninetieth as a little red BMW swung around the corner of Fifth Avenue and headed toward me. The BMW screeched. It lurched toward the line of parked cars to the left. It halted. I kept barreling toward it. I had a quick glimpse of a young executive type sitting behind the windshield. I saw him scream like the girl in a Dracula movie and throw his arms up in front of his face.

I hit the brake. The Dodge didn't even slow down. It skated over the road toward the BMW. About ten yards from the screaming exec, my faithful jalopy touched down with a sound like an elephant sliding over a chalkboard. I threw the wheel and slid just past the BMW to the right. Came to a stop right beside it, in the center of the road.

I looked at my watch. It was 11:17. I had forty-three minutes. And then that son of a bitch down on Crosby Street would start killing in his not-very-pretty way.

I snapped the Dodge's door open. It slammed into the side of the BMW, chipping the paint. I slid out fast.

Young Mr. Executive started to come out after me.

“What the fuck's the matter …”

I slammed his door, forcing him back inside.

“Shut up,” I said.

I went around the Dodge, leapt onto the sidewalk, and headed up the steps to Wexler's town house.

H
e was waiting for me. He must have known—or I feared—that this was one of the ways it could go.

As I reached the top of the stoop, the maid in the black uniform opened the door for me. I nearly knocked her down as I pushed past her into the front hall.

In the shadow of the staircase that wound grandly to the second floor, Wexler stood alone. He was wearing a trim, elegant, three-piece suit. One of his hands was perched in its vest pocket. The other dangled down easily at his side. His legs were slightly akimbo so that one of his feet fell on a black marble tile and the other fell on a white one. The pouches of his cheeks turned upward with a slight, welcoming smile. His watery eyes glinted warmly with it. He looked the perfect host.

He started speaking the second I entered. “Well, John,” he said, a little too quickly. “I was rather hoping you hadn't yet gotten quite this far.”

I wasn't listening. I was striding toward him over the marble. Almost before he finished, my fingers were curling around his expensive lapels.

“I filed the story, Wexler. Call him off,” I said.

He swiped at my hands. I held on to him. “Let go of me,” he said. There was an edge of panic in his voice. He fought it down, steadied himself. He looked me in the eye. This time it was a threat: “Let go of me.”

I thought of slugging him. Then I thought of Chandler. My hands unclenched. His lapels slipped from them. He dropped away a step.

He dabbed at his suit with his fingers.

I lowered over him like a storm. “You only took her to get to me,” I said. “But it's too late, man. The story's in. ‘The editor of the popular newsweekly
Globe
may have had a motive for the murder of Timothy Colt.' That's my lede. Like it?”

He took a breath, drew himself up a bit. The panic was still there, just beneath his damp glare, but he held it at bay. “Very nice,” he said. “‘May have had.' Very responsible of you.”

“I figured if you were in custody for the late editions I could change it.”

“Another scoop for John Wells, boy reporter.” He sniffed at me. He waved a hand at the maid. “That will be all, Terry,” he said.

Terry was saucer-eyed. For a moment she didn't react at all. Then her body lowered a little in a sort of curtsy. She backed out of the room.

Wexler gave his full attention back to me. “If you run that story,” he said simply, “your friend will die.”

“What's the point of that?” I said. “What's the point of that anymore? It's over, man. It was all for nothing. It'll be in the bulldog for everyone to see.”

Donald Wexler turned his back on me. He took two paces away and turned. A rainbow from one of the crystals in the chandelier above us danced on his forehead. It settled. It trembled. So did he.

There was a grandfather clock in the hall's far corner. I heard it ticking toward the half hour. “I always knew it would happen, you know,” he said. “I never thought I could keep it hidden even as long as this. I even thought … it shows how silly you can be, really. I even thought I would take it gracefully when the end came. Go quietly into obscurity and poverty … even death, if it came to that … and just be thankful for what I'd had.”

“It might never have happened. They might never have figured it out.”

He smiled. Wistfully, I thought. “Oh, but they would have. Colt would have, anyway. You don't know what he was like.” He cocked his head to one side. “Or perhaps you do, John. You're really so much like him.” He swiveled his profile to me. He paced away from the winding stairs, turned, paced back. “And when I saw that it had come, at last, when Paul showed up in the tavern and I realized that the day of reckoning had actually arrived, well, I wasn't willing to go quite as quietly—to lose all”—he waved vaguely at the grandeur of the place—“to lose all this as serenely as I'd imagined.” He stopped, raised his eyes to me in a speculative glance. “I wonder if you would believe me if I told you that it wasn't the money. Well, it was: the money, the position, all of that. But mostly … mostly it was Anne. Mostly, it was the thought of losing my wife Anne. I do love her, you know. When Colt and Paul got in that fight … the situation seemed to be tailor-made. I thought the police would just naturally gravitate toward Paul as the suspect.” He shrugged. It was a strangely frivolous gesture. “You know, it probably would have gone just right, too, if you hadn't happened to be there. I couldn't have known about that, of course. Even then, if you had just stopped … stopped worrying at it, John. Or if Geoffrey had killed you in the park. Or if you'd figured it out tomorrow instead of today. Then you'd have gone after Miss Burke, wouldn't you, and … well, everything would be all right.”

I nodded. I didn't give a damn. I despised him. It wasn't a pleasant sensation. I didn't hate him for having Colt killed. I wasn't angry at him for holding Chandler. I didn't even condemn him for trying to murder me. I just despised him—despised him for being weak and making other people suffer for it. Colt, Chandler, me. Eleanora. I thought of her screaming, dying for Wexler's weakness. I felt nothing for him but disdain.

Because he was weak, he had lied. Even before Sentu, he had filed that phony story, pretended to infiltrate a cult when he hadn't. He'd gotten himself fired, disgraced. He'd had to go to Sentu to redeem himself. But no matter how far he went, he was still the same. When the rebels had broken through the army lines, when they'd headed for the city of Mangrela, Wexler had been in Jacobo with Colt. They'd both planned to return to Mangrela, Colt to rescue Eleanora, Wexler to cover the city's downfall. Colt returned. He'd been terrified, he'd nearly been killed, but he returned. Wexler had said he would follow. But when Paul arrived in Jacobo with Eleanora a week later, Wexler was still there. By that time, the passage between the two cities was slow and dangerous even for someone with Paul's connections. Wexler could not have made it to Mangrela and back in such a short time. He must never have returned to the capital.

He must have decided not to risk his life for the story. And that was fine. No one expected him to. No one would have held it against him.

But then he filed the story anyway. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for his series on the fall of Mangrela. He had won the Pulitzer and regained his reputation and come back to a fine job and a marriage to a socialite and the inheritance of millions because he had filed on the fall of Mangrela. Another faked story, like the one on the cult. Only this time, he'd gotten away with it. He'd gotten away with it because, in a way, it wasn't really faked at all. When Wexler, too frightened to go to Mangrela, got caught in Jacobo, he made his way to Eleanora's safe house, desperate to escape. There, he found her radio. He heard Robert Collins filing from the falling capital. He promised to pass the dispatches on and took them down. Collins must have kept filing until he died. Wexler must have heard him die….

And, when Collins was dead, Wexler must have begun to think about what he had.

He had a story. A good story. The last dispatches from Mangrela. Filed long after the airlift, long after the other Western journalists had fled. They were all his, no one knew he had them. Now all he had to do was get the hell out of there and file them himself.

That's when Paul showed up with Eleanora. The minute Wexler heard her name, he must have realized he had a ticket to ride. He went to the rebels who had now taken over the city. He promised to tell them the whereabouts of the leader of the underground in exchange for his freedom. They went for the deal. That's why they came for her in the dead of night. Wexler had sold her out … and gone free.

He'd gone free, and he'd taken a couple of refugees with him. A couple of the children. It was his excuse for leaving the others at the safe house, but maybe one of those—the one he'd called Geoffrey—was a fledgling assassin, the kind of murder-man Paul described. Maybe Wexler liked the idea of having a kid like that indebted to him for his life. Anyway, he'd brought them home and they'd become his servants. Maybe one of them was the chauffeur I'd missed at Colt's funeral. Whatever. He'd saved their lives and they were forever grateful to him. They were willing to do anything for him.

Including kill Tim Colt.

Once Paul showed up, Colt had to die. At least one of them did—Colt or Paul, it didn't matter which. The only thing that mattered to Wexler was that if the two got together, if they talked, if they realized they'd each seen Wexler in Jacobo, then both of them would have discovered what neither of them knew alone: Wexler could not possibly have written the stories that had won him the Pulitzer.

Wexler would have been disgraced again. Colt would have made sure of that. He would have been disgraced, and with a lot more to lose than the last time. The job, the wife, the money, the reputation. And, if Colt had kept thinking, he might have realized what Wexler had done to Eleanora, too. And then, Wexler might even have lost his life.

So he had to kill one of them. He didn't know where Paul was. He had to kill one of them, so he sent his faithful servant after Colt, hoping Paul would catch the blame for it.

But I'd gotten drunk and passed out on the sofa. And I became a witness. And now I was more than that.