There Fell a Shadow (9 page)

“You want to go off the record,” I said.

“That's right. I want to go off the record. Can I do that? Is it too late to do that?” An edge of panic crept into her voice.

I shook my head. “It's not too late.”

“I didn't … I heard you had to say it first. I thought maybe …”

“Politicians have to say it first,” I said. “You can say it now.”

She smiled a little, nodded. “I say it now.”

“Fine.” I lit another cigarette. She didn't take one this time. I leaned against my desk, rested an elbow on it. I glanced down at the messages strewn atop the typewriter. I saw the name Chandler Burke written on one of the pink sheets. I looked up at Valerie Colt. “Mrs. Colt,” I said without thinking, “why did you come here? Why did you come here to talk to me?”

She was sitting, just then, very erect. Like a little girl. Her knees were pressed tightly together. Her hands lay clasped in her lap. She was smiling slightly, ruefully, as if she were almost amused at the bitterness of her situation. Her green eyes were still glassy with a sheen of tears, but behind that there seemed to me to be a kind of nakedness. I knew, looking at her, that whatever she was about to say would leave her exposed and vulnerable, completely stripped of pride. I wanted to lay my hand upon her mouth and hush her. But whatever she wanted from me, it had driven her this far. She could not go back. She could not help herself.

“I came here …” she said, stiffly, primly, as if reciting. “I came here to find out what he said. At the end. If he … mentioned me, at all. At the end? Just … something, you know? Anything he might have … said, I …” We could hardly bear to look at each other. “Now,” she said, her chest rising with a breath. “Now do you understand why I've come? Why the poor, deluded woman has come?”

I grappled with it for what seemed a long time. People went by the cubicle's opening. The business of the city room seemed to press in on the little space. The seconds went by.

“Mrs. Colt,” I said finally. “It was so fast. He—I mean, he died so fast, there was no time …”

“But before that.” She no longer bothered to hide the sound of panic. “You were with him before that, the police told me, you were drinking with him, he must have talked to you, you must have talked about … about … things …”

“Well … I …” I moved my hand about helplessly. The cigarette held between my fingers left a spiraling trail of smoke. “Yes,” I said. I forced my mouth into a slight, self-effacing smile. “You have to understand, I was a little the worse for the liquor, I …”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “You didn't remember … everything … of course, I …”

“That's right, I … forgot, we … We talked of you at great length, in fact … quite a lot, he, uh, Tim, he spoke very, very fondly of you, in fact, I …”

“What did he say? Please. What did he say?”

“Well, he spoke about how fond he was of you. What a wonderful wife you were. He said, I remember now, he said …”

“Oh God!” It was a soft cry, but on the instant it escaped her, she pitched forward. She doubled over in her chair, her hands coming up to cover her face. Her whole body shook as she sobbed and sobbed. “Oh God,” she said again. “Oh God, oh God. Eleanora! Eleanora!”

I sat and smoked and watched her cry. I did not touch or speak to her. I did not think it would help. She sobbed for about a minute. The sobbing steadily slowed. She fought for breath painfully, swiping at her cheeks with one hand, unsnapping her purse with the other.

She laughed through the tears. “And now I'm a mess on top of everything, right?” she said gamely.

I smiled.

Her red forelock dangled limply. Her eyes were becoming swollen. Her cheeks were already shadowy with smeared mascara. She dabbed at the shadows with her tissues. She took out a circular compact and opened the top. Peering into the mirror, she smoothed the shadows away. She was still sniffling, but the tears had stopped.

She returned the compact to her purse, snapped the purse closed. “I'm sorry,” she said. She did not look at me.

I shook my head. “Forget it.”

“It was foolish of me to come here, to look for … for something you couldn't give me, no one could give me. No one but Tim. I was an idiot.”

“We'll all be in jail when they make that a crime,” I said.

She forced a smile. “Well!” she said decisively. She stood up. She still hadn't raised her eyes to me.

“Who was she?” I said. I watched her closely. “Eleanora. Just out of curiosity. Who was she?”

She gazed at her shoes. Cheap flats, I noticed. Tan, well worn. The shoes of a woman who was on her feet all day. Finally she lifted her face. Her voice was squeezed back in her throat, back where she was holding the unfallen tears. “She was the woman he loved,” she told me. She made a little noise filled with humor and despair. “Oh, she was a lot more than that, I guess, by the time he finished with her. By the time he finished building her up in his mind, romanticizing her, she was … everything. Everything Tim loved.” She laughed. Not a happy sound. “In Tim's mind, Eleanora was adventure and work and I don't know what all. His youth. She was more than any
living
woman could have been to him. More than I could be anyway.”

“You mean she's dead?”

Valerie Colt nodded. “So I gather. I didn't know that much about her, of course. Only that he called for her at night. Only that he sometimes … called her name when he was with me.” Her face contorted. She raised a crumpled tissue to her eyes for a moment. This time, the tears did not come. She lowered her hand. “Other than that, he didn't tell me very much really. I mean, she was my rival, after all. And it isn't easy competing with a dead woman, let me tell you. It isn't easy.” She laughed and sniffled. Her words came quickly in her high, hard voice. She seemed relieved to be talking about it.

“I guess not,” I said. “But who was she? Did he tell you anything?''

“Oh … yes, sure. I mean, there was a time, after he came back from Sentu, when he spent most of his time writing letters, contacting ambassadors, trying to find her. He had to tell me something then.”

“Is that where he met her? Sentu?”

She nodded. “That's part of what she was to him: the memory of that first success, that first adventure. She was some sort of a nurse there, I gather. Something like that … I don't really know.” She sounded surprised when she said this. She'd probably lived with the woman's image so long, she was startled to find out how little she really did know. “He met her in Sentu and I guess they … fell in love … and she died when the rebels came into the capital. I guess … I guess that's all I know for sure. I don't think even Tim was sure what actually happened to her. Just that she couldn't get through the rebel lines. And that he couldn't find her.” Now the tears were gone completely. Now she looked at me undaunted. “I lived with Timothy Colt for a year before he went to Sentu. I lived with him and Eleanora for five years afterward. I don't really care who she was, Mr. Wells. I'm sure she was … beautiful and … and brave and … and whatever else.” She slung her purse over her shoulder. She raised her chin proudly. “But I was real,” she said. “And I was there. I was always there.” She moved to the entrance of the cubicle. “I'm sorry if I made a fool out of myself.”

“No …” I said.

She ignored me. “But do you know what it's like? Do you know what it's like to lose the one person you love most in the world?”

She turned on her heels and was gone. I heard her flat shoes slapping wearily against the floor tiles as she vanished.

For a few minutes I sat alone in my cubicle. I sat alone with my cigarette and her question.

Then I put out the cigarette. Then I answered the question.

“Yes,” I said to the emptiness.

A
long time ago, it must be almost ten years now, back when I first came to the
Star
, I covered a sniper attack on Fifth Avenue. It was Christmastime, December twenty-second. The Avenue, between Thirty-fourth and Fifty-ninth, was one long steady river of humanity. It was a colorful river. Red hats and green scarves, blue and yellow and brown coats all blended together into what seemed a single mass. That mass flowed steadily from where the mechanical dwarves hammered out presents in the window workshops of F.A.O. Schwarz's toy store, past the high towers covered with tinsel, electric lights, and starbursts, past the enormous color-dotted tree outside Rockefeller Center, to the bottom of the Empire State Building, which presided solemnly over the whole great human continuum.

The sniper's name, it turned out later, was Wilfred Campbell. He was from the Bronx, a black man with a jowly face and mournful eyes. He was a window washer. Worked in Manhattan mostly.

About three months before, he'd hit the numbers. It was not an enormous jackpot, but there were a few grand at least. He went out to celebrate at one of the neighborhood spots. It was in an old wooden box of a building, green paint chipping from the boards. There was a sign above the window with the words “Girls! Girls! Girls!” painted on it and a picture of a cocktail glass tilting to one side. Campbell had never been in the place before. He was a churchgoing man, married, couple of kids. He usually stayed away from places like this.

But he went in this night. He watched girls in G-strings dance on top of the bar. He took to one of them, a skinny little teenager who called herself Yvette. He paid her to dance on top of his table. He bought her a couple of overpriced drinks. He told her about the jackpot he'd won. After she got off work, she let him come home with her. She lived only a few blocks away from Wilfred's place.

Wilfred stayed with Yvette for two months. That's how long his money lasted. During that time, he lost his job for not showing up. His wife left him, moved back in with her mother. His kids stopped talking to him. Wilfred didn't seem to care. He bought Yvette dresses with spangles on them. He bought her shoes. He rented limos to take her to dinner in. All of this, Yvette later told me, she took with no strings attached. She continued to dance at the bar. She even turned tricks sometimes. Wilfred never complained. Sometimes, she said, she couldn't even stand the sight of him, couldn't bear his touch. He didn't seem to care about that either. She let him live with her. That's all he seemed to want.

When his money ran out, she told him, “Sorry, honey, but now you got to go.” He nodded. He seemed to understand, she said. He left without a fuss.

Now Wilfred owned two guns, a .38 caliber pistol and a small caliber rifle. A .22, I recall. He went home and got them both. He put the pistol in the pocket of his army jacket. He put the rifle in a duffel bag. He took the subway into midtown Manhattan.

He carried the duffel bag into a building on the corner of Fifth and Fifty-fifth. It was about six in the evening then. The shopping crowd was thickening with the rush hour crush.

Wilfred walked right past the security desk. He carried his duffel bag onto the elevator. He rode up to the fourth floor. There was a movie company up there. It took up the entire floor. Wilfred had frequently been the guy to wash their windows. He knew just the one he wanted.

The secretary at the front desk was gone but the door to the story department was open. Wilfred walked through, carrying his duffel bag. He came into an empty hallway. There were doors to offices on either side of it. He walked to the first door on his right and went in.

A young woman was sitting at the desk in there. Behind her was a broad window looking out on the brownstone steeple of the Presbyterian church.

The woman looked up at Wilfred. She smiled brightly. She asked him what she could do for him. Wilfred wrestled the big .38 from his pocket. He pointed it at her and fired. Her smile vanished in a burst of red. Her body rocketed off her chair. It thumped onto the floor.

Wilfred kicked the door shut and locked it. He carried the duffel bag to the window, set it down next to the woman's twitching body. He unzipped the bag and brought out the rifle.

Wilfred shoved the barrel of the rifle out through the pane of glass. The glass shattered. Gleaming triangular shards of it spun down through the air toward the people below. Three adults and four children were injured when they were struck by the falling glass. Wilfred took aim and opened fire.

With that big a crowd, with all the music and the lights, it took a long time before the people knew they were being slaughtered. The victims fell silently. The people behind them shoved to get by. On the steps of the church, a young salesman visiting from Houston, Texas, collapsed backward into his wife's arms. She saw his eyes staring upward. She saw the round, raw, red hole between them. She screamed as he slipped from her grasp to the pavement. Her scream became a gurgle. Wilfred had shot her in the throat.

The people passing beneath the church saw that. They'd looked up when they heard the scream. They'd seen the blood bubble suddenly out of the woman's neck. They panicked. The panic spread. The mob on the Avenue surged and shrieked and fell away again and again like the waves of a stormy ocean. Cars stopped short as people tumbled wildly off the sidewalk. The scream of horns joined the screams of the people.