Cast of Shadows - v4 (38 page)

“My wife found it on my computer and sent it to him, thinking it might be related to” — he wasn’t sure how to put this — “her case. It’s been refined a little since then.”

Big Rob held it up in front of his face, blocking the sight line to his client. “Philly died over this face.” He forced an impassive expression onto his eyes and lips and set the sketch down, fixing his gaze again on Davis.

Biggie told Davis his fee. “And you’ll pay my expenses in the meantime?”

“I will.” Davis unfolded cash from his pocket. Biggie sighed and accepted the money without counting it.

The sheets on Justin’s bed hadn’t been changed in a week and a half, and Martha felt terrible about that. She had been showing four houses a day, many of them for the same client, a young woman (just married to an older doctor) who had convinced her husband they needed a suburban house with a yard and a playroom and a big kitchen more than they needed a downtown apartment with a view of the lake. “If he thinks I’m going to raise kids in the city just so he can be close to his Gold Coast mistresses, he’s nuts,” she told Martha. The woman confessed she knew about her husband’s Gold Coast mistresses because until recently she had been one of them.

For a boy’s room, Justin’s was unusually tidy. He spent a few minutes at the end of every day organizing, arranging his books at alphabetical attention, blowing the dust from his computer keyboard, coordinating his clothes for the following morning. Although he never showed signs of fatigue, she couldn’t imagine how he had time for sleep, between school, his own independent study, his fastidiousness, and the hours he spent playing that blasted computer game. She had read an article about how thousands of kids (and adults, too) spent so much time playing Shadow World they had become indifferent to, if not outright neglectful of, their own, real lives. Extracurricular and athletic team enrollment were both down dramatically in high schools across the country, and many educators claimed, credibly, that Shadow World was to blame. It made sense: just in Northwood, Martha personally knew of three —
three!
— marriages that had broken up because one spouse had left the other for someone they’d met in Shadow World. At least Terry left Martha for his personal assistant. There was something almost old-fashioned about that.

Not everyone agreed the game was entirely bad for kids, though. Some psychologists claimed teens who experimented with adult scenarios in Shadow World were better prepared for college and the pressures of leaving home. They were said to be confident, less risk averse, and more likely to be content once they entered the working world. Never having played the game herself, Martha was skeptical about such claims, but it was easier to believe them than to try taking the game away from her son (or her son away from the game), so she chose to have faith.

Martha pulled the dirty sheets from the mattress and aired out the clean ones, measuring the sides of the fitted sheet and folding the corners of the top sheet. Then she reassembled blanket and comforter and pillowcases, trying to be as neat about it as her son would be. He never complained but Martha had caught him more than once remaking the bed after she had done it, to his mind, in a substandard way.

She had sorted the laundry and carried her own clothes into the master bedroom (compared to where she slept, Justin spent his nights in a biological clean room). Two weeks’ worth of his shirts, jeans, and underwear, washed and dried in a morning-long marathon, filled three round laundry baskets, and she set about putting them away in their proper places. Blue jeans needed to be folded and stacked on the second shelf from the bottom in his closet. Shirts hung on plastic hangers, never metal. Blue socks had a different drawer than black socks. Underwear should be rolled instead of folded. Again, he never complained to her or threw a tantrum over it, but she knew he’d redo it if she didn’t get it exactly right.

At the bottom of the laundry basket she found three bleached-and-dried one-dollar bills. She must not have checked all the pockets before she threw his pants in the washer. Worried she might have ruined something important — a homework assignment or a pretty girl’s phone number — and not above using that concern as an excuse to snoop, Martha began feeling inside Justin’s pockets. She found two more ones and a five in the first four pairs and set the money on his dresser. In the fifth, her hand felt something curious: paper, wrinkled and warped in the agitated soapy water and spin cycle, the size of a business card. She pulled it out. The name printed on it didn’t even register with her at first without the “M.D.” behind it.

Anger wasn’t the word for what pulsed through her. Outrage was closer. Or just rage. She wondered where Moore had approached him. For how long had they been meeting?
What does that sonofabitch want with my son, and why won’t he leave us alone?
She wanted to call her lawyer, but knew he’d start the clock at $350 an hour. She wanted to call the police, but knew the first thing they’d ask was whether she had ascertained all the facts.
Have you talked to your son, ma’am? It’s not a violation of the restraining order for your son to be carrying around a piece of paper with Davis Moore’s name and number.
The truth was she couldn’t ask Justin. She was too scared. He hadn’t said a cross word to her in over four years, but he still frightened her. A mother knows her son, even if he received none of her DNA. A mother knows what her son is capable of. Every time he quietly redid the bedding or refolded his jeans, Martha imagined the pressure building inside his head and inside his heart, pressing against his skull and his ribs, whistling in his ears. Sooner or later it would need to be released.

But as long as she could keep Justin close, as long as her boy studied and played under her roof and under her eyes, as long as she remained interested and up to date with his friends and his hobbies, she could guide and control and protect him.

And hope for the best.

Martha grabbed a piece of paper from Justin’s printer and wrote down Davis Moore’s private phone number and e-mail address, and she returned the card to Justin’s pocket.

In the middle of downtown Northwood was a roundabout where six streets intersected, and in the middle of the roundabout was a small park with a half dozen benches, each perpendicular to one of the streets, and in the middle of the park was a statue of a soldier, erected after World War I but understood to commemorate Northwood veterans from all the military conflicts since, including the most recent mini and proxy wars in Asia and Africa. Parades on Memorial Day and Veterans Day and the Fourth of July always ended here, which made good sense for both symbolism and downtown business.

Big Rob and Davis had made an appointment to meet in the middle of the roundabout, it being a sunny weekday and close to the bank where Davis needed to withdraw the detective’s fee.

Big Rob had spent three weeks tracking down the mysterious Mr. Cash — starting with Chicago and Northwood phone books, then widening his search to online databases he subscribed to for just this purpose. He worked the professional organizations — the bar association, the futures exchange — and found a few Cashes, but none that matched the few facts he had about the man. Big Rob called a friend on the force and got access to recent domestic complaints and sexual assaults, and he checked area luxury-car dealers. If the guy’s name was Cash, the pool of suspects was too small, and if it was just something similar, the pool of suspects might as well be infinite.

The break came when Big Rob wasn’t even looking for it.

“Fum ducking luck,” Big Rob said to himself.

He had collected several months of back issues of
Northwood Life,
which seemed to exist only to print the names of as many residents as possible in every edition. He was scanning them inattentively on a Friday afternoon (but mostly using them to catch Ho Hos crumbs before they reached the floor) when he found a paragraph announcing that Sam Coyne, a graduate of Northwood East and the son of Northwood residents James and Alicia Coyne, had been named a partner at the downtown law firm of Ginsburg and Addams. The name didn’t trip any neurons in Big Rob’s head, but when he saw the photo of Sam Coyne, he bit his tongue. The picture in the paper was a professional business portrait. Sam was handsome, in his thirties, and blond. His suit fit precisely and he looked healthy underneath it. And the face was nearly the same face Big Rob had taped to the top of his desk twenty days ago. “Cash. Cash. Coyne,” Biggie mumbled to himself. “Christ, it’s gotta be.”

Big Rob stood nervously behind his desk. Sometimes the cases just solve themselves, he thought. But he was also a man who believed in earning his fee.

At five o’clock he was loitering outside the glass doors engraved with the names Ginsburg and Addams and hopped on a descending elevator with a gaggle of G&A secretaries. They ranged in age from about twenty to about fifty-five, none of them wore a wedding ring, and they seemed a little happy and loud to be headed for a train home. “I just made fifteen thousand dollars without doing a damn thing,” Biggie announced to the cab as it descended past the twelfth floor. “And I’d like to spend a good chunk of it tonight getting beautiful ladies drunk.” The secretaries whooped and hollered.

The next day he called Philly’s old buddy Tony Dee at Mozzarell. “Tony, how’d you like to do me favor? For old times’ sake. For Phil Canella’s sake.”

Tony Dee laughed. “What you want?”

“How far back do your reservation books go?”

“I got ’em all the way back to the day I opened,” Tony said.

“And credit card records?”

“The same. My accountant says I should get rid of ’em. What do you think?”

“I think you should toss ’em,” Biggie said. “But only after I get a good look.”

On the bench in the middle of the roundabout Big Rob kissed the sides of a strawberry ice cream cone and pinned an envelope under his left thigh to protect it from the cool autumn breeze. He waited about five minutes before Davis Moore appeared. He also had an ice cream cone. Vanilla.

“Hey, we had the same idea,” Biggie said, waving his napkin around as a stand-in for his devoured cone. Davis sat down and they didn’t look at each other or say anything right away, as if they had no business, as if this meeting were only chance, just a couple of men deciding to get in one last ice cream before the weather turned cold. Big Rob’s clients always acted like this. Secretive. Paranoid. He guessed they saw characters in their position act this way on television, and most people had no other frame of reference for the detective business. Biggie always indulged them.

“His name is Sam Coyne,” Big Rob said. Davis looked puzzled. “Coyne. Cash. You said it was something
like
Cash, so I connected the dots.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

Big Rob pulled the summary page of the Moore file out of the envelope and read from it. “Samuel Coyne. Grew up in Northwood. Parents still live here. He was recently named partner at the law firm Ginsburg and Addams. Leases a tricked-out BMW, always black. Has a reputation among his adversaries and peers for being a ruthless sonofabitch, and among his female coworkers for being both a slut and into the rough stuff. No criminal record. Six years ago — that’s in the time frame you specified — he dined here at Northwood’s finest restaurant, Mozzarell. Ordered the expensive wine.”

“Was he with Martha Finn?”

“Reservation was for two.”

“That doesn’t prove anything. His parents live here.”

“You’re right,” Big Rob said.

“Do you have a photo?”

“I do.” Big Rob reached again into the envelope and retrieved an original of the photograph that had appeared in
Northwood Life.
He’d paid a twenty-three-year-old copy editor fifty bucks for it so Moore wouldn’t think he was charging him 15K for clipping articles out of the local paper.

Davis stared at it and nodded, and the empty, narrow bottom of his cone scratched the sides of his throat as he swallowed it nearly whole. “You’re right. It’s him.” There followed an uncertain pause. Biggie knew it as the transition when the detective’s responsibility became the client’s. Except for an inheritance case here and there and the really messed-up revenge divorces, no one who hired him really wanted to hear the information he provided. Biggie was the finder of bad news, and now that it was his, Davis Moore was going to have to figure out what to do with it.

“Dr. Moore,” Big Rob said, “if you don’t mind me asking, and please don’t tell me if it’s something I don’t wanna know, but what are you gonna do to this guy?”

Davis took the envelope and began examining the rest of the contents for himself. “Nothing. Probably.”

“I only ask because of Ricky Weiss. When he thought your man here was Jimmy Spears, he said you were gonna kill the guy. That’s why he said he killed Philly. He was scared of you.”

“Ricky’s the killer,” Davis said. “Not me.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figure, too. But if I find myself on a witness stand at somebody’s future murder trial, I want to be able to say that I asked. That my conscience is clean. Within reason, I mean.”

“You did, and it is,” Davis said. “Shall we get your money?”

The two of them walked to Lake Shore Bank, where Davis had opened up an account fifteen years ago to finance his investigation into Anna Kat’s death. He had kept a slush fund here to hide traveling expenses, as well as a reserve of reward money, from Jackie. He never closed the account and meant to tell Joan about it several times, but he never did. For a while he thought he might use it to surprise her with a trip or a car or a spectacular piece of jewelry. The current balance was $56,533.21.

It took about half an hour for the manager to fill out the paperwork and get all the necessary approvals for a cashier’s check of that size. Big Rob and Davis waited wordlessly in a small cubed office belonging to an account manager, who brought them coffee and an assortment of cookies on a small plate. Despite the odd half walls surrounding them, on which the gray carpet from the floor seemed to be crawling toward the ceiling like ivy, voices in this place, with its high ceilings and broad tiles and marble counters and hushed tones, would carry.