Shadow Games (13 page)

"I see." And he did see. He'd had several dates just like that himself lately. The good Dr.
Sondegard
had recommended it.

"They try very hard to be nice and you try very hard to be nice—but somehow you can't quit thinking about the person you're in love with and so then, eventually, your date starts picking up on this and he gets just as distant as you are—he gets hurt, too—and so the whole night is ruined."

"Did her boyfriend know that she was dating other people?"

She nodded. "He followed them."

"You know that for a fact?"

"Yes. She saw him. Once, he was following them down the street and she turned around and told him to leave her alone."

"What did he do?"

"He threatened to punch out her date."

"Did he?"

She shook her head. In the deep shadow of the room, she looked five years younger than she was. He tried not to notice his occasional pass at an erection. Then he realized he should be happy about it. He hadn't thought of having sex in months.

"No, he finally just walked away."

"So they argued a lot?"

"All the time."

"Did he ever hurt her physically that you know of?"

"She told me that he slapped her once. And I believed her.

She wasn't the kind of girl who exaggerated things much."

"Did she ever try to break the relationship off?"

"Several times."

"But it didn't work?"

"I don't think she really wanted it to end."

"I see."

"She—"

She stopped herself.

"You were going to say something, Marcie," he probed gently.

"I don't know that it matters. Not now."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me."

She looked up at him. "You're not like a cop at all. You're nice."

He smiled. "I'll pass that compliment along to my fellow officers."

But her sense of play was quickly gone. "I'm afraid I'm going to throw up. I can't stop thinking of what you told me about Beth."

She brought her small hands to her small face and started crying softly.

He got up and took a clean white handkerchief from his back pocket and gave it to her. He had another clean white handkerchief in his other back pocket. In his line of business, you went through a lot of clean white handkerchiefs.

Sometimes you felt like using them yourself...

"Thank you," she said between sobs.

He let her go.

He sat on the edge of the desk and looked around and wished again that he hadn't been such a jerk and driven by his old house tonight; and then he sat there and looked around and wished he had a date tonight, even a bad one. Despite her grief, Marcie's presence reminded him of how lonely he was.

"Thank you," she said when the worst of it was over.

"You can keep it. Compliments of the City of Chicago."

She smiled politely and balled the handkerchief up in her small fist.

"I need to know his name, her boyfriend."

And then she told him.

She was the fifth person he'd interviewed today and they'd all told pretty much the same story—very angry, sometimes violent relationship between Beth and her boyfriend—and they'd all used the same name.

A few minutes later, he walked her out to the front of the place again.

She looked shaky, and scared.

He slid his arm around her waist and gave her a little peck on the cheek. He knew that this was highly unprofessional conduct, but at the moment, he didn't give a rat's ass.

He took one more look at all the pretty people out there on the dance floor.

Beth Swallows had once been one of them.

She might be alive today if she hadn't been one of them, if she'd been some other kind of young woman, one disposed to quieter and more lasting pleasures. But there he went being a priest again. He hated that side of him, the stem priest side of him, just as his wife and both his daughters hated it. Who was he to judge anybody?

Cozzens nodded good night to the bouncer and left the smoke and roar and rage of the nightclub behind, out into the chill, silver rain, his Mike Hammer and his fedora keeping him good and dry as he walked slowly back to his car.

2

P
uckett and Anne met
Cobey
and Veronica outside the restaurant. It was a quarter after eight, and the rain was little more than a mist, though the temperature had fallen eight degrees since late afternoon.

The restaurant decor reminded Puckett, as it was supposed to, of the bar in
Casablanca
. Easy to imagine international spies sitting at the various small tables, paying only a modicum of attention to the eight piece orchestra, and never even looking at the dance floor, which was populated by older men in dinner jackets and matrons in pastel-colored organdie gowns. There was even an upright piano—but it was unlikely that the pianist's name was Sam. The man, true to the times, was Japanese.

Many of the customers even cooperated by smoking cigarettes, which was no doubt bad for their lungs but great for the atmosphere.

After being seated, served drinks and given time to look over their menus, Anne said, "This is really a nice place." The other three agreed.

Cobey
said, "I picked it because of the food, though. They're supposed to have great steaks."

"Steak for me, then," Puckett said. "Now I don't have to pore over the menu." He laughed. "That's why I like McDonald's. None of these big decisions."

Just before the food came, a small woman dressed like a nightclub singer of the forties stood at a microphone in a baby blue spotlight and sang a medley of WWII favorites, including beautiful versions of "I'll Be Seeing You" and "The White Cliffs of Dover." She then did a brief Cole Porter medley and left the floor to hearty applause.

"She was great." Anne exclaimed.

"She sure was,"
Cobey
said. Then frowned. "That's one thing you realize when you get out and about."

Veronica made a face. "What's that? How many pretty girls there are?" She'd tried to make her remark a joke, but there was a nasty edge to it.

Puckett stared at her briefly. He'd already turned Veronica into a cliché. The beautiful, dutiful girlfriend of a celebrity—long-suffering, accustomed to sharing him with others. But he saw now that he'd been wrong. Veronica was a lot more complicated than he'd first imagined.

"No,"
Cobey
said. From his tense expression, he'd obviously taken Veronica's remark seriously, too. "I was going to say that when you get out and about, you realize how many talented people there are. And how few of them ever get discovered." He poured Diet Pepsi from the can into his glass and raised the glass in a toast. "We call this 'Alcoholic's Delight' at our AA meetings. So here's an 'Alcoholic's Delight' toast to talent—wherever it is. May it long endure."

Anne nodded. "You know Charles Grodin, the actor? He wrote a book about acting and he made the same point. He said that he was successful just because he'd hung in there all those years, determined to make it. But he said that a lot of actors he worked with, people he said were a lot more talented
than he is, dropped out because they couldn't take all the rejection or they had families to feed."

Dinner came and it was just as good as
Cobey
had promised.

Toward the end of the meal, the girl singer came back, shimmering in her tight, blue gown, her blonde hair giving her a Veronica Lake type of sultry beauty.

This time, she chose songs from later in the decade and into the early fifties, just before rock-and-roll took over the record business forevermore. She did "Red Sails in the Sunset," and "Nature Boy," and "Tennessee Waltz" and "Three Coins in the Fountain," and charmed the asses off, everybody listening to her, including one young busboy who was so obviously entranced by her beauty that he stared at her with beatific lust.

T
here were only two people in the nightclub not paying any attention to the singer. One was the maitre d', a stuffy Polish fellow who hoped that his black tuxedo gave him a continental look, and a kind of dumpy man in a dramatic trench coat who was showing the maitre d' his identification.

"You're a policeman?" the man whispered.

"Cozzens," the man whispered back. "Now where is he? His hotel told me he was here."

The maitre d' frowned. It was not often that the restaurant entertained bona fide TV stars. They finally got one—and one no less a personage than
Cobey
Daniels, who was about to get another network TV show—and what happens?

A frigging cop, all dressed up like Mike Hammer, comes in and wants to spoil everything.

And just why would a Chicago cop be interested in
Cobey
Daniels, anyway?

But what choice did the maitre d' have?

He raised a plump hand and pointed it to the east wall of the place and said, "There."

"Thank you," Cozzens whispered back.

And set off to talk to
Cobey
Daniels.

A
t first,
Cobey
saw the guy only peripherally, too busy drinking in the chanteuse to pay any attention to anybody else.

Veronica had rightly suspected that
Cobey
was becoming seriously enamored of the girl singer. He was trying to get a better look at the way her breasts moved beneath the sequined gown, of the gentle but erotic way her mouth widened when she reached for a high note, of the tender but sexy way her hands moved in the
spotlit
darkness. It was a marijuana dream of lust...

Until he saw the guy moving toward the table, that is, and then it all ended, because
Cobey
had had enough trouble with cops over the years to spot one immediately. For one thing, only a real cop could get away with wearing a dork-o-
rama
trench coat like that...

And for another

For another...
Cobey
had never been made to face what happened in Beth's apartment five nights earlier...

Images: brutally severed head inside refrigerator, blood pooling on the floor.

Images:
Cobey
at trial...DA parading all of
Cobey's
sins past the jury...including that incident with the fourteen-year-old girl in Florida.

Images:
Cobey
in reeking, steamy shower room...two beefy, naked queens moving toward him, shark grins on their faces...ready to divide the spoils.

Cobey
started to get up from his seat just as the trench coat arrived...

P
uckett made him right off, too. Cop. More specifically, detective.

Coming here. Now.

Puckett saw the way
Cobey
writhed in his seat. Scared.

Puckett wondered what
Cobey
had to be scared about.

And, just then, the girl singer ended her performance. This time, the ovation was so generous it probably got the club owner to double the singer's money.

Lights came up. Red-jacketed waiters scooted about. The detective came over and said, "Evening, everybody. My name's Cozzens and I'm with the Chicago police."

"My name's Puckett," Puckett said, putting out his hand. The men shook.

And then Cozzens turned to
Cobey
. "My kids grew up watching you."

Cobey
tried to appear interested and flattered, but the sick look of fear in his eyes dominated his face.

"
Cobey
," said Cozzens, "I'm really sorry to ask you this, but do you think you and I could go over to the bar there and have a little talk?"

"About what?"
Cobey
asked. His voice was trembling.

"Well, your name came up in a case I'm working on, and..." He shrugged. "Well, I'd just like to spend a few minutes talking to you."

Cobey
looked at Puckett. "You think it's all right?"

"It's all right,
Cobey
, as long as you understand that you don't have to answer anything you don't feel like answering, and that you're entitled to an attorney any time you want one."

Cozzens nodded. "Well put, Mr. Puckett. Very well put."

Cobey
glanced at Veronica. He might have been a prisoner about to take that last walk to the electric chair.