Shadow Games (19 page)

What Veronica had just described was something from the darkest of Restoration comedies, yet still she sat there, prim and lovely in her slightly wan way, looking no more manipulative than she had a few moments ago.

"You think that's pretty sick?" she asked.

"I try not to judge people, Veronica. I guess because I don't think I can hold up to much judgment myself."

"He was starting to roam again. I could feel it." He sat there and let her talk.

"He really needs to be loved and sought after. The more conquests he has, the more secure he is. A lot of men are that way—though somehow I don't think you are—and they spend their whole lives cheating on their wives. Do you ever read James Dickey, the poet?"

He shook his head.

"He wrote this great poem about adultery in this cheap motel, about how at the moment of orgasm both people are able to hold off all thought of getting old and dying—just for that one moment. And then they go about their lives and they start getting overwhelmed by everything again, how their bodies are starting to get old, how the street is always filled with fresh, new faces to take their place—and how their spouses somehow aren't enough to make them feel young and purposeful and in control again. So they grab the first woman they can find—a woman who is married and looking for the same thing, even if she doesn't know it—and they rush off to a sleazy motel and are reborn again in their orgasms. If that makes sense."

"Too much sense, really."

"Well,
Cobey's
like that. Only with
Cobey
it's even worse because he not only wants to feel immortal, he also wants to feel famous and beloved—like
Cobey
Daniels, number one TV star of the decade."

He signaled for another pot of coffee. "How did you meet Beth Swallows?"

"Sometimes, when
Cobey
made up some excuse about needing to do something with his play that night—when he was actually sneaking off with somebody else—I'd go to this nightclub and I'd see Beth there. She was very beautiful and
very smart and very unlike the sort of women you meet in nightclubs."

"How so?"

Veronica laughed. "Well, for one thing, she knew who James Dickey was." She reached across and patted his hand. "Sorry, I couldn't resist that." She cleared her throat and went on. "She'd gone out with this doctor for almost her entire senior year at college before she found out he was married. She was crushed. After graduation, she moved here, and didn't go out for months until she started coming to this nightclub. She knew a lot about classical music and painting and books and what she called
   
the consolation of philosophy' and I guess that's why we got to be friends. Both being quiet and everything, I mean."

"How did your plan for
Cobey
come about?"

"It just sort of evolved. Beth and I saw each other two or three times a week and I told her all the trouble I was having with
Cobey
. And, by coincidence, I was reading Albert Goldman's biography of John Lennon and—well, that's where the idea came from, anyway."

"What was her reaction when you told her your plan?"

"She thought I was kidding."

"But she gradually got used to the idea?"

"Right."

"And finally she said yes?"

"Right."

"So how did you arrange for her to meet
Cobey
?"

"She went backstage after the show one night and told
Cobey
that she was a very big fan of his. I could see right away that he was instantly smitten. She was very beautiful.
Very
beautiful."

He wondered if he detected a trace of bitterness in her voice.

"He started sneaking off and seeing her."

"How often?"

"Once or twice a week, at first."

"But things heated up?"

"Very much so. To the point that…" She stopped herself.

"How were you and Beth getting along by this point?"

"You still think I killed her, don't you?"

"I'd just like an answer to my question. Nothing more."

"Well, you'll probably find out, anyway."

"Find out what?"

"I went to Beth's one night and we had a terrible argument. She told me that she'd fallen in love with
Cobey
and that he'd fallen in love with her. I couldn't believe it. I felt completely betrayed. I—I slapped her, and then started trashing her apartment. I just lost it completely. I couldn't help myself."

"But you didn't slap her more than once?"

"No."

"How much did
Cobey
know about all this?"

"Nothing that I know of."

"You didn't tell him, and she didn't either?"

She laughed harshly. "We both wanted to protect our positions. If
Cobey
found out that we'd both been manipulating him—well, he'd probably find himself a new girl entirely."

She smiled sadly. "Do you hate me?"

"No. No, I don't."

"I really do love him. That's why I got Beth to—to help me. But I sense you don't understand that."

"I'm trying to. Sometimes I'm more old-fashioned than I want to be."

She reached over and touched his hand again. It was a tiny hand, and he thought of his daughter.

"I'm so scared for him," she said.

"So am I. So am I, Veronica."

"I'm glad we talked, Mr. Puckett."

He paid the check and walked her back to her hotel in the sunny, warm, April afternoon.

Cobey's
Tapes

In re: Veronica

I suppose I should begin with the time when we were up in the mountains, in that little cabin we'd rented for a four-day weekend, and we learned that Veronica had forgotten to bring her medication along—we'd decided on this weekender very suddenly.

This was about six months after I'd been released from the hospital in St. Louis—which is where I'd met my fellow nutcase Veronica—and when I still had to sneak around to see her. God, how Lilly hated her.

Veronica wasn't Lilly's first choice to hate, though, that honor belonging to a thirty-six-year-old red-haired school teacher who was in the bughouse when I first got sent there. She was being treated for depression, and thus shared the electric-shock table with me. Before I met Veronica, this woman and I would sneak out of our rooms at night and fuck in the stairwells until the muscle boys in the white T-shirts and white ducks caught us one night and told the good gray doctor who in turn told Lilly who, of course, got hysterical and told me that some night she was going to sneak into my room with a pair of scissors and cut my cock off right at the root, blood spurting everywhere like a geyser, and we'd see then who was sticking his cock into places it didn't belong. Lilly, selfish cunt that she is, didn't care that Kathryn, the school teacher, was a fine, sweet, gentle-sad woman whom I happened to really care about despite the simple, crude way it looked, us humping our asses off in stairwells. Kathryn ended up, at Lilly's insistence, in a far, far building where I never had the chance to see or talk to her again.

But I was telling you about Lilly and Veronica, who I met a month-and-a-half after sweet Kathryn's banishment...

First, I think Lilly was jealous of Veronica's looks. Plump Lilly has been trying to lose weight ever since she wrenched me from my parents when I was six. Who could unsettle a fat person
more than a pale, slender, blonde-haired girl with grave, enormous eyes and a voice that rarely rose above a whisper?

Second, I think that Lilly learned about Veronica having one of her wealthy father's accountants fly in that weekend and tell me how, financially, anyway, I could start to pull away from Lilly.

Third, Lilly was concerned about her investment in me. What if I came to my senses and saw my Hollywood lifestyle for what it was—pain and bullshit, hardly worth the trouble? What if I settled down and married Veronica, and we went off to live in Virginia or someplace, and I dropped out of the acting scene altogether?

Anyway, that long weekend in the mountains, Veronica and I were hiding out from Lilly, who had private detectives follow us constantly.

It was a perfect weekend—until we realized that Veronica, in our rush to get out of LA., had left her medication behind.

Veronica was dependent on her pills. She had been diagnosed with a kind of schizophrenia that rendered her virtually dysfunctional if she wasn't constantly taking her medication.

I said I'd sneak back to her apartment and get the stuff, but she said no—and she was probably right—that this would just give Lilly's private eyes one more chance to locate and follow us.

For the first day and a half, everything went fine. There had been great, grim rains in the mountains that week, causing mudslides, wiping out some of the older and narrower roads, flooding the tumbling mountain creeks.

But when the rains stopped, it was perfect weather for taking small hikes up into the piney hills, looking out across the mountains, walking down small trails where every few minutes you'd glimpse a mountain sheep or a pronghorn antelope, or see an odd, colorful bird that looked as exotic as something you'd see in South America.

We ate well, sharing the cooking duties on the little gas stove that came with the cabin, making long, leisurely love and listening to a lot of classical music in an effort to lend me, at least, a little bit of culture.

And then it happened. I wasn't even aware of it until it was too late...

We'd made love and had fallen asleep to the sound of chill midnight rain soaking the cabin roof and walls. Snuggled deep, snuggled together, enjoying sleep.

My first impression was that I was having an especially vivid dream, the kind that is difficult to distinguish from reality sometimes.

There was a woman above me on the bed. She had a long butcher knife in her hand and was holding it up, as if she were about to plunge it into me. She was crying out my name and screaming, "You bastard! You bastard!"

And then she brought the knife down and stabbed me.

At the exact moment that I cried out in pain—at that exact moment—my mind shifted into reality mode.

This was not a dream. Veronica was kneeling beside me on the bed and she was still crying and screaming. She had just stabbed me.

And she was about to stab me again—

I rolled to the right, off the bed, landing with head-thumping pain on the floor.

And now I started some screaming of my own.

"What're you doing?
Why're
you doing this, Veronica?"

Not for a long time, not until she'd hurled the bloody knife into a far corner, not until she'd stopped whimpering, not until I realized how badly she needed her medication, did I calm down enough to feel the pain in my shoulder.

The knife hadn't gone deep, but it had cut wide enough to really run the blood. I grabbed a dish towel and clamped it over the wound. In a few minutes, the entire towel was soaked.

Sometime later, I stumbled out into the rain with my car keys. I drove into the nearest town and found an old doctor who took me into his parlor and sewed me up, all the while staring at my face. He smelled of booze and cigars and sweaty sleep. And when he walked, his old house slippers went slap, slap, slap. "You're that kid, aren't you?" he said.

"Kid?"

"The TV kid."

"Oh, yeah. Him." A little bit of boyish grin. "I'm not, actually. But I'm told I look a lot like him."

He finished and asked, "What do you want me to tell the law?"

"The law?"

"Hell, yes, the law. I've got to report a wound like this."

"Why?"

"Why? Because somebody obviously stabbed you. And that's a felony. At least in these parts."

Fortunately, I'd brought a lot of cash along. I gave him three hundred of it.

Without exactly looking at it, he rolled it up and stuffed it into the pocket of his faded flannel bathrobe.

"You get a lot of
nookie
?"