Shadow Games (23 page)

"That's about it, anyway. I hope this helps, Puckett." The cough again, moist and deadly. "I'm going to take a small rest now. It's that time of day for me."

Still coughing, he clicked off.

2

O
n the way back to his hotel, Puckett tried Boyle's motel again.

Boyle was still gone.

3

"I
like this."

"The dark?"

"Umm-hmm. No TV on. Just the dark and listening to the rain on the window."

"Any place special you want to go tomorrow?"

"You're not going to see Boyle?"

"After I see Boyle. You got any place in mind?"

"I wouldn't mind seeing the stained glass windows at the Second Presbyterian Church."

"You serious?"

"Real serious. I'm a sinner, Puckett. And so are you. It couldn't hurt."

"You're crazy."

"Yeah, but that's why you like me."

"
C'mere
a minute."

"Only a minute?"

1

B
oyle never knew what to say to them in the hard light of morning.

For one thing, none of them ever looked all that good, hair tousled, clothes wrinkled, makeup faded. They looked sad or scared or embarrassed or hurried if they had jobs to get to. Curiously, it was at this moment that Boyle felt his greatest tenderness for them—the way they looked young-old and so vulnerable there in the morning light streaming through the motel window as the day came alive... But he didn't ever express this tenderness, of course, because it just wasn't the sort of thing a guy said to a girl, especially not a girl who'd been nothing more than a one-night stand.

This morning's girl was named Monica and she claimed to be a runway model at Marshall
Fields
who was only "filling in" with a temporary gig as a clerk at Wal-Mart. Right.

He lay in bed, lighting the day's first cigarette, watching her pull her panties up over the slope of her wide hips. She had ginger-colored pubic hair which, for some reason, fascinated him. She also had "blonde" hair badly in need of peroxide and a full body badly in need of a quick diet. Not to
mention shaving the tops of her thighs to where the ginger-colored hair extended. It was a formidable bush, that.

He continued to watch as she drew her hands around her back and hooked the ends of her bra together. Watching her breasts rise a moment, the silver-dollar size nipples looking especially chewy, he felt heat stirring in his groin. But he was a night person, not a morning lover. He hated bad breath and sweat-tainted flesh and mussed hair. Hell, he was a romantic. Night was always better.

"You remember the pitcher?" she said, moving to the straight-backed chair where she'd draped her skirt and blouse.

He wanted to laugh. She'd said "pitcher" instead of "picture." This was funny because he'd decided to stay out near Evanston during the run of the play because he'd find a better grade of young women to pick up in the college bars and the discos that served the college crowd. The image playing in his mind was a very sexy Ph.D. who knew all sorts of kinky tricks that he could take back to Los Angeles with him.

And here he gets this kind of dumpy, puppy-dog-eyed girl who says "pitcher" instead of "picture." And who, for God's sake, works at
effing
Wal-Mart. So much for his sexy Ph.D.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Right."

He got out of bed in a single bound, a trick he'd learned as a boy from Superman. She modestly turned her eyes away when she saw his penis slapping against his leg. He was starting to come erect again, vaguely considering making an exception to his no-morning-loving rule.

The motel room was small and dingy because all he could afford was small and dingy.

The drawn curtains glowed at the edges with morning light. In the next room, a TV blared with Bryant
Gumbel's
smug laughter. Out in the parking lot, car doors opened and closed as an army of small-town tourists and low-rent salesmen made ready to descend on the Windy City.

Boyle's room smelled of disinfectant, hair spray (hers), cigarettes (his) and the vague scent of feces. She'd been in the
bathroom a long time this morning, the water running the entire time, and when she'd emerged she looked apologetic.

Darling
, he wanted to say,
it's all right with me that you have to take a big morning constitutional. I have to take them myself
.

The "pitcher" she referred to was on the desk that was bolted to the floor. (Who the hell would steal a desk?) It lay on a small stack of identical black and white glossy "pitchers," all of which showed Richard Boyle in all his TV sitcom glory...dark, curly hair, black Irish good looks (just narrowly missing pretty) and shining white capped teeth. Discreetly printed along the bottom of the glossy in two-point black type was the legend: "TV star and entertainer Richard Boyle."

He'd never been sure exactly what the hell "entertainer" meant. He couldn't sing, dance, juggle, play an instrument or do hand puppets. And hell, if most of the critics on the North American continent were to be believed, he couldn't act, either. About all he could do was stand there without his shirt and give the women of America one of his patented, blue-eyed, "smoldering" looks and wait for their thighs to get all wet and quivering with pure, unadulterated lust.

But he did look good in glossies. Correction: in glossies, he looked
grrrreaaaat
!
(a little Tony the Tiger, if you please).

"Would you say 'love' on it?"

When she said this, he paused, sitting there bare-ass naked at the bolted-down desk in this shabby little room, and then he turned around and looked at her, really looked at her as a human being, and she goddamned near broke his heart.

He saw how scared and lonely and sad she was. She'd spend her life working at Wal-Mart and then some stud from the stockroom would forget his Trojan one night and she'd give birth to the first of several little kids they couldn't afford at all and her body would mudslide early into middle-age and her husband would take a drunken punch at her every so often and there you'd go. And before you knew it her daughter would be working at Wal-Mart and passing herself around to a whole
new generation of stockroom studs and so the process would go on and on into eternal, black, meaningless, space and time, quick, sad, firefly lives on lonely planet Earth.

And to disprove all this—to prove that her life had meaning and order and dignity and point—she'd have this autographed picture of a fourth-rate TV "celebrity" and she'd show it to anybody who'd look. Hell, she'd probably rent a fucking sound truck and drive up and down the streets of suburban Chicago, pulling cars over, and waving housewives down to the curb from their porches.

And coyly, very coyly, she'd hint to them all that she'd gotten to "know" Mr. Boyle pretty well (if you know what I mean) and a nicer and more gentlemanly guy you couldn't ask for. You just couldn't ask for.

She would carry this photograph into the waiting oblivion of her future, clinging to it far more tenaciously than she'd ever clung to her virginity, because the picture would allow her to convince herself that her hours and months and years on this whirling, nowhere planet amounted to something after all.

He looked at her now and he fucking wanted to cry.

He stood up and he went over to her.

She watched him with a certain degree of apprehension, not certain of what he was going to do.

He took her hand and then he kissed her goodbye the way he always kissed his kid sister in North Hollywood goodbye, just a sweet little peck on the cheek.

"I'd be happy to put 'love' on it, Monica. You're a very nice young woman and I really enjoyed our night together."

And then she did it for him, standing there all mussed, standing there seeming to read his mind, she started crying and laughing, clearly not sure why she was doing either, squeezing his hand and then leaning over and putting a sweet little kiss of her own on his own sweet little cheek.

"So long, TV star," she said, snuffling her nose.

She was out of there in under ten seconds, the door opening, a blast of dirty sunlight angling into the room, the
high, acrid stench of diesel fumes finding his nostrils, the roar and rumble of nearby truck traffic shifting the ground like a six pointer on the L.A. Richter scale.

Then, as always, he was alone.

2

B
ut he was not alone for long.

Puckett knocked on his door.

"Morning," Puckett said. "You remember me?"

Boyle had to think a moment. "You were backstage with
Cobey
the other night."

Puckett showed him his ID.

"Gee, a Junior G-Man."

"Let's go have a cup of coffee."

"How about
please
let's go have a cup of coffee?"

"All right.
Please
let's go have a cup of coffee."

3

"S
o you didn't know Beth Swallows?"

"No."

"Never met her?"

"That's right."

"How about
Cobey
?"

"How about him?"

"I'm told there used to be bad blood between you."

"He chose me as director, didn't he?"

"You hear from him in the past day or so?"

"No."

"And you wouldn't have any idea where I could find him?"

"No."

"How'd you ever get to be this much of an asshole?"

"Practice."

"Figures."

Cobey's
Tapes

In re: Boyle

Ah, the things friends won't do for each other.

Boyle, for instance. When it was apparent that I was going to be the star of
Family Life
and not him, Boyle called a gossip columnist and planted the item that, because his real love was directing, he'd "stepped aside to let me have the role."

Let
me have it!

Boyle is so bad an actor that, even by sitcom standards, he's wooden. All he's got going is that Muscle-Beach tan and that pinup boy sulkiness.

And don't think I'm just being bitchy here. I don't like Boyle, but then, I've
earned
that right.

Item: 1983. Though I've never been able to prove this, I know it was Boyle, after he learned that I had just gotten the lead in a Movie of the Week he'd been after, who went to the L.A. County Morgue and bribed somebody there to cut the hand off a cadaver and sell it to him. And then he put the hand in the refrigerator in my dressing room along with a note that said: THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING.

Item: 1984. He hires a young woman he knows I'll never be able to resist to, groupie-style, seduce me. Which she does. No problem there. But a few short weeks later, I find out that she's given me a very sweet little venereal disease—which she admits to doing on purpose, after Boyle paid her to do it. Bitch. Both of them.

Item: 1985. And this is the real pisser. While we were taping our last show, my trailer caught on fire. It so happened that everybody had taken a break and nobody was around. Except Boyle. He saved my life, hauling me out of there just before the smoke would have killed me. He even got an ambulance. They were afraid there might have been some residual brain damage because, apparently, I was in the smoke a long time.

So now I owe Boyle one! A big one! But yes, like you, I've also wondered from time to time if he might not have
set
the fire on purpose, just so he could save me and get himself a lot of publicity for his next series. And that's why I let him direct my show in Chicago. Because a) he'd actually become a very good director over the eight years we hadn't seen each other, and b) what am I gonna do? Say, "fuck you," to the guy who saved my life (even if he did start the fire—which I can't prove?).