There Fell a Shadow (21 page)

I
looked up from the floor. I saw Gottlieb standing in the doorway. He looked blurred to me. He seemed bathed in pink. I blinked. He came into focus. The pink remained. It was his shirt. It was pink with little black swirls on it. It was stretched tight across his big belly and shoulders. It was open at the neck. Black chest hair poured up out of it. It all went very nicely with his navy blue suit.

He looked at me. Then he looked at Watts. Watts faced him with defiance. Behind that defiance, I thought I saw a trace of fear. Gottlieb just looked worried as usual.

“So?” he said.

Watts gestured at me. He blurted: “Wells had a secret meeting with Lester Paul tonight.”

“Oh? You're on the Colt case now?”

The former captain's arm fell limp. “You'd gone home for the day.”

“I'll tell my wife to have a phone installed, next time you can call me.”

“Listen …” That's as far as Watts got. He looked at Gottlieb and stopped cold.

“Come into my office,” the burly detective said very quietly. “We'll sit, we'll talk.” He glanced down at me. “Meantime, get off the floor, John. You'll catch cold.”

He walked out. Watts watched him go, his hands clenched at his sides. He hesitated before following. He glared down at me. I had just finished working my way into a sitting position. I glared back.

He said: “Remember, Wells. You hit a cop tonight.”

“Your badge is mine, Watts.”

“You can't hide behind that bastard now, you hit a cop.”

“Enjoy it while you got it, shithead. Because it's mine.”

He hesitated another moment. I think he was trying to decide whether to finish that kick he'd started. He decided against it. He went out after Gottlieb.

Alone now, I took the opportunity to groan pitiably. I dragged my hand across my upper lip. It came away dark with blood. The blood ran down into my mouth. I tasted it. I didn't like the taste.

I grabbed hold of the top of a chair. I pulled myself up and slid onto it. I leaned forward on the table, my hands in front of me.

After a few minutes, Gottlieb came back in.

“A terrible situation. Just terrible,” he said. He tossed me a washcloth damp with cold water. “Clean your nose, you don't bleed to death. You need a doctor?”

“I need a drink.”

“You need a drink. You need a wife, you need a home, you need little John Wellses running around withholding information and hitting policemen.”

I stared at the washcloth lying limp in my hands. I held it up to my nose. “Don't start on me,” I said. “I've had a bad night.”

Gottlieb sat down next to me. He folded his hands together on the tabletop. “Tell me something, my friend,” he said. “Are you a schmuck, you hit a policeman?”

“He started it.”

“No, no, no, no.” Gottlieb waggled a finger at me. “You hit a cop, you started it.”

“Hid badge id bine, Fwed, I'm tewwing you.” My voice sounded funny with the cloth to my nose.

The detective leaned back in his chair. He sighed. He shook his head. The worried look returned. “A terrible situation. Who knows what'll happen?” he said.

“Tell me about it.” With a wet sniffle of blood, I lowered the washcloth. I stuck a cigarette between my bloody lips. “I started today with a funeral. Colt's. Since then, I've been followed, threatened, forced out of a car at gunpoint, shot at, chased, arrested, and beaten up by a crooked cop.” I lit the cigarette and blew a great haze of angry smoke all over the place. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I'd call that a terrible situation.”

“Eesh.”

“Yeah. That, too.” I pointed the red tip of the cigarette at him. “But it'll be worth it, Fred, if I get that bastard's badge.”

Slowly Gottlieb shook his dark head from side to side. “Well,” he said. “I'll tell you.… This is something you should think about.”

“I'll think about it, all right.”

“I just convinced Watts not to bring charges against you for hitting a policeman in a room alone where no one sees you and knows what's what especially when you're a muckraking reporter.”

“Fred …”

“I mean, you shouldn't get me wrong: personally, I enjoy your work. But there are more than a few city officials right now, some of whom, I shouldn't be surprised, are judges, who would like to see you buried like an onion with your head in the ground. If you write about Watts, Watts brings charges against you, I'm not sure Watts is the one who gets hurt. A word to the wise is all I'm saying.”

I started to speak again, stopped. I sucked on my cigarette. Gottlieb hoisted his shoulders in a long shrug.

“Oh crap,” I muttered. I hung my head.

“What can I say?” said Gottlieb.

“All right, all right. I'll lay off. But I'm gonna get him, Fred. Maybe not this time. But one of these days, he belongs to me.”

“I believe you. Now let's talk Lester Paul and shootings and chasings.”

“I'll tell you the same thing I told him: I met a source on a story tonight. I promised to protect him.”

He lifted his hands to supplement his hoisted shoulders. “So protect. Tell me what you can.”

“All right. I'll tell you this: I don't think Lester Paul had Timothy Colt killed. If he was any kind of killer at all, I'd be dead by now. He had a gun on me tonight. He thought I'd betrayed him. But he didn't pull the trigger.”

“He is, on the other hand, a smuggler and a fugitive,” Gottlieb said. “Not to mention he shot at a cop at the Hotel Lincoln.”

“At his feet. He shot through the door at his feet. You don't kill a man that way.”

“Maybe. You should remember, if it was Paul, he didn't do the killing himself.”

“I remember,” I said. “Our friend with the knife chased me through the park tonight. This time he had a piece.”

“Uh boy. But why is he chasing you through parks in the middle of the night? Because you know what he looks like?”

“I guess. Or maybe just because he wants me off the story. Someone does.”

“And you're sure this is the same guy? The guy you haven't come in to look for in the mug shots like you promised?”

“Yeah, yeah, that's him,” I said. I tossed my cigarette on the floor, stamped it out. Gottlieb glanced at the dead butt and clucked a little. “Anyway,” I went on, “I don't think you're gonna find this guy in the mug shots. I'm told he's from Sentu.”

“Again with Sentu. It's got a paragraph in the
Columbia Encyclopedia
. Now I know more about it than they do.”

“Well, it figures in here somehow. The knife the killer used. Have you traced it?”

“No.”

“I'm told it's a knife used by some kind of breed of assassin they used to have there. A kind of religious killer. I don't know. The point is: I think there's a connection between Colt's death and Sentu.”

Gottlieb had his hands resting on his stomach now, the fingers laced. He twiddled the thumbs a minute. “There's a connection, but you're not going to tell me anything about Lester Paul, who was in Sentu at the same time and got in a fight with Colt the night before he died? You want to at least call me when the case is solved?”

I smiled. “I don't know where he is, Fred. I really don't.”

“And if you did, you wouldn't tell me.”

“What can I say? He's a source.”

“Uy.” He unraveled his hands, slapped them on the table. His chair scraped the floor as he pushed out of it and stood. “Okay,” he said. “Go home. Go home and put your weary nose to bed.”

I stood, too. I collected my overcoat. Gottlieb opened the door. I had started to walk past him when he said: “Let me ask you something, though.”

I paused. “Ask.”

“There's no one else who can cover this story when people are trying to kill you?”

I tilted my head. “Lansing's on it.”

“Nice girl, Lansing.”

“Good night, Fred.”

“I'm sure she'd rather cover the story herself than have a nice man who could make her happy if he would stop being an idiot killed in Central Park for no reason at all.”

I laughed. I stepped out the door.

“What I'm asking,” he said. “Is there some reason why you can't just let this one go?”

I hesitated, turned to him. “It's good copy,” I said. And left.

I took a cab home. I sat in the middle of the rear seat with my head thrown back and my eyes closed. I could sense the glares of streetlamps passing over me. I could sense the darkness that followed.

I thought about my conversation with Holloway that morning. It seemed like a very long time ago. I thought about Colt and Paul and Robert Collins going off together in an effort to rescue Eleanora and her underground network. What had happened to her? Had she been killed? Paul was the only one left alive who knew. And now he was missing again.

But then, what difference did it make? I wasn't covering Eleanora. I wasn't covering Sentu. I was covering Colt's murder, if I was covering anything. I wasn't even sure I was covering that.

Is there some reason why you can't just let this one go?

An ache of loneliness passed through me. For an instant, I thought of my late daughter. I thought of the day she learned to walk. It happened in the living room of the cottage we lived in then. I was reading the sports pages. Olivia was sort of crawling over my feet, grabbing my knee, hauling herself up. Suddenly, I felt her hand let go of me. I peeked around the paper to see if she'd gone down. I saw her take one step, then another, then another. One more and she toppled over. She looked at me, uncertain. She grinned.

I sat up in the cab, opened my eyes. I stopped thinking about it. I didn't even know why it had come to mind.

Because I love her that much
.

My mind was wandering. That part of my life was long gone. I didn't love anyone. Not like that. Not anymore. That level of feeling is reserved for doting parents. Or for romantics like Colt. Or for madmen like Wilfred Campbell. Or maybe sometimes it's a gift you get from a woman. A woman like Eleanora.

Once again, I saw her in the empty air before me. Eleanora. I saw her face with its crown of golden hair, and then I saw the rest of her. She was gazing upward. She was lying on a bed and gazing upward. She was undressed. Her skin was white. White as Colt had said it was. Her white skin blushed everywhere as Colt had said it did. She panted. She cried out. She looked like a statue brought to life. Brought to life by the man who loved her.…

“This it?”

I looked up, startled. The cabby was watching me in his rearview mirror. I glanced out the window. We were in front of my apartment building. The brick facade looked stark and drab in the gaudy lights from the movie house.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. This is it.”

I paid the man and went inside.

I took the elevator to the fourth floor. I was about halfway down the hall to my apartment when I stopped cold. Light was leaking out from under the door. My heart hammered. I felt faint with the force of the blood coursing through me. I did not think I could handle any more trouble tonight.

I came forward slowly now, step-by-step. I hewed to the wall. When I reached my door, I heard noises inside. A voice. A woman's voice.

“Shit,” I said.

Chandler Burke. I'd totally forgotten she was due today. Shaking my head, I fished my keys out of my pocket. I had a good excuse for being late anyway.

I opened the door. There she was, just coming out of the kitchen, carrying a steaming coffee mug. She seemed to have frozen at the sound of my entrance. She was standing as if in midstep, one foot beyond the other, her shoulders slightly forward, the mug extended.

Her stare, though, was not focused on me. It was riveted, instead, on the easy chair.

There, in the easy chair, was Lester Paul. He leveled his .38 at me.

I
shut the door.

“Put that goddamn thing away, Paul,” I said. “Anyone else tries to kill me tonight it just might make me mad.”

For a moment the gun's black bore kept staring at me. I turned my back on it. I stripped off my overcoat and hung it in the closet. When I turned again, Paul was easing the pistol inside his jacket. He was smiling slightly. Chandler, watching his every move, waited until the gun was out of sight before she started breathing again. Slowly, the mug still out before her, she turned her eyes toward me.

She'd probably prepared herself for the sight of me. She'd known I wouldn't exactly look my best. I don't think, all in all, it was the scars from the old wounds that bothered her so much as the dried blood on my face, my general dishevelment. In any case, her pale cheeks went paler still at the sight. She hurried to the coffee table to set the mug down. Then she hurried over to me.

She came close to me. She smelled clean, like shampoo. Her hand came up to my face. She hesitated, as if I might knock it away. She touched me gently, her fingers on my forehead, then my mouth. I flinched. She studied me with her sad eyes.