Shadow Woman (16 page)

Seaver flailed hopelessly. “But
what would happen here? Who would run security for the hotel? The
casino?”

Salateri blew out a breath in a
mirthless chuckle. “Your errand boy, Bennis, or somebody. Who
cares? If you don’t get Hatcher before he talks, we won’t
have a hotel and casino,” he snapped. “There’ll be
a bunch of U.S. marshals in here running the place for the
government, or a bunch of paisans running it for the ones we screwed
in New York.”

Buckley’s voice became
avuncular. “I think it’s rightly your responsibility now,
don’t you?”

Seaver sat in the chair,
helpless.

Foley scribbled on the pad at
his elbow. “Give this to Eddie downstairs.” He tore off
the sheet and held it out.

Seaver glanced at the small
note. “Give Seaver whatever he wants. M.F.” Seaver stood
up. He took a step, then paused and looked at the three men. He knew
that there must be an answer, but he could not bring his mind to stop
racing long enough to concentrate and find it.

“Good luck,” said
Buckley. His cheeks constricted to bring up die comers of his lips in
a false smile, then went slack again.

“Don’t let the door
hit you on the ass on your way out,” Salateri muttered.

Tonight
was a sort of birthday, because David Keller was three months old. He
had spent the time cautiously, patiently finding out who that was. He
had spent the previous thirty-three years acquiring a working
knowledge of Pete Hatcher, and now most of that work had been wasted.
Any quality that David Keller shared with Pete Hatcher would probably
get him killed. That was the most distinctive characteristic that
David Keller had been able to establish about himself, and it
determined all of the others. David Keller was a suspicious, fearful
person. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of an
old brick building in downtown Denver that had no elevator and
overlooked a triangle of grass that wasn’t big enough to be
called a park. It looked like a spot where the surveyors had not been
able to make three roads intersect and had to leave a scrap.

In the evening, when David
Keller cooked his simple dinner and washed the dishes at the small,
scratched porcelain sink, he could look out the window, across the
tops of trees, and see the side of a topless bar with a turntable
contraption over the door that had a female mannequin dressed in a
sequined outfit revolving around and around like a mechanical
dervish. The apartment was small and dark, built at a time when
lumber must have been cheap, because everything was old, varnished
wood – a built-in sideboard in the dining room and cabinets in
the living room and, everywhere, ten-inch baseboards.

David Keller lived in his little
apartment like a man holding his breath under water. In the two
conversations that Pete Hatcher had with Jane Whitefield he had
memorized a few lessons that David Keller now followed mechanically.
“Most people who don’t make it get caught right away,”
she had said. “If you can put a break in the trail that lasts
three months, they won’t have much to work with, and there
won’t be as many people looking.”

He had asked, “If I last
for three months I’ll be okay?” and she had shaken her
head. “I’m just saying, if you’re going to make a
mistake, don’t do it before then.” Pete Hatcher had been
the kind of person who had wanted to know all of the limits –
where can I go and what can I do? – but David Keller was not.

David Keller carried the limits
in his mind with a shuddering sense of awe that he should ever have
considered going near them. It was lucky for him that he had somehow
come to his senses before he had made some impulsive mistake.

Women had always taken up an
enormous portion of Pete Hatcher’s moughts. He loved to look at
them, to smell the scents that hung in the air close to their hair,
to touch their smooth skin, to hear their soft, high voices. He
savored the unconsciously graceful little movements they made with
their hands. But Pete Hatcher had no philosophy. He had never set
aside the time to sit by himself, wondering why things were the way
they were. That never seemed to get anybody else anywhere, so how
could he be so unrealistic as to think he, of all people, could
figure it all out? He had simply known the obvious – that the
standard, plain, no-frills human being was a man. There could be no
purpose for women to be so radically different from men unless they
were created to be enjoyed and cherished.

One afternoon nearly two months
after David Keller had arrived in town he had gone to a supermarket
on a Sunday afternoon. A pretty woman in her early thirties wearing a
Denver Nuggets baseball cap with a long chestnut ponytail stuck out
through the back walked past him, and their eyes met. A couple of
times after that, when he went up an aisle, his eyes lingered on her
again – on the black, skin-tight spandex bicycle shorts that
the oversized sweatshirt didn’t hang low enough to cover the
way she pretended to think it did, because women bent at the waist to
reach the lower shelves, instead of at the knees. Once, she had
caught him appreciating her, and she gave a little smile of
acknowledgment.

Suddenly, without warning, Pete
Hatcher had struggled to come to life. The opening lines had begun to
rise to his throat automatically: “Do you ride a bike?”
he would say, just in case she didn’t, and he had to talk about
something else. “Riding in Denver traffic is taking your life
in your hands. I guess I’m not as good as you are.” She
had been reading the label on a jar of wheat germ, so he could say,
“I heard that stuff is good for you, but is there any way to
get around the taste? What do you put it on?” There was nothing
to saying the first words. It usually took him five or six syllables
to see in the woman’s eyes whether she was pleased that she had
attracted him or startled that some creep had been drawn to her. He
had never made a mistake after a whole sentence, because women were
much more alert and aware of the people around them than men were. He
knew that if he noticed a woman, she had noticed him first. She had
already decided what she would do if he spoke.

He knew he had to push Pete
Hatcher down, strangle him before he got David Keller into some kind
of trouble. Then he met the woman again on the far aisle, which was
lined with wine bottles. It was a bad place, because it was out of
the way, almost private. He had to look at some labels and put a
bottle in his cart to assert his right to be here.

But she came to him. She said
happily, “I guess you don’t like football either.”

David Keller was startled.
Football? Then he remembered. It was late summer, and preseason games
must be on television already. He hadn’t owned a television set
in months, and what might be on it had slipped his mind. He smiled
and shrugged. “I’ve been known to watch a game now and
then, but it’s such a beautiful day.”

“Yeah, it’s great,
isn’t it? I’ve been out riding my bike.” Her voice
was high and cute, and she moved in little explosions of excess
energy that reminded him of the quick, abrupt dartmgs of a little
bird. He was fascinated. He caught himself wanting to see her do
things – any things, but he was already allowing his
imagination to form preferences as to what they might be.

“Riding a bike?” he
said. “Riding in the traffic around here is too much for me. I
guess I’m not as good as you are. You’re in better shape,
too.”

She gave him the hint of a
smile. It said, “That already? Be patient.” But her voice
said, “It’s not bad on Sundays. If you like off-road,
you’ve got Bear Creek, Cherry Creek, Chat-field…”
Her bright brown eyes narrowed. “You’re new here, aren’t
you?”

He felt suddenly scared. “Yes.”

“One more southern
California refugee, right? Someplace hot and low altitude.”

“Los Angeles.” He
lied with the best smile he could manage. She had instantly known he
was a stranger and picked up the quarter of the country he had come
from. What was wrong? What was he doing wrong?

She lifted her sweatshirt a few
inches so she could reach the pen stuck in the waistband of the tight
pants. The flash of white skin forced him to weather a flood of
wishes. “Here,” she said as she wrote something on her
shopping list and tore it off. “If you need directions, just
give me a call.”

It
was all right. She could hardly be less threatening. He took the
paper. Above the phone number it said “Kathy.” He smiled
again and said, “Thanks, Kathy. I’m David…
David Keller.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You
don’t look like a David.”

His heart stopped.

“Maybe a Mike…
maybe a Jim.”

He desperately reminded himself
of all of the times when women had said things like this. She thought
it was fun to nudge men off balance just a little. He smiled. “I’ll
give my mother a call and see what she can do.”

“You might give it a try,”
she said. “I guess moms all want their babies to grow up to be
Davids. Most of them grow up to be Buck or Ace or something.”
She was giving him a chance, buying him time to notice that he liked
her and think of a way she could be with him that would preserve her
self-respect.

It wasn’t difficult for
Pete Hatcher to think of an invitation. She would like to go pay for
her groceries and meet him next door at the health-food place for one
of those fruit drinks they made in blenders. She could even have been
persuaded to meet him for another ride at one of those creek places
she had mentioned and show him the bike route, if they went in
different cars. Dinner would have made her feel at a disadvantage
because it would mean she had picked up a man and made a date with
him. But David Keller was not Pete Hatcher, could not afford to be.

“Well,” he said,
“I’d better get the rest of my stuff and get home.
Thanks.” He put the slip of paper in his pocket.

The disappointment hovered
behind her bright smile, but she turned to look at the wine bottles
on the shelf. “See you.” She didn’t push her cart
away. Instead, she waited and let him move up the aisle away from
her.

As he stood in the line at the
check-out counter, he was filled with regret and sadness. But for the
first time, that feeling was outweighed by something new. He was
afraid of her. His disguise was transparent, his identity obviously
false. He wanted to leave his shopping cart and slip out the door,
hurry along the windowless side wall of the building, and disappear.

After that Sunday, David Keller
always ate in his apartment, and when he needed supplies he walked to
a small grocery store on Sixteenth Avenue after dark and paid cash
for them, then carried the bag home in his left arm to keep the right
one free to protect himself.

He had gone to a movie a mile
away once, but he had been unable to get used to the sensation that
people were looking at him. He knew, objectively, that they were.
They might be wondering why a thirty-three-year-old man had nobody to
go to the movies with, or they might only be looking at him because
when the lights were still on in a theater there was nothing else to
look at but a wall of white at the front of the room. But David
Keller didn’t want people looking at him, and he especially
didn’t want them wondering. When Pete Hatcher had walked into a
room, people had lit up. He could still see them, hear their voices.
“Hey, Pete. Have a seat.” And he would see pleasure on
their faces, and he would make a joke out of it. “What, you’re
so glad to see me, I owe you money, or something?” He had spent
a good part of those thirty-three years learning about Pete Hatcher
by seeing him through other people’s eyes.

David Keller didn’t
exactly miss being Pete Hatcher. He had simply begun to realize that
being Pete Hatcher had been easy. Being David Keller took a lot of
thought, and there seemed to be no reward beyond waking up each
morning and verifying that he was still alive. And because when he
awoke he found himself still alone, he could regale himself with the
strong likelihood that he would be alive to latch the windows and
close the curtains that night.

He sat in his little dining room
and stared past the gouged sideboard at the mirror above it. The
glass had little black specks where the backing was showing through,
but he could see himself well enough. He had gotten his hair cut
short and lightened it, so he looked a little bit different from Pete
Hatcher. The odd thing was that he didn’t seem to look like
anybody else, either. Some time in his childhood he had been given a
game that consisted of a board with a pink oval and a collection of
eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and hair. Usually, when he selected
features, he could put them together and they would practically
scream out what they were: a pirate, a Chinese mandarin, a cowboy.
But once in a while, when he put the pieces together, nothing
happened. It was simply an oval with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
That was what he saw looking back at him in the mirror tonight: it
was a face, but it didn’t seem to belong to anybody.

He had lived for three months on
a couple of conversations with a woman he didn’t even know. “If
you want to be invisible,” she had said, “you have to do
what other people do. Think average.”

“What’s average?”

“The average man your age
makes about thirty-five thousand dollars a year.” He had felt
distress, wonder. Could that possibly be all? She had tried to
mitigate it. “The good news is that he doesn’t save any
of it. But he’s always doing something. Busy busy busy.”

“Busy at what?”

“Watch people. Whenever
they’re out of their houses, they’re engaged in some
obvious activity. If you were a cop, you could stop every one of them
and ask what they were doing, and they could all bore you silly with
details. They’re dropping clothes off at the cleaners, then
stopping by the drugstore for dental floss, and then they’re
going to head home for dinner at the time when everybody else is too.
An experienced cop wouldn’t even have to ask them, because he
can read it on them: the way they walk, the way their eyes are set.
The people you have to worry about think like cops. Men between
seventeen and seventy don’t just hang out, sit on a park bench
or something. If they’re out in a park, they’re jogging
for their health or walking fast because they have someplace to go.”