Shadow Woman (32 page)

Seaver stared at it, and saw the
color of the paint. It was yellow, and the little marquee on the roof
was visible now. It was the same cab. Seaver waved his arm
frantically, and the cab pulled to the curb. The driver stepped out,
slammed the door, and looked at him over the roof.

“He’s hurt worse
than I thought,” said Seaver. “We need to get him to a
hospital after all.”

The driver trotted around the
rear of the car and opened the back-seat door. Seaver knelt and began
to lift the torso of the body. “Give me a hand.”

The driver squatted to lift the
feet. He backed into the cab and set the legs on the back seat, but
that gave him a look at the chest. “This guy’s bleeding
all over. He’s been stabbed or something.”

Seaver’s hand was already
in motion. The gun swung out, he fired into the driver’s belly,
then raised the barrel higher and fired into the driver’s
chest, then into his head.

Seaver returned the gun to his
coat pocket and walked around the car to get into the driver’s
seat. He turned on the meter, then drove the cab to the rear of the
building he had rented and parked it. He went up the stairs, through
his little office, and into the bathroom. He washed his hands and
face thoroughly, then examined his suit, shoes, and shirt for blood
spatters. He saw none, but wiped his shoes with toilet paper anyway
and flushed it down the toilet. He took a big wad of dampened toilet
paper and wiped off the gun and wrapped it in toilet paper, then went
about the little suite wiping off all of the surfaces he had ever
touched. He collected all of his old coffee cups and lids, boxes, and
wrappers, and locked the door behind him before he left. He dropped
the trash in the Dumpster at the rear of the building.

Seaver started the cab and drove
at least twelve blocks south before he found a dark alley between two
stores that met a second, longer alley, so he could turn and leave it
beside a loading dock. Then he walked a mile, stuffed the
still-wrapped gun into the fishy-smelling center of a trash bag
inside a garbage can, and replaced the lid. He walked another mile
before he came to a theater. People were streaming out onto the
street, walking toward parking lots and climbing into taxicabs. He
attached himself to the crowd, climbed into a cab, and had it take
him to an intersection not far from his hotel.

When he was inside his room, he
pulled the mailer out of the back of his belt. He opened it and
poured the mail out on the bed. The envelopes were all addressed to
Stewart Hoffstedder, C.P.A. That was something that gave him hope, at
first, because Stillman had said something about a man’s name.
But the mail was almost all bills, as though they were for a real
C.P.A. The bills were all for credit cards in different names –
female, male, even corporate names. Were they all for this woman?

A horrible thought came to him.
Stillman’s brain was probably not a perfectly developed organ
to begin with. Since the age of ten it had probably been shorted out
by drugs and jarred by blows. Maybe he had gotten the number wrong.
Maybe this was some real C.P.A. a business manager who paid bills for
a number of clients. The mail in the pouch seemed to have nothing to
do with the dark-haired woman. It was possible that Seaver had scared
Stillman so badly that he had cooked up a box number on the spot.

Seaver laid all of the bills out
on the bed in a row and began to study them, looking desperately for
similarities. On August 8, Wendy Wasserman had rented a car in
Missoula, Montana. On August 10, Michael Phelan had rented a hotel
room in Potomac, Montana. Katherine Webster had paid for lunch in
Condon, Montana, the next morning. Seaver rocked back on his heels
and smiled at the ceiling in relief. He had not wasted all this time
and energy.

He glanced at the forwarding
address on the label stuck to the mailer. It was just another post
office box, this one in Chicago. If he needed to, he could go there
and watch that one too. But right now, he had something infinitely
better. He knew where the dark-haired woman was. She was on the move,
driving around Montana with Pete Hatcher.

Carey
drove up to the gate of the impound lot and parked. Susan stepped to
the gate and rang the bell. Carey could hear the old-fashioned
jangling noise a hundred feet away in the little shack in the center
of the lot, and that meant trouble. There were no lights on in the
windows. He stepped to the gate and stood beside her feeling useless.

Then he walked along the fence
and around the corner. There was a small sign that said, lot hours
6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. He walked back to Susan and frowned
apologetically. “It’s closed until six in the morning.”

“No.” She seemed to
see herself from outside. She was standing in a dark, desolate part
of the city in the middle of the night, wearing three-inch heels and
a strapless evening gown. Slowly, the beautiful smile reappeared. She
let her arms come out from her sides in a “look at me”
gesture.

He said, “Come on. I’ll
take you home.”

They got into his car and he
backed out of the drive. “You can’t really do that,”
she said. “It’s all the way out in Orchard Park. If you
could just drop me off at a hotel near here, you can go home and get
some sleep.”

“Why would you stay in a
hotel?” asked Carey. “It’s ridiculous.” Why
was it that people who didn’t want to be any trouble always
ended up being plenty?

“It’s now after
midnight. If you drive me all the way to my apartment, it’ll be
two before I’m asleep, and probably three before you are. So
I’d get three hours’ sleep, call a cab, and for eighty
dollars or so, he’d drive me to the other end of the county to
get my car. That’s if I could even get a cab in Orchard Park at
five in the morning. But if I stay here, I can be on the spot when
the lot opens and drive myself home.”

“Here’s the problem
with that. Look around you – factories, warehouses, and an
impound lot. It isn’t very scenic in the daytime, so there’s
a shortage of good hotels around here. By ‘good’ I don’t
mean famous, I mean safe.”

“Oh,” she said.

“On the other hand, I
happen to have a perfectly good house about twenty minutes away, with
six spare bedrooms, five bathrooms, and clean towels.” He held
his breath, hoping she would have a better idea.

“I hate to put you to that
kind of trouble.”

That meant “yes.” He
had no choice but to push the offer as graciously as he could manage
at this hour, and make it sound easy. “I have to be at the
hospital by seven, and I can take you to get your car on the way.”
He glanced at her. “I might even be able to scare up some
clothes for you that won’t look strange at dawn – like
the bedraggled party-goer at the end of an Italian movie. Jane’s
about your size.”

She looked at him with what
seemed to be curiosity. “You would do that?”

“Sure.” What choice
did he have?

“Won’t your –
won’t Jane feel… uncomfortable?”

“What for?” he said
too quickly. He had been concentrating on his own discomfort, so he
had not yet thought about what Jane would feel. He cautiously
considered the subject. He had a sudden vision of Jane’s eyes
resting on Susan, taking an inventory – the long, golden hair,
the little wisps on the nape of the long, delicate neck where they
had escaped from the place where they had been tied, the impossibly
smooth ivory skin – then focusing on Carey. But Jane’s
look would be completely unjustified.

What he was doing was a simple
act of kindness – no, it was even more innocent: an obligatory
refusal to be unkind. He imagined Jane hearing his thoughts, and the
gaze turned ironic. No, he thought. That wasn’t the way Jane
would react at all – unless she was just teasing him. He was
being irrational and unfair to her. She would never give him that
look just because the person he helped happened to be female.

Then he admitted to himself that
his deepest motive for taking her home with him had been provided by
the needle on his gas gauge. He hadn’t insisted on driving her
to her place, where she belonged, because he was afraid he wouldn’t
be able to find an open gas station at this hour on the long,
unfamiliar drive to Orchard Park. He might run out of gas, and then
they’d both be stranded.

He realized he was taking too
much time inside his own head. “If she were here, she would be
the one asking you to stay. She’s always doing things like
this.” It sounded true to him, as far as it went. He couldn’t
quite get himself to feel certain that Jane would invite a woman who
looked like Susan to stay in the house while she wasn’t there.

She looked at him closely. “I’d
feel a lot better about it if I heard her say it. I’d hate to
get you in trouble.”

He smiled and shook his head.
“I’m not going to call her in the middle of the night to
wake her up and ask her permission, no. But I’ll mention it the
next time I talk to her.” He drove onto the boulevard and
accelerated. “Of course, the first few times you meet her,
you’ll have to get used to my calling you ‘Sister Mary
Boniface.’ ”

She laughed the melodious,
liquid laugh again. “Oh, well. I guess I’d rather just be
your secret.”

Carey was still contemplating
those words as he pulled into his driveway. He idled near the front
door, where he usually parked in the summer, then found himself
touching the gas pedal again to let the car glide the rest of the way
up the long driveway before he stopped again at the old carriage
house, out of sight of the street. There was no sense piquing the
neighbors’ curiosity, he thought. The fact that what he was
doing was innocent didn’t make it a worse story.

He opened Susan’s door,
led the way to the back entry, unlocked the house, and let her enter
first. He reached over her shoulder to flip the light switch just as
she stopped to keep from stepping into a dark, unfamiliar room. It
would have been much better if they had collided hard, but instead
his body met hers softly. “Oops,” he said. “Excuse
me.”

She half-turned to give him an
utterly unreadable look, then stepped into the kitchen, looking
around her. “Great kitchen,” she said. “Do you
entertain a lot?”

“No,” he said. “At
least I don’t think we do. Jane might let me know I’m
wrong at any time. It’s big because that’s the way they
were in the old days. Everybody hung around the kitchen because it
was warm.”

She said, “Late eighteenth
century?”

“The structure might be
mat old. Of course, it’s been remodeled.”

“When?”

“Beats me. If contractors
worked the way they do now, they probably started in 1850 and
finished in 1950.”

He flipped a second light switch
up as he went, but when he reached the doorway into the dining room,
he paused to let her get a head start. She lingered.

He detected that she was looking
toward the cabinets on the wall. He said, “Can I offer you a
drink?”

She pretended to decide, then
smiled. “Sure. It’s a cinch I’m not driving.”

“I don’t have a lot
here, so we’ll have to rough it. Let’s see. Malt scotch.
McCallan. Terrific stuff. Makes you want to strap on your claymore
and march against the Duke of Cumberland. Vodka. It’s
Stolichnaya, but I’ve run my Geiger counter over it to be sure
it was made before the Chernobyl reactor went. Gin, of course.
There’s also some vermouth if you’re good at making
martinis. I’ve seen every James Bond movie, and mine still
taste like poison. The usual mixers. Cognac. Wine and champagne in
the refrigerator.”

“Did you say champagne?”

“I think I did.” He
opened the refrigerator and found it. He set it on the counter and
lingered over removing the foil and the wire. He would have to
remember to buy another bottle. Jane would remember putting it in the
refrigerator, and the missing champagne was not the best way to lead
into telling her there had been a guest. He removed the cork, plucked
two tulip glasses from the cupboard, and filled them.

The sound of the telephone was
jarring. He snatched the receiver off the hook on the wall. “Hello?”

The operator said, “Will
you accept a collect call from Jane?”

“Yes I will,” he
said.

“Hi, Doc.” It was
Jane.

“Hi. I was hoping you’d
call.” He looked at Susan as he said it, and she tactfully
strolled off toward the dining room, then suddenly turned around and
mouthed the word, “Bathroom?”

He pointed through the living
room at the far hallway, and she walked in that direction. He felt
relieved. “Where are you?”

Her voice was apologetic. “You
know I can’t say.”

“That isn’t what I
wanted to know anyway,” he said. “I should have said
‘How.’ How are you?”

“Tired of missing you.
Tired of… all this.”

“That’s what I
wanted to hear. When are you coming home?”

He heard her sigh. “I just
don’t know. I wish it were now. But I really don’t want
to have to do this again. And I really don’t want to see this
guy’s picture in a newspaper.”

“Or yours, either.”

“You know why I’m
doing this,” she said. “Just put yourself in my place.”

He craned his neck to look out
the kitchen doorway and through the dining room. Susan wasn’t
visible. “Just put yourself in mine.”

Her voice sounded worried,
pleading almost. “Please, Carey. This is an aberration. It’s
the last time, a job that I thought was finished, and it wasn’t.
As soon as I’ve got him tucked away, I’m done. We’ll
start over again, from the beginning.”

He was silent for a long time.
“All right,” he said. “One last fling.”

See? she said. “I knew I
could get around you if I batted my eyelashes loud enough.”

He knew it had been meant to be
funny, an ironic comment on men and women that they were both
supposed to laugh at, but he snorted mirthlessly. He tried to think
of words that would take his mind off the worry and the emptiness he
felt He stared at the kitchen floor. “Well, I’m
exhausted,” he said. “Tonight was the benefit for the
children’s wing.”