Shadow Woman

11

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 thoughts. 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 dartings 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, Chatfield …” 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.”

“Where do I live? What do I do?”

“You rent an apartment. It’s in a large building, but not a building that’s fancy enough so they do any checking before you move in. I’ve already found one and rented it for you. I used an identity that’s old enough to stand up if it needs to. Nothing else is in your name. I’m your girlfriend. If anybody ever asks about me, we broke up and I moved out.”

“What do I drive?”

“For now, nothing. I’ll have to get you out quick, so I have no time to do it for you. Here’s a short lesson. Leasing a car triggers an all-out credit search. Buying a new car on time does the same. But it’s going to be tricky for you to write a check for the full price tomorrow or the next day, because it’s what the people who have studied you think you’ll do. So don’t. What you want is to find a used car for sale by the owner: it’s the only market where paying in cash is necessary, and it will keep you off a car company’s customer list. Have a mechanic check it out. For most people that’s just to see if it’s any good. For you, it’s also because he’ll warn you if it’s stolen. Register it and insure it under your new name. Car registrations are public records, and insurance companies sell lists of customers. There’s no way to avoid that. Just don’t do it right away.”

“How long should I wait?”

“If you do it tomorrow, you’ll be on a short list. The longer you wait, the longer the list.”

“What else?”

“Don’t do anything that brings you to the attention of the police, of course. If you see a fire or an accident or a politician, walk the other way. There could be news cameras. Don’t vote, file any legal papers, serve on a jury, buy land, buy a gun, or get married, because those create public records.”

He had heard the list, and none of those things had been anything he would have done anyway. At any rate, Pete Hatcher would not have done them. He looked at his face in the speckled mirror. The part of this that was beginning to weigh on him was that he had not had enough time to get used to the idea before he had done it. One day he had been Pete Hatcher, walking through the cavernous casino in his tailored summer-weight suit, and a few hours later he had been sitting here in this small, dark apartment in Denver.

She had asked him where he wanted to live, where he could live without being recognized. He had not been able to think of a place. She had rattled off a list of cities and when she had said Denver, he had said yes, just because it was a city where he had never lived, never been for more than an hour or two to change planes, and now even that was safe because it wasn’t even the same airport. She had said Denver was okay, because it was only eight hundred miles from Las Vegas, and a person running for his life didn’t usually stop that soon.

There were lots of things she had not told him, because there had been no time. She had not told him that David Keller would one day sit in this room and look at himself and find that he had not the slightest vision of a future—not just what to do, or what to expect, but what to want, who to be. And she had not told him that David Keller would be afraid.

It was late. Through the open kitchen window he could hear faint traces of the music from the bar floating up through the still, late-summer air, and cars hissing past it on Colfax. He closed the window and locked it, sat on the single bed in the small bedroom where he slept. He should have felt safe. She had chosen a fourth-floor apartment so he didn’t need to worry about somebody climbing in the windows. It wasn’t even in a male name, so it would be hard to trace him here. Pete Hatcher had left Las Vegas with over six hundred thousand dollars. He could live like this for ten or fifteen years without poking his head above the surface.

He took his shirt off and lay in the tiny, dark room, on the surface of the bed. He had found David Keller was not comfortable taking all his clothes off in a bed. There was something especially frightening about having them come for him while he was naked, so now he always kept his pants on and his shoes. He had forgotten something. He got up, walked into the kitchen, opened the drawer, and took out the butcher knife. He wrapped the blade in a dish towel and set it beside his left hand in the bed, so they wouldn’t see it behind his thigh, and he wouldn’t roll over on it. He rested his hand on the handle and lay back in the darkness, feeling the drops of sweat forming on his forehead in the airless room.

As he waited for sleep he thought of the woman in the supermarket. He wished, more fervently now than ever, that he could have responded to her differently when she had spoken. She had been in the market on a Sunday afternoon with nothing much to do, and she had liked him. She had not wanted to put him in danger. She had wanted somebody to play with—to ride bikes, like kids. He had thrown away her telephone number, but maybe he could still find her. He could buy a bicycle, go to one of the places she had mentioned, and just happen to meet her.

No, it was impossible. She would talk, and he would have to talk too—pay out to her an endless series of lies, like beads on a string. There was something too quick about her for that. She would remember what he said, see that bead sixty-seven wasn’t the same as bead nineteen. Or she would tell people about him, even make him meet them, and then he would have two or three strings of lies going at once, then more. They would all get farther and farther out of control until he got himself tangled in lies. She would never be in this bed with him, lying with her soft chestnut hair on his chest. Not her, not anyone. The difference between being alive and being dead had all but vanished.

He awoke to the glare of the sun hitting the window above his head and throwing a square patch on the wall. He closed his eyes again and lay perfectly still. If they had come into the apartment while he was asleep, they would have gone straight to the bigger bedroom, and their muffled creaking and rustling would be what had awakened him. He listened for a long time, as he did every morning, at length satisfied himself that no sound had caused him to wake, and sat up. He sensed a change. The world was different this morning.

He went into the big bedroom, laid out some of his favorite clothes—the plain blue oxford shirt, the blue jeans between new and broken in—and stepped into the shower. This was the best part of the day. It always seemed to him that in the morning the universe was starting out clean and fresh. Anything could happen.

It wasn’t until he was dressed and eating his breakfast under the open kitchen window that he recognized what was different. It was David Keller. He was through holding his breath.

He found the car after an hour of looking in the newspapers. He knew he couldn’t buy something like a Mercedes. Even an Audi or a Saab was pushing his luck. It should be dull and American and cheap. The sliver of an ad said, “96 SL2, 4 door, air cond., automatic, PS. $12,000 OBO.” He called the number and he could hear a baby crying in the background. The woman said, “You should probably come after dinner, when my husband is home. I can’t answer any questions about it. I don’t know a thing about cars.”

He made his voice sound worried and disappointed. “Oh. That’s too bad. I just got to town, so I’ve got nothing to drive, and I start work in a couple of days …” A little of Pete Hatcher seemed to come back to him. He could sense there was something bothering her. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. Your husband’s not home so you don’t want some stranger showing up. And of course, I don’t want to buy a used car in the dark. So I guess I’m out of luck.… Hey, I have an idea. Is the car on the street?”

“No, but I could move it.”

“Great. I’ll just come by and take a look at it. If it’s not what I want, I won’t bother you.”

“I guess that would be all right.”

He took a cab to the house and stood beside the gray car for a time, peeked at the underside, cupped his hands to lean against the window to peer at the number on the odometer, wrote down the license number and serial number, examined the tires. He was running out of things to do when the door of the old duplex opened and a young woman came out on the porch carrying a one-year-old girl on her hip. She had a corkscrew strand of blond hair that kept coming down across her left eye. She had been watching him, as he had hoped, and decided he didn’t look like a psychotic.

She said, “You the one who called about the car?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry to come at such an inconvenient time.” He smiled at the little girl. “Hi, cutie.”

“That’s okay,” said the woman.

“Well, I’m interested.” He looked back at the car. “Is there anything I need to know about the car? Any accidents?”

“No. My husband’s dad bought it, drove it for a year, and died. He seemed to like it, and he took care of it. I’m not going to be working again for a while, so we’d just be paying insurance on it for nothing.”

“I understand,” said Keller.

“Would you like to drive it?”

Keller said apologetically, “If it’s all right.”

“I called my husband and he said it was okay.” As she held out a set of keys, Keller sensed that she wasn’t telling the truth.

He took the keys and said, “I’ll be right back.” Keller drove the car around the block and pulled up in front of the house. This wasn’t exactly the way Jane had said to do it. It seemed better. The woman had seen him for a few minutes, could suspect him of nothing, and seemed too busy and housebound to talk to anybody about him. He got out of the car and walked to the porch. She came out and he held up the keys. “I’d like to buy it.”

She brightened. “Well, wonderful.” After a second she added, “My husband will be happy. It kind of reminds him of his dad.”

“Do you know what time he’ll be home? I’d like to get this done today.” He showed her the envelope. “I brought the money.”

“In cash?”

“I didn’t want to have to wait for a check to clear. I’m not exactly an old customer of the local banks.”

“We don’t need to wait for him. Come on in.”

Keller followed her into the house. She opened a drawer of the buffet, where she kept the dishes, and pulled out the pink slip. Keller handed her the envelope and watched her count the hundred-dollar bills. When she had finished, she leaned over the coffee table and signed the pink slip and handed it to him.

Keller glanced at the slip. It had been signed by Ronald Sedgely with the new owner as Maura Sedgely, and now she had signed it. The car was hers? There was no husband coming home tonight. Either Ronald Sedgely was her father, and she wasn’t married, or she had gotten the car in a divorce from Ronald Sedgely. The discovery made him feel elated, filled with confidence.

He wasn’t the only one. Everybody was lying. Everybody was hiding some vulnerability. Opening your face and telling people the truth about yourself wasn’t normal. She was normal. She was a single mother trying to deal with a man who called on the telephone and might try to cheat her on a car deal, or might even be a maniac who would rape and kill her in front of her baby. Pretending there was some guy who had to approve the deal and knew all about cars, and just might pop in to protect her, that was the sensible thing to do. She was perfectly normal. He was normal.

Keller drove the car to the D.M.V. to register it, drove to an insurance office he had picked out in the telephone book to insure it, and found that neither was as difficult to do as he had feared. They wanted to know the answers to questions he had prepared for a month ago. Jane had assured him that his driver’s license was genuine. It must have been true, because everybody’s computer loved David Keller. He had no outstanding warrants, no problems of any kind, and not even any disturbing blank spaces. He had gotten a new license a year ago, after driving in New Jersey for twelve years.

As David Keller drove around town, he couldn’t help feeling grateful that human beings were so simpleminded. All he had needed to do to break free of the depression that had been paralyzing him was to get out and drive around in a car on a summer day with his window rolled down. It was such a small improvement that it made him laugh.

It made him even happier when he looked at it in reverse. He had bought the right kind of car in the way Jane had said was the safest. He had bought it from the ideal seller, a woman who didn’t even know his name. Maybe he had done it a little early for Jane’s taste, but she had not known how invisible he had been for three months. He had made no mistakes at all. And the car made him feel safer.

He would park it somewhere away from his apartment. If they found the apartment, he could sneak down the fire escape, get in his car, and go. If they found the car, he would see them watching it before he went near it. He would hide some emergency supplies inside the car—money, maybe ten grand in a clever place. And what else would he need if they found him?

The clerk in the gun shop was a woman. She was short and gray-haired and probably had been pretty once, but her face looked as though she had spent some time squinting into the sun. When she walked around the counter and he saw that she was wearing a pistol in a holster on her hip, he thought at first that it was some kind of illusion. Then he noticed that everybody in the store was wearing one, even the stock boy with the broom.

She let him stare down through the glass case for a few minutes, then came up and stood beside him. “Anything I can show you?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Yes, I guess so. I just don’t know what.”

She smiled like an aging dance-hall girl in a Western movie. “Let’s narrow it down. You want to buy a handgun.”

He smiled back at her. “That’s right.”

“Are you an old shooter?”

“No. I’ve never even fired one of these.”

“What do you want it for? Target range or protection?”

“Protection. You know, burglars and so on.”

She stared at him for a moment as though she were estimating his hat size. “Well, okay. You know, of course, that if somebody comes into your house, what he really doesn’t want to see is one of these.” She pointed to a short-barreled pump shotgun on the rack behind her.

“I suppose not,” he said. “But I’d rather have something small.”

She nodded. “And you’ve never fired a pistol. Are you mechanically inclined? Fix your own car?”

Keller shook his head. “Never.”

She opened the case thoughtfully with a key on her belt, selected four pistols, and set them side by side. “There’s this,” she said. “It’s a Beretta 92. A good, reliable nine-millimeter semi-automatic. A lot of police forces use it, and there’s a similar model that the army uses. This is the kind of gun that you have to take apart to clean and oil, and put back together right. I don’t recommend that for a novice.”

“What do you recommend?”

She showed him a revolver with a short barrel. “This is a Ruger SP 101. It’s a .38 Special and it’s small and lightweight. It doesn’t pop up and hit you in the face from the recoil when you fire it. It’s easy to care for, and won’t let you down.” She leaned close to him and spoke from the side of her mouth. “It’s the model we usually recommend for women who don’t know anything about guns.” She watched him for a reaction.

He smiled. “That sounds like just the thing. I’ll take two.”

“Really?”

“Is that a bad idea?”

“No,” she said. “I’d be delighted to sell two.” She pulled a set of forms from a tray behind the counter. “Fill these two out, and after the waiting period is up, you can come get your guns.” She put away the row of pistols, then stopped, holding the one he had picked out. “As you know, it would be illegal for you to carry a concealed weapon. This is a model you have to be very careful with in that regard. It would be possible to put one of these in your coat pocket and go out without noticing it. Your friends wouldn’t see the bulge. Of course, when you reached in and discovered your mistake, the compact size would be a great advantage because you could take it back home without embarrassment.” She winked and locked the gun in the case.