The Identity Man Read online

  Shannon unfolded himself quickly from the bus stop bench. Dodging traffic, he crossed the street and went after the guy. He took an angry satisfaction in it. All this time, the bald guy had been following him, now the tables were turned. And it wasn't like at the fair either. He had a plan now. He was going to get the bald guy alone, catch him off guard, corner him, ask him what the hell—fed or not, get the truth out of him. Just thinking about it, just being on the move, brought his anxiety down from the boil and made him feel better. The bald guy had come to represent the whole situation to him, the way it always came back to the same thing, being hunted, being on the run, identity like stain.

  He reached the sidewalk that ran beside the park's iron fence, directly across from where the bald guy was. Both sidewalks were crowded and getting more crowded every minute as people poured out of their offices for lunch. It was easy for Shannon to blend with the crowd, hold back, and watch from a safe distance as the bald guy hurried along across the street and ahead of him. Shannon had every reason to feel sure the bald guy didn't know he was there. He did feel sure.

  Only it turned out he was wrong.

  The bald guy reached the corner about a half block in the lead, with Shannon across the street and behind him, watching him over the heads of the pedestrians. The bald guy stopped and waited for the light to change, so Shannon pulled up in the middle of the block, pretending to admire the golden dome through the fence. When the light did change, the bald guy crossed the street and then turned the corner. Shannon had to cross in the middle of the block to go after him, running to beat the traffic. The bald guy continued on down the side street, disappearing from view. Shannon fought through the moving crowds. He reached the corner while the light was still good. He crossed and followed.

  He found himself now on a narrower street. There were office buildings all of dark glass to his right. Beside him to his left, taking up the whole block, there was a large parking structure, three stories of featureless concrete. Here, suddenly, away from the Government Center, there were a lot fewer people on the sidewalk. Between Shannon and the bald guy now, there were only a bum and a businesswoman walking along. But the bald guy still kept moving with his quick, determined stride, and it still seemed to Shannon that he was unaware of being trailed.

  Then, without warning, the bald guy glanced back over his shoulder as if he sensed Shannon behind him. Shannon froze, startled. In that frozen instant, the bald guy darted sideways and vanished into the parking structure.

  Shannon cursed. What now? Had he seen him? Had he somehow known he was there? All at once, he went from having the drop on the bald guy to not knowing what was what, who had the upper hand. It gave him a hot, flashing sensation of frustration and anger. This was the way things kept going for him. Well, not this time. The bald guy wasn't getting away.

  Shannon didn't hesitate. He started running, shoving the bum out of his way, getting an acrid whiff of him as he went past. He ran full tilt down the sunlit sidewalk. Reached the entrance to the lot, an archway in the white wall. He charged through the door into the shadows under a concrete stairwell.

  He peered out across a still, dark cavern of parked cars, his eyes flicking to the movements of pedestrians here and there. No bald guy. Then, with a sort of instinct, he glanced up—just in time to see black shoes hurrying up the switch-backing stairs above him. He started up the stairs. Already the bald guy was out of sight, though Shannon still heard his footsteps. He followed the sound to the second-story landing and there heard a heavy door opening above him. He charged up toward the third story, the last story. As he reached the landing, he saw its big metal door swing closed. It shut with an echoing metallic clack.

  Shannon was about to charge through—he was charging through, one hand turning the doorknob, the other pushing at the solid gray metal of the door. But as the door opened, some inner sense, some unspoken logic, told him he was being lured into a trap. He kept pushing the door with his left hand, but his right went behind him, to the gun in his belt under his windbreaker. He was drawing it out even as he pushed into the garage.

  And it was a trap, sure enough. The bald guy was hiding in a little alcove off the garage roof. As Shannon came clear of the door, the bald guy came out from behind it and jammed a gun against Shannon's temple.

  "Fuck with me," he said.

  Gritting his teeth in frustration and rage, Shannon figured, All right, I will. He whipped up his own Beretta and aimed it at the bald guy's face.

  The stairwell door swung shut.

  The two men locked eyes over the guns. Then Shannon snorted. Then the bald guy snorted. If they were going to shoot, they'd have shot by now. It was a stupid situation. But neither wanted to be the first to put his gun down, so they stayed like that, the barrels trained on one another. A standoff.

  The bald guy smiled. "You're a hard case, Shannon. Most scumbags would've run. You should've run. You're a dumb son of a bitch." He had a hard, dark, smooth voice, a voice like asphalt.

  "You know me," Shannon said to him.

  "I know you, yeah. I even figured you'd turn up. I watched from the window all morning. Saw you sitting out there on the bus-stop bench. So yeah, I know you."

  Shannon steadied his gun. He had a strange feeling, a strange jumble of feelings. There was the anger at this fool and the angry anticipation that he was about to get some answers and the fear about where all this was going. And then, beneath all that, there was something else, an understanding he had suppressed from the very beginning, from the very moment he got the text message from the identity man telling him to meet him in the parking lot outside of Eyes. From that very moment, somewhere down deep inside him, he had known that this whole deal made no sense. The foreigner and the white room and the idea that the Whittaker Foundation or some other mysterious "friend" had arranged for him to get a new face and new records and new life like princess in fairy tale ... Fairy tale was right. It made no sense. When did stuff like that happen? When did new lives get bestowed on people in mall parking lots? All along, he had known the whole setup was a lie somehow. He had known it and had suppressed the knowledge, because he wanted so desperately for the lie to be true, wanted so much to be free of who he was.

  Now, as he pointed the gun in the bald guy's face and the bald guy pointed his gun at him, he felt a bright, trembling sense coming up inside him like evil sunrise, a sense that he was about to get some answers to questions he had not wanted to ask.

  "Who are you?" he said. "Why are you after me?"

  "After you?" said the bald guy with a laugh. "You are a dumb son of a bitch. I'm not after you, dog. I'm your guardian fucking angel. If you hadn't chased me away at the fair, you wouldn't be in this mess."

  Shannon blinked, trying to understand, feeling he was about to understand but couldn't yet, not yet. "What are you talking about? You sent that cop. He was gonna kill me."

  "He was gonna kill you. But I didn't send him. I sent you."

  Shannon tried to understand this, too, tried to figure it, couldn't, shook his head. "I don't ... What...? What do you mean? Who are you? Why do you know me?"

  The bald guy snorted again. He shook his head, smiling a wry half smile. Then he lowered his gun and slid it into a shoulder holster under his cheap suit jacket.

  "Know you," he said. "I made you, fool. I'm the real identity man."

  LIEUTENANT RAMSEY WENT to see the old man first. The meeting did not go well. The very sight of the white shingled house standing whole and alone amid the rubble all around it renewed that oppressive superstitious sense of destiny or karma or something at work—that sense that had been haunting the periphery of his awareness ever since he saw Gutterson dead on the floor, the great, staring, stupid lump of him with his brainless head caved in. That whiff of nemesis then—the whiff of dead Gutterson's shit and also of nemesis—of evil fate working against him—an invisible will opposing his invisible will—had been just that, just a whiff, a faint sensation, but it grew now when he saw the white hous
e standing there as if magically unharmed. And when the old man opened the door to his knock, it grew even stronger.

  "Mr. Applebee?"

  "Yes?"

  Ramsey held up his badge. The old man looked at it and then looked back at him, looked in his eyes and then looked him up and down in slow, silent appraisal. He said nothing, only stepped aside to let him enter. A cop gets used to that sort of thing—being hated on sight and all—still, Ramsey had the sickening sense that it was more than that, that he had been judged on his Inner Man and found wanting. That's what made the superstitious sensation worse.

  Worse, and then worse as he stepped inside. The musty Negro respectability here was smothering and accusatory, the sense of nemesis clearer and more present, almost an oppressive stringency in the atmosphere. The old man led the way past moldering upholstered furniture and piles of books about jazz and African culture. There was even an antimacassar on the back of one of the chairs, for Christ's sake. Ramsey's mother had used those. What the hell was this place? 1950?

  The old man himself seemed as anachronistic as his surroundings. Ramsey had had schoolteachers like him as a child. Putting on intellectual airs and white professorial dignity. Looking down at him with disapproval, no matter how he tried to please.

  Applebee led him into the dining room and positioned himself at the mantelpiece. He was wearing a sweater with patches on the elbows, and he leaned one of the patches on the mantel. Ramsey's eyes flicked up and saw the wooden carving above him, three angels, two in profile with trumpets, the third gazing down at him, his hand upraised, his face unpleasantly alive with a look that seemed to echo and amplify the old man's condemnation. The angel of his nemesis, Ramsey thought, before he could sweep the thought under.

  "How can I help you, Lieutenant?" Applebee said quietly, and the way he said it made Ramsey feel as if he'd been called into the principal's office.

  "I understand a carpenter named Henry Conor was doing some work for you."

  "That's right, he was."

  "He's not here now, though."

  "No. He finished the job. He's done."

  "So you don't know where he is?"

  "He was only moonlighting here on weekends. I assume he's at his usual work or at home." Despite the neutral tone of his words, there was a sort of irony and intelligence in the old man's eyes that made Ramsey wonder what he had done to offend him. He tried to chalk it up to the usual neighborhood suspicion of the police, rife even among the law-abiding citizens sometimes. But it seemed more than that. Had Conor said something to him?

  Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson.

  Ramsey glanced up at the angel on the mantelpiece. There was a sort of irony and intelligence in his eyes, too. Annoyed, Ramsey spoke more bluntly.

  "He's not in his apartment," he said. "There's a dead police detective there, but not Conor. That's why we're looking for him."

  Applebee took a deep breath and shifted his position. A dead detective—that was more than he had bargained for. Still, as the breath came out of him, that undertone of disapproval was there again.

  "I don't know anything about that," he said. "I'm sure Henry wasn't involved in killing your detective."

  "Oh, really? What makes you sure of that?"

  The old man hesitated and then answered, "You get a sense of people." He said it pointedly, Ramsey thought, accusatorily—the old fart—the angel of his nemesis—or was all this just in his own imagination? "In any case," the old man went on, "he did some work for me and now he's gone. You're welcome to search the place, if you think he's hiding somewhere."

  Ramsey paused, irritated, giving the old man the eye. "That shouldn't be necessary," he said. "You're here alone, I take it."

  "Yes."

  "You live alone?"

  "I live with my daughter and grandson. She's at work and he's at school."

  There was something then—something on the word daughter— a shifting of the eyes away and back, a slight hesitation. Ramsey caught it, understood it in a flash. Handsome Harry's site boss, Joe Whaley, had been right. There was a girl. Applebee's daughter. Was that the source of the hostility here? Was she the one the old man was trying to protect? That made some sense of this, at least.

  "Is there anything else, Lieutenant?" Applebee said—trying to fill the silence, Ramsey thought, fearing he might have given himself away.

  Ramsey considered getting tough with him but thought better of it. He wasn't ready to go so far as to put his hands on the geezer and, without that, he didn't think the old man would crack. More likely, he'd just get on the phone when Ramsey was gone and warn his daughter that the big bad policeman was on his way.

  So Ramsey gave him a brief smile instead. "No," he said. "Nothing else. I'm sorry to bother you, but I did have to check." He went into his wallet, offered the old man his card. "If Conor contacts you or you hear anything, please get in touch."

  Applebee took the card without a word. Without a glance at it, he stuck it in his sweater pocket.

  The irony and disapproval in the old man's eyes and the irony in the eyes of the angel of judgment and his own self-aggravating superstition continued to annoy Ramsey, but he exercised his famous self-control—merely smiled again and nodded. None of it mattered, none of it was to the point. It was best in this situation just to be polite and move on.

  The daughter was the one he was really after.

  He knew her. The moment he set eyes on her, he understood exactly who Teresa was. The good girl, he thought, the church girl. It figured, her being Applebee's daughter and all. And it gave him fresh insight into Conor's trajectory.

  He was sitting in his Charger now, parked in a no-stopping zone in back of the school where she taught. It was a Westside private school, a big old cathedral-like building of red brick with rounded mission gables. There was a fenced-off asphalt courtyard out in back with some playground equipment and some painted white lines for field games. Ramsey was parked in front of that.

  The lunch hour was just passing. At the sound of a bell, the boys poured out into the yard in their neckties and the girls in their plaid skirts, all of them shouting and laughing together, a surflike roar. Ramsey was just about to get out of his car and go inside to find Teresa when he saw her step into one of the rear doorways. She stood there, watching the children at their play.

  He knew her face from her license photo in the computer, but he hadn't had a real sense of her until he saw her now. Now he felt a sort of helpless admiration for her and a dark resentment toward her and a dark attraction. The good girl, the church girl. His wife had been one of the same. She was the girl who didn't drink or do drugs or smoke or party. The girl who sang in the choir and decorated her notebooks with marker drawings of hearts and flowers. The girl who said "Aw" when she saw pictures of small animals and "Oh no! What're you going to do?" when her friends got themselves knocked up. She was the girl who walked swishing past when the brothers talked jazz at her passing ass, because she wasn't going to come over here, baby, not even if she was so fine, aw really, he'd be so careful, swear. She had her life all laid out in her mind, her plans confided to her diary, and they didn't include no baby-baby-baby, because she wasn't going to have no baby before the clock struck married. She was that girl.

  And here was the thing about it. Girls like that—for some reason, they were love magnets for weak and damaged men. It was some kind of save-me-mommy deal. His wife had told him all about it. They wanted her sympathy, her kindness, her "Oh, you poor thing." They wanted her to make them better than they were, but, fucked-uppedly enough, they wanted to drag her down to their level, too. "I used to tell them if they wanted salvation, they could get themselves a Bible," Ramsey's wife had said. "If you want me, you gotta walk like a man."

  That's what they held out for, these girls. Men. Military men. Cops. Long-haul collegiates going for the big degrees, business, engineering, even medicine or law. That's what his wife had done—she'd held out for him. This one, too—Teresa. Got herself a hero soldier
, the records said. Only she got handed the short stick of God, didn't she? Husband killed in Sandland. So she was stuck with the kid-and-no-husband scenario, like it was nigger fate.

  The thought drew Ramsey's mind back in bitterness and melancholy to his wife. Who had gotten the short stick, too, in the long run, you might say. But that was a whole 'nother story, and he didn't have time to torture himself with it now.

  He got out of the Charger. There was a gate in the schoolyard fence. It was padlocked and an older man, a janitor in dirty greens, was sitting in a chair beside it in lieu of a guard. Ramsey showed the man his shield through the diamond links. The janitor rose creakily and opened the padlock.

  As Ramsey walked across the yard toward Teresa, the children chased each other all around him. Their surflike roar broke into individual voices, cascades of laughter and wordless cries. These seemed to feed the melancholy in him somehow, seemed to increase his brooding awareness of the evil fate arrayed against him. So, too, did the sight of Teresa as he came closer and closer to her, as she reminded him more and more of his wife.

  She had moved from the doorway to settle a dispute between two boys over a kickball. She was turned half away from him and didn't see him approaching. She was bending forward to talk to the children. His eyes went over the curves of her body, and over her profile. Why isn't she teaching in the Northern District public schools where they really need her? he thought—because he wanted to resent her for something other than the fact that she reminded him of his wife, as the laughing children reminded him of his son and daughter.

  "Ms. Grey?" he said. He flashed his badge again as she straightened and turned to look at him. As she came around to face him close up—gave him the whole cornball valentine-shaped face with its high cheekbones and warm brown eyes—the jolt of his attraction to her was startlingly sharp. He was painfully aware that he had once been the sort of man she would have held out for, that now he only seemed to be that man—as his wife had finally understood.