Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  Riding the elevator to the fourth floor, she’d tried to shake off these morbid thoughts. She’d determined not to think of Paul. She wouldn’t think of anyone or anything. She would concentrate on retrieving Michael’s cover letter. It was what a journalist was supposed to do—stick to the task at hand and never mind the context or the consequences.

  When she had turned into the newsroom, there had been few people about. Alcock, apparently unaware he’d been fired, had been standing at the telex machine, frowning fiercely at something while a couple of young reporters, mirroring his frown with their own, had remained glued to their computer screens. No one had paid any attention to her as she made her way to her desk, pulled her keys from her purse, and bent over to unlock the drawer. As she did so, she glanced across the room at Guy’s desk. How unremarkable it looked, how clean, how tidy, how ordinary, how Guy! Was it all a dream?

  She had yanked at the overstuffed WSO file in her overstuffed drawer and extracted Michael’s letter. She stared at it, unseeing. The type seemed a blur. Burn it—the thought flickered in her mind, then died. She looked toward the library. Photocopy it, put the copy back in the file. Just in case. Just in case what? She wouldn’t let her mind dwell there.

  On her way to the library, she had glanced into the trash bins dotted around the newsroom. Each was virtually empty. Likely, they’d been cleared early Saturday morning after the night news staff had left.

  In the library, waiting for the photocopier to warm up, she had checked the wastebaskets. Empty. She had run her eyes over the forest of filing cabinets and the yards of shelving, the stacks of books, the various cardboard boxes of god-knows-what, the microfiche and microfilm machines, the desks, cupboards, chairs, plants—all of it in so small a space it was a wonder Vera was able to maintain order. Something Leo had said, something about the lights in the library being left on taunted her. Would Guy have waved all the file’s damning material in Paul’s face, had it open for him to see, and to seize? Or—and surely this was more like Guy—would he have concealed it, or at least the bulk of it, somewhere?

  Or had Paul hidden it somewhere? No, that didn’t make sense. How would he retrieve it?

  The file wasn’t in Guy’s desk, Leo had said. And he wouldn’t have slipped it in one of the reporter’s desks. (And let someone else get the credit?) He might have taken it home. Or…? The library was ideal, a midden, a haystack. Was it possible? Or was she inventing all this to put off going to the police? The photocopier’s indicator light declared readiness.

  She had seated herself on the edge of Vera’s desk, pulled a lighter and a cigarette from a package in her purse, lit it, and assessed the situation more closely, thinking that perhaps finding the file—if indeed it was to be found—perhaps wouldn’t be so difficult. You could eliminate certain areas easily—shelves (too open), clippings file cabinet (drawers too narrow), desks (locked). The cupboard below the photocopier had drawn her eye. But a quick investigation revealed nothing but tidy stacks of photocopy paper. The other machines in the room offered no hiding places. That really left only the big cabinets for the photo files and the vertical files—although, granted, there were banks of them. On the other hand, Vera did put colour tags on the files to code them. The file would have no tag.

  What one would Guy have picked? The farthest one? It was half buried against the back wall, nearest the back-stairs door. This is nuts, she’d thought to herself, pocketing the lighter and walking over. I’m procrastinating like mad. Give up and get over to the cop shop.

  She opened a drawer, half-expecting her first try would yield up the thing, and when it didn’t she’d been mildly disappointed, as though her 6/49 ticket had failed to win. A second drawer and then a third had been similarly devoid of anything save the usual blue, yellow, pink, and green files. Finally, she had knelt on the linoleum and opened the bottom drawer. Nothing.

  She had started again on the next cabinet, proceeding down the drawers one by one, feeling as she did so that she really was losing it. It was a long shot. And she was probably dead wrong. The file wasn’t here. But she found herself anyway leaning on the top drawer of a third set of cabinets, trying—shudder—to think like Guy.

  It was then that she thought she heard something, a soft footfall, a rustle of clothes resisting movement. Please don’t use the copier, she thought, prepared to dart out and snatch the letter from where she’d left it under the lid. But there was no other sound.

  She turned to the next set of cabinets, and repeated her movements, again with no luck. She was about to open the bottom drawer when she noticed something about the construction of the filing cabinet that had escaped her conscious mind before. Between the bottom drawer and the bottom of the cabinet itself was a height of about four inches. If the bottom drawer was removed completely, a dead space just deep enough to hide a thick file would be available. Then the drawer could be replaced, covering over the space, revealing nothing if it was rolled out in the normal fashion. Rarely did anyone pull a file door out completely. It was a reasonably clever hiding place, in the short term. It was worth a try.

  She pulled out the bottom drawer. There wasn’t much room to manoeuvre and the drawer was surprisingly heavy. With a grunt she was able to hoist the drawer off its rollers and begin the task of dragging it out. But she stopped midway, for suddenly she felt the presence of someone looming beside her, heard the sound of laboured breathing, smelled a distinctly masculine odour of sweat combined with something more visceral—fear. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the bottom of a pant leg and a shoe, a soft brown oxford, laced in a fastidious double-knot, a patina of dust along the outer sole. She froze. The edge of the file drawer dug into her toes. A familiar voice hissed in her ear:

  “What are you looking for, Liz?”

  But before she could speak, she felt the presence lean over and press to the side of her neck the cold, sharp point of a knife.

  40

  Missing

  “This,” growled Leo, clutching the wheel of the Land Rover with both fists, weaving through traffic on Sherbrook, “is a town of Sunday drivers Sunday driving on fucking Sunday. Get out of my way, you old fart,” he bellowed to the Crown Victoria in front of them.

  Stevie pressed her feet to imaginary brakes. “This isn’t how I want to die.” Her teeth sieved the words.

  “You won’t.”

  From Michael’s, they had raced to the phone booth, but no one in the Zit newsroom responded, which was itself worrying. It was drive or die trying. Stevie preferred the former, at a pace perhaps five kilometres over the speed limit, but no more.

  “Are you sure about Mellish?” she gasped, as Leo rounded the corner onto Ellice on what seemed like two wheels.

  “Call it a journalistic hunch.”

  The University of Winnipeg blurred as they hurtled past.

  “But why?” she insisted, in part to keep her mind off Leo’s driving.

  “Beats me.”

  In a moment, he had turned again and brought the Land Rover to a shrieking halt in front of the Citizen building.

  “Hurry,” he said, leaping out. A pale waif in a miniskirt stepped from the revolving doors onto the pavement. It was Julie Olsen, his smokeaholic deskmate. What was a court reporter doing at work on a Sunday? She glared at him, as she had been doing for the past three years. Stevie came up behind him. Great goddamn timing, he thought.

  “You haven’t seen Mellish come in, have you?”

  Her face in the Citizen’s entrance light was sallow and mournful. Leo predicted a long career in newspapers.

  “Nope.” She raised an eyebrow, as if surprised he had even spoken to her.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Since 4:00.”

  “And you’ve been in the newsroom until now?”

  “Like, yeah.” Julie’s brow furrowed in mild annoyance. “Is there a problem?”

  “Any cops around?”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. There was a murder upstairs
last night, you know.”

  “I know. What’s the matter with you? There was a cop here when I came to work. They’ve gone as far as I know.”

  “Have you seen Liz?”

  “I saw her walk through the newsroom. At least I think I did. I was busy on a story so I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention.” She regarded him solemnly, then frowned at Stevie. “I’m on my way to pick up Chinese, by the way. Do you want anything?”

  But Leo was already pushing his way through the door.

  “No, thanks,” Stevie replied for him.

  Rounding the corner into the newsroom, after racing up the stairs and hammering at the entry-code buttons, he was struck by how perfectly normal everything appeared. It was just another slack Sunday evening with a few listless reporters lost in the paper heaps and the sea of desks.

  “Why don’t you fucking morons answer your phones?” he shouted to Alcock between gasps for breath, quickly surveying the newsroom for Liz’s presence.

  “They haven’t rung!”

  Leo had a flash of Martin unplugging switches the night before. “Go into Audrey’s booth. The goddamn switch for incoming calls is probably still off.”

  Leo tore past into library, Stevie in his wake.

  The library was soundless. But there was the lingering odour of cigarette smoke.

  “Liz?” he called. “Liz!”

  Stevie pointed to a desk by the photocopier. “There’s the purse she was carrying in the restaurant.”

  “Liz!” Leo called again, this time more urgently. He stepped quickly up the aisle into the second room of the library and looked out into the back room where they’d been barely twenty-four hours earlier. There was no response. He returned to Stevie. “Maybe she’s in the women’s can.”

  “I’ll check.”

  Leo began a fast search through the forest of filing cabinets, going up and down the narrow aisles, looking for what, he wasn’t sure. Liz’s dead body? If she hadn’t responded to his calls, she couldn’t be nearby. But something was wrong. What was it? The purse! Don’t women drag their purses with them everywhere? Particularly to the toilet?

  And then, on the floor, next to one of the back filing cabinets, he noted a cigarette end. It hadn’t been stubbed out; it had been left to burn down to the filter tip. A brown streak on the linoleum was the souvenir. He picked it up and felt the end. There was a touch of warmth against his fingertip. A lingering odour, acrid and putrefying, assailed his nostrils. He couldn’t imagine Liz leaving a cigarette to burn on the floor. She wasn’t that careless. Well, except in her private life.

  He looked at the door to the back stairwell and turned the knob. On an impulse he stepped through. The door closed softly behind him. He strained his ears. All the tiny squeaks and groans of the old building seemed to find a dull amplification in the muffled rush of rising air in the narrow shaft. The only distinct sound he heard as he made his way down to the third floor was that of Alcock shouting his name somewhere in the library, but it seemed remote, as though from a dream memory. He wondered if he should turn back and alert Stevie, but the downward direction of the stairs somehow gripped him, compelled him to follow gravity’s course. Liz had to have come this way. There was no other explanation for the abandoned purse and her absence from the newsroom. And there was no other exit from the fourth floor.

  He tried the door to the third floor. It was locked, as was the door to the second floor. When he reached the first floor, he hesitated. Because the back staircase was a fire exit, the door, he was sure, would open, and open into the dim back storage room with its jumble of newsboxes. A vision of Liz, laid out like a corpse among them, rose unbidden to his mind and for the first time he felt a ripple of fear. He turned the knob and stepped onto the concrete surface of the room, the scrape of his shoes sounding unnaturally loud. But there was no other sound and an examination of the room yielded nothing. Even through the shadows, he could see the clutter afforded no space for someone to hide, or leave a body, and he felt a moment of relief.

  But had she left by the back door? Or turned the other way and gone through the front lobby? Surely he and Stevie would have encountered her. And there was still the matter of the purse. He looked at the second of two doors set into the wall. Like the one from which he had exited, like so many doors in the Citizen warren, it was completely anonymous, windowless, heavy, grey-painted, giving no clue to outsiders what lay on the other side. He knew where it went, of course—to the subterranean precincts of the building, a whole other world, warm-blooded, pulsating, the air brewing with barely recognizable smells. Here was the source of so many of the building’s recognizable characters, gruff men in blue uniforms, the Morlocks who occasionally ascended to the newsroom to complete obscure tasks among the decadent Eloi.

  This time Leo put his hand to the knob. Am I nuts? Why would Liz go into the basement? But if she were taken there…?

  The knob turned. His heart skipped a beat. Shouldn’t it be locked on the weekend when no one was around? Or was the Citizen building’s fortress exterior and tortuous interior considered insurance enough against any intruder?

  As soon as he swung open the door, a draft of warm fetid air hit him in the face, a pungent mixture of grease and ink and sweat. There were two basements, he recalled, one on top of the other, although the separation of functions was obscure. It had been so long since his last visit he’d forgotten the heavy old wood stairs. And there was more light than he remembered. Along the stairwell and passage of the first of the two basements, the walls, layered with glossy paint, shone luridly blue-white under the fluorescent lamps. In his mind the place was always dark.

  He paused in the passage and considered his options. His earlier visit had been cursory. What he had seen had suggested to him a space as honeycombed and confusing as the building above-ground. In diminished incandescent light off to his left, titanic spools of newsprint lay like slumbering beasts. To the right, a series of small workshops. Beyond them, around a corner, the passage trailed off into darkness.

  It was then that Leo, his senses grown more acute, thought he heard voices drifting upwards from the staircase. While the basement seemed silent, deep in the background a muffled pounding, steady and relentless, throbbed like a great heart. Disturbing at first, it soon felt strangely comforting. Now the sudden intrusion of a human element acted as an alarm and he could feel himself tensing. He strained again to hear, but this time no sound was distinguishable. Had he imagined it?

  He gripped the banister and descended the final set of stairs carefully lest the wooden slats creak and betray his presence. The sub-basement was gloomier than the one above, the lighting more intermittent, the ceiling lower, the passage in front of him narrower. The incessant throbbing of the building was less intense here, but the smell of oil and chemical was sharper. Leo was uncomfortably aware of his own rising apprehension. The voices had not been his imagination. From off to his right there came the low vibrato of a male voice, its owner and the words undistinguishable. By contrast, the higher pitch of a female voice seemed to penetrate the thick rough-hewn walls. The words were similarly indistinct but in the tone held a quality of suppressed panic. There was no doubt the voice belonged to Liz. He felt now the full assault of fear, a clutching at his gut followed by a rush of adrenaline so strong that his heart suddenly pounded furiously against his chest. He knew what he had to do. Flight was out of the question.

  41

  Family Matters

  At first Liz had been too startled to be frightened. It had flashed through her mind that a poor joke was being played on her, but after she had twisted her neck away from the knife point, and looked at the meaty hand holding the handle, then looked along the leather-swathed arm into Roger Mellish’s eyes and saw in them the strange and blazing hostility, felt its penetration, her limbs seemed to grow numb. Crouched on the linoleum, anchored by the heavy file, virtually trapped, she had had to fight back the wave of panic that had surged through her. To his whispered question about
what she was doing she had tried to affect indifference. But her reply had come out as a mumble and when he demanded she repeat herself, the word “nothing” sounded to her ears as guilty and foolish as a child’s lie. He had made her close the drawer then and directed her, silently, knife flashing (although part of her mind realized it was Vera’s letter opener) to remove a different bottom drawer farther along the set of cabinets near the back stairs door. Her deduction had been correct. The file had lain in dust along the floor below. But she had had no time for self-congratulation. Mellish had snatched the file and pushed her toward the backstairs door. Her mind had roiled with other things: should she run? shout? But then it had been too late and she was on the other side of the door.

  For a moment on the landing Mellish had seemed to hesitate, his hot breath pouring onto her neck in moist blasts. When she arched her back in an involuntary shudder, the point of the letter opener had slipped between her shoulderblades in an unnecessary reminder.

  “Why were you looking for this in the library?” he had asked in a low voice.

  The question had caught her off guard.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Liz!”

  “It was a hunch,” she replied when she had gained control of her voice. “I heard about Guy on the radio. I thought maybe the file would still be—”

  “But that doesn’t explain the library, Liz.”

  “I asked…Alcock if anything had been found with Guy’s body. He said no, and the newsroom seemed a poor choice to hide a file—all those locked desks—so I thought maybe the library—”