Bad News

by Linwood Barclay

  It sounded as though I’d gotten him out of there just in time.

  The following morning, after another frosty evening with Sarah, I put in a call to the city’s health inspection department from my desk in the Home! section. I got, much to my surprise and in clear violation of my preconceptions about civil servants, a woman who said if I gave her enough details, she could probably find the health inspector responsible for the part of the city where Burger Crisp was located. I waited, hearing her tap away on a keyboard in the background, and then, ‘That would be Brian Sandler. Let me put you through to his extension.’

  A few seconds, a ring, and then, ‘Sandler.’

  I identified myself, told him I was calling from the Metropolitan but left it a bit murky as to whether this was a personal call or he was being interviewed for a story, and quickly told him what had transpired the evening before. Said at least one person, according to my son, who worked there, had come back to the restaurant complaining of food poisoning. That the owner, and her daughters, were not particularly open to discussing any possible problems with the menu. There was the matter of the baseball bat, for example.

  ‘That all seems kind of amazing,’ said Brian Sandler. ‘I know the place you’re speaking of, that’s Mrs Gorkin’s place, she runs it with her girls. Any time I’ve been in there, it’s always seemed pretty shipshape to me.’

  I thought about the overflowing trash cans, the general appearance of the joint. Even before finding out there might be an actual health problem, the place looked a bit dodgy. If Paul hadn’t been working there, I doubt I’d have gone in. And now there was this other stuff, this business of dropping off packages, other people picking them up.

  ‘Seriously?’ I said.

  ‘I’m looking at their file here, and they have a passing grade, Mr Walker. I’ve been in there personally. Nice people.’

  ‘Mrs Gorkin?’

  ‘You mentioned your son works there?’

  ‘Well, not anymore. Not since yesterday.’

  ‘Maybe you need to look into that. Getting fired, he might have had an ax to grind, you know?’

  ‘No no, you see, that happened after the other thing. Look, we saved some food from there, so that you could test it. We put it in our fridge as soon as we got back home and—’

  ‘I tell you what. I’m heading out this morning, and I’ll drop in, see how things are at Burger Crisp and I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and gave him my number. ‘Could you call me this afternoon and let me know what you find out?’

  ‘I’ll get back to you,’ Sandler said, in what I thought was a pretty noncommittal way, and hung up.

  That’s when I realized Frieda was standing behind me.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she asked. ‘With the feature?’

  I sighed. ‘It’s coming along. Look, I’ve had a few things going on I just needed to deal with, but don’t worry, you’ll get your story.’

  ‘Because the thing is,’ Frieda said, almost wincing, like it was hurting her to tell me this, ‘they want, well, I think Mr Magnuson wants me to do a performance review on you. To see how you’re doing here.’

  ‘A performance review. Frieda, it’s my second day on the job. How on earth can you be expected to assess my work for a performance review? I haven’t turned in a single story to you yet.’

  ‘Well, that’s certainly true. But if Mr Magnuson wants me to do it, I’m not going to tell him no. But I don’t want you to feel under any pressure. This would be a chance not only for me to tell you how you’re doing, but a chance to tell me how you feel things are going, whether you have any issues you want to raise, any goals, that kind of thing.’

  ‘My issue would be that this paper is totally fucking me over at the moment, Frieda,’ I said. She blinked. I continued, ‘I’ve gotten some great stories for this paper, but Magnuson feels that because they sort of fell into my lap, or more accurately, because I stumbled into some deep shit a couple of times, I don’t really deserve any credit. And then some dip-shit reporter from a two-bit paper in the burbs figures he can give his career a shot by sabotaging mine – may he get trapped in a Wal-Mart cave-in, the son of a bitch – and now I’m sent to the exclamation point section, working with you, no offense, because this is the first newspaper department I’ve worked in where you get cookies in the afternoon, but this is not really where I want to be, so when you do your performance review, in the part where it talks about attitude, you could put down that mine could be categorized as,’ and I thought a moment, ‘miffed.’ I smiled. ‘Yes, fucking miffed.’

  Frieda’s mouth was half open. Finally, it occurred to her to close it, and she said, ‘It’s true. You really are an asshole.’

  I tried to think of something to say, but Frieda’s comeback seemed so out of character that I was struck dumb. We seemed engaged in a staring contest when, thankfully, my phone rang.

  ‘I better get this,’ I said. Frieda walked off and I grabbed the receiver. ‘Walker,’ I said.

  ‘It’s me,’ Trixie said. ‘I called to apologize.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t been totally honest with you.’

  ‘I kind of figured that.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask anything else of you. I was wrong to put you in an awkward position. I took advantage of our friendship.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘This has been a tough time for me. I just hope no one saw that picture in the paper.’ She paused. ‘No one that matters. But I think he’s still snooping around. Benson, that is.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘I’m calling from my cell. I’ve been out of town the last day, I’m getting back to Oakwood early this afternoon. I’d like to tell you what’s going on.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Not on the phone. Can you come out to the house? At one-thirty?’

  I paused. ‘Here’s the thing, Trixie. Things are not very good right now with Sarah. Personally, and professionally. My dust-up with Martin Benson got me moved out of the newsroom and cost Sarah a promotion. You follow that trail back and it leads to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t blame you for being pissed.’

  ‘Look, I value our friendship too, but it’s kind of interfering with my marriage these days. Sometimes I think Sarah has the idea that we’ve got something going on.’

  Although it might have been slightly humiliating had Trixie laughed then, it also would have been comforting. Instead, she was silent.

  ‘You still there?’ I said.

  ‘This’ll be the last time,’ Trixie said. ‘I want to tell you everything. I think you should know everything. I feel like,’ she seemed to be catching her breath, ‘I feel like I have to tell somebody. And you’re one of the few people I actually trust.’

  I sighed, closed my eyes. I felt, suddenly, very tired. There seemed to be so much going on. My troubles with Sarah. My career in a shambles. Losing Paul his job. And now Trixie wanted to unburden herself to me. I didn’t know whether I had the energy.

  ‘Zack?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What time did you say, one-thirty?’

  ‘That’s perfect,’ she said. ‘I should be back home by then.’

  I arrived around 1:25 p.m. Trixie’s nondescript two-story brick house was two doors down from our old place, the one Sarah and I and the kids had lived in during our suburban interlude. I wondered who lived there now, and how much they knew about what had happened in that house.

  There was no car in Trixie’s driveway, no sign of her GF300 on the street. Perhaps I had beat her home from wherever she happened to be coming from. I parked in the drive, rang the bell, got no answer, and got back into my car.

  Trixie pulled into the drive ten minutes later.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, getting out of her car. ‘There was a truck rollover on the expressway.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I only got here a couple minutes ago.’

  She was in jeans and
a silk blouse, and her high heels clicked on the pavement and flagstone as she approached the front door, keys out. She put the key in the deadbolt lock, turned it, and cocked her head to one side.

  ‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘It didn’t feel like the bolt went back.’

  ‘That happens with me sometimes,’ I said. ‘You can’t tell whether you unlocked it or whether it was already unlocked.’

  She opened the door, somewhat warily, and stepped inside. I followed. Trixie had a kind of Crate & Barrel look going on throughout the first floor, and the tasteful decorations gave no hint of the ‘early dungeon’ décor of the basement. She headed straight for the kitchen, all white cupboards and aluminum trim with skylights filling the room with light. She tossed her purse onto the countertop, where there was a copy of the Suburban. She handed it to me.

  ‘Check it out,’ she said.

  It was a pretty good picture of her. Striding from her car to a coffee shop. The wind blowing her hair back so you could get a good look at her face. And under the pic, Lesley Carroll’s photo credit.

  ‘Shit,’ I said, putting down the paper. I didn’t bother to read Martin Benson’s accompanying story, which speculated about just what sort of activities this woman engaged in in the fine, morally upright town of Oakwood.

  ‘I’ll start some coffee,’ she said. She opened the freezer, hunted around. ‘Can you do me a favor? I keep my tins of coffee in the freezer, keeps it fresher longer, but there’s none in here. There’s probably some in the fridge downstairs, in the freezer compartment? You want to grab that while I get some cups out?’

  ‘The basement?’ I said.

  Trixie flashed a smile at me. ‘You’re a big boy. You go past the rack, around the corner, there’s the second fridge. I’ve got decaf and regular, take your pick.’

  ‘The rack?’

  Now she sighed, hands on hips, looking at me like I was six. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘No,’ I said, already turning for the door to the basement. ‘I can do this.’

  I flicked on the light at the top of the broad-loomed stairs and descended into Trixie’s pleasure palace – or torture chamber. Pleasure and torture seemed so closely linked in Trixie’s world, it was difficult to know what terminology to use.

  It had been a long time since I’d been down here. And the last time had not been as a client, but to rescue one who’d been strapped in a bit too snugly to one of Trixie’s restraint devices, a huge wooden X with straps at all the far points.

  I found another switch at the bottom of the stairs to light up the whole room, and there was the wall adorned with straps and belts and whips, the kind of stuff that a naive individual like myself might have first thought would be used to secure camping gear to the roof of a car. But then, once you saw the collection of silver and fur-lined handcuffs hanging there, it started to dawn on you that this stuff was not intended for a trip to Yellowstone Park.

  The room looked pretty much as it had on my last visit, except this time, the guy strapped to the big X wasn’t doing any struggling.

  He was dead.

  I froze when I saw him. Stripped to the waist, arms and legs secured, throat cut, blood everywhere.

  Martin Benson.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Did you find it?’ Trixie shouted from upstairs. She must have been wondering why it was taking me so long to find a tin of coffee in a fridge. ‘You’re not playing with my toys, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, unable to take my eyes off Benson. I don’t exactly have a medical degree, but I was as sure as I could be that there was no urgency to check for a pulse, to get the paramedics here pronto. Martin Benson looked very, very dead.

  His head was tilted to the right, resting on his shoulder. The gash in his neck appeared to run right under his thick chin, but with his head slumped slightly forwards, it was difficult to tell. But that was where the blood started, and there was a lot of it, smeared across his oversized torso, blackening his trousers, on the floor.

  Over in the corner, I saw a shirt and jacket and tie, presumably his.

  I think I might have thrown up if I hadn’t heard Trixie coming down the steps. I whirled around, saw her long legs appear first, then the rest of her. ‘What has caught your interest down here, Za—’

  Her jaw dropped, and then she screamed.

  I ran to her, held on to her, pulled her towards me so she wouldn’t have to look. ‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘Oh God oh God oh God!’

  She broke away from me, approached Martin Benson slowly. ‘Oh God, it’s him,’ she said. ‘The guy. The son of a bitch from the paper.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s him.’

  She took another tentative step towards him, reaching out.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ I said. ‘Just leave everything the way it is.’ I looked away again, took a couple of deep breaths. ‘I’ll go call the police.’

  ‘Look,’ Trixie said, pulling herself together. ‘There’s a note.’

  A piece of paper was rolled up and tucked into one of the closed handcuffs hanging from the wall display. She slid it out.

  ‘Trixie, you shouldn’t be touching that. The police will want it, they’ll want to check it for fingerprints, they’ll—’

  Trixie unrolled the sheet, looked at what was written on it, and went very white. She whispered, ‘They’ve found me.’

  ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who’s found you?’

  ‘Someone must have seen the photo and told them. They’ve got friends everywhere.’ There was panic in her voice.

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked her. ‘Show me the note.’

  But she had already folded it and put it in the front pocket of her jeans. She stood a moment, breathing out slowly, pulling herself together.

  ‘You’re going to have to help me,’ she said.

  ‘Help you what?’

  ‘We have to get rid of the body.’

  Perhaps, if I weren’t still in some sort of shock at discovering a dead guy in Trixie’s basement, a guy that Trixie would probably have been happy to see dead a few days earlier, I might have been able to laugh at her suggestion. But I was too numb for that. Instead, very slowly, I said, ‘Trixie, we have to call the police. And we have to call them right now.’

  She took a step towards me. ‘You don’t understand. There are things I have to do. Things I have to sort out. I don’t have time to waste talking to the police. I can’t get involved with them. I’ve got some plastic in the garage, we could wrap him up, find someplace to dump him—’

  ‘Trixie!’

  I guess she was unaccustomed to hearing me raise my voice, to actually shout. Her eyes danced for a second, and she focused on me as though seeing me for the first time.

  ‘Trixie, we are not hiding the body. You’re not hiding it, and I’m not helping you. You have to tell me what the hell is going on. Who’s done this? Who did this to Benson?’ I paused a moment. ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’

  ‘You think I’m capable of this? Of this?’ Her arm flung out in the direction of Benson. ‘You don’t know me better than to think I would do something like that?’

  ‘There seems to be a lot I don’t know about you, Trixie. Like what’s written on that note. Why you were so scared for your picture to show up in the paper. Why those guys selling stun guns put you on edge. Does this have something to do with Canborough, Trixie? Something that happened five years ago?’

  She blinked.

  ‘Is this all related to three bikers getting killed? Did you see something that night, Trixie? Are you on the run? Are you some kind of a witness?’

  ‘What have you been doing? Have you been checking up on me? What gives you the right to start poking into my personal affairs and—’

  ‘Trixie, forget about that. We have to call the police. They can protect you. They can get whoever did this to Benson, they can make it so you don’t have to be on the run.’

  Trixie appeared to be weighing her options. ‘Maybe you’re
right,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep living this way.’

  I smiled. ‘Okay. Let’s go upstairs. I’ll make the call if you want.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ she said, and reached out for my hand.

  It happened so fast, I never had a chance to react.

  As she slapped a cuff around my right wrist, she pulled my body towards her, yanking my right arm forwards towards the base of the stair handrail, onto which she snapped the matching cuff.

  Thrown off balance, I shouted, ‘Jesus Christ! Trixie, what the hell are you doing?’

  She jumped back, afraid that I might try to grab her with my free arm. I yanked my right arm and the handcuffs jangled, cut into my wrist. The handrail held firm. I shook it several times, unable to believe my predicament. When I looked back at Trixie, she was holding a second pair of cuffs.

  ‘I’m going to toss these to you,’ she said, ‘and I want you to put them on your other wrist, then put the other cuff on the railing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need to be able to get by you on the stairs, Zack. I can’t trust that you won’t try to hang on to me.’ She tossed the cuffs and they landed by my foot.

  ‘I’m not putting them on,’ I said.

  Without saying a word, Trixie disappeared around the corner where I guess the fridge that held the coffee was, and returned a moment later with a gun in her hand.

  ‘Trixie, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re probably right, Zack, but I’m in a rather desperate situation at the moment, and I don’t think you should test me.’ She raised the gun and pointed it at me.

  I stared at her a good ten seconds, then bent down, picked up the cuff with my left hand, moved it close to my right hand, which I used to apply half the cuff. Then I slipped the other cuff around the railing and closed it.

  ‘I need to hear it close,’ Trixie said. I squeezed it, and she heard the telltale click. ‘That’s good.’ She produced two keys from her jeans. ‘I’m going to leave these right on the table here, so that when someone comes to rescue you, you’ll be able to get those off right away. And promise me you won’t start yelling your head off as soon as I leave here. I need some time to get away. If you’re going to yell, I’m going to have to leave you gagged.’ She nodded at some red balls attached to straps that were hanging on the wall with the other S&M equipment.