by Ed Gorman
Ed Gorman
Night Kills
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Frank Brolan, successful adman, unwitting fall-guy. Someone has murdered a call girl and planted her in his freezer. Frank has to find the killer before the cops find him.
As the body count rises, with the killer leaving Frank's mark at every crime, Frank flees into the night and the city. He finds help in an unlikely duo-a teenage whore and a wheelchair-bound dwarf with a mind like a steel trap…
***
"A painfully powerful and personal novel about three outsiders-an alcoholic advertising executive, a man twisted and disfigured by spina bifida, and a runaway teenage girl-brought together in a noir unlike any you've ever read. Violent, melancholy, bitterly humorous, Night Kills is a 'relationship' novel of the classic mould. As disturbing and sad a crime novel as I've ever read."
-Cemetery Dance
"Gorman is the poet of dark suspense."
-Bloomsbury Review
"Watch out! Ed Gorman's coming to get you!"
-Crime Time
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P. (scanning & OCR) & P. (formatting & proofing) edition.
***
PROLOGUE
EMMA WAS KILLED ON A TUESDAY, which meant it was Mr. Pinkham day. Actually she sort of liked Mr. Pinkham, or at least she felt sorry for him. Sometimes pity was a stronger pull for Emma than affection. Anyway, Mr. Pinkham. He was fifty-nine, wore custom-tailored dark suits that helped disguise his girth, smelled of cigarettes and hair spray, and boy, did he tip. On her last birthday he'd given her two hundred dollars in cash in a baby-blue Hallmark envelope that also contained a sentimental card. Mr. Pinkham was in banking and was obviously rich. In nearly eleven months of seeing him, she'd detected only one small kink. He liked her to daub herself between the legs with strawberry flavouring before he got down to business. Given some of the men she'd known, this was not a real kink at all.
One other thing about Mr. Pinkham: His wife was dying. Cervical cancer. Once, after he was finished and dressed and pouring himself a drink, he started telling Emma about the process of chemotherapy his wife was undergoing, and then he started crying so hard, he had to go into the bathroom and throw up. When he came out, he was still crying. She helped him over to the bed and held him and rocked him and kissed him tenderly on the cheek and forehead over and over again. Then Emma started crying. She wasn't even sure why. It was just that sometimes everything seemed so sad.
That Tuesday she was to meet him for shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue in the Gavindae Common, the Twin Cities' only real snotty shopping mall. You felt special just walking around the five levels-Burberrys, Pendleton, the San Francisco Music Box Company, and Anne Klein, they were all there-you didn't even have to buy anything. You just felt special.
It was nearing closing time. Mr. Pinkham had phoned to say that he'd had a long day at the bank and an even worse day at the hospital. His wife was slipping, slipping. Whenever his wife got very bad, Mr. Pinkham became impotent. Both he and Emma knew this from experience. On such days he always met her at a mall. Buying her things seemed to make him feel better for some reason. Then they'd usually have dinner-how Mr. Pinkham loved to pour A-1 sauce on his steak; drown it to the point that Emma would laugh and laugh-and then he'd walk her to her car, pay her, and tip her, just as if they'd spent time in bed, and then kiss her chastely on the nose. Always on the nose, with his dry little mouth. Emma invariably found this sweet and squeezed his hand goodbye in response. Then Mr. Pinkham walked to his huge new Chrysler and got inside and tooted goodbye.
A call came for her at Anne Klein, where she was looking at silk blouses with stand-up collars and three-button cuffs, wondering if they were right for her. When she heard herself paged, she asked the salesperson where she might take the call. The woman smiled and directed her to the office. She was the same salesperson who had five minutes ago told Emma how beautiful she was-so long and graceful a neck, so perfect yet exotic a face. Emma had always found women better at giving compliments than men. They just knew how to do it better.
The call was from Mr. Pinkham. He was terribly sorry, but the doctor was now saying that Mrs. Pinkham might not last the night. Emma could tell Mr. Pinkham was struggling not to cry. For the first time ever she said "I love you" to Mr. Pinkham. She didn't even worry if he'd misinterpret it. She just said, "I love you." She imagined he needed to hear that very badly. Then he did start crying, just a little, and said, "I love you, too, Emma." Then he hung up.
In the parking lot Emma stood by her new Mustang convertible inhaling the chill autumn air. She could smell snow coming. Poor Mr. Pinkham. She wished he could enjoy the night.
In the car she turned up KJJO. She needed to hear good strong rock and roll. It was sort of like taking vitamins.
In twenty minutes she was on the Crosstown headed home. When she came to her exit, she glanced by instinct in the rear-view mirror, and for the first time she saw him, the man who'd been hiding on the floor in back.
He said, "Just keep driving, bitch, just like you're headed home."
By ten o'clock they were driving county roads. Gravel dust glowed silver in their wake.
At a farm that had obviously been deserted, the outbuildings leaning so pitifully they seemed about to collapse, he had her pull in.
She got out, just as he told her to. She kept quiet, just as he told her to. She took off her clothes, just as he told her to.
He felt her breasts-she had very nice breasts-and then he slid his hand between her legs. He complained how dry she was there. "You fucking bitch." He backhanded her hard across the mouth.
She started crying. She thought of when she'd been a little girl on the farm near a small town named Coon Rapids. She thought of her high school graduation night, the only time she'd ever really gotten drunk in her whole life, and of giving up the struggle to keep her purity. She thought of moving to Minneapolis. Of working in the law office. She was now only twenty-eight yet it seemed she'd done so much in her young life and it whirled by her, voices and images and even smells. Memory.
He stabbed her first in the abdomen, ripping the knife through her stomach, and then he started stabbing her in the chest and face. She held up her hands to hold him off but that only gave his knife new targets. He cut and slashed and hacked at her fingers until several of them were just bloody stubs. Before she died, she had time to stare down at several pieces of her fingers in the dust.
Finally he stabbed her in the forehead. By this time she was on the ground, and he was straddling her. He left the butcher knife sticking out of her forehead as he unzipped his trousers and started putting himself into her.
Afterward he lay next to her in the moonlight. They might have been lovers. His whole chest heaved. He was sweaty, sticky, exhausted. Blood-covered. The stench of her was terrible. He closed his eyes, felt the breeze dry his sweat. In the distance cows stirred and mooed. Then pigs. Dead corn stalks rattled in the wind. Skeleton bones.
Fucking bitch.
From the trunk he took the tarpaulin. He spread it out and wrapped her up in it tight. It was awkward carrying her back to the car. He sort of staggered. At least she wasn't leaking. The whole idea of the tarpaulin was that there wouldn't be any blood.
In the car he turned up the radio good and loud. God, did he need a drink. He was careful to drive the speed limit, but still, on those rutted county roads he could hear her bounce and bang.
God, did he need a drink.
1
THE WAY BROLAN FIGURED IT, probably not more than three or four couples would get a divorce because of the party tonight. For an advertising shindig that wasn't so bad.
The place was the Hyatt Regency in Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis, the time was 8:37 p.m., and the occasion was the Brolan-Foster Agency's winning
the Down Home Bakery account, which had annual billings of slightly more than ten million dollars. In the Twin Cities it was one of three accounts agency presidents would hand over their teenage daughters to win.
Dinner for sixty had been in The Willows, with its mirrored pillars and ceilings, with its seemingly endless amounts of smorgasbord, pates, seafood and vegetable marinades, mousses and salads. The agency people took up about a third of the place, and it was easy to spot them. They were the ones giving drunken champagne toasts every five minutes and then breaking into applause. Some of the restaurant's other guests found this amusing. Some wanted to go over and punch in a few faces. Hovering waiters asked again and again if there could be, uh, just a little more quiet. Chuck you, Farley, and the horse you rode in on.
Finally the party repaired to a bar down the street. Shouts and laughter like gunfire erupted on Seventh Street as the agency folks wandered down the deep canyons made by the fifty-one-storey IDS Centre and several department stores, including Dayton's. One couple, whose respective husband and wife had been unable to be at the party, stood in the centre of the street alternately kissing and then pointing up at one of the tall buildings where Brolan-Foster had its agency on the ninth and tenth floors. The chill night only made all this insanity even more fetching and precarious-soon enough it would be bitter Minnesota winter; soon enough they would be home and sober with their respective mates. But for now it was time to laugh and shout and hit on whomever you could get away with hitting on. Before the predicted snow came the following day.
The five bartenders behind the bar looked as wary as cops at a particularly unruly demonstration. In less than five minutes the place had filled up, the jukebox thundered rock and roll, and people usually so staid they looked like Bible college graduates were out there shaking their asses as if they were trying to get rid of them.
Brolan paced. He was a pacer. Maybe that was why, at forty-five, he was reasonably trim. Pacing. He'd paced his way through nine different jobs in twenty-three years in advertising, paced his way through a divorce, and paced his way through three earnest but hopeless affairs. He tried hard not to think about Kathleen Logan. Jealousy never did anybody any good, least of all somebody as naturally suspicious and pessimistic as Brolan. So, even in his dinner jacket, his startling white hair and gaslight-blue eyes complementing the black outfit well enough that he should be able to pick up somebody that night, he paced.
In fact, he hated parties, and he hated groups of drunks. One or two drunks at a time was all right, but groups of drunks were oppressive. All that hand-shaking, back-patting, laughing in your ear. All that repeating of the same thing over and over and over. All those sudden embarrassing moments of overmuch sentiment. ("I couldn't ash for a b'er boss'n you, Frank, I really mean that, no shit.") Pacing was partly a way of avoiding all this stuff's being inflicted on him. It was harder to hit a moving target.
The time was 9:57 p.m., and nearly everybody had wandered in by then-account executives, art directors, media buyers, copywriters, television production people, and the accounting department.
He was at the bar having a straight club soda when his partner, Stu, came over. Earlier this evening, Stu had gone somewhere.
"This is just incredible, isn't it?" Stu said. He had the slightly unkempt, chunky look of a college lineman, his blonde hair still worn in something resembling a Beaties' cut, his wine-red dinner jacket giving him the air of a high school heart throb at his first prom. Despite a certain hard-ass quality, there was a peculiar vulnerability about Foster that most people sensed, and many people enjoyed. Maybe that was how you could account for his otherwise inexplicable success in the agency business over the past few years. Quite on his own Foster had been able to snag several of the Twin Cities' largest accounts. As the creative side of the partnership, Brolan knew that the agency could compete with anybody. They had three particularly good writer-artist teams. But even so, Brolan was spellbound by the way Foster had been able to go out right after they'd opened up shop for themselves and start landing the biggies.
Foster rattled his glass. "You as hungover as I am?"
"Worse, probably."
Foster laughed. "It was like college days last night."
At 3:23 the previous afternoon, Brolan and Foster had been informed by telephone that the Down Home account was theirs. Down Home was especially nice to win for two reasons. First because it more than tripled agency billings and took them from the status of a small shop to one of the majors (as a major agency, they'd be more impressive when they pitched major clients). And second because they'd stolen the account from Richard Cummings, their former boss, and a man of whom it had been said, "He gives psychosis a bad name." Until that afternoon, Cummings had been head of a twenty-million-dollar shop. Until then.
"You remember that woman?" Foster asked.
"From last night?"
"Right."
"Uh-huh. Sort of, anyway."
"What the hell was it all about?"
"One of us must have said something."
"You remember saying anything nasty?"
"Huh-uh."
"Neither do I. Boy, that was spooky," Foster said. "Throwing that drink in your face."
"No shit."
The previous night they'd gone out celebrating by themselves. Though Foster's wife, Dana, had wanted to go along, Foster convinced her this was kind of a 'guy' thing and that the next night, at a dinner party the agency was hurling together, she'd have her fun.
Both Brolan and Foster had grown up in Minneapolis, Brolan going to Washburn High and Foster to Southwest, and both graduating from the University of Minnesota, so they knew a lot of places to hit.
Around midnight they ended up in one of those little hotel piano bars where salesmen always try to put the expense account hustle on divorced secretaries who are just starting to look matronly. They'd been standing at the bar quietly having one or two final drinks for the evening, talking about all the plans they had for the agency, when a beautiful woman in a simple white blouse and floor-length dark skirt bumped against Brolan, spilling his drink all over the arm of his sport coat.
Being drunk, and having something of a temper anyway, Brolan started to swear, not at the lady particularly, just swear in general at whatever dopey god permitted such little irritating accidents to happen.
The woman said, "That's not the sort of language a gentleman should use in front of a lady."
Brolan, angry with her contemptuous tone-had she ever thought of apologizing for dumping the drink?-started to tell her that despite her beauty he was not necessarily going to act like a gentleman.
Which was when she threw her drink in his face.
It was one of those terrible moments when everything seems to freeze, when everything seems to become hushed, when everything about the knowable universe becomes irrational and spooky. One moment you're having a quiet drink with your best friend and partner, and the next you're in some insane kind of confrontation with a great-looking woman who appears to have been sired by the same man who gave the world Richard Speck.
Irrationally Brolan had swung his arm out, not to strike her, just to claim some space for himself that he didn't want her to invade. The bartender, having misinterpreted the gesture, jumped over the bar and got Brolan in a hammerlock. "We don't hit broads in this place, ya got me, pal?" the beefy guy had shouted into Brolan's face.
Brolan spluttered that he'd had no intention of hitting this "broad," but it did no good. Other eyes were on him now, watching, disapproving. Some drunk asshole trying to cream a broad. Hate guys like that.
The woman was gone. Vanished.
"Let's go, Frank," Foster had said gently.
"Lucky I didn't call the freakin' cops," the bartender said. He was still mad. To Foster he said, "Get your pal outta here right now."
As they stood talking about what had happened the night before, Foster said, "I kept waking up all night and thinking about it. It was really crazy."
"Tell me abou
t it" Brolan shuddered. He had always worried that he drank too much. At least that's what his ex-wife had told him. Things had been so out of control with that woman in the bar. He kept seeing and hearing fragments of the incident. Total loss of control. Scary shit. No doubt about it
"Hey," Foster said.
"What?"
"Look at your hand."
Brolan looked down at his hand. Twitching. Lordy.
"It's past, my friend. Last night. The woman and all that Past."
"Yeah. I know that, but my nervous system doesn't seem to have gotten the message."
"God, Frank," Foster said, putting a heavy arm on his partner's shoulder. "We deserve to have a good time. Am I right?"
"You're right. When you're right, you're right."
"For six years we bust our asses, and people laugh at us-those little piss-ants, they'll never amount to anything-and finally we make it big. And, in the meantime, we finally get even with our old boss." He hoisted his glass, spilling rum-and-Coke all over his wide hand. "To the two most wonderful guys in the world!"
"Us," Brolan said, hoisting his own glass.
"You're goddamn right, us," Foster said, shouting over the din of disco music and the sweet seductive lies of adultery. "You're goddamn right."
By midnight the place resembled a high school prom. The men had all ripped away their bow ties and cummerbunds, the women had dashed all their corsages and no longer worried about their hair, and most of them danced in their stocking feet, having kicked off their shoes an hour before. It wasn't just the young people dancing, either. The grey-hairs from the accounting department were out there, too. The mood was melancholy but in a nice way, couples holding each other tight, dancing to slow music there in the darkness, lit only by the lights behind the bar. Every once in a while somebody would jump up on a chair and shout out another toast to the Brolan-Foster Agency, but mostly there was just the slow dancing. If anybody remembered, or cared, that the next day was a workday, nobody let on.
