Night Kills

by Ed Gorman

  Brolan and Foster had come here many times back in the days when they'd been employees and not employers. But as soon as they departed Cummings and Associates, they were no longer viewed by the gang here as reliable. They'd sold out. They were bosses. It was never anything as formal as a dig or a punch in the mouth… but soon enough they detected the subtle but certain way the boys viewed them. And so they started hanging out where top-level management folks were supposed to go. It was a caste system rigid as India's, except nobody would admit it existed.

  Brolan found Culhane's ten-year-old Mercedes sitting in the lot. Despite the recent cleansing snow, the car still needed a wash.

  Brolan got out of his car and stood for a moment taking fresh night air into his lungs. Several times that night he'd thought of giving this all up and just calling the police and telling them what had happened. Maybe they'd believe him after all. The problem was that having a woman in his freezer did not increase his credibility as a witness.

  Taking the fresh air deep, he thought again of Emma's portrait. He was beginning to wish he'd known the woman. Some intimate knowledge of her might help him as he tried to figure out who'd murdered her.

  Feeling refreshed, even a little mean in the face of all the forces against him, Brolan went inside.

  The nautical decor was covered up with holiday decor. An electric Santa Claus peered out from a buoy, and mistletoe hung from an anchor. This was from last year. The place smelled of cigarettes and whiskey.

  Brolan had a straight scotch while his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He didn't see Tim Culhane anywhere. After a time he went to the men's room. The big clean white room was empty, nobody at the urinals, no feet sticking out beneath the stall doors.

  He went back and had a second scotch. This time he asked the bartender-who looked somewhat familiar-if he'd seen Tim Culhane.

  The bartender winked at him. Brolan hated winks. "Think he got lucky."

  "Oh?"

  "Brought some real babe in here; then they took off."

  "His car's still out in the lot. That's why I asked."

  The bartender winked again. "Probably took her car. Is Tim boy lucky or what?"

  Brolan decided to finish his drink slowly. Sometimes it felt good to stand alone at a bar and think about things. There was humanity all around you, reassuring in its way, and yet you weren't forced to be a part of it. He listened to an ancient Beades ballad, Lennon slightly too sweet for Brolan's taste but the song-"Norwegian Wood"-comforting in its smooth line of melody. At this moment even the corny decorations looked nice. He allowed himself the luxury of forgetting the spot he was in. He wanted to stay all night like this. There'd be other old songs on the jukebox. He could forget.

  He felt the cold air on his back when the front door opened. A young couple came in. They had snow on their heads and shoulders. They looked enviably happy. The cold air reminded him again of what lay ahead. He no longer paid attention to the Beades; he downed his drink and started for the front door.

  Earlier the snow had been light, scattered flurries. By this time it was a serious snow, making the Expressway slick, sticking to the contours of parked cars. Oddly enough it did not seem quite as cold.

  He was just looking over Culhane's car-wondering where Culhane might have gone-when he saw headlights start down the steep incline to the parking lot. He thought nothing of them, just continued on to his own car.

  After brushing off his front and back windows with his hand-the moist snow was heavy and white as paste-he slid in behind the wheel and closed the door. And it was then he got his first good glimpse of the car that had just pulled in.

  It was a new silver Cougar. It was Kathleen's car.

  Obviously the occupants hadn't seen him-neither Kathleen nor Culhane-and so they sat in her car talking and smoking cigarettes. Arguing, really. Or that's what it looked like anyway.

  He sat there feeling stupid and embarrassed for all three of them. He should have known that eventually Kathleen would get around to the office heart throb.

  In high school he'd dated a girl ('serious' dating for him; something less for her obviously), and one night, with no warning, he'd been walking along a river path and found her making out passionately with a senior boy. He'd never forgotten the sick and helpless feeling of that terrible moment. It had taken long and solitary weeks to recover, and even then he no longer trusted women the way he once had. He saw the power they had over him, and he knew he had to be wary.

  At some point their argument ended, the one Kathleen and Culhane were having, because she leaned over and pulled him to her gently and kissed him.

  Brolan could smell her perfume, taste her lipstick, feel the silk slip beneath her dress. He dropped his head, unable to watch anymore.

  After a time he heard a car door open. He looked up. Culhane was leaving. He still leaned half-in, half-out of the Cougar. They were talking now. Intense talking. She took his hand and kissed it, something she'd done many times with Brolan. Even in the wan interior light she looked beautiful, far more beautiful than Brolan wanted her to.

  Culhane went over to his car, got a scraper, and proceeded to clean the windows. She gave him a little beep and then left the parking lot. Brolan waited till she got to the top of the incline that lead to the access road and then the freeway. Then he went after her.

  It took him twenty minutes to be sure where she was headed: home. A house in the North Oaks area. In the meantime they both slid around on the snow and ice. Brolan must have passed ten fender-benders. For all its vaunted winter Minneapolis went to hell during the season's first bad snow, as if its citizens had never seen the white stuff before and had no idea how to drive on it Miami couldn't have responded much worse. Unlike Miami, however, what made Minneapolis tolerable was that it was one of the world's great cities, big but not too big, modern but with traces of its prairie history and dignity still in evidence, proud but not disgustingly so a la San Francisco. Wherever he went on vacation, Brolan was always happy to be back in the loving arms of the Twin Cities.

  Even after they left the freeway-Brolan keeping a quarter-mile behind her-the fender-benders continued, red-and-blue emergency lights splashing bright light on white snow. The cops looked fatigued already. They'd have a long night, probably one or two fatalities.

  Only when she reached her own block did Brolan speed up, his car sluicing through the heavy slush. As she pulled into her garage at the side of the Victorian that she was house-sitting all these years while some rich college friends of hers 'did' Europe, Brolan came right in behind her.

  Anger overwhelming him, he twisted off the ignition key and jumped from the car. He didn't get far. Just as he was about to enter the garage, the automatic door started descending in jerky fashion.

  He had to stay out in the night until she left the garage. With only moonlight as illumination, the neighbourhood took on an appealing, Christmas card look. Other Victorians could be seen silhouetted against the dark blue, star-flecked sky, their towers and gables and patterned masonry chimneys nostalgic symbols of a gender time.

  She was as angry as Brolan. "Did you used to follow your wife around this way?" she said, emerging from the garage.

  In the gloom he could not make out the details of her face, But he smelled her cologne and saw the appealing shape of her body inside her dark coat.

  "Why the hell didn't you tell me about Culhane?" he said.

  "Probably because it isn't any of your business."

  So, there you had it. She wasn't even going to deny anything. Offer any excuses.

  She said, "I want to go in." She seemed beat. "Alone." He wanted to strike something. Curse something. He wanted to tell her how betrayed he felt, but what was the sense of whining, when she so obviously didn't care. He also wanted to tell her about Emma.

  When he thought of Emma, he realized how dangerously he was giving in to himself. He should be trying to locate Charles Lane, the man who'd bought the painting of Emma from her pimp. Surely a man willing to pay for
a painting could tell him something about Emma.

  She said, "I'm sorry, Frank."

  He had never heard her apologize before, for anything, and the sound of it surprised him.

  She came over three steps, her heels cracking a membrane of ice as she moved. She took him by the coat and tugged him gently to her. In the moonlit gloom, both of them dark figures against the white snow, she kissed him tenderly on the lips. He tried not to think about her kissing Culhane less than' half an hour before.

  "Some things just don't work out," she said. "It's not anybody's fault particularly. It's just-they don't work out."

  He had no idea what to say.

  "I don't blame you for being angry with me, Frank. I don't even blame you for hating me. But I wish you'd try to believe me that I put everything I had into this relationship. It's just-we're different people, Frank. You want to settle down and get married again, and I understand that. But I'm younger than you, and I'm not ready for that. Not yet anyway. Maybe if we'd met a few years later-"

  She left the thought unfinished.

  At the mention of age Brolan felt foolish. Rather than her lover, he now felt as if he were merely some foolish older man who'd been pestering her, one of those pathetic men who embarrass themselves over young women.

  He turned and started back to his car.

  She grabbed his sleeve. "I'd like you to come in."

  "What?"

  "For a drink. I don't want to leave it like this."

  "I don't think so."

  But when she pulled him closer, he felt overwhelmed, felt love and lust equally, unable to stop himself.

  "Please, Frank. Just this one last time."

  He was trying not to read too much into her tone, but he couldn't help but feel that she was inviting him to go to bed with her.

  He started to say no again, but this time she kissed him full on the mouth, and he knew there would be no backing away. He felt helpless again, the way he had with his first high school girlfriend. It was a perfect fusion of pleasure and pain.

  19

  DENISE NOT ONLY HAD HOT CHOCOLATE, she also had a powdered doughnut and a ham sandwich on rye bread, with hamburger dills and mustard, and she had a tall glass of fresh skim milk. During all of which-or around which, actually-talking with her mouth full, she told him all about it. Everything. The guy in the wheelchair. Which was real weird because not even with the counsellor at the runaway shelter had she told everything. She'd skipped over the part, for example, where her dad got her older sister pregnant and where the sister had a breakdown and went to a mental hospital, where she wrote forlorn letters; and then Dad tried stuff on Denise, but Denise wouldn't let him, though she finally had to leave home to stop him, and how Dad always said it was Mom's dying that had made him this way, that he wouldn't have touched either Denise or her older sister if only he had a regular wife, like every other regular farmer he knew, and how it wasn't wrong anyway, really, because it was about love, it wasn't about rutting, groaning animal sex; it was about love, and who loved you more than your father (of course he was shit-faced whenever he started rolling along on that particular rationale), and by the time he was done trotting out his explanation for why he behaved the way he did, you started to get the idea that maybe by humping his own daughters, he was doing them a favour or something, for God's sake.

  Anyway, Greg Wagner, the guy in the wheelchair, listened to all, never once getting glassy-eyed with boredom or smirking with superiority the way most people did. She even told him about the sleeping room she had and how everybody around her was a junkie-throwing up and sobbing on those long black nights when they'd had too much or not enough-and how, even though she didn't exactly believe in God anymore, she still said her prayers.

  He said, "That's what I do, too."

  "You don't believe in God, either?"

  He shrugged his shoulders. "I guess not."

  "But you still pray?"

  "Yep. Because I figure it can't hurt."

  And for some reason that cracked her up-she felt giddy, as she had the few times she'd smoked marijuana-just the way he said it.

  And then he said, "You know something?"

  "What?"

  "I really like you."

  She grinned. "You know what?"

  "What?"

  "I really like you, too."

  "But guess what you could do to make me like you even more?"

  "What?"

  "Tell me what you were doing on the back porch."

  She rolled her eyes. "Looking for this dude who tried to kill me."

  "Kill you? Are you serious?"

  "Yeah." She hesitated. "You know how I told you that I sometimes-you know, like, do the street-walking thing."

  "Right. I remember that"

  "Well, last night this dude picked me up and-well, he takes me out into the country, see, and I think he's going to try and do something really kinky, but what he does is, he tries to kill me. Tries to get his hands around my throat and choke me."

  "God. Weren't you scared?"

  "Terrified."

  "So, what did you do?"

  So, she told him all about it. Admitted lifting the guy's wallet; running till she was safe; talking to Polly about should she squeeze him for some money.

  "What's the guy's name? In the wallet, I mean?"

  "Brolan," she said. "Frank Brolan."

  "Oh, it couldn't be!"

  She was almost shocked by Greg's adamance. "Really?"

  "He's a very nice guy," Wagner said. He kind of scootched himself up in his wheelchair. She could see that he was excited. But not in a good way. "What'd he look like?"

  "The guy last night?" Wagner nodded.

  "Oh, I don't know. Kind of ordinary. He had a beard."

  "Brolan doesn't have a beard."

  "Oh, well this guy did."

  "See," Wagner said. "I told you it wasn't him."

  She decided, at least for a time, to change the subject. Let Wagner calm down a little. It was as if she'd called one of his best friends a dirty name.

  She looked around the room at all the mementoes of thirties movie stars. She loved stuff like this. Whenever she was staying somewhere that had cable, she always watched the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. She loved how they danced. Ginger was so elegant, the way Denise wished she herself was.

  There on the glass coffee table was a press book for a Betty Grable movie called Mother Wore Tights. Next to that was a colour postcard that showed the Cathay Circle Theatre in Beverly Hills on the night of April 4, 1936. How beautiful and sleek the fancy cars looked; how beautiful and sleek the movie stars themselves looked. The beams of floodlights criss-crossed against the soft silver night. Hundreds of people stood swooning as movie stars emerged from limousines to the bursting intensity of flashbulbs. "Boy," Denise said. "You've got a neat place here."

  "Thank you."

  "And I've never seen so many tapes." She nodded to his videotapes. "Do you have Ginger Rogers?"

  He smiled possessively at his tape collection. "Do you prefer Ginger Rogers the singer-dancer in Shall We Dance?-or do you prefer Ginger Rogers the serious actress in Kitty Foyle?"

  "She was a serious actress?"

  "Yes, and a good one."

  "Really?"

  He smiled again. She got the feeling that he thought she was kind of naive, but that he found it endearing. He wasn't like a john. She wasn't trying to please, but she seemed to be pleasing him anyway. "Really," he said.

  As he arranged himself in his chair once more, getting comfortable, she said, "Would you mind if I asked you about-you know, why you're in the wheelchair and all."

  "Be my guest."

  "I'm not trying to be rude."

  "I know."

  "Were you born that way?"

  "Yes. And I was lucky."

  "Lucky?"

  He laughed. "Well, not lucky-lucky but luckier than the people who had spina bifida before I did. People like me didn't used to live very long. Not until thirty
years ago."

  "What happened then?"

  "Somebody was kind enough to invent the brain shunt, which drains the cerebral spinal fluid. It allowed us to be reasonably self-sufficient and to live a lot longer."

  "I'm glad they invented that, then."

  He shook his head. "I keep thinking about Brolan."

  "You really like him, huh?"

  "Yeah. He seems like a real nice guy-and he's in a lot of trouble. Somebody's really trying to make him look guilty." He sounded as if he wanted to go on, say more, but he didn't.

  She said, "You really don't think it was him last night?"

  "Who tried to kill you? No."

  "But why would somebody do that, then? Pretend to be him, I mean?"

  "I'm not sure. Neither is Brolan."

  Unable to help herself, she yawned. The warmth of the place, the comfort of the recliner in which she sat, had made her tired after such a long day of tension.

  He said, "Would you like to watch a movie?"

  "Right now?"

  "Sure. We're waiting for Brolan to contact me. We may as well have some fun doing it. What kind of movie would you like to see?"

  "You want me to choose it?"

  "Why not? You're my guest, aren't you?"

  "Then you're not mad at me-for being on your back porch?"

  "Not anymore. I was. But not anymore." He nodded to the tape library. "Why don't you go pick one?"

  "God, you're really nice."

  "So are you."

  She got up and went over to the tapes. You could tell by the way that he had everything alphabetized and colour coded that these movies were his life. He was a lot more than just a guy in a wheelchair. He was warm, and he was funny, and he was smart, and he was generous. Somehow, being in this place was like being in a retreat of some sort, a place where people couldn't get to you and hassle you and hustle you. And it was because of him-because of the careful, loving way he'd put this place together, layer after layer of things he loved, to protect him from a world that saw him as a freak. Having always felt like a freak herself, she knew just what he was doing.

  "Hey, you've got Cat People," she said.