by Julie Hyzy
The closet light snapped on, spilling into a perfect rectangle on the bedroom floor. He moved closer and watched her shadow move through the motions of taking clothes off and putting others on. Finished, the shadow crouched, and Keith heard the access panel open in the closet wall.
With a click, the panel closed, and Margaret shut off the closet light, her eyes unused to the dark. Keith watched her handle and arrange the Travelogue gear as she walked toward the bed.
Their bed.
It didn’t matter that they’d only conversed. Margaret and William had been on their marital bed. Together.
He was almost sick again.
“Hello, Margaret.”
She jumped, and Keith could see her eyes flicking toward her hands, where the Travelogue rested, ready for action. “Keith,” she said with a tremor in her voice, “you scared me. Why didn’t you answer?”
He moved toward her.
“Whatcha got there, Margaret?” he asked in a sing-song voice.
“Keith,” she canted her head, “have you been drinking?”
“Do you really care?”
“Of course I care. Is something wrong?” She switched the gear to her left hand and leaned forward with her right, to feel his forehead.
“Don’t touch me.” His voice was sharp.
She recoiled as if slapped.
“Don’t let me stop you, Margaret.”
Her voice was deeper, but he could sense her nervousness, as she asked, “What’s wrong?”
“William’s waiting, isn’t he?”
He heard her sharp intake of breath, “Keith,” she began, “it’s not like that…”
“No,” he said, drawing up next to her, “you’re right. It’s not.”
With one movement he grabbed and pulled her toward him. She tried to wrestle away, but he was stronger than she was, and in moments he had her pinned on the bed. Squirming, she resisted, as he pried the Travelogue gear from her hands.
He was thoroughly aroused, breathing heavily, using the weight of his body to keep her from getting away. He locked eyes with her and thought for a moment about how beautiful she was. Or had been.
“Please, Keith, not like this.” Her blue eyes welled with tears.
He gave a short laugh. “Do you actually think I want you anymore?” Holding both her hands with his left, he maneuvered the Travelogue gear into position with his right. Margaret was either so shocked that she couldn’t move, or it was the adrenaline coursing through his system, but the job seemed easier than he’d expected, and within moments he had her hooked up. “Go ahead, sweetness, your love is waiting for you.”
He sat on her, holding her, watching her.
She was in Scotland again, of course.
He waited.
“Oh,” she cried, “Keith!”
“Were you expecting someone else, Margaret?”
He reached over to the nightstand for the bottle he’d left there, still keeping her pinned. She’d quieted a bit, her mind directing her body’s responses. He took a long drink and leered down at her.
“Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”
Fully immersed in the program, she didn’t answer, but he watched her body respond as it had so many times beneath his hands. He supposed that it was learned, the conditioned response to a husband’s caress.
He flipped open the “heart” of the program, the little silver cylinder.
“I have another surprise for you, Margaret.”
Smoothly, almost tenderly, he grasped the tiny little gold ring that prevented Travelogue overdose. “Heightened pleasure,“ he said, “you can thank me later.”
And then, he pulled.
Sanctimony
An Alex St. James short story
My assistant, Jordan, poked her head into my office doorway, one hand gripping the jamb. “You’ve got a visitor, Alex,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“He says it’s ‘Mr. Wizzard’—with two ‘z’s.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the visit. The guy had been e-mailing me non-stop ever since the hazing story we’d aired had gone national. Mr. Wizzard claimed to be a reporter for some internet web site, and kept demanding information out of “professional courtesy.” He even phoned me here at the office once, expressing surprise when he found out I was female.
Despite his increasingly belligerent demands, I’d maintained that it was against company policy to divulge anything without proper verification, and that if he wanted to talk, he could come see me. I thought that would be the end of it, figuring that I’d shined a light on the cockroach, and now he’d scurry away. His showing up here let me know I was wrong.
Truth be told, I was kind of curious about this guy. I stood. “Send him in.”
Middle-aged and scruffy, Mr. Wizzard had long salt-and-pepper hair that hung down to his shoulders and mingled with an unkempt beard. He wore a beat-up leather vest over a black T-shirt. His arms were covered with tattooed images of demons and dragons, long since faded to a nondescript blue-green. The markings stopped at his elbows except for a very small tattoo on the underside of his left forearm where the skin hung, flabby and soft.
He wore dark, wrap-around sunglasses, and a cigarette perched over his right ear. The sudden appearance of big, square, smoker’s-yellow teeth amongst the facial hair let me know he was smiling. “Hi,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Alex St. James.”
“Heath Birdlo,” he said, bringing up a finger to scratch his hawk-like nose. “But you can call me Heath Bar, like the candy.”
Behind his back, Jordan rolled her eyes again. “If there’s anything you need, Alex, I’ll be at my desk.”
So this was the man behind the screen name. “Have a seat, Mr. Birdlo,” I said, as I sat behind my desk.
“Heath.” He settled himself into one of my office chairs and slouched, right ankle resting on his left knee. As he laced his fingers over his ample stomach, I noticed grime had settled into his knuckle-lines. “Seeing as how we’re going to be collaborating, why don’t we keep it kinda informal?”
My spacious office felt cramped and violated. Like heat emanating from an asphalt road, waves of warm sweat and stale cigarettes wafted my direction and I instinctively leaned back. “You flew in this morning, I take it?”
“Flew? Like an airplane?” He snorted. “I rode my bike up.”
“But I talked to you last night. Don’t tell me you made the trip from Georgia to Chicago…” I checked my watch and did a quick calculation, “…in ten hours?”
“Nine and a half,” he said flashing those big teeth at me again. “It’s summer. This is the time of year meant for pushing your bike to the limit.” He leaned forward, lowering his sunglasses to the tip of his nose. Dark eyes stared at me. “And now that I’m here, you can give me all that information I asked for, right?”
“I told you before, Mr. Birdlo, my hands are tied. I can’t divulge any information about the people in our features without their express permission.”
“You told me if I came up here, you’d talk to me.”
He’d requested the full names and addresses of all the people who’d appeared in our recent feature regarding a brutal hazing incident on Chicago’s north shore. “Right. But that’s all I agreed to—to talk with you. Why don’t you tell me why you need this information, and if I think your reasons are valid, I’ll speak to the people myself and pass your contact information on to them?”
“What are you protecting them sanctimonious bastards for anyway?” he asked. He sat back with a whump, making the front two legs of the chair bounce and I watched as he absent-mindedly fingered the lone tattoo. He pulled the cigarette from its perch on his ear and leaned forward, obviously reaching for lighter in his back pocket.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said.
He looked up, focusing on my face as though he’d been somewhere else for a moment. He looked at the cigarette in his fingers, then back up at me. “It’s my body to
abuse as I see fit.”
“It’s my office. Go abuse your body somewhere else.”
He muttered an expletive. “Listen,” he said. I could see the battle waging within him, as he strove for control. “I’m doing a follow-up on your story. That’s why I need the names and addresses of those involved. For my e-magazine.”
I’d visited his site, out of nosiness. After his incessant e-mail bombardment, I’d wanted to check him out. I’d sifted through countless pages of mindless rhetoric, and could say with conviction that if his was a bona-fide e-magazine I’d reach over and plant a sloppy wet one on those hair-covered lips right now.
“Mr. Birdlo,” I began, trying to keep condescension out of my voice, “if you were truly a legitimate member of the media, you would understand.”
He jumped to his feet. As he reached toward his backside, hot panic rose up in my throat with the flash realization that he might pull a gun. Instead he slapped a laminated card on my desk. I waited several unsettled heartbeats before picking it up.
The crude press pass in my hand bore his non-smiling face, and identified him as Heath Birdlo, president and chief correspondent for Wizzard’s Righteous Writings.
I thought: Yikes. Try to say that three times, fast.
He stared down at me. “There you go. Proof.”
I fingered the pass, letting my thumb play on the curled up corner where the adhesive had worn away. “All this proves is that you have access to a printer. You made this yourself.”
Still standing, he placed both hands on my desk, leaning forward. I caught another brief glimpse of the homemade tattoo, but I still couldn’t quite make it out. I didn’t like him towering over me, so I stood up, as well. “Obviously, you don’t know who I am,” he said.
I couldn’t resist. “You’re Mr. Wizzard?”
His mouth clamped shut and when he spoke again, it was through gritted teeth.
“You ever hear of the Freedom of Information Act?” he asked.
I was getting tired of him. Real fast. “Ever hear of building security?” I shot back, picking up my phone. I wondered how quick I could grab my purse and dig for my pepper spray. That would empty the office in a hurry.
“You don’t scare me,” he said. His right arm shoved at a stack of files I had on my desk, sending them toppling to the floor. Like a mischievous little boy, he stared at me with a defiant grin, waiting for my reaction. I stared back.
“Time to go,” I said, starting to dial.
He moved toward the door, but stopped and wagged a fat finger at me. “You just missed out on the biggest story of your life.”
Phone calls at three in the morning don’t generally bring happy news. By the second ring, I’d roused myself enough to go through a quick checklist of who might be calling. When I heard my boss’s voice on the phone, I knew at least somebody wasn’t dead.
“Bass,” I said, relief washing over me like a warm shower, “Where are you?”
“The morgue.”
Yikes. Momentarily discomfited, I struggled to find my words. “Who?”
“Don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you. We got a male here, late-fifties, early sixties. About five-foot-ten, two hundred fifty pounds. Beard, mustache, tattoos. Know him?”
My mind struggled to make a connection. “Sounds like that guy I told you about yesterday, Heath Birdlo. He’s dead?”
“Apparent homicide.” I heard him relay the name to someone nearby.
“Homicide?” I felt slow, like I wasn’t understanding. “What are you doing there? And how did you know to call me?”
“I guess one of the beat officers found him around midnight on Lower Wacker. One shot, right in the head. No ID on the body. No drivers’ license—nothing but about two hundred bucks in cash and a handful of your business cards.” He stopped, for apparent emphasis. “You know, the ones with Midwest Focus’s logo on it.” His voice took on a petulant tone. “They couldn’t get hold of you at the office, and apparently you don’t have your cell phone on, so they came up with the bright idea of calling the station manager instead. Next batch of cards you have printed, you’re putting your home phone on them. Get it?”
Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
“Got it,” I said. I felt a moment’s regret that Heath Birdlo had met his end in such a brutal way. I gave a tiny sigh of sadness on his behalf. I felt my body relax. Relief—knowing that those dear to me were presumably happy and healthy—was making me drowsy again. “Now that he’s been ID’d, I can go back to sleep, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Wrong?” I could hear my own impatience.
“They need you to come down, ID him in person, and give a statement. It’ll give them something to work with.”
“Who caught this one? Anybody we know?”
“Yeah. Detective George Lulinski.”
I nodded, even though Bass couldn’t see me. Lulinski helped us out now and then; he was a good resource and heck of a nice guy. “He’s there now?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell him I’ll be right down.”
It was Heath all right. And except for the hole in the side of his head, black and crusty with dried blood, utterly recognizable.
They showed me a few Polaroids of the crime scene. He lay face up on pavement, his left arm sprawled behind him, draped along the curb. His right arm crossed his chest; his mouth was open, but his eyes were closed. If it hadn’t been for the shiny red halo of blood that surrounded his head, I might have thought he’d fallen down drunk.
Based on the information I’d been able to provide, they’d run a quick check of the name Heath Birdlo. Came up empty. I couldn’t believe the man didn’t have a police record, and said as much. I told them a little about his website and his fascination with my recent feature story. Detective Lulinski wondered about the guy having my cards, and the only explanation I could come up with was that he’d palmed a few when he caused the ruckus at my desk.
After talking with the detectives and then catching a couple hours sleep, I headed to my office where I tried to make sense of this turn of events. With two hundred dollars left on Heath’s person, untouched, the killer was either uninterested in robbery, or had been frightened away after having done the deed.
The ironic thing about it was, that when he’d stolen my cards and stormed out of my office, he’d left his homemade press pass. Which meant I had his picture.
I tapped the laminated card against the heel of my left hand. The reason he’d made the long trek from Georgia to Chicago in less than a day had had something to do with the hazing story my station had aired. He’d wanted to know the names and addresses of those involved. But why?
That question stayed with me as I sped north on Lake Shore Drive, headed into the bucolic suburb where the brutal hazing had taken place. Before leaving the office, I’d reviewed the segment that had aired in Heath Birdlo’s market. The story involved a handful of girls, their parents, and some neighbors. Lots of shouting, lots of hiding, as cameras followed their movements from their BMWs into courtrooms and back again, four-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers trying to shield their young clients from the glare of the insistent lights.
All privileged, all living a white-bread existence where sixteen year-olds received fully-loaded SUVs for their birthdays, they’d become savages in a rite of cheerleader initiation.
Someone at the scene had videotaped the entire melee, and girls were seen shoving fecal matter and trash into other girls’ mouths, dumping refuse over their heads and beating them with baseball bats. Terrifying stuff.
In contrast to my dark musings, the lake to my right bounced blue and bright under the July sun. I rolled my little white Escort’s windows down as I headed back to where this story had started, to talk, again, with the families involved. This time, however, I had a completely different agenda.
Three hours later, I’d contacted most of the folks from the clip. No one knew Heath Birdlo. I displayed the press pass over and over, but came up empty.
Until I made it to Mr. Prendergast’s house. His daughter, Lisa, had been the most severely injured in the attack. She’d suffered permanent hearing loss and possible brain damage. Her story made me wonder where the other girls’ compassion had gone while she was being assaulted. By all accounts, she’d gone to the hazing event in complete innocence, thinking it was a welcoming party for the new cheerleaders. Instead, she’d had a bucket placed on her head and seniors took turns slapping at it with a Louisville Slugger.
Prendergast’s house, in the corner of a curvy street, was one of the most sumptuous in the area. Flagstone led from the circular drive around manicured gardens to the covered front door. Two-storied, the house boasted huge rooms, to judge from the spacing between windows. I rang—no answer. A neighbor pulled up and flagged me down.
“You’re Alex St. James, right?”
His name was Jim Greco, a big guy with receding reddish hair and wobbly jowls. Greco and I had talked early in the investigation. He’d been livid that his peaceful, sweet suburb had gotten such a bad rap.
“Right.” I walked over to his open car window, careful not to lean on the door—folks who drove Jaguars probably didn’t care for fingerprints on their shiny paint. He had his air-conditioning on full blast; waves of cool air tickled my face.
“You doing a follow-up or something?” he asked.
Greco hadn’t been exactly what I’d call cooperative during the original investigation. “Sort of,” I said. “Do you know where the Prendergasts are?”
“What do you need with them?”
I pulled out the picture of Heath Birdlo. “I wanted to know if this man has been around.”
His face registered shock. “That’s the guy who showed up here yesterday.”
“He was here? At your house?”
“Yeah. The maid answered the door.” Greco licked his lips. “He was looking for the names of folks who were in that story you did.”
“You talked to him?”
“He talked to Eva, first.” Mr. Greco leaned his elbow out the open window, “But here’s something you ought to know. He was passing himself off as you.”
