Malevolent

by Searls, David

  Melinda turned to keep Germaine in sight. “How’s your mother doing?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “If you want to talk more about what happened the other night—”

  “I don’t. The subject is closed.”

  Even with the nine millimeter in her purse, the badge in her wallet and a car radio just outside the door, Melinda felt helpless against Germaine and her pitiful sister and the hungry-eyed cats and the still shape under the sheet in the back bedroom.

  She stared down more cats as she crept closer to the front door. She made it out and onto the stoop and into the night and through the weed-choked sidewalk to her car at the curb beyond. She turned the ignition over. Fired up the headlights, clutched and slammed the Charger into gear and got the hell out of there.

  Didn’t stop until she saw the crowd drawn by the blue and red flashing lights on Broadale.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Then you know Wanda Gates,” the homicide sergeant boomed. “She works in your unit, don’t she?” He craned his heavy neck into the crowd. “Hey, Mitch, this’s Melinda—what was it, Dillon?—in Sex Crimes. She knows Wanda.”

  His partner, leaning over the corpse, didn’t seem half as impressed by the small world in which they all worked. He grunted and continued to direct the efforts of the police videographer documenting the American drama at his feet. Uniformed cops were holding the crowd back, a louder, more boisterous gathering than the similar crime scene Melinda had attended the previous week.

  “To answer your first question, Melinda, we can’t move her till we shoot the scene, but I got a look at her neck. Rubbed raw by a rope or something on that order. The ME’s going to say it’s strangulation.”

  The sergeant said this in the hearty, confident delivery of someone who likes his work. He was a muscular jet-black man, his sculpted body only marred by one too many chins. He apparently hadn’t figured out how to bench press some shape into that area.

  He stood by his cruiser, radio mic in hand, having been intercepted by Melinda in the act of reporting in. Now he finished up with a few mumbled words and said, “Come on, I’ll show you, but only because you were in the neighborhood and you know Wanda.”

  Melinda didn’t think she’d ever met a Wanda in her life, but this was no time to voice that particular thought. She followed the booming homicide cop as he kept up the chat and waded through the onlookers like they weren’t there.

  There she was, the bent, lifeless body in the circle of white light set up by the videographer. Center stage. Melinda swallowed hard. Her heart tripped at the possibility that she’d see a familiar face once the corpse got repositioned. The young woman in khaki shorts was facedown, the neck at an odd angle, limbs sprawled like only the dead can sprawl. Melinda’s mind raced back to scenes from earlier in the evening. Most of the women had worn shorts or casual skirts with bare legs and sandals.

  “I’ve got to see her,” she said softly. “Her face, I mean.”

  “Really? Well, she doesn’t at this point appear to be one of yours, but…”

  What the loud sergeant meant was that the victim’s clothing didn’t appear to be in disarray. No panties hanging from one ankle or gone altogether. They couldn’t rule out anything without the medical examiner, but it didn’t look even to Melinda like a sex crime.

  The sergeant sighed. He appeared to be a star in his own movie as he slowly applied plastic gloves under the bright lights and the videocam’s steady gaze. He carefully tilted the victim’s head for a better view.

  “Enough?” he said, repositioning the corpse exactly as found and rising to his feet.

  “Enough,” Melinda said.

  “You know her?” the sergeant barked.

  She stared at the body while the loud homicide cop watched her massage, for the second time that evening, her sore right breast.

  “No,” she replied in breathless relief. “I don’t.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “It’s almost too late,” the female voice purred. “I know you overheard what will happen to you if you don’t leave him to me. Consider yourself warned, bitch.”

  The phone slipped from Patty’s grasp and hung limp at the end of its cord. She wondered, while reeling it up with shaky hands, if the voice would still be there when she drew it hesitantly back to her ear.

  Dial tone.

  She’d had plenty of thoughts to accompany her lonely walk home. For one thing, should she have stayed with Tim rather than stalking away when she saw him talking with that policewoman outside of the church? Tim had called her over, but it had sounded awkward, like inviting a coworker to your party only after you knew they’d found out about it. Besides, she kept imagining them together.

  Whispering.

  Plotting.

  About her.

  But that was ridiculous, Patty had decided by the time she’d reached sight of home. Her suspicions had so much power over her, she concluded, because she wasn’t allowing herself to fully forgive Tim for the Kayla Cosgrove incident. That had been best friend Stacy’s diagnosis whenever the subject came up, as it had frequently in the past.

  “You got two choices,” Stacy had said on one such occasion. “You can forgive him or you can set his clothes on fire, throw his sound equipment out the window, sell his van and change the locks.”

  The point, Patty knew, was that anything Tim did could be put in a bad light if Patty couldn’t rid her mind of suspicion.

  “He works in bars, for chrissake.” Stacy again. “He’s gonna come home late, he’s gonna smell like booze and perfume and you’re always gonna wonder. But that’s just what you gotta accept if you accept him.”

  It was true, every word of it. She thought she’d forgiven him for his only (known) misstep, but her reaction in the church basement had certainly contradicted that.

  The walk home had settled her. The landline was ringing when she got in the door, and she’d answered it.

  “It’s almost too late.”

  Excuse me? she thought, but her throat was suddenly too constricted to get the words out. She knew that voice, although the context threw her. Patty listened to her own harsh breath whistle through the mouthpiece and into her ear.

  “I know you overheard what will happen to you if you don’t leave him to me,” the voice said.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  “So consider yourself warned.”

  Now hearing nothing but dial tone, Patty very carefully cradled the receiver before cradling herself. She drew her knees up and let her body sink into a fetal position in the corner of the dining room floor.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The first mention was a ten-second newscast clip on the radio station that provided his morning alarm. The Plain Dealer, already scattered over the breakfast table by Polly, provided slightly more insight, but it was when he powered up his computer and went online that Griffin caught the latest details of the murder in Old Brooklyn.

  It was a big story at Cleveland.com, on account of the location and the victim’s youth, race and attractiveness. The press had already rounded up what looked like a high school yearbook photo. Staring into her eyes, Griffin could almost feel the girl’s claustrophobic death by strangulation. He “saw” the blue and bloated corpse strewn like garbage on the sidewalk in one of the city’s safest neighborhoods.

  He took his cell phone off its charger and opened it. Stared at the screen, scrolled through his phonebook for Tim’s number and said, “Shit,” as he snapped his phone shut.

  He stared at his mother’s ridiculous Swiss-chalet clock on the wall, barely taking in the fact that it was a few minutes after ten o’clock. He roamed the house, moving from window to window, not sure what he was looking for. He listened to birds chirp outside his window and a lawn mower with old spark plugs stuttering into action as he sank into an overstuffed chair and admitted to himself that his life was so empty that he needed the church mystery. And he was so in need of companionship that he was willing to d
rag a new acquaintance into a futile search for motives and patterns and clues.

  Back in his bedroom—lacking much of anywhere else to go—his eyes went to the DVD on his nightstand. The police had let him pick it up the day after they’d thoroughly and fruitlessly examined it. Griffin didn’t actually want it back, but he’d had a sinking suspicion that the longer he’d give them to study it, the greater the odds that they’d find something incriminating. He had no idea what that something might be, but why take the chance?

  Now he picked it up, flipped it over a few times. Stared at it while knowing there was nothing to see. His hand was trembling slightly when he shoved it into the receiving tray on the DVD player below the small flat-screen at the end of his room, opposite the bed. Turned on the television set using the remote by his bed and once again watched Javier Bardem initiate his ghastly killing spree.

  Growing quickly bored with No Country for Old Men, he turned it off and wandered downstairs for whatever might pass for a late breakfast. He’d toasted a couple pieces of bread, smeared them with fruit jam and taken two bites when he heard the screaming.

  He kept chewing. Poured himself a glass of orange juice. Pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and scrolled back through his phonebook.

  She screamed again. This time he could pick out the words, “Help me! Someone help me!”

  He knew where it was coming from.

  He placed the call. Listened to it ring until he got dumped into voice mail. He didn’t leave a message. What could he say?

  He snapped the phone shut and dropped it back into his pants pocket. Followed the screaming to its source. To his bedroom, of course. Where he found his television on and the movie running, despite the fact that he’d turned off both the television and DVD player before leaving.

  Yes, he was sure.

  He’d surprised himself at how calmly he’d climbed the stairs and stood in his bedroom doorway and faced the television and watched the scene he knew he’d find. Not No Country for Old Men, of course.

  It was a man brutally raping a middle-aged woman. She was facedown on the pavement, her summer dress up over the back of her head. It was night on-screen, but Griffin could readily identify the sidewalk location and its near proximity to the church on Utica Lane. The setting seemed lit in such a way that the viewer couldn’t mistake the action.

  She screamed again, a steady wail by now, as he kept grunting, heaving himself into her.

  The angle was all wrong. The perspective different than when he’d watched it a couple nights ago. Then, the camera POV had been as if handheld by the assailant, but this time it was as though he had a cameraman with him, as well as professional lighting assistance.

  As he—the star of this impressively shot production—turned to leer into the camera, Griffin fell back a step, thudded into his own half-closed door. He could identify the perp in any police lineup, he got such a good view. A very familiar face indeed.

  Griffin Solloway was watching himself on top of the shrieking woman.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” someone whimpered.

  It might have been the woman in the film. It might have been him. He’d never felt so bone-chilled in his life. He leaned against the stability of his doorway and let himself sink until his knees were drawn up to his chest. He closed his eyes as a deep weariness overtook him. The movie, it went on and on, the screaming and wailing and grunting and shrieking.

  Profoundly inappropriate as it seemed to him later, Griffin fell asleep as the assault endlessly went on.

  “Help me, someone help me,” Germaine Marberry screamed, over and over.

  Even in his unsteady sleep, that much got through.

  “Mother of Jesus, what are you watching?”

  That part got through even better. The weariness instantly gone, he sprang up like an ejected shell casing.

  His mother stared from his bedroom doorway next to him, slack-jawed, at the thrusting and heaving and grunting on the screen in front of them. Griffin’s mind now raced through alibis for a crime he’d never committed.

  “I don’t have to see this,” Polly said, though her attention remained glued to the screen.

  Somehow he found his remote control and aimed it at the set and stabbed every button he could lay thumb to. It was like being lost in his worst nightmare, where he’s unable to press the trigger and use the gun that is his only salvation from the charging monster. Giving up on it, he swooped to the set and pulled its plug from the wall.

  “I don’t have to see this,” she repeated softly, as if to herself. Sounding like a doll with dying batteries.

  “Mom, I don’t…it’s not what you think.”

  Not what you think?

  No, it was exactly what she must be thinking. Although the DVD was no longer running, he turned off the manual off-on switch and turned the screen toward the wall. Just in case. Just in case it came back on like a Michael Myers you just couldn’t kill.

  Polly folded her arms around her bountiful bosom. “I don’t know why you need to see movies like that, but you won’t bring that kind of smut into my home.”

  Griffin scratched his beard in that spot under his chin where it always itched.

  His mother had seen…what? She’d watched her son violently raping a woman on screen, and all she’d seen was a dirty movie?

  He stared at her, stunned. She was still glaring irritably at what she could see of the repositioned set, still annoyed at finding him in possession of a fuck flick, and no doubt as embarrassed by the episode as he was, but that’s as far as it went.

  She hadn’t seen.

  Griffin picked up the nearest object on his desk, the latest issue of Premiere magazine. He folded it into a tube and hurled it at the screen.

  “What the fuck gives you the right to spy on me and monitor what I watch?”

  His anger was all over the place. It was on his mother, who’d startled and humiliated him by finding him with the DVD running. It was on the goddamn DVD itself for once again defying all laws of physics with which he had even a passing familiarity. It was on his mother again for not really seeing what she saw, thereby causing him to question his own sanity.

  Polly backed out of the doorway, stepped back into the hallway.

  “Goddamn you,” he said.

  He took a step toward her, but got his feet tangled up in his desk chair, tripped and stumbled.

  “Griffin,” his mother said, her voice neutral.

  A part of him was aware of how off-kilter his emotions were, like when he’d fallen asleep with terror when the movie started up on its own. As he kicked the chair out of his way he got a mental image of his father slashing a wrench into a garage wall, inches from young Griffin’s head when the old man couldn’t remove a car radiator.

  It stopped him, the image. Left him gasping for breath as violet spots formed and exploded in his vision. He leaned against the desk, panting, waiting for his heart to calm. He could “hear” his usually chatty mother’s silence. She’d learned from John Solloway when it was time to end an argument and, as a result, Griffin recalled her being physically attacked no more than four or five times during the course of their long marriage.

  Griffin had only hit her once, when he was a teenager. He’d broken her glasses and cut her slightly across the bridge of her nose. Barely a cut, but it hadn’t totally healed for months. On occasion, Griffin thought he could still see it. Sometimes at night he saw her shocked expression and the excruciating look on his father’s face as he realized he’d raised a son just like himself.

  Which was bullshit. Griffin had barely ever raised his voice after that unfortunate episode. The secret was to never think bad things, never stray from happy thoughts and relationships so superficial they raised hardly any emotion at all.

  Alone again. He could feel the emptiness pressing on him like wet fur. By the silence, he knew his mother was out on one of her long walks. When she returned, she’d never mention what had happened.

  He unloaded the DVD from
the player and dropped it into a paper bag, without caring if he scratched it carrying it loose like that. He left the empty house. Quickly, before his mother got back.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  There was no time to hide what he was doing by the time Tim heard footsteps on the staircase to their second-floor apartment, followed by the knock on his door. The TV set was on the floor in the middle of the living room, the mahogany trunk that served as a television stand open and disgorging documents, old report cards, scrapbooks and loose photos from Patty’s life.

  She was at work, or so he hoped. If she’d returned for any reason, she certainly wouldn’t be knocking.

  Tim rose slowly to his feet and mentally shrugged off discovery. He went to the door and opened it.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Don’t you have a phone?” He walked away, leaving his visitor standing in the doorway.

  “Can I come in?” Griffin looked downright pitiful, standing out there awaiting an invitation.

  Tim reclaimed his place on the living room floor. “Shut the door. About phoning first…don’t take it so personal.”

  “I thought you were still mad at me about last night.”

  Tim flapped a hand. “What last night? I was just pissed ’cuz Patty and I aren’t getting along, but what’s new? I’d offer you a beer, but it’s thirteen minutes till twelve. Beating noon, that’s the slippery slope to problem drinker.”

  “I can wait thirteen minutes.” Griffin stepped delicately into the room and eased himself into a seat. “Nice couch,” he said, patting it.

  “It’s a sofa.”

  “Sofa, couch, what’s the difference?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Patty. She gets pissed when I call it a couch. I think couches are what you watch TV and take naps on and drool all over. If you paid too much and you can’t ever sit on it, it’s a sofa. But enjoy it. She’s not here.”