by Ed Gorman
“What’s he gonna do?” Mike said. “Go to the cops?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? You’re crazy. He goes to the cops, he’d be setting himself up for a robbery conviction.”
“Not if he tells them we murdered his pal.”
Neil said, “Aaron’s got a point. What if this guy goes to the cops?”
“He’s not going to the cops,” Mike said. “No way he’s going to the cops at all.”
Chapter 4
I was dozing on the couch, a Cubs game on the TV set, when the phone rang around nine that evening. I hadn’t heard from Jan yet so I expected it would be her. Whenever we’re apart, we call each other at least once a day.
The phone machine picks up on the fourth ring so I had to scramble to beat it.
“Hello?”
Nothing. But somebody was on the line. Listening.
“Hello?”
I never play games with silent callers. I just hang up. I did so now.
Two innings later, having talked to Jan, having made myself a tuna fish sandwich on rye, found a package of potato chips I thought we’d finished off at the poker game, and gotten myself a new can of beer, I sat down to watch the last inning. The Cubs had a chance of winning. I said a silent prayer to the God of Baseball.
The phone rang.
I mouthed several curses around my mouthful of tuna sandwich and went to the phone.
“Hello?” I said, trying to swallow the last of the bite.
My silent friend again.
I slammed the phone.
The Cubs got two more singles, I started on the chips and I had polished off the beer and was thinking of getting another one when the phone rang again.
I had a suspicion of who was calling and then saying nothing—but I didn’t really want to think about it.
Then I decided there was an easy way to handle this situation. I’d just let the phone machine take it. If my anonymous friend wanted to talk to a phone machine, good for him.
Four rings. The phone machine took over, Jan’s pleasant voice saying that we weren’t home but would be happy to call you back if you’d just leave your number.
I waited to hear dead air then a click.
Instead a familiar female voice said: “Aaron, it’s Louise. Bob—” Louise was Bob’s wife. She was crying. I ran from the couch to the phone machine in the hall.
“Hello, Louise. It’s Aaron.”
“Oh, Aaron. It’s terrible.”
“What happened, Louise?”
“Bob—” More tears. “He electrocuted himself tonight out in the garage.” She said that a plug had accidentally fallen into a bowl of water, according to the fire captain on the scene, and Bob hadn’t noticed this and put the plug into the outlet and—
Bob had a woodcraft workshop in his garage, a large and sophisticated one. He knew what he was doing.
“He’s dead, Aaron. He’s dead.”
“Oh, God, Louise. I’m sorry.”
“He was so careful with electricity, too. It’s just so hard to believe—”
Yes, I thought. Yes, it was hard to believe. I thought of last night. Of the burglars—one who’d died. One who’d gotten away.
“Why don’t I come over?”
“Oh, thank you, Aaron, but I need to be alone with the children. But if you could call Neil and Mike—”
“Of course.”
“Thanks for being such good friends, you and Jan.”
“Don’t be silly, Louise. The pleasure’s ours.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. When I’m—you know.”
“Good night, Louise.”
Mike and Neil were at my place within twenty minutes. We sat in the kitchen again, where we were last night.
I said, “Either of you get any weird phone calls tonight?”
“You mean just silence?” Neil said.
“Right.”
“I did,” Mike said. “Carrie was afraid it was that pervert who called all last winter.”
“I did, too,” Neil said. “Three of them.”
“Then a little while ago, Bob dies out in his garage,” I said. “Some coincidence.”
“Hey, Aaron,” Mike said. “Is that why you got us over here? Because you don’t think it was an accident?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t an accident,” I said. “Bob knew what he was doing with his tools. He didn’t notice a plug that had fallen into a bowl of water?”
“He’s coming after us,” Neil said.
“Oh, God,” Mike said. “Not you, too.”
“He calls us, gets us on edge,” I said. “And then he kills Bob. Making it look like an accident.”
“These are pretty bright people,” Mike said sarcastically.
“You notice the burglar’s eyes?” Neil said.
“I did,” I said. “He looked very bright.”
“And spooky,” Neil said. “Never saw eyes like that before.”
“I can shoot your theory right in the butt,” Mike said.
“How?” I said.
He leaned forward, sipped his beer. I’d thought about putting out some munchies but somehow that seemed wrong given poor Bob’s death and the phone calls. The beers we had to have. The munchies were too festive.
“Here’s how. There are two burglars, right? One gets caught, the other runs. And given the nature of burglars, keeps on running. He wouldn’t even know who was in the house last night, except for Aaron, and that’s only because he’s the owner and his name would be in the phone book. But he wouldn’t know anything about Bob or Neil or me. No way he’d have been able to track down Bob.”
I shook my head. “You’re overlooking the obvious.”
“Like what?”
“Like he runs off last night, gets his car and then parks in the alley to see what’s going to happen.”
“Right,” Neil said. “Then he sees us bringing his friend out wrapped in a blanket. He follows us to the dam and watches us throw his friend in.”
“And,” I said, “everybody had his car here last night. Very easy for him to write down all the license numbers.”
“So he kills Bob,” Neil said. “And starts making the phone calls to shake us up.”
“Why Bob?”
“Maybe he hates black people,” I said.
Mike looked first at me and then at Neil. “You know what this is?”
“Here he goes,” Neil said.
“No; no, I’m serious here. This is Catholic guilt.”
“How can it be Catholic guilt when I’m Jewish?” Neil said.
“In a culture like ours, everybody is a little bit Jewish and a little bit Catholic, anyway,” Mike said. “So you guys are in the throes of Catholic guilt. You feel bad about what we had to do last night—and we did have to do it, we really didn’t have any choice—and the guilt starts to play on your mind. So poor Bob electrocutes himself accidentally and you immediately think it’s the second burglar.”
“He followed him,” Neil said.
“What?” Mike said.
“That’s what he did, I bet. The burglar. Followed Bob around all day trying to figure out what was the best way to kill him. You know, the best way that would look like an accident. So then he finds out about the workshop and decides it’s perfect.”
“That presumes,” Mike said, “that one of us is going to be next.”
“Hell, yes,” Neil said. “That’s why he’s calling us. Shake us up. Sweat us out. Let us know that he’s out there somewhere, just waiting. And that we’re next.”
“I’m going to follow you to work tomorrow, Neil,” I said. “And Mike’s going to be with me.”
“You guys are having breakdowns. You really are,” Mike said.
“We’ll follow Neil tomorrow,” I said. “And then on Saturday you and Neil can follow me. If he’s following us around, then we’ll see it. And then we can start following him. We’ll at least find out who he is.”
“And then what?” Mike said. “Suppose we do find out
where he lives? Then what the hell do we do?”
Neil said, “I guess we worry about that when we get there, don’t we?”
In the morning, I picked Mike up early. We stopped off for doughnuts and coffee. He’s like my brother, not a morning person. Crabby. Our conversation was at a minimum, though he did say, “I could’ve used the extra hour’s sleep this morning. Instead of this crap, I mean.”
As agreed, we parked half a block from Neil’s house. Also as agreed, Neil emerged exactly at 7:35. Kids were already in the wide suburban streets on skateboards and rollerblades. No other car could be seen, except for a lone silver BMW in a driveway far down the block.
We followed him all the way to work. Nobody followed him. Nobody.
When I dropped Mike off at his office, he said, “You owe me an hour’s sleep.”
“Two hours,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Tomorrow, you and Neil follow me around.”
“No way,” he said.
There are times when only blunt anger will work with Mike. “It was your idea not to call the police, remember? I’m not up for any of your sulking, Mike. I’m really not.”
He sighed: “I guess you’re right.”
I drove for two and a half hours Saturday morning. I hit a hardware store, a lumberyard, and a Kmart. At noon, I pulled into a McDonald’s. The three of us had some lunch.
“You didn’t see anybody even suspicious?”
“Not even suspicious, Aaron,” Neil said. “I’m sorry.”
“This is all bullshit. He’s not going to follow us around.”
“I want to give it one more chance,” I said.
Mike made a face. “I’m not going to get up early, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”
I got angry again. “Bob’s dead, or have you forgotten?”
“Yeah, Aaron,” Mike said. “Bob is dead. He got electrocuted. Accidentally.”
I said, “You really think it was an accident?”
“Of course I do,” Mike said. “When do you want to try it again?”
“Tonight. I’ll do a little bowling.”
“There’s a fight on I want to watch,” Mike said.
“Tape it,” I said.
“‘Tape it,’” he mocked. “Since when did you start giving us orders?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mike, grow up,” Neil said. “There’s no way that Bob’s electrocution was an accident or a coincidence. He’s probably not going to stop with Bob, either.”
The bowling alley was mostly teenagers on Saturday night. There was a time when bowling was mostly a working-class sport. Now it’s come to the suburbs and the white-collar people. Now the bowling lane is a good place for teenage boys to meet teenage girls.
I bowled two games, drank three beers, and walked back outside an hour later.
Summer night. Smell of dying heat, car exhaust, cigarette smoke, perfume. Sound of jukebox, distant loud mufflers, even more distant rushing train, lonely baying dogs.
Mike and Neil were gone.
I went home and opened myself a beer.
The phone rang. Once again, I was expecting Jan.
“Found the bastard,” Neil said. “He followed you from your house to the bowling alley. Then he got tired of waiting and took off again. This time we followed him.”
“Where?”
He gave me an address. It wasn’t a good one.
“We’re waiting for you to get here. Then we’re going up to pay him a little visit.”
“I need twenty minutes.”
“Hurry.”
Not even the silver touch of moonlight lent these blocks of crumbling stucco apartment houses any majesty or beauty. The rats didn’t even bother to hide. They squatted red-eyed on the unmown lawns, amidst beer cans, and broken bottles, and wrappers from Taco John’s, and used condoms that looked like deflated mushrooms.
Mike stood behind a tree.
“I followed him around back,” Mike said. “He went up the fire escape on the back. Then he jumped on this veranda. He’s in the back apartment on the right side. Neil’s in the backyard, watching for him.”
Mike looked down at my ball bat. “That’s a nice complement,” he said. Then he showed me his handgun. “To this.”
“Why the hell did you bring that?”
“Are you kidding? You’re the one who said he killed Bob.”
That, I couldn’t argue with.
“All right, “I said, “but what happens when we catch him?”
“We tell him to lay off us,” Mike said.
“We need to go to the cops.”
“Oh, sure. Sure we do.” He shook his head. He looked as if he were dealing with a child. A very slow one. “Aaron, going to the cops now won’t bring Bob back. And it’s only going to get us in trouble.”
That’s when we heard the shout. It sounded like Neil.
Maybe five feet of rust-colored grass separated the yard from the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house.
We ran down the alley, having to hop over an ancient drooping picket fence to reach the backyard where Neil lay sprawled, face down, next to a twenty-year-old Chevrolet that was tireless and up on blocks. Through the windshield, you could see the huge gouges in the seats where the rats had eaten their fill.
The backyard smelled of dog shit and car oil.
Neil was moaning. At least we knew he was alive.
“The sonofabitch,” he said, when we got him to his feet. “I moved over to the other side, back of the car there, so he wouldn’t see me if he tried to come down that fire escape. I didn’t figure there was another fire escape on the side of the building. He must’ve come around there and snuck up on me. He tried to kill me but I had this—”
In the moonlight, his wrist and the switchblade knife he held in his fingers were wet and dark with blood. “I got him a couple of times in the arm. Otherwise, I’d be dead.”
“We’re going up there,” Mike said.
“How about checking Neil first?” I said.
“I’m fine,” Neil said. “A little headache from where he caught me on the back of the neck.” He waved his bloody blade. “Good thing I had this.”
The landlord was on the first floor. He wore Bermuda shorts and no shirt. He looked eleven or twelve months pregnant with little male titties and enough coarse black hair to knit a sweater with. He had a plastic-tipped cigarillo in the left corner of his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Two-F,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Who lives there?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“If you were the law, you’d show me a badge.”
“I’ll show you a badge,” Mike said, making a fist.
“Hey,” I said, playing good cop to his bad cop. “You just let me speak to this gentleman.”
The guy seemed to like my reference to him as a gentleman. It was probably the only flattering name he’d never been called.
“Sir, we saw somebody go up there.”
“Oh,” he said, “the vampires.”
“Vampires?”
He sucked down some cigarillo smoke. “That’s what we call ‘em, the missus and me. They’re street people, winos and homeless and all like that. They know that sometimes some of these apartments ain’t rented for a while, so they sneak up there and spend the night.”
“You don’t stop them?”
“You think I’d get my head split open for something like that?”
“I guess that makes sense.” Then: “So nobody’s renting it now?”
“Nope, it ain’t been rented for three months. This fat broad lived there then. Man, did she smell. You know how fat people can smell sometimes? She sure smelled.” He wasn’t svelte.
Back on the front lawn, trying to wend my way between the mounds of dog shit, I said, “‘Vampires.’ Good name for them.”
“Yeah it is,” Neil said. “I just keep thinking of the one who died. His weir
d eyes.”
“Here we go again,” Mike said. “You two guys love to scare the shit out of each other, don’t you? They’re a couple of nickel-dime crooks, and that’s all they are.”
“All right if Mike and I stop and get some beer and then swing by your place?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just as long as Mike buys Bud and none of that generic crap.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Neil laughed. “He does do that when it’s his turn to buy, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said, “he certainly does.”
I was never sure what time the call came. Darkness. The ringing phone seemed part of a dream from which I couldn’t escape. Somehow I managed to lift the receiver before the phone machine kicked in.
Silence. That special kind of silence.
Him. I had no doubt about it. The vampire, as the landlord had called him. The one who’d killed Bob. I didn’t say so much as hello. Just listened, angry, afraid, confused.
After a few minutes, he hung up.
Darkness again; deep darkness, the quarter moon in the sky a cold golden scimitar that could cleave a head from a neck.
Chapter 5
About noon on Sunday, Jan called to tell me that she was staying a few days extra. The kids had discovered archery and there was a course at the Y they were taking and wouldn’t she please please please ask good old Dad if they could stay. I said sure.
I called Neil and Mike to remind them that at nine tonight we were going to pay a visit to that crumbling stucco apartment house again.
I spent an hour on the lawn. My neighbors shame me into it. Lawns aren’t anything I get excited about. But they sort of shame you into it. About halfway through, Byrnes, the chunky advertising man who lives next door, came over and clapped me on the back. He was apparently pleased that I was a real human being and taking a real human being’s interest in my lawn. As usual he wore an expensive T-shirt with one of his client products on it and a pair of Bermuda shorts. As usual he tried hard to be the kind of winsome neighbor you always had in sitcoms of the fifties. But I knew somebody who knew him. Byrnes had fired his number two man so he wouldn’t have to keep paying the man’s insurance. The man was unfortunately dying of cancer. Byrnes was typical of all the ad people I’d met. Pretty treacherous people who spent most of their time cheating clients out of their money and putting on awards banquets so they could convince themselves that advertising was actually an endeavor that was of consequence.
