Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  Could you ever, Nell found herself thinking. “Acting’s gotta be hard on the ego, though, right? I mean, the competition must be tremendous. There aren’t millions of kids all over the world dreaming of being cops the way they dream of being movie stars.”

  “I work,” Terry said, “even if I have to repair appliances between what I consider my real occupation. Yeah, it’s a struggle, and you get kicked in the teeth regularly, but then, every now and then, you know it’s worth it. Probably not so unlike being a cop.”

  “I don’t recall ever getting any applause for being a cop,” Nell said. “Not the way you must have.”

  He laughed. “I got some at that. Hated to turn in the uniform when the show closed.”

  He tightened some joints with the wrench, then let it clatter back into his toolbox and withdrew a small acetylene torch. “Gotta heat something up,” he said, “do some soldering. Then I’ll recharge the unit, change the filter, and be out of here. I’ll be able to make an audition, and you can return to chasing the bad guys.”

  “No rush,” Nell said. “At the moment, no bad guys close enough to chase.”

  He gave her a sideways glance as the torch popped and its nozzle emitted a narrow, hot flame. Another grin came her way. Then he adjusted the blue flame and began soldering. “Your name, Nell, is it short for Nelly?”

  “It is, but nobody’s called me Nelly in years.” She waited for him to comment that it was a nice name, but he didn’t. The only sound was the humming and clinking of the old box fan, the hissing of the torch. The torch reminded her of the one the Tavern on the Green waiter had used to scorch the crème brûlée, which brought to mind a comparison between Jack Selig and Terry Adams. Nell wasn’t sure she was ready for a sixtyish lover. It might be too much like being in her sixties herself, rushing the season. Selig was certainly sophisticated and handsome—and rich. Terry was certainly sensual and handsome—and still relatively poor. Maybe Terry was Selig twenty years ago.

  Nell was Nell now, and now wasn’t twenty years ago.

  Terry had finished with the blow torch and was fitting a new filter into place. When he straightened up, he wiped his hands on the outer thighs of his Levi’s so they’d be dry, getting ready to hoist the air conditioner back into the window frame. He was going to get away.

  Unless Nell’s refrigerator needed repair. It didn’t seem to be keeping the milk as cold as it used to.

  She watched silently as he slid the heavy unit back into the window, muscles flexing in his corded arms. He began to anchor it to the frame with a screwdriver.

  “Aren’t you going to try it first?” she asked.

  “It’ll work,” he said. “I knew exactly what it needed.”

  When he was finished, he switched the air conditioner on and turned it to high. It ran quietly and more powerfully than it ever had. Nell could see the brass pull chain on the nearby table lamp swaying in the artificial breeze.

  Terry unplugged the old box fan and wound the cord. Then he replaced his tools in their box, and carefully refolded the tarp so nothing would get on the carpet. He stooped gracefully for his Budweiser can, which he’d placed on his clipboard, tilted back his head, and finished his beer.

  “Mind if I wash my hands?” he asked.

  “Bathroom’s down the hall, first door on your right.”

  He placed the empty beer can on the smoothly running air conditioner, then made his way past her and down the hall. Nell knew he’d see her makeup, her toothbrush, intimate things. Maybe he’d sneak a look in the medicine cabinet and see the Midol. Maybe he’d look in the bottom vanity drawer and see her hair drier and her vibrator.

  Can’t get much more intimate than that.

  For some reason, she didn’t care.

  “I bet you made a good cop,” she said, when he returned with freshly scrubbed, almost clean hands. “Got great reviews.”

  “They said I was convincing.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “You should catch me when I perform sometime.”

  “I’d like that.”

  He crossed the room and picked up his clipboard and toolbox. Then he tucked the folded tarp beneath his arm. With his free hand, he picked up the box fan. Fully laden, he glanced at the empty beer can, then at her.

  “I’ll get it later,” she said. “Want me to write you a check?”

  “Not necessary. I’ll bill you.”

  He started toward the door, then turned as if he’d forgotten something. But he didn’t look anywhere other than at Nell. She hadn’t risen from the sofa.

  “Anything else you need?” he asked.

  “Need? Maybe the refrigerator. You do refrigerators?”

  “I do whatever needs doing.”

  “Mine’s been heating up lately.”

  “Your refrigerator?”

  “No”

  He carefully placed the fan, his toolbox, tarp, and clipboard on the floor and moved toward her.

  “Everything in the damned place is overheated,” she said. “I guess I need a Mr. Fixit.”

  He sat down next to her on the sofa.

  “We’ll fix that.”

  35

  Beam parked his Lincoln in a patch of shade across the street from Things Past. The space was available because it was a loading zone, complete with signs that threatened potential parkers with everything from arrest to castration. Nola knew the car and sooner or later would see it out the shop’s window. He didn’t care if she knew he was there. Maybe she’d think he was harassing her, and she’d come outside and walk over and complain. He wouldn’t mind; he wanted very much to have any kind of communication with her.

  Christ! I am harassing her. Just like one of those stalkers women phone the police about.

  There was always the possibility Nola would call the police, and they’d send a car to investigate her complaint. That would be, among other things, embarrassing.

  And there was always the possibility that she’d simply ignore him.

  Beam’s injured leg was starting to ache and stiffen up from sitting in one position for so long. It didn’t do that often; maybe it was trying to tell him something.

  He propped the NYPD placard on the dashboard where it was visible, then he opened the door and used it to brace himself as he climbed out of the Lincoln. After waiting for a string of cars to pass, he crossed the street to the antique shop. He’d been parked there for twenty minutes and hadn’t seen anyone come or go. Does she ever sell anything?

  By the time he’d crossed the street, he was no longer limping. The warm sun felt good on his back and leg. At the shop’s door, with its OPEN sign dangling crookedly in its window, he hesitated.

  Then he remembered what Cassie had told him: “…she needs to forgive you.”

  He wasn’t sure precisely why his sister had come to that conclusion, but she was right enough often enough to give him confidence now. He opened the door and went inside. The muted little bell above his head sounded the customer alarm.

  He seemed to be the only one in the shop.

  Finally, alerted by the bell, Nola came in through an open door behind the counter. Her hair was pulled back, emphasizing her wide cheekbones and large dark eyes. The simple blue dress she had on wasn’t meant to be sexy, but on her it was. Something about the way her body moved beneath the loosely draped material, what was and wasn’t apparent. She was a woman with a subtle rhythm all her own. The thing about women that attracted and seduced was individual and rhythmic, Beam thought. Maybe it was a subtle synthesis of rhythms. He didn’t understand it, but he sensed it was true.

  Nola didn’t look surprised to see him. “You get overheated sitting out there in your car?”

  “It isn’t much cooler in here,” Beam said, aware not only of the warmth, but of the musty scent of the surrounding objects, the past.

  “I’ll complain to the landlord.” She didn’t seem angry that he’d turned up again. She didn’t seem pleased. “What do you want, Beam?”

  “I think
we need to talk.”

  “You need to talk.”

  “We both do,” Beam said. “To each other.”

  She rested her hand on an old black rotary phone on the counter. “I should pick up the phone, call the precinct, tell them I’m being threatened and I’m afraid.”

  “You’re not being threatened and you’re not afraid.”

  “But I could pick up the phone and call.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He waited, but she didn’t move. Didn’t look away from him. Nothing in the world was darker than the very center of her eyes. “I know you’ve asked people in the neighborhood about me, Beam. You wanted to know if I was married, if I was involved with anyone.”

  “I did that, yes.”

  Her hand didn’t move off the phone. “What is this we need to talk about?” she asked.

  There was a good question. But the answer came to him immediately. “Harry.”

  “He was my husband.”

  “He was my friend.”

  “Did he trust you? His friend? The cop who owned him and was bending his arm?”

  “Yes. And he trusted you. He was right to trust us both. I don’t deny I wanted you. But I never moved on it. Never touched you. I was married. And you were Harry’s wife.”

  “I’m still Harry’s wife.”

  “Not any longer.”

  “Your wife is dead now.”

  The simple statement, coming from her, didn’t carry the weight and pain it might have. He was appalled, and then relieved, that he could hear it and not be pierced by grief and loneliness.

  “You’re right, she’s dead,” he said. “And so is Harry.”

  “You want to screw me. You want me to forgive you.”

  “Yes.”

  “One doesn’t necessarily follow the other.”

  “I know. But we both need the same thing.”

  “Oh? And what’s that?”

  “To be free of the past without losing it.”

  She continued to stare at him. He couldn’t decipher what was in her eyes.

  “I’m being honest with you,” he said.

  “You sure as hell are. You think I’m stuck here in some kind of cobwebby, self-imposed purgatory on earth because of what happened to Harry.”

  “Yeah, I think that.

  “And you think I can somehow ease the loss you feel for your wife.”

  She’s right!

  The knowledge, its clarity, so bluntly stated, struck Beam like a bullet.

  “And you have the formula that will help us both,” she said.

  “It isn’t a formula.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “A plea.”

  “You don’t sound so sure of yourself now.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What I said, do I have it right, Beam?”

  “As far as it goes.”

  “It goes farther?”

  “You know it does.”

  “I know I want you to leave.”

  “Question is, do you want me to come back?”

  Her gaze locked with his own. “I want you to leave.”

  Finally she removed her hand from the phone.

  He could feel her watching as he let himself out, the bell above the door tinkling a message in a code he didn’t know.

  He did know she hadn’t told him not to return, and she’d hesitated a beat before telling him again that she wanted him to leave.

  A beat. An infinitesimal fraction of time.

  A change in the rhythm.

  Adelaide understood that publicity was the oxygen of her business. Not that she wasn’t sincere, but why not make her plight known? Why not speak for the other poor people in the same predicament as hers, being pushed around by the system? This was her opportunity, and in a way her responsibility.

  Responsibility. That’s the word Barry used when finally he’d warmed to her idea, and even sort of adopted it as his own. “We average citizens can’t let ourselves be pushed around by the system,” he’d said. “Somebody has to speak up, even if it means falling on his or her sword.”

  “Like a real sword?” Adelaide had asked.

  “Like a book contract,” Barry told her. “And talk shows and acting jobs.”

  So here she was on the steps of City Hall, with maybe a hundred people gathered beyond the dozens of TV cameras and smaller camcorders directed toward her. One of the TV people had given her a tiny mike to clip to her lapel, with a wire running down inside her blouse to a small black power pack they’d attached to her belt at the small of her back.

  Adelaide looked young and beautiful in her tight jeans and her yellow blouse, tailored to emphasize her breasts and tiny waist. Her blond hair was piled high and with seeming recklessness on her head, with a few loose strands left to dangle strategically over her right cheek and left eye. Her tiny figure made even more diminutive by the solemn stone of City Hall, Adelaide looked soft and vulnerable. Adelaide looked cute.

  In her right hand, she held a sheet of crumpled white paper. She raised it high and told the assembled what they already knew: it was a jury summons.

  “It’s unfair!” she said in her high stage voice that would have carried even without a microphone. “I’d be eager to serve on a jury if the city could guarantee my safety. And your safety. They cannot. It’s asking citizens to perform much more than their civic duty when they’re asked to risk their lives.” She waved the summons in her tight little fist. “This isn’t a draft notice! We’re not at war. I don’t feel I should have to pay a price because the city can’t perform it’s first duty to us, its citizens, and that is to protect us!”

  The crowd beyond the media had grown to almost two hundred now, and they began to cheer. Some of the cameras swiveled away from Adelaide and toward the mass of onlookers.

  “I’m not a criminal,” Adelaide continued. “And I shouldn’t be asked to pay for someone else’s crime. But that’s exactly what might happen, because the police aren’t doing their job. They haven’t done it well enough so far, anyway. Maybe it is a tough job. And I’m sure they’re doing the best they can. But it isn’t my fault—it isn’t our fault—that it isn’t good enough!”

  Another loud cheer. Some in the crowd began waving the ADELAIDE’S RIGHT signs that looked homemade, but that Barry had had printed up yesterday by a friend of his who had a graphics art business in the Village. ADELAIDE’S ARMY and FREE ADELAIDE signs were already printed and being held in reserve.

  “I have no choice but to announce publicly that until the Justice Killer is apprehended and the city is no longer in the control of a madman—”

  “You mean the mayor?” a man shouted from the crowd.

  “I mean the Justice Killer.” Adelaide began waving both arms now, palms out in an appeal for a moment’s silence so she could be heard. “Until the city’s safe again, I will not obey this jury summons. I will not serve. I will not be a sacrifice.”

  The crowd was getting ever larger, and uniformed cops were having difficulty keeping it contained. A tall, skinny cop near the front used his nightstick as a probe to move a man back, but the man brushed it aside and pushed forward.

  “I will go to jail first!” Adelaide screamed. “I mean it! I pledge that I will go to jail!”

  “We got rights!” a woman in the crowd screamed.

  “And sometimes we have to fight for them!” Adelaide responded. The crowd roared its agreement. She set her jaw and gave them her left profile. Cute as a feisty twelve-year-old, only with a grown woman’s sexuality. “This is one of those times.” She raised her dainty fist high above her head, as she had when she auditioned for Les Miz.

  The half dozen men Barry had hired began chanting, “Adelaide! Adelaide! Adelaide!” The crowd joined in, many of them pumping their fists in the air. At a subtle signal from Barry, his hirelings pushed forward, knocking over a police barricade. The crowd followed, surging toward City Hall.

  The cops moved fast, but they’d been taken by surprise and there were
n’t enough of them. A line had been crossed, an invisible switch thrown. Suddenly the crowd became a mob. It was held back only a few seconds before it surged forward, knocking over some of the media, sending equipment smashing to the ground.

  “Holy shit!” Adelaide thought.

  “Barry!” She began calling for Barry, but in the maelstrom of motion and shouting no one heard her. “Barry!”

  Adelaide could count crowds, and she estimated that at least five hundred frenetic people were charging toward her. A uniformed cop was on the ground and couldn’t climb back to his feet. He scooted backward, his soles scraping on the pavement, then he was lost from sight in the rush of humanity. That really scared her.

  “Barry!”

  She saw Barry emerge from the left side of the crowd and start toward her. His face was flushed an improbably bright red and he looked out of breath. He staggered, went down, and disappeared.

  God! Barry, don’t have a heart attack, please!

  Adelaide began backing up the steps, afraid to turn away from the crowd, almost falling as her heel caught. She realized her face was frozen in a meaningless smile that masked near panic.

  The blue of a police uniform appeared in the corner of her vision, then another. More and more cops were on the steps. Some of them had long, curved shields as well as nightsticks and were forming a kind of line that was meant to hold back the crowd.

  Adelaide turned and saw uniformed cops streaming out of City Hall and down the steps. It was like the cavalry coming to her rescue in an old Technicolor western. And she was overjoyed to see them. She whirled and ran toward her rescuers with her arms spread wide, dropping her crumpled jury summons. A big cop who looked like a young Gary Cooper was gazing deadpan at her. She veered toward him.

  She fell sobbing into his arms.

  “Arrest me!” she gasped. “Arrest me, please!”

  They didn’t arrest Adelaide, didn’t charge her for inciting a riot, maybe because Barry and his—her—lawyers almost came right out and dared them to. Or maybe she was simply too cute to arrest.

  But they did take her into protective custody, and she spent the night by herself in a tiny, smelly holding cell. The bed was hard as a plank, and it was impossible for her to sleep. The place was noisy, too. There were voices she couldn’t understand because of the way they echoed, and someone was snoring not far away. Now and then people came by to look in at her. Most of them were in uniform. They didn’t say anything, only looked.