Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales

by Loren D. Estleman

  I’m scraping my skull for what to say next when she throws me a life preserver. “You like the Dead?”

  Copy that. Not, “You’re a Deadhead?” Which is a term they know in Bowling Green by now, it’s hip no more, but most people are afraid not to use it for fear of appearing unhip. The way she doesn’t say it, though, tells me she’s so hip she doesn’t even bother to think about it. I admit that’s a lot to get out of four words, but that was Nola, a living tip-of-the-iceberg. Thanks, honey; I like my Scotch good and orange.

  I lost the thread. Oh, right, the Dead. I take a chance. Remember everything hangs on how I broach the subject, and the conventional wisdom is never, ever jump the gun. If opening it up standing in front of her table with her friend about to come back any second is not jumping it, I don’t know what is. I say: “I like the dead.”

  That was it. Lowercase, no cap. Which you may argue makes no difference when you’re talking, but if you do, good day to you, because you’re not the person for what I have in mind. No comment? There’s hope for you. Then you’ll appreciate her reaction. Her face went blank. No expression, it might have been enameled metal with the eyes painted on. She’d heard that lowercase d, knew what it meant, and quick as a switch she shut down the system. She wasn’t giving me anything. Wherever this went, it was up to me to take it there.

  “I know about your problem,” I said. “I can help.”

  She didn’t say, “What problem?” That would have disappointed me. Her eyes flick past my shoulder, and I know without looking her friend’s coming. “Have you a card?”

  This time I smile. “You mean like ‘Have gun, will travel’?” She doesn’t smile back. “I’m known here. I’ll be at the Hangar in an hour.” And then she turns her head and I’m not there.

  I confer with the boys in the van, who take off their earphones long enough to agree the Hangar is Smilin’ Jack’s Hangar, a roadhouse up in Oakland that’s been around since before that comic strip folded, a trendy spot once that now survives as a place where the laws of marriage don’t apply, which is enough to pay the bills even after it gets around that it’s not Stoli in the Stoli bottles but cheap Smirnoff’s and that a ten-dollar bill traded for a three-fifty drink will come back as a five-spot more often than not. Every community needs a place to mess around.

  So forty minutes later, wearing fresh batteries, I’m groping through the whiskey-sodden dark of a building that was once an actual hangar for a rich flying enthusiast under the New Deal, my feet not touching the floor because the bass is so deep from the juke, looking for a booth that is not currently being used for foreplay. When I find one and order my watered-down Scotch, I’m hoping Nola’s part bat, because the teeny electric lamp on the table is no beacon.

  No need to worry. At the end of ten minutes, right on time, I hear heels clicking and then she rustles into the facing seat. She’s freshened her makeup, and with that long dark hair in an underflip and the light coming up from below leaving all the shadows where they belong, she looks like someone I wish I had a wife to cheat on with. I notice her scent: Some kind of moon-flowering blossom, dusky. Don’t look for it; it wouldn’t smell the same on anyone else.

  “Who are you?” She doesn’t even wait for drinks.

  “Call me Ted.”

  “No good. You know both my names, and if we do this thing you’ll know where I work. That’s too much on your side.”

  I grin. “Ted Hazlett.” Which is a name I use sometimes. It’s close to “hazard,” but not so close they won’t buy it.

  “And what do you do, Ted Hazlett?”

  “This and that.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Here and there. We can do this all night if you like.”

  My Scotch comes. She asks for vodka tonic—I’m right about that—and when the waiter’s gone she settles back and lights up one of those long cigarettes. Determining to enjoy herself.

  “We’re just two people talking,” she says. “No law against that.”

  “Not according to the ACLU.”

  “‘This and that.’ Which one is you kill people?”

  I think this over very carefully. “‘That.’”

  She nods, like it’s the right answer. She tells her story then, and there’s nothing incriminating in the way she tells it, at least not against her. She’s a paralegal with a downtown firm whose name I knows having been cross-examined by some of its personnel in the past. Attends law school nights, plans someday to practice family law, except this walking set of genitalia she’s assigned to, partner in the firm, is planning even harder to get into her pants. You know the drill: whispered obscenities in her ear when they’re alone in an office, anonymous gifts of crotchless panties and front-loading bras sent to her apartment in the mail, midnight phone calls when she’s too groggy to think about hitting the Record button on the machine. At first she’s too scared to file a complaint, knowing there’s no evidence that can be traced to him. Then comes the day he tells her she’d better go down on him if she wants a job evaluation that won’t get her fired. These evaluations are strictly subjective, there’s nobody in the firm you can appeal to, the decks are stacked in management’s favor. The firm’s as old as habeas; no rec means no legal employment elsewhere. To top it off, this scrotum, this partner, sits on the board of the school she attends and is in a position to expel her and wipe out three years of credits. Any way you look at it he’s got her by the smalls.

  What’s a girl to do? She’s no Shirley Temple, lived with a guy for two years, object matrimony, until she caught him in the shower with a neighbor and threw his clothes out a window—I mean every stitch, he had to go out in a towel to fetch them. So she does the deed on the partner, thinking to hand in her two weeks’ notice the next day and take her good references to a firm where oral examinations are not required.

  Except she’s so good at it the slob threatens to withhold references if she refuses to assign herself to him permanently, so to speak. Sure, I could have told her too, but it’s a lot easier from the sidelines. She knew the odds, but she rolled the dice anyway and came up craps.

  After stewing over it all weekend, she decides to take it up with the head of the firm, file a complaint. But the senior partner won’t sully himself and fobs her off on an assistant, who by the time she finishes her story has pegged her as an immoral bitch who’s gone to blackmail when she found out she couldn’t advance herself on her knees, if you get what I’m saying; she can see it in his face when he tells her the incident will be investigated. Next day she’s assigned to computer filing. It’s obvious the investigation stopped with the partner, who is now out to hound her out of the firm, filing being a notorious dead end whether it involves a modem or a bunch of metal cabinets.

  But he doesn’t stop there. She tries to finance a new car but gets denied for bad credit. Pulls out her card to buy a blouse at Hudson’s, the clerk makes a call, then cuts up the card in front of her. Some more stuff like that happens, then late one night she gets another phone call. It’s the walking genitalia, telling her he’s got friends all over and if she isn’t nice to him he’ll phony up her employment record, get her fired, evict her, frame her for soliciting, whatever; it’s him or a cell at County, followed by a refrigerator carton on Woodward Avenue, choice is hers. He’s psycho, no question, but he’s a psycho with connections. The refrigerator carton seals the deal. She’s his now, and the law is no longer her parachute. What the partner hasn’t figured on is that by blocking all the legal exits, he’s left her with only one way out.

  There’s no way I can tell you all this the way Nola told it. She lays it out flat, just the facts, without a choke or a sob. I’m ready for the waterworks; I’ve seen some doozies, Oscar-quality stuff, they don’t call undercover Umbrella Duty for nothing. The only hint Nola’s stinging at all is when she breaks a sentence in half to sip her drink, like a runner taking a hit of oxygen before he can go on. Maybe she’s just thirsty. What I’m saying is there’s nothing to distract from
the bare bones of her story. And I know every word’s true. I can see this puffed-up fucker in his Armani, ripping up some poor schmoe in court for stepping out on his wife, then rushing back to the office for his daily quickie with the good-looking paralegal. And while I’m seeing this—I can’t say even now if I knew I was doing it—I sneak a hand up under my shirt and disconnect the wire.

  Nola won’t talk business in a bar. She suggests we meet at her place the next night and gives me an address on East Jefferson. I stand up when she does, pay for the drinks—there’s no discussion on that, it’s an assumption we both make—and I go to the can, mainly to give her a chance to make some distance before I meet with the crew in the van. Only when I leave the roadhouse, I know she’s somewhere out there in the dark, watching me. I walk right past the van and get into my car and pull out. I don’t even give the earlobe-tug that tells them I’m being watched, because I know Nola would recognize it for what it was. And I spend an extra fifteen minutes crazying up the way home, just in case she’s following me.

  My telephone’s ringing when I get in, and I’m not surprised it’s Carpenter, from the van. What’s the deal, he wants to know, something went wrong with the transmitter and you forgot we were out there freezing off our asses, you get drunk or what? I tell him I’m wiped out, sorry, I must have pulled loose a wire without knowing. Not to worry; the Nola thing didn’t pan out, she was just looking for a sympathetic ear, had no intention of following up on her wish-dream of offing the partner. I didn’t like the way the bartender was giving me the fish-eye, thought if I was seen climbing in and out of a van in the parking lot I might blow any chance of a future bust involving the high-stakes poker game that went on in the back room Tuesday nights. Which was the only truth I told Carpenter that night.

  I don’t know if he believed me about Nola, but he didn’t question it Carpenter’s not what you call gung ho, would just as soon duck the graveyard shift for whatever reason. It’s not for fear of his disapproval I stay awake most of that night wishing I still smoked. I can still smell her cigarettes and that dusky scent on my clothes.

  Most of the next day is spent filling out reports on the nonexistent Rockover Case. I log out in time to go home and freshen up and put on a sport shirt and slacks, no sense working on the image now that the hook’s in. Understand, I have no intention of whacking the son of a bitch who’s bringing Nola grief. In twelve years with the department I’ve never even fired my piece except on the range, and even if I had I’m not about to turn into Sammy the Bull for anyone. I’m sympathetic to her case, maybe I can help her figure a way out—brace the guy and apply a little strongarm if necessary, see will he pick on someone his own size and gender. Okay, and maybe wrangle myself some pussy while I’m at it. Hey, we’re both single, and it’s been a stretch for me, what with everyone so scared of AIDS and GHB; I’m telling you, the alphabet’s played hell with the mating game. I figure I’m still leagues above the prick in the two-thousand-dollar suit

  She’s on the second floor of one of those converted warehouses in what is now called Rivertown, with a view of the water through a plate-glass window the size of a garage door in her living room. Decor’s sleek, all chrome and glass and black leather and a spatter of paint in a steel frame on one wall, an Impressionist piece that when you stand back turns out to be of a nude woman reclining, who looks just enough like Nola I’m afraid to ask if she posed for it. I can tell it’s good, but the colors are all wrong: bilious green and violent purple and a kind of rusty brown that I can only describe as dried blood, not a natural flesh tone in the batch. It puts me in mind less of a beautiful naked woman than a jungle snake coiled around a tree limb. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.

  It takes me a while to take all this in, because it’s Nola who opens the door for me. She’s wearing a dark turtleneck top with ribs over skin-tight stirrup pants with the straps under her bare feet, which are long and narrow, with high arches and clear polish on the toenails. It’s as if she knows I’m a connoisseur of women’s feet. With plastic surgery getting to be as common as root canals, pretty faces come four-for-a-quarter, and the effect is gone when you look down and see long bony toes with barn paint. Nola’s perfect feet are just about the only skin she’s showing, but I’m telling you, I’m glad I brought a bottle of wine to hold in front of myself. It’s like I’m back in high school.

  She takes the bottle with thanks, her eyes flicker down for a split second, and the corners of her lips turn up the barest bit, but she says nothing, standing aside to let me in and closing the door behind me, locking it with a crisp little snick. Bird Parker’s playing low on a sound system I never did get to see. She has me open the wine using a wicked-looking corkscrew in the tiny kitchen, and we go to the living room and drink from stemware and munch on crackers she’s set out on a tray on the glass coffee table, crumbly things that dissolve into butter on the tongue. I’m sitting on the black leather sofa, legs crossed, her beside me with hers curled under her, as supple as the snakewoman in the picture, giving off that scent. She looks even better by indirect light than she did in the Hangar. I’m thinking the Gobi at noon would be no less flattering.

  We start with small talk, music and wine and the superiority of streamlined contemporary over life in a museum full of worm-eaten antiques, then she lifts her glass to her lips and asks me if I approve of the police department’s retirement package.

  She slides it in so smoothly I almost answer. When it hits, I get the same shuddery chill I got from the picture, only worse, like the time I had my cover blown when I’d been moled into a car theft ring downriver for a month, bunch of mean ridgerunners whose weapon of choice was a welding torch. Don’t ask me why. All she’s armed with is crystal.

  I don’t try to run a bluff, the way I did with the car thieves—successfully, I might add. Rivertown is not Downriver, and Nola Rockover is not a gang of homicidal hillbillies, although I know now they’d be a trade-up. I ask her how she doped it out.

  “You forget I’m in computer filing. I ran that name you gave me through the system; you shouldn’t have used one you’d used before. It came up on the transcript when you testified against one of our clients as arresting officer. Are you getting all this on tape?”

  And would you believe it, there’s no emotion in her tone. She might have been talking about some case at work that had nothing to do with either of us. All I see in her eyes is the reflection of the wine glass she’s still holding up. I look into them and say no, I’m not wearing a wire; I was before, but I yanked it. I want to help.

  “Am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Lady, if it’s a lie, you’d be in a holding cell right now.”

  Which has its effect. She drinks a little more wine, and then she leans across me to set her glass down on the table. Before I know it she’s got her hands inside my sport shirt. She goes on groping long after it’s obvious there’s nothing under it but me. And in a little while I know there’s nothing but Nola under the sweater and pants. It’s like wrestling a snake, only a warm one with a quicker tongue that tastes like wine when it’s in my mouth and burns like liquid fire when it’s working its way down my chest, and down and down while I’m digging holes in the leather upholstery with my fingers trying to hang on.

  Understand, I’m not one of these fools that regales his friends with the play-by-play. I want you to see how a fairly good cop brain melted down before Nola’s heat. I was married, and I’ve had my hot-and-heavies, but I’ve never even read about some of the things we did that night. We’re on the sofa, we’re off the sofa, the table tips over and we’re heaving away in spilled wine and bits of broken crystal; I can show you a hundred little healed-over cuts on my back even now and you’d think I got tangled in barbed wire. In a little while we’re both slick with wine and sweat and various other bodily fluids, panting like a couple of wolves, and we’re still going at it. I’m not sure they’d take a chance showing it on the Playboy Channel.

  Miss? Oh, miss? Ice water
, please. I’m burning up.

  That’s better. Whew. When I think about that night—hell, whenever I think about Nola—this song keeps running through my head. It isn’t what Bird was playing on the record; he died years before it came out. It wasn’t a hit, although it should have been, it was catchy enough. I don’t even know who recorded it. “Evil Grows,” I think it was called, and it was all about this poor schnook realizing his girl’s evil and how every time he sees her, evil grows in him. Whoever wrote it knew what he was talking about, because by the time I crawled out of that apartment just before dawn, I’d made up my mind to kill Nola’s boss for her.

  His name’s Ethan Hollis, and he’s living beyond his means in Grosse Pointe, but if they outlaw that they’ll have to throw a prison wall around the city. I don’t need to park more than two minutes in front of the big Georgian he shares with his wife to know it won’t happen in there, inside a spiked fence with the name of his alarm company on a sign on the front gate. Anyway, since I’m not the only one who’s heard Nola’s threats, we’ve agreed that apparent accidental death is best. I’m just taking stock. The few seconds I get to see him through binoculars, coming out on the porch to tell the gardener he isn’t clipping the hedge with his little finger extended properly—I’m guessing, I can’t hear him across four acres of clipped lawn—is enough to make me hate him, having worked that very job under the druglord in Roseville. He’s chubbier than I had pictured, a regular teddy bear with curly dark hair on his head and a Rolex on his fat wrist, with a polo shirt, yet. He deserves to die if for no other reason than his lack of fashion sense.