Cold Blue Midnight

by Ed Gorman

Exciting. Scary.

  Fingers on the ornate knobs of the chest's first drawer. Slide the first drawer open. Peek inside…

  Socks. Black socks, blue socks, argyle socks. Maybe two dozen pairs of socks.

  But was something more interesting hidden beneath them? Rick reached inside the drawer smelling of sawn pine and coarse to the touch from being unfinished and started to push his hands all the way down to the bottom of the drawer. He found

  Socks.

  Damn.

  Just like Adam to build up your hopes and then disappoint you with socks.

  Maybe drawer number two…

  Drawer number two was underwear.

  Plain white jockey shorts, buff-blue boxer shorts, even a pair of red bikini underwear, though Adam hated all things effeminate and fussy.

  Maybe beneath this tumble of underwear was hidden

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  More sweet aroma of sawn pine. More feel of rough, unfinished wood. But nothing inside.

  Two more drawers to go.

  This was like a treasure hunt. Or a game show.

  Two more to go!

  And that was when the phone rang. Rick jumped in terror and panic, as if his mother had caught him doing something extremely unpleasant and unwholesome. He fled the bedroom, clipping out the light and trotting down the hall to the living room to pick up the phone there.

  'Mr Runyon, please.'

  He said, and quite angrily, 'How did you get my number, Mrs Tappley?'

  'My attorney, of course.'

  'He promised that he wouldn't tell anyone how to reach me.'

  'I pay my attorney a great deal of money, Mr Runyon. He can't afford to keep secrets from me.'

  He said, 'Is somebody else on this line, Mrs Tappley?'

  'What?'

  'This connection sounds funny.'

  'You must be a very paranoid man, Mr Runyon.'

  'I want to hang up now, Mrs Tappley.'

  'And I want to know how things went you know, tonight.'

  'Watch the news later on.'

  'I really resent your attitude, Mr Runyon.'

  'I don't give a damn what you resent, Mrs Tappley.'

  And with that, Rick Corday became the only person in Chicago history to ever hang up on Mrs Evelyn Daye Tappley.

  A half hour later, still angry that Mrs Tappley had his number, still certain that Adam had gone to New York simply to cheat on him, Rick Corday got in his car and decided to drive past Jill Coffey's place.

  He wanted to make sure she was home.

  So the police wouldn't have any trouble finding her.

  This was such a tidy little job. It did a heart good to know that it was, at least upon occasion, capable of genius.

  CHAPTER 31

  Doris did not hang up until both her mother and Mr Runyon had done so. Then she gently cradled the phone and left the den. She'd heard her mother, in her private office, call somebody. Doris had then immediately ducked into the library and lifted the receiver.

  'Watch the news later tonight,' the man named Runyon had said. What had he meant by that? What had her mother hired him to do?

  Earlier tonight, her mother had said that Jill Coffey was 'finally going to get her come-uppance' and the words had frightened Doris.

  Her mother was old and bitter and had the resources to destroy virtually anybody.

  Had she finally gotten around to destroying Jill Coffey?

  No use asking her mother directly. The woman would never tell her. But Doris had to find out somehow. Jill Coffey didn't deserve her mother's wrath. Her only crime had been that she hadn't fitted into the Tappley household, where Evelyn Tappley was the absolute lord and master.

  Nobody deserved to be destroyed for that.

  Nervously, Doris went downstairs to the den. She needed one of her rare drinks of alcohol. Perhaps, in fact, she needed two.

  CHAPTER 32

  Andre Sovic always knew that someday he was going to be important. When he was in grade school, he figured he was going to be important in high school, and when he was in high school, he figured he was going to be important in college. But he wasn't important in college, either, because this really aggravating little war called Vietnam got in the way. As the son of poor Polish immigrants, Sovic had nobody to take his part when his summons came from the draft board, so off he went to war. It was a fine and noble calling, a war, and as much as the mother and sister were heartbroken, as much as the old man was secretly afraid, off Andre went. He didn't become important in the war. He sat on his butt in a supply depot in Saigon and typed up requisitions. Back home, there were no parades, no newspaper interviews, not even any big family gathering. But why should there be? As yet, Andre Sovic had not proved himself to be important. He went to work at the GM plant, got married to a Polish girl with a set of charlies that were truly eye-popping, and then spent the next sixteen years (they now had four kids) in happy oblivion. Then he got laid off permanently (why couldn't they just say 'fired' and have done with it) from GM and spent just over a year collecting unemployment checks and getting sick of the soap operas his wife watched all day. Andre Sovic was still not an important man.

  He was thinking of all this as he got off the elevator tonight. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he'd never be important. Maybe this was simply the fanciful notion of some dumb polack kid from Chicago wearing his khaki uniform with the little Ajax Janitorial insignia above his lapel, jaunty dark brown Ajax Janitorial cap on his head, and Ajax Janitorial vacuum cleaner in his right hand.

  He went up to the wooden door marked ERIC BROOKS, was surprised to find it unlocked, and peeked inside.

  'Hello?' His voice sounded kind of eerie in the stillness.

  He wondered why the door was unlocked. Brooks was usually the last one out of here (a lot of times he had babes with him, beautiful babes) and he always locked up.

  No answer.

  He went inside.

  He was scared. He didn't know why.

  Odd, too. All these months going up and down inside dark skyscrapers and he hadn't once got scared.

  But tonight, now

  'Hello?'

  What was he scared of? Guy goes off and forgets to lock the door. Big deal. Probably had some babe on his arm who made him forget everything else.

  He went into the plum-colored reception area. Paused. Heard nothing. Decided to take a right and go down the short hall leading to Brooks' own office.

  'Hello!'

  Didn't want to find Brooks bopping somebody on his desk or something. Didn't want to get fired.

  By now he was right up to Eric Brooks' office. The door was open.

  He peeked in.

  The first thing he saw was the blood sprayed and splashed all over the gray fabric wall.

  The second thing he saw was Eric Brooks' head sticking out from behind the desk. On the floor. At a very odd and painful-looking angle.

  The third thing he saw were the bloody orange-handled scissors several feet from Eric Brooks' head.

  'Oh God,' said the formerly unimportant Andre Sovic. 'Oh God oh God oh God.'

  Took him three minutes to gather himself sufficiently to lift his communicator from his belt and talk to his black bastard of a boss.

  'You botherin' me again, Sovic.'

  'You gotta get up here.'

  'You got some chicks up there, all right. Otherwise forget it.' Then he seemed to sense Sovic's mood. He dropped his street-jive accent and said in a perfectly normal middle-class voice, 'What's wrong, Sovic?'

  'Just get up here. Pleaseget up here real fast.'

  Andre Sovic had become important at last. To the police, who would question him. To the press, who would quote him endlessly. To his family, who would forever more tell stories about the night Dad found that rich guy all cut up in his office.

  But as Andre Sovic looked at the bloody body, he wondered if he really liked being important after all.

  Not even in Vietnam had he seen corpses this savagely cut up.
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  CHAPTER 33

  Marcy Browne had been sitting there in her cute little hooker costume for maybe thirty, thirty-five minutes when the blue Volvo showed up.

  She had been listening to a country and western stationthe title of the last song being 'I Cheated With My Body But Not My Soul'because she planned on taking up line dancing very soon. Line dancing was becoming very big in the United States among people who fancied themselves real cowboys and cowgirls, though it was highly unlikely that a real cowboy would ever have done a dance called the Tush Push.

  She was thinking about Tush Pushes, her mind drifting the way it always did when she pulled surveillance, when the blue Volvo eased past her on the opposite side of the street.

  She spotted the guy driving immediately.

  Same white-haired James Coburn kind of guy as in the photo Jill had given her. Same deep blue Volvo Jill had described.

  She sat up good and straight, still feeling a little self-conscious in her hooker get-up, turned on the lights and prepared to make a U-turn.

  The blue Volvo wasn't stopping at Jill's but it was slowing so the guy could look at the second floor and see that Jill was home.

  She started into her U-turn.

  This was great.

  Real excitement.

  The kind of thing that happened to TV private eyes all the time but that almost never happened to them in real life.

  An honest-to-goodness tail job!

  She was going to get his license number and then she was going to follow him and then

  And then, because she'd been so excited she hadn't seen it coming, the gray Plymouth drove straight into her. Marcy had been halfway through her U-turn and

  There was a great and calamitous ripping and rending of metal, a loud and ugly shattering of glass, and an angry blast of horn that could probably be heard half a mile away.

  Only now did March realize what had happened. She'd swerved out into the traffic lane without seeing him coming.

  He was big, truck-driver big, and mean, thug-mean, and he fairly tore off his door getting out of the car. He stalked up to her with ape-drooping arms and said, 'You little bitch, I should slap the shit out of you.'

  It was enough to make her want to go back to community college and find herself a new line of work.

  CHAPTER 34

  After Mitch had left, Jill went downstairs to the darkroom and developed some film from an agency shoot she'd done a few days earlier.

  As she worked, clipping the film up to dry, she tried very hard not to think about Mitch Ayers. Or how, despite all her words to the contrary, she'd been happy to see him tonight. Even worse, she sensed that he just might be telling the truththat his long and difficult and failed marriage might finally be over at last.

  No. Don't get sucked back in.

  This was how it went for an hour, yin and yang, to and fro, back and forth. She wanted to see more of Mitch; she dreaded seeing more of Mitch. Mitch was honest and trustworthy; Mitch was selfish and deceitful.

  This was one of those times when she wished she'd had more experience with men. In all, she'd slept with five men in her life, one of them (she smiled wryly) who wouldn't take a shower unless she threatened to cut him off from sex. She didn't really have enough experience to know if Mitch's behavior was typical of a man in the middle of a divorce, or whether Mitch was just cynically using her.

  She concentrated on work, developing six contact sheets. She had to get back to the client in the next few days. Like most ad men, he believed in starting projects only a few hours before they were due.

  She was just choosing shots, marking off the preferred ones on the contact sheets with a grease pencil, when she heard a loud pounding on her apartment door.

  She thought of two people: Mitch or the man in the blue Volvo.

  This time she didn't have her gun.

  She had to go up the stairs to her apartment then back down a different set of stairs to the ground-floor door.

  She peered out through the eyehole.

  Kate stood there, shivering in the chill wind.

  Jill took off all three locks and opened the door.

  Slender, regal Kate, who might have been a taller version of Audrey Hepburn if only she weren't such a rubber-faced wise-ass, looked suspiciously subdued. Despite her years as a highly paid runway model, Kate usually opened with a dirty joke or two. But tonight there were no smiles, no joke.

  'Have you been listening to the news?'

  'No,' Jill said. 'Why?'

  'Eric Brooks was murdered tonight.'

  'What?'

  Kate nodded somberly, drawing herself deep into her cape-like black coat.

  'Let's go upstairs. Get WGN on. Their news starts in a few minutes.'

  ***

  'Prominent Chicago advertising executive Eric Brooks was found murdered in his office in downtown Chicago tonight. Police aren't saying how he was killed or if they have any suspects. Witnesses at the scene at Brooks' office say there was a great deal of blood on the floor and carpet, indicating an act of extreme violence. We'll bring you a live update later in this newscast.'

  Jill thumbed OFF on the remote.

  The two women sat in silence, sipping at the dregs of Mr Coffee Jill had poured them.

  'You saw him tonight, right?'

  'Right,' Jill echoed. She felt dazed, unreal. For all that the crime rate was going up in Chicago, she had remained untouched by it. A friend of hers had once been robbed in a parking ramp, while another friend had found evidence that somebody had tried to jimmy open her back window, but the worst of itthe muggings, the stabbings, the shootingshad not touched her.

  And now this.

  She wanted to feel bad for Eric: that was what she was really struggling with. She wanted her dislike of him to subside so she could feel an appropriate sense of loss, but all she could summon now was rage at violence of this sort, and real sympathy for Eric's wife and children. This was the kind of event that would mark the girls for years, if not for life.

  And finally she even felt sympathy for Eric. He had been an insecure and manipulative man but despite that there had been some genuine good times, and because of Eric she'd been able to go on her own as a photographer. His business acumen had given her the money she'd needed.

  'What time did you leave?'

  Jill didn't realize, until Kate's question had floated unanswered for a few seconds, that her friend had even spoken.

  'I'm sorry. What was that?'

  'What time did you leave Eric's office?' Even in a simple white button-down blouse and designer jeans, her shining dark hair touching her shoulders, doe-eyed Kate looked gorgeous.

  'About seven-thirty, I guess.'

  'Maybe you should call the police.'

  'Yes, I guess I should.' She shook her head. 'God, I just can't believe it.'

  'I had a friend in college, her brother was murdered like this. She said that even years later, she couldn't believe that somebody had killed him. She kept waiting for him to show up on her doorstep one day.'

  'His poor wife and kids.'

  'And poor Eric. I got the impression from the TV story that they must really have done a job on him.'

  'You want more coffee?'

  'If you wouldn't mind. I'd just gone out to get something to eat when I heard about Eric on the car radio, so I drove right over here.' She patted her stomach. 'It keeps growling.'

  'I've got a stale donut in the cupboard if you're interested. Or a fresh apple.'

  Kate grinned. 'Now knowing me, Ms Nutrition, which do you think I'd like? Fresh apple or stale donut?'

  'Stale donut.'

  Kate clapped her hands together like an exuberant child. 'Correct. Very good guess.'

  As Jill prepared another pot of coffee, and set Kate's donut on a saucer, she thought again of Eric's widow and his children. Especially his children.

  She said a silent prayer for them.

  CHAPTER 35

  Mitch Ayers wanted to live in a kinder, gentler e
ra and his choice in rental videos reflected this fact.

  After leaving Jill's place, he declined the pleasure of meeting some cop buddies in a bar and instead went to Video Crazy where he rented comedy tapes with W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, and a Warner Brothers one which included two Daffy Ducks, two Elmer Fudds and three Bugs Bunnys.

  Mitch was from the last generation that went every week to Saturday afternoon matinees. This was in the mid-fifties when big shiny cars disgorged howling mobs of suburban kids in front of downtown theaters. He'd always been especially keen on comedy, Jerry Lewis, Francis The Talking Mule and Ma and Pa Kettle being among his favorites.

  For nostalgia's sake, he'd even rented a Ma and Pa Kettle tonight.

  He lay on the couch in a jogging suit, a can of Schlitz on the pressed-wood coffee table, trying hard to lose himself in Fields' The Bank Dick. Usually, Mitch had no trouble being transported back to the early part of the century when men were still gentlemen and women were still ladies.

  But every thirty seconds or so he'd find his mind drifting back to Jill and what had happened at her place tonight. Much as he wanted to tell himself that it had gone well, that she hadn't kicked him out anyway, he'd seen how much he'd hurt her. He remembered disappointing his youngest daughter once by forgetting her birthday. He would always remember her face that day just as he would always remember Jill's face tonight.

  He loved her: he was more sure of that than ever. The question was, even though he knew she loved him, would she take him back? Would she give them another chance?

  The phone rang.

  He felt a ridiculous surge of hope. Maybe it was Jill, inviting him back over tonight. All is forgiven.

  Ridiculous was the operative word. Unless she had recently soaked her vocal chords in two packs of Winstons and a pint of Old Grandad a day, this was not Jill.

  'I thought you were goin' out with some of the boys tonight?' Lieutenant Sievers drawled.

  'Decided to turn in early. What can I do for you, Lieutenant?'

  'You know a lady named Jill Coffey, right?'

  'Right. Went out with her for several months.'