Dispatch, still professional, promised to be prompt. I signed off and looked over at Chano. He was white and swallowing fast. For that matter, so was I. Elgar—what had been Elgar—was sitting in a capacious leather chair in the middle of the projection room, facing the eight-foot screen. The body, a 172-centimeter, well-nourished, fifty-seven-year-old male, as the ME would no doubt describe it, had retained its last living posture: upright with knees spread and both hands on the arms of the chair. Elgar had sported old, faded knuckle tattoos and big garnet rings, as everyone knew from seeing him on Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien and Kathy Lee. I could see those tattoos and garnets now. It was just as well. All the rest of what might be termed Elgar’s distinguishing features were lost in the gore that had been his skull.
Jets of blood had feathered the leather walls of the projection room, and the screen, which was frozen on a scene from Lords of Vengeance, probably part of the upcoming season currently in production. It could have been the spoiler of the century, we wouldn’t have noticed. The death weapon was on the floor. It was a long-handled axe, as tall as a man, with a blade on one side of the head and a kind of spiked maul on the other. It had been featured in last season’s finale—rather prominently—in that part where Jame goes berserk after learning it was Sesia who poisoned his brother.
“Right,” I said after a moment; you could funk for only so long, and then you had to get to business. “Who talks to the housekeeper?” We did an eyeball coin toss, which Chano won, or lost, depending on how you looked at it, and he stayed by the projection room while I went upstairs to interview the witness. Luz Gutierrez was a small, loyal woman of about forty-five who would have looked better on any other day. Her efforts at composure were pitiful to watch. I kept my questions as simple as I could: When had she last seen Elgar alive?
The past evening, she managed to say. He’d been heading to the projection room, to view the day’s takes. Around nine-thirty, that had been. She had set the alarm system when she left for the day, as she always did.
And Elgar lived alone? There was no one staying with him?
Not for that night, no. He was working.
So what time had she come in this morning?
Eight, again as always. She had switched off the alarm—it showed no alerts—and went into the kitchen to make coffee.
Had she seen Elgar?
No, but that wasn’t unusual. He kept his own hours. It was the dog that had worried her: El Loco, Elgar’s pit bull. She had found it running back and forth outside the projection room, whining. And there was a smell… She had knocked, and gotten no answer. The door was locked.
And what about that, I interrupted. Was that unusual?
Oh, no. Mister Elgar always locked the door when he was working. He was very conscious that there be no chance for leaks, for spoilers of the new season.
But for the door to still be locked, in the morning?
Well—she’d thought perhaps Elgar had passed out inside. He was supposed to be clean since rehab two years ago, but as everyone knows, there are no guarantees. And if he had fallen off the wagon, the little woman explained to me earnestly, he would have wanted it handled quietly, no paramedics or fuss to bring down the tabloids. That was why she had gotten a tire iron from the garage, and broken the doorknob. She had gone in calling his name—it had been awful—she had had to drag the dog away—she couldn’t even remember coming upstairs…
I saw her settled in the kitchen with one of the security staff, a woman with a tighter buzz cut than mine. The chief followed me back out of earshot. He was ex-LAPD and crisp: “You can count on our full cooperation. We’ve verified Gutierrez’s movements. And the key to the projection room is still in the lock on Mr. Elgar’s side of the door; so her story checks out. We left everything in place for your people, of course.”
“What about last night?”
“I’ve pulled the logbooks and camera footage for you. Mr. Elgar was checked in around twenty-one-hundred hours—”
“Alone?”
“Everything shows that he was. My guys say the shift was routine.”
“No visitors for this address? No false alarms, intruder calls, suspiciously innocent tourists wandering around?”
“No.” He met my eye. “But we’ll review everything.”
I told him we appreciated it, and went back to give Chano the rundown. He was still in the doorway of the chamber of horrors, sucking on a pen, his habit when he couldn’t smoke.
“Tell me what strikes you about this place,” he said.
I did my best to concentrate on the room apart from the obvious. Not large, maybe thirty by eighteen, it was half home theater, half man-cave, heavy on the cowhide and redwood, with a booze cabinet, arcade games, and Elgar’s industry awards displayed alongside posters from Lords of Vengeance, and all the knives and axes. Elgar had gotten his FX department to make a fully-functioning replica of each of the show’s featured weapons, for his own private collection; everybody knew that. He’d taken some of them on the Today show. The projection room, by the looks of it, was his showcase. The walls bristled. Everything deadly was tastefully displayed on a plaque or hanger. The one behind Elgar’s chair was empty.
“Nice place if you don’t get nightmares,” I said.
Chano waved his arms. “Windows!” he said. “Where are the windows?”
“We’re in the basement,” I pointed out. “Who needs natural light in a projection room?”
“Then once the door is locked,” Chano bulleted me with a forefinger, “this place is a sealed box. No way in, no way out.”
“You’re getting carried away.”
“So what do you suggest? A secret passageway?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” I said, eying the décor. Some of those implements had been invented just for the show.
“Whatever you say,” Chano was pacing around, “we’ve got a dead man in a locked room. He goes in last night, alone. He’s found dead this morning, alone. Dead, alone, behind a locked door, a pit bull, an alarm system, and a twelve-foot gate with a guard! Who gets past that?”
“Famous people can have powerful enemies,” I said.
“They don’t have freaking magic ones!”
“It’s not our department,” I told him. “Let Investigative figure it out.”
Chano stopped pacing and looked at the projection screen again. It was still frozen, flickering a little, on some unidentified scene showing Jame and Kroner in all their leather-clad glory. “You ever watch the show?”
“Sometimes.” It wasn’t my favorite. If I wanted horror-porn, I just had to go to work. Especially on days like today.
“You see the one where that girl’s hiding in Bellow’s room and the dogs—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Or the one where they take a spoon to the guy’s eyeball and—”
“Shut up, will you?”
Chano shut up, but the atmosphere didn’t really improve. “You know who could’ve done it?” he said, after a moment. “Them.”
He was pointing at the screen.
“Are you nuts? Those actors were nobody until the show hit prime time. They’re the last guys to want to—”
“I don’t mean the actors, I mean them,” said Chano impatiently. “Jame. Kroner. Sesia. Any of them.”
He wasn’t looking at me, probably because he knew what kind of expression I’d have on my face.
“You mean, they climbed down off the screen, played smashing pumpkins with Elgar’s head, and then went back to never-never land?”
Chano shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to be alone in a locked room with ‘em.”
“They’re make-believe people!”
“So you tell me how an un-make-believe person could’ve been in and out of here without leaving a blood trail, or footprints, or trace on the handle of that axe.” Chano was chewing his pen again. “Guy who did this must’ve been splattered.”
I couldn’t help myself; I glanced up at the screen, at Jam
e and Kroner. As usual, they looked like they’d been born in an abattoir.
Chano said softly, “I don’t guess anyone could hate Elgar more than the characters on his show. He created them, he put them in their screwed-up world, he grinds them through hell every week, has them tortured, beaten up, starts wars, kills their families, their friends, anyone they care about—just so the viewers can get their kicks. And, incidentally, make him a shitload of money. Yes, sir,” Chano tapped his pen against his teeth, “why shouldn’t they kill Elgar? They’d only be doing what he designed them to do. Making revenge. Taking payback. Looking after their own.”
“You’re about two squirrels short of a load,” I said. But it was hard not to shiver. Hard not to want to get your back against the wall, and keep Jame and Kroner where you could see them. Not to wonder if their eyes hadn’t just flickered your way. With Chano’s gentle voice, and the headless upright corpse, the soft illumination of the recessed lighting, and the eerie quietness of the subterranean room, it was exactly like the quiet moment in a movie, where you just know something bad is going to happen next.
So I jumped when Lieutenant Baker appeared at the top of the stairwell.
Lieutenant Gary Baker was very senior, very good, which is what you can expect to have at your violent-death scene if you are a Hollywood producer with your name on a Forbes Top Ten Most list. He was accompanied by Vern Stokes, the most boffinly of the forensics boffins. They took in the scene casually, and then Baker turned aside to shake a couple of Mentos from their packet, and ask me for a report. I gave it to him as concisely as I could. Chano was vibrating beside me, waiting for a chance. I willed him to be quiet.
Baker stepped carefully into the room, navigating around Elgar’s corpse. He looked to be measuring distances with his eyes; how far from the chair to the empty display plaque, and then to the weapon on the floor. He took another couple steps. Grunting a little, he bent down and picked something up off the floor. It was a small brass screw.
“What did you get from CISN?” he asked Vern.
“A trembler of magnitude 4.1,” said Vern, scrolling through his phone, “through this area around 1:09 a.m., lasting no more than fifty-seven seconds. CalTech concurs. Damn me. I would’ve guessed a 4.9 at least.”
“That’s five bucks you owe me,” Baker said. Crunching his Mentos, he strode over to the wall, flipped up the empty plaque so that what had looked like the bottom was now the top, and shoved the brass fastener through it back into the wall. “If you’re going to live in friggin’ earthquake country,” he said, “don’t hang friggin’ battleaxes on your wall without the friggin’ screw anchored.” He indicated, with his arm, the way the axe would have hung, at a thirty-degree angle, and then it was easy to see how the top-heavy implement could have swung out of its holder and gone down to bash Elgar in the crock. Baker shook his head.
“A damn shame,” he said. “Lords of Vengeance is my favorite hour of television, too.”
“You know what they say, sir,” said Chano. “The show must go on.”
Baker gave us a vague smile full of teeth and told us to get outside and keep the press away.
It was a short drive back down to the gate, and neither of us spoke at first.
“You and your ideas,” I finally said. “See if I ever listen to you again.”
“Come on,” said Chano. “I almost had you convinced.”
“Like hell you did.”
“And you’ll always wonder: was it really an earthquake? Or was that just a convenient excuse, so the network could hush up the truth…?”
“I’m warning you—”
“Everyone’s a critic,” said Chano, and subsided into window-gazing, whistling softly through his teeth. I could practically hear the hamster-wheels squeaking between his ears: a couple of screenwriting classes at Lakewood Community College, and pretty soon he’d be pitching his script to studio heads at HBO. It’s this town. Earthquakes and other little facts of nature, we can sleep right through, but a good hook will pull us in any time.
I watched the season premiere of Lords of Vengeance when it came on that fall, just like everyone else. People were already saying the show had lost its edge when it lost Elgar, that it was too tame, too toned down, and probably wouldn’t last. I don’t have any opinion on that, but I know there was one scene that sure raised the hair on my neck. It was toward the end of the episode, and Jame was standing on this rock overlooking the sea. He had an axe, that very axe, in his hands, and right before the closing shot he turned and looked straight out at the viewers. And I could’ve sworn he winked.
Contributor Notes
Maureen Bowden is an ex-patriate Liverpudlian living with her musician husband on the island of Anglesey, off the coast of North Wales, where they try in vain to evade the onslaught of their children and grandchildren. She writes for fun and she has had several poems and short stories published. She also writes song lyrics, mostly comic political satire, set to traditional melodies. Her husband has performed these in Folk clubs throughout England and Wales. She loves her family and friends, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Shakespeare and cats.
Joshua Chaplinsky is the Managing Editor of LitReactor.com. He has also written for popular film site Screen Anarchy and for ChuckPalahniuk.net, the official website of ‘Fight Club’ author Chuck Palahniuk. He is the author of Kanye West—Reanimator. His short fiction has appeared in Zetetic, Motherboard, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Thuglit, Dark Moon Digest, Pantheon Magazine, Fabula Argentea, and multiple print anthologies. More info at joshuachaplinsky.com.
Jessamy Dalton has had work appear in Every Day Fiction, Copperfield Review, HOoT, Mysterical E, and Pure Slush. She lives in the United States, where she occasionally worries about meeting her own characters in a dark alley some night.
Graeme Hurry edited Kimota magazine in the 90s and a horror anthology called Northern Chills in 1994. Now he has branched out by editing this kindle magazine, Kzine. He has a story in Terror Tales of The Scottish Highlands anthology and an honourable mention in Year’s Best Horror 2001 for a story he collaborated on with Willie Meikle called The Blue Hag.
Charlotte H. Lee is a science fiction/fantasy writer and lifetime avid reader. She turned her love of reading into writing while a teen, then raised her children to love stories and storytelling as much as she does. Now that her kids are grown, she’s moving on to sharing that love with the world. Charlotte lives in a small town outside of Vancouver, Canada—just far enough away for those kids to visit every week, but not close enough for them to raid her fridge every day. You can find links to her other published stories at www.charlottehlee.com.
Aaron Perry currently lives in the middle of nowhere, Japan—so deep in the sticks that even Japanese people have rarely heard of it. He spends his time writing, hiking, and during the winter he works at a sake brewery, which involves a lot of rice and more than a little vat churning. He occasionally tweets from @ajoshperry.
Mark Rookyard lives in Yorkshire, England. He likes running long distances and writing short stories. His work has appeared in Metaphorosis, The Colored Lens, SQ Mag and others.
Lynn Rushlau graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in Anthropology and minor in Sociology-which seem like awesome planning for a life creating cultures and societies, but she’ll admit to not have been thinking that far in advance. She lives in Addison, Texas with two attention-needy cats, and can be found on twitter at lrushlau.
Fred Senese is a former NASA scientist who teaches chemistry at a small university in rural Appalachia. He is the author of three books and an award-winning science website that has been recognized by Scientific American, The San Francisco Chronicle, and others. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Murder & Mayhem (Flame Tree Anthology Series), Bartleby Snopes, Triptych Tales, Firewords Quarterly, and others. Find him at fredsenese.com, @fsenese on Twitter, and at facebook.com/fredsenesewrites
Dave Windett is professional comics artist and illustrator. He has worked
for numerous publishers in Britain, Europe and America—among them Cappelen Damm, DC Thomson, Fleetway, Future, Marvel UK, Panini and PSS (a division of Penguin USA. Korky the Cat, Count Duckula, Lazarus Lemming, Inspector Gadget, Ace Ventura, Tails the Fox, The Loony and Tiny Toons are just a handful of the very many original and licensed characters he has drawn. With Writer John Gatehouse he self publishes some work under the Little Lemming Books imprint the latest of which is The Kaci Bell Mysteries. He recently completed work on Monster Hunters Unlimited a four book series for PSS. Samples of His work can be seen at - www.davewindett.com
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