Bad News

by Linwood Barclay

  I swallowed. ‘It does sound like something I might have said.’

  ‘And that you also said you’d be happy if he got caught in a, hang on, got caught in a “Wal-Mart cave-in.” Does that sound like something you said?’

  ‘I was,’ I said carefully, ‘a bit upset.’

  Flint nodded again. ‘I guess you were. I mean, who wouldn’t be, right? Benson, he complains to his boss, his boss is an old friend of your boss, they get talking, and you get demoted.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what happened.’ I happened to glance at the clock on the mantel. I had forty minutes to get to my meeting with Sandler. At least now I had transportation.

  ‘I see you looking at the clock there,’ Flint said. ‘Am I holding you up from something?’

  ‘No, that’s fine.’

  ‘So tell me again, where are you off to? It’s clearly not an assignment. I guess you sort of lied to me about that, what with you being suspended and all.’

  ‘My wife and I,’ I said, ‘we’re having a bit of a rough time. We need a bit of space.’

  Flint frowned. ‘That’s too bad. My wife and I, we’ve had our ups and downs too, over the years. Kind of goes with the territory, this kind of job, you know? Long hours, working nights, that kind of thing. But we worked through it.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said.

  ‘So what would make you imagine a Wal-Mart cave-in?’

  Flint was giving me a case of mental whiplash. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just have that kind of mind, I guess.’

  ‘Creative,’ Flint said, helping.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Because I remember, you write science fiction books, right?’

  ‘I have. Not lately. My last one was a sequel to Missionary, but it didn’t get a whole lot of attention. That, and getting back into a mortgage, since we moved back downtown from Oakwood, meant getting a job at the Metropolitan.’

  ‘That’s a shame, not being able to realize your goals and all.’

  Don’t let him mess with your head, I told myself. Just let it go. ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘I mean, not that you aren’t doing okay. A good job with a big paper, until, well, yesterday, when you got suspended. They still paying you while you’re suspended?’

  ‘Yes. At least, I think so.’

  ‘You got a union?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should talk to them.’

  ‘I probably should. There’s been so much going on, I haven’t really had a moment to think about it.’

  ‘So you really don’t think your friend, Ms Snelling, had anything to do with Mr Benson’s death?’

  It was like watching a one-man ping-pong game. Flint had the ball moving so fast I could barely keep track of it.

  ‘I, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I mean, even if Trixie had wanted to kill Benson, the time to do it would have been before his story and the picture of her ran in the paper.’

  ‘What do you suppose he was doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for an even better story. An exclusive on Trixie’s basement.’

  Flint gave a satisfied nod, like this was his line of thinking too. I tried not to be obvious as I took another look at the clock.

  ‘You sure you don’t have to be someplace?’ Flint asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’ God, I’d barely glanced at it.

  ‘So, that’s quite the basement Ms Snelling has,’ Flint said.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘I think, if I had that kind of space in my basement, I’d build a model train layout.’

  Flint actually chuckled. ‘Yeah, I love those. With the flashing signals, the crossings that come down. Did Ms Snelling ever do anything to you in that basement of hers?’

  ‘No. You asked me this before. We’re friends, that’s all.’

  ‘Some friend. Leaving you handcuffed in the same room with a corpse and all. You got any extra friends like that I could have?’

  ‘I guess she had her reasons.’

  ‘You ever check out all the equipment she has in that basement? Straps and whips and all that stuff?’

  ‘I certainly saw it hanging on the walls, but it’s not like I did an inventory.’

  ‘Some men, they get off on being tortured, spanked, that sort of thing.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘But you wonder, how far would some guys like for Ms Snelling to go?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone would want to have his throat slit, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘No,’ Flint said, his voice drifting off. ‘What I was wondering was, would anyone ever want to be electrocuted?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You know, shocked. Have a few volts shot through their system.’

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t imagine anyone getting their jollies that way.’

  ‘Well, me neither. But I was wondering whether you ever noticed, did Ms Snelling have a stun gun?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A stun gun. You know, the kind some police forces have. You shoot a guy, you put fifty thousand volts into him, tends to slow him down a bit.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I never saw anything like that. What makes you ask?’

  ‘Well, you see,’ Flint said, ‘we found something interesting on Mr Benson’s body. Looked like a couple of bee stings at first. Right on his torso, just to the left of the navel, these two spots, a few inches apart.’

  ‘Maybe he’d been stung.’

  Flint shook his head. ‘No, no trace of any sort of bee venom in his bloodstream. No, these looked like the marks that are left when someone gets zapped with a stun gun.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yeah. See, what I’m thinking is, maybe Ms Snelling, or maybe somebody else if we accept your version, that she didn’t do this, zapped Mr Benson with a stun gun, and while he was incapacitated, strapped him to that big wooden cross, and finally cut his throat open.’

  I tried to make some sense of this. ‘Don’t you think, if Trixie had done this, she wouldn’t have had to use a stun gun on him? She could have lured him onto the device, promised him a bit of fun, made a game out of it, but then, once she had him strapped down, killed him. That’s if she’d done it. But someone else, someone who wasn’t into the whole role-playing thing, they’d have to use a stun gun on him first to get him up there.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘A couple of days ago, these two guys, they did a presentation for the city police, not Oakwood, not your department, but downtown, of this new kind of stun gun. Wanted to get the cops to buy a bunch of them. I did a story on it, for the paper. When Trixie saw the story, saw a picture of these guys, she freaked out. Like they were the very ones she’d never want to see her picture in the paper. And then her picture runs, and now there’s a dead guy in her basement, and you say he was shot with a stun gun.’

  Flint scratched his forehead. ‘That’s quite a story. Here’s another one. Martin Benson came to Ms Snelling’s house, still determined to get the whole story on kinky sex in the suburbs, wants to see her basement, maybe he actually breaks into the house to get a look at it. He’s a moralistic son of a bitch, and would never be persuaded to get on that cross for entertainment purposes. Ms Snelling has a stun gun on the premises, uses it on Mr Benson, straps him down and kills him.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I nodded in the direction of Trixie’s car. ‘I take it you searched that for a stun gun.’

  ‘That we did,’ said Flint. ‘No such luck.’

  Flint flipped his notebook closed and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Well, I can see you have places to go, people to see,’ he said, picking up his hat and putting it on.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  We both went outside, and I locked the front door behind me.

  ‘You have a nice little time away, and I hope things work out with your wife,’ Flint said. ‘She seems like a real nice lady. Too bad about her getting busted down a rank or two at work too.’
/>   There seemed nothing he didn’t know.

  ‘You got a cell phone number where I can reach you if I need to?’ Flint got out his notebook and wrote down the number I gave him.

  ‘You have a nice day now,’ Flint said, walking down to the curb and getting into his unmarked car.

  EIGHTEEN

  I swung Trixie’s car into Bayside Park ten minutes later than I’d promised to get there. The heavily treed park was on a high parcel of land overlooking our Great Lake, and when I pulled up alongside a nondescript silver Buick, the view beyond my windshield was blue-gray to the horizon line. There was a light wind, and some chop on the water, and a freighter was moving slowly from west to east, heading back up the seaway.

  I didn’t see Lawrence, or his car – neither the Jag nor the old clunker he used for surveillance – anyplace. He’d promised to be here, keeping a watch on things, in case anything unexpected happened.

  Where the hell was he?

  I glanced over at the Buick, and Brian Sandler got out and opened the passenger door of my GF300. I hastily grabbed my overnight bag and wrestled it over the center console and into the back seat.

  ‘You’re late,’ Sandler said, clearly agitated. ‘I thought you’d decided not to come, that something had happened.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘The police dropped by.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Sandler said. ‘You didn’t talk to the police about this, did you? I didn’t tell you to go and call them.’

  ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘It had nothing to do with this.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ Sandler said. It was enough to know it wasn’t about him, and I was just as pleased not to have to explain it to him. ‘I don’t know about getting the police involved. I figure, if it comes out in the press, all at once like, then maybe I’ll be safe. There’ll be no point in them going after me then.’

  ‘Mr Sandler, what are you talking about?’

  ‘You weren’t followed or anything, were you?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, no! You wanted a meeting. I’m here. And I’ve got a lot of other places to be today. What do you want to tell me?’

  He sat still in the plush leather seat, pulling himself together, staring out at the lake but not really seeing it.

  ‘The city health department,’ he said. ‘It’s all … it’s all fucked up.’

  ‘Tell me what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Payoffs, threats, deals being made to look the other way. You got no idea.’ He took a breath. ‘I want to state, for the record, here and now, that I have never taken a bribe. Not one penny. Nothing. No free tickets to baseball or hockey games, no free dinners, nothing. But I’m not going to let my family get hurt. No job is worth that. I don’t care if they put me in jail. I’m not going to let something happen to my family. I got two kids, Mr Walker. My daughter is five, and my son is thirteen. I’m not going to let anyone hurt them, but I can’t go on like this, either.’

  ‘Okay, just calm down. Just tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Are you taping this? Is there a tape recorder in this car?’ He looked around the interior. ‘Fuck, reporters at the Metropolitan must do okay. What’s a car like this cost? These are even more than Beemers, aren’t they?’

  ‘It’s not my car,’ I said. ‘And no, you’re not being taped. But if you’re about to tell me something important, I’d like to take some notes. Is that okay with you?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, take some notes. That’s okay.’

  I reached into the back for the overnight bag. I’d tossed a reporter’s notebook in the top before leaving. I grabbed it, folded back the cover, and pulled a fine-point from my jacket pocket.

  ‘Shoot,’ I said.

  ‘Not all, but there’s a bunch of businesses in the city, restaurants, a lot of these people that run them, they’re pretty well connected. Some of them, they’ve moved here in recent years from Europe, the old Soviet Union and other places, they don’t leave all their old ways behind. They don’t have a lot of time for rules and regulations, they don’t much like inspectors coming in, telling them what to do, insisting they spend money on proper equipment, pest extermination, stuff like that. Their way of dealing with this is, you give somebody some money, they go away.’

  ‘So that’s what they’re doing? Buying people off?’

  ‘Some. It’s cheaper to put a couple hundred bucks into somebody’s pocket than spend a thousand upgrading your kitchen. Or get him a hooker for the night. Or put a case of liquor in his trunk.’

  ‘And what about those who won’t take a payoff?’

  ‘They say things to you like “We know where you live. We know where your wife shops for groceries. We know the route your kids walk to go to school. Fuck with us,” they say, “and we’ll fuck with you.”’

  ‘What about Mrs Gorkin?’ I asked.

  ‘That woman,’ he said, ‘she scares the shit out of me. Her and those two girls of hers. They’re like robots or something. They’re not what you’d call very feminine, you know? About as sexy as cement trucks. She sends them out to do something and they do it, no questions asked.’

  ‘Did she threaten you?’

  ‘First time I go into her place, I tell her I see mouse droppings, she’s going to have to do something about that, the bathroom’s a mess, the grill isn’t properly cleaned. I find at least a dozen health violations. I could probably have shut the place down. I’m wondering, why didn’t my boss do something about this place? He used to have the same territory as me, then he gets made a supervisor, I inherit the territory.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

  ‘Frank. Frank Ellinger.’

  ‘Okay.’ I was scribbling madly.

  ‘So I’ve got a list for Mrs Gorkin. Tell her she’s got to do these things. She’s “No, we no do dat.” I say, “What?” She says, talk to my boss, he’ll explain things to me. But first, she says, her girls will explain it to me first. And the two of them grab hold of me. This is, like, midafternoon, there are no customers. Mrs Gorkin goes and closes the door, puts up a Closed sign, comes back, and the one of her girls, Ludmilla or Gavrilla – who knows, you can’t tell them apart – she’s got her hand around my mouth, holding one hand behind my back, and her sister, she holds my hand over the deep fryer.’

  I stopped writing.

  ‘The oil, I can feel the heat from it, and my hand’s still a good six inches away. And then she starts moving my hand closer. She gets hold of my index finger, wraps her hand – her hand’s the size of a fucking catcher’s mitt – around the rest of my fist.’ He demonstrated, holding his right hand so only one finger protruded. ‘And she moves my finger toward the hot oil, like she’s going to dip it in.’

  ‘God,’ I said.

  ‘And she’s saying, “In the oil, Ma?” Like, she’s taking directions every step of the way. And Momma says, “Maybe just the tip.” This bitch, she takes the very tip of my finger and touches it to the oil, and pulls away.’ He paused. ‘My fucking finger sizzled.’

  I wrote down ‘finger sizzled’.

  ‘So then she pulls my finger away, but the two of them are still holding me, and Mrs Gorkin, she comes around, stands in front me, must be a good foot shorter than I am, and she wags a finger in my face and says, “Next time, we put your whole arm in. Or we cut off your dick and drop it in and serve it to somebody as a hot dog.” She says, “You understand?” And all I can do is nod, her fucking daughter still has her hand over my mouth. And then she says, “After we cook your dick, we go find your wife, we cut off her tits, and we cook them too. And your kids, because some people, they like their meat extra tender.”’

  He was shaking. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a tissue, and wiped his nose.

  I finished writing and looked at him.

  ‘Did you talk to your supervisor?’ I said. ‘This Frank Ellinger guy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Brian Sandler said, pulling himself together. ‘I told him I’d been to see the Gorkins. He says, “Hey, you can cut them some slack. They’
re just trying to make a go of it here.” If I looked after them, they’d look after me. I said to him, “They tried to fry my fucking finger.” And you know what he says?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He says be glad that’s all they fried. But the thing is, it’s not just the Gorkins. They’re connected with some other places, run by their Russian or whatever friends. They do all other kinds of shit on the side. Drugs, I’m pretty sure. It’s like a dropoff point or something. A shipment comes in, they leave it with the Gorkins, someone else comes to pick it up. They figure, they have this legit business, the burger joint, makes them look less suspicious, since people are coming in and out all the time anyway.’

  ‘How many others in the department are being threatened or taking bribes?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it with anyone. But this other guy I work with, Harry? He’s been buying all this hot-shit electronic stuff the last few months. Gadgets. Going out, partying, new clothes. We don’t make that kind of money. He didn’t used to have it. Now he does.’

  ‘What about the cops?’

  Sandler craned his neck around, checking the parking lot for strange cars. ‘I’ve thought about it. But what if they start checking around, can’t prove anything? What’s going to happen to me then? The Gorkins figure out it was me, or Frank rats me out to them, what happens? But if there’s a story in the paper, if you guys can blow the lid off this all at once, the city, the mayor and council, they’ll have to take action. They’ll demand an investigation. It’ll all be out there, in the public. They won’t be able to do anything to me then, or to my family. Right? And then, the cops will have to protect me. Won’t they?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said.

  ‘Can you do this story?’

  ‘I think so.’ I decided not to tell Sandler that I was not, technically, a reporter at the moment.

  ‘What do you mean, you think so?’

  ‘I mean, yes. This can be done. Why are you telling me all this? As opposed to some other reporter.’

  ‘When you called, about your son, and the incident at Burger Crisp, I figured it was only a matter of time before the shit hit the fan. I want to get out in front of this. I don’t want to be dragged down by it. I’d rather be the guy who blew the whistle than get caught in this with everybody else.’