by Ed Gorman
Remembering that terrible night, he went over to the phone, lifted the receiver, and dialled Emma's number. Almost instantly the phone began ringing on the other side of the duplex, where Emma lived.
Correction: had lived.
The phone rang and rang, sounding lonely, mournful.
He had never deceived himself about Emma. She was no mental giant. But she was a beauty, and she was possibly the kindest, most tender person he'd ever known. Being a prostitute had not coarsened her in any way. She still retained that curious farm-girl innocence and the sweet, soft laugh, and when his own nights grew too long and treacherous-there'd been a few suicide attempts in the past, and she knew about them-she helped him from his chair and sat with him on the couch, her sweet white arm around him, and they watched TV, just as if they were real lovers; and one night, she let her breasts slip through the sheer fabric of her dressing gown, and he'd held them and kissed them and revelled in the acceptance and love they represented.
He listened to the phone ring a few more times.
Dead.
Setting the receiver back, he went over to the radio to see if there was any news of a body being discovered anywhere.
Sobbing overtook him, his slight body and enlarged head trembling, shaking with grief so violent, it hurt his back.
Emma.
Dead.
4
IN ST. LOUIS PARK new money drove Mercedes sedans and Jaguars and the occasional Ferrari. Old money still tended to drive Cadillacs and Lincolns. Brolan had lived here for the past six months, after getting a very good deal from an acquaintance of his whose agency was going down. The man was moving to the West Coast, too many people here mad at him. Chapter 11 tends to ruin friendships.
The house was a board-and-stucco English Tudor accented with a brick facade and a tall chimney. The front door was enclosed by a brick archway and opened on a vaulted and skylighted entry hall. The vaulted living room, stone hearth fireplace, and three bedrooms were way too much for a divorced man, but given the tax advantages the place gave Brolan, he couldn't afford to live anywhere else.
As he guided his car into the right stall of the two-car garage, the door having just lifted automatically, he glanced around the neighbourhood. No signs of life. His neighbours weren't the partying kind, especially not on a weeknight. With the window down, he shivered slightly. During the past half hour, he had felt the weather shift. Autumn was coming to an abrupt halt in the Twin Cities. This happened most years. Tuesday it was in the seventies; Wednesday it was in the twenties.
Then he thought about the parking garage, the sudden sense of dread he'd felt. And still felt. There was no explaining it… It was something he simply sensed.
"Wish my garage looked this good," Foster said.
"Huh?" Brolan said.
"Your garage."
"What about it?"
"It's so neat and orderly."
"Oh. Yeah. Right."
Foster stared at his partner, trying to look sober. "You're acting weird."
"Just tired is all."
"You sure?"
Brolan nodded. "Let's go inside and get something to eat."
"Like the old days."
Brolan smiled. "Yes, like the old days." And for one of those rare moments, he felt sentimental about his ex-wife. She'd always been their babysitter; Brolan and Foster would stagger back to Brolan's, and she'd fix them a midnight breakfast and they'd sit up till dawn drinking coffee and sobering up and making plans for the agency they were going to start someday.
"That sounds good," Foster said, and then promptly banged his head against the roof of the car as he tried to get out.
***
The moment Brolan opened the kitchen door and walked inside, he knew for sure something was wrong. This time he had a reason for his paranoia.
Flakes and flecks of dried autumn leaves were scattered across the landing floor. He flipped on the light leading to the basement.
He could see the leaves on each step of the staircase.
Somebody had been in here and recently. This was the cleaning woman's afternoon. She would have worked the place into a spotless condition. Certainly she wouldn't have tracked in leaves without cleaning them up.
"What's the hold up, ole buddy?" Foster said behind him.
Brolan continued to stare down the steps.
His sense of dread was almost overwhelming now. Something waited for him in the basement. Something…
"Why don't you go over and sit down?" Brolan said to Foster, trying to sound calm.
"By myself?"
"Sure. I just want to check out a couple of things, and then I'll make us some breakfast. How's that sound?"
Foster shrugged. "Great, I guess." He looked around the kitchen. It had been designed for a real cook. A butcher-block island with a huge iron rack held a battery of pots, plans, and utensils; while such perks as a new dishwasher, two big pink sinks, and enough fine china to make a duchess jealous filled the rest of the space. All this stuff had been left here by the guy who'd fled after taking Chapter 11. He'd told Brolan that in LA only wimps cooked.
Foster tottered over to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair with some difficulty, and then, with even greater difficulty, sat down.
Foster looked over at Brolan and waggled his fingers in a kind of Oliver Hardy gesture. Then he promptly put his head down on the table and went to sleep, like a schoolboy who could no longer endure the physics lesson.
Maybe it was better that Foster was out, Brolan thought.
Brolan walked over to the drawers built into the cabinet. He looked at several butcher knives before selecting one with a stout wooden handle.
He turned and went back to the steps leading to the basement.
Shaking his head, feeling sluggish from the alcohol he'd had earlier in the evening, he descended the steps.
On his way down, he had an almost comic sense of himself and what he must look like at this moment. An advertising exec all dressed up from a party carrying a butcher knife in his right hand. Must be a melodramatic sight.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he felt again that he was being watched. But by whom?
The basement was strictly standard issue, a part of the house none of the previous occupants had really done anything with. There was a large room-invariably referred to as the 'rec room'-that held a lumpy J. C. Penney couch that had been new about the time the Beatles were first appearing on Ed Sullivan; there was a Motorola black-and-white TV console, a small bookcase filled with Reader's Digest condensed books, a poster of a psychedelic rock group circa 1970, and a stack of record albums that ran to the Partridge Family and 1910 Fruit Gum Company. Presumably, kids had lived in this house once.
The other parts of the basement consisted of a laundry room with matching white Kenmore washer and drier, a huge sink, and an entire shelf filled with empty and never-used preserve jars that were now covered with dust.
After checking out both the rec room and the laundry room, Brolan realized there was only one place left.
He tightened his grip on the knife.
The final room was the furnace room. A large green Lennox squatted there. Brolan peeked his head in, flipped on the light, and looked around. The furnace looked familiar. Nothing funny there.
And then he saw the freezer.
Tucked into the corner of the furnace room was a long, white chest freezer which one of the previous occupants had left filled with everything from boxes of Libby's broccoli to Birds Eye peas.
Except now the contents of the freezer were no longer inside the freezer-now they were piled neatly on the floor all around the freezer.
Something else was inside the long, white chest now.
Brolan knew for sure because down the white side of the freezer ran red, red blood.
The furnace made a popping noise kicking in. Brolan jumped and gasped, terrified. His heart pounded.
He looked once more at the contents of the freezer placed all over the floor,
everything from a huge turkey to a fish with its head still on.
Then he looked back at the red blood dripping down the white side of the freezer.
He took three steps over to the white chest and pulled open the lid.
The odd thing was how comfortably she seemed to fit inside there, almost as if this were a coffin and not a freezer at all. She was completely nude and only now beginning to show signs of the freezing process, ice forming on her arms and face. But he could tell she hadn't been in here long because of the smells. The blood. The faeces. The bodily fluids and juices. These still smelled oppressively fresh.
And of course he recognized her. No doubt whatsoever who she was.
He remembered their confrontation last night, and her throwing the drink in his face.
And tonight she ended up here. Dead. In his freezer.
Again Brolan was struck by the comic aspect of all this. Who the hell would empty a freezer and put a corpse into it? Who the hell hated him enough to do this?
He found himself staring at her again. One of the wounds had been across her wrist, and it was this wound from which the blood had been dripping, apparently after being banged on the edge of the freezer.
He wanted her to talk. He wanted her beautiful eyes to open, and he wanted her to talk, and then he wanted her to listen. He wanted to say this was all some terrible mistake and he was sorry and wouldn't she please put her clothes on and go home. Please.
***
Upstairs he made a double-strength pot of coffee, eight eggs in a big electric skillet, six pieces of toast and then-as an afterthought-six strips of bacon. He tried not to notice how badly his hands were shaking.
After getting the food on, he went to work on Foster. He shoved his hands under Foster's arms and half dragged the man into the nearby half bath where he threw cold water on his face, squirted some toothpaste in his mouth, and then filled his hand with a cup of coffee. He forced Foster to drink the coffee before they left the bathroom.
Back in the kitchen, Brolan shoved the food at Foster and said, "Eat."
"Jesus Christ," Foster said, more sober now but cranky as hell. "What's going on, anyway?"
"Just eat. Then I'll tell you."
"Aren't you going to eat?"
Brolan looked at his food. "Uh, no."
"Why not?"
"Not hungry."
"How come?"
"Foster. Please eat. Please. And drink lots more coffee. I need you to be sober."
"You look like shit."
"Thanks."
"That's not a gratuitous insult. I mean you really look like shit. What happened, anyway? Did I pass out and miss something important?"
"Eat. Please."
So Foster shrugged and ate. He popped his over-easy eggs so that the yellow ran free, and then he started dunking his toast in the yolk. The bacon he ate ravenously and with his fingers. He finished everything on his plate within minutes. Then he raised his eyes and stared at Brolan's plate. "You're really not going to eat?"
"No."
"You mind if I eat it, then?"
"Be my guest."
Foster took the edges of Brolan's plate and pulled it over to him. He shrugged then and dug in.
Halfway through his pig-out, Foster raised his eyes again. "You still look like shit."
"Thanks again."
"Something's really wrong, isn't it?"
"You going to give me a clue?"
Brolan sighed. He had to tell Foster sometime. May as well be now. "When you're finished there, I want you to go down to the basement."
"For what?"
"To look around."
"And what will I find?"
"A woman."
"Is she naked?"
"As a matter of fact, she is."
For the first time, Foster stopped eating. He even pushed the plate away. "All right, what the hell's going on? There's a nude woman in your basement, and you don't look very happy about it. Ordinarily you'd be very happy indeed. So I can infer from that there's something wrong with this woman. Right?"
"Right."
"This is when I wish I still smoked." Foster sighed and looked straight at his partner. "She's dead, isn't she?"
"Yes."
"Jesus Christ. You're not kidding me now, are you?"
"I wish I were."
"Jesus Christ."
"She's the woman from the other night."
"The other night?"
"The one I had the run-in with."
"The one who spilled the drink on you?"
"Yes."
"Jesus Christ. How did she get into your basement?"
"I don't know. But I wish you'd go down there and check things out. Then why don't you come back up here and we'll talk."
"You mind if I pee first?"
"Fine with me."
So Foster peed first and then he went down to the basement.
Brolan sat at the table drinking coffee. None of this made sense. None of it.
In ten minutes Foster came back up. He sat down at the table across from Brolan and said, "I've got to ask you something."
"What?"
"You didn't kill her, did you?"
"Are you crazy?"
"I had to ask. I had to know."
"Well, now you know."
"So you call the cops?" Foster said.
"You're forgetting Linda Rollins."
"Linda Rollins? The woman you used to live with?"
"Right."
"What about her?"
"Remember the charges she filed against me when I tried to move out. Domestic abuse?"
"But you didn't do anything to her."
"Right. But I'm not sure either the police or that judge believed me. I always had the sneaking suspicion that they really thought I did slap her around on occasion."
"But she dropped the charges."
"But only after two months. And she made it look as if she were doing me a favour instead of admitting that she'd made the charges up."
Foster said, "I don't see where this is going, old buddy."
Brolan sighed and shook his head. "I call the police and tell them there's a woman in my basement. Then they find out that this woman and I had a run-in in a bar the other night. And then they find out about the charges Linda Rollins put on me and-"
Foster said, "Goddamn, I see what you're driving at. But if you don't call the cops, what the hell'll you do?"
"At least try to find out who the woman was. Try to find out who could have brought her over here."
Brolan stared down at his right hand lying on the kitchen table. It was beyond trembling now. It was shaking violently. "You're not doing so good, are you?" Foster said gently. "No, no I'm not."
"Maybe you'd better call the police." His tone remained soft. "Maybe it'd be easier that way, Frank."
"I just want to find out who she was. I just want this to make a little sense before I go to the police."
"And meanwhile leave her downstairs?"
Brolan looked over at him. "She'll be pretty well preserved there, anyway."
Foster said, "Frank, are you absolutely sure you don't want to call the police?"
Brolan sighed. "That's the only thing I am sure of right now, my friend. The only thing."
5
Wednesday Morning
IT WAS THE USUAL DESPERATE STUFF Rumour had it that a large client of Brolan-Foster's had been seen lunching with the president of a rival agency. A two-inch videotape that was supposed to air on Cleveland television that night (this was a political year, and Brolan-Foster had taken on two candidate accounts) had somehow gotten lost in transit, and everybody (including the hysterical man working on the client's side) was frantic. A perpetually dissatisfied employee in the art department was trying to get several lost souls to band together and demand even more comprehensive health benefits (Brolan-Foster now paid the best in the Twin Cities). A key copywriter had fallen off the wagon again and this time-to avoid firing-was promising to join AA. Brolan looked at a
pencil layout for the agency's third largest client (a retail chain) and felt acid start working its way up his stomach, oesophagus, and throat (a pen-and-ink drawing that was supposed to look fashionably little-girlish just looked amateurish instead). And the accounting department had left the latest balance sheet on his desk in a large manila envelope marked FYI. This had been a particularly good quarter.
Brolan kept his door closed through all this, of course. He'd gotten at most an hour's troubled sleep last night, finding himself three times descending the basement steps to peer into the freezer. To make sure she was still there. (What the hell did he expect? That she was going to get up and run away?) At seven o'clock he'd said hello to Mr. Coffee, draining off two cups before the machine even stopped burbling, and then had a quick one-mile run on the treadmill machine he kept in one of the extra bedrooms he didn't know what else to do with. He used an electric razor instead of a safety razor to shave because he was afraid he'd mutilate himself. And he put on several slaps of after-shave because he knew that he was already sweating all over his freshly showered skin. He permitted himself only one more look at the dead woman. Opening the freezer lid, he looked down with tired, sober eyes at the blue-white flesh, at the gouges and slashes and cuts on her slender, gorgeous body. He wondered again what kind of man and what kind of frenzy could have led to this. An image of Richard Cummings, his former boss and a card-carrying sociopath, came to mind. Cummings with his layered, carefully-moussed dark hair; Cummings with his chiselled handsome face and dead blue eyes; Cummings with fists the size of a professional heavyweight's. Cummings could have done something like this. For sure.