Hard Cold Whisper

by Michael Hemmingson

  His truck was gone but he was waiting. He'd seen the little camp I'd made.

  He jumped me from behind.

  I heard him coming; he was quick.

  He screamed curses at me, this and that, how I ruined his day—all the stuff I was used to hearing week after motherfucking week. He was on top of me, one arm around my neck, attempting to cut off the air from my throat, the other free hand punching me in the ribs and kidneys.

  He was light, and twenty years older. I threw him off me. He landed on the ground with a considerable thud. His face hit the ground and a big rock gray rock deeply wedged into the ground. I noticed something on the back of his fat neck: a small black swaztika tattoo inked into his flesh. So he was one of those—made sense, out here in the San Diego boondocks, where the idea of white is right was out of sight but trite.

  He turned and I saw he'd landed rather hard on that rock: he was spitting up blood. He spat out a tooth.

  “You’re fucked,” he said.

  “You started it,” I said.

  “You people are scum, slime, shit, foul.”

  “Someone’s gotta do the job,” I said.

  “A job you’ll regret. Do you know who I am?”

  “The man I just served,” I replied. “And a fucking Nazi from the looks of it.”

  He smiled, bleeding, another loose tooth falling onto the ground

  “You have no idea, dead man,” he said.

  I could’ve gone all night with this witty repartee. Sure, it might be fun, but it was pointless. Before Maxwell could get back on his feet, I was jogging down the road to where my Mustang was . . .

  And my Mustang wouldn’t start.

  Just what I needed right now.

  The engine wouldn’t roll over, the flywheel sputtered.

  I had an idea what was wrong. I popped open the hood.

  I imagined Maxwell coming after me in his giant truck and rolling over my car—and maybe me—with those ridiculously gargantuan wheels.

  The distributor cap on the spark plugs were corroded. I had been meaning to get a tune up the past two months and I knew this would happen. I cleaned some of the gunk off using my fingernails and put the cap back on the plugs.

  The car started and I drove.

  No sign of Maxwell and his truck.

  I noticed the documents still on the ground. No matter, he had been properly served and he couldn’t argue otherwise.

  17.

  Gabriella was well into a bottle of tequila by the time I got there. We kissed, we drank, we tore off each other’s clothes and did what people do in these moments of booze-soaked lust and strange desperation.

  I was still pumped on adrenaline.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  We were in her small bed, naked, side-by-side, and we were not expecting what happened next.

  “Gabriella!”

  A loud and shrill voice.

  Her aunt.

  Her aunt standing at the door to her room, looking upon our naked shame—with wide eyes and a gaping maw.

  “Gabriella!”

  The old woman sputtered a lot of fast words in Spanish I didn’t understand. The thirty-second outburst took a lot out of her and she leaned against the door frame like she was going to collapse.

  Gabriella put on her robe and quickly went to her aunt, helping her stand up, telling her aunt she should not be awake and out of bed at this hour.

  Tell me about it. The old woman was supposed to be sound asleep so her niece and I could steal those tender moments of intimacy like a couple of teenagers sneaking behind their parents' backs.

  The aunt pointed a long wrinkled accusing finger at me and seemed to curse, maybe in Spanish, maybe gibberish, spittle flying out of her mouth like a newborn spitting up milk.

  Gabriella tried to lower her aunt’s hand.

  Her aunt turned and slapped her across the face.

  “That’s enough,” I said. This was ridiculous.

  “David, go,” Gabriella said. “Just get your stuff and go, quickly.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes! Please!”

  I got dressed as fast as I could and didn’t care if the old woman got a gander at the ol’ family jewels. It was nothing new to her, I’m sure.

  Getting past her was another matter.

  The old woman refused to budge.

  Gabriella tried to move her aunt out of the way so I could pass, but the woman held her ground and continued to shriek words I didn’t know at me.

  I looked at the bedroom window and considered that option.

  “Now!” said Gabriella. She had her arms wrapped around her aunt.

  I leapt for it.

  The old woman tried to kick me, but she was too weak to move that fast to raise her foot.

  I could still hear her screaming like an inmate of the bughouse as I went out back, to the alley, and jumped into my car…and the car wouldn’t start, again.

  Shit.

  I popped the hood and cleaned off the distributor cap once more, and then the car started, and then I got the hell out of Chula Vista.

  18.

  I thought that was going to be it between Gabriella and myself. The end was not something I wanted, nor did she.

  “My aunt forbids you coming inside the house,” she said on the phone, “ever.”

  “But if she’s asleep…”

  “Look at what happened last time.”

  “We can be more careful.”

  “I’m scared, David.”

  “Why? What can she do?”

  “A lot,” she said. “She put a bruja curse on you for one.”

  “A what?”

  “A witch’s spell, that’s what she was saying to you before you took off. If you ever come back here or touch or look at me, your eyes will fall out, warts will pop on your skin, and you will die a slow agonizing death.”

  I laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” she said.

  “You don’t believe in that hocus pocus, do you?”

  “We do come from different worlds,” she said. “There are things you don’t understand.”

  “I have to see you,” I said. “Don’t you want to see me?”

  “You don’t have to ask that.”

  I sat in my car, in the alley, and waited. Gabriella joined me. “I only have a few minutes,” she said, “if she wakes up and I’m not there, there will be hell to pay.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “You’re an adult. You have the right to your own life.”

  “Not the way she sees it.”

  “The hell with her. What could she do that you’re so afraid of?”

  “Cut me off, and I get nothing.”

  “The money?”

  “Everything. She’s even threatening now to call her lawyer to come over and change the terms of her will. She’ll leave the money and properties to the church or to a home for stray cats, just to punish me. She would do something like that, David, believe me. And I’d get nada, nothing, zero. All the years I’ve spent taking care of her, the promises of what I’d get, pulled away like that,” and she snapped her fingers. “That’s the power she has over me, David.”

  “Screw it all,” I said. “Is it worth it?”

  She gave me a hard look. “Yes,” she said, “yes, David, it is. I sell the properties, we’re talking close to three million dollars. Could you say goodbye to three million, honestly?”

  No. I couldn’t.

  I wouldn’t.

  “What are we going to do then?”

  She said, “I’ll think of something.”

  I said, “Something?”

  She said, “I’ll come up with a plan.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  19.

  At the office, there was a message from a Sheriff’s detective by the name of Culpepper waiting for me.

  I called the guy.

  “Can you come in to the station, Mr. Kellgren?”

  “Why?”

  “A few questions I’
d like to ask.”

  “You can’t ask them over the phone?”

  “No.”

  Didn’t think it was going to be anything important. Cops sometimes asked about people I served that were part of an investigation, or of interest in some case or another.

  In the Sheriff's station, I sat in a small room with a metal table, Detective Culpepper across from me. He was a tired-looking guy in his early 50s; he sported a potbelly and an out-of-style tie.

  Why do these detectives always look so beat-up and overworked?

  He asked, “You recently served legal papers on a man in Santa Ysabel, named Arnold Maxwell, correct?”

  “The other evening, yes. Why?”

  “Mr. Maxwell claims you physically attacked him.”

  I laughed.

  “This isn’t a funny issue,” said the detective.

  “But it hurts.”

  “What?”

  “Look,” I said, “he attacked me,” and I told Culpepper my side of the story.

  He nodded and took down some notes on a legal pad.

  “You don’t buy his story do you?” I said.

  “So far it’s your word against his. There are no witnesses.”

  “So what’s next?”

  He shrugged. “A complaint was made. I’m tasked to look into it and determine if any laws were broken.”

  “Yeah, assault on an officer of the court.”

  “Why didn’t you report it?”

  “If I reported every time I was attacked by a disgruntled defendant, you guys would be up to your eyelids in waste of time cases.”

  “We already are.” He did look it.

  I said, “It’s not worth it, unless I’m maimed or down for the count.”

  “If you reported it before he did . . .”

  I knew what he was getting at.

  “Am I free to go?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “That’s it?”

  “For now.”

  “We could’ve done this on the phone,” I said.

  “You know that’s not how it plays,” he said.

  Right. Cops like to have you one-on-one when asking questions, to see if you sweat, to see if you’ll break, to see if you’ll confess and they can arrest you right then and there.

  20.

  Lisa Dean was a lawyer who handled all legal issues that came up for Westlake and Marshall Legal Process Serving. She was a tall, slender woman in her thirties who always had her long blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Allen and I both went to see her about the recent problems.

  First, there was the matter of the lawsuit. “It’s frivolous,” she said. “I’ll file for a motion to demur and I’m sure the court will strike his ridiculous complaint.”

  Then: Maxwell.

  “It depends on how hard the man pushes it,” Lisa Dean said.

  `”It’s my word against his,” I said.

  “There may not be any criminal action,” she said, “but he could sue you as well. He seems like the type. I looked him up in court records and he’s rather litigation happy, and he’s been sued a number of times himself. Including the case you just served him on, he has four others in various stages. One is a freedom of speech complaint he's heading, over some white supremacist group crying foul play, a group he seems to belong to.

  “People,” I said.

  “Keep people like me in business.”

  “For shame.”

  “I don’t lose sleep.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “I’ll file the demur motion; as for Maxwell, let’s wait and see how it pans out,” she said.

  Things weren’t looking good for Allen Marshall, however.

  Allen yelled about it back at the office.

  “Fucking cops!” he said. “This proves why they’re all worthless piece of fucking shit!”

  The officer he had hit wasn’t backing down on the assault charges, and the D.A. was itching for a conviction.

  For the first time in this business, I thought about how I wouldn’t look back if I walked away from process serving forever.

  21.

  Gabriella and I hastily made love in the backseat of my car, parked in the alley. She’d called and said she had to see me immediately; she had an idea about what to do with her aunt.

  First: the sex.

  The sex was good. It was always good for us. I never wanted to let it go.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Gabriella said. “She’s going to do it for sure. David, she’s going to change her will. She’s still crazy mad about you being in the house.”

  “What’s the big deal? She doesn’t like company?”

  “She’s weird about strangers in the home, she doesn’t even like doctors or her lawyer coming by, but she can’t travel to them.”

  “It’s eccentric.”

  “And we were naked; she said the whole house smelled like fornication. Her words. ‘You have turned my home into a brothel,’ she goes, ‘a den of fornication and sin.’”

  I held back a chuckle.

  “Bah,” is what I said.

  “David, I really do think she plans to change her will.” Gabriella's voice was dead-pan serious, and worried.

  “Let her blow off some steam, she’ll get over it.”

  “No, she won’t. You don’t know her. When she says she’ll do something to hurt me, she means it.”

  “Tell her you’ll leave, and she’ll have no one; she’ll need strangers come and take care of her.”

  “She doesn’t give a shit. She’s ready to die.”

  “Let her die,” I said. Then: “I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean that. It’s a horrible thing to say.”

  Calmly: “No it isn’t. No. I feel the same way. Listen to me.”

  I did.

  She said, “She has to die, David.”

  I had a feeling what she was getting at.

  “David,” she said, serious as a suicide bomber.

  “Baby, no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what you’re hinting at?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or am I imagining the worst?”

  “No.”

  “You’re talking murder,” I said.

  “I’m talking freedom,” she said, “and three million dollars.”

  22.

  She would be rich and she would share it with me.

  “We’ll be together and we won’t have to sneak time away,” Gabriella said. “You can quit your job. We’ll travel the world. We’ll be in love. We’ll have babies and have the money to take care of them right.”

  Sounded like she was reading these words from one of those romance novels she liked.

  And it all sounded wonderful, except for the homicide part.

  “This will work,” Gabriella said. Her plan was that we—yes, she and I together—would suffocate her aunt with a pillow while the woman was sound asleep. “We’ll position her on her back,” Gabriella told me. “She’s not supposed to sleep on her back or side because her adenoids will close up her air passage.”

  I remembered her telling the private nurse that.

  “You’ll be my witness,” she went on. “We don’t need to hide our relationship. You were over, visiting me, and we found my aunt together, on her back and not breathing. She turned in her sleep and I forgot to check up on her. Things like this happen all the time. Nothing will look suspicious.”

  “And then?”

  “Her current will remains as is. Upon her death, I get access to her accounts, the safety deposit box with the diamonds, and the property deeds transferred in my name.”

  I sighed.

  “What? David, what?”

  “Do you know what will happen if we get caught?”

  “We won’t. How could we?”

  “Any little thing goes wrong . . .”

  “Nothing will. What could go wrong? It’s a solid plan. A good one. Or do you have a better plan?”

  I said, “Never plotted a
murder before, no.”

  She said, “It’ll work. Nothing will go wrong, David, I promise you.”

  Again, I sighed.

  She said, “Will you help me? Help us? So we can be together and live happy.”

  “Ever after?”

  “Bliss.”

  “Need to think about it,” I said.

  “Think fast,” she said; “we don’t have much time.”

  And she said, “I love you, David.”

  23.

  Everyone was on edge at the office. It seemed that Allen Marshall might actually do time for the assault on a cop. What would happen to the company? Allen said I could run the place; things wouldn’t change.

  “You can’t go to jail,” I said.

  “The goddamn D.A. has a hard-on for me,” Allen said. “You know why? Go on, kid, ask why.”

  “Why?”

  “I once served him with divorce papers. This was, what, fifteen fucking years ago when he was a public defender and he’s remembered it ever since. I served him while he was in court, seemed like the best place since I had to be there that day. He felt like I embarrassed him. The judge said, ‘Well, there’ll be no question about service,’ and his clerks and the bailiff got a laugh out of that, so did the A.D.A. Then he leaves the P.D. office and switches side, starts prosecuting, rises up, get elected D.A., and now he wants a little revenge on my old ass. He's like Kahn in The Wrath of Kahn, but I'm not as witty as Captain Kirk. I know all about the No-Win-Scenario.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this.” Didn't know what else to say.

  “I should’ve seen it coming. That’s why I quit being a private dick. Did you know that? Did I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “I made a lot of enemies with the cops and D.A.’s office,” he explained. “I solved cases they couldn’t. I did things they couldn’t. They tried to pin me on some illegal investigative practices but that shit never stuck to the boot. But they never forgot. I knew those assholes would come gunning for me one day and now the day is here, and they want to put me behind bars for six months over this bullshit and this time, the boot may get smeared in it.