Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  “Yeah,” Bill said, “it’s such a bad sore throat you can’t even swallow beer, huh?”

  Spence laughed. “Yeah, that sounds like a bad one, all right. Can’t even swallow beer.”

  I could tell Bill was looking at me. He was the only one of us who could really intimidate people. “So what the hell’s really goin’ on here, Jason?”

  I sounded whiny, resentful. “I got a sore throat, Lord and Master. If that’s all right with you.”

  “It’s when I said I’m gonna bang her, wasn’t it?” He laughed. “In your mind she’s still this scream queen, isn’t she? Some freaking virgin. She’s nobody now.”

  “Then why do you want to screw her so bad?” I said.

  “Because then I can say it, asshole. I can say I bopped Michele Danforth.” He looked at both me and Spence. “I’ll have actually accomplished something. Something real. Not just all these fantasies we have about going to Hollywood.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it to her,” I said. “We shouldn’t have said anything to her at all. She had her own reasons for vanishing like that.”

  “Yeah, because she was getting fat between movies and they probably didn’t want her anymore.” He laughed.

  Hard to tell which rang in his voice the clearest — his cruelty or his craziness. Bill was climbing out on the ledge again. Sometimes he lived there for days.. Times like these, we’d get into shoving matches and near-fights.

  Spence’s attitude had changed. You could see it in his dark eyes. He’d thought it was pretty funny and pretty cool, Bill screwing a scream queen. But now I could tell that he thought it was just as twisted as I did. Bill always got intense when he went after something. But this went beyond intensity. He actually looked sort of crazy when he talked about it.

  “Maybe Jason’s right, Bill,” Spence said gently. “Maybe we should just leave her alone.”

  The look of contempt was so perfectly conjured up, it was almost like a mask. So was the smirk that came a few seconds later. “The Wuss brothers. All these fantasies about what great talents you are. And all the big times you’re gonna have in Hollywood. And then when you get a chance to have a little fun, you chicken out and run away. We could all screw her, you know. All three of us. A gang-bang.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “now there’s a great idea, Bill. We could kill her, too. You ever thought of that?”

  “Now who’s crazy? All I was talking about was the three of us—”

  I was as sick of myself just then as I was of Bill. I was already making plans to go call the community college again. See when I needed to enroll for the next semester. I knew that maybe I wouldn’t go through with it. But right then, with Bill’s mind lurching from a one-man seduction to a three-man rape... Prisons were filled with guys who’d had ideas like that. And then carried them out.

  “I got to finish up here,” I said, working on the cash register again.

  “Yeah, c’mon, Spence, let’s leave the Reverend here to pray for our souls. We’ll go get drunk.”

  Spence and I had never been very good about standing up to Bill. So I knew what courage it took for Spence to say, “I guess not, Bill. I’m not feeling all that well myself.”

  He called us all the usual names that denote a male who is less than masculine. Then he went over to a stand-up display of the new Julia Roberts movie and started picking up one at a time and firing them around the store. They made a lot of noise and every time one of them smashed into something — a wall, a line of tapes, even a window — both Spence and I felt a nervous spasm going through us. It was like when you’re little and you hear your folks having a violent argument and you’re afraid your dad’s going to kill your mom and you hide upstairs under the covers. That kind of tension and terror.

  I came around the counter fast and shouted at him. Then I started running at him. But he beat me to the door.

  He stood there. “Good night, ladies. Every time I see you from now on, I’m gonna punch your ugly faces in. You two pussies’ve got an enemy now. And a bad one.” He’d never sounded scarier or crazier.

  And with that, he was gone.

  It was misting by the time I got back to my room-and-a-bathroom above a vacuum cleaner-repair store. I had enjoyed the walk home.

  The mist was dirty gold and swirling in the chilly night. And behind it in doorways and alleyways and dirty windows the eyes of old people and scared people and drug people and queer people and insane people stared out at me, eyes bright in dirty faces. This was an old part of town, the buildings small and fading, glimpses of ancient Pepsi-Cola and Camel cigarette and Black Jack gum signs on their sides every other block or so; TV repair shops that still had tiny screens inside of big consoles in the windows for nostalgia’s sake; and railroad tracks no longer used and stretching into some kind of Twilight Zone miles and miles of gleaming metal down the endless road. There was even a dusty used bookstore that had a few copies of pulps like The Shadow and Doc Savage and Dime Detective in the cracked window, and you could stand here sometimes and pretend it was 1938 and the world wasn’t so hostile and lonely even though there was a terrible war on the way. It was a form of being stoned, traveling back in time this way, and a perfect head trip to push away loneliness.

  To get to my room you took this rotting wooden staircase up the side of the two-story stucco-peeling shop. I was halfway up them before I looked up and saw her sitting there. The scream queen. If the misting bothered her, she didn’t show it.

  She smoked a cigarette and watched me. She looked pretty sitting there, not as pretty as when she’d been in the movies, but pretty nonetheless.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Asked the guy at the 7-11 if he knew where you lived.”

  “Oh, yeah. Dev. He lives about three down.” I smiled. “In our gated community.”

  “Sorry I got so hysterical.”

  I shrugged. “We’re video-store geeks. We can get pretty hysterical ourselves. You should’ve seen us at our first Trekkie convention in Spock ears and shit. If you had any pictures of us from back then, you could blackmail us.”

  She smiled. “That’s assuming you had any money to make it worthwhile.”

  I laughed. “I take it you know how much video-store geeks make.”

  “L.A. I must’ve done three hundred signings in video stores.” The smile again. It was a good clean one. It erased a lot of years. “Most of you are harmless.”

  “We could always go inside,” I said.

  After I handed her a cheap beer, she said, “I didn’t come up here for sex.”

  “I didn’t figure you did.”

  She glanced around. “You could fix this up a little and it wouldn’t be so bad. And those Terminator posters are a little out of date.”

  “Yeah. But they’re signed.”

  “Arnold signed them?”

  I grinned. “Nah, some dude at a comic-book convention I went to. He had some real small part in it.”

  She had a sweet laugh. “Played a tree or a car or something like that?”

  “Yeah, you know, along those lines.”

  She’d taken off her brown velour jacket. Her white sweater showed off those scream-queen breasts real, real good. It was unsettling, sitting so near a girl whose videos had driven me to rapturous self-abuse so many times. Even with the added weight, she looked good in jeans. “I’ll make you a deal, Jason.”

  “Yeah? What kind of deal. I mean, since we ruled out sex. Much to my dismay.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Jason. You don’t really think I just go around sleeping with people do you? That’s in the movies. This is straight business, what I’m proposing. I’ll clean your apartment here and fix it up if you’ll convince your two friends not to let anybody know who I am or where I am.”

  “Spence won’t be any trouble.”

  “Is he the good-looking one?”

  “That’s Bill.”

  “He looks like trouble.”

  “He is.”

  She sank back on the co
uch and covered her face with her hands. I thought she was going to cry. But no sounds came. The only thing you could hear was Churchill, my cat, yowling at cars passing in what was now a downpour.

  “You okay?”

  She shrugged. Said nothing. Hands still covering her face. When she took them down, she said, “I left L.A. for my own reasons. And I want to keep them my reasons. And that means making a life for myself somewhere out here. I’m from Chicago. I like the Midwest. But I don’t want some tabloid to find out about me.”

  “Well, like I say, Spence won’t be any trouble. But Bill—”

  “Where’s he live?”

  I was thinking about what Bill had said about screwing a scream queen. Even if she wasn’t a scream queen anymore. It didn’t make much sense to me but it sure seemed to make a lot of sense to him.

  “Why don’t I talk to him first?”

  She looked relieved. “Good. I’d appreciate that. I’m supposed to start this job next week. A good job. Decent bennies and from what everybody says, some real opportunities there. I want to start my life all over.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  She was all business. Grabbing her coat. Sliding into it. Standing up. Looking around at the stained and peeling wallpaper and all the posters, including the latest scream queen, Linda Sanders. “She’s a nice kid. Had a real shitty childhood. I hope she can beat the rap — you know, go on and do some real acting. I saw her at a small playhouse right before I left L.A. She was really good.”

  I liked that. How charitable she was about her successor. A decent woman.

  Churchill came out and rubbed his head against her ankle. She held him up and gave him that smile of hers. “We both need to go to Weight Watchers, my friend.”

  “He stays up late at night and watches TV and orders from Domino’s when I’m asleep.”

  She gave him a kiss. “I believe it.”

  She set him down, put out her hand and shook, that formal, forced way people do in banking commercials right after the married couple agrees to pay the exorbitant interest rates. “I really appreciate this, Jason. I’ll start figuring out how I’m going to fix up your apartment. I live in this tiny trailer. I’ve got it fixed up very nicely.”

  “You didn’t screw her, did you?” Bill said when he came into the store.

  He’d been hustling around the place, getting the displays just so, setting up the 50 % OFF bin of VHS and DVD films we hadn’t been able to move, snapping Mr. Coffee to burbling attention. When I told him she’d come over to my place last night, he stopped, frozen in place, and asked if I’d screwed her.

  “Yeah. Right on the front lawn. In the rain. Just humping our brains out.”

  “You’d better not have, you bastard. I’m the one who gets to nail her.”

  At any given time Bill is always about seven minutes away from the violent ward, but I couldn’t ever recall seeing him this agitated about something.

  “She isn’t going to screw anybody, Bill. Now shut up and listen.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, “now you’re her press agent? All the official word comes from you?”

  “She’s scared, asshole.”

  “Listen, Jason. Spare me the heartbreak, all right? She’s been around. She doesn’t need some video geek hovering over her.” Then: “That’s how you’re gonna get in her panties, isn’t it? Be her best friend. One of those wussy deals. Well, it’s not gonna work because she’ll never screw a pus-face like you. You checked out your blackheads lately, Jason?”

  I swung on him then. When my fist collided with his cheek, he gaped at me in disbelief, then sort of disintegrated, started screaming at me real high-pitched and all, as he stumbled backwards into a display of a new Disney family movie. Most surprisingly of all, he didn’t come after me. Maybe I’d just stunned him. He’d always seen Spence and me as his inferiors — we were the geeks, according to him; he wasn’t a geek; he was a cool dude who pitied us enough to hang out with us — and so maybe he was just in shock. His slave had revolted and he hadn’t had time to deal with it mentally yet.

  “She’s afraid you’ll tell somebody who she is,” I said. “And if you do, you’re going to be damned sorry.”

  And then I couldn’t believe what I did. I hit him again. This time he might have responded, but just then the front door opened, the bell tinkled. The first customer of the day, a soccer-mom with a curly-haired little girl in tow, walked in with an armload of overdue DVDs. Mrs. Preston. Her stuff was always overdue.

  I had just enough time to see that a pimple of blood hung from Bill’s right nostril. I took an unholy amount of satisfaction in that.

  Michele didn’t want to see me. She was nice about it. She said she really appreciated me talking to Bill about her and that she really appreciated me stopping by like this but she was just in a place where she wanted to be alone, sort of actually needed to be alone and she was sure I understood. Because that was obviously the kind of guy I was, the understanding kind.

  In other words, it was the sort of thing I’d been hearing from girls all my life. How nice I was and how understanding I was and how they were sure, me being so understanding and all, that it was cool if we just kind of left things as they were: you know, being just friends and all. Which is what she ended up saying.

  As usual, I’d gotten ahead of myself. By this time, I had this crush on her and whenever I get a crush of this particular magnitude I start dreaming the big dream. You know, not only having sex but maybe her really falling in love with me and maybe moving in together and maybe me getting a better job and maybe us — it could happen — getting married and settling down just as the couples always do in the screwball comedies of the ‘thirties and ‘forties Bill and Spence always rag on me for liking so much.

  Over a three-day period I must have called Spence eight or nine times, always leaving a message on his machine. He never called back. I finally went over there after work one night. He had a two-room apartment on a block where half the houses had been torn down. I was just walking up to the front door when Spence and Bill came out.

  They were laughing until they saw me. Beery laughter. They’d both been gunning brew.

  Bill was the one I watched. His hands formed fists instantly and he dropped back a foot and went into a kind of boxer’s crouch. “You got lucky the other day, Jason.”

  “I don’t think so, Bill. I think you got lucky because Mrs. Preston came in.”

  Spence’s face reflected the disbelief all three of us were probably feeling. I couldn’t believe it, either. I’d stood up to Bill the other day, but I think both of us thought it was kind of a fluke. But it wasn’t. I was ready to hit him again.

  The only difference between the other morning and now was that he was half-drunk. Brew makes most of us feel tougher and handsomer and smarter and wittier than we really are. Prisons are packed with guys who let brew addle their perception of themselves. Or dope. Doesn’t matter.

  He came at me throwing a roundhouse so vast in scope it couldn’t possibly have landed on me. All I had to do was take a single step backward.

  “I don’t want to fight you, Bill. Spence, pull him back.”

  Whatever Bill said was lost in his second lunge. This punch connected. He got me on my right cheek and pain exploded across my entire face. He followed up with a punch to my stomach that doubled me over. “Kick his ass, Bill,” Spence said.

  Even though I was in pain, even though I should have been focused on the fight I was in, his words, the betrayal of them, him choosing Bill over me when it should have been Spence and me against Bill — that hurt a lot more than the punches. He’d been my friend since third grade. He was my friend no longer.

  Bill hit me with enough force to knock me flat on the sidewalk, butt first. If this had been the other night, I would’ve jumped to my feet and started swinging. But I was still hearing Spence say to kick my ass and I guess I didn’t have enough pride or anger left to stand up and hit back. I just felt drained.

  “Y
ou all right?” Spence said to me. I could hear his confusion. Better to stick with Bill. But still, we’d been friends a long time and to see me knocked down—

  “He’s just a pussy,” Bill said. “C’mon.”

  I didn’t stand up till they were gone. Then I walked home slowly. I took the long way so that I’d go past Michele’s place. The light was on. I turned off the sidewalk and started moving toward the house, but then I stopped. I wasn’t up for another disappointment tonight.

  Video Vic’s real name wasn’t Vic; it was Reed, Reed Patrick, and when I called him next morning and gave him my week’s notice, he said, “You don’t sound so good, kiddo. You all right?”

  “I just need to be movin’ on, Reed. I enjoyed working for you, though.”

  “You ever want to use me for a reference, that’ll be fine with me.”

  “Thanks, Reed.”

  That night, I surprised my folks by showing up for dinner. Mom had made meat loaf and mashed potatoes and peas. I figured that was about the best meal I’d ever had. They were surprised that I’d quit my job, but my Dad said, “Now you can start looking for something with a future, Jason. You could start taking classes again out to the college. Get trained for some kind of computer job or something.”

  “Computers, honey,” my mom said, patting my hand. “Jobs like that pay good money.”

  “And they’ve got a future.”

  “That’s right,” Mom said, “computers aren’t going anywhere. They’re here for good.”

  “You should call out there tomorrow,” Dad said. “And my buddy Mike can get you on at the supermarket he runs.”

  I pretended to be interested in what he was saying. I’d never seemed interested before. He looked happy about me, the way he had when I was a little kid. I hadn’t seen him look this happy in a long time. He also looked old. I guess I hadn’t really, you know, just looked at him for a real long time. The same with Mom. The lines in their faces. The bags under their eyes. The way both my folks seemed kind of worn out through the whole meal. When I left I hugged them harder than I had in years. And all the way back to my little room, I felt this sadness I just couldn’t shake.