Cole Perriman's Terminal Games

by Wim Coleman

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” cried Hugo. “Only kidding! Only kidding! Can’t you tell a joke when you hear it? We’re not finished with you yet!”

  The derisive catcalls abruptly switched to the sounds of whistling, cheering, and the rhythmic stamping of feet.

  “And he-e-e-ere we go,” continued Hugo, barely making himself heard over the clamor. He waved a hand toward a signboard mounted on an easel. The sign appeared in a close up. It read:

  The Snuff Room

  is proud to present

  our founder!

  That icon of crime—

  That archetype of anarchy—

  That master of murder—

  the amazing …

  Auggie!

  Hugo stepped out of the picture, and an enormous hand wielding a red sable brush appeared. With a few swift, wet, Disneyesque strokes, the brush set an entirely new scene—an ample, candlelit bathroom. The room had white walls, a spacious black tub, a black sink, and a black toilet. A steady stream of simulated water poured into the tub, and gray curls representing steam crept ceilingward. The setting was underscored by the scratchy, tinny seventy-eight r.p.m. recording of a lazy, ambling guitar accompanied by a piano bass line. A tenor voice began to croon with exaggerated tenderness:

  “You always hurt … the one you love …”

  A barefoot woman wearing a brightly-flowered bathrobe stepped into the picture. She turned toward the audience, shook out her reddish hair, and languorously and seductively removed the bathrobe to reveal a shapely nude figure. She walked over to the sink, gazed narcissistically at her reflection in the bathroom mirror for a moment or two, then ran a comb through her hair.

  The crooning voice continued:

  “… the one … you shouldn’t hurt … at all …”

  Then the woman turned toward the audience again. With a magician-like gesture, she produced a tiny yellow vial in her right hand. She walked toward the steaming tub and poured the contents of the vial into the water. A yellow vapor and a handful of bubbles rose out of the tub. The woman sniffed the air luxuriously.

  She turned off the faucet and hopped into the tub with a single, abrupt leap, splashing a cascade of bright blue water everywhere. Her stiff, fashion-doll limbs settled into the suddenly still water. The woman sat up, sponged her arms and back, then reclined again. One of her arms trailed back and forth along the edge of the tub. The song drifted into a slow, gentle, mock-solemn recitation about love, betrayal, and forgiveness accompanied by soft, bluesily muted trumpets.

  Then, with a series of jerky tableaus, the view shifted to above the tub. As if lulled by the quiet music, the still-reclining woman closed her eyes and smiled, her body intermittently visible through the bubbles.

  Two black gloved hands—seemingly those of the viewer—crept slowly into the picture.

  The recitation ended. Blaring trumpets, screeching clarinets, and a manic banjo broke into a Dixielandish up-tempo. As if awakened by the music, the startled woman opened her eyes and briefly noticed the gloved hands. The smile disappeared from her face just as the hands seized her by the chin and hair and pushed her head underwater.

  The music rushed headlong at a riotous gallop punctuated with gunshots, duck calls, woodblocks, cowbells, and police whistles. The woman’s arms and legs, looking weirdly disconnected, flailed wildly, hurling blue spray all over the place. The singer broke in again:

  “You always hurt the one you love—the one you shouldn’t hurt at aaaall …”

  Popping corks, tinkling champagne goblets, breaking glass, cries of comic agony, and farting trombones joined the musical melee. The woman’s face briefly resurfaced in the midst of a wild splattering of pixels, her lips making grotesque, fishlike gasping motions in time with a pounding bass drum. The gloved hands quickly pushed her face under again. Her arms and legs flailed with less and less force, like a decelerating metronome. With one last burst of energy, her hand reached up and momentarily filled the field of vision, then fell into the water again.

  As the raucous music continued, a torrent of gigantic bubbles broke from under the water. The gloved hands released their grip, and the woman’s lifeless body floated to the surface, her eyes pinched shut and her skin markedly paler than before. As the blue water turned pink, it swirled into circles and then disappeared down the drain. There was one last view of the naked body reclining among a few stray bubbles, then the scene dissolved into snowy whiteness. A fluffy, tailless, black and white cat stepped into the empty frame. The gloved hands picked up the animal and began to pet it.

  The song reached a noisy cadence. With the final, triumphant trumpet chord, the word “PURRRR” appeared next to the cat in huge, wacky letters. A red curtain with gaudy gold fringe descended over the scene. Then Auggie himself, decked out in full clown regalia, stepped in front of the curtain, black and white cat in hand, and took a bow to the sound of thunderous applause. The first in a list of written observations appeared:

  tena>nw thts ireny!

  Message left by Marianne Hedison on Renee Gauld’s home answering machine, Tuesday, January 25, 1:53 A. M. (including continuing recorded conversation with Nolan Grobowski):

  Renee, pick up the phone! It’s Marianne. Pick up the phone, dammit! I just saw Auggie’s snuff. Did you see him? Did you see what he did? Christ, Renee, pick up! No playing around now. This is serious. Pick up the goddamn phone!

  NG: (picking up the phone) Hello, this is—

  MH: Who are—? Who am I talking to?

  NG: Calm down. Let me—

  MH: Where is she? Auggie? Is this Auggie? What have you done with her?

  NG: My name is Grobowski.

  MH: Get out of there! Get away from her! Right now!

  NG: Lieutenant Grobowski.

  MH: Let me talk to her. I demand to talk to her.

  NG: Will ya listen? I’m with the police.

  MH: The—?

  NG: The Los Angeles Police Department.

  MH: Oh my God.

  NG: Please identify yourself, ma’am.

  MH: Oh my God. Oh my God.

  NG: Ma’am, please.

  MH: How do I know who you really are?

  NG: Will ya please—?

  MH: What’s happened to her?

  NG: I can’t tell you that over the phone.

  MH: Why not?

  NG: Please identify yourself.

  MH: What’s happened to her?

  NG: Could you tell me where you’re calling from?

  MH: What’s happened to her?

  NG: Where are you calling from?

  MH: Why?

  NG: I need to talk to you. I want to come see you.

  MH: No.

  NG: Ma’am, please try to understand—

  MH: I’ll come there.

  NG: What?

  MH: You’re at her apartment, right?

  NG: Yes, but—

  MH: I’ll come there. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.

  NG: Ma’am—

  (MH hangs up; dial tone)

  “Really blew it this time,” Nolan grumbled, staring at the machine and holding his temples between his fingers.

  Clayton and Nolan had just listened to the tape of the truncated conversation five times in a vain attempt to make some sense of it.

  “Cut yourself some slack,” Clayton replied. “What were you supposed to do?”

  “Should’ve kept her on the line a few seconds longer. Should’ve found out more.”

  “Didn’t sound like she was in a real talkative mood.”

  “We’re supposed to know how to handle the wallflowers—how to draw ’em out. You should have talked to her. You wouldn’t have fucked up like that.”

  “They gotta want to be drawn out,” Clayton said. “Besides, she said
she’d come here. Maybe she meant it.”

  “What kind of odds do you want?” Nolan snapped. “You wanna bet hard cash?”

  Kim Pak, the precinct’s computer expert, stepped in from another room.

  “You said it’s a ‘Marianne,’ you’re looking for, right?” Kim inquired.

  “You got it,” Nolan said, suddenly hopeful. Clayton and Nolan followed Kim to the adjoining office-bedroom.

  “It’s all in her computer,” Kim said. “Her address book, her appointment book, her guest list for the party.”

  Kim led Nolan and Clayton into the office and plopped himself down in front of the enormous color monitor. “Three names like that on the guest list,” he said, perusing the screen.

  Nolan looked over Kim’s shoulder and shook his head. “Three. Shit. Marian Baxter, Mary Anne Vernasco, Marianne—Hey, Marianne Hedison. That name’s familiar.”

  “Lotta local celebrities on this list. Seen her on television, maybe?”

  “No, it’s not that, it’s—” Nolan snapped his fingers. “That woman! The one at the hotel! I knew I’d heard that voice before.”

  “What woman?” Clayton asked.

  “A woman in the hallway. She was staring at the bloodstain at the Quenton Parks. I asked her name.” Nolan pulled a little notebook out of his pocket and flipped some pages. “Here it is, Marianne Hedison, interior designer. Damn! It was her! She was at the scene of the Judson homicide! Kim, you said she had some kind of address file in that machine of hers?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Run down Marianne Hedison for us. If she was on the guest list, I’ll bet her address and phone are in there, too. And she mentioned an ‘Auggie’ on that tape. See if you can find him, too.”

  “Will do.”

  Nolan turned to Clayton. “If she doesn’t come to us, we’ll go to her,” Nolan said.

  “Sounds good,” Clayton said. “Come on. Let’s talk to some of the neighbors.”

  *

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

  “Why not?”

  The three phrases rolled across her brain in a recurring loop. The loop played over and over and over again. It was identical each time it played.

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

  “Why not?”

  The memory loop closed around itself, locking out all other parts of the conversation. To save her life, she could not remember what the man had said after her desperate “Why not?”

  Was it then that he had told her he was a cop?

  No, it must have been earlier.

  Or did he tell her he was a cop?

  Did she only imagine he told her that?

  Did she believe he was a cop?

  What did she believe?

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

  “Why not?”

  Marianne looked at the speedometer. Seventy-eight miles an hour. A cautionary voice inside her brain admonished her how treacherous this highway always was when it rained. She was probably hydroplaning over a sheet of freshly liquefied mud. At the first need to brake or make the slightest turn, she would undoubtedly lose control and careen off the highway.

  Undoubtedly.

  Not that she could muster a lot of concern for her life right at the moment. It just seemed grotesquely unfair to add an automobile accident to …

  … what?

  What had happened?

  Did she dare even imagine it?

  Marianne gently and ever-so-slightly tilted the steering wheel to the left, urging her car past a vehicle in the right lane. The pickup was dallying along at a leisurely rate of no more than sixty miles an hour. Its driver honked as she hurtled past. She could almost hear the driver cursing at her.

  “Hey, what’s the matter, you crazy bitch? You wanna kill everybody on the road?”

  The pickup’s horn vanished into the back of the night in a howling, descending Doppler glissando. The loop kept right on playing like a stuck record.

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

  “Why not?”

  She felt the road shift slightly, horizontally, dangerously beneath her barreling vehicle, then hastily reshape itself to the contours of her wheels again.

  Slow down, dammit. You wanna kill everybody on the road?

  The voice seemed peculiarly irrelevant to the activities of her body. It had no effect whatsoever on her right foot, imbedded cozily and heavily in the accelerator.

  Few cars were out on the highway.

  Who’s crazy enough to drive on a night like this?

  But the very lack of traffic seemed somehow tormenting as the highway yawned vacantly ahead. Highway lights whirled by, forming vulgar streaks and sparkles of phosphorescent psychedelic tempera all across her windshield. The lights multiplied, increasingly filling the space ahead, bizarrely suggesting sluggishness rather than speed. Los Angeles grew proportionately more distant the longer she drove toward it. She was halfway to the city now, but the remaining distance had doubled in the meantime and would repeatedly continue to do so in geometrically increasing increments all the rest of the way. Time and space were stretching and magnifying wildly with every passing moment.

  She would never reach Renee’s apartment at this rate.

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

  “Why not?”

  Never.

  01010

  LOOP

  The taller of the two men was lean and muscular and had a full mane of well-kept brown hair. He looked like a model—and indeed, Nolan had learned earlier that he was one. The tall man stood behind the armchair, gently rubbing the shoulders of a shorter man, who was sitting in the chair.

  The one in the chair was a bit portly. His hair was thinning and he had a small mustache. He looked like an accountant, but actually he was a photographer. Stricken, he stared into the space beyond the oriental carpet on the living room floor. Both men wore pajamas and bathrobes.

  “I want to see her,” the seated man said, his voice choked with emotion.

  “Tony, don’t,” the taller man said soothingly.

  “I want to see her,” the other repeated. “I won’t believe it till I see her.” A tear rolled down his check. He wiped it defiantly away.

  Nolan remembered his feeling upon viewing the corpse.

  You don’t want to see her. Trust me. You really don’t want to see her

  “Mr. Drexler, please try to put it out of your mind,” Nolan said quietly. “The coroner’s team has already taken the body away.”

  Tony Drexler broke down in quiet sobs. The taller man bent over and held him tightly. Then he said to Nolan, almost in a whisper, “Can’t I go talk to the neighbors now? They must be terribly upset.”

  “I understand your concern, Mr. McKeever,” Nolan said. “But I must say no. The other officers are questioning them right now, and we have to try to keep all potential witnesses separate for the time being. I hope you understand.”

  Roland McKeever nodded.

  “We’ll try to finish up soon,” Nolan heard his partner say. “We know it’s been a terrible night. In the meantime, I apologize if we go back over some of the same ground as before. It’s just routine. And if you remember any little details you haven’t already told us, please say so. They might turn out to be significant.”

  “We’ll help however we can,” McKeever said.

  Nolan stood and watched the two men carefully as Clayton continued the questioning. He was grateful to have his partner
take control of the situation, at least for the moment.

  McKeever and Drexler faithfully told the same story they had related in their separate preliminary interviews. During the Sunday night party, they had asked Renee Gauld to come over for a snack and a drink the following evening. When she didn’t show Monday night, McKeever had called and left a message.

  McKeever said that neither he nor Drexler had been especially concerned at first. They figured Renee had found something more exciting to do. Later that night, they discussed the fact that neither of them had seen her since the party. They asked a couple of other residents. No one else had seen her either. But even that wasn’t really unusual. A little later—at about eleven forty-five—McKeever called again. The machine still answered. That made them wonder. By now, Renee ordinarily would have called to ask McKeever to feed Lucifer.

  “Her cat,” Clayton reiterated.

  “That’s right,” McKeever said. “I’ve got a key to her apartment. Whenever she expected to be gone for the night, she’d ask me to feed Lucifer. Well, Tony and I started to worry, but we didn’t want to admit it. I told Tony I’d stop by her apartment. Just to feed the cat, I said. When I went into the apartment. I was surprised that she hadn’t cleaned up after the party—hadn’t cleaned up at all. She hadn’t turned out the lights, either. I decided to look around.” He paused, trying to control his emotions.

  “And that’s when you found her,” Clayton said.

  McKeever nodded. “Then I went straight to her phone and called 911.”

  “And you didn’t move or touch anything?” Clayton asked.

  “No,” McKeever said. “Actually, I did bring Lucifer back with me.”

  Seemingly at the sound of his name, Lucifer the cat padded softly into the room and jumped up onto Drexler’s lap. Lucifer cozily rubbed his face against Drexler’s arm. Drexler held his hands away from the cat for a moment, as if stunned by its presence. Then he cautiously began to pet it. Nolan noticed something odd about the animal.

  “What happened to its tail?” Nolan asked.

  “He’s a Manx,” Drexler replied simply.

  “A tailless cat—who ever thought that one up?” Clayton snapped.