Night Freight

by Pronzini, Bill

  Franzen had a round, inoffensive pink face with tiny-shelled ears and a Cupid's-bow mouth. His hair was brown and wavy, immaculately cut and shaped, and it saved him from being nondescript; it gave him a certain boyish character, even though Sheffield placed his age at around forty. His eyes were brown and liquid, like those of a Spaniel, behind his rimless glasses.

  Sheffield got a ballpoint pen out of his coat pocket and tapped it lightly against his front teeth; he liked to have something in his hands when he was conducting an interrogation. He broke the silence, finally, by saying, "My name is Sheffield. I'm the lieutenant in charge here. Now before you say anything, it's my duty to advise you of your rights."

  He did so, quickly and tersely, concluding with, "You understand all of your rights as I've outlined them, Mr. Franzen?"

  The small man sighed softly and nodded.

  "Are you willing, then, to answer questions without the presence of counsel?"

  "Yes, yes."

  Sheffield continued to tap the ballpoint pen against his front teeth. "All right," he said at length. "Let's have your full name."

  "Andrew Leonard Franzen."

  "Where do you live?"

  "Here in San Francisco."

  "At what address?"

  "Nine-oh-six Greenwich."

  "Is that a private residence?"

  "No, it's an apartment building."

  "Are you employed?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  "I'm an independent consultant."

  "What sort of consultant?"

  "I design languages between computers."

  Rauxton said, "You want to explain that?"

  "It's very simple, really," Franzen said tonelessly.

  "If two business firms have different types of computers, and would like to set up a communication between them so that the information stored in the memory banks of each computer can be utilized by the other, they call me. I design the linking electronic connections between the two computers, so that each can understand the other; in effect, so that they can converse."

  "That sounds like a very specialized job," Sheffield said.

  "Yes."

  "What kind of salary do you make?"

  "Around eighty thousand a year."

  Two thin, horizontal lines appeared in Sheffield's forehead. Franzen had the kind of vocation that bespoke intelligence and upper-class respectability; why would a man like that want to confess to the brutal murders of three simple-living housewives? Or an even more puzzling question: If his confession was genuine, what was his reason for the killings?

  Sheffield said, "Why did you come here tonight, Mr. Franzen?"

  "To confess." Franzen looked at Rauxton. "I told this man that when I walked in a few minutes ago."

  "To confess to what?"

  "The murders."

  "What murders, specifically?"

  Franzen sighed. "The three women in the Bay Area today."

  "Just the three?"

  "Yes."

  "No others whose bodies maybe have not been discovered as yet?"

  "No, no."

  "Suppose you tell me why you decided to turn yourself in?"

  "Why? Because I'm guilty. Because I killed them."

  "And that's the only reason?"

  Franzen was silent for a moment. Then slowly, he said, "No, I suppose not. I went walking in Aquatic Park when I came back to San Francisco this afternoon, just walking and thinking. The more I thought, the more I knew that it was hopeless. It was only a matter of time before you found out I was the one, a matter of a day or two. I guess I could have run, but I wouldn't know how to begin to do that. I've always done things on impulse, things I would never do if I stopped to think about them. That's how I killed them, on some insane impulse; if I had thought about it I never would have done it. It was so useless. .

  Sheffield exchanged glances with the two inspectors. Then he said, "You want to tell us how you did it, Mr. Franzen?"

  "'What?"

  "How did you kill them?" Sheffield asked. "What kind of weapon did you use?"

  "A tenderizing mallet. One of those big wooden things with serrated ends that women keep in the kitchen to tenderize a piece of steak."

  It was silent in the cubicle now. Sheffield looked at Rauxton, and then at Tobias; they were all thinking the same thing: the police had released no details to the news media as to the kind of weapon involved in the slayings, other than the general information that it was a blunt instrument. But the initial lab report on the first victim—and the preliminary observations on the other two—stated the wounds of each had been made by a roughly square-shaped instrument, which had sharp "teeth" capable of making a series of deep indentations as it bit into the flesh. A mallet such as Franzen had just described fitted those characteristics exactly.

  Sheffield asked, "What did you do with the mallet, Mr. Franzen?"

  "I threw it away."

  "Where?"

  "In Sausalito, into some bushes along the road."

  "Do you remember the location?"

  "I think so."

  "Then you can lead us there later on?"

  "I suppose so, yes."

  "Was Elaine Dunhill the last woman you killed?"

  "Yes."

  "What room did you kill her in?"

  "The bedroom?"

  "Where in the bedroom?"

  "Beside her vanity."

  "Who was your first victim?" Rauxton asked.

  "Janet Flanders."

  "You killed her in the bathroom, is that right?"

  "No, no, in the kitchen . . ."

  "What was she wearing?"

  "A flowered housecoat."

  "Why did you strip her body?"

  "I didn't. Why would I—"

  "Mrs. Gordon was the middle victim, right?" Tobias asked.

  "Yes."

  "Where did you kill her?"

  "The kitchen."

  "She was sewing, wasn't she?"

  "No, she was canning," Franzen said. "She was canning plum preserves. She had mason jars and boxes of plums and three big pressure cookers all over the table and stove . . ."

  There was wetness in Franzen's eyes now. He stopped talking and took his rimless glasses off and wiped at the tears with the back of his left hand. He seemed to be swaying slightly on the chair.

  Sheffield, watching him, felt a curious mixture of relief and sadness. The relief was due to the fact that there was no doubt in his mind—nor in the minds of Rauxton and Tobias; he could read their eyes—that Andrew Franzen was the slayer of the three women. They had thrown detail and "trip-up" questions at him, one right after another, and he had had all the right answers; he knew particulars that had also not been given to the news media, that no crank could possibly have known, that only the murderer could have been aware of. The case had turned out to be one of the simple ones, after all, and it was all but wrapped up now; there would be no more "bludgeon slayings," no public hue and cry, no attacks on police inefficiency in the press, no pressure from the commissioners or the mayor. The sadness was the result of twenty-six years of police work, of living with death and crime every day, of looking at a man who seemed to be the essence of normalcy and yet who was a cold-blooded multiple murderer.

  Why? Sheffield thought. That was the big question. Why did he do it?

  He said, "You want to tell us the reason, Mr. Franzen? Why you killed them?"

  The small man moistened his lips. "I was very happy, you see. My life had some meaning, some challenge . . .I was fulfilled—but they were going to destroy everything." He stared at his hands. "One of them had found out the truth—I don't know how—and tracked down the other two. I had come to Janet this morning, and she told me that they were going to expose me, and I just lost my head and picked up the mallet and killed her. Then I went to the others and killed them. I couldn't stop myself; it was as if I were moving in a nightmare."

  "What are you trying to say?" Sheffield asked. "What was your relationship with thos
e three women?"

  The tears in Andrew Franzen's eyes shone like tiny diamonds in the light from the overhead fluorescents.

  "They were my wives," he said.

  In the sixties and seventies I perpetrated a fair amount of fantasy and science fiction, much of it with Barry Malzberg and the majority of it eminently forgettable. Of all the s-f with my name on it, I like maybe six stories—four collaborations, including a 10,000-word satire on hack-writing called "Prose Bowl" that some critics consider a minor classic, and two solo efforts. "The Rec Field" is one of the solos, a blend of s-f and psychological suspense whose payoff line gave me a small chill when I wrote it in 1979. It surprised me with another when I reread it recently, hence its inclusion here.

  The Rec Field

  We'd been on Repair Outpost 217-C for thirty-four months when Renzo got the idea to build a rec field.

  One of us should have thought of it long before that. Except for compu-disks, the only recreation we had was cards and chess and backgammon—indoor games that neither of us cared for much. The thing was, we'd both been raised on outdoor sports. Soccer was Renzo's game and baseball was mine; we would talk soccer and baseball for hours, the classic professional contests, the matchups we'd been involved in ourselves when we were kids back home. Funny how the mind works. All those hours of sports talk and it still took thirty-four months for one of us to suggest a rec field of our own.

  But then, I guess maybe we'd both blocked off the idea because of the conditions we were working under. Like 217-C itself. It was an uninhabited dwarf planet located just outside the Company's C-Sector shipping lanes, most of it igneous rock and volcanic ash, with here and there little clusters of trees and patches of bright green grass. Gravity was within 2.3 of Earth's, axis rotation was 21.40 Earth hours, but the atmosphere was low in oxygen; you could breathe it without a life-pac, only not if you were doing anything strenuous and not for more than a couple of hours at a time. And the weather was bad; hot and dank all the time, day and night, with a dense cloud cover always hanging low overhead that made even the daylight a dark gray. We never once saw the planet's sun nor either of its two tiny moons.

  Another thing was that we didn't have any equipment—balls, bats, things like that—and no way of getting any sent in. The Company refused to stock the drone supply ship that came from Sector Base every six months with what they called "frivolous material"; the compu-disks were the only concession they made. And we couldn't leave the outpost ourselves, because if we did we would forfeit all of our accumulated wages. We were aware of that when we signed on, of course; it was in the Company contract. They paid enormous salaries, but the catch was that you had to sign on for a full six years and they withheld all your credits until those six years were up.

  If any other human beings had come to 217-C we could have asked them to bring us the stuff we needed on a return trip. But in all our thirty-four months the only other man we'd laid eyes on was Dietrich, the Sector Chief, who came in every fifteen months or so on a routine inspection tour. Each of the freighters that were forced to veer in from the lanes for refueling or repairs was a drone, which were cheaper to operate than manned ships. If the Company could have figured a way to run outposts like this with Mechanicals instead of skilled mechanics, I suppose they would have done it. But they hadn't and so here we were — Renzo and me.

  We got along pretty well from the first, Renzo and me, but even two people with common interests—and we had plenty of them besides sports; that was why we'd been selected to work together as a team—can get on each other's nerves after a while. Particularly in a place like this, where there was no sunlight or moonlight and everything was colorless except for the trees and those beautiful patches of bright green grass. We might even have turned against each other if it hadn't been for the mind-psychs the Company performed on all of its employees. They said the mind-psychs were to keep you from thinking about women and sex and family ties back home, but they were also to keep you from fighting with your partner; they didn't tell you that because they didn't want you worrying about it going in.

  As it was, we'd stopped talking to each other for days at a time when Renzo came up with the idea for the rec field. Then all the friction disappeared and we were as close as we'd been in the early months. It was almost like being reborn.

  We went to work right away. The first thing we did was to draw up plans and then keep on redrafting them until we had the field laid out exactly the way we wanted it. It would be a hundred and fifty meters long and a hundred meters wide. It would be enclosed on three sides by a curving wooden fence three meters high; the fourth side would be four rows of spectators' seats, even though no spectators would ever sit in them, because we agreed the field should look as authentic as possible. It would be floored in that bright green grass, except for base paths and a pitching mound and home plate area for baseball, and it would have soccer goals and dugout benches and all the other necessary items.

  It would be the best damn rec field anybody ever built spaceward of Earth.

  Once we were satisfied with the plans, we went looking for the best possible site. It took us two days to settle on one that pleased both of us. The spot we picked was behind and to the east of the bubble we lived in, at the edge of the compound and right up close to the biggest cluster of trees and patch of grass.

  We started construction the next day. We measured distances, staked them out, and cleared the area of ash and rock. With laser tools from the repair hangar, we cut down trees and shaped them into boards and posts of different sizes. We dug holes for fence posts and the soccer goals and home plate on the baseball diamond. We used a thermosetting resin to bind joints and lock the bleacher sections together.

  At the end of eight months—forty-two months altogether on Outpost 217-C—we had the field roughed out; the fence and bleachers built. We considered painting everything, but the only duropaint we had was gray, the color of the Company freighters and the color of the surroundings, and we weren't about to use that. Besides, the natural wood color looked fine. And it would look even better once we got the grass put in.

  That was our next project, the grass. We dug up blocks of sod a half meter square and carried them to the field and laid them down carefully to form the baseball diamond and the soccer rectangle. When that job was finished we set to work on the dugout benches and the goals. And when they were done we laser-carved a rock into a replica of home plate, put it down, manufactured three bases and two goal nets out of supply material, and put those in place.

  By that time we had been working on the field a few days short of eleven months. We weren't quite finished yet—there were a few small things to be taken care of, and one major problem to be solved, before we could begin to use it—but in essence it was done. And done right, just as we had planned it.

  Renzo and I stood admiring it after we'd tied the last goal net into place. "You ever see anything so goddamn fine in all your life?" he said.

  "No," I said, "never."

  "All the work was worth it, Alex. If it hadn't been for the field, the past eleven months would've been rough—a hell of a lot rougher than the first thirty-four."

  "I know," I said. "But we've got it made now; once we start the games, the next twenty-seven will be even easier."

  "We'll play soccer first, when everything's ready," he said. "That all right with you?"

  "Sure. Soccer it is."

  A little while later, when the heat got to be unbearable, we went back to the bubble to rest and take some nourishment. And while we were eating, a message came through from Sector Base, the first one we'd had since an outbound freighter was diverted in for airlock repairs three months ago: Sector Chief Dietrich was on his way to 217-C for another inspection and was scheduled to arrive in sixty-two hours. Renzo and I were to get everything ready for him, including the spare quarters; he was planning to stay at least overnight.

  The news didn't interest either of us as much as it might have before we began building the
rec field. It had been fifteen months since Dietrich's last visit—fifteen months since we had seen another human being—but we were still pretty excited about the way the field had turned out. And neither of us liked Dietrich much anyway. He was a strict Company man, the kind that let you know you were only a drone yourself, not much different than the fleet of ships that were under his supervision. He didn't like sports, either. I'd tried to talk to him about baseball the first time he'd come for inspection and he hadn't shown the slightest bit of interest.

  But after we had acknowledged the message, Renzo said, "You know, the timing for Dietrich's visit isn't bad. Now we'll be able to show off the completed field to him."

  "You think he'll approve of it?"

  "Sure he will. Why wouldn't he approve of it?"

  We spent most of the next three days getting the repair hangar and refueling station and rocket pit ready for Dietrich's inspection. Everything had to be clean, in its proper place, ready for any emergency; if he found anything at all out of line, which he wouldn't, the Company contract said we could get docked for it.

  We did manage to do a little more work on the rec field, most of it cosmetic: trimming the grass, sanding rough edges off the fence and the bleacher seats, that sort of thing. Renzo and I had a lot of pride in that field and we wanted it to look as nice as possible for Dietrich.

  As scheduled, the Sector Chief's small one-man shuttle vectored in at 0900 hours. When Dietrich had shut off his engines and locked down on the pad, Renzo and I went out and stood waiting near the hatch for the forward airlock. It was another ten minutes before he came out, dressed in his silver-gray Company uniform.

  It was good to see another human again, even Dietrich; and he was a pretty impressive figure, you had to admit that. Tall, ageless, big round head with a mat of hair the same silver-gray as his suit, face brown and so smooth it looked polished. Sharp green eyes, bright and cold—the only color anywhere about him. Like the grass and the tree leaves were the only color on 217-C.