Ed Gorman - Night Kills

"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."

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.

From his office he answered Foster's third phone call. "How's it going, pally?"

"Better than I would have expected, I guess."

"I wish I could get out of my lunch plans."

"You've got to see Fenwick. No doubt about it."

"What're you going to do?"

"For lunch?"

"Yeah."

"Dunno yet." Pause. "Have you seen Kathleen yet this morning?"

Foster paused, too. Foster and his wife, Dana, were always trying to line Brolan up with somebody. Somebody who was-in Dana's inelegant phrase-marriage material. To the Fosters, Kathleen Logan did not qualify. They saw her as the femme fatale of Twin Cities advertising. At thirty-five, ambitious in an almost chilling way, she'd already caused two legendary marital splits on her way to her vice presidency at Brolan-Foster. Foster said, "Can I be honest, pally?"

"Okay."

"With all the troubles you've got right now, do you really need to be worrying about Kathleen?"

"Isn't that sort of my business?"

"You getting pissed?"