Ed Gorman: Cold Blue Midnight

'And they say romance is dead.'

'I've had a few dates who weren't all that far from being Hog Face,' Marcy said as she led them to the inner office.

'So've I, unfortunately.'

The inner office was much like the outer office except that two legs of this desk were held up by books, and the window was cracked and covered with masking tape along the fissure line.

Marcy said, 'This place is kind of a pit but it's all I can afford right now.' When Jill didn't respond Marcy said, 'Now you're supposed to tell me that this place isn't so bad at all.'

'Oh. Right. This place isn't so bad at all.'

Marcy smiled her smile again. 'If we were in acting class, I'd give you a D for that last line. It wasn't convincing.'

Rick Corday did more than burn it.

After the note was charred black gossamer wings, he dumped them in the toilet and flushed them down.

Bastard. Unfaithful bastard.

He went back to the bed where he'd been propped up against the headboard reading the latest Tom Clancy novel. This time, instead of the novel, he picked up a manilla envelope from which he shook out two black-and-white photographs.

Everything about the man bespoke the kind of sleek ego that seemed endemic to the world of advertising. There was something silly and hollow and theatrical about these peoplemen and women alikebut they didn't seem to be aware of it.

This one, for instance.

Standing on the dock next to his yacht, wearing the whites and blue blazer of a man who had conquered several nations and would conquer several more before his time was finished on this world.

Eric Brooks.

Hardly to the manor born, despite an official bio that got more creative each year.

Father a worker at the Caterpillar heavy equipment plant in Peoria. (Is this the same father you would later list as an astronomer, Mr Brooks?)

2.8 college average at the state university.

Three failed marriages, two paternity suits, and the loss of a major client because Brooks kept plugging the client's wife on the side.

Now sole owner of the only Chicago agency to ever win six Clios in one year.

Now sole owner of a Maserati, a Cessna that sat eight and a hunting cabin in Idaho that Ernest Hemingway had owned briefly back in the forties.

Corday looked at the second photo now.

Mr Brooks all gussied up in his handball T-shirt and his handball shorts and his handball scowl. Sweaty, gritty black-and-white, this photo, and how the macho Mr Brooks must love gazing upon it.

That's one tough hombre, that Mr Brooks.

Corday smiled.

He was going to ruin Mr Brooks' life and there wasn't a thing Mr Brooks could do about it.

Not a single solitary thing.

But first Rick had to stop by Jill Coffey's place…

'He wouldn't take a shower?'

'Not unless I refused to have sex with him.'

'You're kidding.'

'Uh-huh,' Jill said.

'Why wouldn't he take a shower?'

'He said taking a shower was just another example of how our totalitarian government had brainwashed us into being robots.'

'Wow.'

'So, anyway, that's how I met Peter. I just got so mad at Donald one night I couldn't take it anymore, and I put on my best dress and stockings and a garter belt, and I went out looking for a good time.'

So many years ago now, it seemed, Jill's college days.

She'd entered the state university just as the Flower Power movement was ending. Unfortunately, the boy she fell in love with, one Donald Franklin Spangler, had taken the considerable college fund his millionaire father had set aside for him, and recreated himself as a snarling student radical.

The first year wasn't so bad because Donald, for all his crazed rants against capitalism, was great in the hay and allowed himself to be dragged to various movies and rock concerts, even though he saw them as more evidence of how 'decadent' our system had become. Jill always wanted to point out the irony of a Marxist who drove around in a brand-new van his daddy had bought him and who owned many thousands of dollars' worth of stereo equipment, but why spoil his self-delusions? Hadn't Eugene O'Neill said that none of us could survive without them?

Her worst embarrassment that first year had been at an SDA rally in a small auditorium, where Donald had insisted on reading a poem to the assembly. He stood before them and said, 'The name of my poem is Screw America.' Jill started sinking down into her seat, hoping that nobody would notice her. This was going to be humiliating. Everybody would see Donald for the pretentious twit he sometimes was.

Screw America

Screw America, I say

Red White and Blue

Screw America, I say

Richard Nixon screw you.

Screw America, I say

So loud and mean

Screw America, I say

Robbing our planet of everything that's green.

Screw America, I say

Killing the Red

Man so proud and tall

Screw America, I say

I don't respect you at all.

At which pointGod, she couldn't help itJill started giggling. The poem was so sophomoric and Donald was such a melodramatic ass that Jill just assumed everybody else, even all these self-proclaimed Maoists, would find it equally funny. But then she started looking around. The poem wasn't over. In all, there must have been forty stanzas, each worse than the previous one. But everybody here seemed mesmerized. Absolutely downright mesmerized. Everybody in the little auditorium was on his feet except her. And they weren't giggling, they were cryingsilver tears streaming down their cheeks as they repeated in a kind of Gregorian Chant, 'Screw America, I say!' every time Donald said it first. She had never forgotten that night, but she sure tried to.

There was even a second act to this farce. She stayed with him a second year. True, the rants were getting longer and crazier but she could abide it because he gave her plenty of time to studyhe was always off somewhere marching in demonstrationsand because she didn't love him. He was an amusing companion and no more, perfect for somebody who didn't want any serious involvementuntil he quit taking showers.

'So that night I went to this singles bar,' Jill went on, 'and there was this great-looking older guy there and this absolutely ridiculous thing happened to me.'

'What was that?'

'I fell in love with him.'

'God.'

'I couldn't believe it. He really was gorgeous.'

'That happened to me once, too. A gorgeous guy like that. God.'

Every few minutes, Jill would study Marcy. It was still difficult to believe that this slender, attractive young woman could possibly have been Biker Mama.

'So then what happened?' Marcy said.

'As soon as I got out of college that summer, he took me to the family manse where I met his mother and sister. The sister was greator as great as she could be, anyway, in those circumstancesbut the mother… Well, to be fair, she didn't like me any better than I liked her. She thought I was an evil woman, out to take all her little boy's money and pride.'

'But you got married, anyway?'

Jill nodded. 'Got married and was promptly locked behind bars for the rest of my life.'

'The family manse.'

'Mmm-hmm. Mother had come around to letting me be one of her honorary children. You know, stay behind the prison walls and do everything Mother told you to. But I couldn't do it. Not for any long stretch of time, anyway. I always had excuses to get out of theremy parents to visit, things like that. Then I sent in one of my photographs to the Trib photography contest and won first prize. People started offering me work and I took it. Over three years, I must have done a hundred assignments and really built a name for myself.'