Ed Gorman: Cold Blue Midnight

I'm not sure when the idea came to me. But I knew right away that it was the only idea that could get me out of my predicament.

In those days, 1979, back before the police were as strict about handguns as they would later become, finding a pawnshop willing to sell you a weapon on the spot was not very difficult. I went down to Maxwell Street, that little hymn to the Third World that the good citizens of Chicago never care to acknowledge, an open-air market of scabrous disease and harsh and myriad foreign languages, and the quick sad cunning of people who live out their lives utterly without joy. I found a gun inside of twenty minutesa. 221 Remington Fireball, a weapon far more powerful than I needed.

I went through the phone book looking for delivery services: there was one just a few miles away. I drove over, parked two blocks past the large cinderblock warehouse, then walked back. The place was laid out simply enougha small office up front, a huge receiving and dispatching facility in back, with perhaps half a dozen bays for truck repair. This was 8:30 in the morning. Some drivers were just getting started for the day. I walked to a far door and then hurried inside and over to a truck that had just been loaded. I stayed in the deep morning shadows, looking around to see if anybody in the big echoing warehouse had seen me. Apparently not. I snuck aboard the truck and hid in the back.

Fifteen minutes later, the truck driver climbed in, heavy enough that the truck tilted to the right when he did.

I let him get a couple of miles from the warehouse and stop at a light before I hit him. I got him with the butt of the Remington right on the crown of the head. He slumped over immediately. He hadn't seen me at all. I dragged him into the back of the truck and hit him again to make sure he stayed out. I took his place in the seat and drove to an alley four blocks away. I went in the back and bound, gagged and blindfolded him with stuff I'd brought along. He was still out. I took his uniform off and put it on. The sleeves were too long so I rolled them up. Same with the trouser legs. I then drove back to Maxwell Street where I bought a large steamer trunk with a sticker that said WORLD'S FAIR 1939. The interior of the trunk smelled like 1939, too.

The address I wanted was over in Montclare. By now it was raining, which would be helpful. A guy in a service uniform was anonymous enough; a guy in a service uniform in the rain was virtually invisible. Nobody would pay any attention.

I was still hoping that nothing had happened, that it was all just panic and fantasy.

By the time I pulled up behind the two-story white apartment building, the truck driver had come awake and started muttering beneath his tape. I went back and hit him once more and once more he was blessedly silent.

I opened the rear doors of the truck and took down a dolly. Then I reached up and pulled down the steamer trunk, using the dolly to transport it inside the building and up the dusty carpeted stairs to apartment 6B. The hall smelled of cigarette smoke and long-dead sunlighta scent that had traveled millions and millions of miles.

I knocked and there was no answer but then I hadn't really been expecting any.

I snugged my leather gloves even tighter and then went to work with two of the picks a felonious friend of mine had once given me to hold as collateral on a two-hundred-dollar loan. The picks never failed me, but the friend had: I never saw him again. Within thirty seconds I was opening the door and pushing dolly and trunk inside.

There is something almost sexually intimate about being in somebody's residence when you're not supposed to. You are walking around in the echoes of their secrets, the thingsbeliefs, desires, longingsthey whisper only to themselves, that nobody else will ever know.

For a long and almost giddy time, I sensed that the apartment was empty and that I had therefore been worried about nothing.

No, I hadn't actually come back from a tavern with a woman and then, just as we were making love, cut her throat. No, it had all been a terrible nightmare. Yes, I'd been here but I'd gone home and nothing bad had happened. She hadn't answered her phone in the following days simply because she'd been called out of town. Simple explanation. Sane and Simple. Unlike the shadowy fantasies of my imagination.

I followed the smell to the bedroom, the odor redolent of the sickly-sweet smell of pigpens on the hot summer days when we used to visit my uncle's farm.

She was sprawled naked across the bed. There was red from her blood and yellow from her urine and brown from her feces on the otherwise white chenille spread. Her skin was the blue of deep and abiding bruises, and a curious buff-blue film covered the whites of her brown eyes. Her legs were spread and her sex looked lonely and vulnerable, exposed that way. Blood had sprayed across the white wall behind her.

Getting her in the trunk took twenty-five minutes and in order to do it, to fit her inside properly, I had to break both of her arms and one of her legs. Thunder rumbled across the gray mid-morning sky as I worked, and rain slid down the dusty windows, sealing me into a melancholy I didn't need.

When I was all finished, when I'd made certain that every inch of the trunk's exterior was clean of her fluids, I hefted it onto the dolly and exited the apartment, locking the door behind me. Then I took the trunk down to the truck. I had to give our friend the driver another slam across the back of the head. He was going to have one terrible headache later on.

There was a point on the river, twenty miles to the east, where a stand of second-growth trees gave a man some protection from curious eyes.

I got her to the river's edge, the chill filthy water lapping as far up as my knees, and then I took hold of the trunk-handle and dragged her as far out as I could, careful not to step off into some unseen hole on the murky bottom and drown.

The current was fast. The water was murky all the way down. In moments, the trunk sank without trace. Perfect.

I drove the truck back to the city, dressed the driver in his clothes once more then left him in the blind and empty alley. Probably wouldn't be found for awhile.

Back in my room, I slept for the next two days. I awoke feeling pretty good. I took a long and steamy shower, put on fresh clothes, packed up all my stuff into the leather briefcase I carried, and left the key behind on the dresser along with a note that said: I've decided to patch things up with my wife. I've enjoyed my stay here. Thank you.

Everybody likes a happy ending, even crabby landladies.

There was going to be an execution and it was going to be a good one. The prisoner was rich, handsome and only thirty-two years old. You couldn't ask for more excitement than that.

The morning of the execution, a long, expensive mobile van pulled up to the prison gates. It was a gray and rainy day.

The gates swung open but the van remained still.

Two armed guards in black rain ponchos appeared and began walking around the van, checking every inch of it. Finished with the exterior, one of the guards knocked on the side door and went inside. He reappeared five minutes later. Presumably, he had checked the inside as assiduously as he had checked the outside.

More than one hundred reporters watched the guards do their job, though exactly what that job was, the reporters didn't understand.

To whom did the van belong?

What were the guards looking for?

Would the van ultimately be allowed inside the high gray walls of the institution?

The last question was answered soon. The guards, apparently satisfied that the van was not carrying any kind of contraband, waved it inward. The gates closed immediately. All this was overseen by two other poncho-clad guards toting shotguns.