Ed Gorman - Cold Blue Midnight

He put on a blue button-down shirt, jeans and cordovan penny-loafers and started down the hall to the living room.

But halfway there, he paused, and looked with nostalgia and anxiety into the darkness of Adam's bedroom. They each had their own rooms. Adam's was verboten. Even the cleaning lady had been instructed not to go in there. One day, Adam had caught Rick looking for a shirt to borrow and he'd become so enraged that Rick thought he might have gone temporarily insane. 'I never want you in here again. Never!' he'd screamed.

But Adam was out of town.

And Adam had cheated on him again.

And Rick felt like a little excitement tonight.

Adam was a very mysterious person. Rarely did he talk about his background, for example, except to say that he'd grown up in the Midwest. For all that they were partners, Rick always sensed that there were many vital things he didn't know about Adam: things which Adam would never tell him.

He took a deep breath.

This was like disobeying your parents, doing the one thing that was going to really infuriate them.

Another deep breath.

He started into Adam's bedroom.

Found the overhead light switch and turned it on.

Adam was as untidy as a little boy. Piles of dirty clothes everywhere; an uneven stack of paperbacks on the night-stand; a half-finished wine cooler next to the bed; the bed itself unmade.

Rick had to smile.

An untidy little boy, that was Adam. Or at least, a part of him, anyway. Rick didn't like to think about the other parts. The secretive part. The cold part. The cruel part. Especially the cruel part. Adam had a tongue like a meat cleaver and wasn't slow to use it when you had displeased him.

Now Rick was going to learn more about Adam.

He went in and walked around, taking in the air. This was very special air: Adam's own private air.

No framed photographs to divulge the past. No college yearbooks to rummage through, and get sentimental over. No dusty military uniforms to hint at where you'd served.

Impersonal. Very much like Adam himself.

Soon enough, Rick got tired of walking around. He had the itch to get his detective work underway.

Here I come, Adam, ready or not.

The chest of drawers that promised to be a mountain of information. People put all kinds of things in their chest of drawers.

Another deep breath.

Exciting. Scary.

Fingers on the ornate knobs of the chest's first drawer. Slide the first drawer open. Peek inside…

Socks. Black socks, blue socks, argyle socks. Maybe two dozen pairs of socks.

But was something more interesting hidden beneath them? Rick reached inside the drawer smelling of sawn pine and coarse to the touch from being unfinished and started to push his hands all the way down to the bottom of the drawer. He found

Socks.

Damn.

Just like Adam to build up your hopes and then disappoint you with socks.

Maybe drawer number two…

Drawer number two was underwear.

Plain white jockey shorts, buff-blue boxer shorts, even a pair of red bikini underwear, though Adam hated all things effeminate and fussy.

Maybe beneath this tumble of underwear was hidden

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

More sweet aroma of sawn pine. More feel of rough, unfinished wood. But nothing inside.

Two more drawers to go.

This was like a treasure hunt. Or a game show.

Two more to go!

And that was when the phone rang. Rick jumped in terror and panic, as if his mother had caught him doing something extremely unpleasant and unwholesome. He fled the bedroom, clipping out the light and trotting down the hall to the living room to pick up the phone there.

'Mr Runyon, please.'

He said, and quite angrily, 'How did you get my number, Mrs Tappley?'

'My attorney, of course.'

'He promised that he wouldn't tell anyone how to reach me.'

'I pay my attorney a great deal of money, Mr Runyon. He can't afford to keep secrets from me.'

He said, 'Is somebody else on this line, Mrs Tappley?'

'What?'

'This connection sounds funny.'

'You must be a very paranoid man, Mr Runyon.'

'I want to hang up now, Mrs Tappley.'

'And I want to know how things went you know, tonight.'

'Watch the news later on.'

'I really resent your attitude, Mr Runyon.'

'I don't give a damn what you resent, Mrs Tappley.'

And with that, Rick Corday became the only person in Chicago history to ever hang up on Mrs Evelyn Daye Tappley.

A half hour later, still angry that Mrs Tappley had his number, still certain that Adam had gone to New York simply to cheat on him, Rick Corday got in his car and decided to drive past Jill Coffey's place.

He wanted to make sure she was home.

So the police wouldn't have any trouble finding her.

This was such a tidy little job. It did a heart good to know that it was, at least upon occasion, capable of genius.

Doris did not hang up until both her mother and Mr Runyon had done so. Then she gently cradled the phone and left the den. She'd heard her mother, in her private office, call somebody. Doris had then immediately ducked into the library and lifted the receiver.

'Watch the news later tonight,' the man named Runyon had said. What had he meant by that? What had her mother hired him to do?

Earlier tonight, her mother had said that Jill Coffey was 'finally going to get her come-uppance' and the words had frightened Doris.

Her mother was old and bitter and had the resources to destroy virtually anybody.

Had she finally gotten around to destroying Jill Coffey?

No use asking her mother directly. The woman would never tell her. But Doris had to find out somehow. Jill Coffey didn't deserve her mother's wrath. Her only crime had been that she hadn't fitted into the Tappley household, where Evelyn Tappley was the absolute lord and master.

Nobody deserved to be destroyed for that.

Nervously, Doris went downstairs to the den. She needed one of her rare drinks of alcohol. Perhaps, in fact, she needed two.

Andre Sovic always knew that someday he was going to be important. When he was in grade school, he figured he was going to be important in high school, and when he was in high school, he figured he was going to be important in college. But he wasn't important in college, either, because this really aggravating little war called Vietnam got in the way. As the son of poor Polish immigrants, Sovic had nobody to take his part when his summons came from the draft board, so off he went to war. It was a fine and noble calling, a war, and as much as the mother and sister were heartbroken, as much as the old man was secretly afraid, off Andre went. He didn't become important in the war. He sat on his butt in a supply depot in Saigon and typed up requisitions. Back home, there were no parades, no newspaper interviews, not even any big family gathering. But why should there be? As yet, Andre Sovic had not proved himself to be important. He went to work at the GM plant, got married to a Polish girl with a set of charlies that were truly eye-popping, and then spent the next sixteen years (they now had four kids) in happy oblivion. Then he got laid off permanently (why couldn't they just say 'fired' and have done with it) from GM and spent just over a year collecting unemployment checks and getting sick of the soap operas his wife watched all day. Andre Sovic was still not an important man.

He was thinking of all this as he got off the elevator tonight. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he'd never be important. Maybe this was simply the fanciful notion of some dumb polack kid from Chicago wearing his khaki uniform with the little Ajax Janitorial insignia above his lapel, jaunty dark brown Ajax Janitorial cap on his head, and Ajax Janitorial vacuum cleaner in his right hand.