Ed Gorman: Cold Blue Midnight

Nice and expensive, Mitch thought. But he was impressed despite himself. There was an almost other-worldly aspect to Chicago from this height and vantage point, a different planet, especially with the snow covering everything. No homeless. No drug dealers. No abused wives. No little kids grubbing up the money their parents couldn't afford to give them.

'Do you think I killed her?' Randy said.

Mitch turned around and faced him. 'Yes, I do.'

'I see. Did your friend Unzak tell you about my alibi?'

'Is that how you're going to make this fast? By telling me about that former girlfriend of yours, the one who'll swear you were with her all night?'

The lights were on in the dining room. The living room was in shadow.

Randy Dupree said, 'No, I was going to make this fast another way.'

'And what way is that?'

'By telling you that I killed her.'

Mitch hoped his small gasp wasn't audible. 'I see.'

'You sound shocked.'

'I guess I am.'

'Because I just said it right out.'

'Uh-huh. And because you didn't even give me a chance to read you your rights. It's not as simple as it is on TV, you know.'

'I don't give a shit about my rights. Or a lawyer. Right now I don't give a shit about anything.'

He started sobbing.

He let the martini glass fall, nearly full, to the floor and he put his face in his hands like a little boy and began weeping.

'I didn't mean to kill her. I was justangry. She'd been so goddammed unfaithful.'

And then he was sobbing again.

Mitch thought of his own wife. And how he'd feltthe terrible agony of someone whose mate is unfaithfuland he said a silent prayer of thanks for Jill.

He went over to Randy and put a paternal hand on his shoulder. 'I'm sorry, Randy. I'm sorry.'

Then he went to the phone.

Now, finally, he'd be able to spend a decent amount of time helping Jill.

He called the station and asked for Sievers and when Sievers came on he told him what Randy had just told him.

Sievers said he'd be right over.

Right over.

Rick had some trouble at the gates.

He said, 'I'd like to see Mrs Tappley.'

'May I ask what about?' asked the maid.

'Is Robert there?'

'I'm afraid not. This is his night off. May I have your name, please?'

He hesitated. 'Rick Corday.'

It was full night now, and the snow glistened in the moonlight, and sitting here shouting into a speaker concealed in the stone face of the fence made him self-conscious.

'Tell her I want to speak to her about her son.'

This time, it was the maid who hesitated. 'Her son? You mean Peter?'

'I mean Peter.'

The maid grew suddenly hostile. 'I think you'd better drive on before I call the police.'

'Look, you bitch, go and tell Mrs Tappley that I'm out here. Let her decide if I get in or not.'

She was thinking it over, that he could tell. But there was still the chance that she'd bypass Mrs Tappley completely and phone straight to the police.

Then what would he do?

'I'll tell you something. Mrs Tappley's going to be damned mad at you if you don't tell her I'm here, I can promise you that.'

His mother hired the kind of people she could easily bully. So now that he'd raised the specter of displeasing Mrs Tappley, the maid was more likely to help him out.

'I'll be right back,' she said.

Inside the car, the heater kept things warm. Too warm. That's why he kept the window rolled down. The cold night air felt good and clean. He remembered building a snowman not far from these gates. The snowman had a top hat and a merry red woolen scarf and a cane such as a vaudevillian would use. Doris hung a sign on him, WELCOME EVERYONE, a sign her mother soon ripped away. Did Doris want the riffraff of the entire Chicago area crowding around their gates?

'Yes?' The voice, even after all these years, had lost none of its imperious edge.

'Mrs Tappley, listen closely and maybe you'll recognize my voice.'

She listened. She said to the maid, 'Please leave now, immediately, Go upstairs and dust the library.'

After the door closed, Evelyn Daye Tappley said, 'When I find out who you are, I'm going to see to it that you spend the rest of your life behind bars.'

'Don't you really believe it's me, Mother?'

Obviously, the woman wanted to break off the connection but she was too snake-charmed to act so hastily.

'It's really me, Mother. Back from the dead.'

'This isn't funny at all.'

'In 1956 you took me to a resort in Wisconsin and I found a turtle on the shore and brought him home and named him Daniel Boone because of the TV show at that time.'

'You could've found that out.'

'How?'

'I' She paused. Some of the imperiousness had gone from her voice. Evelyn Daye Tappley, believe it or not, had begun to sound downright vulnerable and sad. 'My son had a favorite model airplane in his room.'

'A blue Cessna. Just like the one my father owned.'

'And in the basement he had a favorite game he played'

'Bean bags. I never got tired of throwing bean bags through the clown's face.'

A long pause. 'I don't want to be a foolish old woman. I could stand anything but being a foolish old womanbeing tricked into some pathetic, impossible belief.' Another pause. He could feel her reluctantly beginning to believe him. 'My son died in the electric chair.'

'Arthur fixed things for me.'

'Arthur?'

'Arthur Halliwell. Your lawyer.'

'Fixed things? I don't understand.'

So he told her. Arthur had gone to a prominent physician, sworn him to silence, paid him a great deal of money, and then had the physician plot out the way that an execution could be fakedthat the prisoner would appear to die and be taken from the stretcher in a hearse and then put through all the legalities of being prepared for burial. Two different drugs had to be used to simulate death, Peter had to be coached at length, the executioner, the Coroner and the funeral home director all had to be bribed, and then the sham burial performed. Then Peter went to Europe for an extended stay.

'You won't recognize me now, Mother.'

'Y-you're really my son?'

'I am, Mother.'

She began to weep.

'Please open the gates, Mother. Now.'

The gates opened at once.

He felt a kind of triumph driving up toward the mansion again, the snow so moon-kissed beautiful, the mullioned windows of the great house so gently illumined, as if by candlelight. While the estate had always been his prison, it had also been his retreat for many years. Not for him the concerns and cares that daily beleaguered the average citizen. Here he'd been able to devote himself to doing exactly what he wanted to do… as long as it met with Mother's approval. He felt almost sentimental about the place and even, in a strange melancholy way, about hereven though one of the reasons he'd forbidden Halliwell to tell her about her son, was so she could no longer shape and dominate his life.

He pulled up in front of the massive house, stopping the car and picking up his topcoat. He was still bloody, even more so since carrying Adam's head from the basement. But there was no time to clean up. There was only time to

She stood silhouetted in the open doorway. In memory, she was always this huge and formidable woman, but in reality she was a small and fine-boned lady who had shrunk even more with old age.

He saw the shocked look on her face as he walked across the threshold and into the house. But it, too, had shrunk from its remembered size. What had been vast and unimaginable as a Disney castle was now a luxurious but not overwhelming house of large dimensions and priceless furnishings.

'You're not Peter.'

He stopped so she could get a better look at him. 'They did a good job.'

'They?'