Ed Gorman: Cold Blue Midnight

Jill thumbed off the TV.

Sat there unmoving in her frivolous pink pajamas in this ancient, worn motel room that smelled of cigarette smoke and mildew, and whispered of loneliness and adultery.

Soon now, it would be over, the life of the man she'd once loved so much but hadn't really known at all.

Not a word of remorse for what he'd done: that's what bothered her most.

Not a single word of remorse.

She went to the bathroom.

When she came back, she found a Honeymooners rerun and made a singular effort not to look at her little portable alarm clock.

She didn't want to know.

She didn't want to mark his passing.

Ralph Kramden said, 'Honey, you're the greatest!' just as she heard somebody on the rainy drive outside let out a cowboy yelp. 'Yahoo! Fry, sucker, fry!' She hadn't wanted to stay in this rundown place but it was the only accommodation she could find. All the decent motels had been commandeered by the press.

'Yahoo!' somebody else shouted.

They were celebrating.

They sounded drunk, and absolutely delighted.

The Boogeyman was dead.

She did not sleep well, waking several times to the eerie shifting shadows, and the eerie shifting silence, of this battered old room.

She rose early, packed and checked out.

Just as she turned away from the registration desk, the desk clerk said, 'Oh, I forgot. Somebody dropped this off for you.'

A fancy buff-blue envelope. She recognized the author at once. Evelyn Tappley.

Jill didn't open the envelope until she was in her car.

There was a handwritten note in the middle of the elegant blue page:

I hope you're happy, you bitch. You'll pay for what you did to my son, I promise you.

Evelyn Daye Tappley.

21 October

His ass was tired. But then, when Rick Corday pulled a surveillance job, his ass was always tired. He lifted his right cheek now and scratched. It was numb. He'd been sitting too long.

He looked at the array of stuff he always took with him when he pulled surveillance. Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Life Savers peppermints. Johnson amp; Johnson Dental Floss. A penknife for cleaning his fingernails. A copy of the new Guys! Guys! Guys!.

His car phone rang. 'Uh-huh?' he said after picking it up.

'It's me. Adam.'

'She's still in there. Saw a couple of people carrying stuff in and out. She must have a session.'

'I have to go to New York.'

Corday didn't say anything.

'Are you still there?'

'What's this New York crap?'

'You seem to forget who I used to work for.'

'So that means New York?'

'I have to make a little correction on a job I did awhile back. Somebody else connected with the case.'

You might think, from some of the language, that Rick and Adam were cops. They weren't. Rick was a former employee of a large investigative agency here in Chicago, while Adam was a former Los Angeles police detective. One of the things they had in common was that they killed people. Sometimes for fun. Sometimes for profit. Rick always preferred the former.

'Nothing's going to happen.'

'Right.'

'I told you, Rick. I'm really trying to change.'

'So far I haven't noticed. I mean, you were pretty drunk when you got home the other night. And pretty late.'

'Perfectly innocent. Hit a few bars was all.'

'Right.'

'When we wrap this upwith Jill, I meanhow about we take a vacation?'

'Just you and me and one of your new friends, huh?'

'There's no sense talking to you when you're in this kind of mood.'

'This New York thing pisses me off.'

'I'll be back in a week. Just keep watching Jill. But don't do anything till I get back, all right?'

'Yessir, your highness.'

'You can really be hard to take sometimes, Rick, you know that?'

'And you can't?'

'I'll call you from New York.'

'Right,' Rick said. And broke the connection.

The sonofabitch, Rick thought. The unfaithful sonofabitch.

24 October

He was there again on Tuesday, the man in the blue Volvo. As usual, he spent his time pretending to read a magazine. Every few minutes, however, he'd look across the street at the small two-story building that was both Jill's work studio and her apartment.

This was the fourth day in two weeks he'd been here, and this time Jill was ready for him.

Grabbing her 35mm Nikon with the telephoto lens, she snapped a couple of shots, then walked quickly to the back of the apartment and went down the stairs leading to the alley. She couldn't see his license plates from her window.

The smoky smell of October made her nostalgic for her girlhood. Hallowe'en pumpkins to carve. Costumes to try onshe'd always wanted to be Cinderella. And stories to whisper excitedly among the other kids about which neighbors were secretly monsters and had dungeons instead of basementsdungeons in which evil creatures of every kind imaginable lurked.

Now Jill was about to deal with a real monster.

The Lake View East area of Chicago was, as always, getting a partial face-lift. Lake View dated back to the last century and today its homes and buildings replicated perfectly a charming and more leisurely era. The city planned to keep it that way, too. Today a crew was painting the benches in a small park area a merry green color.

At two in the afternoon, the street was crowded. A lot of artisans had moved in lately, combining living space with working space, so traffic was now more intense. Many of the small businesses used awnings as decoration and to lessen the hot Indian-summer sunlight. The street looked tidy and smart.

The blue Volvo was still there.

Jill walked half a block down the street away from the blue car then turned suddenly and started snapping pictures of it.

She took twenty shots in all, the long-distance lens allowing her to get several clear profiles of the man as he stared at her building, and even the trunk sticker that gave the name of the dealer who'd sold the man the car. She still couldn't get the license number because of the car parked behind it.

The air smelled of gasoline and cigarette smoke and heat. She sneezed. She had terrible allergies.

The man surprised her by suddenly starting his car and driving away.

She took a few more snaps of him as he drove off.

She worried that maybe he'd spotted herbut no, that was unlikely. From where he'd sat, seeing her emerge from the alley was virtually impossible. And her camera position had been completely out of his sight.

Satisfied that she'd gotten everything she'd neededmuch more, in factshe went back inside and got to work.

Jill had souped her first photographs while she'd been on the staff of her high-school paper in Springfield. She had never gotten over the seeming magic of it all.

You had developing tank and printing frame and printing paper, you had printing trays and developer and stop bath and fixer, you had film clips and printing tongs and safelightnothing remarkable about any of these elements when you looked at them individually. In fact, they were all disappointingly mundane.

But if you knew how to use them properly, if you became a skilled technician in the holy gloom of the darkroom, then you truly became a wizard because you could reproduce life as you saw it… and sometimes you could even enhance life and its dramatic effects, as she'd done from the first time she'd ever seen an Edward Steichen black and white photo. The great photographer had died in 1973, but his influence and style lived on in Jill and a thousand other Jills around the world.

She went right to work on the photos of the man and the blue Volvo. All the sights, smells and tiny noises of the developing process buoyed her.