Ed Gorman: Cold Blue Midnight

'The doctors in Europe. Plastic surgery.'

'But your hairit's white! And your features'

He laughed. 'I've had a difficult life, Mother. Not many men survive their own execution.'

'But you can't be Peter. You can't be!'

'But I am.'

He had been carrying his overcoat rolled up. He sat it on the edge of a chair. He pulled up the cuff of his suitjacket and his shirt.

He showed her the pear-shaped brown birthmark on the lower inside of his forearm.

'Unlikely they could fake that.'

But she still stared at him open-mouthed, disbelieving. How could this possibly be

'I need a drink of brandy,' she said, almost to herself.

Grabbing his topcoat, he followed her into the den. He'd forgotten how much he'd enjoyed this room. The authentic coat of arms on the wall above the fireplace. The Robert Louis Stevenson collected in leatherbound editions, all signed by the author a hundred or more years ago. The dry bar with its impressive array of cut-glass wine snifters.

Evelyn had brandy and so did Peter.

She sat behind her writing desk, sipping brandy, still staring at him.

'You had no right to deceive me that way.'

He sat in a deep leather armchair directly across from the desk. His topcoat was on his lap. He smiled. 'You sound just the same as you always did when you chastised me, Mother.'

'I'm very serious. All these years I've mourned the loss of my second son'

'And all these years I've been free of you, Mother.' He laughed. 'I wouldn't trade them.'

He heard the bitterness in his voice but felt no shame or regret. It was high time she heard what he really thought of her.

'All those years you choked the life out of me'

She slammed her brandy glass on the desk. 'Is that why you came back, after all these years? To tell me how terrible a person I am?'

'It's one of the reasons. I also want to see my sister.'

Her anger was gone suddenly. She slumped in her chair. In the past few minutes, she'd aged another few years. 'You haven't even given me a hug.'

'I don't want to hug you. I don't want to touch you in any way.'

'I'm your mother.'

'Yes, you are. Yes, I could never forget that.'

'I can't believe you hate me this much.'

'I want to see Doris. Where is she?'

She got up from the desk unsteadily and started to walk around the desk. 'Peter, I want to hold you. You're my own flesh and blood.'

'Not anymore I'm not, Mother. I'm somebody else now. Even you didn't recognize me.'

She leaned over to slide her arms around him but he pushed her away so hard she fell back against her desk.

'I want to see my sister. That's why I came here.'

'Your sister,' she said. 'Your sister didn't raise you, I did. Your sister didn't take care of you when you were sick, or worry about you when you were playing outdoors, or hire bodyguards to watch you night and day.'

He stood up, clutching his topcoat to him. 'Where is she?'

'She's upstairs, if you really want to know. I forced a sedative on her because she was going to tell that bitch you married what Arthur and I did to her. Your sister! She's not any more grateful to me than you are!'

She started crying, a crazed old woman's tears. He saw now that she was broken and alone and he thought: 'It'll be a mercy, what I'm going to do. A mercy for meand a mercy for her.'

She looked up at him and held her arms out and said, 'Can't I just hold you for a little while? Do you hate me that much, Peter?'

He moved quickly then.

He didn't want to change his mind.

The topcoat fell away from his arm, leaving behind the bloody axe it had been covering.

When she saw it, she screamed, knowing instantly what he was going to do.

A maid appeared in the doorway suddenlyprobably the same bitch who'd hassled him over the gate speakerand so he reached calmly into the pocket of his suitjacket and pulled out his. 45 and shot her in the middle of the forehead.

'Oh my God, Peter, you don't know what you're doing. You need to calm yourself down. You need to talk tosomebody. Get some help. You really do.' She was gibbering. 'I can see that now. I should've gotten you help years ago; years ago. I'm sorry I didn't, Peter. I really should have.'

All this time she was backing up, first toward the fireplace then toward the built-in bookcases.

But she couldn't find any place to hide from Peter and his axe.

There wasn't any place to hide.

'All those years you kept me a prisoner here, Mother,' he said over and over again, until the mere sound of his own voice sickened him. 'All those years.'

'Peter, you can go away againback to Europe. I won't tell anybody. I won't. I promise.' She looked frantically to the door where the maid sprawled on the floor. 'We can bury her down by the river. Nobody'll ever find her. Not ever. You'll be free, Peter. You really will.'

The first time he swung the axe, she was quick enough to duck and so all he was able to catch was a brass candlestick lamp. The entire thing flew apart in large chunks. Evelyn screamed again and ran to the other side of the room. She kept looking for a way to get around him, to make it to the door.

But he was not going to let that happen.

The second time, his blade caught a mirror of beautiful glass and even more beautiful fretwork. The glass shattered in large dagger-like shards and fell to the floor.

This time she covered her ears and closed her eyes, as if she were trying to will him out of existence.

And that made it easy for him.

'Mother.'

He knew she heard him but wouldn't open her eyes.

'Mother.'

Eyes closed; ears covered.

'Mother.' Then: 'Goodbye, Mother.'

He got her neck clean. At the last moment, curious to see what he was doing, she opened her eyes and dropped her hands from her ears and and that was when the axe came angling through the air right at her neck.

It was a clean cut. Her head wobbled leftward then rightward then rolled down her back to the floor.

Blood was geysering from the enormous wound just as the body was falling to the floor.

He walked around the body that was violently spasming to some rhythm only the dead could possibly appreciate… all the way around to where her head had rolled over in front of the fireplace.

The head was on its side. Clean as the cut had been, there was an awful lot of gore dripping now from the neck.

She was a mess.

He was happy.

He went to find his sister.

Fitzsimmons from the DA's office arrived shortly after the boys and girls from the crime lab.

He came over to Mitch. 'I suppose you expect me to tell you what a good job you did. Getting a confession and all.'

'First of all, I didn't ''get" the confession. He told me willingly. Second of all, I wouldn't want a compliment from you. It would spoil your track record.'

'I suppose I was kind of a jerk this afternoon.'

'This afternoon? Fitzsimmons, you've been a jerk all your life. And someday somebody's going to wipe that smirk off your face.'

'I take it you'd like that privilege?'

But Mitch was sick of him. Fitzsimmons already had the aura of celebrity about him. Somehow he'd manage to take credit for solving the caseat the very least he'd take credit for pushing the police department so hardand then he'd find a reason to hold seven or eight press conferences over the next week or so. Everybody knew by now that Fitzsimmons wanted to be Governor in the next two or three terms.

Mitch went in to see Sievers.

Just as he arrived, Randy Dupree went into the bathroom. Closed the door. You could hear him barfing.

Sievers shrugged. 'Second degree, maybe even manslaughter. He pushed her, she fell. There won't be much to contradict that from the lab boys.'

'Yeah, but Fitzsimmons'll be able to ride it all the way to the state capitol. Wonder how he'll like prosecuting somebody from his own class.'