Night Kills (20 page)

    "I shouldn't have been so adamant about Denise. She may be just what she seems. A very nice girl who's got some personal problems and nothing more sinister than that."

    "I shouldn't have offered to put her up."

    "You're going to ask her to leave?"

    "I'm going to think about it."

    "Greg, I repeat: I'm a pretty cynical guy. I always tend to look on the dark side. That's a pretty inhibiting attitude sometimes. And sometimes you have to disregard it. I'd give her a chance." Wagner stared at him. "You're not just saying that? You'd give her a chance?"

    "Sure. Let her stay here a few days. You two seem to get along. See how things go. She's too young to have a romance with, so you don't have to worry about that. All you have to see is how you get along as friends. If she just wants your money, that'll be obvious pretty quickly. She'll start hitting on you for all sorts of things."

    "I guess you started me thinking when you mentioned the fact that she came here to blackmail you."

    "She's young. And she doesn't strike me as very sophisticated. Remember what she said-'I was going to ask him for a couple of hundred dollars.' With that kind of attitude blackmail wouldn't be a very remunerative field. I think she's just reaching out. Trying to make some sense of her life and not finding much to be optimistic about. I don't think it was a very serious attempt."

    "We've kind of reversed positions."

    "Not really, Greg. All I'm saying is, wait and see what happens. She seems like a decent enough kid."

    "What about you?"

    "I'm going home and read the diary. I'm going to the office tomorrow."

    "Thought you were going to take a few days off?"

    "Now I need to see our art director." Brolan told him about the pornographic playing cards. He said, as gently as possible, "Emma was in one of them."

    He'd expected Wagner to be shocked or at least angered by this, but the man just sat stared at his small hands. "She mentions that in her diary. She also mentions a videotape she's got hidden somewhere. Whatever was going on with Lane, it was starting to scare her."

    "Any idea where the tape is?"

    "Not yet. But I'll bet it's somewhere in her side of the duplex."

    "Does she mention who set it up?"

    "Our friend, Charles Lane."

    "I can't wait to talk to this guy."

    "I'm starting to think he's our killer," Wagner said.

    "Does she mention anybody else's being involved in the photographs?"

    "Like I said, she mentions names throughout the book, but none of them mean anything to me. No city fathers or leading model citizens or anything like that." He indicated his tape library. "But this isn't my world, Frank. I don't know a lot about the honchos of the Twin Cities. I get my cheque from my inheritance every month, and I get new videotapes sent to me every week, and when dealers have something really collectable, they call me. That's my world, Frank. I don't move in the same circles you do."

    Brolan stood up, dropping the diary into his suit coat pocket.

    "I'll get back with you tomorrow sometime," he said.

    Wagner said, "She didn't really care about me, Frank. Not the way she said she did." He sounded as if he were very close to tears.

    "I don't believe that, Greg, not from what you told me about her. Maybe she didn't love you romantically, but I'm sure she cared about you as a friend. If she'd been faking that, I think you would've known it."

    "I'm just sitting here and getting embarrassed about the stupid things I did." He looked up at Brolan with silver tears shining in his eyes. "You know, I actually asked her to marry me. Pretty goddamn crazy, right?"

    Brolan went over and put his hand on Wagner's shoulder. "Greg, if I had the time to sit here and tell you all the foolish things I've done with women, we'd be here till dawn."

    "Really?"

    "Really, Greg. Just before I came over here, my former girlfriend told me to get lost. She was more polite than that, but that's what she meant."

    Wagner laughed. This time it was a hearty and pleasant sound. "You know something terrible?"

    "What?"

    "That makes me feel better, Frank. Knowing guys like you get dumped, too."

    Brolan smiled. "Glad I could be of service, Greg." Then he got his coat and left.

    

    

    DENISE WASN'T SURE what woke her.

    It was four hours after Brolan left and two hours after Greg, exhausted from the pleasant turmoil of the evening, pitched himself on the sofa and fell asleep watching a Pete Smith short subject.

    At first Denise thought the sound was something in a dream. Her dreams were always vivid, especially the bad ones. Her sister used to get up and shake her hard, just to help her escape the nightmare images that had plagued her since she was a little girl.

    It took a while for her to understand that the sounds were not in the fervid, sweaty cages of her nightmares but were rather… real.

    Her first thought on waking was:
Where am I?

    Her second thought was:
What is that noise?

    Quickly the hours she'd spent with Greg Wagner returned to her. Nice images. Nice times. At first she'd been pleasant to the man because she'd been afraid that he was going to cedi the police. But then she genuinely started liking him, especially his sly, off-the-wall sense of humour. The only times she didn't like that was when he made fun of himself. There was too much pain in his remarks, too much disappointment. And if they ever became better friends, she'd tell him that, too. That he shouldn't make fun of himself. That he was a beautiful man. From what she'd learned on the streets, real ugliness was on the inside, not on the outside. He had wit, generosity, warmth, and compassion to boast of-which was a lot more than most people had to congratulate themselves for.

    Then she realized what the noise was.

    Next door, in the duplex just beyond the wall that separated the two places, somebody was wandering around.

    Stumbling into things.

    She came up from the bed feeling naked and vulnerable in her bra and panties. She should have asked Greg if he'd loan her a pair of pyjamas. She was sure they wore about the same size.

    She slipped into her clothes quickly. Against the drawn blinds she could see the nimbus of alley light and ring of crusty ice on the window. Greg must have turned the thermostat down for sleeping. The hardwood floor was cold.

    She went out into the hallway, feeling her way along the walls with her hands, moving toward the light at the front of the house; the streetlights gave the living room a faint glow from the sodium vapour lamps.

    Greg looked like a child curled up inside a tangle of covers. As she leaned down to him, he smelled of sleep. She touched him gently, not wanting to frighten him. He made deep, groggy noises, but at first he didn't wake up at all. She tapped him softly on the forehead.

    "Greg," she whispered.

    "Huh?" he said, stirring at last.

    "Sh," she said, putting her finger to his lips. "Whisper; otherwise he'll hear you."

    "Who'll hear me?" Greg whispered.

    She could tell that he still wasn't quite fully awake yet, but he was getting there. "Whoever's next door."

    As if to oblige her, the person next door now stumbled into another piece of furniture. It wasn't a big sound, but in the stillness of the winter night, when only the creaking wood and the furnace made noise, it was a significant sound.

    Hearing it, Greg sat up immediately.

    Even in the shadows she could see that he had trouble manoeuvring. She felt sorry for him. She wanted to hug him.

    "I'm going to get my gun," he said, still whispering.

    "Why don't you call the cops?"

    He shook his head, then pawed at his face. "Brolan and I don't want to get the police involved just yet."

    "Involved in what?"

    He patted her hand. "No time to explain things now, Denise. I need to get my gun."

    He manipulated the wheelchair deftly, moving himself up into it in a single near-spectacular motion. Without pause he rolled the chair down the hall and into his bedroom.

    She heard a drawer squeaking open and then closing. She heard him moving quickly back down the hall toward her. He was lost completely in the darkness.

    Then he sat before her, the.45 in his hand. "I'm going over there," he said. "No!" she said. And violated her own rule about whispering.

    They both stood there listening to hear if the person next door had heard her. But apparently not. The undercurrent of sound-things being moved around, drawers opening and closing-continued.

    "I'll go over there," she said.

    "God, Denise, you can't go over there with this gun. You'd end up shooting yourself."

    "Then I won't take a gun."

    "What've you got in mind?"

    "Just see who it is. He probably drove a car. I can get his licence number and maybe get a good look at him."

    "He could kill you."

    "Not if he can't see me."

    "Aren't you getting tired of whispering?"

    She laughed; she couldn't help it. He sounded so crabby when he said it, like a little kid awakened in the middle of the night by a parent. A grouchy little kid. "Yes, I'm tired of whispering, but if we talk any louder, he'll hear us."

    He took her hand. "I don't want you to get hurt, Denise. Maybe we should just forget it."

    "I'll be fine."

    "Maybe you should take the gun."

    "No, you're probably right; I'd just end up shooting myself." She nodded toward the other duplex. "I'd better hurry while he's still in there."

    "I'll say a prayer for you," Greg said.

    She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she grabbed her coat and knit hat and went outside.

    She figured it couldn't be a heck of a lot colder at the North Pole. She had been out there maybe three minutes, and already her whole face was frozen, as if an invisible dentist had just given her an extra-strong shot of Novocain, and her leather gloves weren't doing much for her hands, either. Her fingers felt like frozen fish sticks.

    The backyard was absolutely still. It was the kind of night that is so cold, it's breathless. The alley light cast a purple glow and purple shadows over the three-foot drifts of sparkling snow. In some places you could see where dogs had roamed past and peed yellow in the white snow. In other places you saw where snow was capped by ice; the surface glittered.

    Her present vantage point was behind an orderly row of garbage cans next to the garage. She was approximately ten yards from the back door. Her first goal had been simple enough: get out the back door without being heard and then find a place to crouch and wait while she got her bearings.

    It was time to get to work, and the first thing to do was to find his car. It was very unlikely he'd parked out front. Too easy to spot by anybody passing by, cops especially. No, more likely he parked in the back somewhere.

    Keeping her eye on the back door of the duplex, she started easing herself away from the protection of the garbage cans.

    Then she was in the alley, her rubber-soled boots making vague farting noises against the hard-packed snow. Farting noises; God, she always had weird thoughts like that. It was just one of many reasons that she considered herself so weird and unworthy. Other human beings-real human beings didn't have thoughts like that. She was sure she was alone in that and so many other things in the world.

    It didn't take a genius to find the car. He had parked it several yards down the alley, parallel with a garage. From inside her coat she took the small tablet and pencil she'd copped from Greg and wrote down the licence number. Then she went over and peered inside the car. She had no idea what she was looking for.

    She tried the driver's door. It was unlocked. Since she was looking for stuff, it would probably make more sense to open the door and start looking around that way, wouldn't it?

    She opened the door and started rooting around inside. She could tell immediately that the owner of the car smoked cigarettes. The damp tobacco smell was almost foetid. She could also tell that the owner of the car was rich. The seats were real leather. They smelled that way, and they felt that way.

    She found, among other things, a paperback novel, an unopened pack of cigarettes, a black pocket comb, a map of Milwaukee, some kind of brochure about the trucking industry, an empty 7-Eleven coffee cup with a lipstick smudge at the top, and a candy wrapper, which made her hungry. God, she was hungry all the time. In some ways that scared her. All her aunts and uncles were real porkers. Was she going to turn out that way herself?

    She was just about to start on the glove compartment when the man grabbed her. She knew it was a man because no woman (unless she was one of those ripple-bodied steroidal bodybuilders) could ever have this much strength.

    He grabbed her, yanking her out of the car, and then he struck her a mighty blow on the back of her neck. She assumed in that instant of totally blinding pain, in that instant of terrible warmth rushing up her spinal column to her neck and then exploding inside her head-she assumed that she was dying.

    Then she struck the ground, her cheek smashing against the snow the man's boots had just turned into small ruts.

    She thought of her sister in the mental hospital; of her first dog, Peachy-Keen; of the way sunlight and shadow played on the surface of Henderson creek in the summertime. These were weird things to think of, probably; but then, she was a very weird girl indeed.