Malevolent (3 page)

“Mr. Solloway,” the lady cop started, “can you tell us exactly what you did earlier this evening and who you were with?”

Toss Humphrey Bogart a line like that and he knocks it out of the park. But all Griffin Solloway did was sweat.

Chapter Four

She was out there waiting for him.

He was up and on the move even before coming fully awake. The cold floorboards under his bare feet brought him the rest of the way around. The linoleum kitchen floor, gritty with its accumulation of outdoor tracking, took him to the chipped tile of the back hallway. Here, he unbolted and cracked open the door to the garage and let the chilly night air slap him to an even more complete state of consciousness.

As his eyes adjusted, his nearly nude flesh prickled, goose-bumped. His nostrils twitched at the garage’s harsh scent of rusting tools and spilled lubricants. Hiding beneath those odors was another, the choking fumes of an idling engine in an enclosed space. This, then, was the sound that had roused him.

His eyes teared up and he coughed sharply. The air gradually cleared, as was always the case.

She came at him from out of the lifting fog.

“It’s about time,” she said. “Any idea how long I waited for you tonight?”

He didn’t.

Neither did she, she had to admit. “Time is different where I come from. Not so…linear.”

Laney leaned against the passenger door of his treasured yellow ’69 punch bug Beetle. One hand on the hood, her pose reminiscent of some bikini model in one of his hot rod magazines. She was pretty enough for such a spread, he supposed, but her hips were too full. It was obvious she hadn’t died an anorexic. Her outfit was all wrong for a magazine layout too. She wore the burgundy tailored suit he’d seen her in just about every evening lately. Because, she’d told him, she loved the way it fit her.

But more to the point, because it was what she’d had on when he killed her.

He gummed out the sleep from one eye and took the two steps down to garage level. He twitched slightly as his bare feet found the freezing-cold cement floor.

“Chilly,” he said, pressing his bare legs together and rubbing both hands between his thighs for friction warmth. He wore a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else.

No response, and he thought,
How do you make small talk with a ghost?

She finally gave him a thin smile. “I wouldn’t complain. At least you can feel the temperature. To me, it’s like watching TV. I can see and hear what’s going on, but as far as smell, taste and feel go…”

She shook her head as if at the futility of even explaining.

She was just warming up. In one of her moods, Laney could turn everything he said against him. He sighed, dropped to a seated position on that bottom cement step and resigned himself to yet another long night with his conscience.

His dead wife said, “That might be what I miss most. The feel of the night air against my skin. An actual sensation. It’s like dreaming of sex rather than doing it. Another thing, by the way, which I can no longer experience. The afterlife? You can have it, far as I’m concerned.”

He dropped his face into his hands. He wasn’t going to get any sleep again tonight. The alarm clock’s buzz in a couple hours was going to be brutal.

“What’s with you?” she asked. “You don’t want to talk tonight, that it?”

She started to pace, her sharp heels beating the hard, cold floor into submission. The cramped proportions of the double-stall space—one stall occupied—necessitated a change of directions every few steps. He could see the pockmarks of her nubby heels in the newer oil slicks and wondered how that could be. His imaginary dead wife leaving prints?

She lectured and harangued as she paced. She reminded him of her favorite meals and her dead taste buds. She reflected on the small pleasures—the scent of flowers, long, sex-slick summer nights in bed, the feel of the sun on her face. Gone, gone and gone.

He tried not to listen. He’d heard it all before, all the times she’d visited him these last several weeks. Worse yet, they were growing in frequency. Third night in a row now. Last night, more of the same, leaving him shaky with fatigue at work. He braced his head on open palms and tried to sleep while she went at him.

Laney didn’t mind. Her mouth ran with the relentless monotony of the Volkswagen engine—the engine that he only imagined to have earlier filled his garage and lungs with noxious exhaust. Then something she said nuzzled him back.

“He said you owe me big time, and he’s right, you know. After what you did to—”

“Wait. Hold on. What?” He mentally braced his eyelids open. “
Who
said this?”

She stopped pacing, rolled her eyes dramatically and let her fingers dance over a circular saw blade she’d taken from its place on the shelf a few feet from the VW grille. That had always annoyed him, the way she’d play with his things like that. She’d come into his study and start leafing through his magazines or switching channels with his remote while chatting, always chatting.

She set his saw blade aside—on the wrong shelf, of course—and returned her attention to him. “Well, Vincent, of course. Who are we talking about here? Vincent says that atonement is the only thing that will set things right. Vincent says that everything we do leaves tracks, like walking in snow.”

Or like pacing in motor oil stains, he thought, while staring at her still-visible footprints.

“What remains now, says Vincent, is for you to clean up those tracks. It’s your penance, hon. You can put it off but you can’t evade it. Just like you can’t outrun those snow tracks.” She giggled as if fascinated by how her analogy held up.

“You don’t even know Vincent,” he told his dead wife somewhat petulantly. “He came after you were gone.” He furthermore couldn’t believe that the gentle minister had originated the course of action Laney had been proposing to him for weeks now. It seemed so out of character.

Now she sat on the hood of his beloved Beetle, although he couldn’t recall her having moved in that direction. She slapped one meaty thigh. “What happens now, killer?”

He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do what she and, supposedly, Vincent requested of him. Big deal. It was only his imagination trying to have its way with him.

Wasn’t it?

He yawned, slumped, toppled slightly until his spine found the door jamb. He let his head drop forward into his pillowing hands. “I gotta sleep,” he mumbled. “Can’t take another night of this.”

“That’s fine,” she replied cheerfully. Her voice now came at him from the foot of the garage, although once again he’d been unaware of movement. “We’ll chat some more tomorrow night, okay?”

Chapter Five

He heard her trying to rouse him twice, her voice growing progressively edgier, more put out, before he gave up and struggled to a sitting position on the bed. He double-gripped his face, pulling at the cottony clutches of sleep still in his brain. He was fuzzily aware of the earthy smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen and the much nearer allure of Patty’s perfume.

But that last scent was a bad sign. It meant she was too far along in her work preparation process for him to be groggily shaking off sleep.

“It’s about time,” she grumped.

Tim yawned, tried to cover the involuntary reflex with his hand, but she’d already spotted it.

“So what time did you get in last night?” she asked with deceptive unconcern.

He shrugged, though she wasn’t looking. He drew his bony knees up and watched her from over them.

Patty, astride the low bench in front of her dressing table, was well into the crimping stage of production, where tiny finish-up steps—a tweaking, a smoothing—brought the whole picture together.

Her eyes found his in her tabletop makeup mirror. “Well?” She was tall and slender, but with hips and curves, attractive even with hair that hung loose and lifeless despite her best efforts and those of the city’s most accomplished stylists.

He said, “You’ll never guess what happened.”

“Would you say it was later than eleven?”

Patty’s problem, as near as Tim could figure, was her long-held Kimmler family belief that legitimate labor began early in the day and put you to bed at a decent hour so you could get up early the next day and start it all over again. Kimmlers were industrious, unimaginative people who punched time clocks. They’d been skeptical of Patty’s compulsion to get a college degree and her insistence on moving in with a fellow college grad who’d lost his job in advertising and now worked full-time playing recorded music at weddings and in bars. Was that really even a job?

Though she’d never admit it, Patty had adopted a similar world view. Their spats largely revolved around some aspect of Tim’s late hours and subsequently inactive days.

“I guess you don’t remember my phone call,” he said.

Patty twirled her hairbrush while she eyed his reflection in her makeup mirror. “I think so,” she said slowly.

He thought she’d sounded altogether too understanding when she’d picked up. Now he knew she’d been at least half out, the two of them on radically different sleep cycles.

“You seemed pretty groggy. I called from that video store on the corner of Broadview and Utica Lane. Afterthought, or something.”

Her brows knitted. “You rented a movie? At that hour?”

Tim shook his head. “I’d just gotten back from the house of that guy I told you about.”

“Charlotte’s friend,” she said, her voice flat. “The one with the music collection.”

He snatched the bedsheet aside and did a naked flip-flop so he was belly down, his head at the foot of the bed. “Listen, Patty. I’m serious about this. I couldn’t even tabulate all the music he had. Not to mention pirated concert stuff on tape. He let me have a few CDs and some tapes and vinyl for what I had in my wallet until I can come back with the rest.”

“How much?” she said.

Don’t hesitate, he told himself, hesitating. It’ll only make it worse. “Three hundred. And worth every penny. He told me he’d keep the rest of it off of Craigslist for a couple weeks, give me time to raise the rest. Said he wouldn’t do that except that I’m a friend of Charlotte’s.”

“Tapes? Vinyl? Is my calendar wrong, or aren’t the eighties over?”

How could he explain? MP3s were just electrons. Or protons. They represented music as a
concept
, but not something you could hold in your hands. “It’s not the same,” he said, but it even sounded feeble to his own ears.

“And where are you planning on coming up with three hundred dollars?”

That should have been the easy part. Between her frugality and his…well, pretty much
her
frugality…they’d saved almost thirteen thousand dollars for a down payment on a house. But just try to explain to her what a small percent of thirteen grand that three hundred bucks represented, and she’d fly totally off the handle. “Honey,” he said, sounding somewhere between placating and whiny.

She slammed her hairbrush onto the glass tabletop. “Not again, Tim. More music to go along with your state-of-the-art equipment and a van to hold it all.” Her glare found him in her mirror. “You love the trappings of business, it’s just the work you don’t find to your liking.”

“Patty, this is
traditional
country. Not the urban, big-hat, Alan Jackson, Taylor Swift bullshit. That’s Charlotte’s theme for Wednesday nights. I can achieve my break-even point on the new stuff in a week.”

He wasn’t sure if that was true. Wasn’t even positive he knew what
break even
meant, but he hoped he was speaking Patty’s language. She was a loan officer for the city’s third largest bank. If his spur-of-the-moment verbal business plan wouldn’t impress her, nothing would.

She returned her attention to her preparations with a brief snort of disgust. “Charlotte,” she huffed, making the name sound like a profanity. “More tax-free cash of indeterminate amount. And when we’re filling out income paperwork for buying a house, you can tell the mortgage broker that you really did make more than the six thousand dollars or so that showed up on your last tax forms, and you have the cash-stuffed envelopes to prove it.”

Patty rose from her bench and squatted before her closet shoe rack. Okay, so Charlotte Taft’s business methods were questionable by the standards of his loan officer girlfriend. After the Beer Belly Saloon closed for the evening, Charlotte would dash off some figures in her head and pick bills out of the cash register that reflected her impression of the night’s profit-loss picture. Tim often grossed less than he might get elsewhere, but since the total went unreported to the government, nothing got deducted. As Charlotte would sometimes put it with a chuckle, “Gross equals net.”

“Anyway,” Tim said, anxious to leave the current line of conversation behind, “I was telling you how I ended up at that video rental on Broadview.”

And he did. He enjoyed her wide-eyed reaction. Tales of rape and mayhem had made best-seller lists since caveman days, so it was no wonder. There were no interruptions until the doorbell rang.

Tim and Patty lived in the upper half of an Old Brooklyn up-and-down. From the outside, the house was a tall, unstylish, chocolate-brown wood frame, with neighboring structures hemming it in on both sides. Their front door was at the top of a steep interior stairway, and it was up to that door that someone had climbed at a rather unlikely hour to ring the bell. The young couple stared each other down with identical quizzical and vaguely frightened expressions before Tim donned a robe and tiptoed to the front of the house, his feet groaning over old wood floorboards.