Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

1

Not even the other cops much liked Frazier. He was too angry, too bitter to spend much time with. And he enjoyed the dirty aspects of the job too much. Hurting people. Shaking down shopkeepers and pushers and the richer variety of junkies. Getting freebies from the hookers and then beating them up afterwards and daring their pimps to do anything about it. In Vietnam, it had been called fragging, a grunt shooting his superior officer in the back and blaming it on the Cong. There’d been more than one boozy cop-bar conversation about good old Frazier getting fragged some night.

Josh Coburn managed to get the split pea soup off Lisa’s face but not her white shirt. Oh well, what ten-month-old didn’t walk around with part of her latest meal on her blouse?

“All right, honey,” he said, down on one knee, steadying the home video camera so he could capture her walking toward him. “C’mon to Daddy.”

Josh was babysitting his daughter tonight while Elise went shopping for their Christmas gifts. She’d laughed and said that Josh was more of a baby than Lisa about wanting to know what she was going to get them.

The living room of the Tudor-styled home sparkled with decorations. This year’s tree was so tall they’d had to cut off the top to fit the angel on. Blue, red, yellow and green lights played off the glass doors of the fireplace, and imbued everything in the room with an air of festivity.

“Daddy! Daddy!” Lisa giggled as she toddled toward Josh.

The camera was last year’s Christmas gift. Elise had said that it was guaranteed idiot-proof, meaning that even a mechanical dunce like Josh could operate it.

And then he was on his feet, shooting straight down on her as she danced around in something resembling a circle, waving her tiny hand at Harold the Cat as he strode into the living room. “Hi Harral!” she shouted.

And then she was running toward Josh, arms spread wide. He swung her around and around. Daddy’s girl. And neither of them would have it any other way.

He’d done this before.

It was an odd thought to have at this moment when her fists were smashing his face and her knee was trying to find his groin.

But she couldn’t help but notice that for all the violence of his sudden assault, he was careful not to tear her clothes or bruise her. He was thinking of afterward. He did not want to mark up his victims.

And almost ludicrously — he was already wearing a condom. He’d probably put it on before he’d come to work. Ready. Knowing he was bound to run into somebody he could lure away as he’d lured her.

And then he was inside her. And she was sobbing. But she was no longer hitting him or trying to knee him. She was spent now. She just wanted it over with. She knew he wouldn’t kill her. If that had been his intention, he wouldn’t have been so careful not to mark her up.

He finished quickly and that gave her a strange surge of pleasure. He probably thought of himself as a swaggering macho man. And he couldn’t even last two minutes.

Lisa wasn’t old enough to say prayers. So there in her in pink crib, he said them for her. He prayed for Mommy and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa and Harold the Cat and Princess her doll. Then he thanked God on her behalf for all the good things they had in their lives, and said a prayer for those who weren’t so fortunate and asked that they be similarly blessed.

He gave her a kiss, checked her diapers a final time, and then turned out the light and left the room.

Downstairs, he fixed himself a light scotch and water and sat in the TV room watching the last of an NBA game. He kept the sound down so he could hear Lisa if she called out. He routinely checked her every fifteen minutes. He would have checked her every five but Elise had finally broken him of that neurotic habit.

Not until ten o’clock did he begin to worry. The malls were open an extra hour this last week leading up to Christmas. Maybe she’d stayed till ten. But if she had, why not call him? There were plenty of public phones around and she had a cell phone besides.

He thought of looking over the storyboards one more time. Early tomorrow morning they’d be pitching the Chuck Wagon fast food account. As the TV producer on the potential account, he’d be responsible for approximately a fourth of the whole dog-and-pony show. But, no. He’d looked them over three times earlier tonight. They were fine. He was proud of them. They were classic hard-sell ads and that’s just what the account — which had lost 16 % market share in the past two years — badly needed. Their present agency relied too much on whimsy. Chuck Wagon needed a whole new approach.

At eleven o’clock, he was in Lisa’s room, changing her. She’d developed a diaper rash and so he was powdering her when he heard Elise come in. He called downstairs to her but there was no answer. He wondered why not.

When he finished with Lisa, he rolled her on her back, kissed her forehead, and then went downstairs.

Elise was not in the kitchen. Or the living room. Or the bathroom. Or the den. Or the TV room.

And then he heard the faint noise from the basement. Elise was one of those women who liked instant contact when you came home. She always wanted a hug and kiss from you; and always returned the favor as soon as she got home. So why the basement? And why hadn’t she responded when he’d called out to her from Lisa’s room?

He opened the basement door. “Elise?”

No answer.

They had yet to finish the basement. It was a huge concrete bunker that housed furnace and washer and drier and assorted boxes with stuff they’d probably never use again.

He smelled gasoline. Smoke.

He rushed down the stairs so fast, he started to slide. He grabbed the slender wooden railing.

Elise stood, completely naked, in the center of the basement floor. Before her, in a pile, were the clothes she’d worn tonight. She’d set them on fire with the help of a small can of gasoline she’d apparently brought in from the garage.

She spoke only once. “I want you to go upstairs and not ask me any questions. Do you understand?”

The sensible, sensitive gaze of his good wife was gone, replaced by the kind of despair and frenzy one saw in the eyes of people who had just suffered some vast trauma.

“Elise. Please tell me what happened.”

She shrieked at him. In the eight years of their marriage, the perfect suburban couple, she’d never once shrieked at him before. “Get out of here and leave me alone, you son-of-a-bitch!”

She’d never called him a name before, either.

There was nothing to say. Do.

He went doggedly up the stairs, like a man dragging himself to his own execution. What the hell was going on with her, anyway?

Four showers.

Twenty, thirty minutes apart.

Four different showers. What was she trying to scrub off her?

He lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the guest room shower down the hall. She didn’t even want use their own shower. It was as if he’d alienated her in some irrevocable way. Every half-hour, he’d check on Lisa. He wanted to ask her what was going on with mommy.

He finally fell asleep near dawn.

Earl Frazier had made a bad mistake. It was one thing to rape hookers, as he sometimes did. It was another to rape women who lived in rich sub-divisions.

She was beautiful in a slender, almost ethereal way. But it hadn’t been about sex... She was the kind of woman who’d snubbed him all his life. Who’d made him feel stupid and cheap and unmanly. She was so sleek and polished and perfect. He wanted to ruin that perfection for life. Feel his dirty hands ripping away her purity, her beauty, her money, her privilege.

But she would have access to power. And she could destroy him.

Why in God’s name hadn’t he been able to stop himself?

After his shift, he hung up his uniform neatly and lay in the shadows of his bedroom, sipping whiskey and smoking Pall Malls and praying — actually praying that God spare him this time. That he would never do it again. Whores, yes, because nobody cared about them. But not women of so-called virtue. That was just too damned risky.

Elise was in a white terrycloth robe and slippers when he came down for breakfast. The smells were good. Bacon, eggs, toast. This was much more than the usual mid-week breakfast.

One look at her and he knew not to ask any questions. He felt awkward, bursting with doubts and dreads and curiosity, but unable to give them voice.

He was just finishing up when she sat down across from him in the breakfast nook.

“Isn’t your big presentation this morning?”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry. You probably didn’t get much sleep and it’s my fault.” She started to put her hand out, to touch his, but then pulled it back abruptly. As if she’d suddenly recognized that touching him might contaminate her in some way.

He couldn’t help himself any longer. “What the hell’s going on, Elise?”

She said it simply. No dramatics. “I was raped last night.”

“Raped? My God. Did you go to the police?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It was a cop who raped me.”

The Chuck Wagon presentation went pretty well. The two women in charge of the account from the client side laughed in all the right places and expressed enthusiastic interest in the coupon program the agency had come up with. The competition was killing Chuck Wagon with aggressive coupon programs.

Josh did well, too. It was one of those moments when a person stands aside and lets his doppelganger take over. Yes, it looks like me and sounds like me. But actually the real me is off somewhere else.

In this case, Josh was mentally stalking the cop who’d raped his wife. Josh did not embrace the adolescent beer-commercial machismo of so many advertising men. But he had a bad temper. And he also owned a .38 Special he’d bought at a gun show a few years ago. It was kept in the bedroom nightstand in case of prowlers.

All the way home on the freeway, he kept glowering at cop cars, wondering if this could be the one carrying Elise’s rapist. Several times, he wished he had the family gun.

Elise left a note on the kitchen table.

After retrieving Lisa from the neighbor’s, Josh fed her dinner and then spread out some of her toys on the floor of the TV room. He tried to concentrate on the Seven O’Clock News but it was impossible. All he could think about was Elise being raped. He didn’t kid himself. He knew that her pain and degradation were his main concern. Some women never psychologically recovered from being raped. But he also knew that his own ego was involved here. He felt that he’d failed her, hadn’t sufficiently protected her, must now defend her after the fact.

He got Lisa to bed around nine. Around ten, Elise came down in a Northwestern sweatshirt — Northwestern being their mutual alma mater — and went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee.

They sat in the breakfast nook. All she’d had time to tell him this morning was that a cop had raped her. He’d had to hurry into the city and his pitch to the Chuck Wagon folks.

He said, “Tell me.”

She said, “He pulled me over for speeding. I was out in the boonies. That new mall? I’d taken a wrong turn and was trying to get back to civilization. I was on some country road.”

“He was a city cop?”

She nodded, sipping at her coffee. “He pulled me over for speeding. Told me to come back to his squad car and get in. I figured he was just going to give me a speech about my driving. Instead, he drove up the road to a grove of trees and then told me to get out of the car. He took me behind the trees and raped me.” She looked tired but certain of herself. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

“God, Josh, are you forgetting Sandy Lewin?”

Sandy Lewin was a classmate of theirs. In their senior year, she’d been raped by a very trendy broker who’d earlier interviewed her for a job. By the time his lawyers got done with her, the impression had been left with the public at large that Sandy Lewin was a very sleazy young lady. Sandy was not only Elise’s best friend, she was also one of the most respectable people Elise had ever known. But not anymore. Not to anybody who’d watched the rapist’s lawyers destroy her on the Seven O’Clock News every night. Sandy had finally left town, relocated to LA. The broker went free.

“You have to report it, Elise.”

“It’s too late anyway. All those showers I took last night. I’ve destroyed the kind of evidence they’d need.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

She sighed. “I’m not going to the police, Josh. I couldn’t handle what Sandy went through.” She stared at her coffee. “I wasn’t exactly an angel in college, you know.”

He’d met her when she was still trying to get over the senior who’d dumped her. She hadn’t dealt well with her heartbreak. Drank, smoked, slept around. Had something of a reputation there for a while. The kind of thing defense lawyers get down on their knees every night and pray for.

“I don’t want Lisa to ever have to hear about me that way. And if there was a trial, she’d eventually hear about it. About me. And this isn’t exactly the kind of news Dad needs either.”

Right now, her seventy-eight year old father’s cancer was in remission. But news like that certainly couldn’t be good for him.

He reached across the table and took her hand. She pulled it away as if he’d electrocuted her. “I love you so much, Elise. But to just let this thing go—”

“Now it’d just be my word against his.”

They stared out at the night. It was just warm enough tonight for the raccoons to put in an appearance. He loved sitting here in the nook with the lights off, watching the raccoons play on the white snow in the blue moonlight. He liked it especially when the baby raccoons came along.

He said, “Do you remember what he looked like?”

“Sure.”

“Do you remember any identifying marks?”

“No. But I remember the number of the squad car he was driving. Number 93.”

“That’s great.”

“It is? For what? We’re not going to do anything about it. So what’s so great about remembering it?” She looked sad and weary. “I’ll just have to work through this myself. Just please don’t ask me any more questions about it.”

The next two nights, Josh went looking for car 93. He had an approximate sense of which precinct the car was from, and what part of the city it would be cruising.

He didn’t spot it.

He came home late, exhausted, Elise asleep in the guestroom. She still didn’t want to be in the same bed with him.

On his lunch hour, he walked to a nearby Barnes and Noble and found a book on the aftermath of rape.

Elise was following the general pattern the book outlined. Rage, shame, depression, anger, an inability to make any kind of physical connection even with her husband, even if that connection was as unchallenging as a hug.

There was one other terrifying piece in the hook. One he’d already thought of because he’d heard it somewhere before. Some men, after their wives had been raped, blamed the women themselves. And no longer wanted to be intimate with them. The same way some men responded to their wives’ having a mastectomy. Rationally, none of this made no sense. The women were the victims, not the men who loved them. But then given the male ego, he could see how some men might see the rape as some kind of abstract challenge to their own masculinity. He prayed to God that his male vanity never got that far out of control.

He was thinking of all this when, a few nights later, he spotted city police car number 93. The place was a strip mall. The police vehicle was parked in front of a shoe repair shop with a large front window. The car was empty. The cop was inside at the cash register.

Josh had pictured a hulking man. This one was tall but sinewy and slim. He was losing his hair. The way he was laughing with the shoe repairman, he looked like one of the many Officer Friendlys they had on TV to talk to kids. He was even just a tad nerdy.

When he came out and got in his car, Josh realized that he might be looking at the wrong man. Maybe the rapist was in another car tonight. Or it was his day off. Or he’d call in sick. He just couldn’t imagine that this was the man. He picked up his cell phone and hit the proper speed-dial button.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it, honey,” he said. “I just want you to describe him for me.”

“I thought we had an agreement.”

“We do. I just want you to describe him.”

“I thought you were at the office.”

“I am.”

“No, you’re not. And you haven’t been at the office the others nights either, have you?”

“Just please describe him?”

“Why?”

“I’m — working on something.”

“Working on something? Just leave it alone, Josh! Leave it alone!”

“Just tell me if he’s tall and slim and balding.”

“Yes but—”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

He followed number 93 for nearly twenty minutes. He stayed a couple of cars back, the way detectives always do on TV. The .38 was in the glove department.

He didn’t have any sort of plan. He’d just wanted to actually see the man. He’d told himself that that would be enough for him. But it hadn’t been enough. Now he just wanted to follow him around. Hopefully, that would be enough.

But number 93 burst away from him suddenly, siren screaming. Probably a traffic accident somewhere. Or a tavern shooting. This was the kind of neighborhood for it, long, shabby, dying blocks.

At home, Elise accosted him as soon as he came through the kitchen door. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“You know what I’m talking about. That gun you bought a year ago.”

“Oh.”

“God, Josh, that’s all you’ve got to say is ‘Oh?’ Now where is it?”

“In my pocket.”

“I want it. Now.” She put her hand out, palm up. He put the gun in it. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. “If I can handle this whole thing, so can you.”

Lisa started crying upstairs. Elise hurried to find out what was troubling her little girl.

After dinner, he thought of a good excuse to leave the house. He was low on computer supplies for his home machine. Office One was at a mall twenty miles away.

“You couldn’t wait till Saturday?”

“I’m just going to the mall.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’ve got the gun. What’re you worried about?”

“You. That’s what I’m worried about. Doing something crazy.” She slid her arms around him. Pulled him close. “I know you love me, sweetheart. But it doesn’t help me if I have to worry about you as well as deal with this thing myself.”

“So he just gets away?”

“Sandy Lewin’s rapist got away, too. And she got destroyed in the process.”

“He’ll do it again, you know. Rape somebody else. Maybe even kill them sometime.”

“We have a life that I love. I’ll learn to live with this. It’ll take some time and some patience but if we really love each other we can put it behind us. I want another baby, Josh. And I thought you did, too.”

“You know I do. It’s just the idea of him getting away—”

He kissed her more passionately than he had since she was raped. She surprised him by responding. No mad surge of passion. But her lips parted and she moved her hips gently against his. The mention of babies had brought back his favorite mental photo of her. There in the delivery room. Being shown Lisa for the first time. Thinking about it, he teared up.

“I love you so much,” he said.

Office One was crowded for a weeknight. He bought more than $400 worth of supplies. He knew he should have gone straight home. Instead, he headed for the cross-town. And for the precinct where car 93 prowled the streets at night.

He found the squad car parked in front of a video store close to the strip mall where the cop had been the other night. He sat in the car looking into the store. He wished he would’ve found the cop in the XXX section. Instead he found him in the comedy section.

He was very conscious of the clock. He knew that if he was gone long, Elise would be suspicious. What was he doing here anyway? What good did it do to just follow the bastard around?

He put the car in gear and drove out of the video store lot.

He was seven blocks away when the emergency light bloomed blood red in his rearview mirror.

2

He pulled over to the curb. Waited for the cop to appear. A few cars went past, surveying the scene. Wondering what he’d done.

No swagger. Unassuming walk. Flipped open his ticket book as he approached.

Josh had his window rolled down. The night smelled of distant rain and cold. It was in the low forties.

“Evening, sir.”

“Evening.”

“May I see your license?”

“Sure.”

Showed him his license.

“The information here correct?”

“Yes; yes, it is.” It was a good thing she’d taken the gun from him. He wanted to kill this man right here.

“Was I speeding, officer?”

“No.”

“Taillight out or something?”

“One thing about a silver gray Saab. Brand new one.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“There aren’t very many of them.”

“No, I don’t suppose there are.”

The cop handed him his license back. “Why’re you following me, Mr. Madison?”

“Following you? You were behind me.”

“The other night it was the shoe repair shop. Tonight it’s the video store. And then you just follow me around in general sometimes. What’s going on?”

“Gosh, I wish I knew what you were talking about.”

For the first time he saw anger in the cop’s face. “I catch you following me again, something bad could happen, Mr. Madison. You understand?”

Put the bullet right in the center of his throat. Watch the life choke out of him as he grabbed and clawed at the wound. “You keep that in mind, Mr. Madison.”

Josh woke up around two o’clock. A light rain haloed the streetlight outside. Elise was awake, too. They made love. He surprised them both with the power of his ardor. He could have killed him. He knew now he was capable of it. It gave him new strength. He didn’t tell Elise about seeing the cop.

Three weeks later, they were having after-dinner brandies in the TV room when Elise said, “My God, it’s him.”

Nine O’clock News on WGN.

“Patrol officer Earl Frazier has been accused of rape by South Side resident Oreila McGee.”

Frazier’s photo was a color close-up taken some years ago.

“While McGee’s lawyer, Jefferson Hardin, freely admits that his client is a prostitute, he insists that Officer Frazier beat and then raped his client this past Thursday night. Police spokesperson Donald Thomas said that the department will issue a statement tomorrow morning. But that as far as he knew, Officer Frazier would stay on his regular duty at full pay.”

“Earl Frazier,” Josh said. Now he knew the bastard’s name.

“They’ll laugh her out of court,” Elise said, “a prostitute accusing a cop like that.” Then, quietly, “He’s just going to keep on doing it, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Yeah, he is.”

“That poor woman,” she said.

At breakfast, Lisa decided to decorate herself for the holidays. She got most of her Gerber’s pureed carrots all over her face, hands, arms and hair. The carrots looked especially fetching dangling from her left ear lobe. She looked intensely, radiantly pleased with herself.

Josh fed her. He loved feeding her. “I think I’ll run her through the car wash this morning,” he said. “That’ll clean her up.” He’d almost cleaned out the small glass jar.

He glanced at Elise. She looked drained, tense. “You all right, honey?”

“I should’ve gone to the police that night. I should’ve told the truth. But it’s way too late, now. It’d be just my word against his.”

“Yours and a prostitute.”

“God, I really want to see him in prison.”

“So do I.”

“But how can we do it now?”

He was glad that Lisa chose this moment to smear more of the carrot puree all over her face. “Gee, look, honey,” he said, not answering her question. “An orange baby.”

It was two days later when Josh got the idea.

He was in a TV studio producing a commercial for a car security system. Everything was wrapped up except the final sequence, which showed a shadowy burglar trying to break into a new Buick. The set was carefully lighted to effect a film noir look. The actor, dressed in dark clothes and a fedora, was hulking and ominous as he leaned into the car and glanced first right then left. Resembled a shot from a horror movie.

The sequence took on a more urgent meaning suddenly. He imagined that the burglar was actually Frazier the cop and that he was forcing Elise out of the Saab. He didn’t want to imagine any more. He’d tried to avoid thinking of the actual rape itself. Doing so literally made him sick to his stomach.

“You all right?” the director said. They were in the control booth, a spaceship-like panel of knobs and buttons stretching out before them, Sixteen small monitors filled the dark wall in front of them. They could see the sequence being shot in both color and black and white. “Man, you’re really sweating. Maybe you’re getting that flu that’s going around.”

But it wasn’t the flu. It was glimpses of the rape filling his mind. Her eyes. Her small fists hammering on him. The brutal way he’d taken her. And it was his idea. It had happened before, so why couldn’t it happen again? An unseen private citizen with a home video camera out for a night’s amusement when he accidentally stumbles on...

“Yeah,” he said, finally answering the director. “Must be the flu.”

Elise’s first response was negative. She didn’t think it would work. But the more he showed her the unedited video from the car security commercial, the more she got drawn in. There was a lot that needed to be done. And it wouldn’t be cheap. He’d have to pay a lighting director, a camera operator, a makeup person, a costumer, two actors and an art director who could find the right car and fit it out accordingly.

The first night they were scheduled to shoot was canceled. Rain. The second night was also canceled. Fog. The third night, they actually got down to business. They drove out to the lonely, deserted spot where the rape had taken place and then everybody went about his job. They did every sequence over three or four times. He was afraid that reliving the experience would be too much for Elise. But her anger kept her sane. She’d been able to match the outfit she’d worn the night of the rape. She looked beautiful.

They didn’t get home till midnight. Terri, the babysitter, was asleep on the couch, her senior History book over her face. Conan O’Brien was talking to her but she wasn’t listening. Josh ran her home. By the time he got back, Elise was in the kitchen, micro-waving them hot cocoa with tiny bobbing marshmallows. They sat in the breakfast nook. She raised her cup. They toasted. Everything was ready to go.

Frazier had lived in an apartment complex ever since his divorce. He liked summers best because he had most of the day to hang around the swimming pool and size up the ladies. A lot of them were stewardesses. Being politically correct, the airlines had started using older women these days. The image of the vacuous hut deadly-beautiful stew had changed. You now often found middle-aged ladies serving you on your flights. Still, there was plenty of young flesh around the pool, many of whom didn’t mind coming over to his apartment for a gin and tonic and some afternoon delight. It was the cop thing. They’d deny it of course. But they — the type of women he attracted anyway — liked the authority thing. Even the women he raped. A few of his victims had even had an orgasm while he was raping them. Even against their will they’d responded to the uniform, the badge, the nightstick, the gun. One of them, he’d even used his nightstick on a little bit. He could still remember the way she’d shuddered.

He was still worried about the guy in the new Saab. Following him around like that. It was too late for the bitch to come forward with any evidence. So what was the use of following him around? The only answer was that the guy planned to kill him. Maybe he was just working up his nerve. He didn’t look like the type who’d have the balls to do it face-on. He should never have raped the Coburn woman. He hadn’t been able to control himself. Usually he stuck to the hookers. Stupid bitch that turned him in, she wasn’t going to get anywhere. A hooker challenging a sworn officer of the law? Give me a break.

But the Coburn woman. What the hell was her husband following him around for?

These were his thoughts the morning of the day the tape arrived. The mail came at one o’clock. Just after an argument with his mother. Bitch had cost him two marriages, the way she was always horning him. She’d never liked any of his girlfriends and absolutely detested his wives. His old man had dropped dead of a heart attack at forty-two. Frazier knew why, too. So he could escape. Whatever was on the other side of life — extinction or folks with wings or pitchforks — had to be preferable to life with his mother. He’d thought that moving away from her — leaving St. Louis and picking up his cop’s life here in Chicago — would help. She was very tight with a dollar. She wouldn’t let herself spend all that money on long distance. But she got in one of those cut-rate calling programs and now she was calling him all the time again. Sometimes, twice a day.

The first piece of mail he opened was a birthday card from his eight-year-old daughter. Today being his birthday. He smiled. She was his pride, his one true love. Carrie. She signed it with a big heart and a lot of XXXXs for kisses.

He knew something was wrong the moment he felt the video mailer. Just had some kind of foreboding.

Who’d be sending him a video?

He went upstairs and plugged it into the VCR.

And starting shaking immediately. Five minutes later, he was gunning down a couple drinks of bourbon and chewing on Turns. The tape — he couldn’t see himself on it particularly well... shadowy and shot from the back... but you could see what he did to the woman grabbing her wrist the way he had that night... dragging her into the copse of trees. And then the camera moved in closer for a final shot of he and the woman disappearing into the woods... and held for a moment on the back fender of the squad car. Car 93. No doubt about that at all.

Josh called Frazier from a pay phone. All the afternoon traffic made for nice ambient sound. A blackmailer probably would call from a payphone.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Frazier.” He tried to make his voice sound like a happy phone solicitor. After working with actors all these years, he had no trouble disguising his voice.

“Who’s this?”

“A friend of yours.” Pause.

“Yeah? What’s your name?”

“What’s more important is my occupation, Mr. Frazier. Or pre-occupation, I guess I should say. I spend most of my nights driving around and finding interesting things to shoot with my home video camera.”

“Yeah? What’s that got to do with me?”

“You’re too modest, Mr. Frazier. You’re the star of my last video. And my best, too, if I may say so. In fact, I think I remember sending you one.”

He said nothing.

“It’s a little out-of-focus, I’ll admit. But you can see the number of the squad car pretty clearly. And you can see the woman pretty well, too. Sorry all we could see was your back. And that was pretty close up.” They’d shot the sequence so that you could only see his shoulders and the back of his head. Jumpy, jerky shots, barely in focus. But ominous.

Silence. Then Frazier said, “We need to meet.”

“All right.”

“How about my apartment?”

“Fine.”

“And alone. Tomorrow night at ten.”

“You don’t work then?”

“I’ll worry about work. You just worry about yourself.”

It happened more and more often these days. Private citizen with a home video camera. Roaming the night. Never knew where they were gonna show up. One had shown up the night of the rape. The son-of-a-bitch. Too late for the Madison woman to do anything. And the hooker’s lawsuit wouldn’t go anywhere. But a man with a videotape.

Frazier cursed himself again for ever letting go of himself this way. Nice, respectable woman. That was not the kind to rape and push around. He must’ve been crazy.

And the longer he thought of killing the video man right here in the apartment, that sounded crazy too.

There had to be a better way. Had to.

The store sold everything from guns to tiny microphones you could hide in a tiepin. It was the world of subterfuge and intrigue and it was fascinating to both Josh and Elise.

The chunky man with the crew cut and the American flag pin on the lapel of his sport jacket led them to what they were looking for. “They always make it look real complicated on cop shows. But actually it’s pretty easy.”

Elise laughed softly. “Can an idiot operate it?”

“An idiot can operate it fine,” the salesman said.

“Then we’re in good shape,” she said.

At home, they spent two hours testing the equipment out. It operated simply, just the way the salesman had said it would.

Toward dinnertime, Elise took a nap with little Lisa. Josh used the time to go down in the basement and check over the .45 he’d bought a few days earlier. He’d known that eventually he would confront Frazier and he wanted to be ready. He was hoping the cop would force his hand. He very much wanted an excuse to kill Frazier. He took the .45 out to the Saab and put it in the glove compartment. He spent a moment looking at the decade-old black BMW Elise usually drove. It had been the first symbol of their success, of Josh moving from a small, factory-like art studio to one of the country’s major advertising agencies. He’d drive it tonight. Frazier wouldn’t recognize it.

He couldn’t relax. He kept pacing in the basement. Thinking of Frazier. The Rape. The .45.

Finally, it was time to go. He went to the den and knocked back a drink of bourbon.

Elise watched him from the doorway. “Remember, you’re not there to do anything more than we planned.”

“I remember.” But the harshness of his tone contracted his words.

She came over to him. Slid her arms around him. “This hasn’t been easy for either of us, honey. I know that. I wish I could tell you when I’ll feel like being intimate again but—”

He turned around and took her carefully in his arms. “All I care about is that you get better. That you come out of your shell. All the sleeping. Rarely leaving the house. Never calling your old friends—”

“Just don’t do anything that makes things worse, Josh. You know your temper.”

“Don’t worry. Everything’ll be fine. We’ll nail the bastard. And I won’t do anything stupid.”

Then it was time to leave.

3

The parking lot of Frazier’s apartment house told its own story. All the cars were wannabes, knock-offs of this or that sports car. Josh knew the place by reputation. The last bastion of middle-aged swingers. A number of divorced ad people lived here. A cop could do well for himself here. A certain kind of woman liked authority figures a lot.

He found the building he wanted and went inside, glad for a respite from the numbing cold. It was only a few degrees above zero and the clouds hiding the moon forebode more days of similar freezing.

Dance music filled the lobby from a nearby apartment. Some kind of updated disco number. It was a well-kept place. New carpeting recently vacuumed. Fresh paint. Window casings in good repair. He found Frazier’s apartment and knocked. No answer.

Down the hall two fifty-year-old women emerged from another apartment. They were nice-looking. They smiled at him. “You’re cute,” one of them said. “You want to come along?”

“Maybe some other time.”

“You a cop, too?” the other one said.

“No, just a friend.”

“Well, that story about him raping that hooker — he’ll need all the friends he can get. It’s too bad when some old whore can make trouble for a man like Frazier.”

“He’s very nice to everybody,” the other one said.

“And — no offense — but some cops are pretty hard to deal with. Especially after they’ve had a couple of drinks.”

The other one giggled. “Remember Larry?”

Her friend returned the giggle. “After a couple of drinks, he’d always haul out his bass guitar and take his pants off and walk around in his boxers.”

“I guess he thought he was turning us on,” the lady laughed. “Well, toodles, and if you see Frazier, tell him Kitty and Candy said hi.”

After they were gone, he knocked again. What the hell was going on? Where was Frazier?

He tried knocking again. Then he started jiggling the doorknob. A man came out of an apartment down the hall and stared at him. Josh left.

In his car, starting the engine, he wondered what kind of game Frazier was playing.

He drove away, preoccupied. He didn’t notice, as he reached the slippery nighttime street, that a blue Chevrolet was following him.

The leak was slower than Frazier had figured. He’d slashed Josh’s right rear tire deeply. He’d also taken the spare. By now, the car should be limping along, giving Josh particular trouble on the ice-glazed streets. Trucks were out all over the city, spewing sand on the worst of the main-traveled streets. Cops had already given up on the idea of responding to fender-benders. There were just too many of them.

Then it happened quickly. The black BMW slumped to the right and the car started bumping toward a stoplight. He wouldn’t be going much further on that tire.

He was beginning to lose it.

The tension of the whole situation. Frazier not being home. And now a flat tire.

He pulled the BMW over to the curb and pulled on the emergency lights. He got out of the car, slip-sliding on the ice, doing a couple of silent-movie arm-waving gags while he was at it. He walked back to the trunk.

Great. No spare.

He remembered passing a Sinclair station a few blocks back. There’d been a service garage as well as gas pumps.

Then he remembered the .45 in the glove compartment. He could lock the car but that wouldn’t stop any real dedicated pro. They’d take everything, including the weapon. Better stick it in his pocket.

He got back in the car and opened the glove compartment and the gun wasn’t there and he knew, of course, what had happened.

Elise had found it. Removed temptation from him.

He spoke a few nasty words to himself.

He was just getting out of the car when he saw Frazier standing there. Nobody had taken Frazier’s gun. It was right in his gloved hand.

“Let’s go back and get in my car,” he said. “And be sure and bring that videotape.”

Josh glanced wildly around the street. Mercury vapor lights exposed a small convenience store, a tattoo parlor, a fingernail boutique, an ancient Catholic Church, three bars, a dry cleaners, a real estate office. The rest of the block, on both sides, were filthy giant houses that had long ago been divided up into filthy tiny sleeping rooms and so-called apartments. The legion of the lost plied these streets. Only the bars and the church had any succor to offer them.

Nobody was paying any attention at all to the two men standing by the downed BMW.

“You bring the tape?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s see it.”

Josh held up the videotape cartridge.

“Good. Let’s get going.”

Again, no swagger, no macho posturing on Frazier’s part. He didn’t have to impress anybody. He had a gun and Josh had no doubt he would use it.

“You drive,” Frazier said.

Josh had to fight to control the car. It was a big, lumbering beast and tended to skid.

“The guy who took the home video, how much does he want?”

Josh almost smiled. Not only had Frazier bought the video as authentic, he was assuming that Josh was working with some nameless person who’d shot the footage. “Thirty-five thousand.”

“I want to meet with him.”

“I have the tape.”

“You ever heard of copies?”

“He claims this is the original.”

“I don’t give a damn what he claims. I want to meet him. But first I want you to go over on the Avenue and pull into where all those deserted warehouses are.”

“For what?”

“Just do what I said.”

Driving was still treacherous. They saw a couple of fender-benders on the way to the warehouses. Then Josh saw that the icy streets could help him. What if he plowed into a parked car? Maybe he’d have a chance to get away. It was his only hope.

“Slow down,” Frazier said.

Josh saw an opportunity half a block ahead. A car just now pulling out. Perfect timing to ram into him. And in the confusion, run.

Then he felt cold steel against the side of his neck. “I’m not afraid to kill you, Coburn. Not at all. You try and pile us up, the first thing I do is put a bullet right in your heart.”

Ten minutes later, Josh eased the car down a narrow alley between dark, looming warehouses. This had been a vital section of the shipping business until two large importer-exporters moved away. Now maybe as many as fifteen warehouses stood dark and empty.

“I still don’t know what the hell you want with me,” Josh said.

“Pull over there and kill the lights.”

What choice did Josh have?

“Now kill the engine.”

Josh switched off the key.

“The key.”

Josh handed it over.

“Get out.”

Josh was reduced to silent-movie sight gags again. He slipped and nearly fell on his back.

“I’m going to give you something to remember,” Frazier said. “And something for your wife to remember, too.”

He drove his fist into Josh’s stomach so hard, all time, all sensory data stopped. There was only pain. His entire body, his entire mind, his entire soul was pain. He wanted to scream, he wanted to throw up, he wanted to lash out at Frazier. But he was momentarily, and completely, immobilized. He just crouched in half there, his mouth open in a sound he didn’t have strength enough to make.

Then the same fist smashed into the side of Josh’s face. He remembered how, in The Exorcist, the girl’s head had turned all the way around. Surely his head had just done the same thing.

“I don’t want you or that bitch wife of yours botherin’ me anymore, Coburn,” Frazier said. “You understand me? We speaking the same language here?”

“You... you raped my wife,” Josh managed to say. “I’ll never stop bothering you.”

“You ask her if she enjoyed it, Mr. Advertising Executive? You ask her how many times she came when I was inside her? Huh? You ask her that, you piece of shit?”

He started to move on Josh again.

And that was when the bullet tore through Frazier’s left shoulder and he was turned leftward and slammed against the exterior wall of the warehouse next to him.

Moonlight shone on the ice-glazed tarmac of the warehouse area. Fog was setting in from the nearby Lake. The bullet had come from the fog. And now something else came from the fog, too. A familiar shape. Familiar except for the .45 she was holding.

“You try and hurt my husband again, I’ll kill you right on the spot, Frazier,” Elise said.

Josh was forcing himself past his pain so he could function again. Two of his ribs, his lungs and his head pounded with agony.

“You think you got it, honey?” Elise said.

“I was just afraid,” Josh said, still out of breath, “when he hit me in the stomach he’d feel the wire.”

“The wire?” Frazier said. “What the hell you talking about?”

“It’s all been recorded,” Josh said. “And it’ll be on your commander’s desk tomorrow.”

Elise reached in and took Frazier’s gun from him.

Then she moved a step closer and brought her knee straight up the middle of his crotch. He screamed and doubled over.

“That was for both of us,” she said.

Then she led her hobbled husband away from Frazier and to the gray Saab parked three warehouses back.

Later, in bed, there in the sweet shadows, she said, “I’m sorry I still don’t feel like it, honey. But I’m getting better all the time. If you can just hold out—”

He took her tenderly to him and kissed her. And gave her the answer they both wanted to hear.