A Winsome Murder (2 page)

Tom went over to the answering machine and tapped the Play button. The message was garbled. He played it again. Jotted down the time. Deanne leaned into the kitchen doorway, shielding her eyes, and Tom apologized for waking her.

“You coming to bed?” she asked.

“Not just yet.”

“Why, what now?”

“Nothing. Go on back to sleep. It's only Helga.” Tom headed back down the hallway for his keys. “I couldn't make out what she was saying. I don't know, a dead animal or something out by the highway. Be back in a bit.”

K
evin Lachlan sat in his car and lit a cigarette. Parked in a clearly marked No Parking zone in front of the Bank Street Diner, he didn't care if his car got booted or towed away. Actually, he hoped it would so he wouldn't have to return to work and face the little bitch Mara Davies again, a spiky-haired witch who color-coordinated her eyeglass frames with whatever too-tight skirt she'd slithered into that morning, a woman too old for her hip hairdos and too short for the three-inch spike heels she liked to
ka-lick
around in every day. One stupid night, a drunken night he couldn't even remember, and he'd been paying for it ever since.

Lachlan cranked the AC and opened the window. He wanted two minutes of peace and quiet. The day was only going to get worse, he could feel it. Mara had set the meeting up without asking him and the last thing he wanted to do today was listen to some hack children's book writer perform a dog and pony show she'd probably memorized out of
Guerrilla Marketing for the Writer
. Give me grownups, for fuck's sake, he thought, flicking his cigarette out the window, I want to work with grownups. He shouldered open the car door and headed into the diner.

The Bank Street was the only place in Chicago Lachlan knew of where you could still smoke. Not that it was legal there, they just didn't care. Somebody on the payroll somewhere. He spotted the woman he'd come to meet right away. She was sitting in a booth and waving at him as if she knew him. He gave a half wave back as the owner of the diner took off his glasses and stepped from behind the register. He whispered something in Lachlan's ear.

J
illian McClay had allowed enough time for traffic jams, flat tires, wrong directions, road construction, lack of parking, and unforeseen acts of God—none of which she encountered—and arrived in downtown Chicago an hour before her meeting with Kevin Lachlan, editor
of the
American Forum
magazine. The first thing she did when she got there was buy a pack of cigarettes. Whenever she traveled more than an hour from home she became a smoker again. Like tax deductions, rules were different out-of-town.

Walking into the Bank Street Diner, she first thought that she either was in the wrong place or had wandered onto the set of a Quentin Tarantino movie. The Bank Street looked like the scene of some Slovakian mob hit waiting to happen. When she came through the door, the entire staff paused in their routines and stared. The cook, watching her, set two dishes on the countertop so slowly that neither plate made a sound. The waitresses, staring, kept doing whatever it was they were doing—serving, counting cash—only they did it slower. Even the overhead fans turned with deliberateness. Bad country music was playing, and dying aloe plants were splayed against the windows of each booth as if gut shot.

Jillian stood by the door and waited to be seated. A man with a face like work walked toward her. Middle aged and oddly handsome in the way that ugly men can sometimes be handsome, he sipped his coffee and nodded to her. He wore black-rimmed glasses, a black suit, gray tie, and gray sweater. A charcoal man. He handed Jillian a menu heavy with plastic. “Sit, please, where you like,” he said in a soft accent that, although pleasant, somehow conveyed the sense that he was a person one was never to screw around with, like one of those quiet neighbors you read about who work in their garages late at night carving tiny wooden Santas and are later discovered to have been guilty of genocide somewhere in the Balkans.

Jillian slid into a booth, avoiding the tangle of dead plant limbs hanging off the windowsill, and took out her cigarettes. An older man in a black suit, gray vest and tie, looking much like a twin of the charcoal man, slipped in from between the kitchen's swinging doors. He circled the room silently, paused near the front door, looked out the windows, and then glided, shark-like, back into the kitchen. Jillian dragged over an ashtray, lit her cigarette, and scanned the room. She couldn't write a place like this if she wanted to. The employees all looked as if they belonged to some vaguely Slavic mafia with an enforced dress code of black and gray and instructions to move more slowly than normal people. They sported runway-worthy scowls and smoked cigarettes like
they were inhaling sex. Jillian envied the fact that they still smoked in restaurants in Chicago. And still had sex.

A pretty waitress, late twenties maybe, walked past Jillian's booth. She had dark waist-length hair and wore a gray polo and black spandex pants. She had a pot of coffee in each hand and drifted through the diner topping off customers' cups. She walked over to Jillian's booth, well aware that every man in the place was staring at her and looking like she could care less.

“You know what you like?” she asked in a weary Euro-something accent.

“Just coffee, please,” she said, reading
Fenyana
on the girl's skinny name tag.

The waitress filled Jillian's cup, spilling coffee into the saucer beneath and looking completely bored. Bored and beautiful. Not Hollywood beautiful, deeply beautiful. A plain face, new and undented, and breasts that whispered, “We're young, we're young.” As she walked away, Jillian snuck a look down at her own breasts, adjusted her blouse, nostalgically, and sucked her belly a little farther behind the waist of her jeans.

On her second cup of coffee she saw Kevin Lachlan walk in. Not quite fat, pudgy, a bright red face, salt-and-pepper hair. He was dressed well: suit, dark blue and double-breasted. She'd seen his picture in the magazine, but he looked older in person. Jillian caught his eye with a wave just as the man in gray walked from behind the counter and whispered something to him. Lachlan smiled at the man and then headed toward Jillian. She stubbed out her cigarette and stepped out of the booth.

“Jillian McClay,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Kevin Lachlan,” he said. “Thanks for driving in.”

Lachlan took off his jacket, and they both slid into the booth. He'd already sweated through his shirt. “So,” he said, “Mara speaks highly of you.” He set his iPhone down on the table and turned up his coffee cup. “You two been friends long?”

“We met at the book expo about fifteen years ago.”

The waitress with the beautiful everything came over and filled Lachlan's cup without asking. “Cream,” he said, not looking up. He was about to say something else when his iPhone spun in a half circle on the table before him. He groaned slightly. “Sorry, I have to get this.”
Jillian waited as he listened to the message. Lachlan smiled, trying to fill the awkward silence, saying, “Mara really likes your books, by the way. I haven't had a chance to read them yet.”

Neither has anyone else, Jillian thought.

The waitress brought over a tiny bowl mounded with containers of cream.

“Eat?” she asked, setting it down.

Lachlan, still listening to his messages, glanced at his watch and said no.

“You?” she asked Jillian.

“No, thanks.”

The waitress left and Lachlan put down his phone. “Sorry about that.” He emptied a few creams into his coffee. “So,” he said, “this idea, this story of yours. Talk to me.”

Jillian lit another cigarette. “Mr. Lachlan,” she said, “I'm sure you're very busy. I drove three and half hours and I have to be back by five, so here's the pitch. If you don't like it, thanks for your time.”

Lachlan took a long sip of his coffee, and said, “Go.”

“Winsome Bay, Wisconsin. Bucolic small-town America. Apple pie, county fairs, Corn Queens, unlocked doors. Then a murder. The brutal killing of a young girl. First murder in the town in sixty years. A sort of
Fargo
meets
Northern Exposure
meets
In Cold Blood
. A killer on the loose. Will it happen again? Weekly installments written in chapters. Creative nonfiction.” Jillian leaned into the table. “A true crime story evolving in real time. The reader gets
my
point of view, not some famous author who churns out a book a month, or brilliant about-to-retire detective on his last case, but me, someone who usually writes children's books and has never even been on a crime scene before. Someone who doesn't like dead bodies. Someone who is scared to even put this murder down on paper.”

“What murder?” Lachlan asked.

“Deborah Ellison. It happened a week ago.”

“I've heard the name.”

“The girl in Wisconsin.”

“I read about it.”

“They found her body in the town right next to mine.”

Despite his best efforts not to, Lachlan began to listen more closely. “Tell me more.”

“Here's the angle. I don't apologize for my lack of experience, or my fears, I
write
about them. I write about the very same fears my reader has. This story is bound to get ugly, lurid, unimaginably horrific, and I want to make the reader complicit with every turn of the page, just as I'm complicit every time I write one. Our reader doesn't have to go on. They can put the story down. I don't have to write it. I can stick to children's books. But neither of us stops. Just like the killer who could have stopped, but didn't.” Jillian mashed her cigarette into the ashtray. “That's what I want to write about.”

Lachlan waved for more coffee. “Any suspects?”

“No. But I've already interviewed a few people from the town who knew the victim and her family, and I've got a meeting set up with the chief of police there.”

“You think there's enough to make a serial out of it?”

Jillian took a thin manuscript out of her bag and placed it on the table. “This is rough. There's enough there for two, maybe three installments.”

Lachlan took up the pages and leafed through them, silent for a moment. Small-town murder, he thought, rural Midwest, it might sell. Might even increase sales in Iowa and Minnesota. He could make an offer: option to publish upon approval, no advance. Not much risk.

“Mr. Lachlan,” Jillian said, “I can write this.”

Lachlan looked across the table and held out his hand.

“Call me Kevin.”

 

J. McClay/Killing/American Forum

The Killing of Deborah Ellison

Jillian saved her document, scrolled up to the top, and began editing the first few paragraphs of her new story. At five that morning, she had hobbled into her sweatpants, hustled down the stairs to the kitchen, poured a thermos of coffee—preperked on a timer—and headed out the back door, wide awake and ready to work. She'd tugged open the creaky barn door of her writing studio, a converted carriage house in her backyard, and made her way up the stairs, avoiding whatever spider webs and bat guano had accumulated overnight. She unlocked the door and hit the lights. She had tried writing in the house when Michael was little, but found it torture. At fourteen now, he was used to waking up alone. He'd been making his own breakfast since he was seven. In the days when he still liked Jillian, he used to take breakfast out to her studio: badly microwaved eggs, cold toast, too chocolaty chocolate milk, and a small alp of ketchup. A lifetime ago. Before iPhones and puberty.

Jillian poured another cup of coffee.

She hadn't been this focused and ready to write in a long time.