Malevolent (2 page)

“Not really. All I know is, I’m inside my place and I hear this scream. A shriek, I guess. I get out here and she’s already drawing a crowd. She’s babbling at about ninety miles an hour, but I can’t catch a word of it. I’m thinking she’s drunk, maybe, and pissed of at her boyfriend. You know? Or she just got kicked out of one of the rough bars further up the street.”

The guy prattled on some more, and then stopped. He chuckled, planted his ball cap lower over his head and downshifted, his voice more serious now. “Finally, I picked up a word or two.
Rape
, for one, and I even”—he stopped and chuckled here—“I even thought I heard her mention my place. Probably heard her wrong.”

The dude stayed in motion while he talked, running his fingers through his beard, pulling his baggy jeans out of his ass, repositioning his ball cap, returning his hands to the protection of his armpits.

Tim pulled his bike inches closer. “
Your
place?”

He tapped the bill of his cap. Tim squinted in the near dark to take in the eighties-style, pink-and-turquoise logo up there.
AfterHours Video
, it read.

“It was a movie,” the stranger explained. “Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette. Cheech and Chong cameos. Quirky comedy, I think the critics might have called it. Or plotless, yet intermittently intriguing. Griffin’s my name too, but Solloway, not Dunne. My bad luck.”

He pointed up the street, where Tim could see pink-and-turquoise neon forming the same logo as on the dude’s cap, but in the plate glass of a small brick building that had, not too long ago if Tim remembered right, housed a dry cleaners.

“I’ve been in business since the first of the year. My father died and left a little insurance money. My mom’s my partner, but she stays home in Parma. Thinks she’ll get raped if she leaves the ’burbs.” He glanced meaningfully at the street scene still playing out in the flicker of emergency vehicles. “Don’t know where she got
that
idea.” He seemed to have at least the good sense to wince and mutter, “Sorry,” at his inappropriate little joke.

“I should get back,” he said. “When I heard the screams, I turned my sign to
Closed
, left my cash in the till and all the lights on. Don’t remember if I locked the front door or not. Be ironic if someone’s looting my place while I’m out here checking out a crime scene.”

“I didn’t know there were any privately owned video shops anymore,” Tim said. Even Blockbuster was out of business. The concept of actually walking to a video store and picking up your DVD now seemed as dated as the
Miami Vice
era logo on the guy’s cap.

“That’s the beauty of it,” said Griffin, cheerfully. “I got a niche no one else can fill. Not everyone has a Netflix account. And AfterHours is a destination. A place to go. Think about it.” He was on a roll, the guy’s unprotected cash seemingly forgotten. “The bars close at two, you’re going home alone, but you’re not ready to shut it down yet. What do you do?”

“Go to Denny’s?”

“Or…?”

Tim shifted his helmet from one hand to the other and gave in to the obvious. “You rent a movie.”

“Exactly. In a place that draws a social network of like-minded insomniac film freaks. A place like…”

“AfterHours.”

“Right.”

Tim considered this. He’d rode past the building before, but couldn’t remember seeing much activity any time of the day or night. He could guess what kind of movies drew the attention of the lonely, red-eyed sons of bitches stumbling out of the neighborhood bars, the promise of love with the improper stranger giving way to the reality of last call and a little solo entertainment back at the lonely apartment. He’d been there. “So what do you carry, a lot of skin flicks?”

Griffin looked a little hurt. “All kinds, really.”

Uh huh.

The ambulance’s rear doors slammed, catching Tim’s attention. One cop began to shoo foot traffic away. The woman cop with the tight jeans was circulating among the gawkers, taking notes in a leather memo pad. Tim liked the way she’d shove her compact little body right into the personal space of much taller men, grabbing their attention with her attitude as well as her looks.

“So, the victim…?” said Tim, prodding. He’d earned a journalism degree at Kent State and had at one time thought he’d be a reporter. That hadn’t worked out, but he still had a nose for news.

Griffin was staring in the direction of his shop. “I guess it’ll be okay,” he murmured. Then he took a breath and said, “From all the religious crap she was babbling about angels and demons and shit, I think she must have just left that weird church across the way.”

Tim looked where the bearded dude was pointing. He’d passed it without a thought on numerous occasions, the last building on Utica Lane before it ended at Broadview. It sat across Broadview from the video shop. Short and squat like an overgrown trailer home. Only the brown cross attached to the graying aluminum siding and the
Utica Lane Church of Redemption
sign out front identified it as a house of worship among the street’s nondescript wood-frame homes and brick bungalows.

“Rape’s what she claims,” said Griffin, raising a thick eyebrow knowingly. “But I flew out the door soon as I heard her, and I sure didn’t see no one.”

The crowd was thinning now, their expressions as glum and disappointed as if they’d watched a jumper backing off of a ledge.

“What time is it?”

The dude pulled a cell phone out of a pocket. “Nine seventeen.”

Tim swore quietly.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said ‘shit’.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Nothing.” But what did Tim care if this guy he’d never see again knew how pussy-whipped he was? “My girlfriend’s gonna bitch, that’s all. I told her I’d be home an hour ago. This’ll give her more proof of my irresponsibility.”

“Least you got one. A girlfriend. I’m dating myself these days.”

So am I
, Tim considered contributing, but didn’t.

“Since you’re already in trouble, why don’t you stop by and see my place.”

Tim threw a leg over his bike. “Thanks, but I’d better get going.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Tim watched him shrug it off. With a sudden and quite uncommon burst of insight, he knew the dude wanted to show off his place. He was proud of it. And he’d probably be sitting alone in there into the wee hours and could use the company.

“On the other hand,” Tim said, “I’m only a minute from home. And my girlfriend hates me already.”

“Cool,” said the video dude.

Chapter Three

She’d left a light on for him, as he’d assumed she would. He could hear one of the season’s first moths beating its dinged-up wings against the flickering yellow bulb over the vegetable sink in the kitchen.

“Do you really need that at this hour? Late night calories are the ones that don’t say good-bye.”

He’d heard his mother padding down the stairs and she’d obviously heard the refrigerator door opening and closing. As he pulled the tab, Polly Solloway hissed in perfect pitch with the
skwoosh
of escaping fizz from his beer.

“Aw, Ma,” he said. He tapped one of her solid shoulders, a greeting as well as a haphazard apology.

“Hmph,” she said, rolling her eyes dramatically. She plopped into a kitchen chair, cinched her already tightly cinched thin cotton robe, yawned dramatically and nodded at the clock.

The plastic timepiece was unapologetically kitschy, a boy in Alpine gear who’d pop out of a colorful chalet twice an hour while a caged cuckoo cried out the passage of time. The clock had hung defiant of style or taste from the same wall since Griffin was a child.

At this particular moment, their Swiss-motif timepiece reported it to be 4:17 a.m. His mother’s frown said that respectable people didn’t crack open beer cans at that hour.

Griffin shrugged, grinned, swigged.

She clucked her disapproval, making it her final word on the subject. His mother was, if nothing else, a gracious loser. “How’d it go?” she asked.

Griffin joined her at the kitchen table. He had to think about how to start. Something just wasn’t sitting right.

“What is it?” Polly demanded, her voice adopting that excitable whine that struck him like fingernails on a glossy magazine. “We have a bad day? Oh Lord, I told you to stay out of Cleveland with our insurance money. What was wrong with Parma? I knew this would—”

“Ma, everything’s fine with the store. We only did about twenty bucks by midnight, but it got busy after that. We added a hundred or so by closing.”

“Uh huh,” she said, still staring him down until she worked it out of him.

First, he poured the remaining half of the cold beer down his throat. Beer always tasted better in the summertime, he reflected, though he couldn’t remember ever turning it down even in the dead of winter.

“We had a little excitement down the street,” he said. “Woman got attacked.”

Attacked?
As innocuous a word as he could manage for his mother’s sake.

Polly clenched her thin robe even tighter, as if she herself were the object of the deranged lust. For an exquisite moment, she had absolutely nothing to say. She repositioned the Amish children salt and pepper shakers on the Formica tabletop. Her eyes darted to the night beyond the lacy curtain covering the room’s one small window.

“The police were on the scene practically before the screaming stopped,” Griffin added, his intention to defuse, however slightly, Polly’s reaction to the big bad city and her child’s blame for putting their inheritance at its mercy.

“The
screaming
,” she said.

Okay, so he’d been a little too descriptive.

“Did he kill her?” she asked in hushed tones. As her cheeks flushed with what Griffin guessed to be equal parts dread, horror and excitement, she looked like every face in the crowd that night.

“No, nothing like that.”

“Well, still,” his mother muttered, the glitter fading from her blue eyes. “That’s exactly the reason I urged you not to open for business in that city.”

“Because you thought I’d get raped?”

Her raspy sigh told him that this was no time to joke, and yet a giggle threatened to break free from her.

As a further distraction, he almost told his mother about his new friend, Tim. In fact, the first words—“Oh, by the way…”—were already out of his mouth when the doorbell chimed and made them both jump and suck air.

Polly’s face went pale, her eyes wide as one hand fluttered to her mouth. Griffin took her other hand and squeezed it once. He rose shakily from his chair and walked toward the front door.

“Griffin!”

“It’s okay, Ma.” Wishing he believed it.

It was a stranger he saw through the porthole window in the front door, but he unlocked and opened it anyway. She looked up at him and studied his face.

“Mr. Solloway? Griffin Solloway?” she said. “We’re sorry to disturb you at this late hour.”

Yes, he knew her now. But the knowledge didn’t calm his edginess. In fact, her presence on his front stoop started to give voice to the dull, nameless anxiety he’d felt since earlier in the evening.

“
He
did it, the demon with the dirty movies. He did this to me.”
What he’d heard from that woman sprawled on the sidewalk as the police arrived, but hadn’t mentioned even to his new friend, Tim.

The attractive young woman on his doorstep was slimmer and smaller than average, but the directness of her gaze added muscle pounds and inches. Griffin couldn’t help wondering where she kept her gun. Probably in the small of her very small back.

The man looming in the shadows behind her was broad and tall. The bill of his cap identified him as a Parma police officer. No doubt tagging along as an escort for this out-of-jurisdiction interview.

The lady cop flit her gaze from Griffin to his mother, hiding in the shadows like the male cop. She identified herself as Detective Melinda Dillon from the Sex Crimes Unit of the Cleveland Police Department, and Polly said, “Oh.” Said it the way she might have sounded if Detective Dillon had announced that she had AIDS and would like to sleep with her son.

Griffin nodded in reply to a question that had been asked ages ago. Yes indeed, he was Mr. Griffin Solloway.

Detective Dillon’s sharp eyes flashed back to his mother.

“Polly Solloway,” Ma said. “His mother.”

In the hard-edged
noir
films from the 1940s which he adored, the hero always stayed cool, his tongue firing clever dialogue like the bad guys rattled machine guns. But Griffin couldn’t think of a single wisecrack to fill in the dead space after introductions had been made.

The tall Parma cop’s shoulder-mounted radio belched static. Still just a shadow in the background. Maybe he didn’t actually have a face.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Solloway,” the lady cop said, “but I wonder if we can talk to your son.”

Griffin led the two to the living room. The shadow cop still didn’t speak. He looked too big for the cluttered space. He might have thought so too, for he found himself a patch of corner and stayed there. Ma, Griffin knew, had retreated only as far as the kitchen, where she’d hear every word.