Night Kills (9 page)

    Around four o'clock in the morning, Wagner having fixed them eggs and toast, they came to a file marked Advertising. Brolan's eyes did a cartoon-pop. Advertising? What the hell could that be all about?

    "You're getting excited," Wagner said.

    "Damn right I am."

    "I'm hurrying as fast as I can."

    "I know, I know," Brolan said, leaning over Wagner so he could read the screen.

    The first two pages were prose. She talked about how glitzy she expected the advertising world to be. But for all its surface glitter, she'd found it a noisy, vain, empty world, people strutting around in dinner jackets at ceremonies where ad people constantly gave each other awards for their so-called creativity. John had set all this up. She said this three times. John had set this up.

    Brolan said, "Who's John?"

    Wagner paused. "Her… friend."

    "Her pimp, you mean?"

    Wagner said, "I was hoping we could be a little gender, Brolan. She was a decent woman."

    Brolan noticed two things: (a) that he was no longer "Mr" Brolan, and (b) that he'd hurt Wagner's feelings.

    "I'm sorry," Brolan said.

    Wagner looked up at him and smiled. "You try awfully hard to be an asshole, but you can't quite seem to make it, can you?"

    Brolan laughed. "I guess that's a compliment."

    So they went on. More adventures in advertising. One executive had her get underneath his desk and do him while he was talking on the phone. Another executive had her do a striptease behind a huge blow-up of himself which had been used in an awards ceremony, asking her to kiss the blow-up and push herself against it. A third executive had asked her to let him beat her. She had refused.

    It was somewhere in this sad melange of hired sex and kinky turns that the name Tim Culhane first appeared. When he saw it, Brolan's heart started pounding.

    "Tim Culhane!" he said.

    "You know him?"

    "He's one of our art directors." He was the man Brolan had looked at videotapes with that afternoon.

    "Let's see if there's anything else about him."

    For the next twenty minutes they combed the files for any reference to Culhane. Brolan felt a giddy exhilaration born of exhaustion and desperation.

    Culhane.

    The man was always trying to prove his manliness. He swaggered around the offices. Whenever anybody gay appeared, he immediately started an undertow of innuendo. He gossiped with fat Shirley more than any other person-man or woman-in the shop.

    Culhane.

    My God, he was a wonderful suspect.

    In all there were three more references to Culhane, each about the same. He had asked her if she would take his belt and work him over before they had sex. When she refused, Culhane got vaguely threatening. Then he'd calmed down and had sex with her. She noted that he never once kissed her or was tender in any way. He'd wanted anal intercourse, but when she'd refused, he settled for backdoor. It was as if he didn't want to look at her at all.

    Brolan's mind was already racing ahead to his confrontation with Culhane the next day. Brolan thought again of how he'd given the executive post to Culhane's assistant. Culhane and his bitchy tongue were just too divisive to be in any position of real authority. He could easily imagine Culhane hating him enough to…

    For a long stretch there was no more mention of Culhane or anybody familiar. Brolan decided to go to the bathroom and splash water on his face. Exciting as the news about Culhane had been, Brolan was getting groggy.

    Like the kitchen, the bathroom had been cut to scale so that the four feet nine Wagner could reach things easily. In the mirror Brolan stared at himself. Once again a feeling of unreality came over him. Not even of nightmare. Just… an unlikely and harrowing turn of events. There were even comic aspects to it at certain times. A beautiful woman in a freezer. A man with a file full of scandal on various Twin Cities residents. A man (Brolan) so in love with a woman (Kathleen) that even in the midst of the worst crisis of his life he'd found time to plead and wheedle. At such terrible points in your life, you found out a lot of things about yourself. Brolan did not like very much of what he had found out these past forty hours or so.

    When he came back to the computer, Wagner said, "Didn't you mention a man named Cummings?"

    "Richard Cummings?"

    "Yes. Richard Cummings."

    "He's on there, too?"

    "Right here." By then Wagner sounded as if he, too, was caught up in the whole process. He seemed happy that he'd been able to find another useful name for Brolan.

    Brolan read the next four pages quickly. Cummings was just as kinky as he would have guessed-and just as violent. He'd twice slapped Emma and once, infuriated that she wouldn't do what he wanted her to, had dumped her off in the rain. Emma noted, with one of her rare flashes of anger, that her "friend," John Kellogg, forced her to continue seeing Cummings because Cummings was "so important" and could recommend both John and Emma to other important advertising people.

    "How do I get hold of this John Kellogg?" Brolan asked.

    Wagner smiled. "He lives over near Hennepin and Lake. He's under the impression-or at least he tries hard to give the impression-that he's an artiste and not a pimp all. He's a real piece of work, Brolan."

    Brolan laughed. "I look forward to meeting him."

    Brolan went over to the couch, and picked up his suit coat. He shrugged it on tiredly. He'd go home and catch a few hours sleep, then plod into the ad agency. He had a long day ahead of him. There was a good chance that one of the three men they'd talked about that night-Culhane or Cummings or Kellogg-had killed Emma and put her in the freezer.

    "Anything you need?" Brolan said.

    "No, thanks. I'm pretty self-sufficient."

    "You make great scrambled eggs."

    "You can thank the chicken for most of the work." The humour died in Wagner's eyes. "I want you to work closely with me on this. It's our deal, remember?"

    "I won't forget."

    "And when you catch the right one…" He let his voice trail off.

    "I don't want you to do anything you'll regret," Brolan said. Wagner just stared at him. "Let me know how things are going."

    Brolan nodded and left.

    

    

    
Thursday Morning

    WHILE ADVERTISING PEOPLE are no better or worse than any other group of professionals, they've developed a reputation, largely through the media, of being less than hardworking. God only knows how this got started. Walk into virtually any ad agency at any time of night or day, and you'll find demons at work, people obsessed and possessed by their jobs. Ask the art director who worked until three because a client changed his mind on a certain layout and wanted to see a new version by 9:00 a.m. the following morning. Ask the media buyer who's just been given an additional three hundred thousand to spend on TV, only to learn that the targeted states are Utah and Wyoming (not a lot of fun to buy, given their population, their demographics, and their scarcity of stations). Or ask the account executive who's just sat through a very mean-spirited client meeting, the client accusing the agency of being lazy, too expensive, and greedy (But other than that, you sort of like us, don't you? the account exec wants to say); and now said account exec must come up with a new presentation to mollify this puffing dragon, and he's got (he figures) maybe two days maximum to do so. Such execs have been known to sleep on their couches and exist on Domino's pizza for as long as forty-eight hours. So let's put that "lazy" canard to rest. While ad people may not be budding Mother Teresas-but then, look around and ask who is?-they certainly know how to work, and how to work hard.

    Two meetings required Brolan's attention. One dealt with a thirty-second commercial one of the account executives was having trouble with. The client had thought it was too slow-moving. After the agency had re-edited it, the client felt it was too fast-moving. At the top of the meeting this morning the account executive, a plump, well-dressed man named Baines, said, "Why don't we get down on all fours and look at it from the client's point of view?" It was the oldest gag in advertising. It never failed to get a laugh.

    So, Brolan had Baines show him both versions of the spot. The product was a local restaurant chain. In the first version the people in the spot all looked as if they were having a ten-course meal. The scenes went on too long for the message the tagline was trying to convey-"Fast food prices for real-food meals." True, "real food" implied the old tablecloth and the old personal service and the old well-balanced meal… but did it have to be presented so boringly? With Mantovani strings in the background? And with table candles that you wouldn't actually find in the place? Brolan could see exactly why the client would object to this version.

    The second version looked like a fast food spot. No sense of sit-down, leisurely dining at all. So many scenes cut so quickly that the place looked like McDonald's with table candles. No atmosphere at all.

    As with most things there was room for a happy medium. As he watched, Brolan made notes on a long yellow legal pad. When the lights came up in the screening room, he turned around and gave his quickly considered wisdom to Baines, noting that some scenes and techniques from number one could be merged with scenes and techniques from number two in order to get a better product.

    "You agree with our esteemed client?" Baines was one of those guys who disliked clients on principle, forgetting, apparently, who the hell was paying his salary.

    "I do."

    "I kinda liked number one."

    "Too funereal."

    "Too what?"

    "Too slow; too sombre. We want them to come to one of our restaurants and have good food. We don't plan to embalm them." Baines shrugged. "I'll give your notes to the TV boys." Then he quickly changed to his favourite subject: the Vikings. "You catch them Sunday?"

    "Afraid I didn't." Brolan was one of thirty-two people in the entire Twin Cities who did not follow the Vikings. Or the baseball team, either, for that matter. As more than one Viking fan had said, there was a special place in hell for people like Brolan. About that Brolan couldn't argue. There probably was. But it probably didn't have to do with the Vikings.

    On waking that morning, Brolan's overriding thought had been to find out how it was that Tim Culhane had come to know Emma. And just how far Culhane would go to act out his obvious hatred of Brolan.

    

    

    On the way back to the production department-thirty minutes before his next meeting-he stopped by Kathleen's office to see if she was in yet. Because she always kept her door closed whether she was there or not, it was difficult to tell.

    Shirley, the secretary the account executives shared, sat Buddha-like behind her battleship of a desk. Before her, like treasure she was admiring, lay two pieces of pastry, a strawberry kolach and a long john. The latter was sugar-coated and had a huge white wiggle of frosting on its top. Just what Shirley, at maybe two hundred fifty pounds, needed.

    As always, however, Shirley was a testament to what big-and-tall shops could do for their customers. She wore a dark suit of sensible cut (sensible, given her size), a turquoise blouse, and some attractive rhinestones here and there. Her fleshy face was made pretty with makeup. For a woman her size, she was actually damned attractive.

    But only if you didn't know her. Shirley, alas, was the agency gossip. Oh, everybody gossiped, even those self-righteous people who said that they hated gossip on principle. Everybody carried stories of who was sleeping with whom, who might be gay, who had a drinking problem, whose clients were slipping away. It was nothing to be proud of, certainly, but it seemed ineluctably human-people, even those who were otherwise decent, even those who were otherwise caring and sensitive people, indulged in gossip.

    But with Shirley it was different. There was a meanness, an excitement, a pleasure in her gossip. When she knew something about you, she smirked every time you passed by. And if you had offended her in some way-Shirley was easily offended-then stories about you mysteriously started making the rounds. The past spring an art director Shirley despised had lost ten pounds. Shirley said it was from AIDS. A few months later a media buyer Shirley loathed was said to be having her two children taken from her because of her wild life-style. The woman was forever tainted with the notion that she was a bad mother. And so on. People loved to hang around Shirley's desk and hear her viciously and cleverly work over people who weren't there. In her repellent way she could be quite funny. This gave her a curious power within the agency. Shirley was in some respects the agency's arbiter of taste and standards. You always wanted Shirley's approval; you always wanted to be on Shirley's good side. Because otherwise Shirley would cut you up behind your back. But that was the irony, Brolan had learned. No matter how much you kissed up to her, no matter how friendly she might seem on the surface, she would inevitably turn on you. Brolan always wondered why the people who sucked up to her couldn't see that. That when they were gone, it was they Shirley talked about. Brolan had wanted her fired several months before. Foster had convinced him that she did good work, got along with all the account executives, and was not really a liability. This was one of those instances when Brolan had deferred to his partner. Foster felt more strongly about keeping her than Brolan did about firing her.

    As Brolan approached Kathleen's closed door, Shirley said, "Not in." She didn't look up from the paperwork she was doing at her desk. She liked to give the impression that, like nuns, she had eyes in the back of her head.