But as he bore on-chest heaving, heart pounding, a million vile words for the little bitch filling his mind-he finally saw what she obviously saw.
The twinkling lights of a farmhouse on the low, dark horizon.
Only then did he begin to notice the wind and the rain that was fast becoming sleet
Only then did he begin to notice that she was outdistancing him very badly.
Only then did he begin to notice that he would never catch her.
Bitch.
Fucking bitch.
Exhausted, he fell to his knees in the dead cornfield, stalks crackling beneath him like snapping plastic.
Sleet washed his face; wind took the sweat from his scalp. He took off the wig and the beard then, right there in the cornfield.
She would report a man with dark hair and a Vandyke beard. She would also report a car that within the hour would be returned to the rental agency.
Nothing to go on.
Absolutely nothing.
Then he felt in his back pocket for the wallet he'd planned to plant near the murder scene (just far enough away that it looked accidental). It was gone.
And then, there in the cornfield, he started laughing. There was panic in the laugh and frenzy, but there was also ironic satisfaction.
The little bitch had taken Brolan's wallet.
11
In all, Brolan and Wagner spent five hours working through the files on Emma's machine. What emerged there-for Brolan, at any rate-was a portrait of a very lovely but very naive farm girl who had soft, private dreams of being some sort of princess. Her writing was filled with references to the great Disney animated movies, Snow White and Cinderella and The Lady and the Tramp. She rented these for home video and watched them again and again. These movies-and the old copies of Photoplay and Modern Screen from the thirties that Wagner had loaned her-seemed to be her principal reality. About the men she went out with she had little to say. This or that man might be "nice," this or that man might be "nervous," this or that man might be "rude," but beyond that they had neither faces nor souls. They were just what she did for a living and nothing more. A few times she talked about the possibility of getting a venereal disease or even perhaps AIDS but she confided to her diary that she knew that "God just wouldn't let that happen."
Most of the names were there, most of the meeting places. It was a mosaic of the Twin Cities-occupations ranging from department-store head to doctor to policeman. Meeting places that included the Walker Art Centre, the Civic Centre, and the St. Paul Cathedral. Mention of bitter winter, soft spring, fiery summer. A compliment here for a certain after-shave, a compliment there for a well-cut suit. There was a man named Mr. Pinkham for whom she developed a great affection. He was mentioned at some length at least thirty times.
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.