Blue Murder Stories

The Executioners

The driveway gate was opening, but it began to close as if on its own as I drove through and up toward the house. It was a clouded night and a dark walk between the drive and the front door. I paused a moment on the front step, cleared my throat, shut my eyes, and finally pressed the buzzer at the door after standing back. There were low winds, no other sounds.

A distant voice finally broke through the buzzer, and said in an electronic pitch, 'Hello, come on in. I'll be down in a few moments. Make yourself a drink, please.'

The house looked pretty much as I imagined it: big, expensive, lifeless. I expected Michael Lennox to look the same, whoever he was. I'd long had an image of him in my mind, not anything of detail, just something dim in the sketchings of my imagination to make him real.

I stood there for a few moments after opening the door into a deep white living room, not knowing what to do, what was natural or not, or why I'd even decided to come at all.

I was imagining Terry here with him when I heard brisk footsteps into the room behind me.

The image I had of him was close. Lennox was tall, well-built, deep-tanned, and didn't look his age; whatever it was, really—two decades older than myself, at least. He was dressed down in well-threaded shirt sleeves, rolled. He put out his broad hand and took mine quickly, squeezed it hard, eyed me darkly with his shark-brown eyes.

'I'm so glad to meet you—Christopher, wasn't it? Yes, Christopher Thorson, I remember. I'm Michael Lennox. You probably know that. You haven't made yourself a drink.'

'No, it's alright...'

'I'll make you one, don't worry. Sit down, please, anywhere you like.'

He didn't ask what I drank but went to the bar at the end of the room and built something in a crystal tumbler. I fell nervously into a spot on the nearest sofa. I didn't know at all what his plan for the evening was. Maybe it was just a simple meeting of benevolence, as he'd led me to believe when I first heard his authoritative voice calling me out of the blue.

But there was a reason I'd decided to come when he invited me to his house tonight, as bad an idea I told myself it was. Hard as I tried to ignore it, I still wanted to have some clear idea of who Michael Lennox was—or even just the person he was in Terry's life. Now that I was seeing him; sitting in his lifeless, expensive house; being served his liquor with vacant trust, he was almost exactly as I thought him to be in the first place. Old and rich. The kind of person who could afford to keep someone like Terry as a plaything. Someone who could buy off emotion and exchange it with hollow diversion for his own ego.

How could I tell him that we weren't the same, Lennox and I, as much as he might have wanted to think so with this little summit between us? At least I still knew deep inside myself that what Terry and I had was special. Lennox would probably try to tell me the exact same thing.

'It feels so long ago, doesn't it?' Lennox said.

I realised I'd been circling in my own thoughts again; I startled a little when I heard his voice suddenly. 'What does?'

Lennox was coming back across the room with a glass, just one: three ice cubes and sky-clear vodka. 'Learning about you from the police, of course,' he said as I took the drink. 'I mean, I remember Terry telling me he was seeing someone else, but never any details, you know.'

'No, he didn't tell me anything either.'

'Except that the other guy he was with was an artist. That's true, isn't it?'

I squirmed a little in my seat. Lennox was standing over me like a trunk of stone, looking down.

'Well, not really,' I said. 'I manage a local gallery. Co-manage it, actually.'