Night Kills by Ed Gorman

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