Happy Halloween! Here's an unexpected short story.
A Good Night's Sleep will hopefully haunt you
A couple of years ago, I sold one of my favorite creepy stories, “A Good Night’s Sleep,” to the fine folks at Murderous Ink Press for their Crimeucopia series. It’s a dark little gem of a psychological thriller, and as I was looking at my contract the other day, it hit me that the reprint rights to the story had reverted to me.
So here’s “A Good Night’s Sleep.” I hope it sends a shiver down your spine this Halloween season!
A Good Night’s Sleep
By Bobby Mathews
Corley Brown wasn’t fidgeting. He wasn’t feigning sleep. He wasn’t doing any of the million little tells a murderer’s body uses to betray him. He seemed perfectly calm, sitting there and waiting for someone to come and take his statement. His hands rested on the tabletop, steel handcuffs glinting in the low light of a flickering bulb. His wide shoulders were square, and his hair was thin and dry and brown, long over the top to cover a spot of male pattern baldness. His eyes were clear and bright, and he was smiling.
It’s the smile I can’t forget.
It wasn’t a smirk. It wasn’t sarcastic or mean. It wasn’t hurtful. Corley Brown had the smile of a happy man, and I couldn’t understand it. Happy men don’t kill their wives. They don’t come home from their job at the insurance office and use a framing hammer on their wife and children. They don’t leave the bodies in the living room and go upstairs to their bedrooms to nap while their neighbors call the police.
But that’s exactly what Corley Brown had done.
I took the thin case file into the room with me, a few pages of notes, initial forensic details of how the Brown family had been beaten up and left where they lay. The cops who found the bodies—veterans both, guys with more than a decade on the job—had to run the other direction and thrown up. All while Corley Brown slept on, unaware.
Brown didn’t stand up when I entered the room. He couldn’t. The small gray table where he sat featured a large O ring bolted into the center. The chain of Brown’s handcuffs ran through it.
“You ready to talk about it?” I asked as I tossed the buff-colored file embossed with the Las Vegas Metro Police emblem onto the table.
“What do you want me to say? You know what happened just as well as I do.”
I dragged a chair out, turned it around and straddled it so I could fold my arms over the back. Opened the file and looked at it, not really doing anything, just letting my eyes skip across the pictures of the three victims. There was Rannie, Corley’s wife, and Bradley, who would have been ten in a couple of weeks, and Abigail, who was four. None of them would be getting any older.
I took a white card out of my shirt pocket and read Miranda to him. The uniforms at the scene had already done that, gotten the arrest on video, but I had learned a long time ago that you had to be careful so that there were no questions later.
“I know what happened,” I said. “What I want to know is why.”
Brown shrugged his shoulders and yawned. I could see molars in bad need of a dentist.
“I don’t really give a damn what you want,” he said. “Why don’t matter, does it? Why just fucks everything up for you. I did it. I’ll cop to it. Now let’s quit fucking around. Put me back in my cell and let me get some rest.”
I shook my head.
“It doesn’t work that way. I ask the questions. You answer them.”
Corley stared at me, gave another little shrug.
“Whatever, man,” he said.
“Why did you kill your wife?”
“Are you married?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Then you ought to understand.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I’ve been married for thirteen years. Some of those years were good, and some were bad. Sometimes I wanted to hug Lacey, and sometimes I wanted to strangle her. So I guess I knew exactly what he meant.
“Was there something specific that set you off today?”
When Corley said no, I believed him. Whatever happened in that gray little bungalow on Third Avenue, it had been building for a long time. I kept my eyes on his, watched how steady they were. It was unsettling. He looked at peace, the sonofabitch.
“Tell me what it was about,” I said.
He laughed.
“You are like a dog after a goddamn bone,” he said.
I tapped the gold shield hanging from the lapel of my JC Penney suit. “It’s my business.”
Corley Brown’s eyes skimmed the room. He wasn’t uneasy. He was just looking at his surroundings. Interview One isn’t much of a room. If you’ve ever seen a cop show on TV, you’ve seen one just like it.
“I never thought I’d end up here,” he said. “I thought I could wait it out, you know?”
I didn’t say anything, and after a long moment, Corley Brown sighed. He looked me up and down for a moment.
“You got kids? Of course you do. You got the look. Solid citizen all around, right? I could probably tell your life story. Army, right? Used the GI Bill to go to college. Got out after twenty, caught onto the cops right away.”
Almost. I’d been in the Navy. Took the exam for the fire department and the cops. Cops came through first. I didn’t tell Brown any of that, though. I didn’t have to. He was just warming up.
“I sell insurance. Tough game, you know? Auto, home, whole life. Lotta stress. You gotta make sales to keep the money coming in. Pressure all the time.”
Since silence was my best interrogation technique, I kept at it. I cocked my head to show I was listening.
“Rannie just—it was a lot of things. We got the country club membership, last year’s Lexus. Mortgage isn’t upside down, but it’s close. Always fighting about money. Kids need clothes. Tennis rackets for the club. But we can’t just go down to Wal-Mart and pick up a twenty-dollar stick. Got rackets? Great. Gotta have lessons. It bears down on a man.
“This time it was landscaping. We just had the yard done three years ago, but now she wanted a—what the hell did she call it?—a goddamn water feature.”
Now I did interrupt. “A what?”
“A fucking fountain. She wanted to put up a fountain in the front yard, re-do the driveway into a circle with crushed oyster shells, that sort of thing. You know how much money that shit costs?”
I thought about it for a minute. The casinos and hotels all had water features, but they also had money to burn. Even if the Browns were rich, that kind of thing was just throwing money down the drain. So to speak.
“You killed your wife over a fountain?”
Corley Brown looked puzzled, puffed his lips out and blew a lock of his dry brown hair away from his forehead.
“No,” he said. “I killed her because she tried to stop me from killing the kids.”
My hands lost all sensation. I heard the pen clatter to the scuffed linoleum floor. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just sat there for a moment. I tried to get to my feet, but my legs bent at unnatural angles. Finally I lunged for the door and made it into the hallway before I puked. I scrambled away from the hot vomit, my numb feet kicking at the floor. I couldn’t feel anything. My bladder felt like it would let go at any moment. I put my back against the wall and covered my head with the dead sticks of my arms.
The tears came then, and I let them. Those children—those babies—I couldn’t get them out of my head. A shadow blocked out the overhead light for a moment, and I peeked out from between the protective shell of my arms. Eric Church, my captain, had his hands on his hips. He was looking down at me like he’d never seen me before.
“Get back in there,” he said. My captain isn’t known for his soft, fuzzy side. “I’ll get someone to clean this mess up.”
Church put out his hand, and I reached across the thousand-mile gap between us to take it. He hauled me to my feet and slapped me on the back. In close, he whispered in my ear.
“It’s the worst goddamn thing I ever heard. You’ve got to finish it, though. You know that, don’t you?”
I did know it. It’s part of what makes a cop who he is. You gotta be able to take the shit that comes with the job. It’s part of being a stand-up guy, part of that thin blue line that protects society from itself. If your brother officers sense weakness in you, that they can’t count on you when the shit goes down, it could spell curtains for your career. If they can’t trust you—or even think they can’t—then you’re out. Persona non grata.
Church pumped my hand once, hard, and we gave each other a firm little nod. He bent and handed me the brown manila evidence folder that lay on the floor where I’d dropped it. I felt like the quarterback being asked to go back in and win the game with a minute left and no timeouts remaining. There was sweat on my neck and face, and my bladder was full to bursting.
I ignored everything else and crossed the hall back to Interview One. Opened the door. Corley Brown looked sympathetic, the asshole.
“Everything OK?” He asked. His tone was neutral, slightly concerned. No mocking sarcasm. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong with him.
“Fine,” I said. “Right as rain.” I took my seat again. I was trying to pick up where we’d left off, but I couldn’t seem to find the thread of our conversation. I shuffled his file around a little and cleared my throat.
“Your wife was trying to stop you from killing your children,” I said.
He nodded, his green eyes bright with earnestness.
“Of course,” he said, “she was a good mother. You know how mama bears are, don’t want you to mess with their cubs. I guess it’s genetic.” Brown paused for a moment and stared through the window to the world outside. That window was two panes thick with chicken wire sandwiched in the middle. You could see a little bit of Fire Station No. 6 across Stella Lake Street, but not much else. He wasn’t going anywhere, and I still don’t know what he was looking for.
“What had the kids done?” I asked.
Brown didn’t answer me. He’d wound down like an old watch. He finally rattled his cuffs and said, “Can you take these off?”
I shook my head.
“Not right now. We still have some things to discuss.”
Corley Brown yawned again, big enough to make me cover my own mouth.
“I’m so tired,” he said. “Tired like this, it gets down in your bones like cancer, and no matter how much sleep you get, I guess it’s never enough.”
I grunted like someone punched me in the gut. But I didn’t have anything to say, so I just listened to Brown talk.
“Bradley was a talker, like me. Talk, talk, talk all the time. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Got in trouble for it at school and at church. And when Abigail came along, I just—some folks weren’t ever meant to be parents, you know what I mean?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I didn’t trust my voice.
“Anyway, I put up with it as long as I could. I guess today was the day that everything snapped. I took that hammer and, well, I did what I did. I got to Bradley, and then Rannie tried to stop me. I hit her one good time. I didn’t want to kill her, but, well, she got in the way.”
I could see it all in my mind’s eye. Corley Brown getting home from work, tired like usual. Inside the house, shrugging off his coat and tie, maybe rolling his sleeves up. All he wanted was rest, but then the twin tornadoes of his two kids blow in and make him even more exhausted. All that talk and all of that noise, the constant commotion. Maybe it didn’t drive him crazy, but it drove him somewhere close and let him walk the rest of the way there.
“So that’s it?” I asked. “You were just tired ... of being a parent? You kill your whole family because you’re, what, too lazy to take care of them?”
Corley Brown’s eyes blazed at me, spittle in the corners of his mouth.
“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a decent night’s sleep? Kid cries in the middle of the night and somebody has to go to ‘em, wipe their nose, get ‘em water, right? Well, the other parent doesn’t just lay in bed and sleep, man. Every time one of ‘em woke up, I was either right there with ‘em or layin’ in the bed and listening while Rannie was up. All I wanted was some sleep.”
And then he was done. I waited for several minutes to see what else Brown might say, but there was nothing.
“Are you sorry you did it?” I ask. I didn’t need to know for the confession. I was genuinely curious.
When Corley Brown smiled at me, I believed he was the happiest man in the world. Certainly he was the happiest man I’ve ever seen.
“That nap,” he said. “Before your beat cops got there? That was the best I’ve slept in ten years. I don’t regret a damned thing.”
There was more, but none of it mattered. I had his confession—easiest one of my career—and I was gonna do everything in my power to make sure Corley Brown spent the rest of his life locked up somewhere. The captain congratulated me when I finished my report. I didn’t even have the energy to say thanks, just tipped him a mock salute and headed for the garage.
The unmarked unit is a perk of the job, a late-model Dodge Charger with buggywhip antennas and no hubcaps. It looks exactly like what it is—a cop car. But the seats are leather and comfortably low-sprung, and the AC ran cold enough to circumvent the desert heat on even the worst days.. I made the twenty-minute commute to Summerlin in silence, just like I do every day. I thumbed the button on the garage door opener attached to my visor and pulled in still thinking about Corley Brown and his hammer. Every blow freeing him from obligation, every hit a strike against the chains of responsibility that held him moored to the real world, this stark reality.
Finally, I hit the garage opener again and listened as the big door rattled closed. I shut the car off and got out, wandered over to my little workbench. I keep my tools in a big steel cart that stands about four feet high. The second drawer down holds a variety of wrenches and hammers. I took out the framing hammer, a big old one that my Dad bought for me when we worked construction together near Lake Meade the summer after I graduated high school. The steel head weighed about thirty-two ounces, all by itself. After a summer of using it, the muscles in my forearms looked like cables.
I held the hammer in my hand and swung it a couple of times, just to remember how it felt. I could still see Corley Brown and his family in the back of my mind.
The door to the house opened up behind me, and Lacey stuck her head into the garage.
“Hey,” she said. “When are you coming in? I could use some help with the kids.”
“Right now,” I said.
Then I put the hammer back in the drawer and went inside.
THE END
If you enjoyed this story, you’ll find more like it in Murderous Ink Press’s Crimeucopia: We’re All Animals Under the Skin anthology.
And — as long as you’re on the big A anyway — check out my novel, LIVING THE GIMMICK. The ebook is only $4.99, and the trade paperback is $14.95. I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy this murder mystery set in the world of professional wrestling.
That’s it for now. I’m going to have a couple more spooky stories for free to get you through this Spooktacular October, so check ‘em out.