Gym Rat & the Murder Club

  The Crime Fiction Academy Presents:

  Two New Short Stories

  Gym Rat

  By Lawrence Block

  &

  The Murder Club

  By Matt Plass

  Copyright 2016 by Lawrence Block & Matt Plass

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  About the Crime Fiction Academy

  Gym Rat, by Lawrence Block

  The Murder Club, by Matt Plass

  About the Authors

  Crime Fiction Academy was born out of a love for the genre. Based in New York City’s Center For Fiction it is the only program devoted to crime writing with workshops and Master Classes that can be taken in person or online with some of America’s leading crime fiction writers. Visit our website for details and ways to apply.

  http://www.centerforfiction.org/forwriters/crimefiction/

  Gym Rat

  By Lawrence Block

  I’d seen him at the gym. He worked Mondays and Thursdays with Troy, one of the better personal trainers on staff. Most of the men and women who use trainers let it go at that, and you never see them show up on their own. But this guy was there just about every day. Right around eleven he’d come out of the locker room in black Spandex, and he’d be on the floor for an hour, sometimes longer. Machines and free weights, the elliptical trainer, sometimes ten or twenty minutes on one of the bikes.

  And you’d have to say it was working for him. He had to be a few years older than me, crowding forty, say. Right around six feet tall, and if his body wasn’t one the gym would use in its ads, it was better than most. Decent musculature, pretty respectable definition. He didn’t push himself that hard, and if he used a substance to give himself a boost, it wouldn’t be anything edgier than a protein shake, and maybe a couple of caps of creatine. No way he was into ’roids.

  Which is, no question, the best policy for most people. I’m a little different, I’m a fucking gym rat, and that means I’m in sweats or Spandex seven days a week, and generally for four or five hours at a time. When that’s your life, of course you’re going to experiment, see what works and what doesn’t. And some things don’t—you do a lot of juice, you’re gonna wind up with a basketball sitting on your shoulders and a pair of raisins in your nutsack, and no way that’s a good idea. But if you can keep things in proportion, well, you can put in longer hours and lift heavier weights and see real results, and someday you might wind up Governor of California. Better living through chemistry, you know?

  Anyway, for a Mr. Natural in his age bracket he shaped up okay.

  Then one Wednesday morning he asked me to spot him on the bench press.

  You don’t have to know someone all that well to ask for a spot. What it is, the designated spotter stands right behind you, ready to lend a hand if one’s required. Well, two hands, really, to assist you in raising the bar for that final rep you’re determined to grind out, and perhaps offer an encouraging word while he’s at it. It’s a way to achieve your best performance, because you can go all the way to failure.

  Plus it’s an important safety precaution. Every now and then you hear about some musclehead working out on his own, at home or in an empty gym, and he fails on the final rep and he can’t get the bar off his chest. If he’s stacked enough iron on it, it’ll crush his chest and kill him.

  I took my position, hands at the ready, and he did his dozen reps at 135 and put the bar back on the rack. He could have cranked out a few more, and a potted houseplant could have done as much for him as I did.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  I said it was no problem, or that he was welcome, or whatever I said, and he said, “We should talk.”

  Oh?

  “But not here.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and his lips weren’t moving much. I got the feeling this was a movie, and any minute now Matt Damon would race through, ready to kick ass.

  “I’ve got a business proposition for you,” he said. “There’s a diner on the south side of Thirty–fourth Street a few doors west of Ninth Avenue. Do you know it?”

  “I can probably find it.”

  “Why don’t you find it at three o’clock this afternoon? It’s quiet then. I’ll be in a booth. Maybe you could take the booth right behind me.”

  Jesus, we were still in that movie.

  I said, “Um, I don’t know…”

  “Just show up and listen,” he said. “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars just to hear me out. If you don’t like what you hear, that’s as far as it’ll ever go.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, got up from the bench and headed for the dumbbell rack.

  The hundred dollars, I decided, was just the right amount. Much less and I think I’d have passed, much more and I’d have been even more suspicious than I already was. Fifty bucks or two hundred, I’d have walked away from it.

  Or would I? Easy to say what you would have done, but hard to know for a fact. Maybe I was intrigued. Maybe I’d have wanted to see how the movie came out.

  Some geography, okay? The gym’s in the Village, on the corner of West Twelfth Street and Greenwich Avenue. My room’s a few blocks away in Chelsea, in an SRO on Seventeenth Street. And you know where to find the diner, Thirty–fourth just west of Ninth. The subway’ll run you from Fourteenth to Thirty–fourth, or you can walk it in half an hour, forty minutes if you dawdle.

  I took my time. I tend to be right on time, but if we were going to be playing Separate Tables I wanted him to be sitting at his when I walked in the door.

  And he was, and he’d been there long enough to have a sandwich and a cup of coffee in front of him, and a bite gone from the sandwich.

  I walked to his booth and past it, his eyes barely registering my presence. I sat down so we were back to back, which meant we’d miss out on eye contact but wouldn’t have to raise our voices to be heard. I pretended to look at the menu, and when the waitress shuffled over I ordered an unsweetened iced tea.

  When she’d walked off I heard him say, “Reach over your shoulder.”

  I did, and he put a piece of paper in my hand. It had Benjamin Franklin’s picture on it, so I was now officially a hundred dollars ahead of the game, less whatever they charged me for the iced tea.

  Walking uptown, I’d wondered if he was gay. He didn’t give off that kind of a vibe, though God knows not everybody does. More to the point, the hundred dollars just to hear him out was way high for a sexual overture.

  Well, I was here, and I’d taken the hundred. I’d know soon enough what it was all about.

  “Reach over your shoulder.”

  Again? I did, and this time instead of Franklin I got a picture of a woman. She was sitting in a deck chair alongside a swimming pool, and wearing a bathing suit and dark glasses. She looked pretty enough, though the sunglasses made her face hard to read. Nice body.

  “My wife,” he said.

  I thought, Oh, I get it. It was sex after all. He wanted me to fuck her. While he watched? Or some tag team thing he’d picked up from online porn?

  I wished I could see his face. All I got this way was disembodied words, spoken in a soft voice, and it was hard to take their measure that way.

  He said, “I worry about her.”

  He paused, and I waited, and he waited, evidently wanting me to say something. What I said was, “Oh?”

  “I travel a lot on business. We live across the river in Jersey. A house, not an apartment. Anybody could break in. Nerissa could be the victim of a home invasion. She could be raped, killed.”

  Or struck by lightning, I thought. Or drowned in a flash flood.

  “If you think she needs a bodyguard,” I said, “I’m the wrong person. At a minimum you’d want someone with
martial arts training, and probably firearms training as well.”

  “The last thing she needs is a bodyguard.”

  I didn’t need to see his face when he spoke that line.

  He let it sink in. I looked again at the photo of the nice–looking woman who didn’t need a bodyguard.

  “We have two children,” he said. “A boy and a girl. They’ll both be at summer camp for the entire month of August. That’s in Maine, and Nerissa and I are going up to Bar Harbor for the last two weeks of the month. Nothing there you can’t get cheaper and easier at the Jersey Shore, except for the clam rolls, but it makes a change, and then we pick up the kids and tip their counselors and drive home.”

  A long speech. It didn’t seem to require a comment, so I didn’t supply one.

  “The second weekend in August,” he said, “I’ve got a conference in Las Vegas. I go every year.”

  Okay.

  “That’s when I’m afraid it might happen.”

  “The home invasion,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “The rape and murder.”

  “The rape,” he said, “would be optional.”

  How did he pick me? We’d never spoken, never had any interaction whatsoever. He must have seen me at the gym, even as I’d seen him, but what could he have spotted that let him believe I’d hire on to kill his wife? Did I flash gang signs? Sport aggressive tattoos? Glare at other gym members with murderous intensity?

  No to all of that. Nor, assuming he’d done his research, could he have found anything in my résumé to make me a likely prospect. I’d never been arrested, let alone convicted of a crime. This was not to say I’d never broken the law, but any transgressions had gone unrecorded.

  I led a simple life, and an inexpensive one. The rent for my furnished room was low. I didn’t drink or smoke. I wore jeans and T–shirts from Old Navy or the Gap. My biggest expense was my gym membership, and that was limited to non–peak hours and consequently discounted.

  On what basis had he selected me for this astonishing offer? It scarcely needed to be said that I’d never killed anyone. If I was not a complete stranger to violence, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a fight. It would have had to be in high school. Fifteen years ago, at a minimum.

  For God’s sake, why me?

  “Seventy–five thousand dollars,” he said.

  Before he got to the price, he supplied the reason. The marriage had turned sour several years ago. He wanted out. If he divorced her, she’d fight tooth and nail for the children, and almost certainly get them. And she’d move them out of the state, she’d already threatened as much.

  Simpler to kill her. Cheaper, too, considering what he’d save in legal fees and alimony. And satisfying, because he’d come to hate the woman, and would be happy to see her dead.

  Jesus.

  I said, “Do you even know my name?”

  “No,” he said, “and I don’t want to. I don’t want to know anything about you. My name is Graham Tillman, and—”

  “I don’t think you should tell me.”

  “You could hardly do this without knowing. How are you going to force your way into a house without knowing the name of its owner? And you already know my wife’s name.”

  Nerissa, I thought. Had I ever known anyone with that name?

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he was saying. “Right now it hardly matters which way you’re leaning. You’ll want to live with the thought for awhile and see where it goes. Today’s Wednesday. Our paths may or may not cross at the gym tomorrow, but in any event we won’t speak.”

  He’d be working with Troy, I thought.

  “I won’t be at the gym Friday,” he said. “I have meetings throughout the day. One of them’s with you, at the same hour as today. Three pm.”

  “Here?”

  “No. I’ll never come back here, and I recommend you avoid it yourself. I’ve been unable to spot security cameras here, but even if they have them, we’d never be in the same frame. Even so, it would be the height of folly for us ever to meet twice in the same place.”

  He’d thought this through. That was reassuring, and at the same time it was unsettling.

  “There’s a similar establishment,” he said, “at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and Seventy–second Street. I’m hardly ever in that neighborhood.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Same drill as today. I’ll be there at three. Take the adjacent booth.”

  “I don’t really think—”

  “That this is for you? Right now it’s not important what you think. Take forty–eight hours to live with the notion. Whatever you decide, come to the restaurant.”

  “Why, if what I decide is to pass?”

  “Same deal as today,” he said, “except what you get for showing up is two hundred dollars. Don’t say anything now. Get your check and go. I’ll stay here another ten or fifteen minutes.”

  Tradecraft, I thought. I wonder how he knew all this stuff. Maybe we just both went to the same movies.

  “You might let me have the photo back.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  The waitress had dropped off the check when she brought my iced tea. I’d only drunk half of it, but that was enough. I put some change next to my glass, carried the check to the register, paid it and left.

  I just missed a bus heading down Ninth Avenue, and thought about a cab. I was a hundred dollars to the good, I could treat myself to a taxi, but wound up walking instead. And when I got to Seventeenth Street I kept on going and followed my feet back to the gym. I spent half an hour doing some lifts that hadn’t been a part of my routine earlier that day, just to spend a few minutes in my body instead of my mind. I wrapped it up with ten minutes in the sauna and a few more under the shower, grabbed a protein shake on the way out, and got home in time for the TV news.

  Drought here, flooding there, wildfires in California. Always something.

  I stretched out on me bed and thought about the fresh hundred dollar bill in my wallet. Money wasn’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about. I didn’t need much, and something always turned up. When I was running short, I could pick up day work with a moving company, or take some bartender’s shift behind the stick. And now and then one of my personal trainer friends would overbook himself and bring me in to pick up the slack.

  And there were more marginal gigs that came my way, and sometimes I said yes and sometimes I passed. Tagging along and looking muscular when an entrepreneurial acquaintance wanted to collect a debt, or handle a transaction, or warn off a competitor.

  I lay there and thought about the hundred dollars, which hadn’t affected me much beyond making me consider a taxi. Still, I was better off with it than without it, and all I’d had to do for it was walk for half an hour and drink a glass of iced tea.

  Friday I could pick up twice as much, but Seventy–second and Second was too far to walk. I’d have to take two subways, or a bus and a subway—or, I suppose, two buses.

  Should I have objected to the meeting place? Told him to pick some place I could walk to? Beyond the logistics of the thing, a little assertiveness might have been appropriate.

  Never mind. Proceed to Seventy–second and Second, pick up two hundred dollars.

  And then what? He hadn’t mentioned a city, but if he lived anywhere in New Jersey I could forget about walking there. To his house, to kill his wife.

  What made him think I’d be up for something like that?

  I went to bed early, slept like a dead man. I always do. Well, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I stay away from sugar and keep carbs down, and I’m done with my daily dose of coffee before I hit the gym. My body gets a good workout seven days a week, and there’s rarely anything on my mind to keep it humming after hours. Why wouldn’t I sleep well?

  I had my coffee around the corner, walked to the gym, and stopped for breakfast across the street at the Village Den. Swiss cheese omelet, side of bacon, side of sausage. I didn’
t have to tell them to skip the bread and potatoes.

  I worked heavy, concentrating on pecs and delts. Moved on to the treadmill, and I set the speed low enough so that I could have kept it up all day. I let my mind wander, the way it’ll do.

  Some of the members put themselves through long sessions on the cardio machines, but a lot of them are on and off in ten minutes. I was on a treadmill in a row of eight or nine treadmills, and right in front of us was a row of about as many elliptical trainers. When I started, the machine directly in front of me had the Pillsbury Doughboy on it, but he was gone before I broke a sweat. He was followed almost immediately by a woman wearing running shorts and a singlet, and beyond checking her out (nice little butt, good legs) I didn’t pay any real attention to her.

  But she stayed on her machine and I stayed on mine, and somewhere along the way I found myself thinking that this was her, Nerissa Tillman. That didn’t make any sense, and there was nothing about her to implant the idea. All I’d seen of Tillman’s wife was a palm–sized photo from the front, and all I was seeing of this woman was her legs and her butt and the back of her head. She had dark hair, and so did Nerissa Tillman, but so what?

  I told my mind Thanks for sharing, and I kicked up the pace on the treadmill, figuring if my legs had to work a little harder it might give my mind a chance to chill. But it didn’t really work, because I couldn’t take my eyes off that cute little ass of hers, and I was getting hard looking at it.

  She was still going when I finished my run and quit the treadmill. I managed to get a look at her, and of course she looked nothing like the photo. Just a fairly ordinary–looking woman, and she was probably at her best when viewed from the back, but even then she was nothing special, not really.

  But that was kind of beside the point, wasn’t it?

  Thursday night I was supposed to meet a friend at a storefront chess club on Sullivan Street. A woman with an international ranking was scheduled to play a twenty–board exhibition, and Joel and I would be two of her opponents, paying twenty dollars each for the privilege. We figured it wouldn’t take her too long to beat us, and then the two of us would have dinner at an Italian place we both liked.