Tophouse

Genton’s was the biggest and oldest department store in Missoula, Montana.

It had opened in the 1920s, and barely made it through the depression after old Joe Genton built up two generations of good will by sinking about half of his daddy’s railroad fortune into keeping the doors open. He kept all the employees on the payroll at a time when it seemed like nobody in Missoula had steady work. It had stayed in the family, and while there were some lean years, (particularly when the Wal Mart Supercenter opened up down River Road in the ‘90s) but at the end of the day, only Genton’s had the Tophouse. Even slimeballs like Andy DeRosa, who bounced from job to job, and spent most nights on Reddit or 4Chan reading about delightful topics like prison violence or the “good parts” of white nationalism, could look forward to a trip to the Tophouse.

Located just underneath Genton’s clocktower, all the way up above the 9th floor, The Tophouse was the place to buy menswear in Western Montana. It had been a marketing coup for William Genton, Joe’s son, who’d created The Tophouse out of an unused storage space he used to frequent as a kid. While it was technically the 10th floor, The Tophouse was much smaller than the floor below it, and when the rest of the giant department store felt like too much, William had often taken refuge up there by himself. It made him feel like he was on the top of the world. It was a wonderful feeling for the boy, and when he took over the store, he realized that feeling was exactly how a man wanted to feel when he dressed his best. And the Tophouse was born. It wasn’t small, it was exclusive. And it worked.

If you lived in Missoula, “Tophouse” had even become part of the local slang. If someone was “Tophouse” they were dressed to the nines. Single and ready to mingle. Teenagers from as far east as Billings were known to hashtag their prom TikToks with #Tophouse, even if they’d never set foot in Missoula. Andy DeRosa had convinced Jessy Johnson to meet him in the Tophouse, at the top of the spiral staircase that led from the rest of the store, under a framed picture of a bed, accompanied by an arrow pointing down to indicate which way the bedding section was. She greeted him with a nervous smile. They’d gone on several dates months ago, and she’d only accepted his invite to help him pick out a suit knowing that they would be in public. “I have a job interview Tuesday,” he’d lied to her over text. “And I really want to look #Tophouse for it.”

Jessy’s anxiety at her meeting with Andy turned out to be more than justified, as shortly after being reunited, in one of the Tophouse dressing rooms, while wearing a new double-breasted suit he had no intention of purchasing, Andy stabbed her in the throat seven times. He counted aloud as he did it, “One-Two-Three-Four-Five-Six-Seven.”

His jabs were short, tight and precise, a sharpened toothbrush shiv he’d made himself clenched tight under his right thumb, his wrist frozen at a 15 degree angle and his forearm drawing back and punching repeatedly, robotically, like the rapid pulsing of a sewing machine. While planning this revenge for a perceived humiliation he’d inflated in his own mind, Andy had imagined what his victim’s expression might look like, but as it was happening, everything was so immediate, he didn’t even really pay attention at all.

She made a little wheezing sound and her hands came up, but as the blood came, and there was a lot of it, she simply crumpled to the floor and it was all over her, and all over for her, all at once and forever after. All thirty four years of her life, in a staccato seven count, were all she would get, for ever and ever and ever. Above her, the clock tower started chiming noon. The first four or five of them was as far as she got. Andy glanced at himself in the mirror, faked a cocky smile, and after the 12th and final toll, he turned, and changed back into street clothes. He checked that the outside door sign of the dressing room still read “OCCUPIED,” made sure the salespeople weren’t looking, clicked the stopwatch in his pocket, and briskly walked from the dressing room.