The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  I sighed.

  “I admit,” said I, “there was a certain satisfaction in inching forward, ever forward.”

  “There ain’t no Skipper out here to tell you what direction to go.”

  “I shall not abandon you. We will find the optimal path.”

  “Easy for you to say. You got nothing but time. Me, I’m gonna be thirty-two in December. Life’s just dropping away from me, Finch, I’m bleeding it out everywhere I go. I ain’t had a job in I don’t know how long. I ain’t had a girl since Lilly, not one I didn’t have to pay for. I used to be somebody but now I’m nobody. I’m nobody.”

  He pulled off his glasses, the prosthetic along with it, and rubbed at his tears. The exposed pit of his cheek caught me unawares. The bone had been dug out as neatly as if by an ice-cream scoop, and the pink flesh inside had been layered by surgeons in the style of a croissant. The overall effect was that the right side of his face was being sucked into his skull.

  I, too, was pulled by the vortex—I could stand to see my friend like this no longer! I bucked from the bedroom wall and snatched the prosthetic from his hand. Church blinked at me with all the surprise of a child robbed of his birthday balloon. The apparatus was shockingly lightweight. How flimsy a thing to hold control over such a man.

  I snapped the arms off the glasses. The rims split too and one of the lenses fell to the floor and broke into two clean halves. Church was aghast, confused, buffaloed.

  “Stop? Finch? Stop?”

  The prosthetic was of solid copper but, as Church had said, only one-thirty-second of an inch thick, disqualifying it for any Revelation Almanac we might encounter. I hurled it to the ground, spotted an umbrella left behind by a client of this substandard whorehouse, picked it up, and used the point to stab the lifeless copper until skin-colored paint chips began to scatter. It produced ten times the satisfaction of jabbing a bayonet into something living.

  My next stab sent the cheek skittering across the floor.

  It was halted by the dropped obstruction of a shoe.

  Church stood there with a heaving chest and the cave of his cheek glistening. He lifted his shoe, evaluated the heel. Like him, it was old and beaten, but not without strength or sharpness. He looked, probably for the first time since 1918, like he knew what to do. He raised the heel and took aim, the same as he had against untold scores of armed Germans.

  “I got you,” said he, “you little son of a gun.”

  VIII.

  SO ATTUNED WERE OUR EARS to the minimalist music of spare change dropped into our coffee-jar coffer that we barely noticed the murders at first. Daily news was, for the most part, inapplicable to our social station: stocks we could not buy, fashion we could not afford, events we could not attend. Freed of his false face, Church became a better man and found better work, and our rent, believe it or not, began to be paid on schedule. This left him little time for current events.

  He’d instead narrowed his interest to celebrity gossip. Once a month he’d scrape together the change to buy Photoplay and read it front to back, responding to every article with adolescent credulity. “Wow!” he’d cry. “Mary Pickford really is just a regular girl at heart!” The glum irony was that we were smack in the middle of the age of the movie palace—lavish, air-conditioned, Egyptian-styled temples designed to give proper deference to the new wave of “talkies” starring the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Joan Crawford, Tom Mix, and Bridey Valentine—and we could ne’er afford two tickets!

  For me, the dull diversion of fact-addled newspapers had been superseded by the squawking fluff coming from our secondhand Radiola. It mattered little if the program was morning calisthenics, sonorous scripture readings, malefic weather reports, musical showcases, children’s prattle, or even Betty Crocker’s Gold Medal Flour Home Service. If it babbled, I was there to clap my hands in moppet delight.

  Only when coppers began raiding our scurvy saloons, not to arrest us for illicit imbibing but to pat us down for weapons, did we hear rumors about a killer. Forthwith I found a newspaper slicked with gin to a tabletop and flapped it about so that it might dry. On the walk home that night I read my first account of the Bird Hunter.

  The New York Herald Tribune had an edge over the Times, the Sun, the Evening World, the whole inky glut, for the Herald Tribune had on the case one Kip McKenzie, soon to be known as my favorite writer. It was McKenzie who’d nicknamed the killer. After the third murder, each of them young women returning home from speakeasies, he wrote, “If ‘flappers’ are so named for chicks yet lacking the adult feathers to leave the nest, this executioner might well be called ‘the Bird Hunter,’ so intent is he to clip those wings.”

  Even when the killer went underground for months at a time, not one week passed without McKenzie boasting “exclusive scoops” from “top-secret sources” on one of these variants: a) The indomitable police had a suspect and were about to make the collar; b) There were additional unpublicized victims and the police were bungling boobs; or c) An eyewitness had surfaced to describe the killer as a very tall man, or a very short woman, or perhaps a circus-trained gorilla.

  It was a lurid decade, you understand, and print outlets strove to outdo one another in both the size of their hollering headlines and the carnality of their content. We readers expected fresh, frequent, hot plates of sex and death, and shivered in delectation when McKenzie held back the goriest details to instead repeat his simple, teasing refrain:

  “This girl, too, was gutted.”

  The affair offended Church’s Midwestern decency, and so, feeling like a Judas, I stole away so that I might enjoy exchanging wild hypotheses with strangers on the street. The Bird Hunter was a moralistic madman out to punish our reckless youth. No, he was a Dry delivering atonement to those who dared to draught the Devil’s drink. Any madness was possible in the world of Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. Even yours truly, typically dazzled by wanton bloodshed, had disfavored February’s execution-style St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. Truly, could things get any worse?

  Hah! Funny rhetorical, that.

  Appreciate the caustic couplets of that drunk poet, Gød. On October 24, 1929, Kip McKenzie was back on the front page with the slaying of another young flapper. But his story had been booted below the fold to make way for the only thing worse than bloody murder—the bloodying of one’s own pocketbook. The entire country was shaken on “Black Thursday,” a frightening enough label were it not for the Black Monday and Black Tuesday that quickly overshadowed it. No, it was not a spate of solar eclipses but the implosion of the anything-goes stock market. Boring stuff, yes, unless it was you who had your entire fortune dashed in a matter of hours.

  The initial impact upon Church and me was minimal. The Dream of the Cotton Club remained just that; what little money we had fit into our wallets. But, oh, how the city moaned. We opened the windows to the mournful music while our Radiola supplied the numerical lyrics: American Telephone & Telegraph down 106 and 3/4 points, General Motors down 36 and 3/4 points, the whole market drained of billions of dollars, ninety percent of its total value. The imagery conjured was of tycoons in three-piece suits standing amid loops of ticker tape as tangled as battlefield entrails before opening their fiftieth-floor office windows and taking the plunge.

  “There won’t be any jobs,” said Church. “Finch, what’ll we do?”

  I thought of the bottles of fallacious promises once sold by the Barker.

  “This is what happens,” said I, “when one trusts in false prophets.”

  The United States reeled as if socked by a Jack Dempsey roundhouse. New York City in particular hit the ropes, but at least we had a hero, the intrepid Kip McKenzie, and over the next two months he assaulted his clackety Underwood with the single-minded mission of elevating the moods of we millions of sad-sack suckers. Behold, his latest mobilization:

  MARKET PLUNGE SQUELCHES SERIAL MURDERS

  “Bird H
unter” Threat May Be Over, Says Our Reporter

  Leading theories regarding the Bird Hunter had suggested that he was doling punishment for declining American ethics. The breaking waves of the crash, wrote McKenzie, had tossed the Roaring Twenties against the cliffs; give it a year, two at most, and necklines would rise and hemlines would fall and liquor would stop pouring in such volume. The Bird Hunter, in short, would have no more cause to kill. Wasn’t it wonderful?

  It was! It really was! I know that McKenzie’s millions of readers took solace that, as bad as things were, there were worse things that had been sated. Too bad, then, that, beginning with the very first day of 1930, girls once again began to die, quite a lot of them.

  IX.

  ON A COLD DAY IN February the bastards came for me.

  Church was out, having found dollar-a-day sledgehammering work alongside colored folk. Consequently I answered the door alone, prepared to give our censorious landlord an entertaining spiel excusing our latest default. My story involved, if I recall, the rescue of a dog from a snow drift and a pending commendation of valor from the mayor.

  Two policeman—twins, no less—awaited.

  “Zebulon Finch?” asked the one on the left.

  I hedged, an old technique.

  “And whom might I say is calling?”

  The one on the right grinned.

  “Look at his skin. White just like Fergie said.”

  “Blame the grayness of the day,” said I.

  “You’re coming with us, kid,” said the one on the left.

  “How unlucky, for I am previously engaged. Shall we reschedule?”

  The one on the right rattled his handcuffs, and that was that. I sighed, fetched my fedora and coat (no reason to announce to the world that I did not feel the cold), and allowed myself to be pushed, none too kindly, down the stairs and into a waiting patrol car stenciled with “POLICE N.Y.” and “5 PCT.” Seeing as the buggy had no backseat, I sandwiched between the twins and posed to them polite queries regarding what it was that I had done and where it was that I was being taken, while they, helpful officers of peace that they were, held a debate about the New York Yankees. The left one was a Lou Gehrig man, the right one allegiant to Babe Ruth.

  The Fifth Precinct was nothing to look at; besides, I kept my eyes to the slush-filthed floor. I was railroaded into an interrogation room with a table and two chairs, where Lou Gehrig told me to sit, the same as you’d tell a dog. I sat; Babe Ruth handcuffed my left wrist to the table, just above the old serving-fork wound from Dr. Leather. Now I insisted on knowing my crime. Lou Gehrig responded right away. Yankee Stadium, declared he, was the best ballpark ever. Babe Ruth, though, missed the old Polo Grounds. In verbal combat they were locked; so, too, was the door behind them.

  One hour later, I was joined by a cop who looked as if his former career had been as a rock at Stonehenge. He was a brawler by all indications, complete with crooked nose and missing front tooth. He slapped down a file folder and crashed down into the other seat. His unruly red hair and explosion of freckles gave him a boyish, pugnacious look at odds with his watchful black eyes. He wore not the buttons, badges, and boots of his fellow garbage collectors but rather a smart suit and a stylish brown-and-black spotted silk tie.

  In short, he looked like the sort of combatant who might toss a nobody like me into the slammer on general principle. So sick was I of life upon the nethermost social rung that the old Zebulon Finch insolence bubbled from my throat like bile.

  “Detective Fergus Roseborough,” said he in an Irish brogue. “You got something you need to say to me, you goddamn skullamug?”

  “Well, Fergie,” said I, “I suppose I should like to be let go.”

  His coal eyes glowed and he formed fists as big as medieval maces.

  “Tell me your whereabouts New Year’s Eve. Or January tenth. Or January sixteenth.”

  “This is a Prohibition matter? I assure you, I do not drink.”

  He huffed in disdain, picked up the folder, and glanced at a sheet.

  “Charlotte Weidenheim? Lucille Schrubb? Beulah Olson?”

  One of his fists uncurled, an invitation for response. I shrugged.

  “Your favorite baby names? I vote for Beulah. Congratulations, by the way.”

  “You’re telling me, to my ugly face, you don’t know them.”

  “I should like to know them. Are they waiting outside? Why, the shy darlings.”

  “You think this is a joke? In about two minutes I rearrange your face, see how funny that is.”

  “If it is a joke, dear Fergie, I have yet to be let in on it.”

  He slapped the file to the table with enough noise to make me jump.

  “They’re dead, all them sweet girls. Dead in the worst ways. And I know you did it, you rotten kid.”

  Silence filled the room as muggy and malignant as mustard gas. I wiped it from my ears so that I might believe what had just been alleged. I, New York City’s serial murderer? It was beyond comprehension. Roseborough’s face had turned a pink so vigorous it swallowed the freckles. He cracked his knuckles. I took the flicker of panic I felt and attempted to gentle it to a controllable ember. I knew that I was about to behave in a reckless, immature way—but wasn’t it progress that I at least recognized it?

  “I knew an Irishman in the war,” said I.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” said I, mocking his street dialect. “He was insane, too.”

  It was foolproof bait; in the New York of 1930, hate was endemic. Italians hated Jews, Jews hated Irish, Irish hated blacks, and everyone hated the Roman Catholics. Roseborough slammed his meathooks to the table and the file folder jumped. I took little joy in his fury, for though Piano had indeed been an insane Irishman, his insanity had saved many an American butt. An instant later, the file folder touched down and spilled forth an array of photographs, some locket-sized, others wallet-sized, still others the size of a framed portrait.

  “You know them, you filthy whelp,” accused Roseborough. “Don’t you?”

  Ever willing was I to compare and contrast females; sadly, this flock would turn few heads. This one had a nose like a ripened strawberry. That one had a chip in her tooth she could suck spaghetti through. That other one’s goony glasses could not, despite their efforts, distract from a walleyed stare. I was about to complain that I deserved a sharper selection when something about the walleyed miss caused me to take a closer look.

  I did know this girl; I knew all of these girls. The names the detective had mentioned came into alignment with faces and I remembered exchanging pleasantries with them at various déclassé gin joints. The names of the others came back to me too—Josephine Harris of Fargo, Elizabeth Stearns of Oskaloosa, Audrey Rice of Santa Fe—each of them charming in her own way, each of them dead.

  I blinked my astonished eyes at Roseborough.

  “That’s right, dumb fuck,” said he. “I tracked you down. Skinny guy? Pale face? Hat brim out to here? Spotted talking to every single one of these young ladies? You weren’t hard to find.”

  I touched my beloved fedora. Its soft, comforting realness gave me heart.

  “Were they killed on the same nights that I met them?” asked I.

  “You confess? Good, we can wrap this up nice and easy.”

  “Were they killed on the same nights that I met them?” repeated I.

  Roseborough crossed his arms.

  “I surmise that they were not,” said I. “I submit to you, then, that I am being framed.”

  “Framed? Kid, if you think you’re worth somebody going through all this trouble, you’ve got delusions of what-do-they-call it.”

  “Grandeur,” said I.

  “Goddamn right.”

  I squared my shoulders.

  “You have the time and dates of the murders in that file? Very well; I will provide you wi
th the names and addresses of my past employers. Surely some of the nights in question I was working. There will be records.”

  The twitch of Roseborough’s lip indicated how he felt. But a splinter of doubt had penetrated his dinosaur skull, and he had even less patience for doubt than he did the due process of law. He withdrew from his suit pocket a pen—he would have rather drawn a knife—and took down my information. Then he took the photos and the file and left me without so much as a glass of water or a bathroom break, neither of which I needed but both of which seemed reasonable given my cooperation.

  It was hours before his return. By then, his freckles had resurfaced and competed with the red glint of afternoon stubble. He did not sit; he tossed the file to the table and paced about like a lion, running his claws through the snags of his orange mane while sizing me up for dinner. At last he spoke—“Motherfucking goddamn son-of-a-bitching cunt” I believe was his artful idiom—and did the last thing I expected. He unlocked my handcuffs.

  While I surveyed my wrist for permanent scarring, he gripped the back of his chair and muttered his next question.

  “You ever worn a Van Dyke beard?”

  Were that I could! Instead the smooth cheeks I died with became an advertisement of my eternal teenhood. This fellow knew how to get my goat.

  “We are friends now?” snipped I. “We are to exchange fashion tips? Clearly you are pressing no charges; I demand you let me go!”

  “It’s the one thing that didn’t line up. There was a survivor, see. This hasn’t gone public. She didn’t make it, not with what this monster did to her, but she lasted long enough to give us a description. Big sunglasses, a long Van Dyke. Sang a little ditty. I figured you could’ve grown a beard. Worn a fake one. Everything else pointed to you.”

  “I suppose that is as close as I will get to an apology.”

  He lifted his chair three feet and slammed it back. Two legs snapped off and the chair went toppling in a clatter of lumber.

  “This is not a fucking game! Girls are being butchered! Your stories check out, so maybe you didn’t do it. But the fact remains that every fucking girl you meet ends up dead. There’s a killer pointing a finger right at you, and I’m asking you why that is! Think, why don’t you? Someone who goes around singing the same little song all the time, someone you know who wears a Van Dyke, someone who’s got it out for you—none of that rings a goddamn bell?”