by Edward Lee
“So what happened?” Traci Wilcox griped, showing him into a cramped living room. “She get the shit beat out of her by one of them wrestlers?”
As Straker made to sit, he froze halfway down. “The shit beat out of her by who?”
The woman sat down with a sigh of disgust. Straker figured if he looked up the word “beat” in the dictionary, they’d have a picture of Traci Wilcox. Haggard, crow’s feet, dark circles under her eyes. Central Ident said she was twenty-nine but she looked ten or even fifteen years beyond that. She’d been a line-processor at Gronson’s Chicken for a decade. Since the goddamn governor had deregulated the state’s poultry industry in return for inside trading tips and campaign contributions spirited out of a corrupt S&L, the largest chicken producer in the country had become a legal sweatshop. Wilcox crossed her legs in the tattered corn-blue robe, hands crabbed like an old lady’s from wringing guts out of #1 Whole Fryers for the last ten years. Tacky flip-flops hung off feet whose arches had long fallen flat, and the varicose veins in her legs looked like mapwork. She didn’t seem to care that the top half of a drooping breast showed in the sagging v of the robe.
“Wrestlers, you know, pro wrestlers,” she said.
“You’re losing me, Miss Wilcox.”
“She’s a ringrat.”
“A—”
“A ringrat. A wrestling groupie. Three or four nights a week, I swear to God, she dresses up in those whory outfits and goes to these goddamn wrestling arenas.”
This was too bizarre. Wrestlers? “You’re telling me that she dated professional wrestlers?”
“If fucking a bunch of over-built grapheads whenever they’re in town means dating, then, yeah. I guess you could say that.”
The expletive slapped him in the face. He couldn’t imagine what she was talking about, but one thing was certain—
She doesn’t know, Straker thought. Damn it!
“Listen, Miss Wilcox, before we go on, I regret to have to inform you that Susan Bilks is dead.”
The walked-on face gaped, the pale parched lips opened, then closed. Her expression fell back to its dull, weathered platitude; her reaction to the news of her roommate’s death had lasted no more than a second.
“Figures. Half of ‘em are all fucked up on drugs is what I hear. It was only a matter of time before she got in over her head. I’ll bet she was murdered, right?”
Straker thumbed his eyes, confused. “Yes, Miss Wilcox, she was murdered via an extreme mode of violence. Her neck was broken. She was mutilated. Not to mention, she was raped repeatedly, and I might add…”
Straker stalled. No, no, don’t tell her the rest. You don’t just walk in and tell someone her roommate was raped post extemis—after the point of death. You don’t tell her that her hands and feet were cut off, her teeth were pulled out, her eyes were extracted—
No, you didn’t tell them that.
But this was still too convoluted to contemplate. Straker may well have tripped over a lead. “Help me out here, Miss Wilcox. You’re saying that Susan Bilks was…sexually involved with…professional wrestlers?”
Wilcox sipped lemonade from a smudged tumbler. Straker could easily smell that it had been tuned up with whiskey. “That’s right. They call them ringrats—wrestling groupies. It’s ridiculous. Susan was a cute girl. She could have pretty much any guy she wanted, but if it didn’t have bleached-blond hair and wrestling trunks, she couldn’t care less.”
“Wrestlers,” Straker stated baldly. He was still having a hard time with it.
“I didn’t really know her, we just split the place—this is a double-wide, you know, forty-eight by thirty. I live on this side, she lives on the other. She was crazy about these dopes. Hell, one night she brought one back here—Kevin the Druid, she said his name was. Kinda short but real beefy, could barely fit in the door. Dark-sandy hair and a goatee—devilish-looking, and even I gotta admit, he was a turn-on. They go back in Susan’s room and get started—Christ, I thought they were gonna knock the trailer off its bricks. All night long they did it.”
This oddity, now, was beginning to coalesce. Straker didn’t know wrestling from a hole in the ground. A stunt—that was his understanding, fake fights in an arena, characterized by phony rivalries. Each piece came as a separate thought: Wrestlers. A wrestling groupie. Whory clothes.
The first six bodies had never been ID’d, but…garments were found in their proximities, garments which certainly could be described as “whory.” Hot pants, fishnet stockings, tight halters and tube tops, stiletto heels.
Susan Bilks was a wrestling groupie. The first six girls must’ve been wrestling groupies too.
Was it that easy? He walked into the home of this roughened chicken handler, expecting nothing. Yet Straker realized in a jolt that he was potentially one question away from solving the case.
“Miss Wilcox. If you can answer this next question, it might very well lead to the apprehension of Susan’s killer.”
She leaned over for her drink, unfazed. As she reached, the front of her robe opened wide enough to plainly show both breasts, which depended like white scrotums. Straker felt sure she was doing this on purpose. Their nipples more resembled wads of chewed raw beef.
“So what’s the question?” she asked.
“If Susan was a wrestling groupie, it’s clear that she went to a wrestling match on the night that she died. Our forensic technicians have determined with a fair degree of accuracy that she was killed three nights ago.” Straker sat up at the edge of the seat to ask the question. “Do you know where Susan went three nights ago? Like exactly where she went?”
The tired shoulders shrugged. “Farling Civic Center, right downtown. Believe me, that’s where she went every Wednesday night. There’s always a match there. Seems to me that all you gotta do is find out which wrestlers were there on that night and you’ll probably be able to figure out which one of the creeps killed her.”
Tell me about it. Luck, in Straker’s business, rarely played out this quickly. He rose, a bit dizzy. “Farling Civic Center. Thank you, Miss Wilcox. You’ve been very helpful.”
The woman’s eyebrows hitched. “Maybe, uh, well—”
Straker paused at the door. “What’s that, Miss Wilcox?”
“Maybe there’s something else I can help you with,” she said, and with that remark she placed her flip-flopped feet up on the coffee table, and parted her legs. This, of course, afforded Straker a bull’s-eye view of her genitalia.
His stomach shimmied. What he was looking at reminded him more of a pile of deviled ham stuffed into a cusp of hair.
“No thanks,” Straker said. “I’m really in, uh, something of a hurry.”
Next she fully parted the robe, showing the breasts which seemed to hang like men on gibbets. “In too much of a hurry to pick up Susan’s diary?”
Straker’s thoughts locked up. “Susan Bilks kept a diary? Miss Wilcox, that diary could be crucial to this case. I need that diary.”
“And I’d be happy to give it to you, Captain…whatever your name is. But I need you to give me something in exchange.”
You gotta be shitting me! She was blackmailing him. “That’s coercion, Miss Wilcox, not to mention a grievous obstruction of jurisprudence. I’m a professional homicide investigator. You’re asking me to commit an act of sexual turpitude that could jeopardize my job. Now you can give me that diary, or I can swear out a warrant and take it.”
“Yeah, but who knows how long that would take?” Somewhere behind those tired, give-a-shit eyes something like hopeless longing raged. “All that paperwork and all? And who knows, in the time it takes you to get a warrant, that diary could become misplaced.” She shrugged, sipped her drink. “It could even…disappear.”
Jesus Christ! Straker winced, first at the sight of her putty-like breasts and the stacked-beef vagina, then at the thought of what he was about to do.
What the hell, he thought. Couple of drinks first and it might not be so bad…
««
—»»
When Too Hot Romeo double-flipped off the top rope, Goon caught him in two beefy arms, then did the Back-Breaker. Too Hot, whose real name was Walter Rawson, feigned the appropriate level of pain, then rolled over, groaning. He felt ripped off, but what else could he do? I’m the most acrobatic wrestler in the bizz, and now I’m doing mid-card matches for three-hundred a week. He’d flunked three piss-tests in a row, so WCW had made an example of him. Doing all the anti-drug promo stuff in the ghettos didn’t help; Too Hot often copped from the same dealers. So it was bye-bye to that 200 thou a year.
It’s because I’m black, he felt convinced when Goon stomped his belly. Too Hot faked a near-rupture of the abdominal wall. White oppression, racist motherfuckers. Goon, then, pulled a full body splash off the ringpost, and Too Hot followed the script, rolling away just in time. The crowd cheered when he jumped up and landed a perfect drop-kick to this mastodon called Goon. He hit the canvas, covering Goon for the three count.
“You gotta hit me harder,” Goon whispered, then jerked his shoulder up just before the last count. They hauled each other up in a clinch.
Weird voice, Too Hot thought, their heads locked. Kind of faggy. And how could he hit him any harder without knocking him out? “I did hit you hard,” he whispered back.
Goon broke away then whipped brass knucks from his trunks. But Too Hot’s expert side roll smacked Goon hard to the mat, and he twisted the knucks from the huge fingers.
“Real hard, right in the head,” Goon whispered, faking his own shock. “You’re grappling like a pussy.”
Too Hot didn’t like that. When Goon charged, he belted him a little too hard. Goon staggered but then charged again, locking up.
“What’s the matter with you?” came the weird whisper. “These fans didn’t pay to see paddycakes. Hit me hard with those knucks. Otherwise I’ll turn this into a shoot and kick your ass for real.”
“Think you can, asshole?”
Goon laid a chest slap that cracked through the arena like a gunshot. Too Hot lost his breath for a moment.
“What’s your problem, shithead?” he hissed in the next clinch.
“You,” Goon replied. “This is supposed to be a wrestling match, and all you’re doing is prancing around like some home-boy shuck and jive nigger.”
Too Hot’s teeth clenched. “You better watch that shit.”
“What? Nigger? Sorry, I meant to say porch monkey. Bet your mama’s cookin’ cornbread in some project, got about fifty welfare kids, huh?”
“You really want it bad, don’t you, you big white piece of shit?”
“Yeah, I want it bad, so give it to me. I fucked your sister last night—what’s her name? Lawanda, Sharonda, Linolium, some nigger name like that? She turns tricks at truck stops, ten bucks a pop. Lets nigger dealers knock her up so she can get more welfare. Or I should say mo’ weffair. What’s your favorite chicken, by the way? KFC or Popeye’s? Lub dat dickin’ at ‘Op-eyes!”
By now Too Hot was burning up. Goon was goading him, the insidious whisper inaudible to the fans at ringside but each word stinging Too Hot like a slap across the face. Why was Goon doing this? I could kill this guy with one solid punch in the head, he realized. And if he heard the word nigger one more time, he just might do it.
“Got no balls, huh? Same as all you spooks,” Goon continued to whisper. “I’m calling you a nigger to your face and you’re not doing anything about it. Typical yellow-belly, no-balls cornbread-eating nigger. No wonder your people were slaves for three hundred years, no balls to do anything about it. Took a white man to get you out of the cotton fields. Ask me we oughta nuke all your goddamn nigger ghettos, get rid of all them crack babies and players selling coke to nine-year-olds, raping white women ‘cos the nigger women are all three-hundred pound street cows slapping jive and buying sirloin with the welfare money whites give ‘em. You’ll be on welfare too, Sambo, after I break your knees so you can’t wrestle anymore.”
Too Hot seethed. “Call me nigger one more time and I’ll crack your coconut with these brass knucks.”
“Nigger. Why don’t you go back to the ‘hood, shoot some hoop, mug white people and panhandle in your $150 sneakers, and walk around like an asshole rubbing your crotch listening to gangsta cop-killer songs just like all the other useless, drop-out, thieving, crack-dealer niggers. Hey, blood, what up? Where dah white wimmins at? Where dah cornbread? Where 2-Pac?”
The red veil dropped. Prison would be next more than likely, or at the very least the final end to a career he’d already half-flushed down the toilet. Too Hot reeled back then—
crack!
—and landed a right hook into Goon’s temple with the brass knuckles. The crowd roared. The bell clanged, and as the ref was disqualifying him, Too Hot Romeo belly-slid out of the ring and dashed for the locker room. Gotta get out of here! I just killed that guy!
He scrambled to dress in the locker room. Maybe he could head back to Denver, disappear and…well…sell drugs. It didn’t really matter. Two refs brought Goon in on the stretcher before Too Hot could get out.
But then Goon sat up. “Hey, Too Hot. I was just joking with all that nigger stuff. Wanted to get you riled up, you know? The crowd loved that right hook.”
Too Hot dropped his bag, stared in sheer disbelief that Goon was not only still alive but unhurt by a blow that would’ve certainly killed any man on earth.
««—»»
Ketchum Athletic Center. Not much bigger than a high-school auditorium, and that’s where half of DSWC cards took place—fucking high schools. Talk about the pits, Melinda thought. Fifteen ringrats congregated by the back door, fussing, cussing, whooping it up. Tonight’s card was over—they’d be coming out soon, some to the nearest bar, others straight to the motel with a rat on their arm. In their heyday, most of DSWC’s grapplers had lived the bigtime in WWF and WCW; Melinda had learned that much. Now they’d been consigned to this pissant federation because they were either too old or had stepped on too many toes in the bigger feds. Goon could make a million a year in WWF, Melinda realized, but he’s too smart for that. A big contract would mean huge exposure, big cities, television. But by enlisting in the Deep South Wrestling Conference, it was just a bunch of boondock towns in boondock counties. Easy to hide. Less conspicuous. And the ringrats in these parts? Fly-by-nights. The kinds of girls nobody missed. Melinda knew Goon must be taking a girl at least once a week. And in these little redneck towns? So spread out? Not to mention the fact that only one of the seven victims thus far had even been identified, and there were probably seven more out there rotting in the woods, yet to be found. No doubt Goon’s manager was taking care of body disposal, which meant that he was in on it too.
“I’m Pinkie,” came a voice.
Melinda glanced aside. Blond, late 20s probably—ringrats generally weren’t young. She chewed gum with enthusiasm, arms crossed beneath a ludicrous black-sequined top. Studded jeans, gaudy makeup. They all looked the same in a way.
“I’m Melinda.”
“Who’re you waiting for?”
“I don’t know. Anything that looks good,” she lied. Melinda needed to get close to some other rats, but she had to take it slow, gain their confidence first.
Pinkie snapped her gum, tapping her foot. “I’d like to snag Dick Dude, but I think he left after his match. I’m surprised they even put him on the card tonight. Dude’s top-name now. Ketchum usually only gets the mid-names and jobbers.”
“Hate to disappoint you, but Dude ain’t worth shit in bed.”
Pinkie gaped at her. “You—you’ve done Dashing Dick Dude?”
“Yeah,” Melinda informed her. “Last month in Big Rock. Couldn’t get it up to save his life. The steroids kill their dicks. Hunk Hargan’s the same way. Dead dick.”
Pinkie’s tone turned skeptical. “Hunk Hargan’s in WCW. They don’t do matches down here.”
“Back when I lived in Baltimore,” Melinda maintained the lie. “My place was two blocks away from the Ci
vic Center. Once a month WCW’d come to town, and so would WWF—big cards too, with all the names. We’d just wait for them outside the backstage door, and they’d pick us up in limos, takes us to this great bar by the airport hotel, the Safari Club it’s called.”
Pinkie’s eyes widened in sheer envy. “Shit, I’d do anything to snag some real faces. Who… Who’d you get?”
Melinda shrugged as though it was no big deal. “Rex Ruger, The Big Bad Man, Shaun Jarrety, Undertow—a bunch. But I’ll tell you, most of those big name guys in the big feds—they’re all assholes. They’re either cokeheads or steroid gobblers. At least the grapplers in the regional conferences are humble. I did Reed the Butcher the other night—pretty cool guy but, Christ, he was too big. I was walking funny the whole next day.”
Pinkie giggled. “Better too big than not big enough. I got a crack at Rowdy Randy Rider right before he retired. He was great at first, put a pillow over my face, played like he was smothering me. But when I got a look—I swear!—it was only three inches! Hard!”
“Jeeze. I’ve seen bigger link sausages. Paul Smith’s pretty small too, and so is Quake.”
“Wow, you’ve done a lot of names. I never get to any of the big arenas ‘cos I ain’t got a car. Ketchum, Lockwood, Crick City—they’re about the only places I can get to hitchhiking.”
“My husband lost his job in Baltimore, worked for McCormick,” Melinda practiced her undercover spiel. “So I dumped his ass and moved down here with my sister. It’s a big difference going from WWF and WCW to this smaller fed stuff, but like I said—the big tv names? They’re mostly schmucks. I keep hoping to snag Marcus Arelius or Too Hot Romeo. I did them both a couple of times back before they got kicked out of WCW for coke.”
“What about Dare? You ever do him?”
“Naw, missed him every time, but he was losing his draw bad in WCW. I guess that’s why he turned up in DSWC. Never lost the ego trip, didn’t want to retire even though he’s pigshit rich.”