Still

by Charlee Jacob

  (Some cops thought it obvious the letters B.D. meant Black Dahlia, for this was Miss Short’s nickname around the seamier sections of L.A. But Zane thought the killer was making a moral judgement, saying she was Babylon Descending.)

  Miss Short had been an aspiring actress but had also posed for pornographers to make money. Zane had one of these pictures on the page opposite her death photo. It showed her naked and in a disturbingly prophetic bondage pose.

  Flo-Beth Rhein, aged 19. Died 1947. Hit by a train. Cut in half. Rope fibers found embedded in flesh. She’d been tied to the tracks. Some asshole saw an old Perils Of Pauline movie and was disappointed the heroine had been rescued. A strong narcotic had been detected in her system during autopsy. Had the killer wanted her silent as the film? What did he think when the train roared? Did the thunder piss him off or did he cum like a locomotive?

  A stream of deaths: a couple dozen more or less traditional adulteries, cuckolds and middle-aged lotharios tired of the same old shit-sudden snaps and body parts in suitcases. Hangings, hackings, shootings, stranglings, acid baths, one or two vampires…

  Carmen Ecos, aged 28. Died 1948. Smoked in bed and burned to death. Her photograph showed her curled up on the blackened remains of the mattress, in what the coroner referred to as the pugilist’s position. Contraction of her muscles in the flames had caused her arms to be bent at the crispy elbows, her hands clenched in bacony fists. Like she wanted to duke it out with the devil.

  A second photograph taken from a different angle made her appear to be standing, emanating the emaciated, skin fairly dripping, less like sweat or snowmelt and more like paint in surrealistic Dali. A foreground figure, as such, of Zeno’s paradox, always in the process of moving forward, never getting anywhere.

  Then Zane found out the lady didn’t smoke. And vertibrae in her neck were crushed.

  Zane sighed, looking at her picture. But still picked up the nub of his cigarette and took a drag so hard, if the fourth dimension had been available, he could’ve sucked this into the room through that Lucky Strike. Hello, end of life as we know it. Hello to the universe turned inside-out, like the body of a man he’d seen once, pushed from an airplane to fall through an ice storm in New Mexico with winds clocked at sixty-two miles per hour. At least, the corpse had looked inside-out. Warped bones enclosing a mush of organs, no skin.

  Maurizio Pasolini, aged 33. Died 1949. Was a man in a little foreign handjob of a car. Hit a utility pole so hard he was tossed up, human salad into live wires. Almost cartoonish of that movie coyote who was forever screwing himself over, trying to catch one lightyear bird.

  No murder, just stupid stupid.

  Right? Closed. Obvious.

  Except. Witnesses.

  Man in little foreign handjob of a car seen ‘pursued’ by dybbuks in silk suits and sunglasses. A gun glimpsed emerging out the window of the second car. Two or three shots fired, artfully missing Mr. Pasolini. Were we seeing a movie being made here?

  Uhh uhh.

  Scared shitless, man in little foreign handjob leaps the solid yellow line, clean across the highway lanes through opposing traffic without a hitch, the white dots like an etcetera in a careless eulogy, into a light pole. Up up into voltage and a brief dance pop pop pop in noises not unlike that pistol stuck out of the window of the monster mobster car. And that leviathan steel crate on wheels was reported to stop about twenty feet from the accident. A guy with ten feet of shoulders climbed out, legs as if moving across the Matterhorn out of the back seat of this thing. And he had a camera, took a picture, two pictures, as the man cast upward from behind the wheel of the little foreign handjob died in those wires.

  Zane murmured, “Clickety clackety, yakyak yaketty. Got your money’s worth, Boss.

  “Might’ve been murder, sure ‘nuff. Might’ve been ‘driven’ to his death. What were you, Maurizio? A small time hood out of your class, or stick-up-the-ass who wouldn’t bend over when they wanted a piece of your business? Or just some ordinary citizen who didn’t display the proper respect to a creep who simply didn’t deserve any, because that creep was a crotchcrab-crawling scumbag who knew he wouldn’t be standing before the Lord trying to explain things for a long while yet. Not with his connections.”

  This guy in the little foreign handjob had a present in the glove compartment. A charm bracelet with a gold crescent moon, a gold rosebud, a gold crucifix, and gold letters spelling out ROSALUNA.

  Pasolini’s daughter, turned nine that very afternoon.

  The daughter’s photograph was in the scrapbook, too, five years later. Aged fourteen, dying in 1954. Botched abortion?

  Lying in the back of a big beast of a car, umbilical trailing out of her, wrapped around the infant’s neck like a body trapped in a live wire. She wore that charm bracelet on her left wrist, arm up and draped across the top of the seat, lips pursed as if about to pronounce the ‘oo’ in Rosaluna. In her right hand was a picture of a man hung in utility crucifixion, his pose with electric stigmata, rising up from a wasteland not too physically different from Jerusalem.

  An autopsy found a horse in her bloodstream. Dead baby was born addicted—or would have been.

  Zane couldn’t help thinking, ‘Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’ But he didn’t mean it in a bad way toward her or her father. It seemed to float to him out of the cigarette smoke which swirled listlessly about his head. In a gruff voice choked upon the past.

  Both remained listed as unsolved homicides. Without Resolution.

  Or should he consider all three as remaining unsolved? The infant had been strangled with the cord, probably as Rosaluna watched helplessly. And there had been that other thing.

  (He’d cradled that dead infant in his arms, noticing a little tuft of something between the blue lips. What was that inside there?)

  Same year, Bibiano Moreira, aged 52. Yeah, the man who went off a twelve story roof, a ten story rope around his neck and a six story rope around his testicles.

  Zane reminded himself (maybe silently), We had the head and torso but we never found the balls. Did they vaporize into that fourth dimension? Does somebody have them as a trophy? Set them in glass and uses it as a paperweight? Hell of a conversation piece.

  Bodies leaning into morning, stained glass veins, reflections in cloudy eyes. Dawns smelling of sunflowers, dusks stinking of rose gardens used as urinals, yellow on yellow not adding up to gold. Men who ran with wolves, with werewolves in black turtlenecks, the semi-smooth rumblings of caffeine rapture and ghouls who never yawned while stalking sunset. The sun goes down. We all gotta sleep sometime.

  The last photo he’d pasted in the book, on the second anniversary. Just a week ago. The Hamricks. A family asleep. 1956. Maybe dad asleep at the wheel. No, a drunk driver ran into them. Murder in McFadden’s book anytime anyplace, thought even as he took a swig from the J.D., chased it with a swallow of coffee, and took a long hard puff on the final cigarette in the pack.

  The steering column had pulled out, five wires were exposed at the end resembling a skeletal arm and hand reaching back for something in the engine—under the hood. Zane had seen the headless father, one arm drawn in a tight fist, the steering column like the other arm yet in metallic bone. The mother through the windshield with the child she’d held in her lap. Puzzle pieces. Zane recalled the drunk getting out of his car, hardly bruised, singing Bill Doggett’s ‘Honky Tonk’ offkey at the tops of his lungs as the detective told him in a threatening whisper, “You’re so fucked.”

  At the morgue, some jerk wide awake all night after doing the work-up had written on a napkin,

  The Mister & Missus Out For A Roll

  Now Wrapped Around A Telephone Pole.

  Baby Bomb Hit The Street Like A Dud,

  Fired From A Missile That Whistled In Blood.

  Like one of those killerdiller ditties the blood-fascinated public made up after sensational shit. ‘Lizzie Bordon took an axe and gave her father forty whacks…’ kind of thing. Good to skip rope to—or if you
preferred to carome into the ultimate statement of the present and American Bandstand, the kids might rate it a seventy if you could dance to it.

  Zane had it tucked between pages, with the Hamrick family’s portrait. This one had a SOLVED with it. Too few, man.

  He shivered, suddenly getting an urge to lick the photograph. Sick. Twisted motherf… Just how far had he fallen to come up with such an idea? Somebody who’d been a decent sort, joined the force to protect and serve, to save people from crimes like these—now a nightly voyeur, handling each crime scene totem with not too much less fascination for violence and evil than the killers who’d perpetrated these atrocities.

  (Naw, just rattled on the Dexies, brain and senses on pure overtime/overdrive/speeding over the dark arc of a black rainbow, souls tied like tin cans to the bumper. It sure had been a hard week, a hard month, a hard year. —Crashing now, winding down…slow to compulsion/compunction, catalytic/cataleptic converter stopped at the nowhere junction.)

  His hands trembled. What would licking the picture be—other than sacrilege? (Or maybe a new rush for speed demons.) Some psychic form of detection?

  In Zane’s head was an image, perhaps a revelation of that detection: Of skin peeling back like the two halves of a photograph, casting aside the negative. That acrid stench of developer, left on the fingers, reminiscent of hospital or morgue astringent.

  (Not model airplane adhesive.)

  “It isn’t the beans I’ve been popping. I’m just suggestible,” he explained to himself. It’s an extension of the kind of perception it takes to see things others can’t, to perceive patterns and motives, clues where everyone else gets only a blank slate. Maybe all cops are, by necessity, psychic…or plain nuts.

  He didn’t put his tongue to the picture.

  But he thought back to earlier that day…

  ««—»»

  Another woman had gone missing July 23. Ruth Mercado, age 24, a model-slash-stripper who’d gone out on a date-slash-assignment and never returned.

  Back in March, Shirley Ann Bridgeford went missing after a date. Miss Lonely Hearts still hadn’t turned up. There had been another, Judy Dull, 19, vanished almost a full year ago, after going for a photography appointment with a man. August 1 of ’57 was the last time Miss Dull had been seen. Only a weak link had been made between Miss Dull’s disappearance and the Lonely Hearts Woman. But Dull and Mercado were both models. And all three had gone out with a man previously unknown to them.

  Zane was fielding a lot of questions from the friends and families of the missing girls. Of course, females picked up, ran off from husbands and boyfriends, and relocated on the sly to start a new life for any number of reasons: boredom, newfound love, escape from abuse. But he’d come around to suspecting these three were linked by a repetitive killer. Not that Zane had any hard evidence to suggest they were dead, other than their conspicuous absences.

  He’d been swallowing stimulants more often (he never injected or smoked the stuff but preferred pill form, seemed more properly medicinal that way) and he’d noticed it was taking more to get him going. He knew his body had developed a tolerance to the previous moderate doses. Sometimes it seemed as if everything slowed to a crawl around him, edges a still life blur. Or the blades of fans rotating in the offices resounded of dragged-out thunder across his eardrums. And still others it’d appear to him that the men he worked with were just ferociously stupid.

  He’d had a headache and stopped for a smoke, found the pack in his shirt pocket empty. Zane went out to where there was a cigarette machine, not far from the front desk. That was when a headcase elected to wander into the station and claimed to have killed several people.

  A middle-aged white man with a filthy beard full of lice, wine sores on his face and hands. Weary and sweating in the late July heat, several detectives—Zane included—sat him down and let him confess to crimes wide and varied. Hey, they were used to this. They were patient, knowing he was probably just some crank. But you never knew. Usually the details these lunatics didn’t have about cases were what proved they weren’t anything but bums with brain damage. He rattled off atrocities like a laundry list.

  Zane got called out of the room to receive a coroner’s report on a female body, found in a rusted-out car on the beach. Could the corpse belong to one of the missing women he was investigating?

  No, it was of a transvestite dressed like Scarlet O’Hara. The cops who’d been first on the scene had missed the victim’s concealed sex. Glad it wasn’t his case. Took somebody on downers to make a serious mistake like that one.

  When he returned about twenty minutes later, the headcase had become an elegant but very old black lady in a dress so out-of-date his mother might have worn it to a prom at the end of the last century. It had a high collar and—a bustle. Silk of the sort of green that people perished from in those days, wearing an article close to their skins from a lethal dye. Miles of intricate lace, so much it could have run a railroad from the Rocky Mountains to San Francisco. She held her mouth like it was full up with spiders and described the most fiendish nonsense. All the while she wept ruby tears. It tracked her face like a thunderstorm through a volcanic eruption.

  He was about to ask what happened to the nasty bum with the beard when he got called out again. A return phone call from a Las Vegas modeling agency he’d contacted about Dull and Mercado. A wrong turn. When he returned half an hour later the detectives were still standing around or sitting, arms folded, listening, their faces without expression. But now a child sat there, long black hair strung with beads and feathers, a stripe of white paint on both of his dark cheeks, going on in another language. Nothing Zane understood but it made his flesh crawl as, every time the child spoke, smoke curled out of his mouth. And what was that in his hands? It looked like a helmet. One of those in metal with a crest as for a Spanish conquistador.

  So who was this? What happened to the first two? Sent to the drunk tank? Kicked out the door after their cup of coffee and free donut? Couldn’t tell Zane that this was anything but pure hallucination. That’s what sleep-deprived folks did, wasn’t it? Start to dream while awake?

  (need to CRASH)

  CRASH BEFORE I ~~~{burn}~~~

  McFadden was called away a third time. By another detective who wanted to know could he switch shifts tomorrow? Only gone three minutes, the length of time it took to say, “Sure.”

  Returned. One little two little three little Indians… No little Indian boy.

  Just the bum with the fully-inhabited beard and the steady stream of murders going back before anybody anywhere kept records. This guy had to be prehistoric, right?

  Zane blinked. One of the detectives listening and recording the bum’s statement, finally laughed and asked, “Now how did you manage to kill all those people and never get caught?”

  Because he’d just confessed to about a few hundred murders. Or was it a few thousand?

  (Millions…)

  Entire races of men and women and centuries of blood.

  The nut grinned gray teeth, looked straight at McFadden, and replied, “Aw, ya never really catch anybody. What ya don’t get is it’s all me. Just one killer.”

  ««—»»

  Zane went home, not entirely recalling the drive. Went home to crash. Then why drink all that strong coffee? Just another upper, after all. Because he didn’t really want to sleep. No matter he had nightmares while awake, the nightmares that came while he was completely unconscious were worse.

  ««—»»

  Zane fell asleep in his living room, despite the coffee. Sitting up at the desk, scrapbook open. He dreamed about the victims of those unsolved cases.

  In the dream, he was the one sitting at the center as they listened to him, faces without expression and many with no faces at all, as he spewed out story after story of slaughter. He wasn’t confessing.

  Then what was he doing?

  Pleading failure. Apologizing.

  “What can I do?” he wanted to know.

&
nbsp; Then they said to him, “You have our souls. Only you can heal us.”

  He woke up, dazed, fire inside his belly. Caffeine/sour mash/nicotine burn. He raced to the bathroom and threw up for an hour. His vomit resembled coffee grounds. He read somewhere or other that this was a sign he had an ulcer.

  Afterward, he splashed his face and rinsed his mouth with cold water from the tap. He stared into the mirror and had trouble recognizing the pitiful man that stared back.

  When he finally went to bed, he took the album with him. He removed his pillow and replaced it with the scrapbook. It was on this he would rest his head from now on.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 6

  “The dead bell,

  The dead bell.

  Somebody’s done for.”

  —Sylvia Plath

  Death & Co

  August 31, 1958

  Pearly sat outside on a bus stop bench on the block his uncle lived on. He never considered, Hey, I live there, too. He just passed time.

  He didn’t want to be inside the apartment where Unc and Salem were giggling, painting one another with tomato sauce and ricotta cheese, freaky lasagna sex. It was Saturday morning. Pearly read one of the books he’d recently stolen from the library. ONLY A VIOLET I PLUCKED FROM MY MOTHER’S GRAVE.