Still

by Charlee Jacob

  One of the indicted business partners sent Shirley lots of flowers and told the press he’d personally pay all her medical bills.

  “Lookit that jerk,” Tony Zarembo declared, mournfully shaking his head at the injustice of it all. “Stomps poor Miss Vetsky, then runs over little Ethel Kaplan.”

  “Emily Kaplan,” a reporter corrected him very respectfully. “Her name was Emily.”

  “Oh yeah sure, Emily. This Gegax is a child killer, and the judge and twelve true are gonna listen to him? He’d stick his own mother with a meat thermometer if a barbecue would get him a dollar.”

  ««—»»

  The old black overcoat went all the way down to his ankles. With the sleeves rolled up, Pearly thought he looked like a shadow for The Little Rascals. The garment would be easy to hide a weapon under.

  He’d chosen a knife. The recoil of any decent pistol would probably break both his arms. It would at least knock him on his ass. Besides, he didn’t want to make any noise.

  He was little but already knew he could cut somebody’s throat. Not deeply enough to decap, but enough they’d bleed out. And he’d been practising on sticking a long, slender blade into the couch. Trying to aim with surity between the springs, imagining they were ribs. Dan hadn’t even noticed the stuffing was starting to come through on that fold-out piece of shit. Unc was too busy jumping every time a cloud cast a shadow in the apartment.

  “Was that her?” he’d whisper.

  “No, Auntie Dan,” the kid would assure him.

  Pearly took a bus and then walked about four blocks to the hospital. Sat in the waiting room and pretended to read magazines until he saw cops coming in. Hopefully the shift change for Gegax. He followed them up. The first time, they were only going to see a fellow cop who worked for traffic and broke his leg when some biddy in a Buick ran a stop sign. On that floor he saw a nurse, crepe soles shuff-shuffing. She carried a tray of concoctions. He smelled the drugs in them.

  He flashed on his mother giving sandwiches and cupcakes to strays. He imagined her falling out of the window.

  The nurse smiled and said something to him. He couldn’t answer, looking precious in that coat too big for him, making him appear even tinier than he was. He felt struck mute by something familiar about her beauty as she said, “Aw, you’re so shy,” and patted him on the head.

  He stood there, frozen for several minutes, then finally returned to his senses and went back to the downstairs lobby. It was another hour before a second pair of cops came in. But this time, the officers went to the right place. They stood around, talking to the guys just coming off guard duty.

  Pearly stood at the end of the hall and watched them. This was it. Medical personel were going in and out of rooms. Visitors came and went. There were even a couple other kids. Nobody paid any attention to him. There was a guy in sunglasses standing at the elevator, tying his shoes. This man did actually look up at the boy for a moment. Pearly felt funny as their eyes met. He saw the scar at the far side of the left corner of his lips. It was a cross, a crucifix. It was a ‘+’ with a squiggle in its center as if representative of a Messiah nailed up. Then the guy stood and glanced at his watch.

  See? Didn’t really even notice you.

  You’re anonymous. Children don’t matter.

  Pearly began to walk down the hall, making sure he didn’t stumble in the long coat, the tails of it flapping between his legs. He’d prepared at Unc’s place, wearing the coat, going back and forth along the corridor outside the apartment. He’d gotten pretty good at it.

  The knife was in one pocket that seemed deep as a cave. He’d washed it, wiped it down carefully, then wrapped the handle in wax paper. It made it kind of crunchy to hold onto but he didn’t plan to hold it for long. And he’d carefully wrapped each finger of his right hand with Scotch Tape, round and around at the ends, each a stiff mummy. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do it that way again—if there was another time. He could try candle wax at the fingertips. Or should he buy gloves?

  There were newspaper reporters coming out of the elevator. They began to go toward Gegax’s room, too. This upset Pearly. But all four cops saw them coming and walked out to stop them.

  “Where d’ya think you’re goin’?” one of the officers asked them.

  Pearly went around, walking behind another nurse. She went into the room next door to the child-killer’s. He glanced right, then left and behind. The cops and reporters were starting a shouting match. Some doctor stuck his head out of the room the nurse had gone into and made a loud, “Shh!” at them. But it didn’t quiet them down much.

  Pearly slipped into the room. Saw the man all bandaged up, hooked to machines, left arm up in some kind of traction device. Maybe it had been broken, or perhaps the lung which had been pierced and deflated was on this side. There were wires attached to him over the chest and around on the left. That sure was nice of the doctors to provide easy access to the ribs.

  The guy was fat and doughy, face red, noise when he breathed a sickening rattle. Not much different than the hobo in the park.

  Just a bum on pain-killers instead of cheap hooch.

  The kid moved up to him fast, pulling the blade out of the pocket, gripping it around the wax paper. The tape and paper sounded like he was clutching a fistful of cellophane candy wrappers.

  “Here goes,” Pearly said in a voice little more than the barest sigh.

  He stabbed the knife in and it went pretty much where he’d planned for it to go. Between—he hoped—the fifth and sixth ribs. But it didn’t just slide in. Not a bit like butter.

  Gegax practically levitated off the bed. His eyes popped open, then remained bulged as he squirmed, staring at the little assassin. He didn’t open his mouth, just frowned in pure fury and pain.

  The man’s body was dense, hard to push the blade in far to hit the heart. He leaned, grunted, pushed to give it all he had. And then he couldn’t pull it back out again. He tugged. No dice.

  Leave it!

  Pearly yanked off the wax paper and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  Gegax’s one unbandaged eye rolled up to the white yet he still twitched. No massive blood spray. That was good. Pearly hadn’t expected there would be this time. It just pumped out around the knife, not a fountain, not a tide on a stormy sea. No Ripper thing, no nightmare in midnight technicolor. Just a quick job.

  The guy’s arm jerked right out of the contraption they had it in. He curled it around the bleeding wound until he appeared to be holding an armful of roses, some with petals dropping to the floor.

  Pearly turned to hurry out. The door opened before he got to it. A nurse came in. No.

  All in white this time like some prehistoric bone queen of mortality, Mrs. Death glided past him, barefoot, plucked one of the sanguine blooms, and wrapped the man’s dying scream in it to then click it shut soundlessly within the depths of her purse.

  Pearly went out into the hall and walked, as slow as he could make himself go, toward the other end of the corridor. He was practically to the elevator before he heard the cops shouting again as they worked to hold back the reporters who were trying to take pictures. He pushed the button to go down to the lobby, saw that the man with the crucifix at the left corner of his mouth was looking at him again.

  The guy adjusted his sunglasses, stared down at the ruckus in front of Gegax’s room, and then back at the kid. He watched Pearly get into the elevator without saying a word.

  Outside he realized his own hands were cut. Not baldy but it surprised him that he’d been injured from it. Doing the bum with the bottle hadn’t done this.

  He started to choke up. (No crybaby-ing!)

  Gegax had—what would that be called in French—le grand blessure. Or would it be le grand plaie? And Pearly had le petit blessure. Big and little wounds. Stigmata for butin (prey) and chasseur (huntsman).

  If these cuts were common to using a knife, maybe he should find a way to protect his hands next time.

  And just why did he bel
ieve there would be a next time?

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 7

  “Already old, the question Who shall die?

  Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?”

  —Karl Shapiro

  Auto Wreck

  October 31, 1958

  “Don’t scream,” the man in sunglasses cautioned her in a remarkably smooth voice. He seemed to be half-smiling, as if amused. But she could tell when she looked closer that he probably always half-smiled exactly this way. His lip curled up at a corner somewhat permantly due to the fixture of a small disfigurement.

  The other man’s breath rumbled like a jungle cat’s.

  Had she given the impression she would scream, or did he simply assume it? Given the situation?

  Truth was, Caroline Palmer couldn’t have screamed for anything. No matter the inducement of circumstances and no matter the extent of her terror. The expression of it stuck not in her throat as anybody might have guessed but in her chest. It struggled for air behind her sternum, in stifled horror wrapping itself like a long-armed and long-legged animal around her heart, squeezing it. Nearby her lungs froze into two blue blocks. And, most disconcerting of all, her nipples erected, damned near hammering against the fabric of her brassière like two fists pounding on a door, trying to escape something.

  She didn’t nod to indicate she’d do as he said. She didn’t shake her head to imply, Don’t worry, I can’t cry out. She didn’t shrug, as if questioning the next command, explaining how to proceed in place of a scream. But anything else he might have directed her to do would’ve been reacted to with the same response.

  He might, for example, have instructed her to get onto her knees and bark like a dog or he’d blow her head off. Something like that. She couldn’t have managed this either.

  Caroline Palmer stood very still, motionless as an image captured on a photograph.

  The man who’d spoken to her had indeed blown her employer’s head away. Right from his shoulders, though—not as the expression went—clean off.

  Both Whit Cavanaugh and Caroline Palmer had been leaving Cavanaugh’s executive office, located high atop the Cricket Records building, had actually exited the lobby and were going through the parking lot. Mr. Cavanaugh had waved goodnight to his secretary and then turned toward his car…a brand new, robin’s egg blue Thunderbird. Suddenly two men approached him between parked cars. One raised a shotgun.

  And they didn’t say a single word to him. They simply killed him with a blast that left her head ringing, skull vibrating with a dull resonance similar to a tuning fork.

  The man with sunglasses and shotgun was the one who told her, “Don’t scream.”

  As if any sound she might be capable of would alert somebody the noise of the shotgun hadn’t.

  Perhaps he was trying to calm her. Perhaps screaming only annoyed him.

  (Caroline didn’t want to annoy him.)

  At any rate, she didn’t make any sound, didn’t move, was still as an emulsified portrait on celluloid. Until she fainted dead away.

  But even that state of unconsciousness didn’t occur until the man with the shotgun—who had blown Whit Cavanaugh’s handsome head to sausage and tomato chowder, added, “Don’t talk to the cops. In case you don’t keep up with the news? Big mouths aren’t faring well lately.”

  The other guy (the rumbler) chuckled. “Not faring well. That’s good.”

  Also, prior to her swoon, and this happened all in a matter of seconds, the man with the shotgun swung the barrel of it in her direction. He was going to shoot her anyway. An action which that creature wrapped around her triphammering heart had suspected and anticipated. And this why it clung there, little claws embedded in her ventricles and aorta.

  Yet she passed out.

  Well, it might have been he’d shot her. She failed to hear it because supposedly you never heard the one that got you. Caroline went down to the asphalt: shattered and dead.

  Didn’t happen that way. She went down and the blast missed her by a fraction of a fraction. An increment so small only a physicist could understand it. The company security (consisting of a moonlighting, off-duty cop) had come investigating. The assassins split the scene without firing again. This was intended to be a simple X-out, not a battle during which a policeman got killed. That would escalate into a whole other monster, wouldn’t it?

  “What did these guys look like?” Detective McFadden asked Caroline as she sat in the back of a second ambulance—the first for Whit Cavanaugh’s trip to the coroner. Someone had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. She’d been checked out. They wanted to make sure she hadn’t actually suffered a heart attack (scared to death), even if she was only in her mid-20s.

  “The man who did the shooting was about 35, medium height and build. He was fair-skinned, hazel eyes, light brown hair. He had a small, cross-shaped scar right here,” she said, indicating the left corner of her mouth. “He wore black sunglasses, a gray pinstriped suit…”

  Yeah, she’d gotten a very good look at him. The detective was so impressed, he smiled.

  “Terrific. And the other?”

  “He was huge, not fat but tall and muscular. Like a wrestler, you know? Or that movie monster Boris Karloff played. Frankenstein.”

  “Sure. What else can you say about him?”

  “Brown suit, too tight on his shoulders. And one of those pink shirts men were wearing about three years ago.”

  Zane remembered that season. Only a couple bulls at the precinct ever followed fads. They were teased so mercilessly by the macho element that the pink ended up at the Salvation Army. Of course, somebody as big as a Frankenstein’s creature wouldn’t get gibed much for his fashion statements.

  “Hair, skin, eyes?”

  “He had a tan. But he wore a hat so I didn’t see his hair. As for his eyes, I was really only focused on the one with the gun,” she explained.

  “That’s understandable,” Zane said gently. And it was what he’d been hoping for. Considering the extent of her shock, it amazed him how clear her picture of the event was. He felt sure the man with sunglasses was Larry Gauzy, one of Tony Zarembo’s soldiers. The other guy he wasn’t familiar with, despite his size which wasn’t unusual for mob muscle. Maybe he’d just moved to L.A., perhaps from Vegas or the east coast. “Had your boss been dealing with anything unusual lately? Something you might’ve noticed? Did he argue with anyone? Receive any threatening phone calls? That is to say, had acted angry or secretive while on the phone? Suspicious people coming by the office?”

  He’d had to take more pills to switch gears. Four days ago, a squirrely, jug-eared, grease-weenie of a guy named Harvey Glatman had been arrested as he was about to kill a woman he’d kidnapped, apprehended by a highway patrolman who saw a struggle in a battered 1951 black Dodge Cornet parked off the road. The little guy was so funny-looking he might have been a comedian in the movies, if he hadn’t given off such an air of the totally creepy. Found with a 32 caliber, a rope and a switchblade, the man had admitted to the murders of Judy Dull, Shirley Ann Brideford, and Rita Mercado. Although Glatman was being held in San Diego County, Zane had been with a crew at Glatman’s place, finding photographs of the terrified victims…bound, raped, and tortured…in a toolbox Glatman hid at his digs. They reminded Zane of photos the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, had posed for. (Easy to sneak a picture for his collection, there were so many, taken with an expensive Rolleicord camera out of Zane’s financial league. He’d already put them in his scrapbook, no need to wait for his usual, personal, unsolved-by date. And he knew Glatman was really guilty of these three. The girls’ ghosts hadn’t appeared to him in those awful dreams to beg for help. Yet, there were already so many in his nightmares, crowding close, a mob of broken spirits going back and back, would he have noticed their new faces?)

  Zane had almost felt he did a kindness putting these in the book with those of the unsolved—as if to say, See? We do get ‘em. A matter of time or a divine intervention. Have hope.<
br />
  Even if it really had only been dumb luck.

  (But, damn it, he had to give those ghosts something.)

  In Glatman’s place, victims’ drivers licenses and other ID in the toolbox. In Hollywood, where the photogenic fantasy abounded, Zane had perspired, nauseous. Surrounded by enlargements of terror and death until his heart hammered in his ears.

  “You okay, McFadden?” another detective inquired. “You’ve done gone white as a sheet.”

  “There’s a vein bulging in your forehead,” another pointed out.

  Boom Boom Boom! Peep show night sweats. Embollism symbollism. It’s a syllabub, Bub. Yeah, that’s right.

  (Slap-dash syllogism?)

  Zane felt connected to these girls. Beat beat beat. Through their bulging eyes, cat-scratch nerve endings, popping brain cells. Like a bit of something he’d been reading earlier that day, left at a lunch counter not far from the Sunset Strip. A copy of ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac. He’d picked it up, read this Zen-sightful commentary by a man who passed on through prose his exuberant link with a worldly rhythm. Energy and sex and lilac evenings. Feeling that beat beat beatitude of connection attitude.

  Huge pictures on walls like scrapbook pages and Zane was a fly who landed, got stuck on a dot’s worth of glue, ending up pressed between claustrophobic layers when the book was shut. So close he tasted their final fear, so near they had him by the feet-the feelers-the wings.

  “What’s that?” inquired one of the cops who’d asked if he was okay.

  Zane was too distant from these guys, too near the vics. “Huh?”

  “A syllabubbub? What is it?”

  He hadn’t realized he’d actually articulated that part.

  Zane replied, “Frothy lingo. Like cream curdled with wine and then whipped stiff.”

  All the cops grinned. At least two chuckled. “Kinky.”