Still

by Charlee Jacob

  “You up to a line-up, Miss Palmer?” he asked. “All we need is a finger.”

  She babbled something, then disconnected. Her answer: “NO!”

  Gauzy’s lawyer had him out an hour after that. The guy took his groceries and drove home.

  “We need to guard her,” Zane told his lieutenant.

  “Yeah, well,” Tom Chawbury drawled, a son of Okies who’d arrived in California in 1934. “She’s claiming amnesia.”

  “She’s scared. All the more reason to make her feel we’ll protect her.”

  “Can’t.”

  McFadden protested. “Zarembo’ll have her killed. She only missed Cavanaugh’s fate by the skin of her teeth. I can’t blame her, I guess, for thinking little of our ability to serve and protect. Even with guards standing right outside the door, Gegax was stabbed to death. We’re looking pretty inept here.”

  Chawbury huffed, sympathetic but unbending. “Yeah, I see that. But I can’t afford to schedule men for this if she won’t cooperate.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Zane promised. “I’ll go in person.”

  “Hope you’re not depending on sex appeal,” the lieutenant joked.

  McFadden shrugged, a gesture more intended to cover up a tremor in his shoulder and arm than to indicate simpatico.

  He stopped by the water fountain and took a couple more Dexies. Heard some radio in the breakroom playing an old 1946 number. Harry “The Hipster” Gibson. ‘Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?’

  Zane started to crack up. Turned around, went back to the water fountain. Began to take two more pills. Realized his mouth had cool droplets in it and his throat still felt as if he’d downed a couple small rocks.

  Wait a sec…

  “You on a diet, McFadden?” a uniformed cop asked, passing him in the hallway.

  “Yeah. Diet of stones,” he replied, jogging along.

  “Workin’ good,” remarked the other man. “Wish I had your energy.”

  Zane looked up Miss Palmer’s address from the original report. 924 W. Cranston. It was a small dark house, a few decades old. Painted a charcoal gray, it didn’t immediately register and, thus, was easy to drive right past without even noticing it.

  Provided he hadn’t been there before.

  The house had been yellow then. Sunny bright. Now it was downright funereal. Like in some cultures whose grieving smeared themselves with ashes as part of their mourning rite.

  Zane parked at the curb, unable to go into the driveway. A mental block. He went through the grass, up the few steps, and knocked at the door.

  It opened. Caroline stood there, very pretty, very nervous.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said in a hush, not intending to be rude. “Please, I can’t remember. I hit my head when I fell in the parking lot.”

  Now, Zane knew she’d struck her head on the asphalt. She’d been in the hospital for several days after Cavanaugh’s murder. But amnesia should’ve been immediate, shouldn’t it? If it were genuine. There’d been nothing wrong with her memory after she’d regained consciousness in Cricket Record’s parking lot Halloween night. The small bump on the skull was an excuse. He fully understood the reason behind it.

  He stood there, able to see the living room. He had no intention of asking if she’d let him in. Not now.

  The room was filled with old furniture from another age. Pre-nuclear, pre-total paranoia. There was a padded couch and armchair, faded deco pattern in the upholstery, little Queen Anne-style feet but no other carving. Doilies on the worn armrests. A round, rosewood coffee table. Metal torchere-style pole lamp, the base sphinx-shaped. The carpet and drapes were done in golden poppies, California’s state flower. A piano stood—or, rather, leaned—in the corner. The lady who used to sit there had been a piano teacher.

  “Uhm,” he started clumsily, “say, well, did you happen to know the people who used to own this place? I guess not. Actually, it’s been more than twenty years.”

  She blinked several times, suspicious. Zane could tell what was going through her mind. Was this some sort of trick? Did this cop try to make her feel guilty for not wanting to help put a killer in the gas chamber? If he attempted to make her feel even more vulnerable and helpless, then he’d succeeded.

  She told him what she figured he already knew. “Yeah, I lived here before. I just inherited the house from my parents last year. Palmer’s my husband’s name and we’re divorced. I used to be Caroline Mathewkitty. My big sister, Agnes, was kidnapped out of that driveway when she was ten. They found her body at the school two blocks from here. I had to pass by that spot every day when I went to school there myself. I still can’t even drive past it without wanting to scream.”

  She shook her head and added quickly, “Just because I remember that, doesn’t mean I recall what happened to Mr. Cavanaugh. The doctors say there’s a difference between long term and short term memory. I’m sorry, Detective. It’s beyond my control. You need someone who isn’t quite as painfully aware that many killers are never punished.”

  She closed the door in his face.

  But Zane hadn’t known she was Agnes’s sister. Only that this had been Agnes’s house.

  He headed back to the precinct, hands shaking on the wheel. It had been years since he’d taken any time off from work. Without a family, why bother with a vacation? That was for people with lives.

  But now he took a couple weeks off. If the Lieutenant wouldn’t assign Caroline Palmer security, he’d provide it himself. There was no law that decreed he couldn’t park on a public street outside that dark shroud of a house to guard her.

  He promised, “Agnes, I won’t let her down.”

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 10

  “I shall not murder

  The mankind of her going with a grave truth

  Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath

  With any further

  Elegy of innocence and youth.”

  —Dylan Thomas

  A Refusal to Mourn the Death,

  By Fire, of a Child in London

  November 13, 1958

  He’d had to walk about three blocks. Larry Gauzy sat in a white Imperial, having dropped him off, drinking coffee and eating a glazed donut as he waited for Pearly’s return.

  Early morning, about 8:30. This time of day kids were in school by now. The elementary was just a couple blocks from there. Those few of age who weren’t already in homeroom were on their way, hurrying so they wouldn’t be counted too late. Anybody seeing Pearly would assume he must be one of these stragglers.

  He easily found the right street and went down the alley. Dogs barked. Every time he passed by a fence where some mutt challenged him from the opposite side, the kid reached into the deep coat pocket (that is to say, the other pocket) and pulled out a dog biscuit which he tossed to the animal. The dog would quit being contentious.

  How simple it was to make friends. All with a tasty bribe.

  There was an old lady working in her garden, wrinkled hands in the soil touching chrysanthemums and marigolds. Her ass was as wide and round as a county fair-winning pumpkin. She wore a big, bright yellow straw hat and didn’t look up as he walked past her, the two separated by chain-link densely overgrown with trumpet vines. It was too late in the year for the vines to be green with flowers. Or they might simply have been sickly. Whatever, they were a complicated nest of sticks, yet they still effectively blocked most of her view of the alley.

  He paused beside the neat row of her trash cans, studying her for a moment, making sure. On a tray beside her was a little spade, a pair of scissors, and…a hearing aid.

  She’d removed it, no doubt, so she wouldn’t have to listen to the dogs.

  Wonderful. This one wouldn’t hear a thing. Provided, that is, there should be anything to hear. He hoped not.

  She sang softly to herself, in a high, rattly, slightly out of tune voice, “You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it…”

  He c
ontinued on, looking for the eighth house on the left, counting. In another yard two little girls played in a sandbox.

  They were around four- or five-years old. Too young for first grade and obviously not in kindergarden. They did spot him and waved briefly, then bent back down to the holes they were making. He noticed they put their dolls in the holes and then covered them up. Burying them.

  “Asters to asters,” they said in unison, “dust to dust.”

  Perhaps they’d attended a funeral lately.

  Pearly didn’t get to attend his mother’s funeral. The city had stuck him in a juvenal hall when she died. Had she been buried? Had they cremated her? She’d probably been stuck in a potter’s field, into a cheap box already softened and overrun with worms.

  And Unc had been dead for about two days. Had anyone found his body yet? His pusher coming over to make the next sale, finding Dan Soloway overdosed under the tarp and Salem with a blowfly carnival in the hollow where his brain used to be? Maybe one of Unc’s beatnik painter friends had visited, found the door ajar, walked in, and at first thought the blood and brains and such were just another peculiar vista from one of Danny’s artworks. Would one of the poets write a eulogy for him?

  And what would happen to Dan’s work? The landlord would replace the tub and toilet, junking the so-carefully designed ones of vomit and corpse, griping about vandalizing punkniks. He’d repaint the walls and ceiling (over the portraits of Katrin Soloway and the several Mrs. Deaths). The canvases he might sell cheap, along with any other of Danny’s effects. Or the stuff might end up in cardboard boxes from a liquor store, set along the curb for the garbage collector or those seeking free trinkets.

  He didn’t know yet that Zarembo had sent men in to dispose of the two corpses and clean the place up. Making it look like Dan Soloway had skipped out on the lease, taking the nephew with him.

  “This our fuckin’ boy wonder?” Tony had asked Larry Gauzy when the soldier brought Pearly in to be introduced.

  “Yes, sir,” Larry had replied, always that half smile where the cross-shaped scar pulled up the left side of his mouth.

  “I hear great things about you,” Tony told the child. “And I’m expectin’ great things, you understand?”

  “What fuckin’ boy wonder wouldn’t understand?” Pearly retorted. “Even if it were brain surgery, which it isn’t.”

  Pearly had said it tough as he could. But with his angelic appearance and ethereal voice meant for Christmas choirs, it only made Zarembo laugh.

  Then the man murmured to Larry, “You understand, I trust, that if he doesn’t do this perfectly, it’ll be on your head?”

  “I got no worries there, boss,” the hitman replied.

  So Pearly was in the alley. Behind the eighth house on the left. He peeked through the fence, another chain-link, this particular one drowning in ivy. Couldn’t see a damned thing. He climbed up on a trash can as carefully as he could in that big coat and glanced over the top. The yard was empty. There were a lot of pink roses growing in a corner and he thanked his lucky stars these weren’t what grew on the fence, else he would’ve been risking thorns. He could get caught and end up hanging there, helpless, or get so scratched up he’d have a hell of a time.

  By the way, the original big coat had been destroyed, covered in Salem’s blood and with a hole in the pocket through which the boy had stabbed him. This was a new big coat. He would have a new big coat every time from then on.

  Next door to this house he heard a baby crying. A woman mumbled, “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” She said it in slow motion, punctuated between each pair of words with a sob. He could just barely see across the fence into that yard, enough to assure himself that this unhappy-sounding female and her infant weren’t outside. The yard itself was full of toys: a swingset, slide, monkey bars that resembled the iron framework of a surreal rocket ship, a tank for a pool, a dollhouse about three feet high, a bomb shelter.

  Pearly had read recently that the first suburban bomb shelter had been built in Hollywood. That figured.

  Man, it was almost obscene how many toys were back there. Like the parents simply had to scream at their kids, “See how much we love you!” Covering up what? Compensating for what?

  He removed his sneakers and dropped them to the alley. He also took off a brand new baseball cap Zarembo had given him (the Brooklyn Dodgers had just that year become the Los Angeles Dodgers) and added it to the sneakers. Then he opened a paper bag he’d carried with him, what anyone spotting him would’ve guessed was a schoolboy’s sack lunch, and took out an old pair of men’s shoes. He tossed these shoes over the fence. Then he climbed over, careful not to get pricked by the metal twists at the top of the chain-link.

  Once he’d dropped to the ground, he slipped the men’s shoes on. They were way too big for him, naturally. He walked in them a few steps into the yard, leather flapping inches back behind his heels. Then he sat down on the ground and began to cry.

  Waaa! Waaa!

  The back door opened and a young woman looked out through the screen. At first she seemed fearful. But then her face softened, seeing a child. She came outside.

  “My goodness! What happened? Where’d you come from?” she wanted to know, hurrying over to him.

  Pearly rubbed his eyes and scrunched his face. “I’m late for school so I went over the fence to cut across your yard so I wouldn’t have to go all the way around the block. I was late twice last week already. I caught my foot and fell! Waaa! Waaa!”

  “Oh, sweetie,” the pretty woman cooed as she knelt next to him. Such a tiny thing in what was probably his daddy’s coat and shoes. Was he playing dress-up or was it a show-and-tell day? She looked him over for bruises or cuts.

  “I think I hit my head,” he sobbed and leaned over for her to inspect it.

  She said, “That hurts, too. I know. I hit my head when I fell the other day. Let me see, darling.”

  When she came close to examine his skull, touching his marvelous silky hair, Pearly brought out the ice pick, handle wrapped in paper, and stabbed up with it, aiming for the soft ticking portion of her white throat. He used a short thrust and slash, severing carotid and windpipe. It was the first time he’d managed this smoothly. She flailed back from him, teetering on her knees, such an expression of profound dismay on her face.

  He jumped up and stabbed the weapon into her chest, down through the top of the snowy left breast, visible in the frilly robe she wore which had come open a little as she tumbled away from him. Her eyes were still open, staring at him incredulously, with the betrayal of adults who come to the sudden realization that even children could be monsters under the right circumstances.

  (Went against the order of the world, didn’t it? Actually, Pearly knew there was no real order to anything.)

  Blood sprayed with the first wound, in the throat. The lady and he were red with it. He tasted where it struck him in the face. The angle couldn’t have been helped since she leaned over him, very near when he struck. He didn’t even notice how much blood came from the heart.

  This was a little easier than with Gegax. The guy had been fat. She was slim. The sternum provided resistance, as did the tough muscle he aimed at, but he’d been practicing for the last day and a half—on an array of big, firmly stuffed teddy bears. This was a different weapon than what he was used to, very sharp point/ultra thin with no sideways blade to cut his hands.

  “It’s similar in function to a stiletto,” Gauzy had said. “‘Cept if you get caught with it, it’s not like getting caught with a real weapon. It’s a kitchen utensil, for crying out loud.”

  He recalled Mrs. Death’s stiletto heels after she’d emerged from the beauty parlor in The Vagabonds to collect Emily’s scream.

  Pearly’d pushed down with all his weight, practically falling on top of this poor young woman.

  Pulling the blade out, he heard Larry Gauzy in his head. “You’re Arthur here, rightful king of England, pulling the sword from the stone, straight back and slow.”
>
  It made a sucking noise, like a boot emerging from thick mud.

  Then he put it through her right eye, a coup de grâce which should guarantee she was dead. Something Larry Gauzy had also taught him the night before. Right before they’d taken a break, to dig into a meal of pizza, sodas, and ice cream, watching THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW.

  “Right into the brain,” Gauzy had explained.

  Well, sure.

  And that right eye had watched him, widening with terror as the point approached, one dainty lady’s hand squeezing her gashed throat, one hand clutching her breast, mouth managing only a weak tin whistle.

  Mrs. Death stepped out from the rose bushes, dress covered in a pattern of pink blooms, lips in pink lipstick. She caught the dying woman’s scream (how would she have screamed with her windpipe severed?) in a purse of cerise silk, then receded back into the bushes, thorns tearing her hair the way that fingers could poke holes in tendrils of fog.

  She’d smiled at him, Mrs. Death had. Said something he didn’t hear. But, as usual, his mouth was stopped up, disabling any attempt he might have made to answer.

  Now Pearly walked through the back door, still wearing the big shoes, leaving bloody footprints. He went to the kitchen sink to wash his face and hands, turning the tap on and off with his wrist. He shook the water from himself rather than use a towel. He removed the coat and carefully wrapped it up into a ball turned inside-out, the pick inside its thick folds. He took the wax paper from the handle, went into the bathroom and flushed the wad of it down the toilet. Glanced at himself in a full length mirror. Bloody shoes, bloody hair. But his clothes were all right.

  Pearly went back through the house, left by the same door, threw the wrapped-up coat over the fence, then climbed the chain-link, hands mostly on ivy leaves. He swung over onto the trash can with a modest thud and clang.

  Down the alley the two little girls were giggling, playing funeral day. “Asters to asters!”