Still

by Charlee Jacob

  The old lady had changed songs. “…the fundamental things of life as time goes by…”

  One dog whoofed, perhaps hoping for another biscuit.

  He heard a rumbling on the street a couple blocks away. Garbage truck was coming. He peeked in the trash can. It was full so they hadn’t been in this alley yet. He removed the bloody big shoes, putting them back in the paper bag. He put his sneakers back on and then the baseball cap which covered his bloody hair.

  He moved toward the opposite end of the alley, stuffed the bag with bloody shoes and the folded coat with the ice pick into the trash can behind the last house there.

  He realized he was trembling.

  This was the first killing where he was totally unconnected to the victim. The bum in the park had been one of those who’d been responsible for his mother going out the window. He’d been hired to do Gegax but he’d known Emily Kaplan, and he’d known the children who’d hired him for seven dollars and a coat, and he’d been witness to Theo Gegax’s car running Emily over. He’d read Chambers’ book, JUST A VIOLET I PLUCKED FROM MY MOTHER’S GRAVE, and had met him and been given Mary Kelly’s key by him. He’d known Salem for the vile insect he was—but actually Pearly hadn’t killed Dan’s lover. (Larry had.)

  He hadn’t known this pretty lady at all. Had never seen her except for a snapshot Larry showed him. And this made him feel strange, as if he’d just crossed a threshold where the only door consisted of an almost invisible electricity. The current now crawled across him in blue wisps. It vibrated Mary Kelly’s key, lying against the bare skin of his chest. That key felt as heavy as a cinder block. There were a few real tears in his eyes. There hadn’t been any when he did the Waaa! Waaa! to lure the vic out of her house. His lower lip vibrated so he bit down on it, hard.

  No no. Pearly. The full moon’s lunatic pearl.

  Unless you went around to the dark side.

  If you’re goin’ t’ kill, do it sane.

  The kid took several deep breaths. Told himself these were scouring him out, the emotion carried away in the exhales.

  “I’ll do it sane and I’ll be good at it. I’ll be the best,” he whispered.

  Pearly left the alley, turned the corner, and walked back down toward the direction he’d come initially. This time, streetside, he went right past the victim’s house. At the curb sat a car, a man inside it the boy thought seemed vaguely familiar to him.

  He could feel the fact this guy was a cop crawling over every inch of him.

  The man—older, hair gray and thinning along the top of the scalp—noticed him. Eyes like le grand plaie. But he didn’t frown or seem to take any special interest. Pearly just smiled and waved, the cop doing the same.

  Pearly walked on.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 11

  “Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!

  the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”

  —Allen Ginsberg

  Howl

  November 12-16, 1958

  Zane had already stopped by home, slapped together a half dozen peanut butter sandwiches, grabbed a box of saltines, a couple cans of Spam and a package of ginger snaps. Not that he ate much these days. No, man. A-heads didn’t have much appetite beyond the thin wire. He took a carton of Lucky Strikes. He filled several canteens with tapwater, sugar and instant coffee. He took an empty bottle he could pee in surreptitiously. Didn’t want to be accused of flashing. He got a blanket and that old trusty Polaroid Land Camera, his most recent McBain purchase, KILLER’S WEDGE, and a big bottle of Dexies.

  How could he hold out trying, all by his lonesome self, to guard Caroline Palmer?

  He didn’t really believe Tony Zarembo had left town. And Gauzy was out there, free and free-wheelin’. They would make their move and Zane intended to stop them, to save the girl and also show her that the only chance she stood was to testify.

  Or maybe, if she still refused, he’d help her get out of town. Leave the state. (He even wondered what it’d be like to go with her. A personal bodyguard disguised as an itinerant dishwasher. Maybe he’d grow a mustache and sideburns as they moved to Texas where he’d hire on as a deputy to some small redneck town. She’d bleach her black hair and be a church secretary. Maybe they’d even marry and have a little girl. Call her Agnes.)

  Yeah right, right, you gone from a little speed to H-bomb dreams? You’re just s’pose to save the girl, not ride off into the sunset.

  Zane sensed the ghosts watching as he left. Did they know how idiotically his mind was working? Especially for him to suspect them present in broad daylight, resurrected from his conscious sphere. No way. Haunts were for night and troubled dreams.

  He hopped in his car and started the engine, began to pull away from the curb. A brand new Le Sabre trolled past, big stylized hemorrhoid in the middle of the rear bumper. Definitely a feature flaw. Zane chuckled, thinking of about a dozen of these tossed together on a highway: a real “pile-up”. He winced at his terrible pun.

  Then saw the driver turn slightly to look at him.

  Just for a sec. Was it the crank who’d come into the station to confess to pretty much the murdering of the whole world?

  No way. Le Sabre was an expensive car. Crank was a bum.

  Not the crank.

  Zane sweated, gasped. Could tell by the taste in his mouth that his breath stank. His skin felt like vulcanized rubber. How was he going to do this?

  Not how, Daddy-o. WHY. Because he had to.

  Before he hit the freeway, sunset was a burnished orange. Torches of palm trees. Pink stucco house half flamed, half melted. Smoke created black skull-shaped clouds in which flocks of swallows vanished.

  Two fully-tanned naked fairies stood on the street, beyond the fire trucks, sirens from these and a patrol car synchronized. The men had been partying in a swimming pool when the inferno started in their kitchen. They covered their genitals with their hands. A neighbor brought towels for them to wrap around their hips.

  Zane wouldn’t stop to lend assistance. Weird though, as he drove by, his radio played Peggy Lee, singing ‘Fever’.

  About ten minutes later, he passed an accident. One car had rear-ended another, flipping it across the highway median and into the path of an eighteen-wheeler.

  Didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, foot frozen on the accelerator, smell of gasoline faintly erotic in the wind.

  “Wow, that old lady back there was crying red tears,” he told himself. “Eye rubies.”

  She was hurt. Miles of lace unraveling, poisonous green silk…

  “Naw, you moron. That must’ve been transmission fluid, splashed when the engine block shoved backwards into her lap,” he then replied to shrug it off.

  Now she bent out the open doorway and hawked out blackness. Spiders, many clinging to ride the billowing lace. Others darted across the highway like tarantulas at desert midnights. He thought he could actually hear them exploding as cars ran them over.

  The automobiles that sped by, the ones going faster than Zane did, rippled a shimmer of silvery mirage. The slower cars appeared to stand still, visibly wrapped in gigantic cocoons. The sun slipped down below the horizon, yet there was a line of bleed-out…and speckles of red like the petechiae of a hanged man’s eyes.

  “Don’t look. Don’t concern yourself,” the detective muttered.

  Who?

  It was said that Machiavelli held long conversations with invisible dinner guests. Robert Louis Stevenson chatted up impish brownies (unbeheld by others) who related to him the amazing tales he later penned.

  Zane drove past the school where Agnes Mathewkitty’s body had been discovered, two decades ago. No little dead girl. She belonged to the nightmare host he’d see once he crashed again. But there was a kid out there, on the playground.

  Wasn’t it the rage among boys to wear coonskin caps and miniature fringed leather jackets ala Li’l Davy Crockets? Guitars, toy flintlocks, lunch boxes, phonograph records blaring, “King of the Wild Frontier!” They�
�d even sold Davy Crockett bathing suits. Now where exactly in that effusive legend did Crockett wear a bathing suit? At the fucking Alamo as a block party went on with all the tacos you could eat and all the sangria you could drink?

  The kid on the playground dressed up as an Indian and lifted his face toward the night reflecting neon. The iron merry-go-round spun out of control as the youngster chanted, an ultraviolet blur so fast that McFadden expected it to detach from its metal-screeching base and sail off toward the stars, a genuine flying saucer.

  He drove on.

  There wasn’t anything suspicious at Miss Palmer’s. The living room window had its drapes closed, glowing from the t.v., blue cathode shadows. There was a light on at the back of the building, probably the kitchen or a bedroom. The porch light was on, too. All that kept the dark gray house from being night’s non-entity. At least half of all the porch lights on the block—both sides of the street—were on. The girl’s little green Rambler sat parked in the garage.

  Later the t.v. went off. The light at the back remained on. She must be sleeping with it that way. Really scared.

  The First Night: wasn’t too bad.

  ««—»»

  Morning: Husbands left for work. Wives packed kids off to local teaching establishments (whether or not the boys and girls learned anything at them was possibly moot). The elementary being close, most walked. Buses arrived to take older ones off to junior and high schools.

  Caroline didn’t open her door, but she had no family and was currently on sabbatical from her job.

  He’d considered going up, knocking at the door, to let her know he was there. Tell her she needn’t worry. Zane decided not to do this. She probably peeked often enough out the window, sizing up the street situation. When and if she noticed him, she’d recognize him. Maybe she’d relax a bit.

  She turned on the living room light, didn’t turn off the porch light, even as others down the block went out.

  Perhaps she’d had a gander at the detective and the lights were acknowledgement. He nodded, sipped cold instant coffee harsh as acid frost. He lit a cigarette, smoke mildly irritating to pimples which had broken out on his face. At his age, for chrissakes.

  (Common side-effect of frequent amphetamine use.)

  Zane considered how rough (and hopefully tough) he looked, sitting there. A lone wolf character…more likely to be drawn by Spillane or McBain? (Or Kerouac?) Self-sacrificing, self-reliant, self-possessed.

  Possessed. Fuck. You got that right.

  Hubris.

  He thought about a Lucky Strike commercial from a few years ago. A stunt man in a crash helmet smashes up a car on a movie lot, then lights up his signature Lucky. In another, a guy did some target practice with a friggin’ machine gun before firing up his cancer stick. Damage versus the power to do damage. Smug smiles at manly prerogative.

  Zane ran a nicotine-stained fingertip over the cig’s length, rippled nail curling across the end of the flesh. Should he quit smoking?

  For that matter, quit drinking?

  His gut burned, and sometimes his chest ached. He coughed up the kind of mucous he’d glimpsed in sucking wounds, of liver sunrises and decaying spleen dusks.

  Should he give up the pep pills?

  Not yet. He washed a couple more down with the rusty dusty caffeine breakfast. Watched some little boy stroll by, late for school yet in no apparent hurry—probably a hellraiser but with the face of an angel from one of those Catholic stained glass windows. Had a smudge of blood on his knee. Might’ve gotten that playing ball and sliding into second base.

  Kid seemed familiar, white blond. So cute he could do commercials if he’d put on a couple pounds. Otherwise he might only show up as the ghost of a double exposure.

  “Ain’t my fault,” Zane imagined the cameraman telling a producer. “Child’s so thin he only got one side.”

  Boy waved and smiled. McFadden did the same, then slumped, recalling his own sons.

  Suburb morning, dull as dirt, observing as the postman made his rounds, women going out front doors to retrieve it as if it were the Grail. Noises of soap operas through windows, sounds of wet laundry smacking on the lines in back yards.

  One lady, who lived right next door to Caroline, came out for a stroll with a baby carriage. She had a generous mouth and an abundant bosom. Except she glowered at the infant, hanging her head until her chin touched her chest, depressed as she pushed the pram up and down the main drag of her microcosm. She had the face of an unrealized suicide. After about thirty minutes of this, she finally returned to her home.

  It occurred to him he’d seen her earlier, sending four more kids off to school. Stair steps of despair.

  Zane perused KILLER’S WEDGE, putting himself into McBain’s characters as he always did. Going out on a squeal and catching monsters who rampaged through their imaginary city. On a municipal marathon among the crumbs and crowd. The grifters, grafters, and those snared between. Just trying to do their jobs, catching beasts a lot more often than it seemed McFadden ever did. Talking just like the cops he really knew talked. Living, struggling, loving, dying. No fancy shit beyond the daily grind. No drawing room pretenses in tuxedos Prince-Albert-In-A-Can.

  He had to wonder if the serve-and-protect guys at the 87th Precinct would ever keep a dirty-secret scrapbook like he did. But, then, Zane understood he wasn’t normal—at least not anymore. He sometimes doubted he’d ever been.

  He’d been new to the L.A. homicide division in 1936. It was the year that corruption had run rampant among the city’s officials. The police department had been no better than syndicate enforcers. He’d been an honest cop in a snake pit.

  The main case of that hour (coinciding with the tragedy of Agnes Mathewkitty) was the Rattlesnake Murderer. Robert James, a ’Bama sharecropper’s son, had managed to escape the itchy cotton fields to attend a barber college. He liked women okay but apparently got off especially on heating up his wife’s curling irons to stick ’em under her fingernails. By the time he got to his fifth wife, he enjoyed being whipped horny as she dressed in black leather. But games grow old and he threw a pair of rattlers—named Lethal and Lightning, I shit you not—at her. Afterward R.B. drowned her for good measure.

  Walter Winchell made the trip from the east coast to do his live radio show on the sensational trial. Peter Lorre, the famous goggle-eyed thespian, sat in the courtroom, watching the accused for mannerisms he could borrow for an upcoming film in which he was going to portray a murderer.

  Zane remembered being at the courthouse and seeing Lorre. The man had brilliantly played the child killer in Fritz Lang’s M. Since the freshman detective was there because of little Agnes’s death, he couldn’t help staring at the actor.

  Peter Lorre noticed, then smiled and waved.

  Making Zane super-impose now this memory over the white-blond kid who’d passed him, late for school, blood on his knee.

  Baby-killers and baby killers.

  ««—»»

  Second night: Another sunset, another Dexie.

  Zane finished the novel and decided as a hoot to read it backwards. He’d consumed a peanut butter sandwich at noon, even if he hadn’t been hungry. Now, restlessly, he dipped ginger snaps into Spam. Nodded, eyes at half mast. Popped a second Dexedrine. So, what was that? Fifty milligrams in the past hour? Swallowed coffee that washed across his dry mouth. Damn, but he had a headache.

  He used a flashlight, as opposed to the car’s interior lights. Didn’t want to run down his battery. Held the torch between his thighs so his hands were free to hold the novel and turn the pages.

  Rather hard to concentrate, reading a book backwards. He tried outloud. Seemed a lot longer than it had forwards. Yet he understood it.

  Checking furtively, he turned off the flashlight, fumbled for the bottle he’d brought, peed in it. Then opened the driver’s side door and poured the contents down the nearby sewer opening.

  Caroline’s living room and porch lights were still on. She kept them blazing fo
r his benefit, he was positive. Cathode phantoms of tainted indigo, in front windows down the block. What was on now? Uncle Miltie? Peter Gunn? Not Miss Palmer’s t.v. tonight. She might be reading in bed, after combing her hair and brushing her teeth for a Pepsodent smile. Maybe she read one of the recent romantic bestsellers. How about DR. ZHIVAGO by Boris Pasternak.

  She couldn’t be reading PEYTON PLACE, could she? Nice girl like her? Well, they were only words. Phonic, sonic, but not bubonic. She’d be okay.

  “It’s photographs the damned are trapped in.”

  He shook.

  He dropped his book.

  He dropped it again.

  There were saintly haloes around the street lamps. He rubbed his eyes.

  How were the ghosts faring, left at the house without him?

  “I’ll be home soon,” Zane told them gently. “Don’t be afraid. I wouldn’t just up and leave you.”

  ««—»»

  Next day: Kids off to school. He didn’t see the boy saint, kid-angel. He did see the unhappy mother setting loose her brood after her husband left in the Buick, peck on the lips. Later she came out for her walk, but without the baby carriage. Zane heard the child crying in the house, voice hitching like a misfiring gun.

  She dragged her feet. And when she actually glanced his way, Zane perceived with his speed-furtive eyes the tranquilizers in hers. Yet in the centers of her dilated pupils, bitter sleep translated into hysteria. Even through her bra, two white spots of pathos blossomed from lactating nipples. The worn heels of her shoes sparked in the dry heat every time they struck buckled concrete.

  For some reason, in front of his car, she dropped her keys and bent forward from the hips, straight-legged. Not a housewife’s modest attempt to retrieve but a see-my-pretty-ass whore’s. Roadmap highways marked the backs of stockings all the way up to where a beauty X marked the spot. That’s when Zane considered she’d worn a dress yesterday, a simple plaid and daisy housecoat. But today she had on rolled-up short-shorts. And she shouldn’t do that because she had at least five kids he’d already counted…and, while she wasn’t awful, she carried the hips and stretch marks of a woman with five children.