Those weren’t stockings. Couldn’t be with short-shorts. No garters. The lines on the backs of her legs were drawn on. Women used to do that during World War 2 when the war effort made nylons scarce. Except these, well…they were drawn in bright red lipstick. Razor-straight.
He murmured, “Jesus.”
He slapped himself.
Seeing red fluid drip. Puddling in her shoes, trailing behind her.
Not really. He slapped himself again and the molten aspect terminated.
She might’ve had the red stocking lines tattooed, oh—say, thirteen or fourteen years ago. 1944 or ’45.
He thought he should ask if she was okay. And was the baby all right?
But he just couldn’t do it. He might end up having to investigate and it would remove him, even if only temporarily, from his self-appointed mission to guard Caroline Palmer.
Only a case of another woman imprisoned within the American Dream. Marriage was a penile institution.
Had she once intended to be an actress? She might’ve been a bondage model, like Elizabeth Short. Thought Prince Charming had arrived to save her when talent for legitimate film (whatever that was) couldn’t.
She looked behind her to see if he watched. He did but not with the male appreciation she’d craved. All she saw was his pity. When she burst into tears and ran home, Zane cursed himself.
“Strange,” he said. “Did you see that? When she covered her face with both hands? I saw distinctly. I counted, man. She’s got twelve fingers.”
He cursed himself. He cursed the suburbs so quiet at noon that you could hear a rib crack and a heart deflating.
««—»»
The third night: He found himself touching his snubnose 38. Thinking, what was the caliber of the heart? The one kept silent and close to the vest?
Damn but he wanted to creep out and steal a newspaper off somebody’s lawn. His kingdom for the sports page.
And what was happening in the Glatman case? Okay, there’d been three victims. Then why, when the detective had talked to the crud, had he gotten the impression of corpses to infinity? In deserts numberless and outdoor tombs covered only in turning leaves, keepsaked in quarries of quartz and with erased features beneath the epitaphs of rivers. Rags of love abandoned, orphans of schizophrene fallout, disaster’s torsos martyred unmiraculously when meteors journeyed to die in droves.
Nothing at Miss Palmer’s. Living room/porch light on. Dark-painted house chained to the night or the other way around.
The lady with the baby carriage and the scarlet comets on the backs of her legs…her house. The drapes of smouldering chintz were closed, hubby home, a flickering inside (could be candles). A silhouette of a satyr—curly horns and prickly erection behind the curtains. Posing, flexing, a wild creature from forests with sacrificial altars in their centers. Put the kids (‘cause a goatman’s children would be kids, right?) to bed early, open a couple bottles of Ouzo, play some temple games.
Zane listened to the car’s radio. Perry Como’s ‘Catch A Falling Star’.
“…and put it in your pocket,” he sang along, creakily off-key.
Then John Zacherle’s ‘Dinner With Drac’. Followed by ‘Rockin’ Robin’ by Bobby Day.
McFadden tapped his feet and pounded in time on the steering wheel, dashboard, and his knees. He really took off with Huey “Piano” Smith and The Clowns doing ‘Rocking Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Flu’.
Not even what he’d ordinarily be interested in but, man! This stuff tonight was sending him!
There came a knock at the window and a strong light flashed in his eyes.
A young, uniformed cop stood there, chewing the inside of his cheek, and motioning for him to roll the window down.
“Whatchu doin’ out here, old man?” this fool had the nerve to ask: laconically at that. “Wanna step out here so we can see you walk, like, the shortest distance to Mars? Bein’ a straight line.”
Zane showed him his detective’s shield. He snapped, “I’m on business here, boy. Guarding the premises and person of the witness in the Cavanaugh murder. How’s about you walk the shortest distance to Hell, you shitty-diaper greenhorn? Or would you like to take this matter of interference up with Lieutenant Chawbury?”
The cop’s eyes widened. “Whoa! Sorry, didn’t know… Just doin’ my job. You don’t exactly look—, er…”
“Yeah, well if you want to keep that job, I suggest you let me get on with mine. And as for my methods, I’ve done enough of these to to know better than to sit out here trying to look like some toy sentry at the gates of fucking Buckingham Palace, his anus sewn up so he can’t even fart…”
“I’m goin’, see? I apologize, sir. Just a suggestion but you might wanna turn the music down a little. No need for fireworks. An honest mistake.”
“Get out of here!”
“Uhh, yes, sir.”
Zane trembled with barely suppressed rage for a good half an hour, hand over his chest. Heart doing some crazy, coffeehouse bongo rhythm, half random jazz/half dirge. Fuckhewaspissed!
He did switch the radio off, then sat in the dark the rest of the night. Occasionally a car drove up the street, headlights nova in his eyes, so bright and so long it took them to cruise from one end of the block to the other, that he wasn’t sure another day hadn’t come and gone.
««—»»
Next day? The sad lady with the red stripes on the backs of her legs and the beginnings of cellulite like pocked steam didn’t come out to send the four stair steps to school. Didn’t come out with the hubby, no sterile peck on hermetically sealed lips in the driveway. Hubby didn’t come out either.
Well, honestly, no other kids joined any parade to school. Maybe it was Saturday.
Zane didn’t see her all day. Nor did he hear the baby cry.
Of course, he was fried and zombified on sleep-deprivation. (Can’t let Agnes let Caroline down.)
How many Dexies had he taken? By the way, he was out of coffee. His tongue felt big as a fire hose—but dry.
He did his best not to see himself in the rearview mirror. Once he did happen to glance in but the face he saw wasn’t his own. It belonged to that bum who’d come into the station to confess, back last summer.
Postman came down the street. Zane watched, trying to keep still but constantly twitching, itchy, fidgety as he was fucked up. The guy put a severed hand in one mailbox, a foot in another, a string of guts in a third.
At this rate, would Zane even be any good if Zarembo did send an assassin to cool Miss Palmer?
He’d read KILLER’S WEDGE forwards, backwards, every other word, and upside-down. He’d seen the Black Dahlia walk out of the house where the sad woman lived with her five kids and her lord and master, Pan. She retrieved a breast from the mailbox (nipple leaking pink milk), then swiveled her top half like a gun turret on a tank, walking half-backward inside again.
“No wonder this stuff’s illegal,” Zane said. “Yeah, right.”
He wished he’d brought that Jack Kerouac book. But when he said it aloud, it only sounded like, “Jack Crack. Jack Crack!”
He’d started to feel an intense beat. A rush and painful, a thrashing primal birthright, leaving him with an all-over body concussion—yet merged. (Sub)merged. Combination flailed and deliciously absorbed.
Zane wanted a bowl of chili. He wanted to make love to a tall brown nightingale with eyes the color of bluebottle flies and lips the same red as a blowfly’s pupa case. He wanted to please her until she whispered to him the names of all those killers he’d never brought to justice, until she shared with him the secret of putting the dead to rest, until they rolled off the bed together and off a cliff into an icy sea where he’d sleep, too.
««—»»
Was it day or night now?
allday/allnight/allthesame
Measure some time, then slipstream it. Such and such a sinister passage, quick as a camera flash, slow as its burn across the retina.
How long had Zane been sitting in
front of Miss Palmer’s place? Could time be measured in ginger snaps consumed or in how often he’d peed into the bottle he then sneaked to pour into the gutter?
“It’s the beat to keep,” Jack Crack had said and Zane quoted it.
McFadden wrapped up in it, suddenly, buzzbuzz, except it wasn’t the hipster colorstream jetstream at all. It hung with the moon, but it was black.
Beat beat slambam stars pulsarpulsing going nova to heat up the mad dark heart of the universe. Nebulas of red haloed/red winged angels beat beat beat, vein tympani even when it stops in one, maybe murder maybe nature…always a victim, continuing to bounce off the chamber walls of another hideaway vena cava.
No stop no comfort save for shared suffering, safety of numbers (or did everyone grieve on their own {beating} beating the walls beating the silence beating the horror with execrated fists.
Mechanized piston in the olam, thunder beat, wolf eat you/me meat. Baptised in a white dress in moon water. Baptised in a red dress in blood. Baptised in a black dress in ashes. Baptised in estrus, my mouth sore upon your fallen organ.
Even Death had a beat, owned the beat, stopped it when He wanted to, stalked it like a soul cop, atoms whirling dying unto the final revolution, but still bound to become something else. Man, don’t you know physics? Couldn’t destroy matter, only change it, never entirely gone to Hell, forever part of the beat (skin to ether, flesh to ectoplasm begging from synapse epochs.) Hangman beat, fly beat, revenant beat.
Kiss bite rape thrust rose-colored smoke.
Te deum laudamus, Ego te absolvo ab omnibus, We praise Thee, O God, and pass the ammunition, stoned on stones, addicted to mushroom clouds and consecrated roentgens, numbed on burned baby porno, sucking banned epics, countdown Bibles:
45 RPMs… 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0-
Blast-off into holy roller heaven, hole-in-the-head, picture window between breasts, naked broken hands out supplicating a hierarchical kickback, calling my name in the still in the solemn in the hushed no.
Catgut your tongue?
Eyes blink same, teeth grind same, peristalsis all sigh same, encyclopedia of us back to Eden back to Cain, empathy and apathy again and again. Burp, fart, bay at passing headlights. Kundalini machine each a ghost in one realm or other.
Man, don’t you know physics? Electrons redeemed in a spheric monastery. No vulgar, no obscene, no fuck, go GO GO. Into the howling cocksucker red, this plasmic strobe we share, a nuclear species without conscience, heart whispering in the ears, history shrieking in the brain.
(The ghosts had found him, out of the dream, surrounded the car, Help us, Zane, you have our souls. Only you can…)
He stared at them, then saw a flicker in the rearview mirror. Killer in the backseat said, “Takin’ up a vow of violence ‘cause look LOOK even God wails, ecstatic for His bloodfix.”
And there was the old Negro lady in the late nineteenth century frock of Paris green—a most expensively fashionable shroud—her voice like dice in a cup of ground glass. “Penisknife, fingergun, Aztec goddess womb your tomb. Oral in the lap of luxury. Denial is the only deviance, forgetting the only necro sin.”
(But he hadn’t forgotten them! He hadn’t! He turned back to the ghosts, to explain. But to explain what? A lifetime of failure? Of portraits hoarded in the ragpicker’s theater?)
Sitting on the hood of Zane’s car, a little boy with feathers in long black hair, banging a Conquistador’s helmet on the windshield until the glass resonated a shard thunder. The boy said, “We are martyrs to pathetic ethics taken to the grave. We are children of the innocent rain. We are slaves to the shadows of the anaconda’s integrity, gritty with appetite. We lie down in the wilderness and our colors rot among the catalpas.”
The boy touched McFadden through the broken windshield; the elegant old lady burned him with her ruby radium tears; the bum with the beard passed electricity through him with the lice in his kiss.
Zane laughed, his reply to his ghosts fast as Kalashnikov, “Homo Gestalt, beat strung, still-life to stop-motion death… The Still… The Still Beat, still beating connection. Feel you out there and you and you, string inside my wrist, mirror sliver in the left ventricle. Hear my final breath rattling in your acoustic worm asylum. No such thing as still, no such thing as final. Death beats us until we’re convinced humanity’s only His own invention.”
The spirits of the unsolved, the unresolved faded.
All three of Zane’s other visitors nodded, ghosts of Freak past/present/future. And the bum spoke for the woman and boy. “I live inside some. In others, all the victims live inside them. Victims are filled t’ the brim with victims. Question is, Detective, what are you goin’ t’ be? A killer or a victim? Ask it out loud and often, for it’s your mantra: killer or victim? Killer or victim?”
Zane argued, passionate, pounding the steering wheel with white fists. “There must be a third choice, another category, restraint of one with salvation of the other.”
Bum, granny, Indian boy shook their heads. The boy and the old woman flowed into the man, quicksilver insane. Just him. Just one, after all.
“Ya never really save anybody,” bearded all-killer remarked, scratching crotchcrabs. “Two classifications is why. Which are you? Killer or victim?”
««—»»
Zane had puked on the dashboard. Didn’t know when.
It was daylight but which day?
Had he hallucinated? Yeah.
Had he slept? No. Not even Craaaaashshshshshed. Simply dreamed with eyes open.
He was scared. He understood he’d overdosed and could’ve died. And what might’ve happened then to Miss Palmer while he was in such a state?
Living room/porch light on.
Yesterday (or the day before?) he’d seen the postman stuff an unidentifyable body part into Caroline’s mailbox. Now the box merely overflowed with envelopes.
She hadn’t been taking it in. There were several newspapers on the front steps. Hadn’t he been paying attention while on sentry duty?
Zane climbed out of the car, went up the walk, knocked on the door. Waited. His suit was rumpled. He could smell himself. Fairies had apparently shit in his mouth.
He knocked again. “Miss Palmer? It’s Detective McFadden. Are you okay in there?”
Am I okay out here?
He tried the door. Locked.
He went next door, to the sad woman’s house. He’d call the station from there, tell them he thought something had happened to their reluctant witness. He knocked. Then noticed red smeared on the chintz curtains at the window.
This door wasn’t locked. He wrenched it open.
The stench hit him like a wall. Of course, it occurred to him he’d smelled rot outside.
The living room had three bodies in it. Stair steps, another in the hall. One had made it to the front window, grabbing a fistful of curtain only to be pulled back.
There was a baby in a crib, still.
A dead satyr lying in bed, blood almost invisible on red satin sheets.
The sad lady sat in a chair in her breakfast nook, shotgun between her legs, toe caught on the trigger. On the table were photographs, stacks of ‘em. Kiddie filth, their own kids. Her face in some of the shots, expression of trapped horror reminding him of Glatman’s unlucky models.
Zane staggered to the sink and threw up again. Saw when he brought his head up that he could just barely see into Miss Palmer’s yard. Could see the back of her fence.
Something streaked across it.
Instantly he was running out the back door, leaping hurdles of an almost redundant number of kids’ playthings. He drew his legs up under him on springboard feet, launching off the roof of a fortunately sturdy dollhouse, then jumped—JUMPED—actually clearing the six foot fence. Superman! Into the alley, a hard landing.
And the cat which had gone over Caroline’s fence stopped, stunned, whiskers twitching, ears laid back, growling before it skulked off at a hundred miles an hour.
A cat?
He’
d damned near killed himself to chase a cat?
Why the gore on its face?
Zane scrabbled back up, ran through the death house, not going to try to leap another fence, thank you. Went out sad lady’s front door, crossed Caroline’s front lawn, aimed for the gate and entered the back yard.
Was it possible? Two radically different insanities, unconnected horrors next door to each other. He reeled, had to catch himself on a pink rose bush, thorns stabbing his palm and fingers.
The body did a little dance. The action of infestation.
She’d been dead for a while. All the natural orifices—eyes, ears, nose, mouth, vagina, anus—swarmed. And he could tell by a couple other places, where the business of consumption was heaviest, that these were her injury sites.
He knew she must’ve been okay that first night. Lights had gone off and on. But after that?
The corpse was bloated with gas from bacteria dissolving the tissues. Fluids leaked from the orifices in which things swam upstream. That took at least three days.
How long had Zane been there? Four nights, at least. All this time, sitting guarding a dead woman.
He went inside her house, back door unlocked. No sign of struggle. No mess. She’d been done out there, not in here. He picked up the phone and called the station. Didn’t use the term ‘meat wagon’. Said he’d wait for them.
He managed to stumble to his car, grabbing the camera off the front seat. Returned with it, took several photos of the crime scene. His first. He didn’t know if they’d turn out because he couldn’t see through the lens. He was crying too much, chest pounding, arms tight, brain floating up through a hole in the top of his head as everything else squeezed like his finger on the shutter. Pop pop pop. Beat beat beat.
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