“What?” I said.
“Man, are you square,” the man in the suit said. “Mighty Dull. What you want?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You are pretty damn sorry. I said my handle is Mighty Dull, and what kind of whore are you looking”—he made a little show of twirling his hands like a butler, clearly pleased with the rhyme he was about to make—“for?”
“Oh, I’m not looking to get screwed,” I jawed. “Leastways I don’t pay for it when I am. Or at least I think I don’t.” I chuckled.
Mighty probably had no idea what I was on about, but he clearly didn’t like me running down his chosen profession of pimpology. He popped up his collar and shook his hands like he was casting me off of his dynamite suit. “Man, I don’t even need this jive. If you ain’t here to pay, you ain’t here to play, so why don’t you go take a long walk down a short pier?”
I thought about it for a second. “If I did that, I’d fall in the water.”
“That’s the point, joker!”
“All right, all right,” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m here for a whore if that’s what it takes to get some questions answered.”
“It’s five bucks.”
“That’s extortion.”
“That’s the going rate, my man.”
I shrugged, figuring I could figure something out. Worst case scenario, what was he going to do, kill me? Well, he might. Or leastways he could try.
“All right,” I said.
“Aight?” Mighty said, mushing the words together.
“All right,” I repeated, carefully pronouncing each syllable in turn.
“Aight,” Mighty said again, rubbing his hands together. “Well, come on back, son. Let’s git you a look at the hos.”
Mighty lifted up the counter’s movable leaf and let me come inside. Good thing he didn’t ask me for the money up front. Then again, maybe that sort of thing’s not kosher in brothels. I wouldn’t know. I don’t spend much time in cathouses as a rule. I was surprisingly sure of that. Who the hell knows what my rules are? Or if I have any.
“Welcome to Hat Scratch Fever,” Mighty said proudly. His hand was out with a wave as if he was showing off El Dorado to a beggar.
And it was, truth be told, pretty impressive. The room was good and wide. It looked as if it was a converted coat check. Up top, in the boxes where an average hat would go, sat row upon row of severed heads, each one giving her own distinct “come hither” wink.
“Hey, baby!” one of the heads, a pretty delightful-looking Abyssinian beauty, called out to me.
The cacophony of catcalls that followed might have made me flush red if I still had any blood in my veins. There were some cuties and, to be damn straight about it, a few real ginchy dames. What a surprise, I found myself thinking, how much you get out of a face. Was I a face man? Maybe everybody was, once a face was separated from the rest of a body.
In the next level down, where the coats should have been, hung a row of torsos. It would’ve been pretty gruesome had I seen it at a crime scene. I could imagine the headlines: SERIAL KILLER LEAVES COAT CHECK FULL OF CORPSES. As it was, the girls—if that was the proper term for it—were heaving their bosoms and wiggling their tum-tums like Lebanese belly dancers dying for it.
Down where the snowboots and galoshes would’ve been were, of course, the hips on down, including the gams. They kept those together.
I guessed exactly what was going on, but I figured I’d play dumb to buy a little time with Mighty Dull. I’ll tell you, though, I was starting to think I wasn’t so much a face man as a leg man. A couple of those pairs seemed to go on forever, or at least they would have if they hadn’t been so crudely separated from their torsos.
I suppose they could’ve separated limb from limb, but maybe there’s a certain amount of charm lost when you start switching out arms and legs. How did one control…? Do we still control our own bodies? Or do they act independently? What a funny question.
“Well, what do you think, my man?” Mighty asked.
“Huh?” I said.
“Come on, man, don’t play dumb.” Mighty said, giving one of the pairs of thighs a good stroke and setting a Japanese—or maybe Chinese—prosty’s head twittering. “This is prime meat for your money. Well worth the fin, I tell you what.”
“Come on, baby,” one of the heads said. “Pick me.”
“Don’t pick that bitch,” another one said. “You know you want my fine ass.”
“And if you want her fine ass,” Mighty Dull said, “but not her nagging face, hey, go for it.”
I looked around at the “merchandise.” Seemed a bit crass to call hookers that, but hey, when a spade’s a spade, you don’t call it a Sunday dinner, I suppose. “So how does this work? You just pick a head and a body and a cooch?”
“What?” Mighty exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been to the Fever before.”
“I have not,” I said.
“Well, damn, son, why didn’t you say so?” Mighty put an arm around me paternalistically. “You put your money away. It’s no good here.”
I hope he didn’t notice me heave a sigh of relief. Funny that I would even make such a gesture, being as I don’t breathe. Some behaviors must be hardwired, I suppose. Either way, I didn’t have the money he wanted me to hide.
“Aw, come on, Mighty!” one of the hookers shouted.
“Shut up, ho!” Mighty replied. “First taste is on the house.” He turned to me and whispered, “Comes out of the girls’ common fund, if you can call them girls.”
“Fuck you, Mighty!” one of the girls called out.
“You know how it is, bitches!” Mighty replied. “Go on, son, you pick out exactly what you want. And I do mean ‘exactly.’ Mix and match as much as you want.”
He shoved me forward so hard that I had to shake it off a bit. I had seen a lot of weird things since my untimely death, but that had to be by far the peculiarest. I cocked my head over my shoulder to look at the pimp. “Mix and match body parts? Isn’t this kind of degrading?”
Mighty shook his head as though he was holding in a belly guffaw. “They hos, my man. How much more degraded can they git?”
Fair enough. I shrugged and took a few steps closer to the hat rack. And the rack of racks. “Hey, girls.”
“Hey,” they said back, almost like a gruesome, head-y chorus.
“They call me Braineater.”
“Hey, Braineater,” they repeated, and a few more catcalls and sweet nothings followed.
“Damn, man,” Mighty said, “you don’t gotta tell ’em your name, but don’t use that kind of shit around here.”
“Can’t help what they call me,” I said.
Mighty shook his head. “Whatever. It’s your stupid-ass reputation. You think I let them call me Spooky Dull? Hell no!”
“Can you give me a minute with the…?” I waved my hand sort of like Harry Houdini in the general direction of the head shop.
“You want a minute alone in the meat market?” Mighty asked. “Sure, baby, sure. Just keep your sausage packed up.” Mighty strutted off. He was a hell of a character.
I turned back to the row of heads. “Hey, girls. I’m looking for a pair of deadbeats called Ed and Joey. Supposedly, they frequent these premises. Anybody know who I’m talking about?”
“I do!”
I focused on the first head to answer. A couple were scowling. They probably didn’t know the hoods at all. A couple more were huffing and puffing like maybe they knew but were too slow on the uptake to beat the first girl.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She seemed flattered and smiled. “Brigid.”
“Damn, john,” the Abyssinian-looking head said. “Names cost extra.”
“Well, I ain’t paying anything, so charge me double,” I said, which elicited some laughs from the decapitees.
“I don’t mind,” Brigid said. “It’s kind of sweet, a john giving a squirt about your name.”
“Why don’t we head someplace more private?” she asked.
“Oh, sure.” I gingerly grabbed her by her brunette locks. I started to head up to the suites, but almost everyone in the room, body-free or not, started laughing at me.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Brigid, or Brigid’s head at least, asked.
“Oh, right,” I said, again afraid that if I hadn’t been utterly exsanguinated by lying in a pool with a gunshot wound, I would’ve been blushing like a schoolboy. “Which body’s yours?”
“Don’t take hers!” one of the other girls shouted. “Grab mine.”
“I want a third of it!” another girl shouted out. “Take my gams.”
“Stupid bitches!” Mighty announced, catching wind of the kerfuffle. “I already told you this was pro boner. All the wear and tear, none of the cabbage.”
That shut them up. Seemed a bit weird. I guess they divided up their fees along with their corpses. Hell of a way to run a business.
Hell of a country we live in, isn’t it? Only in America.
I stood in what Mighty charitably referred to as the Honeymoon Suite, which wouldn’t’ve passed muster for a broom closet in the Three Rivers. Then again, who knows?
Maybe I’m a natural snob. I have no idea if I was a caviar eater or a garlic eater in life. Either way, I wasn’t even shacking up in the Three Rivers luxury estates anymore, so I hardly had call to complain.
Brigid stood at the mirror, which had a big chunk missing from the upper right side, and applied a thin line of caulk-like makeup around the seam between her head and neck. I took a zozzle from my flask while she was turned away. I wasn’t sure whether it would brace my nerves, but I didn’t know what else to do.
Finished, she sat on the edge of the bed, not quite naked. She was wearing some kind of slip draped over her ample bosom and fetching frame. I suppose the seam between her hips and torso either took too long to patch up or just didn’t matter when a bit of fancy French lawnjeray—is that how you spell it?—could cover it up. Gotta say, the girl was built, even if she had to be built from scratch. I had grabbed all of the parts that were properly hers, and from the way she luxuriated in it, it had been a while since anyone had put her together with her own bits.
To be fair, though, she seemed a bit uncomfortable in her own skin. Kept readjusting her head. Hazard of the job, I suppose, being uncomfortable with your own body. I wanted to ask her what wearing someone else’s body was like, how it even worked, but everyone else seemed so matter-of-fact about it. I didn’t want to look like a rube.
“Why don’t you sit down next to me?” she asked, patting the bed in a manner that only a woman had, making a dumpy, cockroach-infested flophouse mattress seem inviting, enticing even.
“Nah, better not,” I said.
She cocked her head and looked at me funny. She had a bit of gum in her mouth.
I suppose the gum helped to pass the long hours in the hat rack. How old was she? Couldn’t’ve been older than twenty-five before she died. Whores tended to show their age more quickly than others, too. Maybe I was a bit of a whoremonger in my old life after all.
“You funny or something?” she asked.
“Funny? Oh!” I realized what she meant. “No, I’m not. Leastways, I don’t think I am. Hard to tell.”
She laughed. A giggle, really. A schoolgirl’s laugh. “You ain’t been back long, have you?”
Was she even twenty-five? I didn’t want to contemplate the alternative. If she was nothing but a kid… well, she was nothing but a kid no matter how old she was. Surely she wasn’t growing any older.
I shook my head. “How can you tell?”
“You’ve got the worst case of brain drain I’ve ever seen,” she said. “You should start hitting the bottle a little harder. It’ll help.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t really imagine taking any more slugs a day than I already was. Well, I could imagine it, but I certainly couldn’t afford it.
“So, you don’t remember if you’re funny or not,” she said.
Something about the way she said it scared me. She definitely turned me on, but Lazar was a really pretty boy, too. Maybe I swang both ways. I didn’t even want to think about that right then. I changed the subject. “That’s not why I’m here.”
She shrugged, or at least gave a credible attempt at a shrug, and left the divot in her neckline more exposed than before. I had a sudden unbidden image of the two of us having a roll in the hay, and me going at it so hard that her head rolled off her body and onto the floor. Didn’t seem impossible, really. It made me shudder.
“Who cares?” she said. “Mighty is comping you, and he doesn’t comp anybody. Any. Body. Might as well take advantage of it.”
I grinned. “Lord knows I’d love to, Brigid, but who even knows if it even still works?”
She giggled again, and I had a sudden flash of Shirley Temple. Yet another memory I don’t need or want returning instead of some of the more pertinent ones. Good old Shirley Temple singing and tap-dancing, that’s what the prosty reminded me of. Did I have a little grade school–aged daughter somewhere wondering where her daddy had got to? Or did I have important, grown-up reasons for watching a little girl sing and dance on the silver screen?
“It still works,” she said. “Heaven knows why. Here, I’ll show you.” She kneeled in front of me and undid my zipper for what it was worth.
I had to jump away. “Come on, now. I told you that’s not why I’m here.”
Frustrated, she threw herself back on the bed, and then my worst fear was realized. Her head flopped off and rolled onto the ground. I slapped my palm against my forehead. How much cosmetic goo did those hookers go through if their heads were flopping off and getting dented all the time?
“Could you grab that for me?” she asked sweetly.
Leaning off the bed, I grabbed the brunette by her hair and dangled her a bit like a paper bag full of day-old sturgeon. I dropped the head into her waiting hands, and she adjusted it back on like a dandy fitting a hat.
“What do you want to know about Eddie and Joey?” she asked with a resigned lack of edge to her voice.
“Where do they live?” I asked.
“Oh, that?” she asked. “That’s easy.”
Ed and Joey lived together. Couldn’t tell if they were like that or not, but I didn’t much care. Funny how little I cared about once I was dead. They liked Mighty’s whores, but I’ve known a few who swung the pendulum in both directions, if you catch my drift. Maybe they went to Hat Scratch Fever for fun and then home for all the domestic stuff. How could anyone deny that joint was fun to be in, even if they were queerer than a squid on Tuesday?
The boys—and word on the street was, the whole Infected gang—occupied a dilapidated old house on Russo Avenue. The place was about as well maintained as the windmill in Frankenstein. Most of the windows were boarded up, and a strong wind could’ve blown away the whole damn attic.
I watched and waited until I was pretty sure that only Joey was home, pink ink and all, sleeping off the night before. I wanted to kick his shit in for sleeping in a bed while I had to sleep in an alley, but I restrained myself. I ripped Little Nemo out of his Zs and out of his bed in one swift action.
“Who—who are you, man?” he said, shivering in my grasp.
I slammed him against the wall. “You don’t want to know.”
“You don’t know me, man,” Joey whispered.
I let him away from the wall. He relaxed. Then I threw him against it again. “I don’t care. I’m looking for something, and you’ve got it.”
His eyes were burning. Burning… green. Weird. Something was shifting under his shirt, as if his stomach was churning all on its own. “You don’t know me, man.” That time, his voice held a little stainless steel. “I’ve got friends. You don’t want to mess with us.”
That wriggling… I decided the stomach was getting out of hand. It had
to be punched, independent of what happened to the rest of the little delinquent. Wham.“I don’t care about you. I don’t care about your friends. For all I care, I can never see you again. All I care about is the locket.”
“What locket, man?”
Wham. He didn’t like that. He seemed to find it jarring, especially since I did it at odd times. Nice talk, mean talk, indifferent talk. As long as he couldn’t tell when the hits were coming, I had the edge.
“All right.” He coughed, and I noticed a little blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth. At least I knew he wasn’t one of us.
I let him down. He took me up to the garret. I kept fingering the gun in my pocket. Not much else I could do. He might try to get the drop on me. As long as I had the gun, I had the advantage, even if he had one too.
Of course, I don’t know my own limits. I need to ask someone. Lazar, maybe, if he ever comes out of hiding.
I made Joey walk up the steps ahead of me, which he didn’t like one bit. He kept turning back to check me out. He’d see me fingering something in my pocket, and then he’d turn back as though he hadn’t seen me doing it ten times already.
“Listen, man”—he was trying to lull me into a false sense of security, I guess—“I didn’t mean to steal your locket. It’s just, you know—”
I jammed Gnaghi’s bean-shooter into the small of Joey’s back. That shut him up real good. “If you say it’s nothing personal, I’m going to put a bullet through your spine. And when the docs come—if they come, because I hear respectable folk don’t come around to the Mat much—and they ask you how it happened, if you happen to still be alive and not in my condition, you know what you can say?”
He was too terrified to say anything. There was a kid who really cared about living. It was nice not to have those sorts of worries anymore.
“You can say, ‘It was nothing personal,’” I said. “Because I don’t give a shit about your spine, Joey. You know what I do give a shit about?”
His tongue sounded like sandpaper as it limped out the next three syllables. “The locket.”
“The locket,” I agreed.
That was about enough of his funny business on the stairwell. On the top floor, he reached up and fiddled with the dangling white plastic knob to the attic folding stairs. He fiddled with it so long I knew he was scared. I wanted to grab the knob and stiffen it for him to make him feel bad, but I couldn’t reach. Instead, I pulled back the hammer on my gun. He got ahold of the knob real ricky-tick then.
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