Just Kill Me

by Adam Selzer

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure, man.”

  When he asks how much the tour costs, I tell him “fifty bucks.”  That is more than it actually is, but it’s the price of how much I’m willing to take to put up with a drunk in a backward baseball cap. He fishes two wadded up twenties and two fives out of his pocket and gets on board.

  I start to regret it when I start warming up the crowd.

  “All right,” I say. “What do you guys want to see?”

  “Ghosts!” someone says.

  “You taking your top off!” says the drunk.

  I ignore him as well as I can and say, “Ghosts! Perfect! Did anyone bring someone we can murder?”

  “The trick,” says Cyn, turning around and looking right at Drunky McLoserbro, “is for us to find someone who’s traveling alone, paying in cash, so no one knows where he is and no one can trace him to the tour, and who doesn’t know how to behave himself with a basic amount of propriety, so no one cares if he disappears.”

  Most people look over at the drunk guy, but he doesn’t seem to notice that Cyn is talking about plotting his murder.

  I look at her with a bit of a smirk. Obviously, this guy isn’t a volunteer. But just knowing that she could punch him in the brain . . . I hate to say it feels good, but it does.

  I tell myself that dealing with him gives me someone to hate besides myself for a while, but before we’ve gone two blocks on the tour, I wish I hadn’t taken him on at any price, and I wish we could seriously punch him in the brain right where we are. He’s one of those guys who just has to shout out an inappropriate response to everything I say. I point out the spot where Tillie Wolf was stabbed with an umbrella stick, and he shouts, “Awwww shit!”

  “Look, man,” I say, interrupting my opening talk. “There are kids on the tour tonight. Please conduct yourself accordingly.”

  I realize that a person getting stabbed in the face should be more disturbing than the word “shit,” but still.

  He says he’ll behave, but he’s drunk enough that he sort of forgets after a minute. He cheers when I say how long it took people who were hanged in Chicago to die. When I talk about the owner of the Iroquois Theatre cutting all the corners that made the fire so deadly, he keeps shouting, “Was he retarded?”

  God.

  Even when he’s not shouting anything particularly problematic, it’s distracting, disrespectful, and infuriating. Getting interrupted in the first couple of minutes throws the whole tour out of rhythm. Even Rick says he has trouble getting the atmosphere and feeling back if someone interrupts him in the opening monologue. It’s where you set the mood for the whole thing.

  When I get people off the bus to check out the Alley of Death and Mutilation, he stumbles along with a stupid, shit-eating grin.

  I apologize to a woman who’s on the tour with her two kids.

  “Not much you can do about it,” she says. “I own a coffee shop in Columbus, so I know. If you try to deal with him, he’ll go straight to Yelp.”

  She walks right up to the guy herself and asks if he would keep it down around her kids. The guy smiles sheepishly and says, “Are you a ghost?” Then he laughs like he’s just said the funniest thing in the world.

  When I try to tell the Resurrection Mary story, his comments start to be more about me. “Are you her?” and “I’d give you a ride.” Shit like that.

  At a traffic light, Cynthia leans over to me and says, “Don’t worry. You ever hear the expression ‘I’m going owl-hunting and you just called out ‘whoo?’ ”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s an expression. I’m douche-bag hunting, and this guy just called out ‘bro.’ ”

  Normally, Cyn just stays on the bus during stops when we have people wander around, but this time she gets off with us at Hull House, leaving the bus running, and leads the guy around to the back of the house. I don’t see them at all while I pad around the grounds, answering questions and suggesting good spots for photos.

  When I call everyone back to the bus, the drunk is nowhere to be seen.

  Neither is Cyn, for that matter.

  I assume she ran into the bathroom at the UIC student center, right behind Hull House, so I kill time by telling everyone the tale of Thomas Ward, a story I found in the Tribune archives. He was shot by his brother (while he was trying to stab his mother) in his house back in 1902. Sightings of his ghost on the back porch got so common that the cops had to do crowd control. That house was right about where the student-center bathroom would be now.

  “I just hope he isn’t spying on Cyn in there right now,” I say.

  A couple of minutes later, when she still hasn’t come back, I talk about the funeral home that stood near the site of the bathroom, where the undertakers allegedly tried to resurrect the body of a gangster named Nicholas “The Choir Singer” Viana after he was hanged back in 1920.

  When I finish the story, Cyn’s finally coming back. Alone.

  “All right, my friends,” she says as she hops back into the driver’s seat. “Our drunken companion has taken leave of us.”

  Everyone claps.

  “Did you kick him off?” someone asks.

  “I persuaded him to run off and never be seen in the vicinity again,” says Cynthia. “I don’t like to tell people not to talk during tours, but when you’re shouting out things like that in front of little kids . . . I don’t care if he gives us a bad review. Doinkus probably won’t even remember what company we were anyway.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “He’ll end up giving a bad review to DarkSide.”

  “Maybe even the Al Capone guys,” says Cyn.

  Everyone chuckles with relief, and then I get to ask what has become my favorite question of all time: “Who wants to go to the body dump?”

  Then I lead them in a cheerful chant of “Bo-dy dump! Bo-dy dump! Bo-dy dump!” that echoes down South Halsted Street.

  For a few minutes I can lose myself in my work and just be happy again.

  When we get to the body dump and everyone gets off the bus to explore the dead-end street, I hang back and ask Cyn what she told the drunk guy.

  “Nothing,” she says. “He asked me where the bathroom was, and I gave him bad directions.”

  “So we just ditched him?”

  “Yep.”

  “I kinda thought you might have punched him in the brain.”

  “That’s absurd,” she says. “What would I do with the body?”

  Having Mr. McLoserbro gone helps the second half of the tour, but we never really quite salvage the atmosphere on the bus, and any way you cut it, we only have eight people. When they get off the bus at the end, there’s nothing left to distract me from what’s going on in my life. I just go back to checking my phone, making sure I have notifications turned on for every app I used to talk to Zoey with, and seeing if by some chance Morticia might have tracked me down and e-mailed me or something. It’s radio silence on all fronts.

  Cyn is nice enough to drive me all the way home, even though it’s way out of the way for her. As she drops me off, she suggests that it might help me start fresh if I cut my hair shorter.

  “You think so?” I ask.

  “I can bob it for you,” she says. “You’d look exactly like Lillian Collier.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I try to sleep, but every time I close my eyes and start to drift off, I see the drunk asshole’s face. I try to forget him, but then I start to think of Zoey and what a shitty person I am again, so I go back to focusing on how much I hated the drunk guy, who is probably even shittier.

  In the middle of the night I look up words for “drunk” on the OED to distract myself. It’s a treasure trove.

  Cup-shotten (first recorded in 1330).

  Tap-shackled (1604).

  Swilled (1637).

  Muzzed (1788).

  Elephant trunk (1859). (I figure this is a thing you run into now and then where slang is made up of weird rhymes, like when “pork pies” meant “lies�
� in London in the 1800s.)

  Loaded for bears (1890). (Yeah, no idea what the hell people were thinking there.)

  I try to memorize and repeat them to get my mind off of everything. It helps a little, but not much. Maybe even that guy never cheated on anyone. But I never really do get any sleep. Just a few minutes here and there. And when I nod off at all, I wake up sweating from bad dreams that I’m grateful not to remember.

  In the morning I go to the library downtown, just to give myself something to do besides think about Zoey and Morticia and Drunky and everything else. I’m going to focus on Lillian Collier instead.

  I’m pretty sure I’ve found every single piece of information you could get about her from the old newspapers that are available online, but I know there will probably be more stories in the defunct Chicago papers that only exist on microfilm reels now. Good ones, too. Stories by reporters who were actually on the scene. Most of the stuff about her online is from out-of-town papers, really. They might be third-hand stories that no one bothered to fact-check.

  The library on State Street is a thing of beauty on the outside, with high windows and a gorgeous green ornamental roof with gargoyle owls, but the microforms room on the third floor is very, very plain. Beige microfiche readers, beige walls, and beige cabinets full of microfilm reels. And three beige people using them.

  The machines are not exactly intuitive, and no two of them are quite the same. Finding the reels I want is easy enough, but I have to try four machines before I find one that I like. One has a bulb that’s entirely too dim. One can’t seem to rotate the pages the right way. The next just won’t focus. And even when I find one that works like I need it to, finding information is a hell of a lot harder than it is on online newspaper-archive sites, where I can search using keywords.

  But it’s worth the trouble. Reading the papers on microfilm feels totally different from searching them online. Rather than getting individual articles, I’m scrolling through the entire actual newspapers, wading past headlines about Vice President Coolidge, the Bonus Act, the new Pope, and everything else that was going on in February of 1922, when the Wind Blew Inn was raided. I read ads for lunchrooms on State Street with cheap oyster stew, for the latest tub blouses at Marshall Field’s, for Mr. Edison’s newest music player, and for lectures by old men who knew Abraham Lincoln.

  It feels as close as I can probably get to time travel. These are the papers Lillian read, the events she and her friends would have talked about. It’s like I’m dipping into her world.

  I get distracted reading articles about fights over the price of streetcar fare for a while, but eventually I find one new article in the Chicago Daily News from when Lillian Collier (they call her “Colley”) was first hauled into court for allegedly running an immoral house. It has tons of new details about that night that I haven’t seen before:

  “We’ve been called over to that place about four times,” testified the sergeant. “There was always action over at the Wind Blew Inn. . . . There was an immoral painting on the wall near the door.”

  “It isn’t immoral,” interrupted Miss Colley. “It’s a futuristic painting of a silo.”

  The “futuristic silo” must have looked like a dick. Ha.

  “We found several persons under the stairway. They may have fallen there. There are only two stories in this place, and I’m only telling one of ’em.”

  Then Miss Colley demanded her Wind Blew Innings. “I deny that my place was disorderly,” she declared. “The Wind Blew Inn was designed as a place where artists and writers could foregather to eat and discuss the arts. The windows were kept gray to give that cathedral interior effect to the dining room. The plumber’s candles give it a low light. I tried to make it a place of artistic tone and spiritual uplift—as much like Greenwich Village as possible. But it wasn’t possible because the dirt is so different in Greenwich Village. Despite these handicaps, I maintain that it was the best restaurant ever made out of a gasoline station.”

  I’ll bet Ricardo would have loved the place.

  I’m still scrolling through the Daily News, looking for more on Lillian, when I notice that Edward Tweed has come into the microfilm room. He looks strange without the cowboy hat he usually wears; his hair up top is thinning.

  “Doing some research?” he asks.

  I nod. “Lillian Collier. Flapper who disappeared.”

  “I know who she was. Wind Blew Inn.”

  This is interesting news.

  “Any chance you know what became of her?” I ask.

  “Tuberculosis,” he says. “Died in 1925.”

  I look over at him, away from the microfilm. “Where’d you find that? I’ve been going crazy trying to find a death record for her.”

  “I don’t remember offhand, but I tell stories about her on the tours now and then,” he says. “Where did you hear about her?”

  “From Cynthia.”

  “Well, where do you think she learned about her from?” He chuckles. “I taught her story to Ricardo when he worked for me, and I guess he told it to Cynthia. I’ve got her death certificate in my files someplace. But if you can’t find the data, neither can the customers. That’s my motto.”

  I shake my head. “I try to stick to primary sources.”

  “That’s noble and all,” he says. “But mythology has value too. It gives the city character.”

  I look away, not so much to brush him off as because I’m getting wrapped up in a story about some sort of Ponzi scheme scandal in a 1922 paper.

  “Listen,” he says. “I hate that we’re supposed to be rivals. It’s foolish. We should be colleagues. Rolling with the rotters, you know? We’re all in it together.”

  “I like to call it murdermongering,” I say.

  “Murdermongering!” he says. “Love it. Why don’t we go have a drink?”

  “I’m a bit busy now. Maybe after work sometime.”

  “Well, that would never do. If Cynthia Fargon saw you meeting up with me, she might kill us both and turn us into tour attractions.”

  I start rewinding the microfilm and try not to react to that at all.

  Is Tweed working for the cops? Does someone know something?

  Then his tone gets more serious. “I’m not entirely kidding there,” he says. “She hasn’t told you that Lillian is haunting any particular place, has she?”

  “She says there’s a rumor about Bughouse Square.”

  He nods. He probably made that rumor up himself. But he might have the 1925 thing right. He seems awfully confident about it.

  “We should talk a bit,” he says. “You want to go see some shrunken heads?”

  I give him the oddest look I am capable of, then say, “Please tell me that wasn’t a pickup line.”

  “No, I’m being totally literal,” he says with a smile. “About a block from here is a building that has the clubhouse for the Adventurers Club on the sixth or seventh floor, and they’ve got the world’s largest private collection of shrunken heads. My buddy’s a member, so I can get us in if anyone’s there.”

  “This sounds like the opening of a ghost story,” I say. “Flimflam man meets pretty girl in a library, offers to take her to see a dead body, next thing you know I’m the new head in the collection, right?”

  He laughs again. With his curly mustache, his beard, and the twinkle in his eye, he seems like a jolly old elf.

  I take out my phone and pretend like I’m answering a text, but really I’m looking up the Adventurers Club. From a quick glance on Google I can see that they do have shrunken heads in their clubhouse. Real ones.

  Every cell in my brain tells me that I should turn him down, but how the fuck can I say no to the chance to see the world’s largest private collection of shrunken heads? I’m not that kind of girl.

  “All right,” I say. “Lead the way.”

  The half-block area around the library used to be called Hell’s Half-Acre. At one time it was home to something like four dozen whiskey bars, three dozen pawn s
hops, two dozen brothels, and a couple opium dens. People could rob you here with something close to immunity because they knew you would never go to the police and admit you’d been in the neighborhood after dark in the first place.

  Somewhere along the line, though, it was gentrified. Now it’s mostly yuppies.

  Plus a clubhouse full of shrunken heads.

  And, according to some website, a preserved whale dick.

  Oh, the possibilities.

  “What sort of group is the Adventurers Club?” I ask.

  “Guys who climb Mount Everest and go on safari and stuff.”

  “Bunch of lumberjack-looking white guys. Got it.”

  He laughs. “I know at least one Asian woman who’s in it, so it’s not all white guys. It’s officially members-only, and I doubt you qualify, but I’ll do my best to get you inside.”

  “Hey,” I say. “I’ve been on Space Mountain sixteen times.”

  “I don’t know if that counts, but I guess you do go on tours with Cyn and Ricardo. That’s adventurous. I don’t know how much you know about Cynthia Fargon. Where’d she find you?”

  “She was my babysitter one summer when I was a kid.”

  We step into the lobby of a building with a bookshop on the first floor, and he hits a buzzer next to a label that says “Adventurers Club.” So far, at least, his story checks out. He isn’t just taking me to his lair or whatever.

  There’s no answer, so he hits it again. Still silence.

  “Rats,” he says. “Must be empty today. I don’t have a key, personally.”

  “So no shrunken heads?” I ask.

  “Sorry. But while I’ve got you here, I do need to talk to you about something.”

  “As long as it’s not something in your pants.”

  “I’m being serious. Listen. You should really be careful of Cynthia.”

  I notice that the traveling-salesman glimmer in his eye is gone, and his face has fallen. This is the kind of face and tone people get when they’re ready to say, “Enough small talk about how great my dead brother was. What’s the absolute least I can spend on the funeral?”