Bad Valentines 2: Six Twisted Love Stories (Stories to SERIOUSLY Creep You Out Book 5)

by Steve Vernon

  Once she looked at me, and I thought that maybe she was having second thoughts.

  Perhaps she was.

  She could have had me. I would not have fought. I had fallen in love with that last little laugh of hers, that oh so lonely laugh that sounded so much like a child who had been turned away by her father some thousand years ago.

  Loneliness ached within my heart, and love like a moth that flutters beneath the moon was born.

  She could have had me, but she didn’t.

  The sun rose like a dying phoenix, and without looking at me once, she screamed a long goodbye.

  Olivia Newton John Latex Love Doll

  You know how it gets.

  There are so many challenges and obligations. It’s like trying to juggle a dozen frozen pilsner glasses. You can’t really catch them, can’t claim to be controlling them. All you can do is to try and keep them from hitting the ground.

  So what can I tell you about the murder scene?

  There are just as many ways to pull it all together. I could talk about the wallpaper, tired and unrolling like a hooker’s hosiery. The pattern, a labyrinth of countless random quick straight lines dashed this way and that like a half-shaken Etch-a-sketch designed to hide the stains badly. The walls were eeled with tobacco smoke tattoos, colonies of mildew, random splatters of poorly primed paint and of course the blood.

  Or maybe I could start with the furniture, ransacked from an evil dozen rummage sales, a three-legged couch, a couple of mismatched end tables, a chair and something that looked a little like a broken commode. As far as I could tell there wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the entire room that truly belonged together. It felt a little like a random performance art collage of my last three failed relationships.

  Or maybe I could just breathe it all out to you. The rooming house funk, layered like a rummy’s winter jacket with traces of urine, the pungent tang of sweat, dust and carelessly poured booze. Despair and decay reeked from every inch of the room - a life that had all gone to pieces a very long time ago.

  And then, what I assumed was the body. The fragments were scattered in a mad geometry that almost made sense. A Jenga-dance of human meat cubed and quartered and squared like a lunatic’s three-dimensional-abattoir-jigsaw-crossword-puzzle, as if all of the king’s horses had hoof danced in razored horseshoes upon the man’s remains before scattering.

  At least I think it was a man but the way it looked you just couldn’t really be sure.

  *

  The building used to house a downstairs discotheque. You could still hear that tight electronic rhythm jangling in the decaying ambience. Then, when disco up and rode off in a white polyester hearse, Fat Hilton bought the building and opened a butcher shop where the disco used to be. The Board of Health closed that down and Fat Hilton put his office in the basement and kept the place running as an hourly hotel. The heart of an entrepreneur beats like a drowned frog clogged in the hair-balled gullet of a sewer hole.

  Fat Hilton found the body this afternoon and he called me up. He didn’t call the police. Nobody called the police down here. There’s just no room for authority on this side of town. No room for bylaws and traffic tickets. Stopwatches stopped working, police revolvers misfired and detectives got lost and never found again down here on Kelly and Blowers.

  Down here when there was trouble they called me, the Gypsy. I get the dirty jobs done, picking up the pieces nobody wants to handle, making sure things stay nice and tidy.

  “That’s how I found him,” Fat Hilton said. “Broken all over like tempered glass, road gravel or smashed Jell-o. I never seen the like of this.”

  That said a lot because Fat Hilton had seen a lot. He owned the building. Actually, he owned three of them. Actually, Fat Hilton owned three buildings, one trucking company consisting of six men and two stolen pick-ups and a cleaning service that I sometimes worked for when I felt the urge to swing a mop. He was a regular one-man ghetto consortium.

  Today was one of those sometimes and I was working for Fat Hilton. It beat waiting on tables. Fat Hilton was an old time scam-artist, a man with fingers in far too many pies, a man of parts and pieces, all of them shady and unrecorded and absolutely unverifiable but at least he paid his bills on time.

  There’s a story the rummies tell of a guy who knocked over Fat Hilton’s cleaning business. When Fat Hilton caught up to the guy, he took his pleasure and the better part of a long summer night knocking the man’s teeth out one at a time with a tack hammer, pliers and a thin steel chisel. After he’d finished he made the guy swallow the teeth, one by one. It was easy going down with all that blood but harder when Fat Hilton decided he wanted the teeth back. That’s usually the part when the rummies stop talking and the bottles start tipping back.

  Fat Hilton stared down at what was left of the body. He wiped his mouth off with the back of his ham-sized hand like he had tasted a bad memory. I looked down at the mess at my feet and wondered aloud.

  “This isn’t your doing, is it?” I asked him. “I don’t clean up that kind of a mess.”

  Fat Hilton made a who-you-kidding sound with his breath and his lips and that just added to the general stink of things. “That’s not a side of me anymore. The worst I do is pull suicides out of these rooms maybe once a week. They come down here to Kelly and Blowers, hire a hotel room by the hour and end it quick.”

  He shook his head again. “I have never seen the like of this before.”

  I looked at what was laying on the floor. Bits of cubed meat fractured and scattered like a broken windshield.

  “That’s what you figure this is?” I asked. “Suicide?”

  Fat Hilton giggled nervously and shook his head, getting most of his meat behind the motion, letting the twenty-seven layers of his chin-jowls shake and jiggle into a corduroy cream cheese pimpled earthquake.

  “I didn’t think so,” I said.

  “So what do you think did it to him, then?”

  “I’m not ready to say just yet.” I tiptoed around the organic debris. “Did he have a name?”

  Fat Hilton shrugged. The man had a remarkable shrug. It was kind of like watching a massive oil-slicked sand dune rolling beneath a dirty desert simoom of despair.

  “Probably did but he didn’t give it to me. I think he was peddling whiskey. There’s a sample case of tiny bottles sitting by the bed.”

  I opened the case. It was one of those old fashioned leather satchels, the kind that doctors carried in old time movies. Packed with little glass bottles of whiskey. The brand name said Old Grenadiers. I didn’t recognize it but I didn’t drink a lot of whiskey. It was probably a new brand, though. The old brands didn’t need to advertise, especially down here on Kelly and Blowers Street. All we really needed was a marked down price tag.

  “Old Hand Grenade. That sounds like a whiskey that will blow your mind out.” Fat Hilton kept on talking. I think he was trying to distract himself. The sight of this body would rattle a glacier. “He paid for three hours, twenty bucks an hour. On the fourth hour I came up and found this.” He pointed at the floor.

  “Why four hours?” I asked. “Are you feeling saintly?”

  He made that giggle sound again.

  “I was watching my soap operas. You can’t miss a minute of those or the story line gets broken.”

  On another day I might have argued about the actual story content in the average soap opera but I wasn’t feeling all that cultural at the moment. There was just too much else to look at; too many pieces to try and make sense of.

  “So what do you figure?” Fat Hilton asked.

  “I figure you’ve got a hell of a mess to clean up.”

  I gave him my best disarming grin but Fat Hilton seemed strangely immune to my charm. I wondered if I was losing my touch.

  “Can you do anything about this?” He asked.

  “How much can you pay?”

  We haggled out a deal.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “In the meantime I need all of
the glass bottles you can fit in here.”

  “Bottles?”

  “Is there an echo in this room? I’d hate to have to say everything twice because that’d double my rates. Get every rummy in this building to ransack their cupboards for every bottle they can find. Glass, mind you, no plastic. Plastic is only good for wrapping sandwiches and I’m sure as hell not planning to play hero up here.” Then I told him what to do with the bottles once he got them.

  I fished a bottle of my own from the salesman’s sample case. Old Hand Grenade. I opened it up and tipped it back. Fat Hilton was right. The stuff went off like an actual hand grenade in the pit of my stomach.

  “Are you figuring on taking up alcoholism?” Fat Hilton asked. “I ain’t interested in funding no cirrhosis-hound.”

  I rescrewed the lid and slid the emptied bottle into my pocket. “Not me. I’ve got too many bad habits all ready. I just figure I’ll need a drink before this night is over.”

  I took another look around the room. This was going to be a bad one.

  And then I went out to see Momma Cooz.

  *

  Momma Cooz was the largest woman I’d ever seen or wanted to see in my life. A brownstone could vanish in her smallest noonday shadow. The woman lived on fatback, fried chicken, grease and gravy and grizzle. A tribe of mutated Persian cats took shelter beneath the folds of her fatted calves. She lived on the staircase of Kelly and Blower’s most successful brothel. Folks say that she’d become stuck there one day while walking to the top of the stairs, simultaneously munching on a hot Rueben sandwich and a jumbo jar of garlic dills.

  Prospective customers had to climb a small scaffold over her left shoulder blade to reach the eager pillow girls. Part floor show, part doorman, part bouncer: that was Momma Cooz.

  Momma Cooz smiled at my approach. Her smile was something to behold. It was kind of like watching a giant jack-o-lantern Buddha, exploding teeth and sunrise and bits of heaven across a kaleidoscope sky.

  “Now what bring a Gypsy like you to my door? I doubt a handsome man like you has to pay for any of what my upstairs girls are selling.”

  You’ve got to love a flatterer. I gave her my best grin but it didn’t work any better on Momma Cooz than it had on Fat Hilton. Bullshit doesn’t spread too far here on Kelly and Blowers no matter how smooth you cream it out.

  “I don’t pay for it, Momma. You know that. I pray for it like a farmer prays for rain and between you and me it’s been a long hard drought.”

  “Hmm-hmm, “ Momma Cooz purred. “Why don’t you squeeze on up here and slide me some of that long and hard Gypsy meat and we’ll see what we can do about that drought. Momma Cooz been praying long and hard for the old long and hard, too, you bet.”

  I laughed at that and she laughed too, albeit a little ruefully.

  “Now you got to take better care of yourself, Gypsy. You could come on by sometime when you weren’t on the job and I’d fix you up with a good meal or two.”

  “Hmm,” I said, and that’s as far as it ever got. Momma Cooz letting on that she might have some feeling for me and me letting on not to try and find out. Socializing was out of the question. Besides, I was just plain too shit-scared-silly of that big bad sporting woman.

  “Either we both are lying and we both be telling the truth at the same damn time,” Momma Cooz said. “We’re two cats cut from the same bolt of cloth, you bet.”

  “You sure are speaking a big truth there, Momma Cooz.”

  And she was. The fact was I hadn’t been laid in weeks. It was my own damn fault. I had a couple of cheap opportunities but I’ve never learned to get to feeling without getting any feeling for it first, if you know what I mean. If I didn’t fall in love I didn’t fall into bed. It was my one last ditch stand against the onslaught of decaying moral cynicism.

  Mind you, Momma Cooz wasn’t hurting any. She was serviced once a week as part of her standing rent. Every Sunday morning a team of her girls led a massive assault on every single pleasure point on Momma Cooz’s body.

  Folks still talk about the Sunday morning when skinny Beatrix Hasselforth had wiggled her left elbow into what she swore was Momma Cooz’s g-spot. I guess “g” stood for “god-almighty” because the resultant monsoon of satisfaction had shaken down an abandoned bodega, brought one-legged beggar Pete to his feet running and had shattered the thirty eight foot high stained glass window in Sister Mary’s Holy Oak Church of Demographics. Witnesses swore the broken glass had spelled a long drawn out kaleidoscopic shout of orgasm towards God, but the pastor had swept the glass clean before photographic evidence could be snapped. The sidewalk where the glass had shattered always felt a little warmer to the soles if you happened to be walking barefoot or even if you were wearing a pair of double bond boiled leather work boots.

  I’ve heard tell there is a nun who lives in a pitched-up pup tent out back of the churchyard who would let you peek through a shard of purple-tinted glass, the only scrap of memory left of that thirty eight foot sacred window and what you saw therein could make milk and cream gusher from a petrified pap.

  “I’m looking for a favor, Momma Cooz.”

  Momma Cooz stared at me like a red-faced cardinal staring down at the sinner parishioner who’d dared to fart in mid-hosanna.

  “Momma Cooz don’t do no favors. You know that for gospel, Gypsy.”

  “What about that time last month when I banished that case of runaway creeping diarrhea? It had about put you out of business, creeping like it did from room to room on its sixteen umber stained tentacles.”

  That had been a dirty job. It had taken a mop, a butterfly net, an invocation to the demigod of dung heaps and a four month old buffalo calf to banish that infestation. You should have seen the trouble I had carrying that buffalo calf over Momma Cooz’s scaffolded shoulder.

  Momma Cooz nodded and brushed at the shoulder stain of buffalo chip the calf had left behind.

  “Seems to me I remember something of that occasion,” Momma Cooz allowed.

  “Well you owe me, Momma Cooz. And today I need to collect.”

  She nodded grudgingly. I had her right where I wanted her to be. I figured I’d end up paying for this somehow down the road but for the right here and now I was getting just what I wanted to.

  “What you need from Momma Cooz?” She asked.

  I held out the empty Old Hand Grenade bottle to her with a grin that was two parts Groucho and one part Harpo. “Won’t take but a tinkle,” I said.

  She looked at the bottle slowly and just as slowly it came to her what I wanted. “Well my lord’s shit,” she swore, with a jiggling giggle that would have put Fat Hilton to jellied shame.

  “Not quite,” I said. “But close.”

  *

  “Are you sure that this is going to work?” Fat Hilton asked.

  It was morning, bright and early and the best time of the day for catching ghosts. Ghosts don’t really like the shadows and they sure don’t like the night. The only reason they creep around and rattle their chains so much in the midnight hour is they hope to scare away the darkness. Fact is ghosts are more scared of the dark than any three year old semi-psychotic orphan plug-boy you care to mention.

  “I got it all planned out,” I told him confidently. The fact was I was flying strictly by the seat of my greasy unwashed denim pants.

  “Plans. Yeah, we’ve all got plans. You want to know how to make God laugh?” Fat Hilton asked.

  “Tell him your plans, “I finished with a wink. “Things are bad when even a confidence man lacks confidence.”

  Fat Hilton grinned a fat golem ghost of a smile. He wasn’t all that concerned about my personal welfare. The fact was Fat Hilton wouldn’t piss down my mouth if my teeth were on fire unless there was some sort of profit in it for him. He just wanted to open up his hotel room again and start collecting rent.

  He closed the door, leaving me in the room alone. I looked around. Everything was set just the way I wanted it. There were bottles in every window and on every
flat surface: on the tables and on the top of the broken fridge, on the chairs and on the radiators. The Venetian blinds were pulled down and opened, branding the walls and floor with zebra stripes of light and dark.

  I laid out the last mismatched case of empties across the door.

  There I was, sealed in just the way I wanted it.

  “All right,” I said. “You can come out now.”

  Nothing happened. It never went that easily. I hunkered down in the center of the room with a secondhand paperback copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, opened to a random chapter and started reading aloud in reverse. The dismembered point of view was appropriate but as often happens when reading Joyce, I dozed off.

  I fell into sharded dreams. A scatter of broken teeth falling upon freshly cleaned linoleum; geodetic flesh scrappled across an unwashed carpet; lost and wandering in a labyrinth of blood-soaked wallpaper and stained glass memories.

  I saw a mad disco unfolding below the floor below my feet. I looked down at that disco dance floor from a thousand glittering viewpoints. I was dreaming in a disco-mirror-ball, glinting down like the countless eyes of the god of pince-nez and fly eyes. And there below me staring up like a hungry arachnid, I saw her. An Olivia Newton John Latex Love Doll, all sun greased and Australian sandy, bobbing kinky jazz-aerobics to a blaring Bee Gees beat.

  Now I’m not saying it was really Olivia Newton John. It wasn’t all that likely I’d catch her slumming down here on Kelly and Blowers. It was a kind of tulpa, a wet dream on two legs, a plastic reploid doll of wanna-be wish fulfillment.

  Somebody was playing me like a trout on a singing line.

  That’s how ghosts work sometimes. They rummage through the garage sale of your dreams and fantasies and they throw on the handiest outfit that seemed close to their size. The truth was I had always had a middling fetish for Australian leather queens and some nights in my wettest of wet dreams I would wake myself up chanting “You’re the one that I want”.

  Ooh, ooh, ooh.

  I was dreaming now but not in the way that most people dream. This was a little more real than that. I had entered this dream rather than building it up. I was nothing more than an observer playing reconnaissance games from the safety of the whirling glitter disco ball, until someone cut my dream cord and I fell crashing to the dance floor. Gypsy boy, come on down.