by Hal Bodner
Clive was baffled. Although Becky hadn’t yet completed her autopsy, upon first seeing the body she’d immediately told him she was fairly certain Blowman would turn out to be the guest star in the latest episode of West Hollywood’s currently running True Crime reality series. Clive was ready to start pulling out his hair in frustration.
To add insult to injury, Blowman’s lover, a young film producer, known for his innovative use of the video camera to photograph previously unseen portions of the male anatomy, had appeared at the station that morning in a panic. He explained to the duty officer at the front desk that his “roommate” had vanished two days ago and had missed an important dinner party with some “investors” the previous evening. The producer was hysterical with worry and emphatically demanded that a full investigation be launched and the FBI, CIA, and a host of other organizations be enlisted to help.
The duty officer, although at first tempted to dismiss the producer’s ravings as those of a jilted lover, decided instead, in the spirit of “community-oriented policing” to take a full report. Two hours later, he was in a spare office, busily taking down a description of the errant spouse from the increasingly distraught producer, when the two deputies who had responded to the sanitation worker’s call paused outside the open doorway to discuss the morning’s events. Unfortunately, one of the deputies had seen Blowman’s face, along with more recognizable parts of his body, gracing the box cover of a tape in a local video store. Even more unfortunately, this particular deputy had a tendency to speak in a very loud voice.
The producer heard and, to the chagrin of the duty officer taking the report, immediately began to wail, growing louder with every passing second. Acting instinctively, the two deputies outside the office door drew their guns and burst into the interview room. Confronted with the barrels of two revolvers, the producer’s keening took on a new note and grew even more piercing.
Seeing the two drawn guns, the duty officer, thoroughly flustered by the chaos surrounding him, yelled over the shrieks of the producer, “Don’t fire!”
Because of the tumult issuing from the interview room, one of the secretaries seated at a nearby desk misheard the shouted command. Taking up the cry of “Fire! Fire!” she and her fellows grabbed their purses and briefcases and fled the station, taking care to pull the fire alarm on the way out. As the alarm bell shrilled wildly, the employees of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station began to evacuate the building. Bells ringing and sirens screaming, the fire crew arrived in record time.
During the commotion, Clive had burst from his office, ordered his secretary out of the building, glanced at the emergency board to find out which alarm had been pulled, and had run down the hall toward the interview room where he grabbed a handy fire extinguisher. But there was no fire upon which to use it.
Exiting the building himself, he was approached by the shame-faced duty officer, a relatively bright young man who had figured out what had happened. He filled his captain in apologetically, and Clive, dreading the prospect, went to intercept Fire Chief Fred Delaney, who had appeared on the scene with the rest of the Fire Department.
Certain the whole mess could be straightened out in no time, Clive hadn’t reckoned on Delaney’s belligerent opposition to anyone who appeared to threaten his authority.
“You worry about the criminals, Anderson,” he’d told Clive brusquely, “I’ll deal with the fires.”
“There was no fire,” Clive explained patiently for the third time.
“You let me be the judge of that!” Delaney said pompously, puffing out his chest and drawing himself up to his full height, which, incidentally, brought the top of his head up to a point just slightly south of the knot in Clive’s tie.
“But Fred...” Clive was left talking to the empty air as Delaney grabbed a fire axe from one of his men and marched into the station.
Clive didn’t waste a minute before following the Fire Chief. He broke into a trot and finally caught up with Delaney inside the station just in time to watch, horrified, as Delaney, with all his might, brought the head of the axe smashing down into one of the walls of the interview room.
“What the hell are you doing?” Clive demanded, aghast.
“Looking for fire in the frame,” he said with an almost malicious smile, “Could be something electrical.”
“It was a false alarm, Fred! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”
“Can’t be too careful,” Delaney replied. He swung the axe again, demolishing a large part of the opposite wall.
“You ever see a burned body, Anderson?” he asked as, with a joyful look, he hefted the axe, aimed it toward a framed photograph of the county sheriff hanging on one wall and obliterated both the photo and the wall beneath. “Ain’t a pretty sight, lemme tell ya.”
The axe descended again.
“I suppose the fire could have been hiding in the interview desk, right Fred?” Clive said weakly, looking at the shattered remains.
“Never hurts to check,” Delaney answered cheerily. “Where were we? Oh yeah! Fire victims!”
There was a look of bliss on the fire chief’s face as he continued to speak. “Skin gets all black and brittle. Kinda like Kentucky Fried. Extra crispy.”
Clive felt himself slight nausea.
“Eyeballs boil into jelly. Eyebrows and facial features melt clear away. Sometimes fingers and toes are gone. Damn, Anderson! I remember one time we pulled a guy from a blaze in a dressmaker’s shop, only way we knew he wasn’t one of the dummies was from the pieces of charred bone stickin’ out of him.”
Fred paused in his onslaught, which had now progressed out of the interview room and down the corridor. On the way, he’d casually reached up with the pointed end of the axe and pulled down ceiling tiles, battered the hallway walls beyond repair and had sent a water fountain on to a watery grave. He eyed the wreckage with the satisfaction of a job well done, reversed the ax and leaned on the handle, not having to stoop very much to do so.
“Now, Clive,” he began companionably, “would you ever forgive me if I let you come back into this old firetrap and you ended up like that?”
“No, no,” Clive said, his head spinning from the gruesome description. “Of course not.”
He wandered dizzily outside, leaving the fire chief and his crew to their work. Finally, an hour later, after finding nothing, Delaney grudgingly left the battered station after first warning Clive to contact him immediately at the merest scent of smoke. Thereafter, while people returned to what remained of their desks, Clive sadly surveyed the wreckage of the station. The producer, now heavily sedated, was whisked off to the morgue across the street to identify Lance Blowman’s body.
Now, several hours later, Clive was sitting in what remained of his office, trying to ignore the deep gashes and holes allowing him to see through the wall to where his secretary was sitting, and reviewing a facsimile from the FBI listing similar serial killer patterns. Nothing was helpful. The series of murders closest to the current killings had taken place back in the nineteen thirties somewhere in Georgia. Clive had difficulty imagining a ninety-some-year-old mass murderer with a southern accent rampaging through the back alleys of West Hollywood.
His office door opened and Becky walked in without knocking. She tossed a file at him and flopped into her usual chair.
“Heard a rumor you had some excitement here this morning.” She glanced at the battered walls of Clive’s office where Delaney had been especially enthusiastic. “For once it looks like the rumor mill was spot on.”
“Same guy?” Clive ignored her comment.
“Same guy,” said Becky. “No torture this time. But the skin’s missing from the neck again. Boy,” she said, leaning her chair back on two legs and poking her finger into a foot long gash in the plaster next to the door, “This place is gonna cost a fortune to fix.”
“What about the blood?” Clive asked through gritted teeth.
“What blood?”
“I was afraid of th
at,” Clive sighed. He pushed a copy of the FBI report across his desk toward her. “Don’t worry about messing it up,” he said. “This is your copy.”
Becky looked at him blankly as she picked up the document.
“Never mind,” he said.
Becky glanced through the report and tossed it back onto his desk blotter. “Well, this is no help. Wow!” Her eyes widened as she took in some of the damage to the back wall. “Looks like someone took an axe to this place.”
“Don’t remind me,” Clive said. “Any suggestions?”
“Yeah, get a construction crew in here before the whole place comes down around your ears.”
“Becky...” Clive warned.
“Oh, all right. Lemme think.” She paused. “I have a friend from med school...”
“Good for you,” Clive said, not following the transition, but assuming Becky had some kind of point to make.
“His name is Chris Driscoll. We used to date—well, kind of, anyway—but,” she sighed fatalistically, “He’s gay, of course. My luck, huh?”
“Becky, you know I find your love life fascinating, but...”
“Oh, stop it, Clive,” she said, slightly irritated. “This kind of thing is right up his alley.”
“What is he? A shrink?”
“No,” she said slowly. “He never finished school...”
“Great. An amateur.”
“If you’d let me finish,” she said sternly and went on. “He’s a writer now—or was for a while. Changes careers pretty often. Wrote historical stuff. Nonfiction. He’s also really into the supernatural.”
“This is too weird.”
“Not really,” Becky dug into her purse and pulled out a battered book. “Take a look.”
She handed it to Clive who surreptitiously checked it for potential chocolate smudges before examining the cover. “Peter Kurten: The Dusseldorf Dracula by Christopher Driscoll,” he read flatly. He looked up confused.
“This nut case,” said Becky, “killed a whole bunch of people in the nineteen twenties. He was some kind of perverted sex fiend and, get this, he drank the blood.”
“All of it?” asked Clive, feeling nausea well up for the second time that day.
“Of course not,” was the terse reply. “But there are certain similarities here. There’s some kind of sexual thing going on with our guy. None of the bodies we found were fully clothed—the hustler was naked, remember?”
“True,” Clive said thoughtfully. “And there was the mutilation of the genitals.”
“Exactly. And there’s this thing with the blood. It’s not a perfect match but it’s too close for comfort.”
“So what does this Driscoll guy have that we don’t?”
“That book’s a psychological study. Chris may be able to give us an idea of what kind of crazy we’re looking for.”
“You want to call him?” asked Clive.
“I want to call him.”
“I don’t like this,” Clive told her.
“I know,” she replied, “Beggars can’t be choosers, though.”
She got up and walked toward the door. “I’ll give him another call tonight and let him know it’s OK with you.”
“You already talked to him?” Clive’s tone was angrily flat. Becky at least had the good grace to look sheepish.
“No, I just called and left a message. I didn’t know what else to do,” she apologized. “Don’t worry. He’ll keep his mouth shut. See ya.”
She turned and squeezed through the door, thrusting her hip into it to close it before Clive could call out. The door slammed with a crash and a huge chunk of loosened plaster thudded to the floor, shattering and spewing clouds of white debris into the air.
Clive sneezed twice, pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed futilely at the white dust on the sleeve of his jacket, succeeding only in rubbing it farther into the fabric.
“Things can’t get any worse,” he moaned quietly, looking mournfully at his ruined suit.
But Clive Anderson was wrong. Things could get worse. A lot worse.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Charlie Copperman stumbled out of the bar, closing the door behind him, and collapsed against the brick wall to rest for a moment. Frankly, he didn’t think he’d had all that much to drink; he was usually very careful about his alcohol intake, limiting himself to five margaritas throughout the night and he’d only had three. He never liked to go to the gym in the morning with a hangover. Maybe it was the shots of tequila poppers that the barely passably attractive bartender kept slipping him on the sly. What was his name? Bo or Bob or something beginning with a B?
Charlie had flashed the bartender his most dazzling smile when he entered Rage several hours earlier. He’d taken a quick cruise of the dance floor first, and after deciding there was no one in the place pretty enough to waste his time talking to, he’d seized on the bartender at the back bar, a lanky, almost buff, brown-haired guy with bad skin, as the most likely candidate to buy him drinks. His instincts had been right, as usual, and the tequila flowed like a river all night.
About an hour ago, however, after the bar began to fill up, Charlie had spotted a really hot dark-haired guy in the corner wearing a black button-down shirt and dark jeans. Charlie went into cruise mode and was rewarded with a nod and a smile. He waited a few minutes until he was certain the eye contact hadn’t been just coincidental then strolled toward the bathroom. As Charlie passed him, the stranger smiled again, removing any doubt. Charlie nodded coolly, not wanting to show too much interest, but paused at the men’s room door and looked back over his shoulder. Satisfied the guy was intrigued, Charlie opened the door and proceeded into the bathroom.
As he unzipped his fly to take a pee, he overheard a conversation between two effeminate types at the other end of the room.
“The Rage mystery bathroom, I always call it!” one of the young men exclaimed. “It used to be much smaller but then they knocked down the walls.”
“So what’s the mystery?” his friend wanted to know.
“They took out most of the urinals,” came the reply. “Of course, they might have wanted to make it more cozy.”
The two young men came over to the urinals on either side of Charlie, unzipped and went about their business. Charlie realized the wisdom of the first speaker’s words when he saw that the positioning of the urinals meant he was hemmed in on both sides. As he zipped up he felt a hand on his ass and pulled away from the urinal sharply, jostling the other two. One of them yelped as he spattered onto the front of his trousers, but Charlie didn’t care.
“You gotta be kidding, queen,” he sneered and left the bathroom.
He returned to his previous position at the bar, after making eye contact with the black-clad young man again. The bartender kept feeding him shots of tequila poppers but hey, if Bo or Bob was too stupid to realize Charlie was more interested in the guy in the corner, it wasn’t Charlie’s problem, was it? It wasn’t like Charlie had propositioned the guy or anything; he just sat and smiled and drank his tequila. Charlie couldn’t understand why Bo/Bob got so offended when Charlie hesitated before giving him his number. Bo/Bob wasn’t really gross or anything, except for the bad skin and, of course, Bo/Bob seemed to sweat a lot—and it wasn’t the most pleasant-smelling sweat either. Charlie decided he’d done the right thing by reversing the last two digits of his phone number when he wrote it on the “trick tablet” and handed it to Bo/Bob. He could always claim he was drunk and screwed up if he ever needed to use the bartender to cadge free drinks again.
Charlie breathed the cool autumn air, trying to clear his head. He felt the moist bricks against his back vibrating with the heavy beat emanating from the DJ’s re-mix of classic eighties hits from inside the bar.
Lord save me from Cher fans, he thought. They should screen ’em all first before they let any of ’em spin in public.
He waited several minutes. He kind of hoped the dark haired guy would have followed him out of the bar by now. He’d made eye con
tact with the guy at least three times during the past hour, and he was sure he’d watched Charlie leave the bar. He hadn’t actually gone over and talked to the guy. Oh no! That would be admitting that he found him attractive, something that Charlie Copperman would never do.
Let him come over and talk to me first, Charlie had thought. Now, he steeled his resolve to always be the pursued—never the pursuer—and mentally added, If he doesn’t come out in two minutes, I’m outta here. His loss.
Two willowy Hispanic men approached the doorway where Charlie was standing. “Well, excuse us!” one of them said, loudly. “What’s the matter, honey? No luck?”
“Worthless queens,” Charlie mumbled as he moved away from the door, hoping the two would just go into the fucking Rage and leave him alone.
“Oh! Aren’t we just too butch? Why don’t you try a real woman, sweetie?” the taller of the two asked.
“I wouldn’t fuck you,” he pointed and then shifted his arm to indicate the second queen, “With her dick!” He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. The two men sashayed indignantly into the bar, and Charlie took a deep breath of cool autumn air hoping it would help him sober up.
“Good evening.” The voice was deep and melodious. “I saw you inside.”
Charlie smiled lazily, eyes still closed. “And...?”
“I thought maybe you might be interested in our spending some time together. Alone. I find the noise in there... distracting.”
Charlie at last opened his eyes to confront the guy in the black shirt standing in front of him. Charlie smiled.
“What did you have in mind?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we could take a little walk and perhaps become better acquainted with each other?”
Charlie grinned and held out his hand. “I’m Charlie.”
Taking his hand with seeming amusement, the guy responded with his own name. Unfortunately, Charlie belched tequila fumes at the precise moment the guy spoke and missed it. Oh, well, he thought, I can always take his driver’s license out of his wallet while he’s sleeping—if his name turns out to be that important. Charlie dismissed the identity of the stranger with a shrug, and the two walked together, away from the bar and towards the parking lot.