A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  And as I watch, the Joker stares into a mirror and fits pieces of flesh-colored latex over his chin and left cheek. I see him only in profile, but as each piece is affixed, he looks less and less like the Joker, and more and more like someone else. Someone I know.

  “You gave me some very bad moments there, Dr. Lewis,” he says. “For a full twenty-four hours you had me believing I’d misjudged you, underestimated you. Self-doubt is most unpleasant, even in a minuscule dose. I don’t know how other people put up with a lifetime full of it.”

  I try again to speak but the result is still gibberish.

  “Don’t bother,” he says. “One of the effects of that injection is a disorganization of the speech centers of the brain. But let me get back to the story of my brief episode of inner turmoil. You see, all through these past few weeks I’ve been thinking that I had you, really had you. For instance, you kept the Mercedes. I mean, if you’d really wanted to show me up, you could have sold it, bought another old Toyota junker, and given the balance to charity. That would have put me in my place. Same with the engagement ring. Oh, I know I put you in a tough spot then, but if you really had the courage of your convictions, you’d have told the lovely Dina the truth. But you didn’t. You were willing to let the very first step of your marriage be a false one. Oh, I was sure I had you.”

  He pauses as he begins brushing makeup over his latex mask, then continues:

  “Then you go storming into the staff conference and drop your bombshell. I was shocked, believe me. A prefrontal lobotomy, Dr. Lewis? How audacious! It would have worked, I’m sure. I was almost proud of you when I heard. None of the other incompetents here had the brains to think of it, or the guts to suggest it. But you charged right in and told it like it was. I like that. Reminds me of me.”

  I try to speak again, with the same results.

  “What’s that?” he says. “You’re not like me? Oh, but you are. A while back you took me to task for being indifferent to the consequences of my actions, their tragic effects upon the individuals directly involved and upon society at large. And I told you, quite honestly, that I didn’t care. You were so self-righteous. And then what did you go and do? When you discovered that I had something you wanted, you tried to turn the staff away from your ‘definitive therapy.’ Up to that moment, I’d planned simply to disappear and, as usual, leave you all wondering how. But now I see that you weren’t concerned with what was best for society; you weren’t concerned with the responsibilities of your position here. You were concerned only with what Dr. Harold Lewis wanted. And you weren’t even honest with yourself about it.”

  He lifts the mirror and holds it before his made-up face as he turns toward me. Hidden behind the mirror, he says, “See? Didn’t I say you were just like me?”

  And in the mirror I see the pale, distorted features of the Joker grinning back at me.

  Horror rips through me. I try to scream but it’s useless.

  “That injection contained a nonlethal variation on my tried-and-true Joker venom,” he says, staying behind the mirror. “So, besides scrambling your speech areas, it has also pulled your lips into a handsome smile. I’ve completed the picture by bleaching your skin and dying your hair and fingernails green.”

  Then he lowers the mirror.

  I gasp as I see my own face on the Joker’s body.

  “How do I look?” he says.

  I struggle frantically with the manacles, trying to pull free, trying to break the arms of the chair so I can get my hands around his throat.

  “Guards!” he calls in my voice. The two uniformed men rush in and the Joker says, “The patient has become violent. I think it best to carry him back to his cell as is, chair and all. I’ll order a sedative that will hold him until his surgery tomorrow morning.”

  The lobotomy! Please, God! Not the lobotomy!

  As they drag me from the room, I hear his soft voice behind me.

  “And I’ll be sure to give Dina your best tonight.”

  RUMORS

  I tightened my grip on the dwarf’s throat.

  “Your ring—now!”

  “Why my ring?”

  “I’ve heard it grants knowledge! Power!”

  “It won’t fit!”

  “I’ve heard it fits all!” I squeezed his throat. “Give it!”

  “Stop!” he rasped and stuck out his hand. “Take it!”

  I pulled it from his finger and dropped him, then pushed the ring against my fingertip. It expanded, slipping easily over the knuckle.

  “Ah! Now—”

  The dwarf suddenly looked larger while I . . . I was shrinking. And the ring—it wouldn’t come off!

  “But—?”

  The looming former dwarf leered.

  “Now you know: Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  ROCKABILLY

  Detectives Helmsly and DeSalvo had formed a two-man Committee to End the Noise.

  “That racket’s gotta go, Tracy,” DeSalvo was saying.

  “Yeah,” said Helmsly.

  Tracy couldn’t look at these two without thinking of Abbott and Costello—Helmsly as the former, pudgy DeSalvo the latter. In fact they once did the “Who’s On First” routine at a PBA talent show. But they were good cops, even if they were a little rough around the edges.

  “You know we like the kid as much as anybody,” DeSalvo said, “but either he takes his jungle-bunny music somewhere else or one of us goes in there and accidentally sits on his pipsqueak phonograph.”

  Tracy put down the newspaper. The news from Hungary was pretty depressing—martial law and mass arrests since the Soviets marched in—and the presidential campaign at home was boring, with Ike and Nixon looking like shoo-ins.

  He stared at DeSalvo. He didn’t like the jungle-bunny reference but he let it slide. A lot of people were getting pretty worked up about this new rock and roll music the kids were playing, calling it jigaboo jive and nigger music. He’d even heard some preachers and teachers on the radio calling it the devil’s music. Tracy didn’t know about that. All he knew was that it wasn’t his kind of music.

  The trouble started when Junior brought his little, fat-spindled phonograph into the locker area off the squad room and started playing these funny-looking pancake-size records with big holes in the middle—“forty-fives,” he called them. There were times when the music coming out of that tiny little speaker made Tracy want to try a forty-five of his own on that thing—something .45 caliber.

  Obviously Tracy wasn’t the only one bothered by it. DeSalvo was still carrying on.

  “Bad enough we have to listen to it half the day workin’ on the Wonder Records case, but we’d like a break when we come back to the squad room.”

  “Okay,” Tracy said. “Send him out here. I’ll talk to him.”

  “Thanks, Tracy,” said Helmsly. “Peace and quiet again, huh?”

  “Peace on earth,” Tracy said.

  Tracy thought about Junior as he waited for him to appear. He was a little concerned about some of the changes he was seeing in the boy. The most obvious was his hair. Junior was starting to look like some of the JDs they were picking up on car thefts and in gang rumbles on the north side. What was next—a studded black leather jacket and engineer boots? Tracy would have to draw the line there.

  Not that Junior wasn’t a good kid—he was the best. But Tracy couldn’t help feeling uneasy when he saw him looking like a young hood.

  And listening to hood music.

  Ye gods, that rock and roll stuff was enough to drive any sane man up the wall! Junior played it endlessly at home. You couldn’t pass his bedroom on the second floor without hearing twangy guitars, thumping drums, and wailing voices. Tess seemed to tolerate it better, even claimed to like some of it. But it set Tracy’s teeth on edge. Especially that Little Richard fellow.

  “Hi, Tracy,” Junior said as he opened the door to Tracy’s office. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, Junior. Sit down a minute.”

  Tracy
was at once fascinated and repelled by Junior’s hair. What formerly had been a wild red shock was now a carefully combed masterpiece of . . . what? The kid had let it grow and now it was Brylcreemed to within an inch of its life. Parted high up on each side, combed toward the center and a little forward so that some carrot-colored curls hung over the forehead; the sides were slicked back above the ears to meet at the rear of his head in what was being called a D.A.—and it didn’t stand for District Attorney.

  Tracy didn’t like any of it.

  “This music you’ve been playing. Do you like it?”

  Junior’s freckled face lit with enthusiasm. “You bet! All the kids like it.”

  “Surely not all of them.”

  Junior’s smile broadened. “You know that Elvis Presley song you hate—‘Hound Dog’?”

  Tracy winced. “How can I forget? You play it a hundred times a day.”

  “Well, it’s the number one song in the country right now.”

  “There goes the country. Can you tell me why?”

  “It’s cool. It’s a gas.”

  Tracy laughed. “Ah! That explains it. And that’s why you listen to it all day long?”

  “And all night too. At least till I fall asleep.”

  A thought struck Tracy.

  “Would you consider yourself an authority on rock and roll, Junior?”

  The kid shrugged. “Sure. An expert even.”

  “Good. I want you to look at something.”

  Tracy called to DeSalvo to bring him the evidence in the Wonder Records case. DeSalvo came in lugging the box.

  “Hey, Junior,” he said as he placed the box on Tracy’s desk. “This is the kind of stuff you listen to. Maybe you can have them when the case is done.”

  Junior’s eyes lit as he peered into the box. He glanced at Tracy. “Can I look?”

  “Sure,” Tracy said. “Handle them as much as you want.”

  Junior fished out a stack of 45s and shuffled through them like cards. Tracy noticed the kid’s enthusiasm fading.

  “Aw, these are all copies.”

  If the statement startled Tracy, it shocked DeSalvo.

  “How do you know?” the detective said.

  “Just look at the labels. ‘Long Tall Sally’ by Mark Butler, ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘Ain’t That a Shame’ by Kevin Coyle, ‘Maybellene’ by Buster Squillace, ‘I Hear You Knockin’ by Eleanor Robinson, ‘Eddie, My Love’ by Diane Gormley, ‘Sh-Boom’ by the Flat-tops? These aren’t the real records. I have the real records, the ones that were done first—and best—and they’re sung by Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Smiley Lewis, the Teen Queens, and the Chords.”

  Suddenly Tracy saw what Junior meant.

  “Oh, I get it. You’re saying these are copies because they’re sung by different artists than the originals.”

  “Right. They’re put out for radio stations who want to play the top hits but don’t want to play the originals.”

  DeSalvo ran a hand through his thinning hair.

  “Why on earth would they want to do that?”

  “Because all the originals were sung by Negroes,” Junior said, looking DeSalvo straight in the eye. “Some folks call it jungle-bunny jive and so the big stations won’t play it unless it’s rerecorded note for note by white guys.”

  Tracy could see that Junior’s sense of fair play was deeply offended, and he had to admit the kid had a point.

  “That’s not the kind of copying we’re concerned with here,” Tracy said before DeSalvo could reply. “The president of Wonder Records, Mr. William B. Cover, came to us with a complaint that someone is pressing perfect copies of his records and then selling them to all the stores in the city.”

  “If they’re perfect copies,” Junior said, “how did he find out?”

  “Sales reports,” DeSalvo said. “He read where a store reported sales far above what he’d shipped to them. He checked further and found out it was going on all over town.”

  “Serves him right,” Junior said under his breath.

  “No talk like that, understand?” Tracy said. “Whether you approve of what Wonder Records is doing or not, it’s perfectly legal. Bootlegging copies of his product is not.”

  Junior looked down. “Sorry. You’re right.”

  “We know it’s an inside job,” DeSalvo said. “Mr. Cover is positive someone’s ‘borrowing’ his masters and pressing the copies.”

  “Borrowing?” Junior said.

  “Yes,” Tracy said. “None of the masters is missing, but Cover says someone must be pulling them one set at a time, pressing off the copies in a secret plant, then returning them. He says that’s the only way the crooks could make such perfect copies.”

  DeSalvo snapped his fingers. “Say! What if we put Junior inside and—”

  Helmsly burst in before Tracy could tell DeSalvo to forget it. “Just got a call from the Wonder Records. They found William B. Cover dead in his office.”

  Tracy was on his feet. “Foul play?”

  “Strangled.”

  “Find Sam,” Tracy said. “Tell him to meet me down at the Wonder offices.”

  As Tracy pulled into the parking lot at Wonder Records, he marveled again at the design that had made it one of the city’s landmark buildings. The upper two-thirds of its north wall had been designed to look like the top of a phonograph. The huge black disc representing a record was the most arresting feature. A giant tone arm rested beside it; once every five minutes it would swing over and land on the disc. The disc itself didn’t spin, but the bright orange Wonder Records label at its center did, giving the illusion that the whole gargantuan record was turning on its spindle.

  Inside, Sam Catchem was waiting for him on the top floor. Cover’s office took up most of the level. There was a small lobby outside the elevator vestibule where a receptionist’s desk guarded the passage to a set of oak double doors. These opened on a suite of richly appointed rooms. In the rearmost office a team from Forensics was dusting everything in sight while a pair of morgue attendants waited for the signal to load the sheeted body onto their stretcher and take it down to the meat wagon.

  Tracy went down on one knee beside the body and pulled back the sheet. He’d met William B. Cover only once before, at headquarters. A bluff, hearty man of about fifty with thick brown hair and apple-red cheeks.

  “Strangulation didn’t do much for his complexion,” Catchem said in his usual laconic tone, talking around the lighted cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth.

  Tracy had to agree. The big red cheeks were now a dusky blue mottled with tiny purple hemorrhages in the skin. “What have we got, Sam?”

  “One dead rock and roll record mogul, done in with the cord from his telephone.”

  “How long?”

  “Still got some warmth left in him. I’d say about two hours. How about you?

  Tracy pressed the back of his fingers against Cover’s throat. Not completely cold yet. He glanced at his watch.

  “I’ll go with that—which puts time of death right in the middle of lunch hour. Witnesses?”

  “None.”

  “No secretary by the door?”

  “Yeah, but there’s a private elevator at the back end of the suite. According to his secretary—who found the body, by the way—he often brought his new talent in and out via that route. Seems he liked to keep them secret till he went public with them.”

  “She never heard anything?”

  “I don’t know. She was still pretty hysterical when I got here. She’s down on the next floor. Maybe she’s pulled herself together now.”

  Tracy threw the white sheet back over the corpse and nodded to the morgue attendants to take it away.

  “Let’s see what she can tell us.”

  The receptionist was Carolyn Typo, a pert brunette, young, barely out of secretarial school. She was shivering like someone with total body frostbite. After a few soothing remarks and reassurances, Tracy got to the point.

  “I unde
rstand, Carolyn, that you saw no one enter Mr. Cover’s office.”

  “That’s right,” she said, nodding and sobbing. “They must’ve come up the private elevator.”

  “Do you remember hearing anything strange, any sounds of a struggle?”

  “No struggle, but they were talking pretty loud in there. In fact they were arguing.”

  “Did you hear any of the words?”

  “Mr. Cover said something like, ‘You’ll never work in this town again, or in any other for that matter!’ ”

  “Did you hear the other voice?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Neither did Mr. Cover, I guess, ‘cause he kept saying, ‘What he say?’ I guess the other man was foreign or something. Every time the other man spoke, Mr. Cover would ask over and over again: ‘What he say?’ ”

  In the far recesses of Tracy’s mind, a bell of recognition chimed faintly. He shook it off.

  “Would you recognize that voice again?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Good. There might come a time when we’ll need you for that. But right now, I want you to go down to police headquarters and make a complete statement.”

  After the receptionist had been led away, Tracy turned to Catchem. “Who’s the number two man around here, Sam?”

  Catchem checked his list.

  “Hyram Figh. His office is on—”

  “Did someone say my name?” said a short, slim, dapper man standing nearby. He appeared to be in his midtwenties.

  “I’m Detective Tracy, this is Detective Catchem, Mr. Figh.”

  “Just call me Hy. Everyone does.”

  “Okay, Hy. Do you have any knowledge of any associate of Mr. Cover’s who doesn’t speak English?”

  “No. Not a one.”

  “How about some new act he might have been auditioning?” Catchem said.

  “Well, I do know he was pretty excited about a new rockabilly quartet he was secretly rehearsing in one of our recording studios.”

  “What on earth is ‘rockabilly’?” Sam said.

  “Hmmm.” Hy scratched his chin. “I guess you could best describe it as a hillbilly white kid singing rhythm and blues to a rock and roll beat.”