by Ed Kurtz
Now the lights shut off and the crowd settled in for their respective moments of bliss; be that shooting up, lifting up some whore’s black vinyl skirt or, like Charley, actually paying attention to the mayhem on the screen.
The trailers kicked off with Ginger, that well-worn Cheri Caffaro picture, and even the preview was loaded with leering shots of her completely nude two-toned body. A tired and surprised voice cried out “Tits!” every time they showed up on the screen. Charley hoped the guy was getting his fill or else it was going to be a long night.
When that one crackled off, something new from Al Adamson snapped up in its place—Sunset Cove—which amounted to three minutes of cute teenagers prancing around in string bikinis on the beach. Charley liked the girls well enough, but he didn’t think he’d bother to catch that flick. For Charley, it was all about the horror pictures, good, bad or downright horrible.
The first feature finally got underway and Charley took note of all the Italian names in the credits, which to the savvy theatergoer indicated that this was not Last House on the Left Part II at all, but some recycled old Eurotrash with a new title slapped down on top of it. In fact, it turned out to be Bava’s decade old body count saga Bay of Blood. They hadn’t even bothered to change the title card. Charley had seen this one before, but that was well enough since he remembered liking it. But by halfway through the picture no one had gotten killed for quite a while and his eyelids were drooping. There were possibly worse places in the world to fall asleep in than the Harris, but he couldn’t think of any. He’d dropped off for a little while the very first time he had ever come there to catch a kung fu double bill—Fists of Bruce Lee and Hong Kong Strong Man—and when he woke up a little Hispanic guy with wild coked-out eyes was working at his zipper. Charley kicked him in the chin and promised himself that would never happen again.
At intermission about half the crowd was either leaving or had already gone, but there were some new stragglers coming in, most of them obvious hustlers from the bathhouse next door. Just before the lights went back off again someone slid into the seat directly to his immediate right. Charley ground his teeth, worked his brain for the best way to get rid of the guy, but it wasn’t a guy at all. It was a girl.
It was unusual enough to see women in these places at all, much less a nice looking girl like this one. Charley didn’t think she looked like she was on the make; she didn’t seem to fit the profile. She was dressed fairly conservatively, relative to Forty-Second Street, with a low-cut wool blouse and a new pair of bellbottoms that clung tightly to her body until they spread out at the shins. Her hair was long and sandy blonde and perfectly straight, as though no two strands dared intersect with one another. She had that Middle America look about her, an innocent small town kind of girl, which made Charley fiercely question what the hell she was doing in the Harris by herself late at night. More than that, why had she chosen to sit right next to him?
Charley looked her over and tried to smile, but it got all fouled up in the process and turned into a sneer.
He said, “Hi.”
The girl made a face, the kind of face a girl makes when she really doesn’t want a dude creeping on her.
“Hi,” she said back.
Now he was desperately trying to come up with something to say, something to get a conversation started, something he had never been any good at.
Come here often?
Don’t be an asshole, Charley.
She clearly didn’t want to make nice with him. She was just looking for a place to cool out.
Right next to him.
The lights went down and the second feature flickered on. Another Italian production, another title card that didn’t match the marquee outside: Cold Blooded Beast. Somebody shouted at the screen.
“The hell?”
This one had even less suspense than the first film, but at least all the slow stretches were taken up with a lot of gorgeous nude girls whenever Klaus Kinski wasn’t sulking larger than life on the massive screen. Charley dug the black chick in particular—man, but was she a knockout—but after a while he started to feel a little uncomfortable ogling all the women on screen with this strange girl seated beside him. He glanced over at her and saw that her eyes were fixed firmly on the film. Maybe she’d really just come to check it out, after all. Stranger things had happened.
About half an hour into Slaughter Hotel or Cold Blooded Beast or whatever it was called, a nurse in the film was wandering the grounds of the asylum when the killer popped up out of nowhere and took her head clean off with one of the medieval weapons that were conveniently displayed inside. The girl next to Charley let out a frightened gasp and smashed her hand down on Charley’s knee, squeezing tightly. A vague thrill buzzed in him—he was not altogether sure he liked being touched by a complete stranger, but at least she was finally coming out of her ice shell. He took a plunge and gently patted the hand on his knee, a reassuring gesture that was meant to say, It’s cool, baby. I won’t let anything happen to you. It was kind of an asshole move but he had nothing better in his repertoire.
The girl instantly released her grip and her hand went slack, but she didn’t move it away. Charley liked that, and when he kept his hand on top of hers, she kept hers there too. He watched the rest of the movie like that, sort of holding hands with some chick he didn’t know and to whom the most he’d ever said was Hi.
Still, stranger things.
Occasionally he ran his free hand through his thick, pomaded black hair. Then he would wipe his fingers on his trousers, having temporarily forgotten about the goop he combed into his mop almost every morning. It was all part of his look, the whole Fifties thing, along with the Staceys and the rumbled khakis and his omnipresent brown rayon jacket. Jackie always hated it, told him he was putting on a show that had nothing at all to do with who he was on the inside.
Charley wondered how the girl beside him would react to that.
Things really got heated in the last reel of Slaughter Hotel. There were some pretty wild hardcore inserts, the sort that usually only played the straight up porno circuits like the Cameo over on Eighth, complete with medicinally close shots of female genitalia. Then there were some of the routine lesbian shenanigans common to the European sex-horror trash of this sort, awkward fumbling with fingers and tongues and a little rumba music, when suddenly the black girl Charley liked got an arrow through the neck and her lover started screaming her head off. Charley braced himself for his new friend to get scared again, put the squeeze on his knee. But she remained silent and still. Not even a peep.
Weird, Charley thought.
When the Inspector showed up and the killer was unmasked, Charley knew the film was just about over and he began feeling nervous about what he was going to say when the lights came up. Did he offer to buy her a cup of coffee and a slice of pie? Take her out for a drink? Or did he dare ask her to come back with him to his place? He had been holding her hand for the better part of an hour, but it hadn’t occurred to him what was supposed to happen next until that very moment. Now a sweaty film formed over his face and the opening salvo of panic started to flutter in his chest. There was a perfectly good reason Charley McCormick spent most of his time alone.
Finally the screen shouted The End and the projector died and the lights came back up. The hollering masses down in the seats below shuffled out with tired murmurs. No one bothered to wake up the four or five guys who slept in their seats throughout the auditorium. Charley wagered they’d find their pockets a whole lot emptier once they came to.
With a deep breath he took his hand away from the girl’s. He waited about half a minute to see if maybe she’d start so he wouldn’t have to, which she didn’t. He sighed heavily.
“So, look,” he began, “maybe we should go get some pie or something. You can tell me your name and I’ll tell you mine. It’s Charley, by the way.”
Charley smiled at his goofy little joke and turned to flash it her way. She did not return the smile. Instead, h
er mouth hung open like the hinge was busted and her eyes sagged drowsily down to the floor.
Charley just wrinkled his nose, which filled with a pungent, coppery smell. Then he leaped out of his seat and a scream got stuck in his throat.
The girl’s blouse was soaked through, red, clinging to her breasts. The red seeped out from the back of the seat, too. A small, sticky red puddle had formed on the floor under her.
“Shit!” Charley screeched.
He gazed in cold horror at the girl’s dead face, her bluish lips slightly parted with a few flecks of pink foam collected at the corners. His mind reeled at the realization that he had just spent the last hour at the movies holding hands with a corpse.
He bent over the balcony and vomited.
Chapter 2
When the cops showed up Charley told them everything he knew, which was next to nothing, though he did exclude the part about holding hands with the dead woman. He didn’t figure it would much impede their investigation to keep that out of it and besides, he really didn’t want to even think about it. It was revolting, but even more than that it was pathetic. The first girl he’d touched in the six months since he’d split with Jackie and she was dead the whole damn time.
The detective who asked Charley all the questions was a stocky black guy called Walker who Charley thought looked a little like Fred Williamson. Walker was not too broken up about the whole thing, except that he looked more than a little irritated to get dragged down to the Deuce where he probably spent at least a few nights out of any given month. It had always been pretty nasty, but these days it was getting a lot worse. It was getting so a guy was taking his life in his hands just heading down for a look at some flesh or a little of the red stuff. VCRs were ubiquitous enough and there was no shortage of the requisite video shops that went with them, but watching tapes at home just wasn’t the same. If it was, Forty-Two would be a ghost town.
“You didn’t think it was strange, this girl sitting by you like that?”
“Yeah, I did, like I said. But what am I going to do? Tell her to move?”
“Hoping to get laid?”
Walker grinned, flashing his broad, straight teeth. Charley frowned at him.
“Is that material?”
“Could be, yeah.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking. Mostly I was just watching the pictures.”
“What they got this week? Porno or chop socky?”
“Slashers.”
“Ah, those ones where the guy in the trench coat cuts up pretty girls?”
Charley nodded gravely.
“That’s interesting,” Walker continued. “Maybe if it’d been a kung fu picture she’d only have gotten a karate chop, you think?”
“Sure, and if it was a skin flick she would have got fucked.”
Now it was Walker’s turn to frown. He balled his gloved hand up into a fist and shot his forefinger out of it like a switch.
“You want to make a joke out of this?”
The detective’s temples pulsed and he drew in a loud breath to continue, but a uniformed cop interrupted his wrath when he trotted over, steam pouring out of his nose and mouth from the bitterly cold air.
“Detective—we found her address. Checks.”
The cop handed Walker a white card. Charley craned his neck to get a look at it. It was a driver’s license. Her driver’s license, presumably. He tried to read the name typewritten on it, but Walked palmed it before he got the chance. All he could tell for sure was that it did not have a picture of the bearer on it like Massachusetts licenses had. For all intents and purposes it could have belonged to anybody.
“This address is legit, then?
“Yeah, it checks,” the cop said. “Can’t prove it’s hers until we drop by, though.”
“Do that, then.”
Walker handed it back to the cop and returned his attention to Charley.
“Now you’re going to go give all your information to that fella right there,” he said, gesturing to the cop with the license. “So whenever I come up with some more questions I can find you right away. And whenever you want to tell me something I didn’t think of yet, you’re going to come straight to me, right?”
Charley produced an ironic smile and accepted the tattered business card Walker handed him. John Walker, Detective Second Grade. Midtown South precinct. He stuffed it in his shirt pocket and ambled over to the uniform to give all his stats: home address, telephone number, place of employment. The cop even picked up on Charley’s accent and wanted to know where he was from. Charley said Boston, even if that wasn’t exactly true. It was true enough for the circumstances. The guy wrote slowly, taking his time with each word he jotted down in his little pocket-sized notebook. Charley looked up at the brightly lit sign sprawling atop the Liberty’s marquee.
Enjoy a World of Fun!
He sneered at it.
After about forty minutes spent with the boys in blue, Charley was finally released into the wild and just in time to miss the last subway. He hadn’t exactly planned on walking clear the hell back to the flat he shared with his roommate tonight, but Walker didn’t really leave him a choice. But no, it really wasn’t Walker’s fault; he was only doing his job. It was the girl’s fault. It was the murderer’s fault. And that was the first time it really hit him full blast in the face.
That girl was murdered right next to him.
Murder.
Murderer.
Around the corner and up half a block north on Broadway, Charley pitched over right in front of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs and emptied his stomach of whatever remained of his hamburger and coffee all over the sidewalk. He was relieved that the joint was closed.
Charley walked all the way back to the coldwater walkup he shared with Franz in Alphabet City. It was about a thousand blocks and in the middle of the night, and neither his starting point nor his destination was a particularly nice spot to get caught in after dark.
Alphabet City—so named for the predominance of avenues designated by letters east of First Avenue in the East Village—was a dingy little neighborhood crawling with predators, even in the daylight. The whole area was inundated with the low end of the city’s drug trade, and Charley’s little piece of Thirteenth seemed to be the locus for it all. It never mattered if he was coming or going, there was always some terrifying character lurking nearby who wanted Charley to buy or else.
He had grown considerably braver in the year and half since he first came to the city. Back then, he nearly soiled his drawers at the prospect of venturing past his front door after sunset. He went out all the time now, and down to Forty-Two at least once at week, but that didn’t mean the creepy phantoms lingering in the alleys and shambling down the sidewalks didn’t still unnerve him. Exhausted and shaken, dealing with one of these degenerates was the last thing Charley wanted to do as he turned onto Thirteenth at a quarter to three in the A.M.
But it never failed.
“Say, man. I said say, man.”
Charley picked up his pace and hustled past the alley between the corner building and the one with the flower shop that never seemed to open. Naturally, the guy emerged from his dark hovel in pursuit.
“Whatchoo doin, man? I’m talkin to you.”
All but leaping over a mound of shiny black trash bags on the sidewalk, Charley rushed up the steps to his building two at a time and fumbled for the key in his pocket. His pursuer was already standing at the foot of the stone steps.
“The fuck, man? Can’t you see I’m talkin to you?”
Charley found it and jammed the key into the lock, almost snapping it off as he turned his wrist and opened the door. He slipped into the dim, greasy foyer and slammed the door shut behind himself, just in time to hear the guy hiss kill you.
He never even turned around to see the guy’s face.
Charley bounded up the steps and made a couple of sharp turns onto more steps until at last he landed on the fourth floor, closer than ever to safety and bed. Of cour
se, the door to number four-ten was unlocked, and Charley had every intention of tearing into Franz about it, but not now. All he could conceive of now was sleep. He’d give Franz the business in the morning.
The flat was small, too small for two people really, but all that either Charley or Franz could afford. It had a bedroom, but they had agreed on not sharing it on Franz’s insistence, which meant he slept on the sofa. That was where he was when Charley came in, laid out like a bum on a park bench in front of the flickering blue light of the television screen.
“Any good?” he croaked.
Charley dropped his keys on the card table by the door that served as the border between the kitchenette and the main room.
“What?”
“Your movies. Were they any good?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“What’d you see?”
“Couple of slashers.” Christ, did he ever. He winced a little.
“Hm,” Franz grunted.
Charley stumbled out of his well-worn Staceys and shrugged off his jacket, which he let drop to the floor. He was halfway between the front door and the bedroom when Franz popped his head up from the sofa like a prairie dog.
“Decent Cagney show on TV,” he said. “Want to finish it with me?”
“No, thanks. It’s been a rough—I just need to get some sleep.”
“That’s fine,” Franz moped. “It’s got Joan Blondell in it, though.”
Charley pursed his lips, annoyed at the low blow. Franz knew damn well that Charley couldn’t be expected to pass up a Joan Blondell picture, no matter how tired or terrified he might have been.
“Which one?” he asked reservedly.
“Blonde Crazy. It’s about this bellhop, he’s a conman…”
“I know what it’s about,” Charley groused as he staggered back to the sofa.
He’d hardly had time to sit down when the phone jangled. Franz cracked open a Schlitz and grinned at the banter flooding out of Cagney’s million-words-a-minute mouth, ignoring the phone altogether. Charley sighed and ambled over to the kitchenette to answer it.
