The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  That left Eve. Sweet Eve, beautiful Eve. A girl so alluring that he only wanted to run away from her, though he did not completely understand why. It was not because she was a stripper. This did not particularly bother him at all; if it was all right for him to leer then it was all right for her to do what she did. He supposed it might have something to do with her connection to Elizabeth. That chapter of his life appeared to have come to a close with the death of Chester Price, but continued involvement with the surviving Hewlett sister kept it unnaturally open. Therefore the longer he kept his distance from Eve the closer he was to freedom from the memory scent of Lizzie’s blood in his nose and the phantom pressure of her fingers squeezing his knee that he could still feel from time to time.

  Charley leaned up against a vandalized shutter between the Times Square and Apollo theaters and reviewed his thoroughly unappealing choices—two hours of smelly late night mass transit to Staten Island, flophouse digs with the transsexual version of Honey Ryder, or the loveliest creature on the Deuce who reminded him of murder and made everything smell like murder.

  Charley caught a taxi on Broadway and made his way up to Eve’s.

  It occurred to him en route that she was not likely at home at that hour, but by some miracle it turned out that she was. She welcomed him inside with a sort of cautious enthusiasm, happy to see him but uncertain as to where they stood. Before long, however, she was putting the percolator on the hotplate in her kitchen and the two of them melted into easy conversation.

  Charley told her about running into Stanley, and he described his brief visit to the Deuce’s gay porn sector before he started waxing poetic about the sleaze culture he loved so dearly. For her part, Eve was dubious.

  “What’s so damn great about this city anyway? Yokels like you are always going gaga over it and it’s a damn cesspool.”

  “That’s part of it. I guess I fell in love with a sewer. I’m from a bump in the road town with one post office where old people wave to you from their porches and everybody’s got an American flag in the front yard. That’s yahd in my neck of the woods. This place is like the polar opposite of that. I came here to be an artist, important stuff. I wanted to work my way into the Factory or something like that. Four months in and I’d changed my mind big time.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw The Toolbox Murders at the Selwyn. Everything changed for me in about ninety minutes.”

  “Over a Z grade horror picture?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I’d never seen anything like it. Maybe if you were a yokel, too...”

  “Brother, I’ve got you beat on the yokel ticket hands down.”

  “That a fact?”

  “We came up from Arkansas, Elizabeth and me.”

  “Arkansas!”

  “Bet you couldn’t even find it on a map.”

  “Sure I could,” Charley defended himself. “Right between Texas and Mississippi. Little Rock?”

  “Nothing so grand. A little farm town called Stuttgart. All the kids called it Sugartown, on account of you take all those T’s out of Stuttgart and you’re left with Sugar.”

  “And you went straight from the farm to the Center of the World, huh?”

  “Yeah, and we weren’t even barefoot or pregnant.”

  “I didn’t mean...”

  “I’ll bet you never met anyone from Arkansas.”

  Charley shook his head.

  “That’s because hardly anybody down there ever leaves home,” Eve continued. “We couldn’t take it and left first chance we got.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “We sure thought so. All we ever saw was miles of nothing with nobody on it. I guess we both had ants in our pants. Hanging out at the drive-in gets old after so many years, you know? But then if we’d never left home I guess Lizzie’d still be breathing, wouldn’t she?”

  Charley screwed his face up into a sour grimace as a tear bubbled up from Eve’s left eye and dribbled over onto her flushed cheek. She did not wipe it away. Charley went over to the kitchen and poured two cups of grainy coffee, one of which was already half empty by the time he returned to the sofa with them.

  “I didn’t really want to bring it up tonight,” Charley falteringly began, “but I think you should know that Chester Price is dead.”

  Eve raised her eyebrows and swallowed hard.

  “He got burned pretty badly,” he went on, “and he was a junkie on top of that. Anyway, good riddance, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “Right.”

  “I’m sorry, babe,” he said as he awkwardly craned an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t guess it’s the best way to end this, but at least it’s over. Elizabeth and Franz can rest in peace with him gone, don’t you think?”

  “There’s no goddamn rest,” Eve growled under her breath. “Just death.”

  The conversation faltered from then on, giving false starts and then sputtering out to an undignified demise like a faulty engine. They finished off the coffee in the percolator and then they made love again, this time in her bed. It felt weirdly obligatory and automated to Charley, like the sex he imagined people had in the wake of an arranged marriage. There was no heat, no desperate, consuming need. It was like eating when he wasn’t hungry or lying in bed when he was wide awake. After a while they just stopped and shortly thereafter Eve fell asleep. He listened to the rhythm of her breathing for the better part of an hour before he drifted off, too.

  He did not dream.

  When he gradually woke up in the late morning, Eve was gone. He sleepily staggered around the little apartment for a few minutes until he found the note she’d left him on the coffee table.

  Gone out for a while. Coffee on the hotplate. Might not be back before work, but stay as long as you want. Love, Eve.

  Love.

  Charley furrowed his brow and contemplated the varied possible meanings of the word in context. It was sort of like genius, thrown around so much it was beginning to lose any concrete meaning. Besides, it was just a note. Once, when Charley was a kid and he had just seen Goldfinger for the first time, he wrote to Honor Blackman asking for an autograph. Five months later he got an eight by ten black and white glossy in the mail—her as Cathy Gale, and on it she’d written For Charley—Love, Honor. He never mistook the photo for a confession of true love from the starlet. And he didn’t make that mistake now.

  He helped himself to the burned coffee in the percolator and lounged on the sofa for a while, wishing that Eve’s television worked. After that he explored the apartment in search of something to read, but all he could find were women’s magazines and a sleazy paperback called Bedtime Blonde. It was well worn and split up the spine, and it had a painting of a lusty-looking woman barely covered by her bed sheets. Charley sprawled out on the bed and perused the first chapter but gave up after that. The cover made promises that the content did not honor.

  Disappointed but not yet ready to give up the ghost, Charley dug a little deeper. He peeped under Eve’s bed and got an eyeful of dirty laundry and an empty soda can. He moved on from there to her closet, where he discovered a treasure trove of women’s shoes and more lingerie than they had at Bloomingdale’s. Also there were countless knickknacks like feather boas and lacey garter belts and even a pair of fur-covered handcuffs, all items he imagined she worked into her act. What he could not account for was the contents of a brown shoebox shoved into the far corner of the closet’s floor: a .22 pistol and a box of cartridges to go with it.

  Charley knew loads of people kept guns in their homes, particularly in such a typically unpredictable city as the one they were living in. Still, firearms made him nervous, as did the fact that the box of .22 cartridges was missing several rounds. He wondered if Eve had used them and, if so, what were the intended targets? He felt a shiver surge up his spine as he replaced the weapon and returned the shoebox to its position.

  He then turned his attention to the warped shelf that hung precariously above the clothes rack. Here were severa
l boxes, most of them small enough to bring down from the shelf if he stood on his toes. He tried one by way of experimentation and brought it down. Inside were two stacks of small, silver canisters with yellowing labels glued to the lids. Charley recognized them as film canisters, but in miniature form. Eight millimeter, spurring another memory from his generally unremarkable childhood in rural Massachusetts.

  These were the kind of small reels Castle Films used to produce those digest monster movies Charley used to order out of the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland in the early Sixties. He shook off the reverie and set to studying the contents of the box. Each of the labels on the top two canisters bore a date—8/12/76 and 2/14/77, respectively—but the rest of the paper had been torn away in both cases. Charley transferred the box to Eve’s bed and unloaded all of the canisters, twelve in total. The labels on the rest of them followed the same pattern, random dates with additional information deliberately removed.

  He replaced all the canisters and exchanged the box for another, this one containing the same mysterious cargo. It was only upon searching the seventh, penultimate box of film canisters that Charley finally came across an unmarred label. It was the only one in the box, leading Charley to conclude that it was left unimpaired by error rather than purpose. It, too, included a date—12/30/78—and underneath this a shaky hand had scrawled a single word: Liz.

  As in Lizzie.

  As in Elizabeth Ann Hewlett.

  Shot just over a year earlier, or so the label implied, this was no childhood family movie. It could be footage from a holiday reunion, but Eve’s recounting of their hasty escape from the nether-regions of Arkansas seemed to contradict that possibility. Whatever the circumstances, it stood to reason that the one hundred inch strip of celluloid inside that canister contained footage of a living, breathing and possibly even happy Elizabeth, an Elizabeth Charley had never been given the opportunity to know. He could never know her, but now he could see her. All he needed was a projector, something like the old Bell and Howell he used back in the day whenever he wanted to spool up a thirty-minute version of Dracula or a Hopalong Cassidy short for his buddies. This presentation, however, was going to be a private screening. Admit only one.

  Charley set the reel aside before he returned the box to its place on the closet shelf. There was still one more box he had not investigated, but he did not want to press his luck. Instead he shoved the canister into his pocket and left, hoping that Andy happened to be in possession of an eight-millimeter projector.

  Chapter 14

  Andy had not come home from the night before, but Charley was not particularly concerned. He had not known Andy for very long but he was already clued in to the older man’s penchant for a wild time now and again. Probably he just ended up in some pay-by-the-hour flophouse with that porn-star guy. Presently he was no doubt shoveling fried eggs into his stomach at some bus station choke n’ puke, hoping it was enough to soak up all the booze he drank the night before. Charley even bet Andy had forgotten all about his car or assumed Charley took it back with him. At any rate, it would all get sorted out. Andy just wasn’t the kind of guy you worried about. He lived hard as hell, but he knew his way around the block.

  That left Charley to pick up where he left off at Eve’s; namely poking around somebody else’s house in search of buried treasure. But whereas he never expected to find anything particularly interesting in Eve’s apartment, Andy’s house likely concealed untold horrors by the hundreds that Charley hoped to God he would not come across. All he wanted to find was a projector, and it did not take him very long to track one down.

  It was a late Fifties or early Sixties model Kodak Sound-8, a magnetic sound projector with vertically mounted reels like they used to have in classrooms for educational films. Andy stored the machine in the crawlspace over his kitchen, which happened to be the second place Charley checked after the coat closet by the front door turned up nothing. And his luck held, too—the halogen bulb still worked and the sound head came off easily when Charley turned the rotary knob. There was no sound strip on Eve’s reels so it would not be needed. He took down an ugly painting of a sailboat at sea in Andy’s living room and set the Kodak up to project on that wall. The only thing left to do was thread the film onto the sprockets and get the show underway.

  The film itself was grainy but the picture was surprising sharp for the format. On display was a wall—a wall on the wall—blue except for where it was water stained. The filmstrip flickered a bit, indicating a rough splice. Then she was there.

  Elizabeth Hewlett.

  Lizzie.

  She was completely nude, laid out on a greasy-looking double bed in what could have been a room in the New Rose. Charley noticed that her hair was a little longer then.

  There was no introduction and no context, definitely no tease or foreplay. Just a naked girl on a dirty flophouse bed. Her left arm was flung way up over her head while her right one ran in a straight line from her shoulder to her crotch, where she slowly and mindlessly wiggled her fingers around the sandy blonde triangle where her thighs met in a manner surely intended to be sexy.

  In reality it was just awkward and distinctively sad.

  Elizabeth’s mouth hung open in mock ecstasy and her eyelids fluttered. Charley squinted at the screen, thinking that she looked like she was on something heavy. This was how the scene went for two or three minutes, with a few quick intercut close-ups of her genitals, or somebody’s genitals, until it cut to a wide shot of the entire room. As Elizabeth continued her eerily unenthusiastic solo play, the door to the dirty little room opened up and a broad, hairy arm ushered a panting Doberman inside. Then the door slammed shut.

  The shiny, muscular dog leapt right up on the bed as it had undoubtedly been trained to do. Then Elizabeth, her face still a drooping mask of stupefaction, clumsily shifted her body until she was on her hands and knees. She, too, had no doubt been trained for her part in this.

  Charley covered his mouth with one hand.

  He rasped, “Jesus Christ.”

  A minute and a half later the reel unwound completely and clicked rapidly as the opposite reel kept spinning around. Charley reached over and switched the projector off with trembling fingers. He almost puked on the carpet right then and there, but closed eyes and deep, controlled breaths kept his vomit at bay for the time being.

  It did not keep the images he just witnessed out of his rattled brain. Nor did it put any distance between him and the fact that this little film belonged to Elizabeth’s sister. He gave himself another ten or fifteen minutes to compose himself, and then he returned the film to its canister and put the projector back in its place in Andy’s crawlspace. After that he fixed himself a boilermaker, drank it down, and then made another.

  He was working on his sixth when Andy finally staggered through the front door.

  “What you have there,” Andy explained between slugs of bourbon straight from the bottle, “is a loop.”

  “A loop,” Charley repeated without comprehension.

  “Yeah,” Andy went on. “You see, up until a few years ago this was pretty much the only way you could take a dirty movie home with you. Not everybody’s comfortable jerking off in a public theater, you know.”

  Charley wrinkled his nose.

  “But there was always another big market for porn loops, which was all that weirdo sick shit they can’t even show at the worst hardcore theater in town. Nasty stuff, sometimes. People crapping on each other and stuff like that. A lot of times really illegal stuff, too. I can’t say for certain where state law falls on dog fucking…”

  “Andy, please,” Charley interjected.

  “…but this obviously ain’t your run of the mill X-rated movie, is it?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Man, you really are naïve, aren’t you?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a big, bad world out there, babe. If you can think of it, somebody’s doing it right
this minute. I promise you, human beings are the scum of the universe. And there’s a whole damn lot of them that get off on some pretty depraved shit.”

  Andy tapped the metal film canister on the kitchen table. “This ain’t nothing, Sweet Cheeks. Hell, Linda Lovelace did that much before Deep Throat broke out. You could buy this shit out of the trunks of cars if you knew somebody who knew somebody, that old deal. Used to be the mob controlled all the porn on the Eastern seaboard, but now I don’t know. What surprises me about it is the date here.”

  “What about it?” Charley squinted one eye.

  “Well, this is just a year ago. Nobody shoots this kind of thing on eight anymore. Legit porn still gets the sixteen treatment for the theaters, but this sort of…specialty product is just about always made with video cameras these days. The picture’s a hell of a lot clearer and it’s cheap as hell to produce. Besides that, a VHS tape can record something like four hours to a tape against whatever handful of minutes you can fit into a reel of eight-millimeter film. I mean, it’s a much bigger investment at the get-go, say anywhere from eight hundred to one and half grand for the camera alone, but if you’re looking at a large-scale operation…”

  “Large-scale,” Charley mumbled.

  “Yeah, well—it could really work out to the operator’s benefit. No need for a lab, no film to develop. You can dub all the copies you want right at home on tapes. Shit, one guy could run the whole thing if he was of a mind. Imagine that! The first honest to Jesus auteurs in cinema and they’re making dog-on-girl porn.”