Unpaid Dues

by Barbara Seranella

  Munch winces.

  "Let him go," Jane says. "That's enough."

  Munch thinks so too, but she says nothing. What's the point? Thor would ignore her. He's clearly oblivious to the world as he drags the barely conscious hippie by his hair over to a cement curb and positions the guy's face against

  the edge.

  "No," Jane says.

  "You know this motherfucker?" Thor asks, pointing an accusing finger at her

  Munch knows Jane has fucked up. It can happen that quick with these guys. One minute you're their friend, the next they're your worst nightmare.

  "No," Jane says, her eyes lowered. She'd bow like a geisha if that would help. She'd crawl on her belly.

  "Then what the fuck do you care?" Thor's eyes blaze with excitement. He brings his boot down on the back of the p thief's head. "Eat that, fuckhead."

  The guy doesn't move. Blood runs down the gutter: Munch is afraid the guy is dead. She takes the keys to the truck from Jane. "Let's split."

  Thor bends down, turns the guy's pockets out, and finds some folding money. This pisses Thor off.

  "What's he robbing me for?" he asks, genuinely indignant. He stands and kicks the unconscious man again. Munch starts the truck and pulls into the street. She thinks that if Thor were driving he might run the guy over. Her mouth is dry. She feels cold and something else, something she hasn't felt in a long time: conscience. She's seen plenty of fights before, sees them every week, but usually someone's drunk. Thor wasn't even high this time and his cold-blooded side scares her more than anything else. She decides to cut both him and Jane loose, to find other people to hang with, but like many other resolutions she makes while using, she keeps this one too late.

  The damage will be done, and it will haunt her into her next life.

  * * *

  The coroner 's office was in downtown L.A., so St. John went alone. Wednesday was the earliest Sugarman could schedule the autopsy of Jane Ferrar. Cassiletti had an appointment with a brickyard in Ontario.

  St. John entered the coroner's office through the side entrance, the one the meat wagons used for deliveries and pickups. There was an empty steel gurney by the door, and a coiled green garden hose with a still-dripping nozzle. The smell of wet concrete vied with petrolemn and alcohol fumes.

  Dr. Sugarman was in his office and on the phone. "I'm sorry for your loss," he was saying. St. John wondered how many times a day the pathologist uttered that line.

  St. John remained standing in the doorway; Sugarman looked up at the clock as he hung up the phone. It was eight in the morning.

  "You're here for the Jane Ferrar post?"

  "Yeah," St. John said.

  "Haven't seen you for a while," Sugarman said. "How are you feeling?"

  St. John rubbed his chest, slightly left of center, out of reflex. "I'm all right."

  "Good. Good to hear it."

  Carrying his own camera, St. John followed Sugarman through navy-blue doors into the powder-blue tiled chamber of the autopsy suite. The neon bug-zapper buzzed as insects were drawn to a purple death. Sugarman's assistant opened the door to the cooler and wheeled out a body covered with an opaque plastic blanket. Even that was tinted a pale blue in the reflected light.

  Sugarman and St. John donned surgical gowns and gloves. In the old days, medical examiners never wore gloves. The gloves inhibited dexterity and sensitivity and were a hassle to put on. It struck St. John that the same arguments could be used against condoms.

  "We should buy stock in the company that makes latex," St. John said.

  "This AIDS epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better," Sugarman said, checking the body's toe tag. "Mark my words."

  St. John grabbed a face mask from the box by the door and pulled it on over his nose and mouth. The only sound above the hum of the refrigeration was the buzz of the bug zapper. The ME swept the plastic tarp off the body with a practiced flourish, and what remained of Jane Ferrar lay spread out naked on the cold steel table.

  Sugarman verbally documented every injury into the microphone hanging suspended over the table. Most notable was the throat wound, cut all the way through to the spine. There were also numerous facial lacerations, two other long shallow slashes on her torso, and a large shallow dent in the back of her skull, which they were attributing to either the initial drop into the storm drain or her head bashing against the wall as the current carried her body downstream. The bruising on her upper arms appeared to have been made by fingers. The ID techs took picture after picture. St. John took a few of his own.

  Naked and supine, the body revealed another abnormality that became clear to the investigators. Jane Ferrar's right leg was considerably smaller than the left. Sugarman found a two-inch discrepancy in length, and when St. John reexamined the woman's shoes, he noticed that the right shoe was a size four and the left shoe was a size seven.

  "Polio?" St. John asked.

  "Most likely The poliomyelitis virus usually attacks the spinal column and brain stem of children and causes this lack of development."

  X-rays revealed that both of her forearms had been broken within the last few years.

  St. John envisioned her in a defensive pose. In his imagination she was on her knees, begging for mercy that never came.

  X-rays also revealed a years-old fracture of her right eye socket. The inside of her thigh was peppered with both fresh and ancient needlemarks. A tattoo on the back of her left shoulder read PROPERTY OF THOR.

  Sugarman spent many minutes on the neck wound before drawing St. John's attention to the color and texture. "She was dead before her throat was cut. I'm seeing seepage around the wound, but the veins would have flared open more if the heart had still been pumping?

  "So it was the head trauma?" St. John asked.

  Sugarman nodded as he parted the hair above the right ear to show St. John a star-shaped wound; then he spoke into his microphone. "The victim has a three-inch stellate scalp laceration with several branches running laterally and distally to the right ear. The skin is split rather than sliced, which indicates blunt force trauma."

  St. John leaned in for a closer look at the gray mushroom of brain matter poking out from the hole in her skull.

  Sugarman moved on to the pelvis, swabbing the woman's orifices, and checking for signs of sexual assault. "I'm seeing no signs of vaginal trauma and no traces of semen. And judging from the pelvic structure, this woman never gave birth."

  Jane Ferrar's arms lay flat at her side. The buttons from the doll's dress had left impressions in the soft flesh of her lower arms where she'd clutched the plastic baby to her chest. St. John looked again at the slashes on her abdomen. There was a deliberateness about the two lines that came together just above the navel. The letter V standing for what? Victim? Victory? Vengeance?

  "What do you make of this, Doc?"

  Sugarman peered at the cuts with a magnifying glass. "Nonserrated blade, I'd say"

  St. John took another photograph. Had the killer signed his work?

  Sugarman made the Y cut, commented on the cirrhosis of the liver as he removed and weighed it. An hour later, as the pathologist was sewing the body back together, St. John told him that he was leaving.

  "I'll call you when I get back the tox results."

  Sugarman said.

  "Yeah. Let me know." He needed to get back to the station, contact Missing Persons, and see if anyone had been close enough to Jane Ferrar to notice her absence. He also wanted to put out feelers for an asshole named Thor aka Mac Ferrar.

  * * *

  Jane, 1974

  She is not Thor's first choice. Jane has eyes. She sees the way he watches Munch, how he puffs out his great chest, even makes an effort to brush his hair when he thinks he might be seeing her. But Munch isn't interested and Jane is.

  Lately, Jane wonders why she and Thor bother to think of themselves as a couple. They are not faithful to each other, though her sexual encounters are usually business while his are more matters of control,
conquest, and opportunity. She fears him and that fear is one of the few emotions that touches her. He says he wants a kid from her, a boy. She makes her tricks use condoms, especially the ones who don't have red hair He pretends she only screws white men, and she knows it's best to let him believe what he wants.

  Thor broke her nose when he was in one of his moods; afterward he brought her flowers and a new pair of sunglasses to hide the black eyes. She was back on the street within days, and he was extra sweet to her for almost a week. She even explained to all their friends that she had asked for it, been mouthy at the wrong time, and really hadn't left Thor much of a choice. Munch just snorts when she hears Jane's version.

  "He's an asshole," she says. "I don't care how big his dick is."

  Sometimes days will pass and Jane doesn't see him—her supposed old man—but she keeps track of him through their network of bartenders and connections.

  Once, after not hearing from him in days, Munch said that Jane needed to have a little fun and that she had earned a girls' night out—the other girls being Deb, Roxanne, and Crazy Ellen. Munch and them took her barhopping over to a dive on Lincoln, and there was Thor with some floozy, some little blonde bitch sitting on his lap. Jane had to hide in the bathroom until he left. He would have broken her nose again if he found her out on the town without him.

  Her dad asked her once what she was doing with these guys, these men who treated her like shit. He didn't understand and Jane couldn't explain that she liked being with the baddest of the bad, a man feared by all. She was envied every time she walked in a bar with him, could feel the respect trickle down to her. He was her pirate, her Jesse James. She would do anything for him, whatever the cost.

  One day Thor'd wake up and notice what he had, and they'd all just see.

  Chapter 7

  Nathan was gone when Munch and Asia woke up. He'd left his clothes and made a halfhearted effort to straighten the blankets on the couch. The towel he used the night before was still damp and crumpled in a corner of the bathroom floor. Munch picked it up and hung it over the shower stall. She was going to need to set some ground rules.

  She went outside and retrieved the morning paper. The story was on page three of the metro section with the headline NAME OF WOMAN FOUND IN STORM CHANNEL IDENTIFIED. The one-paragraph article went on to remind the reader that a Caucasian woman had been discovered dead in the storm drain near the Riviera Country Club. The woman was identified as Jane Ferrar; the apparent cause of death pending autopsy and toxicology reports was bludgeoning.

  Munch sat down heavily Jane had spent her life getting beat up by one man after another. She had been pretty when Munch first met her. She had one of those heart-shaped faces with high cheekbones, cat eyes, and a narrow jaw, but every few months, some new trauma would chip away at those looks. The straight nose was broken and healed slightly crooked. One of her front teeth was knocked out and the replacement tooth was too white. It wasn't all Thor, the son of a bitch, although he'd done his share.

  Munch checked the time and then reached for the phone.

  Five hundred miles away her old friend Roxanne answered with a sleepy hello.

  "Good morning," Munch said. "I'm going to ruin your day"

  "What's up?"

  Munch told her about Jane being murdered and the visit from Mace St. John.

  "What did you tell the cop?" Roxanne asked, sounding fully awake now.

  "Pretty much the truth, that I hadn't seen Jane in a long time, and that as far as I knew she didn't have a kid although Thor wanted one."

  "You mentioned Thor?"

  "Yeah, well, the two names went together."

  "Yeah, but still."

  "I know. " Munch looked at the newspaper article and how much it didn't say "I also talked to my sponsor about it. I told her about Jane and Thor and Sleaze John being involved in something heavy ten years ago."

  "Just them?"

  "I told her that there was one other person who was way out of the life now."

  "Can you trust her?"

  "Sure, she's my sponsor. It's like talking to a priest or something."

  "Not exactly" Roxanne said. "You shouldn't have said anything. Now there's one more person to worry about."

  "She'll be cool."

  "I hope so. "

  "By the way" Munch said, "speaking of lost causes, have you heard from Deb?"

  "Oh yeah. She's back in Amsterdam."

  "I knew about that"

  "You'll never guess who arrived on my doorstep last month."

  "Calling himself Nathan?"

  Roxanne laughed. "So you're on his list too?"

  "It appears so."

  "Yeah, I put him up for three weeks. I even found him a job with an outfit that unloads freight from train cars. They were paying eighteen bucks an hour. He went through the whole training program and then split."

  "Well, you can't expect the kid to be a model citizen with the upbringing we gave him."

  "That's what I told myself when the phone bill came with about a hundred bucks' worth of long-distance calls."

  Munch clicked her tongue. Mother and son were cut from the same cloth all right. "Send it here. He said he has a job lined up. He's got to learn to be responsible for his debts."

  "No, it' s okay "

  "I'm serious. We won't be doing him any favors letting him slide on his obligations."

  "All right, I'll do it today"

  "And, Roxanne . . . ? If anyone were to ask why I called?"

  "You don't need to tell me. It was about the boy." Roxanne paused. "You know, Thor 's probably in prison."

  "You think?"

  "That's where he belongs," Roxanne said. "There but for the grace of God . . ."

  "I hear you."

  "Do you know his last name?"

  "Something Irish, I think."

  "What? Like McButthead?"

  "Yeah, that could have been it. I remember writing it out when we went to visit him at Chino that time, but it was so long ago."

  "And we were probably stoned." The three of them—Jane, Munch, and Roxanne—had gone to visit Thor. Jane and Munch carried heroin wrapped in balloons in their mouths and passed them to Thor with tongue kisses while the guards looked on. "Were we just too stupid to get caught?"

  "I guess."

  Munch said her good-byes and could only hope that their combined good fortune held. After getting sober, Roxanne had settled in Northern California, gone back to school, and learned how to program computers. Munch was proud of her.

  Neither she nor Roxanne needed a bite in the ass from the past.

  * * *

  Munch, 1974

  This is their year, 1974. Seventy-four is a magic number, the cubic-inch displacement of a V-twin Harley engine. It is also the year that Munch turns eighteen and has to be more carful. Her arrests will count more; she is an adult. Not that she hasn't already racked up a string of adult charges in a variety of names, but she's always had her juvenile standing to fall back on.

  She and Sleaze John are running together fairly regularly. Sleaze John doesn't have a Harley, but he has an El Camino with a big block 454 and that thing hauls ass. A truck with an open bed and plenty of horsepower comes in handy when someone's bike breaks down, a keg needs transporting, or if some valuable goods happen to fall off a truck.

  Sleaze John makes hustling fun. He can con dope fiends out of their dope and money and leave them shaking their heads and laughing. She should know.

  Part of his charm is his originality; then there is the charisma thing and how goddam pretty he is to look at. There is always a price for picking the pretty ones. In some ways she is no better than New York Jane, how she lets the guy walk all over her for the sake of his company. As much as Munch is capable, she loves Sleaze. Even when he's with other women.

  She finds him one morning sitting on a door stoop in Venice Beach. He is as quiet as she's ever seen him, really dejected, and all out of play. She is up early that morning; he hasn't yet been to sleep.
She stands in front if him, not saying a word. When he finally looks up, she offers him her hand and leads him back to her place.

  It takes a few days to get that mojo of his up and working again. She even buys him a black silk shirt with some of her trick money. She would buy him a motorcycle if she had the means. The shirt looks dynamite on him with his dark hair and brown eyes.

  "You almost look good enough to keep, " she tells him.

  "We should get married," he says. Then he laughs, and she quickly laughs back twice as hard.

  "Can 't you just see me with a husband? Who needs that shit?"

  "Jane and Thor are getting married," he tells her.

  "Get out. "

  "I shit you not."

  "What's the point?"

  John shrugs. "Maybe they wanted an excuse for a Jane, as it turns out, really takes the whole wedding thing seriously. She buys herself a long lacy white dress at a thrift shop on Windward Avenue, and gets all fussy and stressed out the morning of the big day, even buys film for Boogie's camera so he can take pictures. The ceremony takes place at the beach near the pavilion at the end of Venice Boulevard so the guys can keep an eye on their motorcycles. Thor wears a new black T-shirt for the occasion and is drunk by nine in the morning. Jane does her hair up with baby's breath and walks barefoot through the sand. Flower George donates a bouquet of daisies and acts as minister.

  That right there should have said it all. Flower George is the biggest degenerate of all time.

  Munch smokes a joint the night before the ceremony, then sits down and writes a story about the event for Easy Rider magazine. She prints it in pencil on lined notebook paper, finishes it in one draft, and mails it off. It gets published in the April issue; the magazine pays her one hundred and twenty-five dollars—a small fortune—and she's the talk of the clubhouse for a week.

  Her dream is to save up the impossible sum of two thousand dollars and buy her own Harley, a Panhead with a white tank. She'll call it Prince Charming and ride off into the sunset.