STILL
by Charlee Jacob
Smashwords Edition
Necro Publications
2011
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Text © 2007, 2011 Charlee Jacob
Cover art © 2007 Andrea Cavaletto
This digital edition April 2011 © Necro Publications
Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:
David G. Barnett
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a Necro Publication
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PART ONE
“Belief makes blood flow. Belief infects
the dead with more belief.”
WHEN SUFFERING IS EVERYWHERE,
THAT IS OF THE NATURE OF BELIEF
—Karl Shapiro
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CHAPTER 1
“The only people for me are the mad ones…”
—Jack Kerouac
On the Road
March 13, 1958
He had already taken the photograph out of the drawer. No sense trying not to look at it; its grim yet pathetic image was permanently imbedded within the wrinkles of his brain. Nor could he have chosen any of the others. This must be tonight’s selection because tonight was an anniversary.
He thought: Photograph. Snapshot (Shot). Still.
Still. Silent. Dead.
Still. Still Life. Still Death.
He did know that the dictionary definition of ‘still life’ referred to a portrait of inanimate objects—flowers, fruit, furniture. Nothing alive, that is. And it cut him to think that this was what the person in the picture had been reduced to: an object.
He had the dusty drapes closed tight over the yellowed slats of the Venetian blinds. No starlight belonged in here tonight.
There wasn’t any neon out after dark, trying to shoulder its way in. No, because his house was in a real neighborhood, not just along some cruising strip for tourists and the high life (low life). It was in one of the city’s little geographical hideaway niches of which Los Angeles had many. Hollow canyons and valleys. Yeah, he was down in the valley. The valley so low.
Sitting in his gray undershorts, hung up on torrential guilt, he’d removed the single photograph from those in the desk drawer, feeling a chill at the display of horror within. He’d have expected, after so many years, that he’d become indifferent. He wanted to be insensible. A cop ought to be able to distance himself from the outrages he saw.
“Someday I’ve got to write some of this stuff down. Definitely. Not just in the margins either. Not simply as captions. I’ve seen enough to fill a bunch of drugstore novels, haven’t I?”
He glanced over at the bookshelf. There were the Mike Hammer books: I, THE JURY; MY GUN IS QUICK; THE BIG KILL; KISS ME, DEADLY. Classics of crime fiction. And the more recent 87th Precinct stories: COP HATER; THE MUGGER; THE PUSHER; KILLER’S CHOICE. Newer masterpieces.
He didn’t care much for Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man series. That ultra-sophisticated crap was for those who believed murder could be neat and scented with Chanel. Drawing room niceties of bloodshed were like cozy murder mysteries: oxymorons. Oxy for morons.
“I could be the next Mickey Spillane, if I wanted to be. Or that great new guy, Ed McBain.”
Zane McFadden chuckled, realizing the last thought had been said outloud. But so what? It wasn’t as if Janie or the kids were still in the house to overhear him.
The Great Detective Talks To Himself.
(Hey, the renown explorer, Admiral Richard Byrd, who just died last year, was reputed to play cards with invisible friends.)
“Not that my ghosts are my invisible friends…just my invisibles.”
S’okay. Not as if there was anybody else he could share this with. Even those he worked with might give him some strange, sidelong looks if they knew about the collection. Yet it wasn’t as bad as that, was it? Not as if Zane kept a box filled with baby-killers’ thumbs and rapists’ penis tips.
Hell, for all he knew every one of them kept a scrapbook. Every cop, every coroner, every gravedigger. He knew some killers did, creating the book which presented themselves as a twisted hero. He knew one guy who’d been into cutting up women. The fellow had a separate photograph of every piece and a perverted little story to go with each.
“Seen a lot of hell, boyo. Seen some illusion of elusive justice—both street and biblical. Even witnessed a bit of genuine redemption here and there—usually shortlived. And the occasional misplaced saint has sauntered through the wreckage. But most of what I’ve been privy to has been evil. Evil by degrees: from momentary, incapacitating madness to full-fledged, all-out rabid and remorseless destruction.”
Smoking Lucky Strikes, inhaling deeply of the unfiltered gray smoke until it rattled in his lungs like dice in a cup, then taking a swig from a bottle of Tennessee amber mash, he stared at the picture gripped in the yellowed tips of his fingers, studying it. Looking for something he had hitherto missed. A clue which would help him, even if only briefly, to hold close again that illusory justice…before it went off to whatever hole it usually hid in so well.
“This is evil,” he told himself, not bothering to whisper.
For who was there to overhear? “That’s right. Don’t give a damn what the Church says. There are no horns on evil. It isn’t always what you’d expect or where you’d most likely look. Its product is what you recognize. That’s what you have to smell and squint at.”
««—»»
Earlier, at the station, working long hours—as usual, huh? But he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He’d turned fifty last month and it wasn’t a young fifty either. Zane wasn’t a big guy, only about 5’8”, so when he thickened around the middle it made him look even fatter. His gray hair was thinning into a middle-aged landing strip for flies. He’d started sometimes taking Dexies, to be able to do long stretches through the caseloads.
Zane would never have thought he’d use drugs. But, hell, what else were caffeine and nicotine? And another woman, Shirley Ann Bridgeford, had turned up missing four days ago. She’d joined a Lonely Hearts Club, ventured out on a first date, and never came home. He doubted she’d ever be seen alive again. The way he’d always figured it, an A-head wasn’t much different from an A-hole. Musicians, artists, truck drivers traveling coast to coast. Visionaries and the driven, hoisted upon the petards of their assorted deadlines, not caring who they ran down to get there. Zane had been present when people had to be scraped off the highway after an accident with some hipster on goofballs.
He hadn’t slept much in years. So many dreams, marathon hauntings. He’d take Dexedrine to cure his fatigue and sharpen his mind for the job. Then, later, he’d crash, when he had time off.
Hey, sleep was vastly overrated, right?
Crash.
And.
Burn.
««—»»
The scrapbook sat in front of him on the desk. A jar of paste was open with its musty scent sticky in the air, like the odor of crime scene vomit. Photographs of grief and the gruesome, collected from twenty odd years of a career in death, many with notes on cases added around them in indigo ink in his own handwritten scrawl. They had originally been composed in his investigator’s notebook. Secondly, w
hen—and if—he acquired a photo of the particular crime scene, he rewrote the notes on the back of the picture. They weren’t recorded on the page until he decided to paste the photo in the scrapbook.
It depended on whether or not the crime was solved. He’d keep the photos in his top desk drawer (at home) for two years, hoping to be able to add a memorandum that the perp was so-and-so and had been either executed or dumped in prison for a long haul. If after two years it hadn’t been solved, he pasted the photo in the book and reluctantly added that the crime remained ‘Without Resolution.’ He never bothered to add—because it was obvious in the implication of the words, wasn’t it?—that evil had won this case. As it won so many.
He didn’t write ‘unsolved’, which would have been tidier and more succinct. He’d never liked the word. It sounded too much like ‘unabsolved’, as if the sin here which could never be forgiven lay on Zane’s head. No priest could ever say Ego te absolvo ab omnibus for him, not if killers roamed free.
At the crime scene itself Zane hand wrote the notations in pencil, number 2 lead. He did this so particulars might be erased if erroneous. With the pencil aimed at the paper like a hit-and-miss sword of justice, he sometimes printed the original comments. Because printing took more time, gave a man extra minutes to digest a horror which might otherwise have him reeling. A focus on the mechanical and “What am I doing? I’m creating a finite line…point to end point. Now I’m making a loop. Now I’m making another loop. See? I’ve designed a ‘B’. B is the first letter in BARBARA. Her first name was BARBARA. Her last name was SNOW, but we’ll get to that eventually. No hurry. If Miss Snow’s in no hurry anymore, then who am I to rush the lady?”
All the while, see, separating the business of forming these sentences from the different and dangerous act of trying to cope with having to view BARBARA SNOW’s nude body spreadeagled on a bed in a flophouse hotel, her delicate china teacup fists bound to the headboard with her garter belt, her thin ankles lashed separately to the corner end bed posts with her stockings. The wooden grip handle to a .38 caliber pistol was visible but the barrel lost in the vagina, lower abdomen blown out like snakes from a joke can from the trigger being repeatedly pulled with the weapon in this position. Block letters: SUICIDE UNLIKELY.
Before BARBARA SNOW was the importance of the date of discovery (but not necessarily of demise), in this case 7-25-56. After BARBARA SNOW were further particulars. AGE 24. Her address at 114 North Feather, L.A. Calif.
If a suspect was found and convicted, he crossed out the ‘Without Resolution’. Then add SOLVED to: 7-25-56, BARBARA SNOW, AGE 24, 114 North Feather, L.A. Calif. Then: Tortured and shot to death by boyfriend Jack Jerk. Jerk sentenced to S.Q.G.C. 1-8-57.
The S.Q. stood for San Quentin and the G.C. for the gas chamber.
But there had been no suspect or suspects. So it just had the date her body was found, her name (written without hurry, as if banging the slow drum at a funeral), and her age.
(Not written but observed.) Entrails on the floor. Joke can snakes trying to slither under the bed.
(Not written but observed and never forgotten.) Unusual swelling at the breasts, as if the heart had also been reached by a bullet racing up through the trunk. The shape of this swelling was an uncanny valentine.
“Who was your valentine, Miss Snow?”
Now he puffed on the cigarette again, then took another swig—this time from a bottle of milk of magnesia. Zane’s fingers trembled as he opened the book. He started with the first picture he’d ever put inside, taken of a little girl aged ten. Her name had been Agnes Mathewkitty and she’d been snatched from the driveway, raped and strangled, left on the steps to the grade school two blocks away. That was in 1936. Zane had been new to the homicide department, and it was his first murder case as well as the first killing of a child he’d ever seen. It gave him nightmares when he couldn’t find the monster who’d done it. He’d kept a photo so he would be able to see it over and over again, telling himself, “Zane, you’ve got to keep trying to find this animal. You can’t let Agnes down.”
Except he had let her down. And he’d started the album so he would see the photo repeatedly, realizing fatalistically that he’d failed to get justice for this little girl. It would make him try harder; it pushed him to limits both sad and heroic until, a decade later, he’d sometimes ignored his own children just to hunt for Agnes Mathewkitty’s defiler. (Now seeing his kids wasn’t an option. The closest he ever came were their photographs. But those weren’t in this book nor in the drawer.)
He’d seen other dead kids since Agnes. He’d held a few of them, grieving in the silent manner of the cop. He’d held babies, even. Like Rosaluna Pasolini’s infant, no name of its own.
Zane then went through every picture in turn. He thumbed pretty fast because there were more than three hundred of them to go through. And he’d click each one off by memory. “The guy that did this one got the gas. The beast responsible for that got life in prison. That bitch went to jail and the other female inmates—many mothers themselves—tore her to pieces. That guy ended up in the asylum…”
But in-between each monument to justice were the unsolved cases. The ones that bothered him most, that made his heart swell up inside him until a crazy outline became visible on the flesh of his chest. (He’d looked sometimes. The imprint wasn’t a valentine. Usually it was a death’s-head.) These were the ones that tugged at him in the dark, crying out in pain and fear in his dreams, never at rest and never finding peace.
Alone in the house, Janie having divorced him and taken the kids ten years ago, he touched every page as he turned it, seeing a blood-red spark from each crisp corner. A shiver ran down his spine to settle in his scrotum with a kind of desire and something not unlike love. He would get an erection which always made him sick with shame, even as he understood it was the identical hard-on men went into battle with, when they stormed out to protect their families from the enemy. It was the same boner some men died with as they strained toward a merging with a death passionate to possess them.
And when he got to the end of the photos in the scrapbook, he would ejaculate into the paste, mixing it, then applying some to the back of the latest picture to be added to the rest. (Tonight BARBARA SNOW, written slow.)
A man’s semen was taken into the wife; it went to help create the children. So the seed was an integral part of the biology of the family. These were as close as he had to family now. And his sperm was as close as any of these dead had anymore to a link with the organic.
The French call an ejaculation the ‘petit mort’, or ‘little death’.
“This is evil,” he said aloud again but in the barest, tobacco-roughened murmur.
It was fitting: his own mortality offered up to them, the solved and the unsolved. It didn’t seem right they should have these separate classifications, as if the solved were legitimate and the others were somehow illegitimate. Differentiating between rightful heirs to justice and bastards. No, in light of what they had suffered, either at their own hands or the hands of others or at the hands of a capricious God, they all deserved to be cherished and wept over and maybe desired for even the frailest of their imprints on time. So Zane took every one and kept their portraits, considered and reconsidered their stories, didn’t allow them to simply be forgotten.
Even though, yeah, the ‘Without Resolution’ ones were sort-of orphans. And they were special to him as a result. You did always have to love the ones who had no place to go, because God hadn’t seen fit to arbitrate for them.
Zane spent his work days scouring the murder scenes for more of those who needed him. And then spent his nights being haunted. “I’m a man made out of jade and pauper’s coffin pine,” he said to himself. “This isn’t normal; it isn’t dignified; it isn’t nice.”
“That’s right,” he agreed with himself. “You hit it on the money.”
But he knew he couldn’t stop, as he let the glue dry on the still he’d just added before closing the book. It was
Barbara Snow’s. Because today had been 7-25-58. It was two years after her murder and it was her time. He noted her name on the page, her age, the date her body had been found in the flophouse. And, unfortunately, ‘Without Resolution’. It wasn’t that her murder could never be solved—but it was unlikely. Just as it was unlikely he would be absolved for his failures and compulsion.
“I mean, my god, boy! You know from experience where obsessions often lead. To No Good, that’s where.”
He shook his head, slipped the scrapbook into its hiding spot in his closet, staggered into the bathroom to take a scalding shower. He felt disgusted with himself. He knew he was a disgrace. Cops shouldn’t feel so much. They ought to go cold inside and crack callous jokes about their work.
Well, he did do that when he was with other officers. That’s what the notation SUICIDE UNLIKELY had been at the scene of a woman found bound to the bed and shot up through the vagina. Like, she could have done this to herself? It was a flicker of gallows humor meant to make others see and believe that Zane McFadden was a hardened soldier. He kept up the pretense.
It was just a pretense, wasn’t it?
Killers usually killed for the sense of power it gave them, in control of the rapidly escalating heartbeat of their victims. Zane had never done that, never been into this compelling destruction. But perhaps what he did was almost as terrible. The pulse might be the foundation of fear, but blood was the unbearable fascination.
I’m not just a voyeur. I’m not!
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