Still

by Charlee Jacob

  Which was purely ridiculous as they couldn’t all have killed her, could they?

  “Anybody here who can tell me her name?” he asked.

  Looking down, lips pressed tight: no one spoke up.

  “Aw, come on,” he said with a weary sigh. “No one knew her? It isn’t as if I’m asking you to shell out for her funeral.”

  He saw a little pale-haired boy sitting on the stoop, not ten feet from her body. He had his arms wrapped around his skinny knees, his blue eyes wide as headlights on the latest model Oldsmobile.

  There were red smears on the front of the boy’s shirt. And little footprints went once around the body and then to the steps. Red footprints, toe to heel.

  The woman had gone out the window. The boy had raced down the stairs. He’d knelt beside her body, putting his hands on her, mayby gently shaking her. Saying, “Mommie, wake up.” Because she might look asleep if you were just a kid and had never seen a dead person close up before. Because she was your mother, and the triggering mechanism in the mind first denied this apparition of mortality.

  The kid had seen the trauma at the back of her head and touched it, found it sticky and obscene, a violation of the image he had of her. He wiped it off in horror. Didn’t even realize possibly that he was standing in her blood. Stood up, walked a tight backward circle all the way around her body, unable to fully translate to himself that she was now what she was. Then finally backed to the steps of the building to sit down.

  “Son,” Detective McFadden said quietly as he went over to him, careful to skirt the spray of blood from where the back of the madonna’s skull had shattered. “This your mother?”

  The kid’s gaze never wavered from her, even when Zane stood between them. He’s in shock, the cop noted. Of course, he was.

  He turned back to the assembly. “Are any of you fine citizens able to tell me who this little boy is? And while you’re about it, who is the lady?”

  The crime scene photographer walked up to the body for a close shot. Then he stepped back, counted a few paces and knelt down to take another flash at a different angle for the standard mid-range still. He looked around, trying to decide the best way to do the overview, hoping it wouldn’t start to rain again. The standard method was using a reversible tripod but where cars were and the crowd… He might do it from a second floor window. Or he could get a ladder. Any way he looked at it, this particular scene was going to be a bitch for a decent overshot.

  Couldn’t she have fallen just a couple feet in either direction? Didn’t want to place the bottom ends of a ladder in someone’s blood and brains. Same with any tripod. Perhaps he could come up with a long handle of some kind?

  Zane saw the photographer staring up at the building’s windows, trying to choose which one might give him the best overview. Yes, a telephoto lens, leaning from a window.

  The guy sighed, knew there was no way he’d make it home in time to catch DRAGNET.

  “Tell you what,” Zane said to the gathered in the street, trying not to lose his temper. He knew that people often didn’t want to get involved—even if they felt they must have that looksee—and sometimes they just didn’t have any sympathy. Or maybe they didn’t ever talk to cops. In this neighborhood he particularly believed this last. “Let’s just pretend it’s tomorrow and actually Christmas and you’re feeling more generous than usual. Or, hey, it’s just past Hannukah, right? What’s the lady’s name?”

  One woman squirmed, pensively holding her scarf where it tied together beneath her chin. Zane couldn’t decide if she looked more like a Russian peasant this way or a medieval nun. (Standing in the freezing nexus between two worlds, not far from where the knight played chess with Death, trying to decide if she should kibbutz or not and warn the knight about Death’s Queen.) The woman brought her eyes up for a split second to meet the detective’s. She said, “She’s Robby Soloway’s widow.”

  Zane pretended to beam with delight. “And what’s your name?”

  “Olivia Schur,” she mumbled.

  “Well! Thank you! Merry Christmas and did anybody happen to see anything? Like, if she jumped or might’ve been pushed?”

  But here the wall came right back up. They looked away. They looked down.

  He knelt beside the kid. Realizing the boy was shaking—partly from emotion and partly due to his being soaked from the rain—Zane stood back up, slipped off his own coat, and wrapped it around the kid. Then he knelt down again.

  “Can you help me, son? Can you tell me anything?”

  The boy mumbled something. Zane leaned close. “What was that?”

  “Kuntewopmayvahkternmudder?”

  It sounded like gibberish. The poor child was so rattled he couldn’t even articulate.

  The boy repeated it. “Kunt u op mij wachten, moeder?”

  Another language. Not Spanish, which Zane heard a lot in Los Angeles. German, maybe?

  “Anybody here know what he’s saying?” Zane called out to the gawkers.

  No reply. Not that he expected one.

  “Can you at least tell me what language it is? You must have had some idea where this lady was from. Mrs. Schur?”

  “She was a Nazi,” he heard somebody mutter.

  “Naw, she weren’t no Nazi,” someone else said.

  Zane tried to see who had spoken up but he couldn’t tell from people’s faces. “Mrs. Schur, you said she was a widow to some guy called Soloway. You know where she came from? What language she spoke?”

  “Wasn’t English,” replied the woman, clutching the bottom of her scarf even tighter, as if trying to strangle herself so she couldn’t answer.

  The detective tried another approach. “So who was this Soloway she was married to?”

  Mrs. Schur swallowed and told him, “Local boy. Died in Korea three years ago. The kid speaks English good as any of us. I’ve heard him…”

  “Has a nasty mouth on him, too,” a man in the crowd offered. “Foul as a bucket of week-old pig guts.”

  Zane frowned and stood up, thrusting out his lower jaw belligerantly. “Care to step forward and tell me that again? Let me see your face, Mr. Soul-of-Kindness?”

  Zane read once that a tyrannical Roman emperor (Caligula?) once made a statement to the effect that he wished the Roman people had a single throat so he could cut it. At this moment, this summed up pretty well what he thought of this crowd.

  No one else said a blithering word. He’d meant to have them open up to him but, now, the line of communication was probably irrevocably broken.

  Two uniformed cops came through the building’s doorway.

  “Her door was busted down,” one of them told the detective.

  “Don’t necessarily mean she was tossed,” concluded the other. “Can’t even tell if they came inside after they broke down the door.”

  “Yeah, there’s mud everywhere. Don’t know yet how many feet might’ve left it,” added the first.

  “No sign of a note from the flyer?” Zane asked them. Because most female felo-de-se’s left notes. But the detective got the impression the boy had seen her go out, not that he understood how he knew this. And if she had a witness, then why didn’t she just say to him whatever she would have left in a note?

  He threw a look over his shoulder at the kid. Maybe she had done exactly that. Something hasty? Something in prose or blank poetry? Had she kissed him goodbye, brushing back a stray bit of hair from his forehead?

  “Not that we saw,” the second uniform answered.

  Of course, if she’d been pushed from the window…

  “Who lives in this building?” Zane asked the crowd.

  Not a one replied.

  He looked for the Schur woman to ask her. She was nowhere to be seen. She’d slipped away, faded down the street or into an alley to scurry where he couldn’t put her on the spot anymore.

  He addressed the others still present, those unable to withdraw from the sight and stench of this anonymous tragedy’s blood. “I’ll find out who you are. And if
you don’t admit it to me this second, I’m going after you for hindering an investigation,” he said, getting pretty tired of this. “Now—again—who lives in this building?”

  This time a number of hands went up. Silent hands moving skyward very slowly. Like kids in a classroom who didn’t really want to answer a teacher’s question for fear they’d be wrong and…the teacher would throw them out of a window?

  Zane nodded. “That question was in two parts. The second part is: who heard if the lady screamed?”

  It was the same woman, scarf tied so tight around her throat her eyes bulged. She hadn’t left, just moved to the other side of the mob. Maybe she’d been trying to escape and couldn’t get through the ranks. They had shut her into the death circle. You told; you’re a blabbermouth; you don’t get to crawl away and leave us with this.

  They all might have turned away, walked off. So why didn’t they?

  (Answer: this might be uncomfortable or it might be better than television.)

  Mrs. Schur said it so softly it was almost a whisper. “She didn’t scream.”

  “Sounds like you’re pretty sure of that. Means you must live reasonably close to them. How close do you live?” Zane demanded.

  “Next door.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Did you hear the door break down? Did you hear anyone breaking down that door?”

  She gave a quick shake of her head.

  “Oh, come now,” he pressed. “You live close enough you could tell she didn’t scream, but you couldn’t hear the door coming off its hinges with the wood all smashed?”

  “I heard shoutin’,” she admitted, hunching her shoulders and clearly trying to avoid the squints of her neighbors. “I heard a commotion in the hall, men shoutin’. But I don’t stick my nose out. Who would in this part of town? I wanna live to see 1957.”

  “That’s right. Now we’re getting someplace,” Zane said, half to them, half to himself.

  Except they weren’t. Because nobody else would talk and the woman claimed that was all she knew. And no amount of threats could pry the lid off.

  Eventually the coroner took the body away. Eventually the boy was removed, too. Olivia Schur did tell them that the only relative she knew of was Robby Soloway’s little brother, Danny. But Danny was either buried in Iwo Jima or loafing in Greenwich Village (or probably just some cold-water pad in Spanish Harlem), depending on which version one believed. So the kid had to go to the juvenile authorities.

  Zane felt really bad sending him there.

  It was dawn before he got to go home. He stopped for the Christmas mass at a cathedral around the corner from his place. Zane wasn’t Catholic but he sometimes went to this church. He’d sit in the pew the farthest back, close his eyes, smell the incense, and listen to the Latin. He liked the sound of it. It gave him a much needed sense of the mystic. The chanting in a long-dead language simply felt more likely to reach and comfort the dead than any living dialect (gutteral, mongrel extensions of the Roman) could.

  He even went up occasionally and made an offering, burning a candle for somebody. The priests—if they even knew he wasn’t Catholic and well, hell they saw him probably more often than some of their own lapsed faithful—never told him he couldn’t do this. Indeed, there was this one, Father Laing, who always smiled and nodded to him. He never asked why Zane didn’t go to confession or come up to take communion during the masses the detective sat in on.

  This morning Zane lit three candles—making three small monetary offerings. One was for Agnes Mathewkitty, that little girl who became his first (unsolved) homicide case. The second was for the lady with the Marilyn Monroe hair, dead upon the pavement. And the third was for her pale little boy, whoever he was…and wherever he was going.

  Later, once he was home, dead tired and dragging himself into the bedroom, Zane looked at the row of photographs on the bedside table. His own family, taken eight years ago. Just before Christmas of 1948 he’d bought the new innovation, the Polaroid Land Camera. It took instant pictures, ones you didn’t have to take someplace to get developed. Ones you could have right away or, rather, after only a couple minutes. Great for a family man. It used a positive sheet and a negative emulsion, the negative being discarded after use.

  “Gad, those snapshots stank from the processing jelly,” Zane said out loud. “And you had to pull the two pieces apart after the brief developing time was finished. I always wanted to wash my hands.”

  Funny, never in a rush to wash those hands after investigating a death. Even if there were worms involved. Even if there were flies everywhere. Even if it had been unnoticed so long the skin had started to come off and the flesh below was slick as a new photograph.

  He didn’t use the camera much anymore. It sat on a shelf beneath the one he kept his paperback books on. He didn’t know why he kept it there instead of in the closet. Maybe he thought one day there’d be a murder on his street and the crime scene photographs could be taken with this camera.

  Now Zane looked at the pictures of his family. He went over to the bedside table and sat down on the edge of the mattress which bore his imprint. He gently touched the frames, the glass covering the small, faded black and white portraits. They were almost more in shades of sepia, smiling as if from shadows cast long in caverns of brown and gold.

  Hello, boys. Hello, Janie baby. I miss you. Won’t ask if you miss me.

  “Would you tell me if you did?” he said.

  And he thought about that day. December 28, 1948.

  The Christmas season was usually a busy time for police. There were a lot of lonely people who offed themselves. There was also an increased number of automobile accidents with fatalities.

  And there were scads of folks getting drunk and high and partying until they went crazy enough to kill. (Actually the entire so-called winter season—such as it was in Los Angeles—was busy. He’d read or heard in some symposium that in Norway and Sweden such crimes spurred by winter-related depression were highest particularly in February.)

  ««—»»

  He’d been out on the job. Some guy had shot his wife and her lover and then turned the shotgun on himself. Altogether there wasn’t enough from the three heads to make up enough mass for one.

  Zane’s youngest boy, Clay, who was only in his terrible twos, had somehow gotten into the closet and was dragging stuff out. The eldest boy, Lou, who was seven years-old, had seen the scrapbook (filled with twelve years of crime scene photos, starting with Agnes Mathewkitty’s) which Clay pulled out with shoes and galoshes and boxes of trinkets. He carried it over to a corner of the floor and sat down with it in his lap. And found stills of people blown, hacked or bashed to smithereens. He saw photographs of babies strangled, drowned or decapitated. He saw pictures of men, women and children who had been raped and tortured in every conceivably demonic way.

  And Lou started shrieking. And because Lou was upset, Clay began to cry. Pretty soon they were both screaming.

  Janie came running in from folding laundry in the kitchen.

  She’d never seen the scrapbook before. And the loose pictures were kept in a locked desk drawer. She saw what the commotion was over and she started screaming, too.

  (Zane knew this because the neighbor, Mrs. Byrne, ran over from next door with a hot iron in her hand, ready to strike and scorch whoever was hurting the McFaddens. Not everybody wanted to be anonymous.)

  Janie did know that Zane had a habit of talking to himself. And she’d asked him not to do this around the kids, because she didn’t want them getting the idea that it was okay for folks to talk to themselves. But this. Bringing the dead into their house.

  She left the scrapbook closed and on the desk. With a note telling him she was leaving with Clay and Lou. She said she would get a divorce and he’d never see any of them again.

  Her note had added: I might have understood—but never approved—pictures of naked girls. Pictures of death just aren’t healthy. See if you can convince yourself to get some help.

 
; Was this last a parting joke at his personal conversations?

  Janie McFadden had moved to Virginia and remarried—not to a cop. 1956 and his boys were now ten and sixteen respectively. Zane picked the frames up and kissed each picture. And felt very bad that the stills he had of the dead seemed more real to him than these did.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 4

  “They would rather hungersulk with mad tongues

  than believe that on that field no man dies.”

  —Gregory Corso

  Uccello

  April 8, 1958

  No Jackson Pollock was Uncle Dan. Although there was room now for a new one, since Pollock died in that horrible car accident.

  “You ever gander much at Jackson’s work?” Dan had asked Pearly. Like, when would the kid have had that opportunity? “It looked like he knew he’d die this way and he was showing what he’d seen in these psychic flashes of his insides. Man, that took courage. It was cool.”

  Uncle Dan Soloway tried to paint, wanted to be great, secretly harbored suspicions that his genius might not be all he’d hoped for. Maybe all true brilliance suffered this self-doubt. Pearly didn’t know and wasn’t sure he gave a shit.

  Unc’s apartment was full of canvases, many unfinished as he lost his inspiration and flitted from project to project. Even the walls had been painted…if you could call it that. Visions of apocalypses both nightmarish and postmodern. Maybe things Dan had seen on Iwo Jima. Partial bodies, limbs over here/over there. Heads with skewed expressions which would’ve freaked out Picasso. The cabinets in both kitchen and bathroom also done. Pearly had already been living with him when one day Uncle Dan turned off the water, emptied it all out of the toilet, dried the porcelain carefully and completely, then painted the inside and around the rim. He did a gaudy splash pattern down the inward and outward curves in brown and pink, speckles of red, daubed in places to be thick and curdish. Then used a varnish over the entirety.