Still

by Charlee Jacob

  Really laughed the word out in two part warble, as if they had their beer guts tickled by auto-show models and feathers slowly inserted into their asses.

  It annoyed Zane no end that San Diego had first rights to this punk. (Put glasses on him and he’d look just like that What? Me Worry? Guy out of that kid’s publication, MAD MAGAZINE. Or with a few freckly-blood spatters across his face, he might’ve been Howdy Doodie.) All of these poor women had been abducted in Los Angeles County, two of the bodies were in the foothills of the Vallecito Mountains—and that was in San Diego’s jurisdiction.

  The creep had even taken them to the two deserts where he’d dumped the bodies. McFadden hadn’t slept in four days.

  He’d popped and popped well, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (but not squirrely!) to rush to this crime scene. The color of the blood was vivid unto the redundant. The parking lot lights and popping flash bulbs of the crime photographer burned nuclear Rorschachs into the detective’s brain until he thought his eyeballs would melt in their heat. The pulsing red strobes from both cop cars and ambulance washed over him like the firestorm from those imagined atomic events.

  Caroline didn’t notice the detective’s minor tremors or the slight wink of one eye. She ran her fingers through her black hair, cropped short but curly around her delicate face.

  “It’s a record business, Detective,” she replied with a hint of irony. “Some of our clients here to make music are pretty strange. A lot of musicians are into drugs and whatnot, so they’re a long way from normal just when they’re being normal. And their egos! They can fly off the handle if you don’t put enough cream in their coffee.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. Then she opened them again, frowning. “There are men with money and power who try to strong-arm the recording industry into giving contracts to their ‘friends’. Whit never did this. He only helped those he believed had legitimate talent.”

  Zane pursued. “And had there been somebody like this lately? Who’d been pressing for such a contract for his…friend?”

  She nodded and raised one eyebrow. “We did give this one girl—she was about 17—an audition last month. Well, she wasn’t as awful as some, but she wasn’t ever going to be a pro. That is to say, not a pro in our business. Her boyfriend, an older man, was very persistent. Tried to buy the contract.”

  “Know his name?”

  “Whit only called him as Mr. Z.”

  McFadden thought, Z for Zarembo. (Z could also be for Zane, he added mentally, wryly.)

  Z for ZOOM! ZOOM/CRASH/BURN!

  Sixty-years-old, Zarembo’s latest love toy was a teenager named Pati Rose, just dropped out of high school to be at his beck and call. Had tits as big as Jayne Mansfield’s and full blowjob lips to match.

  He’d seen a movie last year, THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT, in which Mansfield played a mobster’s vapid, bombshell girlfriend whom the gangster (played by Edmund O’Brian) hires a press agent (Tom Ewell) for, to make her a singing star. The gist was that she couldn’t sing a note straight. Throughout her music all she did was give this kewpie doll, inanely breathy squeal not-too-subtly meant to remind males of a girlish orgasm. The only thing Zane had liked about the movie was O’Brian’s hilarious satire of Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’.

  Zane didn’t usually go to movies. He’d been out tailing a suspect that night, a fifteen-year-old gang member who’d gone into the theater with a deb to see Little Richard and Fats Domino, rock and rollers with musical numbers in the film.

  Caroline Palmer finally began crying, sobbing, “Poor Whit! Does his wife know yet? You know, she just had a baby, right after July fourth. He was a good man.”

  This should be easy as strawberry pie, with this lady’s ID. He could get Gauzy and maybe Zarembo, scum who’d been responsible for more than a few murders. Then he could put Whit Cavanaugh’s photo in the scrapbook, with a postscript, Killers executed S.Q.G.C.

  “Hope it’ll even put a few of those spirits to rest,” he said. “Make the bleeding crowd at my house smaller.”

  Caroline blinked, looking at him funny. “I beg your pardon?” Zane hadn’t realized he’d made his wish outloud.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 8

  “Screw spring.

  I’m the only thing not blooming.”

  —William M. Hoffman

  Screw Spring

  November 9, 1958

  Children would gather around the door as we used dogs and whipping to force the bullocks inside. Blood and beeves-piss tided out to the pavement where pedestrians were trying to walk. Some crossed to the opposite side of the street, which wasn’t necessarily any better. Others just forded it, it being no worse than what they already had staining them. One got used to the smell fast or they died choking. Of course, we also slaughtered sheep and pigs, but beef was the most popular by far, even if it costed more.

  We’d bash out the brains to kill them. As soon as the animal fell, we’d roll it over onto its back and slit the throat from jawbone to breast, at this last forcing the knife beneath the bone and betwixt the first of its ribs. Then we cut the spine to either side of its gullet. Turning the blade over and downward severed the carotid arteries.

  Pearly read voraciously as Unc used a pencil to begin sketching something on the ceiling. He stood upon a ladder and the position he craned his neck into couldn’t be comfortable. Uncle Dan was likely on a mixture of substances; maybe he didn’t feel all that much.

  We cut the carcass from its breastbone all the way to its anus. One had to be most careful not to nick the intestines. Next we cut the anus loose, tying off the end with a bit of string. Then the entrails were easy to gentle out, cutting them loose where necessary.

  Organs were always a big seller. We knew the heart, lungs, and gullet were attached to the spine, available right through the chest cavity. And the kidneys were in the abdominal cavity at the backbone’s either side. We’d cut through the fatty nubble to reach them, then always stripped off the white membrane that covered them. The liver would be taken out with the entrails. Attached to the liver would be the gall bladder, full of a dark green liquid we had to get rid of. Gall bladder made the liver taste bitter. And there were some who found liver sweet, when done just right.

  That assessment from the coppers’ surgeons and the coroner, saying The Ripper possessed a surgeon’s skill: pure bunk. I may well have worked right alongside him. It was actually an insult that so many insisted only a man with an extended edcucation might have done this much evil. The toffs had to lay claim to everything, didn’t they?

  It was why, ultimately, they didn’t admit that the murders which came later were The Ripper’s.

  It was why they counted Mary Kelly last. Because somebody with class and brains knew when to go home from the party, correct? Knew when enough was enough. Would never be so crass as to do anything outrageous ad infinitum.

  But I knew different. The Ripper was most definitely a born and bred denizen of The Abyss. He did Alice McKenzie in 1889 and Francis Coles in 1891. Betwixt them in 1889, on the anniversary of the outrage done to Dark Annie Chapman, he carved up a woman and dumped her headless, stemless torso under a railway arch. Nameless she was and nameless she remained. Even The Ripper didn’t know her identity as she’d only just arrived on a train from God knew where. She was found a day or two later. He also did others who were never found. He was a slaughterman. He might have sold her for mutton. Who would be the wiser if what they bought and ate was of the four- or two-legged variety?

  Eventually everybody believed he was gone. He became a myth, a grim fairy tale, the shadow lurking behind many a cold joke. They sang:

  Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay,

  Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay,

  An East End ‘oliday,

  The Ripper’s gone away!

  And what happened to him? He might have been killed himself, maybe in a knife fight, maybe drunk to death and rolled by a pair of freewheeling dilly boys for sixpence and a much-used folding knife in his pocke
t. He might have emigrated to the south of France. They had quite a few mutilation murders there in the ’90s. He might have gone anyplace. He might even have come to his senses, having found Jesus and claimed him as his personal savior. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. God’s grace, His wonders to behold.

  Pearly had sent a letter to Lapsus Calami Press, the publishers for Chambers’ narrative. It had been released eighteen years back, which seemed very long ago to him. But he sent his note to the address in Chicago, printed on the title page. With his childish scrawl—which was really convincingly bad since it couldn’t keep up with how fast his mind moved—he wrote about trying to find Mr. Chambers for a book report.

  Lo and behold if they didn’t write back. He was very surprised the day he finished reading the book to find a letter, addressed to him personally. It advised him that Mr. Noom Chambers resided in a senior citizen’s home there in Santa Barbara, practically right next door and a whole hell of a lot closer than Illinois.

  He could actually go see Chambers. And all he was going to do before was write to him.

  Not only that, but the morning he received the letter, it was November 9, the seventieth anniversary of the murder of Mary Kelly.

  In numerology seven was considered to be the number of fate. And this was ten times fate.

  Synchronicity. Pearly came to believe at this moment that there were no coincidences. Everything happened for a reason. He was meant to find this man.

  So he took some money out of Uncle Dan’s wallet, lying on the kitchen table. He took his long black coat and put it on, carefully rolling up the sleeves.

  “Where are you going?” Unc wanted to know, glancing down from the ladder, purple circles under his eyes. His cheeks had grown hollow and his skin looked bad, obvious even beneath all the make-up he wore. He realized his skirt had ridden up as he leaned on the ladder’s steps, so he primly adjusted it. Couldn’t set a bad example for the nephew.

  “To see Jack The Ripper, Auntie,” Pearly told him.

  “Oh, kid. Stop calling him that. He was one of my idols.” Thinking Pearly had said Jack The Dripper again, referring to Pollock, putting The Great Man down.

  On the way out of the apartment building, to the sidewalk, he saw the fellow with the sunglasses he’d seen before, at the hospital. He recognized him by the cross-shaped scar at his lips. But the fellow didn’t see him.

  Why’s he here? Pearly wondered.

  Some teen in a motorcycle jacket with chains wrapped all around his boots cracked wise, “Hey, crucifix face. You die for my sins?”

  And the man stole up very close to him and snarled, “Go die for your own goddam sins, punk. You got yours, I got mine.”

  Pearly rode the city transit to the main bus station and then took a Greyhound to the coast. Seemed to take forever before he got all the way from The Vagabonds in far East L.A. to a beach on the west side of the city. And he considered that he lived in Los Angeles’ Lower East End, just like The Ripper had in London’s. The West End was still for the rich, even here. East was east and west was west. Never the twain shall meet. Except as destiny decreed.

  He had to take a different bus to reach the home. Once there, the building was an imposing structure, designed in faded pink brick like a Spanish villa. Practically a castle. At least compared with how he lived. He waited until a car pulled up and a family got out. Probably there to visit. He simply strolled in behind them and nobody gave him a second look, even in that big coat. It was the modern equivalent of a cloak of invisibility. On someone his age, that is. It might have been that adults really had the arrogance to ignore children this much. Or maybe—just maybe—something protected Pearly.

  Only the two kids with the couple, a little girl about four and a boy about nine, turned to look at him as he tagged along behind them. But they didn’t speak to him nor did they speak to one another about him.

  Inside. But where did he go from there? He had no idea. The man could be lying on a mattress in any room at all. He could be on a perpetual bedpan with bedsores on every square inch of him. He probably smelled like all old folks did, of dessicated lives, selves falling apart as dead and rotted leaves filled them up. He might even have kicked the bucket (one full of beeves-guts) since the last time Lapsus Calami had any contact with him.

  Pearly sighed, realizing he was going to have to ask somebody. He hoped it wouldn’t be a problem.

  There was a front desk. He asked a lady sitting behind it, after clearing his throat and giving her what he was sure must be a very cute smile, “I’m trying to find my grampuh. Can you tell me where he is?”

  “What’s his name, honey?” she asked, grinning back, popping chewing gum. Pearly smelled spearmint.

  “Chambers.”

  She looked it up in a registry. “Noom?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s a nickname. From when he served in India in the British army. Isn’t how the Hindus spell it but it’s how it’s pronounced.”

  “Oh yeah, he does have an English accent. Well, he’s out getting some sun in the garden, that direction through the French doors. He said ‘ello’, dearie,’ to me when the nurse wheeled him by about twenty minutes ago. That’s how he says it, too. ‘ello.’ You know how some of them do, dropping the ‘h’?”

  Pearly nodded. “Thank you.”

  He didn’t want to linger too long. In case she had cause to remember him well afterward. He purely regretted having to speak to her at all.

  He went where she’d said, out onto a nice lawn with California oaks and fruit trees, ornamental cacti and roses. In the distance he heard the surf. But the garden was on the opposite side of the home, away from the view of the beach. He thought it must be expensive to grow all this, where the soil ought to be sandy. Probably had to import dirt. Of course, he didn’t know. The Vagabonds was in the desert and no one really tried much to pretty up the spot with flowers.

  This wasn’t some cheap dive the old were thrust into when they were too weak to put up a fight.

  He walked past tables where some played cards, a court where several were at a game of shuffleboard. He went past lounge chairs where others dozed, shielded by wide, brightly patterned umbrellas. Which one was Chambers?

  He finally found him. Pearly was certain it had to be him. Off by himself under a fig tree so big that everybody in Pearly’s apartment building (actually everyone on the entire block) might have stood beneath the branches with not a single person pushed out from under the shade. The man was reading a book.

  It was THE PINK CRUCIBLE by Devon Goode. Pearly noticed it was also published by Lapsus Calami Press.

  And he was reading out loud,

  “Oh, disfigured beauty, eroded sphinx,

  insensible t’ these kisses and cuts.

  When time is o’ no divined importance,

  ‘ow can I impregnate your shocked desert?

  I would render it shabby t’ compare

  with th’ broken shamelessness I found there.”

  “Noom Chambers?” the boy asked as he walked up.

  His heart pounded in his chest. He heard more than just the roar of the nearby Pacific in his ears. Had he said it loud enough? The elderly gentleman might be deaf. Pearly also might have whispered it, afraid to speak to this creature of mythology. The old man put the book across his lap, peering with rheumy eyes. He challenged with a hoarse “’oo wants t’ know?”

  Pearly got as close as he dared and just stood, staring into those eyes. After a moment he said, “This morning I finished reading JUST A VIOLET I PLUCKED FROM MY MOTHER’S GRAVE.”

  “You’re jokin’.” He said it flatly, a deadpan of wrinkled stone. Just exactly the way the kid had thought this ninety-one-year-old creaker would be.

  “No, sir. I stole it from The Central Library.”

  The old man chuckled and regarded him critically. Sizing the child up. As what? An hors d’oeuvre?

  “Good show,” he told Pea
rly. “An’ you came ’ere ’cause you think I’m Jack Th’ Ripper.”

  Pearly shrugged. “You say things in the book I figure only The Ripper would’ve known.”

  “Christ, ’ow old are you, nipper?”

  “Eight, sir. So why’d you do it?” Jeez, Pearly sounded soft, weak. Like Oliver Twist. A little orphan boy, innocent in a tigering world. It almost made him cringe.

  Chambers looked as if he was going to claim he hadn’t done anything. He probably stuck to this story everytime somebody looked him up. Because Pearly doubted he was the first to do so. Perhaps if the book hadn’t been published in such a limited edition, more people would’ve read it. Maybe the police would have come seeking him. There was no statute of limitations on murder, leastwise not in this country. But Chambers let out a long breath, wheezing it at the end.

  There was a bright glint in the ancient eyes, like a flicker of gaslight off steel. “‘Cause I was a beef man and I ’ated th’ stink o’ bangtail fish. ’Cause I drank a lot o’ absinthe, ’ad since I was twelve. You could get a glass for 4p. Did you know that absinthe addiction caused a kind o’ epilepsy? I ’ad visual and auditory ’allucinations after a bout. I went crazy for a while. Do yourself a favor, son, and don’t get involved with substances! And, if you’re goin’ t’ kill, do it sane.”

  Pearly backed up a half-step. “Why would I do that? Kill, I mean. I’m only a little boy.” Pure of heart Oliver Twist.

  The old man stared, unmoved by cuteness. He tapped the side of his nose. “I smell th’ blood on you. No fi-fee-fo-fum bullshit either. You done th’ deed already. Twice, I think, from th’ roil o’ copper in your aura. Goin’ t’ do a lot more would be my guess. You’re a child prodigy, that’s what you are. Know that word? Prodigy? Means two things. Can mean you’re extraordinarily gifted. Can mean you’re a freak. I’ll wager you deserve both definitions: bein’ you’re a talented monster.”