Still

by Charlee Jacob

  Waiting for the German, he tried not to sweat or tense. It was difficult, as badly as he wanted this particular still in his hands.

  Minutes. Seemed like proverbial hours. The German returned with the scrapbook and handed it to Clay. “Vhich vun is id?”

  McFadden turned the book over in his lap, back cover up. He opened it. “This one. It’s mine. Give it back.”

  “You zold id do me, remember?”

  “No, it’s mine.”

  Dunkel snatched the book away, setting it on the desk. He strutted around the room. As close to a goosestep as anyone could do without the completely ludicrous leg gymnastics.

  “In my vadder’s day, dhey had hozpitals var dose crippled in duh mind and duh body. You are only an untermenschen. I zink I vill kill you now.”

  Friedhof withdrew a switchblade from his jacket pocket, flicked it open to reveal a silver glint along its narrow blade that matched a mercurial fire in his eyes.

  A switchblade. A crass amateur’s weapon.

  Clay stood up quickly as the German came forward. He brought his foot up, snapping his leg four times, catching Dunk in the arm first to throw the piddly knife across the room, then under the German’s jaw, into the gut and into the balls.

  Then, this time, he leaned down with a superior smile.

  Something clicked in Friedhof’s eyes. He cradled his testicles, groaned, and inquired, “Who are you?”

  The man replied. “Was mein weiss, sol man nicht fragen.”

  What one knows, one should not ask.

  Dunkel blinked, spat out blood and a couple teeth. “You are right. I do know you. Duh vheelchair drew me awf. Und you are older dan duh lazt dime, in duh courthouse.”

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 26

  “Again and again the child pledged himself to Evil…”

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  Saint Genet

  Almost fifty years in the business.

  Hollywood loved to say you couldn’t retire from the mob, but that was bullshit. As with most other business concerns it was a young man’s game, save for those at the top.

  Pearly had never been at the top except for the zenith of assassins. For this, he’d been the penultimate, the quintessential killer for all seasons. Educated to every facet of murder, he could be practically anybody anywhere. There wasn’t anyone he couldn’t get to.

  Mrs. Zarembo had called him a toivl all those years ago. She’d been absolutely correct. The word ‘devil’ didn’t bother him. Some of the smartest or at least most interesting people in the world had been devils.

  Killing folks—for Tony Zarembo and then Tony Junior—and hiring out to perform eradications around the world (fascilitated by his fluent speaking of no less than twelve languages and almost as many dialects) made it possible for him to afford the lifestyle of a scholar. That is to say, someone with an extensive library of both modern and rare volumes, with a desire to know virtually everything from history to science and the arts. Pearly had published comprehensive books on weaponry and explosives under the nom de plume Jack Chambers and was known in gallery circles as the reclusive artist, Dan Sol. He’d led a fascinating life, doing exactly what he wanted and was good at. How many could claim this? Yet he had retired recently, called out only for very special favors.

  In 1998, he was arrested for the 1958 murder for hire of a man named Theo Gegax. Back then (1998, that is), Pearly still had hair, albeit receding. It was only 2004 when he’d given up hope and shaved the whole pate smooth. He wore glasses now, too. He hadn’t in ’98. Presbyopia was the hazard for an old reader like him.

  Some guy doing time for armed robbery had fingered him, trying to make a deal for a reduced sentence.

  “This Pearly’s been whackin’ folks since he was a kid,” the jailbird told the cops.

  And Pearly was brought in, eventually arraigned, made a bit of fuss over because it was thought he’d done as many as two hundred hits in his career. But when they found out that the snitch was one of those who’d actually hired him to do the hit on Gegax—a man who’d run over a friend’s little sister with his car—and the payment had been seven dollars in change and an old overcoat… Well, the D.A.’s office first laughed so hard that the Bavarian creme from the morning’s donuts came out their noses. Who was this Will Breslau character? Some petty piece of shit.

  “You trying to tell the savvy citizens of L.A. that an eight-year-old got around the police to stick a shiv in a man they were guarding at a hospital? Besides, everyone who knows any history’ll tell you that hit was done by Tony Zarembo’s people because Gegax was about to turn State’s on them. This Robert Soloway Jr. doesn’t have any criminal record.”

  And to top it off, Donald Kaplan, brother of Emily Kaplan (killed by Gegax’s car), had been brought into court and asked if it was true what Breslau said.

  “No, sir. It’s complete nonsense,” Donnie had said under oath. “Will always did get into trouble a lot and have a big imagination. He had a grudge against Pearly—uh, that’s Robert Soloway there—because a lot of people thought Mrs. Soloway, his mother, was a Nazi warbride. Will’s people came from Warsaw. You know what the Nazis did there, right? Besides, we used to shoot craps in the alley and Pearly—uh, Robert there—always won all Will’s money. It’s been forty years, Willy. Give it up.”

  Grand Jury wouldn’t indict.

  But Pearly and another man who was up on a charge of assault and of photographing the victim of that attack, some German named Dunkel Friedhof, had sat next to each other while awaiting their respective courtrooms. Dunkel was found guilty and received probation. Pearly walked.

  Will Breslau was butt-fucked to death with a free-weight piece of exercise equipment during yard time, weighing about twenty pounds and shaped like a blunt force-trauma torpedo.

  Pearly often went to estate sales. It was a great way to find unusual tomes and the occasional oriental carving or Persian carpet which might or mightn’t cost an arm or leg. Companies that did estate sales for grieving families sent him e-mail advertisements. Not spam, he signed up.

  It was one of these who informed him on a Thursday afternoon in early October that they would be handling the sale of items belonging to the late Jane McFadden. This company’s e-mails usually contained a few photographs of articles they felt would be most appealing to collectors. An item listed was a scrapbook of crime scene photographs, assembled by the woman’s late husband, an LAPD homicide detective. They showed a single still—one they’d obviously considered to be among the least graphically offensive. It showed a young woman who’d jumped from a fifth story window.

  Pearly had frozen at his computer, unable to move, unable to blink or breathe. He’d sat there, staring at his mother’s death portrait until the screen saver turned the screen black. Until night came and then sunrise followed.

  He’d been that little boy again, sitting in the cold rain, in a state of shock with Katrin’s body in that strange combination of blood and serenity lying in the street. Christmas Eve, him on the last day, the final night, he would be six-years-old. The police photographer had taken pictures. Flashbulbs going pop, pop, pop!

  Red angel.

  Broken red angel.

  He’d come to, realized the sale was going on, drove across town to the house he hadn’t visited in almost fifty years. Not since he’d followed a crazy man who’d looked at him on the sidewalk and cried, “Are you a killer or a victim? Yeah, you’re a killer! I’ve seen you!”

  But he’d had such a late start. And traffic was a bitch. He arrived after the sale ended at five o’clock. But he still had to try. So he went up the walk and rang the doorbell.

  A man in a wheelchair answered.

  “I’ve come about the estate sale,” Pearly told him.

  The man replied, shaking his head, “Why, sure except it’s over. Most everything sold. Might there’ve been something you saw in the e-mail? There was a little left and I put it in the garage…”

  Pearly’s heart sank
. He closed his eyes and swayed on the balls of his feet. “Oh, no. I’d really hoped, after I saw it listed in the advertisement…”

  “Come on in,” the man said kindly. “I’m Clay. Jane McFadden was my mother. “Let’s see if what your looking for might just be in the garage. What was it?”

  Pearly glanced behind him to see if any neighbors saw him going in. A matter of habit, that sort of caution.

  Pearly breathed heavily. Did he dare hope? “There was a scrapbook.”

  “Ah, yes. My father assembled that from his days as a detective with the LAPD. Let’s go back through the kitchen to the garage. House’s almost empty,” Clay McFadden explained with a sweep of his arm to show the sparse home. “My mom divorced my father back in ’49. She did it when my brother and I dug that book out of the closet and it scared us plumb to death. We all went to Virginia because she didn’t want us to see him again. She remarried and that man got himself bit in the balls as he gelded a horse. That was in ’58, the same year my dad was murdered, his picture being the last one in that book. Our mother brought us back here, storing Dad’s things in the garage. Don’t know why she didn’t throw nothin’ out. She then lived here until her diabetes made gangrene in her legs. I happened to be on a trip to Barcelona, my last—I sold wheelchairs and limbs for people who had accidents or stepped on landmines, getting blown up in wars… Found her upon my return, visiting her with some trinkets. She was in that sleep-number bed I got her last birthday. Lou, my older brother, went last year from bone cancer, down to sixty pounds—can you imagine? I myself had polio as a youngster.”

  Pearly rolled his eyes when McFadden wasn’t looking. He hated having to listen to this endless crap. Boring old asshole. They passed a stove and refrigerator that had seen better days, avocado green and harvest gold respectively. There were plastic bottles of pills lined up on the counter. Clay opened the garage door and led his visitor in.

  “Those few boxes, that’s it. Help yourself.”

  Pearly knelt down and rumaged through, his hands shaking more every passing second. But there was no scrapbook. No picture of his cherished mother. Damn, as a kid he’d actually leafed through that book, hadn’t he? How had he managed to miss it? By what cruel fate had he skipped Katrin’s portrait?

  He didn’t get up. He just kept hearing over and over in his head, “Kunt u ook komen, mijn parel?”

  He had that memory of her which had haunted him for decades, bringing him out of nightmares with night sweats. Katrin, perched on the ledge, one leg over outside as the rain fell and one foot on the floor. Her silver voice whispering, “Helaas moeten wij nu weggaan. Komen met moeder.”

  Clay Mcfadden made a sympathetic face. “Guess it’s gone, huh? I’m sorry. One of those estate runners was doing the actual transactions, so I didn’t know if it sold or not. There were some loose pictures my dad kept in his desk drawer. Those were put in a shoebox and might be…”

  Pearly reacted out of rage and sorrow. He pulled a knife—for he always carried one, always had—out of his deep-pocketed coat. And he cut the throat of the detective’s son so fast the poor bastard just sat there a second, not even realizing he was dead until he saw the blood spurt from under his chin. A nice arc.

  He heard a voice in his head. Not some crazy voice like schizophrenics heard. This wasn’t from God or Satan. Although it had once belonged to a human demon.

  “You’ve only t’ open th’ artery. T’ slit my throat ear t’ ear would be unnecessary. Too showy for broad daylight and out in public, such as it is…”

  Messy. Pearly looked down at himself. Now, he knew better than this.

  Noom Chamber’s voice continued, “Take your coat off first. Right. Set it where it won’t get splashed…”

  Yet Pearly hadn’t taken his coat off. He’d seen McFadden’s face and it had seemed to belong to every one of those bums who had broken into the Soloway apartment in The Vagabonds. Every man he’d hunted down. It had taken him until he was thirteen to finish them.

  Odd he hadn’t seen old Jack The Ripper, since the man was in a wheelchair. Except seeing McFadden now—nowhere near as old as Chambers had been—the eyes behind the glasses had lids thin as dragonfly wings.

  Pearly’s long coat, black cashmere and severely tailored, was covered in blood.

  He heaved the guy out of the chair. He looked around the garage for something to cut the body up with. He’d want to wait until dark before he toted the pieces to the desert for coyote food. And the buzzards would burn candles for him at midnight.

  But then he heard the doorbell, buzzing like a sick wasp.

  What if it was a neighbor? Coming to see how McFadden was getting along? Maybe bringing some casserole or pie to help get him through the first days of his mother’s absence. Did folks still do this? Pearly didn’t think so. And the guy had said he’d ‘visited’ his mother with some trinkets. So he didn’t live here, did he?

  Pearly noticed the vague resemblance. Both of them near the same age, same basic coloring: white-haired and pale. Glasses. Bald as billiards.

  And it was always possible it was the estate sale company, and maybe they kept a record of who bought what. Maybe they’d have the address of whoever purchased the scrapbook.

  So he shucked off the coat and climbed into the wheelchair.

  ««—»»

  He’d been going to kill Peter, soon as he found out if Beta was telling the truth about a ‘friend’ having bought the book. Then as soon as Peter told him where this ‘friend’ was.

  The man’s second visit. He’d tried to lure him out to the garage with the promise of those loose pictures so he could put him alongside the detective’s son. The back of his car was going to be mighty heavy this evening.

  And then he’d seen that little murder movie on Beta’s right hand. Showing Pearly killing the detective almost fifty years back.

  He didn’t look like this anymore. He wasn’t worried about being recognized. But it had given him quite a turn.

  “Are you like that all over?”

  “Uh huh. What’s really hard is that this just started last Thursday night, on my birthday. I haven’t exactly had time to adjust to the idea. And I don’t know if this is permanent or if I’ll wake up in a week or two with the whole sh-bang vanished.”

  “Son, this must be terribly difficult,” Pearly told him, turning on the charm. “I can tell by your demeanor that you’re mostly concerned right now with my reaction. These are from my Dad’s scrapbook…”

  “Only the unsolved cases,” Peter interjected. “And they have to have been murder.”

  Oh yeah? He thought back to the estate sale promo. There had been writing below the pic. WITHOUT RESOLUTION BUT PROBABLE SUICIDE. Yes, it had been a suicide. She’d left him and that still made Pearly hurt.

  But she’d asked him to come. She’d held out her arms for him. She hadn’t really wanted to leave him.

  The bums might’ve killed her with their bare hands if they’d gotten their hands on her. But they hadn’t. She’d cheated them.

  This man didn’t have that picture on his skin. If Pearly believed he did, he’d have taken that part of his skin right then and there.

  For now, he wouldn’t kill Peter Beta. He hated to admit it, but he was too intrigued. This was very interesting.

  ««—»»

  It hadn’t been so hard, pretending to be Clay McFadden. The neighbors didn’t really know the guy at all. Had just seen some bald man with glasses in a wheelchair who showed up at the old lady’s house from time to time. Hell, few really got to know anybody anymore.

  Such a cold world.

  ««—»»

  Then somebody did take Beta’s skin. It pissed Pearly off. He hadn’t had time to finesse who had that scrapbook. He hadn’t seen the teacher again until after the deed was done. And then to hear that it was Peter who’d had the book all along. He’d damned near flipped out. Told himself, Wait, wait. Be cool. Your time will come.

  And the crap on the Internet. Those s
tinky beasts showing Katrin’s sad portrait over and over again with the others. None of them good enough even to kiss the toes of her black shoes. It almost drove him insane knowing how all of them drooled over this display, jerked themselves off, desecrated her with every filthy word and perversion.

  ««—»»

  Oh, and he was asked politely to do Larry Gauzy. The old man had been his mentor so, he was informed, they felt Larry wouldn’t suspect Pearly. And he knew how to make it look like a heart attack. He’d never killed anyone as softly as he killed Larry.The old guy had clutched his chest and his mouth had opened wide, but no sound came out. This made Pearly flinch, looking around, unable to help himself. It had been years since he’d realized Mrs. Death was only his mother. That he’d stopped seeing her come to take away screams in her purse after going back to their old apartment for the red angel.

  Pearly had heard too many screams since to count.

  No Mrs. Death arrived for Larry. Pearly hadn’t seen her in almost fifty years. Well, that had been a child’s post-traumatic aberration.

  Larry didn’t cry out because he was too frail to manage any sound as he died.

  ««—»»

  But then the doctor, bless her, had come through with those invitations. Where his mother’s picture would be. Where he might be able to claim it somehow.

  Let them scream. He couldn’t wait to hear it.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 27

  “There I was holding the photograph and looking

  at it. And so far as I could see it, it didn’t