Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  ‘Tell me the fucking truth.’

  I shifted in my seat.

  ‘Liz Little is dead,’ I said. The words seemed to hang between us like ghosts.

  Bernie blinked twice, too quickly.

  ‘How?’ he said, quietly.

  My throat felt drier than a dead cactus.

  ‘We found her in North London this morning. She’d been tortured. Fintan’s got all the gory details in tomorrow’s paper.’

  He sighed. ‘To think an evil cunt like me is still here, and she’s gone. Fucking hell.’ He smiled bitterly.

  I tried to read it. Guilt? Regret?

  He leaned down to the shopping bag and pulled out two more cans, handing one to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘To Liz,’ he said.

  ‘You said that by telling you the truth, you could help me, Bernie.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s the second lesson I learnt in this business,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Don’t believe a word anyone tells you.’

  We drank in silence but my mind set off on a frantic hunt for leverage. Fuck it, I thought, I’ve nothing to lose now.

  ‘You clearly have feelings for Liz,’ I said, ‘maybe you can help me find her killer.’

  He snorted bitterly.

  ‘Couldn’t you protect her, Bernie?’

  ‘Fuck off, cop.’ He laughed. ‘You’ve been watching too much Cracker.’

  His radio suddenly spluttered into life, the shock almost ending mine. The deepest, fuzziest voice I’d ever heard gabbled against a backdrop of piercing banshee screams.

  ‘… outside the toilets,’ was all I could make out.

  ‘Copy that,’ said Bernie, turning and frowning down.

  I stood up and walked towards the glass.

  Outside the ladies’ toilets, three women clutched their faces and caterwauled.

  ‘What the fuck …’ muttered Bernie.

  More women staggered out of the toilets, weeping and hawking. People nearby covered their mouths and ran away.

  I wondered if Fintan had come back and taken a massive dump. That would be his style.

  ‘Get Slob up here,’ Bernie instructed the radio, ‘everyone else, evacuate the club. Repeat, evacuate the club.’

  Goons emerged from all angles, urgent, pumped, rehearsed. Within seconds, they too were stumbling about, bewildered apes clawing at their own faces.

  As Slob arrived, screams began to pierce the thick gallery glass.

  ‘Listen to me, Slobodan, don’t let him out of your sight,’ ordered Bernie. ‘If you need to go outside, take him with you. But only leave this building as a last resort. I’m off to check the dogs are okay.’

  Bernie bolted to the stairs.

  ‘There’s mayhem in the club and he’s checking on some dogs?’ I said to Slob.

  ‘That’s Bernie. Loves animals, hates people.’

  The house lights blazed on to reveal revellers crawling about on the floor, gasping for air. Others were racing to the exits. Incredibly, a cluster of people had formed an orderly queue at the cloakroom hatch; unflappable Brits, no doubt.

  I suddenly remembered the remote controls that Bernie’s fist had scattered to the floor.

  ‘Okay if I get another beer, Slob?’

  He watched me all the way to the bag. I lifted it onto the table, took out a can, handed it to him, then opened another and sat down. He turned back to watch the action below, gulping greedily.

  I sneaked my left hand down, picked up the white remote. Sure enough, it controlled the air con. I cranked up the fan, clamped my mouth shut and held my breath.

  Within seconds, my eyes stung. Someone had released some sort of toxic substance in the ladies. Fintan?

  Slob turned to me, his gurning face a turnip of tears. Suddenly, puce face in meaty hands, he slid down onto the floor. I stood only to feel his enormous hands clamping my ankles.

  I grabbed the plastic shopping bag of cans by the neck, spinning it around until the contents formed a solid lump. I raised it over my right shoulder then, with my left hand, pushed Bernie’s little table over.

  Slob looked up at me, crying, somehow knowing, as I brought a half-dozen unopened cans of Heineken crashing down onto his thick skull. He moaned, his hands falling away from my ankles like freshly sliced meat.

  ‘Reaches parts other beers can’t get to.’ I wheezed, tears now rolling down my cheeks too.

  I snapped the fan off, wiped my eyes and walked back to the glass. Below, four uniformed police officers strode about, checking on the stricken and directing people outside.

  Bernie and Jimmy can’t touch me now.

  As I turned to leave, I had an idea. I grabbed Bernie’s copy of The Times and the cans both he and Slob had drunk from, then bounded down those stairs.

  ‘Please, don’t run,’ came the futile order as I hurdled bodies on my way to that fire door.

  I got out, looked left to see Bernie on the other side of wire mesh soothing a pair of Alsatians, then right to flashing blue lights. Police cars and fire engines hurtled to a stop outside the main entrance. I couldn’t figure out what was going on so I just ran. A couple of hundred yards later, I recognised Fintan crossing Regent’s Street towards me.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ he shouted. ‘And what are you doing with that stuff?’

  I felt too furious to form actual words, so emitted a primeval growl instead.

  ‘Fucking hell, Donal, all you had to do was keep track of the time.’

  I whipped off the Rolex and hurled it in his direction.

  ‘What time does it say on your stupid watch?’

  He checked it. ‘I told you they were fakes. It’s almost half one now. What have you been doing all this time?’

  Unloading brought home to me just how close I’d come to real harm tonight, hurtling me into a post-traumatic low.

  ‘It’s a miracle I got out of there. A fucking miracle.’

  ‘Yeah, alright, Billy Graham. Steady.’

  ‘You sneer all you like. I could be strapped to a chair right now, getting a Jimmy Reilly smiley.’

  He nodded. ‘I know, I know. How do you think I felt, sitting at the fucking Troy, wondering what the hell had happened to you?’

  ‘Oh poor you,’ I spat bitterly.

  ‘By ten to one I thought “Fuck it, I’m not taking any chances here”, so I headed to a phone box, put on my best Ian Paisley and rang a coded warning into the Today newspaper. I wouldn’t even have thought of it only for all that shit the Russian gave us going in.’

  ‘How do you know the code word?’

  ‘Everyone in newspapers has to know it. We’re the ones they call. What the hell happened in the ladies?’

  ‘I don’t know, but that’s what really saved my arse. I never would’ve got away from Bernie.’

  Fintan sighed. ‘I still don’t understand how you got yourself into that mess in the first place.’

  ‘The watch was working when I last checked.’

  ‘You drink too much, Donal. Admit it. That’s why you fuck up.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t drink champagne or any white wine for that matter. It doesn’t agree with me at all.’

  ‘Anyway, thank Christ you’re okay,’ he said, ‘and I can promise you now, I’ll never rope you in to something like that again. It nearly did for the fucking both of us.’

  Chapter 8

  North London

  Sunday, April 4, 1993; 02.00

  Our unlicensed minicab stopped on Holloway Road so that Fintan could grab a couple of early editions.

  ‘BILL STAR SLAIN’ screamed the Sunday News’ front page, accompanied by a photo of Liz looking demure, sophisticated.

  Underneath, a ‘screen grab’ from an episode of The Bill showed her in a scene opposite the soap’s most popular character, DS Tosh Lines.

  ‘Black Dahlia copycat-killing baffles police …’ added the sub-heading.

  ‘Great,’ I bristled, ‘we’re baffled already, less than twenty-f
our hours after her body has been found.’

  ‘Are you or are you not baffled, Donal?’

  ‘We’re all fucking baffled, aren’t we?’

  ‘Well, there you go then.’

  I had to marvel at his ability to spot the iconic ‘Black Dahlia’ angle. It’s one of those cases everyone’s heard of, even if we don’t all know the gory details. He had single-handedly turned the murder of an unknown dancer-cum-hooker into a major news event. I read on:

  ‘A rising TV starlet has been savagely murdered just weeks after landing a breakthrough role in prime time hit series The Bill.

  ‘The mutilated body of Liz Little, 22, was discovered just yards from a primary school in North London. Her murder bears disturbing similarities to the infamous “Black Dahlia” killing which rocked Hollywood almost 50 years ago.’

  The splash was accompanied by a ‘spread’ inside, aptly named as it consisted mostly of studio snaps of Liz lounging about in lingerie. I wondered if all young actresses had to bare their assets to find work. It didn’t seem fair somehow.

  ‘Now that Liz is dead,’ I said, turning the ‘spread’ his way, ‘surely these photos are bordering on, I don’t know, snuff porn?’

  ‘Her parents took the money and signed it all off.’

  ‘They’ve been paid?’

  ‘Not yet. One of our junior reporters will be sent up there next week to renegotiate the contract.’

  ‘What do you mean, renegotiate. You said they signed.’

  ‘Yeah, but the paper always beats people down before they cough up. Standard practice.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I gasped, unable to comprehend how anyone could be so callous.

  Below the soft porn, an interview with Liz’s ‘devastated parents’ carried the headline: ‘Our Liz Dreamed of Hollywood’. At least in death, they’d given Liz the fame that had eluded her in life.

  Another piece gleefully revealed the ‘string of uncanny similarities’ between this crime and the murder of Elizabeth Short – ‘The original Black Dahlia’ – in 1947.

  ‘Apart from sharing the same Christian name, both victims were 22, five foot two and budding actresses. Like Liz Little, Short was found mutilated, her body sliced in half at the waist and drained of blood.’

  ‘You’ve said nothing about her working at Jimmy Reilly’s club?’

  ‘Well, you know the rule Donal, build ’em up, then knock ’em down. This week, Liz is the tragic victim. Next week, we’ll reveal her saucy secret life as a high-class call girl in a club owned by a notorious gangster. The old one-two. It’s always worth holding something back when you can, give yourself a little edge.’

  ‘Right, so you haven’t bottled it then?’

  ‘No danger. But the thing is, Reilly doesn’t technically own the club and it isn’t technically a knocking shop. We’ll need concrete evidence before we can run any of that.’

  ‘Won’t the daily papers beat you to it now?’

  ‘They don’t even know she worked at the Florentine. If they do find out, they’ll face the same legal headaches we do. The dailies don’t have the time or resources to deal with all that. We might not be able to stand it up ourselves in time for next Sunday.’

  As soon as the cab sped away from our house, Fintan lit a cigarette and asked: ‘Did any of the girls say anything tonight, about what Liz might have been up to?’

  ‘I sensed two of them knew something,’ I said. ‘The first got very defensive as soon as I described Liz and just walked off. Then this American called Tammy seemed about to talk when those bouncers showed up and took me to the VIP area. I wish I had five more minutes with her. What about you?’

  He shook his head. ‘One girl said Liz went abroad a lot, for weekends, often with some of the other girls. Nothing concrete.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what Tammy said. Is there a way of pulling her travel records?’

  ‘I’ll find out.’

  A breeze came from nowhere, chilling me into a stark realisation: ‘Jimmy Reilly could come for you or me at any time, now he knows we’ve been sniffing around.’

  Fintan took a monstrous drag on his Rothman cigarette, then flicked it hard into the pavement, sending sparks flying.

  ‘He might want to shut me up before next Sunday,’ he said, ‘and that’s why we’ve got to prove he did it.’

  ‘Aren’t you concerned for your own safety?’

  ‘We can’t just let him get away with murder.’

  ‘But we don’t know for certain it was Reilly. If we did, that’d be different. As it stands, we’ve got nothing on him.’

  ‘You know they never caught The Black Dahlia’s killer?’ he said, following me through the garden gate. ‘They think they know who it is now. A man called Mark Hansen.’

  ‘So?’ I said, unlocking the front door and pushing it open.

  ‘So back in 1947, Elizabeth Short worked at Hansen’s nightclub in Hollywood. Guess what it was called?’

  He closed the door behind him as I shrugged.

  ‘The Florentine Gardens.’

  Fintan hit the bed as I took up my customary position, propped against the arm of the sofa, bottle of Shiraz to hand, Sleepless in Arsenal.

  A few months back, I had to leave South London and my shared flat with Aidan ‘Stalker’ Walker in a hurry. Aidan – stressed-out, underpaid psychiatric nurse – had taken to smoking weed at night and leaving his keys in the front door in the mornings. They were swiped, of course, and, we feared, sold on. A few nights later, while watching TV alone, I could hear the rustling of a key in the front door. Key purchaser had come to redeem his investment. As the key scrabbled about hopelessly in the changed lock, I felt gratified that the £120 we’d been fleeced out of had been worth every penny, after all.

  I banged a few saucepans together, to let our prospective robber know someone was in. I figured that even a rattling junkie would appreciate the guiding principle of burglary – best done when the occupants are out. He’d just have to come back later, despite the inconvenience.

  But still the key kept scratching and scraping, so I flashed the hall light on and off. When lightbulb Morse code failed to deliver the message, I gave the door a few kicks and yelled a manly ‘fuck off’. The key stopped rattling. Then it started again.

  I knew ‘Stalker’ kept a ‘Big Bertha’ golf club behind his bedroom door that could scalp a hippo, so I grabbed that, samurai-style, and told myself ‘today’s the day you man up’.

  I crept to the door, club clutched in my right hand as that old key still clattered away, each manic metallic jab ratcheting up my terror. What kind of relentlessly demented head case stood on the other side of this door?

  I swallowed the fear, raised Bertha, turned the lock and pulled the door open hard. I had to look down at the key bearer, because he couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. He glared up at me in shameless, fearless disgust: ‘Fuck, he sold one to you as well?’

  ‘I live here,’ I said, brandishing the club’s meatier end, ‘unless you want me to use your neck as a tee, fuck the fuck off.’

  ‘You can’t speak to me like that,’ declared Arnold from Different Strokes, ‘I’ll be back later with my brothers.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and who are they?’ I taunted, ‘the fucking Drifters?’

  ‘No, the fucking Dentons.’

  I packed immediately – in other words, filled three bin liners. I rang Aidan at work, ordered him home to do the same. We were out within an hour. I’d seen how Jamaican/Irish family the Dentons treated anyone who ‘crossed’ one of their own. A few months earlier, they’d set their tormented, feral fighting dogs on an old man called Malcolm after he’d complained about the constant partying upstairs. As medics stitched him up in hospital, the brothers kicked in his front door and dragged out his paltry belongings, setting them alight in the car park. A real Bonfire of the Inanities. The only items of value he owned, his World War Two medals, were never seen again. Neither was Malcolm, but we learned a valuable lesson from that noble old war hero �
�� as soon as you get any Denton Attention, scarper.

  Neither of us could face the prospect of new flatmates, so Aidan agreed to join me north of the river. Meanwhile, the palatial isolation of London’s trendy new docklands had started to grate upon hard-living Fintan, for whom ‘every evening felt like a Bank Holiday Monday’. To make matters worse, the police had just erected a counter IRA ‘Ring of Steel’ around the City of London, which Fintan had to negotiate daily to get anywhere. Bored of ‘being treated like some Palestinian farmhand’, he snapped up our third bedroom and, lo, the hack, quack and insomniac were as one.

  Even now, ‘Stalker’ still needed a nightly ‘toke’ to wipe away the horrors of the day, and stored his little balls of brown cannabis in an old Cuban cigar case on the mantelpiece. I got up, grabbed the tin and set to work.

  Any Cuban would’ve been proud of my Petit Corona, rolled as it was against the thighs of a virgin. I popped into the kitchen, liberated another Shiraz and flopped back onto the couch.

  Two years ago, I’d discovered that supplementing my nightly quota of Shiraz with a big fat joint made my encounters with the recently whacked less terrifying. It was irrational, an affront to logic, scientific heresy, inexplicable. So I stopped trying to rationalise it, lit up, sat back and zoned out.

  I’d been next to Liz Little’s body this morning. Would her deranged spirit appear to me tonight? If so, could I survive all that terror and torment again?

  Was I ready for another Dance with the Dead?

  Those slate-grey eyes emerge from the shadows, unblinking, dry, foggy, like old grapes.

  I see now the outline of Liz’s head and bare shoulders. She sashays towards me. Seductively? Menacingly?

  ‘For one night only,’ a clipped British voice announces, ‘exclusively for your pleasure … a Dance with the Dead.’

  What is that gloriously ramshackle, stomping, off-kilter tune? Something by Tom Waits?

  Her perma-alarmed, straight-line eyebrows look like knocked-over exclamation marks, trying to scrabble back upright.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I tell myself, ‘she’s trying to wake.’

  She smiles, letting me know she’ll be the one making that decision. Then she tilts her head, curls her top lip into a malignant grimace and flexes her cheek muscles.