Insurgent Fiction

ZOMBIE CONFIDENTIAL

-OR-

DEAD

MEN

DON’T

COMMIT

FELONY

MURDER

-(part 1)-

EXCERPT:

THE HOLLYWOOD HERALD

CHARLIE  COLE‘S CRIME BEAT

JUNE 6^TH, 1953

Dig this, dearest cats and kittens, and dig it good: the devil is alive and well and dwells right here in the City of Angels.

LAPD responded yesterday morning to gulps and gasps on the west end of Wilshire Boulevard where a gaggle of goons gawked at Hollywood’s latest horror production.  Lizzy Long (actress-slash-waitress-slash-hophead party girl-slash-slasher vic) was found sliced, diced and filleted in a vacant lot just off the Pasadena freeway.

Detective William Mars, famously dogged pursuer of dangerous crooks and felonious punks, was on the scene with the county coroner’s team and the usual swarm of L7 uniforms.  Mars scanned the patches of grass and dirt beneath his vic’s bloody body for clues.  I could tell from the twitch inching its way into his stare that he was coming up empty.

Detective Denny Roe, fresh from a year-long trek through the Orient and a passionate practitioner of something called the Martial Arts, was working crowd control.  Known around the department as Cop Suey, Roe was Detective Mars’ latest partner and seemed more interested in safeguarding what was left of the late Ms. Long than holding back the imposing masses.

The girl’s body was halved, butchered at the waist.  There were carefully crafted carvings on her cheeks and forehead, a jumble of crescents and pentagrams, a splash ad for the occult.  It was clear, despite all the gore, that this Red Starlet was at least half a looker.  Once upon a time.

Yours truly arrived on the edge of the lot at 9AM with my trusty Hawkeye Brownie, ready to snap the vivid pics that my discriminating readership has grown accustomed to ogling.  I’m sad to report, my little chicks and hipsters, that I was promptly stopped in my size-nine tracks by the aforementioned Denny Roe, Zen Detective.

“Charlie, I can’t let ya’ snap this girl,” said Roe.  “You can write it up but ya’ can’t run any pictures.”

“What’s so special about this cooz?” I asked with my usual tact.

“Look at her, Charlie.  You don’t wanna put that in your paper.”

“It ain’t a matter of what I want.  It’s a matter of what I owe my readers.  They demand the ugly truth.  Who am I to deny?”

Roe played the compassionate cop, flashed his baby blues and put on his “I believe in you” face.  “Be a paladin kind of guy for once, Charlie.  I know you have it in you.”

Detective Roe and I went way back.  Early in my career, I wrote a think piece about him called ‘Cop in Crisis.’  You may recall; it won awards.

After being shot in the line of duty and almost kicking the mortal bucket, Detective Roe went hiking through the Himalayas, philosophizing and soul searching with a freewheeling cast of sherpas, globe trotters and holy men.  He came back a different kind of cop.  A cop with a bigger perspective than your average Angelino (no offense, dear readers).

I wrote his journey up, and it made us both household names.  For a while.

Roe had made a point to return to wander the back roads of Tibet and China every few years after that.  On his most recent trip, he was given the green light to practice his beloved Fu Manchu street fighting while on American terra firma.  Apparently the first westerner allowed to do so.

Staring into Roe’s puppy dog eyes, I was compelled to grant his request.  I lowered my shutter box and agreed not to commemorate the starlet’s massacre in a two-page gatefold spread.  No matter how classy it would have been.

“You’re a good man,” Roe continued.  “You’ll be a lucky son of a bitch in the next life.”

EXCERPT:

DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

Detective Roe and I continued to shoot the breeze.  The ever charming Detective Mars made a beeline across the lot to put a lid on our convo.

“I don’t know how the Hong Kong police run their investigations, Roe, but here in Los Angeles we don’t talk to Press.”

“Old friends,” countered Roe.  “We were just catching up.”

“What better place to get reacquainted than the middle of my red ball crime scene?” asked Mars.  “You two old chums wanna have a picnic lunch right on the corpse?  ‘Cause I can arrange that.”

The corpse, at that point drawing as many flies as onlookers, filled the morning with a suffocating miasma, a toxic fog that strangled the words from your throat and the good thoughts from your mind.

In addition to being carved up all satanic-like, Lizzy Long had also been stabbed through the chest at least a dozen times.  And there was a hole in her head where her brains had been taken out.

Her lower half, nude but for a thin platinum anklet, did not appear to have been mangled.  Aside from being torn away from the rest of her.

I found myself staring at the two fractions, trying to piece them back together in my mind.  She was a dismantled puzzle demanding reconstruction.

Detective Mars disrupted my daydream.  “Hey, Jimmy Olsen.  Take a hint and get the fuck outta here, will ya?  Beat it.”

“I got a right to be here,” I told him.  “I got news to report.”

“And you can come to the goddamn press conference like everybody else,” he offered.

“Well okay,” I said.  “Now you’re being a friend to the Press.  Don’t it feel good to be nice?”

“Press conference, two o’clock,” said Detective Mars.  “The fuck out now.”

I did a quick crowd scan on the way to my wheels.  My pop always said to memorize the gawkers at a crime scene.  That some perps can’t help but hang around and admire the chaos they’ve created.

I looked across the faces that had come to see the murder circus.  As I committed their details to memory, I took in their curious mix of attraction and repulsion, eagerness and angst, spiritualism and nihilism, and headed home dragging a piece of the devil behind me.

EXCERPT:

DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

A gaggle of bloodthirsty reporters gathered at Police Headquarters for the usual bullshit Q&A Show.  Mars fed us the expected spoonful:

“Gentleman, at 7:33AM, Homicide Bureau received a call about a DOA in a vacant lot on Wilshire Boulevard.  The vic’s been ID’d as Elizabeth Long, a resident of Los Angeles County.  Ms. Long, a waitress at the Blue Moon coffee shop, was twenty-eight years old.  Cause of death has been determined.  Blunt force trauma.  She was stabbed multiple times in the throat and chest and bisected, most likely with an axe, as she lay dying from her knife wounds.”

A Times reporter chimed in.  “Any arrests yet?”

“It’s too early to discuss a suspect, but we’re following a number of promising leads.”

“Like who?” I asked.

“I’m not gonna get into that right now,” Mars answered.

The bosses loomed in the background.  A chorus of silent Svengalis.

Mars continued, mindful of the watchful eyes behind him.  “That’s all I can tell you for now, fellas.  Just do me a favor and tell your readers we’re gonna find who did this.  And that no one else is gonna die at their hand.”

“Can you guarantee that claim, Detective?”  Me again.

Mars gave me the stink-eye.  “That’s all, gentleman.  Thanks for your cooperation.”

I padded up to my Cop Suey buddy Detective Roe as the meeting of the minds broke up.  He threw me a cold shoulder.

“It’s a red ball, Charlie.  No favors on this one.”

“What do you take me for?” I asked.  “I’m here to say hi.  Hi.”

“Okay, hi.  Nice to see ya.”

“So, what’s your partner hiding?  And don’t tell me nothin’.”

He looked me square in the eye and said “Nothin’.”

“He’s hiding something.  I can tell.”

“You sound like your father.”  He knew I had a nose for news and tried to rattle my cage.

I thought of my pop sitting in that nuthouse rec room muttering about conspiracies, ghosts and that goddamned Woodrow Park case.  I declined to see the similarities.

“I’m nothing like him,” I said.  “When I call conspiracy, there’s a conspiracy.”

“There isn’t one,” Roe responded.  “Just a gruesome murder that we wanna put down before the city falls into panic.”

“There’s gotta be something you can give me.  Even if it’s OTR, gimme a goddamn scrap.”

“Can’t do that, friend.  You gotta find your own path this time around.  The enlightened man paves his own way.”

“You do wanna catch this guy before he practices his magic act on another innocent chickadee, don’t you?  I can help you put this down.  You know I can.  Just point me in a direction.”

Roe could always be counted on to want to do the right thing.  He caved almost immediately.  “There’s a boyfriend,” he confessed.  “We’re tryin’ to track him down.  We haven’t found him.”

“You think he’s dirty?” I asked.

“Conrad Reese.  Maker of low budget monster movies.  General scumbag.  He’s who I like for it,” Roe concluded.

“Thanks, pally.  You’re the coolest.”  I am sincere about once a year, and that moment was it for 1953.  “Much appreciated.”

I shambled back to the world to work my lead, my ace reporter brain running through the math, figuring out which angle would give me the best copy.  For some reason, I thought back to the rubber-neckers at the Red Starlet’s crime scene.

The Hard Way Home

William had been burning fuel for days and was dreading the family’s return more and more with each passing mile. Back on the outpost, he feared how things might have changed while they were away, how the family might not fit in after missing so much ordinary day to day life. Since the June 10th event, those fears seemed trite.

“Are we home yet?” asked a voice from the backseat.

William answered, keeping his eyes ahead.  “Not just yet, kiddo. Go back to sleep for a bit.”

Barbara woke up next. “Thought you’d be bouncing off the walls by now,” she said. “The kids wear you out? Want me to take over for a while?”

“No, I’m alright.”

“Why are you lying?” she asked. “You haven’t been yourself since before we left. Tell me what’s wrong.  Aren’t you excited to be going home?”

“I think…something happened. I think something’s gone wrong.”

“What do you mean?  Gone wrong with what?”

“We stopped getting calls from home three months ago.”

“…What?”

“Back on the base, the last call I got was in early June. It came in at a weird hour and I couldn’t make it all out. The sound kept breaking up…but what I heard sounded frantic. Hurried. Panicked.  After that, there was nothing. Complete radio silence. Not a peep all summer.”

“Maybe the receiver went dead. Or the antennae froze up again.”

“The equipment was fine. I checked it over and over. If there’d been a call, I’d ‘ve heard it. There was nothing to pick up.”

“This doesn’t make any sense. Why would they stop calling? What happened to them?”

“I don’t know. I tried for weeks to call from our end.  No one ever answered.”

He could see the realization sinking in, her face dissolving from staunch denial to quiet crumbling.

“I didn’t have the heart to tell you. Whatever happened to them was over and done. We couldn’t have gotten back fast enough to stop it. If we could stop it at all.  So, you see?  There was no good reason to tell you.”

Barbara was no longer listening. She stared at the tide of pink stars that rotated across the horizon outside, the first sunrise she had seen in years igniting in the sky ahead.

“There was no good reason to burden you with that information.  Besides…had you known, would you have not come back?  ‘Cause I had to come. I had to see for myself to know for sure. I had to see for myself that it really happened.”

Barbara glanced back to her husband, her face now carrying the same dread that had clung to him the last twelve weeks.

William kept muttering, “…I had to see for myself…I had to see for myself…”

The kids began to stir as Earth appeared in the spaceship’s window. Home sweet home was still a few hours away, but the family could already see the scorched, dead continents beneath a twisting veil of nuclear winter.

The Wind A Calliope Breathing (part I)

“The clock makes mayhem at midnight.”  Charlotte slumped in the doorway, collapsed into the frame, a loosed marionette.  Charlotte was a world class sloucher.

I struggled to comprehend her words.  “What’s the clock doing at midnight?”  My tongue was wet cement.

Charlotte spun a yoyo down a length of string.  “Making mayhem.”  The yoyo hit bottom, paused a beat, began the bounce back up.

“What does that mean?”  My lips were rubber bands.

“It means what it means.  You dig?”

“I don’t.  What’s your point?”

“The point is there is no point.  You are who you are, life blows how it blows.  It‘s all a big accident.”

I had zero comprehension.  My head was a fog.  “What does any of that have to do with the clock making mayhem at midnight?”

“It don’t.”

“And that’s your point?”

“There is no point.”

“And that’s your point?!”  Thought I finally had it.

This time she whispered.  “There is no point.”

A puff of spores, she was out the door.  I stared after the empty space.  Dwelled on what she’d said.  Landed on the fact that it meant nothing.

I went back to putting my teeth in a row on the table, smallest to largest, left to right, back into an order I could live with.  Back from the brink of a chaos that began to rear when I bumped the table’s edge earlier that afternoon, sailing bicuspids into molars, premolars into carnassials, scattering tusks like marbles over the glass landscape.

I was working row three when a series of loud crashes broke my focus: wooden spoons banging lawlessly on repurposed pots and pans.  The beat: “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves.  Good song.  Not in the mood.

Charlotte had likely grown bored, her default mood, and determined to create her own entertainment, the entertaining element being less about her love of music, more about bothering yours truly.  She found it amusing to pollute my concentration.

I stalked through the hall.  Passed three paintings, each more pornographic and deviant than the last.  Freshly hung, newly minted, post-contemporary outrage.  Aimed at getting my goat.

Hit the kitchen: found broken dishes and unspooled spaghetti strewn haphazardly over the walls and ceiling.  A Pollock splatter of meat sauce and entrails.  Still warm.

Charlotte had smashed every last one of my bowls and plates before sailing my supper through the air as a grand finale.  Then hijacked my pot to play Ringo.

I heard her rhythm kick in again down the other end of the hall.  “Sets the summer sun on fire.”  Nice sentiment, bad timing.

I decided to stay in the kitchen.  Clean up her nihilism.

I could not recall when Charlotte first arrived here, how I initially knew her or where she came from.  The film fluttered in the capstan.  The world flickered.  My memory was meringue.

Mopped the floor and scrubbed the meat mural.  Wiped away the traces of her latest catastrophe.

She appeared over my shoulder, an overstuffed Cuban cigar jutting from her obnoxious clench.  She raised her eyebrows and offered “What’s up, fuck-stick?” as a friendly greeting.

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

“Do what, Doc?”

“Make these messes.  Why do you make these god damned messes?”

“You need these messes, Doc.”  She kissed my cheek.  Then punched me in the back.

Charlotte disappeared from the kitchen and popped up almost instantaneously on the other side of the house.  I could hear her dragging a tin cup back and forth across the cast iron stair case.  My cool detachment thinned.  I craved retreat.

I resorted to my standard quick-fix:  I chopped three pills into fifteen pieces.  Crushed each piece into a thousand granules.  Cut the granules into three even lines.  Ingested.

Fell into the sofa, cozy and serene.  Dusk broke over The Edge of Night.  Charlotte’s mischief dissolved to a beautifully nondescript dissonance.  Television noise gave way to the soft swell of sounds fading in from the outside world.  All noises began to blend.  An earful of trails and echoes.

I stared into the coiling noir that meandered the house each night after sunset.  Twisting through hallways, a black snuffleupagus, it cast a menagerie of shadows on the walls: a sick gaggle of nefarious little creeps crawling across my pupils as I slipped helplessly into narcotic sleep.  I watched as it wound its way back to the attic where it nested.

A discordant howl.  A backwards guitar.  The death of bebop.

I wondered about the world outside.  What may have happened to it since I had last participated in its rhymes and rhythms.

I sometimes stood with my eyes closed in the center of my living room, hands at my hips, pretending the world had ended, destroyed by weapon or natural disaster, and that I was the only one left.  Sole survivor, the last man standing.  I was strangely comforted by this scenario.

A steady stream of commercials and crickets, my concréte  lullaby was occasionally interrupted by sudden bursts of new Charlotte-engineered cacophonies: a vase exploding against the floor, a power drill forcing holes through my Hugo Balls, Charlotte’s monkey-wrench making mincemeat of the downstairs plumbing.  These noises tumbling in and out of freewheeling half-dreams.

The clock struck twelve.  I snapped back to the table to continue arranging my teeth.  To the rhythm of “Are Friends Electric?”  Pleasantly robotic.  What I wouldn’t give to live in a synth-pop world.  To live with that kind of precision and perfection.

An explosion on the east end of the house.  Rocked debris from the ceiling and rattled my teeth.  What the fuck she could have done to cause such a sizable blast was beyond me, but I had to know.

Raced the length and confronted a red glow coming from just outside the kitchen window.  A smell like burning leaves.  A smack of soft corruption.  A wink of casual self-destruction.

Bottle rocket whistle, short silence, BOOM!  Another earsplitting burst in the close neighborhood perimeter.  I staggered back from the kitchen window, heard a building collapse next door.  Something decidedly disorderly was happening, and I was fighting to keep myself together.

Zombie Confidential (part 2)

EXCERPT:
THE HOLLYWOOD HERALD-EVENING EDITION
CHARLIE  COLE‘S CRIME BEAT
JUNE 8th, 1953

Leg work ain’t easy, guys and dolls, but I do it diligently for my loving audience.  And this week, I had my work cut out for me.  In addition to schlepping all over LA in pursuit of primo skinny on the Bobby Mucci mob trial and the Patty Parish gang rape scandal, I also took a day to dig deep into the former life of Red Starlet Lizzy Long.

Employment records confirm that she worked most often as a waitress but occasionally as a B-Movie Queen.  She apartment-hopped and never had more than $150 in her bank account at one time.  The paper trail, though, never tells the whole story.

I hit the Blue Moon café for a 99 cent breakfast, hoovered three cups of so-so joe and squeezed a waitress for juicy dirt on her former coworker.  She promptly pointed me to our first likely suspect: the grieving boyfriend.

I caught up with the distinguished Mr. Reese (that’s Conrad Reese, high-minded producer of low budget monster movies and bottom of the barrel nudie flicks) hiding out on the Paramount lot.  Convinced that the cops are aiming to pin Lizzy’s murder on him, Reese has taken to spending his days in dark screening rooms and his nights in run down jazz clubs.

I found him in an editing bay cutting celluloid with Edward Dmytryk and got right to the point.  “Tell me about Lizzy Long.”

“I didn’t kill her if that’s what you’re driving at,” said Reese.

“I’m not driving anywhere near there,” I said.  “I just wanna know who did kill her.  Any ideas?  You knew her.  Did she have enemies?”

“I read your paper, Mr. Cole.  I know your shtick.  I give you an innocent quote and you twist it into something sinister.”

“You got me all wrong,” I said.  “I just want the truth.  How’d you meet Liz Long?  What was your relationship?”

“Lizzy came into my office a couple of months ago looking for work.  I did a screen test with her just like I do for all the pretty dames come in here.  I told her she was better for stag films than creature features, but she kept working me, trying to get a part in one of my legit pics.  She insisted she had a talent for it, but the only talent I ever saw confirmed what I said about the stag films.”

“I’m sure you, of course, were just an innocent bystander to all her maneuvering, you not being the type to string a girl along giving her the impression you might have a role for her somewhere in one of your wonderful epics, am I right?”

He didn’t appreciate my tone.  I could tell.

“She was no stranger to the ways of the world,” he finally said.  “Lizzy knew how things worked and she worked it right along side the rest of us.”

I took the talk in another direction.  “How were things lately?” I asked.  “Just before the murder?”

“Our fling was cooling,” Reese claimed.  “She had a new guy.  Some asshole mobster who’d been telling her he owned half a movie studio.  She said his name was Johnny or Jimmy or something like that.”

“And you weren’t jealous?  You weren’t feeling jilted, looking for revenge?”

“I was glad she had some other fella to pester.  I was two fucks short of breaking it off with her anyway.  She figured this grease ball could get her a movie and I figured it was good riddance for the both of us.”

“She believed this guy?” I asked.  “She really believed he was gonna put her in a movie even after you’d just strung her along?”

“She trusted anybody she thought could help her get famous.”

Later, I tracked “Jimmy” down through a number of Crime Beat connections whose names are best left unprinted.  As is “Jimmy’s.”

According to police sources, he was a suspect early on in the case but was cleared by his alibi; his wife claimed he was at home with her while the murder was taking place across town.  Convenient.

Cross-checking “Jimmy’s” name with other police reports, I discovered that a girlfriend of his had disappeared six years ago and never turned up.  Why the boys in blue weren’t still following this white hot lead was a mystery even I could not solve.

EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

I found myself back at the crime scene thinking about the long streaks of blood that had fanned out across the lot a few days earlier.  Something in the pattern seemed wrong.  I had seen hundreds of crime scenes and crime scene photos since I was a kid, and I had never seen splatter like that.  Almost like the spray on a slaughterhouse floor.

The sun set cozy into the Hollywood Hills, a burst of crimson, pink and orange to kindle the horizon.  Again, I thought about those two errant halves calling for me to put them together.  Yet somehow, I could not make them fit.

EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

A few days after the Red Starlet murder, most reporters had already resigned themselves to the notion that the crime would not be easily solved and had moved on to bigger and better sensationalisms.  I, however, continued to write about the case’s progress (or lack thereof) in the Herald.

This had apparently not gone unnoticed because Detectives Mars and Roe paid a visit to the news room and interrupted my lunchtime Reuben to tell me to leave the case alone.  That they needed “room to solve it.”

“Room to solve it?” I asked.  “The fuck does that mean?  I’m trying to help you guys.  I’m the only one reassuring the public that this hatchet-happy menace is someday gonna get caught.  You do know you’re supposed to catch this guy, right?”

“We can handle the public,” said Detective Mars.  “That ain’t your damn concern.”

“It is actually,” I answered.

“It ain’t when I tell you it ain’t.  Got it?”

I didn’t, but I played along.  “Got it,” I said.  “Anything else I can help you two   with before I finish my sandwich?”

“Stay outta our case,” Mars replied.

They left me with a cold corned beef and a load of hard questions.  Numero uno was why they were so jazzed for me to drop the story.  Even the reddest red ball had never provoked a flat out squelch of the first amendment.  I was dead set on finding answers.

I started by breaking a cardinal rule of crime reporting; I trailed the cops.  I figured they broke the rules first by trying to muscle me out of doing my job.  With that rationale in tow, I followed Mars and Roe through the night as they supposedly investigated the Starlet’s murder.

I floored my Ford onto the Pasadena freeway and raced to keep up as the Detectives gunned their unmarked sedan out of town.  I tailed them all the way to St. Sebastian’s Asylum.

St. Sebastian’s was home to the worst of the criminally insane that Los Angeles County had to offer.  It operated more like a prison than a nuthouse.  Its residents were responsible for some of the most shocking crimes in the city’s history.

I kept a good distance as I followed the detectives in through the visitor’s entrance.  I eavesdropped as Mars spoke to the nurse on duty.

“Detectives Mars and Roe.  Here to see Dr. Voorman.”

“Yes, Detectives,” she answered.  “He’ll be right with you.”

Dr. Zaul Voorman, former county coroner, had been forced out of office by HUAC when allegations of communist affiliations came to light.  Voorman denied the rumors but still lost the job.

Long before those accusations, there had been reports of strange things happening in Voorman’s county morgue.  Word around City Hall was that HUAC was brought in solely to fabricate a Red charge as an excuse to get rid of the guy.

Shortly after he took over as Director of Wellness at St. Sebastian’s, rumors flew there too.  Strange experiments going on in the basement.  Usual spook house stuff.

The Detectives spoke with the doctor for over an hour while I waited outside.  I remembered an interview I once had with Dr. Voorman during the HUAC attack.  He was a cold fish but got passionate when we talked about science.  “The new religion,” he called it.  His eyes, though, never lost their cold, detached emptiness.  And he never lost the air of being more ghost than flesh and bone.

Later that evening, I watched the Detectives visit three separate locales: a church, an apartment building and an abandoned house in Laurel Canyon.  Not a one of these places had a thing to do with Lizzy Long.  Nevertheless, they conducted a full scale search of each building.

EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

At the county clerk’s, I pulled records on the three addresses searched by the detectives.  The one thing that all three pads had in common was a name on the lease: Byron Boggs, AKA Jack the Rip-Off, dead since 1947.  Boggs was a Jack the Ripper copycat killer and devout devil worshiper who was caught, convicted and hanged.

Back at the Herald office, I pulled the Boggs file.  It was immediately apparent why Mars and Roe were searching his old haunts.  The moment I laid eyes on the photos, I saw it; all the vics, all women in their twenties, had symbols of the occult carved into their faces.  None were cut in half and none had their brains scooped out, but all had been stabbed repeatedly through the chest.

I cruised into Homicide Bureau to speak with Detective Roe.  He made a quick effort to cover something on his desk as soon as he saw me.

“Why are you searching for a dead man?” I asked.

He chose to feign ignorance.  “What dead man?  What are you talking about?”

I found him unconvincing.  “You’re looking for Byron Boggs in all his old hideouts but last time I checked he was pushing daisies with the other members of the crooked neck club.”

“You tailed us?”

“No, but I got sources.  I also know you talked to Zaul Voorman.  How the hell is he involved?”

“You gotta stay outta this, Charlie.  This case is bigger than a red ball.  It’s the goddamned sun.  And you don’t wanna be anywhere near it.”

“Who are you really looking for?  Did Boggs have an accomplice you didn’t know about?  Somebody he recruited to carry on his work?  Is the killer a former patient of Dr. Voorman’s?”

I glimpsed a list of other cases on Roe’s desk.  I memorized a handful before he shuffled papers to cover it.

“Go home, Charlie,” he said.  “Stop writing about this case.  You’ll be all the better for it.”

I walked away in silence, both of us knowing full well that I would not take his advice.

Tales of Fearless Jimmy: the Bravest Little Boy in the World

Jimmy Doyle was indeed the world’s bravest little boy.  He spent his formative years jumping without pause from teetering bunk beds, the tops of contemptuously tall washing machines and any available rooftop or awning.  He challenged his older siblings to no-holds-barred wrestling matches where Jimmy would volunteer to do battle with one arm tied behind his back or with an eye gouged out by a screwdriver.  He routinely raced his Big Wheel around the neighborhood at foolhardy speeds.  He snorted mountains of coke and ate hot peppers by the handful.  He brazenly cursed God and repeatedly challenged the universe to strike him down if it could muster “the guts required to do so.”  He was the world’s bravest little 2-year-old boy, and his family took great pride in that title.  They often bragged to friends and associates that Jimmy could and would do anything in this world that he damn well pleased.  He was scared of nothing and nobody.

Jimmy was so fearless in fact that on his third birthday, on a family camping trip to the Shawnee National Forest, when a 900 pound Black Grizzly Bear appeared at the Doyle’s campsite, Jimmy, without the slightest hesitation,  marched right the hell up and challenged the mighty beast.  And it killed Jimmy immediately.  Ripped him in half like a cheap rag doll.

Flecks of Jimmy’s blood spray-painted the family, a sticky red reminder that no matter how fearless your brave little three-year-old may be…he should probably still be afraid of giant grizzly bears.  And tigers.  Yes, definitely tigers.  …Also downed power lines.  And probably child murderers.

The Long Collapse

1

The strangle of inevitability seeps into the house through hairline cracks in the kitchen walls.  Puffs of insulation tumble from slipshod ceiling tiles, pink, flaky little harbingers of the oncoming apocalypse.  The stove sinks into the floor, forcing up a dark, vile sludge, a gravelly ganache of mud and muck oozing from the depths of a drowning foundation.

Its long crumble renders the house an obscurity.  The lives we knew here rushed fast, forwardly, straight on ‘til grandeur.  Even the most mundane detail took on lively and epic subtext; the pot roast and potatoes aromas, the dusty psychedelic sun-catchers, the bread box full of Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Pies, it all felt like it was leading us to something big, something significant, something in the cosmic neighborhood of Ne Plus and Nirvana.

Brick separates from mortar, beams pull away from bolts, paint peels into serpentine strips that reach out from the walls like the curling yellow fingernails of Nosferatu longing to drag you down to his moldy grave.

2

The walls soften; fontanelles sprouting up and down the pale like cavities across an overripe apple.  You can push your finger right through the plaster, through the old damp wood, into the dense current of worms and insects that rumble around the house’s guts.

The foundation cracks, the structure leans left, the floorboards tremble and cave.  The world falls out from under you.

3

The molecular breakdown is palpable.  Wood swells, splits, splays like Thelonious, separating into dozens of disparate factions, each striking down its own pulpy path, moving on to reach its own conclusions, to start its own movements, to make its own kind of music.  The house’s once unified weld of lugs and lumber has come asunder, turning itself over (and over) in mad surrender to the march and the momentum of revolution.

Find us likewise transformed; untethered spores riding crests on the zephyr; ever longer jet streams trailing vast and violet behind.

4

Fallen shingles litter an unkempt lawn.  Vines entangle the porch, gutters and swing-set.

Standing in a house on the verge of collapse, brought back by the worst of circumstances, you feel yourself succumb (half willingly) to the browning wallpaper, the mossy faucets, the encroaching wilderness that eats incessantly into the edge of your vision.

Raymond Chandler blows in to guest-pen a line or two of your interior monologue:  “Every story has an ending, kid.  The long crumble claims us all.”

5

Hard winds whip through the space that no longer resembles our breakfast nook.  You can practically hear the collective kerplunk as stomachs go woozy with nostalgia, with hazy longing, with the loneliness that wells in the wake of sudden realization.

Roof pours into living room, an avalanche of gook, soot and tar.  The plush couch dies a dirty, undignified death.

The structure buckles, convulses, emits a low growl like the wail of ten-thousand Tibetan Monks howling into the void at the edge of the world.  Pictures rattle loose, crash to the ground, creatures vacate the crannies.

Implosion.

Collapse.

Planet of Dust.

Smoke thins, a ghostly mist.  The family stands in ruins, our cozy ramshackle gone full-on rubble.  An eternity now to follow, the house fallen, already come and gone.  Never to be known again.

Dead Men Don’t Stand Up

“This’ll be over soon, kid.”

“How much is my dad paying to get me back?”

“Half a mil.  Not bad.”

“We don’t get along, me and my dad. I’m surprised he’s payin’ ya’ anything.”

The Kid sat on a gravestone, jammed his hands into his jacket pockets.

“…I didn’t get along with my pop either,” said the Kidnapper.  “My brother Billy, he’s the Golden Boy. Me, I’m a Black Sheep. Got any brothers?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Be glad it’s just your asshole dad ya’ gotta deal with. In my house, it was always two against one.”

“Musta’ sucked.”

The Kidnapper put Bic to Marlbro.  Hoovered the filter.

“You know it was nothin’ personal, us kidnappin’ ya’. We got an anonymous tip your dad’s a drunk and passes out every night by 9:30. We figured it’d be an easy score.”

“You grab any kid who nets ya’ a big payday?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“How’d you get stuck waitin’ for the ransom?”

“Billy says he’s the brains and I’m the muscle. And this is a job for the muscle.”

“Sounds like a good deal for Billy.”

“Here comes your pop. Think he brought any cops?”

“No chance. He hates ‘em.”

“That’s what our tipster told us.  Looks like he’s got the bag. It’s been nice doin’ business with ya’, kid.”

The Kidnapper reached for his gun.  Just as he realized it was missing, he felt a hot sting in his gut. It tore through his lower back. He looked down to see the Kid’s fingers curled around the grip of a smoking revolver.

“I was your anonymous tipster, retard. I needed quick cash and the old man outta the way. So, I’m gonna shoot ‘im and take the bag. The cops’ll figure your brother killed you and my dad and got away.  Pretty good, huh?”

The Kidnapper collapsed face first into fresh laid dirt.

“It’s nothin’ personal, me killin’ ya’. Just an easy score. Too bad your asshole brother’s not layin’ here instead a’ you, though. Shoulda’ stood up for yourself when you had the chance.”

Outskirts (prologue)

“Dig, dig, dig that crazy, bombastic, fantastic sound that streams out of the city like an electrical current, like an unspooling cosmic thread, like a long reaching arm of errant smoke that hooks you by the nose and leads you blindly to some claustrophobic, fog filled bebop club where you fast find yourself in the hypnotic hold of Charlie Parker, suddenly healed of all your lifelong hobgoblins and hang ups; jazz is the tonic to a sickness we don’t even know we have.”

From his cave on the outskirts of town, the Monster could hear the mad, savage rush of city life.  He found a seductive overture in the distant hoots and hollers of well toasted partiers, the wheezing hiss of nonstop traffic and even the salvoes of random gunfire that exploded frequently throughout the lower east neighborhoods.

Most inviting of all, though, was the sound of the revved up and raucous jazz that wafted frequently into the Monster’s woods where it always managed to stir his dark, hardened soul.  He composed long, rapturous poems in his diary, rave reviews of the latest music emanating from the nearby metropolis.

“The drums, the drums, it’s the primal, pounding drums that really make your heart go zoom-a-zoom-zoom!  Hearing the thud and thump of bass and tom tom falling out of the expected rhythm and  into some barely syncopated offbeat ( that teeters on the edge of falling apart) lies tantamount to seeing the face of God materializing in your Saturday morning Corn Flakes!”

*          *          *

The Monster stood watch over the city that cast him out.  Though he longed to live among its bustling crowds and looming skyscrapers and yearned to tell its citizens how he secretly protected them as they slept, he kept his respectful distance.  He remained grievously silent.

He understood that more time was needed before the residents of Radio City could accept something that was so abhorrent to what they had always known.  The memories of his vicious attacks, criminal acts and wantonly destructive rampages were still too fresh in their minds to allow for a cozy coexistence anytime in the foreseeable future.  He knew that, for now at least, he would have to atone for the misdeeds of his past in lonely anonymity.

*          *          *

The Monster had been fighting crime and corruption in Radio City for over a year when he began to investigate a series of smash-n-grab robberies at local museums.  A curious collection of small, inexpensive items had been taken from low security, low interest exhibits.  The pattern made absolutely no sense, and the Monster was trying to connect the dots.

One night while staking out a Natural History hub that had yet to be hit, the creature caught a sudden flash of light in the corner of his hideous, yellow eye; he glanced up from his surveillance in time to see another quick strobe popping to life in the shrubbery that bordered a nearby park.  A third flash briefly illuminated the silhouette of a long nosed man, crouching in the bushes, snapping photos of something happening by the swingsets.

The beast fixed his stare, focusing on the photographer’s subjects: two men loitering just under the tree line.  A low level drug deal was in progress–two dime bags for two bits.  Nothing to get worked up about, certainly nothing worth a Kodak moment.  Intrigued as hell, the Monster decided to tail the peeping creep for the rest of the night to see what other mundane meetings the man chose to commemorate on film.

*          *          *

In public, the creature often obscured his fearsome features beneath a rumpled Johnny Staccato suit, classic black Ray-Bans and a William Burroughs Fedora.  Looking like an eight-foot tall, five hundred pound, preposterously hairy Beatnik, he still managed to blend in better than much of Radio City’s prodigiously bizarre nightlife.  Donning this ridiculous yet effective disguise, the Monster followed the Photog all over town as the cameraman cranked out covert polaroids of a multitude of men engaged in sleazy, reckless behaviors: not only drug deals, but kinky indiscretions, petty larcenies and other acts of deviousness and depravity.

Two nights later, the creature watched from the shadows as the Photog revisited these men, flashed his candid pics and collected a fast payment.  Standard blackmail op.  Or so it seemed in the beginning.

Over the course of a week, the Monster, a natural born detective, did some leg work on the long nosed extortionist and his various vics.  The creature soon came to realize that these men were not involved in a standard blackmail op at all.  This was something far more sordid and sinister.  And as he often did upon making these discoveries, the Monster immediately sought to involve himself in thwarting the bad guys’ plans.

For just as he heard alluring invitation in the most unseemly of sounds and the most discordant of tunes emitting from the boulevards of Radio City, the Monster also heard a persistent siren song in the rumble of the city’s iniquitous underbelly.  He had come to believe that saving the city (from its own darker appetites) was his life’s purpose and as part of his ongoing campaign to atone for the sins of his past, he determined to destroy the plot being formulated by the Photog and his  criminal cohorts.

Before the latest round of city-saving could commence, however, the Monster had to pay a visit to a friend: someone he knew would have a particular interest in this newly uncovered conspiracy.