Chicago’s Finest were doing their best, but when The American Dream, in his alter ego of Evan Shustak, had approached Jake Daves at the Harrison Street station house with Haid’s name, he found himself gently rebuffed. In this city, there was no Commissioner Gordon to Shustak’s righteous parody of The American Dream.
Chicago had never been home to a Bernard Goetz, a subway vigilante. The only serial killers here were those whose victims were gay or crippled. Men in wheelchairs being killed. The city of broad shoulders, Carl Sandburg had written in the forties. Tremble added: collapsed upon an atrophied spine.
“So, why would he come here, wherever the hell it is we’re headed, anyways?”
“We’re just about there, a house on Mohawk Street. A prostitute.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Tremble stopped walking. “And you know exactly which one he’s going to?”
The American Dream turned back to Tremble, his mouth a thin slit behind the mask. “There is someone for everyone when it is needed,” he said.
“She’s known as Lullaby and Goodnight, and she’s handicapped. If you could call it that.” The light began to dawn on Tremble. They were out of the alley. A dull, beet-colored light across Mohawk washed over the Dream’s face like a blood clot bathing the brain.
“She’s also the highest paid hooker this side of Zombie Tongue in Perdition.” He nodded for Tremble to follow him in the direction of the light.
“You’re saying that she’s the highest paid call girl, and that—”
“That’s right, Vic.”
They neared a stairwell at the end of a trellised walkway. Tremble would find that the wooden steps led up to yet another elevated hell in his life. But, at this moment, his thoughts and understandings on what motivated a person to act in certain ways were for the most part naive.
“All the serial killers I’ve ever read about had about as much money as I do in my pocket now,” Tremble said after thinking about it a moment. He strained his eyes in the dim red light to see if anyone had carved their initials into the wooden railing. Or even their beliefs.
“There are exceptions,” the Dream said on the third stair. “Gacy made money from his construction business. And Christopher Wilder paid cash on his cross-country murder spree.”
Tremble did remember the balding man who chewed his nails to the quick and met his end in a gas station in New Hampshire.
“Exceptions,” he agreed.
And Gacy’s construction knowledge taught him how to dig with a shovel and pour cement, Tremble thought as they climbed upwards. What was John Wayne Gacy’s favorite country and western song? “I’m Walking The Floor Over You.” Tremble, you cutup, you.
They reached the second floor landing. The harsh glow from behind slatted blinds was brighter than a softer light from a third story window. A blue light wavered, and Tremble realized it was probably a television.
With the muted sounds of evening around them, the Dream said to the darkness, “Well, here we are.” The way he announced it, Tremble thought of a car pulled over into a Lover’s Lane and the lights of the city were laid out beneath them. While he pondered what it would be like to own a body that would allow him to drive a car, as well as permit him to touch a woman sensually in said car, spasm-free, he saw the American Dream staring at the darkness that loomed above them.
Not at the January sky, bruised purple and black, the light from the nearest stars barely making it through the pollution. The darkness, the American Dream knew, was a call girl who went by the name of Lullaby and Goodnight, with reasoning behind the usage of dual names being the darkest sky of all.
A woman with a young girl’s mind, who never spoke but mewled at all the right times, and who charged, rather Mama Tomei charged, upwards of five thousand dollars for the ultimate one night stand. The highest salaried men came to this dilapidated two-flat on North Mohawk, the turks of Chicago come to kill or mutilate the prostitute as she orgasmed, then return the following week to repeat the act. Mama Tomei took Visa, Mastercard, and Amex for the act itself. Most of the money might be needed for plastic surgery or bone reconstruction.
The ultimate one-night stand. The American Dream thought long and hard on that. Realizing that suicide came in a weak second to what was experienced here.
The velcro on his wrist braces whispered against the wooden railings, reminding Tremble of panty hose being slipped off of a woman he never loved, and then the masked man knocked on the door, twice, paused a heartbeat, and knocked twice again. Tremble wondered if it was a secret password or if the Dream’s arm had simply weakened while rapping.
The porch was enclosed on two sides; Tremble saw a swing near the north end of the landing, a strip of curled flypaper matted to the wire mesh behind it. Magazines were strewn around the well-swept flooring. He wondered if they were skin magazines, or, from what little he’d been told of the expected clientele, recent copies of
U.S. News & World Report
.
He looked over at Evan Shustak. The American Dream, who, as a way of life, catalogued things neatly in the separate prison cells of his brain, seemed not to care about the outer details of this place. These past weeks, since Mike Surfer’s disappearance and presumed death at the hands of the Painkiller, the only thing on his mind was the murderer’s capture. As they waited for a response to the knock, Tremble imagined a scenario involving an eye slit being pulled back from the door like at the El Rukn Headquarters on Drexel Blvd.
The door opened quietly. A woman so frail she made the Dream look like a television wrestler was framed in the kitchen light. One of those overhead jobs with two concentric rings of white light. She was five feet two, at best. Tremble had expected, hell...he just didn’t know anymore. Her eyebrows were penciled in and angled upwards the way a lunatic playing “She loves me, she loves me not,” with a dead rodent might arch his brows.
“You must be Evan,” the woman beamed, her accent vaguely Polish. Lugan, maybe.
Tremble still couldn’t get over it. The guy thought he was a superhero, yet everyone and their Auntie Charlotte knew his so-called secret identity. Or maybe they just think they know, himself included, and that was the American Dream’s biggest joke of all.
“And you must be Vic Tremble,” she took his hand. Their calluses touched. ”I am Mama Tomei. Call me Mama.”
“The pleasure is mine.” He smelled meat on her breath.
Mama Tomei swung her arms in a bid for them to enter Dracula’s Castle, and they walked across cracked linoleum the shade of pea soup that had been puked up into the gutter. A black and white Emerson, its antennae angled towards two o’clock, sat on a beige counter. Barney Miller was telling Wojo and Dietrich to handle a burglary over on Bleecker.
“Please,” the woman said, sliding into a chair. “You sit now.”
‘“You look as young as ever, living in this city that ages every living thing,” the Dream said as he sat down opposite the television.
“Evan, you are the kind one.” The woman fluffed napkins in a wooden holder cut into the shape of a blue duck. Her nails had been painted coral, but the color was chipping away on each finger. Tremble sat opposite her, the tablecloth between them a fractal image of pastel shapes.
“New cologne?” the Dream asked.
“No,” Mama Tomei said softly. “My daughter... she had a visitor. We hadn’t planned...” she let it trail.
“Oh,” the Dream simply said. “We didn’t see any cars out front.”
You ever hear of cabs, Tremble felt like saying then, for absolutely no good reason.
“Would either of you like some coffee? Mountain Grown, the best kind.” Pushing her chair away from the subject of visitors, she busied herself at the counter.
Enough of that, Tremble thought, finding new profiles of beige men smoking corn cob pipes in the tablecloth.
“I thought times like these were made for Taster’s Choice,” he muttered, low enough that the American Dream did not hear him.
* * *
All three were on their second cup, with Tremble just finishing up some small talk on a few of the residents at the Rainey Marclinn House. Both he and the American Dream felt that the Painkiller was zeroing in on the residents. When the dismembered corpses were first found back in November, the wheelchair-bound victims were scattered around the South Loop.
It was then that the American Dream, his mask pulled up over his nose so that he could sip his coffee, brought up the subject of why they had come.
“I, that is, we think we know who the Painkiller is, as I mentioned when we spoke on the phone yesterday.”
“Oh, my, yes.” Mama Tomei put her hand to her mouth. Tremble’s own mother Diedre would make the same motion when watching the nightly news, but only to pick at worry beads of scabs while she mouthed silent prayers for Hollywood celebrities or the First Lady’s upcoming thyroid operation.
“He’s the one been burning them people and cutting them up, such a terrible world we live in.” Tremble would bet dollars to doughnuts that she believed that the weather changes were due to the Apollo moon landing a generation before.
“I suspect there is more to it than simply cutting and torching the victims,” the Dream slapped his palm onto the table. “I just can’t figure the angle, is all.” His fingers spidered over his mask. Tremble’s forehead throbbed three pulses. He faintly heard the closing horns of the Barney Miller show. The WGN announcer then related how Davenport recalls the first time she met Furillo, in the next devastating episode of Hill Street Blues. Mike Surfer had loved cop shows most of all and with this thought Tremble felt a case of projectile vomit coming on as unbidden as pre-ejaculation.
He cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, Mrs., uh, Mama. I, well, I have to use your bathroom.” He was told that it was the first door on the left, down a darkened hallway. There was a mirror above the kitchen sink, and, passing it, Tremble saw that the grey hairs on his blond head looked like cobwebs.
* * *
Tremble could see that the walls down the length of the hallway were bare, but did not focus on any direction at all for fear of whatever hellish scenes the darkness held. He felt blindly for the recess where the bathroom door would be. The floor was carpeted; shadows of branches thrown against the living room bay windows danced to the odd theories of the American Dream, his voice droning on in the kitchen. The guy was grasping at straws, they both were. Maybe they should just let the cops solve it, Rizzi had told them that they were keeping it active whether or not dismembered bodies were found in the wheelchairs or not. The cop didn’t have to add that there was a mayoral special election coming on, in two months.
And he never was told why it seemed logical for the Painkiller to come here. There were plenty of cheaper places to go, both in the city and out in Cal City or Fallon Ridge. Tremble himself had taken in the go-go palaces of Calumet City several times.
Finally finding the bathroom, he was still nervous enough that his urine stream split into two separate dribbles. The seat was broken, yellowed tape was wrapped around the pieces. When he was finished, carefully wiping the seat with a tissue he then stuffed in his pants pocket, Tremble opened the door and faced the opposite wall.
Muted amber light shone at the stairwell landing. He heard a soft moan from upstairs. A female moan.
It took him but a second to decide. Turning the bathroom light back on, he gently closed the door that Mama Tomei might think he was simply having a slow bowel movement.
Three steps up, he recalled flushing the toilet. He hoped they hadn’t heard.
Tremble counted twelve steps—it was another of his compulsive-obsessive tendencies, and wasn’t it funny that the American Dream wanted to form a “super-hero” group with that same name?—and turned right at the top of the landing. He found himself face-to-face with a half-dozen of those infamous velvet dog paintings where they all stared at you with, their mournful eyes, lost dogs who stared at you with a gaze that cynical Tremble saw in the woman praying the stations of the cross at St. Sixtus while secretly asking only to win the Lotto.
He followed the amber light to encounter madness.
Stepping into the shadow in the L-shaped hallway. But he was still able to see the slice of the room visible to Tremble put the woman on the bed in profile from the knees up. She was nude. Lullaby…and Goodnight. The room itself was immaculate and the woman on the bed, Mama Tomei’s daughter, had a head growing out of her emaciated rib cage.
Her body was so pale that he wondered if she had ever seen daylight. Her face was not pretty. High cheekbones and thick hair in a widow’s peak, a crooked nose and a mouth that resembled a paper clip twisted by someone with caffeine nerves.
A sound from deep within her grimaced mouth told him that someone else was indeed in the room. The grunt was nowhere near what he had heard from the bathroom’s doorway.
Chicago’s elite paid five thousand?
The head.
Because of the head.
The head, also female, had sparse black hair and rested against Mama Tomei’s daughters’ breasts as though they were pillows. Tremble had a book at home about freaks. There was a photo of a black girl with part of a torso and legs growing out of her abdomen. She had lived to be twenty-six. When the head fell over to rest against her left elbow, Tremble had to fist his mouth to keep from gagging.