Blood on Celluloid Page 2

  “I was right here all night,” he said. “Anything that happened outside, I wouldn’t have been able to have seen it.”

  I could see what he meant. He probably kept the place like this to stop anybody from seeing the deals he did inside.

  I left him my name and number and headed over to the porno shop.

  * * *

  On a day that seemed like it would never end, evening was crawling over the land in shades of deepening gray.

  The outside of Ray’s Triple X Gallery was brightly lit with neon lights. The plate glass window was painted white from the inside. An iron mesh grill sealed off the door from the outside world.

  A sign was taped to the door from inside the wire mesh that read, “No one under the age of 21 allowed on premises!”

  I entered the door and a hanging cow bell clunked behind me. Two guys were browsing through the fuck magazines looking so closely at the pictures it seemed like they wanted to absorb the images through their skin.

  The place inside was brightly lit and had a pungent odor to it. I was hoping I wasn’t smelling the buckets of cum that was left on the floor in the booths in the back. Although that idea made me want to gag, that’s probably what it was.

  Weird techno rock was playing in the background. I think it was some shit they call Industrial, lots of shrieks and machine noises backed up by a synthesized drum beat. Just barely heard drifting in from the back rooms where they had the beaters booths was the sound of moans and heavy breathing from the porno films being played, paid for by the quarter.

  I walked directly to the counter. A guy with three rings through his lip, a tattooed shaved head and mirrored sunglasses went out of his way to ignore me. He turned his back and started running his fingers over rows of boxes of VHS tapes and old super 8 films of all manner of fuck films like he was looking for something. Above the movies was a display showing camcorders and Super 8 and 8 Millimeter movie cameras.

  “Hey,” I said to him. “I need to talk to you about last night.”

  “I’ve said all I’m going say to you pigs,” he answered and kept right on ignoring me.

  That was the second time today someone had mistaken me for being a cop. I didn’t know if I liked that or not.

  “This is a personal inquiry,” I told him.

  He snorted a laugh. “Then get the fuck out of my place,” he said. “You’re bad for business.”

  I took a business card that was on his counter, wrote my name and number on the back of it, and laid it on the counter at the same time as saying, “This’ll only take a minute.”

  “I told you to get the fuck out of my place,” he said and snatched the card up and backhand threw it at me.

  The card bounced off my forehead.

  I grabbed his hand out of the air with my left hand, twisted it and snapped a hard right jab into his teeth, then jerked him over the counter and threw him to the floor.

  He bounced off a display of dildos and I got on top of him straddling him, pinning his arms to the tile with my knees.

  “Now you want to talk to me shit-head?” I shouted at him.

  “Fuck you!” He shouted back. “The bitch should have stayed home. She fucked around with the wrong people and got fucked up!”

  I leaned into his face. “Who was it?” I yelled.

  “I don’t fucking know. I didn’t see shit,” he said.

  I slammed a good straight right down into his face that made his head bounce off the tile and his eyes rolled around in his head. I did that just because it felt good.

  The card I wrote my name and number on was lying on the floor beside his head. I picked it up and shoved it into his open mouth.

  “You start remembering something, you call me. I find out you know something and don’t tell me I’ll come back and hurt you so bad you’ll wish you were fucking dead.”

  I got up off him and the guys at the magazines were staring at me.

  “Unless you want a piece of this,” I told them. “Keep your face in that fucking book and forget that I was here.”

  Their eyes snapped back to the pictures on the paper.

  I left.

  CHAPTER 4

  I probably should not have slapped that idiot around but so fucking what. He needed a good ass-whipping and I needed to whip somebody’s ass. So we both came out even.

  I drove back toward downtown East St. Louis, not even sure of where I wanted to go. I drove out of habit. My hand drifted to the radio. I switched it on, also out of habit.

  Music came out and blared at me.

  Driving along through the outskirts of town I switched the radio through all kinds of stations.

  Nothing sounded good.

  Music would never sound the same.

  It was cold as hell outside but I didn’t turn on the heater in the Porsche. I didn’t want to feel warm.

  I drove around thinking, trying to figure out what to do next and coming up with nothing.

  I drove around thinking, trying to not feel anything.

  I drifted past downtown, past Johnny’s Bar and Grill and considered going inside and telling my best friend what happened but what the hell good would that do?

  What was I supposed to do, go inside and have him and Jeanette give me hugs and pat me on the back and tell me that everything is going to be OK.

  Fuck that!

  Nothing is ever going back to being just fine and dandy. Nothing is ever going to be OK ever again.

  Yesterday was our day off from the club. Around noon Sherry told me she had an errand to run and she’d be back in about an hour.

  I gave her a kiss and lay around and watched TV.

  She never came home.

  I waited four hours then called Patty’s Kitten House to see if she stopped by there. No one had seen or heard from her.

  I waited another few hours then I called the police to check to see if there had been any bad car wrecks: Nothing. They took my name and number and said you have to wait at least seventy-two hours before you can file a missing persons report.

  I wanted to go look for her but where the hell do you even start? Sherry’s club was her life. Before I came along she didn’t even take days off from work. She ran that place seven days a week. If Sherry had any family she never talked about them except when she told me her mother and father’s names and that was it.

  She had no outside interests that I knew about. Sherry was driven to make Patty’s Kitten House a success. It was what she did. It was who she was.

  During the next ten hours everything possible ran through my head. Did Sherry have a guy on the side? What did she have going on that I didn’t know about after a year with this woman?

  Tom, my big calico cat walked around the apartment meowing like he knew something was wrong.

  I watched TV although I didn’t really see the pictures. I drifted off to sleep on the couch somewhere around four or five in the morning.

  At eight-thirty a knock came on the door.

  Joe Briggs was standing there. That’s when the real pain started.

  * * *

  It was early in the evening, early in December but the sky was already black as coal. It was too early to go home to an empty apartment but where the hell was I supposed to go?

  I didn’t even drink anymore so going and getting wasted was out of the question, even if it did seem like a good idea.

  People were starting to put out the Christmas lights. This was the season for families to get closer. Family was the last thing I wanted to be thinking about.

  Sherry was the only family that I had.

  She was gone.

  The good thing about not drinking anymore and killing hundreds of brain cells every night is that after a while I started being able to think clear again. I wasn’t just reacting to life going on around me.

  The bad thing about not drinking anymore is that I have no choice but to think. I couldn’t stop myself.

  As I drove around in circles in the city of St. Louis I thought too much.
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  There was no doubt in my mind that whoever killed Sherry had done it to get to me. Sherry had never done anything to anybody to make someone hate her so much that they’d torture her to death.

  I had done a lot of things that would make people want to come after me, so I’d have to go and start shaking the trees in my old neighborhood and see what nuts fell to the ground.

  The blinking Christmas lights twinkling in the store windows of downtown St. Louis were depressing so I went home.

  The doorman at the Blaine Building knew me. He was reading a magazine that he barely looked up from and waved me past.

  That was good.

  I didn’t want to talk to him or anybody else.

  I took the elevator to our apartment and went in. Tom was on the couch waiting for me. I sat down beside him and looked around the place.

  The entire apartment was decorated in Art Deco black and white. The place was immaculate. It was stylish and classy just like the lady that picked out all the furniture.

  I sat down beside Tom and patted him on the head.

  He sat beside me and stared into my eyes unblinking. He hardly ever did that.

  “Looks like it’s back to you and me, Bud.” I told him and the words caught in my throat.

  Later on that night, much later, I climbed into bed. I closed my eyes and the scent of Sherry was still on her pillow and inside the sheets.

  I closed my eyes and willed myself to remember the silky feel of her black hair, the softness of her lips and the warmth of her skin. I willed myself to remember the sound of her sighs as we made love.

  I made myself relive touching Sherry and every time I could almost sink deep enough into my memory, deep enough back into my mind to almost reach out and take her in my arms I would start to hear her scream.

  She wouldn’t stop until I opened my eyes and left the dream I’d sunk into.

  I wanted to touch the memory of Sherry but I couldn’t stop the screaming.

  I couldn’t stop hearing her scream!

  CHAPTER 5

  Piano music seemed to be coming from everywhere. My head was buzzing as I opened my eyes. My eyes felt puffy and scratchy like dirt had been ground into them.

  The piano music went on.

  The ghost of Beethoven was taking revenge for…hell, I don’t know what he was taking revenge for. I never did anything to him. The piano music sounded tinny and slightly out of tune. I recognized the tune. It was something that Sherry really liked.

  I could put up with it but it really wasn’t my thing. My kind of music was Rush, Nazareth, Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones, long hair music of another sort.

  It was the cell phone ringing.

  I fell out of bed and grabbed it off the dresser.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “It’s Paul Harris at Patty’s,” the voice on the other end said. “I was making Sherry’s arrangements and wanted to do it right so I figured I’d notify her relatives for you. You got enough on your mind right now and…”

  “You don’t have to explain,” I told him. “I appreciate you thinking of it.”

  “Well, I figured she’d have an address book in her office but I can’t find anything except names and numbers of business contacts. If you can find her address book there I’ll call whoever you want and let them know about what happened.”

  “I’ll look for it and give you a call back when I got some names and numbers for you.”

  I hung up and put Sherry’s cell phone in my jacket pocket.

  I stumbled around the apartment for a while.

  Sherry got me used to drinking coffee in the mornings. Hell, she got me used to getting up in the mornings. So I went to the coffee maker.

  I only drink this shit. I’d never made any before. I didn’t have a clue as to how to make coffee. What the fuck, I thought. It can’t be that goddamned hard.

  After grabbing the can of coffee out of the cabinet I spooned a bunch of it, I don’t have a clue how much, into this black plastic funnel thing that slides in over the top of the pot.

  Then I filled the coffee maker with six cups of water and flipped on the switch and let it do its thing.

  In the bathroom I brushed my teeth and looked in the mirror. I looked like hell. Guess a few days with only a few hours’ sleep will do that to you.

  After the three S’s: a shower, a shit and a shave, I went back into the kitchen to get my cup of coffee.

  I got a cup, poured it without looking and took a big gulp.

  Slimy acrid tasting gravel was in my mouth.

  I spit the stuff into the sink and looked at my cup. The black coffee was swimming in grounds.

  I poured the whole fucking thing down the drain and got dressed and went to McDonalds for breakfast.

  * * *

  Back at the apartment I started looking through the drawers of Sherry’s dresser.

  Nothing is quite as enlightening as realizing that you never really knew the woman you loved and the reason you never knew her was because you never took the time to find out.

  I went through Sherry’s things and found out very little. What little information I did find out was so vague that it almost seemed like Sherry was hiding the information even from herself.

  I had never asked Sherry about her family. Basically, I didn’t care. What did it matter to me who her mother and father and aunts and uncles were? I wasn’t fucking them.

  As I moved around the clothing and personal items in Sherry’s dresser drawers looking for something that might have phone numbers or addresses in it I realized that my not taking interest in Sherry’s past was less respect for privacy than it was just laziness.

  Getting close to Sherry was good for me. I hadn’t cared if I was good for her.

  In the second drawer I was going through, the drawer where Sherry kept her silk panties and lacy bras, I found an old battered black address book.

  There weren’t too many names inside.

  Most of the names were of people I recognized from the club.

  One stood out: Sister Mary Sheridon. Her address was The St. Wisdom Orphanage, 2020 Udon Way, Tehan Setar. There was a telephone number.

  I put the address book in my pocket.

  CHAPTER 6

  I drove over to Patty’s Kitten House and was met by a circus going on at the front door. There were three white news vans with their stations’ call letters on the side: KXOK, KTVI and KDNL were blocking the entrance to the club.

  Three news reporters with their camera crews were harassing everyone coming and going on the street. No one could get in or out of Patty’s Kitten House without having a microphone shoved on their face.

  Ron Martin was waving his arms and shouting at the reporters. Everyone that seemed to be driving up to the club would just slow down then drive on past.

  After pulling around and parking in our private parking lot I went to the front entrance.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” I asked Ron and immediately had three microphones shoved in my face.

  “Get those the fuck away from me!” I shouted at the three reporters. Two of them were damn good looking women. The other one was a guy who looked like he spent too much time gazing with affection at his own reflection in the mirror.

  Ron said, “These idiots won’t leave. Nobody’s going to come in with them here. The customers inside can’t leave either. Hell, they’re like prisoners.”

  I turned my attention back to the three reporters.

  “Get your goddamned equipment off my sidewalk!” I yelled at them.

  They didn’t back off one bit. They were like sharks circling their prey.

  The male reporter said, “Buddy, just informing you that this sidewalk is city property and we can be here just as long as we want to be, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  The two women reporters nodded their heads in agreement just like the bobble-head figurines that they were.

  I turned to walk into the club and Mr. My-Teeth-Are-So-Bright-I
-Must-Brush-Them-With-Cum grabbed my left arm. “Look,” he said. “Give us our story and we’ll leave. Don’t, we’ll be here forever.”

  I looked at the hand still clutching my arm. “Just informing you,” I told him. “The instant you touched me you committed assault. I’m defending myself.”

  I snapped out a good hard straight overhand right to the guy’s nose and felt a satisfying crunch when it landed.

  I broke that mother-fucker’s nose with the first shot and it felt good!

  He staggered back and fell to his ass on the pavement.

  The two women reporter’s mouths were froze open in surprise. One of them had bleached blond hair and thick ruby red lips.

  I don’t know what possessed me, guess it was those lips. I asked big lips, “You want an interview?”

  “Y-yeah, of course,” she said.

  “Then drop on your knees and swallow my sausage and make me sing Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.”

  Her eyes widened so much I thought they would fall out of her head. One of the cameramen laughed.

  “I didn’t think so! That’s the only fucking way you’re getting an interview from me!”

  I waved Ron with me and we both went inside Patty’s Kitten House and locked the door behind us.

  * * *

  Our Disc Jockey was a dedicated guy. He was still spinning his records even though there were only two customers in the place and one dancer was entertaining them.

  I told Ron what to do and asked where Paul Harris was. Ron told me that Paul was in Sherry’s office. I went back there.

  As I was heading to Sherry’s office the music stopped and the Disc Jockey’s voice came over the PA. “Sorry guys,” the DJ said. “We’re closing down until we can get those reporters out of our hair. Leave your name with our lovely hostess at the front door and next time you come in there will be no cover charge.”

  In Sherry’s office Paul Harris had a list he’d compiled of possible people to call. All of them were business contacts. I told him to call all of them.