Seeds of Fear

LULLABY & GOODNIGHT Wayne Allen Sallee

Chicago is a political town, and that was why Patrolman Nicholas Raymond Rexer was confined to the T. D. Slatton Psychiatric Unit, pending the review of his actions by Internal Affairs and other lawsuits against him, the force, and the city. A political town where a man can be wrongly convicted and the DA's office in Cook County gets by with the adage "He might not've been guilty, but he probably done some thing just as bad."

And so it was that the events of April fell into August like lace over a corpse, and Nick Rexer sat in what could have passed for an efficiency apartment down in the South Loop, clutching exercise balls in his right hand, keeping his trigger-grip in good condition (because he knew he'd be back on the force; this was Chicago, after all). He was confined to the seventh- floor wing of the CPD's unofficial Disneyland North on West Belle Plaine Avenue.

The expatriate patrolman spent his days watching out the window for rodents to be run down by rush-hour motorists on Damen Avenue, exercising his trigger-grip, and reliving his vision of what had occurred down that alleyway off that near north side street four months previous.

He remembered it all so clearly, even to the very end:

A dull, beet-colored light in the alley behind Mo hawk Street washed over the two cops' faces like blood clots bathing the brain. An April wind came off the lake, but all they smelled was oil and garbage. Stelfreeze and Rexer had been standing there five minutes, watching one of their own go through the back door of a house of prostitution. They had gone to make sure that Bill Valent wasn't accepting payoffs.

It was much worse than that.

They moved forward towards the second-floor landing. Both were out of uniform. The harsh glow from behind slatted blinds was brighter than a softer light from a third-story window. A blue light wavered, and Rexer realized it was most likely a television.

With the muted sounds of evening around them, Stelfreeze said to the darkness, "Well, here we are." The way he announced it, Rexer thought of a car pulled over into a lovers' lane, and that the two were on a first date, the lights of the city laid out below them. This is how it is with cops partnered for fifteen years.

Stelfreeze stared at the darkness that loomed above them, his lips bloodless, cleft chin thrust out in acceptance of what they were about to do. He knew stories about this place, tales he had not shared with Rexer until later. Only because he had never expected to be looking for, or after, one of their own here.

His partner was absently running his long fingers through his Grouchoesque mustache as he also looked at the sky. Only, Stelfreeze was not staring at the April darkness, bruised black and purple, the light from the nearest stars barely making it through the pollution. The abyss Stelfreeze was aware of was a call girl with a unique angle, a whore who used the name Lullaby & Goodnight. The usage of dual names being the darkest sky of all.

She was a woman with a young girl's mind, who never spoke yet mewled at all the proper moments. Her real name was Celandine Tomei, and her mama charged upwards of fifteen yards for the ultimate in one-night stands. The highest-salaried men allegedly descended on this dilapidated two-flat on North Mo hawk, the turks of the town come to kill or mutilate the prostitute as she orgasmed in her abnormal and childlike way.

And then to return the following month to repeat the act. Mama Tomei took Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and Diner's Club for the act itself. Other than living expenses, the funds received went towards plastic surgery and bone reconstruction. There were certainly no advertising costs, hence Rexer's ignorance of what the two cops would encounter here.

Stelfreeze knew too many people in the television industry, thanks to his sister marrying a sportscaster for the station that considered its biggest competitor to be MTV, not CNN. And sometimes Stelfreeze heard stories they kept off the air and held close to their disgusting hearts.

Stories about the ultimate one-night stand.

He thought long and hard on that; much of it coming out somewhat abstractly in his later Internal Affairs deposition. He realized that suicide came in a weak second to what was allegedly experienced here.

The porch was enclosed on two sides; Stelfreeze 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 across the well-swept flooring, the wooden boards the typical Polish gray on gray with whitened sawdust in the cracks. He wondered if they were skin magazines or, from what he had heard of the expected clientele, recent copies of U.S. News & World Report.

And if their cop friend was really here accepting payoffs, Stelfreeze envisioned Valent walking up these steps with his pockets stuffed with racing forms. In for a penny and all.

Rexer's thoughts were more metaphorical as they walked up to the wooden frame door. Yellowed Venetian blinds were askew behind the dirty glass, yet he thought that they should be encountering some kind of a steel door, the kind that might be found at the Haddon Cobras' crack house on Leavitt.

But there was no eye-slit drawn back, no click of a revolver behind the walls, as the door opened ever so slowly. The woman who stood in the doorway was so frail that she made any skell under a heat vent on Lower Wacker (Drive look like a television wrestler. She was framed in the kitchen light, not caring that her sagging breasts were outlined beneath her flowered beige nightdress.

Both cops were reminded uncomfortably of their respective mothers.

The light on the ceiling was one of those overhead jobs that consisted of two concentric rings of harsh milky white glow. The north side's version of the tesla coil, Stelfreeze always thought. Which was often, as there were three such lights in his flat on Aberdeen. The woman, Mama Tomei, was five feet two. Add another inch if the wind caught her off balance. Her eyebrows were penciled in and angled upwards the way a lunatic playing "she loves me, she loves me not" with the limbs of a dead rodent might arch his own quivering brows.

"You must be Mr. Stelfreeze." A withered hand reached out towards the larger cop. "Mr. Fassl told me you would be coming by. I do so love watching the way he talks about our Cubs. " She mentioned the network affiliate Stelfreeze's brother-in-law worked for.

She extended her hand to Rexer, continuing her talk of baseball. "That Mark Grace is just the cutest thing!" Rexer smiled, wondering why there wasn't more expensive furniture in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was upstairs, and the money they were making here furnished a lakefront home in Winnetka.

They still clutched hands, their calluses touching. "I am Mama Tomei. Please to call me Mama."

"The pleasure is mine," Rexer said. He smelled meat on her breath. Stelfreeze also nodded back in greeting.

Mama Tomei swung her arms in a bid for them to enter Castle Frankenstein, and they walked across cracked linoleum the shade of pea soup that had been puked up into a shadowed gutter. A black-and-white Emerson TV, antennae angled towards two o'clock, sat on a beige counter. Barney Miller was telling Wojo and Deitrich to handle a burglary over on Bleecker.

"Please," the woman said, sliding into a chair. "You sit now. Celly, she is with someone now."

Bill Valent, both cops thought. Hell, they could smell the Eternity cologne he splashed on every Friday night.

"Soon," she repeated, busying herself with fluffing napkins into 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. "Would either of you gentlemen like some coffee? Mountain-grown, the best kind."

She said this with a smile as Stelfreeze glanced towards the hallway, pushing herself away from the subject of her daughter's man friends. Mama Tomei busied herself at the counter.

Rexer looked at the tablecloth of fractal images, discovering several profiles of what could be construed as silver men smoking corncob pipes.

"I thought times like these were made for Taster's Choice," he said to himself. On the television, the ending bass strings for Barney Miller, the shot of the Manhattan skyline. The WGN announcer then related how Davenport recalls the first time she met Furillo, in the next devastating episode of Hill Street Blues. Late-night reruns.

Rexer suddenly wanted the evening to fast-forward. "I have to use your bathroom, ma'am. Mama." He cleared his throat.

She told him, "First door on left, down hallway."

There was a mirror above the kitchen sink; passing it, Rexer looked at his reflection, seeing gray hairs like cobwebs in his mustache for the first time.

Let Stelfreeze sweat it out of her, he thought as he moved down the hallway, the walls bare on either side of him. Yet he still tried not to focus on any single direction for fear of whatever hellish scenes the darkness held. She thought his partner was of high recommendation and maybe Stel could be casual about it.

But Rexer was downright claustrophobic.

The hall floor was carpeted a sickly orange and magenta, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the slim cop saw shadows of branches dancing against living room bay windows. Again, as is expected in north side apartments, the bathroom light was a metal chain dangling to the right of the medicine cabinet. The pull chains always reminded him of the dog tags he wore around his neck, as a member of the air force reserves. Rexer always felt a sense of security when he touched those tags.

He turned in to the bathroom, reaching for the right spot. The white bulb flickered on, and he looked at himself in the mirror briefly. The toilet seat was broken, yellowed tape wrapped around the connected pieces.

He urinated in silence.

But he also noticed the muted amber light, a hazy cone above the stairwell landing. Then he heard a soft moan from upstairs. A female moan.

It took him less than a second to decide. Turning the bathroom light back on, he gently closed the door with hopes that Mama Tomei might think he was simply having a slow bowel movement.

Assumably looking forward to the excitement.

Rexer counted twelve steps and turned right at the top of the landing, finding himself facing several of those infamous velvet dog paintings where they all stared at you with their mournful eyes, lost dogs who gazed upon Rexer in a way that made him think of old Polish women praying at the stations of the cross at Saint Mary of Naz.

The upstairs hallway was L-shaped, and the slice of the room visible to Rexer put the nude woman on the bed in profile from the knees up. Mama Tomei's daughter lay on her back, her thin arms propped against the headboard, hands hanging limp. The handcuffs that held her that way were police-issued. With arms raised, her breasts swelled up, dark nipples pointing in a cross-eyed fashion. Rexer could smell sweat, cologne, and even a fresh aroma, like Ivory soap.

He moved to the side, looking in at a better angle, and had to bite on his palm until he drew blood. Growing out of the left side of the woman's rib cage was a small head, its eyes wide and unblinking. A vestigial twin; he recalled the phrase from growing up downstate; cows sometimes gave birth to such monstrosities. The head was much smaller than Celandine's, its hair like a discarded Kewpie doll's, a sharp chin curving down a long, rubbery neck.

Rexer jumped when it moved, falling back against whitened ribs so that he thought of a plaything lying atop a painted street gutter. He couldn't tell if it moved because of Mama Tomei's daughter shifting her weight, or because it was alive in some way.

Her body was so pale that he wondered if she had ever seen daylight, felt the direct sun on her stupefied body.

Celandine Tomei's face was not pretty. High cheekbones and thick hair in a widow's peak, a crooked nose and mouth that resembled a paper clip twisted by someone with caffeine nerves.

A sound came from deep within her grimaced mouth, and he would always remember what he saw next. A hand coming into view, a man's hand, fingers splayed so that it grabbed onto the vestigial head like it was a bowling ball, lifting it and letting it fall, the woman moaning louder.

The hand was a familiar one; he recognized a pale ring that Bill Valent had received during an altercation with a perp on PCP in the Hermitage Avenue corridor the previous summer.

But he couldn't step into the room farther, he could only stare at the head in the middle of Celandine's torso. The head had sparse black hair and was almost a pinhead, as if part of the connective skull plates were missing. It rested against Celandine's breasts as though they were deflated pillows. He could smell Valent's cologne, dammit!

The head turned towards Rexer, not of its own volition. It simply fell into the crook of the girl's arm. Orange drool formed around the mouth's gum line. Then everything started happening fast, the worst of it being the sound of a man's slacks being zipped up just beyond sight in the room. That sound would keep Rexer awake at nights for weeks to come.

He backed up, his palm striking against a small display case. The movement disturbed the doily dangling over the edge. Looking down, Rexer dry-gagged as he saw rows of gelatin eyes displayed in a cheap jewelry case. Some of the pupils had gold flecks, others were solid blue or hazel, and he knew he had to get out of there.

He backed away, towards the stairwell, knowing his hand was on his holster. He had been blinking away red spots in his mind, wanting to grab his shirt collar and start chewing on it, uncertain.

The next thing he remembered was moving down the stairs as quietly as he could, and Rexer almost shrieking when he saw Stelfreeze standing in the hallway.

"Let's go," Stelfreeze said, not even bothering to nod at Mama Tomei as they moved past her to the door. Rexer thought she looked ashamed.

"What is it, partner?" Rexer said to Stelfreeze as they walked out of the alley onto Eugenie Street. "If she didn't say, I can tell you Valent was up there."

Stelfreeze told him about the stories he had heard from his brother-in-law, the ones he now knew were true. Rexer confirmed what he had seen upstairs.

The thing was: Valent wasn't getting payoffs. He was going there to do what everybody else did, only at cheaper rates. Because he was a cop and could close it up anytime he wanted.

It was like eating your cake and having it too. Have sex with Celandine and strangle the head, tear at the skin, ravage the face. All without killing anything, because Celandine Tomei's decency was long buried.

Rexer thought of the jewel case of eyeballs. The cops passed a row of two-flats that displayed either plastic palm trees, plastic crucifixes, or promo photos of Richard M. Daley in the front windows.

Thunder rolled in the distance.

"The money mostly goes for reconstructive surgery," Stelfreeze said. Both wondered what they would say to Valent. The heavens suddenly opened and the April rain came down.

Jack Stelfreeze had met Rexer in the hallway, all right. He had taken the smoking gun from his partner's shaking hands. Rexer had been disgusted by what he had seen in that room, what he had watched his own friend and sometimes partner doing with that deformed freak.

This was the part he tried to deny, even though Internal Affairs had all the facts:

Rexer had waited all of three heartbeats before pulling his privately owned.38 from his waistband and shooting at Valent. For what he was doing. For what he had been enjoying. The younger cop was taken by surprise, falling from the bed half-erect, his face smeared with the freak's lipstick. It made him look like a clown.

Two steps in then, before the freak could scream. Didn't matter, though, with the iron thunder of the gunshots. Rexer grabbed the deformed head, pulled it from its stalk of a neck, laying it over the freak's face like a pillow so he wouldn't have to see her pleading eyes as he blew her brains out. Because he felt pity for her.

The freak's body going limp, spasming once, scaring him. Stumbling down the stairs, meeting Stelfreeze, Mama Tomei already dialing 911 out of rote.

Nicholas Raymond Rexer smiling, happy, victorious.

Back on Belle Plaine, Rexer smiling from his window, a beautiful vantage point for watching a rabbit blown to bits by a Gran Torino with missing plates. Rexer smiling at the smear, waiting for the knock on the door, the gentle sound his fellow officers would make as they took him into custody, out of the crazy room and off to Stateville. The big and burly coppers making a polite taptaptap, like he was considered a damn psycho.

Keeping his trigger-grip at the ready, rolling the exercise balls in his palms. His own special kind of exercise balls, better than the ones at the Academy, the ones you had to buy at the shop on Racine where you bought your winter shirts and plastic coverings for caps when you're slated for traffic control in winter.

The exercise balls Rexer had in his hands, practicing to fire a gun he'd never hold again, were two small glassine eyeballs. They were gold-flecked and, of course, unstaring.

This story is for Lee Seymour.