Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“Where the fuck is Herman?” Lorraine demanded.

He moved close to Cornelius, grabbing the boy’s skinny left wrist.

“S-s-sick.”

“Who’re you?”

“Cornelius. Herman’s son.”

“Do you work for me?”

“I took daddy’s place,” the boy said.

“You go home and tell your father that he’s fired,” Lorraine said. He breathed into Cornelius’s mouth. The breath was rank. The teenager’s left hand went numb.

Then time seemed to stop.

Lorraine was yelling. Cornelius noticed the reel in the projector coming toward the end. He could still feel the erection even though it had gone limp in his pants. Seemingly of its own accord his right hand clutched the heavy lug-wrench that was used to raise and lower the projectors on their metal stems.

Years later John Woman would blame it all on the magazine.

If he hadn’t been in the throes of masturbation when the irate theater owner burst in, CC wouldn’t have felt rage along with being scared. He would have feared the threat of losing the job but this would have been a boy’s fear, not a man’s. Boys submit to the greater power but sexual man responds with violence, the historian wrote in his private electronic journal.

“You... fucking... never... foot...” these errant words made it to Cornelius’s ears. He understood their intentions if not their exact context. He knew he and his father would be out in the street if he lost this job. He knew that the street would kill Herman.

But John Woman’s historical knowledge could not explain away the crime committed that evening... It came in three phases, he wrote to Posterity, each comprised of one blow. The first strike of the lug-wrench was to free my left arm and get the fetid breath from my face. This only stunned the landlord. Lorraine put his hand to his head and then held the fingers before his eyes. When he saw the blood he surged forward. The second blow was to keep the enraged theater owner from attacking. Lorraine fell to his knees after the lug-wrench landed with a sickening thud at the side of his neck. His head hung down, his fists clenched impotently against the floor. If I had stopped there I would have been innocent, having only protected myself from attack. The third, two-handed blow to the top of Lorraine’s head was that step over the line. The man was dazed and of no threat. But I hit him with all my might. The bone gave way. It was a clean and powerful exertion. To this day it feels like the most definite act of my life...

The reel came to its end while Cornelius stood there looking upon the corpse at his feet.

“Change the reel!” someone shouted from the auditorium.

Cornelius rushed to turn on the second projector. This done, he closed the projection room door and locked it.

The wall flashlight illuminated the dead man’s face. His eyes and mouth were open, the prone body in near-fetal position. Next to him lay Dirty Nymphs, a few drops of blood having fallen upon the face of a woman pretending to have an orgasm. The idea of sex made Cornelius sick. He grabbed the magazine and tore it to shreds.

CC stayed locked up with the dead man until the theater was empty and even France Bickman had gone home. Then he went to the office to call his father.

“Hello?” Cornelius wanted to confess to Herman about Chapman Lorraine but hearing that feeble voice stopped him.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“I’m doing my geometry homework and it’s getting pretty late. I think I’ll stay over at Mom’s.”

“Are you sure she does not mind?”

“No. She said it’s fine.”

“It is fine,” Herman corrected.

“Good night, dad.”

Cornelius called Violet Breen asking her to look in on his father the next couple of days. He slept on the stairs in front of the projection room door, his dreams watched over by Lorraine’s empty stare.

The next morning, with great strain and difficulty, Cornelius rolled the stiffened corpse into the secret closet where his mother hid from Jimmy Grimaldi. Then he went to school, moving from class to class in a daze.

“Is something on your mind?” Mr. Pearl asked the youth in eleventh-grade English.

“No sir,” Cornelius said.

“Then why aren’t you leaving?”

Cornelius saw that all the chairs except his were empty. The bell had rung and everyone left him sitting there thinking about Chapman Lorraine, big breasts and bloody orgasms.

At work he averted his eyes from the bookcase. As the evening moved on he began to plan...

After the show was over CC went downstairs to find France asleep in a small room behind the popcorn stand.

“Hey, France,” the boy said waking the bone-thin septuagenarian. “Did anything happen last night?”

“Not that I know,” France replied.

“I thought I saw some people come in after nine,” Cornelius ventured. “It looked like they might’a sneaked in.”

“Nobody came in. I was at the door till ten at least. You know I only lie down maybe ten minutes before the show’s over.”

Cornelius knew that France went to sleep after the first reel of the last show but he didn’t say anything. He was pretty sure that no one had seen Lorraine come in.

Cornelius slept on the stairs again.

The next morning he went to see his mother. They hadn’t talked for some time. She felt bad about the way Herman had spoken to her so hadn’t come to Uno for their weekly tea.

His mother knew people who had been in prison. Maybe one of them could help him get rid of Lorraine’s body.

“Hi, CC,” Jeremy Brown, Lucia’s upstairs neighbor, said on his way to the front door.

Cornelius had been pushing his mom’s buzzer but she wasn’t answering.

“Hi, Mr. Brown,” Cornelius said. “Have you seen my mother?”

Jeremy, a middle-aged white man with thick dark hair, frowned.

“Didn’t you know that she moved?” he asked.

“Moved where?”

“Said she was going out west. Didn’t say where exactly.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago,” Brown said. “It was very sudden. I thought maybe that gangster boyfriend of hers was in trouble. She seemed upset.”

Realizing that he was on his own Cornelius went to the library. A newspaper story he’d once read to his father told about a woman who murdered her husband then hid the body in the basement. The victim was discovered forty-five years later, after the woman had remarried, raised three children and died.

There were five articles on the crime in back issues of various papers.

The first husband, Rhymer Tottenham, had been a brute by all accounts. Twice he’d put his wife, Alicia, in the hospital. She never brought charges and defended Rhymer to her friends and family, excusing him with explanations of his frustration and rage. Then one day Rhymer was gone. This wasn’t unusual. He often left home for days at a time spending Alicia’s money on drink and other women. When he didn’t return no one put up a fuss. He was no good and no one missed him.

Each of the newspaper pieces partially explained how Alicia Barstow (the name of her late second husband) committed and got away with her crime.

The cause of death was arsenic, probably from rat poison in his food, the coroner reported. Alicia had been a registered nurse and knew that the smell of putrefaction could be covered up by hydrated lime, or calcium hydroxide. She encased the corpse in three successively larger garment bags and hid it in the basement behind stacks of boxes filled with rocks.

Cornelius bought six differing sizes of thick plastic garment bags and a large aluminum suitcase the size of a steamer trunk. He could do this because he controlled his father’s bank account. He also bought two fifty-pound bags of hydrated lime powder from a construction supply store in Soho. He had these items delivered the next morning before France Bickman came in.