There was one thing that brought my Uncle Henry joy-- it was Atlantic City's casinos and the cheap motels just off Black Horse Pike. You probably saw the newspapers' pictures when they showed what was left of Henry's body. He probably would have liked Las Vegas too but a man of his modest means was never really getting very far from Philly's Port Richmond neighborhood. Social Security disability and living in his mother's house. Henry was your typical inner city nobody-- half retarded, 3/4 prevert... but it wasn't his fault. Ever since his mother's cop lover got all fucked up from the Philadelphia Experiment, Henry began hearing voices inside of his head. I talked to the girl who killed him-- I bet you didn't read about her in the newspapers. She lives in Henry's house now. She has hundreds of voices inside her head and man is she beautiful-- I guarantee you that just about any of you would fuck her if got the chance. I got the chance and I did her and it was beauiful and I'll tell you what-- I'll never do it again.
It's pretty easy to visualize, really-- 'Ol Henry frequented Port Richmond's taverns. Beginning of the month, it was gravy time because the SSD money was sitting in his account and the working class neighborhood's taverns were always thirsty for the business. Down there by the river, bars competed for that extra couple of customers and Henry was a reliable 150 a week in cheap beer. Quiet guy too or so I've heard; didn't cause problems. Not that anyone knew of anyways. It took the regulars at the taverns a long time to figure out that crazy quiet Henry was killing people out there on foggy nights in Kensington. If you've been following the papers you know that Henry got his night too. I hear it was a chick that offed Henry, hard to say what really happened that night Henry met his justifiable end but I got some ideas. Someone finally got Henry one night-- caught Henry in the sort of trap that Henry had been using to trap girls.
I met Henry roughly 5 times when I was a kid-- it was hard to see Henry as anything but a smelly urban welfare drunk. The guy couldn't even talk like a human-- at least the times I met him. The brain damage was obvious (was it a genetic defect or from the drinking, it was hard to tell) and all Henry really did was mumble. My grandmother seemed to understand what he was saying but as for me, no way. I could catch about one out of five words if I leaned in real close. Leaning in close was real hard to do because the guy's clothes and breath reeked so badly of booze and old man's taverns so I basically never understood a word the guy said. So how did Henry manage to pull of the considerable trick of luring urban drunk working class women to their deaths in the alleys of Port Richmond? Apparently Henry had a number of different personalities and I guess these personalities came out sometimes-- at the beginning of the month when Henry was flush with his disability money out there on the streets of Kensington.
It's nearly impossible for me to reconstruct what happened on the night Henry finally "got his" but I've read the newspaper accounts and I skulked around Port Richmond's pubs long enough to find out some things about the night Henry got his. I'm a really bad drunk so it took just a few weeks of heavy drinking and question asking before the working class drunks had had enough of me and my questions. Got beat up pretty good one night by either 3 or 4 working class thugs who thought I was some sort of narc. Anyway, I gathered up some good stuff, enough to piece together a basic chronology of events. It's my opinion that Henry ran into a woman who had many of the same problems Henry had-- another multiple personality type who was ruled by the competing personalities inside of her head.
Henry tended to be a daytime drinker, though his drinking sessions often continued into the night. Around 8 or 9 pm, it was Henry's habit to leave Mickey's Tavern and continue the binge inside the house his now dead mother left to him. It was Henry's house now and Henry used the rowhome to drink himself into a fairly beautiful blackout autopilot oblivion and then piss on the walls.
Obviously, Henry had some sort of suave side to him when he was out and about hanging around the taverns; how else could he have gotten those women to leave with him? How else could he have gotten those women to trust him long enough for Henry to do those awful things to them? Henry killed six women before some phantom woman stabbed him to death and then pushed him out of the second story of his rowhome. The cops found him lying face down-- his shirtless and booze bloated body impaled on the wrought iron fence that surrounded the tiny parcel. Sort of weird for sure, the way no one could really physically describe the girl Henry left with in even vaguely the same way. All the pub regulars agreed on one thing though-- she was much prettier than what Henry usually left with.
I talked to the bartender who worked that last night Henry lived on earth; I don't drink much but every once in a while it's fun to tie a load on. Easy way to pass a few days, long as you got the time to kill.
"It was like the guy had other people living inside him," Bob the Bartender told me. "You could really see it after Henry had been hitting it real hard. For hours, the guy would sit there and mutter to himself... stinkin like a bum... and then there were other days when Henry seemed a bit more normal... wore clean clothes and he would bring whores in on dates and you know what? It looked like Henry and the whores were having a good time. None of the whores Henry ever brought in here ever ended up dead... just those poor girls he met in Atlantic City-- they didn't end up so good. Just like Henry went down there one night and then he ended up dead... iz zat how you ended up with Henry's house? He left it to you?"
"Henry didn't leave a will... I got the place by statute, least that's how the lawyer I talked to about the whole thing put it to me-- by statute. I'm sure Henry didn't give a shit who got the house... in fact, he shit all over the place-- like a fucking ape-- before he got killed. It's nice having a place and all but the place sure is a mess."
"Another?" the bartender asked.
"Nah, thanks." I left him a buck tip and took off back to my new house. The spring rain had returned.
I stopped by the corner deli and picked up a couple six packs. Sitting in my new living room, I sipped on the beers and stared at the abandoned factory which blocked most of my view of the Delaware River. I did not want to close the windows because of the piss smell but it was too damned cold to comfortably leave them opened. I wondered if the piss smell would ever dissipate-- and then I drank myself into oblivion while i watched pre-season baseball.
My dreams were filled with visions of Henry's victims-- they filled my mind just like they filled the local newspapers' front pages. Sometime before I passed out I got the idea to drive down the Black Horse Pike and pay a visit to the location where Henry met his end-- The Golden Star Motel. I've driven out to the Golden Star a few times, four times I think. I don't check in and I don't talk to anyone out there about anything that went on there either. I park in the diner lot across the highway, I go inside the diner and I order a cup of coffee. And I look over at the Golden Star, trying to imagine what in the hell went on inside there when Henry was killing whores. It looks most like a movie just around dusk during a drizzle. No one has ever asked me a question-- why should they? I'm just sitting here drinking a cup of coffee, letting my imagination run wild-- terrible images filling my mind. It was here at the Golden North where I first imagined that I too could hear voices inside my head. I could swear that sometimes I heard Henry screaming for mercy while he did his time in hell. Other times I heard the girls' voices, sometimes they screamed out from hell too.... and sometimes I heard them thanking someone named Virgina. Maybe it was a girl named Virginia who sliced Henry into a hundreds of pieces; someone sliced Henry into a hundred pieces after luring him down that dark Port Richmond alleyway. No doubt she was a beautiful woman, dressed down like a street whore. No one heard Henry scream out for help and there was a good chance that "Virginia" cut his throat first. If I remember right, a good throat cut can get a killing started real good. Hard to say, though since Henry was cut up into so many pieces.
I guess I'd like to find "Virginia" sometime; I'd probably thank her for the house. But there is so little to go on regarding her identity. "A real beauty for around here, I think her hair was brown," was the best ID they had on the woman who probably killed Henry. No one wanted to find her; most of the newspaper articles centered on neighbors who wanted thank "the dark angel" who spared Port Richmond another Jack the Ripper type of killing.
The Indian guy who acted like he owned the place had about nothing to give me about what might have happened. He told me to read the internet articles about it-- he'd talked to dozens of reporters and weirdoes already and the fact that I was the killer's nephew meant about nothing to him. Everything was already plastered all over the papers and all over the internet. I tried renting the room but the guy refused-- he'd had the place redone since the initial murders.
Back behind the motel was where Henry (I assume it was Henry who was responsible for the prostitutes' murders; the mystery lies in who it was exactly who offed Henry-- who is Virginia?) murdered the girls is the watery drainage ditch where the old lady walking her dog found the dismembered and rapidly deacaying bodies. It was no longer the crime scene that it remained for months after the old lady found the bodies and it turned into that fixture on the nightly news that I am sure you all saw already.
I stopped by a pretty decent diner across from the motel-- sitting right there on Black Horse Pike-- and though it was more crowded than I liked I went in anyway; I had one of the diner's reknowned 1/2 pound burgers and enjoyed every bite. I didn't ask any questions about any of the murders.
I went to the Trolley Stop that night and watched a pre-season baseball game. The phone call came just a few minutes after I came back from the bar-- roughly 35 minutes after two a.m.. She said: Hi Gerry, how are you; I see you are looking around town for me. The cops are not looking for me and if they are it's to send me a medal for what I did to Henry-- how bout you why are you looking for me... to avenge your murderous uncle?"
"No... I am just curious; you know how it is-- true crime is always fascinating stuff, right?" I said, cracking a open a can of beer.
"Sure, Gerry, true crime is always interesting, especially when family is involved, eh?"
"Whose family are we talking about-- yours or mine?"
"Both of our families, Gerry. We're having this conversation because our families collided out there on the streets. And now we are connected-- forever, really."
"Forever, eh? I'm figuring someone I talked to the past coupla days has talked to you and getting my home phone is no big deal so go on, I'm fascinated and since I was moments away from my nightly dose of UFO radio I'm all game for your story so please... tell me all about it."
"Don't bother taping the call, Gerry-- it's not going to show up on tape or digital voice; I'm a ghost Gerry so don't bother wasting your time."
"I wasn't recording anything, I can remember just fine, thanks."
"Uncle Henry killed my sister and that's pretty much why I killed him. Henry eventually ran into the wrong whore-- the kind of whore who has a special relationship with her sister. The kind of sisterly bond that transcends death-- my sister came to me in my dreams and told me that it was Uncle Henry who tried raping her in that dark alley. When the rape didn't work out Henry cut her throat and left her die out there. Didn't take long for my sister to bleed out but we really don't know what happens to our perceptions of time when we are bleeding out do we Gerry?"
"No, ma'am, we do not."
"There's not much more to the story-- I played the new girl in town routine with Henry and Henry went along with it. I think Henry was having a great time, right up until the seconds just after I cut his throat.... but like I said...."
"...we don't really know what happens to our perceptions of time when we're bleeding do we, what did you say your name was?"
"You can call me Virginia. I'm part of a secret local group that tracks down killers and puts them to sleep so to speak."
"Yeah?"
"After the murders started I was sent out to sniff out the killer... The Group sent me out... it helps being psychic, Gerry... I know you have the voices too Gerry but I know they are pretty quiet inside you, eh?"
"Go on... you got me interested."
"Go upstairs to Henry's room and go to his closet... look hard for the hidden stuff that I put back... after all it was Henry's stuff and why would I want to be caught with it? Bye, Gerry, happy hunting and, if I were you I'd keep on ignoring the voices and if they start getting louder go get professional help as quick as you can. Lives depend on it."
Click. Virginia was gone.
I walked up the narrow stairs and I was standing in Henry's childhood room... old and faded flowered wallpaper... smelly mattress (made worse by the spring rain) sitting on top of an iron bed... the room was small and cramped-- couldn't have been more than 8 by 8 and the radiator took up a lot of space. The light bulb in the closet worked just fine-- thanks "Virginia"-- and the closet was near empty save for the wire hangars. The hidden compartment was fairly obvious in the way its "door" stood out about an 1/8 of an inch and was warped as hell. I opened the compartment and pulled out a few pieces of drawing paper. Someone had drawn crayon figures of children-- they all waved at me as I paged through hand drawn Henry's representations of who was living inside of him. Henry must've picked this up when he was still going to a downtown shrink; I vaguely remembered Henry's tiny living room filled with a lot of crayon drawings; obviously I never thought much of the drawings until now.
I got tired of looking at the simple drawings pretty quick: there was a little blonde girl, there was a teenaged blonde girl and a big old man who looked to be half caucasian and half black. Stick drawings; I guess they were the "people who lived inside" Henry. Who the fuck cared? I stuck them back in Henry's hole in the closet and I left the room. I went down to the Lucky 7 bar and got loaded. I guess I was done messing around with questions as to what might have happened to my Uncle Henry.
It's a few years later now; I still get loaded every night down at the Lucky 7 bar and I haven't heard from Virginia since that on call. I don't know what to think, I live in my Uncle Henry's house and sometimes I piss on the walls on the stair too. My Uncle Henry killed whores and someone who knew about him and the whores got to him. Who knows, really? The voices are easy enough to keep in check, I'm a 20th century kid-- I've grown up with radiowaves and voices all around me. Every day. The voices pound their ways into my head. Forever I assume.