Fiction: "A Turn to Crime"

The final installment of "Kill Fee," set in Chicago in the early '90s

Part 1-3: All That’s Left is Everything

Now that his music journalism career was basically over, there was nothing preventing Walt from entering the true crime non-fiction field, like he’d always been talking about. Actually, there was one stalling point that he became aware of one night when he was tending bar at Mothers, the loud, stupid Rush Street joint featured in About Last Night. Walt got a job there because he was sure no one he knew would ever come in. But then, of course, there was Sallee on the first night with her boss Josh, who was now her boyfriend Josh. She was embarrassed for Walt, but he talked about how happy he was because Otis was living with him. “I just started hating being a music critic,” he said. “Just a ridiculous job. Even I didn’t care what I thought.” It took him awhile to catch up to the rest of us, Sallee joked, patting Walt’s hand to make him in on it. He laughed. That girl could always crack him up.

Occasionally, Walt served one of the most successful writers of the true crime genre, a once-handsome, well-dressed man in his forties who came in to pick up tourists and college girls and rarely left alone. One of his books had been turned into a Tom Cruise blockbuster, so he had lotsa Hollywood stories and bought lotsa drinks, though he drank virgin Cape Cods.

One night Walt pumped him for tips on breaking into the true crime market and the writer gave him the bad news: literary/film agents buy the rights to the real life stories of high profile criminals. “Probably the only way a freelancer could write a book about an infamous serial killer would be to commit the murders, then frame someone else,” the writer said, as he balanced a tray of slippery nipple shots.

What a crazy idea, but Walt became obsessed with it. On the long train ride from Rush Street to Lakeview, Walt passed the time by thinking about the assholes he would kill. And as soon as he got home he started typing away. He wrote for four hours that first night, converting a Gatorade bottle into a “writer’s friend” so he wouldn’t have to take bathroom breaks.

Number one on his hit parade was that fucked-up bouncer from the Roxy who put out the word that rising hip hop critic Tondric Evans was a front for a middle-aged white guy. That wasn’t even the reason Walt wanted him dead. The bouncer was a bully, a racist and a sexual predator who used a closet in the club to feel up and finger underage girls caught using fake I.D.s. “Do you want me to call the cops?” he’d say with his bad breath all over them.

Walt thought about how he would kill that fuckhead and not get caught. Or maybe the bouncer would be best to frame.

Before long Walt had typed a list of future victims. There was the label A&R guy who screwed over a local hard rock band Walt liked, even though hairspray was their performance enhancing drug. It was the classic sign-and-sit deal. The singer ended up committing suicide when it became apparent they were signed only so they wouldn’t compete with the label’s similar-sounding cash cow. Four years of waiting for their album to be released to a public who’d moved on to grunge bands.

Another person Walt wanted to rub out was the Cubby Bear manager known for date-raping young women. He’d slip a roofie in their drink, then offer a ride home when they suddenly got very, very drunk. None of his victims came forward to police, but they told their friends and word got out.

Next would be the big, mob-connected scalper in town, Dom, whose crew beat up Tondric a couple days before that Tribe Called Quest show. Dom, who had threatened Walt about writing the scalping story, had to go.

Did Walt have the stones to pull off the killings played out in his head? The pages came to life.

His first murder was the easiest. He stepped out of an alley behind a bar at about 3 a.m., said “this will knock you out,” and shot the Cubby Bear rapist. He placed a Kung Fu collector card on the body and coolly walked away.

Next day, Walt had Dom meet him at a train station under the pretense that he had a briefcase full of U2 tickets. When the scalper bent down to pick up the case, Walt stuck a Kung Fu card in his jacket pocket and shoved him in front of the train.

That weekend, Walt ran into the A&R weasel backstage and asked him if he wanted to do a bump. “Does Smokey make fudge in the scrubs?” They found an empty room and Walt chopped up some powder with a Kung Fu card, then laid out a long line. “This doesn’t taste like coke,” the guy said, then collapsed.

On the way out of the Roxy one night, Walt placed the rest of the Kung Fu deck at the evil bouncer’s station, then went to the phone booth in front and called the police. He said he witnessed the Cubby Bear manager getting shot in the alley. It was that skinhead bouncer from the Roxy who did it. Police found the .38 revolver Walt planted elsewhere in the club. It was a ballistic match.

Newspaper reports verified tha the suspected serial killer, a nightclub bouncer, was also the leader of a neo-Nazi group. He was found guilty and sent to prison for life.

The murder scenarios jacked him up. But it turned out, of course, that Walt didn’t have the stones to actually kill somebody. It was all in his imagination, where it became real as long as Walt kept writing.

Walter Carmody’s “true crime” book Kill Fee was a fiction best-seller, lauded by critics as a gripping first novel about a hard-drinking vigilante who posed as a music critic to infiltrate a dirty nightclub scene. This “revenge of the music fan” fantasy struck a power chord with the public. Optioned by Miramax, Kill Fee was soon to be a major motion picture, though the title would be changed to Kung Fu Killer.

Walt had been slowly going insane in his life, but was able to use that crazy juice to his advantage as a writer. A couple weeks after Kill Fee was finished he started working on his next crime fiction book, about a middle-aged white man who meets a black kid from the ghetto, and they become an unlikely murder-solving team. Walt was on a streak! This was the work he was born to do. Why did it take him so long?

The first Chicago book-signing was at Guild Books, with a line of fans down Lincoln Avenue, which made Walt nervous. He had no experience with this kind of success. He was somewhat calmed by his wife Sue Franklin, his former Sun-Times editor at his side. She had edited not only Kill Fee, but those feelings of inadequacy at Walt’s core. They were a team, and at Guild she wrote down the names of those wanting their books personalized and handed each book and the slip of paper to Walt.

Next in line was a well-dressed black man and when Sue asked his name, he said, “this cracker knows who I am!” It was Tondric, who got a fellowship to go to Northwestern to study journalism. “I taught Tondric, by example, of what not to do,” Walt announced, to big laughs. That ain’t funny, Tondric said, that’s the truth.

“He’s in the book, as ‘Chino,'” Walt explained to others in line. Kill Fee’s hero Dock avenges Chino’s murder at the hands of drug-dealing brothers with a South Side drive-by. He starts to toss Kung Fu cards on the bodies in the street, but stops himself. “That was for Chino,” he thought to himself, pocketing the trading cards.

It was quite a booksigning- all 125 sold, with about 23 backorders. “That was fun,” the author said to Sue and rested his head on her shoulder, after they got in the town car provided by his publisher. As they pulled out of the parking lot a man on a ladder was changing the bookstore’s lit-up sign to “Maite Alvarez.” The Sun-Times critic was the author of the new Bon Jovi biography Livin’ On a Prayer. Walt and Sue had a big laugh together, to see how wildly different paths had led to the same marquee.

There was one stop before home: a small blues club downtown. Walt and Sue paid the cover and sat down to watch the 18-year-old blues guitar sensation “Otis Carr,” who left “Robert” in Kansas City. Also there was ex-wife Candace, who looked great, with her new husband, the professor now teaching at Northwestern. The new Chicagoans raised their glasses to Walt and Sue, who returned the silent toast from across the bar.

In walked Sallee, gorgeous as ever, then The Three Critics, checking out the local blues phenom set to go national. “You remember my ex, Sallee, don’t you?” Walt introduced her, knowing damn well the pretentious trio had never met her. Shit, the girlfriend was real!

The band got a standing ovation and came back for an encore, as the crowd packed in front of the stage. “I’d like to introduce a special guest,” Otis said, as his guitar mentor Lil’ Sam strolled out from the wings.

“C’mon, baby don’t you wanna go,” Sam sang and stepped back, confident the grooving crowd would finish the chorus, “from the land of California to Sweet Home Chicago!”

Walt didn’t think the night of his first book signing could get any better! But when it hits you, finally, that feeling of fulfillment, it hits you right on time.

Your life is your story. No rehearsal. No encore. Just try to make it as interesting as you can.