Spooky Spiegelman and
The Night Time Killer

Roy remembered an old guy named Rooftop Perkins who ran a radio repair shop in the neighborhood and sold dirty books under the counter. Spooky Spiegelman, a kid Roy had played ball with a few times in the schoolyard, brought customers to Rooftop who kicked back to Spooky a quarter or fifty cents for the hustle. Spooky approached Roy one day and asked him if he was interested in being a puller. Roy said he didn’t think so but agreed to accompany him to Rooftop’s place of business where Spooky wanted to collect what the old guy owed him.

“He owes me five bucks,” said Spooky. “This way you can meet Rooftop, I’ll get the gelt, then we can go to The Pantry and get a couple burgers and fries, my treat.”

Spooky’s real first name was Spencer. It was his mother who hung his nickname on him because of what she described as his strange behavior, his habit of lurking silently in empty hallways, doorways and otherwise deserted rooms of their house, “doin’ nothin’ but waitin’,” Mrs. Spiegelman said, “standin’ around, like waitin’ on a bus. He’s a spooky kid, he disappears but don’t really go nowhere, you don’t see him but you know he’s there, like a ghost.”

Spooky was a year older than Roy but they were both in fifth grade, which Spooky had flunked the year before.

“Mrs. Clancy told me she was puttin’ me back on account of my spellin’ and penmanship ain’t good enough. Penmanship! Only ship I’ll be on is when I join the navy.”

Rooftop Perkins was sitting on a high stool behind the counter in his shop on Washtenaw Avenue when the boys entered. The old man was reading a paperback book the title of which, Roy noticed, was Night Time Killer. The illustration on the cover depicted a snarling, drooling, wildhaired man dragging a blonde woman wearing a torn green dress into an alley.

“Still bonin’ up on the classics, I see,” Spooky said.

“This was a best seller,” said Rooftop, without lifting his eyes from the page. “Whadda you know about literature?”

“I know you owe me five pins.”

“Four and a half. Al Prince didn’t buy nothin’.”

Using only his left hand Rooftop opened a cigar box that was on the counter, reached in and fingered four dollar bills, laid them down, then fished out two quarters and placed them on top of the singles.

“I’m gonna ask Al Prince if he didn’t.”

Spooky scraped up the money and stuffed it into his right front pants pocket.

“Your friend wanna have a look at the merch?”

“He can’t read.”

“I got some don’t need readin’.”

As the boys walked toward The Pantry, Roy asked Spooky why the old guy was called Rooftop.

“He fell off a garage roof after burglarizin’ an apartment what I hear. Broke both legs, got caught and did a nickel for B and E. It was a light sentence cause he’d dropped the goods, so technically they weren’t in his possession. Chicago’s Finest found him crawlin’ in the alley.”

“What’s his real name?”

“Baumholz. Don’t know his first.”

“Could be he’s related to Famous Frankie Baumholz played outfield for the Cubs.”

“You ever met someone famous?”

“I don’t think so,” said Roy, “but my Uncle Buck told me and my mother he and his new wife, Odile, who’s French, were on an ocean liner comin’ back from France and they met Ernest Hemingway, the writer, who was also a passenger. My uncle said when Hemingway found out Odile was a singer he asked her to sing a song for him in French and she did, so they got friendly and had dinner with Hemingway and his wife a couple times during the voyage.”

“This guy ever wrote a best seller?”

“Lots of ’em, I think. My mother said his picture was on the cover of Life magazine.”

“Maybe he’s the author of Night Time Killer.”

Just as the boys entered the diner rain started coming down hard.

“My older brother Ben’s friend Skinny Fazzoletto says the best time to rob houses is when it’s rainin’ because rain makes it easier to get away without bein’ seen or identified. People are too busy tryin’ to get where they’re goin’ without gettin’ wet to notice you.”

“Is Skinny Fazzoletto a burglar?”

“Not at the moment. At present he’s sittin’ out a jolt in Indiana. Got nabbed bein’ in a truck full of stolen furniture after the driver lost control and went off the road durin’ a rainstorm.”

Roy lost track of Spooky Spiegelman after fifth grade when the Spiegelman family moved away from Chicago. Roy always remembered when Spooky moved because it was the year the White Sox traded Chico Carrasquel to Cleveland and Luis Aparicio took over at shortstop. Thirty years later Roy watched a movie on late night television called Night Time Killer. It was crudely made and the plot was simple: a deranged man, played by the hunky but sullen-faced actor Steve Cochran, stood half-hidden in doorways at night waiting for an unaccompanied female to pass by, then following and attacking her from behind before dragging her into an alley where he strangled her to death. No attempt at an explanation for the strangler’s aberrant behavior was made except for a cop’s comment to another cop that “The world is full of maniacs whose only excuse is that when they were a kid their mother didn’t pay ’em enough attention. Well, I couldn’t wait to get away from my old lady, she was always gettin’ on me for somethin’ I done wrong.” The other cop grunted and said, “Yeah, me, too. Maybe that’s why we’re cops.” In the end the killer assaults a female cop wearing a sexy dress who struggles out of his grasp, pulls her revolver and shoots him dead. Roy scrutinized the credits and saw that the movie was based on a novel by a woman named Juanita Mimoso, and the screenplay had been written by S. Spiegel.

Roy was surprised that the author of the novel was supposedly a woman but he was convinced that S. Spiegel was really Spencer “Spooky” Spiegelman. Roy never saw the movie again, nor did he ever notice another screenwriting credit attributed to S. Spiegel, about whom Roy did some research but failed to unearth any information other than that one credit for Night Time Killer. A few years later, however, Roy saw an episode of a cops and criminals tv show about a man who burglarized houses on rainy days whom the newspapers dubbed The Rainy Day Robber. The writing of the episode was credited to Rooftop Perkins.