The Black Stiletto (2 page)

I recognized the typeface as belonging to an old electric typewriter we once had in the house. She had hand-dated the letter and signed the bottom—“Judith May Talbot.”

I had to read it three times before I could comprehend what she had written.

Uncle Thomas watched me eagerly. “You don’t have to tell me what it says if you don’t want to,” he prompted. He was obviously dying to know.

For several moments I sat in the chair dumbfounded. I wanted to laugh. In fact, I did laugh, I think. I asked Uncle Thomas if it was a joke. He replied that it wasn’t and then queried why I would ask that.

“Never mind,” I answered.

I read the letter again. Shook my head.

It was a confession. In it, my mother admitted her name was really Judith May
Cooper
and that she was the Black Stiletto. She had kept this secret to herself since the sixties, when she retired her costume, changed her name, and tried to lead a normal life. She anticipated my skepticism and explained that the contents of the strongbox would lead me to the proof. She also granted me the rights to her life story. In short, she was leaving it up to me whether or not I reveal her secret to the world.

I folded the letter and stuffed it back into the envelope. Then I nodded at the strongbox. “Let’s see that.” Uncle Thomas handed it to me, and I used the little key to unlock it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to see what was inside, and he sensed it.

“Maybe I should step outside?” he asked.

“Would you mind, Uncle Thomas?”

“Not at all, Martin. Just call me if you need me.”

He left the room and shut the door. I opened the lid and found a folded piece of paper, three keys on a ring, and some other trinkets. I removed and unfolded the paper, revealing a floor plan of some kind. I studied it for a few seconds and then realized it was the floor plan of our basement. In the house where I grew up. Where no one has lived for the past two years. It’s been on the market, but nobody was remotely interested in buying it. The real estate agent, Mrs. Reynolds, kept making the same old excuses—it’s a bad market, it’s the economy, the house needs fixing up, and so on.

So what were the keys for? Two of them were grey and appeared suitable for unlocking doors. The third was small and gold colored.

I looked at the floor plan again and then noticed a room that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Hold on
.

A wall separated the basement from that new space—a wall I never knew I could go through. The floor plan indicated there was a door in it. I’d never seen a door there. One or two of the keys must unlock it. And if that was true, what was the gold key for?

Even more puzzling were the other items, which I picked up and examined, one by one.

A heart-shaped locket on a chain, silver-plated, I think.

A Kennedy/Johnson campaign button, from 1960.

And a small canister containing a reel of 8-mm film.

I quickly put everything back into the strongbox, stood, and carried it to the outer office. Uncle Thomas was by the coffee machine and Janie was still at her desk.

“All done?” he asked.

“Yeah. Um, thanks.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You look a little pale. Is something wrong? What was in there, Martin? I assure you, as your mother’s attorney, I—”

“I know. I appreciate it. I may consult you. I just need to process this. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Sure, Martin. Would you like a drink of water?”

I took him up on that.

The three-bedroom ranch house was a prewar affair on Chestnut that had seen better days. In 1970 I’m sure it was probably pretty nice. That was when my mom and I moved in. I was eight years old. Prior to that we had been all over. I was born in Los Angeles, but for the first few years of my life we were living on the road. I don’t remember much of it, but I do have fleeting memories of traveling in a car, stopping in lots of hotels, living in apartments here and there, and finally coming to Illinois. I do recall we were in a small apartment in Arlington Heights before we moved into the house, and I distinctly recollect the day mom took me to see it. She picked me up at school—second grade—and said she had a surprise for me. We rode in her dumpy ’64 Bonneville and there it was. A real house.

Unfortunately, Mom wasn’t the best homemaker in the world. She didn’t spend much time cleaning it or maintaining it properly. I didn’t notice how much it had gone into decline until after I’d graduated from high school, gone away to college, and come back for a visit in the early eighties. By then, mom had started drinking more than usual. She seemed okay, though. She wasn’t a drunk, at least not around me. There wasn’t much I could do about it. But she still worked out and went on her runs and looked fit. Mom always had a punching bag hanging from the basement ceiling and, I swear, every day of her life she went down and beat on it for a half hour. She may have been an alcoholic and all that, but it didn’t stop her from keeping her body toned.

As I visualized her slamming that punching bag over and over, day after day, I realized maybe this Black Stiletto stuff wasn’t all horseshit.

At any rate, I drove straight to the house from Uncle Thomas’s office. The FOR SALE sign was still in the front yard. It appeared that Mrs. Reynolds had replaced it recently. The last one was old and rusty, having been out there for a couple of years.

Yeah, the place was ugly. It needed a paint job in the nineties and here it was 2010. The real estate company took care of keeping the grass cut, but there were weeds everywhere. The shutters on the windows were broken. There were holes in the roof. Squatters wouldn’t want to stay there. It was no wonder it hadn’t sold. I really needed to get off my ass and hire someone to do some work.

I used my own key to get in the front door. The place smelled like mildew in that way old houses do. It was completely empty, for we’d moved out most of the furniture and Mom’s stuff long ago. There was nothing in it but the soiled carpet and a chair or two.

Mrs. Reynolds kept some tools in the kitchen, so I grabbed a flashlight before going downstairs. The basement was dark, cold, and dank. I switched on the single bulb in the ceiling and found what appeared to be animal droppings on the concrete floor. Squirrels, probably; hopefully not rats. There were a few empty cardboard boxes lying around. Mom’s punching bag was still hanging there in the middle of the room. I made my way to the wall in question and examined it. Looked to me like an ordinary wall made of, well, concrete. It was part of the foundation, directly under the stairs. There wasn’t a door. I couldn’t see anything except two blotches of caulk. One was eye level and the other a few feet below that. They seemed old and dry and completely flush with the concrete. I reached out to touch one and I felt some give. Using my fingertips, I pulled it away from the
wall—it was actually a piece of
hinged plaster
! The caulked spots were really little covers built into the wall. And behind them were keyholes.

I quickly got the keys out of the strongbox and stuck one in the top lock. It turned easily. The second grey key worked, too, and as soon as the door unlocked, the frame seemed to pop out of the wall a quarter-inch, allowing me to pull it open with my fingertips.

I must have stopped breathing when I aimed the flashlight inside the small, closet-like space.

Hanging on the back wall were two costumes. Easily recognizable ones. Two sets of the most famous costume in the world, I dare say.

The Black Stiletto.

I stepped inside and touched them.

In both cases, the pants and jacket were made of thin black leather. One outfit was made of thicker material than the other, but was basically the same. Knee-high black boots stood on the floor beneath them. A knapsack lay beside the boots. The single mask was a half-hood with holes for the eyes, but to me it always resembled those kinky S&M things you see in sex shops. The Black Stiletto sure had that dominatrix thing going for her, and that was way before that kind of imagery was in popular media.

The legendary knife—the stiletto—was in its sheath and mounted on the wall next to the costume.

Amazing. Totally mind-boggling.

Sitting on shelves built into the side of the closet were stacks of newspapers, photographs, and comic books preserved inside plastic bags. Black Stiletto comic books—not a lot, but some of the very first ones. Worth quite a bit now, I suspect. She must have bought them when they first came out.

On another shelf was a holster with a gun inside. I picked it up
and inspected it. I don’t know much about guns, but I knew it was a semiautomatic of some kind. A Smith & Wesson, according to what was engraved on its side. Boxes of ammunition sat next to it on the shelf.

And then there were the little books. Diaries. A whole set of them. Each one was labeled with a year, starting with 1958.

Holy shit!

What had I just discovered? What had my dear mother left me?

Who the fuck
was
my mother?

I grabbed the first diary and went upstairs. I needed some air. This was all too much to swallow.

Outside, I sat on the wooden front porch and held the book in my hands. What was I going to learn from reading it? The truth about my father, perhaps? Mom had always told me his name was Richard Talbot and that he’d died early on in the Vietnam War. I never knew him. The really odd thing about it was there were no pictures of him in the house—ever. I don’t even know what he looked like. When I asked my mom about it when I was teenager, she simply said she couldn’t bear to look at his face after he’d died. She’d gotten rid of all his photos. I asked her about his family—my grandparents or any uncles, aunts, or cousins on his side—and she replied that there weren’t any. The same with her own family. We were all alone.

I accepted all that as gospel.

I flipped through the diary, afraid to start reading.

My mom was the Black Stiletto
.

I still couldn’t wrap my brain around it. This was big. It was bigger than anything I could imagine. It was tantamount to finding out the truth behind JFK’s assassination or the identity of the Green River Killer. The Black Stiletto was a
world-famous legend
,
an international icon of feminist strength and power. And no one knew who she really was except the Stiletto herself. And now me.

Her existence had become the stuff of myths, just like that pinup model Bettie Page, who had posed for underground nude photographs and films in the fifties and then dropped out of sight. In the eighties and nineties, pop culture had “rediscovered” Page and her images sprouted everywhere—even though the woman herself was nowhere to be found. The media exploited Page’s likeness without her permission through movies, comics, and magazines—and then she finally made herself known. The elderly former model had been living quietly in seclusion, completely unaware of the attention she’d been getting until a friend pointed it out to her. Only in the last years of her life did Page see any profit from the use of her youthful image.

The same thing had happened to the Black Stiletto.

She was active in the very late Eisenhower years and some of the sixties, an underground heroine who made a name for herself as a vigilante. Although she was wanted by the law and would have been arrested had she been caught or her secret identity been revealed, the Black Stiletto was a competent and successful crime fighter. She battled common crooks, Communist infiltrators, the Mafia—and was responsible for their capture and, in some cases, their deaths. The Stiletto first operated in New York City, but when the police came too close to catching her, she moved to Los Angeles.

Where I was born
.

And then she’d inexplicably disappeared and was never heard from again. No one came forward with knowledge of who she really was and most people thought she’d probably died. Why not? She was involved in dangerous, high-risk situations. It made sense that she’d been fatally injured or even arrested and sent to prison without the authorities knowing who they’d really locked up. For a while it was one of those big mysteries like “who shot
JFK?”
What happened to the Black Stiletto? Where is she? Is she alive or dead? WHO was she?

A decade passed and people tended to forget about her until the mid-eighties, when a fledgling independent comic-book publisher began a fictional series about the costumed crusader. They proved to be extremely popular and sold all over the world. The History Channel did a documentary biopic in the early nineties that consisted mostly of speculation, as I remember. There was at least one biography published, but of course it contained nothing about the Stiletto’s personal life. It was simply an account of everything that had been documented about her in the newspapers. Then came the toys and other merchandise—action figures, videogames, board games, Halloween costumes, you name it. A lot of manufacturers were making millions off the Black Stiletto and there was no one to defend her interests.

A feature film starring Angelina Jolie came out in the late nineties, before the actress had become a huge star. The picture was a hit but had very little to do with the real Black Stiletto. It was all fantasy with lots of gunplay, explosions, and unbelievable stunts. The real Black Stiletto was much more low-tech than what was portrayed in the movie. Still, it captured audiences’ imaginations. There was talk of a television series, but it never came to pass.

Like most people, I, too, was fascinated by the Black Stiletto. If I’d been younger when the comics came out, I probably would have bought and read them.

Apparently, Mom was well aware of what was going on, seeing there was a little collection of ephemera in the closet. She never said a word. She could have capitalized on her past and made a fortune. But instead she lived quietly and in obscurity here in the Chicago suburbs until the onset of her illness.

I couldn’t wait any longer. I opened the first diary and started to read.

2
Judy’s Diary
1958