Nicetown: The Matt Bell Mysteries, #1

By Tom Bates

Matt Bell used to be a respected reporter in Philadelphia until he got too close to a story involving the wrong people. These days he's a podcaster with a dubious reputation who tells stories about the back alleys and dark corners of his home town, spinning tales about true crime, political misdeeds, and as he calls it, weirdness. 

 

When an old friend tells Matt about a monster stalking the rooftops and dangerous streets of Philly's Nicetown neighborhood, Matt thinks it's just what he needs to boost his listener numbers. People are starting to listen, because as he says, "People need the hard news, but weird stuff pays the bills."

 

There's a killer out there in the dark who knows Matt's looking for it, and now it has his scent. Will a centuries old African legend be Matt Bell's last, unfinished podcast?

 

Called by readers, "a flashlight in the pitch black alleys," a "great mix of horror and noir" and "a nostalgic nod to the 1970s series, 'Kolchak: The Night Stalker'," Nicetown is Tom Bates' debut novella and the first in the Matt Bell Mysteries series. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belmont Andrews
• Release date: Sep 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223589204

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

"I t’s just you and I, again, my friend. As always, I am Matthew Bell, your host and guide as we shine our lights into the dark places and history of the City of Brotherly Love. Welcome to Voices of Friends, Vanished and Gone ."

That’s how I started this episode, like I started every one since I settled on my format about three years ago. My podcast was called Voices of Friends, Vanished and Gone after the lyrics in Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Philadelphia, a subtle nod to the city in which I have worked most of my professional career. I had been what some folks would call a legitimate journalist in Philly, once. I did investigative work for a local broadsheet, the Philly Metro, until circumstance and fortune fucked me over pretty good.

Any reporter will tell you that if you write the wrong thing about the wrong folks at the wrong time, you’re done. You don’t even need that many wrongs. One well placed wrong can sometimes do it for you. Most good reporters will also tell you that, in their careers, there had been a story or two where they listened to that adage and now they wish they would have gone to print with it, anyway.  I followed the latter instinct a while ago on a hard story regarding the drug trade in Kensington and…well, I got royally fucked by some folks with the clout to do it. They were some still unknown heavy hitters with some real clout, and I got too close. A few years of drinking and feeling sorry for myself, and a few more tending bar in some local dives and I started to think about where I went wrong, or what I missed. That, my friend, is a story for another time and another round of beers. 

In the streets of Philadelphia, it’s not all brotherly love, I said in my most affected, mellifluous voice. I was only a few years into this and I was still cultivating my style. There are unpleasant things that occur in the dark alleys of Olney and bright boulevards of Chestnut Hill. Tonight’s tale from the shadows deals with one of the unsavory corners of our ‘greene country towne.’ The Nicetown neighborhood in North Philly is a rough place filled with good people trying to get theirs in an unfair world. It also has more than its share of menace and dread.  Most of our stories start with someone being somewhere they shouldn’t be, or seeing something that they shouldn’t see. This one starts with Percy Williams, a solitary, long time resident of the neighborhood. Percy saw something that should not have been there, and it cost him.

Percy Williams lived and died in the same house on West Atlantic Street in the Nicetown neighborhood of North Philadelphia since he was born in 1938. His folks had been renters in a neighborhood that was rough then and has only gotten worse. Percy’s neighbors would tell you, There ain’t nothin’ nice in Nicetown.

Percy’s parents had migrated north from somewhere in the Carolinas. From where and which one, he wasn’t sure. They had told him once, but he forgot. Where they came from didn’t really matter to him. They eventually bought the modest rowhouse from their landlord in the 1960s, as the neighborhood was going from bad to worse as the factories and manufacturers left, ripping the economic heart out of the neighborhood.

His parents both died back in the 70s and left the house to Percy and his younger sister, Carolina, named after her parents’ home state. She got married around that same time and Carolina and her husband sold her half of the house to Percy for $2,500. He only saw her once after that, when she came to visit when he broke his leg and wound up in the hospital. The row home wasn’t much, but it was all their folks had outside of an old brown Oldsmobile, but Percy never got around to learning how to drive, so he didn’t need it. Everything he thought he wanted was within walking distance so why bother?

There had always been rats in Nicetown. You didn’t alway see them, but you always heard them. Their skitterings and squeaks were a constant part of the neighborhood’s soundtrack after dark, much like the indecipherable shouts of the undiagnosed schizophrenics who always seemed to find themselves in Nicetown, the solicitations of the hookers whom Percy mostly ignored or the gunshots of rival drug gangs, fighting a decades long war of attrition for the more profitable corners. Percy was never afraid of rats, but that doesn’t mean he liked them either. Whenever he would have to go down to the basement, he would turn the light on with the switch at the top of the creaky old wooden stairs and wait a minute or so, hearing the dirty, little bastards scratch and squeal as they ran to their cracks in the walls. He had tried, on more than one occasion, to get rid of them. He called an exterminator, one that had been recommended by someone from his family’s old congregation who occasionally stopped in to check on him. It had worked, but only for a little while. The rats would always come back after a week or so. A rat vacation is how he came to think of it. 

It didn’t help that the house next door had alternated between being abandoned and being a crack house for years. He didn’t like it, but if they didn’t fuck with him, he wouldn’t fuck with them. Plus, what was he gonna do? Dealers had guns and he didn’t.

This particular evening, he wanted white beans with his fried pork chop and he knew that there were a couple of cans on the rusty, old rack near the boiler in the basement. Percy walked to the cellar door with the blue paint that had looked fresh back in the 80’s. He ran through his routine of noisily opening the creaky door, flicking the light on and off a few times, waiting for a minute or so, and then carefully walking down the deteriorating steps.  He was conscious to avoid stepping on that damn third step, which had cracked and which he had been promising himself he would fix for a dozen years. 

It was as he was stepping as lightly as his old joints would let him on the fourth step that he heard it, or rather didn’t hear it.  That familiar noise of screeching and scraping as the denizens of the basement scrambled away from their upstairs neighbor…wasn’t there. The basement was empty and quiet and that quiet was frightening. Neighborhoods like Nicetown were never quiet, so a sudden lack of sound was as noticeable as a siren on the Main Line. He called out, Rats?, half jokingly, to take some ownership of his environment and, maybe, alleviate his anxiety.  It’s an odd feeling to get the jitters over what is not there rather than what is.  Where you at, he asked, you filthy motherfuckers? Nothing. Silence.

Percy was not a man of reflection and consideration. Never had been. His anxiety was dismissed like he had dismissed most people. He took two shaky steps over the cracked and uneven cement floor toward the makeshift pantry. The racks, that would have looked more at home in a garage or warehouse than in a basement, held miscellaneous cans and some larger, heavier pots and pans that he didn’t have the strength to use anymore. The old man found and reached for his can of white beans. There you are, he said aloud, trying to break the silence and subconsciously stifle the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. 

He turned slowly towards the steps to return to the kitchen only to see a pair of bright, green eyes staring at him from through the open risers. Cat’s eyes, Percy thought. There was a shape in the shadows under the wooden stairs, too. The light from the solitary hanging bulb reflected in odd green eyes back at Percy. The light from the eyes did not seem to be just a reflection. They appeared to glow on their own. He couldn’t tell who or what it was. Shocked and startled, he tried to shout, but the figure under the stairs lunged, wrapping clawed hands around his throat and tearing at the papery skin of the now panicking octogenarian. The old man fell back under the force, his neck starting to bleed, and struck his head on the cast iron pipes of the ancient water heater. The impact sent a loud clang reverberating through the house that no one would hear. Percy slumped to the dusty cement floor, his blood pooling from a gash in his head, spilling across the uneven cement in tiny rivulets, picking up dust and dirt as it searched for the low point on the floor. His killer, we can call him that as by now we know Percy was certainly dying, lept silently up the steps to escape, easily clearing the broken third stair. No one saw as the figure, which Percy thought looked like a big cat, moved across the kitchen and out through the back door into the darkened alley behind the house. 

CHAPTER 2

Iwas having a beer at the Clean Sheet, the English Pub-style bar near my apartment where I sometimes worked, and often drank, when my phone beeped telling me I had voicemail. I hadn’t felt my phone vibrate with a call. Yo, Matt-ay, the voice on my cell phone said, I got some weirdness for you. I had no idea when the message was left. I assumed it was very late the night before. The voice emphasized the word weirdness. You know, for your internet jawn, or whatever.

The beautiful, baritone voice on my phone belonged to Antoine Twan Barber, a fifty-something North Philly man-about-town.  I had worked with him a few times earlier in my career when I was still a real print journalist.  I never knew if Twan had a legitimate job or not, but if I wanted to know any of the inside dirt anywhere west of North Broad Street, or if I needed to find someone who did, he was usually the first person I would talk to.

Call the bar at Jackie’s and ask for me, the message continued.  Still ain’t got a cellphone.

I shifted on my barstool and finished the last few swigs of my ESB. It was late on a warm Tuesday afternoon in May and I was wearing shorts, old running shoes and a threadbare Temple Rugby hoodie which had seen better days, much like me.

I didn’t usually drink on weekdays, but I was celebrating a little. My podcast had just picked up a decent-sized sponsor. A local law firm would pay me $200 every time I mentioned their name and email address on my podcast, as long as I didn’t do it more than four times a month. The firm specialized in personal injury and had a marginal local reputation, but 800 bucks was something I could not say no to. Not a huge payday, but it would help chip away at my credit card bill.

These days I was more of a storyteller than an actual journalist, so, I told stories about some of the darker parts of Philadelphia. VOF/VAG, the stylized brand for my show, for which I had paid some marketing undergrad from Drexel a hundred bucks and a case of Yards IPA had just passed 25,000 downloads a month. It wasn’t Radiolab or Serial, but it was starting to make a name.

I was born and raised in Delco, or, Delaware County to the uninitiated, just southwest of Philly, but have lived in the city my entire adult life. The stories I told tended to revolve around the dirty politics, deceit, and general scumbaggery that a big city like Philadelphia tends to cultivate. I also, to borrow Twan’s word, told more than a few stories about weirdness. Philly’s an old city, and all that history and folklore comes with a lot of strangeness, and with those weird stories have come a lot of downloads. Locals like the crime and politics, which tend to go hand-in-hand, but apparently everyone else likes the other stuff, and, like I say, weird shit keeps the lights on.

Normally, I wouldn’t have bitten on Twan’s lead, but since signing the new endorsement deal, I needed something new to capture some ears and he knew, sometimes literally, I believed, where the bodies were buried.

I flagged down Ramon, the day bartender, to pay my tab, but he just waved me off. Nodding my thanks, I dropped a twenty on the bar and walked out into the sunny afternoon. I called Jackie’s.

I knew Jackie’s, but had never been there. It was one of the local taprooms for Nicetown and didn’t really have much of a reputation. It was locals only and, I found, they wanted to keep it that way.  

After convincing the bartender, a sullen sounding woman named Angelique, that I was not a process server and that I was an actual acquaintance of Twan’s, she