Sort of Dead

by Rob Rosen

  “So,” I said, post-belch, “what did you find out?”

  He chewed. He swallowed. He was one of those tall guys with a slender neck and an Adam’s apple that would’ve put a grapefruit to shame. It bobbed and weaved before bouncing to a standstill. “It was like looking for a needle in a field of hay,” he replied. “There are thousands upon thousands of files. Glenn’s, for the most part, were the only ones that were password protected. In time, I could probably get into them, but time isn’t necessarily on our side.”

  “You’re still smiling,” I told him.

  He nodded. “It seems to be a recent affectation, but, in this case, with merit.” He blinked and the smile momentarily quivered. “I, um…” He took a sip from his shake. “If we solve this thing, when we solve this thing…”

  I’d already had this same thought, so I knew what he was getting at. “I’ll go away.”

  “You’ll…die.” He whispered the word.

  “I’m already…dead.” I whispered the word. It was no less creepy for me to say it than him.

  “I’ll miss you.” Sad, but still the grin returned. “I don’t even know you, and I’ll miss you.”

  My heart went kerthump. “Then I didn’t die in vain, did I?”

  He laughed. “Schmaltzy.”

  My shoulders shrugged. “Just like your smile, it’s a new affectation. People change. Even sort of dead people.” I grabbed his shake and took a sip. Heaven. And I should sort of know. “I’ll miss you, too, Clark. And Voltan.” I took another sip. “And especially this jamocha shake. In any case, what did you find?”

  “I searched their emails, the ones between Chaz and Paula. I searched for the words: wire, for check, for money, cash, your name, murder, gun, anything I could think of that might tie them to you. Sadly, if anyone’s discussing it, apart from the fact that it happened, it doesn’t seem to be discussed on work email. Again, needle, field of hay. If someone is hiding something, it’s probably going to stay hidden. Or maybe that one file that was on your computer was the sole damning piece of evidence, even if we can’t figure out what that evidence is. Yet.”

  His smile widened. I hoped him and Voltan worked out. Clark was a keeper. I’d always been the opposite; I was a tosser. Sad in retrospect, but hindsight really is twenty-twenty. “Yet?” I thought to ask.

  He nodded. He threw away his garbage, then mine. He held my hand and walked us back to the car. “I looked at all the obvious stuff, but there were two less obvious items I found, glaringly less obvious.”

  I stopped and looked at him. Or up at him, actually. It was odd to be alive and a good foot shorter than I had been. It was even odder because Clark was so tall. Maybe that’s why Voltan wore a turban: it gave him some added height. Guess it was a more novel approach than, say, heeled shoes or boots, so kudos to him. “Glaringly obvious? How glaringly?”

  He held up his finger. “Wait. Let’s go home. See if we can call the others. Best to share this with everyone.”

  I punched him in the chest. Lightly. Then again, Voltan didn’t have that much muscle to back it up with, anyway. I’d chosen a body to inhabit that was better suited for a good chess game than for virtually anything physical. But beggars, choosers, yada, yada, yada. “You’re enjoying this far too much.”

  He nodded as he hopped in the car. “Must be that jamocha shake. Makes a guy giddy.”

  True. So true.

  * * * *

  “Earth to Max,” I said, a short while later. “Earth to Voltan and Bruce. Come in Max and Voltan and Bruce.” I put my index fingers to each side of my temple and stared up at the ceiling. Seemed to be the cinematic way to hail the spirits. I smiled a minute later. “They’re here.”

  Clark waved. I waved. I felt Max. My heart swelled. My crotch did, too. Being sort of dead was wonderful, but a good boner was something to truly be missed.

  “I have news,” said Clark.

  I could feel my friends on either side of me. I felt the comfort I felt in Arby’s. The other Arby’s. The one without the awesome milkshakes. I missed Max. I missed my life. You could never have your cake and eat it, too. Not that it mattered, as my past was gone; the future is all I had left—and even that was tenuous at best. I mean, I could go poof, and then what? Was there a heaven? Would Max go to the same heaven? Maybe you went poof and were reincarnated. Maybe I’d be reborn and never even remember Max.

  I died and I thought I’d have all the answers, but all I had were more questions.

  I looked toward Max and smiled. No, I had more than just questions. And, yes, I was schmaltzing again, but fuck it.

  Clark was sitting at the computer now, typing away. “I sent this stuff back home, hiding my tracks after I did so. Look,” he said as he pointed at the screen.

  I scratched my head. “It’s an address.” I squinted at the screen. I knew the street. Nice street. Ritzy neighborhood. Not Chaz’s sort of ritzy, but not too far from it. “What’s so glaring about that?”

  He turned my way. “Who do you think lives here?”

  I shrugged. “Has to be Glenn. Or does Chaz have a second home?”

  Clark typed some more. A satellite image came up. Google maps. The address became a house. Major square footage. Two-car garage. Two stories. Nice acreage on either side. “Guess again,” he said.

  My mind did a bunch of guessing before the reels finally stopped spinning. I gulped. Voltan’s Adam’s apple was on the apricot-sized-side, but it still did the trick. “Paula?”

  Clark snapped his fingers. “Bingo.”

  “But she’s just an account manager at a middling marketing firm. My salary couldn’t have been too far behind hers, and my salary couldn’t even afford the first story of that house.” I looked from the screen to Clark and back again. “Maybe she was married. Maybe she got it in the divorce. Or maybe she inherited it. Maybe her parents had money. Or maybe she won it in a lottery.”

  Clark’s head moved left to right. “Nope. Easy to check. Never married. Parents live modestly in the suburbs of a small town in Pennsylvania. No record of a lottery win.” He pulled up another screen. HR records. They were Paula’s, in fact. Paula’s salary was right there. “Seems she’s somehow supplementing her income.”

  “Emphasis on the come,” I said, remembering the, ugh, video. “How easy was it to get into those HR records, by the way?”

  He shrugged. “Password protected, but files get copied, copied again, sent by email, saved in non-protected files. Like you said, it’s a middling firm; security is lax.”

  Yeah, lax. A guy could get murdered and no one would be the wiser. Least not right away. “And the second glaring piece of evidence?”

  More screens were pulled up. Financial files. Dozens of them. Tax returns. Then the financial document that had been on my screen when I had been shot, the one that was a couple of years old.

  Clark again looked my way. “This was a harder trail to follow. Glenn password-protects most files, but Chaz winds up with a slew of files, and simply saves them without a password. He also sometimes takes snippets of password-protected files, then just keeps the relevant stuff. I couldn’t get to everything, but I could get to enough.” He pointed at my document, which he’d previously saved. He pointed at a few of the others. “They don’t match up, Nord. The file you had showed a rosier picture of the company two years ago. The files Chaz has from that time shows a bleeding bank account, more money out than in for a bunch of quarters. Even with what I could minimally find, it paints the same picture, namely bleak, at least for back then.” He sighed. “Your file is damning evidence if someone took the time to go back two years. If you ever realized what you’d been sitting on and then released it, odds are better than good that the firm would lose their clientele like rats off a sinking ship.”

  It took me a while to let all that sink in, with or without a ship. “But how could I ever have known what I had wasn’t the truth? Plus, the document was two-years old. Why would I have ever even gone back to it? Also plus, we already
knew the final numbers didn’t tally up right, so that document isn’t even worth the paper that no one even bothered to print it on.”

  Clark sighed. Personally, I liked the whole grinning routine a hell of a lot better. “You seem to be the only person in the company with the file. I looked through everyone’s computers, and you’re the only one who had it. Any person with access to the company’s shared drive could see the other information I found. It doesn’t matter if you knew what you were sitting on not, or even if the document isn’t accurate. The risk is that you had it. The risk is that you could potentially inform other people that the numbers you’d been working with two years ago were fake. You could, theoretically, have taken the entire company down with that alone, real or not.”

  “Fuck,” I spat.

  He patted my back. Max patted my shoulder. Different sort of pats, same effect. “It’s all speculation, Nord, but it’s all I could find. You had the one file that could’ve destroyed them. Even if they deleted the file, they couldn’t delete you.”

  My chest suddenly tightened. “Except, someone did exactly that.”

  “And it’d make sense if it was the CFO or the CEO, the two people who knew the financial truth. As to Paula, she’s sleeping with the CEO and living in a house far larger than what her salary could possibly allow. Something clearly doesn’t add up with her either.”

  I nodded. “Plus, she stole my flash-drive. Maybe she was looking to see what else I had access to that I shouldn’t have. Or maybe she was checking to make sure I didn’t have an extra copy of that financial document, or anything else that would make anyone question her questionable assets.”

  I felt a whoosh at that very moment. In fact, I felt Voltan at that very moment. And then I heard Voltan a second later. “But we already suspected all these things. None of this gets us any closer to finding out who shot Nord.” My lips were moving. Voltan was sharing this with the audience at large.

  “The wire,” I said, borrowing the lips from their rightful owner. “This is all about money. She seems to have too much of it. Why and how? And is it all related to my death?”

  My head nodded. I wasn’t the one nodding it. Then again, it also wasn’t my head. “Chaz taped the sex. Maybe he wasn’t taping it voyeuristically. Maybe he had other motives. Paula has money. He was bleeding money, like we said. She could’ve been the one doing the bleeding, as in bleeding him dry. He’s an azz; she’s a bitch. But which one, if either, is also a killer?”

  And then the keyboard started being punched, except not by me or Voltan or Clark. OR BOTH, appeared on the screen. Meaning, Max or Bruce had a new idea.

  “Fuck,” I spat, yet again. “They could’ve both been in on it. Or all three. They all had everything to lose, after all.”

  The keyboard was again set in motion. AND THEY KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!

  * * * *

  It was a very poltergeist kind of scary moment. An animate keyboard. A threatening message. A bunch of ghosts floating around. And so, yes, we were scared. Terrified was a better word for it. Not for me, no, because I was already dead, but for them, for my newfound friends. I was terrified for them, that my fate could possibly wind up being theirs.

  Which is how we found ourselves at my mother’s house.

  No joke. My mother’s house.

  “Why are we here?” asked Clark as we sat in his car, the spirits piled in behind us.

  “If they go searching for Voltan, for you, they could do so at your homes, or your family’s homes, your friends’,” I told him. “But they’d never look here. Why would they? And if I’m a spirit and Voltan is in this body, here is where I can go, too. We can go to your house because it’s where Max used to live. I could go to my old house, too. The tether is there. But the tether is here as well. I feel it even as we sit in the car. The pull. The draw.” I smiled. I smiled the kind of smile Clark was newly accustomed to. “Plus, you haven’t met my mom yet.”

  We got out of the car and stood at the doorstep. This is the same home I grew up in. My bedroom was as it was when I left for college, waiting for me to return. I had a feeling it wasn’t expecting this. I paused as I stood there. I’d intentionally not come back here. I’d only been dead a short while; I didn’t have the nerve to see her. She was a strong woman. I’d never seen her cry, never seen her weak. Not even after she divorced my father. And now, as I stood there, my very soul ached at what I was about to see.

  Clark looked my way. “Want me to knock?” He was smiling, but it looked forced this time. He had to know what I was going through, or at least have a sense of it.

  I shook my head. I lifted my hand, Voltan’s hand, a tinier version of my own. The knock came next. A minute went by as my heart pound-pound-pounded. The door flung open.

  “If you’re Mormons, it’ll only take me a few seconds to get the hose out, and those clothes of yours don’t look wash and wear.”

  So, yeah, I still wasn’t about to see my mom weak and crying. In fact, she was dressed to go out for a jog. Her hair was in a bun. My mom looked like a larger version of Reese Witherspoon. I imagined Viking women were like my mom, especially when she tied her blond hair into dangling ponytails. She was born in New Orleans. She could cuss and gamble and drink like a sailor, and then hold and cuddle me as if she were Mary Poppins. She was the best mom ever.

  “Not Mormons, ma’am,” I replied, my voice a bit warbly. “Friends of your son.”

  She paused, blinked. I could see the cloud briefly pass over her face. I thought my knees would give out, but I held strong, just as I was sure she was doing. “Nord.” Her smile returned. Nope, no tears; it wasn’t her style. I should’ve known better.

  I pointed at myself. “Lewis, ma’am.” I pointed at Clark. “Clark, ma’am.” I skipped the Voltan thing. How does one explain a name like that? Plus, I didn’t want her to know the truth, at least not all of it.

  She laughed. “God, I hope you’re not brothers then. What parent would do that to their kids?” Said the woman who named her son Nordstrom.

  I pointed to the overly tall Clark and the underwhelmingly short me. “Yeah, doubtful, ma’am.” I didn’t point to the three ghosts behind us, who I could feel pressed in tight to me, Max especially, for moral support, I was certain. His hand, in fact, had been on my shoulder the entire time. “We worked with your son.”

  Her face blanched. Worked, I’d said. In the office I’d been killed at. My mom was strong, but not that strong. “Oh,” was all she could apparently manage. Her head was nodding, but you could see her mind was a million miles away. I wondered if Arby’s was that far.

  “Can we come in, ma’am?”

  She seemed to snap back, blinking the fog away. “Sylvia,” she said.

  “Sylvia,” said Clark. “Would you really have hosed us down if we were Mormons?”

  She pointed to the hose that sat a few feet away, waiting in obvious anticipation. “What do you think?”

  I didn’t think; I knew. In fact, I’d seen it first-soggy-hand. In any case, we were stepping inside a moment later. I breathed in. It smelled like home. I fought not to cry. I fought to be my mother’s son. But I was no Sylvia the Viking. Still, I held it back. This wasn’t the time, though this was indeed the place.

  We sat on the couch. Mom fetched us some soda, cookies, a bottle of vodka, just in case. She sat in her recliner to our side. “I don’t recall Nord ever mentioning you two,” she said. “Seems I’d remember a Lewis and Clark.”

  “We only just started at the firm, Sylvia,” I said, her name foreign on my tongue. Mom. I called her mom. I wished I could then, too. And still I felt the others behind me, Max’s hand, the comfort I needed to keep me going.

  Clark nodded. “If you don’t mind me asking, Sylvia, do you know how the investigation is going? They won’t talk about it at work.”

  She leaned in. “If you don’t mind me asking, Clark, why do you want to know?”

  I fought the grin like I’d fought not to cry. Mom gave good grill. Mom could char a
man’s skin off him she could grill so well. “Nord told me a story about you,” I chimed in with, “after we first met. I’d just got back from camping. He said your family tried it once.”

  Mom laughed. “Once was plenty.”

  “He said the bear was more afraid of you than you were of it.”

  Mom’s head bobbed as she sighed. I heard the crack in the exhale. Two could play at that holding back the tears schtick. I’d learned from the master. “Stupid shit tried to eat our food.” FYI, her maternal instincts extended to her famous fried chicken. In any case, the laughter returned, the crack had healed. And we, it seemed, had gained her trust. “Why are you boys really here?”

  My heart again began to pound, an entire rhythm section taking root inside my head. Her son was murdered. Her son was shot dead at work. We were all in potential danger. We needed her help. How does one say that to a complete stranger, albeit one who raised you since birth? I loved this woman, but I was also, again, a complete stranger. I had to lie. I had to tell the truth. I had to walk a fine line between the two.

  “Sylvia,” I said, “tell us what the police have told you, please.”

  I could see her chest rise and fall. “Nord was…” She paused. “Well, you know.” We nodded. We knew. Intimately. “They have no suspects, no video, no evidence. Everyone at his office has an alibi. They told me they’re working hard to find out who did this, but without any clues, what does that really mean?” Now she looked mad. Mad was good. Mad was what made Mom a formidable ally. And enemy. “Do you two know more than that?”

  Clark spoke up. “We came across some information, Sylvia. Your son had a financial file on his computer. That file was at odds with other financial files. The fact that your son had it might be the reason he was…” She nodded. We didn’t need to beat a dead horse. Or a dead Nord. “It’s just a guess. We saw the documents. It makes sense that that was the reason behind all this. We have three suspects, too. But, now, it’s also possible that these three will come looking for Lewis and me, and Lewis and me would like to try and find out if one or more of these suspects is responsible.”