Private investigator Richard Steele must solve his most difficult case ever—his own murder—while caught between women on both sides of the grave.
THE DEAD LOVE LONGER
By Scott Nicholson
Copyright ©2010 Scott Nicholson
Published by Haunted Computer Books
Original print title: Transparent Lovers
www.hauntedcomputer.com
Table of Contents
TRANSPARENT LOVERS
1.
Rude awakenings sometimes dawn slowly, even gently.
When you're dead, they take even longer, whether you're on the sunny West Coast or in a land so cold and white even the angels are afraid to piss in the snow. Maybe this place was heaven, where nothing ever happens, or if it does, it happens again and again with little change besides the price of admission, which goes ever higher. Wherever I was, it didn't smell like L.A., a city where rude awakenings arrived by the millions each morning and didn't get any better after two cups of espresso.
I fell out of half-sleep and slid into awareness in the Waiting Room, on a bench as hard as granite. My fingers were numb, my head was cotton, my lips were as tight as a teddy bear's stitches. I figured it was another tequila sunrise, but usually I wake up alone after a slow dance with Jose Cuervo. Sitting next to me was some loser who had a steering wheel in his chest. His face looked like he'd cut himself while shaving with a scythe.
"What you in for?" he said, his mouth not moving. He had a lost look in his eyes, like a holiday shopper who'd been trounced in the toy aisle.
"In? I don't know. I don't even remember coming through the door." I shook my head and nothing rattled but cobwebs. Gin and tonic, maybe. Cheap stuff, third shelf. No doubt heaven is well-stocked with it.
He grimaced, and his face made wet noises. "I mean, how did you get it?"
I studied the bad art on the wall. Where was Santa's grinning evil face? The bearded geezer had been all around me the last thing I knew, plastered in every store window and ringing little bells on the sidewalk, dozens of them, armies of the fat little beggars. Christmas had wreathed the nightclubs and sleazy dives with green tinsel and red faces. "What do you mean?" I said to the stooge.
"Buy the farm, kick the bucket, go six feet south, win a one-way ticket to the dirt-shirt dance. How did you die, dummy?"
I didn't like being called a dummy. But I didn't have a chance to get mad because I was too busy mulling the evidence of his face. A vague memory floated into my head, but as I tried to surround it, the thought scattered like fake snow in a Santa Ana wind. A woman sat across the room from me, eyes closed and sunken, black as Goth pudding. Loose skin hung from her cheeks, her skull visible through a crevice of rotted flesh. She didn't look a day over a hundred and fifty. Some mortician must have skimped on the formaldehyde.
On the wall above her was a clock, a round and plastic relic from a 1950s elementary school. Its two black hands ran in opposite directions while the red hand, presumably marking seconds, jittered one notch clockwise and two notches counter.
I put my hands to my jacket and ran my fingers over the tweed. There were four holes in it, just above my heart, not that I was often accused of possessing such an organ. I stuck my pinkie in one of the holes. It went through the cloth and kept going for a while.
"Bullets, eh?" said my bench mate. He tapped the steering wheel that had reorganized his rib cage. "Beats the fuck out of a car crash."
"This suit cost me a hundred bucks."
He laughed, making a sound like someone grinding a frog in a blender without the ice. "Don't worry. They'll dress you up real nice before they bury you. You should have seen my funeral. The makeup was so good, my wife even kissed me on the forehead. First time she kissed me in two years."
He smiled, and his lone tooth glinted like a broken Chiclet. I looked away from his obituary face and checked out the holes in my chest. I'm a deductive kind of guy, one who likes to put all the little pieces together. I like to see things coming, so I can brace myself. I've always hated rude awakenings, no matter how slowly they hit me.
I'm like everybody else, I believed I was immortal. Not in that afterlife or eternal-soul sense, but in the sense that I was quite fond of the lumpy bag of meat I'd been dragging around for forty years. I'd even grown accustomed to that off-kilter bristled face that stared back at me from the mirror each morning. Death was one of those intellectual issues, something poets debated in high school while they were busy not getting laid. Death was something that happened to the other guy, never to you.
"Yeah, kinda threw me for a loop, too, when I first realized," said the crash test dummy beside me.
"How...how long have you been dead?" It's a question I never thought I'd ask, even though I'd been around my share of corpses. It's also a question I never thought would be answered. I'd read some Stephen King like everybody else, I'd watched a few episodes of The X-Files, and I'd browsed the good parts of The Holy Bible—where Jesus got betrayed and nailed, and the Revelation, all the bloody, scary stuff. Now here I was waiting for a stranger to tell me the facts of life—or the afterlife.
"About five days, on Earth. It's my second time through. You may have noticed time is kind of weird here. Sort of like catching a bus to Cleveland. You can't wait for the bus to pick you up, then you get in a big hurry to arrive, but you dread where it's going to take you."
"What are you here for? Where do we go? What now?" I fell back on asking a lot of questions. I guess human habits die a lot harder than humans do.
"Oh, I got red-flagged for lying on my application," he said. "See, after your funeral, you're supposed to get promoted to the afterlife. Only, they got so many rules here that you're guaranteed to be on Social Security before you're good and proper dead."
He held up a manila folder stuffed with enough pages to start a sacrificial bonfire. "I'm what they call a 'tweener.' I was on my way to church with my mistress when some clown in a pickup ran a red light in front of me. As my soul was drifting away, I saw him open his door and walk over to where my '64 Buick was tilted on its side. I had only three payments left on that baby, and it was totaled. The lunkhead didn't have a scratch on him."
"What happened to your mistress?"
"She broke an arm and some fingernails. The lunkhead asked for her phone number. She gave it to him. Talk about your rude awakenings."
"Wait a second," I said. "I don't remember getting killed, or any 'drifting.'"
Buick-brains shrugged. "Maybe it's different for different people. You'll just have to ask one of the experts." He nodded down the long hall that broke into a half dozen offices.
I figured action was the best course of action. Besides, Buick-brains was starting to smell bad. Or maybe it was Pork-Chop Face across the room. Or maybe it was me.
I tried to stand, but my rear felt like a sack of wet cement. Gravity was pretty serious here. And I thought ghosts were supposed to be light, vapory, able to sneak and flit around. Being dead was a terrible fad diet.
"You got to wait your turn," Buick-brains said. A few tiny squares of bloody glass fell from his bare grin.
I leaned back and looked around for a newspaper. No luck, but there was a copy of Time on the coffee table beside me. Right under a plastic potted plant.
The cover featured John the Baptist. Man of the Year. The magazine was wrinkled and smelled like a pool hall. I put it back and noticed an ashtray under the plant. I checked my jacket pocket.
Buick-brains made a clucking sound, snapping his tongue off of a bare upper gum. He pointed to a "No Smoking" sign that was duct-taped to the cheap paneling.
"Are you sure this isn't Hell?" I asked.
"That's what they tel
l me. And I don't think they would lie."
I sighed and folded my arms. Another year or two passed. I wondered if, back in my old life, the Christmas cards I had mailed were in a dead-letter box somewhere. Including that one special card, sealed with seven kisses and some ribbon.
"What's your name, pal?" asked my seatmate. Obviously a chatty type.
I'd always hated small talk. If talk didn't get me what I wanted, it was a waste of time. But it looked like I had plenty of time to waste. The clock was still ticking sideways. "Richard Steele."
"Steele, eh? What did you do...back there?"
I didn't like the way he said "there," as if reality were a place from which we had been paroled.
"I'm a—" I hesitated. This gig made my head spin. Past, future, and present tenses jumbled together in a mess that made Mrs. Dempsey's seventh-grade chalkboard look as simple as the ABC's. "I was a private detective."
"A detective? For real?" His snicker brought another shower of glass.
"Yeah. What of it?" Everybody thought detectives wore Bogart slouch hats and Columbo overcoats. But costumes didn't really help with the undercover work or the legwork, or the waiting that was 90 percent of the job. Pulp novels had given us an undeserved reputation as callous, alcoholic womanizers. As if there were any other kind of womanizer.
"You're a dick," he said, a little too gleefully. "A dead dick!"
If I could have moved, I'd have slugged the clown in the face and claimed his final tooth, or at least given the steering wheel a twist deeper into his chest. But I didn't know what my karma situation was. If this was the crosswalk between heaven and hell, a bit of last-minute good behavior couldn't hurt. So I closed my eyes and thought of Lee.
Ah, that was a think for sore mind's eyes. Lee, with short blond hair that curled around her face just so, naturally, without any visits to the hair salon. And grass-green eyes, speckled with yellow and brown, the kind you can look into for a lifetime or two. And her body...nice and meaty, not one of those brittle stick figures that the magazines use to sell contrived fashion and migraine-inducing perfume. She didn't break when you bounced her.
She was the most interesting person I'd ever met, and contradictory, too. Loved books and guns, gardening and NFL football, karate and boutique shopping. She'd been a member of the rifle team in college, but despised the National Rifle Association's politics. She would never dream of shooting a live animal, but I had no doubt she could take down a fleeing rapist with one shot.
We liked only a few of the same things, but respected each other's tastes. When she turned on the TV set on late-autumn Sunday afternoons, I'd go for a drive in Santa Monica. When she did one of her karate routines, I'd watch admiringly and smoke cigarettes from the safety of the couch, half afraid she'd challenge me to step onto the mat. Now I was dead and she was somewhere on that mythical "other side."
"Lee, if you can hear me, wherever you are, I love you," I whispered to myself.
To her.
I should have said those words more often while I had the chance. But, hell, that wasn't my style. I hated sentiment and Valentine's Day and Peace on Earth and all that other confusing touchy-feely horseshit. Lee put up with me anyway. So far.
But others hadn't.
"Mr. Brumfield, please come to the office," came a static-filled voice from a cheap speaker. I opened my eyes with reluctance, because Lee was looking damned fine inside my head. Buick-brains got up and staggered down the hall, leaving a trail of lug nuts and paint chips. A door slammed around the corner.
More years passed, years that weren't all bad with a dream Lee as company. The clock on the wall spasmed, the fat hour hand heading for some distant dawn while the minute hand reached toward the night before. I thought of all the dead people who had gone before me and wondered if I would see them. That thought sent a chill through my cold, amorphous flesh.
You see, there was someone I had betrayed once. Someone who had loved me back before I knew such a thing was more than just a word in a Beatles song. I didn't understand at the time, but I enjoyed the hell out of the fringe benefits—someone to make me coffee in the morning, nurse me when I caught the flu, bed me without my having to make a fool of myself in a sleazy dive. We didn't have a care in the world, and I wouldn't have hurt Diana for a million bucks and a British Bentley. Then I inflicted the most horrible punishment imaginable.
I married her.
Pork-Chop Face groaned across the room. I thought she was having a seizure, but it turned out she was trying to sing "Amazing Grace." I always liked that melody, despite no one ever knowing the second verse. To hear her crippled caterwauling, though, was about as far from a religious experience as you could get.
I slipped back into my reverie. The popular afterlife image was of "going toward the light" where all your loved ones waited around to welcome you. I didn't have any loved ones, unless dogs were getting into heaven the way Mark Twain believed they should. My parents were still alive, and I'd never met my grandparents, so I didn't have any feelings for them one way or the other. They were nothing but faded Polaroids to me. There was only one person close to me who was dead, and Diana would probably not be petitioning St. Pete on my behalf.
After all, she blamed me for putting her here.
Said as much in the note she scrawled, just before she taped the garden hose to her car muffler and ran the business end through the driver's-side window.
As I waited, I had a thought that grew into a hope that graduated into a full-fledged burning desire. Lee was an angel, no doubt about it. And if I could get to heaven, then, some day, some way, I'd find her again. I didn't understand this death business, but I was a detective, wasn't I? I'd figure it out.
So when my name was called, I stood up, feeling airy with determination, balls loose in my pants, chin up just a smidge. I went down the hall, passing Buick-brains on his way back out. His lower lip protruded in a pout that would make any adolescent girl proud.
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"They're sending me to Detroit."
"Hey, I thought you loved cars. That sounds like heaven."
"Yeah. But my mission is to bring back the Edsel."
I slapped him on the back, causing something to rattle inside him. "Sorry, pal. I feel your pain."
I went into the door he had exited. Filing cabinets lined the walls, the drawers overflowing with forms, fliers, and receipts. Stacks of paper teetered on the desk like flimsy monuments. Apparently computers hadn't made it to the netherworld. A female voice crawled out from behind the mess. "Take a seat, Mr. Steele."
I sat in a wooden chair that made the waiting room bench seem like a throne by comparison. Through a gap in the mountain range of paperwork, I saw a wrinkled woman with a flowered hat and librarian glasses. "Uh...hello," I ventured.
She was reading from a folder that I assumed was my dossier. Her mouth twisted in an expression of clerical torment. "Why do I always get these cases?" she said, rolling her eyes.
"Punishment for a fun-filled past life, maybe?" I couldn't resist a little stab at sarcasm. That was my defense mechanism, the way I dealt with uncertainty. Dying changes some things, but not others.
She didn't look at me as she thumbed through the documents. "Some good...a lot of bad...but then, a few really, really good deeds. You know what you are?"
"A megalomaniac?" I answered. I'd picked up the word from some paperback I'd read while casing an adulterer's love nest. I didn't know what the word meant, but it sounded impressive.
She took off her glasses and stared hard at me. Her eyes were like oil drops. "You're a tweener. A tough call. A half-baked excuse for a soul that could never figure out what its deal was."
"And...that's a bad thing?"
She flapped some papers, and in that moment, I knew she had made it to heaven. Exasperation was her favorite mode, and she had been rewarded with an eternity of it. "Well, I can work with it. But it depends on what you want."
She was making it sound like I had a
choice, here, now, dead. So much for living right on the mortal coil. I briefly regretted the sinful opportunities that I had let pass unsavored. Not that there were many. "Why does it depend on me?"
She put her glasses back on so she could glare at me over them. "Do you want to go to heaven or go to hell?"
"Heaven, of course."
"That's what they all say, but think about it a little. Hell is easy, and your friends will be there. You'll get a decoder sheet to Led Zeppelin's backwards recordings. There are lots of cats, and plenty of Hollywood agents around to pick up your lunch tab. But getting to heaven takes sacrifice. And a hell of a lot of faith."
Now, sacrifices I could make, but faith was one of my weak points. Back in the land of the living that I had so recently departed, half the world was getting ready to celebrate the birth of their savior, though I'd bet most of them would go into shock if they opened the door to find Jesus Christ standing there. I'd never taken the dude's birthday personally myself, but I did go in for candy canes and eggnog a little. And I had a weak spot for "Silent Night."
Getting to heaven was probably a long shot, but I'm the kind of guy who likes challenges. A self-motivator. Before my death, I wouldn't have given two seconds of reflection toward religion and virgin births and God and schmoozing my way toward an eternity of further servitude. But dying changes things. Some day you'll find that out for yourself.
I folded my hands in my lap, like an undertaker who is feigning solemnity for the sake of business. "Well, I guess you can sermonize me the Gospel and I'll believe it, if that's what it takes."
She slammed her fist down on the desk, causing the paper stacks to tremble precariously, threatening an avalanche. "It's not about God or the Devil, Mister Steele, or even good or evil. It's about faith, a belief in right and wrong and justice and hope and love. Love, as in caring about something bigger than your own sorry ass. And, based on what I see, I don't think you've got the equipment for it."
I thought of Lee, I thought of her face, and how I ached to touch it one more time. Then I thought of Diana.
The Dead Love Longer: A Novella Page 1
