by Jeff Crook
I recognized James when he walked through the door by the leather camera case slung over his shoulder. He was younger than I’d guessed from our phone conversation, late twenties to early thirties, wearing a University of Memphis ball cap, a blue jacket, new dark blue jeans and a pair of worn out Nikes with brand-new white shoelaces tied in double knots like a kindergartener. He slid onto the stool beside me and set the camera case on the bar. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “The rain.”
“Jackie Lyons,” I said. He shook my hand as though shaking a man’s hand. He had a grip like a Norse god. There wasn’t a ring on his finger, but there had been, not long ago.
“James St. Michael.”
His name was so familiar it startled me. I sat there staring at him and holding his hand, trying to remember where I’d heard his name before, and now that I looked at him I thought I recognized him from somewhere, maybe from television, but I couldn’t remember. I said, “With a name like that, you should be flying helicopters.”
“I am a pilot,” he laughed, surprised, but also a little nervous. He let go of my hand. “How did you know that?”
I didn’t. It just went with his face. He looked like a pilot. “Squint lines around your eyes. Young face plus old eyes equals pilot.”
“I didn’t realize my eyes were old.” They were blue, hard and clear as gems, but a little sad. He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar, examining his face from different angles. He hadn’t shaved.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “I mean you look like you spend a lot of time staring a long way off.”
He turned on his stool and rested an elbow on the bar. “Now it’s my turn.” He rubbed his chin and looked at me. “I think you’re aaaaaay … photographer.”
I smiled despite myself. “How’d you guess?”
“Squint lines.” He reached up and almost touched my right eye. “You look like you go through life with one eye shut.”
I picked up my beer and held it to my lips without drinking. My breath fogged the glass. That was a pretty accurate description, I had to admit. This guy was some kind of philosopher.
“Or maybe it’s because a person wanting to take vacation photos isn’t about to drop three grand on a camera.”
“Only if I like it.” I sipped my beer.
“What’s not to like?” He pulled the case closer and unsnapped it. I set my beer down and lifted the camera from its leather sheath, cupping it reverently in my palms like a splinter of the true cross. When I spotted the ad for a Leica M8 in the Memphis Flyer, I called the number immediately and offered to pay the asking price in cash, even though I couldn’t nearly afford it. I’d asked James for a few days to get it together.
I still couldn’t afford this camera. But now that I had cradled it like a newborn child in my hand, I couldn’t let it go. It felt heavy and solid for its size, the black parts gleamed, the silver parts shone, and when I turned it on, the little LCD image on the back was as clear and crisp as the HD television picture above the bar.
I released the locking toggle to uncover the bottom. “There’s no memory card,” James said. “I didn’t know that when I listed it in the paper. I’ll knock fifty off the price for that.” I nodded and removed the 50mm Leica lens and looked inside the camera body. It seemed to be in perfect condition. I replaced the lens and turned the camera on again, looked through the viewfinder, caught him checking out my tits.
I turned the camera off and set it on the bar. “I’m sorry. I really wish I could, but things have changed since we talked. I got kicked out of my apartment and I have to find a new place, so I can’t afford to buy this, not even at your very generous asking price.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“To what?”
“Your apartment.”
I tucked a strand of dirty blond hair behind my left ear, wincing inwardly at how filthy it felt. “I set it on fire.”
“Jesus,” he smiled and covered his mouth with his hand.
“It was an accident. So, as much as I’d like to…”
“Twenty-five hundred,” he said. “I know a guy who will give me twenty-five for her. If you can match that, she’s yours.”
“I don’t know.…” I hadn’t expected him to come down so easily. He must have been desperate. I was tempted to find out how much lower he would go.
“I’d rather sell her to you, anyway,” he said with a shy smile.
So that was it.
I knew I could get the money from Michi, but I’d already gone to that well once too often lately. I looked through the camera again and knew I had to have it. I couldn’t part with it now. “Can you wait until tomorrow?” I asked. He was definitely interested and it took every scrap of my remaining dignity not to lay it on sweet and thick and let him get ideas. He seemed like a nice enough guy. He was already willing to come down five hundred. I could have put my hand on his knee and talked him down another couple hundred, but I didn’t want it that way. I liked him for some reason. “I’m pretty sure I can get you the full twenty-five if you give me until tomorrow. I know somebody who might buy some pictures.”
He scoured his lightly stubbled chin with his palm. I watched him mentally calculate something, reject it, rethink it, recalculate. I picked up my beer and polished it off. The bartender started over, but I put my hand over the top of the glass.
“Do you have two right now?” he asked.
“Yeah.…” I wasn’t about to buy a Leica M8 for two thousand. If he sold it for two, it was either ganked or busted. I might as well throw two grand off the Harahan Bridge.
“OK,” he said. He set his hand flat on the bar and stared at it. He was nervous about something. I thought he must have stolen it and was now desperate to get rid of it. He seemed too nice to be a thief, but then again, what was a thief supposed to look like?
“How about you give me the two now,” he said without looking at me, “and the other five hundred tomorrow night.” He still didn’t look at me.
“Tomorrow night?”
“We could have dinner, drinks, whatever.”
Oh Jesus, I thought. “Whatever?”
“Anywhere you want to go. But I need at least two grand today.” He looked at me finally. He was blushing. Christ. He was shy.
“You’re asking me out?”
“I guess.” Not looking at me again, his face pink. Morbidly shy.
“I’m married.” I showed him my hand with the wedding ring.
“Oh.” His blush deepened to a flaming Irish red. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see … it.” Morbidly shy and clueless. I liked him now more than ever. My mother always said I got my mean streak from my grandfather—the dentist. I let James dangle for a bit, slowly twisting on his bar stool like a worm on a hook. He started to pack the camera away. I hated to let it go. I’d never get another chance to buy a Leica at this price, but I wasn’t about to trade myself for it. No matter how much I liked the guy.
He snapped the case shut, set it on the bar again, and looked at me, no longer blushing. “OK. If you can get me the other five tomorrow, you can keep her.”
“Keep it?”
“Sure. Go ahead and take her with you.” He pushed it toward me. “That’s what car salesmen do, isn’t it? Let you take her for a test drive, get used to the idea she’s yours.”
“Well … thanks.” He was a salesman after all. He had me nailed. I dug the envelope with the two grand from my pocket and put it in his hand.
He tucked it away without even looking to see what was inside. He said, “Just don’t forget where you got it.”
“I won’t.” Smiling now. “I promise.” I shook his hand again, warmly, and took the camera. What did I care if it was stolen? It was a Leica! I dropped a five on the bar and James followed me out into the parking lot.
He opened a big black umbrella just outside the door. The rain hammered on the taut fabric like a bucket full of marbles. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.
* * *
&nb
sp; I grabbed one of Deiter’s doughnuts and crammed it in my mouth. He stopped on the first picture I’d taken of the cops onstage at the Orpheum. “What’s this?” he asked. “Shit, this is from last night?”
I nodded and took another doughnut. He clicked through the photos. I couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. “Christ. Two thousand bucks down the shitter.”
“What are these?” He clicked through a series of eight or ten grainy purple images of nothing.
“No idea.”
“Let’s see.” He converted one of the images to grayscale and everything changed. The darkness came alive with textures, tones and shades. It was a photo of the backstage area of the Orpheum, but I hadn’t taken it on purpose. My finger must have touched the shutter between shots, maybe when I was running back to tell Adam that I recognized the victim.
“The M8 is easy to turn on by accident,” he said as he clicked through the next few photos. “It’s a known bug. You should always carry an extra battery.”
“Great.” One more fault to love about it.
“Don’t be pissed, Jackie. The M8 is a damn good camera, and there are workarounds, plug-ins can fix the color problems. It’s worth every pfennig you paid. Black-and-white and infrared photography is where the M8 really stands out. It’s superior to just about anything on the market.” He tweaked the settings, bringing out even more detail in the otherwise empty scene. I leaned over his shoulder to watch him work his voodoo.
“That’s incredible.” In one photo there was a huge piece of castle scenery that I hadn’t noticed even though I walked right past it.
“There’s somebody standing back there,” Deiter said. It was only a hint—an outline of a shoulder, an arm and part of a head, leaning out. I couldn’t make out the face, but it wasn’t one of the cops, I could tell. This person, whoever he was, was short, almost like a kid. It was difficult to judge his height for sure. It might have been another piece of scenery, some cardboard-cutout figure, but my gut told me differently. There had been somebody hiding backstage the whole time.
“Can you pull out any more detail?” I asked.
Deiter shrugged. “Maybe. It’ll take time. I’m too busy today. Maybe tomorrow or Friday.”
“It’s important, OK?”
“Sure. You think maybe he’s the killer?”
“Maybe.” Wishing, hoping to God I should be so lucky.
“It could be a ghost,” he said.
I laughed, but he was deadly serious. “Do you believe in ghosts, Deiter?”
“Of course. The Orpheum has lots of ghosts. Look at this.” He opened a file on his computer and pulled up an image named Orpheum_ghost_girl. It was a picture of a blob of light hanging over one of the balcony seats. “That’s Mary, seat C-5, the most famous Orpheum ghost. This is the only known photo of her. I took it myself with a Hasselblad 503CW mounted with an Imacon digital camera back.”
To me, it looked like a flash reflecting off a speck of dust in the air. But in the background I could see the Exit sign where I had seen the girl standing last night.
“Of course, it’s only an orb, not a full-body apparition,” Deiter continued. “You have to be careful with orbs. Most of the time they’re just bits of dust, but I’ve analyzed this photo every possible way and there is no physical explanation for it.” He opened a drawer, tossed me a black baseball cap. The letters GMPI were printed in white block letters on the front of the cap.
“Grant-Marks Paranormal Investigations. That’s why I’m so busy right now. We’re doing a tour Friday night at Magnolia Manor out in Bolivar, then we’re headed over to the old mental hospital. You want to come? You could bring your Leica.”
“I had no idea you were into this kind of thing.”
“Yah, it is important work. You can keep the cap.”
“Maybe you could check out my place sometime.” I don’t know why I said it. Just making conversation.
“Do you have a ghost, Jackie?”
So I told him about the faceless woman on my bed, but I failed to mention my other special friends. Crazy as he was, I didn’t want him to think I was crazy, too.
“A full-body apparition!” he sighed. “That’s damn cool. And it’s a rare haunting, maybe one in a thousand where you get a spirit actually interacting with the environment, unlocking doors, tying knots. I’d love to see her. Maybe we can come over tonight?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like Ghostbusters, is it?”
“No, nothing like that,” he laughed.
“Because I’m at a good place in my life. I don’t want anybody bringing Ouija boards or conducting séances or anything like that.” I had enough problems in that department without a bunch of freaks stirring my personal pot of demons.
“We’re scientists, Jackie, not mediums. We’ll take pictures, maybe some digital video with infrared, EVPs, check for EM fields, temperature fluctuations, that sort of thing.” He unplugged my Leica and showed me how to mount the infrared filter, then gave me a copy of Adobe Lightroom. He didn’t charge me for any of it.
“So, what do you say?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
He walked me to the door. “One more thing. If the seller wasn’t a pro, I doubt he knew about the infrared problems with the Leica. He wasn’t trying to rip you off.”
“Thanks, Deiter.” Maybe he was right. I hoped so, anyway. I liked James and didn’t want to write him off as a thief.
I ran through the rain to my car. Deiter stood in the doorway in his ratty pajama bottoms and watched me drive away.
8
AFTER I LEFT DEITER’S, I got a call from Preston Park to photograph a wreck on I-240 involving a tractor-trailer and a motorcycle. The biker earlied-out beneath the trailer, doing an estimated buck-twenty. There wasn’t much left of him above the zipper except a big red dent on the trailer’s back door. His mother called Preston Park wanting to sue the truck driver, the trucking company, the city of Memphis and maybe God Himself for making it rain. The scene was jacked up on epic scale, traffic jammed for eight miles, car after car full of Adam Henrys trolling for a look at the corpse folded up under the truck axle. It was enough to make you hate people on principle, but I was happy not to see the motorcyclist anywhere. He hadn’t hung around and I was starting to think God had let this cup pass from me.
The rain was coming down in a gray veil and the air was steadily getting colder. I took about two dozen pictures of the accident. The job only paid fifty bucks, but it wasn’t just for that fifty bucks, it was for every fifty bucks to come after. Besides, Preston was a friend and a decent man, something you wouldn’t expect from a personal-injury lawyer. He passed on more cases than he took, and he wouldn’t take a case unless it was clear his client was a victim and not some leech trying to get paid for a hangnail. Some lawyers I wouldn’t cross the street for, not if they were giving out diamond nose rings.
As I sat at the corner intersection waiting to turn in to his office parking lot, I spotted James St. Michael coming out of Preston’s office with a black banker’s umbrella under his arm. He got into a silver Lexus, backed out and drove away before the light changed. I honked but he didn’t hear me.
I found Preston sitting behind his desk in his dinky office. His receptionist was also his wife, a gorgeous blonde of Cuban descent named Leta. She waved me through while drying her nails and babbling into a telephone crooked against the side of her face. Preston greeted me at the door, pulling me into his office with his gentle hands. I was soaked to the bone and shivering. He coaxed me into a warm, clean leather chair near the heater.
“How have you been, Jackie?” he asked as he sat. There was one file on his desk, about five inches thick, wrapped with a rubber band. “Have you eaten?”
“I had a bag of Fritos,” I said.
“We were just about to order lunch from Central Barbecue. Would you like a sandwich?”
“Thanks, no.” I took a disk of photos from my back pocket and slid it across his desk. When I w
as out on an insurance job, I usually took my laptop with me so I could burn the disk and save my employer the cost of a courier.
“I think I’ll save this until after lunch,” he said.
“Good idea. It’s a mess.”
“That’s a shame. His poor mother.”
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.” He folded his hands on the desk and waited while I wrestled a wad of papers from my jacket. “That’s my divorce. Could you take a look at it before I sign it?”
“Of course.” He took the divorce papers, unfolded them and carefully spread them out. “Finally ready to cut loose?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
While he bent over the papers and gave his meticulous attention to every word, I wandered back out to the reception area. The rain was really coming down now, so hard I could barely see the cars passing on the street outside. Leta Park was just hanging up the telephone. “Do you think it will ever quit raining?” she asked with a pretty shiver. She was gorgeous, statuesque, with a head full of honey-blond hair that tumbled halfway down her back. Three children had only improved her figure. They were beautiful kids, their pictures hanging on the wall behind her desk between a pair of palmettos. Leta shaded Preston by at least twelve inches, but she looked even taller, towering over men and women alike with the withering radiative power of her sexual kung fu. People said that when Leta crossed her legs, Jesus wept. She was on the cover of at least one local society magazine every year.
“Was that James St. Michael I saw leaving here a few minutes ago?” I asked. She nodded. “What’s his case?”
She leaned forward, her blouse falling open and half exposing her tremendous boobs. “You know I can’t talk about another client,” she whispered. “Preston would keel me!”
“I won’t tell.” I winked, just between us girls, but she shook her head no. “Well, what can you tell me?”
“So you know James?”
“I’m buying a camera from him.”
“Yes, it is so terribly sad, isn’t it? And he is so young and handsome.”
