by Jeff Crook
“It’s something about you.” Trey laid the brass rods in his flute case. “I don’t know what. I don’t interpret. I just go where the rods point.”
They packed up their stuff. I followed them into the hall and closed and locked the door behind me.
Mrs. Kim down the hall stuck her head out for a second, then disappeared without saying anything. She looked like she was expecting somebody.
11
MRS. MYNOR WAS IN THE back cooking and there was a fine, spicy fried smell. Trey was standing by the phone-card advertisements with a greasy paper plate piled high with empanadas, quietly and methodically chewing. Mynor was talking in bubbling Spanish to a short, round woman with two short, round children clutching her skirts and eyeing Trey as though he’d just stepped off the mothership from Zambodia.
Walter Pinch sat in his split-cane chair by the door. He stood up as I came in and swayed on his feet. He smelled like a wrecked gin truck. “Mrs. Jackie Lyons,” he slurred, and leaned toward me so I had to catch him. I set him back in his chair, trying to avoid his groping hands. There was a quart bottle in a paper bag by the wall next to his foot. Walter was an old-school drunk, a man who walked himself home no matter how drunk he was and who called any business that sold wine a liquor store. I liked him. Lonely as he was, he seemed to have come to a place of quiet peace I had never known. He wasn’t drinking to kill anything. He drank because he liked it.
“Whose yo friends?” he said slowly, his neck already half rubber. I introduced them as ghost hunters and Walter shook their hands politely without standing up. “What you doin’, Jackie Lyons?” Walter asked when they had gone. “Don’t you be stirring up no ghost shit. Not in my building.”
“They’re not stirring anything up, Mr. Pinch.”
“What they here for, then?”
“They just want to see if I have a ghost.”
“See? See how?”
“They have cameras and meters and stuff. Trey is a dowser.”
“A dowser? What’s he dowse for?”
Trey was close enough to hear us. “Spirits,” he said. “Spiritual residues, energy—dark and light, gates and portals between this world and the hereafter. But y’all ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. That apartment has ugly memories, but there ain’t no spirits, except what this lady brung with her.”
“You ever dowse for water?” Walter asked.
Trey nodded. “Water. Lost shit. Whatever you want.”
“I had an uncle used to dowse with a stick.” Despite the differences in their skin color and upbringing and just about everything else, Walter and Trey were kin. They shared the same folk mythologies. “Once he found a mason jar full of silver dollars somebody had buried and forgot. Maybe you can do me a favor,” he said to Trey. He leaned forward and shifted his weight to his feet, then slowly straightened up. “My tenants say the elevator in this building is haunted. Maybe you can check it out.”
“Sure.”
“I can’t pay you.”
“That’s OK.” Trey picked up his flute case and took Walter’s arm, and the two of them headed out the front door like old friends. Deiter and I hurried after them, which wasn’t hard to do. Walter’s top speed was a Parkinson’s shuffle. We caught up before they were past the tae kwon do school. The bay between the school and the Laundromat was empty and dark, the windows dusty with a For Rent sign, a female child mannequin leaning its bald head against one window as though trying to see down the street.
Nobody was in the Laundromat, but one of the dryers was running, tube socks and underwear curling around and falling down like an endless ocean breaker trapped in a magic bottle. Walter led us to the back, into a narrow, L-shaped hall. The elevator was at the end of the long leg of the L, the tenants’ private laundry room was at the end of the short leg, where a bare light bulb hung from a wire over an old coin-operated washer. The elevator had an accordion cage door, lacquered wood, Chinese silk-screened panels and a worn brass lever that made the thing go up and down. It was also claustrophobically tiny and creepy as a coffin. Whoever put it in this building had strange ideas.
Walter pulled back the elevator’s accordion door and Trey entered with his divining rods. “You need to keep back,” he said to me. “I can already feel the rods trying to pull to you. I can’t get an honest read.”
* * *
I smoked a cigarette outside by the front door. The rain mixed with sleet and snow was coming down hard just at the edge of the curb, and the cars driving by threw up fans of water from the swollen gutters. The smoke felt good going down, scratching that old itch that never goes away. I thought about Adam, somewhere out there in the city, maybe standing in the same rain, trying to chase down his own ghosts. Sure enough, my phone rang.
“Hey Jack,” he said. He sounded like he had just woken up, or maybe not slept at all. Times like these I was glad I was no longer a cop, no matter how poor I might be. I liked being able to sleep regular hours. Regular for me, anyway. He said, “I talked to the director of that Scottish play at the Lou Hale. The vic didn’t make rehearsals Monday.”
“Maybe he had a date with the killer.”
“Or maybe the killer got to him before his date, or after his date. If he even had a date and wasn’t lying to Michi. We’re canvassing the usual places just in case, see if anybody saw him.”
“Anything else?”
“Chief Billet got your photos. He said to thank you.”
“He can thank me by paying me.” A bus bucketed by, sheeting water onto the sidewalk. “How’d it go last night?”
“You mean the parents?”
“Yeah.”
“They said their son wasn’t gay.” That didn’t surprise me, but the bitterness in Adam’s voice did. The world is full of parents who can’t admit their kids are gay. “They said they sent him to a Christian camp run by Reverend T. Roy Howard to have the demon of homosexuality exorcised from his soul through SSA therapy. They said he was cured and had a girlfriend from Abuja.”
“Don’t tell me you believe them.”
“Doesn’t matter I think. They believed it.” He yawned into the phone.
“Have you been to bed yet?”
“I think I slept an hour this morning. I can’t wrap my head around this killer, Jackie. The body, the pipe, the mattress—everything was clean, no fingerprints, no physical evidence at all, nothing, nada. He’s getting better at this and we’re still just treading water.”
I didn’t tell Adam about the backstage photos Deiter found on my Leica. I wanted Deiter to pull out more detail before I said anything, just in case it turned out to be nothing. I didn’t want to get Adam’s hopes up. “Wiley’s working fast this time, running that evidence. It’s not like him to share his results so quick.”
“Director Boykin’s riding everybody’s ass.” A car passed slowly, rap music vibrating the trunk so deep the rain danced on the surface. “The media is crawling all over the place. Why do you think I haven’t slept?”
I told him to get some sleep and let him get back to his work. I don’t know why he called. He didn’t even harass me about going to NA. I hadn’t even got the phone back in my pocket before it rang again. I never used to be this popular.
“Hi,” I said to James. “I have your money.”
“Fantastic. I’m at the airport,” he answered. “I’m headed down to Biloxi to pick up an Embraer Ipanema.” I heard a door open onto the sound of a passing bus.
“Isn’t that a song?”
“It’s a Brazilian airplane—a type of crop duster. It runs on alcohol.”
“So you’re a crop duster pilot.”
“Yeah. For the time being.”
“Isn’t crop-dusting a little dangerous?”
“Only if you get careless. Listen, this job just came up. I’m running behind and I’ve got to catch a flight. I’ll be out of town for a couple of days. I was wondering if you have family in town.” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Because I don’t have any family here and I thought if you were
n’t doing anything, we could have Thanksgiving dinner together after I get back.”
I couldn’t tell if he was asking me over to his place for Thanksgiving, or if he expected me to cook for him. When I didn’t answer, he said, “Of course, the only place that’ll be open is Cracker Barrel.”
“Cracker Barrel is fine.” He made it easy to say yes.
“Fantastic!” he said. That was two fantastics in one phone call. He was nervous about something, but I didn’t know what. I hoped it was just me. “I’ll call you when I get back Thursday.”
I gave him my address and told him to pick me up at six o’clock.
“I’m about to go through security so I have to hang up.”
So hang up. Instead, I said, “Have a safe flight.”
“Thanks. Bye.” He finally hung up. I tried to picture James’s face. Mostly, I remembered how young he looked. He didn’t sound young on the phone. I felt a little guilty about being so attracted to him. But only a little.
* * *
I found Trey and Deiter digging through a garbage can at the back of the Laundromat, spreading garbage on the floor while Grant filmed them. Walter was leaning against a dryer with his mouth hanging open. As I came in, Trey looked up and pointed for me to stay at the door, as though I had a communicable disease.
“What’s up?”
“They is something in the garbage,” Trey said.
“What is it?”
“Garbage. Hell if I know.”
“Them little sticks crossed over the top of the can,” Walter said, looking spooked. He rubbed his mouth with the back of one hand while he reached for his back pocket with the other.
“Y’all stand back.” Trey waved his divining wands over the spread of garbage, pacing a circle around it. His circle became an oval that narrowed with each pass, until finally the rods crossed and stuck, as though drawn together by magnets. Deiter stooped under them and picked up a crumpled fast-food bag. Grant pushed the camera in while he opened it.
Deiter looked up and said, “I don’t get it.” He tipped the bag over and a cell phone slid out.
“Y’all gonna clean this shit up now, right?” Walter said.
12
DEITER LOOKED DEEPLY AND EARNESTLY into my eyes. “Ghost hunting is not an exact science. Sometimes you get a hit and sometimes you don’t. Just because we didn’t see anything tonight doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. I just want you to know I believe you.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“And if you experience anything else, you can call me, night or day.”
I shook his big, warm hand. “I will.”
“If you see anything, try to get a picture with your Leica.”
“And you call me if you find anything on those Orpheum images.”
After dawdling around the hall and offering several more apologies, he dragged his flip-flops out the door. I closed and locked it, then turned and looked at the room. It still smelled like Trey’s chewing tobacco and Deiter’s Viking barn funk. I could also smell the faint, sweet reek of garbage, like a fairground on a summer day.
I got the last quart of beer out of the fridge, sat down and turned on the television. I didn’t have cable, but a Vincent Price movie, Theater of Blood, was still in the DVD player. I listened to the movie without really watching, distracted by the cell phone they had found in the trash. The cell-phone battery was dead. I had the same brand of phone, so I plugged it in to let it charge.
Trey said the phone didn’t have anything to do with Walter’s haunted elevator. There was something else about it that had drawn his divining rods, but he couldn’t say what. I got the feeling he didn’t like me much. I jammed his frequencies. I did that to lots of people.
When the movie was over, I turned the phone on to see what I could find out about the owner. The photos indicated a woman. The phone was full of pictures of women at parties and bars, your standard self-portait with your friends. One seemed familiar to me for some reason, but I couldn’t put a name with her face—a gorgeous, photogenic blonde. The person consistently holding the phone was a young, pretty brunette, so I guessed it had belonged to her. She had probably thrown the phone away with her lunch.
I checked the last number she called and pressed Redial. After three rings, a woman answered, no hello, just a hostile “Who is this?”
“I found this phone. I’m just trying to contact the owner.”
“Jenny, somebody found your phone,” the voice said. Music played in the background, something by John Hiatt, and women talking loudly over the din of a crowded bar.
After a few seconds, another woman took over. “Hey, you found my phone!” She had to shout over the noise.
“In a Laundromat on Summer.” I didn’t try to explain how I found it.
She said, “Somebody stole my purse from a party last night.”
“I didn’t see your purse. All I found was the phone. Sorry.”
“That’s OK. I canceled all my credit cards but I was going to call the cell-phone company tomorrow. I’m glad you found it.”
“I can call the cops, if you want me to,” I said.
“I’d rather just get my stuff back, especially my pictures. Where are you?”
I didn’t want her coming over to my place. One look at this dump and she’d think I was setting her up to rob her. “I can meet you.”
* * *
I needed to splice the mainbrace anyway, so I agreed to meet her at Bosco’s.
Bosco’s was a brew pub off Madison in Overton Square. The Square was Memphis’s seventies-era attempt at re-creating Bourbon Street without all the junkies and whores. The Square had once been the center of Memphis nightlife, before Beale Street was pulled up out of its dilapidation and forced to earn a profit. After that, the party shifted downtown, leaving Overton Square struggling to survive, but there were still a few places around to get drunk and maybe pick up a decent meal. Bosco’s had a good restaurant, not your typical bar and grill, and their beer was brewed on the premises. I had only been there once, with Reed, back when I had a life and more than two dollars in my pocket.
My last quart of Tecate was dying to come out. I skipped the bar and was headed straight for the ladies’ can when Jenny spotted me and called me over. I don’t know how she picked me out of that crowd. Maybe I looked as pathetic as I sounded on the phone. She and her friends were sitting in a deep booth big enough for eight people at a squeeze. They had two big artichoke-and-eggplant pizzas, a bunch of empty beer and margarita glasses cluttering up the table, and no sign of a man, except the ones sitting with their backs to the bar trying to get the four ladies’ attention. The place was noisy and beery without being obnoxious, but best of all there were no families, no shrieking children, just a lot of people wanting to get laid on a Wednesday night. With the Thanksgiving holiday coming up, it was practically Friday night for people with regular jobs. For those of us without jobs, it was always Friday night.
Jenny and her posse were older than I thought they’d be. Jenny looked early thirties, brunette, with a thin healthy face pretty enough to make me look like a junkie. She was wearing a tangerine-colored silk blouse that probably cost more than my rent. She waved me over to their table and after asking my name again, introduced me to her friends. I forgot their names as soon as I heard them. They didn’t appear to notice me long enough to hear my name, so we were even. There were two redheads, probably sisters, and a brunette with blond highlights and a nose like a pug. She reminded me of a girl I had once tried to drown.
My original plan was to deliver her phone, but Jenny invited me to sit down. The booth was big enough for us to sit at one end and almost be alone. Her friends spent most of their time whining about how stupid everybody was at work. I remembered why I didn’t have any girl friends.
“Where did you find it again?” she asked.
This time I told her about the garbage. “I live above the store at the other end of the building.” She wrinkled her razor-thin nose as she
took it. Her nose was the worst thing about her face. She didn’t ask what I was doing digging through the garbage in a Laundromat. She was a little drunk, but then again I was a bit one-eyed myself.
A waiter came by. Before I could say anything, Jenny ordered a drink for me. “It’s the least I can do. I have a lot of important pictures in here. I’ve been meaning to move them to my computer, but you know how it is.”
I nodded and lit a cigarette.
“I’m sorry ma’am, you can’t smoke in here,” the waiter said before he left.
I dropped it on the floor under the table and stubbed it out with my foot. It was my last cigarette, a good time to quit again.
“You want to know something weird?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I kind of knew it would turn up. I think that’s why I didn’t call my cell-phone company. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m actually kind of psychic, you know? God!” She brushed her hand through her hair and glanced at her friends. “They think I’m nuts.”
They would. “Maybe we’re both nuts,” I laughed. What the hell, I finally told her the whole story about my evening with Grant-Marks Paranormal Investigation and how I had come to find her phone in the trash can in a Laundromat. I don’t know why I told her everything about it, even the ghostly woman in my bedroom. Maybe she was an agony aunt—one of those people who put off that vibe that says, hey, dump your problems in my lap.
“That is so weird,” she said when I was finished. At least she didn’t ask me to leave. “I wonder what it means.”
“I don’t think it means anything at all. It’s just a coincidence.”
“I don’t think so.” She nervously tapped the edge of her empty glass with her wedding ring. “It has to mean something. It’s like we were meant to meet each other.”
“Do you think so?” As fascinating as this was, my bladder could wait no longer. I smiled and excused myself to visit the head.
13
I HAD TO WAIT FOR a stall. The ladies’ room was full of tipsy ladies enjoying a communal piss. Somebody was having a birthday party. At least the facilities were clean and my Kegel muscles strong enough to hold back the flood while they chatted and texted, oblivious to my urgency. I looked at myself in the mirror while I waited, measuring myself against the other women. Except for my thrift-store clothes and my heroin pallor, not one of these darlings had a thing on me. Several obviously envied my svelte form. Honey, it took six years on the junk to achieve this famine-victim body. I was going to have to watch my weight again, now that I was off the stuff. I didn’t have the money for a new wardrobe, though a pound or two, here and there, wouldn’t have killed me.
