The Metaphysical Detective (A Riga Hayworth Paranormal Mystery)

by Kirsten Weiss

  Riga said a brief, silent, prayer for the dead, then called 911. She looked around, forcing the sense of failure from her mind. A contract had been signed, death didn’t end it. She would focus on the work now, and let the recriminations come later.

  She took a picture of the body with her phone and returned to the kitchen. Riga removed a pair of hospital gloves from her purse and tugged them on, snapping the wrists. She opened Helen’s purse, riffled through her wallet. There were some receipts stuffed inside and she took photos of these as well, then checked Helen’s phone, making a note of the numbers most recently called.

  Riga knew she had time, the ranks of San Francisco’s finest were stretched thin. The refrigerator drew her eye. There was a postcard from Morocco stuck to the freezer door with a magnet, and one of those poetry magnet sets beneath. The word magnets had been pushed to the sides to make a frame of words around a haiku.

  Woman freeze the moon

  Journey to the mouth of dreams

  She sleeps in thunder

  Creative options were limited with refrigerator magnets, Riga thought philosophically.

  She took a picture of the magnets, then sent all the photos to her e-mail address and deleted them from her phone. Helen had come to her for help. Riga had detected magic – albeit belatedly and of a kind she’d never encountered before – and now Helen was dead by magic. Any way Riga turned it, she had failed her client, and a client she hadn’t really liked much, which made it worse. She returned the gloves to her bag and went outside.

  Pen looked up. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah.” Riga looked across the street. Underbrush formed a break between Helen’s street and the main beach road, which ran parallel to it. The bushes rippled like waves in the wind. “Did you go inside before I got here?”

  “No.”

  “The police are going to print the door,” she warned.

  Pen’s brows lowered angrily, the wronged teenager. “I didn’t go in!”

  “Okay.” Riga felt another urge for a cigarette. “See anyone around when you got here?”

  Pen shook her head, no.

  Riga pulled her suede jacket more tightly about her. No, the fog definitely wasn’t going to burn off today.

  Chapter 6: Petrichor

  Things with the police went about as well as Riga had expected: not well at all. The cops were suspicious, and asked her the same questions five times too many. But they eventually let her go, after checking her cell phone to make sure she hadn’t taken any photos. Once the police had released them both, she’d called Pen’s parents. They too, reacted predictably, and banned Pen from further work with Riga.

  Pen howled at that. “How am I going to get stories for my scripts if I don’t do anything?”

  “Tough break, kid,” Riga said, sympathetic. “You’ll just have to age up like the rest of us for your insights.”

  Pen maintained a resentful silence on the ride home. A block away, Riga pulled the Town Car to the curb of a steep street and looked at her niece. “You’re on your own with this one.”

  Pen shot her a stormy look and exited the car, slamming the door for effect. Riga winced. But it was best if Pen stayed out of it and if it took a teenage grudge towards Riga to achieve that, so be it.

  She rolled down the passenger side window. “And no summoning the powers of darkness!”

  Pen gave her a middle finger in response, not bothering to look back.

  Kids these days. No respect.

  Although, Riga admitted to herself, it had been a bad joke.

  She drove back to her office, and downloaded the photos she’d taken earlier. Riga printed them out, and stuck them to the whiteboard. There was a lot to work with, but most of the leads would be dead ends – receipts for groceries, a local bookstore. One of the receipts was from last night, however – the Cliff House. That seemed promising. She checked her watch. It was well past lunch, too early to catch the night bartender at the Cliff House, and her stomach was growling.

  Food was in order.

  She trotted down the stairs to the billiard parlor. One of the things Riga liked about the place was that it was always the same. Day or night (not that she saw many nights), the lighting maintained an even gloom. Local artists exhibited their works there and never sold anything; the paintings never changed – the same abstract above the bar, a painting of sunflowers on the eastern wall. The bikers were back, bending over pool tables, exposing their broad denim backsides.

  At the bar, she did a double take. The man who’d filched her wine was there, too. Same barstool, same blondes, in their silver mini-skirted glory. The silver looked a little tarnished now though, and their slender shoulders drooped.

  Pete slouched toward her from behind the bar. His face was haggard, dark circles beneath his eyes and a shadow about his jaw. His lion’s mane of hair was lank. And if Riga wasn’t mistaken, he wore the same clothing from last night.

  “Pete, you look awful,” Riga exclaimed.

  “Thanks, Riga,” Pete said dryly. “It’s been a long night. What can I get for you?”

  Riga ordered a cheeseburger and fries.

  Pete nodded and moved off to call in the order at the burger joint down the street.

  “Nothing to drink?” the man said, leaning forward to catch Riga’s eye. His suit today was charcoal colored, and it looked like a good quality wool. The dark color made the green in his eyes stand out. He clearly had money. Why he chose to spend it here was a mystery.

  “And a diet coke!” Riga called to Pete’s back. “To go!”

  The man in the expensive suit eyed Riga curiously. To the women in silver, he said: “Why don’t you ladies go play some pool?”

  Wordlessly, they left the bar and grabbed cues from a rack on the wall.

  “May I buy you a drink?” he asked Riga.

  “No thanks,” Riga said. “I’m going to another place later. Don’t want to ruin my palate.”

  Takako stumbled behind the bar, carrying a case of wine.

  Pete moved forward swiftly, relieving her of the burden. “I could have got it,” he said in an undertone.

  Takako shook her head, no. Her black hair hung limp. She looked frayed around the edges too. “Hi, Riga. How’re you doing?”

  “In top form,” Riga lied. “You?”

  “Business is picking up.”

  Riga looked around. It was more crowded than usual for a Thursday afternoon. Nearly all the tables had players. When she turned back to the bar, Takako had hustled off, fetching more drinks for a group huddled around a table.

  She felt the man watching her and ignored him, staring at the bottles along the wall behind the bar.

  “So tell me,” he finally said, breaking the silence. “Is this it?”

  She didn’t turn her head. “Is what it?”

  “This bar. You go to work, you come here, you go home. Is that all?”

  Riga met his gaze and felt a tremor of awareness. “No,” she said. “Sometimes I go to work, come here, then go back to work.”

  He laughed. At last, someone who appreciated her humor, what there was of it.

  “Here’s your stuff, Riga,” Pete said, depositing a white paper bag before her. He slid a receipt across the bar.

  “I’ll take that,” the man said.

  Figuring he owed her for the wine, Riga let him pay the bill. She nodded her thanks and retreated to her office. Seated behind her desk, Riga’s gaze traveled between the whiteboard and the model of the universe she’d doodled earlier on her desk blotter. It diagrammed her reality at the intersection of time and the dimensions. She still hadn’t quite figured it out, but it gave her something to chew over with her fries. Once the food was gone, she idly shuffled her Tarot cards, eyes staring sightlessly.

  She pulled a card from the deck, glanced at it, then drew another. She smiled and put them up on the board, next to one of the photos. She could start calling the numbers from Helen’s phone, but Riga figured she’d give the police a
chance to get hold of them first. She had a rocky relationship with the local boys and girls in blue, and didn’t want to fan the flames by beating them to the suspects. In her line of work, she didn’t need to be first to the punch. She was usually the only one swinging.

  At five thirty she drove to the Cliff House. The restaurant, perched on a bluff over the Pacific, was one of the city’s oldest, but it had gone through many permutations since it had been built in the late 19th century – Victorian, art deco, fifties diner, garish seventies kitsch, and eighties Miami Vice. The famous bar and restaurant was now returned to its Art Deco glory. It wasn’t far from Helen’s house, Riga guessed less than a mile or two.

  She waved to the young hostess and pointed to the restaurant: I know where I’m going, just passing through. There were a few older folks at the tables, having an early meal. Riga watched the ocean through the restaurant’s tall windows. She’d read once of a man (a writer?) who’d bought a house overlooking the Pacific. He’d sold in a year. The view of all that empty space, and the impersonal, never ending roll and crush of the waves, had driven him crazy.

  She turned and walked into the bar. Unlike the rest of the Cliff House, it was steadfastly Victorian, with heavy curlicued wood and inset mirrors at the back reflecting row upon row of bottles. Riga paused at the sight of a familiar, well-dressed figure leaning against the bar, wine glass in hand.

  “Where are the Doublemint twins?” Riga said.

  The man in the expensive suit turned to her, his mouth curving in a crooked smile. “Jealous?”

  “Green-eyed. I’ve always wanted a set of minions,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding him. She caught the bartender’s eye and he shuffled over. He was heavy set, in his mid-fifties, and wore a pressed white shirt and black pants. Riga opened her mouth to order a local Zin but the man stopped her, index finger raised peremptorily.

  “May I? You wouldn’t let me buy you a drink last time, but I really do owe you a glass. I didn’t realize until after you’d left the bar that I’d raided your private reserve,” he said.

  Riga nodded her acceptance.

  He said to the bartender, “We’ll have the ‘78 DRC.”

  Riga laughed. “Don’t tease the man.” The Domaine Romanée-Conti produced some of the most rarefied and expensive wines in the world; its vintages required decades to mature. The Cliff House wasn’t that kind of place.

  The barkeep nodded, his expression impassive, and departed for parts unknown. To complain to his manager? Get a smoke?

  “Now you’ve done it,” Riga said. She would have to grovel (and leave a hefty tip) in order for the bartender to answer her questions now.

  The man’s smile was lazy. “Let’s start over. My name is Donovan Mosse.” He put his hand out, and Riga took it. His hand engulfed hers and was surprisingly rough for a corporate man. But his grip was careful.

  “I’m Riga Hayworth.”

  “Riga? Your parents must have an unusual sense of humor.” His eyes narrowed. “It’s strange though, you do look like her– the actress, I mean.”

  A cloud parted and the setting sun turned the room golden, lighting its brass fixtures afire and casting weird shadows on the wall. Riga started – Donovan seemed to have grown a second, larger shadow. Its head was bent as if to fit itself beneath the ceiling. She saw that she, too, had grown another shadow, its head bent forward, as if the two shadows were in conversation with each other. She relaxed; it was a trick of the setting sun.

  Still, Donovan’s appearance here was too much of a coincidence, and the shadowy figures uncanny. She reached out gently with her mind, feeling for magic. Nothing.

  The bartender returned with a bottle cradled in a rectangle of white linen, and reverently extended it for Donovan’s approval. Riga’s foot slipped off the brass rest, her elbow hitting the bar with enough force to make her wince. It was the ’78 DRC. She rubbed her arm.

  Donovan nodded to the bartender. “The ’78 is still a bit young for a DRC, but I enjoy the vintage.” He watched the bartender pour. Donovan held the glass to the light, making a show of swirling, sniffing, and sipping. He sighed. “Just as I remembered.” He put his glass down, took the bottle and poured another glass for Riga. “I suggest you give it a chance to breathe. A wine like this shouldn’t be rushed.”

  Riga stopped rubbing her elbow and dug the photo of Herman and Helen at the beach out of the back pocket of her khakis. She unfolded it on the bar and slid it across to the bartender. “I’m looking for someone, and hoped you could help.” In Riga’s experience, most people liked to be helpful, especially after you’d just spent a lot of money in their bar. “Does this woman look familiar to you? I think she was here last night.”

  The bartender picked up the photo and scrutinized it. He shook his head. “No, I don’t recognize her.” He tapped the photo with one finger. His nails were longer than necessary, Riga noticed. “The guy was here though, with a bunch of women.”

  The bartender had to be mistaken. “Was there another bartender working last night?” she asked. Perhaps someone else would have remembered Helen.

  He shook his head. “No, just me.”

  “Who was the hostess on duty?” Perhaps the receipt from the bar had actually come through the restaurant instead.

  “Lana. She’s here now. Want me to get her?”

  Riga nodded, yes. The bartender sped off, made helpful by the expensive wine.

  He returned with Lana, who squinted at the picture Riga handed her. “Yeah. The lady looks familiar… I’m not sure though. Don’t recognize the guy.”

  “Thanks.” Riga took the photo, laid it on the bar before her.

  The hostess left and Riga looked at the bartender, thoughtful. “This group at the bar last night, were any of them regulars?”

  “They all were – some sort of work group. They come every Wednesday.”

  “Know their names?”

  “Marie, Marilyn, and Marta – the three M’s.”

  Riga gave a blink of recognition. Marta was a name on Helen’s recently called list.

  “And the man?” she prompted.

  “Never introduced himself.” He braced his hands on the bar and pressed against it, the top fold of his gut billowing over the polished wood.

  “How did they seem last night? Good spirits?”

  He shrugged. “Usual – lots of cackling. They’re a regular coven.” He laughed at his own joke, his jowls shaking with mirth. “They got pretty loud towards the end of the night.”

  Riga slid a twenty across the bar. “Thanks.”

  He pocketed the money, put the picture on the counter, and moved away to polish a glass.

  Donovan picked up the photo before Riga could retrieve it, gave it a quick, bored glance, then returned it to her. “Why are you looking for them? Are you a private investigator?”

  “A metaphysical detective. And they’re dead.”

  “Was something metaphysical about their deaths?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  “Who’s your client?” He put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Client confidentiality.”

  She shook her head. The confidentiality clause had lapsed at Helen’s death. The contract, however, had not. Riga suddenly realized she didn’t know if Helen had any family besides her late husband, Herman. The photos on Helen’s mantel had all been of the late happy couple.

  He shrugged. “Death’s not so mysterious. It gets us all.” He sipped his wine meditatively. “A return trip, now, that’s something unique.”

  “And unlikely to occur in this case, though it has been known to happen.” She ran her fingers along the stem of her wineglass.

  “I noticed that little cross about your neck.” He touched it lightly with his finger and Riga felt a tremor pass through her body. “St. Nino’s, I believe? What a determined little lady she was, full of righteous vigor, converting pagans, founding churches.”

  He spoke as if he’d known her per
sonally, Riga thought. “There’s no need to sound contemptuous.”

  “Did I?” He watched her in the mirror behind the bar. “I didn’t mean to be. She was touched by the divine. I can’t mock that.”

  She arched a brow. “Little lady?”

  “Everyone was smaller back then.”

  “Have you spent time in the Caucasus?” Riga asked, her curiosity getting the better of her. Nino was an obscure saint.

  He smiled. “I know my wine. Georgia’s suffered during the Soviet period. One of that regime’s greatest crimes,” he mused.

  Riga gave him a look.

  “Aside from the murder of millions of their own citizens, of course,” he amended. “What a joyless regime.”

  “Aren’t they all?” Riga picked up her wine glass and held it to the light at a forty five degree angle. It was clear and sharp, a deep ruby color. She lowered the glass, swirled it, and tipped her head. The wine was redolent of leather and roses and the scent of rain on dry earth. There was a Greek word for that: petrichor.

  She drank.

  Chapter 7: Mystics and Metaphysics

  Pen got up earlier than usual. Her first class wasn’t until the afternoon, but she felt wired. She’d never been involved in a murder investigation before and the thought excited her. A part of her thought she should feel bad for the woman who had died. But she didn’t know her, so that would be hypocritical. Wouldn’t it?

  She slid into her favorite jeans and soft t-shirt, grabbed a muffin off the kitchen counter, and escaped to the pavement outside with her canvas backpack, closing the door on her mother’s protests about healthy breakfasts. Something was finally happening to her and Pen wasn’t going to miss a minute of it.

  Riga had given her a key to the office and Pen went there now, stopping in a local coffee shop to pick up a cup of Ethiopian (black) and to pin a bright orange flyer to the bulletin board. The detective agency flyer stood out among the notices for dog walkers, masseuses, and school plays. A goldenrod flyer with a silhouette of a singing cowboy leapt out of the mix: Oklahoma was playing at the local high school. It always seemed to be playing somewhere.