by Robin Ray
“Afternoon, Nosferatu,” he began. “I was told they wanted to see me here? My name’s Gregory Angelicus.”
The sergeant pointed to his name tag. “It’s Drașovya, and you go in there,” he uttered with literal droll, pointing to the room with the wooden door to his left.
Stepping into the office seconds later, Gregory saw L’Da, Ba’al’figor and a woman who could pass for Salma Hayek’s sister, sitting around the desk discussing the paperwork there. The debutante, wearing a gracefully embroidered white shalmar kameez outfit with matching dupatta over her left shoulder (knee-length long sleeve tunic, pyjama-type pants and scarf) wouldn’t look out of place selling jewelry from a luxury shoppe in downtown Mumbai.
“That’s some scary sergeant y’all got there,” Gregory announced to deaf ears.
“Have a seat,” L’Da instructed him, pointing to a softly upholstered chair next to the book shelf. “We’ll be with you in a minute.”
While the trio continued their conference, the PI scanned the bookshelf, picked out a book, and thumbed through it. Then, noticing a lie detector sitting on a small table, he walked over to it, twisted a few of the buttons and tapped on its VU meter. Where’d they find this machine? he questioned himself, Benjamin Franklin’s Private Collection? Look at the finish on this thing…and these old-fashioned VU meters. There’s gotta be a little rusty metal plate in the back of it that says ‘Manufactured by the Thomas Edison Company.’ The angels, finished with impromptu conference, approached him, interrupting his reverie.
“Thanks for coming, Gregory,” L’Da said, shaking his hand. Ba’al’figor also shook his hand. When the woman shook hands with him, L’Da introduced them. “Gregory, this is J’ai Né. She’s the town prosecutor, and stop drooling – she’s an angel.”
“Nice to meet you,” Gregory said after giving a quick sharp look to L’Da.
“Nice meeting you,” the comely angel returned.
“Do you want to sit down?” L’Da asked the ex-cop.
“I’m okay,” he answered. “What’s up?”
L’Da retrieved a dossier off the desk and handed it to Gregory. The blue folder had “CLASSIFIED” stamped on its front. Opening it, the first thing he noticed was an 8x10 glossy photo of a presumably dead, black-haired woman lying prone in the grass with her right arm stretched out in the dirt in front of her. Her begs were slightly bent with both knees extended and she was wearing a grey sweatshirt, loose-fitting white pants and black, lace-up, canvas boots. Her face was visible as it was positioned to her right, and to Gregory, she even seemed beautiful.
“Amy Winehouse,” L’Da informed the PI. “She was discovered like this nearly a month ago, just off the Millstream.”
“Tragic,” Gregory admitted. “Why are you showing this to me?”
“This is a very, very big deal, Gregory,” J’ai Né elucidated. “It’s an unprecedented event in the history of the overworld.”
“Heaven,” L’Da clarified.
“Yes,” the female angel answered. “No one dies in Heaven. When you get here, you stay on the first circle for a few hundred years, then you work your way up to the 7th level and then, hopefully, Nirvana. Your soul is released and is now free from the cycle of life and death. Look at the next photograph.”
Complying, Gregory flipped to the 2nd photo. It was the close-up of a dime-sized red mark on the lower left quadrant of Amy’s abdomen next to a tattoo of a psychedelic rose.
J’ai Né explained it. “Tests showed that that mark was made around the time she died.”
“Looks like a burn,” the PI observed.
“Strange thing – that area where her shirt laid had no mark. Either the perp lifted her top or it was off altogether. There were no indications they were intimate, though.”
“Man or woman?”
“We don’t know,” she answered.
“Could be a cigarette burn,” the PI guessed, “but how’d it singe her skin and not the shirt?”
“That’s just it,” she stated. “We don’t believe it was a cigarette. This kind of lesion is inconsistent with those seen from a full-thickness cigarette burn, even if the tip wasn’t glowing red hot for just one second or longer. There was also no ash or cloth residue, and the integrity of her skin remained intact. This wound is smooth as if whatever was pressed there was heated metal, like the tip of an umbrella. We’d profile shoe prints but all soles are the same or look very close to each other. The weapon was probably handheld, perhaps even with an on and off switch.”
“That kinda sounds like one of those heaters you dip in cold coffee to warm it up,” Gregory believed, “but of course, where would you plug it in? One of these trees? We know it can’t be solar powered because this was done at night. A battery powered one would need the amps from a car’s cigarette lighter, but cars don’t exist here. And even if there was one, I’m guessing there were no tire tracks.”
“That’s right,” J’ai Né said. “Even if it was a heater, what would be its point? That wouldn’t kill her. We tested her blood, sputum, hair, fingernails, internal organs, heart, clothes, everything and found nothing unusual but that mark.”
“And that’s the big problem,” Ba’al’figor interjected. “Someone found a way to end life, but because there’s been some…issues of citizens versus angels for some time, people aren’t talking. We reached out to the other heavens for help; again, no one’s coming forward. They think that we angels are responsible for her death as punishment for challenging the rules which, truthfully, she was known for. But people are giving us some slack because they know angels don’t lie.”
“Amy was very outspoken,” J’ai Né explained. “And because the underground roots run deep in the overworld, we’re reluctant to even trust the detectives from Legal Heaven. But, Gregory, as L’Da and Ba’al’figor mentioned at your orientation this morning, the higher ups are threatening a ‘stop placement’ to the entire first level of Heaven. If it goes into effect, no one else can come here. Heaven will be, essentially, closed.”
“Wow. And this is why I’m here?” Gregory asked. “’Cause I’m a PI?”
“That, and also because you’re new,” L’Da revealed. “Haven’t had time to be, how should I say, tainted by negativity.”
“And I suppose you want me to solve this conundrum.”
“It did cross our minds,” J’ai Né admitted.
“And if I did,” Gregory suspected, “I’d be everyone’s enemy. If I was on fire no one would spare a drop of piss to put me out.”
“For one thing,” L’Da disagreed, “they don’t trust us, at least not that much, anyway. Also, everyone knows you just got here and couldn’t be embroiled in this controversy.”
“No pressure, Gregory,” the PI said, sarcastically and aloud to himself. “All you have to do is save the world. Walk in the park. You could do it. Just give it the old college try.”
“I think you’re up to the task,” J’ai Né hoped.
“You know,” the deep thinking investigator asked, “whoever burned her, wouldn’t they have a similar mark on their own abdomen? A reciprocal wound?”
“You want us to tell 5,000 citizens to roll up their shirts? People heal quickly here; by the time we got to 1/20th of the line their wound would’ve be gone. Her lesion healed in a day, even though she was dead, because of residual capillary flow. Alive, it would’ve taken a few hours.”
The PI scratched his head in confusion. “How’d it heal if she was dead? There would’ve been no blood flowing through her.”
“L’Da,” J’ai Né requested, “can you explain that to our good detective?”
“Seepage of plasma from capillaries into small air spaces,” L’Da explained. “When circulation stops, blood trickles down into capillaries and veins because of gravity. It’s miniscule but it’s enough for a simple heal.”
Gregory nodded and pondered something for a moment. “Let me ask y’all something,” he stated. “That accident in Seattle with that flower shop robbery – di
d you guys engineer that?”
“We can’t interfere in earthly affairs,” Ba’al’figor declared.
Gregory studied the first photo of Amy again.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” he requested to no one in particular.
L’Da went behind the desk, opened the top drawer, retrieved a magnifying glass, and brought it over to Gregory who immediately used it to scrutinize the photo.
“What’s this?” he asked, staring through the glass. “It looks like characters.”
“What kind of characters?” Ba’al’figor asked.
The detective handed the photo and magnifying glass to the angel. “See, there?” he told the white-clad being, pointing to a spot on the photo. “That looks like letters by her fingers, like she was trying to write something.”
“How can she?” the angel asked. “She was dead already.”
“Maybe not,” the PI doubted. “The killer thought she was dead but there may have been just enough life left to scratch something in the dirt.”
“That’s highly unlikely,” Ba’al’figor suggested.
“I don’t know,” the well-schooled detective observed. “A quick loss of a lot of blood would result in an immediate death, but even with a death as severe as decapitation, a victim still has a few seconds of consciousness. This was observed frequently in French guillotine executions and also with Anne Boleyn, you know, Henry the VIII’s old lady.” He then took the photo and glass back and studied the scratches. “It almost looks like she was trying to write…
27J
…but didn’t get a chance to finish.”
“If she was alive,” Ba’al’figor noted, “that would’ve simply been a scraggly, desperate attempt to stand up.”
“Hmm,” the detective speculated. “27J. Might be an address or something.”
“Worth looking into,” J’ai Né admitted. “Could be a lead.”
“I don’t know,” the ex-cop shook his head. “That’s not much to go on. This case might be out of my league.”
“You’re short-sighting yourself,” L’Da suggested. “Take this.” Reaching into one of the drawers in the desk, he grabbed a crystal clear case with an electronic device inside and handed it to the detective. “It’s a smart watch. It allows you to keep in contact with us as necessary.”
Gregory opened the case, looked over the device, and switched it on. The window on the watch started glowing blue then the digital version of an analog watch appeared, projecting the current time about six inches in the air. “Sure is a lot of controls on this,” he noticed.
“Make sure you read the manual,” L’Da said. “It’s holographic properties are complex.”
“Thanks,” Gregory said, donning the black-banded watch on his left wrist. “Tell me something, L’Da. What will I get if I take on this assignment?”
“Anything you want.”
“I want to go back to Earth.”
“Except that.”
“Well, there are lots of citizens to interview. How about a partner?”
Just then, Young Tony Lopez pushed opened the door to the office.
“Oh, sorry,” he apologized when he saw it was occupied. “There was nobody out in the lobby. What is this? The audition for 12 Years a Slave?”
“Kid,” Gregory told him, “you really want to learn what PI’s do?”
“Sure,” the ambitious youngster beamed.
The PI gave a knowing look to L’Da who retrieved another watch and threw it to Gregory’s new assistant to catch, which he did.
“Get on your dancing shoes,” the PI told his new partner. “We’re going hunting.”
“What?” the puzzled sleuth-in-training asked.
CHAPTER 9
L’Da escorted Gregory and Tony to the basement of the police station where the angel used his skeleton key to open the door of the combination janitor closet/water heater room. When he flicked the lights on, the PI’s could see the dust swirling around the red bulbs. The floor was still an unfinished gray. Metal closets were latched up on most of the also unfinished stone walls. Janitor supplies from brushes to brooms dangled from hooks all around the room.
“What is this?” the PI asked. “Where’s your morgue? Your ME chamber?”
“There isn’t any,” the angel told him. “Just this makeshift space.”
“Are you kidding me?” Gregory asked, astonished. “This is ghetto.”
“What choice did we have?” L’Da asked him rhetorically. “A forensic morgue was never needed in Heaven before. Look over here.”
The angel led them to an area of the room where, after switching a blue light on, they saw a polished silver morgue refrigerator sitting against a wall. Next to it was a metal table which had purple rubber gloves, alcohol sponges, and clipboards on it as well as a few pieces of autopsy tools like intestinal scissors, a scalpel, bone saws and other surgical items in a metal tray.
“This was brought from HVAC Heaven,” the angel said, indicating the fridge. “It took five days to get here because it had to be built quickly. Before that she was simply on ice.”
Opening the morgue’s square door, L’Da slid out a flat metal table with a cloth-covered body on it. Peeling back the sheet to her abdomen, a clearer view of the deceased was revealed. The singer sported black bouffant hair, full lips, albeit blue in color, excessive eye liner, multiple tattoos on each arm, and half black, half red fingernails. Donning the gloves, Gregory inspected her face, eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, neck, chest, and finally, abdomen, scrutinizing the area with the psychedelic rose like a beachcomber with a metal detector.
“She’s in pretty good shape,” he noted, checking the turgor of her skin. “Well preserved. If she wasn’t in this box, I would’ve thought she was just asleep. And there was no blood loss, right?”
“Right,” L’Da answered.
“Maybe the shock of being poked with a hot iron got her,” Tony suggested.
“If you knew Amy,” L’Da noted, “a steel rod the size of your arm wouldn’t scare her. She may have been a singer/songwriter, but she was tough as titanium.”
“Did you know any of her songs, Tony?” Gregory asked as he continued his inspection.
“‘Rehab’,” he answered. “That’s about it,” then sang –
“They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no.”
“How come she’s in R&R, anyway?” he continued. “As far as I know, she’s a soul, jazz and R&B singer.”
“Her request,” L’Da explained. “She wanted to meet Janis Joplin, one of her heroes.”
“How’d those two get along?” Gregory inquired.
“I believe it was amicable,” the angel summated. “Then again, I’m not really privy to the relationships that form around here. Like I said, we pretty much have a hands-off approach when it comes to the citizens.”
“You know what?” the inquisitive PI asked. “How come you don’t just walk around town and read people’s minds?”
L’Da shook his head; once again, disappointed with Gregory. “I’m an angel, not a genie.”
“Yeah, but you know magic, right?” Gregory insisted. “Like, you can fly. You know how to fly, right?”
The being in white looked him straight in the face like he could clobber him to death; the perpetually clownish PI quickly got the hint.
“You don’t have a sense of humor, that’s for sure,” Gregory mumbled to himself. “Can I see the forensic reports when you get a chance?” he asked the angel.
L’Da darted his eyes upwards. “Yes. We keep them locked upstairs.”
Climbing to the second floor, L’Da opened the door near a water fountain in the hallway; all three marched into the room. Turning the light on, Gregory noted the chamber was pretty nondescript in appearance – wooden walls and floorboards, conventional lights, heating vents, etc. Apart from a rustic cherry desk, a few padded office chairs, a handful of wooden file cabinets, a well-stocked floor to ceiling bookcase, and an x-ray illuminator on the wall, there
was barely little else in the office. The angel, using a vintage Victorian skeleton key, opened one of the file cabinets, rifled through a few sections, and produced the folder he was looking for – the forensic report on the deceased singer. Handing it to Gregory, he stood idly by as the PI and his assistant perused it.
“Well,” Gregory noticed, “like you’d said, she lost no blood. No hint of necrosis in the wound, no foreign materials in her tissues. It also must’ve happened very quickly because she didn’t put up a fight. There were no signs of struggle under her fingernails, no foreign fibers, hairs, fluids, nothing. He or she was holding her up after she got zapped then laid her down gently. There are no marks on her knees or elsewhere to suggest otherwise.”
Removing the abdominal x-rays from the chart, he immediately noticed they felt different than radiographic film he was used to seeing in his cases.
“What kind of paper is this?” he asked L’Da, holding it up. “It feels light.”
“Does it matter?” the angel asked.
“No,” he answered, “it’s just that, since there’s no plastic up here…”
“Radiology is digital,” L’Da answered. “The image is just transferred afterwards to translucent wax paper.”
“Translucent?” the PI asked as he started putting them up for display on the illuminator. “So the picture’s not clear?” he said as he switched the backlight on. “I’ll be damned,” he blurted, noticing the image was not as cloudy as he thought it’d be. “It is crystal clear,” he noticed, utterly surprised. “What’s the technology behind this?” he asked the angel.
