by Alex A King
His walker stopped. He gave me the side-eye. “What ghost, eh?”
“A new one. Kyrios Wilson, the Englishman.”
He spat out a thick stream of curse words, featuring the Virgin Mary, my grandmother, several goats, a monkey, and a wooden spoon. Arranged that way, most of his serving suggestions were physically impossible; not enough holes, too much gravity.
Then …
POP.
Kyrios Moustakas vanished.
This was not good. Since the lunatic teenager mowed him down in her car, the old ghost had been a constant presence on this patch of road. He never went anywhere except back and forth, day and night. And now he was gone.
“Kyrios Moustakas?”
Silence.
Was he scared? Angry? Why would the mention of Roger Wilson’s name make him flee the scene? None of this was kosher. Something about Roger Wilson’s death stunk to high heaven.
But what?
Up until now the night had been quiet. Most tourists had puttered away weeks ago on one ferry or another, and with winter coming the locals chose to hunker down at home instead of living their loud summer lives in Merope’s autumn streets. So the ambulance’s siren stuck out like a hammered thumb as it rolled away from the hospital, heading west to the more sparsely populated side of the island.
A voice wafted over my shoulder. “Did you hear? Kyria Fasoula was in an accident. Somebody punched her until she looked like my daughter-in-law.” Kyria Maria, one of the island’s many mouths, stopped level with my head. Paint a watermelon black, stick a caramel apple on top, and you’d have the woman leaning over me. “What for are you on the ground?”
“Loose shoelace,” I said.
She sniffed. She seemed to accept my excuse, but that didn’t stop her looking left and right in case there was another excuse for me to be on my knees. If she was expecting to spot a man fleeing the scene she was half right—just not in the way she suspected.
“I bet it was the husband—it is always the husband except when it is a door shaped like the husband’s fist.”
“Kyria Fasoula, you said? Kyria Eleni Fasoula?”
“That is what I said.”
“When did this happen?”
Shrug. “Five minutes ago.”
That long? Amazing. The gossip train must have been running low on old-fossil fuels.
“It must be bad if someone called an ambulance,” I said.
“If you hear anything new, let me know, eh? I must hurry to tell everyone.”
On that note, Kyria Maria scurried away, clutching her black bag.
There was no reason for me to pedal over to the Fasoulas residence, not at this time of night. But a little voice in my head, the one attached to the bonus cat hair in my DNA, reminded me that there was still a goat’s custody at stake, and my responsibility was to the Fasoulas’s children, who had paid me in colorful euros to find a solution.
Casting a backwards glance at the street in case Vasilis Moustakas decided to reappear (he didn’t), I pushed away from the chipped curb and set off for Merope’s west side.
The night was dark but the Fasoulas house was lit up like Greek Easter. The ambulance was going as I was coming. I spotted Constable Pappas talking to Kyrios Fasoulas, who looked annoyed to be separated from his newspaper for this long. The rookie cop waved when he saw me.
“Detective Samaras sent me over. He said he was babysitting. I did not realize he knew any babies.”
I didn’t mention Leo’s cover story was true and the babies were my niece and nephew. “What happened? Is Kyria Fasoula okay?”
Pappas pulled me aside while her husband hunkered down in his chair, newspaper open, forming a barrier. “Kyria Fasoula was returning from her nightly walk when her husband heard her scream. He said he did not do it,” Pappas told me, “but it is almost always the husband, except when it is a broom handle shaped like the husband’s fist.”
Kyria Maria had said the same thing. “Was it him, do you think?” I eyed the man in question and his clean, undamaged hands. “If it was, he didn’t use his fists.”
“Who knows?” Pappas flip the lid on his notepad and shoved it into his hip pocket. “Hopefully we will find out when she wakes up. I’m going to the hospital now. I will send you that email later, eh?”
The neighbors were few, and the few were keeping their distance. Whatever they didn’t know they would make up. I sat on the porch a short distance from Kyrios Fasoulas and watched the red lights on Pappas’ motorcycle dip and bump as he dodged holes in the dirt road.
Kyrios Fasoulas peered over the top of his paper. “I suppose you think I hurt her.”
No, but Kyria Fasoula had a lover out there somewhere who might be sporting cracked and bruising knuckles.
“It’s not always the husband.”
“Usually it is the husband.”
I scrounged around for a metaphor and seized upon Stephanie Dolas and her obsession with cured meats. “Unless the wife likes a variety of salami.”
A brief pause happened while he calculated probabilities and things like the velocity of gossip on Merope.
“You heard the rumor about the affair.” A statement, not a question.
“I hear a lot of rumors. Some of them are even true.”
Snort. “This one was true, but he could not have attacked her if that is what you are thinking.”
“Why not?”
“The salami was that English malakas—the dead one. Unless he is not as dead as I have heard then he cannot have assaulted my wife.”
The news hit me like a sledgehammer. “Wilson? She was having an affair with Kyrios Wilson? On purpose?”
He spat on the ground, a glob of goo landing a meter away. “That is the one. The xenos skeelos.”
The foreign dog.
“You’re sure?”
“What? Do I look like a vlakas? I know what I know. She was always sneaking over to his house, where they would whisper, whisper together. Tonight, in fact, she was sneaking back from his place. Why she went there I do not know because he is dead. You cannot ride a dead man’s poutsa, although one time I did see a woman on Mykonos try.”
My eye twitched. Everything happened in Mykonos sooner or later. I tried to think happy thoughts that weren’t about Wilson’s penis, alive or dead. “You know this because…?”
“One time I followed her because I had to see it with my own eyes. To be sure, you understand?”
Oh, I understood. “Do the police know?”
“Not yet but they will when they hear the gossip, which will happen soon.”
He was right about that. All the ingredients had gathered for the perfect gossip storm. The dead lover. The cuckolded husband. The younger wife. The perpetually hungry goat that was sidling up to my bicycle, a twinkle in his slitted eye. He wanted my tire. He wanted it bad.
Maybe Hercules wasn’t the only one who wanted something. Normally I didn’t investigate murders, but Leo had all but given me written permission to dig. Kyrios Fasoulas had motive out the wazoo to kill Roger Wilson.
“Where were you when Kyrios Wilson died?”
Kyrios Fasoulas’ eyebrows shot up to meet his forehead’s wrinkles, where they formed a hairy ditch. “Who cares? They say he died of heart problems.”
He had me there. “Did you want him to die?” I held up my fingers a centimeter apart. “Maybe a tiny bit?
“For what? Taking something that caused me problems? Pfft.” He slapped the air. “The man was a hero for tolerating her. You want to know where I was this morning? Here, where I always am!”
“And your wife?”
“In the outhouse.”
“In the outhouse?”
“She goes in there with her crochet to get away from me. Sometimes she is in there for hours.”
My eye twitched. “A lot of people do that, I think. Usually with books. Or these days their phones.”
“She did not kill him and neither did I, but if somebody did, maybe he deserved it, eh?”
Roger Wilson was a jerk, I could attest to that. Did he deserve death though? “What else do you know about him?”
“Nothing. What is there to know? He was a man. Now he will go into the ground like any other corpse.”
The conversation had run its course. If Kyrios Fasoulas had killed the Englishman he struck me as the kind of man who’d be gloating about having done the island a favor.
“I wonder who will bury that malakas?” he said as I was leaving. “He had no friends except my wife.”
Good question.
I rode home mulling over the action-packed day. Looking back, all the pieces felt jangled and discordant, from Wilson’s murder and Betty’s absence, to Kyria Fasoula’s attack and her affair with Wilson. All the pieces in the middle stank, too, especially my living room wall.
The wall.
I groaned.
That’s what I had to look forward to tonight: one-on-one time with a scrubbing brush and a clothespin to prevent any wayward curls of stink spiraling up my nose.
Go me.
Dead Cat watched me clean from his perch on the back of my couch. Boy was I grateful I didn’t live across the road from a public restroom. The diapers were bad enough.
What did I have?
A dead man and his ghost. An attack on the woman who was his lover. Vandalism all over my wall. And let’s not forget the random acts of levitation. So far I’d encountered a flying television, a hovering coffee cup, and a pot that tried to use my head as a lid.
What could move things but wasn’t a ghost?
One problem at a time. If Wilson was telling the truth there was a killer on the loose. Maybe his murder was a one-off and Merope’s citizens were as safe as Greek houses with their concrete and rebar bones. Detective Samaras was cavalier about public safety, at least this time around.
Not me.
First I’d unravel the Wilson murder.
Then I’d tackle the levitating.
Chapter Seven
The following morning, a day with low hanging clouds and the threat of cold rain, Merope’s Best worked sinister Greek folk magic on my thoughts. Today their worst wasn’t so bad. In fact I’d call it downright ordinary. By the time I reached the bottom of the cup, an idea had formed in my head. Maybe, just maybe, Wilson would bugger off—as he would say—and leave me alone if I saw to it that he received a proper burial. Church. Priest. The whole Greek Orthodox shebang. There was no way I’d hurl myself at his coffin, weeping. But hard frowning? That I could do. And if his killer was stalking him, the funeral might smoke out his or her identity.
I peered into the cup and winced. A wild wad of hair that wasn’t mine clung to the sludge at the bottom. An imaginary—I hoped—hair tickled my throat. Gagging, I pitched the cup in the garbage.
So much for their worst being mediocre.
As soon as the hour was decent, I rode to Ayios Konstantinos—Saint Constantine’s—the closest and most notable of Merope’s churches. Father Spiros, the priest in residence and human catheter, is older than democracy and as genuine as a plastic figurine of Zeus with a Made in China sticker stuck to its butt. His church is the place to see and be seen, if your self-esteem is lower than a basement and you get your kicks being judged harder than a one-legged woman on Greece’s Top Hoplite, the country’s favorite reality TV show.
A cloud of sticky sweet perfume ambushed me as I stepped into the golden narthex. In all fairness, I might have seen it coming if the gold wasn’t scorching my retinas. I crossed myself, kissed the icons, and turned to face one of the world’s unholiest creatures.
“Aliki Callas, have you come to confess your sins?” Kyria Sofia asked. In omnipresent sensible heels and sedate suits with a ladybug brooch on the lapel, Kyria Sofia is her priest brother’s gatekeeper. Nobody gets to him without her bleached blond blessing. Her exterior says she’s a woman of small-town decency and good taste. Her computer’s hard drive says she’s the largest collector of bestiality porn in the northern hemisphere. Like her brother, she has two faces. Today she was wearing the accommodating face that came with a sweet smile. I wasn’t fooled; I’d met cats.
“So much better than that,” I said. “I’ve come to offer you money.”
“Money! We do like money.” She fiddled with the ladybug. “The more money we collect, the more we can help the poor.”
Help the poor, my butt. Mentally, she probably already spending the money on rare geese-on-man skin flicks.
“You knew Kyrios Wilson, the Englishman?”
Her expression was the picture of Christian sympathy. Up front, Jesus Christ rolled his eyeballs at the gaudy gold ceiling. “That poor man. But not as poor as he would have been if he had a wife and children. What about him?”
I told her what I wanted: a funeral, paid for by me. Nothing fancy, just the religious basics.
She made a tst sound to signal no. “That cannot be done. He was not Greek Orthodox. He was an outsider—you know how that is.”
Kyria Sofia considered herself high class but she was born on this rock to a family that at one time patched their boots with cardboard, like most families at the time. Her little snipe about my status as an outsider was based on nothing except her desire to press her low-heeled shoe down on everyone’s heads. I was above it; I knew what was in her computer’s Sewing folder.
“I guess I could take my money—and a generous donation—to another church then …”
“Now that I think about it,” she said, “I could talk to my brother and see if we can come to an arrangement. My brother’s generosity is legendary, and we are Kyrios Wilson’s adopted family, even if he never came to church.”
“You are too kind.”
“Spiros and I do everything we can for the unfortunate.”
But not nearly as much as they did for the already fortunate, such as themselves. “You are too magnanimous.”
She smiled beatifically—Judas in the Virgin Mary’s skin. “I am curious, what connection do you have to Kyrios Wilson?”
“No connection. We talked sometimes. He spoke English, I spoke English.”
We never talked. Occasionally, if we passed on one dirt road or another, we nodded.
She eyed me. “I see.”
Translation: she didn’t see but she’d be happy to make up a story to pass along to other big ears.
“He didn’t have friends on this island,” I said. “As someone who finds things for people, I was hoping I could find him a little peace.”
“Strange that he never made friends here. Greeks are very sociable people. Although, I did hear stories …”
Of course she did. She had ears to rival the world’s largest radio telescope and a mouth to go with it.
“Stories?”
She squared her shoulders and made a prim little moue with her gossip hole. This from a woman who owned every Peanut Butter and Pooches flick made so far. “I do not like to tell stories.”
“I know you’re not a gossip,” I said, lying through my teeth.
“Because you are about to be so generous, I feel I can share this with you. I believe the xenos had an addiction.”
Interesting. This was a new angle. “An addiction? To what?” Whatever it was, I bet it wasn’t animal porn.
“Who can say? He had packages delivered to his house almost every week for years now. What was inside them I do not know but I am guessing it was drugs. Did you see how thin he was, how pale?”
By thin and pale she meant English.
“I think that was just him.”
“Drugs,” she said, touching her nose. “I would bet your life on it.”
Good thing we weren’t putting money on it then. There was a chance Wilson’s mysterious packages contained drugs but I didn’t think so. The package on his porch didn’t strike me as a delivery from a dealer.
“Did he have any enemies on Merope, do you know?”
“Everybody has enemies, except my brother. Spiros is beloved by all who know him.”
My ey
e twitched at that. Father Spiros was a greased ghoul. He made the Gentlemen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer seem downright charitable.
Kyria Sofia pressed two frigid kisses on my cheeks, catapulting me into the Macy’s perfume department, with its clashing fragrances, battling for world domination. “Perhaps you would like to light a candle for someone before you leave?” She looked pointedly at the large and locked donation box beside the wide, round candle holder. The sand-filled basin was as golden as everything else in Ayios Konstantinos. I sighed and dug out a twenty-euro note, crossing myself as I shoved the cash through the slot.
The church was holy yet I felt like I’d just bought a favor from the devil.
There was a small noise at the back of the church as Kyria Aspasia, Ayios Konstantinos’ caretaker entered with her bucket of water and a graying mop. Kyria Aspasia has one eye, one hump, and approximately eighty years on her odometer. According to local legend, and Kyria Aspasia herself, the hump is full of secrets. She began to slop water onto the floor.
We made eye contact.
Her one eye closed, then opened. Closed again.
I waved. “Kalimera, Kyria Aspasia!”
She said nothing. Her eye opened and closed.
Virgin Mary, was she winking at me?
Kyria Sofia excused herself. Important church business, she said. She promised to speak with her brother about Roger Wilson’s funeral, then marched both faces out the church’s tall gilt doors.
Kyria Aspasia continued to open and close her eye. I hurried to the front of the church in case it was a medical issue. I could easily run out to get eyedrops if she needed them.
“Are you okay, Kyria Aspasia?” I asked her.
“My eye sees many things,” she said. “One of these things I will tell to you. First—” she held up one finger “—I want a favor.”
I paused. Did I want to venture down this potentially perilous road? “What’s the favor?”
“Next time you put money in that woman’s box, spit on it first.”
“I solemnly promise,” I said, deadpan.
“Do that and I will laugh every time I see her counting her money.”
