Stolen Ghouls

by Alex A King

  “Bad poutsa,” she said. “I need something corrosive to get the taste out of my mouth.”

  Across the street and behind the bushes, there was a squeak. I really didn’t want to know what Jimmy was doing in there. There wasn’t enough brain bleach in the world.

  “Have you thought about quitting, or at least slowing down your poutsa consumption?”

  Her grin was positively vulpine. “No.”

  Well, all righty then.

  “I had a fight with my sister,” I said, eager to swing the conversation away from bad penis. “Actually, I think she had a fight with me and then she hung up. I never got a chance to fight back.”

  “You know I don’t care, yes?”

  “That’s why I told you.”

  “I’m going to get coffee. If you’re still here when I get back, do you want to sit here and ignore each other?”

  “Sure.”

  On that note, she vanished in to Merope’s Best. Across the street, Jimmy’s beard and nose peeked out from behind the bushes.

  “Pssst!”

  I ignored him. It felt good.

  A moment later, my phone buzzed. Text message from the toddler-sized man in the bushes.

  Did she say anything about me?

  Why, what did you do?

  Nothing. I was hoping you would.

  I sighed and took another swig of coffee-like liquid.

  Kind of busy right now, I typed. Come on over and talk to her.

  Forget it. I’m going to stay here in the bushes.

  That’s not at all creepy.

  Good.

  I was being sarcastic.

  You’re kind of a skeela, you know that?

  Skeela is the Greek word for a female dog. Swap the first two letters and you’d have wood. Not pants wood—tree wood.

  Could be worse. I could be a nanos.

  A raised middle finger appeared over the bush’s leafy top.

  Lydia returned with a steaming cup of toxic waste. She sat down beside me on the concrete, took a cautious sip.

  “Did it work?”

  She sighed. “I’ve traded one bad taste for another. But at least this doesn’t have pubes.”

  “That’s because they sink to the bottom.”

  She snorted. Brown liquid shot out her nose. I passed her a tissue.

  Across the street the bushes were on the move again. Why couldn’t Jimmy do that in private like a normal person?

  There was a small yelp, then Jimmy flew out into the middle of the street and rolled until he landed in front of us. He wasn’t the only flying thing. The bushes jerked up out of the ground, much to the horror of Kyrios Yiannis, the dead gardener. His clippers stopped clipping and he watched, mouth open, eyes wide, as one of the bushes rose up and smashed through my apartment window.

  Well, crap. “Bit of a sea breeze today,” I said casually, like this happened every day.

  “A tree just broke your window,” Lydia said. She was watching the whole thing with curiosity, not fear.

  “Technically it’s a bush.”

  “Ungh!” Jimmy said. He peeled his face off the concrete. His skin looked like raw gyro meat. “How bad is it?”

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

  He winced. “Good.”

  You’re still a nanos, was what I’d planned to say, but I knew he liked Lydia and didn’t want to diminish him in front of her. He was perfectly capable of doing that himself. “Your beard saved half your face.”

  “I knew it would be useful one day,” he said. His gaze slid sideways to Lydia, who, from the look on her face, was still working to get the bad taste out of her mouth. “Someone needs to do something about the weather on this island.”

  “You should write a song about it,” I said.

  “I hate you,” he said.

  “A cautionary tale.”

  “I really hate you.”

  As I stood up, I hummed the Oompa Loompa tune and pitched my half-full cup into the garbage. My old pal the poltergeist was hanging around and it wanted attention.

  “Where are you going?” Jimmy said, eyes wild.

  “I’m going to leave you two to get to know each other,” I said. “And I’d do something about your face if I were you. Band-Aids. Balaclava. Mask. Guillotine.”

  “I really, really hate you,” he said.

  “Hate you right back.”

  On that entertaining note, I jogged back upstairs to assess the damage. The window was less of a window and more of a glassless hole. Safely in his salt circle, Wilson was wringing his hands. “It knows I’m here!”

  I played stupid. It wasn’t entirely an act. Wilson obviously knew about the poltergeist but I couldn’t figure out how. “It?”

  “Behind you!”

  I turned in time to dodge a flying cushion. Not cool. Not cool at all. This was my place and I’d done nothing that would cheese off a poltergeist.

  “You’re bloody useless!” Wilson said in his outdoor voice. “Your whole life is a complete balls up! You led it right here!”

  This freakin’ guy. I’d had more than enough of him and his mouth.

  I ignored him. He wasn’t the immediate problem. I had to get this poltergeist out of here before it tore up my home.

  “Cut the crap,” I told it. “If you’ve got a problem with me, find a pen and paper and start a letter writing campaign. Otherwise, go see if the boats are moving.”

  That was the Greek way of telling it to go jump in a lake.

  The pillow booped my nose.

  “Stop that!” I said.

  Dead Cat appeared, huge and hulking, his appearance that of a viking on his way to a pillaging. He sprang up and swatted the cushion. It fell the ground. Everything went still, except my cat. He sniffed the foam-filled case, then began to knead it with his paws before curling up in a transparent ball in its plush center.

  I swung around to look at the ghost in the circle. “What did you do?” I asked Roger Wilson. “Poltergeists are ghosts that are good and pissed off. What did you do?”

  “What are you looking at me for?” he said. “I didn’t do nowt! I’m the bloody victim here!”

  “I don’t believe you. You did something, and I intend to find out what. And when I do, I’m thinking I might just hand you over.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me. I dare you.”

  Dead Cat was purring like a miniature freight train. The Afterlife’s most chilled out cat didn’t give a fig about things like poltergeists.

  “If fish had ghosts I’d bring you a bowl,” I told him.

  He purred harder.

  Like me, my to-do list had gained weight in the past day. I had to make things right with Toula; dig further into Sir Teddy Duckworth’s past before Angela took off for England to confront him about his hobby; sort out custody of Hercules, the Fasoulas’ goat; put an end to this poltergeist chasing Wilson around and pestering me in the process.

  Priorities. I needed them.

  Toula could wait. She held on to her grudges forever so this one wouldn’t be dissipating any time soon. Angela wasn’t leaving until the morning, so I had hours.

  The poltergeist.

  Hercules the goat.

  The alleged murder of one Roger Wilson.

  Roger Wilson knew something about the poltergeist. Too bad the pasty dweeb wouldn’t talk.

  My phone rang. Kyria Fasoula was on the other end.

  “I do not want you to think I love my husband. How could anybody love a man who uses his Greek underpants as toilet paper? But I think maybe he needs your help with a small problem that could be a big problem if he has to speak to the police for more than a minute.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I overheard the police saying they were going to arrest him.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kyrios Fasoulas and his newspaper were nowhere to be found. The house was locked and the goat was gnawing on the outhouse door. Why either of them wanted the goat
was beyond me. It looked like trouble, even for a goat.

  As I was leaving the yard, who should appear but Kyria Sofia. The priest’s sister walked all over the island in her low heeled shoes and her dressy suits. Today, inexplicably, she was here with a basket over one arm.

  “I came to bring my brother’s blessings but on the way a little poulaki told me that the police took him into custody not thirty minutes ago.”

  A poulaki is a little bird. A poulaki is also a small penis. Given Kyria Sofia’s sexual preferences I was confused about where she’d scored this information. I saw a video once with a man and a chicken. Things did not go well for the chicken.

  I faked surprise. “Arrested? Why?”

  “For beating his wife, of course. It is fine to make your wife eat wood, especially if she is misbehaving, but when other people find out … that does not look good. You know how people love to talk.”

  My eye twitched at all the misogyny, and from a woman no less. There was no writing on this wall but I could read the writing just fine anyway. Kyria Sofia heard about the attack on Kyria Fasoula, and she wanted to bring the husband to the church so she could listen in while he confessed his sins to her brother. The Greek Orthodox Church doesn’t perform Catholic-style confessions, but priests do listen when someone wants to spill their guts and other secrets. The arrest was a fly in the ointment, but a convenient fly. I had no doubt that Kyria Sofia would have used the opportunity to snoop around the property if I hadn’t shown up.

  “They do like to talk,” I said.

  “Of course, you make a great deal of money listening when people talk to you, don’t you?” Evidently one of rhetorical questions because she didn’t pause long enough for me to slot an answer into the conversation. “So I am a little surprised that you did not already know about Kyrios Fasoulas’ arrest.” She hung her most innocent expression on her face. I wasn’t fooled. “Unless you are here for another reason.”

  Lucky for me I could have passed the most stringent Pinocchio test. “I’m here because of Hercules. That’s the goat.”

  She stared at the creature in question. He’d quit eating the outhouse and was trying to mount it. “That is a big goat. A very big goat.”

  Virgin Mary help me, I didn’t want to think about the goat’s wiener. And I didn’t want Kyria Sofia thinking about it either because that’s just messed up.

  “They can’t come to an agreement about who gets the goat.”

  “Maybe I could take it and my brother could act as a mediator—”

  “No,” I said quickly and with more force than I intended. “The goat has to stay here. It’s … a condition of their divorce proceedings.” Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. All I knew is that I didn’t want this particular goat showing up in Kyria Sofia’s Sewing folder.

  She sniffed. “If you are sure …”

  I had to distract her—for the goat’s safety and peace of mind. “Have you had a chance to talk to your brother about Kyrios Wilson’s funeral?”

  “He is considering your request … and your very generous donation.”

  There wasn’t going to be any funeral if Roger Wilson didn’t want one. Unfortunately I couldn’t tell her Wilson had told me himself that a religious funeral was out of the question, thanks to his atheism.

  “That’s good news,” I said.

  “Are you sure I cannot take the goat?”

  “Positive.”

  Leo and Pappas were hard at work shoveling loukoumades into their faces. Loukoumades are the doughnut’s Greek cousin: fried blobs of batter, drenched in syrup. They’re delicious, which is pretty much anything covered in syrup. The policemen weren’t alone. Perched on Leo’s desk, the two succubi performed manicures on each other, like real live women.

  “Here’s our least favorite human,” Choker said.

  I ignored her—mostly so Pappas wouldn’t think I was crazy. Although his attempts to go through my underwear drawer led me to believe he wasn’t playing with a full mental deck either, if the email he’d sent me was any indication.

  “Why is Kyrios Fasoulas in jail?”

  “Can she ask that? I don’t think she can ask that,” Pappas said, looking to Leo for confirmation.

  “I can ask,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me, but I’m still allowed to ask.”

  Leo wiped his mouth then pitched the napkin into the garbage can. It landed neatly inside. The man had skills. “We didn’t want to bring him in, but he refused to answer questions about his wife’s assault. I’m hoping a night or two here will put him in the mood to talk. By the way, looks like you’re right about Kyrios Wilson. There’s evidence it might be murder.”

  Well, well, well. With each successive well my eyebrows hitched a little higher. “What evidence? I thought you said Roger Wilson had a plain old vanilla heart attack.”

  He closed the polystyrene clamshell lid on his loukoumades. I wondered what I’d have to do to get him to share. “You seemed convinced he was murdered, so I went looking for evidence of a murder.”

  “And you found some?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited. When it became obvious he wasn’t going to tell me, I cleared my throat.

  “I can’t tell you everything,” he said. “This is an ongoing investigation.”

  “The dead man had salt in his stomach,” Bleeder said, inspecting her freshly polished nails. Good thing she was non-corporeal because she could cut a bitch with the lethal points. “Not just a little bit of salt either.”

  “All the salt,” Choker told me.

  “Mountains of salt,” Bleeder said.

  I swung back to Leo. “How much salt are we talking about?”

  Pappas choked on his loukoumada. I reached over and slapped his back until the fried pastry shot out and into his hand. “Gamo tin putana mou, how did she know?” he rasped.

  Leo looked at me. I flicked my gaze sideways to the primping succubi.

  “I overheard someone talking about it,” I said. “So was it a lot of salt?”

  Leo nodded and blew out a sigh. “Panos said the man’s last meal was salt. A fist-sized amount. He found salt in Wilson’s mouth and throat, too. Kyrios Wilson’s heart quit pumping, either from all that salt or because he was suffocating.”

  I whistled. “So the salt killed him?”

  “That’s what Panos told me. No sane person would eat that much salt on their own, so now I’m looking for some kind of weird malakas who would force feed a man salt.”

  “Not a Greek,” Pappas said. “Not without giving him salad and bread to go with it.”

  As far as points went it was a good one. Greeks plied people with food, and they didn’t waste salt. They remembered Ancient Greece, and how in those days a Greek citizen could buy a perfectly good slave for a handful of sodium.

  “Any suspects?” I asked.

  Leo went tst. “Nobody really knew the man. He wasn’t liked but he wasn’t hated either. What have you found?”

  Two things: Roger Wilson was an obnoxious horse’s ass. And Leo didn’t know Kyria Fasoula had been having an affair with Wilson when he was killed. And why would he? Up until now he had been investigating my butt, as my grandmother would say.

  “Not much,” I said. “He wasn’t a team player.”

  He gnawed in that a moment before hitting me with another question. “What about the ferry? Was that about Wilson?”

  “Dead end. Figurative, not literal. Wilson stiffed someone. She came to get her merchandise back. By the time she arrived he was already dead.”

  “You sure?”

  I stared down my nose at him. “Positive. When Wilson died she was landing in Athens.”

  He grinned. “Good work. Anything else?”

  My chin moved up then down to signal no. “Can I talk to Kyrios Fasoulas?”

  Leo looked puzzled. “What for?”

  “I’m trying to work out the goat custody problem.”

  “Go on back,” Leo said. “And if you can get him to admit to
hitting his wife, that would be great.”

  “I don’t think he’s your man,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “My gut tells me he’s innocent.”

  “What else does your gut tell you?”

  “That if you were a good person you’d give me those loukoumades.”

  He handed me the box then hit me in the face with the full force of his smile. For a moment the Earth quit spinning, and Pappas and the rest of the police station faded away. Then I remembered the loukoumades were mine now. All mine.

  I laughed like a supervillain.

  “She is strange,” Pappas said to nobody in particular.

  “Says the man who is always trying to poke through my underwear drawer,” I said.

  Leo’s head snapped around. “What is she talking about?”

  “You tell him,” I said. “I’m going to eat my loukoumades and talk to Kyrios Fasoulas about his goat.”

  I skedaddled before Leo changed his mind—about talking to Kyrios Fasoulas and the loukoumades.

  Although Merope is home to some twenty-thousand people and countless goats, sheep, and donkeys, the jail is built to accommodate the needs of a small city. That’s life in a tourism hotspot. Apparently shoving all the drunk and disorderly tourists into one cage is bad for publicity and the island’s Yelp reviews. During the off-season, most of the cells sit unoccupied. Today there was exactly one prisoner, and he was sitting in his chair, reading today’s paper.

  “What?” he said as I approached.

  I indicated the chair cradling his backside, the one that usually resided on his hovel’s front porch. “They brought your chair along with you.”

  “I refused to go without it.”

  “I’m sorry this happened. I know you didn’t hurt your wife.”

  He grunted behind the paper.

  “Leo—Detective Samaras—is a good cop. He’ll put the pieces together and you’ll be out of here in no time.”

  “I like jail,” he said as though he didn’t have a care in the world. “It is quiet here. I can read my newspaper in peace. Nobody disturbs me.” He lowered the paper, revealing a glare. “Except you. What do you want?”

  “I was thinking you could share custody of the goat. You take one week, Kyria Fasoula takes the next.”