How to be Death

by Amber Benson

  What’s this?” she said, standing over a tiny droplet of blood that had somehow found its way inside the grate of the fireplace. It was a minute island of red far removed from the original blood puddle.

  Freezay squatted down beside the hellhound, sticking his finger in the middle of the droplet.

  “How did it get all the way over here?” Jarvis asked, but Freezay was too busy sniffing the speck of blood, behaving as if he were some kind of forensic chef who’d just tasted a particularly divine treat.

  “All right, I think we’re done here,” Freezay said suddenly, ignoring Jarvis’s question as he wiped his bloodied finger across the leg of his pants. “Time to start collecting lies.”

  “Lies?” I asked.

  “Oh, no one ever tells the truth when you question them,” Freezay said rather absently, his mind seemingly elsewhere. “Who saw our victim last? We can establish a timeline and see where that leads us.”

  “Something startled her. Or she wasn’t feeling well—I couldn’t tell which—and she left before dessert,” Jarvis said, something I’d totally forgotten in the wake of everything else that had happened; for me, the Death Dinner might as well have occurred another lifetime ago.

  “And Daniel went outside to check on her,” I added before I realized this might put Daniel in a bad light. “But he came back and finished dinner with us then walked Runt and me back here … so it couldn’t have been him.”

  Freezay shook his head sadly.

  “Just because you’re in love with someone doesn’t mean they can’t commit murder.”

  “i didn’t touch Coy,” Daniel said. “I swear to God.”

  Jarvis had sent one of the bodyguards to fetch Daniel from his room. His hair was wet from the shower and he’d changed into a white button-down shirt and gray corduroy pants, but there were dark smudges under his blue eyes. He looked worn out, but he winked at me when he came into the room.

  Freezay had commandeered the drawing room for his “lie detections” as he liked to call witness interviews, saying that: “They lie to your face, they lie on their mother’s graves, and they lie to themselves … but the truth is always there, just below the surface, waiting to be teased out of them whether they know it or not.” Now I knew cynicism had its place in the universe, but I liked to think the majority of us were a relatively honest bunch and that the “lies” Freezay was referring to were mostly just differences in perspective. Maybe that was just me being naïve—it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen people in my life resort to conniving, evilness—but I didn’t want to live in a world where bad behavior was the norm.

  “You were the last one to see her alive, were you not?” Freezay asked Daniel, continuing the interrogation as he bit into a piece of hot buttered toast.

  Upon our arrival, Freezay had badgered Jarvis into ordering coffee and toast from the kitchen. Amazingly, Zinia Monroe was already up and cooking, happily making us a beautiful continental breakfast of buttered toast, croissants, strawberry preserves, and coffee.

  “Yes, I talked to her outside the dining room,” Daniel agreed, holding a cup of coffee in his right hand. He’d refused the food, but he’d jumped at the offer of a caffeinated beverage. “But all she said was that her stomach ached and she was going to go to our room. That was it.”

  “What about the kiss?” I chided him and he looked at me blankly. “I saw lipstick on your jaw. Pink glossy stuff.”

  Daniel took another sip of his coffee and smiled mysteriously.

  “Not Coy.”

  And that was all he would say on the matter. Freezay didn’t seem to think my question was pertinent, so he didn’t force the issue. Instead, he zeroed in on what Daniel remembered of Coy’s departure.

  “So, you said you’d see her in the room later and went back to the dinner?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “That’s it. That’s all that happened, and when I went back to the room, she was gone. I never saw her again.”

  Freezay dipped his toast in the coffee and sat back in his armchair, plunking his feet down on top of the coffee table.

  “Anything else? Anything we should know before I send you on your merry way?” Freezay asked.

  “Well,” Daniel replied, “I don’t think it was a stomachache.”

  “Me, neither,” Freezay agreed, yanking his feet off the coffee table and sitting up, so he could lean in close. “Did anyone else see the two of you talking?”

  Daniel was thoughtful for a moment, eyes pensive, then he sat up straighter in his chair.

  “The two servers. They were clearing the dishes. They walked right by us.”

  sitting in front of us on the love seat, hands folded primly in her lap, Connie Silver looked even smaller now than she had the night before. She was still in her serving outfit, her face haggard from lack of sleep, but she seemed calm, a secret smile playing at the corners of her lips.

  Next to her, the other server, Horace Perez, was still as death, his lips compressed into a minimalist smile, though for the life of me, I couldn’t fathom what he had to be smiling about. Horace’s silent green gaze remained fixed on Freezay as the detective asked him questions, his eyes hardly ever blinking. He was lean and compact, his lithe body packed into a tight white T-shirt and cuffed dark-washed jeans. He reminded me of a leopard perched high on a tree branch, preparing to leap upon its unsuspecting prey.

  “What were they arguing about?” Freezay asked again and Connie blinked, her eyes skittering around the room, her brain finally processing the question.

  “No, I told you before. They weren’t fighting,” she said haltingly, her mouth dry as tissue paper. She swallowed and licked her lips, but that didn’t seem to help. “He was just trying to make sure she was okay.”

  She couldn’t keep her fingers still as she talked, massaging her right wrist like it was an avocation.

  “The man, he was, shall we say, worried about the woman,” Horace interjected, and it was the first time he’d spoken since the interview had begun. “She insisted she was fine and he went back into the dining room. She left … by herself.”

  Connie stared at the man sitting next to her on the love seat, her eyes blinking furiously.

  “You weren’t there when they came in,” she said, her tone accusatory. “I was the only one there.”

  Horace tsked quietly to himself, shaking his head as if he were expressing regret for a friend’s unfortunate mistake.

  “She has misspoken, but it is not on purpose,” Horace said, smiling benignly at Connie, who glared at him. “My partner was very distracted last night. She would not have noticed my entrance as she was too busy eavesdropping on the couple.”

  “I was not—” Connie protested, but Freezay held up his hand for quiet.

  “No petty squabbling, Ms. Silver. It’s unbecoming. Now, did either of you see which direction the victim took when she left? Perhaps she exited by the front entrance?”

  “I don’t know where she went,” Connie Silver said, annoyed at being reprimanded. “I went to the kitchen.”

  Horace shrugged his shoulders, cocking his head to the side in apology.

  “I don’t know where she went, either,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Freezay fell back into his chair, jarring the cup of coffee he held in his hand and slopping the lukewarm brown liquid out onto his woolen pants.

  “Get out of here,” he barked. “Both of you.”

  Connie shuddered, twisting her hands together nervously as she stood up. Horace, cool as a cat, rose from his seat, unflustered by Freezay’s outburst.

  “I hope we were able to aid you in your investigation,” he said as he followed Connie to the door.

  “You helped me more than you can know,” Freezay said, throwing the sentence away like it was nothing—but it seemed to have a profound effect on Horace, who paused midstep and turned back around to stare at Freezay.

  “Excuse me?” Horace said, eyes narrowed.

  “Might I see your tattoo before you go?”
Freezay said, smiling innocently up at the other man.

  Horace bit his lip, shaking his head as if to say he had no idea what Freezay was talking about. Connie Silver stood in the doorway, her curiosity piqued now that Freezay’s steel trap of a mind was fixated on someone else.

  “And what tattoo is that?” Horace asked finally.

  Freezay fluttered his long blond eyelashes like a flirtatious slattern and said:

  “Why, the one of the dragon on your upper bicep, of course, silly.”

  The odd smile returned to Horace’s lips and he nodded. Then slowly, seductively, he rolled up the left sleeve of his white T-shirt to reveal that, yes, indeed, his bicep was ringed by the curving green body of a double-headed dragon.

  “Happy now?” he asked, the vein in his left temple ticking in time with his heartbeat—and suddenly the room was pulsing with energy; power, unbound, coursed through the drawing room as Horace dropped his mask, all pretense at appearing human disappearing as a frisson of pure energy pulsed out of every pore. Then Horace pulled the plug, letting the raw power dissipate until all that remained was the unassuming young man with the weird smile.

  “Yes, very happy,” Freezay said, holding Horace’s gaze a tad longer than necessary.

  “Good. Then excuse me,” he said and walked over to where Connie was waiting for him at the door.

  No one said a word until the door had closed behind them—and then Jarvis, who’d been standing by the fireplace, came over and sat down on the edge of the love seat they’d just vacated.

  “Amazing,” Jarvis said, shaking his head in disbelief. “How could you have known about the tattoo when I had a clear view of his left side and I never noticed a thing?”

  Freezay grabbed a croissant from the breakfast tray and took a bite, the pastry flaking onto his lap.

  “Neither of those servers is a caterer by trade. That I can tell you for certain,” Freezay began, wiping buttery croissant residue from his upper lip with the back of his hand. “Did you notice the way she rubbed her right wrist, as if it were a nervous tic?”

  I nodded.

  “She was obsessed.”

  Freezay shook his head.

  “Not obsessed. In pain. I suspect carpal tunnel syndrome. She usually wears a brace on that hand—you can tell by the slight difference in skin color between the wrist and the fingers—yet she hasn’t been wearing it. Why?”

  Runt sat up. I thought she’d been dozing by the fire, but she’d apparently been awake the whole time.

  “Don’t you get carpal tunnel from typing?” she asked.

  Freezay clapped his hands together happily.

  “Precisely.”

  “She almost dropped the tray of sherry she was carrying twenty different times last night,” I added, sitting back in my own armchair, pleased I was able to contribute. “I remember thinking she wasn’t a very good server, that there was something off about her.”

  “She isn’t a server,” Freezay agreed. “That’s what’s off about her. I think she works with a computer. In a job that causes repetitive stress on her wrists, forcing her to wear the brace.”

  “Now what about Horace and the tattoo?” Jarvis asked. “How were you able to deduce that?”

  “The tattoo was an educated guess, based on contextual clues.”

  “Like what?” I asked, sipping my coffee, which had started to get cold and chalky.

  Freezay stood up, coffee cup in hand, and began to pace in front of the fireplace, careful not to step on Runt, who was splayed out beside the hearth.

  “His accent,” Freezay said, stepping over Runt’s tail. “Very slight, but distinctly Mexican, specifically Mexico City—and he smells of sage and rose petals, am I correct, Runt?”

  The pup yipped her agreement.

  “I knew one of them was a God!” she said, thumping her tail.

  “And a God would never sling coffee and Danishes,” Freezay said, stroking the stubble on his chin.

  “No argument there,” Jarvis said—and I could tell he was very much enjoying this game of “whodunit.” I wouldn’t have pegged my Executive Assistant for a Sherlock Holmes fan, but he was clearly having a blast.

  “Hey, just FYI, I got coffee plenty of times for my boss—” I said.

  “You’re not a God,” Jarvis replied before I could get another word in edgewise.

  “Add to that our victim, Coy, hailed from Mexico, where she ostensibly worked in the field of import-export, though that was probably just something she created to entice Daniel,” Freezay said, hitting up the coffeepot for its last greasy dregs. “Do you know anything about Aztec ritual sacrifice?”

  This wasn’t where I was expecting the conversation to go, but Jarvis seemed to have gotten a hold of the same thread Feezay was trailing.

  “The head and the heart … of course! You think she was ritually murdered,” Jarvis exclaimed.

  Freezay downed the last of the coffee then set his cup back on the breakfast tray.

  “The funerary arm cuff leads me to suspect so, yes,” Freezay said. “And the nature of the killing itself can’t be ignored.”

  Someone cutting off your head and stuffing it into a bag was just a miserable way to die, ritual or not—although I suspected if Coy had known her final resting place would be a Louis Vuitton travel bag, it might’ve made her feel slightly better about her untimely end.

  “I’d noticed earlier that Horace was left-handed, and assuming he actually had the tattoo I thought he might have,” Freezay continued, “well, I made the educated guess it would be on his dominant arm.”

  “Amazing,” Jarvis said, impressed.

  “So, you think Horace killed Coy,” I said, putting into words what I assumed everyone else was thinking, too—but Freezay wasn’t ready to slap the cuffs on Horace just yet.

  “It’s still too early to tell,” he said, drumming his fingers on the mantelpiece. “I suggest we speak to the other guests before we rush to judgment. These things always have a way of getting more complicated than we expect.”

  “But the book? Do you think Horace has it?” Jarvis asked.

  “If that man wanted the book,” Freezay said, raising an eyebrow, “I don’t think you, or anyone else in this room, could keep it from him.”

  Freezay was right. If that mini show of power was any indication, Horace was not a man to be trifled with.

  “Luckily,” Freezay continued, his brows knitting together in thought, “I believe he came here for an entirely different purpose.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  Freezay shook his head, a smile flitting across his lips before morphing into a frown.

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  eighteen

  Leaving the warmth of the drawing room behind as Jarvis led us through the snaking corridors of Casa del Amo in search of our next interrogation victim, I couldn’t help but feel slightly claustrophobic in the semidarkness of the narrow halls. To make matters worse, whenever Jarvis was nervous, he went into hyper–lecture mode, superfluous information leaking from his mouth like water through a sieve.

  “And this lovely oil is another Titian. You can tell by the subtle shading of…”

  I rolled my eyes, trying to filter out Jarvis’s voice so I wouldn’t have to listen to his single-subject monologue, detailing the provenance of every piece of artwork we encountered as we wound our way through the building.

  “Jarvis, no more art talk. You’re killing me,” I said, my words coming out more harshly than I’d intended.

  Jarvis got all pouty, his feathers ruffled by my comment, but before he could regress into full-on squawkiness, Runt had trotted ahead of us, giving a short yip to let us know we’d arrived at our destination. Startled out of his snit, Jarvis hurried over to join her in front of the closed door.

  “Yes, good job,” Jarvis said, patting Runt on the head. “Now, I need to telephone Wodin and the rest of the Board of Death to let them know what’s transpired, so I’ll leave you to it.” />
  I’d never seen Jarvis use a telephone before—mostly because he was a stickler for handling things in person; he was always popping off via wormhole to see someone about something—so the idea of my Executive Assistant forced into using a telephone was almost enough of a novelty to make me want to tag along for the show.

  “I think we can handle this one on our own, Jarvis,” Freezay said, stepping over Runt and knocking on the door three times in quick succession. “Go do whatever you need to do.”

  Jarvis seemed a little hurt that no one begged him to stay and help with the interviews, but he didn’t pout about it.