4 Angel Among Us

by Chaz McGee

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I do not know how long I stayed in that strange hypnotic state. It could have been hours or it could have been minutes. But slowly I felt myself rising back to the surface of my world and found myself in the drawing room of the mansion with the morning light just starting to leak through its windows. The old butler’s wife was sitting in a chair by the empty fireplace, staring intently at me. Her expression was blank but her eyes unwavering in their focus on me. I smiled at her but she did not respond this time. She was lost in a world even more inaccessible than the one I inhabited.

  I knew now for certain that Arcelia Gallagher was being held somewhere nearby. But where to begin to find her? Perhaps by determining who in the house had taken her. It could not have been the old butler. He was far too frail. Perhaps the gardener after all? Perhaps Rodrigo’s carefree attitude was not a sign of a clean conscience but, rather, the sign of a psychopath? I thought of what I had seen the evening before – Dakota Wylie’s manager paying off that odd couple in the beat-up Chevy with the Alabama plates. They looked like just the types to have done Lamont Carter’s dirty work for him. But why? And did Carter even have it in him? Yes, he was angry, but he was also passive. I had seen him give in to Dakota often, unable to keep from indulging her whims.

  I drifted upstairs, hoping to find his room. That would tell me more about him.

  The master bedroom where Enrique Romero lived, apparently without his wife, was lavish beyond good taste and devoid of any personal objects. It could have been an opulent suite in a Vegas hotel. I wondered how many nights he had spent there, if any. His whole life here seemed a sham.

  The next bedroom over was empty and waiting for guests that never came. Two more bedrooms appeared to be the same. But a fourth bedroom in the middle of the long hallway had to belong to Lamont Carter. He wasn’t there, but it definitely looked and felt like him. It was strangely lowbrow, given the rest of the house. A huge widescreen TV covered most of one wall and he had arranged leather couches in front of it like a living room. There was a bar built along another wall. Empty glasses and dishes littered its countertops. His bed was round and unmade, its black silk sheets draping to the floor. It was like an adolescent boy’s dream of the perfect bedroom, a fantasy of what life in the Playboy Mansion might be like. And yet, it was also an unhappy room, filled with resentment. Lamont Carter felt out of place in this room, I thought. He felt out of place in this house.

  I left his room and continued down the hall to the far end, where Dakota Wylie passed her days in the shadows. She was still asleep, curled up beneath her white comforter, her loose blond hair hiding her battered face. Lamont Carter slept next to her, pressed against her so closely they would have appeared as one if Lamont had not been on top of the covers, fully dressed, his gray slacks and black silk shirt a startling contrast to the snowy white of her coverlet. He was cradling Dakota Wylie in his arms and his chin fit perfectly into the curve of her neck. They were nestled like spoons in a kitchen drawer, breathing in and out as one.

  I did not know what to think. They felt so peaceful. Her anxiety had been banished; his anger and rough edges were gone. It was as if this was the place they both belonged.

  I drifted through her room, counting the endless bottles of perfume and jars of cream guaranteed to keep her young forever. I admired the length of the marble bathroom that led off her bedroom and thought of how my wife Connie would have loved to have had all that counter space instead of the cramped life I had given her. Rows of cosmetics lined the counters of Dakota Wylie’s bathroom, but I knew they were useless to her right now. Nothing could touch her skin in its present condition. It was still raw from surgery. Would her face ever heal to a semblance of normalcy? I wondered. Had she destroyed herself forever?

  I heard the murmur of voices and returned to the bedroom. Dakota Wylie had woken. She touched the back of Lamont Carter’s hand, reassuring herself that he was there.

  ‘I’m right here,’ Carter murmured, still half asleep and yet seeking to reassure her.

  ‘Did he call?’ Dakota asked. She closed her eyes again, perhaps knowing the answer but not yet understanding what her life had become.

  ‘He’s not going to call, Dixie,’ Carter told her, using a nickname for her I had never heard before. ‘He was just using you. You have to accept that. He’s not worth it. You’re going to be more famous than he ever was. I think it’s time we move on.’

  Dakota Wylie opened her eyes. They were the clearest I had ever seen them and she sounded lucid. The drugs had not had time to cloud her system. ‘I signed a pre-nup, Lonnie,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not going to get much if I walk away. Besides, I don’t believe you. I think he loves me. He would never have tried so hard to win me if he hadn’t.’

  Carter groaned and rolled over on his back. ‘He came after you because that agent of his told him to. He needed the boost for his career. You have to accept it. He used you. The only thing we can do now is use him back. The pre-nup doesn’t matter. Once you have the kid, he’ll have to pay you millions. He can’t walk away from his kid. His managers won’t let him do that. It would be terrible publicity.’

  ‘How much longer do you think it will be?’ Dakota Wylie asked. Her voice grew dreamy. ‘Maybe when I have the baby, it won’t matter about Enrique. I could love the baby and the baby would love me back.’

  ‘Soon, soon,’ Carter promised her. He wrapped his arms around her again. ‘Soon it will all be over.’

  Dakota was staring at the walls of her bedroom, her mind far, far away. ‘A man comes to me at night, you know,’ she said. ‘He talks to me. He tells me things.’

  Carter raised his head from the pillow to look down at her. ‘What are you talking about, Dixie? What man? What does he say to you?’

  She was self-absorbed to pick up on his anxiousness. ‘I can’t see him. I can only hear him. He whispers to me. He keeps telling me the baby is coming, the baby is coming. Help the baby, he tells me.’ She smiled. ‘Isn’t that beautiful, Lonnie? I am going to help the baby. I’m going to take care of the baby. And the baby will love no one but me.’

  ‘That’s crazy talk, Dixie,’ Carter said more sharply. ‘You can’t talk like that. People will think you’re crazy.’

  She took his rebuke without rancor. All she cared about was what she wanted. ‘But I’m going to get to take care of the baby, right? I’m still gonna have my baby?’

  ‘Of course you are. Now go back to sleep. Sleep is good for you.’

  They fell back into a half-sleep, still intertwined. There was something strong and unalterable that bound them together, but it was clouded in too many emotions to separate the memories out from the here and now. Between them, there seemed to be years of sadness, with moments of joy but, more often, remnants of cruelty. There was love there, but resentment, too, and always an undercurrent of fear they could not seem to escape. Most of all, I could feel that they needed one another, that neither one of them would be able to flourish without the other.

  How had they reached that point? I wondered. What had they gone through together to get there?

  I wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch them longer, but a knock at the door startled them both. Carter leapt to his feet and, with a deftness that made it clear he had done it before, ran to the bathroom and slipped inside it. Dakota sat up in bed, arranged the bedclothes around her and anchored herself with pillows as if she did not have the strength to sit up on her own. ‘Who is it?’ she called out.

  ‘The new maid is here,’ the old butler said through the door. ‘I would like you to meet her before I give her the final go-ahead.’

  ‘Come on in, then,’ Dakota Wylie said. She arranged the scarf around her face so that it covered much of it and slipped the oversized sunglasses on to conceal her eyes.

  The old butler shuffled into the bedroom. Alice Hernandez, the undercover cop Calvano had nominated for the task, and who he apparently carried a torch for, trailed in behind him, looking as innocent and be
wildered as she possibly could. I was not fooled. Her tiny frame and huge brown eyes hid a scary competence and a legendary thirst for justice. I had heard about her even before my death and she was even more talked about now. She was smart and driven, and had turned down promotions to stay on the vice squad, where she had an astonishing arrest record. She had a reputation for going straight for the pimps and johns instead of the girls. She was particularly brutal on johns who preferred under-age prostitutes and had once broken a man’s arm after she caught him with a twelve-year-old runaway in his car. The man was now serving fourteen years and his lawsuit against the department had gone nowhere. That case was just one reason why other cops called her ‘The Terminator’ and said she was invincible.

  You could tell none of that now. She looked like nothing except a young Hispanic woman in her late twenties, who looked bewildered at the English words being used around her, even though she spoke English better than most of the schmucks on the force.

  ‘Does she speak any English?’ Dakota Wylie asked as she automatically evaluated Alice to see if she was prettier than her or in better shape. In my opinion, she was both, but apparently Dakota did not feel threatened and nodded in unconscious approval.

  ‘A little,’ the old butler said. I felt bad that he was being hoodwinked. ‘Well enough, and I speak enough Spanish to manage her and I think she will learn more very quickly. She is obviously intelligent and can help out in the kitchen as well.’

  ‘That’s fine. Why don’t we try her then?’ Dakota said with a touch of loneliness in her voice. She needed a friend. ‘I know some Spanish, too, not that it did me any good when it came to keeping Lupe from leaving me. I hope this one stays.’

  ‘I hope so, too, Mrs Romero,’ the butler agreed. ‘I will send her back up once she has filled out the necessary paperwork.’

  Alice Hernandez remained docile and agreeable during this exchange, looking about the room with appropriate wide-eyed wonder. I had a feeling that same wide-eyed wonder had made her very effective when it came to prostitution stings. When she didn’t have you in a chokehold, she seemed no older than a teenager.

  ‘She’ll be right back up,’ the butler promised. He gestured for Alice to follow him and she obeyed, still acting as if she did not understand much English.

  ‘Mr Jarvis?’ Dakota called out just they reached the door.

  The butler stopped, startled to hear his name. ‘Yes ma’am?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘I just wanted to thank you for everything you do. You take such good care of me.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ the butler said automatically as he shuffled out into the hall, Alice trailing after.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I had been a famously incompetent detective when I was alive, known for my ability to tolerate an equally infamous partner. No one had ever requested that I be assigned to their case and many a colleague had begged off from being assigned to one of mine, knowing it was headed for failure. My ineptitude had isolated me over the years and I had seldom felt part of a team. But that morning, as I searched the halls of the mansion, wondering what it had been like in its glory days, I felt the comfort of knowing that Maggie and Calvano were searching for the man who had tried to buy a baby and that Alice Hernandez was keeping watch on the house. Their efforts left me free to search for Arcelia Gallagher.

  I knew she had to be in the mansion somewhere. The unhappy being who roamed the halls with me knew where she was. If I could find him again, I might find her. But how do you find something you cannot see?

  I could feel the house around me, as sad and forlorn as a person who has spent too much time alone. The sights this house must have seen through the years, the drama, the dreams realized and denied, the love and the hate that it had held. Irrationally, I wondered if the house itself had played a part in what happened to Arcelia Gallagher. Maybe the house changed those who lived within its walls? Maybe the unhappiness of its former occupants really did linger and infect those who followed?

  I thought of the clay walls I had seen Arcelia chained to in my vision and checked the basement first. The house had been built on top of the remnants of another house. The old basement from the first house was boarded off and extended westward. But the wall was no barrier to me and I checked every corner of the old basement carved into the earth. I found nothing but spiders and a long forgotten silver baby rattle with bells attached to it, dropped into a corner. Curious, I thought. What an artifact to find in the darkness of such a room. There were a few tunnels leading off from the old basement and I followed them as well, but they led to nowhere and ended within a few yards in small rooms barely big enough to stand up in. I wondered what their purpose had been. Perhaps Maggie’s father was right about the house that had stood on this property before the Delmonte House? If it had been part of the Underground Railroad, the tunnels could have been used to conceal hidden slaves. It would be easy enough to disguise the entrance to the openings with shelves filled with canned food and other provisions. Could Arcelia Gallagher be in one of them? If so, I could not find her.

  I returned to the newer basement. It consisted of a tidy series of storage rooms to hold the many possessions the house’s owners could not give up. I found several rooms of opulent white and gold furniture, the fantasy of a young girl who had made it big. The furniture had probably been banished to the basement as tasteless by whatever decorator Enrique Romero had hired to create his tabloid-worthy home.

  There were plenty of places where Arcelia Gallagher could be, but all of the rooms felt lonely. The whole basement had a deserted, musty air to it. I thought of how few people were trying to maintain the house and was not surprised. Indeed, a layer of dust coated each step that led back upward to the house. I don’t think anyone had been in the basement for months except for me. Certainly, Arcelia Gallagher had not been there. I could not feel a trace of her anywhere.

  Upstairs, the house was coming to life, its stillness replaced by the clatter of silverware, pipes running with water, and doors being opened and shut. I left the house to its inhabitants and walked the grounds next, checking every outbuilding, but did not feel so much as a twinge that Arcelia Gallagher was near. I roamed the amazing gardens and the stands of trees that rimmed the vast lawn, searching for signs that she had been there. Nothing.

  I returned to the house and checked every room, every closet, every recess I could find but felt nothing to indicate that her presence. I finally returned to the open field where I had felt her presence so strongly and there it was again – the essence of her despair as palpable as it had been when I was inches from her. Arcelia Gallagher had to be near. But where? I was in the middle of an empty lawn. It made no sense.

  A wave of cold washed over me, followed by a sensation that felt as if someone had grabbed my heart and tugged it, turning me inside out on myself. It only lasted a few seconds and, yet, it left me stunned. I stood, alone beneath a summer sun, and looked around, knowing that the other spirit was near.

  All I saw was the mansion’s gardener, Rodrigo Flores, tilling a patch of ground along the edge of the field. A neat row of bushes, roots bound in burlap, had been lined up by his side, ready to be planted. He had stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow when his cellphone rang. He glanced at the number and answered it. He stood abruptly and froze as he listened to what his caller had to say. To my astonishment, after hanging up, he lifted his arms toward the sky, his face wreathed in a smile, then dropped to his knees, praying with his head bowed solemnly. When he was done, he rose and began to run toward the house.

  Had they found her? I wondered. Had Arcelia Gallagher been found?

  I followed Rodrigo to the back door of the mansion. He washed up in a bathroom near the kitchen, where the butler’s wife sat at the table, staring blankly into space. Rodrigo stuck his head in, toweling dry after his wash, started to tell the old woman something and then shrugged and left as quickly as he arrived.

  I was about to follow, when the old woman turned right to me and
said in a surprisingly deep voice, ‘There is only one in trouble, but you must find her now.’

  When she lapsed instantly back into a reverie, I had no choice but to continue to follow Rodrigo. He walked so briskly toward the front road that even I had trouble keeping pace. When he reached the split-level fence that rimmed the mansion’s grounds, he hopped up on the top rail, hooked his heels over the lower rail and lifted his face to the skies again. He stayed that way, immobile and reverent, until a car pulled up to a stop in front of him. Father Sojak sat at the wheel. The two exchanged words in Spanish – interesting, as I had not known that Father Sojak was fluent – and Rodrigo hopped in the front seat beside him, grasping his hand and shaking it vigorously.

  I was no fool. I hitched a ride.

  Father Sojak drove quickly toward downtown. I could feel relief flowing through him. Sometimes, the two men would speak and then Rodrigo would return to his happy contemplation of the world rushing by.

  I was surprised when Father Sojak pulled up outside the station house instead of the church. Rodrigo leapt from the car before it came to a complete stop. I followed him as he pushed through the media crowd and was let into the station house by the guards, who recognized him from his many prior visits. As he approached the front desk. Freddy, the desk sergeant, waved him upstairs toward the holding cells where a few were always set aside for high-profile prisoners in demand by the brass, lawyers or the media. I knew that Rodrigo’s brother, Aldo, was still being held there, pondering what had happened to his wife and why no one cared about her as much as they cared about Arcelia Gallagher.