The Love-Haight Case Files

by Jean Rabe, Donald J. Bingle

  Thomas hovered above them, looking so wispy that he was going unnoticed.

  “Them Libyans had a ghost with ’em,” the teenage boy said. “The hot chick scared the ghost away too.”

  Thomas hovered a little higher.

  The minister put his hands on Evelyn’s shoulders. “Would you like to come inside?” He gestured with his head toward the church.

  A police car pulled up at the sidewalk and two female officers got out. Thomas briefly considered joining Evelyn and making a report to the police. But ghosts weren’t recognized as legal entities, so he stayed hidden, watching one pull out a clipboard and start in on the questions. More in the gathering took pictures with their cell phones.

  “Give her some room,” one of the officers said. The other retrieved the sap and knife and bagged them.

  It was the Tenderloin, and there were bigger fish to worry about than a pair of thugs who came out on the bad end of a tussle, Thomas knew. He doubted that the hoods would be caught, even though the officers appeared diligent and courteous, and handled everything in under a half hour. They took statements from some of the parishioners and invited Evelyn to come by the precinct and look at mug shots.

  “Later,” she said.

  The small crowd finally dissipated, the cops pulled away, and Thomas manifested a little thicker and joined her.

  “Like I said, Thomas, not the best neighborhood.”

  “And like I told you, I’ve a bad feeling about this case.”

  Chapter 3.7

  The apartment building Dimitar called home appeared older than it probably was. All the wood trim was in need of a sprucing. What paint remained was cracked and curled and looked like fish scales that had dried in the sun.

  Mrs. Miller was home, and Dimitar had called from the jail to let her know his attorneys were coming. Thomas hadn’t concocted any mental images of the vampire’s friend, but was nevertheless a little surprised. Mrs. Miller, who did not volunteer her first name, was in her mid- to late-seventies, petite, and dressed to those proverbial nines, complete with a hint of makeup. She wore a tweed suit with a calf-length pencil skirt, polished black shoes, and had her hair arranged in a bun. On her hip, partially concealed by her suit jacket, was a holstered gun. What Thomas knew about firearms could fit in a thimble, so he didn’t know what kind it was, other than big.

  “There’s riff-raff in the neighborhood,” Mrs. Miller explained, obviously catching Thomas and Evelyn looking at the gun. “Smitty here—” she tapped the gun, “—keeps the bad element away.”

  “Good thing I didn’t have a Smitty a half hour ago,” Evelyn whispered. “I would’ve brought him out to play.”

  Thomas noted that Mrs. Miller didn’t even raise an eyebrow at his ghostly appearance, just ushered them in, handed Evelyn a key, and added: “That’s the only key I’ve got. If you need one, you’ll have to make a copy of that. Dimmy wants me to take care of Bella, so I have to keep a key. Hardware store’s a block and a half down the street. Matt works at the back counter and he’ll make you a copy.” She gave them a stern look. “And if you’ll be going in and out on any regular basis, you take real care with the door. Don’t want that dog getting out and something happening to her. Dimmy would have a conniption. You get that key back to me when you’re all done. I’m in number four.” She turned and took a few steps, then stopped and looked over her shoulder. “And you two better be damn good lawyers. You get Dimmy off that stupid charge and back home where he belongs, understand?”

  The interior of the squatty apartment building hinted that it had been beautiful at one time; the trim dark hardwood, still retaining some of its polish, with brass fittings on the fluted milk glass light fixtures and along the banister. The floor was hardwood too, but it was pitted and worn, saggy in some spots; and the carpet runner that led down the center hall did nothing to hide the dips.

  “What does it smell like?” Thomas hadn’t meant to ask the question aloud. He’d lost all sensation—he couldn’t touch, taste, smell, and the lack of those senses made him feel empty.

  “Fusty,” Evelyn pronounced. “But there are hints of pleasant things—vanilla, maybe candles or incense burning behind one of these doors, and I think someone is cooking chicken. Mrs. Miller was wearing some nice cologne, a little too heavy on it. Oh—” She sniffed softly and lowered her voice. “I smell pot.” Softer, and Thomas had to concentrate to hear her: “My mom was into it when she had some money to burn.”

  On the stroll here he’d tried to talk about the men who’d jumped her, about how she’d managed to fight back. But Evelyn didn’t want to discuss it. “Later,” she’d said. Thomas knew when to back off, but the faces of the two men simmered behind his incorporeal eyes. Why did they want Evelyn off the case? Why did they want a seemingly harmless vampire to go down for theft? Later? Yes, he and Evelyn would certainly be talking about all of this later.

  They took the stairs down. There was only one apartment in the basement. The rest of the lower level was taken up by a small laundry room, a storage area, and the furnace.

  “Wait a moment, okay?” Thomas floated through the door ahead of Evelyn. He wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything particularly gruesome … given the neighborhood and that the man who rented this apartment was a vampire. He heard Evelyn key the lock behind him, obviously not willing to wait.

  Bella came out from around a tall shelf, hair raised along her back and growling menacingly at Thomas.

  “Good lord, what is that?”

  Evelyn laughed as she entered, flipped on the light switch, and closed the door behind her. “Thomas, that is a chin, a Japanese chin. Not what I’d pictured a big man like Dimitar owning. I honestly figured Bella was going to be a basset hound or some big mutt.”

  Thomas guessed the dog tipped the scales at six or seven pounds. It had a broad head, wide-set eyes, a short muzzle, and feathery tufts of hair hanging from its tail, belly, and ears. It was black and white, looked to be professionally groomed, and was obviously upset by their presence.

  Evelyn knelt and made cooing sounds. After a few moments, Bella let Evelyn pat the top of her head. “Good dog,” she said. “Good Bella. Would you like a treat?”

  The dog brightened at that word, and Evelyn stood and picked up a box of Liver Snaps from the kitchen table. Thomas hadn’t noticed the treat box. Evelyn had an eye for details. The dog sat up on her haunches, waved her front paws, and accepted the treat.

  Thomas floated through the dog. He noted that the apartment was clean and simple, and the windows were high and boarded over. An air freshener sat on an end table, another on a low shelf, above which a crucifix hung.

  “What does this apartment smell like?” he asked.

  He heard her suck in a breath. “Well, it smells a little like Japanese chin. But it also smells like apple-cinnamon, like a pie was recently baked. It smells … wonderful.”

  Thomas continued his visual exploration. The living room was large and included the kitchen. A Formica-topped table stacked with mystery novels divided the area. At a glance he could tell that the books were alphabetical by author, then title, and an open notebook showed that Dimitar was in the process of cataloguing the collection and making little notes about which ones he’d enjoyed the most and intended to read again. More books were on shelves that lined two of the walls, also alphabetized, with gaps where Thomas suspected the ones on the table would be going. A forty-two-inch flat screen TV hung on one wall, the DVD player on a small table beneath it. Open doors led to a bedroom, which had a double-wide coffin on a platform, and to a bathroom with an overlarge tub.

  Thomas took a more critical look around while Evelyn continued to fuss over the tiny dog. The furniture was sparse—an oversized recliner and a loveseat, the kitchen table had only two straight-backed chairs—everything in good repair; and the carpet looked relatively new. The stove was spotless, like it had never been used, the microwave either. He poked his head inside every cabinet and appliance. One shelf in the refrigerat
or was filled with leftovers in “Golden Pumpkin” bags, “for Bella” scrawled in marker on the outside. Another shelf held two six-packs of Pepsi and three pint bottles of blood with the label: Type-O-To-Go, B-negative. Nothing in the freezer. The cabinets held place settings for two, CorningWare, and there were only two cooking pots. Maybe Dimitar had a girlfriend or had Mrs. Miller over for a meal now and then.

  There were dozens of small cans of dog food in the cupboard, all arranged by type and expiration date: beef, chicken, pork, salmon, and two twenty-pound bags of dry dog food under the sink with the label: LAMB & RICE FOR TENDER TUMMIES. In another cabinet, Thomas saw an assortment of doggy dental chew sticks, dog shampoo, and a variety of dog grooming products. On the floor in front of the stove were ceramic water and food bowls with “Bella” painted on them in fancy script. The garbage can was the style with a closed lid and the swinging flap. There wasn’t a crumb of anything on the floor or countertops, and in a lower cabinet was a bunch of cleaning products, all in perfect rows. There was the faintest layer of dust, however, over every surface, no doubt because Dimitar hadn’t been here to clean. The cabinet above the refrigerator was filled with apple-cinnamon air fresheners—again all in rows.

  The vampire was OCD, Thomas decided.

  He floated into the bedroom and found more dog-related items. In addition to the double-wide coffin to serve Dimitar, Bella’s bed, a large fluffy pillow encased in a bone-print slipcase, occupied a corner of the room. Thomas thought the pillow looked comfortable. Next to it was a crate mounded with dog toys. The closet was filled with casual clothes, arranged by color, and all carrying the Big & Tall label.

  “Bella doesn’t have a mark on her,” Evelyn announced from the other room.

  So Evelyn had thought, perhaps, the vampire used the dog’s blood for snacks.

  “He loves the dog,” Thomas called back. Man’s best friend? In this case it was vampire’s best friend. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt that dog.”

  There was a picture on the bureau of Bella. Other pictures were of people Thomas didn’t know, some of them black and white and, from the style of clothes, looking to be from the 1940s. There were a lot of pictures hanging on the bedroom walls. No mirrors anywhere. He saw three more pictures of Bella, the largest in an ornate frame that appeared to be an antique. If Dimitar had owned a dog before Bella, there was no evidence.

  The bathroom revealed an assortment of men’s toiletries, all stamped AVON. There were a dozen boxes of Black Suede soap-on-a-rope, a dozen bottles of peppermint bubble bath, eight bottles of shampoo, and all of it neatly arranged in rows … Dimitar bought in bulk. Thomas felt a wave of sadness crash through him. The bathroom reminded him of his law school roommate, who also bought in bulk, and who also was a vampire. Was it a trait of vampires?

  An Avon catalog on the back of the toilet had MRS. MILLER printed on it, along with a phone number. Thomas memorized the number. He’d always been good at memorization, but he’d gotten even better lately, as he couldn’t write anything. But if he needed to call her later he’d have to get someone else to punch in the numbers.

  Back in the living area, he saw Evelyn looking through the books. “He reads mysteries and romances primarily,” she said. “And a little science fiction, but only from the masters—Gene Wolfe and Robert Heinlein. It looks like everything is alphabetized. The DVDs cover the gamut: comedies, drama, action. There are hundreds. I’m not going to poke through them, but they look alphabetized, too.” She waved an arm gestured to a living room closet she’d opened.

  It was filled floor to ceiling with DVDs and VHS tapes.

  “According to the police report, eight empty vinyl envelopes from the blood bank were found in the kitchen sink, three on the counter, and one on the nightstand in the bedroom,” Evelyn said. “That bothers me.”

  “Bothers me, too. In fact, I’m a little disappointed in San Francisco’s finest,” Thomas said. “It is obvious that the blood bags were planted and that Dimitar was framed. Our client is a clean freak, and there’s no way he would’ve left anything like that out on a counter. He would have thrown them in the garbage or maybe in a recycling bin. And if Manny Rizzo didn’t have such a hate on regarding OTs, he would’ve realized Dimitar was set up.”

  “Why?” Evelyn asked. “Why set up Dimitar?”

  “Why, indeed?” Thomas’s incorporeal fingers touched his chin. “Why would someone want to frame our client? And why does someone not want us to defend him? What has Dimitar done to so tick someone off that they’d go to such lengths?”

  Chapter 3.8

  Evelyn got a copy made of the apartment key and returned the original to Mrs. Miller. “I want to do some checking on the witness, Thomas, see what I can find on the Internet. I want to poke around and see if Dimitar has any enemies.”

  “I’m sticking around here a bit longer,” Thomas said. “I’ll head back to Haight-Ashbury later. Watch your back.”

  “I can take care of myself.” She gave Bella one more head-pat. “But, yes, I’ll watch my back.”

  Thomas listened to her footsteps on the stair. There was nothing else in the apartment he wanted to investigate. He just wanted to be alone.

  “Vampires.”

  He wasn’t thinking about their client, Dimitar, though he knew he should be. Instead, he was thinking about the first vampire he’d met—Harold Farrar, or Harry as he’d asked to be called. Harry was twenty-eight years old, had only been a vampire the past four of that, and came in answer to Thomas’s post looking for a roommate. Thomas had just entered law school and opted for an apartment rather than to remain in the dorms. Between his father’s money and the scholarships, he could have survived without a roommate, but he’d always been thrifty, and the apartment had two bedrooms.

  Harry had looked a little like Harry Potter, brown hair, glasses, boyish face, but a bit taller than the movie character and a shade on the pudgy side around the middle. Thomas would have said “no, thank you,” as he’d fully expected to take on a living roommate. But Harry was affable. Thomas had seen him around campus—at night, and usually in the company of a pretty girl or two. Apparently Harry had sensed Thomas’s apprehension.

  “You don’t have to worry about me swiping your groceries. I can’t eat them,” Harry had said. “And I promise not to bite.”

  For whatever reason, Thomas liked Harry immediately, and it didn’t take long before they were fast friends, as both had an insatiable appetite for the law. Harry had been a political science major, thinking about a career in government. But he’d visited the Tenderloin with friends the first semester of his senior year, imbibed a little too much alcohol, and ended up in one of those illegal places Dimitar had hinted at. The result … Harry became a vampire. He’d drifted around the Tenderloin for the next three years, in a perpetual pity-party funk. Then he got his act together after working with a counselor at Glide Memorial and returned to the university, finished his bachelor’s degree, enrolled in law school, and answered Thomas’s advertisement.

  They took some night courses together, and Thomas learned to look at the campus through the eyes of an OT. He and Harry even discussed opening a practice together.

  “We’d cover it twenty-four-seven,” Harry had said. “You take the day cases, and I’ll handle night court.”

  Most of the law students and professors took Harry’s presence in stride, and some even “embraced the Other,” as they’d called it and actively sought him out for social activities. But there were students who didn’t like OTs… and some of them went to extremes to show their hatred.

  “Some people hate all vampires,” Dimitar had said.

  Thomas knew their client was unfortunately right on the mark.

  He took a last look around their client’s apartment and noted that Bella had curled up on her pillow and was asleep, little feet twitching as if she was caught up in some marvelous doggie dream. Maybe Harry had met Dimitar during his years in the Tenderloin, through Glide Memorial. Maybe Thomas would a
sk Dimitar about it tomorrow.

  Thomas floated out of the building. He’d never really toured the Tenderloin before, not up close. He’d driven through it a few times—when he was breathing, borrowing one of his father’s cars, but had never stopped. He knew that the area was at the same time a tourist trap and the worst neighborhood in San Francisco. The place was known for its drug dealers, addicts, unbalanced street people, and prostitutes. It was also known for being one of the most diverse places in the city. Every ethnicity was represented, particularly Vietnamese, who in the past twenty years were responsible for a lot of the clean-up. And there was a significant OT population.

  A few blocks from the apartment building, Thomas watched some sort of hag in a knee-length dress strut by, maybe a hooker. A creature that looked like a goblin, but had a prehensile tail, was perched on a streetlight, hand cupped over his eyes and scanning the street as if looking for something. Two ghouls stood outside a trendy-looking sandwich shop, one pointing to something on the menu taped to the window—all of these in addition to the regular and somewhat raggedy humans passing by. A trio of dog-headed men caught his eye. They were in black leather jackets, like they were part of some biker gang. They jostled the ghouls, threw back their shaggy heads in laughter, and entered the sandwich shop.

  The Tenderloin was colorful; he’d give it that.

  Thomas decided to travel back to the office in “stealth mode” as he’d come to think of it, rendering himself so transparent that only the most observant soul would spot him, looking like a mirage, a misty patch above the pavement. The streets and the sidewalks weren’t clean—fast food wrappers and cigarette butts littered the edges. Crumpled pieces of newsprint scudded along in the slight breeze. He wondered what the place smelled like. He could only take in its myriad sounds: the shush of traffic, music rolling out car windows, a live jazz band playing somewhere nearby. He could still differentiate between live and recorded music. It was getting close to dinnertime. He imagined the scents from the various ethnic restaurants were mingling with the odors of everything else.