The Love-Haight Case Files

by Jean Rabe, Donald J. Bingle

  He felt incomplete without all of his senses, not feeling the coarse brickwork against his fingertips, earlier not smelling the scent of Evelyn’s perfume that she always wore, no longer able to taste the sweetness of a fresh orange, his favorite fruit. If only he’d known his “life” was going to turn out this way, he would have paid more attention to the details. He would have appreciated all the little sensations that made the world amazing. And he would have asked Evelyn out for more dinners … and not to discuss cases.

  His route took him past Glide Memorial Church. He’d heard it called a “spiritual oasis” and knew it was big into community assistance programs. Thomas slipped through the building, seeing a dozen people—each of them sitting alone on the pews. The only OTs present: a trio of women ghosts kneeling at the altar in the front.

  Thomas hovered behind them, wanting to chat with another spirit, but decided not to disturb them. The music in the big chapel was soft, and canned, “Amazing Grace.” He passed by a placard that listed times for free meals, counseling, health services, and job training. Supposedly the city’s most popular minister preached here and news accounts reported that people would line up around the block to hear him. Had that been the fellow who’d tried to come to Evelyn’s aid?

  Past the church was a stretch of brick apartment buildings and cheap hotels, then the Alcazar Theatre loomed, the most ornate building within several blocks. Thomas had always appreciated San Francisco’s architecture, and the old building was Byzantine style, originally built for Shriners closing in on a hundred years ago.

  He traveled across Sgt. John Macaulay Park at the corner of O’Farrell and Larkin, taking little note of the children on the colorful jungle gyms, and paused outside the Mitchell Bros. O’Farrell Theatre. It was said that the city’s most gorgeous female strippers worked there. Thomas remembered Harry talking about the flesh palace’s Green Door Show and Kopenhagen Room.

  He missed Harry.

  A few hours ago Dimitar had said: “Vampires were hunted in Serbia back then. Hunted now, too, though not like then. Hunted here sometimes. Yes, even in San Francisco.”

  Harry had been hounded by a group of OT-haters on campus … verbal taunts mostly, but sometimes there were foul e-mails and disgusting Facebook postings. It escalated during the final semester of law school. In fact, that was the year Thomas’s world went down the crapper.

  Chapter 3.9

  It was first semester of Thomas’s final year in law school. The air was crisp, and it was quiet.

  Thomas, Harry, and one of the girls trying to be Harry’s girlfriend … Margie, that was it … walked across the grass, barefoot, just having gotten out of the Thursday night Political Asylum and Refugee Law. Thomas’s toes were cold, but the grass was thick, and he thought it felt grand.

  “Explain to me about the relationship between American law and gender-related claims to refugee status,” Margie said to Harry.

  Thomas slowed his step and lagged behind a dozen yards. He was enjoying the silence and was disappointed Margie, who reminded him of a lily—tall, with sun-bleached long hair and a long neck—had to break it with some inane prattle meant only to draw Harry into a conversation. He saw Margie slip her arm around Harry’s and lean in close, the vampire obliging her and discussing refugee issues.

  Thomas smiled. He knew Harry had his undead heart set on an English lit grad student who’d stopped by the apartment a few times. What was it about Harry that drew girls like sugar attracted flies? Thomas was better looking, six-two and with the broad shoulders of a swimmer—a champion diver, actually—cornflower blue eyes, mud-brown hair, and was only a few pounds overweight. His nose was crooked, though. Certainly more imposing in his appearance than Harry. And it wasn’t that Thomas didn’t have dates. He went out with fellow law student Crystal Gaye on occasion. It was just that Harry—

  “What the …” Margie screeched.

  In an instant Margie and Harry were swarmed. The shadows had hid the gang until the trap had been sprung.

  Thomas charged forward, but was grabbed from behind and jerked back off his feet. Three sets of hands digging into his arms and pulling him back. He struggled and craned his neck from left to right, trying to see who held him. “What the hell?” Was he the victim of some college prank? An impromptu hazing?

  Margie broke free and ran screaming. In the light that spread out from the parking lot ahead, Thomas saw her pull out a cell phone. Faintly, he heard her call for the campus police. Then she was out of sight.

  Blinking, the details came clearer. Five men in Stanford hoodie sweatshirts were on Harry. The ones holding Thomas wore hoodies, too, but he managed to get a look at two of their faces. He recognized them from a business law class he’d taken the previous year.

  “Hold him good,” one of Thomas’s attackers said. “Don’t let him loose.”

  Thomas struggled harder. This wasn’t a prank or a hazing. This was something far worse. Thomas’s chest tightened and he fought for air. He kicked backward and landed a blow against someone, and was punched in his side in retaliation.

  “Let me go!” Harry shouted. The five pushed the vampire to the ground and rolled him on his back, just as the three holding Thomas forced him to his knees. One of them grabbed a handful of Thomas’s hair and aimed his face forward.

  “Eyes open, vamp lover,” one of the men hissed. “Watch this. Stake him!”

  “No!” Thomas howled.

  Harry managed to knock one of the men off him, and the hood flew back. Thomas got a good look at his face. Another turned and shouted something, and Thomas couldn’t make it out, but he saw that man’s face, too, just enough in the dim light from the parking lot. He could put names to four of the attackers.

  “Let him go!” Thomas shouted, gyrating but unable to break free. Then he changed his tactic. “Help! Police!” There were campus police always on patrol, and the parking lot was near. Maybe he could catch somebody going to or from a car. “Help!”

  “Say goodbye to your pal, vamp lover. Stake him!” the attacker repeated. “Get him quick and let’s get out of here.”

  Thomas saw one of the men pull out a stake, using his feet to hold Harry’s arm down. Another produced a mallet and knelt.

  The sound was sickening, the dull thud of the mallet against the stake, a shrill inhuman scream that came from Harry.

  “Stop it!” Thomas was pushed face forward into the grass and whacked on the back of the head. He heard the mallet hit the stake again and again, and he himself was struck again. He heard his own harsh breathing and smelled the damp earth. The grass was cold against his face. Harry wasn’t screaming anymore. Thomas fought against a wave of dizziness and pushed himself to his knees. He couldn’t stand, too woozy from the blow he’d taken, but he managed to crawl to his friend.

  Feet slapped across the grass, then across the parking lot. The men—eight of them all together—hollered and cheered, whooping like their team had just won a football game. They raced to the far edge of the parking lot, weaving around cars, and Thomas lost sight of them.

  Harry was dead—truly dead; his corpse shriveled into a desiccated husk as Thomas watched.

  There were two other vampire stakings on campus that night, though no witnesses came forward in those incidents.

  The experience forever changed Thomas, though the depth of that change would not be realized for several months.

  Thomas gave a description of the assailants to campus police, then to the city police. He’d only gotten a good enough look at four of them. The quartet was found, charged with first-degree murder, remained mum on their accomplices, and the matter eventually went to trial.

  Thomas was the D.A.’s star witness, and he sat through the entire proceeding. Margie testified, too, though she’d only gotten a brief look at one of them.

  Thomas’s father—Reginald Brock of Brock, Davis & Davis—defended the quartet, in spite of Thomas’s pleas that his father stay out of it. The elder Brock was exceptional in his presentation, m
eticulous. The D.A., though earnest, was not in Reginald Brock’s league. Brock repeatedly cited California Penal Codes 242 and 245, the definition of assault and battery—a willful and unlawful touch that is harmful or offensive.

  “That is all my clients can be charged with, Your Honor.” The elder Brock’s concluding words were burned into Thomas’s brain. “My clients cannot be charged with murder, as the supposed victim in this case was already dead. Harold Farrar had died years ago in the city’s Tenderloin district. That he had subsequently risen as a vampire is immaterial. Vampires are dead, Your Honor. And you cannot murder someone who is already dead. A death certificate is on file for the man. He’d never bothered to have it rescinded when he became a vampire.”

  Reginald Brock won that day, driving a permanent wedge between father and son. The quartet was instead found guilty of assault and battery under Penal Code 245, assault with a deadly weapon—the penalty for which ranged anywhere from a year in county jail and a $10,000 fine to four years in state prison.

  But the elder Brock hadn’t been content with that, he’d pressed and pressed and managed to successfully argue self-defense; that the students feared for their lives in the presence of a vampire. The students were expelled from the university, but they avoided jail time. And then he’d gloated to Thomas about his victory.

  Thomas never accepted another dime from his father, and they’d not spoken again.

  “We will win this case for Harry,” Thomas said as he shook off the ugly memories and drifted back toward the heart of the Tenderloin. “For Dimitar,” he corrected himself. “We will win.” Traffic passed through him as he pointed himself toward the Golden Pumpkin. He intended to hover around until the sun went down and Dimitar’s brother surfaced.

  Chapter 3.10

  Pete looked over Evelyn’s shoulder as she clicked through various links on the computer monitor.

  “Interesting,” he pronounced. He had a little trouble reading some of it, especially the small print and the stuff in blue, but he didn’t want to admit that.

  Pete normally perched at the top of the old three-story building, hanging out over the edge. He had to be connected to the building, but lately he’d kept that connection by putting in some hours inside the law office helping Thomas, turning pages and rifling through filing cabinets, sometimes surfing the Internet. Pete actually liked the work, a good change-up from simply fortifying the building by his presence and watching the birds on the roof across the street.

  He especially liked playing on the computer. But sometimes he didn’t want to be told what to do. “Bring me the files under ‘D,’ and grab volume two on civil liberties while you’re at it,” or “I need you to make a call for me. Just punch in the numbers and hold the phone to my face.” Because Thomas couldn’t touch anything, he was using Pete as his fingers. Pete preferred putzing around the office when Thomas was elsewhere.

  “Hey, Evey, try that one. That link.” He pointed to the third entry down that said: VAMPIRES ON THE RISE? and Evelyn obliged.

  The link opened to a copy of a news article, the print tiny, and he was about to swallow his pride and suggest she increase the magnification, but she started reading aloud. Pete liked the sound of her voice.

  “Villagers in Zarozje, Serbia, are getting their garlic, crosses, and stakes ready, on guard for Sava Savanovic, the country’s most infamous vampire.” She leaned back. “Sava. Our client said that Sava made his aunt into a vampire, and then the aunt bestowed the curse on her own kids and nephews.”

  “The family that slays together stays together, eh?” Pete made a tsk-tsking sound. Gargoyles had relatives too, of a sort, brethren that had been carved from the same section of rock. Some of Pete’s relatives were on a big Catholic church a few miles away. They kept in touch by sending vibrations through the ground. “Keep reading, Evey. I want to hear more.”

  “Zarozje is a remote hamlet sitting between thick forests and mountain slopes, and this article, dated about a month ago, says Sava has awakened, had been staked about a hundred years ago but has come back now as a ghost. Tourists are visiting the tiny place, and the ghost-sightings have been a boon to the local economy.”

  “Too bad the ghost sightings in this office aren’t a boon to our economy. Go on. Read some more.”

  “A local council has warned all the villagers to carry garlic with them whenever they go out at night and to nail wooden crosses throughout their homes to keep vampires at bay. Some claim the measures are meant more to attract visitors, as the hamlet is in an especially impoverished region that borders Bosnia.”

  “So … this Sava … might be real? Not that it has anything to do with your case, but it’s hooked me. That’d be one old vampire.”

  Evelyn shrugged. “I don’t know about the vampire turning into a ghost part. But I bet Dimitar was being honest about Sava starting his family’s … condition. So, yeah, I’d say at one time Sava was real. From what I can tell, vampires were a big deal—and occasionally still are—in the Balkans. Dracula from Romania. Vampire tales triggered widespread hysteria centuries past, and people who were accused of being vampires were executed, sort of like this country with its Salem witch trials.”

  Pete made a whistling sound. “Try that link. There, that’s it.” The article was in much larger type. “So this Sava Savanovic is a legend, and there are no visual accounts. But apparently there were a string of killings in that area only a little while back, villagers milling their grain on the Rogatica River. And over here in the sidebar it mentions that vampires fled Europe for the United States in the seventeen hundreds. And look at this, says that old mill collapsed a month or so back, about the time the Sava-the-ghost sightings started.”

  “What are you two poking into?” This came from Gretchen Cain, who’d been sorting through paperwork at her desk at the very front of the office. She snapped up her cane and made her way to Evelyn’s desk. “What’s got you two so absorbed?”

  Evelyn told her about their vampire client.

  Gretchen rolled her eyes. “I find these OTs who cross our threshold an interesting bunch,” she said, reaching out a finger and pretending to tweak Pete’s nose. “I liked that ghoul, Mr. Holder, and I put up with Valentino drifting in to cop a buzz when I have to take my Vicodins. But vampires?” Her face gathered into a point. “They can be trouble, Evey, so you need to watch yourself. I’m sure there are some halfway decent blood-suckers in this city, and Tommy told me about his vampire roommate from law school. But—”

  Pete watched the elderly woman. He’d never seen Gretchen with such a sour look.

  “But you be extra careful. Sure, they don’t sparkle like in the teenybopper-angst series, but some of the movies portray ’em right. Ever see them Underworld pictures?”

  “The turf wars with vampires and werewolves?” Evelyn laughed as she clicked on another link. “I saw one of them. Too gooey for my taste.”

  Gretchen tapped her cane on the floor. “There’s turf wars in San Francisco, too, sweetie. Just like in Underworld. Don’t you get caught up in one, hear me? If you go getting yourself killed, this practice’ll be closing its doors. And who else is gonna hire me at my age? You think about that.”

  Evelyn smiled. “Gretch, it’s a grand theft case. And our client is innocent.”

  “They’re not all innocent, Evey. Some of the OTs in this city are just as foul as bad-minded humans.” Gretchen toddled back to her desk. “I’m heading out. You lock up when you’re done, all right?”

  Evelyn nodded. “Pete, here’s a report from a villager who lives near that collapsed mill on the river. He says he heard strange sounds coming from the forest, but he does not fear the vampire-ghost because he respects Sava and does not make fun. He says the people of Zarozje should ‘embrace the Other.’ Now that’s a term we hear around here once in a while. He says ‘embrace the Other’ and call in the tourists, that if the Romanians can profit from the Dracula legend with the big castle in Transylvania, they should do the same with Sava.”<
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  Pete walked around to the front of her desk. “So … how does all of this history stuff help your case with Dimitar?”

  “It doesn’t really help the case, it just helps me. I wanted to get a better look at where my client came from. Besides, I couldn’t find anything useful on Fahim Yar’Adua, the witness against our client. I guess I’ll have to go talk to him face-to-face tomorrow.” She stifled a yawn. “And now I have to head out. My stomach demands dinner, and I want to go to the revival at St. Agnes’s later tonight. There’s a box of crackers next to the fridge, and a couple of six-packs. Don’t drink it all, though, please. I’m not going back to the store for a few days.” She reached to turn off the computer.

  “Hold up there. If you don’t mind, I’m going to do a little more of this Internet research, all right?” He eased himself onto Evelyn’s chair as she headed toward the front door, and he adjusted the controls to lower the seat, careful to keep one foot on the floor. The furniture probably counted as part of the building, but he didn’t want to chance his connection to it. “I’ll shut it down when I’m done and turn off all the lights this time before I head back to the roof. Promise.”

  She said something to him before she left, but he didn’t pay attention. Another link caught his eye and he clicked on it. Pete was thankful Thomas had invited him down into the law office. This was much more interesting than watching birds and passersby all day. And when he was done with this bit of research, he’d get a beer out of the fridge and try his hand at that computer solitaire game or download a free trial of World of Warcraft. Evey didn’t have anything but solitaire on this computer. Maybe she’d object to Warcraft clogging up some of the memory, but Pete knew it was better to apologize after the fact than ask permission and risk a “no.”