Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel)

by Laura Resnick

  “We got squat,” said Lucky.

  “Our interviews and researches produced only a negative result—which I am inclined to think we can consider conclusive.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Capuzzo’s clean,” said Lucky. “I mean, really clean. Good husband, good father, good neighbor, good employer, and a good Catholic. Never involved with anything mystical, occult-related, illegal, or even a little woo-woo.”

  “And no connection to Quinn?” I guessed.

  “The last time Mr. Capuzzo engaged with a police officer, as far as anyone knows, was twenty-four years ago when he reported a burglary at one of his stores.”

  “Hm.”

  “Nate was right about the widow being a nice lady,” said Lucky. “She sent some cannoli home with us.”

  “And she gave Nelli that lovely bone.”

  “You took Nelli with you?” That must have been a surprise for the Capuzzos.

  “I wanted to see whether she would react to anyone in the Capuzzo family the way she reacted to Detective Quinn,” he said. “But she was perfectly relaxed in their household throughout our visit.”

  “So now we turn our full attention to the redheaded cop, I guess,” said Lucky. “Did you squeeze any juice out of Lopez?”

  I immediately banished the mental image that phrase evoked. “I got less than squat. I got squat’s rejects.”

  I summarized what I had learned from Lopez and explained that I’d told the truth (or started to) when he demanded an explanation. I concluded, “I don’t think any of the information I got tells us anything relevant. Lopez is no longer a source. And it’s possible he’ll alert Quinn to my suspicion.”

  “Ah, don’t beat yourself up, kid. Lopez is a detective. He was bound to notice he was being interrogated.”

  “He was in a pretty bad mood to begin with, too,” I said. “It turns out that he’s the cop who that lawyer—the one Nathan saw in the news—is blaming for Uncle Six’s ‘suicide,’ so that situation is causing him problems.”

  “Oh, really?” said Lucky. “Lopez is being investigated? Got some legal trouble? What a shame. My heart bleeds for him.”

  I ignored that, too, since Lucky’s resentment was understandable. It could have been avoided altogether, of course, if he had not chosen a life of crime; but it was understandable.

  I changed the subject. “Plus he’s got gremlins, so he’s pretty stressed out.”

  “He must be mistaken,” Max said seriously. “Gremlins are a myth. There is no such thing in reality.”

  “I didn’t mean real ones,” I said with a smile. “It’s a saying, Max. When your appliances and electronic devices keep breaking down, people say your stuff is infested with gremlins.”

  “Ah, I see!” He beamed. “That’s rather clever.”

  “Any chance these gremlins will wipe his computer clean of anything to do with Victor Gambello?” Lucky asked grumpily.

  “Well, his computer is one of the things that’s stopped working,” I said. “But I really doubt OCCB leaves all the evidence or records for a big case in one cop’s computer, with no duplicates or backup anywhere else.”

  “Sometimes I really hate technology,” Lucky grumbled.

  “By now, I think Lopez probably hates it, too. He’s on his third cell phone in one month—they just keep dying on him.” I frowned. “I wonder if there should be a recall? Does—”

  “Do I understand correctly that two separate cell phones have ceased functioning for Detective Lopez recently? As well as his computer?”

  I nodded. “He’s been having a run of bad luck. Oh, and then there are the cars.”

  “What about the cars?” asked Lucky.

  So I told them.

  “He has been having bad luck,” Lucky said—with noticeable schadenfreude. “Tell me more. I’m enjoying this.”

  “It’s Detective Quinn,” Max murmured, staring at me.

  We both looked at him.

  “What’s Quinn?” I asked.

  “The malfunctioning of communications devices, the disruption of electrical equipment, the unexplained breakdowns in machinery . . .” Staring off into space as he considered these incidents, Max mused, “And there was also Nelli’s reaction.”

  “What are you on to, Doc?” Lucky asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “All of these things have occurred in the vicinity of Detective Quinn.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but now that Max mentioned it . . . “Well, yes. I guess. He’s around Lopez a lot, so he’d be around any machines or devices that Lopez uses when he’s working.” I remembered something Lopez had said, and I added, “And he used Lopez’s computer before it went haywire. Lopez told me he thought Quinn had done something to it—by accident.”

  “Where are you going with this, Max?” Lucky wondered.

  “These incidents are signs of the demonic,” he said.

  “A car breaking down is a sign of the demonic?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Not as an isolated incident, no. But as part of a repetitious pattern? Yes.” He stroked his beard pensively. “Three cars, two phones, a computer . . .”

  I gasped as I realized something else. “Lopez said all of these things had happened within the past few weeks!”

  “Ah!” said Max.

  “I get it!” Lucky slammed his hand down on the table. “They’ve been happening since Quinn became his partner!”

  “And that’s why Lopez, despite spending lots of time with him, hasn’t noticed anything weird about Quinn! Because the weirdness isn’t in Quinn’s own behavior, it’s in what’s happening around him. And it would never occur to Lopez to associate Quinn with these incidents. The only reason he thinks Quinn may be the one who messed up his computer is that the guy used it one day. Apart from that—well, knowing Lopez, it’s not a connection he would see, despite how observant he is.” I added, “It’s not a connection I would see, either, if you hadn’t pointed it out, Max.”

  “So we’re saying Quinn is a demon?” Lucky asked.

  Max shook his head. “No, I think it more likely that Quinn is being oppressed by a demon. Incidents such as the ones Esther has described are common in cases of demon oppression. That would also explain Nelli’s reaction. She may not have been aggressive toward Quinn, but rather toward something that is enmeshed with him. An entity which is present wherever he is present, but not visible to us.”

  “But Nelli saw it,” Lucky said, looking at the dog with admiration.

  “Or sensed it,” said Max.

  “Good work!” Lucky said. “Good Nelli!”

  Upon hearing her name, Nelli wagged her tail, but she did not pause in her enjoyment of her bone.

  “Then this demon is what animated Mr. Capuzzo?” I guessed.

  “I assume so,” said Max.

  “Why?”

  “Yes, that is the question we must explore.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “I thought you might already know.”

  “Well, certainly there are demons that take a strong interest in death, graveyards, tombs, mummies, corpses, human remains . . .”

  I pushed my plate away, feeling my appetite wane.

  “But reanimation of the dead is unusual.”

  “Was it just a prank?” I wondered. “It frightened people. Could that have been the goal?”

  “Well done, Esther!” Max beamed at me. “Demons thrive on fear, so that is certainly a possibility.”

  “Then there are other possibilities, too,” Lucky guessed.

  “Yes. We shall have to investigate this more closely to narrow them down. So we still need what we needed before.”

  “More information about Quinn,” I said gloomily.

  “And more direct observation of him. There are a number of questions for which we need answers. Who or what is
this demonic entity? How or why did it attach itself to Quinn? Is Quinn aware of it or not? And . . .”

  “And?” Lucky prodded.

  I think I knew the next question. “What does it want?”

  “Correct,” said Max. “And what will it do in order to get what it wants?”

  Thinking of Lopez again, I said, “And who will it hurt?”

  8

  “I don’t got time for you,” I said. “I’m working. When you come around like this, you’re costing me, detective. You understand what I’m saying? You’re costing me.”

  “Yeah, whatever. We gotta talk.”

  “Oh, really?” I said with scathing contempt. “Is this another one of those talks where you unzip while I get on my knees and open wide?”

  “No, it’s the kind of talk where you tell me exactly what you did for Little Ricky last night.”

  “Got on my knees and opened wide,” I lied, injecting bitterness into my voice.

  “I don’t mean that,” Michael Nolan said, flipping to the next page of his script. “He used you to carry a sample of his merchandise into the Last Call Bar.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What was in it for you, Jilly? Did he pay you? Did you owe him a favor?” Nolan paused, and his voice changed as he said, “Or did he give you more junk? I keep telling you, that stuff’s gonna kill you.”

  “You’re barking up the wrong girl,” I said firmly. “I got nothin’ to do with—”

  “Don’t even go there, Jilly,” he said. “We’ve got you on video.”

  “Doing what?” I challenged brashly. “Going down on Little Ricky? Oh, gosh, I’m blushing.”

  “No, we got you accepting illegal merchandise and carrying it into a place of business for a criminal transaction.”

  “Oh, bull—”

  “Next time, don’t conspire right outside a building that has a surveillance camera.”

  “I didn’t conspire!”

  “You’re gonna tell me who you met with to turn over that sample . . .” Nolan paused, then broke character and said, “I don’t like the wording here.”

  We were sitting around a rehearsal table at the C&P company’s production offices. It wasn’t a full-cast read-through, since most of the D30 actors were currently filming on location, but a couple of regular cast members were here to read the scenes they would appear in with my character. Benoit, the director for this episode, was also here; he was French-Canadian, and it was pronounced Ben-WAH—as I’d learned after initially saying it wrong. There was also Kathleen, who was the writer/producer for this episode, and her assistant, as well as the usual army of staff. Working on a C&P production was unbelievably luxurious compared to most of my experiences. I suspected that if I wanted to blow my nose, one of the production minions in the room would anticipate this and pull the tissue from the box for me.

  “. . . who you met with to turn over the sample . . .” Nolan shook his head as he read the line again. “It’s clunky.”

  Kathleen nodded and typed a note into her laptop. “You’re right, I’ll fix it.”

  “Let’s continue,” prompted Benoit, his French accent very slight.

  “You’re gonna tell me blah blah blah,” said Nolan. “Which will be fixed.”

  “Which will be fixed,” agreed Benoit. He seemed like a patient man, which is a good thing in a director.

  We were reading a flashback scene in the upcoming episode. Detective Jimmy Conway, still lying in his hospital bed (where he’d been for so long that he should probably think about making a down payment on his room and hiring a decorator), was finally semi-lucid, verbal, and trying to remember how he got shot (again).

  He’d been suffering from traumatic amnesia ever since waking up a few episodes ago. “And that’s not just a dramatic device,” Kathleen had assured me when explaining the story. “It’s not unusual for someone who has suffered a traumatic accident to be unable to remember it or the events leading up to it. It’s completely credible that Jimmy doesn’t remember what happened for hours before the shooting.”

  “Okay,” I’d said.

  I didn’t really care about the veracity. To be honest, I was just glad that Jimmy was having so many flashback memories that involved Jilly. I liked working.

  I glanced at Nolan now and read my next line, after Conway insisted that Jilly was going to tell him who she met with. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

  “You’re on camera, Jilly! We got you!” His voice was getting louder.

  “You’re full of it,” I said. “Get lost.”

  Kathleen’s assistant read the description of action here. “Jilly tries to walk away. Conway grabs her arm.”

  “Jimmy,” said his partner, Detective Cal Donner, played by former underwear model Kihm Hazlett. “Come on.”

  Kathleen’s assistant, whose name I couldn’t remember, read, “Donner tries to restrain Conway, who shakes him off and gets rough with Jilly, who’s trying to get away.”

  “Let go!” I said angrily. “This is police brutality.”

  “You’re gonna tell me,” Conway insisted. “Tell me!”

  “Jimmy!” Detective Donner shouted. “Stop!”

  As written, this is where the scene would cut away from the nighttime street corner where we exchanged these lines in the flashback sequence, and it would cut to Jimmy Conway’s hospital room with disorienting swiftness, reflecting Jimmy’s own confused state of mind.

  Seated beside the bed, where Conway was still hooked up to some tubes, Donner said with concern, “Jimmy . . . that never happened.”

  “Huh?”

  “There was no surveillance camera. We never had any video of Jilly C-Note.”

  “Are you sure? But . . . but what about the—”

  “Jimmy . . .” Kihm shook his head and said, “I wasn’t there. I never even saw you that night.”

  “What?” Nolan said in vague, distressed confusion.

  “What you’re remembering . . . it didn’t happen.”

  It was the end of the scene. After a moment, Nolan said to Kathleen, “I think I need another line there.”

  “We’re going to get a close-up as you realize what he’s telling you,” she replied, apparently recognizing that what he meant was that he wanted the final moment of the scene to focus on him, not on the other actor.

  “Hmm,” said Nolan. “That might be okay.”

  Kihm Hazlett’s expression changed to a subtle, wry smile as he kept his gaze fixed on his script. He’d been working with Nolan for a while and knew him well. I suspected he had rather enjoyed the break from Nolan’s daily company that the actor’s two heart attacks had given him in recent months.

  Kihm was a California blond who’d made a few embarrassingly bad straight-to-DVD movies after aging out of the underwear game. He’d fallen off the radar for a decade or so after that, then eventually reinvented himself as a capable middle-aged character actor. He’d auditioned for The Dirty Thirty when it was a controversial new project that the networks wouldn’t touch, and the producers had cast him against type. Still a good-looking guy who kept in shape, he played perhaps the ugliest character on the show. While Jimmy Conway was corrupt, conflicted, and complex, Cal Donner was a bigot, a brute, and a mean bastard. He was also hardworking and loyal, though, so he got the job done, and he covered for Conway, who went off on drinking binges and sometimes fell down on the job because of his PTSD.

  The police of the actual Thirtieth Precinct, which ran alongside the Hudson River from West 133rd Street up to West 155th Street, loathed this show’s portrayal of their team so passionately that D30 didn’t even do location shoots there anymore. A TV production company needs the support of local law enforcement (or at least a grudging minimal level of cooperation), and this cast and crew got the sort of reception from the cops of the Three-
Oh that I would get at Fenster & Co., where I had accidentally destroyed most of the fourth floor last month while confronting Evil.

  Anyhow, although he was a workaholic and a loyal buddy, Detective Cal Donner wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, so despite his going on a rampage to find his partner’s shooter after Michael Nolan had his heart attacks, he still had no idea who’d shot Jimmy Conway . . . and it was a plotline that had faded from view after a few weeks, as other characters entered the spotlight with new storylines that eclipsed Nolan’s absent character.

  So now Conway was trying to remember the night he got shot, but his memories were unreliable—as in the scene we’d just read. As he continued trying, throughout the final three episodes of the season, it would be unclear whether he was having memories or hallucinations . . . but it would become increasingly apparent that he was obsessed with Jilly C-Note.

  Donner, eventually believing that Conway’s focus on Jilly meant she knew who the shooter was, would go after her in the next episode. Finding Jilly wouldn’t be easy, and when he did . . . in predictable Donner fashion, he’d wind up beating her badly in his rage and frustration. Even Donner wasn’t dumb enough to do that to someone who might hire a lawyer or file a complaint, but a streetwalker like Jilly wouldn’t do either thing. She’d just yearn for revenge on every cop in the dirty Thirtieth Precinct, wishing she could make them pay for the things they’d done to her.

  Meanwhile, it wouldn’t be clear whether Conway remembered harassing Jilly over criminal matters the night he was shot, or whether he was just sexually obsessed with her and fabricating those memories in the confusion of his morphine withdrawal. (In addition to everything else, recovering from the shooting had turned Conway into a morphine addict. Really, I thought, it was amazing that any of these characters could even get through the day.)

  I’m unlikely casting for a leading man’s sexual obsession in a more mainstream style of American television show, since my looks aren’t Hollywood gorgeous, but—as with casting the handsome, gentle-eyed Kihm Hazlett as a brute with an ugly soul—D30 didn’t make predictable casting choices.

  I can play romantic leads onstage, and the camera lens doesn’t crack when it focuses on my face—actually, I look okay on screen, since I have decent bone structure and good cheekbones. But I’m not the sort of actress who gets exploited for her beauty while young and then cast aside after she turns forty (and then subsequently seeks plastic surgery in an effort to prolong her career as a babe). My profession means that I keep in shape, but I have a pretty average figure for an actress, rather than a bankable one. With fair skin, brown eyes, and brown hair, I can fit a variety of roles . . . including a bisexual junkie hooker with whom a bent, traumatized, substance-abusing cop had become obsessed.