THE GHOST DETECTIVE
A Novel
by
Thomas Kennedy Lowenstein
SCHILLER & WELLS, LTD.
PUBLISHERS
An Imprint of Stay Thirsty Publishing
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STAY THIRSTY MEDIA, INC.
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Copyright © 2010 Thomas K. Lowenstein
All Rights Reserved
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected]
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Cover Design: Jason Mathews
Thomas Kennedy Lowenstein
THE GHOST DETECTIVE
“…the possible includes not only the fantasies of people with weak nerves but also the as yet unawakened intentions of God.”
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
“How strange! So that is time! Strange!”
H.M. Stanley’s last words
For JL, SUF, and AKL
Chapter One
The Great Detective Arrives
Boston, in the last Fall of the last century: Tall buildings hung cold shadows over old graveyards; automobiles squeezed into narrow streets, delivery trucks stopped traffic; a thousand store windows were carefully arrayed with a hundred thousand new things to buy. Construction cranes loomed high above deep trenches where a new highway was being built. Commuters and tourists shuffled and strode in almost-unseen gray pollution and the muted blues of spent emotion on cobblestones or bricks a hundred years old, talked into wireless telephones, passed churches with white paint and tall spires. Windowpanes rattled, a dog barked, people sat in silence or laughter at restaurants or around supper tables or stared at televisions. A couple hugged a tiny baby and each other and felt the world sliding past on the cold wind and didn’t care. Matter and cells and relationships divided and joined together again only to split apart; cells multiplied and cancers grew. Cycles of decay and regeneration spun fast and the only one everyone noticed was that of night taking over for day.
In the rail yard at the edge of the city a train groaned to a stop. In a middle row of a middle car James McParland, a stocky man with gold-rimmed glasses and a moustache, balanced his cane against the seat, pulled on his overcoat, and took hold of his satchel. He touched his cap to a young woman who stopped in the aisle to let him out and was keenly aware of the weight his cane supported as he proceeded up the aisle and lowered himself carefully down the steps to the platform.
The great hall of the station stretched high and long; two immense schedule boards with station names and train times flipping mechanically hung above the stone floors, the multitude of passengers flowing into crowds of people waiting, reading, drinking coffee, eating cheap food. McParland walked slowly, looking around without turning his head. Astonishing, he thought: the brightness of it all. Outside, he stopped to consider the construction cranes, higher than any cathedral he’d ever seen, outlined against the remnants of the orange, flashy sunset. Behind him the black harbor sipped at the edges of the land. He sniffed and out of instinct faded to habit checked behind him to see if he was being followed. There had been a time when, without going to some length to disguise himself, he couldn’t have stepped off that train without a reporter trying to talk to him. But no one knew he was here now—no one. A car passed close, vibrating with the whump of modern music.
Well, he thought, a corner of his mouth curling beneath his moustache, on the whole, a decent landing in a complicated city. And anonymity had its advantages, if not for the ego, especially in the overgrown Puritan cow town of Boston, where it was and is so rarely offered. Welcome.
Commuters filled the intersection, in the middle of which a large hole had been dug in the earth. A bus, navigating a close turn from one narrow street to another, almost hit a group of people; the driver honked and, through a wide window reflecting the last rays of sun, shook a fist. McParland stood at the edge of the construction site, watching the hard hats and orange vests of the workers as they moved among the chalky mud, steel, concrete, and tubing. He looked up: There used to be an elevated here, he thought. When will they stop cutting this city up and rebuilding it?
A hard-eyed woman sagging in her blouse and overcoat blocked his path. Drops of sweat stood out on her upper lip.
“Excuse you,” she said.
McParland squinted at her. “Not at all,” he said.
She opened her mouth to speak but her lips hung still, like soft tomatoes.
“Move along,” McParland said.
“Jerk,” the woman said.
McParland held his hat in place and bent into the flow of pedestrians. A few blocks from the station he came to a shopping area thick with the smell of roasting sausage and nuts from sidewalk vendor carts. People carried bright bags and looked around here, though not at each other. He touched his moustache with forefinger and thumb. Boston again; perhaps it was only appropriate to seek redemption at the scene of one’s grandest humiliation. He had last come to Boston for money—its own form of redemption, perhaps; he had sat on the edge of a chair in the spring sunlight of a dark-wood and polished crystal parlor in a house on Beacon Street.
“It is my hope my daughter can be saved,” his client had said, pale, watery around the eyes, thin and tough with a strand of gray hair pasted across his round forehead.
A whiskered ancestor considered the room from a dark portrait hung above the sickly yellow fire sputtering in the fireplace.
“Of course,” McParland had said, thinking: For five thousand dollars I will try to save anyone.
The sound of a horse-drawn carriage making its way up the hill outside drifted in to them.
“You understand,” the client had said, sipping coffee from blue-white china, the edges of his collar digging into the loose skin on his neck, “that I want to know everything. Not merely where she goes and with whom, but the other whos as well—I want that entire perverted world delivered to me.”
“Yes, Mr. South,” McParland said, sipping coffee. “If it were a simple job, anyone would have done.”
Mr. South winced, lowered his coffee cup to the dark wood table, and took a folded check from the inside breast pocket of his jacket.
“As we agreed,” he said.
“Indeed, Mr. South,” McParland said, taking the check. That is a good year, right there, he thought. “You know, sir, when I was in Pennsylvania—”
“Yes,” Mr. South interrupted. “I have been told that you talk rather too much about your past glories. Let us hope you retain much of your former skill.” He raised his cup to his thin mouth.
McParland nodded deeply. “I will keep a strict account of my expenses,” he said, thinking: And I will live well.
“I expect detailed written reports every day and that you will be available to answer any questions I may have on twenty-four hours notice. Agreed? Fine. And, Mr. McParland, you will please use the kitchen entrance when you do come.”
“Of course.”
Relax, McParland told himself. This is easy money. Easy money.
“Good day to you, then,” Mr. South said, lowering his chin to his stiff collar.
“Good day,” McParland said, standing up, putting on his hat, and walking slowly from the room, aware of the noise his cane made against the floor in the hall, of his slowness, of the missing piece of his heel as if it throbbed red through his shoe.
For what, McParland wondered in the crowd of shoppers, do I seek redemption? For having had to make a living? For being great? Who in their right mind could wish to be re
deemed for such things? And yet, here he was. The argument in his mind was ever thus. Redemption was an infinitely corrosive word and he would not think of it anymore.
The sidewalk was narrow; McParland backed against a wall and let the crush of people pass him for a while. If you stood still, stone still, he wondered, for long enough—a million years, two million, two million measurements of earth and sun and sub-measurements of moon—would the spinning earth cause other people to revolve around you, would you become the smallest possible particle of firmament, the center of energy, the heart of the atom? Would your force, your particle in the very center bend others into a circle around you? But the bodies would be subject to their own cycles of decay and would disappear, leaving only energy. Dead dust rotating around the smallest particle.
He walked again and came to City Hall—“Old City Hall” a sign in front of it read. It was now a restaurant. He came to the rear of greenish King’s Chapel: At least they hadn’t turned that into a restaurant yet. Souls lingered at the doors, looking at commuters with gray eyes. Human beings are never so alone alive as they are in death, McParland thought.
Rumor had it that a messenger of God was coming to give rest, and that he would arrive at this church. McParland had followed enough of these rumors to enough places—Idaho, St. Louis, Chicago, even Los Angeles, for God’s sake—to know that no one really knew if there was a God, if there were messengers, if anyone ever really rested. This time he’d heard, too, that his former client’s daughter, an invert so at war with herself she hated her very sex was lingering, too, and had felt the pinch of the irrational hope that helping her now could somehow help him to his own rest, if rest there was. That was when the idea of redemption had lodged in him, and he had come to Boston again. Maybe the rumors were true. In Boston, it was said, even the living could see the dead if they looked. So, perhaps if any place could ever offer him a chance to rest it might be this lumpy old city that had always teemed with ghosts—and there were a lot of them now, clustered around King’s Chapel, some bright, some fading. But was that because of the rumor of God’s messenger’s imminent arrival or had the endless digging for the new highway simply excited the dead?
McParland stepped inside the church and removed his hat. From the balcony a small choir sang quiet folds of music. To his right a few tourists, chewing gum, breathing out the brackish gray of blasphemy, stared at the pew in which George Washington once sat.
“Oh, bother it all,” a voice exclaimed from a rear corner of the church. McParland turned to look. In the last pew in the far-right row, on its back, lay the marble bust of Mr. Frederick Gaines Roberts: deep eye sockets, strong, curving nose, bald head. Beside the bust sat the gray-eyed Mr. Roberts himself, his long fingers stroking his pate.
“Not Roberts complaining again,” a woman’s voice muttered.
“Mr. Roberts? Mr. Roberts? Are you quite all right?” a man’s voice inquired.
“No, I am not, Mr. Frye,” Mr. Roberts answered. “Though I do thank you for your consideration, which is in such marked contrast to certain—”
“Do spare us your complaint, Mr. Roberts,” the woman’s voice said.
“It’s not right to leave me like this,” Mr. Roberts said.
“I’m certain they’ll set you right very soon, Mr. Roberts,” Mr. Frye said. He approached the pew buttoned up in layers of shirt, vest, and coat, his slanted eyebrows contracted in a frown; he seemed to be sweating.
“Not soon enough,” Mr. Roberts exclaimed. He was, perhaps, slightly weaker of jaw than his bust.
“Do stop talking and talking about it,” the woman said from the stairs to the balcony, stamping her foot in irritation. Her face was small, her lips bright red.
“Stop talking about it? It has been close to six months, Miss Thompson. Six of their—”
“And before that you talked endlessly of the drip. All we ever heard about was the drip, drip, drip on your bust.”
“It is quite uncomfortable,” Mr. Frye interjected.
“Uncomfortable? How so? He’s been dead a hundred years—”
“Ninety-three,” Mr. Roberts corrected.
“Well, awkward,” Mr. Frye said.
“Would the three of you please stop having the same conversation over and over again?” an old man’s voice asked. “Spare us the outrage about your bust. I begin to wonder if they need hell as long as you are still here.”
“Dr. French,” Mr. Roberts said. “I knew your family, sir, and I have never understood how you came to be members of this church in the first place.”
“Oh! Indeed! Perhaps honest people should worship elsewhere,” French said. He was standing by the pulpit, glowing purple, tufts of gray hair protruding from his ears.
“You are so mean,” Miss Thompson called to Mr. Roberts.
“Who’s that?” Mr. Roberts asked, pointing at McParland.
“Are you from out of town, sir?” Mr. Frye asked.
“Speak!” Mr. Roberts demanded.
“Oh,” Miss Thompson giggled.
“Is this the place, then?” Dr. French whispered, moving to McParland’s side. “We are getting a lot of visitors these days.”
“It must be—we deserve a chance,” Mr. Roberts said.
McParland replaced his hat on his head and, nodding, wished them all a good evening. The voices of the choir filled the church.
“You see what you’ve done, Roberts?” Dr. French said. “Damn it, Roberts!”
McParland ached. He went into the hotel across the street and as he crossed the marble-floored lobby, his head still, he surveyed the people around him to make sure he hadn’t been followed. He saw only businessmen, tourists, one couple walking quickly, probably having affair, judging from how the man looked around. McParland took the stairs, leaning on his cane, his breath fluttery and his shirt damp. In an empty room, over a large television, hung a black and white photograph, taken from the top of a tall building, of old Boston: men in suits rushed along narrow streets under huge billboards, pressing hats to their heads; women in dresses of varying gray seemed to be walking less quickly.
McParland put his satchel down and parted the heavy curtains at the window. He stared at the church across the street. Beyond the black wrought-iron fence at the back entrance he could see the last row of sinking headstones in the graveyard disappearing in the deepening evening. He hung his overcoat and suit coat in the closet across from the bathroom, loosened his tie, and moved a chair so he could sit looking out the window. He stretched his legs.
So, Boston it is, he thought. Where and how did these rumors get started? Who could know. Who could help following them and hoping. Though he wasn’t at all sure he deserved hope, he knew he felt it. He took a packet of cigarettes and a small amber bottle from his satchel and sipped from the bottle. He lit a cigarette, and held the smoke in as he stroked his moustache. Commuters rushed past the church. A couple of tourists stopped to see if they could go inside. And the dead, coming and going, dressed as if they lived, flitted, drifted; frantic, angry, searching.
I deserve better, he thought. Traitor, he told himself. You deserved everything you got and now you deserve this. He sipped again from his bottle and smoked. Laudanum. The taste was bitter. Warm heart of the atom, warm sooty soft jelly center. Circles of measurement, strings of circles, centers of warm sticky lung-filled jelly. And all the people, here again, cycles of circles, circles of string, strings of atoms.
You’re a traitor, a mercenary, he thought. No redemption for you. His chest ached. His feet ached, even his missing heel.
He looked out the window. From the back door of the church, as if in tiny gasps of steam swept away by the strong wind, fluttered ripe green, sickly yellow, sapphire, crimson, gold. The headstones were obscured in darkness.
McParland closed his eyes and smoked and swept his tongue along his lips for bits of tobacco.
Chapter Two
Sam
From the fluorescent curve of a downtown office building Sam Morgan stepped
into the chilly wind and early darkness of the evening. He had stiff, blondish hair and blue eyes; he was skinny. He loosened his tie and joined the rush of commuters heading toward the subway station and looked at his feet as he walked, thinking he could’ve stayed a little later, worked a little harder. He put his head down and thought of the papers lying on his desk exactly where they’d be in the morning when he arrived to turn on the light again.
At the burying ground next to King’s Chapel, a stone church with heavy doors and a cast-iron gate, Sam stopped to consider the crooked headstones. He’d read somewhere that in the old graveyards the headstones represent only some of the people actually buried there in mass graves. He thought of his step-grandmother lying sick in her bed at his father’s house and thought he’d better get home quickly so he’d have more time to—to what. Eat dinner. Have more time before he had to go back to the office. He wanted to see his step-grandmother, though that would mean seeing his father and step-mother, too. As he passed the entrance to King’s Chapel the doors opened and a few elderly people came out, adjusting their hats and mufflers against the wind. The light from inside was warm, spectral. Sam heard the choir practicing.
“Are you going in?” a gray-haired man asked him, holding the door.
Sam looked at the tide of commuters heading for the subway and back at the dim foyer of the church. “Yes, thank you,” he said.
He took off his hat as he passed through the stone-floored foyer. The voices of the choir, practicing in the balcony, floated down. Stone busts lined the back wall of the church. A center aisle, flanked by box pews with worn crimson cushions, led to a pulpit, the low communion railing, a table with silver candlesticks, and the Lord’s Prayer written in gold lettering on the wall to the left of the table. A line of white columns on each side of the aisle held up the ceiling, high above, light blue with patches of peeling paint.
THE GHOST DETECTIVE: Boston Page 1
