The Dead Detective

by J. R. Rain

  A convenient legend, surely.

  Anyway, I next make the mistake of asking him what happens to mulos. They’re burned, beheaded, or just buried alive with steel stakes through their hearts and tongues, he tells me. Great. My day just keeps getting brighter and brighter.

  “There may be a counter-spell, though. I can look that up for you.” There’s always hope, I guess. And he does have the dreamiest eyes―big and sad and very brown and sort of Middle Eastern. A lot like Malena’s, in fact, except that hers are always laughing. He invites me to his office to go over the old task force records with him; I’ve told him the name of the woman I suspect of having put the spell on me, Gana Kali, and her daughter, who I think I heard called ‘Nadia.’

  The walk back to Center Plaza is in the midday sun, and by the time we get there, I’m back to feeling pretty sick and faint. So definitely not at the top of my game when it comes to, you know, staring soulfully into Tabori’s eyes. On the way over, I’d asked him why the Gypsy task force had been retired by the city.

  “Racial profiling. At least that was the excuse. But what they really hated was the name―I mean, there isn’t a ‘Black Task Force’ or a ‘Hispanic Task Force’, right? So they just folded us all into the Gang Task Force. But they made a big mistake―I’d guess that Romani organized crime has shot up by about 400% since they shut us down.”

  And last night, thanks to me, there had been two more victims of it.

  I don’t come down to PD headquarters too often, usually just for training seminars or briefings or special cases, but I always feel like a total rube when I do, mainly from the way the Robbery-Homicide department here treats precinct detectives. I run into a couple in the elevator up to Val Tabori’s office on the fourth floor, and they give me a hard time for “getting punked by gang-bangers.” I guess the story’s gotten around. Tabori hadn’t heard it, though; his interest is clearly aroused by this additional anecdotal evidence of the power of Gana Kali’s curse. The guy seems to view most of life through a Gypsy prism; I guess that’s what happens to you in his line of work. It must be the same way for Chinese detectives who specialize in Triad crime, for example. We meet a couple of these on the way to his desk, and they look and act less like cops than any two fellow-officers I’ve ever seen on the force; more like Silicon Valley geeks.

  Tabori doesn’t have his own office, just his own cubicle. We squeeze into it and go through his database. No hits on Gana Kali, but we get about a dozen on the name Nadia from all over the country. None of them look like mine, though.

  “I’ve got two more names for you to check out,” I tell him. “Dorothy Uwanawich and Bobby Marks.”

  He eyes me inscrutably. “Where did you get those?” But I’m guessing that the investigating officers in Rosedale must have already called him about the double murder.

  “Tip from a CI.” An informant. He arches his eyebrows but runs the names anyway―and there on the screen, lo and behold, are mug shots of the two people I killed last night.

  “I better give this to Rosedale,” he says. “And the city morgue. Thanks for the positive ID.” But I can tell from his tone that he knows I did it. So now here’s one more person who knows my secret controlling my fate. Luckily, he has no positive physical evidence. Yet.

  When I get up to go, he says, “Hold on.” He digs through a steel drawer stuffed with paper file folders and finally pulls one out. “I think we need to work on finding this counter-spell for you ASAP, don’t you? Let’s see…” He flips through laser-printed and Xeroxed pages, some of them old and dog-eared. Here’s a man who loves his work. For the first time, I notice he’s wearing a nice cologne. Everything about this guy screams sex―except maybe the fact that he’s a fellow-cop, and I don’t do other cops. And that maybe he isn’t into necrophilia.

  But speak of the devil. While he’s digging around through his papers, my cell phone chimes, and I take it because it’s Harper. Maybe he’s got more lab results for me; just what I’m in the mood for.

  “Richie?” he says. “I’ve had an idea. There’s this company called the Baby-Plus Prenatal Educational System that makes these little electronic devices that fake a mother’s heartbeat. I just went out and bought one on my lunch break, and I was thinking I could implant it in your chest cavity right above your heart, you know, where your rib used to be. If I angle it right, it should fool a―”

  “Harper, not over the phone, okay? These things are radios.”

  “Okay, okay, sorry. I just got so enthusiastic. I mean you’d have to change batteries every―”

  “And I appreciate it, truly.” It actually isn’t a bad idea. If I could figure out a way to cook my body temp, I might even be able to pass a physical. Someplace like Lagos or Guatemala City, anyway. “When could you do it?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Can’t―it’s Mom’s birthday. How about tomorrow?”

  “No, that’s no good for me. It will have to be over the weekend, I guess. Call me?” Just like the good old days; now you can see why we didn’t work out. Except, after he hangs up, I realize why his idea won’t work: blood pressure. Or maybe he has a plan to cover that, too.

  “Okay, here we go,” says Tabori, and reads aloud from his sheet: “First you must gut a newly born lamb under the full moon, and capture its entrails in a bowl made of oak. Then, these must be spread under the bedsheets of the cursed person for a month. After that, in order to ward off any spirits that wish to re-enter the body, the effected person must block all possible points of entry to the body with either the feathers of a duck, or the fur of a wolf.”

  “Seriously?” It seems way easier to me to just find the old bitch and whack her. If I’m free that long…

  On the way out, I drop in on ballistics in the basement and ask about my bullet. You know, the one I tweezed out of my heart. They’ll have something for me tomorrow, the guy says. Probably. Then I drop by the stationhouse to read my email and see if anything else shitty has happened to me since yesterday. And to check in with Ayon and the Cap and in general make sure that the lid is still on things. Until I get arrested, I mean. Maybe they’ll warn me if Internal Affairs has started sniffing around. But neither of them is in the building.

  Just for fun, I tap into Tabori’s CTF database and see if I can run any more creative searches that might turn something up. Like the names of anyone local who owns a silver Mercedes. Then I call up East Orange to find out the name of the lawyer who posted bail on the three Gypsy women in Uncle Sylvestro’s house.

  William A. Gluckstein & Associates, the clerk tells me. I look up Mr. Gluckstein’s offices: an address about twenty blocks north of the stationhouse, in the heart of the old downtown business district. It occurs to me that tonight after I leave Mom’s might be a good time to serve a midnight warrant on the premises. A ‘midnight warrant’ is one that doesn’t require a judge’s signature, by the way; just a lock-stripper or a set of skeleton keys, both of which I just happen to keep in the trunk of my car.

  I mean, how much more trouble can I possibly get into?

  Okay, forget I said that. In the meantime, I decide on flowers for Mom―maybe a really expensive floral arrangement. It’s not like the old bitch actually needs or wants anything. She just calculates how much you spent, whatever it is you’re giving her. Then she guesses. Out loud, I mean. Eventually, she throws it out, whatever it was; the cool thing about flowers is that she has to do that anyway. I mentally set a fifty dollar limit.

  Then I Google the next full moon. And I start calling local farms to find just what the hell the odds are on my being able to buy a newborn lamb born that night. It’s not exactly as if this is sheep-farming country, either.

  Cell phone. Devon. “I knew you’d forget,” he says bitterly.

  “What?”

  “Counseling? Remember? It’s in ten minutes―I’m already in the waiting room.”

  “Shit! Okay, I guess I can make it. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes if I can find a parking space.”

/>   Half an hour is more realistic, but they won’t mind starting without me. Dr. Susan, a big lanky athletic freckled brunette in her mid-forties, is very into Devon; she’d prefer I didn’t show up at all. Sometimes when I’m talking, a sneer actually crosses her face like the look you make at an unpleasant odor, and if we didn’t have our cell phones switched off at her command, I’d take a snap of it just to prove it’s there. I mean, she’s really naked about her dislike of me. And pretty much half-naked, anyway, always taking off her jacket or her shoes or her panties or something whenever Devon walks in the room.

  Today, however, the moment I get there, I realize Devon’s spilled his guts out to her already. About me being dead and all. Because her usual look of blank hostility and disdain has a sort of hungry, eager, yet stunned look to it now. Like a big raptor swooping down on its prey, unable to believe its luck. Obviously, she doesn’t really think I’m dead dead; just that something really big is going on that she can exploit to the max.

  “Is there anything you’d like to say, Richelle?” she asks me as soon as I sit down.

  “Like?”

  “Devon says that you and he had a very frank heart to heart last night. He says that, well, I don’t quite know how to put this—he says you told him you’d been shot and were―are―now, well… dead. That’s how he termed it.”

  Sigh. Meanwhile Devon stares at me sort of half-accusing, half-hypnotized. “I guess Devon just misinterpreted what I said. I meant that our marriage is dead.”

  “He says you have a hole in your heart. He says you let him see it.”

  “It was a metaphor. I was upset.” As a detective, I deal all day, every day in nothing but excuses. Non-stop excuses from suspects, from witnesses, even from my fellow police. Lame, stinking, pathetic excuses; I’ve heard them all. So it’s no surprise that I’m pretty good at producing them myself when needed, is it?

  “Okay, I can accept that. So if I touch you right now, your skin won’t feel cold, and I’ll be able to detect a pulse?”

  I shoot her a look that says, try it, you bitch, and I’ll smack you to the floor and cuff you for assaulting a police officer. But all I say is, “Did Devon also tell you I spent yesterday at the hospital? I have a stack of test results that say I’m completely normal. I’ve had a reaction to the SSRIs, is all, which I’ve stopped taking, by the way, that’s caused something called ‘temporary narco-catalepsia.’”

  She looks momentarily confused. “I’ve never heard of that. What exactly―”

  “It’s a form of narcolepsy. Sometimes body temperature and pulse rate are severely depressed. I’m supposed to keep warm and drink plenty of liquids.” Jesus, maybe I should have been a doctor. And gotten paid the big bucks for inventing horseshit like that.

  Sensing he’s losing this battle, Devon says, “I should get the house. And I want Kitty.” I could have told him nobody would believe his story.

  “I’m sure your lawyers can work those details out,” Dr. Susan tells him soothingly. “The important thing is that you’ve both made an important life-decision―and now you can be free of this soul-destroying relationship, Devon. Now you’ll be able to soar, to work on your own karma, free from a mother-substitute.”

  Ha. What she means is with her for a mother-substitute.

  “But she’s the one who’s deserted me.” Beneath the soft brown carpet of beard, Devon’s beautiful mouth, with its naturally red lips that I would personally kill for, sets stubbornly. “I’m not going to let her get away with it.”

  So now he’s finally in denial. But Devon is always playing catch-up, just like in his course work.

  y mom’s name is Kat. When she was in her teens, she ran away from Novosibirsk, Russia, and went to work in a brothel in either Vladivostok, Bangkok, Singapore, or Hong Kong, depending on who she’s telling the story to. What I do know for sure is that she immigrated to this country when she was eighteen, worked in a series of strip clubs, and then had me a year later, which makes her fifty-two tonight.

  Through dedication and hard work and sheer brilliance, she rose in life to become a dental hygienist; the typical American success story. She looks fantastic for her age; in fact, she’s still a more physically beautiful woman than I’ll ever be, in spite of her crows-feet and her nose, which has been broken and reset a few times. She’s an inch taller than me, almost white blonde, and very striking, like an actress you can’t quite place; people always think she’s been on old TV shows until they hear her speak. Her Russian accent is thick and ugly, even after all these years, though she gets all her English grammar right, pretty much.

  She’s now on her fifth marriage and has retired from her profession. All her professions, except possibly the first. She and her husband Sid―Dr. Sidney Berman, DDS, MSD―live out in Glenwood Estates, in one of the wealthiest parts of town near the beach. Sid is thin, very brown, balding, and never wears socks. He loves jokes and greets me at the door with “Have you heard the one about the dyslexic rabbi who walks into a bra?” Actually, I have, but I laugh anyway, then go and air-kiss Mom after handing Sid the sort of skimpy-looking floral arrangement of saffron crocuses, white lilies, and moonflowers that I just blew a hundred bucks on. But it’s the price that counts.

  Mom doesn’t spare the flowers a glance. She stares intently into my face instead, first checking for signs of receding gums, then for wrinkles or blemishes. “You look terrible, Rishya,” she says finally. “You should do something about your hair. You feel cold to me. Are you getting enough sleep?”

  Yeah, Mom, The big sleep. For a single split-second, I toy with the idea of telling her the truth, but then I think: nah. It’s bad enough being followed around and nagged by ghosts like Bull McGuiness, I don’t need my mother doing it, too. Bull is not with me just at the moment, incidentally; he said he had an errand to run first when I left him at the house. But he made me promise to come back for him before I turn over Gluckstein’s, saying that he doesn’t want to miss out on it. “Besides,” he said, “you’ll need a lookout.” Can’t argue with the voice of experience; from the stories he tells about the old days, McGuinness appears to have been as much of a criminal as a cop.

  Which, of course, is true of me lately, too.

  Here’s the thing about Mom; no matter how well you think you know her―and yourself―she can always slap you in the face with some fresh surprise or embarrassment. For example, over supper―they have a live-in cook, of course, who’s whipped up a ginormous birthday dinner more suitable for a small wedding party than just the three of us, complete with a huge untouched cake that says “Happy Birthday Ekaterina” on it―Sid starts asking me about my latest cases. Like a lot of civilians, he’s basically a badge bunny; loves the sight of chicks in uniform, watches a lot of cop shows on TV, etc. So I make the mistake of mentioning the three women I’m trying to track down now, which leads to me telling the whole story of how they moved in on Ayon’s uncle, the eviction, and so on. I may have used a few culturally or ethnically insensitive terms a few times. I may even have dropped an F-bomb in connection with the word Gypsies once or twice, especially after I’ve had a large glass of wine.

  So then I notice Mom turning her knife from side like a metronome, which is her way of correcting me. When she doesn’t have a knife, she uses a finger.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Rishya, you shouldn’t talk like that about Tsygane.” That’s Gypsies in Russian. And okay, yeah, I speak some Russian. Out of sheer self-defense.

  “Huh? Why not?”

  “Because you are partly one yourself. Your father, Dadd; he was Irish Traveler.” Yes, Mom drops words sometimes; I’m used to it.” He called himself…a, hmmm, I know this word…a didikoy.”

  See what I mean? Full of surprises. Shock, in this case. I’d never heard any of this before. Her story had always been that my father, Dicky Dadd, who I totally don’t remember, was an Irish-American she’d married for a Green Card. But before I can quiz her further about it, Sid’s cell phone rings. He’s the
team dentist for the city’s NBA franchise, which is playing downtown tonight, and one of the assistant coaches grinding his teeth on the bench has just fractured several roots under a crown and is being taken to ER. So Sid slips a bathrobe over his loungewear and heads on off into the night in his white Lexus SUV, looking like a very tanned and fit Mr. Magoo. Minus his socks, as per usual.

  After that, over Russian coffee―Mom puts “wodka” in everything, even her morning carrot juice and, I suspect, table wine―she clams up, instead launching into a long litany of complaints over Sid’s infidelities, which, I also suspect, are non-existent, while slyly dropping hints about her own. Sid has the good sense not to hire pool boys, or, when he does, sixty-year old Asian ones, but Mom always seems to ferret out college-age beefcake wherever it’s hiding. Or cowering in fear.

  “You should find a younger boyfriend,” is all she says when I mention Devon and I are splitting up. Which is okay to do now, since we’ve taken the semi-official first step of announcing it to Dr. Susan. Second step will be altering our ‘relationship status’ on Facebook, of course. Then, you know, actually filing legal papers. Although that last may be a moot point soon enough. Come to think of it, Devon will get both the house and the cat anyway if I go to jail. Or if I don’t break this curse soon.

  “Or you could get back with that nice Layla,” Mom is saying now. “I could kill you for leaving her.” Harper she never liked―go figure―but Layla Levinsohn, my lover in college, she adored and constantly asks after. And nags me to get back in touch with. Mom claims that was when I was my most emotionally stable, that Layla had a “good effect” on me, and maybe that’s true. All I can tell you is that a gay relationship can get just as miserable as a straight one.