The Dead Detective

by J. R. Rain

  On the other hand, even though she’s fearless in real life, her terror of the supernatural seems real enough.

  I promised I’d meet Harper for lunch―dinner dates in hospital cafeterias were always the highlight of our relationship―and there’s no way I want Ayon tagging along for that. Not with all the sexy intimate chitchat about heart pumps and regulator breast implant valves that will no doubt be flying back and forth across the table. But, most importantly of all, Val said he’d call. You know, after our unfortunate incident last night. And I not only don’t want to miss that, I also don’t want Ayon finding out about me and the Gypsy King right now.

  Because. Just because.

  Okay, because she might give me shit for it. Or he might like her better than me because, you know, seriously, who wouldn’t? Or…if she really is the one who set me up, it might mean his life would be in danger. I call those pretty good reasons.

  Luckily, I have an excuse to ditch her. Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. arrive promptly at noon, though not before we’ve spent an hour packing up Devon’s room. Which would be really sad, in a “boo hoo another failed relationship” kind of way, if he hadn’t basically hired somebody to kill me last night. So, try as hard as I can, I really can’t take emotional responsibility for the failure of our marriage. It’s not me, it really is him―I’m not the bad guy for once.

  “Aren’t you even just a little sad anyways?” Malena takes a row of old Michael Buble and Enya and Oliver Shanti CDs down from a wall shelf. “We’ll need a few more boxes from the basement for this crap.”

  “No. No to the sad part anyway,” I say, starting to refold his Calvin Klein underwear collection, which is big enough to clothe several African villages. “Yes to the boxes.”

  “Oh, come on, Rich―he isn’t such a terrible guy. I mean, aside from being a lying, cheating rat-bastard. You had some happy times together. I don’t get why you’re being so…” She breaks off and eyes me speculatively, giving me that famous Ayon look. “Unless…”

  “What?”

  “That’s it! You’ve met somebody, haven’t you, girl? Come on, you can tell me.”

  “Nothing to tell,” I say, but I can’t help smiling a little. So she totally knows I’m lying.

  “Uh huh. Go ahead and play it like that―I’ll find out sooner or later. Detectin’ is what I do. Is he cute?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay, he’s cute. Way hotter than Dev. But nothing’s happened between us yet.”

  Anyway, this kind of goopy girl talk goes on for a while; then my partner gets practical, as she always does midway through any conversation.

  “You know, there’s no reason to hold onto this place any longer if you guys really are over,” she tells me after we finish up his clothes closet. “It’s a hell of a long commute, and it’s too big for just one person―it’s not like you’re ever here.”

  “Yeah…”

  She has a point. Except that even though I’m pissing away money like it’s water and can’t afford it, I discover I really, really want to stay here. I feel like I’m finally making friends in the ‘hood, what with all these new shades from the boardinghouse. And besides, what would Lorna do if there are new owners? Particularly a family with a couple of kids; ghosts hate kids. And it’s looking more and more like Bull may move in with her, so it’s not like I’ll ever get lonely.

  “You should trade this place in and get a condo in town like me. Hell, you could stay with me while you’re looking.”

  “Oh, hon, that’s sweet, but you’d be taking Benadryl twenty-four seven.”

  “You’d meet way more guys in the city.”

  This convo goes on for pretty much the rest of the time until the cleanup crew, a husband and wife team with a big van full of plastic tubs and industrial vacuum cleaners and tarps and bottles, shows up at the front door. That’s when I tell Malena I’m packing up my car with Devon’s shit and heading out and ask her to hold the fort for me.

  “Huh? What’s your hurry? Damn―”

  “Sorry, hon. I’ve got a lunch date.” I don’t tell her it’s at the hospital with Harper, which is sort of the opposite of hot. But I’m really hoping in the back of my mind the Gypsy King asks me out for tonight. Or at least calls. So far, nothing, though.

  Which is why I keep checking my messages surreptitiously all through lunch while Harper, frustrated in his attempts to install all-new plumbing inside me, goes on and on about how unhappy he is in his marriage. And God, between his wife’s and Devon’s ex-wife’s names (Geri? Jenni?), I’m getting seriously confused and unsure what advice to offer him or anybody else. One thing’s for sure―I’m not telling Harper that Devon and I are getting a divorce. What if it’s like, contagious?

  Which is when I realize what my next logical step is before I even try to track down Gana Kali and the Horvaths. I guess it’s the subconscious reason I’m dragging all Devon’s worldly goods around with me crammed into my car. When I try to skip dessert and make a break for it, Harper says, “You’re not eating enough.”

  “I’m eating plenty.”

  “I’m worried about the metabolic effects of your…hemostasis, Richelle. I’d like to work up a basic panel while you’re―”

  “Sorry, Harper.” I get up from our cafeteria table. “It’s just that I’ve really got to run. Today’s my last chance to track down who did this to me before I have to report back to duty.” Tomorrow will be a nonstop parade of paperwork, more interviews with wits in our open cases from last week, along with calls from mothers with missing kids and patrol cars from the dumpsters and crackhouses where the dead bodies turn up every Monday morning. I’ll be lucky to get any lunch at all tomorrow, much less dessert.

  “I won’t starve―I promise,” I tell Harper, kissing him on the cheek. And, since he’s being so sweet, putting a little extra feeling into it. Val has sort of warmed me up on the idea of men again; for whatever reason, today I’m seeing a little of what I first saw in Harper. “Who knows? Maybe what I am is the key to―I don’t know, immortality or whatever.”

  “Which is another good reason for me to keep close tabs on you and fully record the process,” he says doggedly.

  Suddenly I see the gears whirring and clicking away inside that fine surgical mind of his. He’s two steps ahead of me, already dreaming of his own immortality: articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, maybe a serum synthesized from my blood. Maybe a cure for aging called the Schomberg Vaccine…and here I was thinking he was just totally into getting back with me. Duh. I’m also his golden goose.

  Out in the parking lot, I put in a call to the MVD to get an address on the plates I jotted down last night from the Voodoo-mobile. Then I phone the stationhouse for a current address for Devon’s ex, Jennifer Slocumb. Or Puckett, if she’s kept his name; divorced women sometimes do. My mom always did, serially. Naturally, Jennifer Whatever lives in a far suburb on the other side of town, but I cut the drive time down with the police flasher.

  She answers the door to her first-floor garden apartment. “He’s not here right now,” she says the moment she sees me. She knows who I am; we’ve met once or twice briefly during the complicated process of my stealing her husband from her and then marrying him. Now she’s halfway to doing the same thing right back at me. Her face is bright red like her hair and she’s not looking me in the eye, just at a place near my right ear.

  “It’s okay, I haven’t come to see him, anyway. I brought most of the rest of his stuff over. He can come get his gym equipment whenever. And tell him he can have whatever furniture he wants except for my old stuff. We’ll divide everything up when I file the separation papers. Oh, and let him know I’m having the locks changed this afternoon.”

  She nods.

  “I could use a hand,” I tell her, and she follows me out to the car.

  I give her a bulky but light box to carry from the trunk. She’s a small woman, about Ayon’s size but slight, not lushly built. “Jennifer, saying I’m sorry at this point would just
sound like bullshit, even if it’s true, but maybe someday you’ll believe that, I dunno, that I was nothing but an interruption in your marriage. A hiccup. A momentary blip on the radar. I hope you two get back together and stay together. Seriously, I wish you all the happiness.”

  I can’t tell what she’s thinking from her red face, whether she wants to make peace or just slap me down where I stand in the street, but I guess it doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna be besties forever from now on, right?

  “Did he tell you anything about what happened last night?”

  She nods again. “He’s been on this kick lately,” she says, in that soft gentle twangy voice of hers I’ve always sort of envied as being very feminine, “where he claims that you’re…dead or something. Like a zombie? So he came up with this crazy plan of his and hired those Haitians. I knew it was a terrible idea at the time―I guess I should have called the cops or warned you or something, but I…”

  “But you aren’t exactly my biggest fan.” We carry the first load inside. She is like a one hundred times better housekeeper than me―everything’s as neat as a pin. And she’s got matching bad New Age art, the kind Devon likes, on the walls. I’m thinking this is a remarriage made in heaven. Until he cheats again, I mean. But who knows? Maybe he’s learned his lesson. Hey, maybe other married women should hire me to train their husbands to appreciate them.

  “I still should have said something,” she goes on apologetically. “I just kept thinking he wasn’t actually serious. And that you could look out for yourself. I mean, you’re a cop, you have a gun. I thought you’d probably put a stop to things before they got out of hand?” She’s one of those people who ends most sentences like it’s a question. Which would drive me batshit to live with.

  “He told you everything that happened last night?”

  Because I’m highly doubting Devon told her the part about the axe. You know, the axe that was going to chop my head off. It gave me a really weird feeling to wipe the Huskie’s blade clean and put it back on the basement wall this morning, I can tell you.

  “He said that he and the Haitian lady got chased out by―no, it’s too dumb. Honestly, I think maybe some aspects of his tantric Buddhist chanting or weed-smoking or something maybe has sort of affected his judgment a little? You know? Do you honestly think he needs therapy?”

  “Yes, I do,” I say with enthusiasm. An idea suddenly occurs to me. “Hey, why don’t you take my place at couples counseling on Tuesday? I mean, you two are the couple now, not me. Right? It’s only fair.”

  “Well, if you’re sure.” She sounds timid, like I’m offering her my ticket to the Oscars. “I hate to take your place, though.” As if!

  “Be my guest.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Dr. Susan. This thought makes me smile as I open the car door, and she smiles tentatively back at me. Impulsively, I lean forward and kiss her cheek, too. It’s my day for it.

  “Hey, I’m really, really sorry, Jennifer. For everything I put you through. Honestly.” And for a moment, I actually feel like crying, although whether it’s for her or Devon or our pathetic three-year joke of a marriage, I have no idea. Or most likely, just for myself. What with being dead and all.

  When I drive away, she waves after me from the sidewalk. Why is it that nobody in life gets who they truly deserve? Or vice versa?

  Or maybe we do. Now that’s a really freaky thought.

  ama Lourdes, real name Alourdes Laurette Polynice, lives in Bolden Park, a half-black, half-Hispanic neighborhood on the opposite side of my precinct from Harbor Beach. Normally, I wouldn’t come down here without Ayon, at the very least, for backup, but Mama’s house is on a relatively quiet urban street where the neighborhood kids are actually playing in the road and not just riding their bikes back into the alleys after taking drug orders from passing traffic. There is, in fact, almost no car traffic here right now as I park in front of the small rundown white frame house that matches the address I got from the MVD.

  But I take the precaution of turning on my collar radio and attaching it before I get out of the car. For this little social call I’m dressed in my full rig: black Kevlar vest, my shield in its leather and plastic case attached to a breast pocket and taser and cuffs on my belt. I’ve also removed my revolver from the shoulder holster and jammed it into my jeans under the belt buckle, so that it’s very visible. The barrel pokes out through the front of the fabric like a steel hard-on, which makes me think of Val. Something I’m doing way too much of today.

  I walk up the front steps and get barked at by a pair of pit bulls in the next yard. I ring the doorbell and bang on the door. Nobody answers, but I’m getting a nobody home vibe from the house; after your first few hundred times, you get pretty good at telling whether there’s anybody inside a place or not. I walk back down to the cracked sidewalk.

  “They at church” says a little girl with her hair in cornrows sitting on a small pink bike with training wheels. Her older sister hushes her and drags her away. A bluebird flies tweeting into the branches of a peeling sycamore just above my head, as a kid on a motorcycle roars by.

  He is followed after a minute by the Suburban Voodoo-mobile. The playground-style murals on its side panels look even more child-like in the daylight, and the grinning skulls and wailing zombies rising from their graves, as depicted in crude acrylics, must have looked pretty weird sitting in the church parking lot. “Call Mama Lourdes for Magic Spells & Special Exorcizings” it says above her phone number. But hey, I’m all about religious freedom.

  Noel the drummer, who is driving, must not have seen me behind the tree, because he turns into the little cement half-driveway and kills the engine. Then he gets out and opens the door for Mama before he spots me. For a second or two, he just stands there; then he takes off across the street, narrowly avoiding being hit by a pickup truck, and disappears up a side-alley. Mama Lourdes, however, is too fat to run.

  “We need to talk,” I say, approaching her open car door. She is dressed I guess for church, all in dazzling white ruffles and matching kerchief that make her look like a giant wedding cake.

  “Got no’ting to say to you,” she says sullenly with a heavy Haitian accent.

  “Sure you do, Mama.” I put a hand on the cuffs. “Unless you want me to arrest you for the attempted murder of a police officer.”

  “You got no wittiness.”

  “My husband. He’s already ratted you out.”

  The expression on her great round face turns to one of impassive resignation. “All ri’,” she says finally, and laboriously pries herself from the passenger seat. “We can go in an’ talk.” She winces as she walks up the front steps. “You little hell-cat, she really hurt me―I should sue you.”

  “And I should shoot you in the ass for resisting arrest.” It occurs to me that I really don’t want to go inside her house. Who knows what amulets or magical incense or hawthorn sticks she’s got in there? No way I want to put myself at her mercy again. “That’s far enough,” I say when we’re standing on her open front porch. “We’ll talk here where everybody can see us.” A small crowd of kids has gathered on the sidewalk and is staring up at us solemnly.

  “What you want?”

  “I want to know what’s happened to me.”

  “You know it already―you are a zonbi. You are one of the living dead.”

  “Yeah…a Gypsy put a curse on me.”

  “Yon Gitane? E’!” She looks around fearfully and, ludicrously, clutches at the crucifix around her big bullfrog throat. “Dey scary people―even I don’ want to mess wit’ dem.”

  I figure I don’t really have many secrets from this woman. “She’s already summoned me once to―” kill her enemies, I almost say―” to commit a crime for her. How can I stop her from doing it again? Can I do that just by staying away from the warehouse?”

  “What house?” The woman is plainly confused.

  “The warehouse. The place where they killed me, and, you know, brought me back.”r />
  She shakes her head. “It don’ matter where you are. Dey can call you back any time after t’e sun set, any time, any place, in you bed or even in you car. You are dey slave now, ti fi.” Mama Lourdes licks her lips and for the first time looks me in the eye. As if I might be, you know, an actual human being. “T’ere is only way for you. A zonbi can be kep’ lyin’ in t’e grave if you pockets is full wit’ salt. So even if t’ey summon you, you cannot move.”

  “Salt?”

  She nods. “It is even better if you mouth it is all full with t’e salt, too, and you lip is sew togedder. And you should be bury under t’e dirt. It is t’e best way to stop a zonbi wit’out choppin’ you head off.” She says this unapologetically, like Harper discussing a craniotomy.

  “But with the salt, I would still be alive?” This thought is like my worst nightmare: being eternally buried alive but helpless to move.

  “Yah, sure. But I also give you magic charm if you pay me. Very powerful charm, work for you even against t’e Gitanes.” Her tone is suddenly wheedling, but I don’t trust her. There is something treacherous in the looks she gives me, as if she’s calculating how to control me herself.

  “Tell Noel to call me if he wants his drums back,” I tell her on the way back to my car. It’s funny―in old movies, zombies are always scary, supernaturally strong creatures that everybody’s afraid of. But me? I’m nothing but a frightened rabbit on the run; at the mercy of everybody. And able to trust no one.

  So…salt. If I can go put salt in my pockets every night when I go to bed, then I can sleep through the night without fear of being summoned, right? But then what? If no one’s there in the morning to remove it, then I’ll just lie in bed forever―or I guess until somebody smashes the door down and finds me. And then calls the cops when they can’t rouse me.