Mother, Maiden, Crone

by Gwen Benaway

  The smell that crawled up her nose through the front door as she jimmied the lock suggested someone had clocked Russo out for the day. Bitter orange and lavender couldn’t cover up the metallic, wet tang announcing the blood pool on the carpet well.

  The bungalow was small; four rooms, plus a privy crammed with more bottles than the kitchen. She slipped the shiv from her purse and thumbed the little worn-down stretch of blade by the hilt as she appraised the tiny home. Sun room led to kitchen led to den led to bedroom led to sun room, without anything more substantial than a curtain to pry them apart. Not a lot of places to hide, but she checked what little there was: the alcove that qualified as a closet, the pantry, under the bed.

  The blood pool was the obvious clue, and obvious clues had a way of shouting down the important ones. She pushed the stink and the deep red splotch from her mind and focused on what was there. Marcell Russo poured drinks behind the bar at Fulgencio’s, the same rathole currently serving as Joey Muduro’s headstone. The two clearly knew each other, so it was no coincidence Joey was there last night. Like most bartenders, he didn’t keep much stock at home. Seeing sick slobs swilling hooch to salve all the wounds their sob stories opened up could leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth, a shining example of the virtues of sobriety. Other than liquor though, Marcell’s home didn’t lack for anything obvious. There was no sign of missing valuables or anything else that would inspire anyone to spill four quarts of sangre over.

  Things were tidy. No scuffs in the carpet, no overturned furniture, nothing broken on the floor.

  “Fuchs?”

  The ghost still lingered on the porch, darting eyes in, then back out to the street as he stood, a dour sentinel. Aggie waved the spirit in but he hesitated. She wondered if dying in the rain made him like this, or if the poor son of a bitch had always been a claustrophobe.

  It would’ve made the trenches and foxholes hell, if so.

  Aggie kicked around the den for the proper armament of any Florida bachelor. A box of cigars sat on the credenza, tiny white notecard still resting on top. Aggie thumbed open the lid, while reading the tag. “Thanks again, buddy. Best old Javier has to offer!—Joey,” it read in a tight, neat hand. Everyone in Ybor began their professional lives in the cigar factories, sharpening, cutting, packing, rolling. It was a point of pride when they graduated to handing them out. She pulled a cigar from the tight, undisturbed rows and waved it in the air in Fuchs’s direction as she scanned the den for a cigar cutter or matches. Fuchs squared his shoulders and set his jaw—he’d have held his breath if his lungs weren’t rotting eight feet below some hill in France—and stepped inside. His flippant bravado melted away; inside he was a scared child hiding in his mother’s skirt, and in those quiet times Aggie felt herself feel sorry for the man who ruined her life.

  She abandoned her search and turned to her ghost. “Kannst du Marcell sehen,” she asked in a patient, even tone. Can you see Marcell?

  “Nein.”

  “So he didn’t see it coming,” she thought out loud as she crouched down to the blood marking the den floor. Ghosts tied themselves to the world by way of regrets and begging and fear. Not a lot to cling to if death was quiet and sudden. “Lucky bastard.”

  She reached a thumb out and pushed it down into the stained carpet. Cool and tacky. Little wet beads grew from the fibers as she pressed down. Marcell died last evening, she estimated—no one looses enough blood to make a six-foot circle and survives—probably within an hour either side of Maduro’s death.

  “Two men dead; one saw it coming and the other didn’t. So odds are good Muduro fingered Marcell holding the cash.” Fuchs stared at her in the same vague flavour of disapproval he used whenever she rattled off in English or Spanish. She gave the red stain on her thumb a sniff, as if the smell didn’t drown out everything else in the apartment. Inspiration failed to strike and she wiped the clinging mess off into a terrycloth rag by the sink. “Five’ll get you ten that whoever followed the trail here has the money now.”

  But people paid for closure, not the same dead ends they started at. The client wasn’t likely to fork out the five dollars without at least a new target for her agitation.

  Something caught Fuch’s attention and drew it into the backyard. He gaped out the window, and Aggie followed his gaze to nothing in particular. She half-wondered if he was simply eager to leave the small building, but finally relented to ask. “Was ist?”

  His pale complexion took a moment to register, and he turned vaguely toward her without taking his eyes away from the back window. His eyes darted quickly to her, then back to the yard, confused and vaguely upset. “Geistenhund.”

  Aggie returned his look of confusion, and withdrew A German and English Dictionary from her bag. Geist—ghost—was her stock and trade and she knew it in a dozen languages, but the run-on nature of the German tongue meant Fuchs shackled a dozen concepts into a single, overlong word at every opportunity he got. The wispy infantryman stepped through the wall and out into the sun before she could fumble open the G’s.

  She stepped to the kitchen and pulled open the back door to follow, vaguely registering that—unlike the front—it was unlocked.

  Fuchs crouched in the grass, hands extended before him opening and closing as if kneading dough. A low stream of gibberish poured from his dead lips through a wide, bittersweet smile. His eyes were half-closed and long since dry. He was crying quietly to himself, though she couldn’t parse whether it was for joy or pain. He looked like a starving man preparing his first meal in weeks.

  “Oh no.” She scanned the yard and a patch of white and honey-red stood out beneath the green shrubs abutting the house. She might have guessed a discarded towel or bedsheets ruffled by the wind at first, but knowing what to look for, the short, sleek hair was too obvious. The breed might have even stood out if the head weren’t a mess of blood and bone that Aggie’s eyes wouldn’t linger on.

  “It’s a dog.” She turned back toward Fuchs and registered the mix of anguish and joy on his face. He got to pet a dog—maybe for the first time since the war upturned both their lives—but that dog had to die horribly for it to happen.

  The dog had seen it coming.

  She allowed him a few more minutes of murmured affection before drawing his attention. “Fuchs.” The man turned, but the soldier looked back at her, the human affection draining from his face. “Kann er …” She fumbled through the dictionary for the right word. “Strecke?”

  Fuch’s confusion drove her back to the page.

  “Kann er nachspüren?” Can he track?

  The dog—despite working with murder victims for years, Aggie still found it easier to think of the spirit as “the dog,” rather than as something with a name that someone had once loved—led them halfway across Ybor as it followed some unseen trail. She hoped it was the dog, at least. Fuchs could have just as easily been leading her around town on a wild goose chase for his own secret delight, and she wouldn’t have known until she kicked the cardboard off a shoe.

  Fuchs stopped once they were back downtown and pointed a finger in silent witness. Bar de Estanza. So Joey carried a matchbook from this place, and Russo’s killer—presumably Joey’s killer—crawled back here when he finished the deed. Estanza was the kind of place that served drinks in the light of day, half the time for cops. Places that pour illegal beers for cops have connections. “Oh Joey, what the hell did you do?”

  She walked inside, and Fuchs lingered in the street. He couldn’t get far from her, but somehow he could always find the strength to be a little further off when it involved small, dark spaces. Estanza wasn’t especially small, but Aggie guessed the low ceilings and long shadows were more than enough to keep her ghost on edge.

  No police lingered in the bar, which was the only good thing she could say. Alonzo Ricci sat at a table, wiping glasses; She’d never had the pleasure of meeting Ricci face-to-face, but his reputation b
lanketed Ybor as thoroughly as the afternoon haze, and left Aggie feeling just as dirty. Five-foot eleven and decorated with a thousand small scars—insect bites, pox, and the long, pale lines that knives left—he stood out around town and levelled his distinctive appearance to good effect. She glanced back out to the street where Fuchs stood, unmoving and unbreathing, and quietly prayed that his dog hadn’t led her to this gator of a man.

  Ricci’s eyes followed her with a lazy, unblinking stare. “Don’t need a perisher,” he announced. Aggie hoped her reputation preceded her, but no one would look at her frame and angular face and not see a woman who killed and buried a man’s name, and earned a ghost by her side for the trouble. No one is dead yet, he implied.

  “Not looking to sell. Just waiting to meet someone,” she managed. Her voice cracked and they both heard it. After taking a moment to collect her nerve, she took a hopefully guess. “Man named Prapunker.”

  If the name sounded familiar, no sign on Ricci’s face revealed as much. “You drinking or playing?” Aggie’s eyes drifted to the wide, flat case sitting atop the bar. A leather bag draped over it like a discarded coat, and a dog-eared notebook beside. A bar that didn’t need to hide its beer from the flatfoots didn’t need to hide its bolita either, and that meant the Estanza belonged to Charlie Wall—the local king of the lotteries—or was so deep in his pocket that ownership was a formality. Wall—the White Shadow, as the locals affectionately called their crime boss—came from a nice enough family that he was on a first-name basis with the chief of police and the mayor, and while that alone didn’t buy him credibility, it told him exactly who to bribe and how much they’d demand.

  She rolled over the question long enough to make herself uncomfortable, finally ordered a beer, and took a seat. Ricci delivered her drink, spilling just enough to let her know it was her last.

  Aggie had never learned to read the bolita. She wasn’t entirely sure anyone could, beyond superstitious grandmothers who found meaning in how socks split and where birds shat. But the Bar de Estanza set the hair on the back of her neck on edge. Even if no one had died here—and she wouldn’t be sure until Fuchs worked up the nerve to join her—the entire building was saturated in emotion. The drinks and the gambling accounted for plenty of that—the highs and lows of both made the bars in Ybor feel subtly wrong, like the film of dried beer and cigar smoke on the tables was climbing into her soul—but there was something else behind it all. Something like …

  “Qual.”

  Pain. She hadn’t seen Fuchs walk up beside her. He stared in the same lidless haze he’d had outside, mouth slightly agape. “Yeah,” she acknowledged. Fuchs could see the bloodstain on Ricci. He could wash off the material behind it, but the emotion it left—the guilt or the thrill—lingered longer.

  A bell rang from somewhere in the back, and the snarling man with the blood-soaked soul sneered at her but said nothing as he stood up and disappeared. Aggie took a long drink from her glass. Fuchs gulped along with her, savouring the warm, cheap swallow of hops. He’d earned a prize for coming inside, and she needed the extra swallow of courage besides. She stood up and crossed the room, flipping open the notebook atop the bolita case. Flipping it open to the latest entry revealed lines of numbers and names—bets—but she was more interested in the handwriting. Last night’s take was recorded by someone hurried, with the broad strokes that suggested a large hand. But every night before the notes were recorded in the same neat, tidy script she’d seen before.

  “Joey, you stupid—”

  “Achtung!”

  Aggie began twisting away by reflex as Fuchs shouted, though she had no idea why. Calloused knuckles drove into her hip instead of her kidney and she staggered sideways with a yelp. Alonzo Ricci grabbed her arm hard enough to bruise and drove her entire torso down across the bar, bouncing her head against the wood hard enough that the whole world went white until she managed to breath.

  “Don’t need no perisher,” he breathed in her ear, and dragged her awkwardly back up to her feet. “But if you’ve been talking to Joey, maybe you can ask him where the Shadow’s money is.”

  “I don’t—”

  Ricci slammed her against the bar again and Aggie couldn’t find her feet this time. She slid to the floor and tried not to pass out.

  Aggie pulled away and Fuchs threw himself at Ricci’s bulk. He passed through, but the big man shuddered at the invisible touch. The ghost returned and plunged his arm into the enforcer’s chest. Fuchs hated Aggie with a passion, but she was the only tether holding him to the world of the living, and his only hope to set right whatever unfinished business forced him to linger on. Without a perisher, he was as anonymous and unheard as any other ghost—the only fate worse than a lifetime connection to his murderer.

  Ricci grunted and held a hand to his chest, sweating a little as his heart pounded against the intangible weight of Fuch’s desperation. The Italian tucked his second and third fingers under his thumb and extended the others, and Fuchs whipped his arm back from the mano corno and cradled it as if he’d tried to grab a burning lamp. Aggie guessed Fuchs was not the first angry spirit Ricci had encountered—anyone who makes more than a few ghosts makes a few enemies from the same lineup.

  Aggie held her hands up as Ricci turned his attention back to her. “I can explain.”

  It still hurt when she sat up straight, so Aggie leaned on her unbruised right arm as she looked across the cluttered desk. She hoped it suggested a rakish, carefree confidence and not the awkward mess of bruises and tears she actually was. Estelle Maduro still didn’t look the part of a grieving sister, but Aggie couldn’t find it in herself to judge her for it today.

  “How well did you know your brother?” she asked.

  Estelle’s lips parted and her brow furrowed. “Well enough.”

  “You know when he stopped pouring drinks and started taking bolita bets for Charlie Wall?”

  The crack in Estelle’s voice told Aggie she hadn’t heard about that. “And how did you know?”

  “My little ghost told me.” Aggie nodded to Fuchs at his perch just outside the window, where he squatted and glowered on the fire escape. “Spanish isn’t his first language. He thought Joey was giving him a name; Jason Prapunker. He was saying La Sombra Blanca.”

  “The White Shadow?” Estelle went pale and twisted at the fabric in her skirt. Charlie Wall spent a lot of money on the community. He was a folk hero, but he was the kind of folk hero who would ask for volunteers to kick your head in and twelve men would raise their hands.

  “Joey wasn’t satisfied with his new position. Thought he could start his own operation, and was skimming a little off each night’s take to fund it. Marcell Russo would’ve been his partner.” Aggie pulled Russo’s cigar from her breast pocket and gave it a sniff before rolling it across the desk. Estelle looked on, confused. “Cut it open.”

  “What’s the most ubiquitous thing in this town?” Aggie asked as Estelle found a seam in the wrapper and pried the layers apart. Six worn twenty-dollar bills peaked out among the tobacco. “Joey passed off the cash by rolling it into cigars. No one looks twice at box of cigar’s in a man’s home in Ybor.” Not unless that man didn’t have a cigar cutter, or lighters, or ashtrays, she didn’t add. Russo didn’t smoke, the one simple fact Ricci hadn’t realized when he came looking for Charlie Wall’s missing money.

  “Joey died over a hundred and twenty bucks,” Estelle finally spat out in disgust. “He only left me a hundred and twenty dollars?!”

  “Minus my fee,” Aggie kindly reminded. Estelle tore open her purse and threw five crumpled one-dollar notes across the desk. Aggie didn’t bother to count them as the client stormed out.

  “Warum hast du ihr das Geld gegeben?” Aggie hadn’t realized Fuchs had started watching from his fire escape. He rarely cared about the functional ends of any given job. She took a broad guess at his question, not recognizing more in the jumble of
words beyond “warum” and “Geld.”

  “I gave her the money because her brother just died.” She picked up the crumpled bills and flatted them carefully before stacking them and tucking the money away in her desk drawer. “And because there are twenty-four more just like it waiting in Russo’s apartment.” Estelle might’ve realized the same thing, but she’d need to be as reckless as her brother to go after it.

  Aggie glanced over at the wall calendar and made a mental note to swing by Bar de Estanza come Monday to tell Ricci she’d ‘finally’ convinced Joey’s spirit to tell her where the money was hidden. Despite protesting that he didn’t need a perisher, the large man had been amenable to hiring her services once she’d convinced him that she was only interested in telling the sister who had killed Joey, and that neither of them knew anything about the theft. A part of her cried, knowing she’d be turning over more than twenty-eight hundred in cash, but a twenty dollar finder’s fee was better than more bruised ribs. She could’ve told Ricci where the money was that day, clients paid her for peace of mind, and a few days’ wait would be enough to convince him that the secret was well and truly dead.

  Bios

  Ellen is a trans woman author and reader. She has written three novels, her latest being Ghostkin, a supernatural thriller set in her home town of Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England. She has a burning ambition to one day write The Legion of Super-Heroes.

  So many books. So many comics. So much tea.

  Izzy Wasserstein writes fiction and poetry, teaches writing and literature at a public university on the Great Plains, and shares a house with a variety of animal companions and the writer Nora E. Derrington. Her most recent poetry collection is When Creation Falls (Meadowlark Books, 2018), and her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming from Clarkesworld, Apex, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a member of the 2017 class of Clarion West, and likes to slowly run long distances. Her website is www.izzywasserstein.com.