Read A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) Online
Authors: Christopher Moore
Ray sighed. “Maybe I should search for another Web site. What’s a word that means that your standards are lower than the desperate?”
Charlie read down the page a little. “This woman has a master’s degree in English lit from Cambridge, Ray. And look at her. She’s gorgeous. And nineteen. Why is she desperate?”
“Hey, wait a minute. A master’s degree at nineteen, this girl is too smart for me.”
“No she’s not. She’s lying.”
Ray spun on the stool as if Charlie had poked him in the ear with a pencil. “No!”
“Ray, look at her. She looks like one of those Asian models for Sour Apple Flavored Calamari Treats.”
“They have that?”
Charlie pointed to the left side of the front window. “Ray, let me introduce you to Chinatown. Chinatown, this is Ray. Ray, Chinatown.”
Ray smiled, embarrassed. There was a store two blocks up that sold nothing but dried shark parts, the windows full of pictures of beautiful Chinese women holding shark spleens and eyeballs like they’d just received an Academy Award. “Well, the last woman I met through here did have a few errors and omissions in her profile.”
“Like?” Charlie was watching the woman in tweed with the glowing frog, who was approaching the counter.
“Well, she said that she was twenty-three, five feet tall, a hundred five pounds, so I thought, ‘Okay, I can have fun with a petite woman.’ Turns out it was a hundred and five
kilos
.”
“So, not what you expected?” Charlie said. He smiled at the approaching woman, feeling panic rise. She was going to buy the frog!
“Five foot—two-thirty. She was built like a mailbox. I might have gotten past that, but she wasn’t even twenty-three, she was sixty-three. One of her grandsons tried to sell her to me.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, you can’t buy that,” Charlie said to the woman.
“You hear the expression all the time,” Ray went on, “but you hardly ever meet anyone really trying to sell his own grandmother.”
“Why not?” the woman asked.
“Fifty bucks,” Ray said.
“That’s outrageous,” the woman said. “It’s marked ten.”
“No, it’s fifty for the grandmother Ray is dating,” Charlie said. “The frog is not for sale, ma’am, I’m sorry. It’s defective.”
“Then why do you have it on the shelf? Why is it marked for sale? I don’t see any defect.”
Evidently she couldn’t see that the goofy porcelain frog was not only glowing in her hands, it had started to pulsate. Charlie reached across the counter and snatched it away from her.
“It’s radioactive, ma’am. I’m sorry. You can’t buy it.”
“I wasn’t dating her,” Ray said. “I just flew to the Philippines to meet her.”
“It is not radioactive,” the woman said. “You’re just trying to jack up the price. Fine, I’ll give you twenty for it.”
“No, ma’am, public safety,” Charlie said, trying to look concerned, holding the frog to his chest as if shielding her from its dangerous energy. “And it’s clearly ridiculous. You’ll note that this frog is playing a banjo with only two strings. A travesty, really. Why don’t you let my colleague show you something in a cymbal-playing monkey. Ray, could you show this young woman something in a monkey, please.” Charlie hoped that the “young woman” would win him points.
The woman backed away from the counter, holding her purse before her like a shield. “I’m not sure I want to buy anything from you wack jobs.”
“Hey!” Ray protested, as if to say that there was only one wack job on duty and he wasn’t it.
Then she did it, she quickstepped to a rack of shoes and picked up a pair of size-twelve, red Converse All Stars. They, too, were glowing. “I want these.”
“No.” Charlie tossed the frog over his shoulder to Ray, who fumbled it and almost dropped it. “Those aren’t for sale either.”
The tweed woman backed away toward the door, holding the sneakers behind her. Charlie stalked her down the aisle, taking the occasional grab at the All Stars. “Give them.”
When the woman butt-bumped into the front door and the bell over the jamb jingled, she looked up and Charlie made his move, faking hard left, then going right, reaching around her and grabbing the laces of the sneakers, as well as a scoop of big, tweedy ass in the bargain. He quickstepped back toward the counter, tossed the sneakers to Ray, and then turned and fell into a sumo stance to challenge the tweed woman.
She was still at the door, looking as if she couldn’t decide to be terrified or disgusted. “You people need to be put away. I’m reporting you to the Better Business Bureau
and
the local merchants’ association. And you, Mr. Asher, can tell Ms. Severo that I
will
be back.” And with that, she was through the door and gone.
Charlie turned to Ray. “Ms. Severo? Lily? She was here to see Lily?”
“Truant officer,” Ray said. “She’s been in a couple of times.”
“You might have said something.”
“I didn’t want to lose the sale.”
“So, Lily—”
“Ducks out the back when she sees her coming. The woman also wanted to check with you that the notes for Lily’s absences were legitimate. I vouched.”
“Well, Lily is going back to school, and as of right now, I’m back to work.”
“That’s great. I took this call today—an estate in
“I’ll do it, but first we have a lot to catch up on. Flip the ‘Closed’ sign and lock the front door, would you, Ray?”
Ray didn’t move. “Sure, but—Charlie, are you sure that you’re ready to go back to work?” He nodded to the sneakers and frog on the counter.
“Oh, those, I think there’s something wrong with them. You don’t see anything unusual about those two items?”
Ray looked again. “Nope.”
“Or that once I took the frog away from her, she went right for a pair of sneakers that are clearly not her size?”
Ray weighed the truth against the sweet deal he had here, with an apartment and under-the-table income and a boss that had really been a decent guy before he went 51/50, and he said, “Yeah, there was something strange about her.”
“Aha!” said Charlie. “I just wish I knew where I could get a Geiger counter.”
“I have a Geiger counter,” Ray said.
“You do?”
“Sure, you want me to get it?”
“Maybe later,” Charlie said. “Just lock up, and help me gather up some of the merchandise.”
Over the next hour Ray watched as Charlie moved a set of what seemed randomly chosen items from the store to the back room, directing him to under no circumstances put them back out or sell them to anyone. Then he retrieved the Geiger counter that he’d obtained on a sweet trade for a stringless oversized tennis racket and tested each item as Charlie instructed. And, of course, they were as inert as dirt.
“And you don’t see any glowing or pulsating or anything in this pile?” Charlie asked.
“Sorry.” Ray shook his head, feeling a little embarrassed that he was witnessing this. “Good first day back to work, though,” Ray said, trying to make it all better. “Maybe you should call it a day, go check on the baby, and make that estate call in the morning. I’ll box this stuff up and mark it so Lily won’t sell or trade it.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “But don’t throw it out, either. I’m going to figure this out.”
“You betcha, boss. See you in the morning.”
“Yeah, thanks, Ray. You can go home when you finish.”
Charlie went back to his apartment, checking his hands the whole way to see if any of the red glow from the pile of objects had rubbed off on them, but they seemed normal. He sent Jane home, fed and bathed Sophie, and read her to sleep with a few pages from
Slaughterhouse-Five,
then went to bed early and slept fitfully. He awoke the next morning in a haze, then sat bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and heart pounding when he saw the note sitting on the nightstand. Another one. Then he noticed that this time it wasn’t his handwriting, and the number was obviously a phone number, and he sighed. It was the estate appointment that Ray had made for him. He’d put it on the nightstand so he wouldn’t forget.
Mr. Michael Mainheart,
it read; then
upscale women’s clothing
and
furs,
with a double underline. The phone number had a local exchange. He picked up the note, and under it was a second piece of notepaper, this one with the same name, written in his own handwriting, and under it, the numeral 5. He didn’t remember writing any of it. At that moment, something large and dark passed by the second-story bedroom window, but by the time he looked up, it was gone.
A
blanket of fog lay over the Bay and from
When he arrived at the home of Michael Mainheart the first thing Charlie noticed was that no one noticed him. There were two guys working in the yard, to whom Charlie waved as he passed, but they did not wave back. Then the mailman, who was coming off the big porch, drove him off the walkway into the dewy grass without so much as an “excuse me.”
“Excuse me!” Charlie said, sarcastically, but the mailman was wearing headphones and listening to something that was inspiring him to bob his head like a pigeon feeding on amphetamines, and he bopped on. Charlie was going to shout something devastatingly clever, then thought better of it, for although it had been some years since he’d heard of a postal employee perpetrating a massacre, as long as the term “going postal” referred to anything besides choosing a shipping carrier, he felt he shouldn’t press his luck.
Called a wack job by a complete stranger one day and shouldered off the sidewalk by a civil servant the next: this city was becoming a jungle.
Charlie rang the bell and waited to the side of the twelve-foot leaded-glass door. A minute later he heard light, shuffling steps approaching and a diminutive silhouette moved behind the glass. The door swung open slowly.
“Mr. Asher,” said Michael Mainheart. “Thank you for coming.” The old man was swimming in a houndstooth suit that he must have bought thirty years ago when he was a more robust fellow. When he shook Charlie’s hand his skin felt like an old wonton wrapper, cool and a little powdery. Charlie tried not to shudder as the old man led him into a grand marble rotunda, with leaded-glass windows running to a vaulted, forty-foot ceiling and a circular staircase that swept up to a landing that led off to the upper wings of the house. Charlie had often wondered what it was like to have a house with wings. How would you ever find your car keys?
“Come this way,” Mainheart said. “I’ll show you where my wife kept her clothes.”
“I’m sorry about your loss,” Charlie said automatically. He’d been on scores of estate calls.
You don’t want to come off as some kind of vulture,
his father used to say.
Always compliment the merchandise; it might be a piece of crap to you, but they might have a lot of their soul poured into it. Compliment but never covet. You can make a profit and preserve everyone’s dignity in the process
.
“Holy shit,” Charlie said as he followed the old man into a walk-in closet the size of his own apartment. “I mean—your wife had exquisite taste, Mr. Mainheart.”
There was row upon row of designer couture clothing, everything from evening gowns to racks, two tiers high, of knit suits, arranged by color and level of formality—an opulent rainbow of silk and linen and wool. Cashmere sweaters, coats, capes, jackets, skirts, blouses, lingerie. The closet was shaped like a
T,
with a large vanity and mirror at the apex, and accessories on each wing (even the closet with wings!), shoes on one side, belts, scarves, and handbags on the other. A whole wing of shoes, Italian and French, handmade, from the skins of animals who had led happy, blemish-free lives. Full-length mirrors flanked the vanity at the end of the closet and Charlie caught the reflection of himself and Michael Mainheart in the mirror, he in his secondhand gray pinstripe and Mainheart in his ill-fitting houndstooth, studies in gray and black, stark and lifeless-looking in this vibrant garden.
The old man went to the chair at the vanity and sat down with a creak and a wheeze. “I expect it will take you some time to assess it,” he said.
Charlie stood in the middle of the closet and looked around for a second before replying. “It depends, Mr. Mainheart, on what you want to part with.”
“All of it. Every stitch. I can’t stand the feel of her in here.” His voice broke. “I want it gone.” He looked away from Charlie at the shoe wing, trying not to show that he was tearing up.
“I understand,” Charlie said, not sure what to say. This collection was completely out of his league.
“No, you don’t understand, young man. You couldn’t understand. Emily was my life. I got up in the morning for her, I went to work for her, I built a business for her. I couldn’t wait to get home at night to tell her about my day. I went to bed with her and I dreamed about her when I slept. She was my passion, my wife, my best friend, the love of my life. And one day, without warning, she was gone and my life is a void. You couldn’t possibly understand.”