Moot (2 page)

Miss Lopez waited for us
in a sparsely furnished bedroom at the back of the house. The room was likely a
humble affair, by her standards. I could fit my entire office within its walls
with enough room left over for a round of miniature golf.

After shooing the butler
off, Miss Lopez moved to the bed, sitting next to a grotesque uniformed in
maid’s cap and dress. I shook Cora’s offered hand, scarcely hiding my disgust
as I felt the dried joints crackle.

“She just came back from
shopping,” Miss Lopez said. “She can still read a grocery list, although
sometimes she forgets to pay.”

I pulled up a chair and
looked in its eyes, snapping my fingers. The right eye focused lazily on the
motion. The left wandered. I removed its cap and examined the canyon gouged
into its skull. Beyond the blackened edges of bone, the brain glistened.

“It’s wet,” I said.

“We spritz her every day.
Dr. Feingold told us the moisture would help keep her mind sharp.”

“He’s lying. Or
incompetent. Overpaid either way.” I fit the cap back snuggly over Cora’s
patchy scalp. “Makes no matter if the brain’s protected—” I knocked my head with
my knuckles. “—or on a shelf. You’d have as much success if you filled the
crater with tar. Brains just eventually stop on their own. When they’ve had
enough, I guess.”

Cora’s lips peeled up,
showing gums long absent of pearly whites. I smiled back. “No tongue?”

“She lost it early on. But
she can still write.” Its head bobbed in agreement. Miss Lopez handed me a
notebook, pages black with scrawl. The first few pages were barely legible. The
last, hieroglyphic.

“Not much time left,
Cora,” I said. Its eye looked to the floor dejectedly. From what I saw on the
page, the moot had a few months at best before complete body shutdown. What
happened after that is anyone’s guess.

I scanned ahead to the
last page, to a chicken scratch of a word.

P A S K O

“This why I’m here?”

“I thought it was nonsense
at first,” Miss Lopez said, “but she was so adamant.” Cora poked a finger at
the scribble, then at me, asking a question. I dipped my head, and its smile
returned. Still some higher functions in there. Maybe a year.

“Isabel used to talk to
her at night. I could hear murmurs, but I didn’t feel it was my place to pry. I
thought Isabel was simply keeping her company.” She put a hand on the moot’s
shoulder. “Cora always was the family sounding board, weren’t you?” It nuzzled
her hand with its cheek and groaned.

“And after Isabel
disappeared,” I said, “you asked it where she might have gone.”

“Yes, Cora wrote this
down. I had a devil of a time figuring out what she meant. Until we actually
met I wasn’t sure I was right, that it was a name.” She frowned. “I don’t know
how Cora would have known of you.”

“Maybe it heard my name
somewhere. Cora, do you ever meet other moots? Maybe while shopping?” Cora’s
eye remained glassy as whatever remained that was still human parsed my
question. After a lull, it shrugged.

I felt like I was
questioning a particularly dense gorilla.

I took Cora’s hands and
looked into the good eye, willing it to remember. “Cora, do you remember
Isabel? Nod for yes.”

It cautiously lowered its
chin and raised it again.
Yes.

“
Did Isabel talk to you?”
Yes.
“Do you remember what she talked
about?”
Yes.
“Did Isabel ever talk about running away?”

The seconds ticked by,
then:
yes
. A single tear escaped and trickled down the cracks of its
dead flesh. Miss Lopez gasped. I waved her silent, hiding my own disquiet. It
might have been coincidence, but moots don’t normally retain enough moisture to
cry. I took it as a last sign of intelligence, dying within a withering prison.

“Could you write where you
think she’d go?”
I put the notebook in its lap and worked a pencil into
its grasping fingers. It hurriedly began squiggling streaks of lead across, up,
and down the page, still moving after Miss Lopez gently pried the pencil away.

I rubbed at my temples in
frustration. “Would anyone else know where Isabel went?”

Its face went blank; then,
yes
. Cora started slowly flipping through the journal, scanning the
nonsense. We waited as it cautiously studied each page’s gibberish until it
grunted excitedly, stabbing a finger to the paper.

In a space of lines thick
with ink, a tiny oasis of clarity.

N E X

“
Nex
,”
I said. “Does that mean anything to you, Miss Lopez?”

“No. Cora, is this a
person?”
Yes
.

“And this
Nex
knows where Isabel is?”
Yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
.

“So what now?” asked Miss
Lopez.

I took the journal from
the moot’s grip and ripped the page out, shoving it in my pocket. “Now I hit
the streets.” I stood to leave. “There’s a few snitches I know. I’ll let you
know if anything pans. Hopefully this isn’t just your moot sending me on a
snipe hunt.”

#

“Did you have to
keep calling her that?”

Her voice quivered as she
walked me down the main hall to the drabness of the world beyond luxury. I
ignored the question.

“
It
.
Your moot
. Cora is not an
it
,
Mr. Pasco.”

I stopped at the door and
faced her. “Miss Lopez, I appreciate your courtesy on behalf of the help, but
Cora isn’t a
who
anymore. She and
I, we’re
it
s
. And I was under the impression I had been hired for my detective
skills, not my manners.”

I walked down the path,
turning back when I reached my car. She stood in the archway, in every way
perfect, and not for the first time I bemoaned my mootness. “You’re not doing
it any favours by keeping it around,” I yelled. “Take my advice, book a
crematorium. Cora will be much happier as a pile of ash.”

She yelled something back
as I lurched into the driver’s seat. I turned the ignition, letting the engine
complain, pretending not to understand what I heard so clearly.

I drove away, idly
fingering the scars on my wrists, mulling over her question.

Why haven’t you, then?

Excellent question.

#

Over the next while
I hit up my usual sources, trotting out Isabel’s smile in places a young woman should
never frequent, to faces a young woman should never meet. Getting nothing but
deadpan stares and obscene single-
entendres
, I
sprinkled the name
Nex
about, along with a few fins.
All I earned was a lighter wallet.

I started hitting
airports, train and bus stations, taxi stands. Zip. Ditto hospitals and
morgues. If Isabel had left town, it wasn’t via public transport or pine box.
Reaching out to my last few friends on the police force was similarly
dispiriting. I started visiting churches, synagogues, arbitrary places of
worship. Isabel’s face brought me downturned mouths and
Isn’t that a shame
s,
but no results.

My reports to Miss Lopez
were perfunctory. She told me Cora had slid further downhill. I think it was
keeping itself going by sheer will, hoping that someone would bring Isabel
back.

I sat in my office and bit
my lip until it should have bled, walking though options. Isabel’s pic was
propped up next to the girls’. So, Jo, Isabel. My eye flickered over the trio.

Three expressions of utter
guilelessness. Faces alit with heady expectancy. They could go anywhere, do
anything. They were hope. They were life.

But they sat here, on my
desk, captured in moments of wonder. Frozen in possibility.

These children did not
belong in my office. Their being here was a violation. They should never have
put their faith in me.

I knew where I had to go.
I had always known – and had wasted days.

I put my head down, hands
over face, resigned, loathing myself.

I hate moots.

#

Every city has a
Greytown
. Ours is a
northside
slum once intended to quarter miscellaneous population detritus: junkies,
immigrants, juicer hoboes between train hops.

Soon after moot point –
that day when death became debatable and funeral homes lost business – a
decision was made from on high to reorganize the social hierarchy. Ghetto
denizens found themselves shifted to more suitable surroundings, and the new
Greytown
was abandoned to moots. While no laws actively
forbade
a conscious corpse from lingering in
Lifeville
,
moots were politely
encouraged
to
consider
Greytown
their new home.

A handful of jazz clubs
operated on its borders. Joints with names like The Belly Up, The Dirt Nap, The
Worm Bait; dismal haunts where lifers got their giggles slumming with the dead.
The music wasn’t anywhere near good, moot combos being reliant on fate to
supply them with musicians still gifted with lips to blow and fingers to tickle
ivories. Any moot of real talent inevitably found itself onstage at a lifer’s
club, eking whatever pleasure it could from its extended sojourn aboveground.
I’d caught Charlie Parker at the Carleton while on a case. If anything, death
had only improved its playing, adding an indefinable touch of despair that
resonated long after the tunes had ended.

My best bet was The Death
Knell, the closest a
Greytown
club would ever come to
respectability. After tipping the lifer doorman with a growl and a flash of
Marion’s ample assets, I took a seat at a booth and motioned for the waitress.
A group of businessmen was laughing uproariously as the moot behind the bar
painstakingly assembled a fleet of complicated cocktails with its one good arm.
The joke was on them, I knew. Not only was the hooch watered down, it was a
safe bet the bartender was leaking juice from one of its open orifices into
every glass.

The waitress walked up –
another moot, all appendages intact and body deloused should a discerning
customer wish to order an Open Coffin, a nice-nellyism for corpse coitus. I
slipped her a fin and asked for the manager. While I waited I took in the
onstage trio. The saxophonist managed to blurt out a passable "Harlem
Nocturne," even with the hindrance of an open torso. A dwarf in clown
makeup added a touch of macabre theatricality to the set by
squuezing
the sax player's lungs like bagpipes, to the delight of the audience.

“You know, Terry wasn’t
reborn like that.” A moot with skin dark as java, one whitened eye, and a body
that was an altar to infidelity slid in next to me.

“Good to see you, Jimmy.”

“Tut, tut. Madame Destiny
of the Nine Spheres, when I’m at work.”

“Apologies. I like the
eye.”

“Flatterer. Rubes love it.
They think it bestows some kind of extra perception into,” it shifted its voice
down and took on a robust Jamaican
patois
, “
the
vast all-ah-knowing cloud-uh of the great beyond!
”
The moot tapped its head against the back wall of the booth and its left eye,
the blue one, popped out and bounced into my waiting palm. “They were both
white once, but clients were beginning to think I was blind, not psychic. So
out went leftie.”

Business was obviously
doing well, well enough that few would suspect
Jymma
Olfonse
was one of the oldest moots in town. In life she
had been a card sharp with a gift for prophetic fabrication. I’d crossed her
palms a few times and she’d never steered me wrong, but since my death I’d kept
away.

After its murder and
resurrection at the hands of a disgruntled client, Jimmy took up with some
resourceful miscreants who could craft opportunity out of atrocity, renovated
an abandoned dive, and became a success. All its profits must have gone into
body upkeep, which, I could see, was worth every penny. Even up close there
wasn’t a trace of moot. Except for the eye, and the bruises around its neck,
which Jimmy kept visible as a badge of some sort of honour.

I tossed the marble back.
Jimmy slipped it in and blinked it into place.

“There was nothing wrong
with Terry's body, he just isn’t a very good musician. He needed a gimmick, so
he cut his chest open and gets the
shortie
to man the
bellows. How could I ever turn that down?”

“You’re all heart.”

“
Ain’t
that the truth. Plus, I’d swear he’s a better player now.” It laughed at that,
a laugh in sound only. “Brass tacks, Duds.”

“Is the reunion over?”

“You died years ago, yet I
only see you now? You’ve hurt my feelings.”

“Something tells me you’ll
get over it.” I handed Jimmy the photo. “I’m looking for this girl.” I ignored
its smutty
tsk
tsk
. “I’ve caught a missing kid
case. Can’t find her among the living. Maybe she’s found her way down here.”