The Sleeping and the Dead (10 page)

“I've never felt uncomfortable here,” I said.

I took a picture of Grant coming out of the bathroom with his EMF meter. He passed me on his way into the bedroom, then stopped and scanned me with the meter.

“Do you have a cell phone?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Turn it off.” I did.

He finished his sweep of the bedroom and returned to the kitchen. Deiter set a Sharp MD-SR60 MiniDisc audio recorder at the center of the table, then set his EMF meter next to it. Grant stood by the refrigerator and started filming. I recounted everything I had experienced since moving into the apartment. When I was finished, Grant turned off the lights.

“Now we introduce ourselves.” Deiter raised his voice slightly. “I am now addressing any spirits or entities who may be present. My name is Deiter Marks. Also present is Grant Lauderdale, Trey Monroe, and Jackie Lyons. We are not here to harm or frighten you. We only want to find out if anyone is here, who you are, and if you are willing to talk to us.”

Trey waited and listened, but nothing happened. “Can you knock on something, like this?” He rapped on the table with his knuckles three times. All I heard was the Tejano music downstairs.

“If you are here, we would really like to get to know you better,” Deiter spoke into the darkness. One whole side of his face and beard was green from the traffic light outside. He looked like a Viking berserk. “Can you make the lights on our meter flash?”

The EMF meter remained dark.

“I only ever saw anything late at night,” I said in a low voice. “One or two o'clock in the morning.”

“Sometimes it takes a while for them to get comfortable enough with us to make themselves known. We should just be quiet and listen.” We listened for about two minutes to the Tejano music, the quiet roar of the rain on the roof and the peeling of tires on the wet pavement. I learned that the faucet in the shower had a slow drip and that the floors creaked like a wooden sailing ship whenever the heat came on. Deiter's belly muttered like an old man talking to himself. Grant filmed the whole thing, all nothing of it, as patiently and quietly as my father stalking a bass on Lake Charles back home. Trey chewed his tobacco with the regularity and monotony of a ticking clock. I never saw him spit.

“Maybe Trey should do his thing now,” Deiter suggested.

Trey opened his case and took out a pair of brass rods. The rods were shaped like the letter L. He picked one up in each hand, holding the short leg of the L loosely in his fist, with his arms about chest height and his hands out like he was holding a steering wheel. The rods swayed randomly side to side. “Y'all gimme some room here,” he said.

The rest of us backed away from him. Trey walked slowly around the table one time, then stopped. The rods in his hands swung together, making an X, then swung apart again. “They ain't nothing here,” he said.

“Try the bedroom,” Deiter said.

Trey walked into the bedroom and came back out again, stopping just outside the bedroom door. The rods were perfectly still in his hands. He turned slowly in a circle, shuffling his feet in tiny steps like an old man, and as he came back around the rods moved together as though magnetized. He followed the direction where they pointed, stopping every second step, until he was standing right in front of me. The tips of the rods were touching together, about two inches from my left tit.

“It's her.”

“What's that mean?” I asked.

“It's you.”

“What's me?”

“Your ghost,” he said.

I looked at Deiter. He shrugged and asked, “Have you ever experienced any poltergeist activity? Things flying off shelves? Banging doors? Lights turning on or off? Unexplained fires?”

“No,” I said before I even thought about it. Nothing like that had ever happened, except for the fire a few days ago. Adam had told me it started with a candle in the bathroom and I had no reason not to believe him. I didn't remember leaving a candle burning, but I barely remembered anything about that night up until the moment a fireman flopped me over his shoulder.

I said, “Just what I told you before. There was a woman sitting on my bed. The next night, she came in under the door, then opened the door and went out.”

“Where are your shoes?” Trey asked.

“I'm wearing them.”

“Take one off and put it in the middle of the floor.” I did. He held his rods over them for a minute and nothing happened, but when he turned away, the rods swung around and pointed at me again. “It's definitely her.”

“I don't understand.”

“It's something about you.” Trey laid the brass rods in his flute case. “I don't know what. I don't interpret. I just go where the rods point.”

They packed up their stuff. I followed them into the hall and closed and locked the door behind me.

Mrs. Kim down the hall stuck her head out for a second, then disappeared without saying anything. She looked like she was expecting somebody.

 

11

M
RS.
M
YNOR WAS IN THE
back cooking and there was a fine, spicy fried smell. Trey was standing by the phone-card advertisements with a greasy paper plate piled high with empanadas, quietly and methodically chewing. Mynor was talking in bubbling Spanish to a short, round woman with two short, round children clutching her skirts and eyeing Trey as though he'd just stepped off the mothership from Zambodia.

Walter Pinch sat in his split-cane chair by the door. He stood up as I came in and swayed on his feet. He smelled like a wrecked gin truck. “Mrs. Jackie Lyons,” he slurred, and leaned toward me so I had to catch him. I set him back in his chair, trying to avoid his groping hands. There was a quart bottle in a paper bag by the wall next to his foot. Walter was an old-school drunk, a man who walked himself home no matter how drunk he was and who called any business that sold wine a liquor store. I liked him. Lonely as he was, he seemed to have come to a place of quiet peace I had never known. He wasn't drinking to kill anything. He drank because he liked it.

“Whose yo friends?” he said slowly, his neck already half rubber. I introduced them as ghost hunters and Walter shook their hands politely without standing up. “What you doin', Jackie Lyons?” Walter asked when they had gone. “Don't you be stirring up no ghost shit. Not in my building.”

“They're not stirring anything up, Mr. Pinch.”

“What they here for, then?”

“They just want to see if I have a ghost.”

“See? See how?”

“They have cameras and meters and stuff. Trey is a dowser.”

“A dowser? What's he dowse for?”

Trey was close enough to hear us. “Spirits,” he said. “Spiritual residues, energy—dark and light, gates and portals between this world and the hereafter. But y'all ain't got nothin' to worry about. That apartment has ugly memories, but there ain't no spirits, except what this lady brung with her.”

“You ever dowse for water?” Walter asked.

Trey nodded. “Water. Lost shit. Whatever you want.”

“I had an uncle used to dowse with a stick.” Despite the differences in their skin color and upbringing and just about everything else, Walter and Trey were kin. They shared the same folk mythologies. “Once he found a mason jar full of silver dollars somebody had buried and forgot. Maybe you can do me a favor,” he said to Trey. He leaned forward and shifted his weight to his feet, then slowly straightened up. “My tenants say the elevator in this building is haunted. Maybe you can check it out.”

“Sure.”

“I can't pay you.”

“That's OK.” Trey picked up his flute case and took Walter's arm, and the two of them headed out the front door like old friends. Deiter and I hurried after them, which wasn't hard to do. Walter's top speed was a Parkinson's shuffle. We caught up before they were past the tae kwon do school. The bay between the school and the Laundromat was empty and dark, the windows dusty with a For Rent sign, a female child mannequin leaning its bald head against one window as though trying to see down the street.

Nobody was in the Laundromat, but one of the dryers was running, tube socks and underwear curling around and falling down like an endless ocean breaker trapped in a magic bottle. Walter led us to the back, into a narrow, L-shaped hall. The elevator was at the end of the long leg of the L, the tenants' private laundry room was at the end of the short leg, where a bare light bulb hung from a wire over an old coin-operated washer. The elevator had an accordion cage door, lacquered wood, Chinese silk-screened panels and a worn brass lever that made the thing go up and down. It was also claustrophobically tiny and creepy as a coffin. Whoever put it in this building had strange ideas.

Walter pulled back the elevator's accordion door and Trey entered with his divining rods. “You need to keep back,” he said to me. “I can already feel the rods trying to pull to you. I can't get an honest read.”

*   *   *

I smoked a cigarette outside by the front door. The rain mixed with sleet and snow was coming down hard just at the edge of the curb, and the cars driving by threw up fans of water from the swollen gutters. The smoke felt good going down, scratching that old itch that never goes away. I thought about Adam, somewhere out there in the city, maybe standing in the same rain, trying to chase down his own ghosts. Sure enough, my phone rang.

“Hey Jack,” he said. He sounded like he had just woken up, or maybe not slept at all. Times like these I was glad I was no longer a cop, no matter how poor I might be. I liked being able to sleep regular hours. Regular for me, anyway. He said, “I talked to the director of that Scottish play at the Lou Hale. The vic didn't make rehearsals Monday.”

“Maybe he had a date with the killer.”

“Or maybe the killer got to him before his date, or after his date. If he even had a date and wasn't lying to Michi. We're canvassing the usual places just in case, see if anybody saw him.”

“Anything else?”

“Chief Billet got your photos. He said to thank you.”

“He can thank me by paying me.” A bus bucketed by, sheeting water onto the sidewalk. “How'd it go last night?”

“You mean the parents?”

“Yeah.”

“They said their son wasn't gay.” That didn't surprise me, but the bitterness in Adam's voice did. The world is full of parents who can't admit their kids are gay. “They said they sent him to a Christian camp run by Reverend T. Roy Howard to have the demon of homosexuality exorcised from his soul through SSA therapy. They said he was cured and had a girlfriend from Abuja.”

“Don't tell me you believe them.”

“Doesn't matter I think. They believed it.” He yawned into the phone.

“Have you been to bed yet?”

“I think I slept an hour this morning. I can't wrap my head around this killer, Jackie. The body, the pipe, the mattress—everything was clean, no fingerprints, no physical evidence at all, nothing, nada. He's getting better at this and we're still just treading water.”

I didn't tell Adam about the backstage photos Deiter found on my Leica. I wanted Deiter to pull out more detail before I said anything, just in case it turned out to be nothing. I didn't want to get Adam's hopes up. “Wiley's working fast this time, running that evidence. It's not like him to share his results so quick.”

“Director Boykin's riding everybody's ass.” A car passed slowly, rap music vibrating the trunk so deep the rain danced on the surface. “The media is crawling all over the place. Why do you think I haven't slept?”

I told him to get some sleep and let him get back to his work. I don't know why he called. He didn't even harass me about going to NA. I hadn't even got the phone back in my pocket before it rang again. I never used to be this popular.

“Hi,” I said to James. “I have your money.”

“Fantastic. I'm at the airport,” he answered. “I'm headed down to Biloxi to pick up an Embraer Ipanema.” I heard a door open onto the sound of a passing bus.

“Isn't that a song?”

“It's a Brazilian airplane—a type of crop duster. It runs on alcohol.”

“So you're a crop duster pilot.”

“Yeah. For the time being.”

“Isn't crop-dusting a little dangerous?”

“Only if you get careless. Listen, this job just came up. I'm running behind and I've got to catch a flight. I'll be out of town for a couple of days. I was wondering if you have family in town.” He didn't wait for me to answer. “Because I don't have any family here and I thought if you weren't doing anything, we could have Thanksgiving dinner together after I get back.”

I couldn't tell if he was asking me over to his place for Thanksgiving, or if he expected me to cook for him. When I didn't answer, he said, “Of course, the only place that'll be open is Cracker Barrel.”

“Cracker Barrel is fine.” He made it easy to say yes.

“Fantastic!” he said. That was two fantastics in one phone call. He was nervous about something, but I didn't know what. I hoped it was just me. “I'll call you when I get back Thursday.”

I gave him my address and told him to pick me up at six o'clock.

“I'm about to go through security so I have to hang up.”

So hang up
. Instead, I said, “Have a safe flight.”

“Thanks. Bye.” He finally hung up. I tried to picture James's face. Mostly, I remembered how young he looked. He didn't sound young on the phone. I felt a little guilty about being so attracted to him. But only a little.

*   *   *

I found Trey and Deiter digging through a garbage can at the back of the Laundromat, spreading garbage on the floor while Grant filmed them. Walter was leaning against a dryer with his mouth hanging open. As I came in, Trey looked up and pointed for me to stay at the door, as though I had a communicable disease.