Dead Bolt (21 page)

After a few moments the ache receded, just like that.

He sat back and smiled. “Better?”

I nodded. “What are you, a healer of some kind?”

He laughed. “It’s a trick my mother used on me when I was a child. It only works if you catch the headache when first it starts.”

“Well, thanks. And thanks for your time, as well. I’d better get going.”

Olivier insisted on walking me to my car. The fog had rolled in, thick and cold. A foghorn sounded in the background, low and mournful.

“Have you eaten?” he asked as we walked.

“I, uh . . . had a samosa from the lunch truck on the way here.”

“
Bof!
That is not dinner. You need real food to function properly, especially if you are to have the fortitude to go up against ghosts, no? Yesterday I made an amazing osso buco. Do you cook?”

I shook my head. “My dad’s the cook in our family.”

“Ah, this is how it should be.”

“You and my dad would get along. He insists the best chefs in the world are men.”

“I did not mean that in a sexist way. I meant only that cooking is the least we can do, since the women do so much more.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, unconvinced.

“At least I believe it is true for the French. Cooking a beautiful meal, awakening the senses through taste and aroma, is a wonderful way to please a woman.”

“In America we say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

“Perhaps so. But I am not interested in men.”

“This is me,” I said as we arrived at my boxy Scion. “Oh, what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Your answering machine doesn’t take messages.”

He pulled out a business card and wrote a phone number on the back in curvy, French-style writing, then handed it to me.

“I’m available tomorrow night. Nighttime is better, because the vibrations are clearer.” He gazed at me for a long moment, the streetlight bathing the planes of his face in an amber glow. “Perhaps together we will vanquish these ghosts, and find you and your friends some peace, yes? And then I will cook for you.”

The jury was still out on that last part.

“Thanks again, Olivier.”

“I will see you soon, then. I look forward to your call.”

 

“Hey!” the homeless man shouted at me the next morning as I walked toward Cheshire House. “You’re the one who yelled at Blunt the night he died, right?” He was sitting on the sidewalk in front of Emile’s shop, his back against the wall below the grimy display window.

“Um . . . yes,” I said, blushing. It wasn’t among my proudest moments.

“Some lady just threw me outta the doorway. Why can’t I sit in the doorway? Man’s already dead—what does he care?”

“Who threw you out? The inspector?”

He shook his head. “Old lady. She’s in there now.”

The crime-scene tape was torn and hung limply on either side of the shop door, waving lazily in the light breeze. Last night’s fog had become this morning’s deep mist, and the mournful foghorn lent a mysterious note to the scene.

Stepping over the cracked mosaic at the entrance of Emile’s shop, I pushed on the door, which was slightly ajar. I recognized the old woman inside the shop.

“Hettie? What are you doing here?”

“This here’s my place now.”

“
Y
our place?”

“That’s right. Emile left it to me in his will. Don’t that beat all? Maybe I’ll hire you to fix it up for me.”

“I’m . . . surprised,” I said, recalling what Janet had said about Hettie and Emile. It was hard to imagine them being amorous toward anyone, much less each other, but as I kept reminding myself, I was no expert in the ways of love.

Heck, I was no amateur in the ways of love, either.

“Will you look around with me?” Hettie asked, tucking a big black patent leather pocketbook securely under her arm. The formality of the purse contrasted sharply with her oversized T-shirt. This one was black with bold yellow lettering, and advertised a local supermarket chain. “I’m afraid the ghosts will figure out I’m here and come on over. Or do you think they’re stuck in Cheshire House? But then, if they’re stuck there, how’d they kill Emile?”

“I, uh, really don’t know.” I thought of last summer’s apparition. He hadn’t been limited to one location, that’s for sure.

I glanced around the shop. It felt strange to be here, on the site of a murder.

Dozens of footprints and scuff marks, no doubt belonging to emergency personnel, were visible in the thick film of lint and dirt on the ugly linoleum. The crime scene itself had been cleaned of blood. The seven-by-four-foot patch was the only clean spot in the room.

I felt a pang of sadness. Curmudgeon or not, Emile didn’t deserve to die like this.

“Hettie, the last time we talked you didn’t sound very fond of Emile. And frankly, he didn’t exactly speak of you in glowing terms, either. Why would he leave his place to you?”

“We go way back.”

I waited for more. Looked like I had a long wait.

“I guess he could leave it to whoever he wanted to,” Hettie finally said, peering into the cupboards along one wall.

I noticed white hair on one side of the burgundy moiré sofa. I remembered Emile telling me he didn’t keep cats because of the risk of getting fur on the furniture. So where had this hair come from?

“Were you here that night, Hettie?”

“What night?”

“The night Emile was killed? Did you stop by to see him?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She played with her dentures a minute. “Place is a dump anyway. Not much of value here.” She pointed to the stuffed cat I’d noticed on my previous visit to Emile’s shop. “Maybe I’ll take the cat, at least, give it a proper burial. Never did like how he did that, stuffed them. Why’d someone want to do that to a kitty?”

“I think he meant well by it,” I said halfheartedly. Then I noticed that the cat’s rhinestone collar, the one that held the charm, was no longer around his neck.

“Have you taken anything from here?”

She looked surprised. “No.”

“Because the shop’s not yours yet, you know. The police have to release the crime scene, and then the actual transfer of ownership will take a while.”

“I know that. Wasn’t born yesterday, you know. I just wanted to see if it was worth anything, is all. Maybe I’ll do what I did before, and donate it to the shelter. That way I don’t have to mess with it. And I don’t want to deal with any more ghosts, anyway.”

“Hettie, I wanted to ask you something. The other day you mentioned one of your former boarders, Dave Enrique? Remember?”

Hettie nodded.

“What was his relationship to Janet? Or Emile’s for that matter? Janet mentioned that Emile took something from her.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“No idea what went on that time up in the attic?”

Hettie smoothed her T-shirt, and poked her dentures with her tongue. “I expect it wasn’t anything good. Grown men and a young girl. After that Janet seemed different, changed. I sent her to live with her daddy after that. Better that way.”

 

When we left, the homeless man was still sitting on the sidewalk, talking to himself.

“Got a dollar for the hobo?” Hettie asked.

“I’m not sure ‘hobo’ is the best term. . . .” I said out of the side of my mouth as I scrounged in my satchel for a dollar.

“Actually, I prefer ‘hobo,’ come to think of it,” the man said with a lopsided smile. “Sounds more adventurous, doesn’t it? I’m not lacking a home; I’m on a grand adventure.” He pulled a fifth of some kind of liquor out of his coat pocket. “Bon voyage to me!”

As we left, we heard the man singing to himself.

“Ever notice how now that regular folks walk around with their phones in their ears, talking out loud ’bout this and that, the crazies on the street don’t seem so crazy?” said Hettie. “You gave that feller some clean clothes and . . . maybe a chair to sit on instead of that piece of old cardboard, and people’d assume he’s talkin’ to his stockbroker ’stead o’ being nuts.”

“You might be right,” I mused. Seemed like a social experiment worthy of one of Luz’s graduate students.

I walked Hettie to her car, a dented avocado-green gas guzzler that must have dated back to the seventies.

“You think you could fix the place up for me, I decide to keep it?” Hettie asked as she climbed in.

I paused. The truth was the building didn’t call to me, and besides, I wasn’t sure how much time I wanted to spend with Hettie the cat lady. And anyway, where would she get the money to fix it up? In my business I had to make quick judgment calls about clients’ ability to pay, and my ability to work with them. Hettie failed on both counts.

“Why don’t we cross that bridge when we come to it?” I said as I closed her door for her. “Give your cats a squeeze from me.”

She laughed, a kind of hoarse chuckle. “Will do, lady builder. That much, I can do.”

Hettie fired up the car’s engine and roared off, her driving style as unrestrained as her personality. She flapped one arm out the window, waving good-bye, and screeched around the corner, narrowly missing a stop sign.

Time to go back to work.

But . . . Emile’s place was wide-open. What could it hurt to have a more thorough look around? I didn’t know what I was looking for, but maybe I would discover something that would connect Emile’s murder with the ghostly goings-on across the street. Inspector Crawford probably wouldn’t approve but . . . I promised myself I’d be extra careful not to interfere with any possible evidence, and headed into the shop.

I didn’t see anything else out of the ordinary, except for the hair on the sofa. That bothered me. I noticed a pad on Emile’s desk.
K. Daley, 2 pm
was written in blue ink, but there wasn’t anything suspicious about that
.
Katenka mentioned to me that she was going to have him reupholster her settee.

Had this really been a simple break-in that had turned lethal? Could Emile’s spirit be hanging around, angry that his life ended so horribly?

If so, perhaps I could communicate with him. Then I wondered if I
wanted
to communicate with Emile. I hadn’t liked him when he was alive. Why would I like him any better as a mad-as-hell ghost? And if I did manage to reach him, could he even tell me what had happened? Did I want to hear it?

Impatient with my own doubts, I forced myself to stand on the clean spot, where Emile had died. I took a deep breath, focused, and called to Emile with my mind. I waited.

Nothing. No tingle at the back of my neck, no sensation of being watched. All I felt was depressed.

The shop was quiet as a tomb. I took in the mess, the gloom, the gazes of forlorn creatures.
Reason #348 why I don’t want to be a taxidermist: The risk of spending my last moments on earth like Emile, prone and injured, surrounded by dead animals, their glass eyes unblinking, hungry . . . vengeful.

I squeezed my eyes shut, cursing my overactive imagination.

“You are
so
busted,” a voice said from the vicinity of the door.

“
Graham!
You scared the
daylights
out of me!” I clapped my hand over my heart in a dramatic gesture. “I swear: you’re committed to giving me a heart attack.”

He remained in the doorway. “Maybe you’re jumpy because you’re snooping around a crime scene where you have no right to be. Come on out, before you get busted for breaking and entering.”

“I have a right to be here,” I insisted, but I joined him at the door. “Sort of.”

Graham just raised his eyebrows.

“Hettie Banks says she inherited this place, and she might hire me to redo it.”

“Does she have that kind of money?”

“Not to my knowledge,” I admitted as we left the shop and I closed the door behind us. “Anyway, the crime-scene tape’s down.”

“She probably took it down herself. Doesn’t mean you can go poking around someone else’s property.”

“I just . . .” As we crossed the street toward Cheshire House, I wondered whether I should tell him the truth, that I was trying to conjure Emile’s ghost. That sounded crazy, though, didn’t it? “I was wondering if Emile’s death might be linked to the strange things going on at the Daleys’.”

“Linked how?”

“I have no idea. But I . . . I seem to have some sort of connection to these . . . entities. Spirits. Whatever.”

“So you
did
see a ghost.”

“Maybe.”

Graham leaned back against his truck and crossed his arms over his chest. I could see his jaw clench, but he said nothing.

“What,” I pushed, “are you going to pretend you didn’t feel something up in that attic?”

“I felt something—that’s for sure.” His gaze flickered over the length of me, then returned to mine. When he spoke again, his voice was very quiet. “I felt like kissing you. And a whole lot more.”

“I . . . I think maybe the ghosts sensed something between us and piggybacked on our emotions, ratcheted things up.”

“Or maybe it was just high time I kissed you.”

I swallowed, hard, and tried to keep my mind on the supernatural, rather than the very real chemistry I felt whenever I was anywhere in the vicinity of this man. “I think it had more to do with ghosts than with . . . with you and me. It was like they took control of our conversation, remember?”

“Okay,” he said. “For the sake of argument let’s put aside everything science has taught us for the past century and pretend you can talk to the dearly departed. What makes you think you’re qualified to deal with them?”

“Who else is there?”

“Surely there’s someone who knows more than you about this sort of thing.”

“I’m working on it. I met a guy last night who might be able to help. He leads ghost tours out of the Eastlake Hotel. If Katenka agrees to hire him, he’ll come take a look at the house.”