Dead Letters Anthology (10 page)

I knew it was cancer. I’d had a brush with uterine cancer the year before and they’d taken care of it with a hysterectomy. I just didn’t know whether this was the same thing or something new. I was thinking things like,
Will I go bald
and
Is there a special place to buy those I-have-cancer head scarves
and
Am I going to puke so much that I actually lose some weight
, shit like that. And then the oncologist, this nice lady in a tasteful wool dress, even more tastefully accessorised with a print scarf, a gold brooch, and plain black pumps with low but authoritative heels, tells me I’m looking at two years. Then she adds, “It could be less.”

My Macmillan nurse phones while I’m on my way home on the bus. She’s great, my Macmillan nurse, but I tell her I’ll call her back later because I don’t feel like subjecting the strangers sitting nearby to my tale of woe. But after she hangs up, I consider talking aloud to the dead phone as if she were still there just to get it out of my system:
The oncologist said this and I said that and now I feel blah blah blah. So you think you’re having a bad day? Cheer up, pilgrim, it could be worse by a fuck-ton!

But I don’t. I am very short on luck and what little I have ain’t good. The phone would probably ring in the middle of my soliloquy of sorrow. I’d go from tragic heroine to the punchline of a real-life anecdote, which would probably go viral on YouTube, courtesy of someone else’s cell phone. Life is ready to kill you without provocation; why tempt fate into humiliating you before you go?

* * *

My downstairs neighbour Tim was outside puttering around in the front yard when I got home. He’s a nice young man, not even half my age and half again as tall. Normally I’d stop to talk to him but not today. I know what’s going to come pouring out if I open my mouth and we do not know each other well enough for that kind of disclosure. Being a nice guy, he’d probably invite me for a cup of tea and listen sympathetically but I can’t handle that right now. Plus like I said, he’s half my age – he probably thinks sixty-two is old. So I smile, try to look like I’ve got too much to do to stop and chat and zip through my front door as fast as I can work the locks.

The postman has come and gone, leaving me a single yellow envelope on the carpet at the foot of the stairs. Two thick blue lines are drawn through the address and in black marker, the word
Deceased?

“Not yet, thanks very much,” I tell the envelope, picking it up. There’s a number written in pencil, like a serial number; it means nothing to me. In black ink, a different hand has printed,
No longer at this address
, and underneath, what could be a name or initials –
J e p
.

“Hey, don’t assume someone died,” I scold the envelope and turn on the overhead light so I can see who this was addressed to.

Detective Sergeant Michael Parris (ret’d)

The Oak House

Station Road

Fishponds

Bristol

One of the lines goes through the postcode so I can’t read it but it doesn’t matter. I don’t know anyone in Bristol. Nor do I know any cops, ret’d or otherwise. I turn the envelope over but there’s nothing except
Return to Sender
in the same blue as the lines through the address.

“Wrong sender,” I say. I’m about to tell myself to stop talking out loud like some crazy old lady when I notice that the envelope’s been opened, cut open, and the stamp or franking removed. Jeez, how blind am I, I wonder. Shoulda gone to watchamacallit.

Even as I’m thinking I should ask Tim if this is his, I’m emptying the contents into my hand. Fuck it, I had a rough day, I’m in the mood for the cheap thrill of reading someone else’s mail.

I have no idea what I might have been expecting – a birthday card with five quid in it or a love letter or a note from Detective Sergeant Michael Parris (ret’d)’s kid asking for money. What I did get:

I laid it all out on my kitchen table. There wasn’t much. Two pieces of paper, one a torn half-sheet with a note:

Mike

Please help

K

xx

I held the paper up to the light but there was no watermark and no indentations indicating something written on a sheet covering it.

The other piece was from a notepad. The logo in the upper right corner said Four Pillars Hotels. Not a chain I’d ever heard of but there are lots of things I’ve never heard of. There was an elaborate doodle in the lower left-hand corner – all abstract but whoever had done it had genuine artistic ability. I put on my reading glasses for a closer look and discovered that it wasn’t completely abstract after all. In the very densest part of all those lines and squiggles and lattices was a single word:
MURDER
. The doodler had gone over each letter several times to make it stand out.

Below the doodle, like the paper had been turned sideways so the doodle was at the top:

WEDS

6:00 pm

“Stella”––47

The third item took me from puzzled to what-the-fuck: a plastic card, plain black except for a circle printed on it in shimmery metallic silver – that’s a circle, not a solid dot – about an inch in diameter. The other side was brick red – or maybe drying blood red – with a black magnetised strip and tiny print setting out Terms and Conditions. Whose T&C’s, however, had been thoroughly scratched out and blacked over. And as if that wasn’t enough, someone had punched a tiny hole through the card and attached an old-fashioned property ticket with a bit of cord. On the ticket, someone had hand-printed:

Room 47

Below that, in smaller letters:
*NOT a hotel… belongs to THE ETERNITY CLUB.

The Eternity Club? I’d never heard of that either but given what I had heard today, it definitely sounded like my kind of place.

* * *

Now, London is lousy with private clubs, the most well-known being the Groucho Club, named for the Marx Brother who so famously proclaimed he didn’t want to join any club that would have someone like him as a member. There are lots more and all of them charge a fortune for membership so no one has to suffer the indignity of belonging to one that would have anyone with a bank account like mine (or yours) for a member. Most are so exclusive that civilians like me have never heard of them. That’s okay – it’s not like I ever think about exclusive clubs anyway. Although a friend took me to the Groucho once as her guest and if I were going to join one, I’d pick that one; they’re a classy bunch.

But after a doctor says you might have only two years to live, a place called the Eternity Club will definitely pique your interest.

Not that I had any idea what it really was. The black card reminded me of the uber American Express card, the one that’s several levels above platinum and so exclusive it’s just plain black, like it’s the Little Black Dress of credit cards. But this one wasn’t blank.

I looked from the note to Mike to the doodle and then to the card with its property tag. I rearranged them on the table in front of me, as if that would tell me anything. And son of a gun, it actually did.

I’d left the envelope on the table; placing the note from the hotel just below it showed me that
No longer at this address/ J e p
and
WEDS / 6:00 pm / “Stella” –– 47 / 30756
had been printed by the same hand.

Just like the tag attached to the card. Except for
Room 47
. That had been written by a different person… the same one who had put
Deceased?
on the front of the envelope. And
Return to Sender
on the back.

This had to be some kind of joke, I told myself, a prank on Mike Parris (ret’d). Maybe a bunch of his fellow detectives decided to punk him on his last day at work by putting together a bunch of fake clues to a fake case.
Mike please help K xx Don’t call me
. Only TV detectives get notes like that. Truth is duller than fiction because fiction has to be entertaining. So do jokes. Ergo, this had to be a prank.

But why include a card supposedly from this Eternity Club? An in-joke? Or maybe a jab at his age: Mike’s so old, the only club he qualifies for is the Eternity Club.

Nope; it sounded flat even just in my head.

I was about to put everything back in the envelope; instead, I found myself picking up my cell phone and dialling information. I didn’t expect to get Michael Parris’s number. He could have gone anywhere after retiring – Brighton, the south of France. The north of France, even. Or Paris. But surprisingly, he still had a number in Bristol. I called it and a woman answered.

“I’m trying to reach a Michael Parris,” I said after a moment of hesitation. “He was a detective?”

“This is his daughter,” the woman said with formal cordiality. “Can I help you?”

“Uh… is Detective Parris available?”

“My father passed away several weeks ago,” she said in a quiet, I’m-tolerating-you-because-I-have-manners tone. I waited for her to ask how she could help me again but apparently she wasn’t that tolerant. Not that I could blame her.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother you at such a difficult time.”

“Did you know my father?” she asked, not quite as stiff.

“Oh, no, I’m not a cop – uh, detective.”

“Are you some other kind of associate?”

“You mean like a snitch?” I wanted to bite my tongue off as soon as I said it. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’m… uh, this is going to sound kind of strange but please bear with me.”

“All right,” she said. “I’m listening.”

“I have a piece of mail that was meant for your father,” I said, holding the envelope in my other hand. “Someone tried to send it to him and it was returned. Only it went to the wrong address.”

“I see. Did you want me to come get it?”

“Oh, no, you can’t,” I said. “Well, technically, you could, it’s not impossible. But I’m calling from London.”

Suddenly that changed everything. “Is this you, Karen?” she snapped. “Don’t you know when to give up?”

“I don’t know any Karen,” I said. “My name is—”

“Then you’re stooging for Karen. I don’t really care. It’s over. My father’s dead, find some other mark.”

“Please, Ms Parris, I’m not Karen, I don’t know what you’re talking about, honest. I just got this piece of mail and it looks like it might be important. There’s this black card—”

“Yeah, sure. Send it to the Avon and Somerset cop shop,” she said. “Or if you’re really in London, you can take it to Scotland Yard for all I care. Now fuck off and don’t call here again.” There was a click as she hung up, which seemed anticlimactic. There are whole generations who will never know the pleasure of slamming the phone down.

I picked up the note to “Mike”. So K probably stood for Karen. Big deal; as facts went, it was pretty anaemic. Even knowing that she was someone who made Michael Parris’s daughter very angry didn’t tell me much. Hell, I didn’t even know Michael Parris’s daughter’s name. I’d have made a lousy detective, I thought.

And then again, maybe I could improve. I fetched my laptop from the other room.

Googling Michael Parris Bristol sans quotes got me a seemingly endless list of links to stories that included the words Michael, Parris, and Bristol, all listed under the question,
Did you mean Paris?
Then I tried Bristol Police and discovered that you can’t just get a list of law enforcement officers on request – unless they’re on Twitter, that is. Then you can even see thumbnail photos. But there were no detectives among them. I followed a few, thinking I could ask them about Michael Parris in a Direct Message, only to find you can’t DM anyone who isn’t following you back.

I kept searching and eventually I found Michael Parris’s obit. It was frustratingly short. He’d died two months ago, aged fifty-six, and would be missed by his husband Mark Ramirez and his brother Arthur Parris and that was all; no children. Cremation had been at the South Bristol Crematorium. In lieu of flowers, people could make a donation to Macmillan Cancer Support or to Ballboys, a testicular cancer charity.

Ballboys for testicular cancer. Save the Ta-tas for breast cancer. Uterine cancer didn’t lend itself to that kind of whimsy. But then, neither did rectal cancer – although it could have. They were missing an opportunity to give out ribbons saying
Assholes need love, too
.

You think a lot of crazy shit when you get cancer.

I was still thinking when the phone rang, startling me so I nearly jumped out of my skin. I looked at the screen; it was the number I’d called an hour ago. Didn’t see that coming, I thought, pressing the answer button. “Hello?” I said, a bit nervous.

“This is Michael Parris’s daughter. Is this the person who called me earlier?” Not a bit angry now; in fact, she was practically oozing concern.

“Why?” I asked.

“I just wanted to apologise for how I spoke to you. I’m still grieving for my father. I still can’t believe he’s gone. We were very close.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So close you’re not even mentioned in the obituary.”

Long moment of silence; I could practically hear the wheels turning as she tried to think up an answer for that. “My father was a complicated man. It wasn’t always very easy to be his daughter. We were estranged for a long time and then at the end of last year, we finally reconnected.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Another briefer silence. “When you called, I was going through some of our family things and I was feeling very emotional. I’m afraid I took it out on you.”

“Apology accepted,” I told her. “Anything else?”

“You said you had some mail that looked important, including a black card? You see, that card should have been in with my father’s papers, but after you called I checked and it’s missing. You seem to have found it—”

“Yeah, I took your advice.”

“Pardon?”

“I mailed it to the Bristol Police Department. You’ll have to talk to them—”

“Liar.” Just like that, the growl was back in her voice.

“Sounds like you’re getting emotional again,” I said breezily. “We all handle grief in our own way. Don’t bother calling back to apologise, I’ll forgive you now—”