Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (23 page)

“What on Earth are you talking about?” Mrs. Eldridge said. Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Whose murder are you investigating, Sergeant?”

“I think you know, ma’am.”

She stared at him.

Rob waited. A change of expression, a twitch, at this point, could blow everything out of the water.

“It’s mine, isn’t it,” she whispered.

Rob nodded, and waited.

Mrs. Eldridge simply sat there for some moments, looking down at her tightly interlaced fingers. They worked a little, and the knuckles were white.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Who would want to murder me?”

“We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on that, ma’am,” Rob said.

Now, though, the shock was beginning to set in. “But I fell down,” she said. “That was all it was.”

“Ma’am,” Rob said, as gently as he could—for if at any point gentleness was needed, this was it— “as far as we can tell, you were coming into the house when someone came up behind you and struck you in the head from behind. You did fall down. But not because you tripped.” He stopped, there, not yet being finished with his own disgust at the crime scene pictures, the tidy rug with its pattern blotted out across nearly half its width. It still astonished him sometimes how much blood even a small human body could contain.

Her face was surprisingly still: the face of a woman who’s just received one more piece of bad news in a life which has had its fair share of it. She looked up at Rob, then, and said, very composed, “Who killed me?”

“We don’t know, ma’am. That’s why I’m here: to see what you know about it. Unfortunately the Department is very backed up, and there were no witnesses in the neighborhood, so it’s taken awhile to get around to you. I was only brought on about two months ago to handle the backed-up cold cases—”

She blinked. “‘Cold cases’?”

“Cases where we ran out of leads, ma’am, and didn’t have the manpower right away to follow through. Your case was put ‘on ice’ until someone could be spared to look into it again.”

The look in her eyes gave Rob a whole new definition of “cold” to work with. “Which has been how long, exactly?”

“You’ve been dead for about three years.”

Her eyes widened. “And you’re only turning up here
now?”

“Budget, ma’am,” Rob said, truly ashamed. “We’re a very small department yet. The other kinds of forensics have been established longer, and they get most of the funds. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”

She looked at him more with disbelief than horror, which was a relief. “Bullshit!” she said.

Rob’s mouth dropped open.

“The only reason my murder hasn’t been solved sooner is that I don’t have any sons or daughters making it hot for somebody on the City Council!” Mrs. Eldridge said; and though she was annoyed, it wasn’t at him. “Or somebody else down at Parker Center. When you say ‘budget’, you mean there’s one kind of law for the poor—excuse me, the low-income—and one for the noisy rich. Isn’t that it? There’s no big rush looking into the murder of an elderly widow with no living relatives, living on SSI. And I’ve been here being dead for three years when I could have been—”

She had to stop for a moment. “What
could
I have been?” Mrs. Eldridge said. “I mean, I’ve always been a churchgoing woman, I thought that—”

“We’re not allowed to get into that, ma’am.”

“Well, why in God’s name
not?”

This was not the usual dry resignation Rob was used to from the vast majority of his murder cases. “Lack of personal experience?” Rob said, maybe a little more roughly than he’d intended.

She let out a breath. “Sorry. This does make you uncomfortable, doesn’t it. I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

Rob also wasn’t used to his victims being quite this perceptive—or so perceptive of others’ reactions, anyway. Mostly they immediately got totally absorbed in the personal implications of being dead. “Ma’am, there are various things that can keep someone from moving on to their final destination. Trauma. Confusion—”

She gave him a look that suggested she was not confused. “My ‘final destination?’ Next thing you’re going to tell me to fold up my tray table and put my seat in the upright position. Young man, I’m not so sure how final my destination is, even if I am churchgoing. You’re saying I’m dead, but I haven’t moved on. Fine. So what do I need to do so that I
can
move on? Since there are probably some people wondering where I am. I’m not the kind to be late.”

And then she stopped, and gave him a wry look. “That was a pun,” she said. “Isn’t there humor after death? You’re not laughing.”

Rob took a long breath: this interview was getting out of hand. “Ma’am,” he said, “sometimes, in my line of work, it’s smarter to wait a while and make sure you’re
supposed
to laugh.” He did have to smile, then. She was going to be an easier job than he had originally feared.

She looked around her, bemused. “And what about my house?” Mrs. Eldridge said. “If I’ve been dead for three years…”

“Ma’am, this is your
image
of your house,” Rob said. “After your murder, your real house was put up for auction to pay off funeral expenses and death duties. It was bought by some people who sold it to a consortium of cocaine dealers. Until last week this was a crack house.”

Now it was Mrs. Eldridge’s turn to open her mouth and close it in shock.

“Let me see,” she said.

She stood up.

“Ma’am,” Rob said, “there’s one thing we have to do first.”

He fumbled about his left wrist, feeling for the slight sizzle of power that meant contact with his heartline. He didn’t get the sizzle, possibly because he was so thrown off balance by the way this whole interview had gone; but the heartline he found, and drew it out—a thin silver thread, glowing even in the warm afternoon light of Mrs. Eldridge’s living room.

“While this is connecting us, you can walk in the land of the living,” he said, holding it out between his wrist and the fingers of his other hand. “And I can walk where you take me. Ideally, that would be back to the hours just before you died. You may not have been able to see who murdered you, but I will.”

She looked at the line of silver light. “’Or ever the silver cord be loosed,’” she said, “’or the golden bowl be broken…’”

Rob nodded.

Mrs. Eldridge held out her wrist. Rob draped the free end of the heartline over it. This time he got the shock, stronger than he expected; but that was in line with the kind of psychic energy bound up in someone who was so newly in touch with her status as a murder victim, and so thoroughly annoyed.

Mrs. Eldridge looked out the window at her tidy, close-mowed lawn, went to the door with Rob very much in tow, opened the door, and went out onto the porch.

There she stood for some moments, staring out at what her front yard had become. From somewhere next door, to the left, came the sound of loud heavy metal music.

Mrs. Eldridge shook her head.

“Well, since you’ve taken this long getting onto my case,” she said, “we’d better get going, because I’m certainly not staying in
this
dump a moment longer than I have to.”

And she looked at him.

“Ma’am?” Rob said.

“I’m waiting for you to offer me your arm,” she said.

Rob did, helping her down the step. “There’s this to be said for being dead,” Mrs. Eldridge said, looking with distaste at the “lawn”: “I don’t feel my rheumatism so much. What do we do now?”

“We retrace your steps,” Rob said. “Where were you coming from, that last day, when you had the groceries?”

“I’d been around the corner, at the Ralph’s,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “I couldn’t get the delivery people to come up here any more: my orders weren’t big enough. I had to walk.” She sighed. “And it wasn’t a pleasant walk, as it was when I first had the house. The neighborhood’s just not what it was.”

Rob nodded and mmm-hmmed, and let her talk. This was just what he would have had to encourage her to do, anyway; immerse herself in her memories of her last day. While in circuit with a lanthanometer, her experience would briefly reshape Rob’s perception of the world.
This is going pretty well.
At last we should get some kind of result in this case,
Rob thought. It was a relief to him, for the case seemed to have been going on for so long now. They all did, though—all the cold cases with which he was routinely saddled. Not that it mattered, really, so long as they got solved: so long as Justice in Her majesty was eventually served.
It just seems to take so long sometimes. And this one more than most…

“I don’t see what the point is in talking to you when you’re off in a world of your own,” Mrs. Eldridge said, squeezing his arm.

“Uh, sorry, ma’am,” Rob said. They were halfway along the long block, making their way down past more lanai apartment buildings, up toward Sherman Way. Slowly, slowly, the landscape around them was beginning to shimmer and change—uncertainty descending over things in a silvery fog as, on a local basis anyway, the past shouldered the present aside. Cars shifted position without warning, the sky started to get patchy about its weather, cloudy in one spot, clear and sunny in another.

“I said, Sergeant, do you have family?”

“Uh, no.” That sounded a little bald: the change around them was taking quite nicely, and Rob didn’t have to concentrate quite that hard on it. “It didn’t seem fair,” he said after a moment. “What I do can be dangerous.”

“Other men have families.”

Rob nodded. “It wasn’t right for me, though,” he said. “Maybe later, when I have some more seniority. Is this the way you came, ma’am? Through this parking lot?”

“That’s right.”

“All right,” Rob said. He stopped at the edge of the parking lot at the end of the block, and paused there, waiting for the change to settle fully, for the present to lie down under the weight of the past. That glassy clarity set in again all around the two of them. “Is this the time of day it was?” Rob said.

Mrs. Eldridge looked around in calm wonder at the way broad, blazing afternoon had reshaped itself into late afternoon, shading into dusk. “That’s right,” she said. “It was just before six. I realized I didn’t have anything left in the fridge for dinner. I can’t keep a lot of stuff in there any more; it’s on its last legs, poor thing… it has trouble keeping more than a quart of milk cold.”

She laughed, then, as they started across the parking lot together. “I guess I don’t have to worry about my fridge any more,” she said. “So now what do we do? I just show you what I did?”

“That’s right, ma’am. As far as possible, you ignore me and just do whatever you did that evening. I’ll take care of the rest.”

She nodded and headed for the doors of the supermarket. The doors slid aside for them; as Mrs. Eldridge picked up a hand basket, Rob looked over his shoulder at the parking lot. People there were loading groceries, driving in, driving out; none of them showed any sign of having particularly noticed the small, thin woman walking in.

Rob let the heartline stretch between them, looking around at the supermarket staff, the other people wheeling carts up and down the aisles. “You go ahead, ma’am,” he said. “The people here can see you, just as they saw you that day. It’s all happening again; just let the flow of it carry you along. No one can see me. I’m just your invisible friend.”

“Well, I would talk to myself half the time when I was shopping,” she said, wandering down the bakery aisle, “so no one’s going to think twice if I do it now. Did I get bread? Yes, I think so. That sunflower rye.”

Rob dropped back as he would have on any surveillance involving the living, watching to see who noticed Mrs. Eldridge, how the people she interacted with behaved. She picked up the loaf of rye bread she wanted, chatted briefly with the young paper-hatted girl behind the bakery counter, and then headed back toward the dairy case. “I can never decide what kind of milk to get,” she said softly. “All the different kinds they have now, it just gets confusing. What kind do you get?”

“I’m not much of a milk drinker, ma’am,” he said. “Mineral water mostly, or beer.”

“But what do you take in your coffee?”

“I drink it black.”

Mrs. Eldridge rolled her eyes at him as she picked up a quart of skim. “Not sure you’re human,” she said, with a mischievous look. “But maybe a dead lady shouldn’t be casting aspersions.”

Rob had to smile at that as she made her way into the next aisle. For a while he followed her up and down, while Mrs. Eldridge chose a head of lettuce here, a couple of potatoes there, hesitated for some minutes over the comparative virtues of two different brands of beans. “These are cheaper,” she said, “but the others taste better…” She sighed and put the cheaper can back. “If I’m going to be murdered before I get in the door with these,” she said, “I’ll at least be found with the better-tasting brand. And you’ll see the murder, you think?”

“The murderer too, I’d expect.”

“That must be hard for you,” Mrs. Eldridge said, heading into the paper products aisle. “Never able to stop a crime. Always having to watch it happen, and not be able to prevent it…”

“It has to be done. But just finding out what happens,” Rob said, looking around as Mrs. Eldridge turned into another aisle, “makes a big difference.”

“And not just to you, I take it.” She went through her basket, saw that everything she needed was there, and headed for the express checkout.

“Routinely, ma’am,” Rob said, “when the murderer’s found and brought to Justice, the soul of the murdered is released from whatever trauma it may have suffered, and it then goes…” He trailed off.

“Still can’t get into detail about that, Sergeant?” Mrs. Eldridge said under her breath, while waiting her turn. She smiled: she was teasing him now.

“The destinations would appear to vary, ma’am,” Rob said, “and any answer I gave you could prejudice the course of action you take. Once Justice has taken Her course, you’ll be free to go…wherever.”

She got to the checkout, paid for her groceries, and picked up the bag. “It’s just a shame I can’t make you carry these for me,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “This was always the bad part. But I guess I should think of it as the last time….”