Murder by Magic (13 page)

Not anymore,
Rob thought. The frontages of the beige-painted terrace apartment buildings to either side of the house came up to within about two feet of the sidewalk, and the tiny strip of what could have been grass between them and the sidewalk was trampled to bare dirt. And the house that seemed to crouch between them had no lawn anymore, either—just a tangle of heat-blanched goatsfoot and crabgrass and a single incredibly stubborn patch of dusty, wilted pachysandra that had refused to die even though no one ever watered it now. The windows were all barred and curtained inside. The door had been barred, too, but the black iron screen-and-scrollwork gate hung sideways off its hinges, rammed through when the Drug Squad came in last week. Probably the neighbors had been glad to see the crack house go.
Most of them, anyway,
Rob thought.
The rest of them’ll have found another source by now.

He finished his coffee, crumpled up the paper cup, and chucked it into the garbage bag hanging off the cigarette lighter, then got out of the car and locked up. Rob made his way across to the front walk of the house, relieved at least that he wasn’t going to have to go through the usual prolonged explanations to the present residents of the house. Just shy of the single step up to the cracked concrete of the front porch, Rob paused, gazing at the scarred paint on the door, the tiny window with the iron grille just visible inside, the newly split and splintered wood of the doorsills.
All right,
he said silently to the Lady with the Scales,
help me see what’s going to get the job done here.

The shift happened: the air got glassy clear, all the uncertainty and randomness of daily reality falling out of it in a breath’s space to leave everything unnervingly fixed. That fixity had long since stopped bothering Rob, though: he worked in it every day. He stepped up onto the porch and tried the bell. It didn’t work. Rob knocked on the door.

A pair of pale blue eyes, a little watery, looked out that little grilled window at him. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Eldridge?” Rob said. “Mrs. Tamara Eldridge?”

“Yes?” said the soft, uncertain voice.

Rob held up his ID. “I’m Detective Sergeant DiFalco from the LAPD, ma’am. Homicide. Could I speak to you for a moment?”

“Oh! Oh, of course, just a minute—”

There followed the sound of locks and chains being undone from the inside of the door, though one last chain remained in place. The lady standing on the far side of the door peered around it carefully, looking Rob up and down. “Here, ma’am,” Rob said, and handed her his ID, being careful before he let it go to make sure that she could touch it.

She could. She held it in one hand, shaking a little, and looked down at it, while Rob looked her over and readily recognized her as the woman from the picture in the case file. Those watery blue eyes looked up at him again, and the crinkled face, framed by curly silver-white hair, smiled at him. “That’s a terrible picture of you,” she said. “It makes you look like a cartoon burglar.”

Rob had to smile, for this was an accusation he heard often enough from his buddies back at Division. They claimed Rob could display five o’clock shadow five minutes after shaving; and he did have the kind of dark, craggy, brawny look that suggested he should be climbing out of windows in a striped shirt with a big sack labeled
LOOT
. “May I come in, ma’am?”

“Certainly, just a moment—”

She closed the door to take the chain off, then opened it again. “Please come in, Sergeant,” she said, gesturing him past her into a small, tidy living room on the right-hand side.

The room was like her: neat, compact, a little worn but well kept—overstuffed chairs; a sofa with some brassware, half polished, laid out on it on newspaper; antimacassars over the sofa and chair backs; a worn but clean Persian rug in a reddish pattern; and curtains and wallpaper in an ivory shade. The lady herself, as she sat down across from Rob, struck him suddenly as so very frail as to almost certainly make this a wasted trip.
She’ll never buy it,
Rob thought.
She’ll throw a seizure or something, and I’ll have to come back next week. And probably about twenty times after that.

But he’d been down this road before, and patience had always won out. It would win out now. “Please sit down,” Mrs. Eldridge said. She sat there perched on the edge of a big chair done in worn red brocade, looking very proper in a rather old-fashioned pastel tweed jacket and skirt, the effect of faded elegance somewhat thrown off by the tattered “comfy” scuffs she was wearing. “I’m sorry the place is a little messy at the moment: I was cleaning. What can I do to help you?”

“We’re investigating a murder in the neighborhood, ma’am,” Rob said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you much with that, Sergeant. I don’t get out a lot: I don’t really know any of the people living around here these days. And I don’t know much about the neighbors, except that mostly they play their stereos too loud. Especially the people upstairs over at Fifteen Seven-twenty. I call and call their landlord, but he never does anything . . .” She shook her head in mild annoyance. “When did this murder happen? I didn’t see anything in the papers.”

“It’s not recent, ma’am,” Rob said. “There was very little physical forensic evidence to help us, so we’re having to do neighborhood interviews and psychosweeps to see what else we can find.”

Mrs. Eldridge looked at Rob with great surprise. “Why, you’re a lanthanomancer!”

It was the usual mistake. “No, ma’am,” Rob said, “that takes a few more years of training, and some paralegal. A lanthanometer, yes.” He would have taken on a night job years ago if he’d thought he had any real chance of getting through the LMT course and making ’mancer. But his regular work left him tired enough, and Rob was also none too sure he could make it through the entry exams. He’d made it through the lanthanometry course only because of natural aptitude scores high enough to favorably average out the rather low score on his written tests.
I like what I do well enough,
Rob thought.
So why screw with what works?

“So you can sense dead people,” she said. “That must be very interesting work!”

There was a lot more that could be said about the job, but this wasn’t the time to get into the technicalities. “Uh, it is, ma’am,” he said. “Which brings me to the reason I came. Have you noticed anything different about the neighborhood lately?”

“Well, besides the noise from next door . . .” She laughed a little, shook her head. “The whole place has gotten so remote. I can remember when all the doors on this street would have been open: no one ever locked anything. If you did that now, you’d be dead in minutes.”

Rob thought of saying something, restrained himself. “And if something happens to you,” Mrs. Eldridge said, “well, you’re probably just going to have to handle it yourself, aren’t you? I remember when I fell down, right there, coming in the front door with the groceries. Nobody came to help. I had to drag myself in. It was awful.”

“Can you tell me a little more about that, ma’am?” Rob said.

“What’s to tell? I tripped, I fell down.” Mrs. Eldridge gave him a wry look. “It’s such a joke, isn’t it? ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’” she said, in too accurate an imitation of the old commercial. “But that’s all it was, dear, a fall. I got up.”

“No, ma’am,” Rob said. “You didn’t.”

She looked at him strangely. Now it would come: the part that always bothered Rob the most, but couldn’t be rushed. Without her acceptance, his work could go no further—and Rob’s memory was mercifully dulled as to how many of his cases had gotten stuck for weeks or months right here, at the point where truth met denial.

“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. 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 contains.

Her face was surprisingly still: the face of a woman who’s just received one more piece of bad news in a life that 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 a while 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 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 awhile 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.