The Dead Love Longer (5 page)

Her eyes were almost as pretty as Lee's, and nearly the same color. She looked at the stairs and the elevator,
then
clutched her purse to her chest. She was anxious and scared.
And in a hurry.

I went around the corner and composed myself while out of sight. I took on flesh and form, and I felt pretty good for a dead guy. I flexed my fingers as if they were in gloves. I was almost normal again, except for the headache I got from concentrating myself back into corporeal existence. And my jacket still had the holes in it. If there was any spiritual cost besides underarm stench, then I assumed I was running a tab somewhere up there on the heavenly ledgers.

I walked into the lobby as if I'd just come from the restroom. "Meet me in the lobby?" I quoted from the note.

She nodded. "Richard Steele?"

"In the flesh."

"Hi, I'm Bailey
DeBussey
."

A porn star's name or a budding actress.
Usually the same.

She glanced at the door to the street outside. The sirens were louder now, audible even over the
Muzak
strains of "O Christmas Tree" that permeated the lobby, and the attendant snapped out of his stupor long enough to rubberneck. "Let's go out the back way," she said, taking me by the elbow.

I'd never minded a woman's taking charge, especially if she might become a client or lover. The closing of the door sounded frighteningly like one of Diana's patented hisses of disapproval. We went into the alley behind the apartment building. A wino was leaning against the dumpster. I tossed him all my spare change and wished him happy holidays. Having no need of money was a freeing experience, especially when the cash registers were going full guns all across the city, ringing in the season.

"God bless
yaz
,
suh
," he said, flashing me three yellow teeth with his grin.

"I think I'll need it."

"Over there," the impatient Bailey
DeBussey
said, pointing across the street.

She took my hand and led me through a gap in the chain-link fence. We went across a parking lot into what used to be called a coffee shop. Now it was a "casa de cafe." Same deal, only guys like me didn't hang out there anymore and coffee was three bucks a cup.
Still, any port in a storm.

We were seated as the first of the police cars pulled up to the Hollywood Hype. It would take them a while
to find my body. Maybe even a day or two, after Lee called five or six times and received no return call. For a moment, I regretted my casual treatment of her. But in a way, I was glad to delay the breaking of her heart. Because, unlike a lot of women I'd known, she had one.

"So why the mystery?"
I asked the woman after she had ordered a cappuccino. I didn't order anything myself, because I wasn't sure how food or liquid would play in my newly fabricated body. Plus I didn't know how long I could hold this human act together. I kept expecting something strange to happen, like the wall opening and spilling out a horde of deranged demons.

"I wasn't sure if I could trust you," Bailey said.

Trust?
Me
? I had a pretty decent rep, if she'd even gone to the bother of a background check. If she had received a personal reference, I'd need to worm the information out of her somehow. I figured I'd play the tough guy. I'd watched the Sam Spade movies like almost every two-bit gumshoe, and the rule of thumb was to cut gorgeous dames quick and cold and hard like you would the diamonds that were supposedly a girl's best friend.

I almost wished I had a cigarette to mutter around. "Well, at my rates, you better learn to trust me fast, because the meter is running."

"It's..." She fluttered those long eyelashes and studied the cracked polyurethane coating of the table. "It's my husband."

Husband?
A looker like
her, and
she
can't keep a man faithful? Made you wonder about the human race, at least the male half of it. But I'd handled dozens of adulteries for divorce court. Those were bread and butter for private investigators, and rarely were more dangerous than the occasional indignant middle finger flashed in anger. That kind of case had never earned me a lungful of hot lead.

"Is he running around on you?" I was blunt, because my flesh could dissolve away at any moment, and then some wet-nosed waitress would be selling an eyewitness account to
Sightings
or
Unexplained Mysteries
, probably pitching a screenplay at the same time.

"Nothing
like
that," she said, and there were honest-to-goodness tears in her eyes.
Tears.
In
Los Angeles
.
Who would have
thunk
it? But this was a female, and tears come to them as conveniently as lies did. Only men know how to cry, and believe me, we keep it in the dark whenever possible.

"What is it, then?" My head ached. I felt like death warmed over, which I suppose I was.

"It's these," she said, pulling three printed-out digital snapshots from her purse. She waited until the waitress brought her steaming drink before sliding them across the table. "I need to know where he got them."

I glanced at the photos and was about to ask which "he" she meant when I felt myself go lightheaded. My stomach did a flip and my feet felt as if they had fallen asleep. I was losing it. My tab was coming due.

"I got to go," I said. "I'll keep these and get in touch later." I pushed the photos into my pocket, then stood and hurried to the door. Clean-cut yuppies and actors-in-waiting stared at me from their booths. I felt like a stack of clothes, nothing more.

Bailey called out as I battled with the front door. "I love you, Richard. See you at your place?"

I thought maybe I'd misheard in my panic to leave, and that word "love" added to whatever panic I was experiencing at the time. But then she yelled, "Lee can't keep us apart."

I staggered into the street. I wasn't sure if I had gone
out
the door, or
through
it. I hope I was in the shadows by the time I fully dissolved. Only the wino behind my apartment building knows for sure.

***

4.

I didn't feel like going to my room to watch my body decompose. I hung out in the bottom of the elevator shaft. There was an odd assortment of junk in there: a few used condoms and liquor
bottles,
some spare steel cable, a man's hat, and a teddy bear.
A teddy bear.
I spent fifteen or twenty minutes putting my hand in the stuffing, then animating the bear and making it do funny little dances.

Eventually my head cleared. By playing the puppet game, I had learned one of the rules of ghostly existence. Solidifying
myself
took a lot of willpower, and the more thinking I did while solid, the lower the juice in my metaphysical batteries. That's why my encounter with Bailey
DeBussey
lasted only a few minutes: she'd been taxing my deductive powers while simultaneously triggering some deep and patently offensive sexual fantasies.

The other thing was that objects I carried, like the photographs and my clothes, seemed to borrow a little of my nothingness, because they came through the walls with me. I even sent the teddy bear through the wall a few times, but it took a lot of willpower.
Maybe the bigger the object, the harder to "ghost" it.

I studied the photographs.
Nothing much on first examination.
Two of them were of Bailey and a man I didn't know, standing on the beach with the Santa Monica Pier in the background. Bailey filled a bikini as well as she did a leopard–skin dress, maybe better. The guy with her looked like an extra from one of those
California
angst TV dramas, perched under his
moussed
hairdo with biceps the size of grapefruit. He wore the same smarmy expression in each of the photos, his "money smile."

The third photograph showed Bailey on a fishing boat, one of those that rich people chartered for the half day so they could squeeze in some serious drinking. A white-haired man in a captain's hat and a knit short-sleeved shirt had an arm around her, his fist clenched in a buddy-buddy hug. The
Golden Gate
Bridge
was barely visible in the background, and
S.S. Lady Slipper
was emblazoned on the bridge bulwark.

What did all this have to do with Lee? Why had Bailey called out her name? And what was all that staged nonsense about Bailey's claim of loving me? Had she been setting me up for something? She couldn't know about Diana—maybe that my wife had committed suicide, but certainly not the part about returning from the dead and knocking back espresso twenty feet from where we sat.

I played over the coffee shop scene in my mind. The two gay lovers in the corner booth, the skinny punk with the baggy jeans and skateboard, the mouse-haired girl with the Kurt Vonnegut hardcover displayed so all could be impressed by her intellect. Then something clicked. On one of the counter stools sat a woman in a trench coat, collar turned up to her ears. I hadn't thought much of it, because that close to
Hollywood
, everybody was
either an
actor, pornographer, screenwriter, or plain, out-and-out schizophrenic figments of their own imaginations.

But now I remembered how she'd taken her coffee hot and steaming from the waitress, gulped it down as if it were lemonade, and exhaled with an air of satisfaction, without a hint of steam or wince of pain. As if she'd absorbed the heat. I wondered if she'd worn anything beneath the trench coat, because the bit of her hair that was exposed had been slightly curly and dark. Like the style Diana had apparently adopted in the afterlife.

No. Surely I would have recognized her just by her mannerisms. When you know somebody, when you've slept with them and held them and watched them, when you've let them a little into your soul, you know their gestures, the way they move their fingers, the way they lean forward when they sit. That wasn't Diana.

Then again, people change. And dying was the biggest change of all. If it
had
been Diana, she had disguised herself well. But I couldn't imagine her sitting there in silence while I chatted up a beautiful woman. It was the kind of thing that would have ignited her jealous nature back during our marriage. She would have doused us both with scalding coffee, turned over the table, and tried to stab me with a butter knife. After that warm-up, she'd turn nasty. Judging by our initial encounter in the afterlife, I suspect she hadn't let go of that particular character defect.

I started to light a cigarette, then decided I didn't want the smoke mixing with my mist. I studied the photos until my head was tired. You wouldn't think a ghost could get tired, would you? I figured it was just another part of the test. Hell, if being a ghost were easy, everybody would be doing it.

In fact, I wondered why I hadn't encountered other lost souls, those who had been sent back to accomplish missions of their own. I didn't for a second think I was getting some kind of special treatment from the gods. Maybe we were all invisible to each other. In everyday life, people pass in total ignorance and apathy all the time, ghosts in their own lives. We each built our own realities as breathers, to some degree, so why should death be any different?

I guess I sort of dozed off, despite the cantankerous screeching of the elevator. When I came back around, my head was clear and I realized I had made my first mistake. I should have drifted on over to the Hollywood Hype while the assassin's tracks were still fresh. By now, the cops had already dusted and powdered everything, tracked down the shell casings if the killer had been dumb enough to leave them lying
around,
and probably were trying to figure out why and when the shots were fired. No body yet, so it wasn't officially a murder investigation.
Except in
my
book.

I mentally thumbed through the cases I had been working on at the time of my death. A few alleged insurance scams, delinquent dads, petty embezzlement on the order of a check-out drone swiping change from the till.
Nothing big enough there to justify murder.
A missing persons, some kid from
North Dakota
who ran away to make it in movies. That case was a low priority. Even if you find the runaway, she won't believe you when you tell her the only films she'll ever star in are the kind that cost four quarters a peep.

None of my active files provided a link to this case, at least as far as I could tell. So why did somebody plug me on the off chance that I could help Bailey
DeBussey
? After all, I wasn't the only P.I. in town, even if I was probably one of the best.

Well, no need to lie anymore, was there? In my new state of existence, honesty was the best policy, unfortunately. I was actually pretty damned mediocre. Sam Spade, rest easy, wherever you are in that fictional character graveyard in the sky.

As usual, thinking was getting me nowhere. Another few minutes with the photos and I headed across the street to the Hollywood Hype. Maybe the police overlooked something. Maybe not even a maybe. The police were about as mediocre as I was, and every mortal's head was stuffed full of holiday gift ideas and jingles during that most wonderful time of the year.