Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (32 page)

Scattered among the above were some ideas about basic human rights––freedom from harassment, fair housing and employment, the right to vote and own property. Petitions were passed around asking the State of Maryland to grant citizenship to the undead. I signed one. As one living speaker pointed out, zombie rights were in everyone’s interest. You may not benefit now, but when you die and come back you will.

The rally broke up about eight. We were released at nine, after the last of the stragglers left City Hall Plaza and any threats of violence were reduced to the normal dangers a Baltimore night has to offer.

Since I was already downtown, I decided to do some work on the Foreman case. Debbie had given me an address for Frank Chavis. A phone call when I go back to my desk the day I talked to her told me that Chavis had moved on. A few calls later I had traced him to his last official place of residence––111 Penn St, the City Morgue. He had died almost six months to the day after Foreman passed on. Drinking had killed him. That and the tree he hit doing sixty with a 0.24 blood alcohol content.

Chavis didn’t have a fixed address. According to government records, he was among the last to leave the containment camps set up to welcome the dead back to this world. When no one came for him, they asked him his city of origin, and when he said “Baltimore,” they gave him twenty dollars and put him on a bus headed for the Trailways Travel Plaza. In life Chavis had a history of alcohol-related arrests and problems. Figuring that old habits die hard, and that some come back with you, I decided to check out the zombie bars.

It says something about Baltimore that it’s only a short walk from City Hall to the notorious Block. Back in the Fifties and before, the Block was Baltimore’s only tourist attraction, the only reason for a businessman to stop in the city on his way north or south. Back then, the Block was really three or four blocks long, and its strip joints and burlesque houses were famous nationwide. Blaze Starr’s Two O’Clock Club was on the Block, and at the Gayety one could watch the legendary Ann Corio and Irma the Body take most of it off.

It changed in the sixties, with “free” love and increasing nudity in the movies. Fashion changed too, and by the Eighties one could see more female flesh on the beach at Ocean City than Miss Starr ever showed on stage. Videotapes and DVD’s brought adult movies into the home, and camcorders let people make their own. By the Nineties the Block matched its name, having being reduced to that size, the once proud theaters now cut up into liquor stores, small video shops and strip clubs where under-aged girls dance listlessly on stage and middle-aged hookers hustled drinks to a tired disco beat.

Nothing happens in this world that someone doesn’t try to make money from it. The Block had revived since the return of the dead. It was still the same size, but the entertainment had changed.

The strip clubs were still there, but now the banners out front proclaimed “Dead Girls Live!” and “The Naked and the Dead!” The bars were a mixed lot––some were for still breathing patrons, who paid for the novelty of having shuffling deadmen bring them their drinks. (And where every night some drunk loudly proclaimed, “Hey, I didn’t order a Zombie,” then laughs like he was the first to tell the joke.) Other bars catered to the undead crowd, where the Returned could be among their own kind. When one of the breathing mistakenly enters these places, they’re stared at by pairs of cold, unblinking eyes until they feel uncomfortable and leave. It was in one of these that I found Frank Chavis.

It was called The Horseshoe Lounge. If there was a reason for the name it was lost three owners ago. The bar wasn’t on The Block proper, but rather halfway down on Gay St. It was the third place I tried that night and I was tired. If Chavis wasn’t there I’d give it up and start again Monday. I stood in the doorway to let my eyes adjust to the dim lighting then walked over to the bar.

Unlike his customers, the bartender was still breathing. No surprise there. These days almost any skilled profession requires a license, one of the requirements for which is that you have to be alive.

I flashed my badge. “Because I said please.” I was hoping the power of the badge would be enough. It was too late and I was too tired to think of any believable threats.

He filled a glass from a bottle of the hard stuff, then offered to cut my ginger ale. I declined. He took a drink, filling his mouth then pausing to swallow.

“Debbie,” he said, putting his glass down. Whatever he thought of her was lost in the flatness of his voice. “They say you always remember your first. Debbie was my last. Not everything rises from the dead. I’m a stiff in everyway but the one that matters.” He looked down at the bottle. “The only vice I have left, and it has to be at least 180 proof before I feel any kick.” He looked back up at me. “You think I killed Foreman?”

“Did you?” I asked. I had a feeling he’d tell me if he did. It wasn’t like I could do anything about it. The courts had ruled that crimes committed before a person’s death were not punishable if he returned.

Thanos gave me a slow shake of his head. “No, Debbie was a nice piece, but not worth killing over. When she told me it was over, it was over. Plenty more out there. Of course, after Foreman died I did comfort her for a while. That ended about a week before I did.”

“Debbie ever talk about it, say who might have wanted him dead?”

“Just that scum of a partner of his. Other than that, old Terry wasn’t the type to have enemies. From what Debbie said afterwards, he was an all around nice guy, a church-going Christian sort. He’d have to be some kind of saint to take back a woman who did him wrong like she did.”

“For the record, where were you when Foreman was killed?”

Thanos made the effort to shrug. “Nowhere near Debbie’s place. Other than that, you find out, then we’ll both know. There’s parts of my warm life that just haven’t come back yet. Anything else?”

He didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead. When I got up he was still staring. I left him to his liquor and memories of warmer days.

Despite his denials, Thanos still could be the killer. He did wind up with Debbie. And she wound up with a nice insurance settlement, some of which she could be sharing to keep him quiet. Or she could have killed Foreman herself, with Thanos knowing and not saying. I’d see about getting a court order to look into her financial records. Right after I got back from seeing Morrison on Tuesday.

“Everything I did was legal,” Ronald Morrison told me once I finally got into see him. He’d been tied up in a meeting, he said, explaining the hour he kept me waiting. That hour gave me time to review what I’d learned about Morrison & Associates.

The business grew from the remains of Foreman & Morrison. The two partners had run an advertising firm, not the biggest, but it had its share of regional and local accounts. Morrison was the idea man, the outgoing glad-hander who met and woed the clients. Foreman worked behind the scenes, running the business end of things. It came apart when Morrison emptied the corporate account and filed to dissolve the partnership. He planned to start his own firm, taking most of F&M’s clients with him, leaving Foreman broke and looking for a job.

“I wasn’t my fault Terry made the mistake of trusting me. We each had equal access to the money. He could have cleaned me out first if he had thought of it.”

“From what I heard, Foreman wasn’t that kind of man.”

Morrison let out a hearty laugh, the kind that comes from enjoying a good joke. “No, he wasn’t. He was a good and decent fellow, the poor fool. Honest to a fault, considerate to the employees, fair with the clients. Definitely not meant for the business world.”

“You used him,” I said, my tone accusing him of a crime akin to murder, “to build the business, to get everything running smooth, then you screwed him over. The night he was killed he was coming to see you, to give you a chance to do the right thing.”

“And I was waiting for him,” Morrison said calmly. “Was surprised when he didn’t show. Terry never, ever missed an appointment. Didn’t hear about his death until the next day.”

“Unless you arranged it.”

Morrison took the accusation of murder lightly. “Detective Scott,” he smiled, “I’ll admit that over the last year of our partnership I slowly drained the corporate account. Terry kept the books and he wasn’t a hard man to fool. However, according to my attorney I had a legal right to do so. Terry’s attorneys would no doubt see things differently and he was free to sue me. He might even have won, if he had any money left to hire attorneys. So you see, I had no motive to want him dead. In fact, he had a better reason to kill me.”

Morrison was so gleefully venal and proud of the way that he’d cheated Foreman that I doubted he’d killed the man. He’d want his victim alive. He would have gloated over the remains of Foreman’s shattered career then thrown the man a bone, offering him a job with the new firm. If he had no other prospects, Foreman may have swallowed his pride taken it. I got the feeling that when the Lord called the next batch of us up, Morrison wasn’t going to make the cut.

A week went by. In between doing the work the Department paid me to do I managed to get Debbie Lochlear’s bank statements. She showed a regular pattern of deposits from her job and withdrawals from both savings and checking. She could have been giving money to Thanos, but there was no way to be sure except to follow her. I also checked on the bullet that had been dug out of Foreman’s head. It had yet to be matched to a gun, nor had the Firearms Unit’s computer paired it to bullets recovered from other crime scenes.

There comes a time with some investigations when you look at what you’ve got and realize that you’re not going to get anymore. That’s when you know it’s time to close the case folder for good. I was at that point with the Foreman murder. I suspected that Debbie, Thanos or both knew more than they were telling, but suspicions aren’t proof. Maybe it was time to admit defeat and call the real homicide detectives. I’d give them what I had and maybe they could close things out. For me, there were just too many questions I couldn’t answer.

I was going over these questions yet again, looking for answers, not really wanting someone else to break this case when I thought of the big question, the one nobody had asked. I signed out a car and drove to Perry Hall.

After the last time I didn’t think Debbie would let me in, so I sat in my car and waited for someone else to enter and went in behind them.

I knocked on her apartment door. When Debbie answered and saw who it was she tried to slam it shut. I was a bit faster and had my foot and shoulder past the door before she could close it. “Get out,” she told me, “I don’t have to talk to you.”

“Just one question,” I said quietly, not wanting to rouse any helpful neighbors who might call the county police. “What did you do with the gun?”

Foreman lived with his sister in a housing development on 33rd St, near where Memorial Stadium used to be before Baltimore’s sports teams moved downtown. On the way there from the station I stopped at Lake Montibello. How, I thought, looking at the placid waters of the lake, did she get the gun past the police? They would have searched her, the cars, the house. Where did she hide it? No matter, every house has a dozen hiding places known only to its occupants. It didn’t matter either that the gun was now resting somewhere at the bottom of the lake. Let it lay there. No one needed it.

Foreman was waiting for me. “You have news?” he asked, as excited as his kind can get.

“I know who killed you,” I told him. We sat down. I took out a sealed envelope. “Before I give you this, what are you going to do after you open it?”