The Metaphysical Detective (A Riga Hayworth Paranormal Mystery) (3 page)

Riga shrugged.  “Painting up a storm, doing her own thing.”

“Ah, ze life of ze artist.  Like us, she stands separate from society, bravely creating her own world!  Unlike you, however, Liz has had husbands.   And she is still quite popular with the gentlemen.”

Riga turned her head and gave the gargoyle a long stare.  If she ignored the eagle-like body, it was like looking at a statue of a French maid.  The gargoyle’s face had been carved human, with long hair cascading down her stone-feathered back.  She took another sip of the wine.  “Not helpful, Brigitte.” 

Brigitte arched her back, flexing her wings.  It was something of a relief to Riga that Brigitte’s renaissance sculptor had clothed her in a breastplate of scales.  Brigitte’s head turned, making a grating sound.  “Now that man in ze bar, c’est magnifique!  That one could show a woman a thing or two.”

“He’s trouble.”

Brigitte sighed.  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Chapter 5: Bad Haiku

Riga slept late and awoke the next morning feeling as if she hadn’t slept at all.  She tried to catch the tail end of her dream but it eluded her, a jumble of broken memories.  Tarot and dreams were her method of journeying to the other side – Riga had never been able to click with shamanism – and it bugged her that she’d lost this one.  She dressed in khakis and a linen shirt, then prepared a quick meal.  Marmalade on toast – breakfast of champions.

She pulled up in front of Helen’s house at ten o’clock sharp.   Helen lived on the ocean side of San Francisco, on a street parallel to the Great Highway.  It was windier here, the road threatened by ever encroaching sand dunes.  The fog hadn’t burned off yet, a gray blanket over this part of the city.  A swirl of wind caused the mist to coalesce into an opaque form.  It gusted down the street, phantomlike.  Riga buttoned her suede safari jacket, repressed a shiver.  The fog might not burn off at all today, she thought, at least not here. 

Helen’s house looked as if its builder hadn’t been able to decide if it were a Victorian or nautical: gingerbread trim and circular windows.  The white and blue paint said nautical and it was peeling.  A set of stairs led to the front door and upon these lounged a lithe teenager in a black zip-up jacket and a pair of green convertible hiking slacks.  The wind tossed her mop of chestnut-colored hair and she impatiently clawed it behind her ears.  Riga reached her step and the girl looked up, her skin dewy with youth and fog.

The girl crinkled her gray eyes in a smile.  “Jesus, how do you do it?  That car pulled out just before you got here.”

“Regular sacrifices to the parking gods.  And don’t swear.”

 “You need all the help you can get in that battleship you drive.  So what’s your sacrifice of choice?”

Riga glanced back at her Lincoln and activated the car alarm with her keychain.  “Priuses bathed in the blood of virgins.  How’d you know I’d be here, Penelope?”

“Your desk calendar.  And don’t call me Penelope.”

Damn.  What had possessed her to let her niece have a key to her office?  “Okay, Pen.  What are you doing here?”

Pen gracefully unfolded herself and stood to face her aunt.  “I’m your assistant, aren’t I?”

“You’re my receptionist.  When you feel like it.  How long have you been here?”

Pen shrugged.  “Five minutes.”

They engaged in a brief staring contest.  Riga broke first.  “Fine.  You can take notes.  Did you bring your camera?”

She looked affronted. “Of course!  You know I don’t go anywhere without it.”

Riga placed a hand lightly on Pen’s elbow.  The kid was skin and bones.  “Hey, before we go in – my new client found your flyer under her windshield.”

“Cool!”

“She wasn’t happy about it,” Riga said.  “Thanks for helping out with the advertising, but let’s stick to bulletin boards from now on, okay?”

Pen drew her eyebrows together.  “If you’d just let me get you online, I wouldn’t have to resort to such primitive measures.”

“No Internet.”

“But it makes it so hard to find you!”

“It’s supposed to be hard – it’s part of the initiatory process.  If people want to deal with the metaphysical, they have to figure things out, face the unknown.”

Pen snorted.  “Yeah, right.  You just don’t want to admit that you don’t understand technology.  Je—Jeez, you’re behind the times.   No website, puhleez!”

Riga gave Pen’s t-shirt a pointed look.  Emblazoned across it was a picture of a steak and the words: MEAT IS MURDER, TASTY, TASTY MURDER.  “Thank you, Miss Conformity.  And for your information, I am not behind the times.  I have a smart phone.”

“Name one new song you’ve got on it that’s not country.”

“You can put songs on it?”

Pen stared, horrified.

“I’m kidding.”  Riga turned her back on her niece and climbed the rest of the stairs.  “Cup of Brown Joy by Professor Elemental.”

“What?”

“My latest tune.  It’s chap hop.  Very cutting edge.”

The bell looked like it had been installed in the 1970s – a dingy rectangle of cracked plastic.  Riga pressed hard on it and waited, sensing Pen slouch up the stairs behind her.  A Mini Cooper slowed as it drove past, then revved its engine and peeled off, tires screeching.  Riga rang the bell again.

“Did you hear a bell?” Riga asked.

Pen shook her head.

“Me neither.  I wonder if it’s broken?”

Riga waited another minute then knocked hard on the door.  It swung inward a few inches.  She and Pen looked at each other.  Riga touched the door lightly with her fingertips and pushed it open further. 

“Helen?” she called, peering into the dark, wood-paneled hallway.  “It’s me, Riga Hayworth.”  She strained to hear footsteps, or a voice of acknowledgment.  But the house was silent.

Riga had a bad feeling about this.  She smelled dark magic – a mix of sulfur and disappointment.  “Wait here,” she said to Pen.  “I’m going to go inside.  She may be upstairs or in the yard and can’t hear us.”

Pen’s hand moved compulsively toward her hip pocket, where a tiny video camera protruded.  “I’m going with you.”

“No.  She doesn’t know you’re coming.  I don’t want to startle her by bringing a stranger into the house.  Wait here,” she commanded, gesturing at the stairs.  To her surprise, Pen took a couple steps back and returned to her perch without further argument.

Good.  Pen’s parents were going to give her hell if she got her niece involved in a police investigation, and Riga feared that this was exactly where today was headed. 

She took a moment to shield and cloak herself, then stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her.  Helen had squeezed a bench into the hallway for people to sit on while removing their shoes, and above it were pegs for coats.  Amidst feminine cardigans and a pink rain jacket hung a man’s peacoat.  Her husband’s?  The new boyfriend’s?  A living room with a stone fireplace was on the left.  Riga walked inside it, her boots clicking on the hardwood floor.  She looked around without touching anything. 

“Helen?” she called again, not expecting an answer, but following form.    There were photos on the mantel.  A wedding shot in a silver frame of Helen in a traditional veil, and her husband wearing a tuxedo and clown’s nose.  They were laughing, turned towards each other, eyes bright with delight.  Herman had been a handsome man, with thick hair just asking to be ruffled and classical bone structure.  In another photo they huddled together on a large rock at the beach, a blanket draped around both their shoulders as if they were Siamese twins.  Riga stopped to examine that thought.  The couple didn’t look at all alike and in many ways they were physical opposites: Helen blonde and fair to Herman’s dark good looks, Helen heavy and masculine looking, her husband more of a metro-sexual.  Still, there was something about them – something in the way they looked at each other.

Riga took a photo of the pictures with the camera on her cell phone and moved on down the hallway.  A bedroom off to the left, and then into the kitchen.  Helen’s purse sat beside a bag of groceries upon the center island – a wooden chopping block.  Riga looked inside the paper sack without touching it: coffee and pastries.  Had they been purchased for her visit? 

“Helen?” Riga called again.  She turned right – a TV room with a bar.  The odor was stronger here.  A door exited from it into the back yard.  Riga looked at the door, it had a heavy deadbolt and was locked. 

She turned at the foot of a staircase that descended into the room.  “Oh, Helen,” she said sadly.

What had been Helen lay upon the stairs, upside down.  Riga didn’t need to check for a pulse to know she was dead, but she did it anyway.  The flesh was cold.  Helen’s head hung off one of the lower steps, twisted at an odd angle.  Her eyes stared sightlessly, arms stretched overhead.  One leg was bent akimbo, toe to knee, a parody of a ballet pose.

Riga said a brief, silent, prayer for the dead, then called 911.  She looked around, forcing the sense of failure from her mind.  A contract had been signed, death didn’t end it.  She would focus on the work now, and let the recriminations come later.  

She took a picture of the body with her phone and returned to the kitchen.  Riga removed a pair of hospital gloves from her purse and tugged them on, snapping the wrists.  She opened Helen’s purse, riffled through her wallet.  There were some receipts stuffed inside and she took photos of these as well, then checked Helen’s phone, making a note of the numbers most recently called. 

Riga knew she had time, the ranks of San Francisco’s finest were stretched thin.  The refrigerator drew her eye.  There was a postcard from Morocco stuck to the freezer door with a magnet, and one of those poetry magnet sets beneath.  The word magnets had been pushed to the sides to make a frame of words around a haiku. 

Woman freeze the moon

Journey to the mouth of dreams

She sleeps in thunder

Creative options were limited with refrigerator magnets, Riga thought philosophically.

She took a picture of the magnets, then sent all the photos to her e-mail address and deleted them from her phone.  Helen had come to her for help.  Riga had detected magic – albeit belatedly and of a kind she’d never encountered before – and now Helen was dead by magic.  Any way Riga turned it, she had failed her client, and a client she hadn’t really liked much, which made it worse.  She returned the gloves to her bag and went outside. 

Pen looked up.  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.”  Riga looked across the street.  Underbrush formed a break between Helen’s street and the main beach road, which ran parallel to it.  The bushes rippled like waves in the wind.  “Did you go inside before I got here?”

“No.”

“The police are going to print the door,” she warned.

Pen’s brows lowered angrily, the wronged teenager.  “I didn’t go in!”

“Okay.”  Riga felt another urge for a cigarette.  “See anyone around when you got here?”

Pen shook her head, no.

Riga pulled her suede jacket more tightly about her.  No, the fog definitely wasn’t going to burn off today.

Chapter 6: Petrichor

Things with the police went about as well as Riga had expected: not well at all.  The cops were suspicious, and asked her the same questions five times too many.  But they eventually let her go, after checking her cell phone to make sure she hadn’t taken any photos.  Once the police had released them both, she’d called Pen’s parents.  They too, reacted predictably, and banned Pen from further work with Riga.

Pen howled at that.  “How am I going to get stories for my scripts if I don’t
do
anything?”

“Tough break, kid,” Riga said, sympathetic.  “You’ll just have to age up like the rest of us for your insights.”

Pen maintained a resentful silence on the ride home.  A block away, Riga pulled the Town Car to the curb of a steep street and looked at her niece.  “You’re on your own with this one.”

Pen shot her a stormy look and exited the car, slamming the door for effect.  Riga winced.  But it was best if Pen stayed out of it and if it took a teenage grudge towards Riga to achieve that, so be it.

She rolled down the passenger side window.  “And no summoning the powers of darkness!”

Pen gave her a middle finger in response, not bothering to look back.

Kids these days.  No respect.

Although, Riga admitted to herself, it had been a bad joke.

She drove back to her office, and downloaded the photos she’d taken earlier.  Riga printed them out, and stuck them to the whiteboard.  There was a lot to work with, but most of the leads would be dead ends – receipts for groceries, a local bookstore.  One of the receipts was from last night, however – the Cliff House.  That seemed promising.  She checked her watch.  It was well past lunch, too early to catch the night bartender at the Cliff House, and her stomach was growling.

Food was in order.

She trotted down the stairs to the billiard parlor.  One of the things Riga liked about the place was that it was always the same.  Day or night (not that she saw many nights), the lighting maintained an even gloom.  Local artists exhibited their works there and never sold anything; the paintings never changed – the same abstract above the bar, a painting of sunflowers on the eastern wall.  The bikers were back, bending over pool tables, exposing their broad denim backsides. 

At the bar, she did a double take.  The man who’d filched her wine was there, too.  Same barstool, same blondes, in their silver mini-skirted glory.  The silver looked a little tarnished now though, and their slender shoulders drooped.

Pete slouched toward her from behind the bar.  His face was haggard, dark circles beneath his eyes and a shadow about his jaw.  His lion’s mane of hair was lank.  And if Riga wasn’t mistaken, he wore the same clothing from last night.

“Pete, you look awful,” Riga exclaimed.

“Thanks, Riga,” Pete said dryly.  “It’s been a long night.  What can I get for you?”

Riga ordered a cheeseburger and fries.

Pete nodded and moved off to call in the order at the burger joint down the street.