Tombs of Endearments (14 page)

“But Damon wasn’t murdered.”

“No, no he wasn’t.” Gene shook himself. “I was
just thinking, that’s all. We’ve been through so much together, me and the band, yet when the guys need me most…” He shivered. “I was in Pittsburgh the night Damon died, checking out the venue for our next concert date. I spent a lot of years in therapy coming to grips with the fact that even if I’d been with him, there probably wasn’t anything I could have done to save him. And this morning…” Gene sighed. “There I was, sitting on my duff back at my hotel, drinking espresso and eating eggs Benedict while somebody was slicing up Vinnie.”

Since there had actually been more stabbing than slicing, Gene’s comparison wasn’t exactly accurate. I didn’t bother to correct him. Mostly because I figured slicing or stabbing, it didn’t much matter. Dead was dead.

“And then this happens to Alistair.” Gene interrupted my thoughts just as they were about to latch on to the memory of Vinnie on the floor with that knife sticking out of his chest. For this, I was grateful. “It’s strange, don’t you think?”

“Exactly what I was twying to tell Quinn.” Don’t ask me why I bothered to look outside. Of course, Quinn was long gone.

“You don’t think it was a coincidence.” Gene studied me carefully. “Funny, you don’t look like a cop.”

I would have laughed if my mouth didn’t hurt. “I’m no cop.”

“But Officer Harrison said you sometimes work together.”

“Did he?” I was surprised (and strangely grati
fied) to hear Quinn would ever admit it. “I’m a kind of consultant.”

“You mean like a private detective.”

“Sort of. But not weally.” I felt it necessary to add this last bit, just so Gene didn’t get it into his head that he wanted something investigated. I had enough on my plate. “I weally work as a tour guide. At Garden View Cemetewy.”

Gene’s eyes lit. “Where Damon is buried. Is that how you met Belinda?”

“I met her downstairs. She was cleaning Damon’s exhibit.”

Gene chuckled. “Thank goodness the folks who run this place are tolerant! Belinda’s obsessed. Damon and the guys…well, she thought of them as family.” The gleam in his eyes diminished, and he looked at me carefully. “How did you get involved in all this?”

I was all set to give him the same story I’d concocted for Vinnie. The one about how I was a big fan. But something told me Gene wouldn’t believe it. For one thing, I was too young and obviously too with-it to be of the Mind at Large mindset. For another, I didn’t want to risk having another old guy try to seduce me because he thought I was an easy target. Been there, done that, thank you very much.

With not one original idea in my brain, I fell back on an old ploy, one that had worked well for me when I was investigating Gus Scarpetti’s murder.

“I feel silly admitting this,” I said, and I made sure I gave Gene a tiny (the only kind I could
manage) smile along with the explanation. He might be old, but he was a man, and I had yet to meet one who couldn’t be schmoozed by a little feminine charm. “I got intewested in Damon Curtis because, like I said, I work at the cemetew…at Garden View. I’m hoping…” Here I looked away, then sighed. With any luck, he’d believe he was the first one who’d heard my secret. “I’d like to wite a book someday. About Damon. I’ve started my wesearch. That’s why I went to talk to Vinnie.”

Over the years, I’d bet Gene had heard this same story from a thousand people (though probably not with the preponderance of Ws). Big points for him, he didn’t tell me I was wasting my time. In fact, he looked downright interested. “What have you found out?” he asked.

“About Damon?” I wasn’t expecting this, and I scrambled. “Oh, you know, this and that. Vinnie was vewy helpful. He told me all about how Damon used to wite his songs.” Since Gene didn’t know which he my
his
referred to, this was technically true. I remembered the story I gave the Lakewood cops and decided a little corroboration wouldn’t hurt. “He loaned me a couple things, too. You know, CDs and such.”

“I’ll tell you what…” Gene reached into his pocket, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me along with a pen. “You write down your name and address and I’ll see what I have around that might help with your research. You’ll hear from Zack.” He looked across the hall to where a tall, skinny kid with long hair and bad skin was talking to a TV reporter. “He’s our PR guy. Don’t
expect anything too soon. Between dealing with what happened to Vinnie today and getting ready for the big concert, we’re going to be pretty busy.”

I scribbled down the information and handed the card back to Gene. “You’ll still do the concert?”

“The show must go on!” He tried for cheery, but I could tell he was hurting. “Vinnie wouldn’t want us to cancel.”

“And Belinda?”

When I saw that Gene was confused, I caught him up on my thought process. “I’m just wondering, that’s all. If there’s any weason, you know, that Belinda would think the show must go on. Or any weason she might want the concert to be canceled.”

“You don’t think—” Belinda was long gone but Gene automatically looked toward the escalator. “Nah!” He dismissed my suspicions with a snort and a shake of his head. “She’s crazy, all right, but she’s not dangerous. You don’t think she and Vinnie—”

“I know she might have been there.”

“At Vinnie’s place? Did you tell Officer Harrison?”

“I didn’t have a chance. Quinn doesn’t hear anything Quinn doesn’t want to hear.”

“Then do me a favor, okay?” Gene put a gentle hand on my arm. “Let’s keep this under our hats. There’s no use pulling a mentally ill woman into the limelight if we don’t have to. And you know…” He bent nearer. “That’s exactly what you’d be doing if word of this gets out. You think every reporter in the country isn’t just itching for a lead? They’d go chasing after Belinda in a minute
if they knew she’d been over to Vinnie’s place.” He looked me in the eye. “And you, too, you know.”

I’d never been one to shy away from the spotlight, but I knew exactly what he was saying. The Lakewood police had already decided that I was a high-priced call girl. My poor mom, hiding out in Florida because of what happened with my dad, didn’t need another family scandal. If this made it’s way into the press, she’d never be able to show her face in town again.

I nodded, silently agreeing to Gene’s plan, but that didn’t mean I was willing to completely relinquish responsibility. “But what if she’s guilty?” I asked him.

“Belinda? Guilty?” Gene laughed, and when the PR guy waved him over, he patted my arm and took off in that direction. “Believe me when I tell you this, honey, because I know it for a fact. The only thing Belinda was ever guilty of was partying too hard.”

Over the next twenty-four hours, the chill in my
lips spread through the rest of my body. It was uncomfortable to say the least. Especially when every time I shivered, I thought about kissing Damon.

Or maybe thinking about kissing Damon was what made me shiver in the first place.

Either way, the icy cold was a constant reminder that I was a dope. Thinking I could kiss a ghost and come away unharmed was bad enough. Recognizing that I was falling in love with that ghost…

I dashed the thought away and tried to look on the bright side. As so often happens in Cleveland in the fall, the temperature dipped considerably that night, so when I arrived at work the next day bundled in wool pants, a turtleneck, and a sweater, nobody questioned it.

I tucked my hands up into the sleeves of my sweater, but it was hard to type that way, and I had a monthly report to prepare on the tours I’d given. I was getting nowhere fast.

Which was pretty much the same place I was getting in my investigation.

Call it coincidence or karma or maybe it was just an accident. No sooner did the thought pop into my head than Damon showed up in the chair across from my desk.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure.” When I smiled, my mouth hurt. “The swelling’s down and my lips aren’t bleeding anymore.”

“But you’re freezing.”

“That’s the downside of the Gift.” I was too uncomfortable looking at Damon so soon after thinking about what he was doing to my self-composure (not to mention my common sense), so I typed a quick description of the tour I’d conducted for the fourth graders. Not to worry, I wouldn’t dream of causing Ella apoplexy, so I left out the part about how six of them refused to get off the bus because they didn’t want to step on dead people. I didn’t mention the kid who we thought was lost and was found wedged between two headstones he shouldn’t have been climbing on in the first place, either, or the four others who decided they were hot, took off their shoes, and went wading in the pond behind the chapel.

When I was done, I hit enter a couple of times, signaling that the paragraph—and with any luck, the conversation—was finished. “I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“You’ll be warm by tomorrow.” Leave it to a poet to pick up on the subtle difference. Damon was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that was torn at the neck and had a picture of Lyndon Johnson on it. His hands flat against his thighs, he leaned forward. “What are we going to do, Pepper?”

Damon wasn’t talking about the investigation, but I did so not want to go where I knew he was headed. Acting dumb was better than taking the chance of being caught by the magic of his voice. Or the simmering sensuality that lit his dark eyes when he looked at me. That road led nowhere. Except to Popsicle Land.

And I was already cold enough.

“We need to find out if and how everything that’s happening now has anything to do with your death. That seems like the key to me. I don’t know if Quinn believed me or not,” I said. “I mean about how Vinnie’s death and the attack on Alistair might be related. He’s hard to read.”

I left it at that and hoped Damon would, too. We’d had our little heart-to-heart about Quinn back at the Rock Hall, and I didn’t need to rehash it all. I skillfully deflected the conversation back where it belonged. “There’s got to be a connection. It’s all just too coincidental.” Careful with the tips of my nails (I didn’t want to chip my toffee-colored polish), I drummed my fingers against my desk and tried to make sense of it all.

Thirty seconds of that kind of thinking, and I was more confused than ever.

I slapped my hand against the desk. “Maybe I should just ask Vinnie,” I said.

I was kidding.

Until I thought about it for a moment.

“Hey!” I jumped to my feet. “I’m the one with the Gift. Maybe I should just talk to Vinnie!”

Damon nodded. “That’s a great idea. Go ahead. Do it. Contact him.”

Now that I was on the spot, so to speak, I fum
bled around for the right way to approach things, and believe it or not, I was actually embarrassed when I wasn’t sure where to start.

“I’ve never tried to do this before,” I told Damon, making excuses because excuses were better than admitting that, Gift or not, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. “I mean, I’ve never tried to contact a ghost on my own. Not until I knew the ghost, anyway. I’m not sure what to say to Vinnie.”

“Just talk.” Damon got to his feet, and we stood facing each other, the desk between us. “Maybe just say hello.”

“All right.” I scraped my palms against the legs of my wool pants. “Vinnie! It’s me, Pepper.” I sounded as unsure of myself as I felt, so I put a little more oomph in my words. “Hey, Vinnie! Come on, I need to talk to you.”

Nothing.

I tried a different approach. “Pepper to Vinnie, Pepper to Vinnie. Come in, Vinnie.”

More nothing.

Damon said, “Let me try,” and went through the same routine.

He got the same results.

Disgusted, I glanced around my smaller than small office and headed for the door. “Maybe we just don’t have the right vibes in here. We might have better luck out in the cemetery where there are more dead people.”

Anxious to prove the theory, I hurried outside.

Like I mentioned, it had gotten considerably cooler, and though the sun was shining, I wasn’t surprised that there weren’t many visitors in the
cemetery. A snappy breeze blew in from the north, rattling the trees that surrounded the office. I didn’t want to attract any attention, so I crossed the parking lot and zipped down a road lined with oak trees. At a place where that road split off, left and right, I gauged my distance from the office (and from anyone who might look out the window), took the street on the left, and ducked into the closest section. There was a 1940s bandleader buried nearby, and a couple of times the summer before, I’d led visitors to his grave. I knew that not far away, there was an empty bit of land surrounded on all sides by monuments taller than me. I skirted the statue of a weeping woman and stepped onto the patch of grass. I was completely alone, except for Damon, of course, and with all the privacy I needed, I raised my voice.

“Hey, Vinnie. Are you around here somewhere?”

I didn’t get an answer to my question, and as crazy as it seems, I felt I needed to justify my lack of results. “You know, Vinnie’s body is being shipped back to California,” I told Damon. “I read it in the paper this morning. Vinnie was front-page news. They said once the coroner is done with him, he’s going to L.A. to be cremated. His first, second, and third wives are already fighting over the ashes. Maybe since his body isn’t around here anywhere, his spirit isn’t, either?”

“I don’t know, I’m not exactly sure how it all works. I’ll give it a try again.” Damon closed his eyes and stood as still and as quiet as the angel on the monument nearby. He looked like an angel, too—a fallen one—and because that was some
thing I didn’t want to think about when I was supposed to be concentrating on contacting Vinnie’s spirit, I closed my eyes, too.

I didn’t open them again until a couple of minutes later when I heard Damon sigh. “I can’t feel him anywhere near,” he admitted.

“Great.” It wasn’t, and I knew it. I stomped out of my hiding place. There was a flat gravestone nearby, and I sat down on it. “Talking to Vinnie is exactly what we need to do. He might be able to tell us who killed him, and that might tell us something about the attack on Alistair, too. I wonder if we could do a séance or something.”

I didn’t know squat about how to conduct a séance, so before Damon could take me up on it, it was a good thing I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. For once, I was happy to see the ghostbusters.

They were prowling around an ornate mausoleum with pink and gray granite columns and an intricate iron door, and since they didn’t look especially excited, I figured they weren’t getting much in the way of readings. Hoping to keep it that way—at least for now—I told Damon to take a powder and hurried over before the busters decided to climb into the SUV parked nearby and head to another part of Garden View.

“Hey, what’s up?” I waved and called to them.

I wasn’t surprised to see Dan with the group and carrying a Geiger counter. I was surprised to see him looking like the Dan of old. Gone were the ignite-my-fantasies jeans and the black leather jacket that creaked and crinkled every time Dan moved. He was dressed much as he had been back
in the days when I thought he was nothing more than a brainiac doing research at a nearby hospital, in brown polyester pants, a blue sweater, and gray windbreaker. He’d fallen in with the geek crowd, and he was apparently proud of it.

I figured Brian, the leader of the hunters, would be most susceptible to my suggestion, so while the others were busy taking temperature readings, snapping pictures, and playing with their tape recorders, I talked to him.

“I need your help,” I said.

He didn’t seem surprised. Then again, I suppose it goes along with the territory. When you’re a ghost hunter, nothing much surprises you. “You want to conduct a hunt?” he asked.

“Something like that. I want to get in touch with Vinnie Pal.”

This was my carrot on a stick, and it wasn’t hard to see why. If the ghost hunters were dead set (pun intended) on finding Damon’s ghost, then finding evidence of Vinnie’s would be part of the package and bring them even more prestige in the eyes of other ghost-hunting dorks.

Brian’s eyes lit, and he waved the rest of the hunters over. When they gathered, Dan somehow managed to end up right next to me. Did he know more than the rest of them about ghosts? I wasn’t sure, but as the Magic Eight Ball would say, all signs seemed to point that way.

“What’s the best way to find someone who recently died?” I asked him.

It was clear that as leader of the group, Brian felt it was his responsibility to be their spokesperson, too. Before Dan could answer, he jumped right in.
"That can be tricky,” Brian said, and when he did, he sounded like he was repeating something he’d read in a book. “Sometimes the recently deceased aren’t available for a while.”

This was not news I wanted to hear and I wasn’t willing to settle for it. Something told me Dan wouldn’t be quite so wed to the party line. I turned his way so that there was no mistaking the fact that he was the one I was addressing.

“We could try, anyway, couldn’t we?” I asked Dan.

He peered at me from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Trying implies that you believe in ghosts.”

“And if I say I do, then can we try?”

He didn’t take my admission (such as it was) as an outright surrender. But he didn’t argue, either. “Brian’s right,” Dan said, “it can be a challenge. But…” He strung me along just for the hell of it. “We might have some success. If we had access to the place the person died.”

I thought of Vinnie’s penthouse condo. And the doorman who knew me on sight. I couldn’t say I was certain that I’d be able to get past him, especially with a bunch of ghost hunters in tow, but I did know it was worth a try.

We set a time—eleven o’clock—and a place to meet—the service entrance of the condo building. After that, I hurried into the office, told Ella I needed to take an early lunch, and headed to the store. I needed a tape recorder, batteries, and a digital camera.

I was going on a ghost hunt.

As it turned out, it didn’t matter if I knew the doorman, or not. He wasn’t on duty that night. In fact, nobody was. To people in real cities, like New York or Chicago, this would probably seem a little odd. But we were talking Lakewood, Ohio, here, home of a private boys’ prep school, dozens of mom-and-pop stores, and hundreds of the kinds of bars where everyone really does know your name. We were just over the western border from Cleveland, but apparently osmosis doesn’t apply to crime. People feel safe in the suburbs, and high-priced or not, the lobby wasn’t staffed at night.

This was good news, yes? It meant that when the ghost hunters and I trooped into the elevator, nobody challenged us.

But of course, there’s the whole cloud-and-silver-lining thing. No questions asked; that was the silver lining. We discovered the cloud upstairs when we realized the door to Vinnie’s condo was locked. Of course.

“I thought you said you could get us in here.”

Apparently geeks with their hearts set on ghost hunting can get a little testy. Brian’s words were sharp. They were aimed right at me.

I defended myself. “I did get us in. Into the building. Last time I was here, the door was open.”

“But the cops never would have left it that way, would they?” Brian said this like I was solely responsible for the oversight. Since I wasn’t, I didn’t take it to heart. But I wasn’t going to take it lying down, either.

“You’re the one who wants to find Damon’s ghost,” I reminded him. “You know this is a perfect opportunity. If you contact Vinnie Pal, you
might be able to get him to tell you how to find Damon.” I looked around at the other busters, too, just so they didn’t think they were going to get off the hook easily. “What do you usually do when you go somewhere to look for ghosts and you can’t get in?”

“We leave. It’s the legal way to handle things.”

“It’s legal when you have a key.” Dan pushed his way to the front of the group. In fact, he didn’t have a key, but surprise, surprise, he did have a set of lock picks. He sized up the lock, rummaged through the picks, and got to work.

Call me paranoid, but as he worked, I noticed Dan had thought of something none of the rest of us had. He was wearing surgical gloves, and even with them on, his fingers were quick and nimble. He never hesitated or fumbled, and realizing what it meant, my stomach went cold at the same time my curiosity turned white-hot. This wasn’t his first time.

When the lock snapped open, Dan stepped back to allow the other ghostbusters into the condo. I waited until they were all inside. “Want to tell me how you learned to pick locks?” I asked Dan.

Unlike the other ghost hunters who were in the darkened living room spreading out the equipment they’d be sharing, Dan had brought a backpack of his own. He slipped it off his shoulder, put the lock picks away, and took out some gizmo that reminded me of a…well…a gizmo.