Tombs of Endearments (3 page)

This was no senior citizen although, come to think of it, had he lived past 1971, he just about would be. He was dressed as he had been in the smokin’ photo, in tattered jeans slung low across his hips. His chest was bare, and though I hadn’t seen the detail in the photo, there was a delicate blue teardrop at one point of the golden star tattooed near his heart. He wasn’t as tall as I expected. When he paused in front of me, we would have been eye-to-eye. That is, if Damon’s eyes were on my eyes and not taking a long, slow look at my body.

For way too long a time, I was so mesmerized by the smoldering look, I was tongue-tied. Me! Ms. Cool in Any Circumstances. Ms. I Was Engaged Once and After My Weasely Fiancé Broke Up With Me, I Swore Never to Let Myself Fall Under the This-Is-Love Bullshit Spell Again.

Which was all good to remember. And not so easy to do.

Not when heat rushed up my neck and set fire to my face. And my legs suddenly felt as if they’d turned into Silly Putty. Then again, I’d never had this kind of up-close-and-personal encounter with a legend, living or otherwise. Maybe it was the whole rock star bigger-than-life-persona thing. At that moment, if Damon Curtis had asked me to run off to Africa, or fly to the moon, or drop down right there on the floor with him and—

The thought just about knocked me off my feet, and to get rid of it, I reminded myself that hot or not, this was one cold dude. One cold, dead dude.

If I was smart, I wouldn’t forget it.

I remembered my mission. And how I’d done my best to avoid Damon all summer. And ended up here at the Rock Hall anyway.

“Damon Curtis, you son of a—”

“No, not looking for that exhibit.” Of course, there was no possible way the man in line behind Damon could know there was a ghost standing between him and the person in front of him. He thought I was talking to him. “We’re looking for Elvis.”

“Ooo, Elvis!” Damon grinned. “That guy’s a god.”

“Not what we need to talk about.”

“It isn’t?”

I dodged both the question and the man in line behind Damon, who had asked it, and excused my way through the crowd. I didn’t bother to check and see if Damon followed. Now that he’d made
contact, so to speak, I knew he wouldn’t disappear again. In fact, I was counting on it.

I ducked into a small theater where a black-and-white movie about the history of rock and roll played in a continuous loop. I was the only one in there, and I took a couple of seconds to orient myself. The walls and bench seats in the theater were black, and the video threw splashes of light and shadow against them. When Damon appeared next to me, the light flashed like a strobe against his bare chest.

“Last chance,” I said. I was talking about Damon’s last chance to tell me why he was bugging me, not my last chance to jump his bones. I told myself not to forget it. “No more hocus-pocus. We talk now, or we don’t talk at all.”

Though something in Damon’s expression told me he didn’t expect me to be so frank, he didn’t bite at my offer. At least not as quickly as I would have liked. His lips thinned with concentration, and, one dark eyebrow raised, he cocked his head, the better to study me. A laid-back hippie to the very end. And beyond.

“So talk,” he said.

“Hello!” Just to get his attention, I waved my hands in front of his face. “In case you forgot, you’re the one who showed up looking for me.” Whatever was happening in the movie playing behind me, the music got louder and the flickering speeded up. Light and shadow pulsed against Damon’s face. It was making me dizzy, and I plunked down onto the nearest bench.

“I don’t need any more clients,” I told him.

He sat down next to me. We were both facing
the movie screen, and the play of light and shadow made Damon’s face look gray. “That’s not what I heard,” he said. “I hear that when it comes to special cases…well, there’s this dude who told me you’re an expert.”

Gus Scarpetti. It had to be. I was tempted to ask how Gus was doing, but rather than get off track, I stuck to the matter at hand. “Gus has been known to exaggerate.”

“He said you solved his case. And that other one, too. The one about the chick and that book of hers.”

“So you want me to take your case? No thanks, not getting suckered into a dead-end investigation again. Been there, done that.” I stood up and turned my back to the movie screen. Partly because it was less distracting to talk without the flicker of the video flashing in my eyes. Mostly because I needed to dispel the uneasiness that touched me like a clammy hand when I thought about the rest of what I had to say. “Every time I poke my nose where somebody thinks it doesn’t belong, people try to kill me,” I told Damon and reminded myself. “Not exactly my idea of fun.”

“Oh baby!” Damon reached out a hand. But apparently he knew how these things work. He stopped just short of grabbing my arm. “I can see why you’d be uptight. Peace out! I’m not asking you to do anything dangerous. What I want you to do, it’s easy.”

“Murder investigations are never easy.” I knew this for a fact, and I turned my back on Damon and paced to the other side of the theater. Another thought struck, and I spun around again. “You
overdosed,” I reminded him. “That’s what that sign over at your exhibit says.”

“You read it, huh?” Damon stood and stretched. His body was lean, and he moved as smoothly as a panther.

I turned back toward the movie.

Damon came up behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to know it. The air changed. It didn’t get cold, not the way the ghostbusters on TV say it does when a spirit is around. Oh no. Suddenly my temperature shot up and my throat locked. It felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

“That sign you saw at my exhibit, it’s right about me overdosing,” Damon said. His voice skimmed my ear. “I was careless. Thought I knew my shit…but hey, I was jonesing. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been.”

“So it was an accident?” I’d already had one client with suicide issues. I was grateful Damon wasn’t another. My relief didn’t last long, though. I spun to face him. “But if you weren’t murdered, what do you want me to investigate?”

He stepped away from me, and suddenly I found it easier to breathe. “This has got nothing to do with me being…well…you know.”

“Dead?” If he wasn’t going to say it, I would.

As if I hadn’t spoken, he went right on. “It’s all about something that’s happened since. That’s what I want you to take care of for me. All you have to do is talk to Vinnie.”

I went through my mental Rolodex of the facts I’d learned about Mind at Large ever since I realized Damon was haunting me. The way I remem
bered it, Vinnie Pallucci was the band’s keyboard player. After Damon died he also wrote most of their songs.

“You want me to walk up to a perfect stranger and talk to him about how you accidentally killed yourself?”

“You’re not listening!” Damon drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “That doesn’t matter anymore. My songs, though…My music is the only thing that matters, you know?”

I didn’t. Then again, I suppose no one who’s not a musician can really understand. Before I could tell him this, the movie ended and the doors at the far end of the theater opened automatically. There were people waiting to come in to see the next show, and I knew we couldn’t stick around. We headed for the doors opposite the crowd and ducked into the nearest empty hallway.

“All I want you to do,” Damon said, “is to go tell Vinnie to stop stealing my songs.”

“Isn’t that what attorneys are for? I mean, aren’t there copyrights or whatever on songs? Don’t people know which songs you’ve written?” I answered my own question. “God, there’s so much about you on the Internet, people who know every little detail of your life and people who interpret your lyrics and people who say you’re not really dead at all, just hiding on an island somewhere in the Pacific, or living as a Buddhist monk or—”

“So you’ve been checking me out!” Damon rolled back on his heels and grinned. “You like what you see?”

“I like being left alone.” This was a far better answer than the truth, which was more in line
with melting into a puddle of mush at Damon’s feet. “You won’t leave me alone. That means that whatever’s bugging you about Vinnie and the songs, it’s important. At least to you. So let’s get this over with, why don’t we. You tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you I don’t want to do it. Then you’ll disappear into a puff of smoke, and that will be that.”

“It turns me on when a girl talks tough.”

“I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.” I shouldn’t have had to remind him, but then, maybe because he was from way-back-when, he wasn’t clued in to the whole equality-of-the-sexes thing. “And that’s not what we were talking about.”

“It’s always what people are talking about!” Damon laughed. The sound tickled its way up my spine. “Politics, religion, the stock market, and the price of cantaloupes. It’s really all about sex.”

He was starting to sound like one of his songs. Better to stick to the matter at hand, which, as far as I could remember, was the songs in question. “You want me to call your attorney?” I asked. “No problem. I can do that. I’m just not sure how I’m going to explain that a client who’s been dead for more than thirty years is wondering about copyright laws.”

“Not the songs I wrote back then.” Damon shook his head. “The new songs. The songs I’ve been writing in my head since…well, you know, since back in ’71. Since the night I took that hit of orange sunshine.”

Boy, for a guy whose lyrics were as full of death as Garden View Cemetery, he sure was reluctant to
say the word. I supplied it for him. “The night you died, you mean?”

He didn’t confirm or deny, and I was tired of beating around the bush. “Are you saying that this Vinnie guy’s been stealing your songs even though you didn’t write those songs when you were alive? What, this is like E.T., phone home? Vinnie gets in touch with you and you sing him your songs and—”

“No. That’s not it at all. Vinnie doesn’t just get in touch. He’s got this hold on me. He’s channeling me, that’s what he’s doing.”

“Huh?”

Okay, so it wasn’t the most probing question, but it was all I could think to say before I blurted out, “Channeling? Like changing the channels on TV?”

“Channeling like capturing my spirit and making me do what he wants me to do.”

I thought this over, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Then again, I was a woman who didn’t believe in ghosts until they started butting in on my life. I was quickly finding out that taking a walk on the spooky side meant learning about a whole bunch of things I never knew existed and never would have believed in before my Gift reared its ugly psychic head.

“You mean Vinnie makes you write songs for him?” I asked Damon, trying to get it all straight. “Even though you’re dead?”

“Sort of.” Damon may have been a genius when it came to dark lyrics, but it was clear this was hard to explain, even for him. “As far as I can see, this is how it works. The body is sort of like a car, and a car needs energy from a battery to run, right?”

I knew as much about cars as I used to know about ghosts. Still, I couldn’t argue with this. I nodded.

“But a car doesn’t care where that energy comes from. You could buy a battery anywhere, from any manufacturer, and your car would still work.”

“And this is the same as channeling because…”

“Because it’s the same thing as what happens when Vinnie channels my spirit. His body still works, but the energy comes from me.”

I was getting dizzy again. To chase away my confusion, I started walking and since I didn’t have a whole lot to say, this worked out perfectly. We walked. Damon talked.

“Vinnie’s been doing it for years,” he said. “He’s got it down pat. He calls on my spirit, and like it or not, when he calls, I have to go. I get drawn into his body, and I become the energy that runs it. When I do, he makes me write songs for him.”

I thought about the green Magic Marker lyrics on the pizza box. “So why isn’t this a good thing?” I asked him. “I mean, you’re a songwriter, right? And songwriters are all about hearing their words come to life. Shouldn’t this make you happy?”

“You actually get it.” He said this like it was something exceptional, and I basked in the glow of the compliment. “There aren’t many people who understand. You must be an artist yourself.”

Only when it came to accessorizing fashion. I would have pointed this out if I didn’t remember that back in Damon’s day,
fashion
was pretty much defined by how many love beads a person wore with dirty jeans and raggy T-shirts. Needless to say, I shivered at the very thought.

“I’m making you cold.”

Damon’s comment caught me off guard, but I answered instantly. “No. That’s not it.”

“Then maybe I’m making you hot?”

When he said this with a little growl in his voice, it wasn’t easy to deny. I tried, anyway, with a tight smile and a quick detour back to the original subject. I was helped out because by that time, we were back in the lobby of the Rock Hall and face to face with the poster of Mind at Large that advertised their upcoming concert.

“Which one is Vinnie?” I asked.

The Rock Hall employee standing nearby—a young, perky blond whose nametag said she was Sarah—naturally thought I was talking to her. She pointed at the poster, left to right. “Vinnie, Ben, Alistair, Mighty Mike, Pete. I think.”

I scanned the poster and the five guys on it. Every single one of them must have been at least sixty, and I thought about how different they looked on the poster outside the building, the one that showed Mind at Large back in Damon’s day, before they had forty years of hard rockin’ under their belts.

Back then, Alistair had been the cute one. Now his hair was silver, his jowls drooped, he wore glasses as thick as soda bottles. Mighty Mike (I’d heard tell the nickname came from female fans who couldn’t get enough of his wide shoulders and broad chest) had a stomach that pouched over his belt, and Pete was so thin, I’m pretty sure a brisk wind could blow him away. As for Vinnie…

I shifted my gaze and took a closer look at the dark-haired guy who sat at the outside of the pic
ture. His hair was as long as Damon’s, but on Vinnie, the style was more grungy than appealing. He wore a tattered T-shirt, beat-up jeans, and a wide smile.

“I’ve got to tell you, I’m not a big fan.” Sarah said this in hushed tones. Like she couldn’t afford to let anyone at the Hall know it, but she didn’t want me to get the wrong impression. “I mean, their stuff, it’s pretty hokey, isn’t it? I guess a lot of people like it, though. You know, old people. Somebody told me that Vinnie writes all the band’s music. But then, you probably know that. Not that I think you’re old or anything,” she added, before I even had a chance to get offended. “I just figured everyone knows that!”

“Everyone in this world and beyond,” I told her.

She thought I was kidding. “They’re going to set up the stage right out there.” She pointed toward the plaza out in front of the building. “We figure there will be tens of thousands of people here. They say it’s going to be the biggest thing to happen in Cleveland since I don’t know when.”

I remembered the last biggest social event to happen in Cleveland and how I’d attended it so that I could investigate. That investigation led to the debunking of one of the biggest icons in the literary world. It was a little intimidating to think that if Damon had his way, I would have the same effect on the music industry.

Speaking of investigating, this struck me as a good time to start. “Has Vinnie always written the band’s music?” I asked Sarah.

Sarah got big points for honesty. She shrugged.

“I guess. Vinnie Pal—that’s what they call him, not Vinnie Pallucci, just Vinnie Pal—I’ve heard people around here say that he’s a genius. You know, that his songs are brilliant.”

“His songs are shit.”

Since the songs in question were allegedly Damon’s songs, this comment from him surprised me. I knew better than to question him within earshot of Sarah, so I excused myself, hurried into the gift shop, and ducked behind a rack of Rock Hall lunch bags.

“I’m getting confused,” I told Damon. “I thought the songs were your songs.”

“They are my songs. Or at least they’re versions of my songs.”

I didn’t bother with the
huh
this time. My expression said it all.

“It’s like this,” Damon explained. “Vinnie channels me, and whether I want to or not, I gotta go. Wherever he is. When I get there, I slip into his body, and he makes me write songs for him. But when he does…hell…” His mouth thinned with disgust. “Inside my head, every single one of my songs is damned near perfect. But when they come out of me and pass through Vinnie, somehow they get all watered down. It’s a bummer, man, and it’s just plain embarrassing.”

“You’re dead, you can’t be embarrassed!”

A mom and her little boy were just about to check out the lunch bags. She put a hand on her son’s shoulder and ushered him away.

Damon hardly spared them a look. “I can be sick and tired of the whole thing. And I am. I want you to go and talk to Vinnie. I want you to tell him
to stop. Maybe if he does…” Damon looked away.

I guess I was getting good at reading between the lines. Case in point. I sensed that there was more going on than Damon was willing to talk about.

Being the polite person that I am, I knew to leave well enough alone and allow Damon his privacy. But it would take more than civility to get me in on this case. Honesty, for one thing. And a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T for another.

If Damon wasn’t telling me the whole truth and nothing but, then I wasn’t getting either.

“Maybe if he does…” I jumped back into the sentence, hoping Damon would finish it for me, and when he didn’t, I narrowed my eyes and pinned him with a look. “You’re leaving something out, and you should know this right now. I won’t work for you. Not if you keep secrets.”

Did I know one of the gift shop employees was refilling a shelf nearby? He heard me and glanced over. “You want to work here? Applications are up at the cash register.”

I smiled my thanks. And turned my back on him. There was a stage nearby, one of those makeshift ones that looked as if it was set up and taken down as needed. I scrambled over to it, eager to finish my conversation in private.

I turned to face Damon and made sure I kept my voice down. “Maybe if Vinnie stops channeling you…what? What will happen then?”

Damon twitched his shoulders. “I don’t know for sure.”

“But you have a hunch.”

He looked away and back into the lobby with its wild displays. When he looked my way again, his face was as gray as it had been back in the movie theater. “He’s the reason I’m still here, Pepper,” he said. “Vinnie Pal has this hold on me, and he won’t let go. Because of him, I can’t leave this plane and move to the Other Side.” A young couple passed by near where we stood. They were holding hands and singing along with the music that blared from overhead speakers, bumping hips to the beat of the music.

“It’s different being…you know…”

“Dead?” When I supplied the word, the young man and woman gave me weird looks. They walked in the direction of a security guard, and call me paranoid, I didn’t like the thought that they were going to report me as the resident weirdo. I moved away from the stage and toward the front doors.

“We’ve got to talk somewhere else,” I said, my teeth clenched around my words. “You’re buried at Garden View. We can just meet there. Tonight after work.”

Damon’s face, already ashen, got a shade paler. “You could just come here.”

We were close to the front doors and the security guard, who, I noticed, was watching me a little more carefully than he was anyone else. I grabbed a brochure about the hall, held it up in front of my mouth, and kept my voice to an impatient hiss. “Except the Rock Hall isn’t open late tonight. And before you can suggest it, no, I’m not going to try my hand at breaking and entering. I work until five. I’ll make some excuse to stay late. That will
make my boss very happy. Let’s say seven. Your grave.”

“But—”

“Do you want me to take your case?”

“Yes, but—”

“Seven tonight,” I said, and I punched my way through the revolving doors. “Your grave.”

I can’t say for sure, but I think right before he disappeared in a puff of smoke that smelled a whole lot like pot, Damon nodded.

And a new thought struck.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I had a date. A date with a hot, sexy guy.

Too bad he was dead.

I did actually make it to the County Archives that day, though by the time I waited for someone from a nearby garage to change my tire, it was pretty late when I got there. Still, I managed to do a smidgen of the research Ella had lined up for me, and when I arrived back at Garden View, I had a pile of copies of immigration papers to prove it. My fear and loathing of research aside, they were the perfect excuse I needed to explain why I was still hanging around when Ella stuck her head into my office a few minutes after five.

“That’s my Pepper!” Ella beamed me a smile from across the room. “You’re staying late to enter all the information you gathered today into our resident database, aren’t you?”

I might be willing to take a little credit where it wasn’t due, but I wasn’t delusional. I looked from the pile of papers on my desk to Ella. “Well, maybe not
all
the information.”

“I’d love to help.” She wasn’t kidding. I prayed that by the time I was her age, I’d have more of a life than that. “But we’ve got Meet the Teacher Night at school. The girls say I should just forget it, that there isn’t anything any of their teachers can tell me that I don’t already know, but you know I’m not buying into that.”

I did. Ella was the most conscientious parent I knew, and I told her so. She said good night and left me to my database entering, and I checked the clock against the size of the stack of papers. If I didn’t make too many mistakes, I could get at least some of it out of the way before I had to leave for my date with Damon.

I caught myself and grumbled a stern lecture. “You have to stop calling it a date. Dead men don’t date.” And live women who think they can date dead men? It was too sick to even consider.

Rather than think about it, I got down to work. I turned on my computer and accessed the cemetery database. I was about halfway through the stack of immigration records when my phone rang.

“It’s after five. I’m surprised you’re still there.”

For a couple of seconds, the comment caught me off guard. Until I recognized the voice.

Then my throat closed. And my heart stopped. And the hormones I’d been telling to behave since the moment Damon spooked his way into my life sprang back into action, jumping up and down and shouting hoo-ray!

It was Quinn Harrison on the phone, a man I’d last seen the night a few months earlier when a
goon with more muscles than brains tried to throw me off a bridge.

Did I say
man
?

Well, there’s no denying that Quinn is certainly that. And a gorgeous one, to boot. But he’s also a cop. A Homicide detective, to be exact.

Hence our penchant for running into each other.

Not that I’m complaining. In the great scheme of things, running into Quinn is right up there on my wish list along with a trust fund, an end to the annoying hauntings caused by my Gift, and a red Jag that arrives with no strings attached. Trouble is, Quinn thinks I should mind my own business when it comes to investigating murders. And me? I’m not exactly in a position to explain that murders
are
my business because I’m working with the dead victims.

The results are predictable.

Though he is as hot for me as I am for him (and believe me when I say this is plenty hot), in his heart of hearts, Quinn believes I’m a meddler who sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong, gets in trouble, and thus, gets in his way.

Hotness aside, I think Quinn is hide-bound, bullheaded, and too quick to judge. Okay, so I do have the tendency to get in his way. And he does have the tendency to show up now and again and save my life. That doesn’t mean I owe him explanations, does it? Especially when any explanation I could offer is only going to make him think I’m certifiable.