Ghost Detective Read online

  “Yes, you’ve said that.”

  “I have to know if he killed me, Myron—and if he did, then why. I can’t rest in peace until I know.”

  “Well, who rests in peace anyway? That’s one of the first things I learned about you folks—there isn’t a whole lot of resting going on.”

  “It’s just a figure of speech. I—I even brought his picture. So are you going to help me?”

  Her voice had grown tense. I couldn’t blame her. I was being pretty obtuse, even by my standards. The thing was, I knew full well the real reason she wanted to hire me, and it wasn’t to find out why he’d killed her. The real reason was to find out if he’d really loved her. That was the burning question on her mind, and why she needed me rather than a detective from her own kind. She needed somebody to talk to him, somebody he could talk to, and that wasn’t going to happen with my transparent counterparts.

  Love is a messy business. If I’ve learned anything, before and after I became the freak show I am, it’s that questions of the heart can never be fully answered to someone’s satisfaction. I knew that better than anyone.

  “I already bought the tickets,” I said.

  “I told you, I’ll reimburse you for any—”

  “I really wish I could help.”

  I said it with enough finality that it cut short the argument. She nodded sadly. Outside, the rain had mercifully stopped, as had my off-key singers down the hall. Thank God for small miracles. Well, thank somebody for small miracles. Nobody knew if the Big Guy really existed—on either side of the great divide.

  That was the bitch about dying. You still didn’t get all the answers.

  “Well, thank you for your time,” she said, rising abruptly.

  I rose along with her. “I really do wish you all the best of luck.”

  She turned away without comment. I thought that was it, I’d never see her again, but then I did something stupid. Before she made it to the door, my curiosity got the best of me.

  “You have his picture, huh?” I said.

  She looked at me. “Yes,” she said, a hint of her hope in her voice. “Do you want to see it?”

  A thousand voices inside me screamed to say no. I’d already made my decision, so it would have been the prudent thing to do. Of course, being too prudent was one of the chief reasons my life had ended up the way it had. Sometimes, I’d learned, it was better to be impulsive and follow your instincts.

  I shrugged, and she snapped open her purse. I still thought it odd that ghosts carried on as if their world were as physical and real as ours was, when I figured they could imagine just about any kind of world they wanted, but old habits probably died hard—or didn’t die at all, to be more literal. She pulled out a 3-by-5, one of those glossy head shots that were more the province of actors than businesspeople, and held it out as if she wanted me to take it. But of course I couldn’t take it. It may have been real to her, but it was no more substantial to me than she was. Ghosts were always forgetting this.

  Instead, I merely leaned in, smiling, arms behind my back, with the kind of polite display of attentiveness that a person engages in when inspecting some new piece of jewelry a friend is particularly proud of—which may have been why the man’s picture, when I finally saw it, hit me so hard.

  There may have been some small part of me that knew there was at least a tiny chance I’d recognize the person in the picture, but I never in a million years expected this.

  It was the man who’d shot me.

  Chapter 2

  A little more than five years before Karen Thorne walked into my office, I was riding shotgun in an unmarked police car on a cold February morning, listening to my pretty partner unleash her latest diatribe about her latest loser boyfriend, and counting the blocks until I could get my wake-the-hell-up caffeine fix. A bit of the weekend snow, a rare event in Portland, still clung to the sidewalks, but the roads were bare except for the occasional glistening patch of black ice. The Crown Victoria fishtailed rounding the corner onto Hawthorne, but Alesha, as usual, didn’t slow in the least.

  “Might want to take it a bit easier,” I said, gripping the vinyl armrest a little tighter.

  She gave me one of her looks, a look that would have been preposterous coming from someone else but always seemed to work for Alesha—a sort of Chuck Norris don’t-mess-with-me attitude combined with schoolmarmy peevishness. “I’m from Chicago,” she said. “I know how to drive on this stuff. And anyway, don’t change the subject. As I was saying, Steve shows up at my place at two in the morning—”

  While some funky all-women folk band I’d never heard of played on the radio, Alesha proceeded to unload on poor Steve, whose only crime seemed to be that he didn’t call to tell her his poker game was running a bit late. This apparently gave Alesha license to run down all his many flaws, from his beastly cologne, to his penchant to laugh too hard at jokes about lawyers, to his flippant attitude toward all the New Age books that Alesha devoured like other people devoured ice cream.

  “Hold on,” I said. “You’re picking on him because he doesn’t like your books?”

  She glared at me, her eyes so dark that only a tiny sliver of the whites was visible. Even in the shadowy interior of the car, even in the pale light of an early winter morning, her eyes were still arresting. With her black hair cut scalp-short, a style she’d adopted lately after going with the full Afro for the better part of the year, all the focus was on her eyes. Even if her eyes had been more ordinary, she still would have been attractive—petite but athletic, nice cheekbones, skin like polished obsidian—but her eyes were what set her apart. A man had to be careful or he could lose himself in those eyes.

  “I’m not picking on him,” she protested. “I’m just … venting some of my frustrations. And it’s not about the books. It’s about whether we share a common outlook on the universe. “

  “Oh, I stand corrected. That’s much better. Especially since you’ve dated him, what, two weeks?”

  “It’s long enough to get a sense if you’re compatible,” she said huffily.

  “So you’re saying he has to believe in Bigfoot or you’ll dump him?”

  “No, he doesn’t have to believe in Bigfoot. But he doesn’t even believe in the stuff that everybody believes in.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like the stuff everybody knows is true.”

  “Death and taxes?” I offered.

  She sighed.

  “Elvis still alive and living somewhere in Florida?” I added.

  “Will you stop,” she said, but I saw her mouth curling into a grin. “No, I’m talking about things like … I don’t know, like ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Dead people coming back to life?”

  “No,” she said, “those are zombies. Nobody believes those are real—well, nobody sane, anyway. I’m talking about the living spirits of the deceased. Souls walking the face of the earth. Everybody knows that ghosts are real.”

  I said nothing.

  “Oh come on,” she said, “you’ve got to believe in them.”

  “Alesha,” I said patiently, “you remember that I’m an atheist, right? You remember how I said I believe in science and rationality and what the evidence shows us?”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t believe in ghosts,” she insisted.

  I let this inane comment pass without a reply.

  “So you’re saying you don’t believe in ghosts at all,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I replied. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s all a bunch of hooey.”

  “Well, that’s only because you haven’t seen one.”

  “Maybe I haven’t seen one because they’re not real.”

  “What about all the people who have seen them?”

  “Maybe they’ve seen them because they do think they’re real.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re saying, what, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or somethi
ng?”

  “Or something,” I said.

  “What if I told you I’d seen one?”

  I didn’t say anything. Four blocks to go until Starbucks. I wondered if I could make it.

  “You don’t want to hear about it?” she asked.

  I sighed. “Please, tell me about the ghost you think you saw.”

  “Did see.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Okay, now I know you’re just being cranky. Is it just the lack of coffee, or did Billie kick you to the couch again?”

  “Are you going to tell me about the ghost or what?”

  “Ah,” Alesha said, “the couch. That’s, what, three times this month?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She smiled impishly. “You don’t want to talk about it. And yet you’re perfectly willing to lecture me about my relationship problems. Must be a white-guy thing.”

  “Oh, here we go,” I said.

  “What? You are white. Or don’t you believe in that either, honky boy?”

  “Honky boy? Really? What is this, an episode of Shaft?”

  “All I’m saying is that I’m not going to tell you about the ghost I saw unless you tell me what’s up with Billie.”

  “Promise?” I said.

  She shook her head, but I could see the smile growing. We were different in so many ways, black and white, a seven-year age gap, me into Carl Sagan and her into Deepak Chopra, but she was still the best friend I’d ever had. Even when we fought, it was a good kind of fighting, full of banter and mirth, not at all like my fighting with Billie. Sometimes I wondered—in fact, maybe I wondered a little too often—just what it might be like to be married to Alesha. But then, I didn’t get to choose such things. That was something I did believe in, as irrational as it might have been: The heart was its own master.

  The Starbucks was just ahead at the corner, and Alesha approached without slowing, the sides of the tires scraping the curb.

  “Fine,” she said, “you win. Keep your relationship troubles to yourself. But I’m still going to tell you my ghost story when you come back with your coffee, crackerjack.”

  “I think I liked honky boy better,” I said.

  Getting out of the car, I stepped over the dirty snow piled at the curb, approaching the Starbucks without really glancing at the window. A frigid wind, swirling up from the Willamette River a few blocks away, hit me full in the face, and I kept my chin tucked into my gray wool overcoat. I often wondered, looking back, if it would have made a difference had I glanced inside, if my detective training would have allowed me to spot the pending trouble before I walked into the middle of it, but I could never convince myself that it would have mattered.

  As it was, I swung open the door and stepped inside just as a man started to shout.

  “Nobody move! This is a robbery!”

  The first thing I thought, before I even located the source of the voice, before my heart started to pound and my mouth went dry, was that it was some kind of joke. Because robbing a Starbucks? Really? But then I saw him, a tall, grungy, broad-shouldered man in a knitted gray hat pulled low over thick blond hair, waving a small-gauge revolver at the customers and the staff, a .38 Smith & Wesson Special, it turned out later, based on the ballistics. I knew as soon as I saw the revolver that this was no joke. After eight years on the force, I knew a real gun when I saw one.

  People always say that time slows down in crisis situations, but in my experience it’s not so much about time slowing down as your brain speeding up. Details I might have lingered on before—the warm air venting from the ceiling, the droplets of water on the dark tiles, the bells on the door jingling as it swung shut—were hardly noticed as all of my senses were trained on the shooter. My vision tunneled out the world, leaving just the two of us, me frozen at the door, him swinging the revolver around in my direction. Because my appearance had startled him. I could see that now. He was swinging his gun in my direction, and there was a good chance he would pull the trigger when he saw me.

  I don’t know why I thought this. It wasn’t like I was standing there in uniform, or that he could even see my Glock strapped to my chest beneath my overcoat. I should have looked like just another late-thirties Portlander on his way to some office job, a little too frumpy to be a banker or a lawyer, maybe, with my dirty tennis shoes an odd choice to wear with my charcoal slacks, but certainly no cop. But I still knew he was going to fire. I think I knew it the first time I laid eyes on him.

  The gun was coming around and I was thinking, What do I do, go for my gun? Hit the floor? Dive back outside? As he turned, I saw that he had a brown mustache so thick I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it crawl off his face. Both his orange vest, as thick as a life preserver, and his dirty blue jeans had been patched multiple times with duct tape. In Portland he was just another funky dude in a city full of funky dudes.

  If I’d gone for the gun immediately, maybe dived for the floor at the same time, things may have gone differently—but only maybe. I had only a second to choose, and in that second I defaulted to my standard nature: caution. I would talk to him, reason with him, try to get him out of this situation without anybody getting hurt. It was the prudent thing to do, after all.

  As the gun pointed at me, I got a full look at his face. There was something distinctive about him, a certain chiseled quality to his nose and cheekbones, a certain granular quality to his olive skin, that made his features seem both the model of human attractiveness and not human at all. It was like the face of a statue, lightly powdered with makeup but fooling no one. His eyes were dull and dead; they fixed on me with all the sparkle of lead balls.

  “Wait,” I said.

  It was the only word I managed to get out before the pop of his revolver rang out—and my whole world changed.

  Chapter 3

  The rain-slicked streets of Portland were filled with people.

  Even though it had been over five years since the shooting, long enough that I should have gotten used to the constant crowds, my first reaction whenever I stepped outside my office building was still to wonder what special event was going on in the city.

  But of course there was no special event. It was just my world.

  It was a Wednesday evening in the middle of November, drizzly and cold, still light enough to see but dark enough that the passing cars all had their headlights on, and any other flesh-and-blood person stepping out of my building probably would have spotted a lone person or two walking on foot. Not me. I saw dozens—three businessmen in suits and bowler hats, a stout woman in a dress that looked like it was off the set of Little House on the Prairie, some teenagers with long hair and bell-bottom jeans smoking pot on the corner, and two police officers in fifties-era uniforms walking down the street with a Hispanic man in handcuffs between them. Those were probably ghosts, the easy ones, though I still couldn’t know for certain without a hand check. The rest of the people, more modern in appearance, could have gone either way.

  It actually would have been easier if more ghosts stuck with the styles of their day, but many liked to keep up with current trends. Dying, I’d found, didn’t rid people of vanity. In many cases, it only increased it.

  The air had a wet, chill bite. Although it didn’t appear to be raining, the yellow bubbles of light surrounding the street lamps were streaked with razor-thin lines. I buttoned up my overcoat, watching a bus slosh through the puddles, the inside packed to the hilt, people sitting, people standing, a lot of faces turned my way. I wondered how many of them had a pulse. Not many, probably.

  I should have cooled my heels at the office until Billie returned—that was our usual routine—but I couldn’t this time. Not after I’d seen the eyes of the killer who’d changed my life.

  The first stop was Mama’s Bistro around the corner, Billie’s most frequent hangout, and I headed there at a fast clip. When I dodged around a woman pushing a stroller, a couple holding hands just past her gave me a funny look, which was often the only
way I knew when I’d just walked by a ghost. To a real person, it always looked like I was weaving like a drunk man.

  For the living, the current population of this little ball of mud we call home is around seven billion. That’s no number to sneeze at, especially when you’re at the DMV and it seems as if half of them are in line ahead of you. But according to the last census performed by the Department of Souls, who are charged with keeping track of such things, over a hundred billion people have lived and died on planet Earth before anyone alive today was even born.

  For me, they’re all still here.

  The tables at Mama’s, both inside and on the covered patio, were occupied, but there was no Billie. I wove through a group of cell-phone-yakking yuppies decked out in REI, made the mistake of stepping in a puddle, and cursed as I slogged forward with one wet sock. No Billie at the bus depot, one of the places she liked to people-watch. No Billie at the newsstand on 26th, the one that had burned up in a fire fifty years go but was still operated by the same old codger.

  I rounded the corner and stopped at our favorite neighborhood hot-dog stand. The heavyset man in the red and white sequined jumpsuit handed a little girl with pigtails a corn dog, then flashed me his famous smile. As usual, his full head of black hair was perfectly coiffed. Most mornings, he worked the street outside my window, but in the evenings he liked to rove around a bit.

  “Hey Elvis,” I said, “you seen Billie?”

  “No, sir,” Elvis said, rolling some of the franks on his grill. The way he flicked the dogs, it was like he was strumming a guitar. It was hard to believe none of it was real. I still didn’t quite understand why ghosts used real-world things at all—buses, buildings, bridges—when it was obvious they could just create something out of whole cloth, just as Elvis had done with his hot-dog stand. And if they saw it, then I saw it. Just one of those weird little rules that I lived by but couldn’t fully explain.

  “You lost the little lady?” he said.

  “Oh, she’ll turn up eventually. I just need to talk to her.”