Ghosts of Christmas Present: A Dead Detective Short Story (The Dead Detective) Read online

  “Looky here, it’s Dolores!” said one the moment we set foot inside. “Long time no see.”

  “Oh hello, Mr. Taylor. I thought you’d be up at the big store.” Mr. Taylor was a huge older black man with gold front teeth wearing a homburg and what I imagined a “zoot suit” might look like.

  “Too many memories. Besides, I’m not wanted there anymore. You know how it is—they’ve changed everything around in there since the fire.”

  “Say, this is my new friend, Richelle. She’s got one foot in Shadytown and the other in Sunnyside. I never seen anything like it.”

  “Me neither!” said Mr. Taylor. “Baxter, Lil, come here a minute. Meet Richelle, she’s a live one, all right. Expecting a baby but dead like us. Doesn’t that beat all?” Baxter and Lil were white—though distinctions like that are meaningless among the shades—and looked a little like Abbot and Costello, if you can imagine Lou Costello in a blonde wig and a dress. And too much lipstick.

  We all said hi, and they ordered me a ghostly hot chocolate with “a shot of something” in it. Their talk got loud and boisterous. It was one of those nights of the year when there seemed to be a lot more life among the dearly departed than those left behind in the land of the living. And a lot more drinking. Mr. Taylor, who seemed to have a little thing for Dolores, invited her along “for a toot”, but she said she hated to leave me, since I wasn’t feeling well.

  “I want to keep an eye on her,” she told him and his friends. “What with her feeling so funny tonight of all nights. What if she, you know, has to go to the hospital?”

  Not that a ghost was going to be much use in that situation, but that didn’t stop them all from crowding into my Toyota and coming home with me. Then, while Dolores and I incinerated the Hohner in the abandoned back yard grill my ex-husband Devon had insisted on buying but had only used once before he became a vegan, Mr. Taylor and his buddies must have gotten busy on the old ghost phone (most houses have them), because by the time we went back inside, there were about a dozen newcomers crammed into my living room, all rapidly getting “boozed up”, as Dolores said. In addition to several cases of champagne and Johnny Walker, somebody had also brought along a portable Victrola, and they were listening to carols played by jazz bands and jitterbugging. Which, noisy and irritating as it was, was still an improvement over my last Christmas Eve, which I’d spent listening to Devon play his Mannheim Steamroller and whale sounds CDs and explain to me for the hundredth time that Jesus didn’t exist and so neither did the holiday we were celebrating.

  “Excellent Solstice,” he’d said to me at midnight by way of compromise.

  But I’d been hoping Wiley would show up and we might at least have some time to be alone together—now what would he think about all these people who’d invaded my home with their racket? Would he even come by? Meanwhile, back in the real world, I hadn’t heard from Malena, either, aside from a text to tell me she’d landed safely.

  Also, it was no big deal, but she hadn’t left a present for me, which wasn’t like her and honestly felt a little weird. Maybe she’d forgotten to buy me one—or more likely just felt that moving in with me and helping to ease my financial problems was the best present she could give me, anyway. Which was totally true. Except it sort of hurt my feelings, anyway. Dumb, I know. But it wasn’t like her not to call—usually she bugged the crap out of me.

  Mom hadn’t called either. And what a unwelcome surprise it was to me that I’d even noticed—and a sign of just how low I’d sunk. Maybe Harper was right, and I was secreting hormones like crazy in spite of being clinically PDOA (DOA?). But hey, I guess Mom was all the family I had. I’d never had a father. Mom said he’d been an Irishman, half Traveler, half Gypsy—a didikoi, as the Romani call anyone of their mixed blood. It was cool that she’d actually made the effort to find out who’d knocked her up, but as far as I was concerned, he was just a rumor. And what looked like a forged last name on a birth certificate: Richard Colum O’Shaughnessy Dadd.

  Meanwhile, the minutes ticked by. Wiley, if he was coming at all, was late—it was already past the time normal families were sitting down at the dinner table to eat their Christmas turkey. I’d lit candles everywhere, then turned out the lights so you could really see the colored lights blinking on the tree Mal had sweetly trimmed for me; sewing together strings of popcorn to put around it was about the only use I’d been. I felt even less use now watching the ghosts dance and sing and carry on.

  It was my party, and I think I was actually about to start crying, something I never, ever let myself do—well, hardly ever—when suddenly Wiley Fontenot was there, with a wrapped box and a bottle in his arms, standing just inside the doorway. He had let himself in. My “young man.” After I’d introduced him to everybody, and we’d all drunk a few toasts, I finally got him into my bedroom where we could be alone, if you didn’t count Kitty hiding under the bed.

  “Here’s your present,” I said breathlessly after we’d kissed. Kissing a spirit feels a little like the tingling sensation you get when you’re about to stick your finger in a light socket. Making love is even more intense, like merging souls together in a thunderstorm, except that I have to be asleep and outside my physical body to do it—which was kind of a problem lately with baby Tamara on board.

  “I brought one for you, too,” said Wiley, handing me mine. “That’s why I ran so late.”

  “You first.”

  “Oh, merci le bon Dieu, un tit noirs!” he said when he’d unwrapped it. “Mais ceci est rouge, l’accordéon. And it’s a Hohner Grand Imperial! Richie, where in the world did you find it? How did you know? It looks just like the one I had in the war.”

  He played a few licks on it while I opened my present. When I realized what it was, I just sat there stunned. It was Sizzle the Bear, the Beanie Baby my mom had burned up in the back yard almost thirty years ago. I mean, it didn’t just look like the same bear—it was my Sizzle. Or his ghost, anyway. It even had the same loose right eye and torn-off left ear.

  “But how—?”

  “Nah, nah, cherie,” he said, smiling. “I ain’t telling. You’re not the only detective round here. Took some finding, though.”

  Maybe I’ve made being dead sound like too much fun. Believe me, it isn’t. Sure, some things work the same, almost the same, but believe me, nothing beats being alive. For one thing, you can still get a little privacy, something that ghosts seem to have no concept of. No sooner had we started to thank each other properly than Mr. Taylor’s friend, the blowsy Lil, sailed into the room.

  “Hey, break it up, you two,” she giggled. “It’s no fair for the rest of us—we’re tryin’ to find some mistletoe and make egg-nog. We need you to offer us some nutmeg, Richelle. Sorry…”

  “Offerings” are what the dead call anything you send to the other side, usually by burning it. But rust and decay do the same thing over time. So I ended up staggering splay-footed back to the kitchen while Wiley went back to the living room and played Cajun Christmas tunes for the others, who were getting pretty drunk by now.

  The doorbell rang.

  Rang back in the real world, I mean. It took me a minute to realize what it was, I was so used to my ghostly companions by now. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was expecting anybody this time of night; by now it was just after midnight. Somehow I dragged myself through the living room and answered the front door.

  A man stood outside in the night, lit by my porch light. He was about sixty, though his long straggling grey hair and snaggle-teeth made him look older. He had a cigarette between his lips and wore a dingy, ill-fitting old coat that looked like he’d picked it out of a dumpster. Or more likely, at a homeless shelter.

  “Richelle Dadd?” he asked when I answered the door. His voice was hoarse and rasping but with a soft lilting Irish accent.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thing is… I’m not entirely sure of it, but… I think you might be me daughter. Me name’s Dadd, as well, you see—Dickie Dadd.”

  I just
stood there, too stunned to move or say anything. The man looked ashamed for a moment, maybe because he was seeing himself through my eyes, and cast his eyes down at the concrete stoop. He was oblivious to all the noise and light the ghosts were making inside the house behind me, Wiley’s fais do-do, as he called it; to the living, the place must have looked lonely and deserted. “Sorry to be disturbing you at this hour of the night.” Distarbin’ yez at this ire of the noight. “Thing is, the lady said it would be all right. She told me to do it this way, you see.”

  “The lady?”

  “The lady cop. Pretty young lady cop she was, happened to be passing by the slammer when I was run in for vagrancy last week. Well, not as pretty as you, if I’m allowed to say. Father’s privilege. Anyhow, she asked me a few questions about meself, then busted me loose, gave me a few bills, and made me promise to darken your door at midnight on Christmas—and so I have. Oh, and she said to give you this.”

  He handed me a blank warrant card. On the back of it, Malena had scribbled, “Merry Christmas, partner!”

  he D.C. morgue—The Office of the Chief Medical Officer of the District of Columbia—normally had at least twenty employees on night duty. The “skeleton crew”, they called themselves. This Christmas Eve, with people calling in sick at the last minute, or just disappearing from their desks, Jackie Sprewell was left with a staff of six, as far as she could tell. She was a small but formidable woman of about forty. Absenteeism was so bad tonight she had to cover the Admissions Desk herself. It was decorated with strings of silver and green tinsel, and Shanelle had left the boombox on, tuned to an oldies station. It was playing Jinglebell Rock.

  Jackie was just sitting down to text her sister when the two children walked in. It was a few minutes after midnight, according to the big clock on the wall.

  These two just stood there for a moment beneath a sign that read “OCME: More Than a Morgue” gazing around the reception area.

  “May I help you?” Jackie said sharply.

  Kids didn’t just wander into the city morgue late at night, not white kids, anyway, not in this neighborhood. They looked like they were about ten or eleven years old. A girl and a boy. The girl was slightly taller and seemed to be the elder of the two; it was she who walked up to the front desk and spoke to Jackie.

  “We’re here to see our dad,” she said.

  “Your dad?” Jackie asked, taken aback. She couldn’t think whose kids they were. Certainly not Luis’s or Jamal’s, the two orderlies on duty. Or Dr. Akebe’s, the Nigerian pathologist. That left only the Hindu medical technologist, whose name she could never remember, or the new family counselor, Mary Lee something. She glanced automatically at the printed list that sat in a plastic folder next to the phone. “You sure your dad works here? Maybe you want the Unity Hospital just next door. Just go back out to the driveway and turn—”

  But the girl was shaking her head. The lights on the desk switchboard telephone flickered. “No, Mom said she’d probably be meeting him down here around midnight. But it’s not fair for us to have to stay home alone—it’s Christmas!”

  Jackie was confused. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight—your mom was planning to meet your dad down here at the city morgue tonight? How did she know he’d even be here?”

  “Oh,” the boy said, speaking up for the first time. “He’s been here before, plenty of times. So’s Mom.”

  Jackie’s jaw dropped. This was obviously some kind of prank—even though both kids were playing it perfectly straight. But they were definitely playing. Jackie Sprewell had raised two of her own and possessed an advanced bullshit detector. And she wasn’t about to take any sass. She came to a decision and took out a pad of paper and a pen.

  “I’ll need your names,” she told them. She’d check the computer; there was a faint chance their parents were Health Department employees who came in here from time to time.

  Or cops.

  “Tinkerbell Roberson Di Angelo,” the girl said promptly, with a hint of pride in her tone. She was an odd-looking little thing, slender and pretty, with almond-shaped eyes and an Asian cast to her features—but she had bright red hair and freckles everywhere. She was dressed just like every other girl her age, in a black North Face coat, tight pink yoga pants, and Nikes.

  The boy had dark-blond hair and heart-melting good looks, along with an earnest, angelic expression. He was wearing a jacket very like his sister’s, along with black sneakers and baggy blue jeans. “Ariel Dante Di Angelo,” he said when Jackie glanced at him.

  “Isn’t Ariel a girl’s name?”

  The boy glowered and stuck out his jaw. His features seemed to thicken and turn coarse and heavy, like stone. Jackie felt hot. Sweltering. “Sredni vashtar…” the boy muttered under his breath.

  His sister grabbed his jacket.

  “No, Ari—don’t!” she raised her eyes to Jackie. “He gets upset when people say that about his name.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Jackie rasped past the sudden frog in her throat. After a moment, the burning sensation passed, and she found she could draw breath again.

  “Our father’s name is Rocco Di Angelo, ma’am,” the girl added politely, in an obvious attempt to defuse the tension. “Are you sure he hasn’t been in yet?” She acted as if she thought this was a Starbucks. Jackie checked the sign-in sheet.

  “We received a John Doe about an hour ago,” she admitted with some reluctance after a few moments. “A fatal gunshot wound to the chest. But I doubt that’s your father. The ambulance driver said the man was shot trying to burglarize the King Tut exhibit at the Smithsonian.”

  The two Di Angelo kids looked at each other and smiled. “That sounds like Dad, all right! Can we go see him, please?”

  “The PIP—Positive Identification Procedure—requires an adult next of kin,” Jackie said firmly. She wasn’t about to allow a couple of kids to just wander in out of the street to rubber-neck at corpses. They might be doing this for some kind of school science project. Or initiation dare. Neither seemed the least bit upset by the idea of their father actually being dead. She got on the switchboard phone again. “Ms. Billerbeck?” she said. That was Mary Lee’s last name, according to the duty roster. “Would you mind coming downstairs to the reception lobby? I think we may have a family crisis situation.”

  Mary Lee Billerbeck found the two children waiting for her in the lounge, which was a cluster of six dingy vinyl waiting-room chairs anchored by a corner table at one end of the front reception area. A stack of magazines sat on the table, along with a miniature plastic Christmas tree, whose blinking lights turned the two children’s silhouettes alternately green and red. When Mary Lee arrived, the little girl—Tinkerbell, Jackie had said her name was—argued loudly with somebody on her cell phone.

  “Is that your mom?” Mary Lee was the type of woman who seemed to always show up in police reports as the victim of a crime—young, overweight, and kind-faced, with mousy-brown hair and timid hazel-colored eyes. This was her first job out of college.

  “No,” the girl said. “It’s Walkie. He wants to talk to you. Walkie Talkie,” she went on, seeing the blank look on the woman’s face. “We can’t get cell phone reception down in the vault. Or wifi—”

  “Or cable,” the boy said bitterly.

  “—so Walkie T. calls us and talks to us all the time. And takes messages and stuff.” Tinkerbell finished as she handed the phone to Mary Lee, who stared at it for a moment. It was a pink, plastic Hello Kitty toy phone. When the family counselor put it to her ear, she heard only tinny static. It occurred to her that maybe these two children were disturbed or abused somehow.

  “Why don’t we all sit down and discuss this?” she said brightly, giving the Hello Kitty phone back to Tinkerbell. The chair Mary Lee sat down in, she noticed, was particularly soiled. A lot of the family members that had come in to identify victims were homeless or disabled.

  “Your name is Ariel, right?” she said to the boy after consulting the scrap of pape
r Jackie Sprewell had scribbled on.

  He nodded.

  “Well, Ariel and Tinkerbell, can you tell me exactly what you mean by ‘vault’? Your parents lock you in some kind of closet or sealed room when they’re away and leave you home all alone?”

  The two children glanced at each other briefly. Then, Ariel said to her in a pitying tone, “No, they don’t lock us in. Our home is in a vault. We live under the Federal Reserve B—”

  Tinkerbell hushed him. “We live in a sort of old-fashioned apartment downtown.”

  “What kind of work do your parents do?”

  “They’re Federal employees. They work for a secret government agency called the Department of Magic.”

  O-kay. Mary Lee doodled a circle and then X’ed it out instead of writing this down.

  “That’s where we’re going to work, too, when we grow up. If we ever grow up.” Tinkerbell said.

  If true, this at least meant their household income was presumably a pretty decent one. “Did your parents leave you in the care of some kind of nanny or housekeeper tonight?”

  The two children looked at each other. “Nanny? Um, no,” said Tinkerbell.

  “We’re not allowed to have one,” Ariel piped up. “Tink might start sucking their—“

  “Shut up, Ari!”

  “We’re not allowed to say shut up, either,” he mumbled.

  “But we have lots of babysitters,” Tinkerbell went on.

  Her brother snorted at the word.

  “Aunt Krys. Uncle George. Uncle Tyrann. Uncle Cozy. Uncle Crawley. We just sort of snuck out tonight to be with Mom and Dad.”

  “Our uncle George is George Washington,” Ariel added proudly. “The real George Washington. We learned about him in school.”

  Mary Lee found her eyes involuntarily moistening. The poor kids had obviously invented a pantheon of imaginary friends to fill the void in their lives.