The Dead Detective Read online

Speaking of which, and having absolutely no place else on earth to go this time of night, I drive home. Devon’s car isn’t in the driveway when I pull in around one AM. Which is kind of unusual on a weeknight. For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder if he’s seeing someone. I’m not nearly as jealous or upset by this as I probably should be, and the reason is, well, I guess I’ve just assumed he’s been cheating on me for a while now. You know, from all his coldness and the lack of sex and everything. And the truth is…I’m not even sure I’d blame him.

  I’ve been a lousy wife, I know. I haven’t been unfaithful, and I’ve supported him financially, true―but I’ve never really been interested in his profession or all his stupid little projects with his pet students or his political causes, which quite frankly, I pretty much started seeing through in 10th Grade. And I keep terrible hours, and I’m almost never home when he is, and when I am, my mind’s almost always someplace else. But of course, being human, it would still piss me off to find out he was fucking somebody else.

  Being almost human, anyway. Still. Just barely.

  But I’ve hardly had time to feed and pet Kitty and introduce Bull to Lorna―and at the sight of her, his big bug eyes are, like, totally on stalks―when Devon shows up. If I thought he was acting weird this morning, now he’s really freaked, creeping around and treating me like I’m one of the ghosts. He goes into the bedroom and gathers a few of his things which he then takes into the guest room/study where he’s been sleeping for the past few weeks. As he brushes past me without even saying goodnight, I notice he smells of something very familiar, though it takes me a minute to place it.

  Prada Candy Eau de Parfum. The scent Malena Ayon wears. Though in fairness, a lot of other women wear it, too. Still. My poor dead heart races at the thought of the two of them together―and not in a good way. Ayon said she had a “thing” tonight, didn’t she? That might be why she bailed out of Billard’s in such a hurry―to go meet Devon. Suddenly, a number of suspicious things like that are cropping up all at once. I mean, it was Ayon who first set me up with the Gypsies, right? And I was shot by what might very well be a department-issue firearm; though again, the Glock 9mm is one of the most common handguns in the country. But who would be a more natural candidate for my murderer than a woman who’s sleeping with my husband? Especially one who’s a way better shot than I am? And who may have secretly hated me all along and just pretended to be my friend in order to get even for the bad start we got off to?

  I can’t think. It’s been a terrible twenty-four hours, and my mind is reeling. Perhaps the worst ever. In the history of mankind. Irrationally, I’m expecting the Cap or IAD or maybe a local patrol car to show up at my door any second to take me into custody. I leave Bull and Lorna to watch TV in the living room and get up to whatever the dead get up to on their own time and take Kitty into the bedroom with me. You can’t pick her up unless you want a face full of claw, but she compulsively follows me around when I’m home and purrs. Then I get into my PJs and curl up under the covers with her and at long last have a really, really good cry.

  Because I feel like I’ve at least got that coming to me, right? Along with a great deal more Belgian double-chocolate ice cream. I wonder if you can get that on death row. Not Ben & Jerry’s, anyway, I’m guessing.

  I guess I must have cried myself to sleep. Because the next thing I know it’s already morning again. What with one thing and another, I haven’t logged much rack time lately, so despite having the specter of arrest hanging over my head, I’ve slept, well…like the dead. Like Lorna, who’s lying next to me when I wake up, staring at me with her eyes wide open. She’s changed into some sort of nightie, but it isn’t covering much.

  “So, how well do you know him?” she asks me when she sees I’m awake. It takes me a minute to make out what she’s saying, then another to figure out what the hell she’s talking about.

  “I just met him last night. What’s up? Isn’t he still here?”

  She shakes her head, and a peroxided lock of wispy hair falls over one eye. I can tell she’s been crying, too. Jesus, this place is like a cathouse these days. Or a dorm room where everybody’s PMSing.

  “What?”

  Her voice is a faraway whisper. “You wouldn’t understand. A real gentleman like that―and me. The things I’ve had to do…” You and me both, girlie. But Bull McGuinness? Mr. “The Dog Ate My Face”? A real gentleman? Seriously? Oh well, the last thing I expected when I went to bed last night was to wake up to a really good laugh first thing this morning.

  I ask her a few more questions, but she’s doing her fading out with the daylight thing again, and I can’t quite make anything out. Bull seems to have taken off.

  Devon’s cleared out early, too. Over breakfast, I give Harper’s cell a call―surgeons are always up and at work at the crack of dawn because it’s cheaper for hospitals to schedule surgical procedures first thing in the morning. I get his voicemail. So I call Detective Tabori again.

  “You’re pretty fucking gung-ho, Detective Dadd,” he says when I tell him who I am, meaning that I’m an eager beaver to be calling him again so early. “I’m still going through my messages.” Meaning that’s why he hasn’t called me back.

  “I’ve got a personal interest in this one,” I tell him.

  “How’s that?”

  I decide to be upfront with him. I don’t have much time to waste. “What do you know about Gypsy curses?”

  Silence.

  “Maybe we better meet,” he says finally. “How about someplace away from the office?” Which is good for me. Because if IA has any interest in me yet, then they’ve already tapped my phones. In the end, we agree to meet for coffee at Mindy’s Cafeteria, which is a large, somewhat famous old deli not far from the Center. He asks me somewhat suggestively how he’ll know me and what will I be wearing, which is a good sign. It’s a good sign that that he’s flirting with me at all, that is. It means that Gypsy curses don’t necessarily always end in death or some horrible lingering disease.

  Meanwhile, Harper has called me back. Now there’s an eager beaver. Eager for beaver, anyway, even if it’s chilled to room temperature. I head him off from telling me anything further over the phone and promise to swing by Beth-El in two hours. Then I take a shower, wash and dry my hair, and get dressed in my best work clothes because I want to look really together in case I get arrested today. For the TV cameras. And, very possibly, for the Gypsy detective, who has, truth be told, a pretty damn sexy voice over the phone. But you know how that always goes. The ones who sound great on the phone turn out to look like Jar Jar Binks. And the ones who both sound okay and look really great in person turn out to secretly be Hannibal Lector. Or Devon.

  Just for the hell of it, I put on a dab of Prada Candy on the way out. Because you always want to fight fire with fire, right?

  n my way to the hospital, I call the East Orange stationhouse and talk to a deputy sheriff there, hoping they got some kind of real ID on the three Romani women all those months ago. They didn’t. He tells me the women were held at the station for exactly an hour before a group of men, including a lawyer, showed up in a Mercedes and posted bail. Then they vanished. And the names and addresses they gave turned out to be bogus.

  Gana Kali I know the name of at least, though whether it’s a real name, a full name, or just some kind of Gypsy honorific, I don’t have a clue. I don’t even know how I know it’s her name; I guess I must have overheard one of the other women calling her that.

  When I park in hospital lot, I realize I’m spending way too much time at the place lately. And grateful as I am to Harper, I still only see him as the guy who gave me a colonoscopy and sewed me up, not the one who can mend my shattered heart, if you know what I mean. It’s maybe going to take someone else to do that.

  Luckily, Harper is between ops and can only see me for ten minutes, which is about all I can take of his longing glances. This morning, anyway―this time tomorrow I may be begging for them. But he’s a married man. And
never again, you know? I’m trying to get rid of all the curses in my life.

  “I’ve only got the prelim,” he tells me. “I’ve sent samples on to the biochem lab at Tech for the details. But I think I’ve already got a pretty fair idea of some of the chemicals that got into you via the wound on your arm. The main one was atropine, but there are also other tropane alkaloids present: hyoscyamine and scopolamine. You may remember from your narcotics unit that they’re deliriants or anticholinergics. The other biggie is bufotenin. And 5-MeO-DMT. Both are hallucinogenic tryptamines.”

  “All that from a fingernail?”

  He shrugs. “I’d say the best candidates are cane toad poison and jimson― ‘locoweed.’ I did a bit of research last night, and that’s the formula Haitians supposedly use to create…” His voice trails away.

  “Zombies?”

  Now he looks embarrassed. “Well, it’s pyschosomatic—you know, a drug-induced psychosis, followed by hypnotic suggestion. So that could be part of it, at least.” I realize that he’s being hopeful here, trying to talk himself away from all the empirical evidence.

  “You’ve seen my heart, Harper,” I say softly. Up close and personal. Now he checks my pulse―just an excuse to hold my hand―and takes my temperature again.

  “I know―you’re right.” He nods and blinks back tears. “But it… it makes no sense, Richelle. You have to admit, no fucking medical sense!”

  I squeeze his arm. “Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “Any time of day or night.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to― “ Jenny? Jesse? ― “Geri. It’s not fair to her.” Of course, what I’m really referring to here are his feelings about me.

  But life isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that I fell out of love with him during his last year of med school, for instance. That’s a particularly rough time in the life of any med student―full of pressure, lots of non-stop studying and overnighters; death to most relationships. He was mainlining caffeine tablets and popping Ritalin, and that didn’t bring out the best in him. But to make matters worse, I was already pulling away. I was pretty sure by then I wanted to be a cop, not a doctor, and I knew I’d never have the chops to become a surgeon like Harper wanted to be. And, honestly, he was pretty arrogant and overbearing about it, too.

  But you know how it is. One day everything’s comfortable between you―normal, anyway―and then the next, it isn’t. Nothing feels right, you bicker about the stupidest things, you resent his physical presence when he’s there, because he somehow doesn’t smell or sound or feel right any more, and when he’s not there, you resent him even more for not being around. There hadn’t been another man―or woman―in the picture. I just got tired of living with him. I could foresee a really boring life ahead of us, like an endless straight highway through a really featureless desert, and it wasn’t for me. Maybe there really is something deeply emotionally wrong with me, like Layla used to say. Three years and out seems to sort of be my pattern.

  And now it looks like I may be headed out the exit door for the whole deal―marriage, job, life itself―pretty soon. That ought to be my epitaph: “She couldn’t stay committed.” Like I’m a serial escapee from the loony bin or whatever. I blame Mom for that. Which reminds me, I still need to buy her a birthday present.

  Maybe they’ll lock me in a real loony bin for killing the two Gypsies. It might be a smart move on my part to plead insanity. I mean, it’s not like I had a motive, or stood to gain in any way. And let’s face it, any juror hearing my testimony on what really went down will definitely think I’m totally batshit. Bad as psych wards are, it might go better for me there than as an ex-cop in a max security prison. You think? Maybe I should just turn myself in to Quirk right now and tell him the truth before I seriously discredit him, too. I mean, this is not going to do his highly checkered career any good. Final straw, pretty much.

  Come to think of it, they won’t lock me away in either place. Just as soon as I’m given a physical from anybody who isn’t Harper, the FBI will rendition my sweet ass to some secret underground facility outside DC and I’ll spend the rest of my pathetic life as a lab rat. They’ll probably try to extract some kind of Walking Dead elixir from my pancreas or pineal gland or something. This is the sort of crap running through my head when I get to West Broad Street and park in the lot there for my date a few doors down with the Gypsy detective.

  You’d think there would be a whole bunch of ghosts in Mindy’s, considering all the famous movies stars and writers and gangsters who used to eat here over the decades, but maybe they’ve all been blasted out of their booths by the bright sunshine. It’s almost noon, and I’m not feeling so great myself. It’s like I’ve got the blood sugar low from hell. Maybe I’m fading away, too, like Lorna always does. I asked McGuinness about this, and he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said that ghosts― “shades”, he calls them―see no difference between day and night, but exist in a perpetual twilight, so the perception must be on my part. I guess ghosts fade in daylight like weak radio signals or whatever. There’s no question that I feel like crap in the daytime, anyway; I’m wearing the thickest, darkest pair of Oakleys I own to keep from feeling my eyeballs scorch.

  I’m running late, so Tabori is already here somewhere. You’d think he’d be easy to spot, me being a detective and all, but I suffer a few embarrassing moments before I see him grinning at me from the far corner of the main dining room. He’s all white teeth and alabaster skin and black hair and flashing eyes; not nearly as beautiful as Devon, but way more wicked-looking and dangerous. Like a pirate. In fact, Detective Tabori pretty much resembles the bad-boy hero of a Harlequin novel; you know, the dude the heroine thinks is the villain at the start of the book but who turns out to be the dot.com billionaire or the son of the Duke of Kensington or the secret owner of the Double Flying Bar-L Ranch. That guy.

  He’s having an effect on me; he can tell, and he grins at that, too. If I wasn’t so freakin’ half-dead, I might blush. Or flirt my ass off back at him. Instead, I just sit down on the other side of the table. I need coffee or sugar or something. Bad. Why am I so hungry and thirsty all the time? Harper’s theory is that I’m burning through glucose at an accelerated rate to keep my brain alive and avoid ketosis and eventually, auto-phagy. Which means that the body begins to cannibalize itself. Hence the constant sugar cravings. Since I can’t breathe, I’m also oxygen-starved, which is why I’m obtaining it from liquids. H2O contains oxygen, remember?

  “Detective Dadd?” He extends his arm to shake hands, something police basically do only with each other. But I pretend I don’t notice the gesture. Touching people is a habit I’m trying to break because of my body temperature―either that or I’ll need to wear evidence gloves all the damn time. But I tell him to call me Richelle, and he says to call him Val, short for Valeriu. His parents, he goes on, were Rumanian Gypsies who emigrated here in the Seventies. The waitress shows up, and I order a double Frappuccino and Belgian waffles with lots of syrup. He looks at me in surprise.

  “Eating for two?” he says, with that killer smile, and I shake my head.

  “No chance of that.” I sound a lot more snappish than I’d intended. “I’m just getting a lot of weird cravings lately.” I’m gonna have to come clean with this guy sooner or later about the curse and what it’s done to me; it might as well be sooner. And I’m so hungry I could eat a…well, I could actually eat my own cooking. “So it’s okay to use the word ‘Gypsy’?”

  He shrugs. “It goes back and forth, but that’s what we call ourselves mostly. To gadjo, anyway―that’s non-Gypsies. You can say Romani, if you want, but Romanians resent that. Rom is like Dom or Sinti; just a tribe, though it’s the main one.”

  “There are a lot?” I should have Googled this before I got here.

  “Nobody knows for sure. There have been a shitload of genome studies in the last few years, but only some of the tribes have been definitively linked to a North Indian origin. We believe we originally came out of Egypt, w
hich is where the word Gypsy comes from. My parents think they’re part of the lost Tribe of Israel, actually―I was brought up as a Jew.”

  This surprises me. He goes on for a bit about the similarities between Mosaic law and the traditional rules handed down by the kris, which is apparently the council of elders that rules each Gypsy family, but by the time my waffles arrive, I’m getting impatient to cut to the chase.

  “I’ve had a Gypsy curse put on me,” I tell him point-blank. “And it’s working.”

  He looks taken aback, but not nearly so surprised as you might think. Not, “Hey, this crazy psycho-bitch dragged me here just to waste my time” surprised―not at all. More like…sorrowful. Like I just announced I had terminal cancer.

  “Okay. I’m sorry to hear it. What kind of curse?”

  “A really major one. Like the biggest you can think of.”

  “The biggest magic spell among Gypsies is called the hakkni panki, which is where the English word ‘hanky panky’ comes from. It means you enchant a gadjo first to give you all their wealth, then to say nothing about it afterwards.” What happened to Uncle Sylvestro, in other words.

  “That’s not it. This is a sort of curse to turn you into a―a zombie.” The word sounds pretty stupid now that I’ve said it to someone. But he’s nodding.

  “A mulo,” he says, very solemnly indeed. “That’s our word for the undead. Or in your case, since you’re a woman, a muli. The spell is called the hakkno mulo, but I’ve never heard of it being done successfully.” He looks at me like he thinks I’m weakminded. Or being hysterical. I take his hand and place it on my wrist―and after a minute, he stops smiling.

  “Holy shit. I’d say you are deeply, deeply fucked, detective.” He no longer looks like that’s what he plans to do to me; the latter, I mean. Which is kind of too bad, really, I suddenly decide.

  ext he mention the ‘V’ word.

  The word mulo, he explains, is often translated as ‘vampire’, but that’s just a confusion with Slavic myth. Mulos are sort of like zombies, created when spirits become too restless to leave their bodies. This is usually the result of their possessions not being given away fast enough. Even Gypsy mythology, apparently, is based mostly on theft and pilfering. Then again, weren’t the Gypsies forever forgiven for the sin of theft? I had read once, in an ebook of all things, about the legendary Fourth Nail. As the story goes, Christ was to be hammered to the cross with four nails, not three; that is, until a Gypsy had stolen it, thus sparing Christ some pain, and thus forever exonerating gypsies from the sin of theft.