Scott William Carter - [Myron Vale Investigation 01] - Ghost Detective

by Carter

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I just ... wait a second, will you?”

  Sal waited. His boot slid up and out of view, the heel banging against the desk. In the stillness, I could hear Dad breathing through his nose, a deliberate and labored breathing. I did my best to make my own breathing match his, but quieter, hiding the sound. It was as if Sal wasn’t even there, just the two of us in that little room, Dad and me, breathing in unison. My bladder was like a water balloon stretched to the limit. I felt a twinge in my knees, growing into a painful ache, but I didn’t dare adjust my position. The slightest rustle of my pajamas might alert them.

  Still, this silence went on for so long that I was seriously thinking of outing myself—when something must have changed.

  “Oh shit,” Sal said.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad said. His voice sounded strange, gurgled.

  “Jesus, man. It’s okay.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “Hank—”

  And then I knew, because Dad wasn’t even trying to muffle the sound now. He was crying. There was no other way to explain the sniffling, the shuddery breathing, the pitiful whimpering. Of all the things that happened that night, this was the biggest shock. Dad never cried. It just didn’t happen. I cried. Once in a blue moon, Mom cried. Even Kevin Blaine cried when Mrs. Rooker sent him to the principal’s office for shooting spitwads at the girls in our class. But Dad? No. He didn’t cry any more than a lion did. Or a bear. Or a mountain. I may not have known much at seven years old, but I knew this much.

  I felt a lot of things in that moment, in addition to shock. The worst of them, the one I’d tried to forget as much as I could in the ensuing years, was shame.

  For the first time in my life, I was ashamed of my father.

  “Man, take it easy,” Sal said. “It’s all right. Just let it out. You can let it out.”

  “No—”

  “It’s good to let it out. You can only keep it bottled up for so long.”

  “No, I’m—I’m all right. I just ... Oh, boy.”

  “Hank—”

  “It’s okay. I’m okay. I’ve got it.”

  Finally, mercifully, Dad stopped crying. He sniffled a few times, cleared his throat, and that was it. It was like one of Portland’s rare thunderstorms, here as fast as it was gone. He took a few deep breaths. I heard a rustle that might have been Dad wiping his face on his sleeve.

  “Meds,” Sal said.

  “What?” Dad said.

  “You asked how I handle it.”

  “I did?”

  “You were about to. Meds. That’s how I handle all this crap. I’ve started taking some meds. Right after we saw him, I started. It was the only way to make things feel right, you know. To make the nightmares stop. Don’t tell anybody, okay? I don’t want it getting around the station.”

  Dad was silent.

  “You might want to think about taking some yourself,” Sal offered. “I can recommend a doctor—”

  “I don’t need any pills.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, but—”

  “No pills, dammit!”

  “All right, all right. It’s just a suggestion, that’s all. It helped me, okay? You don’t need to be an asshole about it.”

  “No pills.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Sal said.

  There was another uncomfortable silence, but thankfully there were no tears. The urge to pee was back, and this time it was so strong I had no choice but to cup my hand over my crotch.

  “You have to let it go, Hank,” Sal said. “There hasn’t been a killing in months. The guy is gone.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  When Sal spoke again, his voice took on a strange, tremulous quality, as if somebody put hands around his windpipe. “When we saw him ... When we saw him, it must have, I don’t know, spooked him. He must have realized how close we were getting. It was only a matter of time. He must have known that.”

  “Seventeen, Sal.”

  “I know.”

  “Seventeen murders. Seventeen in five years ... and those kids. The kids of those first two victims. I still think about them, the way they looked at me. Their mothers were taken from them. And the one boy? I told you, he said he wanted to be a cop when he grows up.”

  “I know. But I’m telling you, Hank. The Goodbye Killer is gone. We’ve got to get on with things.”

  “There’s got to be clues—”

  “All of them have been dead ends, you know that. No fingerprints. No DNA except the victims. The national news has moved on. Even Portland is finally turning the page. I haven’t seen a story on the front page of the Oregonian for over a week. Maybe he’ll show up again, but for now ... there’s nothing to go on. And the only people who’ve even ...” He trailed off.

  “Who’ve even seen him are the two of us,” Dad finished.

  “Yes.”

  “But what did we see, Sal?”

  “What?”

  “What did we actually see?”

  Even under the desk, I felt the mood in the room change, a subtle shift, a curtain of dread dropping over us. A wave of cold passed through me, and I felt something, a strange uneasiness that prickled the back of my neck. It was almost like there was something ... there. When Sal finally replied, his voice was hoarse.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “That—that face—” Dad said.

  “I don’t know what we saw.”

  “I can’t describe it.”

  “I know.”

  “It wasn’t ...”

  Dad trailed off, his voice so anguished that for a moment, I was afraid he was going to cry again. Sal cleared his throat.

  “Human,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “Human. It was like it wasn’t human. Inside that hood ... Then, when he turned away ...”

  “A hallucination,” Sal said.

  “What?”

  “It’s the only explanation. We were tired. Exhausted from a lack of sleep. It was late. Dark. The mind plays tricks. You know that, Hank. Think of all the crazy shit we’ve heard from drunks and crackheads over the years. You think any of that was real? It was in their minds. This was in our minds. Only explanation. Has to be.”

  “But if both of us—”

  “A hallucination,” Sal said firmly.

  “He disappeared, Sal. He disappeared right in front of us.”

  “We imagined it.”

  “No.”

  “It has to be that way,” Sal insisted. “Don’t you see? It has to be. You have to convince yourself of it, Hank. If not with meds, then some other way. See a shrink. Drown it in Jim Beam if that’s what you have to do, but just don’t kill yourself. Clamp it down. It’s going to eat you up otherwise. We didn’t see that. We didn’t see anything, just like we told people. It was just like the others. He was gone by the time we got there.”

  I heard Dad sigh. The desk creaked again, and the backs of Sal’s heels appeared in the crack. I heard him pat Dad’s jacket.

  “I got to get home, pal,” Sal said. “I’m already on thin ice with Maria. I know things ain’t peachy with you and Eleanor either. Get some rest. In the morning, you’ll feel better.”

  “Okay,” Dad said.

  “Quarter to eight.”

  “Right.”

  The doorknob clicked and a tiny jet of air flitted under the desk.

  “Sal?” Dad said.

  “Yeah?”

  “It was like he wasn’t even there. It was like he was a ... a ghost.”

  If Sal answered this, I didn’t hear it. There may have been a headshake, a frown, or some other unspoken communication, but all I heard were Sal’s footsteps, then the door closing.

  For a long time, Dad did nothing but sit there. I didn’t hear him move. I didn’t hear him breathe. Even though I was sure I’d heard only Sal’s footsteps, I was tempted to lean down and peer through the crack to see if he really was gone, but I didn’t dare. The
slightest sound would have been a dead giveaway.

  I prayed that he would get up soon and head for the couch, because if he fell asleep in the chair, my chances of sneaking past him were slim. And that’s if my bladder could even hold for another five minutes. I was debating just peeing myself when the neighbor’s dog barked again, loudly enough to rouse Dad from his stillness. He made a sound, half groan and half cough. Oh please, I thought, please, please ... Then there was the distinctive rustle of leather, the chair groaning as he rose out of it.

  The door opened, he shuffled out, and the light clicked off. He closed the door behind him. I stayed under the desk for as long as I could, holding my crotch, rocking back and forth, praying for him to fall asleep fast. Maybe I’d even get lucky, and he would risk his life and go crawl in bed next to Mom. When I couldn’t wait any longer, I crept from under the desk to the door, first on my knees, then walking, forcing myself to take my time so the floor wouldn’t creak. I turned the knob slowly—not a sound. I opened it a crack and felt a stream of cool air against my nose.

  His boots were at the edge of the couch, toes pointed to the ceiling. I could just make out his easy, regular breathing over the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the grandfather clock.

  Tiptoeing with all the terror of a Marine traversing a minefield, I headed for the hall. The air, cooler in the living room, pressed my pajamas against my skin like a wet sheet. The cotton was damp, and I thought maybe I’d wet myself after all, but no, it was just sweat. Lots of sweat.

  Halfway there. Almost. A little bit farther, and then I’d be to the bathroom door. If he woke then, he’d just think I was getting up to take a leak.

  Then, like a ghost in the darkness, my father spoke to me in a voice that was not slurred at all.

  “The next time you want to hold a gun,” he said, “make sure you ask first. I might even let you shoot it.”

  Chapter 1

  If there was one thing I’d learned since becoming a private investigator, it was that when Elvis gives advice, you listen. It didn’t matter that he was holding a hot dog with a pair of metal tongs or that he was wearing an apron stained with enough grease that it could have been displayed in Portland’s Museum of Modern Art as an abstract painting. Or that he’d been dead for more than thirty years. The guy had an angle on wisdom that even the Dalai Lama couldn’t match.

  Even if half the time, what he was saying didn’t make much sense at first. Or ever.

  “Frozen yogurt,” he was saying to me. The smoke curling around his white chef’s hat was so real it was hard to believe I was probably the only living person on earth who could see it. “I’m telling ya, Myron. That’s the answer to all your problems. Frozen yogurt.”

  “Frozen yogurt?” I said.

  “Yep. Money in the bank.”

  “I ask you how I can drum up more clients, and you tell me I should sell frozen yogurt?”

  The expert way he rolled the franks on the grill, with such style, cooking them up to a nice golden brown, I could see the same echoes of flair and panache that had made him so famous in his music days. “You got it, pardner. Or coffee, I guess. But Starbucks has kind of got that one cornered. Frozen yogurt—that’s your ticket.”

  I blinked at him through the haze. Was it some kind of Zen koan, or was he just messing with me? The smell of grilling meat, and the wonderful honey-mustard glaze that was his specialty, reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything since coffee and toast that morning. Even the sting of the smoke in my eyes was real, which still made no sense even five and half years after the shooting that made me this way, but it was one of the strange rules I’d been forced to live by. If a ghost could see it, hear it, or smell it, that usually meant I could, too.

  Only touch. That was all that separated us. If I reached for them, they weren’t there. I called it a hand check, and every now and then I was forced to use it just to keep what was left of my sanity.

  It was not yet noon, but already the sun felt warm on my neck. We were still in early April, barely out of winter, and yet it was one of those bright, blue-sky days that were more common in Portland in June. My eyes felt heavy from all the pollen in the air, and no amount of Claritin or Allegra had done the trick. The Willamette Valley was ground zero for people with allergies. I didn’t have problems with my nose or throat—thank God—but this time of year my eyes always felt as if they’d been replaced with ball bearings.

  A homeless woman wearing enough clothing to stock Target pushed a rattling shopping cart past us, giving me a strange look. Probably a living person like me, though it was hard to tell. I adjusted my copy of Willamette Week, doing my best to hide my mouth while I chatted with Elvis.

  The sidewalks on Burnside bustled with pedestrians, normal for a Saturday—grunge types on skateboards stopping at the vinyl shop across the street, a Vietnamese man cleaning the window of the laundromat, a burly guy with tattooed arms tinkering on his Harley in front of the closed bar, yuppie lovebirds decked out in J.Crew and Birkenstocks out for a casual stroll, parents with their kids coming out of the diner, old people holding hands sitting on the bench, waiting for the bus. There were stranger ones, of course, two boy scouts wearing uniforms and wide-brimmed hats in a style thirty years past its prime, a woman with a big red perm roller-skating in the middle of the street, a bearded man leaning against a brick wall, giving me the cold eye, his gray Confederate uniform stained with dirt. Or blood. It was hard to tell. There was no doubt, though, that the bayonet at the end of his musket was deadly sharp.

  The strange ones were probably ghosts, but then without a hand check, any of them could have been ghosts. I’d learned that the hard way more times than I could count.

  I didn’t usually come to the office on a Saturday, but then I didn’t usually have $32.18 in my checking account. Or credit-card companies filling up my voice mail with gentle reminders that I was sixty days past due.

  “Frozen yogurt,” I said again.

  “Yep.” He used one of the tongs to hold up a hot dog. “Want one?”

  “You know I can’t do that, Elvis.”

  “Ah, right. Sorry, pardner. You just seem so much like us that I’m always forgetting.”

  “I’ll try to take that as a compliment, I guess.”

  “You should, you should. All my best pals are ghosts.”

  “That’s because all of your best pals are dead.”

  “Hey now. No need to be rude ... Uh-oh. Don’t look now, but bad news coming your way.”

  He was gazing east on Burnside when he said it, his brow furrowed with concern. I turned, newspaper in hand, and followed his gaze up the crowded street. There, inside a group of fit twenty-something women in sports tanks and spandex, who jogged past him without taking any notice of him at all, was a lanky old priest. His white hair on top of his flowing dark robes was like creamer on black coffee. In the bright sunlight, his obscenely large cross shone like a beacon. There was no doubt, judging by the way he was hastily heading in my direction, that he was coming to see me.

  From my past experience with him, this was never good. The grumble of my empty stomach was suddenly replaced with queasiness.

  “You don’t happen to know his name, do you?” I asked Elvis.

  “Oh, I know much more than that.”

  I looked at him, surprised, but Elvis merely returned his attention to his hot dogs. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

  “Really?” I said. “You won’t tell me anything more?”

  “It’s not about won’t.”

  By then, the priest had reached us. Right away, judging by his grave expression—even graver than usual—I saw that I’d underestimated how bad his news was going to be. His face, with all its pockmarks and deep gouges, and with its weathered, grayish quality, reminded me of an old wooden fence. The lines in his face, once deep and sharp but now faded, were like graffiti carved with a knife by a teenager long ago.

  “I need to speak to you immediately, Myron,” he said, in hi
s deep, James Earl Jones voice. He gave Elvis a perfunctory nod. “Hello, again. I trust you know better than to tell people I was here?”

  Elvis, his attention fixed on rolling the hot dogs, replied with a grunt. The grill sizzled and spit out fumes of smoke, which plumed in the air.

  “How do you know each other?” I asked.

  “We’ve had ... past dealings,” the priest said. “The rest is not relevant, except that I know that he can keep a secret. Can we go up to your office? We should speak about this in private.”

  I turned the page in my newspaper, suddenly very interested in the article about rezoning part of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. “I’m actually pretty busy right now.”

  “You don’t seem busy.”

  “Just came out for some air. Got a lot on my plate.”

  “Really? You haven’t had even a small case in over a month.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Myron, please. This is quite serious, so let’s skip—”

  “Are you a paying client?”

  “If we could just go upstairs to your—”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “This one has to be off the books, Myron. When you hear why—”

  “I don’t need to hear why,” I said. “I don’t need to hear anything from you at all. Or the Department of Souls. Or whoever you actually work for. Whatever crap you’re mixed up with, I don’t want any part of it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

  Folding my newspaper with a snap and tucking it under my arm, I turned to go. Myron Vale, exit stage left, with plenty of attitude—even if in reality all that was waiting for me upstairs was a half-finished game of Sudoku.

  “Myron—” the priest called after me.

  “Forget it.”

  “Myron, please. There was a murder. A terrible one.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “We need your help. When you hear the details—”

  “Nope.”

  I was almost to the door. I didn’t think there was much he could say to stop me, but of course I was wrong.

  “It involves your father,” he said.