A Ghost in the Glamour

by Elizabeth Hunter

  Maybe too easy, to be honest. I had gone high on my price and he hadn’t even bargained.

  “This drip,” Frank muttered. “I swear to God, kid, you could do so much better.”

  Still ignoring you, Bogie.

  “So,” I said, “I should be finished by Wednesday morning at the latest.”

  “What am I going to do without you?” Jackson smiled.

  Was he flirting? Oh shit, I was really bad at flirting.

  So I smiled my stupid smile, because of course I did. And I laughed a little and gestured toward the door. “I go to the book store down the street a lot, so if your coffee doesn’t suck, I might be back.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Honest.”

  “Sorry.” I hadn’t meant to say that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was picky about coffee, but that sounded obnoxious. “I’m sure it’s going to be great.”

  “Not that she’ll like it, pretty boy. She doesn’t like anyone’s coffee but her own and her nan’s.” Frank was standing at the window watching the cars drive past. “Can we finish this up, please?”

  I’d kill him. If he wasn’t already dead.

  Though he was kind of right about the coffee.

  “I better finish this.” I gestured to the wall. “Get out of your hair.”

  “You’re always welcome.” He smiled. “In the shop. We’ve got wine as a backup if the coffee sucks.” He laughed. “I don’t know if you really want to hang out in my hair.”

  I laughed with him. And yes, I thought about his hair because it was long, but not too long, and it was really nice. Kind of wavy. The color of good caramel. Wavy caramel.

  “Please, make it stop.” Frank mimed banging his head against the wall. “You’d probably get stuck in his hair with all the junk he puts in it.”

  “Okay! I’m going to finish. Supposed to help my nan cook dinner tonight. Hoping to leave before three so the traffic…”

  Jackson grimaced because he was from Omaha or someplace where they ate a lot of wholesome dairy products—I was just going by his teeth—but he’d learned very quickly about Southern California traffic.

  “Right. Bye, Linx.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “I better go check with the guys. If you need anything before I leave…”

  “I’ll make sure I wave before I go,” I said. “Later, Jackson.”

  When I turned around, Frank was leaning against the wet paint. Luckily, none of it was going to get on his impeccable phantom suit.

  “Cupcake, this guy’s a drip. You’d be bored in two minutes if you weren’t so dazzled by his teeth.”

  I put my earpiece in and picked up the brushes I was using to texture the paint. “Shut up, Bogie.”

  “Tell Peggy about insulting Jackson’s coffee,” Frank said, leaning against the counter and peering over my nan’s shoulder as she browned the beef for the pie. Frank was the only one who called my nan Peggy since my granddad died.

  “I didn’t insult his coffee.” I was chopping carrots for the shepherd’s pie.

  “You insulted your boss’s coffee?” Nan said. “In his own coffee shop?”

  “One, he’s not my boss, he’s my client. And two, I didn’t insult it!”

  “You might as well have,” Frank said. “Did you see the look on his face?”

  “No— Wait, he had a look?”

  Nan looked up. “Who had a look?”

  “Jackson. Frank said he had a look.”

  “When?”

  “When I insulted his coffee.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t insult his coffee.” She looked toward Frank. Even though she couldn’t see or hear him, she could feel his presence. “Frank, are you telling tales?”

  All the women in my family were mediums, but I was the only one who saw Frank. Nan was a geographic medium. She tended to see ghosts who were bound to familiar places, which meant she saw a variety of dead people throughout her day. Mom was a familiar medium, which meant she spoke to dead people who were still hanging out around their loved ones.

  Me? No one knew what I was. Grandma had looked in the journals and apparently no Maxwell woman in the past four hundred years had reported being stuck with one ghost her whole life.

  God, please don’t let me be stuck with Frank my whole life.

  Maxwell women were also very Catholic, which meant I prayed about as often as I talked to ghosts. None of us saw any conflict of interest, but we tried not to think about it too much.

  “Peggy, you are a treasure.” Frank watched my nan with fond eyes. “They don’t make women like you anymore. Wish they did.”

  “Hey!”

  Frank adored my nan even though he refused to say it. He’d known my grandfather when he’d been alive. And by known, I mean arrested. He’d arrested my granddad.

  Nan said, “Well, Frank is a good judge of character. What does Frank think of Jackson?”

  “He’s a drip,” Frank said. “Boring pretty boy.”

  I shrugged. “He hasn’t said much.”

  Nan’s eyes danced. “From the agitation I’m feeling in this room, I say you’re lying through your teeth, Lindsay.”

  “So not cool.” Frank mimicked me. “Why don’t you tell her how straitlaced he is? Law abiding? No Maxwell woman has ever married a rule follower. You gonna be the first?”

  It was true. Maxwell women married con men and thieves. Fences and forgers. Nice men—not violent—but not precisely on the bright side of the legal line, if you know what I mean. One Maxwell woman had married a pirate and lived very comfortably as a man for most of her life. A man who was shagging the pirate captain on a very nonjudgmental pirate ship, I guess. Her journals weren’t too clear on the details. My granddad had been a very successful pawn broker (and sometimes fence) for most of his life, along with being a dedicated husband, father, and grandfather. My dad was a con man who’d ducked out when I was around four but still sent my mom and me money and postcards from random places like Singapore and the Maldives.

  Jackson Powers, on the other hand, was a Boy Scout. (Seriously, he’d mentioned that he was in the scouts until high school. I didn’t even know you could be in the Boy Scouts for that long.) Which was a little out of range for my normal type, but I figured I didn’t need any extra danger in my life. Not when I had Frank trying to make me into his girl Friday.

  “Frank, don’t you think Jackson…” I suddenly missed his presence. “Frank?”

  He was gone. He rarely up and left like that. Usually I had to shove him out the door to get rid of him.

  When I was young, my mom had described the door to me. She said all people had it, but most people kept it shut all the time. They didn’t even know the door was there. In our family, we had a tendency to leave it open. The trick was, we had to learn when to leave it open a crack and when to slam it shut.

  For my mom and my nan, slamming it shut was pretty common. For me, it was harder. Frank had been with me for a long time. Slamming the door shut on him felt rude when he was practically part of the family. So yes, I usually kept the door cracked open, but my Bogie was also considerate. One thing about the early twentieth century, it did breed the kind of courtesy you rarely see these days. He didn’t intrude on private moments, but when it was just my mom, my nan, and me hanging around, Frank usually joined the party.

  Frank disappearing felt wrong.

  “Nan, do you feel Frank around?”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “He’s in the living room.”

  I heard the TV as I walked down the hall. The air felt heavy around me, and I knew in a second that something was very wrong.

  “Bogie?” I halted in the doorway of the living room, spying Frank with his eyes glued to the television. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?”

  A woman on the news was speaking: “Representatives from the LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office say the bones of the woman will be examined for evidence, though it’s rare that cases like this are solved so many years after they take place. Tha
t said, the presence of a note buried with the victim might give them answers, since apparently it’s already given them the woman’s identity.”

  A male voice asked, “Deb, didn’t you say that LAPD already had a lead?”

  “They do, Ray. Of course, when the note found on a dead body is addressed to a deceased LAPD detective, finding a lead on this kind of cold case isn’t quite as difficult as it would be otherwise.”

  Frank’s arms were crossed over his chest and two lines marred his forehead.

  The male voice continued: “Just to give you some background if you’re new to this story, the bones of a woman who died over sixty years ago were uncovered yesterday afternoon in Griffith Park and have now been transferred to the LA County Medical Examiner’s office. Though the body was decomposed, the victim’s purse was recovered near the body, miraculously giving the police both her identity and leads to a very old case. Right now the medical examiner’s office is in charge of the remains, but LAPD was quick to issue this statement: ‘Nina King was last seen outside her home in Los Angeles on November 19, 1952. She was reported missing by a neighbor. The murder of Nina King now appears to be tied to the disappearance of Los Angeles Police Detective Frank Bogle, who vanished on March 14, 1953, while investigating Miss King’s missing-person case. All of Detective Bogle’s files remain in the archives. The LAPD does not close unsolved cases, and we do not forget our own. We will follow every lead to bring closure to the family of Miss King and to determine what happened to Detective Bogle. We believe that answers in one case could lead to both cases being solved.’”

  The station switched to commercial as I stared at Frank, my mouth gaping. He looked up for a heartbeat, and then he was gone.

  2

  Risking Arrest with Pretty Nerds

  Frank didn’t have much as a dead guy. A stellar taste in suits. A relentless sense of justice. And me.

  And I had Raul.

  “I’m going to get fired, I’m going to get fired, I’m going to get fired,” Raul chanted as he let me in the back door of the LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s main building on Mission. Not the pretty historic building in front, but the one where the bodies were kept.

  “You’re not going to get fired. We do this every time.” I patted Raul’s cheek and slipped in the maintenance entrance. “I love you, Raul.”

  “Not enough to let me see your boobs.”

  “Don’t be gross. Besides you don’t even like girls.”

  He shrugged. “But I like boobs.”

  Raul had massive shoulders that would have made me swoon (if he was anyone other than Raul) and a body I had painted many times. He was my most frequent nude model. His lips would launch a thousand fantasies if I didn’t know him so well.

  “So why are you getting fired this time?” I played innocent. “Have you been sexually harassing Eddie again?”

  “He wishes.” He put the borrowed uniform coat over my shoulders along with an ID lanyard he’d borrowed from Janie, one of the other lab techs in his department who looked a little like me without the fuchsia hair. Said fuchsia hair was tucked under a black cap so I didn’t glow in the dark. Raul ushered me down a familiar dark hallway. There was nobody in the building except for a few guys on intake and security; the ID was just a precaution.

  He said, “I am so going to get fired because this is not like other cases, Linx. Usually you want to see stuff that nobody pays attention to. But everyone is paying attention to glamour girl, okay?”

  I felt Frank behind me, and I paid no attention to him. He’d disappeared for three days after he’d seen the news, and I was kind of pissed at him. Usually he was the one harassing me to ask Raul for a favor, but not this time. This one was all me.

  “I love you, Raul.”

  “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

  “I’ll let you sleep on my nan’s couch if you get fired, go broke, and lose your amazing apartment.”

  “Thanks, that’s comforting.”

  “I hope you understand I really need to see her. It’s important, and I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

  Raul had never asked why I needed him to regularly break the law, but I think he thought I worked for an underground newspaper or blog or something. Maybe he just thought I was a freak. We’d been friends since high school. The fact that he worked at the medical examiner’s office was just a bonus. We had each other’s backs, because in our very homogeneous Southern California town, we were both considered “out there.” My family saw ghosts, so I’d been teased as the “Ghost Girl” all through school. His family was Haitian, which meant that no matter how many times he went to Mass, kids at school still thought his grandma was a voodoo priestess.

  Kids are stupid. To be fair, Gran Paulette wore awesome scarves and had a habit of spitting ominous-sounding Haitian phrases at little kids who stared at her too long. She found this hilarious. She and my nan got along well.

  When I’d heard the report on the television, I immediately wanted to read the note they mentioned. Something was eating me, and part of it felt like guilt.

  I’d never asked Frank how he died. It always seemed too intrusive.

  We spent so much time together we’d developed boundaries about certain things. I didn’t ask him about his personal life, but he had endless opinions about mine. He rarely offered commentary on my art, though we often talked about his past cases. He was young enough that I’d always suspected he’d died on the job, but asking the specifics felt morbid in a way I didn’t want to examine. Frank was my Bogie. My ghost. Thinking about Frank Bogle, the man, made his life something tragic.

  But after the news report, I had to know. I’d already put together a rough idea, but seeing glamour girl and the contents of her purse were things I could only do with Raul’s help.

  “I don’t need to see her bones—”

  “Yeah, you do.” Frank finally spoke up in a quiet voice.

  “—just the artifacts found with her body.”

  “We need to see the body, kid.”

  I didn’t want to see the body. I hated seeing the bodies.

  Raul said, “It’s the artifacts that have been the most interesting.”

  We turned down a hallway, and I ignored Frank’s huffed breath behind me. Like it or not, I steered this ship, and I didn’t want to see the body. I wanted to read the note. I wanted to see what Nina King was carrying when she died.

  Raul punched in a code that let us into a room with stale air scented with dirt and disinfectant. You might wonder how those scents coexisted. So did I. Nevertheless, there it was. Dirt. Disinfectant.

  “There wasn’t much. And if she had a suitcase or something, it wasn’t with her. Just this stuff.” He pointed to a box on the end of one counter. Just an ordinary plastic box like the kind my mom uses to store Christmas supplies. Raul opened it and spread his arm out. “There you go, freak.”

  “Why would there be a suitcase?”

  “Because of the note.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite.” I peered inside, and the first thing I saw was an old piece of stationery that had been stored in an archival plastic sleeve. The envelope was in a separate sleeve and was addressed to Frank Bogle. No address, just his name. I picked up the envelope and set it on the stainless steel counter before I got out my phone.

  “Linx.”

  “It won’t end up online. I promise.” I snapped a bunch of pics, making sure to get in close enough that I could read the letter from the photograph. I flipped it over and took pictures of the back and the envelope too. I could feel Frank behind me, trying to read over my shoulder, so I casually pushed the note farther down the counter so he could see it while I looked at the other contents of Nina King’s purse.

  A lipstick, the metal case still shiny but with a little rust at the seams.

  A compact mirror.

  A silver cigarette case.

  A coin purse.

  Two bus tickets too faded to read, though I knew techs might be able to read them from the impressi
ons.

  A scarf that looked like it could be silk.

  I glanced at the purse encased in a large plastic bag. “This is a nice purse.”

  “Very nice,” Raul said. “It’s the only reason this stuff is in such good condition. Vintage Hermès leather. The note was hidden in the lining. Guess whoever killed her didn’t think to look there. The purse was wrapped in a raincoat and buried on top of the body. Raincoat protected the purse. Purse protected the contents.”

  “Even the paper.”

  “Linen stationery. It’s the good stuff.”

  “This woman had money.”

  “No, but her boyfriend did.” Raul raised his eyebrows. “Read the note, Linx.”

  Frank was on the other side of the room, staring at the wall. I felt like a horrible voyeur, reading a letter addressed to him while he was in the room, but I couldn’t ask Raul the right questions if I didn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered as I picked it up.

  “For what?” Raul asked.

  Shit. “I just… feel bad for making you risk your job on something this high profile.”

  He gave me an incredulous look. “Yeah, right.”

  “What? I do.” I quickly took pictures of everything in the box. Tons of them from every angle I could think of. “Here, I’ve got pics of everything, okay? I can read the note at home.” I started putting everything away, exactly as it had been in the box.

  “Linx, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, of course.” My hand paused over the note, and I saw Frank’s head turn toward me. Our eyes met for a moment before I picked it up and placed it carefully back in the evidence box. “I’m fine. I’ll just head back home and go over everything there. You’re working on this?”

  His chest puffed up. “Who’s the pollen king, baby?”

  He was so pretty, but at the end of the day, he was still such a nerd. A pretty, pretty nerd.