The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  She decided that she ought to see everyone. If she found herself personally uncomfortable with a client’s energy, then she wouldn’t see that person anymore. That had been her policy all along. But she wouldn’t prejudge any of them, wouldn’t screen them in advance.

  “But it’s impossible to fit everyone in,” she told Claire Warburton. “I’m just lucky I got a last-minute cancellation or I wouldn’t have been able to schedule you until the end of next week.”

  “How does it feel to be an overnight success after all these years?”

  “Is that what I am? A success? Sometimes I think I liked it better when I was a failure. No, I don’t mean that, but no more do I like being booked as heavily as I am, I’ll tell you that. The work is exhausting. I’m seeing four people a day, and yesterday I saw five, which I’ll never do again. It drains you.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But the gentleman was so persistent, and I thought, well, I do have the time. But by the time the day was over…”

  “You were exhausted.”

  “I certainly was. And I hate to book appointments weeks in advance, or to refuse to book them at all. It bothers me to turn anyone away, because how do I know that I’m not turning away someone in genuine need? For years I had less business than I would have preferred, and now I have too much, and I swear I don’t know what to do about it.” She frowned. “And when I meditate on it, I don’t get anywhere at all.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Claire said. “You don’t need to look in a crystal for this one. Just look at a balance sheet.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sylvia,” Claire said, “raise your damn rates.”

  “My rates?”

  “For years you’ve been seeing a handful of people a week and charging them twenty-five dollars each, and wondering why you’re poor as a churchmouse. Raise your rates and you’ll increase your income to a decent level—and you’ll keep yourself from being overbooked. The people who really need you will pay the higher price, and the curiosity seekers will think twice.”

  “But the people who’ve been coming to me for years—”

  “You can grandfather them in,” Claire said. “Confine the rate increase to new customers. But I wouldn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “No, and I’m costing my own self money by saying this, but I’ll say it anyhow. People appreciate less what costs them less. That woman in California, drives the red Tosteroni? You think she’d treasure that car if somebody sold it to her for five thousand dollars? You think People Magazine would print a picture of her standing next to it? Raise your rates and everybody’ll think more of you, and pay more attention to the advice you give ’em.”

  “Well,” she said, slowly, “I suppose I could go from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars…”

  “Fifty,” Claire said firmly. “Not a penny less.”

  * * *

  —

  In the end, she had to raise her fee three times. Doubling it initially had the paradoxical effect of increasing the volume of calls. A second increase, to seventy-five dollars, was a step in the right direction, slowing the flood of calls; she waited a few months, then took a deep breath and told a caller her price was one hundred dollars a session.

  And there it stayed. She booked three appointments a day, five days a week, and pocketed fifteen hundred dollars a week for her efforts. She lost some old clients, including a few who had been coming to her out of habit, the way they went to get their hair done. But it seemed to her that the ones who stayed actually listened more intently to what she saw in the cards or crystal, or channeled while she lay in trance.

  “Told you,” Claire said. “You get what you pay for.”

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon there was a call from Detective Jeffcote. There was a case, she might have heard or read about it, and could she possibly help him with it? She had appointments scheduled, she said, but she could come to the police station as soon as her last client was finished, and—

  “No, I’ll come to you,” he said. “Just tell me when’s a good time.”

  He turned up on the dot. His hair was very short, she noticed, and he seemed more confident and self-possessed than when she’d seen him before. In the living room, he accepted a cup of tea and told her about the girl who’d gone missing, an eleventh-grader named Peggy Mae Turlock. “There hasn’t been much publicity,” he said, “because kids her age just go off sometimes, but she’s an A student and sings in the church choir, and her parents are worried. And I just thought, well…”

  She reminded him that she’d had three nights of nightmares and headaches when Melissa Sporran disappeared.

  “As if the information was trying to get through,” he said. “And you haven’t had anything like that this time? Because I brought her sunglasses case, and a baseball jacket they tell me she wore all the time.”

  “We can try,” she said.

  She took him into her studio, lit two of the new scented candles, seated him on the chaise and took the chair for herself. She draped Peggy Mae’s jacket over her lap and held the green vinyl eyeglass case in both hands. She closed her eyes, breathed slowly and deeply.

  After a while she said, “Pieces.”

  “Pieces?”

  “I’m getting these horrible images,” she said, “of dismemberment, but I don’t know that it has anything to do with the girl. I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

  “You picking up any sense of where she might be, or of who might have put her there?”

  She slowed her breathing, let herself go deep, deep.

  “Down down down,” she said.

  “How’s that, Ms. Belgrave?”

  “Something in a well,” she said. “And old rusty chain going down into a well, and something down there.”

  * * *

  —

  A search of wells all over the country divulged no end of curious debris, including a skeleton that turned out to be that of a large dog. No human remains were found, however, and the search was halted when Peggy Mae came home from Indianapolis. She’d gone there for an abortion, expecting to be back in a day or so, but there had been medical complications. She’d been in the hospital there for a week, never stopping to think that her parents were afraid for her life, or that the police were probing abandoned wells for her dismembered corpse.

  Sylvia got a call when the girl turned up. “The important thing is she’s all right,” he said, “although I wouldn’t be surprised if right about now she wishes she was dead. Point is you didn’t let us down. You were trying to home in on something that wasn’t there in the first place, since she was alive and well all along.”

  “I’m glad she’s alive,” she said, “but disappointed in myself. All of that business about wells.”

  “Maybe you were picking up something from fifty years ago,” he said. “Who knows how many wells there are, boarded up and forgotten years ago? And who knows what secrets one or two of them might hold?”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  Perhaps he was. But all the same the few days when the police were looking in old wells was a professional high water mark for her. After the search was called off, after Peggy Mae came home in disgrace, it wasn’t quite so hard to get an appointment with Sylvia Belgrave.

  * * *

  —

  Three nights of nightmares and fitful sleep, three days of headaches. And, awake or asleep, a constant parade of hideous images.

  It was hard to keep herself from running straight to the police. But she forced herself to wait, to let time take its time. And then on the morning after the third unbearable night she showered away the stale night sweat and put on a skirt and a blouse and a flowered hat. She sat in the garden with a cup of hot water and lemon juice, then rinsed it in the kitchen sink and went to her c
ar.

  The car was a Taurus, larger and sleeker and, certainly, newer than her old Tempo, but it did no more and no less than the Tempo had done. It conveyed her from one place to another. This morning it brought her to the police station, and her feet brought her the rest of the way—into the building, and through the corridors to Detective Norman Jeffcote’s office.

  “Ms. Belgrave,” he said. “Have a seat, won’t you?”

  His hair was longer than it had been when he’d come to her house. He hadn’t regrown it entirely, hadn’t once again taken to combing it over the bald spot, but neither was it as flatteringly short as she’d advised him to keep it.

  And there was something unsettling about his energy. Maybe it had been a mistake to come.

  She sat down and winced, and he asked her if she was all right. “My head,” she said, and pressed her fingertips to her temples.

  “You’ve got a headache?”

  “Endless headaches. And bad dreams, and all the rest of it.”

  “I see.”

  “I didn’t want to come,” she said. “I told myself not to intrude, not to be a nuisance. But it’s just like the first time, when that girl disappeared.”

  “Melissa Sporran.”

  “And now there’s a little boy gone missing,” she said.

  “Eric Ackerman.”

  “Yes, and his address is no more than half a mile from my house. Maybe that’s why all these impressions have been so intense.”

  “Do you know where he is now, Ms. Belgrave?”

  “I don’t,” she said, “but I do feel connected to him, and I have the strong sense that I might be able to help.”

  He nodded. “And your hunches usually pay off.”

  “Not always,” she said. “That was confusing the year before last, sending you to look in wells.”

  “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

  “Surely not.”

  He leaned forward, clasped his hands. “The Ackerman boy, Ms. Belgrave. You think he’s all right?”

  “Oh, I wish I could say yes.”

  “But you can’t.”

  “The nightmares,” she said, “and the headaches. If he were all right, the way the Turlock girl was all right—”

  “There’d be no dreams.”

  “That’s my fear, yes.”

  “So you think the boy is…”

  “Dead,” she said.

  He looked at her for a long moment before he nodded. “I suppose you’d like some article connected with the boy,” he said. “A piece of clothing, say.”

  “If you had something.”

  “How’s this?” he said, and opened a drawer and brought out a teddy bear, its plush fur badly worn, the stitches showing where it had been ripped and mended. Her heart broke at the sight of it and she put her hand to her chest.

  “We ought to have a record of this,” he said, propping a tape recorder on the desk top, pressing a button start it recording. “So that I don’t miss any of the impressions you pick up. Because you can probably imagine how frantic the boy’s parents are.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So do you want to state your name for the record?”

  “My name?”

  “Yes, for the record.”

  “My name is Sylvia Belgrave.”

  “And you’re a psychic counselor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re here voluntarily.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why don’t you take the teddy bear, then. And see what you can pick up from it.”

  She thought she’d braced herself, but she was unprepared for the flood of images that came when she took the little stuffed bear in her hands. They were more vivid than anything she’d experienced before. Perhaps she should have expected as much; the dreams, and the headaches, too, were worse than they’d been after Melissa Sporran’s death, worse than years ago, when Gordon Sawyer drowned.

  “Smothered,” she managed to say. “A pillow or something like it over his face. He was struggling to breathe and…and he couldn’t.”

  “And he’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “And would you happen to know where, Ms. Belgrave?”

  Her hands tightened on the teddy bear. The muscles in her arms and shoulders went rigid, bracing to keep the images at bay.

  “A hole in the ground,” she said.

  “A hole in the ground?”

  “A basement!” Her eyes were closed, her heart pounding. “A house, but they haven’t finished building it yet. The outer walls are up but that’s all.”

  “A building site.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the body’s in the basement.”

  “Under a pile of rags,” she said.

  “Under a pile of rags. Any sense of where, Ms. Belgrave? There are a lot of houses under construction. It would help if we knew what part of town to search.”

  She tried to get her bearings, then realized she didn’t need them. Her hand, of its own accord, found the direction and pointed.

  “North and west,” he said. “Let’s see, where’s there a house under construction, ideally one they stopped work on? Seems to me there’s one just off Radbourne Road about a quarter of a mile past Six Mile Road. You think that might be the house, Ms. Belgrave?”

  She opened her eyes. He was reaching across to take the teddy bear from her. She had to will her fingers to open to release it.

  “We’ve got some witnesses,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “A teenager mowing a lawn who saw Eric Ackerman getting into a blue Taurus just like the one you’ve got parked across the street. He even noticed the license plate, but then it’s the kind you notice, isn’t it? 2ND SITE. Second sight, eh? Perfect for your line of work.”

  God, her head was throbbing.

  “A woman in a passing car saw you carrying the boy to the house. She didn’t spot the vanity plate, but she furnished a good description of the car, and of you, Ms. Belgrave. She thought it was odd, you see. The way you were carrying him, as if he was unconscious, or even dead. Was he dead by then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You killed him first thing? Smothered him?”

  “With a pillow,” she said. “I wanted to do it right away, before he became afraid. And I didn’t want him to suffer.”

  “Real considerate.”

  “He struggled,” she said, “and then he was still. But I didn’t realize just how much he suffered. It was over so quickly, you see, that I told myself he didn’t really suffer a great deal at all.”

  “And?”

  “And I was wrong,” she said. “I found that out in the dreams. And just now, holding the bear…”

  He was saying something but she couldn’t hear it. She was trembling, and the headache was too much to be borne, and she couldn’t follow his words. He brought her a glass of water and she drank it, and that helped a little.

  “There were other witnesses, too,” he said, “once we found the body, and knew about the car and the license plate. People who saw your car going to and from the construction site. The chief wanted to have you picked up right away, but I talked him into waiting. I figured you’d come in and tell us all about it yourself.”

  “And here I am,” she heard herself say.

  “And here you are. You want to tell me about it from the beginning?”

  * * *

  —

  She told it all simply and directly, how she’d selected the boy, how she got him to come into the car with her, how she’d killed him and dumped the body in the spot she’d selected in advance. How she’d gone home, and washed her hands, and waited through three days and nights of headaches and bad dreams.

  “Ever kill anybody before, Ms. Belgrave?”

  “No,” she said. “No, of co
urse not.”

  “Ever have anything to do with Eric Ackerman or his parents?”

  “No.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Second sight,” she said.

  “Second…”

  “Second sight. Vanity plates. Vanity.”

  “Vanity?”

  “All is vanity,” she said, and closed her eyes for a moment. “I never made more than a hundred fifty dollars a week,” she said, “and nobody knew me or paid me a moment’s attention, but that was all right. And then Melissa Sporran was killed, and I was afraid to come in but I came in anyway. And everything changed.”

  “You got famous.”

  “For a little while,” she said. “And my phone started ringing, and I raised my rates, and my phone rang even more. And I was able to help people, more people than I’d ever helped before, and they were making use of what I gave them, they were taking it seriously.”

  “And you bought a new car.”

  “I bought a new car,” she said, “and I bought some other things, and I stopped being famous, and the ones who only came because they were curious stopped coming when they stopped being curious, and old customers came less often because they couldn’t afford it, and…”

  “And business dropped off.”

  “And I thought, I could help so many more people if, if it happened again.”

  “If a child died.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you helped.”

  “Yes. And I waited, you know, for something to happen. And there were crimes, there are always crimes. There were even murders, but there was nothing that gave me the dreams and the headaches.”