Tombs of Endearment

by Casey Daniels

  I actually might have been cheered by this thought if I wasn’t so busy being frustrated by the traffic that jammed Euclid Avenue, the main artery between the cemetery and the County Archives. Too impatient to wait out the bumper-to-bumper nightmare, I inched close enough to the nearest viable-looking cross street, turned—and found a utility crew had the street dug up directly in front of me.

  “This way, honey!” A guy in a hard hat and a reflective neon orange vest waved me around the mess. I followed where he pointed and tried to get my bearings, but this was an unfamiliar part of town. Maybe if I turned left at the next main street, circled around downtown and…

  My best-laid plans went up in smoke when I found myself hemmed in by the results of an earlier accident involving a van and a utility pole. Power lines were down across the sidewalk, and one side of the street was completely blocked by huge utility trucks and a crew of guys restringing the lines.

  I grumbled my displeasure, but at this point, there was little else I could do. I waited my turn to get by the mess, my teeth clenched around my frustration. Eager to get my mind on something else, I tried the radio again.

  A song by Mind at Large—and Damon Curtis—was playing.

  Like I was going to let that stop me?

  I switched stations.

  The same song blared out at me over the airwaves.

  When I screamed my opinion of this, the cop directing traffic in the middle of the next intersection thought I was talking to him. I smiled and waved as a way of letting him know not to take it personally, and when he stabbed his hand to the left, I turned. It was that or risk getting on his bad side.

  By the time it was all over, I found myself directly in front of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

  “No way,” I told myself, but hey, it’s hard to argue with facts, and the Rock Hall in all its glass and chrome glory was one large and unmistakable fact. In the morning sunshine, the building sparkled like a beauty queen’s smile.

  I refused to be tricked; I looked the other way.

  “No,” I said, my voice as firm as my conviction. “No way am I getting suckered in by another ghost and another case that means putting my life in jeopardy because of somebody who’s already dead anyway. No way am I even thinking about it. No way am I looking at the building. No way am I stopping. Or—”

  My rant was interrupted when my car bucked and pulled to the right as sharply as if another pair of hands had taken over the steering wheel. I careened toward the curb, and if I hadn’t jammed on the brake’s, I might have gone right over it. Curious, I turned off the ignition and got out of the car.

  It didn’t take a mechanical genius to see that my front right tire was as flat as a pancake.

  “Son of a bitch!” I moaned, and a couple of people walking by turned to stare. They probably thought I was complaining about the tire.

  They couldn’t possibly know that the flat was the farthest thing from my mind.

  Still grumbling, I fished a handful of change out of my purse and dropped it into the nearest parking meter. When I strode to the front doors of the Rock Hall, there was fire in my eyes and mayhem on my mind.

  Neither was slaked by the huge poster hanging outside advertising a reunion concert for Mind at Large. Still rockin’ after all these years, it said, and it featured two pictures of the band, one recent (and the guys in it, old and tired-looking) and one taken forty years ago when Damon Curtis was still young, hot, sexy—and very much alive.

  Chapter 2

  From where I stood just inside the front doors of the Rock Hall, I could look up at the glass structure that surrounded me and see the fat, white clouds that floated above the building. They weren’t the only things that attracted my attention. The place is, after all, a testimonial to everything innovative, fun and rebellious about rock and roll. I shifted my gaze from the great outdoors to the indoor funk. There was a display of huge guitars next to me, all painted in striking colors. Across from where I stood, two giant neon signs that had once been used as the backdrop to some group’s concert scenery were suspended high above the floor. Dangling nearby was a humongous hot dog (complete with bun and relish). This, I didn’t have time to wonder about.

  My eyes on the brightly lit marquee that advertised the upcoming Mind at Large concert, I paid my admission fee and headed off on a ghost hunt of my own.

  Easier said than done.

  The hall is a maze of sound and color, and the more exhibits I wound my way through, the more lost I got. Fortunately, I ran across a guy wearing a Rock Hall shirt.

  I asked for the Ancient History Department.

  He gave me a blank stare.

  Until I explained that I was looking for Damon Curtis.

  Normal person that he was, he thought I was looking for the exhibit about Damon Curtis.

  I left him to his delusion, followed his directions, and got down to business.

  Turns out, Damon Curtis has one entire wall devoted to him, and nearing it, I slowed my steps and waited for the cleaning woman who was wiping down the glass exhibit cases to finish her work. She didn’t look like she belonged in the same class as the hall employee who’d directed me to the exhibit. Which is a kind way of saying that he was well-groomed and dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. And she…

  The woman was wearing a pink and purple filmy skirt that skimmed her bony knees, and an orange T-shirt that was a couple of sizes too small. Maybe that was intentional; she had no figure to speak of, and with the shirt being that tight, it was impossible not to notice that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She was probably in her sixties, and believe me when I say this: It was a wise fashionista indeed who once advised women of a certain age to cut their hair. This woman’s hair was poker-straight and hung to the middle of her back. It was the color of a field mouse, shot through with gray, and it framed a long, bony face that on a good day might have generously been called homely. Her cheeks sagged. There were dark circles under her eyes. The overall impression was of a particularly sad donkey. Even if she was singing a Mind at Large song as she worked.

  She took a last swipe at the glass case. That’s when she noticed me and stopped singing. Her eyes lit. “Death is my confidant,” she said. I figured it must have been a lyric from a Mind at Large song.

  “Go death!” I gave her the thumbs-up but I have to admit, when she finished and walked away, I was more than a little relieved.

  Dealing with my Gift was challenge enough. I didn’t need to throw odd living people into the mix.

  Finally with the exhibit to myself, I was able to stand back and take in the overall picture.

  DAMON CURTIS: AMERICAN IDOLATER is what the sign above the exhibit said. Displayed all around it in frames and in the glass exhibit cases that were now officially sparkling clean were bits and pieces of the rock star’s life.

  Handwritten snippets of song lyrics shared space with album covers. A leather jacket that sported enough fringe to make a cowboy proud hung next to an old photo of the guys in the band standing with an older man. Compared to their shaggy tresses, his bald head stuck out like a…well, like a bald head. There were stage passes, concert tickets, and even some of Damon’s elementary school report cards on display. In the center of it all was a black-and-white photo of Damon, larger than life. I took one look and sucked in a breath. Stared. Oh yeah, and drooled just a little.

  The one and only time I’d seen Damon, it was from a distance. I’d noticed that he was good-looking, of course. I would have had to have been blind not to. But there’s a difference between simply good-looking and oh-my-god.

  Damon Curtis fit into the latter category.

  He had dark hair, and it tumbled around his shoulders in the sort of arty disarray that made me think the picture had been taken just as he got out of bed.

  I wondered what he was doing while he was in there. And who he’d been doing it with.

  He had dark eyes, too. Even in the colorless photo, they looked like they were lit with fire.

&nb
sp; His body…well…that was to die for.

  He was standing in front of a window draped by gauzy curtains that diffused the sunlight until it was as soft as a watercolor. It caressed Damon from behind, outlining the tattered jeans slung low across his hips, his bare chest, and his slim, athletic body. There was a sprinkling of dark hair on his chest that arrowed down toward his waist, and a tiny tattoo of a star near his heart. Just over his left shoulder, the curtain was torn, and a stab of sunlight grazed the left side of his face and rushed toward the viewer like a comet.

  It was hokey in a sixties, psychedelic-poetic sort of way. It was also self-indulgent, egotistical, and just about the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

  The Rock Hall was chilly.

  I was suddenly hot enough to self-combust.

  I didn’t even realize I wasn’t breathing until my lungs screamed for air. The momentary oxygen deprivation shook me out of my stupor. I gasped, told my hormones to behave, and reminded myself that sexy or not, Damon Curtis was a big ol’ ghostly nuisance.

  One I needed to deal with ASAP. Before he took up any more of my time.

  “I’m here,” I said. There was nobody near the exhibit but me, but I looked around anyway, just to be sure no one heard and thought I was a loony. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to see me? To talk to me? Well, here I am.”

  In spite of the way those shows on TV portray things, real ghosts aren’t much into grand entrances. At least not the ghosts I’ve run into. They show up. Just like that. And they look just like regular, living people, too. They’re not see-through. There’s no glowing aura around them. Actually, except that no one can see them but me and that they’re incorporeal and so can’t do anything for themselves that involves this world (like open doors or turn the pages of a book), the dead aren’t all that different from the living. Well, except for the fact that they’re dead, of course. And that if they happen to touch a living person, that person freezes like a Popsicle. I ought to know. My first dead client, Gus Scarpetti, had once pushed me out of the path of a speeding car, and just that bit of contact left me chilled to the bone for days.

  Grand entrances aside, there was no sign of Damon Curtis.

  Was this good news? Or bad?

  I wasn’t sure, and while I digested it, I inched nearer to the exhibit to take a closer look.

  Damon is a smarter-than-average little boy, the notation on his second grade report card said. But he sometimes has trouble controlling his behavior.

  “Rock star in training,” I mumbled.

  Your thesis shows a spark of originality. This was a note from his English 101 professor, written at the top of a paper about some Shakespearean play and displayed right next to a sign that said Damon had flunked out of college soon after he’d gotten this particular failing grade. Sadly, your ideas are often disjointed and not followed through to their logical conclusions. You have the tendency to rely too heavily on simile and metaphor even when it is not appropriate, and often your symbolism is ambiguous and thus, perplexing.

  “That explains the songs that make no sense,” I told myself.

  Medical Certificate of Death.

  Though I am in the business of the dead (both at the cemetery and in my private investigator’s life), this next bit of memorabilia threw me for a loop.

  I looked up at the photo of Damon Curtis that stood watch over his exhibit. As I might have mentioned, in it he was young and vital, as tempting as sin and very much alive.

  I looked down into the exhibit case, at the facts about his death laid out in cold, hard terms by the Bureau of Vital Statistics.

  Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself.

  Cause of Death: heart failure.

  Though my father is a doctor (I should say was a doctor, since he lost his medical license because of a little matter of insurance fraud), I had never aspired to follow in his footsteps. Still, it didn’t take a medical wunderkind to know that every death is ultimately caused by heart failure. One second it’s working, the next, nada. So this bit of info didn’t tell me much about Damon. The sign next to the death certificate, though, did.

  On June 22, 1971, while in Cleveland on a Mind at Large concert tour, lead singer Damon Michael Curtis, age 27, died from an overdose of drugs. Though the Cleveland Police Department conducted an extensive investigation, they were never able to determine if the overdose was accidental or if, like the tormented souls who inhabited so many of his dark lyrics and his grim poetry, Curtis made the conscious decision to end his life. His parents, who lived on a farm in Illinois, were strongly religious. Throughout Mind at Large’s meteoric rise to fame, they refused to acknowledge their son’s stardom. After his death, they declined to take responsibility for the body or the burial. Damon Curtis was laid to rest in Cleveland, at Garden View Cemetery.

  Laid to rest. But not in peace.

  I thought this over as I moved on to the next part of the exhibit where some of those “dark lyrics” of Damon’s were displayed. The first of them looked as if it had been scribbled in the heat of inspiration. The words were written on a pizza box in green Magic Marker. The resulting song, the museum information card said, had sold more than two million copies in less than a month and catapulted Mind at Large past the Beatles, the Stones, and the Doors on the charts and into the forefront of the psychedelic pop movement.

  “Dragon’s Breath.”

  The song was popular way before my time, but I knew it, anyway. It was the one that had been playing on not one, but two radio stations while I was in the car earlier. Like it or not, the tune pounded through my head as I read the lyrics.

  Lizard scales and devil’s wings.

  Bloody, spoiled soul.

  I’ll leave you, love, in your heat, in your sweat.

  Sated, gorged.

  My black butterfly body,

  Wet from the chrysalis.

  I wasn’t so sure about that whole lizard-scales-and-devil’s-wing thing, but similes and metaphors aside, I think I knew what was what when it came to the butterfly body in the wet chrysalis. No wonder the world knew Damon Curtis as an iconoclast. Back in the late sixties when “Dragon’s Breath” was recorded, the lyrics and the driving music that accompanied them must have put more peoples’ knickers in a twist than just Mr. and Mrs. Curtis back on that farm in Illinois.

  “I’ll leave you, love, in your heat. In your sweat. Sated, gorged. My black butterfly body, wet from the chrysalis.”

  The words tickled their way through me. That was because someone had whispered them in my ear.

  It didn’t take a genius—dark or otherwise—to recognize the blistering, baritone voice.

  “It’s about time you showed up,” I said, rethinking the whole grand entrances thing. But then, I guess a rock star would be more into drama than most other ghosts. “We need to talk about the way you’ve been bugging me.”

  Only we couldn’t.

  Because when I turned around, there was no one there.

  I grumbled a curse Farmer Curtis and his wife would not have appreciated.

  It was met with a chuckle that came from somewhere on my right.

  But there was no one over there, either.

  “Fine.” Just to show I’d had it, I emphasized my point by slapping a hand against the glass display case in front of me. “If that’s the way you want to be, have it your way. I came here to talk to you. But hey, if you’re going to play hard-to-get, I guess there’s nothing we have to say to each other. I’m leaving, and here’s the scoop. I’m not going to tolerate any more of your songs on the radio. And no more flat tires. So you might as well stop trying to get my attention. Nothing you do is going to bring me back here. You had your chance. You blew it.”

  I stomped away from the exhibit without so much as another glance.

  None of this helped soothe my temper. Annoyed, I moved through the museum, heading in what I figured was the direction of the escalator that would take me back to the first floor.

  My bad luck, by t
he time I was halfway there, a long line of patrons was just heading into the exhibit area. They were part of a tour, and when they all stopped to gawk at the costumes that had once been worn by the likes of David Bowie and Elton John, I was trapped. I couldn’t get through them. I couldn’t get around them.

  Never let it be said that I believe in stereotypes. There’s absolutely no truth to the fact that I have a low threshold of patience because I’m a redhead. Any right-thinking woman would have tapped her foot and mumbled at the inconvenience. Right-thinking woman that I am, I did just that.