Tombs of Endearment

by Casey Daniels

“I’ve packed it all away,” Vinnie said. “I’m done with magic.”

  Call me skeptical. I couldn’t get what Vinnie said out of my head, that stuff about how the songs had earned the band millions, and the rush he got from channeling, and, oh yeah, how chicks will do anything for songwriters. “You’re done with magic because you’re tired of being the center of attention, is that it?” I’d seen more than enough; I headed back into the living room. “I’m not buying it, Vinnie. Why would you quit now when you haven’t quit in the last forty years? Why should I trust you?”

  “How about because I’m dying?”

  That got my attention. I screeched to a stop and turned. “You’re—”

  “Dying. Yeah, that’s right.” Vinnie poked his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans. “I told you, I spend all my time with doctors and lawyers these days. That’s because I’m getting everything in line, you know? That concert at the Rock Hall? My docs say it’s going to be my last one.”

  My morbid curiosity got the best of me. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, and I had to give him credit, he didn’t look as resigned to his prognosis as much as he looked at peace with it. “Pancreatic cancer,” he said. “They say I’ve got a couple of months. If I’m lucky.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too!” Vinnie grinned. “But I’m grateful, too. I mean, I found out a couple weeks ago and since then, I’ve had time to get things in order and hey, maybe I’ve helped my cause a little, too. See, I gave away just about every cent I have to that hospital where they take care of kids with cancer. Told them they couldn’t say where the money came from, either, or I was taking it back. And if you’re thinking that I’m a great guy for doing it…” A soft smile touched his lips. “I’m just trying to oil a few palms. You know, so that when I hit the Pearly Gates they don’t send me packing for hell.”

  Did I still look dubious? I guess so, because Vinnie went back to the magic room, and I heard him messing around with those packing boxes. When he came back, he had two manila envelopes in his hands. He shoved them at me.

  “Here,” he said. “Take these. This will prove that I mean it when I say I’m not going to channel Damon again.”

  Neither envelope was sealed, and I peeked inside. The larger of the two had a couple of guitar picks in it, along with a string of love beads and a beat-up old bandana. The other, smaller, envelope was filled with snippings of dark hair.

  “It was Damon’s,” Vinnie said. “All of it. The guitar picks and stuff, that was easy to get. Damon always left stuff lying around.”

  I saw the flaw in Vinnie’s logic and called him on it. “And the hair?”

  “Damon was screwing some hairdresser chick. She used to love to trim his hair. You know, to make him look good before every show. Once, when she was done, I swept up the hair and kept it.”

  “But if you never planned to channel Damon—”

  “I didn’t. Not then. The hair…” He glanced away. “That was for something else.”

  “A different spell?”

  He nodded. “The hairdresser chick…I don’t remember her name…but she was mine first and a fine little piece of ass, too. Before Damon set his sights on her. I wanted her back. And see, that’s one of the first things they tell you when you learn magic. If you’re going to put a spell on somebody, you need something that belongs to them. Don’t you get it? None of it matters now. What matters is that I’ve had this stuff of Damon’s for years. I use a little bit of it each time I need a new song. And I had it all packed away. I was going to get rid of it. Once it’s gone, I can’t call on Damon’s spirit anymore. You’ve got to believe me!” Eager to prove he was telling the truth, Vinnie plucked the two envelopes out of my hands and looked around the room for a place to get rid of them. His gaze fell on the fireplace and the fire that sparkled there, and he hurried over to it and tossed the envelopes into the fire.

  For a second, nothing happened, and I wondered if the envelopes had smothered the fire. But then a finger of flame licked the side of the smaller envelope. A hiss of steam went up and a second later, a sound like thunder filled the room, so loud and so powerful that Vinnie and I both staggered back. Flames erupted and filled the fireplace, throwing a light show of orange and yellow against the walls.

  The next second, the fire burned itself out. All that was left was a small pile of ash and a plume of smoke that scrolled to the ceiling and disappeared.

  Vinnie swallowed hard. “See? It’s gone. All of it. Now do you believe me? There’s nothing more I can do to Damon now. I’ve got nothing left that belonged to him. I never meant to hurt him.”

  Softhearted or not, a private investigator does not have the luxury of letting somebody off the hook just because they grovel a bit. “You didn’t have anything to do with Damon’s death, did you?”

  “It was an accident. It had to be.” Vinnie spoke to the empty space over near the windows. “You had a lot to look forward to, Damon, so I know it wasn’t suicide.”

  “There’s one way for you to prove you’re sincere,” I told him.

  “Anything.”

  I knew Vinnie meant it and took him up on the offer. “Give me the candle and the guitar.”

  “Sure. Sure.” Vinnie went over to the piano and retrieved the items. “Like I said, I’m not going to need them. Not anymore. Once you get rid of that stuff…” He drew in a shaky breath and let it out slowly. “That’s the last of it. I won’t have a hold on Damon anymore. Once you get rid of this stuff, that should free him.”

  It was what Damon wanted. And exactly what I wanted, too.

  Wasn’t it?

  I asked myself the question as I tucked the candle into the crook of my arm and grabbed the guitar, and I was still wondering why it unsettled me as Damon and I rode the elevator down to the lobby in silence.

  Back outside in the late morning sunshine, I didn’t head for my car. Instead, I crossed to the far end of the property where the parking lot overlooked the lake. I set the candle and the guitar down on the waist-high wall that surrounded the lot and glanced down to the water, some twenty feet below.

  Maybe I wasn’t as tough as I liked to pretend I was. When I asked Damon the question, I didn’t have the nerve to look at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Hey, baby, you’re not changing your mind about helping me out, are you?”

  Maybe Damon wasn’t as committed to heading to the Great Beyond as he claimed to be, either. There was an undercurrent of emotion in his voice, and anxious to understand what it was, I turned to him.

  I was sorry I did. Regret shimmered in his eyes and in the smile he gave me. Was it for the life he’d led? Or because he’d been shackled to this earth long past his time? Or was there some other reason he was sorry to leave? Someone he was sorry to be leaving behind?

  My heart lurched, but before I had a chance to say anything, Damon spoke.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  “I know.” Which didn’t explain why I was so reluctant to make the final move. “It’s just that—”

  “What?”

  I bit my tongue. It was better to keep my mouth shut than to tell a guy who’d been dead since before I was born that I was going to miss him.

  Rather than take the chance of confessing my feelings and looking like a chump, I did exactly what I was supposed to do—I threw the candle in the lake. Damon stepped up to the wall, and side by side, we watched the candle bob. In my head, I imagined that Damon’s spirit was doing the same thing, hovering in some unnamed space between this world and the next.

  The candle finally went under the water. And Damon?

  I gave him a sidelong glance.

  Damon didn’t flutter or fizz or fade.

  As one, we turned our attention to the guitar.

  “I don’t think you can just toss it in,” he said. “I mean, someone might fish it out. Or it could just sink to the bottom and stay there and maybe that would mean I’d have to stay here, too, at least until it rots away.�
�

  He was right. I picked up the guitar, and maybe I was a little emotionally strung out and maybe my imagination was playing tricks on me. I swear I could feel Damon’s essence in it. I closed my eyes and cradled it, close to him in a physical way for the first time.

  But hey, strung out or not, I knew the feeling couldn’t last, so I clutched the skinny end of the guitar in both hands, backed up, and brought the guitar down on the wall as hard as I could.

  It shattered, and the boing of all the strings snapping at once echoed through the parking lot. A couple of people getting into their cars not far away stopped and stared and pointed.

  I didn’t care. Before anyone could stop me, I scooped up the pieces and tossed them into the lake. The guitar was the last connection Vinnie had to Damon. There was no way he could channel him again, no way he could hold Damon’s spirit to earth, and I knew it. I knew I couldn’t watch Damon fade and blur into nothingness, so I kept my eyes on the water, watching until I saw every last fragment of guitar sink.

  “Well…” Big points for me, I was pretty good at fooling myself. Even though I was talking to nobody but me, I managed to sound like my throat wasn’t clogged with emotion. “That’s that. It’s over. It’s done. Damon’s—”

  “Still here.”

  When I heard Damon’s voice behind me, I jumped and squealed.

  As if he was just as surprised as I was, he looked down at himself and held his hands out to examine them. His left hand was still washed-out, but other than that, he looked the same as ever.

  Okay, so it wasn’t the most politically correct thing to say to a dead guy who was hoping to move on to the trip of all trips, but I couldn’t help myself. I blinked and stammered, “What the hell are you still doing here?”

  Chapter 9

  Much to Ella’s delight, I stayed late at work that day. What Ella didn’t know was that I wasn’t combing through the cemetery files looking for more immigration information like I said I’d be doing. I was down at Damon’s grave, and he and I…well, we were trying to figure out why he wasn’t wherever he should have been now that Vinnie’s power over him was gone.

  We got nowhere together, and when I finally gave up and went home and thought about it some more, I got nowhere alone. Except, of course, for the nagging and uncomfortable feelings that kept me awake half the night—the ones that made me wonder what the hell was wrong with me. And why I wasn’t sorry that Damon hadn’t crossed over.

  By the next day, I was so tired of thinking (and feeling what I had no business feeling about a dead guy), that my brain hurt. “It doesn’t make any sense.” I dropped my head down on my desk. It helped with the pounding. “Vinnie’s not holding you here anymore.”

  “Unless he is, and he’s lying.”

  This was, of course, one of the first theories we’d discussed the night before. Now, as then, I dismissed it. I sat up, and because my hair was loose, I shoved it out of my bloodshot eyes so I could look across my desk to where Damon was sitting in my guest chair. “I believe him,” I said. “Don’t ask me why. But if he’s really sick like he says he is, if he really gave away all his money…It’s pretty clear that Vinnie’s trying to turn over a new leaf. And he does feel really guilty about the channeling. You saw how upset he got when I told him what it was doing to you. It seems impossible, but it all adds up. I believe him.”

  Damon sighed. “So do I.”

  All of which, of course, put us right back where we started.

  I didn’t dare breathe a word about what I’d been thinking the night before. I mean, about how maybe it wasn’t so bad that Damon was sticking around after all. But I didn’t dare not mention it, either. If I didn’t say anything, and if Damon had already thought the same things I was thinking, then I’d not only look obvious, but stupid, to boot.

  When I brought up the subject, I wanted it to sound less like an obsession and more like an oh-yeah-I-forgot-to-mention-this-P.S., so I moved around the piles of papers on my desk to make it look like I was busy. Since I wasn’t known for my filing skills and there were plenty of papers and plenty of piles, I had a good excuse for not meeting Damon’s eyes. “I don’t know, I think maybe there’s nothing we can do. Maybe…” Was that me sounding like a love-struck teenager? I gave myself a mental slap and gulped down my mortification. “Maybe you’ll just have to stick around for a while.”

  “Pepper…”

  It wasn’t Damon saying my name, it was the way he said it that forced me to look up.

  I don’t think I ever knew exactly what bittersweet meant until that moment. Because that’s what the smile Damon gave me was, gentle and warm at the same time it was filled with emotion so sharp that I sucked in a breath and collapsed back in my chair, as if a hot knife had sliced my heart into little pieces.

  “Wish I could stay around.” He didn’t elaborate. All he did was hold up his left hand.

  I could barely see it. Or part of his arm.

  I don’t panic easily. At least not unless I have a really good reason. This was a really good reason.

  I sat up straight, and my brain froze. All I could think about was what might happen if I didn’t help Damon cross over before he disappeared completely. If he was never allowed on the Other Side, and he disappeared from this one…

  A terrible vision filled my head. It was of a lonely place where the spirits who didn’t belong anywhere spent eternity lost and all alone. Yeah, I wanted Damon to stick around. For purely selfish reasons. But not at that price.

  I slapped my hand against the desk and stood. I hoped that moving around the office would kick my brain into gear, so I paced to the door and back again.

  “We’ve got to do something,” I said. It was an understatement, but I couldn’t think of anything profound. “It was easy with my other cases,” I grumbled. “Gus and Didi both had unfinished business, and once we finished it, they were able to go to the Other Side. But you died of an accidental overdose. Everyone knows that. But if you’re still here, maybe you do have—”

  Call me slow. Or maybe I was just so caught up in thinking Damon was going to vanish, and then so relieved when he didn’t, that I hadn’t been able to think straight.

  “Unfinished business.” Damon and I said the words together, and now that we were finally getting somewhere, I hurried over to my desk and sat back down.

  “If the overdose wasn’t accidental then maybe what’s holding you here isn’t the channeling. Maybe you’re being held here—”

  “Until we find out what really happened that night I died.”

  “Shit.”

  At my vehement reply, Damon raised an eyebrow. “This is good news, isn’t it? I thought this was exactly what we were trying to figure out.”

  “It is. But you see what it means, don’t you? I’ve just talked myself into another murder investigation.”

  The most logical place to start was with Vinnie. I bought myself some time by telling Ella I needed another trip to the County Archives. It wasn’t a total lie. Number one, because I did need more information if I was ever going to add to all those files Ella had pulled out. Number two, because the County Archives was in the same direction as Vinnie’s Gold Coast penthouse. Sort of.

  With Damon riding shotgun, I headed back to the suburb of Lakewood.

  I only had to endure a couple of winks and one comment from the doorman about how he bet Vinnie Pal couldn’t wait to see me again. It was a small price to pay for being allowed up to the penthouse unannounced. A short while later, I was in the wide, elegant hallway that led to Vinnie’s apartment.

  The door was open.

  “Hey, Vinnie!” There was no loud music playing that morning, so when I toed the invisible line between the apartment and the hallway and rapped on the door, I figured Vinnie would hear me. “It’s me, Pepper. Can I come in?”

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard a muffled response.

  I took it as an affirmative and stepped inside. Except that it was messier, the place looked like it h
ad the day before: pizza boxes everywhere, coffee cups and beer cans (open and empty) strewn all around, and of course, the cutout of the naked woman. But there was no sign of Vinnie.

  “Vinnie?” I tried again, louder this time, and again I heard what sounded like a muted reply. It came from Vinnie’s magic room.

  I headed that way, and at my side, Damon grumbled his disapproval.

  “Vinnie didn’t lie to us,” I said, reminding him of what we’d both decided back at the office. “He’s trying to go straight. He promised not to channel you again. Nothing’s going to happen to me if I go in there. He’s not messing with magic anymore.”

  “What if he is?”

  I paused, my hand on the doorknob of the magic room. “I’ll open the door, but I’ll stay out here. And if I see anything weird, I’ll run.”