Tombs of Endearment

by Casey Daniels

  Swipe.

  There was nothing to see out there but gray and gloom and the fog that collected in pockets along the hillside. I blew on my hands and waited, feeling more isolated by the moment as the rain coated the windows and I lost touch with the outside world.

  Swipe.

  Like I said, there were pluses to being a detective. This was one of them, the reassurance that my instincts were right on. Because this time when the window cleared, I saw Crazy Belinda walking toward Damon’s grave.

  I was tempted to hop right out of the car to intercept her, but I bided my time, eager to see what she was going to do. A coffee cup clutched in one hand, Belinda paused in front of the marker with Damon’s name on it, and I could see that she was talking to someone. Not to Damon. At least not so that he’d hear. I hadn’t seen him around since I left the chapel earlier that day.

  When she was done, Belinda reached into the shopping bag she was carrying and pulled out a rag. She wiped down the headstone, removed each of the objects on the flat stone behind the marker, cleaned them, and set them back in place. The rain wasn’t driving, but it was steady enough. She didn’t even try to relight the candles in their colored-glass cups. Instead she took a wilted bouquet of flowers away and replaced it with a bunch of orange and gold mums that she’d brought along with her.

  She was done, and it was time for me to spring into action. It was my job to make sure Belinda didn’t get away before I had a chance to talk to her.

  Gritting my teeth against the raw weather, I hopped out of the car.

  “Hey! Imagine running into you here!” When Belinda turned at the sound of my voice, I waved. She was wearing a blue plastic rain slicker, and though it had a hood, she hadn’t pulled it up. Her hair hung around her shoulders, dripping. Belinda’s toes stuck out of the worn sandals that were brushed by her long, tie-dyed skirt. Her eyes were glassy, and when she looked at me, I could tell she wasn’t sure who I was.

  I didn’t want to spook her, so I closed in slowly. “We met at the Rock Hall, remember? I was talking to Gene Terry, the manager of Mind at Large. You know him, don’t you? You know the guys in the band, too.”

  As if a fairy godmother had flitted by and done the bibbidi-bobbidi-boo routine, Belinda was transformed. Her face lit. Her eyes twinkled. “I’m with the band!” she said. “Don’t need a backstage pass. I’m with the band.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You’re always with the band. That’s why I knew you could help me.”

  Belinda’s expectant expression melted. “Can’t help you find the angel. He promised he’d be here and he hasn’t come.” As if she was giving him another chance, she looked up at the leaden sky, and when the angel of death didn’t appear (thank goodness!), her shoulders drooped. “Can’t find Alistair, either,” she said. “Bad, bad Alistair. He went out for the mail and he hasn’t come back.”

  I was clearly fighting an uphill battle, but I remembered my promise to Damon. I told him I’d do everything I could to keep the band safe. So far, talking to Belinda was the only thing I could think of. “Alistair the drummer?” I asked her. “Or Alistair your cat?”

  When Belinda shook her head, raindrops flew around her. “Went out for the mail. He hasn’t come back. And he took Damon along.” She leaned in close and put a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell anyone. He was in the living room. You know, the night he died.”

  “Damon was in your living room? The night he died?” I did my best to make sense of this piece of information. “But I though he died right before a concert.”

  “You’re so funny!” With one grubby finger, Belinda poked me in the ribs. I promised myself my raincoat would go to the dry cleaner’s first thing the next morning. “June 5, 1969,” she said. “That’s the night.”

  I thought of everything I’d read about Mind at Large. “But that’s not the night Damon died,” I said, even though I knew this was one person I didn’t need to remind. Any fan obsessed enough to come out to Damon’s grave in the rain would surely know he hadn’t died until two years later. “And it wasn’t the night he told the band he was heading out on a solo career, either, because that was the same night he died and that wasn’t until seventy-one. So what happened in June of sixty-nine? Their first gold record?”

  Belinda rolled her eyes, and the sound that escaped her wasn’t exactly a laugh. She washed it away with a sip of coffee. “Everyone knows,” she said.

  Everyone, apparently, but me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Tell me.”

  Belinda’s eyes were on her coffee cup, but it was clear her mind was a million miles away. Or more precisely, nearly forty years in the past. “They let me backstage,” she said, and she smiled. “They said I was cute. That’s when I met him. Damon. Damon, Damon, Damon.” Her eyes lost their focus, and still mumbling, Belinda shuffled away.

  A smarter person would have just let her go. But let’s face it, there was something about her insisting that Damon had been in her apartment the night he died that was as fascinating as an auto accident. I couldn’t turn away. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from following her.

  Curious to know where she was headed and what she would do when she got there, I trudged behind Belinda through the rain, up the hill, and into the old, ornate part of the cemetery, and by that time, I was breathing hard and wishing I’d been smart enough to follow her in my car. Like I thought she’d walk all the way here? I told myself it wasn’t possible but hey, like I said, there was that whole crazy thing to consider. When we got to the main gate and Belinda stopped to look both ways before she crossed the street, I was huffing and puffing, and—not incidentally since the rain started to come down harder than ever—soaked to the skin.

  Did I let this stop me?

  I’d like to say that in true detective fashion, I refused to give up on my investigation.

  I reminded myself of that fact when Belinda paused in front of an old red brick apartment building within spitting distance of Garden View’s main gates. She was just about to go inside (and I was all set to slip in right after her) when a movement in the overgrown rhododendrons to one side of the front door caught my eye. I saw a flash of gray and a peek of a little black nose.

  I may have been soaked to the bone and as chilly as a frozen margarita, but I wasn’t dumb, and I was willing to try just about anything to get Belinda to keep talking. I darted forward, stuck my hand into the bush, and came out holding a cat.

  “Hey, look!” Holding up the wet critter so she could see it, I closed in on her and hoped that I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree. (I guess that’s a mixed metaphor, but since by this time it really was raining cats and dogs, I figured it counted.) “Is it Alistair? Did I find him?”

  Lucky for me, it was the right feline. I knew this because Belinda tried to look stern when she said, “You bad, bad boy!” It might have worked if she wasn’t smiling at the same time.

  While she made a move to unlock the door, I kept a firm hold on the cat. “Go on ahead,” I told her. “I’ll bring him up.”

  Belinda didn’t argue. A couple of minutes later, we were inside her apartment.

  While she clucked and cooed and grabbed Alistair out of my arms to rub him down with a tattered towel and get him something to eat, I took the opportunity to look over the place. It was, to put it charitably, pretty basic. The living room contained nothing but a worn couch and a table across from it that was filled with pictures.

  Rude or not, I didn’t care. I reached for the closest gold-colored metal frame. It contained a faded color photograph of Damon. In it, he was standing with his back to the ocean where sunlight glittered like diamonds on the water. He was smiling.

  Next to that photo was another one, this of Damon along with his bandmates and Gene Terry, as bald then as he was now. There was another photo of Damon to the right and another next to that one. Interspersed with the pictures was an incense holder filled with ashes and five colored glass cups. Each contained a burning candle. On the wall a
bove the table there were a dozen more photos of Damon. They had been painstakingly hung in a perfect circle. It might not have struck me as odd that the center of the circle was empty—except for the rectangular-shaped patch of lighter colored paint there. And the empty picture hook.

  When Belinda came into the room with Alistair in her arms, I was ready for her. “Something’s missing,” I said.

  “Alistair was missing.” She smiled down at the cat, who had lost no time and was sleeping soundly. “I told him not to get the mail, but he didn’t listen. He isn’t allowed outside. There are dogs, you know, and dogs eat cats.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we found him.” I tapped the empty spot on the wall. “But something’s missing here, too.”

  Her eyebrows dipped. They needed a good plucking and an expert’s hand when it came to shaping. “Damon was here,” she said. “He left with Alistair.”

  There are those who say I am not the brightest bulb in the box (well, actually, Joel was the only one who’d ever really come out and said it). I was about to prove him wrong. Believe it or not, what Belinda said actually made sense.

  “You mean that Alistair disappeared the same day the picture of Damon went missing?”

  She nodded. “Alistair went outside. He shouldn’t be able to reach the door handle.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. So Belinda didn’t get wind of what I was looking for (and maybe panic), I strolled over to the door that led into the hallway. The wood was raw near the lock, as if it had been scraped. As if the door had been forced open.

  As casually as I could, I turned back to her. “Belinda, on the day Alistair went outside and took Damon with him, was anything else missing?”

  As if she didn’t understand, she narrowed her eyes.

  I tried to explain without frightening her. “You know, a TV or a stereo. Maybe some jewelry or—”

  Belinda’s rough laugh cut me short. “Don’t have any of those things. Don’t need them. I won’t be here long. Only until the angel spreads his wings and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that part.” I did, and honestly, I wasn’t in the mood to hear all about it again. “So nothing else was touched? Nothing else was taken?”

  “Only Alistair.” She cuddled the cat. “He’s back. He promises he’ll never do it again.”

  I nodded as a way of telling her that if the cat swore he was going to be good, I wasn’t one to argue, and pointed to the empty spot on the wall. I had a feeling that by that time, Belinda had forgotten all about it.

  “What was in this picture?” I asked her. “You know, the picture that disappeared the day Alistair went out for the mail? In the picture, what was Damon doing?”

  This question was tougher, and considering it, Belinda sucked on her lower lip and stared at the empty spot on the wall. “It was the night he died,” she said.

  At this point, I should have been frustrated but actually, I wasn’t. See, I was too busy realizing that when it came to my investigation, I was finally getting somewhere. Because I knew more now than I had a little while earlier.

  Number one, I knew that Alistair the cat hadn’t really gone out for the mail. (Okay, I actually knew that before, but I was sure of it now.) What I thought was that when the door was jimmied open, the cat escaped.

  As to why that door was forced open in the first place…

  I looked from the scratch marks near the door lock to the empty spot on the wall.

  A picture of Damon. The night he died. And call me crazy, but something told me it must have shown more than that.

  Whatever was in that picture, it must have been something important. Because somebody was willing to risk breaking into Belinda’s apartment to steal it.

  Chapter 13

  It took me a couple of days, but I finally came up with a plan of sorts. While I waited to put it into action, I sat in my office, alone and grumbling, trying to make sense of everything I’d found out while I tapped my fingers against my keyboard. Maybe the constant tap, tap, tap would jump-start my brain.

  That’s when Ella poked her head in the door. “I heard you typing. You’re not too busy for company, are you?”

  Since my monitor wasn’t on, she should have seen I wasn’t. I waved her inside, and while she bustled over to my guest chair, I flicked on the computer monitor, just so she didn’t ask any questions.

  “You’re so much better at computers than I am,” Ella said. Her cheeks were rosy, just like the sweater she was wearing with a black skirt that brushed her ankles. “All those bytes and bits and such…” She made a face. “It makes me crazy. My girls are terrific with computers, of course. Kids have no fear and they learn things so quickly. But I can’t ask them for help. Not with this.”

  When it came to her daughters, Ella was as protective as a lioness with her cubs. I couldn’t help but be curious. What was she up to that she didn’t want the girls to know? Internet compatibility profiles? Internet dating? Internet sex?

  I shuddered at the thought and carefully phrased my question. “Is there something you need help finding? I can show you how.”

  “Oh, no. I’d rather have you do it for me.” Ella chuckled. She was wearing a dozen strands of black, sparkling beads, and they shimmered when she shook. “I want to surprise the girls. We’re all going to the Mind at Large concert.”

  I guess I looked surprised because Ella smiled. “I’m not such an old fogy that I’m not still rockin’ and rollin’.”

  “Yeah, I can see you wanting to go, but the girls—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about them. They’re hip. They’re down. They’re into the groove. We’ve been talking at home, you see, about the sixties. I think they’ll get a real kick out of seeing one of the bands that defined the era. Of course, now that Vinnie Pal is dead…” She shook her head. “What a shame! I’m glad they didn’t cancel the concert. They said Vinnie would have wanted the show to go on. Even without him. I want to order tickets now. Before they’re all gone. You know how it is, Pepper, once a rock musician dies—especially mysteriously—the legend grows.”

  It was so much like what Damon and I had discussed back at the chapel earlier in the week, it was uncanny. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get the opinion of someone who’d lived through the Flower Power generation and come out the other side without frying her brain.

  “Is that what happened after Damon Curtis died?” I asked Ella. “Was the group more popular than ever after that?”

  “Well, for a while, yes, of course. Not that most of the fans cared much about the rest of the band. Really, all Alistair and Vinnie and the rest of them ever were was Damon’s backup band. But that Damon, now he was another story! He was the one all the girls went to see. What a face! And that voice! Dreamy with a capital D. After he died, the group scattered for a while. I hear that at one time, Mighty Mike was working at a golf course. And Alistair went back home to London and opened a pub. Of course, they had plenty of money. Their old music—the stuff they recorded when Damon was alive—that became more popular than ever. But the stuff they recorded right after his death…” A devotee to the last, Ella shivered.

  “Then Vinnie wrote the music for that Disney animated movie. You remember, the one about the aliens in New Jersey. Or was it the one about the stray cats that take over the boarding school? Either way, Vinnie wrote the music and he brought the band back together to record it. After that, they were bound to be famous. All the lite rock stations started playing their songs.”

  I cringed on Damon’s behalf. “You know an awful lot about these guys,” I said. “You don’t look like the type who was ever into the psychedelic scene.”

  Ella winked. “You never know by looking, kid. I’ve had an adventure or two in my day.”

  “And now you want your girls to see what it was all about.” I could relate. My first trip to a spa was with my mom. I logged onto the Internet to search for tickets, and Ella came around from the other side of the desk and watched over my shoulder.

  “Just get us
four seats, anywhere you can. It probably won’t be near the front or anything. That would be asking too much.”

  “I dunno…” I moved the cursor around the screen, clicking at the appropriate spots and checking out ticket availability against the seating chart on another page. “Looks like you can get a ticket just about anywhere.”

  “Really?” Ella peered at the screen. “How cool is that? Let’s go…here.” She pointed a finger at the seating chart, and I noted the section number, went back to the ticket page, and added four tickets to the shopping cart.

  “There’s always room for one more,” she said, handing me her credit card. “You sure you don’t want to come with us?”