Murder in Rock & Roll Heaven

by Robin Ray

“Let’s walk,” the angel suggested, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Gregory and his new friend sat cozily enjoying scones and coffee at a rickety, round, wooden table near the front window of the Renaissance Bakery & Café. Besides the two, the bakery/café was populated by other diners, mostly men from about 24 to 70 years old and beyond. To the PI, out of all the attendees, the faces of two very capable musicians he’d admired over the years, sitting together at a table near the back, looked familiar.

  “Are those two who I think they are?” he asked his host. “George Harrison and Ray Charles?”

  L’Da glanced at them. “Looks like it.”

  “Wow. What could two icons like that be talking about?”

  “Why don’t you go ask them?”

  “Yeah, right,” Gregory winced. “I could just see that. Hey Ray, Hey George, I was just in the neighborhood, pardon my sheet but, you know, wanted to see if you guys would come over to my house for a barbeque. Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington’s gonna be there. Don’t forget the Cristal.”

  “People up here are much more approachable than you think,” L’Da promised him.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “They don’t care that you’re walking around looking like David Duke.”

  The PI moaned, shaking his head. “Too many freaks, not enough circuses.”

  “That’s not original,” the angel noted.

  “Yeah, I know,” the embarrassed PI solemnly admitted. “I gotta work on my comebacks.”

  Affixed to the brick-exposed walls were black and white photos of jazz greats like Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Barney Kessel, Wes Montgomery, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman. A dark brown baby grand sat sad and alone, aching to be played, on a small stage near the entrance to the kitchen. The street outside was now hustling and bustling as more people went walking and riding past the café, some of them in rickshaws, and almost all attired in loose fitting gear.

  “I know you must have a thousand questions, Gregory,” L’Da began, “and all will be answered in due time, but tomorrow, you’ll have an orientation at the Playhouse. I can’t stay too long right now because I have to catch up with someone in a little while.”

  “Sure. Okay, let’s see…” Gregory mused, rubbing his chin. “Tell me about this transference business.”

  “You have a soul.”

  “Yes, yes I do,” the PI agreed. “You know, that’s weird to hear me say that. I ain’t been to a church since I was baptized. Sorry, I’m not a religious person; never was.”

  “I’ll have to recap some of what we’ve spoken of before…” the angel said.

  “I’ll have to recap some of what we’ve spoken of before,” Gregory snickered, mocking the angel using a husky, British voice. “You sound like that guy from Lord of the Rings.”

  L’Da ignored his insouciance. “If you were to build a human being out of the exact same parts all humans are made from, your creation would still have no life. It’d just sit limp on your construction table doing nothing. You must remember the soul as the spark and maintainer of life.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The universe is filled with endless souls, always in motion like meth heads…”

  “Oh, no! You just didn’t say meth heads.”

  “I figured I’d use a term you’d be familiar with,” the angel smiled. “Those souls zip around at super speed, passing through all objects since they are smaller than atoms which, as you may remember from high school chemistry, is comprised of protons, neutrons and electrons.”

  “Of course,” Gregory stated, although he had no clue what the angel was talking about since chemistry class = naptime, as far as he was concerned, anyway.

  “Atoms join together to form molecules and are held together by chemical bonds.”

  “Like the Bloods and Crips,” the ever mirthful detective said, then, adopting a gangsta’s swaggering tone, added, “Let it rain, let it drip, bust a crab in the lip.”

  “You remember H2O, right?” L’Da asked, ignoring the PI’ s irrelevant outbursts.

  “Water.”

  “Well,” the angel said, shaking a finger, “not yet. Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom is just a molecule. A whole bunch of ‘em clumped together is…?”

  “Water!”

  “Now it’s water,” L’Da acknowledged. “Most cells are water because they’re the most abundant molecules on Earth, something like 70%.”

  “Mama said put down the basketball and hit the school books. Did I listen? Noooo.”

  “So now we go up, from molecule to macromolecule to cell organelles to cells.”

  “And when Mama Bear and Papa Bear are knocking boots, their cells get together to make Baby Bear.”

  “Crude, but true,” L’Da nodded. “At the very smallest union of the sperm and egg, an errant soul gets trapped. That energy of the soul moving the atoms and molecules around, causing them to attract more molecules based on the DNA in the genes of Mama Bear and Papa Bear, is called vitae – life.”

  “Sweet.”

  “When the body dies,” L’Da continued, “the tiny soul slips out through the now dormant cells and, depending on the karma it has accumulated in this life and the lives before it, it’ll rise up because it is lighter or, if weighed down with karmic matter, move downward.”

  “Heaven or Hell.”

  “Or on Earth in a different host – animal, plant, whatever it would give life to.”

  “How do you know all this?” the detective asked.

  “You are capable of knowledge, right?”

  “Yes…”

  “It’s not tangible, yet it exists.”

  Gregory looked even more doubtful. “And…?”

  “The fact that you can ‘know,’ that you can ‘experience,’ that your ‘temperance’ can change when all humans possess the same number of cells, senses and so on, they were all awakened and affected by that spark and maintainer of life, the soul.”

  “It almost seems like you’re using the soul to explain the existence of itself.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” the angel said. “The soul is the author of its actions. For instance, the universe is a closed system. I’m sure you’re familiar with the law of conservation of mass – matter can neither be created nor destroyed, simply changed or rearranged in space. We know the soul exists because there is movement through the universe. The soul is a pure substance trying to escape this reality of going around and around, the concept of life and death. But because the soul is loaded with karma, it needs a host to rid itself of that karma. And we know karma exists because of the existence of inequalities, suffering and pain that weighs the soul down, trapping it in the cycle of life and death. I know this seems odd, but in their very finest, tiniest state, these qualities are like dust or matter which clings to something that passes from living body to living body and gives life to cells capable of division. That dust, and the something it clings to, is karma clinging to the soul.”

  “You’re asking me to accept that suffering and pain are tangible qualities?”

  “Inasmuch as you can refer to knowledge and love and chastity as “things,” in their absolute minutest form imaginable, they’re bonded to karma because we call those qualities real. Inanimate creations cannot acquire these qualities. You need to breathe, to eat to stay alive, to procreate, to build, to survive. You have the knowledge of your own existence. What inanimate object can do that without the spark to give it life, the spark commonly referred to as the soul? Imagine this: if you can doubt the existence of a soul, you can also doubt love and hate doesn’t exist, but they do.”

  “This is kinda…I don’t know, maybe too deep for me,” Gregory admitted. “I wish there was a simpler way to explain “your” soul. This is kinda “whoosh,” going right above me, you know?”

  “Okay, how about this? When you look up at the night sky what do you see?”

  “The red-eye from Seoul to Seattle?”

/>   L’Da groaned. “Higher up.”

  “Stars?”

  “Millions and millions of them. The majority of those stars are still alive, beacons of light, hundreds of light years away. A few, though, have already died and we’re just now seeing their light. In other words, we know those stars existed because of the light they left behind. And here’s an interesting thought – the dinosaur age is still upon us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This universe is so very vast that a world extremely far removed from this one is still seeing earth as it was 65 million years ago. Fields and fields of dinosaurs all over.”

  “I think I feel a stroke coming on.”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  “What’s karma made from?”

  “Just particles,” the angel replied. “It’s their amount and type that’s important.”

  “What types do they have?”

  “Many,” L’Da answered. “Harming karmas, like perception obscuring; non-harming ones, like life-span determining.”

  “Can they be counted or weighed?”

  “Nope. The trajectory of the soul lets you know if it’s weighed down or not.”

  “Too bad you just can’t reach out and grab one.”

  “You know,” the angel in white mused, “in a way, you can, just like you can an emotion.”

  “How do you even grab an emotion?” Gregory quizzed him. “It has no mass.”

  “If two persons are indistinguishable in all of their physical properties, they must also be indistinguishable in all of their mental properties. In other words, some ‘thing’ is making identical people different. That ‘thing’ may not take up three-dimensional space as is commonly recognized, but that’s immaterial. Light and sound take up no physical space but they can be detected and measured. Emotions also take up no physical space, but there they are.”

  “That’s, um…that’s, um…”

  “That theory was actually postulated by several of your earthly philosophers – G.E. Moore, R.M. Hare, Donald Davidson and many others. They call it supervenience.”

  “Supervenience?” the detective asked. “Is that, like, a super convenient store? You know – a Safeway in a 7-Eleven? You’re not laughing.”

  “So there’s mind-body supervenience – every mental phenomenon must be ground in some underlying physical base. Shall I continue with this line of dialog?”

  “Nah,” Gregory objected. “That’s enough for one day. I can already feel my brain cells dying one by one.”

  “In due time you will learn about karma.”

  “How is it that if I hit you I feel the pain?”

  “That will be explained later on,” the angel promised. “It is related to karma, though. Here in Heaven, you’re protected from negativity because the soul is on its way to liberation. If someone means to cause you harm, the level of their negative karmic particles will rise. This sudden lift translates into pain. Remember, according to supervenience, pain would have physical properties.”

  “Well, dang,” Gregory swore. “I hope I don’t trip on a rock and push somebody on a fork.”

  “You’ll definitely feel the pain,” L’Da promised, “but it won’t add to your karma because there was no malicious intent. You’d just have to be more careful.” He then stood up. “Well,” he apologized, shaking Gregory’s hand one final time, “I have to be off now. Feel free to wander around some more, talk to people, get to know the lay of the land, sample the fabulous nourishment. The chefs here are worth their weight in gold. I understand all of this will be hard for you to accept, but in due time, you will learn more.”

  “In due time I’ll develop schizophrenia.”

  “No, you won’t,” the angel assured him.

  CHAPTER 4

  When Gregory was finished with his coffee at the Renaissance Bakery & Café, he strolled back leisurely to see Karen Carpenter at ‘House of Romany.’ Along the way, he studied the faces of those walking by, perhaps trying to see if they showed signs that they were dead. When he thought about his unusual exercise, he giggled. Maybe they might be zombies, he wondered. Better not rile them up just in case they’re hankering for fresh brains.

  “Hello?” he announced himself, stepping into the gypsy emporium.

  “You’re back,” Karen uttered, entering the store from the rear.

  “So what’s this about an ID?”

  Karen went to the counter in the rear of the store, brought out a gray pad the size of a phone book that was stored in a glass-encased étagère against a wall, and placed it on the counter between her and her customer. The pad seemed unassuming enough. Completely smooth on the top and side, it simply looked like a lump of clay, albeit shaped in a precise rectangular block. In the middle of the pad was the word usitatissimum.

  “Place your right hand here,” she instructed, motioning to the pad.

  “What’s this?” the stranger asked.

  “Think of it as a passport maker,” she answered.

  “A passport maker.”

  “Yes.”

  Briefly scrutinizing the box, he noticed, “It’s not plugged in.”

  “It’s self-powered,” she informed him.

  He motioned to the unusual word inscribed on the pad. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s Latin for ‘most useful.’”

  “Okay.” Reluctantly, Gregory placed his palm in the middle of the unusual pad. Its surface, he noticed, was so soft that the weight of his hand created an imprint in it. Just then, a blue light emanated from below his palm, suffusing its warm glow around the perimeter of his hand. Seconds later, the light went out. As the confused man removed his hand, Karen slid a small door open in the pad closest to her, produced a dark blue, credit-like card and handed it to Gregory.

  “Congratulations,” she told him. “Welcome to Heaven.”

  Gregory studied both the front and back of the card. It was devoid of numbers and didn’t even have a magnetic strip, just a plain deep blue card with the word usitatissimum printed below his full name. Like most cards, this one felt as smooth as plastic, but was far more pliable, able to bend in half and rebound its shape without showing breakage.

  “What kind of material is this?” he asked, studying his card.

  “Rubber-infused carbon,” she explained.

  “What is it, though?” he asked.

  “Your passport, or ID card. You use it to make purchases at every establishment in town. You can use it for clothing, groceries, services, restaurants, everywhere.”

  “This machine made this card without knowing any of my personal data?”

  “It knows all your data,” she insisted. “The box read your soul and transferred the information to your card.”

  “So it’s like a debit card?” he asked, examining it closely.

  “Yes,” she professed, “but you don’t fill it up with money.”

  Gregory looked confused. “What do I use?”

  “Credits,” she answered.

  The new arrival furrowed his brow. “Credits?”

  “Yes,” she explained. “Specifically, soul credits. When you do work around town, or do favors for people, or anything positive, really, you automatically add credits to the card. There is no cap on how much you can add to your card. Naturally, bad deeds will result in a subtraction of credits.”

  Gregory nodded. “Interesting. So they don’t use money in…Heaven?”

  “That’s right,” she revealed.

  “So how does it work?”

  “Well,” she informed him, pointing to some items on a far shelf against a wall, “say if you want to get one of those dream catchers or throw rugs, all you have to do is take it. The credits aren’t subtracted from your card until you leave the store.”

  “I see,” Gregory nodded. “There’s some kind of magnetic strip by the door then?”

  “Something like that,” she indicated. “If you didn’t have enough credits for the purchase, or you took it by accident because you were dist
racted, your item wouldn’t be able to leave the store with you. It’ll just return to the place you acquired it. In other words, you’d have to want the item. The card will know because it has a symbiotic connection to your soul. And, of course, it’s non-transferable. It won’t work with anyone else but you. Just so you know, some stores do have alarms in case you took it accidentally. I must say, that’s pretty embarrassing. Better to know what you went in for, I guess.”

  “How do I know how many credits I have left?”

  Karen walked over to one of the display stands and pointed to a small metallic box with a green light attached to the stand.

  “These are in every shop,” she informed him. “Just wave your card in front of it and you’ll see the amount of credits you have left on the scanner.”

  Gregory went over to the scanner and waved his blue card in front of it. The numbers on the little machine displayed 100.

  “You begin with 100 credits,” she briefed him. “Right now that would be enough for food, dining out, cleaning and household supplies, a trolley ride, and so on. Obviously, the more credits you have the bigger the things you can get, like TV’s, computers and smart phones.”

  “What do smart phones cost?” the D asked. “So far, everyone I’ve met make them sound like contraband.”

  “They might as well be,” Karen answered. “They go for around 16,000 credits.”

  Gregory’s eyes widened. “For a phone?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “How long would it take someone to save 16,000 credits?”

  Karen thought for a moment. “Four years, if you give up food for all those years.”

  “Why is it so high?”

  “Electronic parts are hard to come by and manufacture,” she answered. “Cobalt, for instance, is used in batteries, but how many people want to dive down in a mine and scrape rocks all day for 10 grams of it? You’d really, really have to want one. Also, as you may have noticed, there is no plastic in Heaven.”

  “No?”

  “No fossil fuels,” she elucidated. “Phytoplankton without zooplankton does not for fossil fuels make.”

  “Thanks, Yoda,” he groaned. “I’ll remember that for my next chemistry class. So they have TV’s in heaven.”