Under the Cheaters Table

by Etta Faire

  He studied me as I studied him. “Oh, I came by to make sure you were okay from yesterday’s bird attack. I knocked but you didn’t answer, and the door swung open on its own. You must’ve left the back door ajar.”

  I could tell by his expression he believed me about as much as I believed him.

  But I was starting to trust my new client. In the car on the way home, I thanked him for his help at George’s. “We’ll do the channeling tonight,” I told him, almost instantly kicking myself for deciding not to wait for the sapentia formula.

  Chapter 9

  Feldman’s Story

  Jackson hovered by my side, arms crossed, watching as Feldman and I looked over the photos I’d printed out from Shelby’s album that were spread across the dining room table.

  “These people were your best friends, huh? The ones who slit your throat and wiped away the evidence,” Jackson said, in an almost taunting tone. “Makes you wonder who your worst enemies were.”

  Feldman glared at my ex like he wanted to kill him and I gave the man a similar look. It was just like Jackson to do something stupid like piss off the already-angry ghost I was about to channel with tonight. Jackson didn’t know the part where I was about to channel with Feldman, though.

  Feldman hover-paced the floor beside me. “I’ve thought about that myself many times. If they were my friends, why didn’t they report the crime,” he said. He was calmer than I thought he’d be. “And the only logical reason I can come up with is that most the people in that photo were pretty prominent in the community. They had a lot at stake and couldn’t afford to get caught gambling and drinking at an illegal joint where a murder took place. They’d have been done for it. A doctor, a rich socialite, a couple of tradesmen, the sheriff…”

  “The sheriff? So you’re saying this could’ve been a cover up on a huge level.” It felt a lot like the boater’s “accident” again, except I got the distinct impression the victim was hardly as innocent this time. “I’m going to need you to tell me exactly who’s who in this photo.”

  I grabbed my pencil and scribbled as fast as I could into the pages of my notebook, putting little notes about the looks of the people in the photo.

  Feldman pointed to a tall, clean shaven man with sunken cheeks and a sleek combover similar to Hitler’s. “That’s Richie Mulch, sheriff of Landover.”

  He was the one quoted in the article, commenting about the lack of fingerprints at the murder site. I vowed to look him up more as soon as possible.

  “My best friend, Doc Yelman,” Feldman continued, pointing to a short dark-haired guy next to the sheriff. “He’s the guy I sold my part of the bar to. We made a lot of deals together. Mostly, he wrote the prescriptions and I filled them at the pharmacy.”

  “But they were really just alcohol,” I asked.

  “Or something equally as medicinal.”

  “Were you cheating him?”

  “Everybody cheats a little,” he replied, moving onto the next person in the photo. “Including Doc.” He pointed to a woman in a fur jacket. Doc’s hand was on her shoulder and she was laughing. “Doc had a wife, but that ain’t her. Everybody’s got a little something going on the side.”

  “Did you?”

  “Everybody.” He paused. “Nothing serious. Just fun.”

  I remembered reading The Great Gatsby in my college freshman class at Landover University. It did seem like most people in that era had fairly open relationships, like the original free-love generation.

  Feldman went on, pointing out the other people in the photo and I took notes on as much as I could. I’d already written about Richie, Doc, and Terry, so the rest of my notes looked something like this:

  Drew: Cute brunette, late 20s. Feldman’s girlfriend of almost 10 years. Seamstress.

  Blanche: Unknown age, blonde. This is the girl Doc brought. Feldman doesn’t know much about her.

  Flo: Terrance’s girlfriend, early 20s, blonde. The rich and spoiled socialite. A Donovan.

  Boyd: (Bobby’s relative), large man with overalls and a beard. A farmer.

  Chance: Tall, handsome guy in the photo. Feldman says he was the “pigeon” Doc brought so they could all make money. Feldman thinks he might have worked as a handyman for Doc and was probably romantically involved with Doc’s wife.

  I turned to a fresh page of my notebook, my hand already tired from writing longhand. “Tell me what you remember about the murder.”

  He sat back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling. “That’s the part that’s still a little fuzzy. It was the end of the night. Everyone had gone to bed, I think. We were snowed in, I told you that, right? But I found everyone places to sleep. Blankets, pillows, the whole shebang. I made sure everyone was all nice and cozy. And how did they repay me for my hospitality?”

  He took a minute to think about that, the betrayal of his friends. Not just the one who murdered him, but everyone else for cleaning it up and never even helping with the investigation.

  He continued. “Before I went to bed, I came back into the bar where the poker table was still set up, just to clean up a little before I headed off. And that crazy piggy bank was sitting right smack in the middle of the table again.”

  “What crazy piggy bank?”

  “Ah, I didn’t tell you about that, huh?” he said, looking at the ceiling again like he expected the memories to pour into his head if he looked long enough. “Nobody would admit where it came from, but somebody sent me this ugly-as-hell cast iron bank in the mail about a week before the party. It was crazy and heavy, looked like a horse.”

  “And you had no idea where it came from?” Jackson asked, voice skeptical.

  Feldman shook his head. “No, and it drove me nuts all night. What did it mean? Who sent it? It kept showing up in odd places all night. Everyone thought it was hilarious.”

  I scribbled everything into my notes and checked the photos for a horse bank. I didn’t see anything.

  “That creepy thing was on the poker table as I was heading off to bed. That’s when I noticed it had something sticking out of the little hole on its neck. You know, the hole for putting the coins in? So, I sat down to get a better look. It was pretty stuck in there, but I was able to dig it out with my pinkie. It was a string or something with a long thin paper attached. It said: You gamble. You lose.”

  I think I may have gasped.

  “That’s all I remember. Somebody grabbed my chin and yanked my head back. Before I could even struggle…”

  “Okay,” I said, stopping him. I would live the rest of the gory details in real time soon enough. It was better that I didn’t know too much ahead of time. “You never figured out what the note meant, though?”

  “Nope. I mean I wasn’t exactly the kind of person others might describe as virtuous. I had a lot of things in my life that someone could’ve seen or found out about. A lot of gambling. A lot of cheating. But I don’t remember any huge bets I didn’t pay off or anything like that.”

  “It’s so hard when everyone wants you dead,” Jackson said, making Feldman scowl at him again. They stared at each other for almost a full minute.

  “Said a man who had a very similar problem in life.” I reminded my ex, interrupting their staring contest. “But we do know it was impossible for anyone else to get into the speakeasy or leave it because of the snowstorm.”

  “It had piled up around the doors and windows. Yeah. We were stuck.”

  “Then we know all I have to do is follow that horse. Whoever planted the horse around the bar that night is the killer. Do you know about what time your murder happened?”

  He ran a hand over his long chin. “It’s hard to say. Everyone had gone to bed. That much I know. Maybe two or three in the morning.”

  “I should go into the channeling at the beginning of the party,” I said.

  Feldman smiled.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Jackson interrupted. He had moved so he was a safe distance from our guest, hovering closer to the living
room, right by Rex. The chicken. He could dish out the insults but he never wanted to deal with the repercussions. “I think that’s exactly what you want,” he continued. “Carly combining energies with you for that long… You’d be a very powerful ghost if that happened.”

  My heart pounded in my chest. I never knew that’s what was happening during a channeling. I knew I was combining energy, and I knew I felt drained afterwards, but I never thought I was somehow giving the ghosts more power when we did it.

  Feldman couldn’t stop grinning. “Carly’s a very strong medium. She can handle herself. She doesn’t need a babysitter.” He moved in closer to Jackson, and my ex backed away.

  Jackson turned to me. “This sounds like almost a full day of channeling. You can barely handle a couple of hours.”

  “I’ll take breaks with this one,” I said. “I’ll set a timer on my phone and I’ll only channel for half an hour at a time.”

  I pointed my finger at my still-grinning houseguest. “And you’re right. I’m pretty sure I can handle a half an hour. But that’s it for tonight.”

  Jackson’s face dropped. “You are not serious. Tonight? I cannot believe you are considering it at all, but so soon?” He disappeared, allowing his voice to fade out with him. “You gamble. You lose. I suppose.”

  Chapter 10

  Channeling with a cheater

  Jackson appeared again in front of the sofa I was trying to relax on. “For the record, I would just like to state this is a bad idea, and I am completely against it.”

  “Duly noted, professor,” I said. “I’ll probably hear my phone’s timer, but just shake me out of the channeling in half an hour if I don’t.”

  “I most certainly will not,” he said. “You are on your own. I want no part of this.”

  “It’s okay, pal. She’s not gonna want to stop after half an hour, anyway,” Feldman replied, winking at me. His teeth were almost a golden shade of yellow as he smiled. “Most women can’t get enough.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on things,” Jackson said, weakly.

  Of all the channelings I’d done over the last eight months or so, this one made my skin crawl the most.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” I said. I set my timer, put my phone on the coffee table, then let my head rest against the pillows, trying to get my mind to go blank.

  It took me a couple of minutes to calm my breathing down enough for Feldman to enter. He kept telling me to relax, which made relaxing that much harder, kind of like when Jimmy Swinson and I fooled around under the bleachers during a football game my freshman year of high school. It was my first time making out and people were stomping their feet above us. There was no relaxing then, no matter how many times he said to do it. There was no relaxing now.

  I closed my eyes and tried not to think about Jimmy Swinson.

  Still, it took me by surprise. His ghost entered my energy faster than I expected. And an instant chill fell over my entire body, like when you drink a Slurpee too fast and your brain feels numb and achy, only this was over my entire body. And this Slurpee was creepy.

  I needed to stay professional, I reminded myself, no matter how much I couldn’t stand the ghost I was channeling with. This was my job. I needed to do it. I concentrated on the sounds and smells around me. It was cold. My hands ached with a stinging, frozen feeling. A strong wind smacked my face and made my nose run. Laughter surrounded me and a bright light permeated my closed eyelids.

  “Okay, Feld, now you take the photograph and I’ll be in it.”

  I heard the sounds of footsteps crunching through snow. Somehow, I knew they were my own. Snowflakes fell along my face and head. I opened my eyes. I was standing in front of a large, box-like, black camera on a stand.

  “And hurry up, will ya?” said a curly-haired blonde in an opened mink coat with a short dress and thick legs. I recognized her as Blanche, the woman Doc brought, who wasn’t his wife. “The girls and I are freezing. You try wearing a dress in the snow.”

  “Who’s to say we haven’t?” One of the guys joked.

  “It’s warm inside,” Feldman said.

  “No kidding,” she replied. “I wouldn’t know.”

  There they were. The same people from the photo, scrunched together and smiling in front of the pharmacy, snow falling around them, piling up. Women in long coats, opened to show their short skirts, cute short haircuts made cuter by the flapper hats pressing against their hairlines. The men were in suits, of all things. The kind of ties, collared shirts, and vests that would’ve seemed too stuffy and pretentious for such a casual weekend now.

  Feldman clicked the photo. Then we all crunched back through the snow inside, laughing at nothing but our own daring foolishness to be taking a photo in a snowstorm. One of the brunettes wrapped her arm into Feldman’s. “It’s good to see your old friends again,” she said as we walked around toward the basement steps.

  “Yeah, seeing ‘em’s great. Hanging out with them’s a whole other story,” he replied.

  The smell of alcohol took over my senses as soon as we stepped through the basement door, a strong smell that I wasn’t expecting, almost medicinal, like the kind of alcohol that goes into thick cold syrups, and it seemed to ooze from the cracks in the wood, that and the tobacco smoke.

  The basement seemed larger than it did at Chez Louie. There were rooms off to the side that I never noticed before. A kitchen, maybe. The place was bright with hanging lights that separated the bar from the lounge area that was decorated in white tufted white couches and small wooden tables. At least now I knew what the lumps probably were sitting under drop cloths in Mr. Peters’s basement. I couldn’t get over the bar, though. It looked amazing compared to its rundown condition today. With its polished wood and glasses hanging down decoratively, it almost glistened.

  “Let’s have a toast to the Bear Bird,” the dark-haired man I knew was Doc said. He quickly hustled behind the bar and grabbed nine shot glasses from the cabinet underneath, lining them up along the counter while he puffed on his pipe. He looked even older in person, his hair graying around the temples. He handed the woman in the mink the first glass and they stared at each other for a second before she turned away.

  “To our good friend, Feldman Winehouse, the most appropriate host for a most inappropriate weekend,” Doc said, and everyone laughed, downing their shots. It burned my throat a little going down but Feldman didn’t cough or gag at all. It was water to him.

  “Thank you, one and all, for showing up to what I hope will turn into a tradition. An annual weekend of debauchery,” he said, turning to Doc.

  Doc looked down at his shot glass.

  Feldman spoke to me in his head again. “Look at them all. My brother, he’s sure laughing, huh? Look at him with his girlfriend. I should never have sold the place for him. He didn’t even care. All I did for that jerk, and he never even said thanks.”

  I could tell channeling was going to be hard for Feldman. He was very angry and bitter, making me feel almost sorry for the guy. It’s one thing to remember something as a distant memory tucked away in the dark corners of your mind that you pull out and rewrite every once and a while. And it’s an entirely different thing altogether to relive that day exactly how it happened, breath by breath, moment by moment, knowing one of the people in the room was just about to slit your throat.

  “Keep an open mind, Feldman.” I reminded him. “Terrance might not have been the one.”

  He did look guilty, though. They all did. A radio played softly in the background and Terrance’s girlfriend, Flo, turned up the sexy jazz song. Slowly, she took her long wool coat off to the beat of the music, laying it seductively over Terrance’s shoulders. Her dress was short and flouncy. The other men turned their heads when her coat came off. She was easily the cutest one there. Early 20s, short blonde hair, long lashes.

  “Although the weather outside is frightful, thank you, Feldman, for keeping this joint delightful,” a man said.

  Feldman turned toward
the voice. It was the guy I knew was the sheriff. Richie Somebody. He sat at the bar, cleaning his fingernails with the blade of a long silver pocket knife. His initials were on the handle.

  “I like to make sure the furnace stays on so the skirts stay short,” Feldman replied. “You should know that, Richie.”

  Feldman’s girlfriend, Drew, smiled awkwardly at them both, then at the girl who had just taken off her coat. She took hers off too, but nobody’s head turned. I could tell by how quickly and meekly she’d done it, though, that turning heads was far from her intention. She was just as cute as Flo, but her dress was more of a modest length, a little longer and looser than the younger woman’s, and her face was more serious and less makeup-perfect. “Who wants a tour of the darkest corners here?” she asked. “Chance? Blanche? Anyone?”

  I really wanted Feldman to raise his hand and take her up on the offer. I knew there was no way, though. He already knew his own darkest corners.

  I recognized most of the people from the photo and my notes. But I was pretty sure I was noticing things Feldman probably hadn’t. The man known as Chance was more than just the dumb pigeon Doc had brought. I could tell by the way the women all stared at him that he was the most interesting man here. Like Flo, he was also in his early 20’s with broad shoulders, a chiseled chin, and dark, thick hair.

  Chance went on the tour with Feldman’s girlfriend and so did Blanche, Richie, and Boyd. Bobby looked eerily like his distant relative. Same curly hair and the kind of bushy dark eyebrows that looked like they might spin a chrysalis on his forehead. I would never have guessed Feldman went to high school with the man, though. Feldman was about 40, and this guy looked much younger.

  While the group left for their tour with Feldman’s girlfriend, Flo grabbed Terrance’s hand. “Come dance with me before you jokers go off and play your cards,” she said, kissing him lightly on his lips, making Doc puff harder on his pipe.