Walkers

by Gary Brandner

  The Tarot cards were considerably larger than ordinary playing cards, and Joana found shuffling them an awkward task. She managed to mix them, however, and tried to come up with a question. She still thought this was a lot of foolishness, but as long as she was here, she might as well play the game.

  The question. What should she ask the Tarot? There was only one thing of importance on her mind—her experience in that shadowy tunnel, and what came immediately before and after. The feeling stayed with her that she was not out of trouble yet. She concentrated on the question: How will this all end?

  She finished shuffling the cards and placed the deck on the table between them. "What now?"

  "Cut the deck into three piles, from right to left, with your left hand."

  Joana followed his instructions, and felt a tingle of anticipation in spite of herself.

  Peter took up the three piles in reverse order, using his left hand. "There are many different methods of laying out the Tarot," he said, "but we're going to use the one that's most common—the ancient Keltic method."

  "If it was good enough for the ancient Kelts, it's good enough for me," Joana said. She was trying to lighten the mood, to lose the apprehensive feeling that this oversize deck of cards was actually going to tell her something.

  Peter just smiled and peeled off the first card, which he placed over the Queen of Cups in the center of the table. As he laid the card he said, "This covers you." The next card he placed horizontally across the first, saying, "This crosses you." The next four cards he laid down in the form of a cross with the covered Queen of Cups at the center. As he carefully placed each card in its position, Peter spoke the ritual that went with it. "This is beneath you... This is behind you... This crowns you... This is before you."

  Next he laid down four cards in a vertical row to the right of the cross, beginning at the bottom. "These, now, will build up to give us the final answer to your question."

  He snapped down the tenth and last card. Joana flinched. The picture was of a skeleton in black armor mounted on a fiery-eyed white horse. Beneath the horse's hooves lay a dead king. Before it a woman and a child were on their knees. The legend under the picture: DEATH.

  Joana reached out and tapped the card with a finger. "My God, what does this mean?"

  Peter's composure slipped a notch. "That? Oh, we'll get to that. It doesn't necessarily mean what it seems to."

  "I hope not," Joana said.

  Peter cleared his throat and slipped back into his professional manner. "Let us consider first this card, the one that covered your Queen of Cups. It represents the influences at work on you and the general atmosphere in which you ask the question. As you see, it is the Three of Swords. Here the swords are piercing a heart. Your heart. There are problems in your romantic life. A quarrel. Separation, perhaps."

  Joana looked at him quickly, remembering the chilly exchange she'd had with Glen this morning. She tried to recall if she had made some reference to that when she'd met Peter in the parking lot this morning. That was probably it. He was a perceptive man.

  He pointed to the card at the right side of the cross—a stalwart young man in a winged helmet, a cup held firmly in his outstretched hand. "But now the good news. Here, in your very near future, we find a new romantic interest. A young man, sensitive, artistic. He will have a message for you. An invitation, perhaps."

  "Or a proposition?" Joana suggested.

  "Possibly, possibly." He went on in more general terms, telling her what each card represented—the forces opposing her, an influence just passing away, and so on. The things he read, or said he read, in the cards could generally fit her situation, but a clever man like Peter Landau could have deduced enough from what he already knew of her to build a fairly convincing story.

  Still, as he talked on, telling about the cards that made up the cross, Joana could detect a faltering in his patter. She watched his eyes and saw they kept straying to the top card in the row of four, the Death card.

  "Is anything the matter?" she asked.

  "Matter?" he said too quickly. "No. Well, maybe. I don't seem to be getting strong vibes from you. Maybe the Tarot wasn't a good choice. What sign did you say you were? Libra, I'll bet."

  "I'm an Aries, but don't change the subject." She pointed down at the skeletal figure on horseback. "I want to know what this means."

  "Without reading all the other positions and relating them to each other, it's impossible to—"

  "Cut out the bullshit, Peter," she said. "Tell me what it means."

  Peter cleared his throat again. "Well, this position, number ten in the Keltic layout, tells us what the final outcome will be. It is the sum of the information contained in all the other cards, and the ultimate

  answer to your question."

  "Death?"

  He tried a smile that did not come off. "When you come right down to it, isn't that the final outcome of everything, for all of us?"

  Joana did not answer his wobbly smile. Her eyes returned to the card showing the deadly figure in the black armor.

  Peter reached out suddenly and swept the cards into a pile. "Sometimes you just don't get a true reading," he said. "It happens all the time. Why don't we start over again?"

  "No, thank you," Joana said.

  "Well, look, how about another glass of wine? I'll put on another tape, something upbeat, and we can relax and rap for a while."

  "I've really got to go," she said. "I haven't even been home yet to change my clothes."

  She stood up, and Peter immediately got to his feet. "Can I see you again?" he said.

  "What for?"

  "What does a guy usually want to see a girl for? A date. You know."

  "I'm pretty involved right now, Peter."

  "With Glen Early?"

  "Mm-hmm."

  "You're not engaged or anything?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Well, then?"

  "Call me if you want to," Joana said. "I'm in the book. J. Raitt on Beachwood Drive."

  "I'll find you ," Peter said. He walked with her out onto the porch and watched as she descended the steps to the street.

  Joana climbed into the Datsun and sat for a long minute behind the wheel before starting the engine. Coming here had been foolishness, she told herself. Tarot cards! That was for people who believed in tea leaves and crystal balls and all that supernatural crap. And Peter Landau was no seer, he was just another guy on the make. Joana was a hard-headed, intelligent young woman, not some superstitious dingbat.

  And yet, she could not put out of her mind the picture of Death in black armor astride the white horse with the blazing eyes. The skull face under the upraised helm glared at her with empty eyes. The skull swam in Joana's mind, and blurred into the face of the woman behind the wheel of the station wagon.

  Joana shook her head vigorously to clear away the troubling thoughts and cranked the little car's engine to life.

  Up on the porch Peter Landau watched the Datsun turn around and head down the hill and out of sight. Then he went back inside the house. The late clouds had begun to drift inland from the ocean, and it was growing cold.

  Peter walked over and sat down on the love seat. He stared at the table where he had laid out the Tarot cards for Joana. It was the first time anything like this had happened to him, the first time he had lost control of a reading.

  It had been his plan to give her one of his standard flattering readings, with the subtle suggestion that the time was ripe for a new romantic adventure in her life. That approach had worked many times, leading him into more beds than he could remember. With Joana, though, it was different. He had been uncomfortable from the start with the familiar routine. For the first time he could remember, the

  cards seemed to be actually telling him something. Something he did not want to know.

  Years ago Peter had memorized the standard interpretations for each of the seventy-eight cards. He could weave them together glibly into any kind of a story he wanted to tell.
For some reason, today he could not seem to talk his way around the portents of bad news, violence, and disaster. And then there was that damned Death card in the crucial number-ten position. Jesus, was he starting to believe in this crap?

  Idly he scooped up the deck, shuffled, and cut it to his left into three piles. He chose the Magician, as usual, to represent himself, and began laying out the Keltic cross. It always relaxed him to weave brilliant futures for himself by giving his own special interpretations to the meanings of the cards.

  He laid out the six cards of the cross and frowned. Many swords, a sign of strife. Especially bad, the Nine, Ten, and Page of swords. Sorrow, desolation, misfortune, pain, and an impostor exposed. How the hell could he make anything good out of that?

  Peter was tempted to sweep up the cards and put them away, but some compulsion made him continue. Deliberately he put down the seventh, eighth, and ninth cards in the vertical row.

  First came The Fool, that unheeding young man about to step over the brink of a precipice. Folly, indescretion, thoughtless action. Then The Tower with its fearsome lightning bolt and falling bodies. And The Hanged Man, bound and suspended from a T-cross of living wood. The most ambiguous of the Tarot deck, but with a dark and sinister look. Bad news, all of them.

  What the hell was he doing? This was only a game, wasn't it? He could make the cards say anything he wanted, couldn't he?

  One more to go. The tenth card, the final outcome. Peter hesitated a long time. His fingers rubbed the crisscross design on the back of the card, and seemed to sense what it would be.

  Don't turn that card, he told himself silently. If he did not actually see it, then it wouldn't exist.

  His fingers moved without his willing them and slid the next card from the top of the deck. He flipped it face up in the tenth position. It was no surprise. It was Death.

  Chapter 8

  The air in the elevator grew rapidly cooler as Dr. Hovde rode down to the basement of the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. The car came to a stop, the doors slid noiselessly open on oiled rollers. The doctor shivered when he stepped out into the tiled hallway. Powerful fluorescent lights gave the scene a harsh, blue-white clarity.

  Dr. Hovde walked quickly past a row of heavy drawers set into the wall. One of the drawers was rolled out. The outlines of a body could be seen under a green sheet. One naked black foot protruded from under the sheet. A cardboard tag was attached to the big toe.

  Horde continued to the end of the hall and through a door with Pathology Lab lettered on frosted glass. Inside, the smell of disinfectant was sharp in his nostrils. There were four tables spaced across the room. The tops of the tables were metal grillwork with troughs underneath to catch the spilled body fluids. At one end of each table was a stainless-steel sink, at the other a hanging scale for weighing organs as they were removed from the cadaver. Three of the tables were empty. On the fourth lay the naked body of Mrs. Yvonne Carlson.

  Dr. Kermit Breedlove, the chief pathologist, a lanky man with an unruly shock of black hair, stood over the body with his arms folded. A wooden toothpick danced from one side of his mouth to the other. Dr. Hovde had always thought he would look more at home playing the piano in a saloon than cutting up dead bodies.

  "Hello, Warren," Breedlove said. "What brings you down to the icebox? Things slow upstairs?"

  "For the moment." Hovde walked over and stood next to the pathologist, looking down on Mrs. Carlson's body. "I'm a little curious about this one."

  Breedlove shrugged. "What you see is what you get. Female Caucasian, middle to late fifties. Old

  appendectomy, more recent gall bladder."

  "Will you be doing an autopsy?"

  "Got to," said Breedlove. "According to the sheet, there was no doctor in attendance at the time of death."

  "I know. She died in a traffic accident."

  "That so? Doesn't look very banged up."

  "It was her heart or something."

  "We'll find out for sure when we go into her," said Breedlove.

  "Doesn't the coroner usually handle these?"

  "Normally, yes, but they're crying short-handed downtown. Proposition 13, you know. As long as we've got the time and the facilities, I don't mind helping them out now and then."

  Dr. Hovde remembered the manila folder under his arm. He took it out and passed it to Breedlove. "Here's the police report."

  "Thanks." The pathologist scanned the two typewritten pages and shook his head, making a disgusted sound.

  "What's the matter?" Hovde asked.

  "Just another L.A.P.D. fuck-up. Nothing out of the ordinary."

  "What do you mean?"

  "This here report doesn't go with this here cadaver, that's all."

  Dr. Hovde felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. "Why do you say that, Kermit?"

  The pathologist gave the folder a contemptuous slap with the back of his hand. "According to this, the dead woman here was driving a car in Westwood"—he looked up at the electric wall clock—"just a little

  over an hour ago."

  "So?"

  "So, the woman here on the table has been dead at least twelve and possibly twenty-four hours."

  "Are you sure?"

  "This is my specialty, Warren, remember? I'll be able to tell more when I cut her open, but just by looking at her I can assure you she wasn't up and around this afternoon. Feel the epidermis."

  Dr. Hovde touched the woman's pale forearm. The flesh was rubbery-firm and cold.

  "Under normal conditions," said Breedlove, "a body will retain some of its heat, especially when the weather is warm like today and the body is clothed like this one was, for six to twelve hours. This one is cold as a mackerel." He used his thumb to peel back an eyelid. "Take a look at that."

  The woman's eye was dry and lusterless, with a cloudy film over the cornea.

  "If it was only an hour after her death, the fluids would still cover the eyeball, making it glisten," Breedlove said.

  "Aren't there other conditions that could account for these things?"

  "Maybe. Like I said, I won't know everything until I go into her. I'll tell you another funny thing about this one. Look at her feet."

  Dr. Hovde followed the pathologist's pointing finger and saw that Yvonne Carlson's feet and lower legs were discolored a dark purplish-red. Breedlove slipped both hands under the body and expertly flipped it over onto the stomach.

  "Now look at her back."

  The woman's flesh was unnaturally pale from the neck all the way down to the midpoint of the calves, where the discoloration began.

  "She is supposed to have died in a supine position, according to the police report," said Breedlove.

  "That's right. She got out of the car after it stalled, took a couple of steps, and fell. Nobody moved her, and she lay there on her back until the ambulance came.

  "And in the ambulance they'd have her strapped down, again on her back."

  "That's the procedure."

  "And when you saw her she was on her back, likewise when she came down here."

  "What are you getting at?"

  "If that was the way it really happened, the blood, when the heart stopped and circulation ceased, would have settled into the lowest part of the body. With the body in the supine position, that would be the subcutaneous vessels of the back of the neck first, then the shoulders and the rest of the back. The shoulder blades and buttocks, where the skin was compressed by the supporting surface, would have remained free of blood and pale. The stagnant blood would congeal there, giving us the characteristic discoloration. As you can see, the woman's back has no sign of postmortem lividity, but there is advanced lividity in the feet and lower legs."

  "Thanks for the lecture," Hovde said drily, "but what does it mean?"

  The pathologist ticked off one finger. "It could mean she died by hanging, but as there are no abrasions or discolorations at the throat, and none of the usual signs of asphyxiation, we can eliminate that."

 
; "We know she didn't die by hanging," Hovde said impatiently.

  Breedlove ticked off the second finger. "Then we go to another possibility." His eyes twinkled mischievous]y.

  "Get to it, Kermit."

  "This woman was walking around for some hours after she was dead."

  The pathologist's laughter rang in the tile-walled laboratory. Dr. Hovde stared at him.

  "Just having my little joke," Breedlove said.

  "Oh, that's funny. That's very funny."

  "Look, Warren, if you're going to come down with a case of sensibilities, go on back upstairs and patch up your emergencies. Down here, without some kind of a sense of humor a man would go crazy in a hurry."

  "Yes, I know. I'm sorry. When are you doing the autopsy?"

  "As soon as the husband comes in to I.D. her. Hey, this wasn't somebody you knew, was it?"

  "No. I think it might involve somebody I know, though. I'd like to hear what results you get."

  "Sure. Give me a call."

  Dr. Hovde left the laboratory and walked back up the hall past the refrigerated drawers. They were all closed now. He rode back up in the elevator, and as the temperature warmed he felt as though he were returning to the land of the living.

  Things were still quiet in the emergency ward. The young resident was removing a splinter from the foot of a little girl who stared at him with huge adoring eyes.

  Dr. Hovde washed his hands and dropped a quarter into the machine for a cup of bitter coffee. He carried it back into the office cubicle and sat down at the desk to think about Mrs. Yvonne Carlson, lying dead on an autopsy table downstairs, and young Joana Raitt, nearly hit by a car seemingly driven by this woman many hours after she died.

  Hovde lit a cigarette, holding it down below the window out of habit so no one could look in and see him smoking. He tried to relate the strange automobile accident to the story Joana had told him this morning about the hallucinations she experienced after her near-drowning. Hallucinations, or whatever the hell they were. Was there a connection? He concentrated, trying to remember exactly what Joana had told him.