“Miss Carmen Lopez. Miss Lopez, if you’d be so kind, Mr. Pasko.” Her lips smiled. The rest of her didn’t bother. No one ever truly smiled in my office.
“I might be so kind.” I propped my feet up, showing off socks that had been new when Roosevelt took office. The first time. “I aim to please, Miss Lopez. Says so on my business card. But if you’re here for personality, I have a different office for that. And I’m disinclined to put on airs without a look at your bankbook.” I leaned back, slid a cigarette into my mouth, and flicked a matchstick with my thumbnail. If I’d been wearing my fedora I’d have tilted it over my eyes.
Ever since Bogart’s Maltese shtick, people expected a show for their buck, and I was happy to play the part if it meant a client. But where I once followed up dry witticisms with professionalism, I now intentionally prodded. Helped maintain a distance. If you were at my door, you’d likely as not be put off by a little brusqueness anyway.
Her fingers whitened around her handbag. She wasn’t used to lip. “Mr. Pasko—”
“Dudley, please.” I took a long drag, imagining the rush that once upon a time calmed my nerves.
“—I am looking for someone, and you come…recommended.”
“By whom?”
“Does that matter?”
“I suppose not.” I puffed out a few half-hearted rings. “But I offer a discount for referrals.”
“Money is no object, Mr. Pasko.”
“Never is, until it is.”
She withdrew an envelope from her purse and laid it on my desk. I ignored it. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here? I hate letting money get in the way of friendship.”
I motioned to the chair nearer my desk. She looked at me, uncertain.
“Please sit. I rent it by the hour.”
She cleared her throat. “I think I’d rather stand over here. If it’s all the same.”
The door must have looked inviting, she kept inching toward it.
“Something on your mind, Carmen?”
She took a breath and said, “You’re moot, Mr. Pasko.”
I sighed, camouflage blown. “Well done, most don’t notice. What was the tell?”
“You haven’t blinked since I came in.”
“That’d do it.” I slipped my sunglasses on. “Better?”
“By degrees. Also, your eyes are different colours.”
I sat up at that, rattled. “What?”
“Your left eye is brown. The other is green. Were they like that before?”
I clawed a mirror from my desk drawer and peered in, not seeing what she saw. I’d lived in tones of grey for months. Forgetting myself, I scooped the right out, scowling.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Quite.”
“I’ll kill him.” I shoved the marble back in. “He swore they were twins.”
“It’s hardly noticeable.”
“Not the point. In my line, appearance is important.” I spat the cigarette to the floor and ground it beneath my toes, forgetting that my shoes were in the closet. I heard the flesh crisp as embers singed through the wool of my left argyle, not feeling a thing.
“Now that my mootness has been uncovered, sit and spill, will you? It only looks like I have all day.”
I gave her a moment. She gnawed at a fingernail, caught herself, and sat, crossing her legs. In another life that would’ve been it for me.
“I do apologize, Mr. Pasko. I wasn’t expecting…”
I waved her quiet. “No one ever gets used to it. Moots, I mean.”
“You look…” She struggled for the word. “…real. Alive, I mean.”
“My pay mostly goes to upkeep these days.”
“Why do you…?” Miss Lopez blushed, ashamed of her curiosity. “Please forgive me. I shouldn’t pry.”
I finished her thought. “Why play lifer? Tell the truth, would you have come to my door otherwise?”
“Perhaps not,” she admitted. “It’s not that I’m deathist, you understand. My maid is moot. But she’s not…what’s the word? She’s not smart?”
“I prefer the term ‘sentient reanimate.’”
“Yes. Cora’s beginning to…” She looked around, hesitant to utter such unpleasantries. “…spoil. There was a burglary. She was struck with a crowbar. Here.” Miss Lopez drew a line across her forehead with her finger. “It’s unpleasant, of course. She makes almost as much mess as she cleans. We took her to Greytown once. I thought she’d prefer it there, among her own, but she wandered back the next day. Not that I mind. Cora’s family.”
Family. I swallowed my irritation at her necrophobia. Family, just not capital F family. Family, but not family enough to set Cora up in a resurrection community.
“Start again,” I said, taking out a pad and pencil. “Begin with why.”
She composed herself. “It’s my sister. Isabel’s always been unpredictable. Went to all the best schools, because none could handle her for more than a month. Can’t sit still, won’t take anything seriously. A hellraiser, as my father says. She’s only sixteen, and already she has been involved with men. And drugs. My family has spent a great deal to keep her out of the papers.”
“And she’s taken off for parts unknown.” Kid nobody understands runs away, takes up with a bad scene. Not the oldest in the book, but a classic for a reason. “Have you called the police? They’re helpful with missing persons, especially well-off missing persons.”
“We’d prefer this be handled quietly. My father feels Isabel has embarrassed us enough.”
“Your dime. Luckily, you’ve caught me with a gap in my schedule. I get thirty per plus expenses, which you’ll receive itemized once I’ve found her or the trail runs cold.”
It was more than I usually charged, but she could afford it. Plus, my doc wasn’t the cheapest in town, and I was only going to get worse. Especially if I killed him for the peeper switcheroo.
“There’s more.” Her eyes began to mist. “Isabel was never interested in religion. We couldn’t even get her through Sunday school. But when Cora returned last year, Isabel started going to church.”
“Not surprising. I hear attendance in the pews has quadrupled since this all started.”
“Suicides, too,” she said.
I nodded, fiddling at my shirt cuffs.
“It hit Isabel particularly hard. Cora is the closest thing to a mother Isabel knows. She was the one who discovered the body. Cora returned in Isabel’s arms.”
“Unsettling.”
“After that, Isabel started taking things more seriously. After the inconstancy of death became clear.”
Inconstancy. I liked that. Nicer than random chance or fickle finger of fate. Or worse, God’s Will Be Done.
“So Isabel found God. Not usual for a runaway.”
“It’s my fault. We are good Christians, Mr. Pasko. But Isabel never does anything halfway. She prays loudly all hours of the day, she preaches chapter and verse to anyone and everyone. When she’s not at church, she has her head buried in the family Bible. I’m ashamed to say this, but her belief has become frightening.”
“There’s religious, and there’s religious.”
“You understand, then.”
“Too well.” I glanced at the corner of my desk. She followed my gaze and frowned, curious at the picture frame lying there, face-down.
“And then Isabel left,” I said, louder than I meant to.
“Yes, Monday. We had been arguing again. This obsession, especially with death, it’s unhealthy for her. Then Isabel didn’t show up for breakfast. Cora was agitated, but I didn’t think much of it. I thought perhaps Isabel had gone to an early Mass. Later on, I noticed the safe in my father’s office was open.”
“She took money?”
“A few thousand dollars. We haven’t heard from her since.”
“How about your church? Anything going on there? Hate to say, it wouldn’t be the first time a trusting young woman was taken advantage of.”
I scratched
at my wrist absently while Miss Lopez assured me at length of Reverend Carlson’s impeccable reputation. We both remembered the Bishop O’Shea case. For an entire year it had consumed the city’s attention. A clergyman taking advantage of young girls has a way of firing up the populace.
“What about the maid?”
“Oh, Cora’s practically doornail.” If she thought the term would bother me, she didn’t show it. “Honestly, I’m thinking of putting her down.”
There’s only so much oblivious mootism I can take. “I’m sure that’s for the best. Cora’s not really family. Will you have it stuffed?”
She blanched. “Oh, that’s not what I—”
“Get the bones resined? Use it as a hat rack?”
“That isn’t fair,” she protested.
“None of this is. But your moot’s the one that recommended me.”
Her mouth gaped at that. “How did you know?”
“Who else could you have asked? It’s probably not quite the doornail you think.”
I’d have to talk to the moot, that much was plain. After a few more questions, I saw Miss Lopez out with the promise to expect me at her house that afternoon for a moot-to-moot chat.
After all, even a rusty doornail has its uses.
I wrote myself a note to eviscerate my physician – or at least get a refund – and opened the envelope. Inside, a sheaf of centuries promised another year of function, maybe two if I could barter Doc down on a few procedures.
As a rule, moots invest any savings they accumulated in life in priests and charlatans and quacks – anyone promising something beyond their shambling non-existence. There are many ways – grisly ways, blood-soaked ways – to escape the clutches of unlife, but most moots, sentient and doornail alike, continue to crave spiritual assurances on the state of their immortal souls.
I’d never gone in for the godbotherer bit. In my opinion, whatever deity was in charge had either died, left work early, or simply stopped caring.
Myself, I kept to the routine. I had little else to do. My family was gone, my unplanned early retirement refused.
Rather than try again, I stuck around and took my punishment.
Beneath the cash lay a photo of Isabel in all her sixteen-years-of-life exuberance. Youthfully curvy, face pleasingly baby-fatted. Polka-dot dress fit for both church suppers and driving young men wild. A wide-brimmed hat shadowed a mischievous gap-toothed grin that would keep any boy she deigned to favour with a smile occupied with dirty thoughts and dirtier socks.
Regretting it but helpless to do otherwise, I lifted the picture frame and held it next to the photo. They could have been sisters. So and Jo gazed out at me, arms around each other’s shoulders, their toothy grins infectious enough to bring one to my lips even as a lump formed in my throat.
Three years dead, and still my body refused to forget.
I put the picture back, face up. I pocketed the photo and deposited the bulk of the cash in my floor safe beneath the desk, grabbing a Michigan bankroll I kept there for emergencies. After a second of thought, I loaded and holstered my gun, a Colt Detective Special I named after my wife.
Like the pistol, Marion promised safety.
And delivered death.
I typically neatened up for house calls. Laundered pinstriped suit, shined patent leathers, tie fully Windsored, chin shorn of shadow. The prospect of interrogating a moot dissuaded me from looking my best.
At the sight of my rumpled apathy, the Lopez butler promptly broke the first rule of butlering and allowed his blank features the momentary gift of undisguised loathing. I followed his stiff-backed majesty through the manor, marching past the requisite displays of animals cut down mid-snarl and traversing a kitchen fit to feed an entire restaurant filled with the highest of high society.
Miss Lopez waited for us in a sparsely furnished bedroom at the back of the house. The room was likely a humble affair, by her standards. I could fit my entire office within its walls with enough room left over for a round of miniature golf.
After shooing the butler off, Miss Lopez moved to the bed, sitting next to a grotesque uniformed in maid’s cap and dress. I shook Cora’s offered hand, scarcely hiding my disgust as I felt the dried joints crackle.
“She just came back from shopping,” Miss Lopez said. “She can still read a grocery list, although sometimes she forgets to pay.”
I pulled up a chair and looked in its eyes, snapping my fingers. The right eye focused lazily on the motion. The left wandered. I removed its cap and examined the canyon gouged into its skull. Beyond the blackened edges of bone, the brain glistened.
“It’s wet,” I said.
“We spritz her every day. Dr. Feingold told us the moisture would help keep her mind sharp.”
“He’s lying. Or incompetent. Overpaid either way.” I fit the cap back snugly over Cora’s patchy scalp. “Makes no matter if the brain’s protected—” I knocked my head with my knuckles. “—or on a shelf. You’d have as much success if you filled the crater with tar. Brains just eventually stop on their own. When they’ve had enough, I guess.”
Cora’s lips peeled up, showing gums long absent of pearly whites. I smiled back. “No tongue?”
“She lost it early on. But she can still write.” Its head bobbed in agreement. Miss Lopez handed me a notebook, pages black with scrawl. The first few pages were barely legible. The last, hieroglyphic.
“Not much time left, Cora,” I said. Its eye looked to the floor dejectedly. From what I saw on the page, the moot had a few months at best before complete body shutdown. What happened after that is anyone’s guess.
I scanned ahead to the last page, to a chicken scratch of a word.
P A S C O
“This why I’m here?”
“I thought it was nonsense at first,” Miss Lopez said, “but she was so adamant.” Cora poked a finger at the scribble, then at me, asking a question. I dipped my head, and its smile returned. Still some higher functions in there. Maybe a year.
“Isabel used to talk to her at night. I could hear murmurs, but I didn’t feel it was my place to pry. I thought Isabel was simply keeping her company.” She put a hand on the moot’s shoulder. “Cora always was the family sounding board, weren’t you?” It nuzzled her hand with its cheek and groaned.
“And after Isabel disappeared,” I said, “you asked it where she might have gone.”
“Yes, Cora wrote this down. I had a devil of a time figuring out what she meant. Until we actually met I wasn’t sure I was right, that it was a name.” She frowned. “I don’t know how Cora would have known of you.”
“Maybe it heard my name somewhere. Cora, do you ever meet other moots? Maybe while shopping?”
Cora’s eye remained glassy, as whatever remained that was still human parsed my question. After a lull, it shrugged.
I felt like I was questioning a particularly dense gorilla.
I took Cora’s hands and looked into the good eye, willing it to remember. “Cora, do you remember Isabel? Nod for yes.”
It cautiously lowered its chin and raised it again. Yes.
“ Did Isabel talk to you?” Yes. “Do you remember what she talked about?” Yes. “Did Isabel ever talk about running away?”
The seconds ticked by; then, yes. A single tear escaped and trickled down the cracks of its dead flesh. Miss Lopez gasped. I waved her silent, hiding my own disquiet. It might have been coincidence, but moots don’t normally retain enough moisture to cry. I took it as a last sign of intelligence, dying within a withering prison.
“Could you write where you think she’d go?” I put the notebook in its lap and worked a pencil into its grasping fingers. It hurriedly began squiggling streaks of lead across, up, and down the page, still moving after Miss Lopez gently pried the pencil away.
I rubbed at my temples in frustration. “Would anyone else know where Isabel went?”
Its face went blank; then, yes. Cora started slowly flipping through the journal, scanning the nonsense. We waited
as it cautiously studied each page’s gibberish until it grunted excitedly, stabbing a finger to the paper.
In a space of lines thick with ink, a tiny oasis of clarity.
N E X
“Nex,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you, Miss Lopez?”
“No. Cora, is this a person?” Yes.
“And this Nex knows where Isabel is?” Yes yes yes yes yes.
“So what now?” asked Miss Lopez.
I took the journal from the moot’s grip and ripped the page out, shoving it in my pocket. “Now I hit the streets.” I stood to leave. “There’s a few snitches I know. I’ll let you know if anything pans. Hopefully this isn’t just your moot sending me on a snipe hunt.”
“Did you have to keep calling her that?” Her voice quivered as she walked me down the main hall to the drabness of the world beyond luxury.
I ignored the question.
“It. Your moot. Cora is not an it, Mr. Pasko.”
I stopped at the door and faced her. “Miss Lopez, I appreciate your courtesy on behalf of the help, but Cora isn’t a who anymore. She and I, we’re it s. And I was under the impression I had been hired for my detective skills, not my manners.”
I walked down the path, turning back when I reached my car. She stood in the archway, in every way perfect, and not for the first time I bemoaned my mootness. “You’re not doing it any favours by keeping it around,” I yelled. “Take my advice, book a crematorium. Cora will be much happier as a pile of ash.”
She yelled something back as I lurched into the driver’s seat. I turned the ignition, letting the engine complain, pretending not to understand what I heard so clearly.
I drove away, idly fingering the scars on my wrists, mulling over her question.
Why haven’t you, then?
Excellent question.
Over the next while I hit up my usual sources, trotting out Isabel’s smile in places a young woman should never frequent, to faces a young woman should never meet. Getting nothing but deadpan stares and obscene single entendres, I sprinkled the name Nex about, along with a few fins. All I earned was a lighter wallet.
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