by C. L. Bevill
Words came to Tavie in a rush. “I remember I came home from Taos— they had me in a boarding school there— and there was this car accident, well, it was my fault, but anyway I got home eventually, and Mom went out to a New Year’s Eve party and left me alone with him, that jerk, because he said he wasn’t feeling well. Right. But hey, I was grounded on account of the fact that I ‘borrowed’ the car I was driving when the accident happened.”
Taos was in Northern New Mexico like Santa Fe. Tavie envisioned a map of New Mexico in her head. Albuquerque was a little north of center of the state. Then there was Santa Fe, and finally she thought Taos wasn’t that far away from the New Mexico/Colorado border. If a girl went to a boarding school there and borrowed someone’s car to drive to say, California, where valley girls tended to live, then she might very well drive through Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
All of which was really reaching in Tavie’s mind. Coincidences often upset well laid plans.
Coincidences were silly things. Most cops knew that there were always going to be baseless coincidences unrelated to the cases they worked. But a good cop knew that there were very few that really were baseless.
There were three people who came from New Mexico or had been there roughly at the same period of time. Tavie had thought that it was the seventies, but it could have just as easily been 1982. In a world where approximately 17-34 died per hour, and only a certain portion came through Deadsville, how could anyone say that was just a big coinkydink?
Tavie needed the smart phone again.
It took her about an hour because the girl wasn’t in the steamboat house when Tavie knocked on the door. Instead she was three blocks over, playing a rousing game of Sorry with Motormouth and two other deadies Tavie hadn’t previously met.
Tavie could have found Coco and simply asked her what she needed to know but she knew that Coco didn’t have all the details. Coco only had one piece of the pie. Tavie needed it all.
Peony looked up from where she was moving one of the red pieces and smiling in triumph. Her smile faded. “Poop,” she muttered.
“I need a word with you,” Tavie said in her best authoritative voice, staring directly at Peony.
Motormouth looked up and winced. “I didn’t do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Whatever.”
Tavie frowned. “A word with you, Peony.”
The girl looked about the same except she’d changed her clothing. She was still an early 2000s college student, but was now wearing a green silk blouse and white low-riders that showed her belly button. Her blonde hair was caught up in a matched emerald scrunchie. Under the cover she was the same girl who had died due to complications of cancer. “Oh, not now,” Peony said through gritted teeth.
“It’s urgent,” Tavie said.
The other two people stared at Tavie and Pudd. “That’s the sheriff,” one said, who had a big chunk of what looked like blue ice embedded in his skull. It dawned on Tavie that he had been the unlucky recipient of something from an airplane’s toilet dropped from very, very high in the air. Talk about winning the lottery.
“That’s the dog,” said the other deadie, who had chew marks all over him.
Tavie realized the second one had died of a drug overdose, but while he’d been unconscious rats had taken advantage of a convenient buffet. There might even be a few of the rats running around Deadsville he had brought with him. That was just eww.
“Yep. That’s me, boys. And my dog,” Tavie said. Pudd yipped sharply as if he knew someone was talking about him. “I just need a short little ol’ word with Peony and she can come back to her game as good as gold. Unless she has a desperate and inconsolable desire to visit the Deadsville Jail.”
“I hate you,” Peony hissed. She got up and brushed her butt off. They’d been sitting in the middle of the street playing the game.
Tavie jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Don’t hate the sheriff,” she said. “Hate the game.” Then she chuckled at her own joke and Peony glared daggers at her.
Once they were around a corner, Peony pulled the phone from her cleavage. Tavie watched with interest. It would have been difficult to tell anything was down there, but Peony had pulled it off.
Tavie sat on a nearby wall while Peony impatiently tapped her pointy toed sandals. She powered up the phone, waited for Hello Kitty to appear, and waited for the satellite to connect. “This is almost a miracle this works. If only I’d known I was going to die, I would have been talking on my phone, too,” she commented. “No, wait, my battery was dead in my phone. Too bad.”
“Whatever,” Peony said breezily. “One day you’re going to come around and I’m going to be gone. Gone to wherever we’re supposed to go, and then you’ll be out of luck.” She ruined her hard-to-get act by bending over to scratch Pudd’s jowls. Pudd drooled out of the side of his mouth and bent into the scratching. His back leg thumped against the ground.
“I can live with it,” Tavie said, and laughed again. It wasn’t really funny but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She could live with it, or she could die with it. That was funny.
“Ha. Very funny.”
Tavie waited and again Google popped up as Peony’s home page. She put in a few search terms such as car wreck, New Mexico, Coco, and December, 1982. She got about two million hits. Nothing significant was in the top of the list. She clicked down the list and went to the second page.
“Okay, that wasn’t a huge blip on the radar in 1982,” Tavie murmured.
Peony strode back and forth in front of Tavie. She paused. “What are you looking for?”
“A car accident in 1982,” Tavie said.
“Do you have the name of the driver?”
“Just the first name.”
“Oh, these deadies, keeping their names to themselves. What else do you know about the person?” Peony stared at Tavie with a distinctly impatient air. “Try to approach it from another angle. That’s usually what works best.”
“Hey, great idea,” Tavie said. Coco had been the victim of the Steppie Killer. She had said it had made the news because he confessed after he’d killed the nanny of the second woman he’d married. Then he’d led the police to that body, but he couldn’t quite remember where Coco’s was located. She searched for Steppie Killer and found him right away. His name had been Allen Fisk, which sounded like a suspicious name to Tavie. And the nanny’s name had been Tegan Smith. Then Coco’s name was Coco Chanel Oakes. Yes, someone had very much liked the perfume or perhaps the designer.
A search for Coco Chanel Oakes led to a very brief news article from The Albuquerque Journal dated December, 1982. “Teen Driver Arrested for Theft, Car Wreck”- according to the headline.
To sum it up, it went like the following. Coco stole a car from the warden, er, headmaster, of the school where she went in Taos. She drove it down past Santa Fe and into Albuquerque, on her silly way back to Californ-i-yea. She got tired just outside of Albuquerque and broadsided a 1982 Buick LeSabre Estate station wagon. The photograph of the decimated wagon showed that its imitation wood sides had popped right off. Coco walked away with a few scratches and a few bruises. Mrs. Patrick Byrne, the driver of the station wagon, later died at the hospital. Coco went to juvie. A very good lawyer named Minh Thanh got her off because of her minor status. Mrs. Patrick Byrne’s mother was quoted with a bitter interpretation on the inequalities of the justice system.
Peony sat beside Tavie and peered over her shoulder. “So what?”
“If someone killed someone in a car wreck, with a stolen car, it’s considered felony level manslaughter or whatever New Mexico’s laws are, or were in this case. It’s serious.”
“So what happened?”
Tavie didn’t say anything. She added Darren’s name to the mix, but it wasn’t noted in connection with Coco or Mrs. Patrick Byrne. But she looked at the initial article and remembered that Darren Tucker had been Darren Tucker, M.D., an emergency room doctor and a specialist in emergency medicine.
The victim hadn’t died on the scene, but she had died several hours later, when she was likely in the nearest ER, under the care of an ER doctor. Tavie murmured, “Ah, I think I’m getting the big picture now.”
She erased the browsing history on the smart phone because Peony looked like she might take advantage of information and because Tavie was instinctually paranoid.
Tavie hesitated for a moment. It would have been so easy to type in her name in the window. Octavia Stone. Phoenix Police Department. It would take just five words. The search would tell Tavie everything she wanted to know. Her fingers levitated above the digital keyboard. She said a very bad word and hit the icon for home instead.
Handing the phone back to Peony, Tavie thought about Coco instead. The teenager was likely safe with Enoch for the time being. Of course, Enoch could be connected to the murderer, but Tavie would eat her badge if Enoch was a bad guy. However, Coco had been correct about needing back-up. Had she known she was in peril or had she simply suspected?
The idea of Coco being a target for the three misters made Tavie more suspicious. She stepped around the corner and beckoned to Motormouth. He reluctantly climbed to his feet, and trudged over to Tavie. Peony was adjusting her blouse from making the smart phone vanish once again.
“What?” Motormouth demanded. “You’re going to give me a bad reputation. I’m going to be, like, the sheriff’s bitch.”
Tavie smiled coldly. Motormouth took a step backward. Pudd evidently took that as permission to growl at Motormouth.
“You didn’t just happen upon that girl with the diamond tennis bracelet, is that correct?” she asked.
Motormouth glanced at Peony. Peony shook her head sadly. “What have you been doing, Motormouth?” she asked miserably. “Someone told you about her, right?”
Motormouth nodded shortly. “Roy knows someone in the welcoming committee who tells him about the new ones with cool stuff. We were supposed to watch her, though. Tell the guy where she ended up sleeping and stuff.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never met him. Only Roy has.”
And Roy AKA Mr. Slit Throat was still located in Deadsville Jail where she had put him, just waiting to answer some of Tavie’s questions.
“Don’t leave town,” Tavie warned him.
Motormouth’s face contorted uneasily. “That’s not funny.”
* * *
Tavie again got lost trying to find Deadsville Jail. She asked directions from a woman who had been stabbed in the chest with the underwire of her Wonderbra. The underwire had hit a major artery and she’d bled out before anyone thought to apply pressure to her breasts. She was too preoccupied with Pudd to give coherent directions.
Then Tavie asked directions from a man with an icicle in his eye socket. The icicle had gone all the way into his brain, causing massive hemorrhaging.
He saw her looking at it and said, “I looked up during a thaw in Fairbanks. Then it came right down. I should have moved. I mean, I watched it come down. Anyway, go down three streets that way. If you’ve passed Hungry Hippo Herman’s new place, you’ve gone too far.”
Tavie stared at icicle man. “Hungry Hippo Herman,” she repeated. The light bulb in her brain went on like a spotlight from a police chopper. Herman had been the one to say something about catechism school. He had learned some Latin from how-to-be-a-good-Catholic school.
And Herman wasn’t that far away from her. He might know something about exorcisms and what was needed to perform one.
Coco was probably safe with Enoch and that was Tavie’s consolation. Tavie had figured out the why connection, but she hadn’t figured out the who part, or even more importantly, the how part.
* * *
Hungry Hippo Herman’s place of business, nee Darren’s place of business, hadn’t changed. It was a regular sized building, constructed from mishmash materials. The windows were still sheets of plastic and the sign on the makeshift door still said “Got SOMETHING to Barter?” in Sharpie and crayon. Class, thy name be Hungry Hippo Herman’s Barter O-Rama.
The only thing that was different was that Herman was sitting outside in a papasan chair with a blood red cushion, trying to look cool while leaning back. He might have been comfortable, but he didn’t look cool. His two flunkies played with a deck of cards near him, both sitting cross legged on the ground.
Herman still wore his Mobsters-R-Us suit, although she could see the outline of the meatball in his throat under the cover of the barely-legal businessman. Tavie thought it must be difficult to speak, or maybe it didn’t really matter in Deadsville.
Jake of the Cuisinart death looked at Tavie with marked apprehension.
The third deadie was the one who had been shot several times, and she hadn’t caught his name in her previous visit.
“Meatball,” Tavie said as she pointed at Herman. “Slice and diced,” she said, indicating Jake. She gave the third one a long look. “I’m thinking shotgun blasts. Boy, who did you tick off?”
“Girlfriend,” he said.
“We saw that act before, doll,” Herman said with a certain insouciance that Tavie envied but would never admit it.
“The papasan’s new. Someone died in it?”
“How else would it be here?”
“Well, duh, right?”
“Trade you the papasan chair for the gun,” Herman said.
“I don’t think so.” Secretly Tavie would have loved a papasan chair, but the fact that someone had died in it held considerably yuckiness. However, the truth was that most things around Deadsville were associated with someone dying in it, near it, while touching, or with it. If she didn’t actively think about it, then it wouldn’t bother her.
Herman frowned.
“Need to talk to you,” Tavie said instead of bartering. She would never give up the gun.
Herman struggled to get out of the chair. It looked almost as hard to exit as a bean bag chair. Finally he snarled something at Jake. Jake climbed to his feet and gave Herman a hand up.
Herman glanced at Tavie. “It’s a nice chair, but bigger people probably shouldn’t sit in it.” Then he opened the door and held it for her.
Tavie went inside with Pudd scuttling in behind her, and waited until Herman had shut the door behind them. She looked around and saw one of the snow blowers was absent. In addition, there was half of a Ski-Doo in the back. “That must have hurt,” she said with a nod at the water toy. It was almost sliced in half. Pudd sniffed it interestedly.
“That’ll teach the guy not to play chicken with one of the big tankers in San Francisco Bay.”
“Really,” Tavie said as she looked at the Ski-Doo. “Propellers, huh?”
“Yep. The other guy didn’t blink.”
Tavie glanced around again. Her gaze came to rest on a six-pack of Coca-Colas sitting on a shelf. It was the kind someone would have had in the seventies; the bottles were smallish and made from real glass and not plastic. The thought of drinking some Coke made her mouth water.
Behind the Ski-Doo was a snowmobile. It was bright, red, and appeared ready to rumble. It said Polaris on one side with an 800 above it and a Pro-X below it. It was a little banged up, but looked like it might run. “Avalanche?” she asked and Herman nodded.
Then her eyes went to the two lists pinned to the wall. A few items had been added to the items owed to Darren, or rather, Herman. The other list of favors owed by Darren, er, Herman, was the same as it had been.
“When I spoke to you before, you said something about catechism school,” Tavie said.
“Faithful lifelong Catholic,” Herman said. He straightened his tie and adjusted the Knights of Columbus pin.
“What do you know about exorcism?”
“Linda Blair never got past it,” Herman said promptly. “Scared the crap out of thousands of good Catholics.”
“What would you need for an exorcism?”
The space between Herman’s eyebrows narrowed as he focused on Tavie. “Well, exorcism is basic
ally the act of expelling demons or other spiritual forms out of a human body. Demons are the cinematic popular form. Can’t be expelling unicorns and rainbows out of a human body. It just wouldn’t be the same.”
“Okay.”
“Is this about the two dead deadies?”
“Do you want to take an extended visit of the Deadsville Jail?”
“I do not and because I do not, I get your drift. You know, exorcism isn’t just for Catholics. Many religions practice it. Catholics need a consecrated priest. As a matter of fact, I think there are specialists in the Catholic Church that do just that one thing, although I think that many of the priests would be willing and able to do it.” Herman tugged at his collar. The meatball pressed against the part of the throat closest to the collar. “That would be the most important part, if it was a Catholic doing it.”
Catholic Church. Latin writing. What else?
“My nonna, that’s my grandmother in case you don’t know about Italian-Americans, used to say that a priest had to believe. He had to believe fiercely, or the words wouldn’t mean anything,” Herman said and sighed. “I miss that old woman. I never got to say goodbye to her. She wouldn’t have ended up in Deadsville. And she wouldn’t have made meatballs as big as the one I choked on.”
“Do you know any priests in Deadsville?”
“Catholic priests,” he said. “I don’t think so. There’s a few self-made ministers and preachers.”
“I’ve already visited the Angelina Jolie Church of Christ,” Tavie interjected. Her eyes settled on the second, smaller list. The last item was the bible owed to Patrick and the little skull and crossbones was drawn in next to his name. “Patrick,” she said. “Do you know who this—” she tapped the name on the list “—is?”