A Room For The Dead (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 3)

by Noel Hynd

  If things continued like this, there would be a tragedy on some future night. The formula was already in place: the gun, the alcohol, and the unseen fears. Frank O'Hara was on the path to getting himself in some deep trouble.

  Either that or killed. By suicide. By accident. Or by some self-destructive combination of the two.

  He put the note upon his wallet. The time had come to call Dr. Steinberg. The next morning, he told himself.

  Or at least sometime this week.

  He had to have help. Soon. Before the red crab returned. Before he started seeing other things that he knew weren't there.

  Meanwhile the night surrounded him. He leaned against the windowsill again. He gazed out at the darkness of the summer night which lay before him like an ancient debt. It was accumulating interest all the time, and, in the end, he suspected it would be hell to pay.

  He turned the music off and crawled back into bed. For several seconds, he lay very still, again listening to the silence. As he closed his eyes and felt himself drift back to sleep, a strange notion was upon him.

  The smell he had noticed downstairs. The strange acrid scent that he had picked up near the quaking rocking chair. The scent was similar to that of burning flesh. Like a body burned during warfare. Or like an execution.

  It was a bizarre notion, he told himself, that he thought he could smell such a thing in his home. Absolutely crazy, with no rational explanation for it whatsoever.

  Chapter Two

  From the very start, Adam Kaminski sensed something unnatural about Carolyn Hart.

  Not that he hadn't seen some strange customers in his time. As a rental agent for several family-owned buildings in Philadelphia, Kaminski had developed an extra sense, a special inner voice that told him when a prospective tenant was a bit “off.”

  Not that he hadn't acquired this skill through several disastrous experiences.

  There had been Mrs. Bernice Ryan, for example, who had rented an apartment on the 800 block of Spruce Street with a “husband” and two children. She had signed a lease, initialed the “No Pets” clause, and paid her security deposit plus the first month's rent. Yet by Christmas her children were gone, so was her husband, and she had come into possession of thirteen cats.

  The stench from the kitties was fierce. The tenant across the hall moved out, and eviction proceedings dragged on for fifteen months. Then when Kaminski dug a little deeper, he discovered that Mrs. Ryan had a history of nickel-and-dime litigation-and a talent at it as well. The pussycats, she argued in court, were her “only family.” Kaminski finally managed to evict, but she picketed his office for another six months.

  And there had also been the Strauss kid, who must have been about twenty-five-approximately Adam Kaminski's age-when he first rented from Adam's family.

  Larry Strauss had rented three rooms on the ground floor of a walk-up on Lombard Street, not far from St. Peter's Church. The premises had a front and back entrance. There were also several ground-floor windows.

  “I'm jittery about fires,” Strauss had explained. “A lot of exits mean a lot of ways to get out. Know what I mean, man?”

  “Uh huh,” Kaminski answered.

  “People get careless, you know,” added Strauss.

  “Uh huh,” Kaminski said again.

  Getting out in a hurry obviously had its appeal, but not due to fires. Strauss moved a bed into the living room and even had a dresser-sort of, it was concocted out of mismatched plastic milk crates-in the front hall. The rest of the apartment had been taken up by the warehousing of electronic gadgets, jewelry, and expensive leather coats. Larry's inventory was without any receipts and mostly-the Philadelphia police said when they came to visit one day, equipped with a warrant-removed without paying from some of the finest stores in the city.

  Larry Strauss, before he jumped bail in August 1992, called this the storage of personal effects. The D.A. called it a fencing operation. Kaminski called it another costly headache.

  And then there was Paula Burns. Of a bad lot, she was Adam's favorite. First, she didn't cost him anything. And second, she fulfilled an emotional need.

  Kaminski fancied that he would someday rent to just the “Right Woman,” some primal fox with an insatiable libido with whom he could fall in love. Within several minutes of meeting Paula Burns, he fantasized that Paula was her.

  Ah, Paula Burns.

  She gave as her employer an accounting firm on Walnut Street. She was fashionably thin, stood about five feet six on a great pair of wheels, and had red curls down her forehead. She usually wore purple lipstick, jeans, and plain blouses. The latter were usually opened to the third button where they revealed the freckles that dotted the tops of her breasts. She did not look, Kaminski told himself, anything like a cruncher of numbers. She looked like a cruncher of men. Adam was anxious to be crunched.

  Paula rented a single-unit house, a small brick edifice at 565 South Oswell Street. This particular block of Oswell was a narrow tree-lined lane that intersected with Lombard about two hundred yards west of Broad Street. It was barely navigable by car and hadn't changed much in the last seventy-five years.

  “The house is a 'trinity,'“ Kaminski explained the day he first showed it to Paula. “Three floors, one large room to each floor. Some people find that very cozy.”

  “I'm sure I will, too,” Paula answered. She signed the lease the same day.

  When Paula moved in, she brought with her an assortment of white wicker furniture, large, leafy plants, and a bed big enough for three. She painted the walls of her bedroom a sensuous shade of fuchscia and kept to herself.

  Kaminski was thin, bespectacled and balding. He was also a snoop, even after a tenant had moved in. But he was particularly nosy when it came to Paula. She was, after all, the woman of a lifetime.

  He put her under a crude sort of surveillance. At first, he just kept an eye on her, keeping track of her comings and goings, occasionally allowing himself to imagine the things they would do together after she admitted that they were in love.

  He came around twice in her first month to see if he could perform any carpentry for her. She said no. He learned her hours and managed to be on the sidewalk a half-dozen times when she came and went from the building. She exchanged a pleasant but brief greeting each time, which he took as encouragement, though she never stopped to talk. He learned where she parked her car and made passes at her garage on the off-chance of an encounter.

  Then, a few weeks into her tenancy, Kaminski noticed that Paula was riot going to “work” until evening. He phoned the employment number that she had placed on her rental application and learned that she had never worked there. So Kaminski reckoned he was more than justified in nosing around a little more.

  From a distance of two blocks, he followed Paula one evening. She reported to Benny's Sahara Spa, a concrete-and-neon mob joint with a desert harem motif located on one of the shadier strips of Delaware Avenue. Paying his way inside, Kaminski discovered that Paula's real line of employment was that of a hostess-clad only between the thighs and the navel, and even there not very much. Not that Paula's actual employment wasn't more lucrative than squeezing the blood out of bottom lines at the accounting house. And not that Paula didn't pay her rent on time. She paid quarterly and in advance.

  But from Adam's sudden change in attitude, Paula knew he had discovered her true vocation and had most likely caught her ach. So henceforth, when they passed on the street, Paula would give him a conspiratorial wink. Just one wink. One enticing flutter of a mascaraed lash. It turned Kaminski into soft butter and kept him firmly in her camp. A gesture like that from Paula was enough to speed any normal man toward a cold shower.

  But inevitably there were police again, this time an investigation from out of state. It stemmed from the sudden demise of a man in Baltimore who went by the name of Antonio Blue.

  Blue was either Paula's former boyfriend, ex-husband, current legal husband, or one-time pimp, depending on how those terms were defined. Or
maybe Mr. Blue was a modern version of all these things. No one knew exactly, and by the time the story reached Kaminski, Blue wasn't anything anymore. One night as Blue sat in his Buick 225-the automobile was a striking deep blue, naturally-an unknown female who matched Paula's size, shape, and hair color, walked up to his car and popped a bullet in the left side of his head, just above the ear.

  This was a case which the local cops could mark as “Civic Improvement.” But nonetheless they investigated. Paula hadn't been dancing at Benny's that night, and the “Crabcake City” cops wanted to ask her a few questions about the shooting.

  Paula, however, didn't wish to answer. In fact, she was so anxious not to answer that she disappeared, leaving behind her possessions, that high-paying, high-octane job, and Adam Kaminski with a broken heart.

  To the young landlord, the emotional strain was nothing new. Women had trampled his feelings before. And he knew they would again until that Right Woman came along.

  But from a business angle, the Paula Burns affair was another case altogether. Fully paid tenants didn't usually leave everything behind. The Baltimore cops pushed a business card into his hands and asked if he would call if he heard from her. He promised he would. And he knew he was lying.

  Two weeks later he received a letter attached to an Arnerican Express money order for the final three months' rent on Paula's lease. She said she wouldn't be returning to Philadelphia. She had gone to stay with her sick mother in Montana and her stuff-the plants, the white wicker, and the big plush bed à trois--could be donated to the Salvation Army. Montana or not, the letter was postmarked Miami. Kaminski sighed. He pictured the woman he loved on South Beach, wearing only slightly more than she wore at Benny's, and his spirits sagged a little more. He cashed the check and said nothing to the police. Although he cried inside that his lady love had vanished from his life, who was he not to do her a final favor?

  Later that month he put the house on Oswell Street up for rent. Paula's furniture remained. Real estate rented faster with furniture in it. All of which brought Adam Kaminski to Carolyn Hart. And vice versa.

  By the time Carolyn appeared in Philadelphia in August 1993, Kaminski was certain that he knew which tenants were trouble and which ones were okay. Particularly women.

  Which further brought him to Carolyn Hart. There was something wrong with her. Something not quite right.

  Carolyn Hart had replied to an ad in the newspaper. She was specifically interested in the house on Oswell Street. It was a Thursday afternoon, Kaminski would always remember, and she met him on the corner half a block away.

  The first thing Kaminski noticed was that initially she wasn't there, then a moment later she was. The second thing he noticed was how pretty she was. Here, he immediately started to think, was a woman who would help him forget Paula Burns.

  They walked together to the house that Paula had evacuated. Adam carried under his arm a sturdy leather portfolio bearing pens, leases, and notepads.

  Carolyn was thin and tall. Her skin was astonishingly pale and very pretty, as if she had been confined indoors for an unconscionably long time, or as if she disdained being in the sun. To Adam Kaminski-a well-read, literate sort of swine-she looked like one of those delicate beauties he associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the ones who sat around the Plaza Hotel in New York in the 1920s.

  But she wasn't one of those. She was flesh and blood, and belonged to the modern world. Or so she gave every indication as they arrived before the house at number 565.

  “From the outside, it's very charming,” Carolyn said. “How old would it be?”

  “About a hundred years,” Kaminski answered.

  She lowered her eyes, looked back to him and gave him a beguiling smile. “Well?” she pressed gently, covering an awkward moment. “May I see the inside?”

  “Of course,” he said. He fished a key from his pocket. The front door opened with a creak.

  The house was stuffy from disuse. And Paula's furniture didn't show it to its best advantage. But Kaminski had been watering her plants, and the property did have a certain charm.

  The first floor was a large single room with a kitchen at the rear and a half bathroom near a staircase. There was also a tiny but cozy garden in the back.

  “You new in Philadelphia?” Kaminski asked. They stood in a spot on the first floor that could have been occupied by a small dining table.

  “Sort of,” she said. “I was here once before.”

  “Here? In this house?”

  “No, no. In Philadelphia.”

  “Really? School? University?”

  “I was a little girl,” she said. “Don't remember that much of it. Just passed through. With my parents. I was a Navy brat.”

  “A Navy 'kid,'“ he offered, gently correcting her. “I'm sure you were never a brat.”

  Carolyn smiled softly. “If you say so,” she said.

  She stood in the kitchen and gazed out the rear window toward the small garden. The window was large, and sunlight was upon her. Then a cloud must have obscured the sun because shade came across both her and the garden.

  Kaminski guessed that she was in her late twenties, but he had been wrong about women's ages before. So she could have been anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five. Perfect age for him, he mused further. But a tinge of sadness gripped him as he realized that she very well might have a boyfriend.

  “Can we go upstairs?” Carolyn finally asked, turning back to him.

  “Of course.”

  Kaminski led the way. He was starting to like her, attached or not.

  The second floor was bright and airy. Two of Paula Burns's leafy-palmed plants stood sentry amidst the departed's furniture.

  There were two large windows on the front of the room overlooking Oswell Street, and a window of odd proportions and construction, sort of a half-bay effect, overlooking the rear garden. The room was about twelve by fifteen, but gave the impression of being more spacious than its measurements.

  “Perfect for reading or relaxing,” Kaminski offered. “Or maybe for your television.”

  Carolyn nodded. She said she didn't own a television, which Kaminski took to be evidence of stellar character.

  “You would like living here,” Kaminski then volunteered. “The neighbors are very nice. A retired couple on one side. A young family on the other. I can introduce you.”

  “I keep to myself,” Carolyn said.

  “That's fine, too. But it's nice to know you have good people around you,” Kaminski said. “Never any problems. The block is a very good one. It's a safe area if you're alone.”

  “Let's look at the top floor,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  The second floor was the one with the full bathroom, but the third floor, Carolyn said after Kaminski had led her all the way up, would be her bedroom.

  Kaminski stood to one side as Carolyn examined the closets. Kaminski waited patiently, watching her, keeping his thoughts to himself as she poked into the corners of what he hoped would be her bedroom.

  Then she turned and gave him a smile. “I like it,” she said. “How much are you asking?”

  “Seven hundred fifty a month,” he said. His voice was firm. But he was ready to bargain.

  She surprised him. “Seems like a fair price,” she said.

  “And you would be . . .?”

  “Living alone?” she asked. “Yes.”

  “So you're single?”

  “No husband, no boyfriend, no roommate. I travel light.”

  Kaminski nodded. “I guess you do.”

  “Whose furnishings are these?” she asked.

  “The last tenant left them behind,” Kaminski said. “I'll have them removed as soon as-”

  “Actually,” Carolyn interrupted, “I could use them. If you don't have to give them away.”

  “I own the building,” Kaminski said in his most accommodating voice. “I don't have to do anything.”

  “Can we go downstairs? I'd like to see the
garden.”

  He let her descend first.

  In the garden she said she was entranced by the house. It had a certain hominess ready to emerge, she said. Kaminski bowed very slightly at her comments.

  “What do I have to do to be a tenant?” she asked next.

  “Same as everyone else,” he said. “You fill out an application form.”

  “An application form?” She made a face.

  “Standard procedure.”

  “Can I see a copy?”

  Kaminski opened his leather portfolio and handed her the dreaded sheet of paper. The usual questions probing the details of her life. Name. Date of birth. Social Security number. Job. Personal references.

  When she took it in her hand, Kaminski felt a wave of contradictory vibrations. There were some that he liked, but he also noticed something that he recognized as a danger signal. There was something “off' about her which made him wonder why she was passing through Philadelphia in the first place.

  But all of this was nuts, he told himself. She was a prospective tenant like any other.

  “We insist on the application,” Kaminski explained. “The references. Previous landlords.” He thought of his parents back in the rental office. They would howl if he veered from the norm.

  Carolyn made an uncomfortable expression and said nothing. “Look,” Kaminski said, “if there's been a problem, we try to be understanding.”

  “That's good.”

  “You been in some sort of trouble?” he asked.