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

by Noel Hynd

  Off-kilter.

  He drove past the campus of the University of Pennsylvania and up onto Baltimore Avenue until the university city neighborhood fell off into racially mixed working-class neighborhoods and those in turn gave way to urban disintegration and slums.

  “You sure you know where you're going?” he asked.

  “I'm sure,” she answered.

  His only reassurance was that he still carried his service weapon. The neighborhood went from bad to worse.

  But apparently, she did know her directions. They turned a corner in a section of Southwest Philadelphia, and O'Hara felt a chill upon him. Not because of the climate or the cold or the fact that the sun was coming down. Rather, she had directed him to the front gates of an aging cemetery. Brick and iron, the bricks crumbling and the iron rusting.

  “Here,” she said. “Stop here.”

  He eased his car to the midpoint of the block. He liked to think that he could read an urban street as well as any cop. This one didn't give a very pleasant reading.

  Four cars were parked on the entire block, two were mere chassis, having been abandoned. Doors gone, axles up on cinderblocks. Stripped like carcasses by the vultures of too many unpoliced midnights.

  “We'll only be a minute,” she said.

  “That's the best news I've heard all day.”

  He stepped out of the car, and so did she. His instinct reminded him again of the weapon on his left hip. Idly he thought that no matter what the depths were of some cases, some others were even worse.

  He eyed the crumbling row houses across the street from the cemetery. He shuddered. One looked like a crack house, another as if it were occupied by squatters. Occasionally a curious face appeared at a window, stared for a moment, then disappeared just as unpredictably.

  “Come on,” Carolyn said. She seemed oblivious of her surroundings, as if she had no fear of physical harm.

  He turned. She had already pushed the gate open a little farther. “There's just enough daylight left,” she said.

  She went through the gate, and he followed.

  He might have known that this investigation would see him crawling among tombs, tiptoeing among the dead and half dead. The thoughts he kept to himself contained torrents of profanity and a multitude of suspicion and fears.

  The graveyard was deeply in disrepair. The grass, which was tall and brown from the cold, was overgrown. It had declined along with the neighborhood that surrounded it, and those interred here were now, in a sense, dying a second death. Even the shrubbery had grown out of control. Small trees edged up through long forgotten family plots, their naked branches reaching like spidery arms across gravesites.

  They walked through a collection of broken old stones, markers worn by weather and overturned by vandals. Then, as daylight was dying, they were in a newer section of the yard, and for a moment Carolyn didn't quite seem like she knew where she was going.

  She stopped for a moment to get her bearings, and O'Hara took the occasion to glance back toward the gate through which they had passed. He could no longer see it. Nor could he see his car and he marked the chances as fifty-fifty that the vehicle would be broken into by the time he returned. Then, as if operating on some bizarre form of radar or instinct, Carolyn corrected herself again and went toward a fringe of the yard.

  Of course, a fringe, O'Hara thought to himself. This whole damned case was about people on the fringe. Or a few steps beyond it.

  But he followed her. A few moments later, they had descended into a small hollow near the periphery of the cemetery, a stretch of lower ground which seemed almost rural, considering it was well within the city.

  On one side, the area was boxed in by a high brick wall. The wall had been graffitied from within, and many of the bricks were crumbling, same as the stones within the yard. Across the top of the wall, there was a strand of old, rusting, concertina barbed wire which didn't appear to keep anything out any more.

  They stood among a tangle of unkempt trees. They were out of sight of any building, far from any sounds of the city. The whole place immediately struck O'Hara as very strange, almost as if they had stepped into a little pocket that existed outside the normal world.

  She finally stopped.

  “Are we wherever we need to be?” he asked. “I sure hope so.”

  Inside him, warning lights and signals were flashing. He couldn't take his eyes off her. He almost wanted to touch her a third time to see if she was real.

  Almost.

  “Yes. We're here,” she said.

  She held him in her gaze, then looked down. Her fingers touched the top of a tombstone. O'Hara immediately registered that despite this location, despite the unkempt nature of the yard, despite the veritable “oldness” of this area of graves, this stone was relatively fresh.

  “So what's this?” O'Hara asked.

  “The key to your puzzle,” she said.

  “What key? What puzzle?” he asked.

  “Do you expect me to do your work for you?”

  “Look, Carolyn,” he began gently. “I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me whatever you know. I'm here on serious business and I don't care much for games.”

  “I didn't even have to contact you,” she said. “I don't have to tell you anything. I'm doing you a favor just by being here. Remember?”

  He heaved a dispirited sigh. He would still have to play by her rules. “So what the hell is this?” he asked.

  She looked downward. Her gaze told him to follow hers.

  There was a name on the stone, and he could just make it out in the fading light of the afternoon.

  Travis Jones. R.I.P. And there were dates. January 23, 1957-July 8, 1987.

  “Whoever he was, he died very young,” O'Hara said, making the statement almost sound like a question.

  “He was murdered.”

  “Doesn't anyone die a natural death any more?”

  “Maybe not.”

  O'Hara knelt down by the grave marker. He placed his hand upon it, almost as if to see if he could pick up any vibrations. But there were none. The only other inscription implored a forgiving God to have mercy.

  “So what about this Travis Jones?” he asked.

  “You have a badge. You must have contacts,” Carolyn said. “I don't have the answers,” she said. “I only know how to put you on the right path. So that you can find them.”

  He stood. “You'll forgive me if I complain a little,” he said, “but you're not making it any easier.”

  “I am making things easier,” she insisted. “You just can't see it yet.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “I'm helping you as much as I can.”

  Darkness was falling. She looked around and pulled her sweater closer to protect her against the cold. “We're finished here,” she said. “Will you take me home?”

  “Gladly,” he answered. Again out of instinct, he reached to take her hand, to direct her back toward his car. They walked in silence for several seconds until she spoke again.

  “What are you doing next?” Carolyn asked. “After checking out this murder?”

  “I'm going to Florida,” he said. “I want to look at the prison records,” he said.

  “There was a priest,” she said, “a man who came to see Gary when he was on Death Row. You might talk to him, too.”

  “Father Robert Trintino,” he said.

  Carolyn nodded.

  “You know a lot, don't you?” he asked.

  She smiled shyly at him, as if she didn't know whether to construe his words as a compliment or a complaint. He might have given her some indication if only he had known himself.

  They reached his car. It was still intact. The unknowing rental company would have been grateful.

  He opened the door on the passenger side of the front seat and she slid in. Moments later he joined her from the driver's side and she gave him her address.

  The trip back downtown took twenty minutes. Darkness had fallen by the time they arrived
at Oswell Street. Despite her protestations, he guided his car down the narrow pavement that ran before her house.

  She thanked him and stepped from the car.

  Silently, he watched her enter her home. At least he knew where she lived, he thought to himself. At least he could find her again. Yet something about her was deeply unsettling. He had been around witnesses enough to know who was playing straight, who was lying, and who was telling only part of the truth. Distinctly, he felt, Carolyn Hart fell in this last category.

  That evening, O'Hara visited the big police roundhouse on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the cop HQ for the city of beastly brothers. After picking through some sleazy, unsolved back files, he caught the full impact of what Carolyn had shown him.

  Travis Jones had been a bartender in an after-hours gay bar on Thirteenth Street. Travis had apparently gone home one night with some Street Meet, a rough boy from out of town. The detectives who had covered the case at the time had noted that the visitor had a Dixie accent, which made it perfectly logical to O'Hara that he might have been Gary.

  A picture of Travis Jones peered out of the file. A good-looking kid with dark hair. Pretty boy good looks which led him to a murder victim's grave at age thirty.

  O'Hara's heart jumped as he scanned the file. His disgust was nice and fresh because he hadn't had to think about human mutilation for a full twenty-four hours up till this instant.

  The victim, Travis Jones, had been decapitated. And one hand had been chopped off at the wrist as well.

  Gary's alleged MO, plain and simple. Only this time the victim had been a gay man, not a woman. Sheesh! What kind of spin was that putting on the case?

  The local homicide dicks had done a half-hearted investigation at the time and had come up with nothing. So they had chalked up the Jones homicide as one of those things that was just going to happen now and then in a big, evil American city.

  O'Hara managed to find Detective Russell Cummings at the Roundhouse that night. Cummings was working late in his own office.

  Cummings had been one of the two investigating officers. His partner from that time had retired. The city detective was a brawny, balding man with a drooping gray-black mustache. He recalled the Jones case.

  “Yeah. I remember it real good. It was a psycho fag job. You know what I'm talkin' about? The type of case that you can never clear. These gays are out there snuffin' each other all the time. Hey, it was low priority after three weeks. And the same MO never happened here again.”

  “There were other decaps up and down the east coast at the time,” O'Hara said. “Women.”

  “Yeah?” Cummings answered, vaguely intrigued. He sipped a Diet Sprite and picked casually through his memory. “I don't remember knowing about them.” He pursed his lips. “Could have been unrelated, too.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Cummings paused, lowering his voice. “Let's face it, a queer snuff in a city isn't the most unusual thing we see. Know what I mean?”

  “Even with a head and hand mutilation?”

  Cummings shrugged. “No offense, Detective,” Cummings said. “I mean, you been working up in New Hampshire among a bunch of straight white people, so I don't know how much activity you get. But down here in 'Philthydelphia,' I mean, we ain't as bad as Baltimore or New York or Washington, but do you know how often we find body parts in car trunks or trash bags? Couple of times a week. Don't even make the news most of the time.”

  “I can imagine,” O'Hara said. “But tell me something else. Why did Jones get buried out in some rundown cemetery? Any significance to that?”

  “None. Burial space is at a premium. There are a couple of old lots with space. Doesn't cost the city anything. No one claimed Jones's body. So. . . .”

  “I get it.”

  “Can I get you a soda?” Cummings asked, standing. “We got Pepsi, if you don't like Sprite.”

  “I'm okay, thank you.”

  O'Hara studied the date of the Jones murder. The killing preceded the alleged Gary-wave in the Northeast by a year. (O'Hara wondered: Preceded it or served as a precursor to it?) So when ladies started turning up without their heads a year later, no one made the connection to Travis Jones. No one tossed it back to a quickly forgotten psycho hack job in Philly because the Philly victim had been gay.

  O'Hara ordered copies of the investigation of the Jones case and the postmortem on the victim. Detective Cummings said a day would be necessary.

  “I'm going to Florida tomorrow,” O'Hara said. “I'm stopping in Philadelphia on my way back, though.”

  “I'll have everything ready for you,” Cummings said.

  O'Hara then closed the books on the day. He figured it was safe to take a drink-just one drink-with the other cops at Bertha's Hot House, the harness bull bar across the street on Spring Garden.

  The one drink was safe, probably because O'Hara was thinking ahead, thinking about interviewing a priest in Florida, rather than looking back over his shoulder or watching out for Gary in the mirror.

  Late in the evening, Cummings sauntered over and joined O'Hara's table.

  “I thought of a couple of things about the guy we were looking for,” Cummings offered, sitting down.

  “Go ahead,” O'Hara answered.

  “He was a fringe player around the gay bars. A Southern guy. Then he disappeared real quickly,” Cummings said. “Know what we nicknamed him, on account of the way he disappeared so fast?”

  “No,” O'Hara answered. “I would have no idea. What?”

  “He was here one day and completely disappeared the next,” Cummings said. “So we called him 'The Spook.’” The detective thought it was funny and gave it a good laugh. O'Hara was unable to join him.

  That same evening, Carolyn stepped through the door to her bedroom shortly after eleven P.M. She stood very still and listened to the silence. A moment later, she was before her mirror, looking at her own reflection.

  She searched her eyes and tried to find madness in them. She saw none, even if others did. She placed a finger to her wrist and felt for a pulse to assure herself that she was still alive. Just as the policeman had done.

  She found the beat of her heart. Her eyes came back up at the mirror again. She found her skin so white that it repelled her. She felt that she wanted some sunlight. Some color. But it had been so long since she could do something like sit in the sun, read a book.

  She was a prisoner of her own existence, her own world. She stared at her own face for several seconds more. Far beyond the room, there was noise from the city. Very distantly, she could hear a train on the Arntrak rails that passed close to the river.

  Trains made her think of faraway places. How far she had come to this point. How far she would have to go. She certainly didn't want to go back to the place she had been before Adam Kaminski let her move in.

  Not there. Above all, not there!

  She closed her eyes, as if to seek solace in a dream. Her eyes were tired. They burned. She rubbed them and held them closed for several seconds.

  Then she felt a presence. And she knew.

  Gary.

  Her eyes opened.

  They moved only a fraction of an inch from where they stared in the mirror. But instead of looking at her own face, she now looked at a male figure taking shape behind her.

  First the shape was misty, like steam rising from dry ice. Like some phantasmagoric stage effect in some eerie theatrical production.

  But this was real.

  The image took shape before her eyes. From what world did it come, she did not know. She only knew it was there.

  Gary.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice was almost toneless.

  She felt his eyes upon her back. And she watched him in the mirror. It was as if he were flesh and blood. He was no longer shimmering and fantastic. He was solid.

  And real.

  Hello, Gary answered.

  “I love you, Gary,” she said.

  She spoke to him without turning, as if l
ooking directly upon the dead man might destroy the moment. As if being face-to-face with him would be either too intense to bear or might drive him away.

  Yeah, Gary answered. Love. It's great, huh?

  “Do you love me, Gary?”

  Of course, I do.

  “I love you, Gary. I miss you.”

  Her eyes were on him diligently, like needles of a compass pointing north. Carolyn's gaze followed him even as he moved.

  Love got me killed, Gary said.

  He drifted to a point just behind her, close enough to extend an arm and touch. But he didn't touch. In the mirror, his face was directly next to her, and she felt the coldness of the grave close to her.

  “I told the policeman what you wanted, Gary,” she said to the ghost. “I told him just what you asked me to.”

  Gary conveyed no specific words. But somehow Carolyn knew he was pleased. Finally, words came.

  That's good, Gary said.

  “I wish I could be with you,” she volunteered.

  Someday soon you will be.

  Gary moved behind her. He was closer now. He moved with grace and delicacy, unlike the trudging, awkward way he had moved in life. He glided more than he walked. Or maybe he just appeared in one place after being in another.

  She looked at him.

  “The policeman said that there are two more ladies who are dead,” Carolyn told him. A silence hung in the room. The silence accused Gary.

  I didn’t kill no girls.