The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli

by Carolyn Hennesy

  Chapter 6

  Damian Spinelli

  and Great Alan’s Ghost

  She let me in the bathroom window.

  “I feel like I’m breakin’ in,” I said, easing my unmentionables out of the begonias and over the sill. “It’s been a while since I’ve used a window in a crapper, pardon my French, and usually I’m hightailin’ it out. Jealous husbands ain’t my favorite dessert, if you know what I mean, doll.”

  “It’s Doc . . . I mean, you may call me Doctor,” Monica Quartermaine said coolly, but I could tell she was nervous . . . underneath. “I couldn’t let you in the front door because Tracy has the whole place alarmed like Fort Knox. She changes the code every night and keeps it a big secret, the evil she-man. This window is the only open spot in the house. And I’m not interested in your back window exploits, Mr. Spinelli . . . For heaven’s sake, I could be your mother.”

  Suddenly my guts went all loosey-goosey. I was gonna have trouble holding down my Spam and cream cheese on sprouted wheat with a cup of tapioca on the side.

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?” she said.

  “My mother?”

  “Oh, for pity’s . . .”

  “Oh . . . oh, Ma!”

  “Stop it!” Monica said. Then she hushed herself and looked up toward the second floor. “No, I am not your mother.”

  “Sorry, doll . . . Doc,” I said. “I just got a little excited there for a second. Not many people know that one of the reasons I came to Port Charles was because I got a bead on my mother, see? Trail got cold after I arrived, but I ain’t givin’ up hope, y’know.”

  “Well, I am certainly not her.”

  “It’s jake,” I said, feelin’ the Spam settle back down . . . along with my hopes. “So what’s with the squeezy phone call to my office? Why the jitters?”

  Monica looked around the bathroom. She stared at the expensive hand towels, the gold toilet handle, and that funny contraption that washes your prat n’ parts. It was a nice place to take a powder.

  “Doc? You gonna talk or do I call Madame Rosinka, the psychic on Sixth and Pine, and have her tell me, huh?”

  “It . . . it’s . . . well, now that I am actually about to say it, it’s just going to sound silly,” Monica said, rubbing her hands together.

  “Nothing’s silly if it pays the rent. Come on . . . you musta called for some reason.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I’m being haunted.”

  That’s when I remembered that Doc Quartermaine enjoyed her hooch. I tried to smile real big.

  “Can I leave by the front door, or do you want me to smash a few more begonias? Oh, that’s right . . . the alarms.”

  “I’m not joking!” she practically yelled. “I know how it sounds . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “. . . but it’s the truth.”

  “Yeah? Haunted, huh? A ‘haint’? Well, is he here right now? Maybe his name’s Jack . . . or Jim . . . or Johnny . . .”

  “What?” she said.

  “. . . or Jose . . . or Absolut . . . or Belvedere . . .”

  “I have not been drinking!” she screamed. Then she put her hand over her mouth.

  “I have not been drinking,” she whispered, her eyes gettin’ all wet and her mouth twitching. Suddenly, I knew she was on the level. I could tell an honest twitch from a drunk twitch. I’d learned that in Saigon.

  “Come on, Mr. Grasshopper,” I said. “I will bet you a case of orange soda that you have never been in Saigon.”

  “My contradiction means no disrespect, Surly Solicitor,” Spinelli said. “But where do you think I obtained the moniker ‘Grasshopper’?” It was closing in on 2:00 am, and I knew Max had finished the Häagen-Dazs, gone out for another pint, and polished off most of that as well. In fact, if he were true to form, he’d taken the second pint to bed to watch the late, late show on the Hallmark channel and fallen asleep, mid-scoop, and now there was Vanilla Swiss Almond dribbled all over my Egyptian cotton sheets. It was the couch for me no matter what time I got home.

  “Forgive my doubts . . . Grasshopper.”

  Just then, Spinelli jumped in his seat and I knew his cell phone had gone off again. He fished it out and glared at the number before clicking the button to ignore it.

  “Nefarious One! Desist!”

  “Who is it?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Then how do you know they’re nefarious?” I asked him.

  “Forgive my outburst,” Spinelli said. “But I have personal and in many cases intimate knowledge of all who possess this most secret of phone numbers. But, on occasion, I will be the recipient of prank phone calls from fellow yet lesser cyber lords. This is a number I don’t recognize . . . it’s not even a country I recognize.”

  “No wonder they’re calling at such an ungodly hour. And it is. Ungodly. So let’s push onward, shall we?”

  “Okay, Doc, okay . . . you haven’t been tipplin’ tonight. But you can’t expect me to believe that . . .”

  “It’s my husband.”

  “Your husband? The late Alan Quartermaine, one of GH’s finest pill-pushers and general Port Charles gad-about?”

  “Y . . . yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Come upstairs. You can see for yourself.”

  I followed her out of the powder room, down the hallway, and past the maid’s room where Alice was snorin’ and mumblin’ something about Johnny Zacchara and Pudding Pops. We headed up the grand staircase, but not before Monica put her finger to her lips about five times, warnin’ me to keep mum.

  We turned left and started walkin’ down the longest damn hallway I had even seen—including the one in that big palace belongin’ to that Frog king, Louis . . . the guy that lost a few pounds, head-wise. Yeah, I knew the Q house was big, but this was a Hitchcock hallway: one that just kept stretchin’ away, the more you walked down it. It wasn’t hard to see how Doc Quartermaine kept her girlish figure; I was gonna drop a few pounds myself whenever we got wherever we were going. Finally, she stopped at a set of double doors about twenty-five yards in, put a key in the lock, and turned to me.

  “I called you because I think you’re a man who doesn’t scare easily.”

  “Only one thing scares me, Doc . . . and your see-through hubby ain’t it.”

  “Good.”

  She turned the handle and we walked into a bedroom the size of an airplane hangar. Strange thing was, it was cold. Really cold.

  “You can’t afford heat?” I asked, as she flipped on the lights. “Or you just like it like Oslo?”

  “Look,” she said pointing to a little box on the wall. The thermostat read seventy-five degrees.

  “Right,” I said, feelin’ the hairs at the back of my neck stand at attention. “So, what’s the story?”

  “He’s in the bathroom.”

  “Say again?”

  “In my medicine cabinet.”

  “Doc . . .”

  “That’s where he spends most of his time, I think . . . but then he leaves me . . . messages. Over here . . .”

  She motioned for me to follow her across the room. Two minutes later, I realized I shoulda brought a snack. Two minutes after that, we were approachin’ what I took to be her bed. It was one of those silly affairs, high off the floor with piles of pillows . . . the lady needed a stepladder to get some sleep. Monica stopped right by her nightstand. She was shakin’, hard; but it wasn’t DTs. It was pure fear. I could tell the difference. I learned that in Rangoon.

  “Oh, please . . .”

  She turned on the lamp and looked away quickly.

  “Tell me what it says,” she whispered. “I don’t want to look.”

  I took a gander at the nightstand. There was a pile of medical-type magazines, a jug of water, an open pound bag of peanut M&M’s, and a pocket-sized Bible.

  “What are you gettin’ at?” I asked her, real nice. I thought maybe if I talked real nice and all, she might gimme a few M&M’s f
or the trip back across the room. “I don’t see nothin’.”

  “Behind the water pitcher.”

  I took a look.

  One word.

  Spelled out nice and neat with, maybe, a hundred little bright orange pills: MONICA.

  “Somebody’s been pill-paintin’,” I said.

  “What does it say?”

  “It’s just your name.”

  “God,” she gasped. “Sometimes he spells out other things.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “This is what you called me about? You, playing jigsaw puzzle with your meds?”

  “I didn’t do it!” she said. “I came into my room tonight and there it was. I just saw them lying there . . . but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. That was three hours ago. That’s when I called you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I was startin’ to lose my cool. I didn’t like losing my cool.

  “All right,” I barked at her. “How about someone else in the house, huh? Somebody trying to drive you around the bend in a 1967 green Jag with a bright orange interior? Like Tracy, maybe? You ever think of that?!”

  “My door is locked whether I’m in my room or not,” Monica said; she was turning on the waterworks, but good. “And I’m the only one with a key. One night, about six months ago, I caught Tracy standing over my bed with a frying pan, screaming something about kippers and a glue-gun. I called the locksmith’s the next day. Tracy hasn’t been in this room since.”

  “Okay, Doc,” I snapped. I was tired and this was lookin’ more and more like Monica Quartermaine was buckin’ for a room in Shadybrook. “First of all, your sis-in-law couldn’t stand over your bed, ’cause she’d have to be seventeen feet tall. And second, I’m headin’ home. I don’t know what kinda crazy game you’re playin’ . . .”

  Suddenly, the Doc’s eyes went all buggy in her head. Her mouth began opening and closing like a carp, and she pointed at the table.

  I followed her finger . . . and felt my Spam comin’ back up.

  The little orange pills had been rearranged into two new words.

  JOIN ME.

  I started to back away from the table.

  “How’d you do that?” I said, tryin’ like hell to keep my voice calm.

  “Spinelli . . .”

  “Never mind,” I said, realizing that if I lost my tapioca, two crazies in one room wouldn’t do anybody any good. “Just start at the beginnin’.”

  She kept it brief. It had been happening for about four weeks . . . not every night . . . once, maybe twice a week to start; messages spelled out with pills. But not just any pills . . . sleepin’ pills. The kind that could bring down a horse. Sometimes, like tonight, they were on her nightstand. But most of the time she found them on the sink or clingin’ to the mirror. She’d read the message and the pills would drop into the basin. Once she found them floatin’ in mid-air over the bathtub. But for the last three days, she’d found them everywhere: I LOVE YOU. PLEASE! COME TO ME. BE WITH ME.

  “Why don’t you call the goons on TV?” I asked. “Those palookas that go to the lighthouses and the old hotels and prisons. Sure, they never really see anything and the show’s a steamin’ pile, but they’re in the business. Why me, Doc?”

  “I know what you did for Edward,” she said. Her shoulders slumped forward; she looked like she was curlin’ into a bocce ball. “You saved his life in that terrible storm. Alice made sure we all knew about it and hasn’t let us forget. That took a kind of courage I can’t even imagine. I couldn’t tell anyone here . . . Tracy’s just waiting for an opportunity to put me in Shadybrook, and Edward wouldn’t be able to stop her if I started talking about messages from beyond. You’re the only one I thought of. Plus, the big bald guy on that show frightens me a little.”

  “Okay,” I said, startin’ to feel like a prize chump. The dame was countin’ on me. I didn’t really know her history; she’d already had her little deal with John Barleycorn going when I’d first arrived in town. I’d only heard talk of her brilliance, her skill with a scalpel, how many lives she’d saved. I knew it took some tough times to turn an ace like that into . . . the scared female standin’ in the middle of her ballroom-sized bedroom. I wasn’t gonna let her down. Not if I could help it.

  “I’m no witch doctor, see,” I said, heading toward the bathroom. “But I’ll give it a go.”

  Monica Quartermaine’s bathroom was as big as the penthouse I sublet to Jason Morgan.

  “Now I happen to know that’s just not true. Jason allows you to stay in a room in . . .”

  “A thousand pardons, Brusque Barrister,” Spinelli interrupted, “but Stone Cold and I are not small about such things. We don’t keep books, as it were. And that is not the penultimate and final point of this case.”

  “Is the Metro Court kitchen still open?”

  “I’m sorry . . . ?”

  “I am starving to my death,” I said. “I would commit several criminal acts for a Monte Cristo and a side salad.”

  “I am afraid the kitchen is closed,” Spinelli replied. “But I do know a spot, right around the corner, it just so happens, that serves all night. Many’s the time I have returned from a stakeout and ordered a short stack of buttermilk hotcakes.”

  “We’re leaving. You’re buying.”

  “As you wish.”

  We settled into a booth at the Night Owl, a cozy joint that I’d have to remember for those times Max and I got the post-nookie munchies. No Monte Cristo on the diner’s menu, so I ordered my steak and eggs rare and poached respectively, and Spinelli ordered a short stack . . . and asked if the fry-cook could make them into little pancake men, “like the last time.”

  I turned the tape recorder back on.

  Her bathroom was just as big as the penthouse and looked twice as pricey. You coulda parked a Buick between the bathtub and that funny contraption that washes your arschloch. Monica waited at the door as I started walkin’. And if I thought her bedroom was cold, her bathroom was a deep-freeze. A minute later, I was comin’ up on the medicine cabinet sunk into the tiled wall, just over the sink. It was open, but everything looked like it was in its place. Then I checked the washstand. Sure as shootin’, there were about eighty pills in a neat orange message, just to the left of the hot water knob.

  I’M WAITING.

  My skin was really startin’ to go all clammy. I pushed the little pills around with my finger . . . they moved easy enough. It was a brand I was familiar with; hell, I used them myself when it was late and I wanted to stop thinking about Maxie’s assorted shenanigans, so three or four somehow moved into my pocket. Now, the message read:

  I’M WA TING

  Yeah, the Doc coulda put it there, spelled it all out before I arrived. But there was no reason; it didn’t make sense unless she was too afraid to flat-out demand a room in Shadybrook and this was the only scheme she could imagine. But that’s not what I was gettin’ from Doc Q. The lady believed . . . and even if I didn’t, I was gonna find an ans . . .

  That’s when I closed the mirror on the cabinet.

  “Hello, Spinelli.”

  My hands flew up so fast I nearly brained myself. If I hadn’t been trained by ancient masters, I might have peed a little. Instead, I just backed up about ten paces. Fast.

  Alan Quartermaine was starin’ outta the mirror, right at me.

  “What?!” Monica yelled from the doorway when she saw me doing a box-step into the towel bar. I looked around for the gimmick . . . the projector, the tape recorder . . . whatever the trick was. Nothin’.

  “Let’s just say I believe you, Doc,” I said, lookin’ at the ghost in the glass.

  “Why!?” Monica called. “What do you see?”

  “Let’s leave her out of this for a moment, shall we?” Alan said.

  Suddenly the bathroom door swung shut. Mister Doc Quartermaine and I were all alone.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Spinelli. There’s been a lot of talk around the house about you ever since you pulled Edward off of death’s
door. I was a little disappointed by that; he would have been nice company. At least I think so; he may be going somewhere else. At any rate, you’re a good man, and I hope you’ll help Monica. I was actually going to spell out a message that she call you, but the old gal beat me to it. Great minds, they say . . . Monica and I always did think alike. Well, most of the time.”

  “Look, Casper,” I said, “I ain’t tryin’ to be rude, but what the hell are you doing leaving crazy messages with little night-night pills?”

  “I want her to join me?”

  “You want your wife to join you,” I repeated . . . ’cause I couldn’t think of anything else to say . . . “on the other side?”

  “That’s right,” he said with a big smile.

  “But why?”

  “Because I’m lonely.”

  That’s when my jaw hit the imported I-talian floor tiles. I’d heard that Alan Quartermaine, who was a fine chopper in the operating room, was also a spoiled rich kid who was a spoiled rich man until he popped off. He was used to getting what he wanted, but this took the cake.

  “You gotta be jokin’!”

  “Why?”

  “Ain’t nobody, livin’ or deceased, ever been that selfish. Your wife is still livin’ and breathin’ over here on the bright side and you want her to off herself ’cause you don’t have a playmate?”

  “Well, it’s a little more serious than that, I can assure you. First of all, I didn’t actually get into Heaven . . . it’s sort of Heaven-Lite. It’s not bad, it’s just kind of a limbo. There’s a veggie plate and cookies in the afternoons. And table tennis. But the women here are really down a few pegs. Oh, there are some that are all right, I suppose, but when you’ve had a woman like Monica, everyone here just pales . . . no pun intended. And I don’t want to be unfaithful . . .”

  I choked a little.

  “From what I hear tell, Prince Charming, that’s all you ever were.”

  “What’s going on in there?” Monica yelled from the other side of the door.

  “We’re having a chat, throttle it back a little.”

  “I wish I could have handled her like that back in the day,” Spooky Q said. “It was only in coming here that I learned a few things . . .”