The Corpse Whisperer

by H. R. Boldwood

  As we headed out the door, I took one last look at the unholy trinity—Nussbaum, Headbutt and Kulu—and couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just made a deal with the devil.

  6

  Life in the Tar Pits

  As we turned onto Jora Lane, folks were trimming bushes, edging their lawns, and taking leisurely strolls in the late afternoon sun. Cozy, red-bricked Cape Cods stood side-by-side on the quiet, tree-lined street of Oakley. Locals kept their houses neat and clean, and their yards manicured and green. Crime was nearly unheard of. The residents, many of them members of the Neighborhood Watch Association, made it their business to keep it that way.

  It was Every Street, U.S.A., anonymous and ordinary, the perfect place for a safe house, despite Leo’s reservations.

  “You’re killing me!” He gawked out the car window at his new neighbors. “Look at those dinosaurs. Not one of ‘em’s under ninety. It’s the La Brea tar pits—only without the tar.”

  I figured at least he wouldn’t be sneaking out for booty calls. But then I remembered him going moon-eyed over Nonnie, and realized that keeping track of Leo could be like herding cats.

  Rico did a quick sweep of the house before Leo and I climbed out of the car. When we got the all clear, we walked inside and found ourselves smack-dab in the middle of the 1960s.

  A metallic sunburst clock stretched across the living room wall like an enormous golden spider. The hardwood floors were covered by a puke-green shag rug, anchored by an ugly plaid sofa and two faded, flowered chairs, all of which wore plastic slipcovers.

  Accessories included a laminate coffee table with chipped edges, a set of matching end tables, and some cheesy Lucite lamps. But the crowning glory, a huge console television, squatted in the corner like an ancient wooden behemoth. No satellite dish on the roof, no cable box in sight, and no strip-club at the corner. Poor Leo.

  In a brief but blessed moment of silence, Leo stood speechless. The kitchen, with its white steel cabinets, canary yellow countertops, and ugly-ass linoleum floor seemed to break the spell. He opened the cabinet beside the refrigerator, put his medicine on the shelf, and then rummaged around beneath the sink, pulling out spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels.

  For some reason, when he walked back into the living room, he tore off a wad of towels and threw them at me.

  “You take the chair on the right. I got the couch.” He drenched them both in spray cleaner.

  I tossed the towels back. “Sorry, guy. I don’t do windows.”

  A vein on the side of his head began to pulse. “Do you know how old this piece of shit furniture is? It was here when Kennedy was president. Who the hell has furniture this old? The FBI, that’s who. Cheap bastards. Hello? This is the twenty-first century calling. Can we please have furniture that isn’t dry-rotted and shrink-wrapped?”

  Leo scrubbed the cooties off the fifty-year-old slipcovers, I supervised, and Rico scavenged for food.

  “Coffee filters,” Rico said. “But no coffee. Nothing in the freezer. Ketchup, mustard, and something green and shriveled stuck to the bottom of the vegetable bin in the refrigerator.”

  Leo threw up his hands. “No food, Leo. No food! Of course, there’s no food. Why would there be food? Just starve me before I get to the grand jury. What’s a matter with you people? I’m doing you a favor, here. Is it too much to ask for a cracker crumb?!”

  In Leo’s defense, it was almost dinnertime. We were all hungry.

  He disappeared down the hallway with the spray cleaner, paper towels and his clothes, ranting about the place not having been cleaned since Kennedy was president. While he did that, I ordered an extra-large pie with everything except anchovies from Ricardo’s Pizzeria.

  Ricardo’s had the best pizza in town. Their delivery guy, Toby, a tall, skinny kid about twenty-years-old, four-eyed and curly-haired, always got the pies out hot. And they were never stuck to the top of the box. All the cops at the 51st knew Toby. He was in and out of the precinct, all day long.

  To be completely honest, Ricardo’s was the only restaurant phone number I knew because they were the only joint in town that would still deliver to me. I mentioned that to Toby once, and he said my house was on some top-secret delivery blacklist. The reason Ricardo’s would still deliver to me is because Toby said he didn’t mind stopping by. But they made him sign a waiver. He was fascinated with deadheads, worshipped me like a goddess, and despite the odd goings on at my place, never once left me hanging in need of my mozzarella. Good man, Toby.

  I walked down the hall to Leo’s bedroom, to let him know dinner was on its way, and found him wiping out the inside of the dresser drawers. The paper towels were almost gone. I looked for more and, in the process, discovered the house had exactly one roll of toilet paper. Someone would need go grocery shopping.

  Once again, that wasn’t going to be me.

  Leo, the prissy little weasel, put his clothes away exactly like you’d think a numbers guy would, every pleat creased and every collar crisped.

  When he finished sanitizing the bedroom, he moved to the kitchen and scrubbed the table and chairs. Then we drew up his grocery list. Every time I thought we were finished, we weren’t.

  “Swiffers, SOS pads, and rubber gloves. And Frosted Flakes. And a half-gallon of Johnnie Walker.”

  The scotch drew a side glance from Rico.

  “This place gives me the willies,” Leo said. “I’m going to need something to help me sleep. You don’t got any Ambien, do you?”

  A knock came at the door.

  Rico peered out the window from behind a dusty, pinch-pleated drape and smiled. “It’s Toby.”

  I held out my hand to Rico for money. “Don’t look at me. I’m not getting paid to feed this Sicilian greaseball.”

  When Toby walked in with a steaming hot pie, napkins and paper plates, I handed him the thirty bucks Rico had given me and told him to keep the change.

  Rico’s jaw dropped.

  I didn’t care. I liked Toby. He deserved a good tip, especially when it wasn’t coming out of my pocket.

  “Hey, guys,” Toby asked. “What’re you doing here?”

  I set the stage. “My…uncle…moved here from New Jersey and he’s renting this house. His name is David. Say hello, David.”

  Leo grabbed hold of the pizza box and tried to walk away.

  “Uncle David,” I said, refusing to let go of the box. “Don’t be rude. Say hi to Toby. He’ll be delivering your pizzas, from now on.”

  “Yeah? What if I don’t like it? Maybe I’ll order from somewhere else. Gimme that,” Leo said, opening the lid and jamming a slice into his mouth.

  I stared a hole through his head. “Impossible. Everyone loves Ricardo’s Pizza. And besides, we know them and trust them, Uncle David.”

  Leo shrugged and jerked the box out of my hands with a nod. “Yo, Toby.”

  “Nice to meet you, Uncle David. I gotta bounce. More pies to fly,” Toby said, as he walked out the door.

  Leo winced and spit a bite back onto his plate. “There’s pineapple on this. Nobody puts pineapple on pizza. It’s un-American.”

  I reached over and flicked another chunk of pineapple off the top of his slice.

  It skittered across the table and fell to the floor.

  “There. Problem solved.”

  “Get your fingers off my pie.”

  What a freaking whiner.

  Rico and I drew straws to see who would get the groceries. I won, which meant I got to stay at the house. Like I would have gone, anyway.

  But, Rico put up a good fight. “You should go, Nighthawk. I’m the cop. This is my job, watching Leo.”

  “Hey, I’m qualified. I shot my way through Perptown. Besides, if you wait for me to go, he’ll starve.”

  So, Rico went to the store, leaving Leo and me sitting at the kitchen table, sipping some iced tea.

  Motormouth had so much nervous energy that he stopped in the middle of a rant, frowned, and jumped up to open the cabinet over the st
ove. He glanced inside at his meds, like he was making sure they were there, then shut the door with a sigh. For the next few minutes, he yacked about nothing and paced around the kitchen like a caged animal.

  He could be such a sleazebag, it was easy to forget how he’d gotten here in the first place.

  I waited until he sat back down to revisit a memory he might rather forget. “If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you get bit?”

  At first, he didn’t answer. I figured maybe he thought it was none of my business and he was blowing me off.

  But then he opened up, sounding almost shy, maybe even humble, nothing like the Jersey bad-ass he’d been all along.

  “I can tell you what happened, but why? Who the hell knows? I was in town, seeing a…a…a…client in the Carew Tower.”

  The tower was a high-rise not far from the riverfront. That’s a busy part of town, especially during the day. Security everywhere, cameras and alarms.

  “How any freaking biter could get into that parking garage, I’ll never know,” Leo said. “The thing staggered out of the shadows, from between the parked cars, and headed my way. At first, I thought it had to be a prank, right? Or maybe I’d walked into the middle of a movie set.”

  His voice caught in his throat. “I mean, seriously—a freaking zombie in the middle of town? No fucking way. And it seemed like the damn thing came right at me. It shuffled past cars and other people to get to me.”

  His story set off all kinds of alarm bells. Little Allie went nutso inside my head. I had to shut the brain bitch off, so I could hear the rest of what he had to say.

  “Some guy whaled on the deadhead with his briefcase, connected real good, too, right at its chest. The son of a bitching biter just absorbed the blow and kept moving. Another guy tried to back over it with his Beamer. It just rolled off the trunk of the car and kept coming at me. People started running and diving, scrambling for cover. I can still hear them screaming.”

  His eyes grew moist. “And I still see it, too. Every night, when I close my eyes, that meatbag lurching at me like a fucking juggernaut, nothing stopping it. The smell, that sweet, sick stench when it was on top of me. So strong. It stuck inside my nose and liked to never go away. That motherfucker tore a chunk out of my side.”

  He yanked up his shirt and showed me the bite wound beneath his ribcage. “That’s a whole new kind of pain, let me tell you. But I got lucky, if you can call it that. Somebody’d called the cops. They shot the bastard off the top of me when it was going in for seconds.”

  He pointed toward his med stash in the cabinet. “The EMTs gave me a needle full of that stuff. Do you know how much that shit costs? One month’s worth is more than I make in a year. What’s that they say about ‘necessity making strange bedfellows’?” Leo swiped at his face. “Excuse me.”

  He shuffled down the hall to the bathroom looking twenty years older than when he’d sat down.

  He might have mixed his proverbs, but his message was clear. He’d never be trapped in this 1960s time warp, waiting to testify before the grand jury, if not for that bite.

  When he came back into the kitchen, his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.

  I pretended not to notice and asked, “You said it seemed like the deadhead was coming after you, specifically. Did it act like it could see you?”

  “Well, yeah. It had to have seen me. When I moved, it moved with me.”

  “How long ago was this, Leo?”

  “Three weeks, yesterday. Hand to God, Nighthawk,” he said. “When this medicine stops working, I ain’t coming back as no filthy, stinking meatbag. I had them write it into my witness protection agreement. Somebody’s going to have to scramble my brains but good.”

  He was right. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about who that somebody would be.

  In a surprising move, he turned the tables on me. “So, what’s it like to be a corpse whisperer? Must be a rush, huh? The power of life and death in your hands?”

  I squirmed in my crappy vinyl chair and glanced at the clock above the sink. “Yeah, well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with anyone, let alone Leo.

  I got up and looked out the window. “Rico should be back any time now. Maybe he picked up some of that Johnnie Walker.”

  Leo wasn’t going to let it drop. “Where does this power of yours come from?”

  Damn, if he wasn’t an annoying little dipshit.

  “It’s hereditary. On my mother’s side.”

  “Hereditary. Wow. How old were you when you raised your first corpse?”

  Son of a bitching, Leo. Why couldn’t he just let it lie?

  And just like that, I wasn’t the corpse whisperer sitting in that 1960s piece of shit kitchen anymore. I was a little girl in a pink sun dress, standing with my momma in Rose Hill Cemetery, late one August night, my small hands shaking as they stretched over the body of Red Jameson.

  Red had been out hunting in Adams County with his eight-year-old son, Noah. When they didn’t make it back home, a search party found Red in the woods, dead of a snake bite. No sign of Noah.

  “Feel the heat in your hands?” Momma said. “Don’t be afraid. You can do it, Allie. Try again. Let the power flow through you.”

  I had been trying. Blood dripped out of my nose onto my sun dress. I let out a sob. “I don’t want to, mommy! I don’t want to. Let him sleep. Please. Please. Let him sleep.”

  She knelt beside me, put her hands on my shoulders, and said something that would stay with me all my life.

  “This is God’s work we’re doing, Little Allie. God’s work. He gave us this gift for a reason. You need to know how and when to use it. Now, you wake Mr. Jameson up and ask where Noah went. After you do that, go on home to your daddy, and I’ll put Mr. Jameson back to sleep. I promise. I’ll teach you that part when you’re older. You never, ever raise a soul you don’t put back to rest. That’s a sin before God and man.”

  The sound of the kitchen door brought me out of my reverie. In walked Rico with Leo’s Johnnie Walker, and suddenly it didn’t matter to Leo how old I was the day my life changed forever—a memory that, despite my best efforts and untold quantities of Jack, I could never erase.

  “I knew I liked you, De Palma. Drinks all around!” Leo said, pouring himself a double.

  I could have used one about then, too, after my trip down memory lane.

  But Rico cut me off. “Sorry, Leo. We’re on duty. Thanks anyway.”

  Well, crap.

  Since Leo had killed all the couch cooties, we took the party into the living room. I flopped on the sofa and stretched out, leaving the chairs for the guys.

  Rico sipped some tea and asked Leo how he got hooked up with the Giordano Family.

  Leo waved us off. “Ah, you don’t want to hear that shit.”

  Rico kicked back in his ugly flowered chair and said, “Why the hell not? What else have we got to do?”

  Leo rubbed his hand through his greasy black hair and fidgeted on the plasticized chair that groaned with his every move.

  Finally, he leaned back and closed his eyes. “I grew up in Newark. I never knew my dad. My mom…she did what she needed to do, to put food on the table. Let’s just say, I had an endless parade of uncles coming in and out of our apartment. Know what I’m saying? Most nights I’d sit on the stoop and wait for Mom to get done…transacting business. Even when it was cold, I’d sit out there. What kid wants to hear that shit going on with his mom? Right?

  “So, this guy who lived in our burg, Paulie DeVito, a made guy, you know. Nice as hell. Used to bring me and mom food sometimes. And he never touched my mom, or made me call him uncle, or nothing. When I was maybe eight years old, he asked me if I wanted to make some money running numbers. It wasn’t a question of wanting to make money. We needed money. He knew that, but he didn’t want to make me do it. He wanted it to be my choice. See?

  “And he…he was so cool, why wouldn’t I want to do what he
did? Of course, I ran numbers for him. And when I got older and had enough street smarts, I did some drops for him, too. Paulie always made sure I had money for clothes. He never let us go hungry. If we needed help with the rent, he was there. We needed someone to pay utilities, he was there.” Leo went quiet, lost in his thoughts for a second.

  I looked at him and wondered if everyone with a fucked-up childhood ended up loud and bigger than life. Maybe we had more in common than I ever would have thought.

  Leo leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Paulie could see I had a head for figures, so he helped me with tuition, so I could get a degree. He didn’t make me go to work for the Family, but Jesus, I owed them that and more. When I got out of school, there was a job waiting for me. No small potatoes shit, either. I was finally making some serious dough and supporting mom, so she didn’t have to sell her soul to live hand-to-mouth anymore.”

  Rico wrinkled his nose. “But did you ever stop to think, in all those years, what the Giordano Family was into? Drugs, gaming, extortion, murder? You had a degree. You said it yourself, the Family gave you a choice. You could’ve gone straight.”

  Leo face fell. “I was a banker for chrissake! Moving money around, just like those Wall Street yahoos. Only, I made a helluva lot more dough than they did, ‘cause the Family was good to me. I sat behind a fucking desk!”

  He slammed his fist on the coffee table and stared Rico down. “I never did no wet work. You hear me? I never killed no one. And don’t you go thinking I did.”

  Rico blanched. “I don’t think that, Leo. You’re not the type. You don’t have it in you.”

  That awkward little Kodak moment was interrupted by the sound of Rico’s phone. He pulled it out of his pocket. His eyebrows raised when he glanced at the display.

  “De Palma,” he answered, but not in his usual macho-cop tone. “Hi, Ms. Chen, how can I help you?”

  He listened for a moment, then got up with a smile and moved past me toward the kitchen, blushing like a school-boy. I craned my neck to watch him, from my seat on the couch.