Ghost Detective

by Scott William Carter

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  * * * * *

  We were halfway to Lake Oswego before either of us said a word, the traffic light, the sun shining daggers on the glistening asphalt. As usual, my anger with her was short-lived; what I felt now was mostly a mix of gratitude and relief. What Billie was thinking I couldn’t say, which was also no surprise. She’d taken off her beret and was turning it around slowly in her hands, her face thoughtful. I was watching the fuel-economy monitor on the console, something I found endlessly fascinating. For the trip, I was currently at sixty miles per gallon. I often treated it like a game, seeing how high I could push it, using all of the Prius’s sensors to maximize its efficiency.

  “So how’s Mom and Dad?” she asked, when I’d finally gotten so used to the silence that her voice startled me.

  “How do you know I saw Mom and Dad?” I said.

  “Because you always see your parents when I go off on my own a while.”

  “I didn’t realize I was so predictable.”

  “Only to me.”

  “Oh. Well, they’re about the same. Mom’s still convinced I’ll come to my senses and have them come live with us at the house.”

  “Wouldn’t that be lovely,” Billie said.

  We both laughed. It was good to hear her laugh. Billie may not have laughed often—she spent most of her time brooding, and brooding and laughter did not mix—but when she did laugh, everything seemed right in the world. Everything seemed right with us.

  I was still laughing when a young man in a red Camaro passed on the right, gaping at me. He had every reason to gape. From his point of view, I was having a lively conversation with my empty passenger seat. I waved to him. He flipped me the bird. That was all right. I took satisfaction that he had no idea that he was carrying his own passenger, a young woman in the backseat whose entire face had been badly burned into a blackened mess. There were times I actually liked the weird ghosts. I comforted myself imagining that she followed this jerk around everywhere.

  Manuel Loretto’s house in Lake Oswego was even more impressive than I’d imagined, and I’d been imagining something plenty impressive. It was more like a fortress than a house, with the eight-foot wall of uneven stone surrounding a forested estate of at least twenty acres, the wrought-iron gate spiked with the kind of forked blades that might have been used in the Spanish Inquisition to extract confessions, and the turret at the gate where two guys in black uniforms and semiautomatic weapons stood watch on the turret’s balcony. I drove past without stopping, catching a glimpse of a mansion through the trees, a mansion five or six stories high with a similar uneven stone facade as the wall and a turret on each corner.

  “They say a man’s home is his castle,” I said to Billie. “I guess Loretto took it literally.”

  “And you thought you were just going to charm your way in there.”

  “It was worth a try.”

  “No, dear, it wasn’t. Drive a little farther. I want plenty of distance between you and them.”

  It was more than a little farther, a half-mile at least through tall Douglas firs crowding the road, before we came to suitable place for me to park: a gravel drive between two other large but not quite as awe-inspiring houses, a real estate sign marking a three-acre plot for sale. I pulled in, out of sight from the road, and killed the engine. I rolled down all the windows, letting in a rush of cool, woodsy air. It smelled of fir and wet earth and fresh growing things.

  In the old days, I used to go to the woods all the time, for exercise, for solitude and peace of mind, but I seldom did anymore. For some reason, some of the really, really weird ghosts seemed to be drawn to the forest. It was one thing to run into the strange ones in the city, surrounded by living, breathing human beings, and quite another to run into them when you were alone.

  Billie donned her beret and stepped right through the door, then turned back and leaned down to the open window. “It’s not like I can ask questions or open drawers,” she said, “so I may be a while.”

  “Oh, darn,” I said, “and I forgot the socks I was knitting at home.”

  “I’m only telling you because I don’t want you getting impatient and marching down there looking for me. Remember, I’m a ghost. Just keep telling yourself that if you get worried. They can’t hurt me. I’m a ghost.”

  “All right, you don’t need to keep saying it all the time. I know you’re a ghost, for God’s sake.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me, which, combined with that beret, may not have been as annoying as a smirk but was pretty close.

  “Do you?” she said. “Sometimes I wonder.”

  Before I could come up with a witty retort, she walked up the road.

  I considered turning on the radio, but I wasn’t in the mood for music. I rolled down the window, enjoying the cool breeze on my face and the sound of the morning rain dripping from the trees.

  I thought about everything I’d learned about Tony Neuman so far and wondered how it all fit together. Five years ago, he’d been a crazy bearded man robbing a Starbucks who’d panicked and shot me in the face. More recently he’d passed himself off as a high-rolling day trader, but in reality he had a fake name and no discernable past. He may have killed his rich wife in the hopes of inheriting her fortune, he definitely slept with his wife’s depressed housewife of a sister, and he possibly owed money to a Mexican drug kingpin named Manuel Loretto. Add it all up and what did I have?

  A headache. That’s what I had. My old friend, that bullet lodged in my brain, was acting up again, starting with tiny tremors somewhere deep inside and escalating to a steady pulsing that I felt all the way down to my toes. To take my mind off the pain, I thought about using my cell phone to talk to other people of interest in the case, but I had no signal in the trees. I opted for counting passing cars. I made it all the way to seven before I lost interest. Nobody came out of the forest, ghosts or otherwise, but I did see through my rearview mirror a man wrapped only in a dirty white sheet pushing a shopping cart along the road, a naked woman in the basket with her legs sticking out the front. The man was mumbling to himself, and the woman was whistling “Material Girl” by Madonna.

  We weren’t even in a real forest and already I’d spotted a weird one. Fun times.

  When I finally heard the crunch of Billie’s feet on the gravel, nearly two hours had passed.

  “That took a while,” I said, when she floated in through the door.

  “It was harder than I thought it would be,” she said. “He’s got ghost security.”

  “What?”

  “At least two of the guys wandering around in there are ghosts. I don’t think Loretto knows he’s got ghost security, but they still seem pretty loyal to him. I think they died in a turf war dustup with a Russian outfit. At least that’s what I’m guessing based on something they said.”

  “Nice. He’s so powerful he’s got both the living and the dead protecting him. So did you manage to learn anything useful?”

  She took off her beret and smoothed her hair, then turned and looked at me with sympathy. “I had to sneak around a lot so they didn’t see me, but yeah, I found out some interesting stuff. I don’t think you’re going to be very happy about it, though. Tony Neuman is dead.”

  “What?”

  “I guess they found him holed up on the coast outside Seaside a couple of weeks ago. He owed them a bunch of money. Some kind of stock scheme he’d sold them on as a sure thing. I guess it wasn’t such a sure thing, but they still wanted their money.”

  “And they killed him?”

  Billie nodded. “I guess they’d killed Karen first. They told him if he didn’t pay up by last July, they’d kill her as punishment, and they did. That’s why he took off and hid.”

  “Not well enough, apparently.”

  “Nope.”

  “Where’s the body?”

  “Not totally sure. I got the impression he might have gone for a nice one-way boat ride out into the ocean, though.”

 
“But why were they following me, then?”

  Billie hesitated. She looked down at her beret, turning it slowly. “I don’t know. I mean, I could only learn so much, just listening in on people’s conversations, especially when half the time they were talking in Spanish.”

  “It’s okay,” I reassured her. “You did great. Really.”

  “Yeah. But I think … Well, I think they still believe Tony has the money somewhere. That he hid it or gave it to somebody or something. And when you showed up at the condo …”

  “They thought maybe I knew where the money was,” I said.

  “Right. So they followed you.”

  “Hmm. So Tony was a sleazeball who assumed another man’s name and slept with his wife’s sister, but he didn’t kill his wife.”

  “It doesn’t appear that way,” Billie said.

  “I’m still left wondering why he shot me.”

  Billie reached for my hand, on the steering wheel, stopping just short of it before setting her own hand back in her lap. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this isn’t what you were hoping for. I know you wanted more closure than this.”

  “It’s not about closure,” I said thickly. “It’s about justice.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I looked out the window. I knew Billie wanted me to say it was over, that I was ready to put this case behind me, but I couldn’t. There was still something that didn’t quite add up. I couldn’t say what it was, not yet, but I knew if I didn’t at least make a stab at figuring it out, it would gnaw at me forever. There was some kind of deeper truth about Tony that was just eluding me. It was like smoke. I was grasping it, trying to hold on to it, but it was slipping through my fingers.

  Closure. I didn’t think I’d ever have closure, whatever that meant, but maybe Karen Thorne might. That was something at least.

  Shafts of sunlight slanted through the firs, droplets of water sparkling on the leafy branches like tiny white pearls. I thought I saw a face amid all the green, another ghost, maybe, but it didn’t appear again. Great. Now I was even imagining ghosts.

  I put my foot on the brake and hit the power button, waiting for the Prius’s console to beep to life. Maybe I couldn’t quite let Tony go, and maybe I never would, but that didn’t mean I had to obsess about him twenty-four hours a day. Tony was dead, after all. That might make him out of reach for most people, but not for me. I’d find him eventually. In the meantime, a little break from it all might do me good.

  “I wonder what the weather’s like in Honolulu,” I said.

  Chapter 20

  Fifty-eight days after Billie walked out on me, I awoke to find her standing at the end of the couch, accompanied by a young mousy woman in a yellow headscarf and a simple, full-length blue dress, the kind of conservative outfit worn by the Russian Orthodox Christians who’d been immigrating to Oregon in recent years. Billie was dressed in a sharp gray pantsuit, sunglasses perched on top of her head, looking all the world like she’d just stepped off a designer clothing photo shoot.

  I blinked through my hangover, trying to focus on them in the bright glare of sunlight filling the living room, and sat up so fast my head began to spin.

  The television was on, but the sound was muted. The perky hosts of some morning talk show, both wearing outrageous white chef’s hats, were baking red and green peppers in a sizzling skillet. Realizing I was lying there in nothing but my boxers, I grabbed one of the empty chip bags and covered myself with it. In the process, I managed to knock over two of the empty beer bottles on the coffee table, their clatter as loud as cannon fire. Billie, surveying my sad state of affairs, wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  The young woman frowned, though whether it was because of me or because of Billie invoking the Lord’s name, I couldn’t say. Now that I got a better look at her, I doubted she was more than eighteen, her face free of makeup of any kind, eyebrows growing slightly together, the skin around her eyes pink and raw as if she had been crying. I propped myself up on my elbows.

  “Took you long enough,” I said. My mouth felt as though I’d been chewing on dirt all night.

  “You smell like you slept in the sewer,” Billie said.

  “Thank you. It’s a new cologne I’m wearing, Scent of Dumpster. Like it?”

  “I didn’t think you’d let yourself go all to hell.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t think you’d disappear for nearly three months. Guess we’re even.”

  Billie nodded. “You’re mad. I can see that.”

  “Your powers of deduction are amazing, Sherlock.” I nodded to the woman. “Hello, I’m Myron. Sorry I didn’t have time to tidy up a bit. I wasn’t expecting guests, you see.”

  The young woman looked at Billie. “Maybe I go,” she said. Her voice, tinged with a Russian accent, was just as mousy as her appearance, a tiny squeak.

  “No,” Billie said. “Look, I know you’re mad, Myron. That’s fine. We can talk about that later. For right now, I want you to put that aside. This is Antonia. She died of cancer three years ago, and she needs your help.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Antonia,” I said. “But I’m not a shaman. I don’t know what you heard, but I can’t bring people back from the dead.”

  Antonia looked confused, glancing from me to Billie and back again. “That’s—that’s not—”

  “Her daughter was abducted five days ago,” Billie explained. “Someone took her right out of her school playground in Woodburn. She needs to get her daughter back with her father again. Think you can stop feeling sorry for yourself long enough to help her do that?”

  I glared at her. “Sorry for myself?”

  “This isn’t about us, Myron. This is about what you can do to help Antonia.”

  “I don’t see how I can do anything the police—”

  “Please, mister,” Antonia said. “The police, they know nothing. They are not looking in right places for little Katya. I have ideas. There is woman who always wanted child I think took her. I can tell you people, people no longer living, you can talk to, and they might help find this woman. They will help.”

  It took a while for me to filter all this through my jittery brain. Not liking my position being loomed over by the two of them, I rose from my personal landfill of chip crumbs, candy-bar wrappers, and unopened junk mail, wading through the clutter in the room to the television. My legs and arms crackled as if there were glue in the joints. I turned off the television, then spotted my fraying terrycloth robe on the floor and slipped that on my aching body. The robe may have stunk of mildew and scotch, but at least it gave me some measure of modesty.

  “I don’t know what you heard,” I said, “but I’m not a detective anymore.”

  “I pay you,” Antonia said.

  I sighed. “It’s not about the money. I just don’t think I can—”

  “Please,” Antonia begged, “please, there is no one. I have money in jars in special place in field near where we live. My husband, he drink and he spend money, so I must save some. You can have this money. I tell you where it is. Please, mister. Your wife, she say you are a very good man. She say you have a good heart. Please help me. Please.”

  Her face was so earnest, so genuine in her desperation, that I couldn’t help but be moved. What if that little girl was my own? Something clicked into place deep inside me, some gear gummed up by too much booze and self-pity. I felt the fog that had clouded my mind the past year begin to lift. There was a glimmer of hope, at last. There was a rope before me, leading out of the pit where I’d fallen, if only I had the courage to grab it. I doubted things would get any easier for me, but I didn’t need easier. I realized that now. I needed to feel like I mattered again. I needed purpose.

  Antonia had tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t the only one. When I looked at Billie, I saw that her own eyes were watery.

  “A good heart?” I said.

  She nodded, and when she managed to speak, her voice was rough and strained. �
�The one I wish I had,” she said.

  Chapter 21

  After coming back from Manuel Loretto’s place, I spent the rest of Saturday poking around the house catching up on chores, plus brooding about Tony Neuman and how I might go about finding him in a world filled with hundreds of billions of ghosts. I was good at brooding. There was a real art to it, walking that fine line of morose thoughtfulness without slipping into outright depression. I wasn’t as good as Billie, who brooded at the pro level, but I still had some talent.

  I went for a walk at dusk, the fall air crisp and cool, and saw the same Ford Explorer that had tailed me on Friday parked at the end of the street. Irritated, I started to approach them, but they gunned the engine and screeched around the corner. How long would they keep tailing me? I was going to have to get the word out to them somehow that their efforts were pointless.

  On Sunday afternoon, I met Alesha at Sharkey’s, a pool hall about halfway between my house in Sellwood and her condo in northeast Portland. We met there about every other week, and we liked Sunday afternoons because the place was generally deserted—at least of the living. A few ghosts always wandered around from table to table, mostly old-timers who’d spent hours playing the game and now watched the movement of the balls longingly.

  Alesha was racking up a set when I got there, alone, at our favorite table in the corner. Sometimes she brought a boyfriend, but mostly she came alone. Smoking had been banned in all Portland bars for years, but the smell of cigarettes still clung to the green felt and the dark-paneled walls—walls so thin I could feel the November breeze flitting through the gaps in the wood. Billie was at home finishing a painting. When I’d left, there’d been a particularly annoying ring to the way she’d told me to go have fun. She said it the same way she might tell me to go to hell.

  While we played, I told Alesha about what Billie had learned about Tony’s fate. When I was done, she was already three balls ahead of me and had set the table up to make it hard for me to come back.