Royal Ghouls

by Alex A King

  “No.” Her eyes gleamed. “No gloves.”

  I swung around and looked at the pool again. What kind of freak hoarded chicken crap?

  “Is there a reason you’re collecting this?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited. She didn’t elaborate.

  Oh boy. For this I needed rubber gloves. No way could I stick my bare hand in there, not even for Christ on his cross. I rolled down my sleeve.

  “I’ll be back with tweezers,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Gloves. I meant rubber gloves. I have to go but I’ll be back soon with rubber gloves.”

  She rose out of her chair and hobbled over, one hand supporting her lower back. The chickens followed her. They knew she was feeding their addiction, enhancing their calm.

  “For what? You will not be able to find my necklace with big rubber gloves on your hands. Maybe that is what you want. Or maybe you want to hide my necklace in your glove and keep it for yourself. What kind of person steals from an old woman, eh? What would your yiayia say if she knew you were a thief?”

  Knowing Yiayia, she wouldn’t have said a word. Instead, she would have grabbed Kyria Hondrou by the messy bun and shoved her into the pool, face first. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part.

  Slowly, reluctantly, like a peasant on the way to the gallows, I shucked my jacket, rolled up my sleeve to the elbow.

  “Higher. I want to make sure you do not steal from me.” Her gnarled, olive twig of a finger wagged in my face. “And remember, you promised to do this for free.”

  It took me thirty minutes to dredge the bottom of the paddling pool with my bare fingers. I recovered one dead rat, three pebbles, and something I think used to be reading glasses. No sign of Kyria Hondrou’s chain and crucifix—or my dignity.

  I looked at my manure-covered arm. There was a good chance it was unsalvageable. Probably they’d have to amputate.

  “Why you stop?” she barked.

  “It’s not in here.”

  The old woman shrugged. “Maybe it is somewhere else.”

  “Somewhere else,” I said flatly.

  “Wait.” She reached into her apron pocket. Out came her withered hand, a silver chain coiled around her fingers. “I found it. You can leave now.”

  I sat back on my haunches, the scream trapped in my throat.

  What are you waiting for?” she said.

  “I spent thirty minutes sifting through chicken kaka.”

  “So?”

  I looked at her. Hard.

  “You get nothing,” she said, jabbing her cane at me. “I did your job for you.”

  I peddled toward home with my sleeve rolled up and my coat scrunched in my bicycle’s basket. The stink of chicken manure wafted up my nose. Eleni had kindly let me rinse off under the yard’s pump, but frigid water doesn’t do squat for poop. For that you need soap. A lot of soap. And possibly bleach.

  As I approached the More Super Market, I spotted the Triantafillou brothers sitting outside in a pair of dilapidated chairs. Yiorgos and Dimitri, the Triantafillou brothers, were a pair of potatoes, baked too long in a slow oven. Their skins were too loose for their bodies. They wore their pants hoisted almost to their armpits. Each man came with a walking stick and a thick wallet. My yiayia used to say the brothers could squeeze money from a corpse, even if no one had been using the corpse as a place to hide their savings. Neither brother was married; Yiayia also said they planned to live forever or take it all to the grave. Looking at them, I was glad they had a Plan B.

  These same Triantafillou brothers had a meeting scheduled with Harry Vasilikos, before the bread baron perished between islands. Which meant I wanted to talk to them, Thessaly Police or no Thessaly Police.

  I rolled to a stop, wished them a kalimera—good morning—even though I’d spent the morning elbow-deep in chicken waste and therefore there wasn’t much good about this particular morning, except that eventually it would be over.

  The men wrinkled the root vegetables they called noses. Their eyes watered. “What is that smell?” Kyrios Dimitri asked.

  “Chicken manure,” I told him.

  “Ah. You have been to see Kyria Hondrou. That woman is sour, like the lemon.”

  “And that thing on her face,” Kyrios Yiorgos said. “What is that? A dead animal? Who can say?”

  There was a shower not too far away and it was calling my name.

  “Did you hear about Harry Vasilikos?” I asked them.

  “We heard,” Kyrios Yiorgos said.

  “Someone mentioned you were supposed to have a business meeting with him about distributing Royal Pain bread.”

  “Sure. A meeting,” Kyrios Yiorgos said. “But then Harry went and crashed into the island, and now there is no meeting.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “He used to spend summers here, but not for a long time. We have not seen him in five years.”

  “More like twenty,” Kyrios Dimitri said.

  “Twenty? How can it be twenty when he was here five years ago.”

  “Twenty,” his brother repeated.

  “Five.”

  “Re malaka, it was twenty years. Maybe longer.”

  The conversation devolved quickly. While the brothers bickered, I wished them a good morning and rode away. I’d get back to them later, when I wasn’t covered in chicken manure.

  One long, hot shower later—heavy on the soap and shampoo—I was almost fit for human consumption again. Almost. The smell was still there, lingering in my mucus membranes. I shuddered as my brain dredged up the memory of me with my arm in the poop pool, complete with the sensation of chicken manure slick and slimy against my skin. Every time I moved, I caught a whiff of ammonia. Moving wasn’t convenient right now for a couple of reasons, including the stink.

  It was noon and the delivery boy had just thrust an obscenely huge bunch of roses at Olga Marouli’s granddaughter. I knew this because I was peeping through my spy hole.

  “Who are they from?” Lydia asked him.

  The delivery boy shrugged. “A secret admirer, I think.”

  “I don’t even like roses,” she said.

  “What is she doing?” Jimmy asked over the phone. It was pressed to my ear and I was trying to spy and communicate at the same time. Not easy when there was only a thin slab of wood standing between me and discovery.

  “Wrinkling her nose,” I whispered.

  “In a good way or a bad way?”

  “I don’t think there is a good way.”

  “She doesn’t like the roses?” He sounded crestfallen. “I thought all women liked roses.”

  “We’re not a monolith, you know. We come in different colors, shapes, and sizes, just like underwear.”

  He ignored that. “What is she doing now? Is she reading the note?”

  I squinted through the spy hole. Sure enough, Lydia was reading the card. The delivery boy, a local teenager who had dropped out of school to follow his dreams of being a delivery boy, went to leave. Lydia grabbed his shirt collar, yanked him back.

  “Wait.” She held up the card. “Who sent these?”

  The kid shrugged. “I don’t know. I just deliver flowers.”

  “How can I find out?”

  “Ask Despinidia Diktaki? She owns the store.”

  Despinidia—Miss—Diktaki had inherited the florist from a rich, dead relative who wasn’t dead or a relative. In fact, her very rich not-a-relative had a wife and seven children in a swanky Athens neighborhood. Nobody talked about the wife or the children—at least not to the florist’s face.

  “Where can I find her?”

  He shrugged again. He did that a lot. Like most teenagers he didn’t know much, even though he thought he knew it all. I had been there myself; I knew. At sixteen I was the smartest person on the planet and everyone else was an idiot.

  “At the store?” he said. “She arranges all the flowers herself.”

  Lydia struck him with her smile. “Thanks.” She shut t
he door, taking the flowers she didn’t like with her.

  The delivery boy adjusted the front of his pants, then he slunk off down the hall.

  “She read the card,” I told Jimmy. “Now she’s gone to call the florist.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “Pray,” I said.

  “Pray for what?”

  “That on some level, I have respect for you.”

  “Do you?”

  “We’re about to find out.”

  Apartment 201’s door flew open. Lydia padded across the hall in fluffy slippers.

  “Uh oh,” I said. “Here we go.”

  “What?” Jimmy sounded worried.

  “Wait.”

  Lydia knocked. “Allie, are you there? I need to talk to you.”

  There was no point delaying the inevitable. I took a deep breath. I opened the door.

  “No,” I said.

  “I still don’t know if I like you,” she said, “but you’re funny, so it’s looking good. Did you send me flowers?”

  “On behalf of a client, yes.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Who?”

  “I can’t tell you.” What do you know, I did have some respect for Jimmy Kontos after all. Not much, but it was better than nothing.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  She twiddled a hank of her hair and chewed on the ends. “Is it someone I know?”

  “Give me a list of everyone you know and I’ll tell you.”

  She laughed. “Okay, let me think.”

  I waited.

  “Do you smell something?” she said.

  “No. And it’s especially not chicken manure.”

  Her cute nose wrinkled. “A work thing?”

  “Indentured servitude or maybe an act of reluctant charity. Either way, I didn’t get paid.”

  “You should go back and demand hazard pay.” She looked back at her apartment. “The roses. Was it Johnny Margas? I bet it was. I heard he’s here on the island.”

  My mouth wanted to fall open but my brain kept it shut. “You know Johnny Margas?”

  “We’ve met.” She winked at me. Obviously we had very different definitions of the word.

  “Did you know he’s married?”

  “Lots of rich men are married. That doesn’t stop them sending flowers to young, attractive women.”

  Behind me, Kyria Eva gasped.

  Lydia couldn’t hear her. She carried on speculating. “They are from Johnny, aren’t they? It would be just like him to send something old fashioned like roses without stopping to consider what I like. Women are widgets to men like him. Our mounis are interchangeable. The same hole with different faces.”

  I thought about Kyria Eva and Angela, both betrayed by Johnny Margas. If he kept it up, he would wind up a dead man.

  “It wasn’t Johnny Margas,” I said. “The roses are from a much better class of man. And if or when I get permission to give you his name, I will.”

  “Aww, I’m touched,” Jimmy said in my ear.

  A sly look crept over Lydia’s pretty face. “What if I hire you to find out who sent me the flowers?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know if I like you either, but you’re funny, too.”

  Shrug. “It was worth a try.”

  She went back to her apartment, leaving me with a wailing Kyria Eva, six ghosts, and a cheering Jimmy Kontos.

  “You’re good,” Jimmy said over the phone. “So good I could kiss you. Too bad you’re a giant. So what do we do next?”

  “What you do is relax. You’ve already piqued her curiosity.”

  I could hear him rubbing his hands together. At least, I hoped it was his hands.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I owe you.”

  I reminded him that he’d already paid me in money, then I ended the call. Now I had to deal with these ghosts and the weeping Kyria Eva.

  My hands found my hips. I put on my best stern, non-sexy librarian face.

  “If you were solid, I’d pour you a glass of ouzo. But you aren’t really here, so sit up, shut up, and listen.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that,” Kyria Eva said, sniveling.

  “She is talking to you like that, and you deserve it,” Kyrios Harry said. “Sit.”

  Kyria Eva’s bottom hit my office chair.

  “Johnny Margas is kaka,” I said. “He’s a cheating, no-good, murder suspect. And when you wake up and get out of that hospital bed, you need to get a good lawyer and leave him.”

  “I can’t do that,” she wailed.

  “Why not?”

  With a twist of an internal faucet, the crying stopped. She wiped her hand across her eyes.

  “Because he is in my hospital room right now, and I think he is going to kill me.”

  Chapter Ten

  I couldn’t dial Leo’s number fast enough.

  “Where are you?” I yelled into the phone.

  Groggy voice. Slurring words. “In bed. Why?”

  “Johnny Margas is going to kill his wife.”

  “Who?” His tone sharpened—fast.

  “Johnny Margas. Real name: Yiannis Margas.”

  Upstairs, his feet hit the floor. “And who is his wife?”

  “Eva Vasiliko.” Virgin Mary, he had no idea who I was talking about because they hadn’t identified her yet. “She’s your survivor, the one you’re supposed to be guarding.”

  “We are guarding her, at least until the Thessaly Police move her.”

  “There won’t be anyone to move if you don’t get Margas away from her right now.”

  He ended the call.

  “Skata na fas,” I muttered. The dead women giggled because I had just told Detective Samaras to eat poop. More precisely, I’d said “Shit to eat.” The Greek language doesn’t string words together the same way English does. I called the hospital, told them to get up to the ICU right now to check on the crash’s lone survivor.

  Someone knocked on the door. I yanked it open to find Leo there in sweat pants and a t-shirt with a leather jacket thrown over the top.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The hospital. And you are coming with me because I have questions.”

  “You didn’t call the police—I mean Merope’s other police?”

  “Relax, I called them. But I still have to go.”

  I grabbed my bag, shoved my feet into boots and followed him downstairs. Hopefully he wasn’t taking me somewhere to cut off my head.

  He opened the car door for me. I flinched as he reached over and buckled me in.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “I like touching you,” he said. “Why do you look like I’m going to take you somewhere to cut off your head?”

  Yikes. Was he a mind reader? I looked in the passenger mirror. No. I really did look like I was on my way to my own beheading.

  “I spent the morning digging through a paddling pool filled with chicken manure.”

  “Work or pleasure?”

  Under the circumstances, I couldn’t laugh. But I wanted to.

  “Neither. I got conned by an old woman.”

  Thirty seconds later we were speeding along the streets of Merope, toward the hospital.

  “Pappas is at the hospital. He’s the one I called,” Leo said.

  “Did he stop Margas?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He glanced me. “How do you know the survivor’s name?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “If you tell me, I can keep it confidential.”

  “Okay. She told me herself.”

  He flashed another look at me, this one disbelieving. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out myself. Ghosts I’m used to, but people in comas? This is a first.”

  The car slowed. Distracted by my revelation, Leo had pulled his foot off the gas.

  “Ghosts. People in comas,” he muttered.

  “Keep driving,” I said.

>   He jammed his foot down. The car shot forward.

  “Ghosts,” he said again, dazed.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “The world is a crazy place. You really have no idea how crazy. I’m not sure I even know how crazy it is, which kind of bothers me. If ghosts exist, then why not other things?”

  I had contemplated the possibility before, just not out loud and in front of other people.

  “So Harry Vasilikos and his sister. Who were the other victims?”

  “I don’t know their names. They’re Harry Vasilikos’s companions.”

  “Companions?”

  “People who keep other people company.”

  Leo clammed up. Not a word out of him the rest of the way to the hospital, which wasn’t far. When Leo parked I had to open my own door. He was already loping ahead, leaving me in the dust. Well, he had wanted the truth, hadn’t he? The detective had left me no choice. There was no way to lie about my source; my details were too detailed. And now he couldn’t handle that truth. Colonel Jessup was right.

  I hurried after Leo. He took the stairs two at a time.

  On the second floor I caught up to him. He cut into the cluster of cops around what I guessed was Eva Vasiliko’s door. Johnny Margas was there, too, hands splayed, mouth working fast, spitting out words. He didn’t do anything, he was saying. He was adjusting his wife’s pillows, that’s all.

  “Adjusting them all over her face?” Constable Pappas asked. “Because that’s what you were doing.”

  Hands in his pants pockets, Johnny Margas shrugged. “She always sleeps with a pillow over her head.”

  “Really?” Leo said. Cop face on. Hard and cool. Magnetic and simultaneously repelling. I kind of wanted him to use his handcuffs on me. My Virgin Mary, why did he have to be a whacko killer?

  Johnny Margas opened his mouth, presumably to proclaim his innocence again, then he spotted me standing there, trying to blend in with the paint and a rack of bedpans. “You again.”

  Leo glanced at me. “You’ve met?”

  “He was trying to get into a client’s sovraka.” I didn’t mention Angela’s name or what kind of underwear she wore. “Can I see her?” My question was directed at Leo.

  A long moment passed, then he nodded once. “For a second.”