Services Rendered

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Before I could check them out, however, a thin and dusty mummy shuffled up to the rack of books, studying them with his extended fingers. His bandages were yellowish-brown except for a few swaddles of fresh white gauze where he had patched himself up. His entire head was covered, including his eyes, leaving him blind. He ran his gnarled fingertips along the spines of the paperbacks. “Wonderful. Ah, just wonderful!” he muttered, his voice dry and dusty. “They’re in perfect condition.” He drew in a long breath. “Mint.”

  I stepped closer. “I don’t have a mint, but I have gum,” I offered, quickly realizing that the old mummy needed it.

  “No, I mean these books. They’re pristine and highly collectible. I want the complete set.”

  “I already bought three of them,” I said, holding up the ones I had taken. “And how can you read? You don’t have eyes.”

  “I don’t need eyes to appreciate fine collectibles,” the mummy said. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Actually, I don’t,” I said, and extended my hand. “I’m Dan Chambeaux, zombie private investigator. I’d give you one of my cards, but it wouldn’t do you much good.”

  “I’ll remember,” said the mummy. “I am Ro-Tar, known since the time of ancient Egypt.”

  “Most mummies I know come from ancient Egypt,” I said, although I had met a few Inca and Aztec mummies. “Normally, the mummification job is a little better. Did they make a mistake preserving your eyes?”

  Ro-Tar seemed ashamed. He bent his bandaged head. “Yes, and dozens suffered the same fate. Caused by an improperly trained embalming employee. There was a class action suit.” He turned his bandaged, eyeless face toward me. “But my legacy remains. I created a very popular luncheon club for business networking and guest speakers. It was named after me, and it still endures.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve heard of the Rotarians. I didn’t know their origin, though.”

  “Now I’m retired,” said the mummy, making me wonder about the retirement age for someone who was thousands of years old. “And I’m an avid collector. I simply must have these paperbacks.” He waved his bandaged hand to get Rita’s attention. “How much for the books?”

  “Two dollars each,” the gremlin said without taking a breath. I held on to my three 50¢ paperbacks and didn’t point out the price difference.

  “Sold! I’ll take the lot,” Ro-Tar said and cackled in a low voice to me. “She has no idea what these are worth.”

  Sheyenne called, “Beaux, look what I found!” She lifted several colorful lacy scarves that fell more into the lingerie category than hold-your-hair-against-the-wind category.

  Finding my beautiful girlfriend more interesting than old paperbacks, I helped her select several veils that I thought would look best on her. She lifted them with her poltergeist powers, and the wispy fabric drifted around her insubstantial form. I had no idea how or why mangy old Eldon Muff used the sexy scarves, nor did I want to know. What I did care about, though, was how pretty they were going to look on Sheyenne.

  Ro-Tar, the blind mummy, was carefully packing his entire collection of pristine paperbacks into his sarcophagus, which had a set of wheels for easier carrying. I tucked my three books under my arm, but frankly my attention was on how Sheyenne would model the colorful scarves later in private.

  Back at Chambeaux & Deyer Investigations, Sheyenne used her supernatural skills to organize our office, a task that exceeded the abilities of any mere human.

  Robin, my lovely and talented lawyer partner, was busy in her own office preparing notes for an upcoming trial. She was defending a shapeless oily blob that left ugly stains wherever it went. The client had been charged with damage to public property, but Robin’s defense was that the blob had a right to exhibit free expression and artistic verve. Regardless of this defense, Sheyenne adamantly refused to let the greasy blob creature into our offices because of the possible damage to our carpets.

  The office phone rang before I had a chance to slump into my office chair, where I planned to stare at the folders of unsolved cases. I often expected clues to jump out at me like a cat from a dark alley in a bad horror movie. When I heard McGoo on the line, I realized I should have bought some junk from the estate sale to give him as a thoughtful birthday gift.

  “Hey, Shamble—want to see a particularly nasty crime scene? I mean really gross and unbelievable? The victim must have had the worst karma of any person on Earth, off the charts bloody and tragic.” He was trying to make it sound like a selling point.

  “I’ll be right there. You need my help solving it?”

  “Not much of a mystery, but this is one for the record books.”

  I met him at the crime scene just outside of the opera house. The Unnatural Quarter wasn’t known for extravagant cultural events, but the Phantom did reasonably well at the opera, especially with his Saturday afternoon children’s matinees and with his midnight laser light shows, all accompanied by pipe organ music.

  Crime scene techs had placed yellow tape around a splattered bloody mess that looked like a meat delivery truck had crashed into a shipment of plumbing supplies. Gore and polished pipes were scattered around amongst ivory keys that looked like long rectangular teeth.

  I looked up and saw a snapped rope dangling from the pulley near the roof of the opera house, and I realized that these weren’t plumbing supplies, but polished pieces of one of the Phantom’s grand pipe organs. A bent kid’s bicycle lay crashed in the gutter.

  Being a detective, even a zombie detective, I didn’t need a calculator to put two and two together. The rope hoisting the large pipe organ up to the rooftop level of the opera house had broken, and the huge organ had toppled onto some poor victim on the street. The pipes had fallen straight down and punched through the body like an automated press that mass-produced hamburger patties. Goblin evidence technicians kept busy sorting the mess into tubular debris and mangled-flesh debris, often using tweezers.

  “You weren’t kidding, McGoo. This is pretty gross.”

  In front of the building, the Phantom strutted about in his tuxedo, looking distraught. He pulled off the white porcelain mask that covered half of his face, wiped sweat from his ugly visage, and popped the mask back into place. “That was one of my best organs, too.”

  “It made quite a crash when all those pipes clanged and clattered onto the sidewalk,” McGoo said. “Nobody even heard the poor kid scream, although half of the neighbors are now deaf.”

  “Being deaf might help them enjoy the opera better,” I said.

  McGoo nodded, as if he hadn’t considered that before. He’s a redheaded beat cop with a round freckle-spattered face and a grin full of humor that often gets him in trouble. He’d been transferred from a normal precinct to work in the Unnatural Quarter because of his unfortunate penchant for telling politically incorrect jokes.

  As he paced around the crime scene tape, looking at the wreckage, the Phantom frowned with the unmasked half of his face. “If the pipes aren’t too dented, maybe we can reassemble the whole thing. I don’t know about the sound quality, but we could advertise that it’s a blood-cursed organ. Imagine the tickets we’d sell.”

  I looked up at the snapped rope high above. “Why were you hoisting the organ up to the rooftop level?”

  “Special springtime event,” he said. “We were going to have an open-air barbecue. Hamburgers and hot dogs along with opera. We thought it might catch the lowbrow audience.”

  “Free hot dogs,” McGoo said. “That might even get me listening to opera.”

  Something still didn’t seem right to me about this crime scene. It was too improbable. I saw a couple of burly blue-collar golems standing next to the other end of the broken rope, looking confused because they obviously hadn’t finished their job. They had been standing here, using brute force to pull the rope and raise the organ from the sidewalk up to the roof.

  “So where did the organ come from in the first place? You were moving it from where to where?”

  “It
started out in the second-floor gallery,” the Phantom said. “We brought it down here and out onto the sidewalk, so the golems could lift it up to the roof.”

  “And how did it get onto the sidewalk in the first place?”

  The Phantom turned to me as if wondering why I was so interested in the mechanics of furniture moving. “The golems carried it out of the second-floor gallery down the stairs onto the street, where they tied the ropes and began hauling it up to the third story, where we could swing it into the attic and then carry it up to the roof.”

  “But if it was already in the second-floor gallery, why didn’t they just carry it up the third flight of stairs?”

  The Phantom shrugged, turned to the golems. “Union rules, I think.”

  I looked at the mangled mess of what had been some poor unlucky kid on a bicycle. “I guess he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The Phantom clucked his tongue. “He shouldn’t have been here at all. I don’t even subscribe to his newspaper, and I’ve tried again and again to stop the kid from throwing papers in front of my opera house. Somebody has to pick them up, and nobody reads them.”

  “A paperboy?” I asked, suddenly alert.

  McGoo said, “Yeah, I guess his name was Bobby Neumann, a zombie kid.” He shook his head. “Black and white and red all over, that’s for sure.”

  Bobby Neumann … I knew that name. I suddenly realized it was the same zombie paperboy who had found Eldon Muff dead in his home buried under a pile of monster Hummel figurines. “That’s quite a coincidence.”

  McGoo raised his eyebrows. “You subscribed to the same paper, Shamble?”

  “No, not that.” I started to explain about the estate sale, but before I got to the part about the curse written inside the old paperback, McGoo received a call on his police radio.

  “1063A just occurred at the Gardening and Cemetery Supply Center. It’s a 1616 with a 793C.”

  Around the mess in front of the Phantom’s opera house the crime techs also picked up their phones, studied the information, and got ready to move.

  McGoo clicked his radio, and his face looked as gray as mine normally did. “Oh, no. Is it a 71B or a 71C?”

  The dispatcher hesitated. “71C, I’m afraid.”

  He groaned. “Oh, this is bad.”

  Even though I had spent a few years at the police academy before deciding to get my private investigator’s license, I hadn’t kept up on all the new crime scene codes. Even so, I felt an odd dread build in my stomach. “I missed some of that, McGoo. What happened, exactly?”

  “An awful accident at the home and garden center,” he said. “A salesman was demonstrating different models of lawnmowers used to trim cemetery plots. Some teenage werewolf kid had just gotten a job at Greenlawn Cemetery and was there admiring the equipment.” He swallowed hard. “But a drunk poltergeist somehow got lost inside the engine of the lawnmower that was being demonstrated, and the demon-possessed gardening machine went berserk. It mowed right over the poor werewolf kid.” He shook his head. “Unfortunately, the blades were set to golf course level, so it trimmed the victim’s fur all the way down to his internal organs.”

  I was amazed that McGoo could have gotten so many details from the code numbers in the police call. “Another truly horrible death. What was the victim’s name? The werewolf boy?”

  “He was eighteen, so not really a boy, like Bobby Neumann.” McGoo glanced over at the mangled pipe organ and the bloody mess on the sidewalk. He asked the dispatcher, who responded, “His name was Reginald Dinkler.”

  Seeing my shocked look, McGoo said, “Did you know him?”

  “I read his name in a book. And Bobby Neumann, too.” I narrowed my eyes, settled my fedora more firmly on my head, because I was going to have to do a lot of thinking as a zombie P.I. “These aren’t just accidents. We’ve got a curse on our hands.”

  Back in the office, feeling the urgency, I went straight to my desk and picked up the three old paperbacks I’d purchased from the estate sale. I spread them out on the conference room table while McGoo, Robin, and Sheyenne gathered, curious. “Eldon Muff was a thoroughly unpleasant man,” I said, “but now I have proof that he was actively evil.”

  “That old werewolf hated everyone,” Robin said. “It’s been documented.”

  “Yes, and he particularly hated the paperboy and the teenage werewolf who peed on his shrubs. He wrote a curse in these two paperbacks.” I picked up Nightmare in Pink and read Eldon’s scrawled writing. “I hereby curse the paperboy Bobby Neumann for his incessant harassment. When this curse is activated, he shall die a truly horrible death. My vengeance extends beyond the grave! Sincerely yours, Eldon Muff.”

  “Well that does sound suspicious,” said McGoo. He had followed me from the crime scene, not understanding what some used paperbacks had to do with horrifically mangled accident victims, although he did admit how much he enjoyed John D. MacDonald’s detective novels.

  “Being killed by a plummeting pipe organ counts as a horrible death,” Sheyenne said.

  “And here’s the second one.” I read aloud the curse from A Purple Place for Dying, which identified Reginald Dinkler as the lucky recipient.

  I rested my gray-skinned hand on the third book, Free Fall in Crimson, holding it closed. “I haven’t looked in this one yet.”

  “But Eldon died some time ago,” Sheyenne said. “Why did the curses activate now? This afternoon?”

  “I think I triggered them by opening the books and reading the words.”

  Robin frowned at the old paperbacks. Her brown-eyed stare was intense, and I could see the legal wheels turning in her mind. She had given up a chance at a far more lucrative corporate law practice to see that unnaturals got justice after the Big Uneasy.

  McGoo snorted. “Are you suggesting that you’re responsible? That the paperboy and the werewolf urinator are dead because you wanted to do a little recreational reading? Whew, I’m glad I don’t read much.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” I said.

  McGoo scratched his head. “Not many that I can think of.” I could probably come up with a few after all my cases, but I didn’t want to encourage what would certainly be a lengthy and pointless discussion.

  I picked up Free Fall in Crimson. “There’s one way to find out. If Eldon wrote another curse inside this book, we’ll know the target. He always names his victims.” I looked at McGoo. “Once the curse is activated, we should have a little time. Do you think you could rally the UQPD fast enough to put protection around the target, whoever or whatever it is?”

  McGoo straightened his blue cap on his head. “If we start the paperwork now.”

  Sheyenne looked nervous. “What if this causes another murder, Beaux?”

  “Another accident,” Robin corrected. “Legally speaking, Dan can’t be held responsible since he didn’t place the curse. It’s clearly not his handwriting.”

  “I don’t want to cause another grisly death,” I said, tapping the paperback. “But the curse exists, and it could be triggered anytime the book is opened.”

  “We could just burn the book,” McGoo suggested. “Wouldn’t that cancel the curse?”

  “I don’t like the precedent of book burning,” Robin said.

  Sheyenne and I both reacted with alarm. I said, “I don’t want to mess with curses. There could be nasty unintended consequences, and the horror could spread. If we activate the curse under our own terms, though, at least this way we can respond and try to help the poor victim.”

  I looked at Robin, then at Sheyenne. Both of them showed their support. McGoo sighed and took out his police radio. “I’ll call it in as soon as we know, just to make sure.”

  Since I’d just had a fresh embalming treatment last week, my fingers were more nimble than usual. I opened the cover of Free Fall in Crimson, turned to the title page, and spotted Eldon’s angry handwriting. Bracing myself, I read aloud, “I hereby curse Nolan Pratt for his incompetence as a house painter.
He left thin spots on my eastern wall, didn’t clean up his mess, overcharged me, and never cleaned out the gutters as he promised. When this curse is activated, he shall die a truly horrible death. My vengeance extends beyond the grave! Sincerely yours, Eldon Muff.”

  I lurched to my feet, and I’m very good at lurching. “We’ve got to find this Nolan Pratt and keep him safe.”

  McGoo was already calling in the report over his police radio. “Send a protective detail right away!” When the dispatcher asked for details, he replied, “We don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s a curse! A meteor could fall from the sky for all I know. Just find Pratt and keep him safe. We’re on our way.”

  We all rushed out of the office together.

  The curse-prevention response was a military-style operation, like a sophisticated army sweeping in to conquer a small country. The headquarters of Pratt House Painting & Bell Maintenance was just a little office in a business park with one receptionist who had no idea what was happening. She was a fluttery ghost of an old woman who nearly disassociated from fright when she saw the invasion.

  “We’re a protective detail,” McGoo announced as he and I rushed in, accompanied by Sheyenne, Robin, and half of the UQPD. Everyone was armed to the teeth, and many of them were unnaturals with extravagant teeth, too.

  The old receptionist nearly faded away. “But Nolan’s not here. He’s out on a job.”

  “Where is he? We need the address,” I said. “His life’s in danger.”

  “He’s cursed,” Robin said, as if it were a legal term.

  The receptionist was so flustered she lost control of her poltergeist powers. Fortunately, as a ghost, she didn’t need to worry about losing control of her bladder, which she might well have done, considering the panicked expression on her face. The woman fumbled with her intangible hands but couldn’t manage to touch the pages in the appointment calendar. Finally, Sheyenne flitted in and helped her find the location of the painter’s current day job.