“Harvey has underlings to do everything, sweetheart. It’s suspicious, but I don’t see how that helps us.”
“I plan to follow up and ask around.” I pulled out more photos. Twice, I had tracked Harvey Jekyll to clandestine nighttime meetings with shadowy figures, once accompanied by his chief sales rep, Brondon Morris. “I have no idea what those meetings were. I could never get close enough.”
“Could it be a sex parlor of some kind?” Robin sounded embarrassed. “Drugs? Gambling?”
“We can only hope,” Miranda said. “You’ll need proof.”
“I will step up the surveillance, Mrs. Jekyll.” As a zombie, I could put in long hours, day and night. “It’s taken me a few weeks to . . . get back on my feet. Don’t worry, I’m on the job now. The cases don’t solve themselves.”
“No, sweetheart, they don’t.” She reached into her handbag, which probably cost as much as a block of real estate in the Unnatural Quarter, and withdrew her checkbook. “I’m going to double your hourly fee this week in hopes that it encourages you.”
She wrote out a check from her husband’s account, blew us an air-kiss, and said her goodbyes.
Chapter 8
Seated at my desk, I spent half an hour studying the homicide file McGoo had delivered to me (unofficially) four days after I awakened from the grave. “Here you go, Shamble—do your stuff. The cases don’t solve themselves.”
I was grateful, though intimidated. “It’s not often a person gets a chance to catch his own murderer.”
“Consider this a do-it-yourself project. Besides, it’ll save me the work.”
Fortunately for me, the medical examiner relied on virtual autopsies and high-tech imaging of suspected murder victims. (In my case, there wasn’t much “suspected” about the murder.) My body had been buried intact, relatively speaking.
Now I reread the report, although I already had the words memorized: Classification of Death: Homicide. Cause of Death: Gunshot wound to head. Bullet entered lamboid suture of skull, completely penetrating brain and exiting forehead. Wound is consistent with .32 caliber bullet found at crime scene.
The slug had been embedded in a wooden door in the alley, having lost most of its momentum after passing through my skull. The bullet was damaged by striking the door (not to mention the back and front of my skull, which, according to McGoo, is quite thick). Even so, the lab had gotten good information:
Lead rim-fired bullet, five lands and grooves with a right-hand twist, consistent with a round from an antique Smith & Wesson No. 2 Army .32 caliber revolver. As best we could tell, the weapon was made around the time of the U.S. Civil War. No bullet casing found at the scene, but in that kind of gun, someone would have had to remove the casing manually, and only a stupid murderer would have left it on the ground. Anybody who could have killed me had to be reasonably smart, or lucky. Just for my own reputation, I preferred to imagine him, or her, as fiendishly smart.
A lot of unnaturals had a fondness for antiques. Gun shops specialized in exotic pieces, and in the Unnatural Quarter it was easy enough to get hold of unregistered weapons of all makes and types. I just needed to figure out who owned a hundred-fifty-year-old Smith & Wesson .32 revolver.
Piece of cake.
Chambeaux & Deyer dealt with the usual gamut of cases: missing persons, divorces, civil lawsuits, recovery of stolen objects.
Seven years ago, Robin had won her first legal case dealing with unnaturals—securing a victory for a monster-literacy charity—before the two of us ever joined forces. A prominent werewolf millionaire had died as a result of a tragic silver-letter-opener accident (another story entirely), and the will left his entire fortune to the literacy charity. The jilted family contested the will, alleging that becoming a werewolf each full moon had rendered the old man mentally incompetent; they showed video evidence of his slavering, bestial antics to prove their point.
Robin argued that—notwithstanding the allegation that a werewolf was by definition mentally incompetent—the decedent was indisputably competent during the rest of the month when the moon wasn’t full, and she entered lunar charts into evidence to prove that the moon had been in the gibbous phase at the time he signed the will. Based on her argument, the judge ruled that the monster-literacy charity was entitled to the full inheritance, as stated in the millionaire’s will.
A few years before that, I had put out my shingle offering my services as a detective around what would later become the Unnatural Quarter. After McGoo got himself punitively promoted to this part of town, he threw me a bone and set me up with my first unnatural case.
He put me in touch with a forlorn family who was desperately trying to track down their uncle Mel. I treated it like a regular missing persons case, even though Mel was one of the walking dead. He had died six months before the Big Uneasy, but his corpse was still fresh enough to rise up in the first wave of zombies after all the rules changed. When his family came to deliver flowers to the grave one day, they found the earth churned and a sunken hole left where Mel had battered his way out of the coffin and clawed himself back into the light of day.
They followed the muddy footprints out of the cemetery, but lost his trail on the way to the Quarter. So they hired me to find him. Standard detective work. I remember the blond-haired niece in particular, her lower lip trembling, tears filling her eyes . . . so sad, so sincere, not even twenty years old. “Uncle Mel is lost—I just know he’s homeless somewhere! We’ve got to find him.”
And that’s what I did. I knocked on doors, I asked around the Quarter, I showed Mel’s funeral-notice photo to anyone I met (though the photo wasn’t going to be a very good likeness, since he’d been ripening in the grave for half a year). I finally found the unkempt-looking zombie sleeping in an alley, covered with flattened cardboard boxes and newspapers, little more than a pile of ambulatory detritus getting snuggly with rodents and beetles.
Success. I had done my job.
Mel was perfectly alert, and he must have been a charming guy in life. When I told him that his family had engaged my services to find him, at first he brightened, then became dejected as reality sank in. “They don’t want to see me like this.”
“Oh, yes, they do. Trust me, it’ll be all right.”
I arranged the meeting, and I was as excited as any of them. Since he’d been in the ground for so long, Mel was too putrid for embraces, however, which made for an awkward reunion. With one glance at his rotting form, the young blond niece and her aunts and uncles immediately reconsidered their wishes. Within minutes, they glanced at watches, consulted day planners, pretended they had other things to do.
The niece put her thumb to her ear and pinky to her mouth to mime a telephone and quipped, “We’ll call you, Uncle Mel.”
The others gave him their best wishes. “Take care of yourself, Mel.”