Dead Man Talking (11 page)

I swallowed this bitter pill because it was, after all, the absolute truth.

“And the good news?”

“Well, the good news!” Ella beamed. “According to the station, they got hundreds of calls for more information before the show ever aired. And they’ve gotten even more calls this morning. So many people are interested, they’ve scheduled a repeat of the show in prime time on Thursday night. Isn’t it fabulous?”

“It’s unbelievable.”

I meant this just the way I said it. It was improbable that anyone would have wasted their Sunday night with the likes of
Cemetery Survivor
. It was pretty pathetic, too. Ella took my
unbelievable
to mean something more like
cool
. Which would explain why her smile never wilted.

“The publicity is priceless,” she said, nearly swooning. “If we’ve got this sort of a following after only one episode, imagine what’s going to happen next week.”

I was still trying to work my way through the weirdness of the whole thing. “It’s a fluke,” I said, convinced.
“There may have been a few losers who watched the show, but—”

I heard the commotion before I was close enough to see what was going on, and the noise brought me up short. I turned, all set to ask Ella what was up, but she marched me right along, and like the little engine that could, she didn’t stop, not until we ducked under the branches of an overhanging tree and stepped into the section assigned to my team.

I took one look around and nearly keeled over. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Ella giggled. “Does it look like I’m kidding you?”

“No. But . . .” Feeling a whole lot like Dorothy when she walked out of that black-and-white house and into a technicolor Oz, I stepped closer to the scene. There were bigger crowds here where my team would be working, mostly women, and they held signs that said things like DELMAR, WILL YOU MARRY ME? and

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Ella didn’t know which sign I was looking at, but she didn’t care. She laughed. “Don’t you get it? You’ve got groupies!”

It had to be someone’s sick idea of a joke.

But it wasn’t. The closer I got, the more I realized that the people on the other side of the fence were there because of us. A couple people clapped when we walked by. An elderly woman brought cupcakes and insisted I
take them. I would have handed them right off to Ella if she hadn’t been so busy basking in the glow of our sudden notoriety. So were Reggie and Delmar. At least they weren’t fighting. Instead, they were standing side by side, talking to a couple cute little
chicas
who were hanging on their every word. Jake was taking pictures. Absalom was over near his voodoo altar eyeballing the crowd with suspicion. And Sammi . . .

I looked around, but I didn’t see her anywhere.

At least not until I heard her scream, “Son of a . . .”

I scrambled over in the direction the voice was coming from, pushed through a couple shaggy evergreens, and found Sammi near the fence. There was a man on the other side of it. He was taller than her, as thin as a Dolce & Gabbana belt, and he was wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. He had a thick chain hanging from one pocket of his low-slung jeans and a tattoo on his left arm. It was a red she-devil in a short, short mini-skirt and a revealing low-cut blouse. The name “Sammi” was written over it.

“Oh no!” I dropped the cupcakes on the closest headstone and hurried forward. “It’s her boyfriend,” I told Ella, who came huffing and puffing behind me. “If he’s going to cause trouble—”

Maybe he was. We never had a chance to find out. Before we got close enough to intervene, Sammi reached a hand through the fence, wrapped her fingers around the man’s throat, and squeezed so hard, her knuckles turned as white as skeleton bones.

Ella’s gasp of horror was overshadowed by Sammi’s shout. “You seein’ her again?” She was loud enough to attract attention, and remember, we already had an audience. Even the girls with Delmar and Reggie abandoned them to see what the excitement was all about.

“I’m gonna kick your ass, Virgil,” Sammi yelled.
“You think you gonna two-time me with Carmela, you got another thing comin’.” The whole time she yelled at him, Sammi tightened her fingers around Virgil’s throat. By the time I got close enough to do anything about it, his eyes were bulging and his face was a not-so-pretty shade of red.

“Sammi!” I stepped closer, but with her free hand, she swatted me away, and she might have been small, but Sammie had punch. I staggered back and would have gone down in a heap if I didn’t slam into the brick wall that was Absalom. I steadied myself, doing my best to sound calm and reasonable when I felt anything but. “This is not a good thing, Sammi,” I said. “Let him go.”

“Oh, I’m gonna let him go, all right.” Just like that, she released Virgil and gave him a shove all at the same time. He flew back, lost his footing, and went down on the sidewalk.

“Right where you belong,” Sammi screamed. “In the dirt.”

It didn’t take long for our groupies to take sides. They applauded Sammi and yelled at Virgil. It did nothing for his mood.

“You think you can do that to me?” Virgil pulled himself to his feet. “You think I ain’t gonna tell your probation officer what you just done?”

“Yeah? Right, go ahead!” She tossed her head. “And don’t forget to tell her that if I ever see you with Carmela again, you gonna be sorry you was ever born.”

“Uh, Pepper . . .” At my right shoulder, Ella’s voice was small and tentative. I guess she didn’t want me to be the last one to know that Greer had arrived with cameraman in tow. Oh yeah, they’d gotten the whole thing on film. I could tell because Greer was drooling. I dropped my head into my hands.

“Oh, dear.” Ella’s face paled. “Do you think this will hurt our ratings?”

I didn’t have the heart to see her suffer, so I patted her shoulder. “Drama is what makes people watch TV shows, right? We’re just giving them what they want. Next week, I bet we get twice as many fans.”

And because I was afraid I was right and didn’t want to think about it, I stepped between Sammi and the fence, the better to get her mind off Virgil. I gestured to my team and they gathered around, and since I had their attention for once, I pounced on the opportunity and handed out their assignments for the day. Greer liked this. I could tell, because after she told her cameraman to make sure he got a shot of Virgil climbing into his car and peeling rubber down the street, she had him follow me around.

“Sammi and Reggie over there,” I said. Along with a map of our section, I handed them a spray bottle full of water. “We’ve got to figure out a way to decipher some of those worn headstones and if we spray them with water, the carving will show more clearly.” Ella had called on Saturday night to offer this friendly advice, and seeing that I was actually following it, she was all smiles again.

“Absalom . . .” I turned his way. “Why don’t you and Delmar . . .” Honestly, I didn’t know what I wanted them to do. Ella’s suggestions had stopped at the water bottle. “Maybe you could—” With no particular plan in mind, I reached for a sketchbook lying nearby. It flipped open, and I was surprised to find a gorgeous watercolor drawing of our section.

Only it wasn’t.

Our section, I mean.

The drawing showed neat paths, beautiful plantings,
flowering shrubs. There was a bench in a clearing that was now empty, a small trickling fountain beside it. I glanced from the picture to my team. “What in the world . . . ? Where . . . ?”

“You like it?” Delmar shifted from foot to foot, his cheeks as red as the geraniums in the drawing.

It was the first time I realized he took some pride in the picture. “Did you . . . ?” I checked out the picture again and tipped it so that the members of my team—and the camera—could see it, too. “Delmar, did you draw this?”

You’d think a kid who had the guts to sign his name to graffiti on a school wall would be less shy. Delmar tried to control a smile. “It’s not perfect,” he said. “I was just messing around, you know, over the weekend, and I was thinking about this place and what it looked like and how maybe we could change it.”

“It’s wonderful.” I wasn’t kidding. The drawing was nicely done, the colors were perfect, the detail . . .

I took another look. “If we could make our section look like this—”

“We’d win for sure.” Absalom’s comment came on the end of a sigh of admiration.

“You’re good, dude!” Reggie slapped Delmar on the back. “Now you draw me on that park bench with that little number back there . . .” He poked a thumb over his shoulder to where the two girls were still watching. “Now that, brother, would be a picture I’d want to see!”

Even Crazy Jake laughed. Sammi, it should be noted, did not. Still steamed from her encounter with Virgil, she was breathing hard and shooting death-ray looks in the direction where she’d last seen him.

“Sammi?” I dared to touch a hand to her arm. “Why don’t you go along with Delmar,” I said. “You two can—”

“Don’t need you to tell me what to do.” Sammi spun around and stalked away. “Don’t need nobody to tell me what to do.”

When I made to go after her, Absalom put a hand out to stop me. “She knows she screwed up. She don’t need you reminding her. Let her be.”

It was a better plan than mine, which was to read her the riot act.

I backed off, and big surprise, my teammates actually went off in all directions, their assignments in their hands. I seriously doubted they’d make any headway—on anything—but for now, with the cameras rolling, at least they put on a good show. When Greer took off after them, I saw my opportunity. I told Ella I’d talk to her later and left her to worry if violence would help or hurt our ratings while I went off to do a little sleuthing. This time, I wasn’t going to interview anyone or even think about Jefferson Lamar. Not directly, anyway. Instead, I was on the lookout for the missing coin.

I saw a backpack I recognized as Delmar’s tucked just inside the open door of the moldy mausoleum, and I headed that way. There was no one around when I slipped inside and found that, somehow, my team had gotten their acts together enough to realize that the mausoleum was the perfect place to leave their belongings. No, it wasn’t anywhere near as snazzy as the tent the ladies of Team One had pitched (not by themselves, I was sure), but the mausoleum was cooler than outside and nice and shady in the corners farthest from the partially caved-in roof. In addition to the backpack, I found one of those personal-sized coolers with a photograph of Jake duct taped to the top of it, a bag from McDonald’s, and a purse made out of a vinyl tablecloth with blue butterflies and orange daisies on it. No mystery about who that belonged to.

I worked quickly and looked through everything in a
matter of minutes. Though I found a stash of hash in Delmar’s bag, a half-eaten Egg McMuffin in the sack, and more lipstick than even I carried (none of it especially suited to her complexion) in Sammi’s purse, there was no sign of the wooden box or the coin.

Really, did I expect there to be?

I grumbled my annoyance and took the opportunity for a bit of a break. This particular mausoleum was older than most of the ones at Garden View, and in very bad shape. There had once been a window across from the door. It was long gone, and the opening was boarded up. There were burials on either side of me. Three in the wall to my left, another three on my right. Directly in front of me was a wooden platform about six inches from the ground.

Could someone have stashed the coin box under it?

I shuffled closer, leaned over, and pressed my palms against the platform.

That was when I heard the crack.

The platform gave way, and I fell headfirst into pitch darkness.

 

W
hen I finally opened my eyes, the only thing I saw was a whole lot of darkness pocked with what little sunshine made its way through the tumble-down roof and the jagged pieces of broken platform. I was in a hole, and from extending my arms and feeling around, I could tell it was maybe eight feet deep and four wide.

A grave.

As if that wasn’t creepy enough, it was damp, slimy, and nasty. Fortunately, I didn’t feel anything like a coffin under my feet or hear the crunching of bones. But worms
don’t make noise, do they? And something told me there were plenty of worms down here.

Still shaky from my tumble, I pulled myself to my feet, a move that would have been easier if not for the whole damp-slimy-nasty thing.

I slipped, slid, and went down on my knees.

This time when I got up, I took it nice and easy. While I was at it, I brushed off my jeans and my shirt. Just so one of those worms didn’t get the wrong idea and decide to hitch a ride.

Standing, I could almost reach the lip of the hole. Almost. I jumped and tried to catch hold of it, but though I’m tall, I wasn’t tall enough. The dirt I grabbed onto crumbled in my hands, and a piece of wood from the platform scraped my arm.

Were there blood-sucking worms?

With no options, I made another effort to jump and pull myself out of the hole.

This time, I ended up on my butt.

Panic closed in, as real as the dirt walls that surrounded me. Hoping to steady the sudden, frantic beating of my heart, I sucked in a gulp of air, but it was moist and smelled like decay. I gagged and sputtered and did my best to talk myself down from the edge of a full-blown case of the screaming meemies.

“You could just wait for Crazy Jake to come looking for his lunch,” I reminded myself, my words calm and reassuring, though my voice bubbled on the edge of paralyzing fear. “Or you could just relax and wait for Delmar to decide it’s time for a hit on a joint and come to get one out of his backpack. They’ll hear you down here. And they’ll help you. They’re your teammates. They wouldn’t leave you.”