I Spy Dead People (30 page)

His father was the iconic Hollywood producer, Van Poe, who was currently dividing his time between filming movies in Hollywood and a flashy action television series in New Mexico.  Harrison had money, and that allowed him to avoid being completely unpopular, but he wasn't social.  In fact, he was very close to being a total nerd.  He kept to himself and was excessively fond of chess, two things that would have sent a normal guy into social banishment.

At this point I would not have been surprised to discover he was either in a heavy metal band or studying to be a priest.  It could go either way with him.  He was an enigma.       

“Talia?”  It was obvious from his pale skin and incessantly darting eyes that he was terrified.  I had no idea if I was the frightening thing, or if it was something else entirely. 

“Who is that, Tallulah?” Mom called out. 

I decided to ignore her for the moment, focusing, instead, on Harrison's forehead, beaded with sweat.  What was wrong with him?

For a second his eyebrows pulled together, and he seemed to snap out of whatever fugue he was in.  “Your name is Tallulah?”

My eyes narrowed.  “For you my name is
Talia
.  The only person who calls me Tallulah is my mother and only because she won't stop though I've asked her not to over and over.”

“Your mother is
Private Ike
?”  His voice was hoarse.

“What the hell is a 'Private Ike?'  Is that some kind of weird euphemism?  Because we don't do that stuff here.”

There was actually a hint of a smile on his tight lips.  “
Private Ike
was the name of the private detective who had an office here.  I used to see his sign all the time.  I guess not anymore?”

I shook my head, watching him carefully.  “It's the shop of Mystic Madam Megdala, the psychic.” 

“Mystic Madam Megdala is your mother?”  His voice was tinged with hysteria now. 

I had a feeling we'd reached the point where Harrison was beyond freaked out.  He couldn't handle one more surprise.  “Her name is Stephanie.  She just likes alliteration and the name Meg.”

“Your mom is psychic?”

Oh, boy.  I hadn't pegged him for the believer type.  He clearly wasn't here to see her, just some dude name
Private Ike. 
Unfortunately it was also clear he thought it was possible people could be psychic.  I wasn't
Private Ike
, but if I didn't do something to talk him down, he might go darting back out into traffic and not be so lucky when the next fish truck zoomed past. 

“Harrison, look at this pamphlet.  Read the bottom line.”

He stared at the pamphlet lying on the glass counter next to the register.  Mom kept crystals under the glass, and a small selection of incense.  No one had ever bought anything.  “Visa, MasterCard and cash?”  He glanced up at me quizzically. 

“Okay, no.  The line above that.”

“For entertainment purposes only?”

I'd been the one to insist she add that.  For us, this was a relatively honest life we were leading, and I wasn't ready to be chased away by lawyers.

“Yeah, that one.  That means she's full of crap.  My mom's not psychic.  She'll happily take your money, but if you have a real problem, she can't help you.  And you look like a guy with serious problems.”

For a fraction of a second visible sorrow hooded his light brown eyes.  Then he shrugged, hunching his shoulders up into his body like in a moment he might disappear. 

“I didn't come here for her.  Or any other psychic.  I was looking for a detective.  Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude.” 

My mind scrolled back to the first week we'd been here and the things the last tenant, apparently
Private Ike
, had left behind when he'd gone wherever people go when they leave a pit like this.  Prison perhaps?  He had left a laminated plastic card with his prices printed on it.  A hundred dollars an hour, plus expenses, twenty hours guaranteed, ten percent up front.  I remembered thinking it was a pity that my mother didn't have the skills necessary for being a detective.  Or paying attention enough to fake being one. 

The thought of that two thousand dollars, two K I could really have used, by the way, was enough to make me sigh.  If only someone, a nice man named Mr. Pete, hadn't been stupid enough to put my mother in charge of finances at his carpet cleaning business when we'd first come to town.  After all these months he'd just now noticed the eighteen hundred dollars missing from his yearly totals.  He was too nice to accuse Mom of embezzlement outright, but it would go there eventually, if I couldn't come up with some way to pay him back. 

Mom finally wandered into the lobby decked out in full Mystic Madam Megdala regalia.  Usually Mom looked ridiculously young for a woman in her thirties, like a child almost.  Short, tousled red hair—the only physical characteristic I'd inherited from her—freckles and pale blue eyes failed to give her the impression of age.  She played it up, too, whenever she could.  She said that people never failed to trust a person who looked cutesy and young.  Only with "Meg", she was going for a more "authoritative psychic" look.  Layers of shiny fabrics draped all over her like the sales counter at a material store.  My friend's grandmother always used to say that God was in the details, but Mom would have countered that
con
was in the details.  She said that if you went the extra mile to make sure the details were right, the mark was sure to believe you. 

In this case, Harrison must have had the stink of big money on him, because she was going all out.  She stopped, stared at him, and suddenly, her eyes lost their focus, and she stiffened completely, from head to toe.  “The eye, the eye.  Don't open the eye.  The eye is death.  Don't open it.” 

Okay, usually she didn't get this dramatic.  She must have been trying out a new formula.  But I could tell her this one wasn't working.  Tell the client what they want to hear is a much better rule than anything involving the word ‘death.' 

Any color that had been left in Harrison's face immediately drained out.  He pulled in a deep breath.  I turned on her. 

“What the hell, Mom?”

All of the tension left Harrison, as though my words had broken the spell caused by Mom's drama. 

“You talk to your mother like that?”  

There was no use trying to explain my relationship with my parents, and especially my mother.  He couldn't possibly understand as he, undoubtedly, had parents that had continued maturing beyond the age of twelve or thirteen.  It would only be pointless and embarrassing trying to describe our backwards parent/child relationship. 

“You raise your parents however you like, and I'll raise mine, okay?”

“Are you going to send the client in, Tallulah?” Mom asked before Harrison could react to my response. 

She started making the low humming noises at the back of her throat that indicated she was in mystic mode.  At least she was resorting to tricks I was familiar with now.  I didn't like it when she started pulling new crap like that little scene I'd just witnessed. 

Then she fixed me with a glare, like Harrison and I were wasting her time.  Like she hadn't come out and been all
wooooo, death is behind the eye
, or whatever. 

“He's not here for you, Mom.”

She glared at me one more time, like she couldn't believe I'd be so bold as to have a conversation in the lobby, and then disappeared behind the beaded curtain.  I turned to Harrison.  I wouldn't exactly have called us friends.  We'd dissected a fetal pig together.  He was kind of hot in an
I really like chess
kind of way.  But regardless of whether or not we were friends, I had enough of a conscience to feel uncomfortable with this whole situation. 

“Look, I'm really sorry about the whole detective thing.  Whatever you need…maybe I can help you.  Or someone else.”

“There used to be a
Private Ike
sign outside the window.  In neon letters,” he added.  “I guess I should have known he was gone.”

I had been bugging my mom to get a neon sign.  “Yes, bright lights attract the stupid ones.  I mean, you know.  Not that you're stupid.”

His eyes narrowed.  “It was right outside my window.  I saw it all day and all night.”  He glanced toward the large bank of windows through which I'd watched his approach.  “I didn't know you lived so close.”

“And yet, here I am.”  I didn't like people knowing my personal business, and this felt really personal to me.  “I'm sure there's another detective.  Somewhere.”

“
Somewhere
.  I just don't know where else to go,” he whispered, before pulling in another deep breath, squaring his shoulders, and heading for the door. 

 

 

 

Rules of the Scam #3

Don't make your story too big, or no one will believe it…

 

Harrison didn't look at me on his way past, but I wasn't just going to let him leave.  Though I had no idea why.  It wasn't my business.  I had no room for anyone else's problems in my life.  But before I could move, he was gone, breaking the land record for a teenager on foot.  Cursing, I jammed my feet into flip-flops and followed him.  I heard his footsteps bounding down the stairs, but he moved way too fast for me.  I stumbled after him, still not sure why I was doing this. 

As usual, Mr. Wong's smelled like heat and detergent.  Warm, artificially fresh air pushed in around me immediately, like an aggressive blanket monster just out of the dryer.  We'd only lived here about nine months, but in the colder months it was nice.  The heat wafted up and took huge dollars off our potential energy budget.  Right now it was still the beginning of October, and in New Mexico that meant it was too hot to live inside an industrial dryer. 

Harrison's green
chess club
jacket was just visible slipping out the door.  “Harrison, wait.”

Not surprisingly, he didn't listen.  Whatever was wrong with him was all consuming now that my mom had given him the boot.  I darted into traffic, dodging through the crawl of Friday afternoon workers desperate to get home or to one of the tiny pubs that dotted our neighborhood.  Either way, traffic was slow going, and that made it easy to follow Harrison.  And since The Library was directly across from Mr. Wong's it wasn't hard to keep up.  

I caught up to him in the lobby of his building.  I'd never been inside before though I'd seen it a million times from across the street.  The idea of living in a library appealed to me, but from what I could tell, there was very little library left.  Just the tall airy ceilings and the smoky colored panes of ancient glass in the high windows.  And maybe the white marble floor.  It was hard to say since it had ceased being a library years before I was born, let alone before I'd moved to New Mexico in January. 

Willing myself not to be distracted by the one nod to librariness, a wall of dark wood shelves lined with old books, I directed my attention back to Harrison. 

“Hey, wait.” 

I grabbed his sleeve, and he stopped, the stiffness of his spine telling me how reluctant he really was to talk to me.  He kept partially turned away, the shadows of the ill-lit room obscuring his expression.  That bothered me.  I didn't like not being able to gauge people. 

“So I went to the wrong place for help.  You don't have to feel sorry for me.” 

I made sure I kept my voice low so we didn't bother anyone else who came into the lobby.  “Why do you need a detective?”

I had to ask.  For some reason it bugged me.  All of it.  That he'd come to my house looking for help.  That we didn't help him.  That he was so clearly suffering.  So I brutally tamped down the
not my business
impulse and waited impatiently for him to speak. 

“It doesn't matter.”

He didn't sound like it didn't matter.  He sounded broken. 

I really looked at him for the first time in all the months I'd known him.  I'd seen Van Poe around town because he filmed a movie once near the high school.  He was an aging Cali boy.  I knew his type from my years running scams with my parents up and down the California coast.  It wasn't until my dad had gone to prison that we'd left SoCal and come to New Mexico instead. 

Van Poe represented a cross section of California life that was comfortably familiar.  He was tall, too tanned, face lined from too much sun exposure, board shorts and baggy shirts and hair that had once been blond and was fading out to white.  It occurred to me for the first time to wonder if Harrison was his biological son.  If he was, Harrison's mom was some other race, though I didn't know what.  His skin was darker than mine, despite my persistent tan, and he definitely wasn't Mexican.  Around here, that minority was definitely the majority. 

He looked a little like his father, but not enough to immediately seem related.  That was the long and short of it. 

“Clearly it does matter, and you would not believe how good I am at getting what I want.  So why don't you just tell me.”

He pushed out a breath, a mix of a snort of laughter and what sounded like a sigh of frustration.  “I can believe it.  Look…”  He glanced around.  “Someone wants me to think I'm being hunted by a demon.”

“What?”  Of everything I might have expected to come out of his mouth, that wasn't even on the list.  “Why on earth would you think you were being hunted by a demon?”

Breath left his body in a hard push I could hear from feet away.  “Let's just go back outside.”

I wasn't about to argue with him when I was this close to the answers I was dying to have.  Harrison was a conundrum.  He was brilliant, and yet he believed he was being hunted by demonic forces.