Second Grave on the Left (29 page)

“As long as it doesn’t involve pole dancing.”

We stepped into the café and scanned the area. Norma was indeed on duty, but we couldn’t see who was cooking. And there were two customers sitting in a very inconvenient spot. But I’d deal with that later.

I gestured toward the bar with a nod, and Cookie and I strolled forward. My silver screen star was standing at it, leaning on his elbows, legs crossed at the ankle. His tan fedora and trench coat came straight out of the forties, the Humphrey Bogart look undeniable. And the entire picture left me a little breathless. Cookie and I loved us some Humphrey.

I sat on the stool right beside him as Norma strolled up. “Hey, sweethearts, did you find who you were looking for?”

Cookie sat beside me, but on the wrong side. I grabbed her jacket underneath the counter and steered her around me. “No,” I said sadly. “We’re still looking.”

Norma
tsk
ed and poured us two cups without even asking. I was actually a little worried about drinking coffee with my head throbbing like it was, but still, saying no to coffee would be like saying no to world peace. Everyone involved would benefit from a resounding yes. The moment someone came out with a way to mainline it, I was so in.

Cookie sat down, then cast me a nervous look underneath her lashes.

“Do you remember your lines?” I asked her.

Her brows slid together, but she played along and nodded.

I smiled. “Good, we have to get them down before tomorrow night’s dress rehearsal.”

“Oh, right,” she said with a shaky giggle. “The dress rehearsal.”

“You two in a play or something?” Norma asked, passing us menus.

“Yeah, at the Stage House. Nothing special.”

“Wonderful,” she said, going back to wiping down the counters. “I did some acting in high school. Let me know when you’re ready.”

“Thanks,” I said before looking back at Cookie.

Bogart was between us. He cast me a sideways glance.

“Hi,” I said, hoping to come across innocuous.

He turned toward me, a grim line thinning his mouth. “Of all the cafés in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

My heart skipped a beat. He was so much like Bogart. It killed me that Cookie couldn’t see him.

“You here to collect my soul?” he asked.

I was a little surprised he knew my job description. “If you don’t mind,” I answered. I fished out the picture I had of Mimi Jacobs and held it up. “Have you seen this woman?”

He turned back to stare through Brad’s pass-out window. “Don’t look around much.”

I smiled. “You looked at me.”

“You’re kinda hard to miss.”

Fair enough. “Why don’t you want to cross?”

He shrugged. “Do I have a choice?”

“Of course. I take the
grim
out of being a grim reaper. I can’t force you to cross.”

He looked back at me in surprise. “Sweetheart, you’re the only one who can.”

I wasn’t going to argue with him. “Well, I won’t. If you don’t want to cross, I’m not going to make you.”

I looked past him at Cookie. She sat staring at me, nodding, as if critiquing my performance. I snorted, and she glanced around self-consciously.

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked through her teeth, pretending not to be talking.

“No,” I promised before focusing on Bogart again.

“Babe!”

I turned and grinned at Brad as he stuck his head through the pass-out window. “You came back to me.”

“Naturally,” I said. “And I’m hungry, handsome.”

A confident grin slid across his face. “You just said the magic words, baby.”

He ducked back in and started cooking God only knew what. But I was fairly certain his creation would be nothing short of a work of art.

“Sometimes,” I said to Bogart, “our memories are hidden, buried. And when people cross, I can see them. I was hoping you might have seen Mimi, taken note of something everyone else missed. If you cross through me, I can scan your memories, look for her. But I won’t make you cross.” I didn’t bother to mention that I couldn’t do that anyway.

He shook his head. “Don’t really have anyone waiting on me.”

“Nonsense. Everyone has somebody waiting. I promise, you might not know it, but you have someone.”

“Oh, I got people.” After a heavy sigh, he said, “I think I’ll pass, if it’s all the same.”

My heart broke a little. He did have people waiting, he knew that, but he didn’t feel worthy to cross. He’d done something in his past, something that caused a rift, most likely in his family.

I was hoping I could talk him into it. He didn’t realize what he was missing by remaining earthbound. But he had his reasons. I wasn’t going to push.

“When you’re ready,” I said, placing a hand on his arm. He looked down, picked up my hand, and raised it to his cool mouth. After placing a soft kiss on my knuckles, he disappeared.

I glanced at Cookie in defeat. “He didn’t buy it.”

“You can see their memories?” she asked in awe. Why anything should awe her at this point was beyond me.

“I can, but I’ve never tried to scan them, to look for anything in particular. I think I could, though. I have to try. And I have one more person to talk to.”

I gestured for her to pick up her cup and follow me into the dining area. About a dozen tables peppered the large room that was lined with booths along the walls. The lights were low, and a young couple sat whispering by one of the large plateglass windows that overlooked the intersection. At a table farther back sat the woman who looked like she’d been a drug-addicted prostitute. From the look of her skin, she’d done her fair share of meth.

I eyed the chair, then Cookie. “You’ll be cold,” I told her, regret filling my voice. But we were already getting odd looks from Norma. I really needed her in front of me while I talked to the woman.

As if walking on eggshells, she took a careful step forward then sat down, curling inside herself. The woman filtered through her, completely oblivious of the fact that her personal space had been invaded. “This is disturbing on so many levels,” Cookie said.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“No,” she chastised, “for Mimi, I’d do this all day. Just wiggle your fingers, do your magic, and find out where she is.”

I grinned and sat across from her. “You got it.”

The woman’s arms were on the table as she stared out the window. She kept rubbing her wrists together, and I suddenly realized she’d cut them. But the wounds had healed, scarred up, so that wasn’t how she died. Whatever did her in, she looked like she’d had a rock-hard life.

“Sweetheart,” I said, reaching out and touching an arm.

She paused her OCD behavior and leveled an empty gaze on me.

“My name is Charlotte. I’m here to help you.”

“You’re beautiful,” she said, raising a hand to my face. I smiled as she ran her fingers over my cheeks and mouth. “Like a million stars.”

“If you want to cross through me, you can.”

She jerked her hand back and shook her head. “I can’t. I’m going to hell.”

I reached over and took her hands into mine. “No, you’re not. If you were going to hell, honey, you’d already be there. I have no jurisdiction, and hell is pretty hell-bent on taking care of its own.”

Her mouth trembled as tears pooled in her lashes. “I’m … I’m not going to hell? But … I just thought that since I didn’t go to heaven…”

“What’s your name?”

“Lori.”

“Lori, I have to admit, even I don’t always understand why someone doesn’t cross. Oftentimes it’s when the departed has been the victim of a violent crime. Can you tell me how you died?”

Cookie hugged her arms to her, fighting off the chill.

“I don’t remember,” Lori said, leaning forward and wrapping her fingers around mine. “Knowing me, I probably OD’d on something.” She cast me a shameful look. “I was not a good person, Charlotte.”

“I’m sure you did the best you could. Obviously someone thinks so, or like I said, you would have gone the other direction. But you’re here. You’re just confused, maybe.” I took out the picture of Mimi and showed it to her. “Have you seen this woman?”

She narrowed her eyes, shook her head in memory. “She seems familiar. I’m just not sure. I don’t always pay attention to people. They’re so far away.”

“When you cross, if you decide to, can I have permission to look through your memories and see if I can find her in there?”

She blinked in surprise. “Of course. Is that possible?”

“I have no idea,” I said with a chuckle.

She smiled. “So, what do I do?”

I stood up. “You walk through me. The rest just seems to happen.”

After a long intake of breath, she stood. The air around us danced with excitement. I was happy for her. She’d seemed so completely lost. Maybe this is what Rocket was always talking about. Maybe many of those who stay behind are lost and need me to find them instead of them finding me. But I didn’t know how, short of traveling around the country nonstop.

I had to concentrate, to focus on searching her memories. Just as I took a deep breath, Lori took a step forward, and I heard her whisper, “Oh, my god.”

Her life came rushing at me full-force. From the time she was a child and her mother sold her to a neighbor for the afternoon to get her fix to the time she was in high school and a group of girls pulled her hair as they walked past in the locker room. But the heartbreak was quickly overshadowed when I saw a poem of hers win a contest. It was published in a local paper along with her picture. She had never been so proud. She cleaned up and went to college a semester, but she quickly fell behind, and the heavy weight of failure took root again. She went back to the life she knew, life on the streets peddling herself for her next high, and died of an overdose in a dirty hotel room.

I had to push past the salient parts, to scan her memories before she was gone completely. I found the first time she walked into the café. She sat down and never got up again, remaining locked inside herself for years. I crawled forward, saw patron after patron, too many to look through, so I forced Mimi’s image to the forefront, and I saw a woman stumble in the front door, her face full of fear, her eyes wide and searching.

She sat down and waited, but as car after car pulled up, her nerves got the better of her, and she grabbed an unopened Sharpie off the register and hurried to the bathroom. About a minute later, another woman entered the bathroom, and Mimi rushed out the door, the darkness of night enveloping her.

With a gasp of air, I opened my eyes and clutched at my chest as if emerging from a pool. I filled my lungs and eased back into the chair, blinking in surprise. I’d done it. I’d searched her memories. It took a moment for me to absorb everything I saw. I fought down the sadness that threatened to overwhelm me. Lori’s life had been anything but easy. But she was most definitely in a better place, as hokey as that sounded.

And I found her. I found Mimi.

I glanced back at Cookie, a tiny grin tugging at my mouth. “Let me ask you a question,” I said breathlessly.

“Okay.”

“If you were the wife of a very well-off businessman with a humongoid house and gorgeous children whom you loved more than life, where is the last place anyone would look for you?”

Cookie’s expression changed to hope. “Did it work?”

“It worked.” I glanced over my shoulder and pointed across the street.

“That homeless shelter?” she asked, her voice brimming with disbelief.

I looked back at her with a shrug. “It’s perfect. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. She was right under our noses the whole time.”

“But … oh, my god, okay, what do we do now?” She patted her palms on the table, her enthusiasm barely containable.

“We go say hi.”

Chapter Seventeen

YOU KNOW THOSE BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE? I’M THAT.

—T-SHIRT

I dropped a twenty on the counter as we ran past. “Brad, can you make our orders to go?”

He stuck his head through the pass-out window, his palms raised in question.

“We’ll be right back.”

We raced across the street to a brick building with bars on the windows and a large metal door. It was starting to sprinkle.

“I don’t think they’re open,” Cookie said, panting behind me.

I pounded on the door, waited a moment, then pounded again. After a long while, a sleepy-eyed Hulk opened up.

I decided to smile. Mostly ’cause I didn’t want to incur his wrath. “Hi.” I held up my license. “My name is Charlotte Davidson, and this is Cookie Kowalski. I’m a private investigator on a case for the Albuquerque Police Department,” I half lied. “Can I talk to you?”

“No.” Hulk was grumpy when awakened in the middle of the night. The show never mentioned that aspect of his character. I’d have to write the producers.

And clearly he was not impressed with my license. I held up a twenty instead. “I just want to ask you a couple of questions. I’m looking for a missing woman.”

He snatched the twenty then waited for my Q&A session.

“Oh.” I took Mimi’s photo out of my bag. “Have you seen this woman?”

He studied it, like, forever. With a heavy sigh, I handed over another twenty. If this kept up, I’d have to find an ATM PDQ or we’d be SOL.

“Maybe,” he said. He took it from my hands and looked closer. “Oh, yeah. That’s Molly.”

“Molly?” Molly made sense, considering her name was Mimi. It would be semi-easy for her to get used to answering to as opposed to something like Guinevere or Hildegard.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. But they’re all asleep right now.”

“Listen, you know how, like, if a nuclear bomb were going to drop on our heads any second, kissing our asses good-bye couldn’t wait until morning?”

He chuckled. Who said the Hulk didn’t have a sense of humor? “You’re funny.”

“Yeah, well, think of me as an armed nuclear warhead. I really can’t wait until morning.”

“So, you want to see her now?”

Damn, he was fast. “Speed of light, buddy. Are you a stone genius?”

He frowned at me, trying to figure out if I was making fun of him.

I leaned forward. “And afterwards, maybe you and I could hoof it to the café over there and have a cup?”