Dead and Hating It Read online

  “Find out,” Brody said, almost ordered. Sage smiled at his tone of voice and copied it exactly when he repeated what Brody had said.

  “Yes, boss man,” Mike replied, shaking his head. “Right now, though, unless you had a reason for dropping in, why don’t the two of you vanish? Sage and I have plans.”

  Brody glanced at Jon, whispering, “It’s too early for them to go to bed.”

  Jon rolled his eyes. “This is Mike and Sage we’re talking about.”

  “You two have dirty minds,” Sage said. “We’re going to a movie. I suppose, if you insist, you can come along.”

  “Naw, we’re good. We have plans, too.”

  “We do?” Jon said.

  “Yes. We’re going to find Tonio and keep him company.”

  “Like finding him will be hard, since he lives next door to us,” Jon replied.

  “If he’s home. Let’s go see.” With that, Brody and Jon vanished.

  “Are you going to look into why, or how, Kurt drowned?” Sage asked when they were gone.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Mike replied. “At least to find out who this George guy is and if he and Kurt did break up. It certainly could be a reason for Kurt to kill himself, if he cared about him as much as it sounded like he did.”

  “It’s a hell of a way to commit suicide, when you think about it. If I were that depressed I’d, I don’t know, slit my wrists or take an overdose of pills. I wouldn’t go down to the river and throw myself in. Among other things, it’s too uncertain.”

  “You have a point there, although if he’d jumped off a bridge it might have worked. Another thing to find out. If there are any near where his body was found. And where are his clothes? The story said he was naked when they discovered his body.”

  “Which is weird, isn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily, if he swam to the middle of the river, although even then I’d think he’d have left on his underwear. I know I would have, if it was me, but who knows what he was thinking. For damned sure he’d have kept them on if he was going for a midnight swim. He could have worn himself out so much he couldn’t make it back to shore.”

  “Or, someone murdered him and tried to make it look like that’s what happened,” Sage said.

  “Who? The boyfriend?”

  “You’re asking me? You’re the detective.” Sage tapped his lip, then asked, “What are the chances you can get me into the morgue to see his body?”

  “You think he might be hanging around?”

  “If he was murdered, he has to be somewhere until his killer is caught. You know that, after dealing with Brody and Jon, and Tonio.”

  “True. Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Right now, though, if we don’t get moving we’ll miss the start of the movie.”

  * * * *

  Kurt wasn’t with his body. He had no desire to see it again, and for sure he didn’t want to be there when the coroner performed the autopsy, if that was going to happen.

  He had left the ambulance moments after it had pulled up to the building housing the morgue.

  Now what? Where can I go? Home?

  He glanced down at his bare feet and legs and realized something that hadn’t hit him until that moment. He was naked—and needed to do something about it.

  So home it is, though that could be a problem. I don’t have my keys. He smiled dryly. I am a ghost. I guess that means I don’t need them. I can walk through walls, or so I’ve read in stories about them…us. Damn it!

  The morgue was several miles from Kurt’s home and the idea of walking there did not appeal to him. He saw a bus stop and decided, since no one could see him, they wouldn’t know if he was a passenger on the one going in the right direction. Several minutes later the bus he needed pulled up and he got on. It was crowded so he reached for the bar above the seats. His hand went right through it which gave him pause. If I can’t hold on to it…The bus swayed. He bumped into the man beside him and started to apologize, before realizing the man hadn’t felt him.

  This whole ghost thing sucks. Being dead sucks. I hate it! I want my life back. Well, minus George, all things considered. What did he mean, ‘It’s time to move on and try again’? If he felt that way, why didn’t he just break up with me? Why kill me? Was he that desperate to get me out of his life for good he didn’t want to deal with how I’d react if he told me it was over?

  “Maybe…” he said under his breath, “Maybe I should ask him? Yeah, right, like he’d hear me.” He had a thought and laughed out loud, even though it wasn’t a laughing matter. “I’ll start haunting him. Throw things at him, move things around in his apartment. Well, if I can move things. Trying to hold onto the bar didn’t work too well.”

  He grimaced when a woman walked right through him on her way to get off the bus, and then began to watch for his stop. It came up ten minutes later, but the bus kept going as no one wanted off. Two stops later, someone did, and Kurt followed them when the door opened.

  As he walked to his apartment building, he passed a restaurant he and George had eaten at more than once, and the shop where he’d bought a cake to celebrate George’s birthday. We had some good times together, until the end. I thought…I was sure he loved me. I know I loved him, or close to it. Why, George? Why? What did I do wrong? I wasn’t clingy, despite what you said after you killed me.

  He stopped when he got to his building, looking up the window of his living room, four stories above him. “Now I find out if I can walk through things.”

  He could. Through the building’s front door, the doors to the emergency stairs—since he had the feeling he wouldn’t be able to push the elevator button to reach his floor—and then through the door to his apartment.

  “Home sweet home,” he said sadly. “Not any more. I’m sure the building manager will clear out all my stuff as soon as he finds out I’m dead, so he can rent it again. Or my folks will.”

  That gave him pause. He hadn’t considered what would happen when his family was notified of his death. “They’ll have a funeral, of course. Will George come?”

  The funeral was a given, he figured, not that he had any intention of going to it. I don’t need to watch my mortal remains being put in a hole in the ground. His body would be buried in the same plot where his grandparents had been put to rest, in a cemetery in one of the city’s southern suburbs. “Will Mae and Norma come in for it? Probably. After all they are my sisters, even though we haven’t seen each other for several years, except when the folks had us all together for Christmas.” His parents lived in another of the city’s suburbs and had for over forty years.

  “Clothes,” he muttered, going to the bedroom closet, thankful he rarely closed the door. There was enough light for him to see his jeans and shirts, neatly hung up. He reached for a pair of jeans—and his hand went right through them. “How the hell can I get dressed when I can’t move anything?”

  He tried again, with the jeans and then a shirt. Nothing. He thought maybe he could get a pair of briefs from the dresser, until he realized he might be able to put his hand through the front of the drawer, but even if he could grip the briefs, he couldn’t pull them out of the closed drawer.

  “So I get to spend the rest of my death naked, until I move on? And why haven’t I moved on? Do I have to prove George murdered me before that can happen?” Something he wondered earlier and forgotten about until now. “That won’t happen. Who could I tell? No one. And if the cops or the coroner, or whoever does those things decides I committed suicide or was stupid enough to go swimming in the middle of the night and drowned, then even they won’t be looking for my killer. Of course I was stupid, and half drunk, when I agreed with George we should go swimming. Is that why he kept plying me with champagne? Right now, I’d say so.”

  He carefully sat on the edge of the bed, worried he’d go through it. He didn’t, so he lay back, staring at the ceiling. “How can I prove he killed me? I can’t search his apartment to see if he made notes on how to do it or used his laptop to research ways
to commit murder and make it look like an accident. Not that he’d be that idiotic to begin with.”

  He sat up again. I might not be able to search his place, but I can be there and watch him. Maybe he’ll do something incriminating—like I could tell anyone if he did. Damn it, I’m doomed to be here forever if the cops don’t decide I was murdered. Either way, though, I am going to keep an eye on him. All I need to do is convince myself I can stand seeing him again after what he did.

  Chapter 3

  “Len, do you have a second?” Mike asked, resting his hip on the edge of the detective’s desk. It was late Monday morning; he was on his lunch break and praying he wouldn’t be called out on a new case until he had the chance to do what he and Sage had planned.

  “For you, sure. What do you need?” Len replied.

  “You caught the Kurt Foster case, right?” When Len nodded, Mike asked, “Are you sure it was suicide?”

  “According to the coroner it was that or accidental. Why?”

  “I knew him. Not well, but he never struck me as the kind of guy who’d kill himself.”

  “That doesn’t rule out accidental drowning.”

  “True,” Mike agreed. “But something doesn’t feel right to me. Would you think I was stepping on your toes if I talked with the coroner?”

  “Not at all. I’m going to close the case and call it suicide, but feel free to follow your hunch. If you’re right—” Len grinned, “—I’ll hand it off to you, instead.”

  “Another question. He told me he had a boyfriend named George. Have you talked with him?”

  “I didn’t know he existed. I’ve notified Foster’s parents about his death and they didn’t mention him, either, although I got the impression they weren’t too close, even though they live here in town.”

  “Nothing in Foster’s apartment relating to him?”

  “Not that we found.” Len smirked. “No passionate love letters. Actually, no photos of an unidentified man, either, although there were several from stories Foster had worked on.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Mike pushed off the desk and left the squad room. Sage was waiting for him when he got to the car, head cocked in question.

  “He has no problem with it,” Mike told him.

  “Then let’s do it and hope Kurt’s hanging around.”

  When they got to the morgue, Mike tracked down the assistant coroner who had done Kurt’s autopsy, asking her if it would be all right for him to take a look at the body.

  “You made it in the nick of time,” she replied. “The mortuary is due to pick it up any minute now.”

  She took them to room where the bodies were stored, opening one of the steel drawers. Sage shuddered, even though Mike knew he’d seen his fair share of dead bodies since they’d met. He looked at Mike and shook his head, meaning Kurt wasn’t around.

  “Are you sure it was an accident, or suicide?” Mike asked the woman.

  “Everything indicates it was. If you’re asking if he had been knocked out before he went into the water, he hadn’t. Could someone have been with him and held him under until he drowned? There’s no way to tell, considering the condition of the body when it was found. Luckily we were able to get fingerprints or we wouldn’t know who he was. If he was murdered, and fought back, any skin that might have been under his fingernails was washed away. We did run a blood alcohol test, but, due to fermentation in the body we can get a false positive, unless the test is done immediately after death, with a reading of up to 0.20 percent, or two and a half times the legal limit for drivers. His was high, but it could have been because of that. I can tell you, there were no drugs in his system.”

  “Have his parents officially identified his body?”

  She sighed. “They did. I got the impression they were unhappy, of course, but not terribly surprised. His father said he was reckless, thus the thought it was probably an accident, although as I said, we’re not ruling out suicide.”

  “All right,” Mike replied. “Thank you for your time.”

  * * * *

  “He wasn’t there,” Sage said as soon as they returned to Mike’s car. “Now what?”

  “We can…we will pay a visit to his apartment, but not until tomorrow. We both have to get back to work.”

  “Yeah. I have a client coming it at two, so I’d better get prepared. I have the layouts for the landscaping he wants. He just has to approve them.”

  “Okay. I’ll drop you off.” Mike did, giving him a kiss before Sage got out of the car.

  Sage paused before closing the door. “Are you going to see if you can find out who George is?”

  “Not until we go to Kurt’s apartment. Len said he didn’t find anything about him, there, but then he didn’t know George existed until I told him.”

  “Okay. See you when you get home.”

  * * * *

  Kurt knew he’d eventually have to do something other than lying on his bed feeling sorry for himself while trying to figure out what he could do to prove George had murdered him.

  He got up, smiling ruefully as he looked down. At least I don’t have to worry about anyone seeing me in all my naked glory. It didn’t keep him from wishing he could put on some clothes. Ghosts must be able to move things, at least according to all the stories I’ve read and seen. I wonder how long it takes for that to happen. He hoped it was sooner than later.

  Leaving his apartment, and the building, the way he’d gotten in, he stood on the front sidewalk, trying to decide whether to walk the ten blocks to George’s place or catch a bus. For damned sure I can’t drive there, even if I had my keys.

  He decided to walk, which was why he saw the front page of the paper in the news box—and the headline on the sidebar about his death by drowning, which had happened three days before the body had surfaced. He knelt to read it, feeling his anger rise. I didn’t kill myself. I’d never do that. Anyone who knows me knows that’s a lie. I can see how the cops might think it was an accidental drowning, but suicide? No fucking way.

  More determined than ever now to get to George’s place and…Do what? Look for proof he killed me? I’ve already figured that’s not going to happen. Watch him gloat because he got away with murder? I wonder if he’s regretting it. Probably not. After all, he set the whole thing up from the idea we’d be celebrating our one-year anniversary to the champagne to the midnight swim. Why didn’t I see what he was like?

  Kurt knew the answer to that. He’d been besotted with George and believed that George loved him, or close to it.

  “What an idiot. I’m never going to put myself in that position again with any man.” He sighed as he realized it would never be possible. Not now. Thanks a lot, George.

  He almost turned around when he got to George’s apartment building—but didn’t. He had to see him one more time, even if George didn’t know he was there.

  When he made it up to the fifth floor, he went down the hallway then stood in front of the apartment door. Taking a deep breath, he walked through it.

  “What the hell!” The living room still had all its furniture, but there were empty places on the shelves where George had kept a couple of awards he’d won as ‘Salesman of the Year’ from his firm. The two photos of his family were missing, too. He’d never owned any books; a failing Kurt had pointed out to him a couple of times before deciding it was useless to push.

  He went into the bedroom, expecting the worst and finding it. The bed had been stripped, the closet and dresser drawers were open and empty—not only of George’s clothes but the ones Kurt had left there as well. When he checked the bathroom, he found there were no towels or washcloths on the shelf along one wall, and the door over the cabinet above over the sink was open, revealing it was empty, too.

  “He’s moved out. In three or four days he’s packed everything up and taken off. And he did it fast, if the fact he didn’t close anything is any indication.”

  He wished he could search the place, if for no other reason than to find som
e clue to where George had gone. It wasn’t happening, though, so feeling very disconsolate, he headed home. Or what will be home until the manager cleans the place out so he can rent it again.

  * * * *

  “How do we get into his place,” Sage asked as he and Mike drove to Kurt’s apartment building Tuesday morning.

  Mike grinned. “We could call Brody and have him go in and unlock the door.”

  Sage took him seriously, saying, “Do it. It’ll save you hassling with the manager. Even though you are a cop he might be reluctant to let you in without a warrant.”

  “True.” Mike took out his phone and texted Brody—the only way they could communicate one-on-one since Mike couldn’t hear him talking if he called. They had used that method while searching for Tonio’s killer, and Mike decided Brody should hang onto the phone once the case was closed. He was even willing to pay for a cheap phone plan for it because as he’d said at the time, “Sure as hell you can’t get one in your name.”

  We need your help, if you’re willing, Mike texted.

  Brody responded seconds later. Where?

  Mike sent the address and a couple of minutes later Sage let him know Brody and Jon had arrived. Then he explained to Brody what they needed.

  Brody nodded, went through the door into the lobby, and opened it to let Mike and Sage in. Then the quartet went up to the fourth floor, where he did the same with Kurt’s apartment.

  “Is he here?” Mike asked.

  “Nope,” Sage, Brody, and Jon said in unison, although Mike only heard Sage who added, “Not in the living room, anyway.”

  “Damn. Okay, let’s see if we can find any information on this George guy. I’ll take the bedroom, the rest of you search the other rooms.”

  It was a good ten minutes later, and Mike was beginning to wonder if George actually existed or if Kurt had said so because he wanted Mike to think he had someone in his life who cared. He closed the bottom drawer of the dresser and stood, arms akimbo, shaking his head. “This is an exercise in futility,” he muttered.