Through the Grey, page 20
“Some nonsense with a bequest. There’s a set of instructions—sorry: conditions—that have to be fulfilled.”
“Like in one of those movies where you have to stay in the haunted house overnight or change your name to Gaggleplox?” he asked. “Those usually don’t work out well—most of the cast ends up dead or the inheritance turns out to be a stash of counterfeit bills.”
I made a face. “That’s in the movies. This is just a job. Find the right grave, put the dog on it, and wait for daybreak.”
“And in between is when all hell could break loose. Which seems pretty likely considering your talents.”
“It’s possible,” I conceded, “but the money is pretty attractive and I don’t get a sense of danger from the statue—just trouble.”
He snorted. “Just trouble. And why did this woman pick you? Did you know her?”
I shook my head and pinched off a bit of fried potato for the ferret. “No. I didn’t know her and I don’t know why she picked me for this job. I assume she somehow knew what I can do, but how she knew, that’s the big mystery. And why I agreed to go. Maybe there’s some clue to be found about why this happened to me and not to every person who’s ever had a near-death-experience. There must be someone who knows more about all of this than I do, or the Danzigers do, or every vampire from here to Vancouver seems to.” I felt a flush on my face that didn’t come from the space heater overhead and realized I was getting angry. Not at Quinton, but at the shifty fate that had yanked the rug out from under me when I’d died only long enough to have my life wrenched into a shape beyond my control.
“But if it was this Arbildo woman, she’s already dead,” Quinton said.
“Then I’ll hunt her down in the Grey.” At least my change of life had come with useful skills. I was still figuring them out more than a year later, but I no longer hated and resented them.
My flight was set for 11:40 that evening with a five-hour layover in Dallas before I could fly on to Mexico City and from there to Oaxaca, but even with the delay, I’d still have a few hours once I got to Oaxaca City to find the records office and start looking for the grave of Hector Purecete.
I finished up my food and gave Chaos a final scratch around the ears. Quinton got a lot more than an ear-scratch, which annoyed the ferret, judging by the way she kept pushing herself in between us and snagging our kisses for herself. Jealous little furball.
The trip was smooth. Right up to Mexico City where they broke the dog.
The customs agent was going through my bag when it happened. There was the box with the little clay dog inside. He held it up.
“Is this a gift?” he demanded in a crabby, tired voice.
I’d have guessed he was near the end of his shift if it wasn’t quite noon, but maybe he was aware in his own way of the cranky, dispirited, over-excited motion of the Grey as much as I was. The customs area was aboil with the flashes and clouds of hundreds of passengers’ emotional energy giving shape and color to the loose power of the magical grid. It chafed and roared and twisted through the space around us like angry lions in a too-small cage. The sound of the Grey was a strong, steady hum with a sharp edge, like barbed wire under silk.
That sharpness was probably why my response was inappropriately flippant: “No. It’s a dog,” I said.
One really shouldn’t joke with security people of any kind while they are on the job; most have had to leave their sense of humor in their locker with their civilian clothes. He raised his eyebrow and opened the box, rooting inside with his blue-gloved hand—every employee at airport security looks like they’re about to play doctor in some very unpleasant way these days. He snorted in surprise and jerked his hand out with the figurine not-quite gripped in his sweat-sticky glove. You’d have thought the little dog had bitten him from the way he moved. His hand yanked back, jerking upward a little as the statuette cleared the edge of the box. The black object moved up, popping out of his loose grip, and arced into the air, ripping a slice of glove with one pointed ear as it went. It was like slow-motion film watching it rise from safety and crash to the hard linoleum beneath our feet.
As it hit the floor, it flashed a panic-bolt of silver white into the Grey. The little clay dog shattered, a tiny bundle of dark fibers bouncing onto the floor amid the terracotta shards. With a silvery gasp, the flash rushed back toward the broken figurine and coalesced into the ghost of a dog.
The ghost dog looked around, then looked at me, and whined piteously. It was a rangy, mongrel beast with the shape of a stunted greyhound and the coat of a shaggy pony. It sidled up to me and leaned against my legs and I felt its cold, Grey shape press against me with its memory of weight.
The customs agent looked at the smashed figurine and bent to pick the tiny knot from the wreckage. “Eh?” he mumbled. “What is this?”
I shrugged. “Hair?” I guessed.
He looked at it, rubbed it between his fingers, sniffed it. Then he motioned to one of his coworkers who walked over and rubbed a small cloth swab over the little bundle. He put the swab into a machine while the first man moved me and my bags to another table deeper inside the security zone. Someone else swept up the bits of clay and put them in a plastic bag. The dog stuck to me like a shy toddler.
“Nada,” said the man with the machine. “Esta es pelo.”
They put a little of the clay dust from the broken figurine into the machine, but that also yielded “nada.” The customs agent looked sad as he finished inspecting my bag and closed it up, handing it and the bag of shards back to me with what almost looked like a contrite bow, and an apology for breaking my dog.
“De nada,” I replied. Then I asked for the knot of fluff back, which he thought was odd, but dug into the trash and retrieved for me anyhow. I dropped it into the bag of broken ceramic—it wasn’t intact anymore, but better to keep it all together, just in case, I thought.
He handed me a claim form to fill out if the dog had been insured, and I took it, even though I doubted the figurine was valuable. I was sure it was the ghost that was the important thing.
The spirits of Mexico hummed and roared. The ghost dog pasted itself to my heels and shadowed me around the halls of the Mexico City airport as I tried to find a place to put down my bags and make a phone call. Of course, the place I found was a bar.
I threw myself and my bags down and ordered a beer while I called Nan on my cell phone. Seattle being close to the other border, I’d had international calling added to my service long ago. Sometimes I wondered how I’d gotten along without a cell phone so long. Other times I wished I still had my pager.
It took a few minutes to get connected to Nan.
“What is it, Harper?”
“Mexican customs broke the dog.”
“Is it reparable?”
“No. But I have a major part of it,” I added, looking at the cowering ghost at my ankles.
“Where are you?”
“Mexico City airport.”
“Banda is located nearby. He may have instructions for that contingency.”
She gave me his number. I wrote it on my cocktail napkin, as is traditional in that sort of situation. “If I call this guy, I may miss my connection to Oaxaca,” I warned her. “I’m already running tight because of the mess at customs.”
“I’ll have Cathy reschedule you to a later flight and call you back with the information. Is there anything else?”
“No. I’ll let Cathy know if anything is still out of whack when she calls.”
“Good. Stay in touch.” And she was off the phone as fast as that.
I finished my Negro Modelo and called the number on the napkin. I felt itchy from annoyance and lack of sleep—I don’t get more than a fitful doze on planes, since my long legs end up cramped and headrests are never in the right place for me. I always longed to upgrade to first class, but the PI business usually comes with an economy-class budget.
Guillermo Banda answered his own phone. He spoke English like a New Yorker as soon as he heard how bad my Spanish was.
“Miss Blaine! You’re here! This is excellent! How is the perrito? The little dog?”
“Customs broke it.”
“Fuck! Pardon me. My client would be very upset to hear it. If she weren’t dead.”
“Which is why I’m here at all.” Talking to this guy was like talking to Lou Costello and I was afraid I might start laughing. “I do have part of the dog and I could take that up to Oaxaca, if you think that would be in the spirit intended.”
“I don’t know…” There were noises in the background and he muttered away from the receiver something about Puerto Vallarta which was rejoined by a feminine giggle.
I tried to keep him on track. “Well, if you could tell me what it was your client had in mind with this condition, I’m sure we can figure out a way to satisfy the spirit, if not the letter, of her request.”
“That I also don’t know. Miss Arbildo wasn’t very…forthcoming.”
“How long had she been your client, Mr. Banda?”
“Oh, years! Years and years! But we never spoke. She came in to update her will last year and before that we’d only seen each other twice. I inherited her account from my partner who died a few years back in a plane crash. Horrible.”
“Did your firm do any work for her aside from the will?”
“Well, the specifics are confidential, but yes. We did a little background investigative work for her and for her father—mostly routine checks. We managed her estate—her father’s estate—and of course we’d been doing work for his company for many years. We work primarily with international and maritime law and his company was involved in quite a bit of international shipping. Handling Miss Arbildo’s will and so on was more in line of a…courtesy.”
“I see. Do you have any idea what her relationship was to Hector Purecete? The guy on whose grave the dog was supposed to be put.”
“None at all.”
“Damn. I wish I knew what she expected. This is kind of a pain in the butt. You don’t have any idea what her intentions were in the will instruction?”
“No. Like I said, the woman was very strange.”
I sighed. “Maybe if I could see the will itself we could figure this out. May I come to your office?”
“Oh no,” he said. “You’d never get here and back before your flight.
“I’ve already called Nan to change it.”
“No, no, you don’t understand—the traffic. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll bring it to you at the airport, if you have time.”
“I’ll make the time.” I told him where I was and that he should bring as much of the paperwork as he had. He said it would take him an hour to get to the bar and I said that was fine. After all, I was still waiting for Nan’s secretary to call me back.
I was thinking about ordering food when the phone went off, showing me Nan’s office number on the ID. It was Cathy with my flight change and some additional information.
“Nan’s booked you into a guest house in Oaxaca City—it’s one she’s used before. The owner speaks English and can help you with the records search if you need it.”
“Thanks. I only hope I’ll get there before the offices close.”
“I think you’re going to have to re-arrange your schedule. The earliest flight I could get you was five-fifty. I’m sorry. But the provincial offices should be open Friday.”
Terrific. My two days for research was now down to one. I’d have to hope I got what I wanted the first time or could work up some local contacts very fast. “I’ll make it work,” I said, then continued, “Umm…I talked to Banda. Nan said he was reputable, but he seems a little…odd. Is there anything I should know about him?”
“About Guillermo? I don’t know much except that he’s the biggest New York Yankees fan in Mexico. And I’m not even sure that’s unusual.”
“Baseball?”
“Yup. Baseball is big in Mexico City. A few years ago he had season tickets and flew up to watch the games—I swear that’s why he took his international courses at Columbia; so he could go to Yankees games—he even tried to take Nan to one, but she’s not a sports fan. Don’t get him started on any conversation about baseball or you’ll miss your plane.”
I said my goodbyes and started thinking while I waited for Banda. It was after one o’clock already. I’d have to get lunch at the airport and see what I could do by phone. I’d miss the open hours in person today at whatever government office might have the burial records and I’d only have Friday to do records searches before the holiday weekend hit—if they didn’t close early or not open at all. I’d have to get to that office first thing on the thirtieth if I was going to stand much chance of finding the right grave. I only hoped that whatever I could turn up about Hector Purecete in that time would help me get information from Maria-Luz Arbildo. If she showed up at his grave. Definitely no time for “Who’s on First” discussions with Guillermo Banda that afternoon—I hoped he didn’t look as much like Lou Costello as he sounded or I might lose it.
Fish called me before I could get anything done with directory assistance, saying there was not much to report on the scrapings he’d taken from the clay dog, except that the black paint was colored with crushed charcoal and volcanic sand, with just a touch of human blood. Not your average pottery glaze. No sign of dread diseases or drug residue. No unusual clay substrate, just plain terracotta. I mentioned that the dog had broken and dropped the bundle of hair out.
“So it is hair?” he asked.
“It looks like it. My Spanish is lousy, but I heard the inspector call it ‘pelo’—which I recognize from my shampoo bottle as the Spanish word for hair,” I replied, gazing into the plastic bag of shards. “Five or six strands here, dark brown and black, with a red thread holding them together.”
“Two different kinds of hair?”
“Two different colors, but they have the same look and texture.”
“Interesting. I wonder if the DNA matches the blood in the paint. I’d love to take a look at it when you get back—if you’re game.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring it back. It might have to stay here,” I added, glancing down again at the phantom hound. Once the knot of hair had come free, so had the dog, and I wasn’t sure if it was the hair or the sculpture which had held the spirit in the clay shell, but I wanted to know more before I let any of the parts out of my hands.
The dog ghost leaned against me and seemed to doze. I envied it; the beer had made me feel more tired than ever. Resigned, I stuffed the bag of pottery bits into my purse and went back to fruitless phone calls for the next hour. Outside of Mexico City directory assistance, most of the people I talked to had no better English than I had Spanish—and my Spanish was embarrassingly poor. The dog stirred and I could feel its low growl as it pressed against my leg.
A man of medium height with short black hair stopped beside me and looked me over as I tried to make myself clear—without much success—to a clerk in a provincial office somewhere in Oaxaca. The man carried a leather briefcase. He wore a gray suit, had a bland, oval face made interesting only by a boxer’s crooked nose and basset-hound eyes. He smelled of laundry starch. The aura around him jittered and jumped in flickers of vibrant orange and blue as his eyes moved over everything, evaluating, cataloging... He seemed to have a hot-sauce stain on his tie, but it could have been part of the pattern.
His eyes flicked down toward my feet and he blinked, but I wasn’t sure if he saw the ghost dog or if he just didn’t like my boots. He turned his restless gaze back to me, waited until I hung up in frustration, and said, “You gotta be Harper Blaine.”
He didn’t look at all like Lou Costello, not even a Hispanic version. He didn’t look like an international law practitioner with an advanced degree from Columbia, either. He looked like a guy who worked in an office eight-to-five; like an insurance adjuster or a mid-level manager in a very expensive suit.
“You must be Guillermo Banda,” I replied.
“Willy. You can call me Willy.” He hoisted himself onto the bar stool next to mine, keeping his feet away as if I might kick him without warning.
Considering my ex-boyfriend was named Will, that particular first-name didn’t sound like a good idea. “I’d rather not,” I said and wondered if he could see the ghost dog—he seemed a little wound-up.
He shrugged. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Miss Blaine.” He put the briefcase on the bar and snapped it open. It held a single manila folder and a business-size envelope. Banda picked up the folder. “These are the last three versions of Miss Arbildo’s will. I don’t have to show them to you, but since a will in probate is a public record here, just as it is in the US, you could get most of this information by searching the district probate records—”
I cut him off. “Mr. Banda, I’m not offended with you and I’m not trying to put your back up. I’m just at a loss to understand this. I don’t know why I was named in your client’s will—I’ve never met her or heard of her. I just want to understand what I’m doing. I don’t want to be stuck with some creepy mystery for the rest of my life.” I did not look at the dog, but I could feel it still rumbling and pressing to me. “The conditions say I’m to put the dog on the grave intact. What am I supposed to do, now that the statue is broken?”
He put the folder down in the case and picked up the envelope, offering it to me. “That’s easy. You take the money and run. I’m sure Miss Arbildo won’t even know. She inherited a truckload. Thirty thousand U.S. is a drop in the bucket.”
I was sure she would mind. Very much. I shook my head and didn’t touch the envelope. “I can’t do that. Maybe if I knew why she wanted the dog put on Purecete’s grave, I could agree, but I don’t. What is with the dog?”
Banda laughed—a tired laugh but genuinely amused. “It’s a tradition. A really old one. You don’t see it around here much anymore—up in the mountains around Michocan and Yunuen, maybe in Oaxaca, but even there it’s dying out. It’s from the Aztecs. They used to sacrifice a dog and burn the body on the funeral pyres because they believed the dog could lead the spirit of the dead to Mictlan. Now we just use a statue.
