And the dead shall live, p.1
And the Dead Shall Live, page 1
DAVID SHAWN KLEIN
©2024 by David Shawn Klein
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine, or journal.
The author grants the final approval for this literary material.
First Digital Version
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-68513-374-0
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2023945307
PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING
www.blackrosewriting.com
"How Long Has This Been Going On" by George and Ira Gershwin
With permission of Alfred Publishing
For Eva, as ever and always.
I would like to thank Meaghan Wagner, Louise Stahl, and Nicholas Litchfield for their help and encouragement in bringing my novel to fruition.
There are bad nights, and then there are nights like this. Electrical storms when he sleeps, fragments from the shit show that was his past. He wakes on his sofa and reaches for his bottle of Ativan. It’s empty. Sleep deprivation is messing with his judgment. Forgetting to renew his Ativan is like a guy in an iron lung letting himself run out of oxygen. Now he needs to walk out of his four-block Zone of Safety to get to Wyckoff’s Apothecary, the only all-night pharmacy in his neighborhood. In his cell phone there are only two contacts: his son, Flynn, and Dr. Vincent Guarnaccia, his on-call phone shrink. He refers to him as Guano, and not with affection.
“It’s one in the morning, Philip,” the doctor says, trying, and failing, to stifle a yawn.
Raymond tapped out a long time ago trying to get Guano to call him by his last name.
“You’re trying to impress me with your mastery of the big hand and little hand,” Raymond says.
Guano wears a bathrobe—stolen from some hotel, no doubt. His hair looks like he’s just pulled his head from a blender. For a moment, Raymond almost likes him.
“I have a cancellation at nine,” Guano says. “Surely it can wait until then.”
“If it could wait until nine, I would call you at nine. You made a deal: on-call access, twenty-four seven. And don’t forget how much I pay for it.”
The doctor sighs and tries to coax his hair into a semblance of order.
“I ran out of pills,” Raymond tells him.
“How did that happen?”
“If I knew, and wrote it up in a thesis worthy of the dean of Harvard Medical School, I would still be out of pills.”
Guano sighs and ends the call, phones in an emergency prescription, then calls Raymond back to coax him into the elevator. They ride down together, Raymond and his shrink-in-a-box, from the penthouse of his Rosemary’s Baby apartment building. Raymond presses himself into a corner and prays that no one else gets in until he’s released onto the ground floor.
The door finally opens and he breathes again, and steps out through rust-colored walls, bamboo paneling, and recessed lighting, a recent renovation that Raymond calls “Swedish Bawdy House,” though he’s never been to Sweden and would rather climb Everest in sneakers than step foot in the bacterial war zone he imagines your typical house of ill repute to be.
In any case, when Peg walked out, she took his sex drive with her. Every ounce of it.
As Raymond walks, head down, the doorman shuffles a package in the cubby. Raymond has trained the staff to avoid any hint of eye contact, by employing the behavior modification technique of frequent gifts of cash. Still, he negotiates the fifteen jittery strides through the lobby without taking his eyes from his Cumberland hiking boots. He hasn’t hiked in years, except from one room of his apartment to another—not since the Catastrophe.
The lobby doors hum open at his approach. He sucks in a huge breath and steps out, turning a sharp left toward University Place. On his phone, Guarnaccia alternately congratulates him on his courage, and reminds him to take it one step at a time, celebrate each step, and the next thing you know, you’re there.
“I should never have let you talk me into giving up my mail-order drugs,” Raymond says.
“Think of it this way: not only are we gradually expanding your Zone of Safety, but it gives you an excuse to wake me from a sound sleep.”
“There is that,” Raymond says, pushing through the door at Wyckoff’s and bracing for the chimes that will induce every customer, like Pavlov’s dogs, to turn and gape at the freak show standing in the threshold.
Luckily, the place is empty. But whenever Raymond stumbles onto luck, God laughs and slips a banana peel under his foot.
A stranger is working behind the pharmacy counter. A complete and utter stranger. A Filipino woman, neat and unsmiling and efficient. Still, the manager should have given him a heads-up. She asks his name, and he whispers it. Not having been briefed on his rules, she repeats it, out loud. A killer squid thrusts its tentacles up through the floor and around his ankles to drag him under. The offending pharmacist hands him his bottle and he tears open the bag and throttles the bottle open, throws down a pill.
Guarnaccia holds his tongue until Raymond is outside again. “We should discuss this at our next formal session, Philip. Letting your prescription lapse.”
“You’re right, we should,” Raymond answers. “I find it curious how you failed to remind me.”
Guarnaccia sighs and coaches him home, to the relative safety of his lobby. Then the inconceivable happens.
A woman, sitting on a lobby chair, turns to catch Raymond’s eye.
“Philip?” Guano says. “Why did you stop, what’s going on?”
Raymond shuts down the call and pockets his phone. No one, not even a total stranger, can know he needs a shrink.
“My God, Philip Raymond!” the woman says, rising from her chair. “Right there in front of me!”
He recoils—if she knows who he is, that can only mean bad news.
“I’m so sorry,” she continues breathlessly, “but I had no idea I’d react like this. You stare at an author’s photo in the back of a book and think, well, he’s still got to put his pants on one leg at a time, just like us uncreative folks. But then, up close and personal! I’ve read Mistress Death three times.”
He quickly sizes her up: middle to late forties, pert and moneyed, but with a backbone, like a Texas horse breeder or one of those retired starlets from the days of Old Hollywood—Doris Day or Barbara Stanwyck, fresh from her ranch in San Clemente. He would like to believe that after the Catastrophe brought the already meager sales of his two novels to a crushing halt, he’s found a fan who loves his work so much that she just has to tell him all about it at one in the morning.
He knows better.
She seems to read what he’s thinking. “You don’t have to worry, it’s not like that movie, where the woman with the sledgehammer keeps telling the writer she’s his biggest fan. ‘Say it plain,’ that was my father’s motto. So here goes: I need your help. Give me ten minutes and you’ll understand everything. I beg you, ten minutes at the most.”
Raymond can’t walk away or she might go full Looney Tunes. He has no choice but to learn what fresh hell from his past she means to unleash. He turns for the elevator, catching the doorman in the gleaming new mirror near the elevator door, his nod of smarmy disbelief.
The whack job from the penthouse actually got lucky.
They ride in silence. She bites her lip, white-knuckles her handbag. His is one of only two penthouse apartments. He pauses with his key in the door—she’s the first person to cross his threshold since Peg stole Flynn and flew him on her broomstick all the way to California.
He doesn’t want the stranger to feel too comfortable or she may never leave. So instead of inviting her to sit on a sofa in the sunken living room, he pulls out a chair from the dining room table.
She says, “I don’t make a practice of barging in on folks in the middle of the night, but my flight was delayed. The storm was so bad, at one point I thought, God doesn’t want me doing this. Then I thought, not even God can stop me from finding out what happened to my baby. So when we finally landed, I dropped my bags at the Plaza and ran right over. I’m only here for a day. Oh! My name’s Kit. Kit Wheaton.”
Before he can ask about her business, she reaches into her bag and removes a photograph of a young woman, sprawled naked on the shoreline of some beach.
“They tell me fingerprints deteriorate after death, especially when the skin is wet, but …”
She turns away to stare at the wall of windows just behind his table, and to the city lights beyond. Raymond senses she wants to cry, but wouldn’t be caught dead at it.
“… the police had enough to work with, to identify her,” she continues. “Shoplifting is how they had them, her prints. She only did it once, but Wallace and I, we really lost our shit, excuse my French. What a stupid, stupid thing. We’d given her a no-limit Platinum Amex, why did she need to …”
Wheaton bites her lip, apparently to keep from crying. Raymond thinks she might draw blood.
“Her foolishness turned out to be one of those blessings in disguise,” she continues, sitting up straight and squaring her shoulders, “because they wouldn’t have had her print s and I would never have known. The police still insisted I identify her body. She washed up on a beach in California. Carmel. I left Texas, I was a basket case. Wallace … the stress of it all, he had a heart attack. Then another. Then he was gone, too. I was just so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed. A detective was kind of enough to send me this photograph instead of making me travel all the way to … from the state of her body they could tell it had only been a few hours since …”
She swivels around to face his window. “That’s quite a view, Mr. Raymond. Step out my door you see nothing but stars. But the lights of New York City …”
She turns to face him, eye to eye. “Her name was Paige.”
Raymond sees that not a single tear will fall, she would rather die.
“She was so loving and full of life. Special. She was only seventeen. A good girl, with a full life ahead of … I don’t care what the cops think, they didn’t know her. If she’d done a bit of drinking that night, that’s what you do, seventeen. The only trace of drugs in her system was something they couldn’t identify, they said it was something they’d never seen before, maybe a derivative of ketamine or something called MDA, but there was so little of it they just couldn’t tell, and I got the sense they weren’t trying all that hard. She’d only been doing what every teenager does, drink and party.”
Raymond believes he’s supposed to say something now. About being sorry for her loss, and what a fine young woman Paige must have been. It will take a fistful of Ativan to calm him after she’s gone, and what he would really love to do is hustle her out his door.
“No one can know I was here,” she says. “I have friends up on Park Avenue, the Chadwicks. Dinner with the Chadwicks, a Broadway show, some shopping. That’s my excuse for being in New York.”
“Why can’t anyone know you were here?” he asks.
She lowers her voice as if his apartment might be bugged.
She’s going to take out that sledgehammer, after all.
“So they can’t connect the two of us,” she explains.
He doesn’t want to know more. Instead, he tries to return her photo; it embarrasses him that her daughter is naked.
“Do you have a child?” she asks.
Raymond doesn’t answer, but can’t hide that he did.
“Then you know what it does to you, loving someone that completely, loving with everything you are until you’re emptied out and there’s nothing left, only your baby and your love.”
The Ativan is kicking in big-time now, and he’s crashing. If she would only stop talking, he might hope to hustle her out.
“I was doing my best to cope, losing my baby, then my husband. Struggling so hard to find the tiniest shred of meaning in it all, when out of the blue her friend Sloane shows up at my door. Before Paige went missing, she’d sent Sloane a text. That text was the last Sloane had heard from her. After the police called to tell me that Paige … well, it took Sloane a few weeks to come see me, because she couldn’t decide whether to show me Paige’s text or let it lie. I never did ask what finally made her knock on my door. Anyway, it was one of those selfies. My baby was in bed, with her first-thing-in-the-morning face, wrapped in a sheet. She’d spent the night with some fucker, pardon my French. The sonofabitch was right next to her, asleep under a blanket. Paige had a big smile on. All her text said was, ‘Guess who?’ with all capital letters and three exclamation points.”
“And the guy? Didn’t the police question him?”
“Like I said, not interested in a wild girl who got drunk and fell off some party boat. And anyway, as you can see, all you get with that blanket over his head is a half an ear and some pig-whiskers-worth of hair. That selfie is the last any of us ever heard from her. I told those cops, you don’t know my Paige … you just don’t know her.”
Her grief makes her fierce. She’s stubborn and willful. Raymond likes that, but he wishes she would get to the part where she explains why he’s supposed to care. He searches for words from the old days, when he knew what to say in moments like these.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he finally tells her, pushing off his chair.
She leans forward with a death lock on his wrist. “I need your help.”
When was the last time he’d been touched by another human being?
“I’m begging you,” she continues, gripping harder, “don’t let her go through eternity as some wildcat teenager who drank too much and washed up on some beach. Someone killed her. There’s no doubt in my mind. The guy in that bed, Mr. Wonderful—he killed my baby.”
“How can you know that?” Raymond asks.
“Because I do—she was my baby.”
Raymond glances down at his wrist. She releases him.
He says, “What you want is a private investigator.”
“You think I haven’t tried that? Failure and excuses, and ‘here’s my bill.’ All anyone wants is to do is the least they can get away with. But not you, not Philip Raymond. I know you’re just a writer, but your stories are as real as life. And you understand people, you see through them, and into them. To their hearts and souls. And you have courage.”
He laughs, bitterly. “I think you may have the wrong Philip Raymond.”
“No, you’re a hero. I remember. What you sacrificed, for us, for your country, and the hell they put you through. Courage and determination and grit—if I’d come to you first I would know everything by now, and that bastard would be rotting in prison.”
Raymond never talks about the Catastrophe, not even with Guano. He gently guides her toward his front door.
“If your first private investigator failed, perhaps you need to try again.”
“I can pay you,” she says, glancing around his penthouse apartment with a look that acknowledges the foolishness of her offer.
“Mrs. Wheaton—”
“Kit.”
“That a man can create a detective does not mean he has the least capacity to be one.”
But it seems that nothing will deter this woman from getting what she wants. She presses the screenshot and photo of her daughter into his palm, along with a screenshot of the selfie. Her voice breaks.
“What if she were your child?”
“But she’s not, madam,” Raymond says, sweating like he’s just finished a marathon, and imagining with profound longing the bottle of Ativan waiting for him in his pocket. “She’s not my child.”
She closes his fingers around the photograph and selfie.
“She is now.”
As soon as the Wheaton woman walked out his door, Raymond tossed the photograph and screenshot onto his kitchen table next to his laptop, gulped a second pill, and collapsed onto his sofa. The bed he and Peg had shared, before the disgrace of being Philip Raymond’s wife became more important to her than the vow she’d sworn at their wedding—that was off-limits. Flynn’s bedroom, too, was off-limits. Raymond hadn’t cracked Flynn’s door since Peg had stolen his son right out from under him, carried him off like some Grimm Brothers witch, with banalities of California as her candy-covered gingerbread house. Raymond had spent every one of the 2,743 nights since she’d run away fighting sleep on the sofa he’d dragged from his sunken living room.
He began to crash, promising himself, as he did every night, that he would finally sleep without the demons of his past howling in his head.
He prayed in vain.
. . .
Every morning, after realizing that God was, indeed, punishing him with another day of life, Raymond fired up a pot of coffee and started in on his daily hour, searching for Nurse Costello.
Costello had triggered the Catastrophe. Costello was in possession of the autopsy on his old life, when things were good. All he had to do was find her in a country of three hundred million people. Filter for nurses. Filter for Costello. Bang your head against the wall until it bleeds.
One hour was all he demanded of himself. Sixty minutes a day of focused work, aided by a pot of Black Skull coffee. Eddie Aponte had come up empty. Aponte was a retired NYC detective. During Raymond’s high-flying days in politics, before Aponte retired, he’d done some occasional off-book work for Raymond. But even Aponte couldn’t find Costello. Eventually, Raymond took over the investigation himself. He called every state licensing agency in the country, every nurse’s society, asking for Kate Costello, RN. He unlocked the mysteries of Facebook and checked for nurses’ support groups. Tried every nursing school. Maybe she’d graduated, but never gotten licensed; maybe she’d dropped out. She might have retired, or had her license revoked, or changed careers, so he searched for non-nurse Costellos, too. Worked his way through the White Pages: Kate, Katherine, Catherine, Caitlin. He’d seen her nurse’s ID, right there in front of him. Looked into her eyes.
