Best New Zombie Tales: Vol. 1 Part 24

"Who wanted to kill you, Mr. Foreman?"

"I can't think of anyone."

The trouble with questioning zombies is that they show little emotion. Their faces generally don't move much unless they want them to. And with a near expressionless voice it's hard to tell if one of them is lying. I fell back on one of the givens in detective workeverybody lies.

"Mr. Foreman, when I look through that folder I'm going to find two or three people with a reason to have wanted you dead. Why not save me the trouble and tell me yourself. Let's start with the obviouswife, girlfriend?"

"Wife, we were married five years."

"And how did you two get along."

"Fine."

The answer came too quickly. I started tapping the case folder with one finger. If he were telling me the truth he'd see the tapping as a nervous gesture. If not...

"She'd been having an affair." Something showed on his face that time, a sorrow so deep it had to come out. A sadness that death couldn't ease.

"When did you find out?"

"A few days before I... you know."

"Who wanted the divorce, you or her?"

"No, we were trying to work things out."

That could be true or not. Either way, his wife was now suspect number one.

"You mentioned a meeting with your partner. How was business?" I started tapping again.

"Not good, bad actually. I'd gotten the result of an independent audit and... "

"Your partner was cheating you."

Foreman nodded. Suspect number two.

"Your partner and your wife, were they... together?"

"No, it wasn't him. She wouldn't tell me who, but it wasn't him, I'm sure."

Unknown boyfriend, number three.

I stood up with the folder and made copies. When I came back he was standing. He took his originals with his left and offered me his right. I took it, asking as I did, "your wife, ex-wife, is she..." I fumbled for the right term. Words like "alive" and "dead" are losing their meaning.

Foreman forced a smile. "She's alive, not a zombie like me."

My face must have shown my surprise, the undead don't usually use "Z" word. Foreman kept his smile. "I am what I am, Detective. Thank you for your help."

I walked him out, hoping my presence would prevent any more hara.s.sment from the desk sergeant.

It did, sort of. The uniformed Buddha behind the desk saved his comments for me.

"You were with that cadav a mighty long time, Scott. What are you, some kinda necro or somethin?"

There was a lot I could have said back. Comments about his large size, small IQ or doubtful parentage came to mind. I even thought about the ever popular "He wanted directions to your mother's house. I told him to expect at least an hour's wait and have his two dollars ready." Instead I turned the other cheek, took the laughter that came my way and went back to my desk.

I called Homicide and told them what I had.

"Foreman, Foreman," muttered the harried detective as he searched through a year's worth of computer entries. "Oh yeah, here it is. It's been dropped into the Cold Case bin. No one's really working it right now, but if you want to bring him down I can see him," I heard him paging through a calendar, "Tuesday a week."

"So soon?" I asked, not trying to disguise the sarcasm.

"Listen, Scott, I don't know what it's like up in the great Northeast, but down here in the real world we're swamped. The murder rate's been going up ever since the dead returned. Word on the street is that it ain't murder if they come back after you kill them. And you try getting a homicide conviction after the so-called victim walks into the courtroom. Baltimore juries never were the brightest, and there's always one of the twelve who can't tell the difference between alive and undead."

He rambled for another few minutes. When he paused to breathe, I made my offer. "Look, if it's that busy how about I look into it? If I get any where I'll give you a call, say, Tuesday next."

I got a "Yeah, you do that," and then he hung up.

I slipped a CYA memo into the case folder noting the date and time that I had been given permission by the Homicide Unit to investigate one of their cold cases then sat back and started reading reports.

Ten months and three days before the Righteous started leaving us, Terry Foreman was found dead in his car. The car was parked in his driveway, the motor running. Foreman was slumped over in the driver's seat, having died from a close-contact gunshot wound to the head.

Foreman's body was discovered by a curious neighbor who noticed the car idling for about twenty minutes before going over to investigate. According to his wife, Debbie (nee Lochlear), Foreman had left the house forty minutes prior to the discovery of his body.

No gun, casings or bullets were found on the scene. The Medical Examiner did recover a .38 bullet from the inside of Foreman's head. The bullet was suitable for comparison should a suspect weapon be recovered. The Crime Lab did a nice job of photographing and diagramming the scene. The lab techs also dusted Foreman's car, recovering quite a few latent prints, all of which were matched with Foreman, his wife, the neighbor and the first officer on the scene.

The area was canva.s.sed and of course, no one heard or saw anything. Foreman's wife and business partner were both questioned, routinely it seems, with no mention of either infidelity or embezzlement. But then, that's not the sort of thing one brags about to police investigating a murder.

Updates filed one, two, three and six months after the murder reported little progress in the case. The last update listed "solvability" as "poor," and recommended that the case be placed in the "Pending" file to wait further developments.

There were none, not until the dead returned and one of them walked into my office.

I started with the wife, the ex Mrs. Foreman and now Debbie Lochlear. She'd moved out of the Hamilton duplex she'd shared with her husband into a pricier Perry Hall condo. Perry Hall was in Baltimore County and out of city jurisdiction, but I was only going there to chat, this time at least.

I'd called ahead and she was expecting me. So when I rang the bell she buzzed me in right away.

"Ms. Lochlear," I said when she opened the apartment door, "I'm Detective Scott." She let me in and offered coffee. I took a cup and we sat at the kitchen table and talked.

"You said you had some information about my husband's death?"

"Yes, Ma'am. I've been asked to reopen the case."

"By who?"

"Your husband."

"But I'm not married... Terry's back?"

She was genuinely surprised. I looked at her hard, trying to find some guilt or fear but came up empty.

"He's back," I told her. "You didn't know?"

She shook her head. "I knew it was possible, but thought maybe he'd call. When he didn't, I thought that he'd been one of those that... didn't come back."

"How did you and Terry get along?"

It must have been the way I asked the question, because right away she said, "He told you, didn't heabout the affair?" I nodded and let her continue. "It was one of those things. Terry was a good man, the best. He loved me dearly, gave me everything. But he wasn'texciting. One day I decided that I needed some excitement and went out and found it. Terry was never supposed to find out."

"But he did."

Her "Yeah," came out like a curse, and her following words grew bitter as she came near tears. "Someone who knew us, a 'good friend' of ours, saw me with my boyfriend one day. I guess we were being a bit obvious. Anyway, he thought Terry should know, so he told him. That night he when came home, Terry asked me about it. I never was a good liar."

"How did he take it?"

"Sat there and cried like a baby. Blamed himself for not being what I needed. We talked and I said all the right things, the things he needed to hear. Told him I'd end the affair, that I'd make it right between us again."

I halfway believed her. She might have just been someone who made a mistake. We all make them. But then she might just be telling me "all the right things" hoping I'd believe her like her husband did. "Did you make it right?" I asked.

"I would have tried, but Terry was killed a few days later."

We sipped our coffees for a few minutes, then Debbie asked, "When you talked to Terry, what did he say happened that night?"

"He doesn't remember." Did a look of relief pa.s.s across her face? It was time to play bad cop.

"Ms. Lochlear, what was your lover's name?"

"I don't think Frank had anything to do with it?"

"Frank?"

"Chavis." She gave me the address she had for him. "But he didn't do it."

"Why not? You were his. You might have told him you loved him. He didn't want to lose you. With Terry out of the way..." I let that hang and changed direction. "When your husband died, you got the house, the bank account, everything. Right?"

"Yes, but... "

I interrupted. "And Terry was well insured, he was that kind of person, double indemnity for 'accidents' like murder."

She caught on. "I did not kill my husband." No tears now. The eyes that glared at me were clear and hard.

"Someone did. Somebody put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Why not you or Chavis? You both got something out of it. He got you and you got," I looked around the room, "a condo in Perry Hall."

She called me a name, one I'd been called before. "I did not kill my husband," she repeated. "You want someone with a reason to kill Terry, talk to his partner. Talk to Ronald Morrison. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d stole from Terry, then was going to leave the firm and take most of their clients with him. Terry was going to sue. He wanted to give Morrison one last chance to make it right. He had a meeting with him the night he died. He never got there. Go see Morrison, and get out of my house."

I thanked her for her time. On the way out I stopped at the door. "You never asked, you know."

"Asked what?" she said icily, wanting me gone.

"About Terryhow he was, what he was doing, that sort of thing."

For a moment she softened. "Terry's dead," she said quietly, then she closed the door without saying another word.

It was the weekend before I could do any follow-up work. A rash of B&E's in the Glenham area combined with a string of armed robberies along Harford Rd. kept us all busy. Then I got picked for a special detail.

Friday, City Hall. The first Zombie Rights rally here in Baltimore. Anyone who didn't expect something like it sooner or later hasn't been paying attention to the last 100 years of American history.

I got "volunteered" as part of the security taskforce, to make sure the prominent undead brought here from other cities weren't killedagain. It had happened in other places, one speaker shot by a sniper, two more blown up in a car. It didn't stop the cause, only slowed it down while everyone waited for the deceased to come back from wherever the newly dead go these days. The terrorism backfired. Nothing feeds a cause like martyrs, and having living (sort of) martyrs makes the cause stronger still.

There was the usual rhetoricZombies should give up their old ident.i.ties and adopt "post-existence" names. There was a call for a Zombie Nation, where the undead could dwell in peace. Even the name "Zombie" was attacked as insulting, a slur based on beliefs fostered by horror fiction and the movies. "Revenant" and "Non-breathing American" were the best replacements offered.

Scattered among the above were some ideas about basic human rightsfreedom from hara.s.sment, fair housing and employment, the right to vote and own property. Pet.i.tions were pa.s.sed around asking the State of Maryland to grant citizenship to the undead. I signed one. As one living speaker pointed out, zombie rights were in everyone's interest. You may not benefit now, but when you die and come back you will.

The rally broke up about eight. We were released at nine, after the last of the stragglers left City Hall Plaza and any threats of violence were reduced to the normal dangers a Baltimore night has to offer.

Since I was already downtown, I decided to do some work on the Foreman case. Debbie had given me an address for Frank Chavis. A phone call when I go back to my desk the day I talked to her told me that Chavis had moved on. A few calls later I had traced him to his last official place of residence111 Penn St, the City Morgue. He had died almost six months to the day after Foreman pa.s.sed on. Drinking had killed him. That and the tree he hit doing sixty with a 0.24 blood alcohol content.

Chavis didn't have a fixed address. According to government records, he was among the last to leave the containment camps set up to welcome the dead back to this world. When no one came for him, they asked him his city of origin, and when he said "Baltimore," they gave him twenty dollars and put him on a bus headed for the Trailways Travel Plaza. In life Chavis had a history of alcohol-related arrests and problems. Figuring that old habits die hard, and that some come back with you, I decided to check out the zombie bars.

It says something about Baltimore that it's only a short walk from City Hall to the notorious Block. Back in the Fifties and before, the Block was Baltimore's only tourist attraction, the only reason for a businessman to stop in the city on his way north or south. Back then, the Block was really three or four blocks long, and its strip joints and burlesque houses were famous nationwide. Blaze Starr's Two O'Clock Club was on the Block, and at the Gayety one could watch the legendary Ann Corio and Irma the Body take most of it off.

It changed in the sixties, with "free" love and increasing nudity in the movies. Fashion changed too, and by the Eighties one could see more female flesh on the beach at Ocean City than Miss Starr ever showed on stage. Videotapes and DVD's brought adult movies into the home, and camcorders let people make their own. By the Nineties the Block matched its name, having being reduced to that size, the once proud theaters now cut up into liquor stores, small video shops and strip clubs where under-aged girls dance listlessly on stage and middle-aged hookers hustled drinks to a tired dis...o...b..at.

Nothing happens in this world that someone doesn't try to make money from it. The Block had revived since the return of the dead. It was still the same size, but the entertainment had changed.

The strip clubs were still there, but now the banners out front proclaimed "Dead Girls Live!" and "The Naked and the Dead!" The bars were a mixed lotsome were for still breathing patrons, who paid for the novelty of having shuffling deadmen bring them their drinks. (And where every night some drunk loudly proclaimed, "Hey, I didn't order a Zombie," then laughs like he was the first to tell the joke.) Other bars catered to the undead crowd, where the Returned could be among their own kind. When one of the breathing mistakenly enters these places, they're stared at by pairs of cold, unblinking eyes until they feel uncomfortable and leave. It was in one of these that I found Frank Chavis.

It was called The Horseshoe Lounge. If there was a reason for the name it was lost three owners ago. The bar wasn't on The Block proper, but rather halfway down on Gay St. It was the third place I tried that night and I was tired. If Chavis wasn't there I'd give it up and start again Monday. I stood in the doorway to let my eyes adjust to the dim lighting then walked over to the bar.

Unlike his customers, the bartender was still breathing. No surprise there. These days almost any skilled profession requires a license, one of the requirements for which is that you have to be alive.

"Beer, please," I ordered once he decided to pay me some attention.

"No beer," he replied mechanically, 'Just the hard stuff."

"Ginger ale then." I knew how hard they served it in these places.

He put a small gla.s.s in front of me. "Five bucks."

"For soda?"

"A drink's a drink, and drinks here are five bucks." I put a bill on the bar. "No tip?" he asked.

"Maybe," I showed him a photo of Chavis. "Know this guy?"

He knew him. I could that by the look on his face as soon as he saw the picture. Would he tell me? That was the question.

"Maybe. Why should I tell you?"

I flashed my badge. "Because I said please." I was hoping the power of the badge would be enough. It was too late and I was too tired to think of any believable threats.