“Everything’s all right, folks,” I announced, shooing them back into the store area. “We’ll have the room ready in a jiffy.”
Glancing back, I saw Deirdre, Kenneth, Shelby, and Josh gathering up the fallen water bottles while Timothy Brennan told the technicians from the C-SPAN cable network how to do their jobs.
CHAPTER 3
A Postmortem Post
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve it through not dying.
—Woody Allen
IF THERE WAS a hell, Jack Shepard was in it. Or else the universe was playing the cosmic joke of the century. Why else would it doom a guy like him to a place like this?
In life, Jack’s blood had pulsed to the rhythm of the city’s streets. The smoky dice joints and swingin’ suds clubs, the back alleys, panel pads, and flophouses. The grifters and grinders, Joe-belows and triggermen, high rollers and sweet honeys—he knew them all.
He even got to know the uptown joints doing swing shifts as a bodyguard for cliff dwellers—those high-rise society types. Believe it or don’t, every third dame would get all hopped up, take him back to her posh Park Avenue pad, and jump his bones. “What do you say, big guy? Be my sixty-minute man?”
Why couldn’t eternity be a joint like that?
Instead, he got lead poisoning in the godforsaken sticks—eternity in cornpone alley.
Now the only excitement Jack ever got was scaring the crap out of small-town operators witless enough to invade his cave. And when that bored him—as it always did—he’d really scare them, running them the hell out of his space.
At times, whole years would go by with blessed peace and quiet. And Jack found, when human activity was sparse, he could get some true rest settling into a sweet, forgetful limbo, a cosmic sleep akin to passing out after a bender.
He’d been in precisely that state when the damn construction had started. Hammering, sanding, painting, sawing . . . a lousy, nerve-racking racket in the lousy bookshop where somebody had punched his last ticket and given him the big chill.
Sure, Jack had played some pranks on the construction crew—making them think work tools had disappeared, sending energy surges through the electrical wiring—but they’d finished anyway.
Then that buggy dame had started in with the folding chairs. He’d watched her arrange them, one by one.
Unfold the chair.
Place the chair.
Adjust the chair.
Unfold another chair.
Readjust the first chair.
Make a row.
Adjust the row.
Make another row.
If he’d been alive, Jack would have beat his own head against the stone wall until he’d blacked himself out. Instead, he’d made every chair appear turned on its damned head.
He had to give the broad credit, though. She hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t even made a peep, just hightailed it outta there, returning within minutes to see them set upright again.
Her name was Mrs. Penelope Thornton-McClure. And he had to admit she showed more moxie than a lot of grown men he’d pranked in the past fifty years.
Not a bad looker, either.
Had a nice face and soft voice. Certainly, she was the first living entity he’d even considered shifting himself toward since he’d crossed over, which was hilarious because, if he’d read her thoughts right, she didn’t even believe in ghosts.
Well, he hadn’t believed in them, either.
Concrete Jack. That’s what he’d been. “I’m the hardest case you’ll ever meet,” he once told a client who wanted help beating a murder rap. “Too many con artists to count in this world. You want me to believe something, I gotta see proof. Show it to me plain as the broken nose on my face.”
Just like Mrs. McClure, Jack had once believed that when you died, you died, and that was the end.
Brother, had he been wrong.
So he sat back and watched.
And right now, it was that broad, Penelope, he couldn’t stop watching. Despite her sweet-as-pie face and her hard-work ethic, this Penelope doll could be pretty damned annoying. The chair-fixing compulsion was just one case in point. Still, the dame didn’t deserve the crap she was getting from the biggest a-hole of the twentieth century if ever there was one—
Timothy Brennan.
Timothy Brennan, the lousy rat fink.
Before Brennan appeared, Jack had been observing the bookshop activities this evening with mild interest at best.
Now Jack was awake.
And alert.
And pissed.
Brennan didn’t know it yet, but he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life: he’d finally walked into Jack’s bookstore.
CHAPTER 4
A Drink before Dying
I’m just not sure we need this . . . mess right now.
—Angie Gennaro to Patrick Kenzie, Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane, 1998
I WAS STANDING next to the refreshment table. It had been dragged, on Brennan’s orders, to the back end of the room—unappealingly close, in my opinion, to the rest rooms. Before me, a surreal sea of battered fedoras bobbed with excitement. Murmurs of approval rose and fell amid the dark ties and three-piece suits.
Timothy Brennan was leaning forward against a carved oak podium (which I’d bought for a song at a Newport estate sale), captivating the crowd with his prepared speech:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Brennan read aloud. “Such words could have been applied easily to my fictional private detective, Jack Shield, a man who was a complete man and a common man, and above all a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”
I winced.
Brennan had just asserted that “Such words could have been applied easily to Jack Shield.” But he’d somehow forgotten to mention that they were Raymond Chandler’s exact words in his famous essay describing the quintessential detective.
I searched out Brainert, seated near the front. Not surprisingly, he was shaking his head with all the perfected disappointment of an English professor reviewing a badly footnoted paper. He caught my eye and together we mutely mouthed “Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder.”
I shrugged and lifted my hands palm up, as if to say, Perhaps it had been an innocent oversight.
Brainert rolled his eyes.
J. Brainert Parker (the J. was for Jarvis, a first name he’d utterly rejected since age six) was one of my closest childhood friends. A single, gay St. Francis College English professor in his thirties with a stringbean body, blanched complexion, and self-described “Ichabod Crane” style, he was also (as Sadie put it) one of those “relentlessly sober” types.
Brainert claimed to be a distant relative of the Providence occult author H. P. Lovecraft; and, like his supposed ancestor, he was extremely well-read. All the regular customers respected his opinions. And his enthusiasm for out-of-print Holmes books kept the store’s lights on—his most recent purchase being a forty-eight-dollar copy of a P. F. Collier & Son Holmes collection decorated red cloth hardcover, circa 1903.
In any event, I was feeling pretty badly about Brennan’s unhappiness with our bookstore in general and me in particular. Before his speech, I’d actually tried to make peace by fetching him a cup of coffee and a plate of the Cooper Family Bakery goodies. The incoming guests were already digging into the food, and I was afraid Brennan wouldn’t get to sample any of it.