Charlaine Harris - Crimes by Moonlight

“What do you do?”

“I’m a student.”

“At Columbia?”

“Yeah.” He cocked his head at me. “What do you do?”

That question always throws me. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I always think of myself as an aspiring actor/writer. At my age, that’s tough to claim. “I’m a private investigator,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Are you a real private investigator, or are you just pretending to be one?”

My mouth fell open. He nailed me. Put his finger right on the inner conflict that’s haunted me most of my adult life.

He smiled at my confusion. “There you are. That’s just it. Am I a vampire, or do I just pretend to be? I am what you want me to be. To Debbie I am. To you, maybe I’m not. But who gets hurt?”

I frowned.

He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a stick ofwood. One end was fashioned to a point.

“You know what this is? This is death. I keep it close to my heart, to remind me death is near.” He grinned. “You wanna tell that to her father? He won’t be pleased. And who does it threaten? Debbie or me?”

He stuck the wooden stake back in his pocket. “Life’s an illusion. Yours, mine, Debbie’s. Even her old man. Believe what you want to believe. I can’t help what you think.”

The light changed. Traffic streamed by.

“Ah, here’s a cab.” He raised his arm, flagged it down. “Remember our deal,” he said.

He hopped in the cab and drove off.

I remembered our deal.

I let him go.

NEEDLESS to say, Debbie felt I’d failed.

“You didn’t find out where he lives. You didn’t find out where he goes during the daytime. Which is the whole point. If he’s a vampire, he can’t exist in sunlight. If he can, he’s not a vampire. It’s that simple. Don’t you get it?”

“Can I tell you something?”

“You’re gonna give me advice?”

“I suppose.”

“You gonna charge me for it?”

“You’re going to make a good lawyer.”

“That’s your advice?”

“That’s an observation.”

“I don’t need your approval.”

“Yeah, I know. Look. There’s no such thing as vampires. But if you wanna play the game, this is not a bad guy to play with. Is he a vampire? No, he’s not. I can’t prove it, but I’ll bet the ranch on it. It doesn’t matter. You’re young. This is a passing fancy.”

“Just a phase I’m going through,” she said sarcastically.

“I didn’t say that. But, frankly, I don’t see you in a courtroom in your Kabuki face.”

She pouted, then switched gears. “All right, look. He’s taking me out again tonight.”

I put up my hand, shook my head. “No. I’m done. That’s it. You don’t owe me anything. We’re all square. Let’s leave it at that.”

She looked betrayed. “But…”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve done all I can. Probably more than I should. Anyway, I got work to do.”

I snapped my briefcase shut and went out the door.

I wasn’t worried about leaving her alone in my office. If she could find anything there worth stealing, she was welcome to it.

SHE was back the next morning. I almost didn’t recognize her without her makeup. It was a vast improvement. She looked like any other college girl.

Except for the fact she was hysterical.

I tried to calm her down, find out what was the matter.

Turned out it was simple.

“He didn’t show up!”

Ah, youth.

I smiled reassuringly. “You’re not the first girl in the world ever got stood up.”

She shook her head. Practically stamped her foot. “No! He’s not like that. He wouldn’t do that. If he didn’t show up, something is wrong!”

“Did you check up on him?”

“How could I check up on him? You didn’t give me his address. You just assured me everything was all right. Well, guess what. Turns out you were wrong.”

“I understand. You’re upset. You feel helpless. But I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

“You’re sure? Like you were sure everything was okay. Why won’t anyone pay attention to me? Why won’t anyone listen?”

And there she was, the girl in the horror movie, pleading for help. Which is what brought me to MacAullif’s office. That and a sense of obligation and a desire to pass the buck. In the movies, the people pleading for help are the good guys, and the people not listening are the jerks. Not that I wished the role of jerk on MacAullif. I just didn’t want it on me. I talked MacAullif into running a trace on the guy and went out on my rounds.

HE got back to me later that afternoon. I was in Queens interviewing a woman who’d fallen on a city bus when the office beeped me, told me MacAullif wanted me to call. That couldn’t be good.

It wasn’t.

“A corpse matching your description turned up yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday? How come you’re just getting to me now?”

“You gave me Morris Feldman. This guy’s Michael Fletcher. Same initials, so I ran it down. You gonna be grateful for that, or you gonna be pissed off I didn’t pick up on it sooner, seeing as how I have no workload for the NYPD.”

“Yesterday morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Where was the body?”

“ Riverside Park at 114th. Just off the upper path, buried in a shallow grave.”

“What do you mean by shallow grave?”

“That’s the way it was described to me. I didn’t happen to see it. The guy was at the morgue by the time I got the lead.”

“How’d he die?”

“Multiple stab wounds. From a sharp object, most likely a butcher knife.”

“What about the time of death?”

“About twelve hours before he was found.”

I sucked in my breath. “Right after I saw him.”

“You saw him?”

“Yeah.”

“You were the last person to see him alive?”

“Aside from the killer.”

MacAulliflet that lie there just long enough for the silence to become uncomfortable. “Wanna run down to the morgue and see if it’s him?”

IT was.

The guy on the marble slab looked exactly like the vampire I’d met. With perhaps a few pints less blood.

The medical examiner was cutting up some woman. He stopped long enough to check us out.

“You did the autopsy on this one?” MacAullif asked.

“Yeah.”

“Can you give me the cause of death?”

“You want me to talk in front of him?”

“Relax. He’s on our side. What killed him?”

“Multiple stab wounds to the torso. Some sharp object, probably a butcher knife.”

“Which one killed him?”

“The one in the heart,” he shrugged. “He might have died from the one in the lung. But the one in the heart wasn’t postmortem, because it was still pumping blood. Was it the last wound? I don’t know. Was it a mortal wound? Yes, it was. What ‘killed him’”-he made quotation marks around the word with his fingers-“is splitting hairs. You sure this guy’s not a lawyer?”

“Any contributing cause of death?” I said.

“Funny you should ask.”

“Why? Was he drugged?”

He shook his head. “Tox screen was clean. But when you mention contributing cause of death…”

“Yeah?”

“He was also stabbed with a sharp piece of wood. I didn’t see it at first. Found it in his clothes. It was in the wound and had fallen out.”

“The wound?”

“The wound in his heart.”

“Are you saying a wooden stake caused his death?”

“No. He was stabbed in the heart with a butcher knife, just like all the other wounds. The killer stuck the stake in his heart afterward.”

“You mean he was dead?”

“He was probably still alive. There was a lot of blood on the wood. But he died shortly thereafter. I figure the heart pumping blood pushed the wood out of the wound. Just before he died. We’re not talking a long time here. A few seconds, maybe.”