Casey Daniels: Dead Man Talking

The fifth book in the Pepper Martin Mystery series, 2009

There really is a Monroe Street Cemetery in Cleveland, but thanks to the work of a dedicated group of volunteers, it is not nearly in as awful a shape as I portray it in Dead Man Talking . This book is dedicated to the members of the Monroe Street Cemetery Foundation, the Woodland Cemetery Foundation, the Ohio Cemetery Alliance, and to all the other hardworking people all over the country (and the world) who help preserve our past and the memories of the people who have gone before us by restoring and maintaining our cemeteries. Cemeteries are truly museums without walls. Visit one near you, and volunteer to help. What you do will be remembered and appreciated for generations to come.

The ghosts were waiting for me when I arrived at Monroe Street Cemetery that morning.

I figured they would be. They’d been hanging around my office at Garden View Cemetery ever since the day a couple weeks earlier when my boss, Ella Silverman, informed me that instead of leading tours through Garden View that summer, I would be spending my time working on a restoration project at Monroe Street.

Back at Garden View, I’d pretty much been able to ignore this pack of annoying spooks, and I knew why. They were buried here at Monroe Street, and far from where they were resting (but not at peace), they didn’t have nearly as much ghostly oomph. Here they were as lively as the dead are likely to get and way pushier than ghosts have any right to be.

Then again, I guess I couldn’t blame them. Thanks to their daily visits to my office, they’d had a chance to look around Garden View, and they were bound to be pissed. After all, Monroe Street and Garden View are as different from each other as cemeteries can be.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a cemetery geek. Not like Ella. But I do know that in the hierarchy of burying grounds, Garden View is at the tippy-top. Its three hundred acres are as swanky and pristine as Monroe Street is… well, far be it from me to judge, but it’s hard to escape the facts. This one-hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old, thirteen-acre patch just to the west of downtown Cleveland was nowhere near as elegant-or as well maintained-as Garden View. The city-owned Monroe Street had been neglected for years, and it showed. From where I stood, I could see the overgrown paths and shaggy lawn. Oh yeah, and the few hundred vandalized and toppled headstones thrown in just for good measure.

But of course, if Monroe Street were perfect, it wouldn’t need to be restored, I wouldn’t have been there in the first place, and the gang of irritating ghosts wouldn’t have been all over me like-

Well, like ghosts on the world’s one and only private investigator for the dead.

“My hat is missing.” A tall, thin guy, who probably hadn’t looked any better alive than he did dead, rubbed the top of his bald head. “They say you solve mysteries. They told me you could find it.”

“As if she’d waste her time on you!” A woman in a canary yellow gown and one of those big honkin’ picture hats elbowed him out of the way and stepped into my path. “I haven’t heard from my beau. Something terrible must have happened to him. Else he never would have abandoned me. You must find him. They say you have the Gift, and-”

“News flash!” I said this nice and loud so Mr. Hatless and Ms. I-Should-Have-Looked-in-a-Mirror-Before-I-Wore-Yellow-with-My-Waxy-Complexion and all the rest of the ghosts crowding in on me were sure to hear. There were a couple dozen of them, and I glanced all around, meeting their eyes one after the other. “Missing hats and missing lovers… Come on, people, you know that’s not my thing. If you’ve got something important for me to investigate-”

“Aunt Lulu’s ruby necklace was nowhere to be found after she passed,” a woman wailed.

“My brother told Ma I was the one who ate the last of the cherry pie,” a man moaned.

“There’s money missing from the collection plate.” This from an elderly man in a clerical collar.

“Which ain’t nearly as important as my problem.” A flapper pushed to the front of the crowd. “There’s liquor missing from the speakeasy, and if the boss finds out, there will be hell to pay.”

At the sound of such language, Ms. Yellow swooned.

The preacher tsk-tsked.

And me?

I knew if I didn’t take control, these annoying ghosts would spend the summer bugging the crap out of me. With the restoration project already on my plate, that was more than I could handle.

“You’re not listening. None of you are listening!” I stomped one Juicy Couture ballet-flat clad foot against the ground to emphasize my point. “I don’t waste my Gift on dumb stuff,” I told them, even though I shouldn’t have had to. “So let’s make two lines. Those of you who are looking for lost necklaces and missing boyfriends and money and such…” I waved to my right. “You get over here. If any of you were murdered and need me to actually use my Gift to find your killer so you can finally go into the light…” I gestured to my left.

They shuffled and shambled. They stalled and hemmed and hawed. But in the end, they formed the lines. I should say line . One. On my right.

“All rightee, then,” I said, with a ta-da gesture to my left. “None of you have anything important for me to investigate. Nothing that involves you crossing to the Other Side, anyway. So how about you just get a move on.” I shooed them. “I’ve got enough problems without a bunch of annoying spooks spooking me.”

Big surprise, they actually listened. One by one, they drifted off among the tumbled headstones and overgrown paths of Monroe Street and disappeared.

Except for one guy who’d been lurking at the back of the crowd. I’d noticed him not because he was as pushy as the other ghosts, but because he wasn’t. While they competed for my attention, he kept his distance. While they chattered, he kept his mouth shut. And while the rest of them scattered off into the nowhere where ghosts go when they aren’t hanging around to bug me, he stayed. But he never looked at me.

Chin up, shoulders back, chest out like a soldier on parade, he paced back and forth on the small, clear path between the cemetery driveway and the overgrown tangle of weeds that was all that was left of the once-pristine grounds of Monroe Street.

Interested in spite of the good sense that told me not to be, I looked him over.

This ghost was a middle-aged man in a charcoal pin-stripe suit. Narrow stripes, narrow lapels, narrow tie. The only thing big about the guy was the black plastic frames of his glasses. That, and his shoulders. He wasn’t tall, but he was stocky and broad, and not as handsome as he was rugged looking. Maybe it was my imagination, but I also thought he looked a little lost.

Did Pepper Martin know to keep her mouth shut? You bet she did. Which doesn’t explain why I stepped toward him. “Is there some part of if you weren’t murdered, I’m not interested you don’t understand?” I asked. “Because if there isn’t-”

He stepped behind a tall-standing headstone and vanished into thin air. Just like that.

“So much for ghosts.” I brushed my hands together, ridding myself of the thought as well as the responsibility of taking care of so many ectoplasmic pests, and it was a good thing I did. Just as that last ghost vanished, my boss Ella pulled up in her minivan and parked behind my Mustang.

“Yoo hoo!” She rolled down the window and waved. Like I’d miss the only other living person anywhere around?