Poe Read Free

throw from the hospital, mortuary, and cemetery. Lisa is my main point of contact and supplier of scoops when it comes to the dead or nearly dead. She hears all the good gossip about the inmates (excuse me, residents)—things that of course can’t, but should, go in the obits.
    “Relatives?” I ask.
    “Bitchy niece who’s got her eye on Muriel’s Victorian,” says Lisa.
    Lisa’s voice is smoky, and I know she’s about my age, but I haven’t yet gotten the nerve to ask her to coffee and meet her in person. I like to tell myself that I’m working up to it.
    I tap my pencil on my desk. “So what’s the story?”
    “Well,” says Lisa, and I can hear her pause as she checks to see if there’s anyone within earshot, “apparently Muriel was loaded. She was a burlesque dancer in Vegas.”
    I drop my pencil on the floor with a clatter, causing Myrna to glare in my direction.
    “No shit,” I whisper.
    “But she really made her money playing poker. Word is she was a card counter, and when the Mafia found out, they got her a one-way ticket to New York and told her if they saw her again, no one would ever find the body.”
    I whistle through my teeth. Go Muriel.
    “So she just settled down and got married, never had kids, and played Suzie Homemaker until after her husband Harold died. Then she went back to Vegas one last time.”
    “No one would recognize her,” I say.
    “Exactly,” says Lisa. “Who’d suspect a nice little old lady with permed gray hair? I wouldn’t. Bitchy niece said she made over two hundred grand her first week, but the thick-necked guys started following her with walkie-talkies, so she decided it was time to clear out. A year later the Alzheimer’s started.”
    I jot notes as we talk. Not that any of this will make the paper. But still.
    “Anyone else close?” I ask. As in close to dying. I like to keep track so that if there’s a flurry of deaths in a short period of time, I can have some prep work done and easily make my deadline. I’m that sick.
    “Umm…” says Lisa. “Mrs. Jameson has been dying forever… She seems close, but then I think I said that last month.”
    “Two months ago,” I say. I already have a file on Mrs. Jameson with some preliminary research, so I could wrap her up fairly quickly. “Nothing new?”
    “No,” says Lisa with a sigh. “I found out she did some charity work at the hospital, nothing else.”
    I make a note to do some digging. There’s always “the thing” that separates a person out, makes them unique, different. It’s not always stories about Vegas gambling, although you might be surprised at thenumber of adulterous relationships, incarcerations, and illegitimate children of the Greatest Generation currently stationed at Crosslands. Sometimes the thing is as simple as a mastery of French cuisine, a collection of rare butterflies pinned on a piece of velvet in the living room, or a stay in the White House during the Nixon years. Finding the thing gives me a strange kind of thrill. It’s finding the story behind the façade, even if I have to spin it so that the raging alcoholic was “the life of the party” and the drug addict dies “suddenly of heart failure.” I know the truth. Someone knows the truth before they’re buried. I think everyone deserves that.
    “Dimitri, you there?” says Lisa.
    I have once again completely spaced out. This happens often in my line of work.
    “Hey Lisa, I wanted to ask you—”
    Suddenly the line is dead, and I see a large, familiar, thuggish index finger pressing the receiver’s button. Fuck. Nate.
    “Talking to your girlfriend on company time?”
    I look up to find Nate, Mac’s son and the senior editor, aka Senior Asshole, or Senior Douche Bag, or Senior Beneficiary of Nepotism, standing in front of me. There is a characteristic dumb smirk on his squarely-jawed face, and a gleam of unexpressed sadism in his eye. If there was a nuclear war and people resorted to a Lord of the Flies