Dead to Me

16

I turned in early for the long day I suddenly had before me. Irene was still sleeping in my guest room when I quietly left the apartment. I felt bad blowing off work, but not bad enough to actually get off the train with my file box and head back south to the city. I was desperate for the cash, and besides, spying on Jane would require darkness so I had to wait until nightfall anyway.

In the meantime, I hoped to reunite one of the promising purchases cluttering up my apartment with its original owner. Kevin Matthews had been the name I had gotten off the Intellivision game system reading at the night market, and a Google search had led me to believe that he had most likely grown up to be a Kevin Matthews who managed a bookstore at the mall in White Plains—so that was my first stop. The four other items I had brought with me were good finds that I could sell off to a local antiques dealer I knew up there. If I didn’t supplement my income unloading these goods, I doubted my building’s management company would accept antiques as payment.

Twenty minutes into my trip, Connor called, and without thinking, I answered.

I debated putting on some form of sick voice, but decided against it.

“How ya feeling, pal?” Connor said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, opting to sound not necessarily sick but not necessarily well either. “I’m okay. I’ve been better.”

“Well, make sure you get lots of fluids.” Why does everyone say that? You could be hit by a car or dive naked into a vat full of razorblades, but people were always suggesting that you get lots of fluids.

“Yeah, I’ll make sure to do that,” I said. The train slowed for its next stop, and before I even thought of covering the mouthpiece, the doors bonged open and a voice came over the loudspeaker.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor said with all the enthusiasm of Droopy Dog. “The station stop is Crestwood. Crestwood station. Scarsdale will be next. Scarsdale will be next. Step in and stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

I slammed my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

“Ohhh,” Connor said, “I see…you’re that kind of ‘sick’ today.”

Shit. Busted.

“Don’t tell the Inspectre, okay?” I pleaded.

“I don’t know, kid.” Connor sounded dead serious. “You’ve already got a mountain of paperwork sitting here in your in-box. Then there are the open investigations you’ve yet to do any follow-up on. I really don’t think it’s fair to the rest of us in Other Division.”

“How about if I promise to…” I couldn’t come up with anything that might appease him. Connor outranked me. I couldn’t bribe him by offering to do most of his tasks or reports that he needed to file. I also doubted he would take me being his coffee boy as payment for his silence.

“Don’t sweat it, kid,” he said with a laugh. “I’m just busting your chops. Everybody sneaks out every now and then. I’ll talk to you when you get back to the office. And kid…?”

“Yeah?”

“Next time, be a little faster on the mute button, will ya?”

After hanging up, I settled back and tried to enjoy the rest of the ride as the fall foliage whooshed past at breakneck speed. The foliage thinned as we pulled into the White Plains station, and I grabbed the legal-sized filing box I’d brought and got off.

A short cab ride through the White Plains business district of shiny modern buildings—tiny compared to the steel canyons of Manhattan—and I was at the Westchester Mall. I had never been there before, and my first thought was Who the hell carpets a mall? I made my way to the nearest directory, found the B. Dalton Bookseller, and headed off to it.

The scent of plastic, books, and fresh carpeting washed over me as I entered the store. After asking to see the manager, a matronly looking clerk named Yolanda showed me to their back room. It was stacked to the ceiling with boxes, and a lanky gentleman was unpacking one of them onto a sleek metal library cart. He would never win World’s Hunkiest Librarian—midthirties, possibly older, with stringy brown hair that made him look all Six Degrees of Ichabod Crane.

“Kevin?” she said. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”

“Thanks, Yolanda. I’ll be with you in a second,” he said, his face still buried in the contents of the box. “As you can see by the state of our store room, the holiday rush is upon us.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking up at the towering cartons. “Who knew the holidays could look so…dangerous.”

“Please,” he said with a gesture toward a small table with several chairs around it, “have a seat.” He sat down, but looked distracted by the amount of work teetering behind him. “I assume you’re here about the holiday help.”

He pulled a yellow legal pad and a stack of blank applications from a nearby shelf, handing one to me. “You’ll need to fill one of these out.”

I placed my file box on the table and sat down opposite him. “No, I don’t, Kev,” I said, pushing the application back toward him.

“I’m sorry…do I know you?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

There was the tiniest hint of nervousness in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. “Well, if you’re not here for the job, what are you here for?” He gave a quick look toward my box.

“Don’t worry,” I said as reassuringly as I could, “it’s nothing bad. I promise.”

“Oh God,” he said, with sudden revelation on his face. “Are you an author? Look, we have buyers at our home office who handle all that. I can give you their phone numbers but you have to go through the proper channels. We do very little direct buying of self-published work on the store level…”

“I’m not selling anything,” I said, reassuring him. I was already losing patience. I still had the antiques dealer to see and I really didn’t have time for Kevin’s guessing game.

I went for the direct approach. I pulled the lid off the box and lifted out the Intellevision unit.

“This, I believe,” I said, handing it to him, “is yours.”

I reached back into the file box and began laying out game box after game box before him—twenty in all. There was a little water damage to some of the boxes from the puddle in the alley where I had helped Connor with the ghost, but other than that, they looked okay.

“My God….” Kevin whispered and tears formed at the corners of his eyes, slowly rolling down his face. He ran his fingers over the individual boxes, pausing his thumb over tiny colored tabs that had been added to the upper-right-hand corners of each.

“What are those?” I said.

I always tried to maintain my emotional detachment when reuniting owners with their lost property, but I had to admit, I always loved seeing their reactions. They often cried, or had to do their damndest not to. The thing was that if an item had a strong enough emotional fingerprint on it that I could identify its past owner, it probably meant that the item was extremely important in the owner’s life.

“I…” he started, and stopped. The words wouldn’t come. Finally he grabbed hold of another one of the boxes. The words Shark! Shark! ran down the side of it, and he hugged the game to his body. “I’m sorry. I’m a little overwhelmed is all.” He pointed to one of the tabs. “My friends—we were geeky as hell back then—and we used to color code the games by their genre. Sports games were green, for grass. Red was for fighting games, because, well, you know…blood and guts. Puzzle games were purple.”

“Why purple?”

He shrugged and smiled. “We couldn’t really think of a good color that stood for puzzles, really, so we went for alliteration. Purple Puzzles. See?”

I nodded and checked my watch. I could make the next train upstate if I was out of here in the next five minutes.

“How on earth did you get your hands on these? And how did you find me?” he asked, drying his eyes on his sleeve. “I thought this stuff was gone forever. I know it must seem foolish that I’m crying over something like this, but there are a lot of memories packed in here.”

“If you look on the bottom of the console, it has your name and old address on it,” I said.

It was a lie, really. I had gone ahead and faked the signature because it seemed a much more plausible explanation than trying to convince him that I had tracked him down through a psychometric vision of his childhood. I hoped he assumed one of his parents had done it.

He picked up the machine, flipped it over, and looked at the signature. “Huh!” Let’s wrap it up, Kev. Honestly, I wasn’t insensitive to what he was going through. I loved giving someone that sense of connection to their past, but if I was to be straight with myself, my real motivation was the possibility of a cash reward. I checked my watch again. Four minutes left to get out of here and catch the next train up to see the antiques dealer in Poughkeepsie. It was time to close the deal. There were two approaches that usually worked. One was a simple “How much you willing to pay?” gambit, but I thought the subtle approach would catch Kevin hook, line, and sinker. He was weepy enough, for sure.

Step one. “I should probably be going,” I said with the most sincere and sheepish look I could muster. “I just thought this stuff might be important to you.”

“Wait,” he said, getting up. “Please…let me give you something for your trouble.”

Step two. Look surprised.

Step three. Refuse once. “No, that’s okay,” I continued. “Really.”

“No, please. I insist.”

Almost everyone says that. “I insist.”

Step four. I reluctantly agreed, like I was doing him a favor by taking his money. “Well,” I said with a kind smile. “If it will make you feel better…”

I walked out of the store with Kevin’s gratitude and a check for just over three hundred dollars. He insisted I not take a dime less. It was amazing how high a price tag people put on healing their emotional scars. I sold memories. I sold a certain amount of healing and hope, too. It didn’t mean that I didn’t feel dirty about it sometimes.