Deader Still

29

I went home and slept, but woke up the next morning good and depressed. I unlocked the door that led to my Fortress of Solitude, the White Room. I flicked on the light. Every piece of furniture and even the walls were all the same shade of white, and, more importantly, nothing in the room would set off my psychometry. I was hoping to clear my head by sitting in the neutral room, but it was no good. Its blinding whiteness and blank features only served to depress me further, and so I decided to skip out on going to the Javits Center later. If I didn’t see Connor, I wouldn’t have to deal with him, right? Instead, I would work on this chupacabra case all on my own. Well, mostly on my own, anyway. First I had to bait Godfrey.

“Donut?” I said, holding out the box I had just bought from the front counter of the Lovecraft Café. Godfrey Candella looked up from the wingback chair he was sitting in, pausing his pen on the page of his open Moleskine notebook.

“Oh,” he said, quite surprised by my offer. “Thank you.”

“Try the powdered ones,” I said. “They’re lemon filled, I think.”

“I don’t do powdered donuts,” he said, quite serious. He took one of the plain ones out of the box. “The powder gets all over my suit.”

Given the fastidious nature with which Godfrey dressed himself, it wasn’t surprising. I sat down across from him and helped myself to one of the powdered ones.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “I don’t care if I get all powdery. Brushes right off the leather.”

I bit into the donut. Jelly. I hated getting jelly when I was expecting lemon. I swallowed the bite, but put the donut back in the box. I grabbed the other powdered one. This time when I bit in I was rewarded with the taste of delicious lemony goodness.

When I looked up, Godfrey was staring at me.

“Is there something that you needed, Simon?”

“Me?” I said, nonchalant. “Not really. Just . . . enjoying my donut here.”

“Oh,” Godfrey said, finding his place in his notebook. “Okay. You don’t mind if I get back to my notes, then?”

“Not at all,” I said. Godfrey’s concentration fell back to his work while I finished my first donut in silence.

“Another donut?” I asked when I was done.

Godfrey held up his first one; only three bites were gone from it.

“Still working on this one,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Sorry,” I said, then started poking around the remaining ones in the box.

Godfrey seemed put off by my being there.

“Honestly, Simon, if there’s something that you need . . .”

“Well,” I said, “now that you mention it, I was kind of looking for a little help with something.”

“Ah,” he said, and closed his notebook. “I see. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Thing is, I really can’t tell you what it’s about,” I said, feeling bad about being so cryptic.

“Is this something to do for the Fraternal Order?” he said.

“Yes,” I lied, but it was only a half lie. I had discussed Godfrey and his history with the Inspectre and the both of us were F.O.G.gies, so didn’t that count a little?

“But I really can’t tell you,” I continued.

Godfrey gave a sad but knowing smile. “You’d be surprised how often I hear that. For someone as archival as myself, a lot of people prefer me in the dark around here. I’ve never quite understood why.”

After talking to the Inspectre, I understood. No one ever wanted to run the risk of letting Godfrey in on his innate luck power.

I stood up.

“Can you come with me?” I asked, gesturing toward the street.

Godfrey looked astounded. “You mean . . . out into the field?”

“Why do you look so shocked?” I asked. “I’ve seen you out on operations plenty of times.”

He shook his head. “No one really asks me to go there. I just happen to be in the neighborhood and catch some of the commotion. But no one’s ever asked me officially to come on an operation.”

“And you still haven’t been asked officially,” I said with pointed wariness in my voice. I sat back down and leaned in conspiratorially. “I need you to keep this under wraps for now.”

He smiled like a little kid, then wiped it from his face before nodding his head with vigor.

“Sure,” he said. “Absolutely. Do you think I should change?” He looked down warily at his suit.

“Do you own anything other than suits?” I asked.

He considered it for a moment. “Truthfully, no,” he answered.

“Then don’t sweat it.” I stood up. Godfrey stood as well, ready to follow, his eyes already showing his excitement. “Should just be a walk in the park.”

“When you said it would just be a walk in the park,” Godfrey said, taking off his suit coat and throwing it over one shoulder, “I thought you meant it figuratively, not, you know, an actual walk in the park.”

During the day, Central Park was far less spooky. I led Godfrey toward the crime scene. We stood at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, staring up the side of it. The crabs, I noticed, were still missing.

The Gauntlet archivist stood there, stone still, as if his eyes were recording every last detail of the monument, writing it to the hard drive that was his brain.

“God?” I asked. “You okay?”

“Sorry,” he offered when he pulled out of his trance. “I don’t usually get to see many of the things in our archives up close. Fascinating.”

I wanted to give the poor guy a hug. Godfrey looked kind of lonely. Given that it was daylight in a park full of people, I opted for clapping him on the shoulder in reassurance. That seemed to do the trick for now.

“You need to get out more,” I said.

The park was unseasonably warm and the two of us were sweating bullets. Godfrey even loosened his tie, a feat I wouldn’t have imagined possible for him.

“So now what?” he said after we had stood at the crime scene for a couple minutes.

“I hoped having a second set of eyes might help me figure out something more about what happened to that jogger here,” I lied.

Honestly, when I’d talked Godfrey into joining me, I didn’t know what was supposed to happen. The Inspectre had told me about his powers, but I had no idea how they worked. I had simply brought Godfrey here because I thought I might be able to use him as some kind of clue lightning rod that would lead me in the right direction.

I was grasping at straws just to keep this case moving. The shame of having called a false alarm on vampiric activity stung, and in my desperation I needed a break in the case. I’d hoped that, however Godfrey’s power worked, whatever innate ability he had would have kicked in by now.

“Let me clean my glasses, then,” Godfrey said, untucking his shirttail, nearly causing me to die of shock. Candella was a fastidious dresser, but he was so focused on actually being out in the field that he didn’t care what was happening to his outward appearance. He wiped his glasses clean before sliding them back onto his nose just as one of his lenses popped out and rolled off across the stones.

“Oh, bother,” he said, and knelt down to find it. I joined him in his search.

People walked by, giving us strange looks as they went, no doubt wondering why two grown men were crawling around together in Central Park. After several minutes, Godfrey found his lense and we stood back up. Earlier I had printed out a map to mark the two incidents I had dealt with so far—the attack at the pier and the one on Dr. Kolb—and I pulled it out now to examine it.

“I’m sorry,” Godfrey said as he fished around in his pockets for something. “I don’t notice anything. I’m afraid I’m not much use out here.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

I looked up from my map, and Godfrey was heading back up past the monument and toward the East Side exit onto Fifth Avenue.

“Hey, God,” I called after him. “Where the hell are you going?”

Godfrey turned, and his face was slack. When he spoke, it was like he was in a fugue state. “I need to repair my glasses. Have to find a repair kit.”

He turned back around and started walking off again.

“God!” I called out after him, but it was no use. Godfrey Candella was on a mission, and with every passing second, I started thinking that maybe he was on to something. I folded up my map and followed him, but still kept far enough away so as to not disturb whatever mojo he had going on.

At Fifth Avenue he crossed against the light, almost getting himself run over in the process. Tires screeched and horns blared, but Godfrey didn’t react to any of it. He entered a Duane Reade that was on the corner. Minutes later he reappeared at the door with an eyeglass repair kit, which he quickly opened, using the tiny tools to pop his lense back into place before fishing out a miniature screw to hold it in his frames.

When he was done, he noticed that his shoe was untied. Godfrey leaned against a lamppost to steady himself while he lifted his foot to retie it, but even so he stumbled and had to reach out for the post. His fingers grabbed for it, but only ended up tearing away one of the flyers affixed to the post itself. He read it and started heading up Fifth Avenue. This was the strange sort of stuff I had been hoping for out of him. I followed.

When he stopped in front of the Guggenheim Museum, I finally ran up to him.

“Oh, hello, Simon,” he said, coming out of his trance. “Have you come for the show?”

“Huh?” I said. “What show are you talking about?”

Godfrey held up the flyer, and I snatched it from him. It advertised a modern art installation currently going on, but other than that, it looked normal enough.

“This is why you came here?” I said. Godfrey nodded.

There had to be more to this. He had stopped here, of all places. I pulled out the map and consulted it again. I found the tourist icon for the Guggenheim, then the one for the boat at the pier. Running in a straight line between them was the very spot where we had found the body of Dr. Kolb. The chupacabra hadn’t been after Dr. Kolb. The good doctor had merely gotten himself in the way of its direct beeline for the museum. I put the map away.

“Follow me,” I said, and started walking around to the side of the building. If the chupacabra had come to this spot, I doubt it had gone in through the main entrance of the museum. I doubted they could open doors, anyway. There had to be another opening. I crept along the wall and tried every door I found, only to find each and every one locked. At the end of the building, however, was a gated area and the gate was slightly open. The door inside of it sat oddly ajar as well. I ran over to it.

“We’re not going in there, are we?” he said, his eyes widening like a fifth-grader spying an ice cream truck.

“Not we,” I corrected. “Just me. This is where you get off.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded.

Godfrey looked nervous, scared, and a little relieved that his field trip was about to end this way. I had no other choice but to send him back to the offices. I wouldn’t put him at further risk. Using him like a lightning rod for what I was looking for would probably get me in trouble anyway.

I reached for the door just inside the broken gate but pulled away from it.

Up close, the door wasn’t just open, but its lock had been busted by force. I looked for whatever security system was attached to it, only to find that someone had already looped the exposed circuits in an expert manner so there would be no danger of setting off any of the alarms. Professional work, something I was pretty sure a chupacabra couldn’t do.

I turned back to Godfrey.

“Listen,” I said. “You can’t breathe a word of this to Connor or the Inspectre, okay? They’d just get pissed off or worried. But if I’m not back in the office by six or so, let them know where I went. Got it?”

Godfrey nodded and backed away from the gate. He gave an all-too-enthusiastic thumbs-up at me. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I returned it before entering and closing the door behind me.

With my power back, I could certainly handle a little re-con with just my bat by my side, couldn’t I? After all, it was just a museum in the daytime.

The interior of the Guggenheim corkscrewed downward underground the same way the museum proper did upward. A set of dimly lit stairs ran down into the depths of the abandoned part of the building and I followed them, contemplating the finer differences between bravery in the face of potential danger and stupidity. I blamed my time with the Fraternal Order of Goodness for blurring the line so much.