Don of the Dead Read online

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  Copyright © 2006 by Connie Laux

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-082146-3

  ISBN-10: 0-06-082146-9

  First Avon Books paperback printing: June 2006

  First Avon Books special printing: March 2006

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Dedication

  For David,

  my cemetery stommpin' buddy.

  Here's to tomato soup and Cheez-Its!

  Chapter 1

  I have to admit, the first time Gus Scarpetti spoke to me, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention.

  After all, the guy had been dead for thirty years. How much could he possibly have to say?

  "Hey, doll baby!" He called out from the back of the crowd that was gathered around me, and though I'm usually pretty quick on my feet, I was so freaked when I saw him that I was speechless.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the black marble mausoleum that contained the worldly remains of Gus Scarpetti. I looked back toward where this Gus Scarpetti wound his way in and out of the clumps of tourists waiting for me to begin the day's talk: "Cleveland's Famous Dead."

  Dead being the operative word.

  I reminded myself of that fact while I watched Scarpetti sidestep between two blue-haired ladies. "Doll baby. Hey!" He gave me the once-over. Like I'd been hearing since I was thirteen, I was too tall for a girl. Five eleven. Just about the same height as this guy. I also happened to have a size 38C bust.

  Guys always noticed. Even guys who were pretending to be dead guys.

  Scarpetti stared at my chest for a while and he smiled when he looked me in the eye. "You got no manners? I'm talking to you. The least you could do is say hello."

  "Hello." I answered automatically. I was still trying to figure out who concocted a joke this lame. Whoever it was, I had to give him (or her) credit. Where they found a Gus Scarpetti who looked exactly like the Gus Scarpetti I had seen in the pictures in the cemetery's research archives was a mystery to me.

  The guy was shaped like a bull, compact and big-boned, with a nose that sat on his face at an angle, a souvenir of his early years working as mob muscle. He had a football player's neck, as beefy as a porterhouse. Like the photos I'd seen, this Gus Scarpetti was dressed in a perfectly tailored dark suit, a fat tie, and a diamond ring on the pinky finger of his left hand. A white handkerchief peeked out of his breast pocket.

  It was probably what he'd been buried in.

  The thought sent a shiver up my spine, and I shook it away. Good thing. My too-curly carrot-colored hair was wound into a braid and it twitched against the back of my white polo shirt, snapping me back to reality.

  It had taken me a solid week to get the script for this tour down pat. Now this guy shows up and throws me off my game? He deserved to be put on the spot. I made a sweeping gesture toward our guest. "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you all to meet Mr. Augustino Scarpetti."

  You'd think it would have had a little more effect on the crowd. A little more than none, anyway.

  Two dozen pairs of eyes stared at me. As empty as my checkbook. Two dozen people whose sticky tags said their names were things like Gladys and Rose and Henry, waited for me to say more.

  No one at Garden View Cemetery had ever bothered to tell me how to handle a cemetery-tour heckler. I knew I had to punt.

  "Mr. Augustino Scarpetti is buried here." I pointed toward the mausoleum with its Egyptian columns at the front corners and a door that had been imported all the way from Italy. It was brass with a glass insert, and according to what I'd been told by the folks who knew about these things, the door cost more than I paid in rent for an entire year. I guess that was only right since the mausoleum was bigger than my apartment.

  Pretty classy digs for someone who was too dead to appreciate it.

  From the other side of the door, I could see the glow of the stained-glass window at the far end of the mausoleum, the oriental rug that covered the marble floor, and the dozen red roses that were delivered every week like clockwork. Always on Thursday, the day Gus Scarpetti had been gunned down.

  When I turned back around, I half expected that the Gus clone would be gone. But he was still there, looking as interested in what I had to say as everyone else in the group. Which was pretty much the reminder I needed to get my head back into the game.

  "I'll bet most of you have heard stories about Gus," I said, and everybody but Gus nodded enthusiastically. "His mob nickname was the Pope, and he was the head of one of the largest crime families in—"

  "One of the largest?" Scarpetti looked me over like I was a salami hanging in a deli window. His eyes glinted. Just like the diamonds in his ring. "What idiot told you to say that? One of the largest? That's what they get for letting a girl talk about something as important as this. The Scarpetti Family was the largest. The largest family. Go ahead, you tell them that."

  "I don't have to. You just did."

  "Did what?" The question came from a woman named Betty in the front row. I looked her way.

  "What he said," I told her.

  Betty turned toward where I pointed. "He who?"

  "He. Him." For a second, I wondered how the practical joker (whoever he—or she—was) had convinced the Heights Lutheran Senior Citizens League to go along with the gag. Just as quickly, I decided there was no way. They couldn't be bullshitting me. Not all of them. Not Lutherans.

  "Gus Scarpetti. The mobster." This time I didn't just point, I stabbed, the gesture broad enough so that even Chester, the guy with the thick glasses who stood at Betty's side, could see it. "Gus Scarpetti is—"

  My stomach hit bottom, then bounced up again and lodged in my throat.

  Because that's when I realized that nobody else saw the guy.

  "Crazy." The word escaped me on the end of a gasp of 100 percent pure panic.

  Didn't it figure, the Scarpetti figment of my imagination noticed. Smiling, he stepped back and settled his weight against one foot. "You know what to do, doll baby," he said, his voice smooth and satisfied. "Tell them all about me."

  It's not like I had a lot of options. Being a tour guide at Garden View might not be the most ideal job in the world, but it paid better than the barista job at Starbucks that I'd tried and hated. It also didn't involve typing and filing (at least not much), like the phone company job I'd been told I didn't have enough experience for. So it wasn't Saks. Or even Nordstrom. I'd applied at both those places, too, but until I heard back from them (if… when) or figured out some other way to handle the monumental screwup that was my life, this was all I had.

  Besides, I had to get the tour over with and get out. Fast. Before I convinced myself that the crack-up I'd been waiting for had arrived, not only in living color but wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit.

  "Gus Scarpetti. Born in 1921. Got his start with the New York mob. Tried to take over somebody else's territory. Forced to leave town. Came here to Cleveland. Died."

  Even before the last word was out of my mouth, I turned and walked away from the mausoleum. "Follow me and we'll see the grave of famous entrepreneur—"

  "But isn't there more to the story?" Betty's question stopped me dead in my tracks. "A
ren't you going to tell us all that interesting stuff? You know, about how he was killed?"

  With a sigh of surrender, I turned back to the group. And to Gus Scarpetti, who looked pretty satisfied. Like he'd just won the first round and I was the down-for-the-count loser.

  I sucked it up and scrambled to remember my tour script. "One summer night thirty years ago, Gus walked out of his favorite restaurant."

  "And that's when he was killed, right?" A man in the front row asked the question. "He was shot to death by a mob hit man."

  No way could that guy know how grateful I was. Now that everyone knew the not-so-happy ending to the story, I didn't have to tell them. That meant we could get out of Dodge. I backstepped my way toward the street where the tour bus waited for us. "No one was ever arrested," I said. "But the cops are sure that's what happened."

  "You were doing fine right up until then, sweetheart." Like I was some kind of big ol' disappointment, Scarpetti shook his head. "You bought into that same line of bullsh——Madonn'!" He pressed a hand to his heart. "I beg your pardon. I forgot myself. When there are ladies present—"

  I couldn't help it. I started to laugh.

  "Did I miss something?" Betty tapped her hearing aid. "Did I miss a joke?"

  "No!" I tried my best to explain away my sudden fit of the giggles, but my panic got the best of me and sent me into a serious laughing jag. How could I be serious when I felt myself on the brink of the mother of all nervous breakdowns?

  Not only was I hallucinating, now I was getting apologies from the hallucination.

  I wiped away the tears I knew were smudging my mascara and so I could try to get a grip, I waved the group back toward the bus.

  At the last minute, I remembered the advice that had been drilled into me during my training. "Be careful," I told them. "The ground at a cemetery is pretty uneven. It's easy to trip. Just a couple days ago—"

  The truth hit me like a whiff of knock-off perfume. Just three days earlier, I was giving this very same tour when I stepped in a hole and twisted my ankle. The heel of my right shoe snapped off and I went down in a heap and smacked my head on the front step of Scarpetti's mausoleum. When I came to, I was in the ER. The doc there told me I was just fine and at the time, I believed her.

  Apparently, neither one of us figured leftover delusions into the mix.

  The tour group walked ahead of me and now that I had finally figured out what was going on, when Scarpetti walked past, I was ready for him. "I'm just seeing you because I hit my head," I told him. "You're not really here."

  He kept right on walking. "You think?"

  I didn't just think it, I knew it, and it made me feel a whole lot better. I wasn't a whack job. I wasn't cracking up. My walking, talking dead guy was nothing more than a figment of an imagination that got scrambled like an egg when I thwacked my head.

  Of course that didn't explain why I was wasting a perfectly good hallucination on something as weird as a dead-and-gone mobster. You'd think if I was going to fantasize, it would be about something really worthwhile.

  Like my ex-fiancé Joel Panhorst.

  Wearing nothing but a Speedo that was two sizes too small.

  Swimming in a lake full of piranha.

  Wishful thinking, and I snapped out of it just in time to see my Scarpetti fantasy disappear behind a nearby marble column with a statue of a sad-looking lady at the top of it.

  I breathed a long sigh of relief. As hallucinations went, I was glad this one was over.

  That probably explained why I was in such a good mood when I got back on the bus.

  It didn't explain why when we got to the chapel, the next stop on our tour, Scarpetti was leaning against the front door.

  This time, I wasn't just upset, I was pissed. At my own brain for letting this happen. At myself for letting it get to me. When I gathered my clipboard, my hands shook. When I climbed down off the bus, my knees buckled like they were made out of peanut butter. But I had to give myself a lot of credit. The first thing I did was face my own warped fantasy. I marched over to where Scarpetti waited.

  "You're not here," I told him and big points for me, I sounded like I meant it. I guess I figured if I could convince him, I could convince myself. "That means you can go away. Right now."

  "But we're not done."

  I didn't realize that Chester was standing behind me.

  "She wants us to go away, Mother." He handed Betty off the bus. "But we're not done yet, are we? We're supposed to see the grave of that Supreme Court justice. And the former mayor. And that woman. You remember. The one who wrote that cookbook."

  Chester was right, and that meant only one thing. As the cemetery's one and only full-time tour guide, I was trapped like the proverbial dirty rat. As the afternoon ticked by and we visited one grave after another, Gus Scarpetti was always there. Lounging against the headstone of the Supreme Court justice. Sitting next to the angel that topped a long-dead mayor's final resting place. Walking alongside the bus as it wound its way through the two hundred and seventy-five scenic acres of Garden View.

  By the time we were done, I wasn't just tired of my Gus hallucination, I was more convinced than ever that I was teetering on the brink. My stomach was tied in knots. My breathing was shallow. I was shaking and, let's face it, sweat is not an attractive thing.

  As soon as I could, I said goodbye to my tour group and hurried into the ladies' room near the cemetery's main office.

  "Cold water," I mumbled to myself. "Lots of cold water."

  I splattered it on my face. I soaked a paper towel with it and held it to the back of my neck. I tried the face again, leaning over the sink and splashing so much of it on me that the front of my polo shirt got damp and there were drops all over the Pepper Martin printed on my plastic name tag.

  It wasn't until an icy cold drop trickled between my breasts that I realized I was finally breathing a little easier. I stood and looked at myself in the mirror above the sink.

  It wasn't a pretty picture.

  My mascara was a mess. My bangs were soaked. I had long since chewed off my lipstick and without the help of the Pretty in Pink that I made sure I put on when I so much as ducked into the hallway for my morning newspaper, I was as pale as a coed on the first day of spring break. I had never been fond of the freckles that coated my cheeks and nose. They looked worse than ever against the background of washed-out, wrung-out, stressed-out me.

  It's not like I needed a reminder of what was making me feel like a full-blown nutcase. Still, it took me a minute before I dared a look over my shoulder.

  For the first time in what seemed like forever, there was no sign of Gus Scarpetti.

  I let go a long sigh of relief and, as calm as I was going to get and finally back in control, I headed out of the ladies' room.

  The first person I saw outside was Gus.

  I must have turned green because he took one look at me and shrugged. "What? You didn't think I was going to follow you into the ladies' room, did you? Just because I'm a wiseguy doesn't mean I'm some kind of pervert."

  "Are you having headaches? Do your eyes hurt? Is your stomach upset?"

  Each time I shook my head no, Dr. Cecilia Cho checked off another item on her list. When she was done, she looked at me over the rims of her glasses. "You don't have any symptoms. You say you have no pain. Why did you come back here to the ER to see me, Pepper?"

  "I just thought… " I glanced toward the wall. It was backlit, and hanging from it were a series of head X-rays and CT scans. I knew I was looking at my own brain. "I just wondered… "

  Dr. Cho's dark hair was shot through with gray. She wore scrubs and a lab coat decorated with pastel butterflies. She patted my hand. "It's common to feel a little shaky after a mishap like the one you had. Once the world slips out from under your feet, you expect it to happen again. But you've got to remember, you went through… " She checked the patient information sheet on the desk in front of her. "You went through the first twenty-five years of your life with
out an accident. Relax! Chances are, you aren't going to have another one any time soon."

  "I know that. It's just that last night when I was lying awake—"

  "You have trouble sleeping?"

  "No. I mean, not usually. I mean… "

  Actually, I didn't know what I meant. I had never had trouble sleeping until the night before. I tossed and turned all night long, thinking about the Gus Scarpetti I had met in the cemetery. Wondering what was wrong with me and what they did to people who were so crazy that they talked to people nobody else saw. And the people nobody else saw talked back.

  I shrugged before I could stop it. "I just wondered if, you know, a hit on the head might cause a person to… I don't know… Maybe see things?"

  Dr. Cho laughed. One of the nurses outside the office where we were sitting called to her and she popped out of her chair and headed into the hallway. "You've been watching too much TV. The brain doesn't work that way. Your X-rays and scans don't show anything abnormal and your EEG is fine, too. If you're not having any real symptoms… "

  Before I could ask what, exactly, made a symptom real, Dr. Cho was gone.

  I gathered up my Louis Vuitton bag, my sweater, and all that was left of my hopes that I'd find out that Gus Scarpetti was nothing more than residual brain scramble. Just as I turned to leave, a guy walked in. I stopped just short of slamming into his chest.

  Too bad. I saw right away that this was one chest I wouldn't mind getting up close and personal with. Toned. Just like the rest of him.

  Hey, I might have had my heart mashed, smashed, and bashed by Joel the Jerk, but I wasn't dead. No use letting an opportunity like that pass me by. I took a moment to check the guy out.

  He had brown hair a couple weeks past needing a cut. Blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. And one of those boy-next-door faces. Cute. Way cute. In an oh-boy-wouldn't-I-like-to-find-out-what's-under-those-clothes sort of way.

  Speaking of clothes, he was dressed in a green lab coat and underneath it, a blue shirt with a button-down collar over rumpled brown pants and black loafers. There was a hospital ID around his neck. It said he was DAN CALLAHAN, PhD.