Gardened of the Damned Read online

  There was a pile of mail behind the door. Dehan hunkered down to gather it up. The place smelled musty and unlived-in. The drapes were drawn, and there was only a filtering of light to alleviate the gloom. To the right of the door, a flight of stairs rose to an upper floor. To the left, there was an open-plan living room, dining area, and a kitchen, separated by a breakfast bar. There was a sofa and two chairs arranged around a TV. A framed photograph of a very pretty young girl with a middle-aged man and woman stood on a small bookcase that held mainly DVDs and CDs. The books were Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan trilogy, three books by Stanislavski, Norma Jean by Fred Lawrence Guiles, and three self-help books by authors I had never heard of: Dream Yourself Happy, It’s Not Your Fault, and Rebirth in Life: A Guide to Rebecoming. There was also a scrapbook in which she had pasted reviews of plays she had been in.

  As I was reading through them, I became aware of the hum of the fridge. There was a table lamp nearby, and I reached out and switched it on. It cast a dull, amber glow. Dehan was at the table leafing through the mail and turned to look at me. I stood, went to the kitchen, and opened the fridge. It was full of rotting, moldy cheese and vegetables. I closed it and leaned on the breakfast bar to look at Dehan.

  She said, “There’s been enough money in her bank to cover her electricity bills, which must have been minimal. But more important than that, she was intending to come home. She was not planning on staying in New York, or on disappearing. If she had been, she would have cleaned out her account and disconnected the electricity.”

  I nodded. “What have you got there?”

  “Not much. A few bills, invoices. But this could be useful. It seems she’s an actress; this is a letter from her agent, Philip Shaw.”

  I frowned. “I didn’t think anybody wrote letters anymore.”

  “These are statements. Maybe she wanted hard copies.” She glanced at me and smiled. “Maybe her agent is a dinosaur.”

  “There are a few of us left. We’d better go and have a talk to him.”

  We had a look upstairs. There were still clothes in her closet and her dresser. They were of a surprising variety, from torn jeans and sweatshirts to elegant ball gowns and cocktail dresses, from the demure to the downright outrageous. Dehan raised an eyebrow at them. “I guess an actress needs all this.”

  “Most women,” I said, with the air of one who knew, “like to dress differently for different occasions. They don’t wear the same jeans and boots day in, day out.”

  “Like you’d know.”

  She had a dressing table with lots of makeup, and in the bathroom, her toothbrush was gone, but most of her toiletries were still there. Dehan sat on the end of the bed and scrunched up her face.

  “So here is an actress, living in a nice house in the Bay Area. She has an agent, and she is obviously working because she has money in the bank and she’s keeping this house on her own. One day she ups and goes to New York, but not just New York—the Bronx. She is not planning to stay there; she is planning to come back soon, so it’s just a visit. While she’s there, she visits this loser, Stephen Springfellow, the Sureños show up, beat seven bales of shit out of him, and then shoot them both. They leave him dead where he is on the chair, and take her body away with them.”

  I was leaning on the bathroom doorjamb listening to her. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense. We need to know why she went to New York.”

  “Maybe she got a gig there and that’s how she met Stephen…” But even as she said it, she was looking unconvinced. “He doesn’t strike me as the theater-going type. I think they met here.”

  There was something nagging at the back of my mind. “Didn’t the file say Stephen had been living in San Francisco?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, for a couple of years. Then went back east in 2014. They could have met here.”

  “So maybe she went back for some kind of reconciliation.”

  “Why suddenly? What happened to make her suddenly want to go out east and meet up with him?”

  “We need to talk to her agent.”

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  Table of Contents

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  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  Twenty-ONE

  Twenty-TWO

  Twenty-THREE

  Twenty-FOUR

  Twenty-FIVE

  Twenty-SIX

  Twenty-SEVEN

  Epilogue

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  LAST CHANCE

  EXCERPT OF BOOK FOUR...

  Two

  Three