The Obituarist

By Patrick O'Duffy

What happens to your Facebook account when you die?

Kendall Barber calls himself an obituarist – a social media undertaker who settles accounts for the dead. If you need your loved one’s Twitter account closed down or one last blog post to be made, he’ll take care of it, while also making sure that identity thieves can’t access forgotten personal data. It’s his way of making amends for his past, a path that has seen him return to the seedy city of Port Virtue after years in exile.

What if cleaning up your accounts could get you killed?

But now Kendall’s past is reaching out to drag him back into the world of identity theft, just as he gets in over his head with a beautiful new client whose dead brother may have been murdered – if he’s even dead at all. Chased by bikers, slapped around by Samoans and hassled by the police, all Kendall wants to do is close the case and impress his client without winding up just as deceased as the usual subjects of his work.

Will the obituarist have to write his own death notice?

Or can Kendall turn the tables and put this body to rest?

The Obituarist is a crime novella about death, identity and redemption. It’s very serious, except for when it’s not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick O'Duffy
• Release date: Apr 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476389325

Patrick O'Duffy

Patrick O'Duffy is tall, Australian and a professional editor, although not always in that order. He has written role-playing games, short fiction, a little journalism and freelance non-fiction, and is currently working on a novel, although frankly not working hard enough. He loves off-kilter fiction, Batman comics and his wife, and finds this whole writing-about-yourself-in-the-third-person thing difficult to take seriously.

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The Obituarist

Patrick O'Duffy

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Patrick O'Duffy

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License Notes

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For Nichole, who really liked it.

And for Raymond Chandler, even though he would have hated it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

AFTERWORD

ONE

Jay Moledacker was far more handsome in death than he ever had been in life. Okay, not true, but at least his Facebook profile picture was now a lot more dignified. Not difficult, since his profile picture while alive had been a photo of him drunk and vomiting onto a horse during a racing carnival.

Now that he was dead – of an embolism, rather than being kicked to death – he looked regal, elegant and a good six years younger. That's because I had to use his graduation photo; everything after that point seemed to involve Jay throwing up, getting punched in nightclubs or out cold with FUCKWIT written on his chest in mustard.

A life well lived. Well, a life. Lived.

And it had fallen to me to close it all down.

Which didn't stop my clients – his parents – from dicking me about on the invoice.

'I don't understand this charge here,' Mrs Moledacker said, pointing to the first item on the invoice. Yes, the first one. This was going to be a hard sell. 'Investigation into subject's internet access profile. We told you he was on the Facebook when we hired you, so what else did you need to investigate?'

'That means that I had to find out his passwords, ma'am. I had to go into his browser settings, his internet history and the personal details you gave me to put it together. It took a little time.' To be honest it took about five minutes, most of which was checking his emails to see that Jay's friends called him Boofer, then plugging in the standard nickname-plus-birth-year combos. Still, I bill in fifteen-minute increments. 'It would have taken longer if he'd used a number of different passwords. But he didn't.'

'Oh. What about this? Search for and remove subject's personal information on the following sites. These aren't the places we asked you to fix!'

'No, ma'am, they're not, but they're sites that Jay used to frequent and that still had some of his personal and financial details in their records.'

Mrs Moledacker began running through the list. 'Balling cars dot com... club scene dot com... hot and horny whores dot com, oh Jay...' I suspected that the dozen-odd porn sites listed on the breakdown would disappoint but not surprise Jay's parents. 'Wait, what's this? Hamster heaven dot com?'

'It's a virtual hamster, um, zoo, I suppose you'd say. Jay had four virtual hamsters in a little virtual hutch and would buy virtual habitrails and the like for them to play with.'

'I don't think so,' and Mrs Moledacker was very firm on this. 'That doesn't sound like something Jay would find interesting. This is a mistake!'

'It's not a mistake, ma'am. I can show you the records of Jay's account and the monthly subscription fee in his bank statements.'

'But...' Mrs Moledacker visibly struggled to reconcile her knowledge of her binge-and-purge boychick with a man who groomed and bred database entries shaped like gerbils.

'Ma'am, everyone has a hidden side. There's always something that can surprise you, even in someone you've known their entire life. We in the industry come across it all the time.' Not that I knew anyone else in this industry, such as it was, but I'm sure it happened to them too.

Jay Moledacker Senior leaned over, the chewed ends of his moustache the same damp grey colour of his wife's pearls.

'Look, Mr Barber, we hired you to get into Jay's internet places and put up obituary notices, make them look nice, include the funeral details. And that's great, fine, you did that. But we didn't ask for this password and browser guff, this... this hamster nonsense. The other people we read about in the newspaper, the internet funeral directors, they don't do all this.'

'No, they don't. But they should.'

'Why?'

I launched into my spiel. 'Because if Jay's name and date of birth are still in the registry of a website, they can be found if someone breaks into that registry to steal the data. Same for his bank account and credit card details. And once someone has information like that, they can steal Jay's identity. They can run up bills on his old credit card, or create new accounts and get new cards and run up bills on those. They can get a driver's licence, a passport, a membership at a gym or a permit to buy a gun. All by claiming to be your son.'

My phone bleeped in my pocket. 'Excuse me a moment,' I said to the Moledackers, and turned around in my chair to look out the window while I took the call. 'Kendall Barber.'

'Yeah, hey. Flynn Douglas told me you might be someone I could talk to about a project.'

And there it was. I'd been expecting a call like this sooner or later.

I said, 'Sorry, you have the wrong number,' and hung up on him, knowing he'd call back eventually.

'Where was I? Oh, right. And when the banks come looking for payment, when the police come looking for someone to arrest, when journalists want to know who slept with the mayor's daughter and then crashed her car into a hot dog stand and left his gun and underpants behind... they'll come to your door. And break your heart.'

By now the Moledackers were looking at each other in terror at the thought of scandal, debt collectors and the desecration of their son's sort-of-good name.

'Everyone leaves online footprints behind when they pass away. Footprints that other people can use to steal their shoes, and I know that's not a very good metaphor but I think you get my point. My job as Jay's obituarist isn't just to post a final tweet – I'm here to protect you and the memory of your son. Other services might put a black border on your son's homepage. I do that and I make sure no-one can steal his identity. For his sake and yours.'