A Ghost of a Chance: The Haunting of Detective Tory Alston

By Jim Van Loozen

When private detective Ransom Stone embarked on the investigation of a missing congressional intern, he suspected the trail would lead to murder -- only not his! Suspended on Earth as a ghost, he finds that he is capable of assisting Detective Tory Alston in her quest to find his murderer. That the two investigations would become linked is inevitable. With a tapestry of unexpected plot twists and a fair share of twisted characters in play, the story harkens back to the days of solid Noir fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475986112

Jim Van Loozen

Jim Van Loozen was a celebrated newspaper reporter and editor in Houston before moving to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S. Postal Service headquarters in a number of positions. He has won numerous awards and honors for his writing and now resides in Florida with his wife Diane. His novel A Ghost of a Chance also has been published by iUniverse.

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1

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I f it hadn’t been for the rain and the pending decision of whether Heaven or Hell awaited the arrival of my soul, I might have embraced the last day of my connection with Planet Earth with a sense of joyful expectation. But although I know that it is the mother of all clichés, it was a dark and stormy day. That’s the best way it could be described.

It had been raining the proverbial cats and dogs off and on since about 3:30 a.m., which was five hours ago. The day dawned on one of those gray amorphous masses where the clouds are sucked down to the ground and the air is an ugly mixture of fog, hanging mist, and intermittent rain showers. The effect was like looking out through dirty lace curtains. The ugliness of the city was suddenly exposed, every living and inanimate thing seemed like an apparition.

When I was detecting, I abhorred days like this. May flowers? Okay, I’d stop to smell the roses, but you could keep the April showers. That was my attitude.

When you did most of your legwork, so to speak, watching with your backside planted on a car seat and your window on the world was the fogged up windshield of an aging but dependable Subaru Outback, rain was an occupational nuisance. It would stream down the glass and offer an at best distorted view of a world I already considered to be warped.

In my line of work, I saw more of the worst than the best people could be. Over time, it wore my optimism down and made me hate the rain, especially winter rain that chilled both the body and the soul without actually touching either.

Instead of a last rainy day, I wished it was snowing. Snow covers up a lot of human excesses and transforms the worst cityscapes into soundless pristine postcards that hint at the beauty of newness and fresh starts. That seemed like a perfect sendoff to me.

Not so the rain. Taking photographs on rainy days was similar to having cataracts. The nature of private detecting was being a legal Peeping Tom, although I never took any voyeuristic pleasure from the spying. The camera was just one of my key tools, not some pleasure toy.

Unlike combat photographers, who documented the horrors of war, or news photographers, who captured the horrors of peace, my galleries were freeze frames of the seedier side of everyday life, if you called that living. I recorded histrionics, not history. My subjects weren’t artistic or noble: cheating spouses, workers’ compensation frauds, shoplifters, petty thieves of all kinds. Rain made the job of recording their transgressions more difficult.

When I was a kid growing up in southern New Jersey, and hadn’t yet come to hate the rain, I would think of days like today as the best days for hunkering down with a good book or watching old movies on television. Or, perhaps, for gathering a few friends in the gloom of the backyard clubhouse we had fashioned from an old rusty tool shed and telling stories while the rain drummed out its cadence on the tin roof.

With the imagination of youth as our guide and the dreariness of a sputtering camp lantern as our inspiration, we would inevitably turn to ghost stories. Like the one I am about to tell you.

2

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I am dead now, of course, murdered while having sex with an unfortunate friend who worked as a prostitute. The killer crept up on us stealthily; I didn’t hear a thing. In a split second a silencer spit a bullet into my brain and scrambled my thoughts, including any awareness of the second shot that killed her.

Until then, I was a damn good detective with a talent for locating missing persons. I don’t know why I was good at these cases. Maybe it was their similarity to the childhood staple of hide-and-seek, and my inner child had never allowed me to grow up completely.

It had to be my last search that triggered my demise because my work never was glamorous like on television or in the movies. Mostly it was low key investigative work that kept me in groceries and current on the payments on my Outback and the rent for a decent apartment and a functional office space. These possessions, along with a modest account at the local bank, collectively represented my financial net worth. Not much, but I was never chained to the office, was independent, and thought both were worth more than money.

I don’t recall being inordinately proud or excessively ashamed of the work. Everybody is good at some level of craft, and my talents for snooping had resulted in my gravitation into detecting.

I had my fair share of detractors who found my work and me distasteful. Some of them, I think, were jealous even though I wasn’t gorgeous like a Redford. I was more the heroic type, rugged like Bogart or John Wayne: square face that showed the wear and tear of life, square jaw, square shoulders, and really, really blue eyes that sometimes proved to be lady killers. I also had been described as That shamus with the small scar over his eye and the big nose he likes to stick into places it doesn’t belong. Or, my personal favorite, That gumshoe who dresses so well you’d think he was for sale.

Hell, I was for sale. But I never presented anybody with consequences they didn’t deserve. Someone would filch a little inventory, starting their company toward the death of a thousand cuts. An otherwise doting wife would step out an afternoon or two a week to the local tea dance to banish her boredom and violate the borders of fidelity. Or a guy with a ‘crippling back injury’ would be spending his benefits on golf lessons that had him hitting a nice draw and lowering his only legitimate handicap. It was my job to peek and pry and document these sins: to stop the bleeding, cheating, and double-dealing. I considered that mundane but honorable work, except for my last missing person case, the Holly Morison matter.

People like Holly had a lot of reasons for running away and just as many tricks for disappearing. But like a good magic act, their success depended on creating illusion. Some subconscious insight enabled me to see through the smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand to make them reappear, unless they were murdered. About one in ten of my missing person cases went down that way, and they always were my least favorite. They meant grisly details, more intense interaction with the cops, and, usually, time and work and expenses for which I wasn’t paid or reimbursed.

Murders also increased the likelihood that I would have to use a gun instead of a camera. I preferred using my brains and my wits, and occasionally a little good luck, to break my cases. I never was a danger freak. A murder investigation meant danger. Invariably, someone would point a gun at me, and I liked that least of all. There was nothing like a little gunplay for turning honorable work into something tawdry and untidy and more annoying than the rainiest day.

Murder never ended with just a single victim. It changed and trampled a score of lives, from the victim’s, to the family’s, to the perpetrator’s. Sometimes the body count mounted up until the perp’s corpse was the last to be thrown on the pile, often with the state’s blessing. I was pretty sure that’s where the Morison case was heading, but I was about a mile off on the ‘last body on the pile’ thing since this time that was me!

You’d think that as a trained detective I would have seen my murder coming. But I came home from that night on the town a little too tight on good scotch and totally distracted by my female friend. We were too deep into our sexual union for me to hear the rustle of clothes or the light rumble of the closet door opening. The cost was ‘Pfft, pfft, you’re dead.’

I used to think life ended with earthly events being followed immediately by the final judgments rendered in Heaven. I also missed that one by a mile, I now know.

When I woke up I was a ghost. I was on the threshold of the next phase of something, just what I wasn’t certain. But continuing my quest to discover what had happened to Holly Morison was part of the deal. I don’t know why I knew that; I just did.

How did I feel about all this? I wasn’t thrilled with being one of the undead, a spectral zombie. I existed in some dimensional warp I didn’t fully comprehend. Call it what you like: The Other Side, The Spirit World, or The Supernatural. I thought of it as Serlingville, a time and place somewhere between Heaven and Earth, a kind of holding cell between yesterday and tomorrow, a prep school for the afterlife.

Whatever, I wasn’t going to take being killed lying down, pardon the pun. The good news seemed to be that I had been given a last chance to work things out, to resolve the unresolved, and to repent the occasions when neither my work nor I were completely honorable.

But to tell the truth, hanging around as a ghost to solve the case I was working when I was murdered didn’t feel right to me. It felt wrong as rain.

3

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H eaven knows what Tory Alston thought about the circumstances of my death. Beyond her forensic impressions of the murder scene and ruminations about the motive for our murders, she said little.

The murders made a king-size mess. When head shot, the human body spills an incredible amount of blood, and two victims can make a grisly pond. Tory seemed unaffected; she might have found the whole scene comical in its own way. Two naked people with their limbs intertwined in the sex act are one of God’s natural sight gags. When you add in a pair of death throes, their final repose is at least ironic. Tory probably knew as many guys as I did who aspired to die in the arms of a beautiful woman, but she knew without asking that the experience wasn’t all it is cracked up to be.

Tory made the murder scene while the crime and our bodies both were still fresh. As she walked through my apartment, she was instantly hard at work. From my perch just beyond human awareness, I watched her breeze through her routine. She looked around carefully, and she made notes about whatever observations seemed to interest her or might require future recall.

She didn’t seem to be favorably struck by the place, but that was okay. I didn’t live to impress. My furniture was mostly cheap laminate, plastic wood veneer over particle board, not because I couldn’t afford better, but because I didn’t need better. My philosophy was not to invest too heavily in junk assets or status symbols. The empty bottle of champagne Doris and I had guzzled in the cab on the ride over, as cheap as the coffee table on which it rested, probably confirmed that for Tory.

The only exception to this pattern was my wardrobe. If you were going to play the role of the successful snoop, you didn’t dress like Colombo. A good suit of clothes attracted and impressed a better class of clientele.

When Tory took the time to examine the trail of hastily discarded garments leading back to my bedroom, she had to notice the designer labels in mine. I don’t know if she put them down to vanity or business strategy, but she made more notes on the small pad she was carrying.

She didn’t flinch when she came through the bedroom door. I took that as a sign of toughness or at least callousness bred by hard experience. I watched her take in the scene with a sweeping look as she seemed to wriggle her nose in a moment of adjustment.

A small lab team was collecting and bagging blood and hair samples, dusting for fingerprints, and taking photographs. They didn’t much resemble the hot-looking CSI teams on television, but they looked like they knew what they were doing. Tory gave them a brief nod of recognition.

She finished her quick look around and seemed to fixate on a frumpy man in his late forties, but with the timeworn look of a much older person. He had a rumpled forehead, bags under his eyes, and cheeks and jowls that sagged sadly. Bloodhound-like in appearance, he reminded me of McGruff, the crime fighting cartoon dog. His posture added to the illusion. He slouched against the dresser, smoking an unfiltered Camel and tapping the ashes into a half-consumed cup of coffee with cream and two sugars, which Tory seemed to recall from the experience of their partnership. She peeked into the cup, nodded affirmatively, and wriggled her nose again.

His name was Harold Coims. Everyone who knew him, including me, called him Moony. He had earned the nickname from his penchant for showing his ass in public, though figuratively through rudeness, not literally, as my dead body was doing on my bloodied double bed. I had wondered long before that moment, and on more than one occasion, how a person with his mean temperament could succeed in a public service job like police work. Years on the job had made him caustic, cantankerous, and meaner than the proverbial junkyard dog.

Then again, the department itself had a deserved reputation for rough behavior when it rubbed up against the criminal element. It was common knowledge that its officers, including Detective Lieutenant Tory Alston, considered the streets a war zone, and they didn’t fancy themselves as peace officers. They were soldiers on an urban battlefield, and Moony was one of their top sergeants.

Tory fixed her attention on Moony’s cigarette and coffee cup and said with mock derision, "You’re committing a major breach in procedure and contaminating a crime scene, Moony. And those stinky things are going to kill you some day."

Hey, Loo, Moony replied with affectionate recognition of her rank. Like a number of females she had ascended to it quickly as the department moved to correct a marked gender gap in its leadership and avoid a run of civil suits. Now she was first string and deserved it.

Moony’s face rippled into a smile as he tapped his ash into the Styrofoam cup and held out his cigarette pack in a gesture of offering. They smell better than the blood and excrement. Death is heinous enough on its own merit. I never understood why the old sphincter has to let go and add to the indignity of it all. He held out the pack like a peace offering. Want one of these?

No thanks, Tory said. Comparatively speaking, it’s not that bad in here. Corpses haven’t had time to ripen. I assume the crew already has worked that little patch where you’ve parked your butt. She offered a little giggle, which didn’t comport with the no nonsense image of her I had formed.

"Yeah, they made the scene about an hour ago. Started right about where I’m leaning. Responding unit put the wheels in motion. A neighbor heard a couple of shots and called 911. Neighbor’s name’s Edwin Stark, and he’s some kind of U.S. Marine. Didn’t see anything though. Probably hid under his bed until the first patrol unit arrived. Semper Fi, Moony said referring to notes he’d made in a pad that was the twin to Tory’s. The staccato of his comments was rapid not unlike the gunshots Edwin Stark had described. Discretion is the better part of valor and all that bullshit, I guess. Patrolmen got a statement, but except for time of death, it doesn’t have much value to us. We’ll talk to him when we’re through here, go over his statement with him, but I wouldn’t expect much. Call came in about 10:15 p.m. give or take five minutes, it pins the time down close enough for us. The M.E. will confirm it."

Tory nodded lightly. What else do you have?

The two stiffs on the bed, or at least they’re going to be stiff soon, Moony said matter-of-factly. With the slightest hint of fantasy and maybe jealousy in his tone, he added, What a way to go.

Tory looked at the mess on the bed. She seemed unmoved. I figured all deaths were obscene in her book, and the seedier tone of ours didn’t seem to impress her much.

Not my idea of a good time, she said almost on cue. Dead is dead. Probably doesn’t matter how you get there, but if I get a choice, let me go quietly and quickly in my sleep.

This way’s almost the same thing, Moony shrugged, cupping his hands at shoulder height, probably never knew what hit them. I’ve been standing here and surmising how it went down. As you can see, he was taking her from behind. That made it easier for the shooter. First slug hits Stone in the head and stays inside the skull. Second shot does the same to her. Looks professional, which means the lab vultures probably are wasting their time.

The new spectral me, already recycled, was nearby listening. I was bothered by Moony’s description of events. The witness’s account of audible gunshots did not jibe with my experience. That made the neighbor a suspect, but I wasn’t ready to make myself known, so I remained silent. There would be a time for me to speak in the very near future. Besides, I was slightly irritated. I didn’t object to Moony’s cavalier description of the acts that added up to our murders. Moony was a cop, and I didn’t expect more from him. But I didn’t expect his ‘give up before we’ve really started’ attitude. I glanced at Tory, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

Moony took another hit from the Camel and dropped it in the remnants of the coffee. Then he motioned to the closet. Nice rack of duds, he continued. See how they’re pushed back and scrunched up to either side? The man on the bed wouldn’t treat his clothes that way. He was too much a dandy for that.

Tory didn’t say anything, but she glanced back at my hastily discarded clothes in the hallway. Her right eyebrow rose as if to note that exceptions were sometimes the rule.

Moony shrugged. I figure the shooter was hiding in there until the climactic moment when they would be making enough noise to cover his transit from the closet to the bed. Can’t tell you how he got in here, but there’s no sign of forced entry. Could be he picked the lock. It was cheap.

Tory stood on her tiptoes and tried fruitlessly to see the door. Scratches?

Tons of them, but nothing that looks new. You want to go look?

Not necessary; I’ll take your word for it. Okay, so you deduce that it’s more than a jealous husband or boyfriend, Tory responded. What would warrant a contract killing? Who are these people?

"Who they were, Moony corrected, was a pair of nobodies. Neither one was a person of great consequence, just a private dick and a hooker, pardon my cynicism."

They were of enough consequence to somebody, Tory pushed back. I agree that this wasn’t a crime of passion. It was coldly brutal. She ran her fingers through her hair, half out of frustration. I could tell she figured it would take divine intervention to close the book on my murder. Turns out, of course, that she pretty much was right.

Moony shrugged and continued his inventory of known facts. Her name was Doris Walsh, and she made a decent living as a call girl. Was a time, back when she was a street hooker, that a couple of patrol cops were hustling her for freebies. Blow jobs a couple of nights a week in the back of the patrol car. As a favor to her pimp, our man on top got involved. He snapped some incriminating photos that got the two cops a suspension. It was enough to make them back off and give her some space when they were returned to duty.

Tory made a quick note. I could almost hear her wheels turn. She said sarcastically, Cops as persons of interest. Great.

Moony rolled on.

Maybe, but they probably just moved their game to another hooker, one without a white knight.

Yeah, Tory commented while scratching out another note. Still need to see where they were when this went down.

Will do, Moony committed while making his own note. I guess Doris was appreciative enough to take care of this dick’s needs once in a while. I’d heard that they’d stayed fast friends. I guess it was true. His name, by the way, was Ransom Stone.

I’ve heard of him, and I remember the flap with the patrol cops, Tory replied, jotting my name down in her notebook. I rated three underlines and an exclamation point. I seem to remember a few other incidents. He worked a lot of missing person cases, right? Made the department look foolish a time or two.

Yeah, same guy, Moony nodded. More than just a couple of times.

And the same guy, I think, who caught some state politician in a child pornography scandal. He had to have made plenty of enemies. Maybe the politician finally got even. Or the two cops actually came back to even an old score.

Not likely. The pol is long gone. Resigned and sent up the river for a short stretch, one of the rare ones who actually did time. He might have met or heard about somebody in stir and hired them, but that’s wrong I think. Turned out to be a blessing for the pervert; when he got out later, he got a tell-all book deal and made a small fortune on it. I think he writes and sells soft porn on the Internet now. Anyway, too much time has passed, water under the proverbial bridge.

Your power of recall of things that are better forgotten is amazing. What about the cops?

"Possible, but I don’t think so. They got a wrist slap. They were already on the bottom rung, so they didn’t have too far to fall. They came back on duty when the media lost interest, reinstated with their pensions intact. We’ll check them out like you said, but if we’re going to do all the possible enemies, the list will be long. Stone did a lot of divorce work. Caught cheaters and outright thieves at