Royal Ghouls Read online

  “She didn’t say. It was strange. Is everything okay with her?”

  Strange? He didn’t know strange. “As far as I know.”

  Ghost Woman One was joined by Ghost Woman Two. Tall. Thin. The kind of beautiful normally created by Photoshop. Ghost Woman Two had a pair of pantyhose wrapped around her delicate, crooked neck. She choked for several long minutes, face purpling. Then she straightened up and perched her perky kolos on the table’s blue-and-white edge while her friend bled.

  “This is all pantyhose are good for.” Ghost Woman Two smiled down at me with full, red Max Factor lips. “And all he is good for is killing women.”

  “A killer,” the bleeder agreed. “He made this look like a suicide. Convincing, yes? He is very talented.”

  “Talented and deadly. You should run away now. Save yourself. If only we could have saved ourselves.”

  “But we never saw it coming.” The first woman wiped her wrist on a passing waiter. To me, his shirt looked like a used maxi pad but the poor guy had no clue. “The beautiful murderer.”

  “He is beautiful,” the choker agreed.

  Killing women? Detective Leo Samaras? My skin goose-pimpled. Sour acid sloshed around in my previously starving stomach. I jerked in my seat. My elbow bumped my glass. Water everywhere.

  Leo surged forward, napkin in hand. He mopped my dress but it was pointless—this mess, this dinner, was unfixable.

  I got up. I left via the bathroom window. I didn’t look back.

  In the here and now, Sam’s face was passive, curious. I knew that face; my former boss was in information gathering mode. “You think he killed those women?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Want to know what I’d do?”

  “I know what you’d do because it’s the same thing I’d do.” Check homicides, suicides, and missing persons until I found those faces.

  “But you haven’t done it yet, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Let me ask you something.”

  I snorted. “Like I could stop you.”

  Sam laughed, loud and deep. “You know me too well. Okay, my question is this: Why do you think your sister went to see him?”

  “The only reason I can think of is that she considers him her property and wants him to stay away from me.”

  “Why is that? She’s married, got herself a couple of cute kids, a home, a business.”

  “Because he’s her ex and it would be weird if we were together—for all of us. Or maybe because, on some level, she still wants to ride the Leo train.”

  “Or maybe she knows that boy ain’t right. Maybe she can’t articulate what exactly it is that’s wrong with him, but her animal brain knows. You want me to do some digging for you?”

  “You don’t know what the dead women look like.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t poke around, see if he’s got any skeletons in that closet of his.”

  “Not yet.” I wanted to be the one with the shovel, but I wasn’t there yet. Denial wasn’t just a river in Egypt. The longer I delayed digging, the longer I’d be able to stay hopeful. I didn’t want Leo to be a murderer.

  He tapped his cheek. “Then give me some sugar and get going.”

  I kissed Sam’s cheek and hugged the stuffing out him.

  On the other side of Sam’s front door, a surprise was waiting, a surprise I hoped would never darken my doorstep.

  “Aliki Callas, I have not seen you in church recently.” Kyria Sofia wagged her white-gloved finger at me. Kyria Sofia’s brother Father Spiros is the priest at Ayios Konstantinos—Saint Constantine. This means Kyria Sofia has taken the heavy burden of being the island’s morality police upon her slim shoulders—shoulders that were, today, encased in a navy blue skirt suit with her favorite ladybug brooch pinned to the lapel. The hand that wasn’t wagging a finger at me was lightly gripping a wicker basket, filled with loaves of bread and wrapped parcels of cheese and deli meats.

  “I’ve been thinking about going, and it’s the thought that counts.”

  She smiled. Bright. Wide. Faker than Astroturf. “No, the thought does not count at all. Only actions count.” She held the basket out to Sam. “I’m here to do Christ and the Virgin Mary’s work. Helping cripples is the best part of my day.”

  Somehow I doubted that. The priest’s sister possessed the largest collection of bestiality porn in the country. She kept it all on safely hidden on her computer in a folder labelled “Sewing”. And just between us, her most-viewed file involved a “romantic” encounter between a man, a billygoat, and a jumbo-sized can of feta.

  Sam accepted the basket. “This cripple” he pressed lightly on the word “thanks you.”

  Kyria Sofia tittered. “Your Greek is getting so good, I almost forget you are black.”

  My eye twitched.

  “Aliki,” she went on, not giving a fig about her casual racism, “a poulaki told me you were there when that yacht crashed.”

  A poulaki is a little bird. It’s also slang for a small penis. If I were a betting woman, I would not put my money on the bird feeding her that story.

  When I confirmed the rumor, she nodded. “Such a tragedy. I knew Harry Vasilikos, of course.”

  “From here on Merope?”

  “Of course. He used to come often, but not for many years. I do not know why he stopped coming.” She smiled. It was the smile of someone plotting social destruction. “Come to church soon, both of you, eh? Otherwise people will talk.”

  People would talk—they always did—but what Kyria Sofia didn’t mention was that all gossip and rumors would be started by her.

  She waved goodbye and slithered back to the street on squat, sensible heels.

  “That was nice of her,” I said, deadpan.

  Sam grimaced. “I’m the only black man that woman has ever met. She’s dying to know if the rumors are true.”

  Like most days on Merope, this one was shaping up to have a lot of sun in it. Now there was enough heat in the rays for me to discard my top layer. I stuffed it into my bicycle’s basket and considered my next move. Angela’s man of the moment was still absent, so I scrolled through my email and voicemail and picked out the easiest, least time-consuming jobs. I grabbed a satisfying, non-toxic coffee at a kafeneio that wasn’t Merope’s Best and sat at one of the outdoor tables in a patch of gentle sun.

  Almost immediately, I located a heating pad large enough for a donkey and placed the order for one of the local elderly men, who didn’t have internet access or anything to access it with. His donkey was almost as old as he was, and in the colder months the animal’s joints ached.

  The male half of a recently married couple was convinced his bride was cheating, and he wanted me to find out who she was banging and why—and did he have a bigger poutsa than my client? The Merope grapevine had already solved this one. His wife wanted to make a little extra cash, so she’d taken on a job as a sisa cook, whipping up cheap Greek meth for other housewives. She couldn’t brew the illegal drug at home, so while her husband was at work she was sneaking off to one of the island’s abandoned houses to do her cooking.

  I messaged him back and told him he had bigger problems than a cheating wife. Relieved that she wasn’t cheating, and more than a little proud that she displayed ambition and an entrepreneurial spirit, he paid my fee in full, with a bonus.

  Forrest Gump was wrong. Life wasn’t like a box of chocolates; people were.

  While I was sifting through small cases, my brain was gnawing on the Vasilikos murders. Kyria Sofia, using one of her two faces, had mentioned this wasn’t Harry’s first trip to Merope. If she remembered him, maybe others did too. I wasn’t sure which local thread to pull first, so I checked out the list of suspects Harry had given me and crosschecked it with business owners in the Sporades. Not everyone, or every business, is connected to the internet in Greece, so I had to go swimming outside my regular information pool.

  Jackpot on the first search. Penny Papadopoulo, the first name on the list
, owned the largest, most profitable supermarket on the island of Skiathos in the Sporades. Sixty seconds later, Penny was on the other end of my phone, laughing. Her receptionist had patched me right through the moment I’d mentioned Kyrios Harry’s name and death in the same sentence.

  “Are you serious, Harry Vasilikos is dead?”

  “His yacht crashed into Merope, but he was already dead by that point.”

  She laughed and laughed and laughed. When I thought she was done laughing, she laughed some more. “Good. Now I will not have to kill him myself.”

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “He was skata. Rich skata, but skata.”

  “What happened?” The American in me wanted to add a disclaimer such as “If you don’t mind me asking”, but this was Greece, so I did it the direct, Greek way.

  “He expected me to hezo all over the local bakers by selling his bread. Have you tried it? It tastes like archidia.”

  Some balls tasted pretty good, and by the size of Harry’s yacht I figured a lot of other people agreed.

  “Our island doesn’t sell his bread.”

  “Neither does ours, and it never will. The bakers would riot if we started selling his bread. They would go out of business. How could I sleep at night? I was born and raised on Skiathos. This is my home, and these are my people. I own a supermarket that has been in my family for decades. We all do what we can to maintain balance, so we can all survive, especially in this economy.”

  Her words made sense. Not everybody embraced the cut-throat business model of dominating the market, hoarding all the money, and sleeping on it like one of Tolkien’s dragons.

  “According to the police, everyone on the yacht was dead before the boat crashed.”

  “Dead how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe someone did not like his bread.”

  I didn't tell her she was on the suspect list. Sooner or later Detective Samaras would be in touch; he could give her the bad news.

  “What happened when you turned down his offer?”

  “He offered me more money.”

  “And when you didn’t accept that?”

  "He left. But first he reminded me that he could burn down my business, and I reminded him that Royal Pain is not the only bakery in Greece—just the worst.”

  “Who was his main competition, do you know?”

  “You are on Merope, you say? You might know the family. The owner was Thanassi Dalaras. The business is owned by his widow now, although according to the papers she does not play an active role in the company.”

  “What’s his widow’s name?”

  “I don’t remember. All I know is she lives on Merope, and Wundebar Bread is currently run by Yiannis Margas.”

  I froze.

  The name rang a bell. A really big, grubby, tarnished bell. Margas’s name was on the suspect list, but that’s not all. With everything going on, my brain had missed the connection. Yiannis is the Greek form of John. John—Johnny Margas was Angela’s new fling, the one she had me watching for.

  I thanked Penny Papadopoulo for her time, then spent several minutes staring out to sea, wondering if one of the specks on the horizon was Johnny Margas’s ride. Then I called Angela.

  “How did you connect with Johnny?”

  “Why? What is wrong?”

  “Nothing. Yet.”

  “We met on a message board for rich people.”

  There was a whole world out there, and it was strange.

  “Do you know what he does?”

  “He is a businessman.”

  I banged my head on the table. The waiter came loping over, order pad in hand.

  “One more?”

  “One more,” I told him. “Angela,” I said into the phone, “was one of your husbands Thanassi Dalaras?”

  “My first husband,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose you own a bakery?”

  “Maybe. I own lots of things.”

  Bang! went my head again.

  “What are you doing?” Angela asked me.

  “Banging my head on this table.”

  “Why?”

  “Johnny Margas handles the day-to-day business operations of Wundebar Bread.”

  “That name sounds familiar.”

  “It used to belong to Thanassi Dalaras, your first husband—your first and dead husband—and given that he never sold it to anyone else, it’s probably still yours and has been for a long time.”

  There was a long pause, filled with a hodgepodge of things like anxiety, low self-esteem, and loneliness. Angela was a mixed bag of unresolved issues, and she hung them all on a giant hook labeled ‘Men’.

  “Do you think that is why he likes me?”

  “Don’t jump to any conclusions yet. We don’t even know if he knows who you are. He doesn’t even know your last name, correct?”

  “He knows me as Angie.”

  It wasn’t much but it was something. I took a deep breath before I hit her with my next question.

  “Where were you yesterday morning?”

  “I went to Mykonos to get my hair done.”

  I stifled a smile. Everyone except Angela believed the local stylists were good enough. Tease (the local salon used the English word) was high-end, overpriced, and always twisted your arm until you left with a little paper bag filled with styling products. Tease catered to the Angelas of the island, wealthy tourists, and anyone else who could scrape together the small fortune one of their cuts cost. So I found it amusing that Tease wasn’t good enough for Angela.

  “Did you take the ferry?”

  “Of course not!” She sounded offended. “I took one of my yachts.”

  Angela’s name wasn’t on Kyrios Harry’s suspect list, but her bakery was run by a man who occupied a spot near the top. Call it me wanting to preemptively clear her name, I promised to let her know if and when Johnny rowed ashore, and then I went in search of the man who captained Angela’s yachts to make sure the Mykonos story was true.

  I wandered down to the dock and talked to Angela’s captain, a young guy who defined the word “perky,” and he confirmed what Angela had told me. They’d spend the morning and part of the afternoon, sailing to Mykonos and back.

  My blood pressure sat back down, grabbed a newspaper, relaxed. Angela wasn’t Harry’s (or anyone else’s) killer. I didn’t think she was, but you never know with people. They do funny things if you put them in the corner.

  Then he shook his head and squinted. “Wait—which one is Mykonos?”

  Oh boy. Maybe he had a big brain, but it wasn’t the one in his skull.

  “Mykonos is the island south of here.” Informative enough? Probably not. “If you look at a map, south is down.” I pointed at the ground, just in case he wasn’t familiar with the dictionary definition.

  The lights in his head were on a dimmer switch. They came on slowly. “We went up, to the other island. I get names and directions mixed up. It’s my dyslexia.”

  Yeah, I didn’t think dyslexia was his problem. “Do you mean Skiathos?”

  “Is that the one with the little island in the harbor?”

  Maragos. He meant the islet of Maragos. Skiathos had a bunch of tiny satellites. Maragos was the one snuggled in the larger island’s harbor.

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s where we went!” He said it proudly, like he was a three-year-old who’d made it to the potty in time.

  I thanked him for his time, then, with an icky feeling in my stomach, I trudged back to get my bicycle.

  Angela couldn’t be a killer.

  But then that’s what I’d thought about Kyria Kefala . And look at her; that crafty old witch with her fake Alzheimer’s had murdered my friend.

  At the end of the dock there was a small commotion. The rescue boats were clustered together. People were shouting. I spotted Leo, talking into his phone. He was headed in my direction, so I put my head down and pretended he was the Invisible Man.

  “Allie,
” he called out. “Didn’t you get my text message?”

  Rats. He’d caught me. I stopped, pivoted on one foot, and hoped he wouldn’t murder me.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “So have I,” he said, coming to a full halt in front of me. He glanced over one shoulder then swung back around. We’ve got a survivor.”

  Chapter Seven

  “So you going to tell me how you knew?”

  I played dumb. “Knew what?”

  “That we were missing a person.”

  “I said you were missing a body, not a living person.”

  “You said I was missing one. That could be living or dead.”

  He had me there. “I told you: I used my powers of persuasion to get a headcount.”

  “Who is your source?”

  “Who is the survivor?”

  “No idea. Survivor is a woman. She’s badly burned but still alive. Are you going to tell me who your source is?”

  “No,” I said simply. “Can I see her?”

  “Why?”

  “Curiosity.”

  He blew out a long sigh. “Nobody who isn’t medical personal or law enforcement is going anywhere near her for a while. She’s in bad shape. We might still lose her.”

  Lights and sirens blaring, an ambulance was trundling down the narrow road that connected to the dock. It rolled toward the rescue boats. The paramedics loaded their human cargo, then backed up slowly. Leo and I watched. We weren’t the only ones. Everyone in the village had gravitated to the scene. Nobody wanted to miss out on this newsworthy moment.

  They weren’t all civilians.

  Merope Fores—the Merope Times—was the island’s one and only newspaper. The newspaper had been in the family since Merope scored a name and inhabitants worth writing about. The Bakas family rarely hired outsiders, professionally or maritally. Their family tree was a straight stick. The latest puddle of sap was standing ten feet away from us, notepad in hand, eyes on the departing ambulance. When it vanished out of sight, his head swiveled and his gaze landed on Leo with an almost audible thunk.

  “Who is in the ambulance?”

  “Poseidon’s poutsa,” Leo said.

  I stuffed my laugh back down my throat. If even a squeak popped out, I would be all over the paper tomorrow, painted as a callous skeela, laughing at burn victims.