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“About your father?”
She nodded.
“Is he hurting you?”
“No,” she said. “Sorry. It’s not that.”
“You can tell me. I’m here to help.”
“Thank you. You were the only woman I could find. Well except that one who tries to entrap the guys by wearing wigs in their favorite color.”
People always mention her when they come to see me. I’m nothing like that Amazon. Just cause we are both Janes.
“So why not her?”
“I heard that interview with you.”
There’s only been one. It was in conjunction with the new X-Files movie. The local news compared me to Fox Mulder because of my interest in the paranormal. I expected business to boom after that but it didn’t. In L.A. you have to look like a movie star with big tits or be a guy to make it big in this business. I’m neither.
In the interview I talked a little about s
ome weird, dark stuff, the kind of thing teenagers and X-Files fans eat up. But most teens aren’t going around hiring a P.I. and the X-Files fans would rather watch David Duchovny reruns. Like the famous female P.I. who wears the wigs, he has a lot more sex appeal than I do.
Coco put her hand to her mouth as if she were about to chew on what was left of her nails, then thought better of it and folded her hands tightly in her plaid-skirted lap. She looked out at the sunny fall day. The leaves on the tree outside my window looked like they were on fire. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was. I wondered why Coco was here and not at some mall with her friends or something.
She took some crumpled bills out of her sweatshirt pocket and put them on the table.
“That’s all I have,” she said. “But I’ll get more.”
“And you want me to do what exactly?”
“Oh. Uh. Sorry.” She hesitated. “Do you believe in zombies?” she said, finally.
Fuck.
Sorry, but I am not going to pretend to you that I am normal. I am not normal in any way. Yes I shop at Trader Joe’s and watch CNN, get my hair cut on a regular basis, shower and use deodorant. I wear my dark hair scraped back in a tight bun like I did on the force, and dress in flat-front black trousers and white stretch button-down shirts from the Limited and black heels or flats or boots from Macy’s.
When I got out of the hospital they let me live in the trailer in the backyard of what used to be my home. I can see my old house through the trailer window. It is a long, low structure painted avocado green. My ex and I were always planning on repainting it but we never got around to that. Then Kimmy came and picked the green. It looks nasty, even monstrous in certain lights. I planted the roses in the garden but I’ve stopped trying to take care of them. Once Kimmy came out while I was watering and weeding. I said, “Sorry,” and scuttled back into my trailer. The roses remind me.
At night I stay up watching the windows of my old bedroom until the lights go out.
I went into this work because I didn’t know what else to do. I thought it would help me forget to get up every day and go to my little office on Washington. It helps me forget that I was ever Max’s mom but it makes me remember the hospital and the doctor’s face, as I sit here waiting for someone who really needs me to come in.
I mostly just follow cheating husbands and wives. Once I followed a woman who was engaged to two men at the same time. The guy that hired me was so upset he started crying in my office. Then he wanted me to dress up like her and fuck him. That was the most eventful case I’d handled so far. But the thing that happened with Max made me open to the possibility of stuff that wasn’t so easy to understand.
Coco told me that her father had been behaving very strangely. She’d seen him eating flesh in big, gross, salivating bites and it didn’t look like cow, pig, goat, lamb, chicken or turkey. Let’s just say that. And he never spoke anymore. After his stroke he shambled around the house with these heavy steps just staring at the floor. He grumbled and grimaced and that was all. His skin was a weird shade of greenish white and once when he was asleep she’d felt for a pulse and there wasn’t one there. He smelled bad, too.
I said, “Sorry, but I have to ask you something. What makes you think he’s one of the undead though? I mean, how do you think this could have happened?”
Coco’s father was a car salesman in Van Nuys. He’d done pretty well for himself selling SUVs until people stopped being able to afford gas at almost five dollars a gallon. The stress was too much for him. While waiting for the electric car to return he’d had a stroke and almost died. Well, according to Coco there was no almost involved.
“When he came back from the hospital,” Coco said. “He just wasn’t the same.”
“What was he like before?” I asked.
“Well, kind of like now. Except I recognized the meat he ate and he had better skin tone and a pulse. And…sorry, but… he didn’t smell so bad.”
I tried not to say, “Ouch. Harsh.” I was trying to behave with some decorum.
