Odd Hours (Odd Thomas 4)

My statement compounded Mr. Sinatra’s annoyance. With one cocked eyebrow and a gesture, he seemed to say So what’s wrong with pride?

“Nothing is wrong with pride based on accomplishment, and your life was packed full of accomplishments. But justifiable pride can sometimes mutate into arrogance.”

Mouth tight, he stared at me. But then he nodded. He knew that in life he had sometimes been guilty of arrogance.

“I’m not talking about then. I mean now. You don’t want to move on to the next world because you’re afraid you won’t be special over there, that you’ll just be equal to everyone else.”

Although he resisted moving on, he wanted to make the journey, as do all of the lingering dead. He seriously considered my words.

I needed to channel him from polite consideration to a strong emotional response. I regretted what I was about to do, but his soul and my neck were on the line. Extreme measures were required.

“But it’s worse than that. You’re afraid to move on because you think maybe you’ll be starting over from nothing, with nothing, just a nobody, and all the struggle will begin again. You’re as scared as a little boy.”

His face knotted with offense.

“Your first breath was a struggle. Will it be again? To win any respect, you had to fight. You can’t stand the idea of being a nobody again, but you don’t want to fight your way to the top like you had to do the last time.”

He put up his fists.

“Sure, threaten to fight me. You know I can’t hurt a ghost, what courage does it take to threaten me?”

He rose from the chair and glared down at me.

“You want all the respect you won in this world, but you don’t have the guts to earn it again, if that’s the way it is over there.”

Never would I have believed that those warm blue eyes could have produced such an icy stare as the one with which he skewered me.

“You know what you’ve become in death? You’re a scared little punk like you never were in life.”

In anger, hands fisted at his sides, he turned away from me.

“Can’t handle the truth, huh?”

Treating him with such disrespect, when in fact I respected him, was difficult, and I was particularly afraid of revealing the falsity of my contempt by using the word sir.

I believed that I had in fact arrived at the reason that he lingered in this world, but I did not despise him for it. In other circumstances, I would have led him gently to accept the truth and to see that his fears were ungrounded.

Certain that Hoss Shackett would come through the door at any moment, I said witheringly, “Chairman of the Board, Old Blue Eyes, the Voice, famous big-shot singer, big cheese of the Rat Pack—and now all you are is another gutless punk from Hoboken.”

He turned toward me once more.

His mottled face, his dead-cold stare, his lips skinned back from clenched teeth, his head lowered like that of a bull that sees not one red cape but a hundred: As lingering spirits go, this one was as pissed off as any I had ever seen.

The steel door opened.

Chief Hoss Shackett entered. Utgard Rolf followed him, rolling a cart on which was mounted the polygraph.

TWENTY-EIGHT

IN MY ROOM AT HUTCH’S HOUSE, WHEN MR. Sinatra had levitated all the biographies of him and had spun them slowly around the room, out of my reach, he had shown poltergeist potential.

In my experience, only deeply malevolent spirits had been able to conjure the dark energy necessary to cause havoc. Mr. Sinatra had his moods, but he harbored no true malevolence.

Judging by the evidence of his life, however, his was a powerful spirit that might be able to bend the rules as I knew them.

The thing most certain to light a short fuse with Mr. Sinatra was unfairness. From his early years as an unknown singer, he had been angered by bigotry and had taken risks with his career to open doors and gain opportunities for black musicians in a era when many white performers were cool with the status quo.

The attack I had launched on him—calling him a gutless punk—qualified as grossly unfair. My first hope was that he would seethe as hotly when he was the target of unfairness as he did when he saw it being directed against others.

My second hope was that I had not cranked him so hard, so fast that he would blow like Vesuvius while I remained locked to the table.

As Utgard Rolf closed the steel door behind him and wheeled the polygraph, Mr. Sinatra turned his furious glare from me to the chin-bearded hulk.

“Spoke to the man,” Chief Shackett told me. “The money’s yours, as long as the machine says you’re the real deal.”

Because being shackled to the table would raise my stress levels and affect the reading, the chief kept his promise to free me. The cuff fell away from my ankle.

As Utgard readied the polygraph and the chief went around to the other side of the table, I said, “What do you think of Sinatra?”

“Think of what?” the chief asked.

Getting to my feet, I said, “Sinatra, the singer.”

The tone of Utgard’s bearish voice suggested that he did not like me, did not trust me, and did not want me in their game, no matter how much top-secret intelligence from Homeland Security I might be able to share with them: “What the hell do you care what we think?”

“Sinatra,” the chief said dismissively. “Who listens to that crap anymore?”

The Voice, voiceless since death, pivoted toward Shackett.

“I had this girlfriend,” I said, “she swooned for Sinatra, but I say he was just a gutless punk.”

“They’re all punks,” the chief said. “Fact is, they’re all pansies.”

“You think so?” I asked.

“Sure. The big rock stars, the heavy-metal idiots, the lounge lizards like Sinatra, they all act tough, want you to believe they’re true wise guys who made their bones, but they’re all light in the loafers.”

Here was contempt, bigotry, and insult served up steaming on a platter, and I was so grateful to the chief that I almost cried.

“In World War Two,” I told Shackett, “Sinatra dodged the draft.”

Mr. Sinatra snapped his head toward me so fast that had he been alive, he would have broken his neck. He knew that I knew this was a lie, which made my attack on his character especially unfair. His face contorted so extremely that it conveyed both astonishment and rage at the same time.

“Of course he dodged,” the chief said. “What would he have done if he’d come up against Nazi badasses—slap them with his perfumed handkerchief?”

Concentric rings of power, visible only to me, began to radiate from Mr. Sinatra’s fists.

“So,” I said to Hoss Shackett as, in blissful ignorance of the building storm, he settled on his chair, “then you think maybe he and Dean Martin were more than just friends?”

Utgard Rolf stepped around the polygraph, scowling. “What’re you going on about?”

In the corner, the third chair began to rock slowly side to side as the pulses of power from Mr. Sinatra disturbed it.

“I’m just saying he was a gutless punk,” I replied, wishing I could think of a new insult.

“Anyway,” the chief volunteered, “that old music—Rod Stewart sings it better.”

“That should just about do it,” I said.