Mean Streets

Banda shrugged again and dropped the envelope back into the briefcase, glancing down. "I don't know. Before you ask, I don't know who Purecete was or what his connection was to Miss Arbildo, either. You want to see the will for yourself?" he asked, looking back up at me.

I nodded. He pulled a draft copy of the will from the folder and handed the long pages to me. He pointed as he talked.

"Sec how she left her money to all these charities? That was pretty much unchanged from the first version I ever saw—one Jimenez, my partner, drew up for her. You can tell she was kind of an oddball when you look at the list." He pulled out another version of the document. "In an earlier draft of this will, she'd designated Jimenez's grave as the recipient of the dog, as you can see. She did it right after he died and she was very upset with him. Then she changed her mind—out of the blue—and named Purecete. Just a few months ago, she marched into the office and she handed me this."

He fished a creased scrap of paper out of the file. It was the hard white of a cheap notepad, torn along one side to make a ragged square from a longer piece of paper. The handwriting was similar to the signature on the will, but more crabbed and wandering:

Harper Blaine

Seattle Wash USA

The letters were cramped up against the left edge, but became more expansive and arched as they moved to the right, as if she hadn't thought she'd have enough space when she started and tried to stretch the words out to fill the page as she finished each line. It looked odd.

"She just held it out to me and said 'this is the one' and I knew better than to argue with Maria-Luz. So I wrote you in." He offered me the collection of drafts. "Take a look, you can see she had pretty definite—if crazy—ideas about her money. The woman was kind of loopy."

I glanced at the will again, making mental notes of the recipients of her bequests. They were mostly church charities for the unfortunate, the homeless, the poor, the dispossessed. There were a few odd animal charities as well, such as support for retired racing greyhounds, a rabbit shelter, llama farms, and cure for retired circus elephants. None of them had conditions. And there were no individuals named other than me and Purecete.

"Didn't she have any family, or friends… employees even?" I asked.

Banda laughed and pretended he was coughing. "Miss Arbildo? No. She was the last of a literally dying breed—the Arbildo family died with her. And as I said, she was pretty strange and she wandered around a lot, didn't settle down much after a certain age, didn't make a lot of friends. She was kind of fond of Jimenez once—like I said, she put him in the will at one point—but about the time he died she was furious with him. She stormed into the office screaming about it: 'Why did he do it? Why, why? I almost thought that she would have dragged him back out of his grave and killed him if she could." "What was she so mad about?"

"Well… his dying on her. She worked Jimenez pretty hard— he used to say if he died suddenly it would be her fault. His death shook her up. She was irrational. You know how some people get mad instead of grieving…."

I nodded; I was familiar with that phenomenon. Arbildo sounded like a difficult client, and I could understand not wanting to argue with—or console—one like her. But there was something incredibly strange about both the wills and Banda himself. I just couldn't pin down what was bugging me….

As I pondered the problem, under cover of checking the wills, the ghostly dog at my feet began whimpering and moving restively, then it got up and walked a few feet away from the bar, toward a column of thick mist that was forming in the Grey between the bar and the doorway. I adjusted my position on the bar stool so I could watch the dog and still seem to be reading the documents. The dog stopped near the smoky mass, then looked back at me with that pleading look dogs have. It looked at the ill-defined shape, whimpered, then glanced back to me.

The form that interested the dog was vaguely human in size and shape, but it had no features. There was no face, and after a few moments the dog turned and trotted back to me, whimpering and scratching at my legs with its cold, incorporeal paws. The specter drifted out the door. I didn't know what it was or where it was going, but the dog seemed to be urging me to follow it—or at least humor the dog's desire to do so. Banda would still be in Mexico City in a day or an hour, but whatever the ghost dog was after might not last another five minutes.

I wanted to ask him more about Arbildo, but I excused myself from Banda and said I'd be right back. Let him assume I needed the washroom, if he liked. I stood up and the dog darted out of the bar and into the main concourse. I hoped my luggage would be all right with the lawyer for the time it would take to chase the dog.