Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

DEAL BREAKER Justin Gustainis

“You’re not an easy man to find, Mr. Morris,” Trevor Stone said. “I’ve been looking for you for some time.”

“It’s true that I don’t advertise, in the usual sense,” Quincey Morris told him. “But people who want my services usually manage to get in touch, sooner or later—as you have, your own self.” Although there was a Southwestern twang to Morris’s speech, it was muted—the inflection of a native Texan who has spent much of his time outside the Lone Star State.

“I would have preferred sooner,” Stone said tightly. “As it is, I’m almost . . . almost out of time.”

Morris looked at his visitor more closely. Trevor Stone appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He was blond, clean-shaven, and wearing a suit that looked custom made. There was a sheen of perspiration on the man’s thin face, although the air conditioning in Morris’s living room kept the place comfortably cool—anyone spending a summer in Austin, Texas without air conditioning is either desperately poor or incurably insane.

Morris thought the man’s sweat might be due to either illness or fear. “Are you unwell?” he asked.

Stone gave a bark of unpleasant laughter. “Oh, no, I’m fine. The picture of health, and likely to remain so for another”—he glanced at the gold Patek Philippe on his wrist—“two hours and twenty-eight minutes.”

Fear, then.

Morris kept his face expressionless as he said, “That would bring us to midnight. What happens then?”

Stone was silent for a few seconds. “You ever play Monopoly, Mr. Morris?”

“When I was a kid, sure.”

“So, imagine landing on Community Chest and drawing the worst Monopoly card of all time—one that reads Go to Hell. Go directly to Hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.”

It was Morris’s turn for silence. He finally broke it by saying, “Tell me. All of it.”

The first part of Trevor Stone’s story was unexceptional. A software engineer by training, he had gone to work in Silicon Valley after graduation from Cal Tech. Soon, he had made enough money out of the Internet boom to start up his own dot-com company with a couple of college buddies. They all made out like bandits—until the bottom fell out in the Nineties, taking most of the dot-commers with it.

That was how, Trevor Stone said, he had found himself sitting alone in his company’s deserted office one afternoon—bankrupt and broke, under threat of lawsuits from his former partners and of divorce from his wife. He was just wondering if his life insurance had a suicide clause when a strange man appeared, and changed everything.

“I never heard him come in,” Stone said to Morris. “Which was kind of weird, because the place was so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart. But suddenly, there he was, standing in my office door.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Buddy, if you’re selling something, have you ever come to the wrong place.’ And he gave me this funny little smile and says “I suppose you might consider me a salesman of a sort, Mr. Stone. As to whether I am in the wrong place, why don’t we determine that later?’ ”

“What did he look like?” Morris asked.

“Little guy, couldn’t have been more than five foot five. Had a goatee on him, jet black. Can’t vouch for the rest of his hair, because he kept his hat on the whole time, one of those Homburg things, which I didn’t think anybody wore anymore. Nice suit, three-piece, with a bow tie—not a clip on, but one of those that you tie yourself.”

“Did he give you a name?”

“He said it was Dunjee. What’s that—Scottish?”

“Maybe.” Morris’s voice held no inflection at all. “Could me any number of things.” After a moment he continued, “So, what did he want with you?”

“Well, he was one of those guys who take forever to get to the point, but what it finally came down to was that he wanted me to play Let’s Make a Deal.”

Morris nodded. “And what was he offering?”

“A way out. A change in my luck. An end to my problems, and a return to the kind of life I’d had before.”

“I see. And your part of the bargain involved . . . ”

“Nothing much.” Another bitter laugh. “Just my soul.”

“Doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me,” Morris said gently.

“I thought it was just a joke, man!” Stone stood up and started pacing the room nervously. “I only listened to the guy because I had nothing else to do, and it gave me something to think about besides slitting my wrists.”

Morris nodded again. “I assume there were . . . terms.”

“Yeah, sure. Ten years of success. Ten years, back on top of the world, right where I liked it. Then, at the end of that time, Dunjee said, he’d be back. To collect.”

“And your ten years is up tonight, I gather.”

“At midnight, right. That’s actually a few hours over ten years, since it was the middle of the afternoon when I talked to him, that day. But he said he wanted to ‘preserve the traditions.’ So midnight it is.”

“Did he have you sign a contract?”

“Yeah.”

“Something on old parchment, maybe, smelling of brimstone?”

“No, nothing like that. He had the template on a disk in his pocket. He asked if he could use my PC to fill in the specifics, so I let him. Then he printed out a copy, and I signed it.”

“In blood?”

“No, he said I could use my pen. But then he pulled out one of those little syrettes they use in labs, still in the sterile wrapper, and everything. Dunjee said he would need three drops of blood from one of my fingers. I said okay, so he stuck me, and let the three drops fall onto the contract, just below my signature.”

“Then what happened?”

“He said he’d see me in ten years plus a few hours, and left. I told myself the whole thing was going to make a great story to tell my friends, assuming I had any friends left.”

“You felt it was all just an elaborate charade.”

“Of course I did. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of my former partners had sent the little bastard, just to mess with my head. I mean, deals with the devil—come on!”

Morris leaned forward in his chair. “But now you feel differently.”

“Well . . . yeah. I do.”

“Why? What changed your mind?”

Stone flopped back in the chair he had left. “Because it worked, that’s why. My luck changed. Everything turned around. Everything. My partners dropped their lawsuits, some former clients who still owed me money decided to pay up, a guy from Microsoft called with an offer to buy a couple of my software patents, my wife and I got back together—six months later, it was like my life had done a complete one-eighty.”

“So you decided that your good fortune meant that your bargain with the Infernal must have been real, after all.”

“Yeah, eventually. It took me a long time to finally admit the possibility. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, you know what I mean?”

“I do, for sure.”

“But the bill comes due at midnight, and I’m scared, man. I have to admit now that I am really, big-time terrified. Can you help me? I mean, I can pay whatever you want. Money’s not a problem.”

“Well, I’m not sure what—”

“Look, you’re some kind of hotshot occult investigator, right? There’s a story about a bunch of vampires, supposed to have taken over some little Texas town. I heard you took care of that in four days flat. And, yesterday, I talked to a guy named Walter LaRue, he’s the one told me how to find you. He said you saved his family from some curse that was, like, three centuries old, but he wouldn’t tell me more. Christ, you must deal with this kind of stuff all the time. There’s got to be a way out of this box I’ve got myself in, and if anybody can find it, I figure it’s you. Please help me. Please.”

Morris looked at Trevor Stone for what seemed like a long time. Unlike his unexpected visitor, Morris was dressed casually, in a gray Princeton Tigers sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sandals. There were a few touches of gray in his closely trimmed beard, but none at all in the black hair above it. Finally, he said, “You’re probably pretty thirsty after all that talking—how about something to wet your whistle, before we talk some more?”

Stone asked for bourbon and water, and Morris went to a nearby sideboard to make it, along with a neat Scotch for himself. Although well into his forties, Morris moved easily, like someone who still likes to make hard use of his body from time to time.

Morris gave Stone his drink and sat down again. “You know, my profession, if you want to call it that, isn’t exactly well organized. There’s no union, no licensing committee, no code of ethics we’re all expected to follow. But my family has been in this business going back four generations, and we have our own set of ethical standards.”

Stone took a pull on his drink but said nothing. He was watching Morris with narrowed eyes.

“And it’s a good thing too,” Morris went on. “Because it would be the simplest thing in the world for me to go through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, recite a few prayers over you in Latin, maybe splash a little holy water around. Then I could tell you that you were now safe from the forces of Hell, charge an outrageous amount of money, and send you on your way. You would be, too.”

Stone shook his head in confusion. “I would be—what?”

“Safe, Mr. Stone. You’d be safe, no matter what I did, because you were never in any danger to begin with.”

After a lengthy silence, Stone said, “You don’t believe I made a deal with the Devil.”

“No, I don’t. In fact I’m sure you didn’t.”

Hope and skepticism chased each other across Stone’s face. “Why?” he asked sharply. “What makes you so certain?”

“Because that kind of thing just doesn’t happen. It’s the literary equivalent of an urban legend. I don’t know if Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was the start of it or not, but bargaining away your soul to a minion of Hell has become a . . . a cultural trope that has no basis in actual practice. Sort of like the Easter bunny, but more sinister in its implications.”

“You’re saying you don’t believe in Hell?”

Morris shook his head slowly. “I’m saying no such thing, no sir. Hell really exists, and so does Satan, or Lucifer, or whatever you want to call him. And the other angels who fell with him, who were transformed into demons as punishment for their rebellion—they exist, as well. And sometimes one of them can show up in our plane of existence, although that’s rare. But selling your soul to the devil?” Morris shook his head again. “Just doesn’t happen.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“Because, among other things, it makes no sense theologically. The disposition of your soul upon death is dependent on the choices you make throughout your life. We all sin, and we all have moments of grace. The way the balance tips at the end of your life determines whether you end up with a harp or a pitchfork, to use another pair of cultural tropes.”

“What makes you such an authority?” Stone asked.

“Apart from what I do for a living, you mean? Well, I suppose my minor in Theology at Princeton might give me a little credibility, along with the major in Cultural Anthropology. But far more important is the fact that we’re talking about the essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mr. Stone. The ticket to Heaven, or to Hell, is yours to earn. You don’t determine your spiritual fate by playing Let’s Make a Deal—with anybody.”

“But it worked, goddammit! I bargained for a return to success, and success is what I got.”

“What you got was confidence. You may have had a little good luck, too, but most of it was just you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course. You must know how important confidence is in business. If you believe in yourself it shows, which causes other people to believe in you, too. And that’s where success usually comes from. You were convinced your business problems were going to be fixed, and thus you acted in such a way as to fix them. You assumed your failing marriage could be repaired, and so you went and repaired it. And so on. They call that a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Happens all the time.”

“My God.” Stone sat back in his chair, relief spreading over his face like a blush. But in a moment, he was frowning again. “Wait a minute—Dunjee, with his contract and the rest of it. I didn’t imagine that, I didn’t dream it, and I don’t do drugs that would give me those kinds of hallucinations.”

“I have no doubt he was there. That’s why I asked you what name he was using, and what he looked like. Your description was very accurate, by the way.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Oh, yeah,” Morris said, with a broad smile. “When you deal with the occult, it pays to keep track of the various frauds who pretend to supernatural powers. A lot of my work involves debunking con artists.”

“Con artists? That’s what Dunjee was—nothing but a con artist?”

“Exactly. His real name, by the way, is Manfred Schwartz, and he ran that particular scam very lucratively for a number of years. He would look for successful people who had fallen on very hard times. He’d show up, go through the routine he used on you, get a signed contract, then fade away.”

Stone’s brow had developed deep furrows. “I don’t get it—how could he make money off that kind of thing? He didn’t ask me for a dime.”

“Not at the time, no. His approach, as I remember, was to visit a number of people, across a wide geographical area. He would go through his ‘deal with the devil’ act, then wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For his ‘clients’ ’ fortunes to improve. Some of them would never recover from their adversity, of course. Those folks would never see ‘Dunjee’ again. But Manny chose his victims carefully—people with brains, guts, and ambition, who had just been dealt a few bad hands in life’s poker game. People who might very well start winning again, especially if Manny convinced them that the powers of Hell were now on their side. Then, after they started to pull themselves out of their hole, Manny would show up again.”

“Before the ten years were up?”

“Oh, yes, long before. He’d say he was just checking to confirm that they were receiving what he had promised—and to remind them what the ultimate price would be. Then he’d sit there, looking evil, and wait for them to try to buy their way out of their contract.”

“Oh, my God,” Stone said. “I see what he was doing, the little bastard.”

“Sure. Manny would act reluctant, which would usually prompt the victim to offer even more money, which he would finally accept—in cash, of course. Then he’d make a ritual of tearing up the contract, and go off to spend his loot. It’s a perfect example of the long con, because the mark never knows that he’s been ripped off.”

“Wait a minute—Dunjee never came back to see me. Never!”

“I’m not surprised,” Morris said. “Because Manfred Schwartz was picked up by the FBI on multiple counts of interstate fraud—something like nine and half years ago.”

“Son of a bitch!”

“Manny never came back to extort money out of you after your life got better, because Manny’s life took a turn for the worse. He’s currently serving fifteen to twenty-five in a federal pen—Atlanta, I think.”

“But I never heard a thing—the feds never asked me to testify.”

“Probably because Manny hadn’t received any money from you yet, so technically he hadn’t committed a crime. Besides, I expect the government had plenty of other witnesses to present at his trial.”

Stone leaned back in the easy chair and appeared to relax for the first time since he had shown up at Morris’s door.

“Feeling better?” Morris asked with a quiet smile.

“Better doesn’t begin to describe it,” Stone said. “I feel like . . . like I can take a deep breath for the first time in ten years.”

“Well, then, I’d say that calls for another libation.”

Morris took their empty glasses back to the sideboard. While mixing Stone’s bourbon and water, he unobtrusively opened a small wooden box and removed a couple of capsules. Using his body to shield what he was doing, he popped open the capsules and poured their contents into the drink he was making. He stirred the contents until the powder dissolved, then poured a Scotch for himself.

Morris gave Stone his drink and sat down again. The two of them talked desultorily for a while, then Stone said, “Man, I suddenly feel really wiped out.”

“Not surprising,” Morris said. “With the release of all that tension, you’re bound to feel pretty whipped. Anyone would.”

A few minutes later, Stone’s speech started to slur, as if he had consumed far more than two drinks. His eyelids began to droop, and then they closed all the way. Stone’s head fell forward onto his chest, and the nearly empty glass dropped from his fingers and rolled across the carpet, before coming to rest against a leg of Morris’s coffee table.

Morris called Stone’s name at a normal volume, then again, more loudly. Receiving no response, he slowly stood up and went over to the unconscious man. He put two fingers on the inside of Stone’s wrist and held them there for several seconds. Satisfied, he gently released Stone’s arm.

Morris then went into his bedroom and came back carrying a small, square-shaped bottle with a gold stopper. Back at the sideboard, he poured several ounces of a clear liquid from the bottle into a clean glass. He stoppered the bottle, then took the glass back over to his chair. He put the glass on a nearby end table, but did not drink from it. Then he glanced at his watch, picked up the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer from the end table, and settled down to wait.

Morris did not check his watch again, but he knew the witching hour had arrived when a gray Homburg suddenly plopped onto the middle of his coffee table. Looking up, Morris saw a small man in an elegant suit and bow tie sitting on the sofa. The man absently stroked his goatee as he frowned in Morris’s direction.

“I was about to say that I’m surprised to see you, Quincey.” The little man’s voice was surprisingly deep. “But, on reflection, I really shouldn’t be. My last client tried to hide out in a cathedral, for all the good it did him. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before one of them came crying to you for protection.”

“I’m surprised you even bothered with this one, Dunjee,” Morris said. “He was contemplating suicide when you showed up to make your pitch, so you guys would have had him anyway.”

The little man shook his head. “Our projections were that he wouldn’t have given in to his suicidal ideations, more’s the pity. Even worse, there was a seventy-thirty probability that, after hitting rock bottom a year or so later, he was going to enter a monastery and devote the rest of his life to prayer and good works. Ugh.”

Dunjee stood up. “I hope we’re not going to have any unpleasantness over this, Quincey.” He reached inside his jacket and produced a sheet of paper, which he waved in Morris’s direction. “I have a contract, duly signed of his own free will. My principals have lived up to their part of the agreement, in every respect.” He glanced over at Stone, and the expression on his face reminded Morris of the way a glutton will look at a big plate of prime rib, medium rare. “Now it’s his turn.”

“You know that contract of yours is unenforceable in any court, whether in this world or the next,” Morris said. “The only thing you’ve got working for you is despair. The client thinks he’s damned, and his abandonment of hope in God’s mercy ultimately makes him so.”

Dunjee shrugged. “Say you’re right. It doesn’t matter a damn, you should pardon the expression. If it’s despair that makes him mine, so be it. Bottom line: the wretch is mine.”

“Not this time,” Morris said quietly.

“Surely you’re not claiming he didn’t accept the validity of the deal. Did he come running to you because he was eager to hear stories about that ancestor of yours who helped kill Dracula all those years ago? I don’t think so, Quincey. He knew he was damned, and he was hoping you could find him an escape clause.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Morris told him.

Dunjee stared at him, as if suspecting a trick. “So, why are we talking?”

“Because I found one.”

“Impossible!”

“Not at all. Despair is the key, remember? Well, he doesn’t despair any more. I convinced him that the soul is not ours to sell—which you admit yourself. Further, I spun him a yarn about how you were a con artist planning to come back when his luck changed and extort money from him, except you got arrested before you could return.” Morris shook his head in mock sympathy. “He doesn’t believe in the deal anymore, and that means there’s no deal at all.”

Dunjee’s eyes blazed. “He doesn’t believe?” Before Morris’s eyes, the little man began to grow and change form. “Then I will MAKE him believe!” The voice was now loud enough to rattle the windows, and Dunjee’s aspect had become something quite terrible to behold.

Morris swallowed, but did not look away. He had seen demons in their true form before. “That won’t work, either. I slipped him a mickey—120 milligrams of chloral hydrate, combined with about four ounces of bourbon. He’ll be unconscious for hours, and all the legions of Hell couldn’t wake him.”

Morris stood up then, facing the demon squarely. “The hour of midnight has come and gone, Hellspawn,” he said, formally. “You have failed to collect your prize, and consequently any agreement you may have had with this man is now void, in all respects and for all time.”

Morris picked up the glass he had prepared earlier. Pointing the index finger of his other hand at the demon he said, in a loud and resolute voice, “I enjoin you now to depart this dwelling, and never to enter it again without invitation. Return hence to your place of damnation, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is never quenched, and repent there the sin of pride that caused your eternal banishment from the sight of the Lord God!”

Morris dashed the contents of the glass—holy water, blessed by the Archbishop of El Paso—right into the demon’s snarling face, and cried, “Begone!”

With a scream of frustration and agony, the creature known as Dunjee disappeared.

Morris took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He carefully put the glass down, then pulled out his handkerchief to mop his face. His hands were trembling, but only a little.

He looked over at Trevor Stone, who had started to snore. He would never know what Morris had accomplished on his behalf, but that was all right. In the ongoing war that Morris fought, what mattered were the victories, not who received credit for them.

He sniffed the air, noting that the departing demon had left behind the odor characteristic of its kind.

He hoped the sulfuric scent of brimstone would be gone from his living room by morning.

After earning both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, Justin Gustainis was commissioned a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Following military service, he held a variety of jobs, before earning a PhD. Gustainis currently lives in Plattsburgh, New York where he is a Professor of Communication at Plattsburgh State University. Outside of his academic publications, he has authored three novels and two novellas of occult investigator Quincey Morris and his “consultant,” white witch Libby Chastain; three novels featuring Stan Markowski and the Scranton [PA] Police Department’s Occult Crimes Investigation Unit—the most recent is Known Devil—as well as a standalone novel, The Hades Project. He also edited Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives.