You may be surprised to learn that more male ghosts are named Ray than any other name. But this story is less about me than about my best friend Louise. Even in the afterlife, nothing is permanent.

I'll tell you about the day when Lolo was murdered. Expectant ghosts in unusual numbers gathered around the diner where Lolo worked. Their common expression was one of oppressive, gloomy anticipation of violent tragedy. The gravity of the upcoming moment drew them out of the walls, out of the ground, down from the shadowy ceilings. They stood singly and in clusters, vague and grimly gray. Some gathered in the doorway, hanging thickly from the corners atop the door frame, unnoticed by customers entering and leaving. Living people came and went without knowing they had brushed cheeks with someone who died years ago. Some ghosts half climbed up out of the concrete sidewalk and waited, resting on their elbows, while passers-by walked right through them without a clue.

Eye-orbits like dark smoke focused on the door, which had a big, friendly white cardboard sign with red, italic letters: Open. Park Avenue was a quiet street drenched in sunlight. The area was a bit run down in those days. Long ago, the street carried trolley tracks that were now buried six feet under asphalt.

Lolo was a young, dark-haired waitress in the Park Avenue Coffee Shop, up in the heights near Mission Cliffs Gardens, San Diego. The shop had an ornate Victorian front, with twin plate glass windows, a double door, and two concrete steps up from the sidewalk. Lolo's china smile and big brown eyes made all the customers fond of her, both men or women. The regulars all tried to sit at her counter section, and tipped her well. Her face, while feminine in a soft way, had a jaunty way of radiating tomboyish assurance that life was great. She worked the crowd with a wry, slightly lopsided smile. Every individual received at least one innocently personal smile, a glance, a wink. Every service was a relationship, a reassurance, a Platonic flirtation. She brought out the parental in older people, comradeship in younger women, and a rapid heart-beat in younger men.

She was slender, of medium height. She always wore an apron--that day, a white apron, with strawberries on it. Her skin was just a shade dark, because she had some Iroquois in her genes, which added something slightly exotic to her features. She always wore some kind of decorative pin in her short, straight ebony hair, like a red ribbon, a tortoise-shell comb, or a blue lacquer cat. Seasonally, it might be a pumpkin, a turkey, or a snowman--though it had not snowed in San Diego that anyone could remember, and she'd laugh and say it gets plenty cold in Montreal. In summer, it could be a surfer with his arms outstretched, catching a glossy hair-wave around the corner of her temple. Louise Maurian-Wheeler, our Lolo, was from Montreal, mothered by a Francophone Maurian and fathered by an Anglophone Wheeler. Lolo was in San Diego to study Art at San Diego State University. She worked at the coffee joint to make ends meet. She told everyone there was a boy named 'enri back home, studying to be a docteur at McGill, whom she planned to marry when she went home. She spoke English well, but with that twangy, lilty French Canadian accent that sometimes made people laugh good-naturedly when she stumbled over an 'ard phrases, like those with lots of h-words, as in 'ard of 'earing, and she'd laugh with them and shrug. It meant a good tip, and she was a consummate performer. She also stumbled over piles of r's when they were mixed with h's, as in you are 'ere. More fond laughter, more tips.

A six-foot-two giant with wild red hair and beard named Wallace Fleisch, aged 35, lived nearby with his mother. He would start drinking beer from quart bottles at nine every morning. He'd wander up and down the sidewalk under the palm trees on Park Boulevard, waving his beer bottle and talking with people real and imagined. Maybe he was speaking to the gray, vague figures that stood in doorways, on corners not waiting to cross, in windows looking down. If he saw them, the ghosts did not reply, but stared at him mournfully. Ghosts could not see the past well, living in a sort of eternal present, but they could see heavy, oppressive future events coming. Mr. Fleisch was shrouded in unhappy, violent auras.

One morning, Mr. Fleisch's mother didn't give him beer money. She yelled at him to get a job, because her Social Security money was $23.14 short, which she said he'd stolen from her.

Wallace Fleisch was a big red-haired slob with sun-reddened man-tits that wobbled when he hulked about. He had a way of walking whereby he stretched his arms and upper body in various directions, while his lower half sort of staggered and leaned, because all the years of alcohol and serious drugs had damaged his neurological connectivity.

When he didn't get his beer money that morning, his gray eyes got a crazed look, like smashed glass. He went to the Greek market on the corner of Madison, and caged himself a short-term loan for beer and cigarettes. He could be incredibly sly and persuasive.

Around mid-morning, wearing filthy corduroy pants, barefoot, and naked from the waist up, so that he looked like an enraged Viking, Mr. Fleisch lurched through the door of the Park Avenue Coffee Shop. In the grimy fingers of his left hand, he choked the neck of a quart beer bottle, and held a half-finished Lucky Strike between his index and middle fingers. With his right hand, he waved a twelve inch, serrated turkey carving knife. There was no indication that Mr. Fleisch, who drank beer all day, had ever been in the coffee shop, or had ever before exchanged a single word with Lolo. But he must have noticed her--who didn't--and been consumed with rage and envy and rejection.

People were still laughing and talking over the next several seconds, but a wake of silence plowed ahead of him as he zigzagged across ten feet of dark wood floor space, through an atmosphere of coffee and pastries. He lurched toward the counter, and people ducked out of his way in either direction.

Lolo had just served coffee to two cops and an off-duty detective sitting about ten stools down the counter. Lolo started toweling a coffee cup dry. That day, she wore a dark green T-shirt that worked well with her brown eyes. She wore a dungaree skirt over black ballet tights, highlighting an upturned little rear that appealed to boys. She wore fine mahogany loafers. She had a pencil tucked behind one ear, and it stuck up comically, pointing at the ceiling. The gray-haired, stout waitress, Edith, spoke from the kitchen and said "Sweetheart, the coffee urn is almost empty."

Everything with Lolo was quick motions, eager to please. Lolo nodded and spoke her last words: "I'll take care of it!" She turned her back to the counter, and genuflected to pull a fresh coffee bag from the lowest shelf cabinet, just as Mr. Fleisch arrived at the counter and set his beer bottle down with a crash.

Hearing Fleisch muttering, she rose, a smile starting to light up as she turned. Her eyeballs noted his dirty left hand with the cigarette, and the other hand rocketing toward her. Her smile froze. Her light went out as the turkey knife jammed between her small breasts in the black leotard and green T-shirt. The knife ripped through her heart, and she bled to death in a minute, lying on the dirty floor among half-torn cardboard boxes with restaurant supplies--straws, paper Park Avenue Coffee doilies, plastic forks knives and spoons, as a wine-dark puddle spread. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep, her mouth slightly open. Her brown skin turned pale, like snowy marble. Her hands lay palms-up behind her head, the pencil a few inches away between them and the little red rose in her hair that day.

Wallace Fleisch reared up, waving his knife. He mumbled some muddled nonsense, through toothless gums that made him look far older and more decayed than his thirty-something years. He slashed to the left and to the right. The off-duty detective 's gun fired six times in rapid succession, each bullet hitting Wallace Fleisch in the upper torso or head. The detective did not use his .38 Special, for fear the rounds would go through Mr. Fleisch and hurt innocent bystanders, so he pulled a .35 throwaway automatic from an ankle holster and emptied it into Mr. Fleisch, who staggered back and then crumpled amid piles of stacked newspapers in a corner. Detectives found $23.14 amid the toe-jam in his rumpled blue jeans pocket.

From there, the living people did their stuff as you'd expect, and the spirit world moved along its complex axis in parallel to the people-world.

Police cars came racing with howling sirens, as did a fire engine whose big siren made a long, low, mourning wail as if it were crying with grief. Later came a gray coroner's van. The place was declared a crime scene, and tearful coffee drinkers left their testimony before moving on with their lives. Piles of flowers lay at the doorway of the shop when it reopened a few days later. There was a sign for a time, Now Hiring. It did not read Now 'Iring, which would have been more Loloesque. The money was good, and a new girl with a pretty smile appeared. Some old-timers said it would never be the same again, and didn't come back. New people came. The flowers wilted and disappeared. Cars passed, as did the days, the seasons, the years.

Ghosts who witnessed the event told me that the wall unfolded into a myriad, complex spirit wall with red and gold and dark blue blurry glowing corridors running in all directions, and gloomy shapes, wearing black gloves, emerged to hustle off a smoky human-like soul shape that slowly rose out of Wallace Fleisch's cooling corpse. Those shapes are Handlers, I was to learn on the path of my own fate. The crowd of ghosts would hang thickly around that place for years, as they did around all places on the cusp between the worlds of the living and of spirits. Which is not the same as the world of the dead, but a parallel, inbetween world, where some of us go to accomplish unspecified missions before we are finally allowed to move on.

The living were very angry at Wallace Fleisch and kicked his corpse, spat on it, threw scalding coffee on it, until the police cleared out the place and shut it down for the day. People climbed over the counter and tried to help Lolo, but she was gone. To the dead, too, she was instantly special. Six Handlers wearing white gloves appeared out of nowhere and lifted her spirit body as if it were that of a dead heroine or even a deity, and carried her s olemnly away through an opening the color of ash.