“This doesn’t bother me,” Lewis said in a loud voice. “Does this bother you?”
“Heck no,” I said and moved over to stand close to him.
“You wanna move off my foot, then?”
I giggled nervously but quickly stifled it, feeling obscurely guilty, as though I might offend the bodies on the gurneys. I pointed to a long, silver object with a needle point. “That’s a trocar, Lewis. They use it to remove the bodily fluids and then to inject embalming solution into the body.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much for telling me that. I can’t tell you how much happier I will be in my life now that I know what’s waiting for me at the end of it. For Christ’s sake, you wanna cut the ten-cent tour? Tell me what you know about what happened in here.”
“I don’t know much.” I left his side and began to walk the floor. Near one of the drains, I bent over to study the tile floor more carefully.
“What’s the matter? You sick?” Lewis asked anxiously.
“No. Look at this.”
He joined me. I pointed to a number of scratches in the tile floor. “Geof told me they found evidence to make them think that she struggled while she was being choked. I’ll bet you this is where it happened, because these are the sort of scratches a woman’s heels would make on the floor.” To test my theory, I walked a few steps away and scraped my own high heel against the tile. It left a mark like the others. I looked up at Lewis, “That’s all I know.”
“That’s it?” He looked pained.
I nodded. “What do you know?”
“Rudolph’s casket was in here that night.”
I felt as if that fact ought to hold some meaning for me, but I couldn’t think what it might be. I stared down at the scratches in the floor, hoping they might tell me something profound about the moment of life becoming death. Lewis began to circumnavigate the room, examining everything, picking up arcane tools, putting them back down again, peering into cupboards, opening drawers. Finally, he looked over at me. “Why in God’s name did she come back here that night?”
I shrugged and said the first thing that popped out of my mouth: “To say good-bye to him.”
Lewis’s head jerked up and he stared at me. I felt a chill of recognition creep across my shoulder blades.
“Do you think so?” Lewis whispered.
I realized that was exactly what I thought. They were lovers, and she was drunk, and because he was a married man she wouldn’t be able to cry for him in public, so she came back to say good-bye to him, privately.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s weird.” Lewis seemed to discard the idea. “I’ll bet she had some kind of weird fetish. Maybe she liked to do it with dead men. I mean, why would anybody want to work in a funeral home anyway unless they were kind of, you know, weird?”
“Why would anybody want to report on car wrecks and rapes,” I retorted, “unless they were kind of, you know, weird?”
He made a face at me and resumed his search.
“Lewis,” I said, “I think she liked her men alive.”
“Yeah.” His tone seemed regretful. He picked up a large bottle of yellow liquid, squinted at it, made a face, put the bottle back down again. “It sounded that way from what Mrs. Rudolph said out there tonight. Man, that was a scene, wasn’t it?”
“Are you really going to see her tomorrow?”
He was standing over one of the dead bodies, staring down at it. “Sure.”
As I watched him, I considered which of my principles I should compromise: my belief in the sanctity of individual privacy, or my belief in the duty of a citizen to assist the police in the investigation of a crime. Finally, I decided.
“I’d like to go with you,” I said.
He looked up. “Why?”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself. It’s three o’clock, twenty-five thirty-two Brooklyn Terrace. Let’s get out of here; it’s colder than Santa’s butt.”
I followed him to the door, where he turned off the fluorescent lights and then preceded me back into the hallway. “Oh.” I tripped over him as I came out the door, because he had bent over to pick up something off the floor. “Lewis!”
“Where’d this thing come from?” he muttered, and straightened up again. In his hands, there was a manila file folder.
I grabbed it. “It’s mine. I must have dropped it. Sorry.”
“Some spy,” he said irritably. “What is it, anyway?”
I held it against my chest so he couldn’t read the tab on the edge. “It’s the file I came back to get tonight.”
“Did you have it when we went in there? I don’t remember you having it when . . .”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” I hissed, and started to walk quickly toward the exit. “Move it, Lewis! And give me back my coat!”
15
This time I could hardly wait to drop Lewis off at his car so that I could go home to read the personnel file on Jack Smith. I took it and a glass of red wine with me to bed, and I spread out the pages in front of me.
Well, I had been right on the mark about one thing: he was nineteen. There in Geof’s bedroom, with the bedside lamps shedding cozy light upon the pages, I looked at that number-only nineteen—and felt silly to be afraid of someone so young, still only a kid, really. And he hadn’t actually hurt me, had he? But then I thought about all the “kids” whom Geof arrested for robbing liquor stores and beating up old men and raping neighbors. I thought of the grieving, gray-haired man, and of Sylvia Davis lying on the floor of that morgue, and of my own terror that morning, and I proceeded to examine closely every word of the stolen file.
He had filled in his employment application in a tight, secretive script. If what he had written there could be trusted to be accurate, the Jackal was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he left high school at fourteen, though he claimed to have earned a GED. I leafed through the papers in the file, but I didn’t find a copy of a graduation equivalent degree. No college or trade schools. Part-time jobs, all short-lived, a fact he hadn’t tried to disguise on the application. He had been a waiter, a delivery boy, a janitor. Under “Reason for leaving,” in each case he had written an ambiguous “No future in it.”
I took a couple of drinks of wine, rolled my shoulders forward and back to release some of the tension in them, and thought about what I’d read so far.
Well, there was certainly “no future” in a job from which a person was fired. Had he been fired from all of those jobs, or had he quit? I flipped through the papers again, looking for references that might tell the tale, but there weren’t any. Maybe they didn’t think a gravedigger was worth the trouble of getting references. Or maybe there weren’t many people who wanted the job, so they took anybody they could get, no questions asked. Did they tell him he had a future in funerals? I wondered if anybody had bothered to verify his claim that he had never been arrested for anything.
According to the application, he was unmarried, at least when he applied for the job, which was a year and four months previously. No children, at least none that he claimed on official documents. He had listed an address, on Ash, which was a few blocks away from where Miss Grant lived. He had gone to work at Harbor Lights for minimum wage, and had received cost-of-living and merit raises since then. Well, Stan claimed he was a good worker. I looked for his quarterly performance reviews.
As I read them, the picture of an ordinary file of an average employee fell apart.
“Mr. Smith’s performance in the first three months of his employment has been unsatisfactory,” I read. “He is chronically late for work, frequently absent, and his general attitude can be described, at best, as uncooperative. This evaluation has been discussed with Mr. Smith, who indicates an unwillingness to alter his work habits. Recommendation: Dismissal.” At the bottom of the form there were two signatures: “A. Friedman,” and “F. You.” But that wasn’t all. There was another notation scrawled in red across those signatures: �
�Place on probation for three months.”
I sat up straighter in bed and drained the wine.
Whose handwriting was that?
They hadn’t fired him, despite Friedman’s strong recommendation and obvious cause. And when I read the subsequent reviews, I discovered the firm kept him on the job despite performance reviews that grew progressively more scathing. But each time, Friedman was countermanded by that red scrawl: “Probation.”
This was getting more and more curious.
I picked up the most recent performance review, dated only this last month. It was terse compared to the others and written in a hand different from Friedman’s neat, legible writing. “Performance improved,” it said. “Recommend cost-of-living and merit raise.”
I compared that handwriting with the red scrawl. They seemed to match. At the bottom of the last performance review there were again two signatures. This time, they were: “Stanley Pittman, Jr.” and “Jack L. Smith.”
“Oh, Stanley,” I said to the mirror in the bedroom. “What’s the little bastard got on you?” And what was the Jackal getting out of it for himself? Not a huge salary, that was obvious, or even promotions. And at his level of salary, the raises he got were too small to be worth the trouble of blackmailing somebody for them. Was he that desperate to hold a job? It didn’t make sense. Stan would have to be paying him out of his own pocket, or out of the business. Had Sylvia found out about it? But if that was a motive for killing her, why hadn’t he destroyed this evidence? Why had he, in fact, thrown it right back in my lap? God, I wanted to talk it over with Geof.
Would Ailey listen?
And did it really have anything to do with Sylvia’s death? Or, if I reported it, would I only be pushing an old friend into an embarrassing situation? Maybe it didn’t indicate anything more than bad judgment on Stan’s part, although that didn’t seem likely, considering his strange reaction that day to my simple question about the gravedigger.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told the mirror.
I closed the file, turned out the lights, and lay down. Maybe I should try to talk to Aaron Friedman before I approached Ailey. That might be the thing to do. I closed my eyes.
I fell asleep to the sound of a certain former teacher droning on in my head, something about prior commitments and responsibilities.
When I woke up the next morning, I recalled which prior commitment she meant, and called her.
“What time is the service?” I asked.
“One o’clock, dear, according to the paper. You will want to allow a little extra time, Jennifer, since I move rather slowly on my crutches.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
I called the funeral home then, to tell Francie I would be right over with her file, and to make an appointment with Aaron Friedman for that morning.
“He called in sick, Jenny,” Francie told me. “Flu.”
That probably meant he wouldn’t attend the funeral, either. And there wasn’t any excuse on earth that was good enough to get me into the home of a sick man I hardly knew to inquire about a gravedigger whose personnel file I wasn’t supposed to have. Well, maybe he would return to the office tomorrow. And maybe Ailey was bright enough to look through the personnel files himself and draw his own conclusions.
I got dressed, had a bite of breakfast, and drove to the funeral home to drop off the file so it would be there if the police wanted it.
Then I drove to my office to see if it still existed.
Faye greeted me with a smile and a message; “Mr. Leland and Mr. Ottilini want to talk to you right away, Jenny.” They were two of my bosses, the trustees of the Foundation.
I got us all together on a conference call.
“Found ‘em yet?” Roy Leland demanded. He was the big, blunt chairman emeritus of United Grocers. I gathered he was referring to the missing bodies, several of which belonged to his wife’s family.
“No, Roy.” I knew better than to offer excuses.
The third party on the phone chuckled. It was Edwin Ottilini, a prominent and elderly local attorney. He said in his dry, wry voice, “It has been only a few days, Roy. We might give Jennifer a day or two more to locate the bodies.”
“Jenny, you’ve got to find them,” Roy insisted. “Doesn’t look good for the town, you know what I mean, Edwin? Makes us look careless, losing our ancestors like this. We’ll have a hell of a time convincing new industry to settle here if we can’t keep our ghosts under ground where they belong. People don’t like empty graves. Makes ‘em nervous.” A snort echoed through the lines. “Hell, it makes me nervous.”
“Miss Cain will find them.” Mr. Ottilini spoke with a calm assurance that flattered, but did not convince me. “Won’t you, Miss Cain?”
“Sure,” I said with more optimism than I felt.
I hung up only to find my assistant, Derek, grinning at me. “Listen,” he said. “I heard about this great medium. She’s a gypsy, see, and she’ll raise the dead for only a small fee, oh, a hundred bucks a head. Let’s see, at 133 heads, assuming nobody was decapitated, that comes to . . . thirteen thousand . . .”
“Oh, shut up,” I replied.
I worked hard on foundation business until it was time for lunch. After a sandwich with Marv and Derek at The Buoy, I drove over to Miss Grant’s to take her to the funeral.
16
All the way over, I fretted about how I would get the large and wounded woman down two flights of stairs to my car, but as it turned out I needn’t have worried. She swung herself down to the bottom as if she had been born on crutches and then gazed back up at me with a modestly triumphant smile.
“I’ve been practicing. I have to get the mail each day, you know, and the newspapers.”
“You couldn’t ask your neighbors?”
“One mustn’t impose, my dear.”
I shook my head in mock disgust, then followed her out the front door of the apartment building. I had to hustle to keep up with her gaily swinging pace.
“Oh, it’s grand to be outdoors again!” she said. “Oh, look up! Do observe those wispy cirrus clouds, Jennifer, like writing in the sky . . .”
“God’s handwriting,” I said, “with a message of hope for us to decipher if only we possessed the courage and the faith to read it.”
Miss Grant stopped abruptly and swung around on her crutches. “You remembered,” she said, with a pleased and surprised smile. “Did I really say it so very often?”
“Just enough,” I replied.
She swung on down the front walk, then waited patiently beside my car for me to catch up with her. She wore a long-sleeved, full-skirted dress with a pattern of large lavender lilacs and pale green ferns and several inches of soft floppy ruffles down the front. She also wore black orthopedic shoes and a large black hat of lacquered straw, and she carried a large black purse, which was crooked up over one shoulder so her hands were free to ply the crutches.
I opened the car door for her. “You look pretty, Miss Grant.”
“Impossible.” But she turned a little pink nonetheless. With some lifting and pushing and grunting and shoving, we worked her into the front seat of my relatively small car and her crutches into the back seat. I got in, too, and started the car.
“Do you attend church, my dear?”
As I pulled away from the curb, I smiled and shook my head in the negative.
“You’d like my minister,” Miss Grant said. “The only thing he takes for granted is his own faith, so his sermons challenge the intellect while they comfort the soul. He’s a little older than you, and divorced.” I glanced at her and she quickly glanced away, nearly managing to look innocent. “We must look for the potential of good, even in the awful wreckage of evil, you know.”
“I have a special friend,” I said. “He’s a cop.”
“Well, I’m sure your young man will like my minister, too.” Her tone was pleasant but firm, the same one with which she used to assure us that we would learn to appreciate long division if we wo
uld only apply ourselves. “He performs simply lovely wedding ceremonies.”
“Miss Grant, about the missing bodies . . .”
“We won’t talk about that today,” she informed me. “At funerals, paradoxical as it may seem, it is best to focus one’s attention on life rather than on death. Did you fasten your seat belt, Jenny?”
I chose a route to the funeral home that took us past 1210 Ash, Apt. 4, as listed in Jack L. Smith’s personnel file. It, too, was a brick fourplex but shabbier than Miss Grant’s. If there was money changing hands, Smith wasn’t spending it on fancy clothes or living quarters. Or course, I hadn’t seen the interior of that apartment. . .
As funerals go, it was ordinary except for the presence of police officers and reporters in the rear. Both Ailey Mason and Lewis Riss were taking notes. The preacher tried to comfort the mourners by pinning the murder on God, who, we were given to believe, works in mysterious ways his wonders to achieve. Miss Grant made small, disapproving noises in her throat throughout. “Theologically unsound,” she murmured once, and I half expected her to scribble “Needs more work” on a copy of the memorial program and pass it up to the front.
As we filed out of the chapel afterward, I watched the gray-haired man follow an elderly woman into a funeral-home limousine. Two younger people sat on the jump seats; a blond girl who looked like the pictures I had seen of Sylvia Davis, and a sad-faced young man with an abundance of muscles and blond hair. Younger sister and husband, I supposed.
“Her husband must miss her terribly,” Miss Grant whispered, uncannily echoing my own train of thought, if not the exact car on the train.
“I thought they were separated,” I whispered back.
“That would have been Sylvia’s idea.” She shook her head slowly. “Not Darryl’s. He has never been one to so easily let go of anyone he loved, and I suspect he’ll never really be separated from her, in his heart. Even as a child, Darryl Davis clung to his belongings and to his friends as if he would lose a part of himself if he lost any one of them. I wasn’t at all surprised when he grew up and went into the military—he was just that sort of serious little fellow who would take things like God and country and marriage vows to heart. Why, I remember how he recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in my classroom as if he were taking an oath on the Bible. He had to leave the service when he was wounded, you know, and it must have been wrenching for him to go. I doubt that he has fully recovered even from that separation. No, Darryl would not be so easily parted from someone he loved.”
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