No Body

by Nancy Pickard

  Could history repeat itself? There was World War II, wasn’t there? There were once again American advisors in distant agrarian countries, weren’t there? History repeated itself every day.

  But how had it been accomplished?

  And how had Sylvia discovered it?

  I had the feeling, stronger than ever now, that somehow or another, it all came down to John Rudolph. She had been his lover, and she had been killed. Muriel was his wife, and she died, too. And I mustn’t forget that John himself was dead. Was he, had he always been, the link?

  John Rudolph . . . funerals . . . and cash.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Cain.”

  A nurse walked in with my mother’s supper: glucose in a clear plastic bag which she hooked up to the feeding tube that led into a needle in my mother’s arm, I watched her perform her questionable miracle, then kissed Mom goodbye. I had a powerful hunch, and it was going to drive me immediately to the offices of the Port Frederick Times, Lewis would be there, working on Sunday, or I didn’t know my ambitious reporter.

  He was, and when I walked in, he looked up in surprise.

  “You’ve left him . . .” Lewis grinned, and opened his arms as if to welcome me into his embrace. “And come running to me.”

  I was already talking as I walked over to his desk. “Lewis, do you keep other newspapers on file around here?”

  He dropped his arms, folded them over his chest.

  “Why yes, I’m fine thank you, and you? Yeah.”

  “The Wall Street Journal?”

  “Sure.” He had tilted his head by now, and was giving me a reporter’s inquisitorial stare. “Should I be taking notes?”

  Other than the weekend guard in the lobby, we were the only workaholics on the premises, so I talked freely. “Lewis, I want you to get me a copy of last Wednesday’s Journal, all right?”

  “If you say so.” He went after it, returning in a few minutes, which I spent drumming my fingers on the top of his computer monitor. When he returned, he held up the front page for me to see. “Which story?”

  I scanned it, looking for news about the funeral industry.

  “This one,” I said, and handed it back to him, “Here. Why don’t you read it aloud, so we’ll both know?”

  “Sure.” He folded the paper back. “And after that, boys and girls, Uncle Lewis will read to you all about Brer Rabbit and the Three Blind Mice, since Uncle Lewis doesn’t have anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon, right? Draw up a rug, kiddies, here goes. . . .”

  He read to me the Journal’s report that prearrangement salespeople in Texas had been caught skimming off their client’s contracts. When customers paid in cash, the salesperson simply falsified the contract and pocketed a little money off the top. Other times, the salesperson convinced gullible customers to make out their checks to him, and again, skimmed some off the top for himself, then made out contracts for less money. Or, he offered to write the check for the down payment himself—so that a customer who could not otherwise afford a contract might take advantage of a “special deal”—and to bill the customer later. That, of course, allowed the salesperson to “buy” a contract for lesser amounts than the customer ordered and to skim when the customer wrote a personal check to pay him back. They were easy scams, the Journal pointed out, and possible not just in the funeral industry, but in any business that depends to a great extent on the inherent honesty of its salespeople. The paper went to some pains to point out that the “vast majority” of prearrangement companies dealt honestly with their customers. But if the story had an editorial slant, it was “buyer beware.”

  In the reading, Lewis’s voice had grown increasingly sharp, alert, interested. When he finished, he looked up at me and said, “Now, little girl, you will kindly tell your Uncle Lewis why you had him read that particular story to you, hmm?”

  “I think somebody at Harbor Lights has been pulling those scams, and Sylvia Davis found out about it,” I said. “and that’s why she was killed.”

  Lewis let out a long whistle. “Jesus.”

  I pulled over a chair from another reporter’s desk and sat down in it.

  “Well,” Lewis said, “what do you . . . ?”

  I held up my hand. “Wait a minute. Lew, let me think.”

  He complied, uncharacteristically, without argument. What I was thinking was that all I had was another theory, but no evidence. I could lay it on Geof, but he would politely, insistently, and correctly suggest that I take it to the police officer in charge of the case. And why should Ailey Mason pay attention to any hypothesis of mine? I didn’t have any more credibility with him than he did with me, possibly even less since the Darryl Davis fiasco. What I needed this time, instead of running to the nearest cop with my latest, possibly harebrained theory, was evidence. Inarguable, irrefutable, direct evidence.

  “Lewis?” I looked up.

  “Still here,” he said. “Older, but still here.”

  “I think you need a funeral prearrangement plan, Lewis.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Is that a veiled threat of some kind? The only reason people arrange for funerals is if somebody’s gonna die. Do you know something I don’t, Cain?”

  “I know that you and I need to set up appointments for tomorrow to take out prearrangement contracts for ourselves, or for our parents, or anybody else, it doesn’t matter who. And when they ask us for a down payment, we’re going to pay them in cash. You see?”

  He was nodding. “Plainly. How much cash?”

  “I’m not sure, but we may each need several hundred dollars before the job is done.” I looked him up and down, taking in the unshaven cheeks, the missing button on his shirt, the ratty cuffs on his jeans. “Do you have that much on hand, Lewis?”

  “Sure.” He grinned, and combed his hair with his hand. “See, I got this sock full of cash, thought I’d need it to purchase a bit of the evil weed, but it seems I came into a fortune in mind-altering substances. I got cash to burn, Cain. I might even smoke some of it.”

  “I wouldn’t.” I smiled back at him. “It has probably been salted with arsenic by the DEA. Now about our appointments. I’ll set up meetings for myself with the prearrangement-sales manager, with Stan Pittman, and with Spitt, if he’s out of jail yet.”

  “He is,” Lewis informed me.

  “Good.” I pointed at him. “You take Aaron Friedman, just to see if he ever sells plans, and Russ Bissell, and the other prearrangement salespeople. I don’t imagine there are more than a couple of them, and you can get their names from the secretary at Harbor Lights, a friend of mine by the name of Francie Daniel. What do you think, Lewis? Sound okay to you?”

  He was looking down at the floor, and frowning. I thought maybe he’d detected a flaw in my plan. “Listen, Cain. When you prearrange your funeral, you can pick your own flowers and music and crap, right?”

  “Right”

  He looked up. “You think they’d let me pick Springsteen?”

  “Springsteen on a pipe organ?” I pretended to consider it. “Gee, I don’t know, Lewis, which song did you have in mind?”

  “‘Cover Me,’” he said, and grinned.

  We used the phones at the Times office to make our appointments. Amazingly, everyone we wanted to reach was available to answer the phone, even Spitt, who had indeed been released on a bond that he swore to me he would never pay back to “that dumb bunny,” his son. Everyone we wanted to see was also available to see us when we wanted to see them the next day. I wondered if we should take that as a good omen or just sheer dumb luck.

  To justify the unseemly urgency of our Sunday calls, I told each person on my list that “my mother has taken a turn for the worse.” Lewis claimed that a beloved uncle was at death’s door and demanding that his funeral be arranged so he could the in peace.

  “God will get us for this,” Lewis predicted after he hung up from his last call. “If my uncle gets sick and dies next week, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “I didn’t know you
were superstitious, Lewis.”

  “Jenny, Jenny, there’s so much you don’t know about me.” He rolled his chair closer to mine and leered intimately into my face. “Wouldn’t you like to get to know me better, Cain? I am not merely the callow, shallow reporter you see salivating before you. No. Beneath this hairy chest there lie fascinating depths for you to plumb to your heart’s content when, as they say in the movies, this is all over.”

  “Lewis . . .” I breathed it seductively.

  He rolled closer. “Say it, Jenny.”

  “When this is all over . . .” I placed my hands on his knees. “. . . this will all be over.” I shoved hard. Lewis rolled across the aisle and banged up against his own desk.

  “Damn! I’m on a ‘downbound’ train with you.”

  I stood up and began to gather my purse and coat. “On the other hand, Lew, if you’re a good boy, maybe I’ll help you win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting of fraudulent practices in the Port Frederick funeral industry. And tell the truth, Lewis, which would you rather have—me or a Pulitzer?”

  He grinned and walked me to the door.

  32

  I met Stan for breakfast the next morning at the Sunnyside Up and Cup, a local café with smiling sun faces on its menus and “bottomless” coffee mugs and tall red vinyl booths where one might talk to one’s companion in relative privacy.

  He ordered poached eggs, which nearly ruined my appetite for my two-egg cheese omelette (cooked well, not runny) with onions, green peppers, and extra cheese. Worse, he only picked at them, so I had to endure having those two rheumy egg eyes gazing reproachfully up at me as he gradually blinded them with his fork. King Lear came unfortunately to mind.

  “I don’t do much prearrangement work, Jenny,” Stan, said right off, repeating the caveat he’d offered on the phone the day before. “It doesn’t seem fair to take the business away from our salespeople. But now and then I’ll do it for friends, the same way Dad and I will handle funerals if somebody makes a special request.”

  “I appreciate it, Stan.”

  He peeled the paper top off a little white tub of Half’n Half, poured the cream into his coffee, and then began to stir it as methodically and seriously as if it were his mission in life to mix that coffee with that cream.

  “Feeling low this morning, Stan?”

  He shrugged. “I paid Dad’s bail. I think he may disinherit me for doing it.” He looked up at me with eyes that were as lugubrious as the yolks of his poached eggs. “Do you want me to give you the whole spiel on prearrangement, Jenny, or do you kinda already know what you want?”

  “If there’s anything I can’t stand,” I said, “it’s high-pressure salesmanship.”

  He looked blank, then smiled.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said then. “Let me describe to you what I want, and then you tell me what it will cost. And then I’ll give you a down payment, and we’ll be done.”

  “If there’s anything I can’t stand,” he said, “it’s an indecisive, wishy-washy customer who doesn’t know her own mind.”

  I laughed, and then launched into a fictitious description of the funeral of my dreams. It didn’t take long for him to fit it nicely into one of his company’s available plans, and to affix a price to it.

  When I pulled out the down payment in cash, he raised his eyebrows slightly but didn’t demur. Instead, he rummaged to the bottom of his briefcase, pulled out a pad of receipts, and wrote one out to me in the amount of $250.

  “Thanks, Jenny.”

  “Thank you, Stan.”

  From the cash I had given him he extracted, in a preoccupied, absentminded sort of fashion, a five-dollar bill and two ones—added change from his pocket—and left it all on the table to cover food and tip.

  Back in my car, I wrote a note to myself: If he didn’t do much prearrangement, why would he carry a cash-receipt pad around with him? And why would he pay for breakfast with the cash I had given him on account, a loose practice at best, and without even making a note of the amount or asking for a receipt from the waitress?

  I called Francie Daniel from my office.

  “Francie,” I said, “would you quietly look through your files and find out for me which salesperson handled the prearrangement account for John and Muriel Rudolph?”

  I hung on the line while she went to look.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when she returned, “I can’t find it anywhere.”

  No, that would have been too easy. I sighed, even though I had not expected her to locate the file.

  “Do you want me to ask around?” she inquired helpfully.

  “No! Thank you, but don’t do that! And Francie, the salespeople will be turning in several contracts and cash down payments today and tomorrow from me and from that reporter, Lewis Riss. Will you please call me, privately, the minute you get them all in?”

  She agreed to do so.

  I met Beryl Kamiski for lunch at the restaurant of her choosing, the Sailors Three. A waiter in black slacks, white shirt, black tie, and a long, immaculate white apron brought us each a serving of Beryl’s recommendations: Crab Louis salads and glasses of a superior domestic white wine.

  “Exceptional,” I said after my first bite.

  “Good.” Beryl wore a stylishly cut black silk suit with a mauve silk blouse and tie. Instead of the usual prim bow—the kind that says I-may-be-here-on-business-but-by-God-I’m-still feminine—she had unbuttoned the top three buttons, laid the collar open, and flipped one end of the tie over the other in a loose, casual knot at the bottom of the V. It just covered what would otherwise have been a generous peek at her generous cleavage.

  She smiled at me, and I felt as if I had known her for years.

  “I’ll tell you a secret, Jenny,” she said in the brisk, intimate way she had of speaking. “This business teaches you to appreciate life. There’s nothing like a funeral to make you glad you’re alive, you know? I don’t mean to sound egotistic, but I probably enjoy life more than most people I know. I love good wines, good food, I love handsome men, nice clothes, really good music—Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, none of this modern junk. I love vacations in Las Vegas, Hawaii, Dallas, all the really nice places. I like to dance a lot and drink a little, and God, I love to sell things, and I love to talk, talk, talk.”

  When I smiled, she chuckled at herself. It was a deep, rich, smoker’s laugh that attracted attention. The male glances lingered for several seconds. She was a large, handsome woman with an air about her of having lived a ripe, sensual life, of knowing secrets, and of maybe even being willing to share one or two of them. There was something common about Beryl, but she had dolled it up, toned down the sass with a little class. I suspected that she moved as easily among the gentry as among the peasants.

  She put down her glass of wine, leaned toward me, looked me straight in the eye. Her own eyes were large and gray, laugh lined, life lined, and there was a shrewd knowingness in the depths of them. I felt she was either going to tell me a very funny dirty joke or something deadly serious.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, Jenny,” she said in a low, vibrant voice. “Life is no laughing matter. Oh, these comedians who laugh at life and death, what do they know about the pain of losing someone you love? Nothing! They don’t know anything about it! But I,” she tapped the flesh of her chest with a long, pointed, red fingernail, “I’ve lived and loved, I’ve loved and lost. I’ve seen more funerals than the average person sees in three lifetimes, and I’ll tell you something. . . .”

  She leaned closer.

  I leaned closer.

  “There are some funerals that provide a sense of comfort, and some that don’t; some funerals that ease the pain, and some that don’t; some funerals that allow the survivors to celebrate the joy of the life of their loved one, and some that don’t.”

  “Which ones,” I said, “don’t?”

  “The ones that are planned at the time of need, Jenny.”

  “Time of need?”

 
; She looked to her right, to her left, leaned forward.

  “Death, dear.”

  At which point I knew we were off and running. Well, I thought, as she sold me on the benefits of a top-of-the-line funeral for my sister, there are all kinds of sales approaches. Hers was magnificent in its way—illogical, yes, but dramatic, theatrical almost, and probably highly effective with many different types of people. The fact that I kept wanting to laugh in no way negated the fact of the power of her personality, and thus of her presentation. The woman was a saleswoman par excellence. It was only dried-up old MBA’s like me that she would have a hard time convincing.

  On this day, however, I was an easy sell.

  Like Stan, she raised her eyebrows over my display of $250 in bills. “Cash, dear? I don’t think I have a receipt pad with me. Let me check.” Like Stan, she rummaged through a briefcase, but unlike him she came up empty-handed. “Will you trust me to mail you one?”

  I said I would.

  She picked up the tab on her American Express Gold Card and slipped the blue copy in her briefcase. “It’s a shame about Spitt,” she said on our way out the door together. “But I absolutely refuse to believe he did it, so I know he’ll get off. Between you and me, though, it’s been awful for business. Do you know, for a second there the other day, I thought you thought that Darryl Davis did it. Isn’t that silly?”

  “Really,” I said.

  Back in my car again, I added to my notes: If she couldn’t give me a printed receipt, why not at least scribble a temporary one on a piece of scratch paper?

  I found Spitt at home in his wood-paneled den.

  His wife—a small, pleasant-faced, white-haired woman in a black dress—led me into the den in the manner of a nun ushering in a penitent to see the Pope. “He will see you now, dear,” she said. “Thank you, Reverend Mother,” I was tempted to reply.

  Spitt had his slippered feet up on the footrest of a brown leather recliner, and from that throne, he waved me into the room. I went, with some trepidation when I saw what awaited me there: a wild hog snarled down at us from the west wall; on the south wall, the head, neck, and shoulders of a creature that used to be a goat or a sheep—for some reason I couldn’t immediately think which—hung from a wood plaque; to the east, there was a stag; and to the north, a doe. I tried to look her in the eyes, with the vague notion of apologizing to her for my species, but found I couldn’t do it: she was crosseyed—definitely, for all eternity, cross-eyed. I wondered if the fault were nature’s or the taxidermist’s. God, I thought, how would I like to have my own slightly bowed legs glued to a plaque and nailed to a den wall for future generations to view?