Norton’s information, it would appear, was reliable, just like the company name.
The sun was coming up, and I’d barely scratched the surface, hadn’t even opened Miranda’s .pst file yet, because so far I could see both ends of their e-mails on Lenny’s. But Miranda’s e-mail probably had more info about the sale of her sister’s policy, and maybe somewhere an e-mail from her telling Lenny to put her name down on that Guaranteed Investment Mutual Trust policy, just for kicks?
My machine chimed to announce the arrival of more e-mail, and one of the ten or twelve that came in was from [email protected] but with no file attached.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Re: Attila-at-Home cam
Hey, Carved Meat, nice try, but I think it was you on Lenny’s machine earlier. Just a funny feeling. Why would Lenny log on to his own machine as a new user?
And why is it you want a picture of Lenny’s girlfriend?
Why isn’t Lenny on-line anymore?
He’s not answering e-mail either. When he does I’m gonna tell him you were on his machine, unless you wanna try to convince me different?
GothicRage86
16
FUNERAL
ST. DYMPHNA’S CATHEDRAL IS a gargantuan landmark done in early-twentieth-century Spanish Renaissance revival and built on the highest hill in town. Okay, the highest bluff. Groundbreaking to christening took fifty-four years (1905–59), and now the twin bell towers are visible for miles on both sides of the Missouri River.
From afar the cathedral looks like an overwrought Baroque tomb jutting up out of a stand of trees on the prairie. Its cornices, cupolas, and quatrefoils are trimmed in swirling marble swags, friezes, and decorative moldings, with massive flying buttresses of scrolled stone supporting the domes. Skim off the wrought-iron crucifixes and stone crosses, and it would look like the summer palace and seraglio of a Turkish emperor vacationing in Spain shortly after conquering it. In a town dominated by square, white-brick buildings and shopping malls, the cathedral is an architectural red zone where the city planners have quarantined all of the ornaments, filigrees, and masonic braveries in the Mid-Heartland on a single monumental anachronism.
Ascending the granite steps to a row of twelve-foot wrought-iron doors, I had the usual sensation that the bell towers and the rose-windowed façade were slowly toppling forward like the walls of Jericho to crush us grieving human insects and end the world. Inside, the marble pillars soared into arches and vaults spangled with the glittery tesserae of murals that covered the domed ceilings. The diocese had raised the money to restore and preserve the grandeur of the architecture, but the supernatural power that had terrorized me in my Catholic youth was almost all gone. I hoped.
I watched SUVs and minivans unloading out front, soccer moms bullying their children like trail bosses getting after stray cattle, herding the little ones into St. Dymphna’s Elementary School next door. And double-parking outside of them, carloads of people coming for the funeral.
It took quite a while for Lenny’s family and friends to make their way up front. Lenny’s retarded sister was clinging to Vera, and his aunts and grandmas were kissing and splashing tears on each other. We menfolk had official duties in the funeral procession, so we waited in the narthex with Lenny and his casket. The other pallbearers were uncles and neighbors, young and old men I’d met once or twice and got high with, some even from the insurance business, but I didn’t know them well enough to talk about death in a familiar way. They were all dressed better than I—in real suits. I wore the same black sport coat and khaki slacks I always wore when I had to dress up. We shook hands and stood around the casket listening to the organ and the choir.
After the high-end wake, the choir was no surprise. I was half expecting that Hector Crogan would fly in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sing Palestrina’s Stabat Mater for Mrs. Stillmach. The music was loud enough to give us pallbearers an excuse not to attempt conversation.
More of Lenny’s family and friends streamed in the doors. I knew some of them, and I wound up in a receiving line of sorts, a line I didn’t want to be in. I heard the “He was so young” thing, over and over. “Cause of death unknown” kept appearing in the paper, which had everybody thinking that Lenny had committed suicide, which I hated, because I didn’t believe it. Have I said that before? Maybe I thought about it too much.
First up was Addie. She wriggled her eyebrows and shook her head just enough to say: I tried, but it’s posted on FDN.
Maybe by now even more policies had turned up.
She shook my hand, then pulled me down close and said, “I know the name Miranda Pryor because she works with you, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”
“Same way she worked with Lenny?”
Her eyes scorched me like twin lasers.
“Addie, I know what it looks like,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I hope they come after all Three Musketeers.”
Then she walked away. I owed her for the blunt warning; until this fiasco sorted itself out, her allegiances were to the insurance industry, the FBI, and the postal authorities. Hell, she’d help Norton, too, if it came to that, and it would.
Behind her was Miranda, and she had the old rosary out and wrapped around her hands, her fingernails painted one shade lighter than the wooden beads. I watched her walk toward me in an espresso-colored designer suit, matching heels, and sheer hose. Maybe it was the organ blaring, the smell of lilies, or the emotional turbulence, but I realized that if we ever did get married, it would probably be in this cathedral.
Eyes were on us, because everybody knew that Lenny had been out with me and Miranda the night he’d died, and we were the last to see him alive. Nobody was going to badger us here at high-lamentation tide, but soon people would sidle up to us and ask, “What happened?”
We hugged each other, and I whispered, “We’re in trouble.”
She looked at me like she knew that, but what else did I have for her?
“Will you sit with me,” she said, with the same poorly concealed desperation that I’d appreciated so much late last night.
I showed her the pews where us pallbearers would end up. She squeezed my hand and whispered, “Norton’s behind you,” then she leaned into me suddenly, for another squeeze, kissed me on the cheek, and whispered, “I love you,” and moved off, while us pallbearers tried not to watch her hips because it was a funeral.
Norton wore a black wool sport coat and a dove gray shirt with a silver satin tie, altogether the most elegantly dressed man in the church. His finery highlighted the professional distance between his position as the head of the Special Claims Department at one of the biggest companies in town and the shabby circumstances Lenny had managed to surround himself with at the end of his short life. Norton was here out of noblesse oblige for the mentally disabled, overpaid, salaried employees who ran his information-technology engines.
He shook my hand warmly, then put his arm on my shoulder, then his hand on the back of my head and shook it, just like I was a kid and he was the boss I never had.
He leaned forward, uttered a standard-issue condolence, and then said, “The office. Right after the cemetery. We need to talk. And Brent has sent you some e-mails.”
Brent Slipper was Reliable’s in-house counsel, which meant we had legal problems.
He took my right hand in both of his and said, “Time heals all wounds.”
Father Fogarty did the honors without pausing to knock on the casket, while we pallbearers marched it up in front of the Communion rail and turned it sideways, so everybody could get a good look, study it during the service, and think about Lenny’s dead body inside.
I sat one row back from the rest of the casket crew so I could be with Miranda, even though the guys looked at me like it was not protocol to sit with a babe when you were on pallbearer duty. The ceremonies included a concelebrated mass and a customized homily featuring four or five re
membrances of Lenny loosely themed around the Five Sorrowful Mysteries. Fogarty put mind, body, heart, and soul into it, and stirred everyone with the proper mix of grief and consolation and the promise of redemption.
He sounded like Anubis reading from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The deluxe service was a long one; I had plenty of time to remember my sins and what I used to think about at daily mass.
I felt Miranda getting the heebie-jeebies next to me whenever eternity was mentioned, and she trembled halfway through the Apostles’ Creed where it said, “Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead…rose again…He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
That means he’ll judge you, too, Miranda.
But I’d save that for tonight.
“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.”
“And let perpetual light shine upon him.”
It was all about eternity, and in grade school we had no trouble imagining eternity. We knew it better than our own backyard, because we’d had vivid metaphors wired into our heads and soldered in place with white-hot, nun fervor: If a bird came, once every one thousand years, to sharpen its beak on the highest mountain in the world, when the mountain had been worn away from the bird sharpening its beak upon it, Eternity would have just begun.
Normally, Miranda’s religious fervors weren’t catching, and normally I was merely bemused when she asked if I believed in hell. Here it was different. A casket with my best friend in it, a massive congregation of people who believed in everything I didn’t. They were good people going to heaven because they all liked being together for some reason those of us in hell cannot comprehend. I wondered whether, since it meant so much to Miranda, I could see myself coming back to church on Sundays with her. I had my doubts. I had escaped the tractor beams of the Empire Church in the starship of a liberal arts education. I was a free spirit in the deep space beyond the twilight of the gods. Maybe.
I sensed Miranda was glad to have me next to her at a time like this, and she moved closer to me when I hit the timing just right on the “Lord have mercy” and the “Christ have mercy” during the Responses of the Faithful. Father Fogarty waved the altar boys over to meet him at the casket, where they held back the sleeves of his vestments while the thurifer loaded the censer with more incense. Then Fogarty took a trip around the casket, ceremonially swinging plumes of smoke at the four corners. He took another lap, waving his aspergillum like a grand marshal’s swagger stick and sprinkling holy water, first on Lenny’s casket, then on the crowds. I remembered to bless myself when I felt the sprinkles land on my face.
Miranda and I had talked about the Catholic thing many times, and I’d told her I didn’t want to go back to thinking about hell all day and going to the Godbox every Sunday. I subscribed to the theology of Peter DeVries, who said, “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that He need not exist in order to save us.”
Miranda didn’t think that was the least bit funny and argued that the church wasn’t about hell anymore. According to her, instead of high mass and high terror, it was Mass Lite, probably created by the same people who’d brought her Hell Lite. She said being a Catholic was easy nowadays, like being a Lutheran or an Episcopalian. The church makes a real effort to put on a show of joy these days. Maybe, but it wasn’t something I was going to experience at a funeral. All I had to accompany me here were hormonal memories of sin and death flooding my nervous system, while I thought about Lenny shut up inside a coffin, full of sin, and dead in life’s prime.
“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.”
“And let perpetual light shine upon him.”
I lost ten minutes of mass in daydreams and nightmares from my altar-boy days, and the next time I came around, Father Fogarty said, “Let us offer each other a sign of peace.”
I shook hands with everybody in arm’s length, and Miranda gave me a long hug and sobbed against me a few times. When I looked over her shoulder, I saw Norton sitting with Addie, and instead of exchanging the sign of peace, they were exchanging information. They were working, while my brain was locked up running grief processes, error checking, scanning for corrupted files in the life and times of Lenny Stillmach.
When I got back into his e-mail folders later that night, I could probably figure just when he’d gotten the AIDS and just how he’d played it before and after he’d sold the policies to Heartland.
Maybe Miranda had seen Norton, too. She didn’t know Addie, but she’d recognize her as an Industry Someone, and maybe that’s why she was clutching me. Miranda also had to think about the best time to file her claim for three hundred thousand dollars as a beneficiary on Lenny’s life policy. She’d probably wait until the autopsy and medical examiner stuff came in, and they had a cause of death.
And what would Norton advise Addie or Pete at Guaranteed Investment Mutual Trust to do? If somebody filed a claim for three hundred grand on a Reliable policy under similar circumstances, Norton’s first thought would be how to deny the claim, because it was in his job description, and it was still in the two-year contestability period. Sometimes outright denial and the right lawyers could make the other side settle for fifty cents on the dollar or less. But Pete and Norton also had to consider that Miranda would have no trouble attracting a first-rate lawyer, and the first-rate lawyer might take Guaranteed Investment Mutual to trial looking for the death benefit and punitive damages for breaching their duty of good faith to pay on claims.
Guaranteed also had to consider Miranda sitting at the plaintiff’s table in a good little Catholic-girl skirt and sweater or vest, a demure ensemble that would remind the jury of the uniforms she’d worn as a young lady at Duchesne. Perhaps a small, plain gold crucifix would be twinkling in the crushed wool of her lapel. Her lawyer would describe her as a young Catholic woman with a big heart who sacrificed her free time to care for a dying AIDS victim. “And when this troubled young man tried to repay his angel of mercy with the only thing he owned in this world—his life insurance policy with Guaranteed Investment Mutual Trust—the company broke the promise it made to Leonard Stillmach. Guaranteed Investment Mutual Trust took Mr. Stillmach’s premiums every month for TWO YEARS and then refused to pay a dime to Miranda Pryor, his angel of mercy, whose name he’d so carefully written on Exhibit A when he’d chosen her as his beloved beneficiary.”
Guaranteed’s best hope would be to ask Norton to process the policy for them, then Norton could assign Miranda to the file and hope that she would deny her own claim by sheer force of habit.
And if Lenny had been the dirty insider for a viatical scam outfit, Norton would probably call the archbishop and make a ten-thousand-dollar charitable donation to the Catholic church, contingent on Lenny’s body being buried nowhere near consecrated ground.
We struggled through the service until it came time for Communion. I begged off on taking the Eucharist, because I remembered that it is a mortal sin to eat a Host unless you really believe it’s the Body of Jesus Christ. Miranda looked at me with the usual disappointment, then she took my hand in hers and gave me another, closer look. This one said, “Believe with me, just for today, please?” So I went with her.
Fogarty said, “The Body of Christ.”
I said, “Amen,” and ate my first Host in at least ten years.
I went back to the pew with Miranda, knelt next to her, bowed my head, clasped my hands together, closed my eyes, and moved as close to her as I could.
I wasn’t praying. I was pondering whether God would send me to hell because I ate a Host to please Miranda. Would God do this, even if I didn’t quite believe in him, Hosts, eternal damnation, or Miranda?
17
NOT RIGHT, NOT WRONG
FATHER FOGARTY RODE WITH Vera Stillmach at the head of the motorcade over to Calvary Cemetery for a graveside ceremony and personalized memorial.
Miranda had her own car, as usual, and when it was all finally over and just before we parted, I said, “
We gotta talk. Tonight.”
She said, “Come by my house after work.”
I moved in close to hug her, watching her eyes, looking for any clue to what she’d done. I got no reading, only her looking back at me, as if she were wondering the same thing about me.
On the way to my car, I saw Charlie Becker, the homicide detective and part-time regional investigator, coming out of the cemetery’s main building, cell phone pushed in his ear, frowning, jabbering. He had a tie and a sport coat on for the occasion.
As I imagined it, a career in law enforcement had brought him up close and personal with hundreds of sudden, tragic deaths, where his duty was to be a peace officer, a decent human being, and a collector of quality information if it was a death unknown.
Only trouble was, he was late. He looked as if he’d stopped in the cemetery office to pick up a plot map, only to be informed that the services for Lenny were already over.
He didn’t greet me, he just walked up, put his phone away, and started talking to me.
“I’ve been reading a lot about life insurance,” he said. “And these whattaya-call-’ems? Viagra-tals?” he added with a sly grin. “I hate to read. Then I remembered: hey, I know a guy who knows all about this stuff. Why don’t I find Carver Hartnett and have him explain life insurance and veggie-tales to me.”
I looked at the mourners heading back to the cars in huddled clusters of two and three.
“Right now?” I asked.
“Tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. Come down and see me. I’ll call your boss and get you out of half a day’s work.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I can take the morning off.”
“We got a preliminary autopsy protocol on Lenny,” he said. “Something is not right.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t say something is wrong. I said it’s not right. Tomorrow morning you teach me about selling life insurance policies, and I’ll teach you about not-right autopsy reports.”
Bet Your Life Page 17