“Oh yes, very generous. I doubt if we do that much.”
Binky and I looked at each other.
“Sunny,” I said softly. “According to the computer records you furnished, during the past six months Whitcomb Funeral Homes have shipped out almost five hundred dead.”
She gave every indication of being astonished. “I can’t believe that!” she cried.
“It’s true,” I said, “if the information you gave us is accurate. You may check it yourself if you doubt it.”
“I simply can’t believe it,” she repeated and took a hurried slug of her vodka.
“In addition,” I went on, “the overwhelming majority of those shipments went to three cities: New York, Boston, and Chicago. Can you offer any explanation for that? It does seem odd.”
She shook her head without disturbing a hair of that glossy helmet of russet. “I can’t explain it,” she said. “Are you suggesting that our rise in income is due to a huge increase in the number of out-of-state burials we’re handling?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Incredible,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”
I thought the lady was lying—and amateurishly at that. It wasn’t only the thrice repeated “I can’t believe it” that alerted me; it was her manner, expressions, and her intense reactions to what I had told her. Too dramatic by half, and she hadn’t the histrionic talent to make her passion believable.
Trust my judgment on this, since I am a consummate liar myself. I knew Ananias. Ananias was a friend of mine. And believe me, Sunny Fogarty was no Ananias.
“Archy,” she said, “what do you think we should do next? I just can’t understand that volume of out-of-state burials.”
“Hey!” my acolyte said brightly. “I think I’ve got it! Maybe there’s a serial killer on the loose knocking off scads of people.”
“All of whom come from New York, Boston, and Chicago,” I said disdainfully. “Binky, Sunny has already informed my father and me that there has been no unusual rise in Florida’s mortality rate, and no other funeral homes have had the income increase that Whitcomb has enjoyed.”
“Oh,” he said.
I turned back to our hostess. “As for what we should do next, I’d like to get the names and addresses of the out-of-state funeral homes or cemeteries to which Whitcomb’s shipments were sent.”
She stared at me. “Archy, I gave you that. It was all on the computer printout.”
“No, ma’am,” I said gently, “it wasn’t. Names and addresses of Florida cemeteries were noted, but out-of-state shipments were merely listed as being delivered to airports in New York, Boston, and Chicago.”
Now she was truly bewildered; there was no falsity in her response. “That’s impossible!” she burst out. Her face was suddenly contorted with an emotion I could not quite identify. It was either fury or fear—or a combination of both. “Of course that information is on our computer and it should have been on the printout I sent you.”
“It wasn’t,” I said. “Was it, Binky?”
“Nope,” he said. “Just the names of the airports.”
I saw in Sunny’s hardened eyes an affirmation of my initial instinct that she was not a woman to be trifled with. “I’ll find out what happened,” she said fiercely. “First thing tomorrow morning.”
“If it’s missing from the computer,” I said, “is it irretrievably lost?”
“No,” she said. “It can be restored from the original documents submitted by our funeral directors. A lot of work, but it can be done. I’m more concerned with discovering why it’s not computerized as it should have been.”
“Please keep me informed,” I said. “I’d like to see the names and addresses of assignees in other states as soon as possible. One more thing... I think it would help if Binky and I could somehow meet the principals involved. Especially Mr. Horace Whitcomb and his son, Oliver, the chief executive officer, and Oliver’s wife, Mitzi.”
She looked at me curiously. “How did you know her name is Mitzi?”
“I’m sure I must have read it in the society pages of our local newspapers and magazines,” I said without a qualm. “They’re very active socially, are they not?”
“Yes,” she said shortly. “Very. As for meeting them, that will be no problem. Mr. Horace is having a birthday party for his wife, Sarah, on Tuesday night next week. A black-tie affair. More than a hundred guests are expected. A big buffet, three bars, a band, and dancing. You’ll be able to meet all the executive personnel of Whitcomb Funeral Homes. Archy, your parents have already been invited. I’ll have invitations sent to both of you.”
“Goody,” Binky said. “I love huge parties with dancing. Perhaps I’ll meet a wondrous lady who can do the turkey trot. As long as no one from Whitcomb follows me about with a tape measure.”
“No,” Sunny said, smiling, “I don’t think that will happen.”
I finished my drink, stood up, and motioned to Binky. He rose, obviously reluctantly; he would have been happy to stay for hours, drinking Sunny’s booze and schmoozing. We thanked Sunny for her hospitality, and she promised to send me the information I had requested.
In the descending elevator I said to Binky, “A very attractive woman.”
“A bit antique,” he said. “Too old for me.”
“Binky!” I said. “She can’t be more than two or three years older than you.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said.
Then my irritation at his behavior that evening faded. I mean, the man was such an utter bubblehead, but if you’re going to be a friend of a bubblehead, there’s not much point in getting furious because he is a bubblehead. That’s a bit complicated, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?
Outside, we stood a moment in the parking area lighting cigarettes. Mine. Binky never carries coffin nails, claiming he is determined to stop smoking. His pals pay for his firm resolve.
“We’re going to that black-tie bash, aren’t we?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
“Glad to hear it. Things in the detective business are looking up. Archy, do you believe everything Sunny told us tonight?”
“Perhaps not everything,” I said cautiously.
“Me neither,” he said. “I think she was scamming us—or trying to.”
For the second time that day I was shocked by his perspicacity. I wondered if there was a tiny, tiny spark of intelligence in that bowl of lemon Jell-O between his ears.
“Call you tomorrow,” I said. “We’ve got things to do.”
“Okay,” he said cheerfully, “but not too early. I’ve got to watch the Cat People tonight so I’ll probably sleep in. Make it around noonish—all right?”
I stood there and watched him pull away in his decaying Mercedes, black smoke spewing from the exhaust. Then I climbed into my barouche and headed home.
I slid into bed shortly after midnight, still pondering the events of that hugger-mugger day. Before waltzing with Morpheus I reviewed again everything that occurred and what little I had learned in the curious case of the lucrative funeral homes.
I had an aggravating itch that I was failing to recognize something significant that had happened. But the Z’s arrived before I could pinpoint exactly what it was.
6.
IT SOMETIMES HAPPENS THAT one falls asleep with a problem and awakes with a solution. So it was for me on that Friday morning. I sat on the edge of my bed, and the puzzle that had bedeviled me the previous night suddenly became clear, if not completely resolved.
Question: Why had Sunny Fogarty sought the assistance of McNally & Son in the first place?
She had given us a rather frail excuse for not conducting an in-house investigation on her own: she said she might endanger her job by “poking and prying,” and arouse the derision of other employees. After all, who would be silly enough to become concerned because their employer was suddenly making more money?
I might have accepted that if I had not pegged Comptroller Fogarty
as an extremely competent executive, a computer maven who kept a sharp eye on Whitcomb’s balance sheet and bottom line. I could not possibly believe she had missed the increase of out-of-state burials; it was so obvious that even a couple of computer illiterates had caught it immediately.
Assuming she was aware of what we’d discover before she sent us the printout—and I did so assume—what could be her motive in dumping the mystery into the lap of McNally & Son, her employer’s attorneys of record? I could only conclude she had an urgent need for wanting us to investigate rather than the flimsy reasons she had stated.
But what that need might be, the deponent kneweth not. I did know that if something was seriously awry at Whitcomb Funeral Homes, it was doubtful if Sunny herself was involved in any wrongdoing. I mean, since when does a guilty party initiate an inquiry, discreet or otherwise, into his or her own conduct?
After breakfasting on eggs scrambled with chunks of smoked turkey sausage, I phoned Binky Watrous around ten o’clock. I endured his grumbling at being awakened at such an ungodly hour and finally had to cut him short by threatening to tell the Duchess of his distressing lack of ambition. He finally agreed to come to my office in an hour’s time.
He was only fifteen minutes late, still yawning, and grasped my packet of English Ovals like an opium smoker reaching for a full pipe. He smoked and listened in silence while I outlined our program for the day.
We were to visit funeral homes in the area and conduct research on exactly how a person who has passed to the Great Beyond is shipped via airliner to the destination of his or her choice, as expressed in his or her will or dictated by close relatives.
“Yuck!” Binky said with a small shudder.
I hope you will not have the same reaction and consider our investigation somewhat macabre. Of course I do not know your attitude toward dying and death. I do know that for many years mine was abject terror.
But then one day at the funeral of a good friend I recalled Aristotle’s classic dictum: “A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.” It is true for a whole life, is it not? That realization has been a great comfort to me, and I hope it may be to you as well.
I explained to Binky that we would canvass funeral homes other than Whitcomb’s. Since we were to attend Mr. Horace’s party on the following Tuesday, I did not want to run the risk of being recognized by Whitcomb employees, who might question the presence of journalists at the private affair.
“Journalists?” Binky said, puzzled.
“That’s what we’re going to be today,” I told him, “or for as long as it takes. We shall be two writers preparing an article for a national magazine on burial practices in Florida. Do you think you can play the role of a reporter?”
“Of course,” he said confidently. “We’re looking for a scoop—right?”
I sighed and we started out with two pages torn from the classified telephone directory listing all the local mortuaries.
At this moment I shall not detail the results of our peregrinations, but I promise you will learn them shortly. I do want to mention that although I feared our pavement-pounding might be dreary, it turned out to be unexpectedly fascinating.
We worked all day, pausing only once in mid-afternoon for lunch at a greasery that served French fries limp enough to be bent double. We then continued our labors until 4:30, when we decided we had accomplished enough for one day. We parted company, and I returned home to enjoy a delightful swim in a gently rolling sea just cool enough to give the McNally corpuscles a wake-up call.
Engraved invitations addressed to Binky and me had been delivered, requesting our presence at a celebration to be held on Tuesday evening at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Horace Whitcomb. My father raised one of his brambly eyebrows when being so informed at our family cocktail hour.
“How did you manage that, Archy?” he asked.
“Sunny Fogarty arranged it.”
The thicket went up another millimeter. “I hope you intend to dress conservatively,” he said.
“Archy always dresses beautifully,” mother put in.
“Maddie,” the lord of the manor reminded her, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But not this beholder.”
After a ravishing dinner of baked scallops (with braised endives) and a dessert of bread pudding with sabayon sauce, I went upstairs and worked for an hour bringing entries in my journal up to date.
I spent the remainder of the evening planning my weekend and making umpteen phone calls. I lined up a golf game for Saturday afternoon; dinner with Connie at Renato’s on Saturday night (playing Benedick to her Beatrice); a tennis match on Sunday afternoon; and a poker joust with a quartet of rapacious cronies on Sunday night. If a whole life really does consist of beginning, middle, and end, I wanted my middle to be as pleasurable as possible. We are all hedonists, but I’m one of the few willing to admit it.
Mirabile dictu, the weekend proved to be as joyous as anticipated. I awoke Monday morning full of p&v and ready for another day of research into the arcane practices of human burial in South Florida. Actually, it was only half a day, for by one o’clock I decided Binky and I had completed the needful. We repaired to the Pelican Club to lunch on barbecued ribs while we compared notes on what we had learned.
If you wish to prepare yourself for this recital, I suggest a sip of schnapps would not be amiss.
The statistics Sunny Fogarty had quoted to us were generally correct: approximately 25,000 dead are exported from Florida each year, most of them to contiguous states but some as far afield as Malaysia and Tibet.
South Florida is especially active in this commerce, with about four thousand corpses being shipped annually from Broward County alone. The large population of the elderly retired accounts for that.
Coffins are packed in cartons, embalmed bodies airlifted in special crates. All containers are labeled “Human Remains” and “Handle with Extreme Care.” That’s a comfort, isn’t it?
The packaged deceased are delivered to airports in unmarked vans, not hearses. This custom demonstrates a nice sensibility. Can you imagine sitting in first class, waiting for your plane to take off, and you glance out the window and see a hearse pull up alongside? “Stewardess, I’ve changed my mind; I think I’ll take the bus.”
According to our calculations, Monsieur Watrous and I reckoned that almost every airliner departing from South Florida carried at least one corpus in the cargo bay. As Binky remarked, “That’s one passenger who won’t worry about a crash.”
Of course there was an added expenditure for all this. Funeral homes charged a hefty sum, sometimes two thousand dollars, to prepare a loved one for shipment and delivery to the airport. Airlines billed about three hundred dollars for a domestic destination and at least five times that for one overseas.
A final note: Some religions forbid embalming. In that case, the body is placed in a metal container packed with ice before being airlifted. Remember that before you ask the flight attendant for your third Scotch on the rocks.
After discussing all this wonderful stuff, Binky and I fell silent and stared at each other.
“What does it all mean?” he asked finally.
“It means,” I said, “that Whitcomb Funeral Homes is making a great deal of money by shipping an amazing number of dead out of Florida to points west, north, and east.”
“Sure, Archy,” he agreed. “We knew that before we started. But where are they getting all the inhabitants of those crates?”
I said, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of living men?”
“Hey,” Binky said, “you’re not The Shadow.”
“True, but I’m a reasonable facsimile thereof. Do you have any ideas, wild or otherwise?”
He shook his head. “Haven’t the slightest, old boy.”
“Nor do I,” I admitted. “And there’s no point in worrying about it until we get more information from Sunny Fogarty. Let’s go home.”
“Banzai!” he cried. “There’s a rerun of Invasion of th
e Body Snatchers on the tube at four o’clock. I don’t want to miss it.”
“Very fitting,” I said approvingly. “Maybe it’ll yield a clue to what’s going on at Whitcomb.”
That evening I brooded in my den, staring at the journal notes I had jotted. The entire mishmash seemed to me Much Ado About Nothing. But then, I reflected, if there was chicanery afoot, it might be As You Like It to the perpetrator. In either case, it was a comedy, was it not?
I recalled the pater’s admonition to go through the motions but not spend too much time on the Whitcomb affair. I had already disobeyed him and knew I would continue. I was hooked by the puzzle.
Sgt. Al Rogoff of the Palm Beach Police Department—my friend and sometimes collaborator—constantly complains that I overuse the adjective “intriguing.” I suppose I do, but I cannot think of a better word to describe Whitcomb’s increased revenue from the departed and deported.
If the truth be told—a painful necessity—I am a nosy bloke. I do like to stick my schnozz in other people’s business and learn what’s going on. It’s a grievous sin, I admit, but more fun than Chinese checkers and also, on occasion, a good deal more dangerous.
Nothing of any great consequence occurred on Tuesday morning except that I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast. The afternoon was similarly uneventful. I did have my quadriga washed and its gullet filled. But other than that, the day was without excitement.
I finished my two-mile wallow in a placid sea and returned home to dress for the Whitcomb party. It was still warmish in South Florida and I decided on a white dinner jacket: a costume my father insists makes me look like the headwaiter at a Miami stone crab restaurant.
We all gathered for a cocktail before setting out for the bash. Hizzoner was wearing his rather rusty black tuxedo with a pleated white shirt (wing collar) and onyx studs. Of course his cummerbund and tie were black, and the bow was hand-tied. He considered pretied bows a portent of the decline of Western Civilization.
I must confess he looked rather regal in his formal attire, not at all like a mustachioed penguin. But mother was the star. She was absolutely smashing in a long brocaded gown and carried an aqua satin minaudière. Her white curls were a halo and she wore a three-strand, choker of pink pearls. Momsy has a natural high color and that evening she positively glowed: a teenager ready for the prom.
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