by Joss Cordero
Ingersoll’s thoughts returned to the other girl, not the living girl still bowing onstage, but the girl who’d taken her last bow on the autopsy table, her eyes plucked out by birds, her throat cut by the maniac, and the rest of her cut open by the pathologist, so they could know her last meal, her last drink, her last pill, her last everything.
“Was she raped?” asked Smoker.
“No. There’s plenty of DNA, but the lab’s so backed up we’ll be lucky if we see the results in two weeks.”
“Is there any chance she knew the lunatic? “
“We’ve been tracking down her male friends. Like her, they’re sober citizens.” Ingersoll produced his photo of Megan laughing on the beach, her freckled face radiant, and tossed it on the table. “Look at this girl.”
“A real sweetheart.”
Ingersoll got to his feet with a sigh. “And she made a beautiful bride.”
It wasn’t until the following evening that Mrs. Zuckerman received the long-awaited knock on her door.
“Sorry I took so long to get your groceries, ma’am.”
“I thought maybe you went to Israel.”
She moved aside with her walker so he could come into her trailer and set the food down on her counter.
She noticed he was no longer wearing his Polish snowstorm hat and suit. He’d exchanged them for a kind of explorer’s outfit, olive drab with epaulets and lots of pockets. Before she could comment on this surprising alteration, her neighbor handed her the change from her twenty and walked back to his own trailer.
The next morning he was gone.
And he wasn’t just gone temporarily. Mrs. Zuckerman knew from experience. At her age she had a seventh sense for abandonment.
Maneuvering her walker, she mounted the stairs to his door, raised herself on tiptoes, and squinted through the cut-out window. Nothing on the table. Nothing on the chairs or bed. No dishes in the sink. No knapsack or saddlebags. No nothing. Had she driven him away with her shopping list?
True, she had planned to use him on a regular basis.
I pushed him too soon.
And as a result, Bougainvillea Park is never going to be a hotbed of scholarly Jews.
Megan’s throat was swathed in pink chiffon to match the pink velvet lining of the Silver Rose Casket. Her eye sockets had been filled in with ocular prosthetics, and her eyelids delicately glued shut. Her freckled skin looked dewy smooth beneath its makeup. The embalmer and cosmetologist had worked extremely hard and done a lovely job.
In a row near the flowers sat her angry father, her freckled weeping mother, and two freckled grim-faced brothers.
Smoker offered his condolences, and took his seat in a corner from which he could see everyone who signed in. There he listened to the low-volume feed of classical music, and wondered if funeral directors had catalogs with different categories of music for different categories of corpses. One thing about this musical category, it was very fucking depressing.
Megan had many friends, but none of them looked like the guy in the surveillance photo, and none of them stayed long, not out of any lack of affection for the murdered girl but because they were young and alive and had places to go on a Friday night.
As for him, he was here for one reason—so his amazon didn’t wind up in a coffin too. When dealing with a nut job, you had to cover all bases. The lunatic might just show up to see how someone else laid out his bride.
The brothers left a few times and came back. As they passed Smoker’s corner, the aromas revealed that one had been out for a smoke and the other for pizza. He could use a slice himself. Occasionally they glanced his way, and finally the pizza brother came over. “You must’ve been a good friend of Megan’s.”
“I’m doing surveillance,” said Smoker, showing his badge and ID.
“Somebody’s paying you for this?”
“The details are rough. You sure you want to hear?”
He wanted to hear.
“Another woman, same age as your sister, was attacked the same way. She survived, and I’m working on her behalf to try and catch the guy who did it.”
“You think he might come here?”
“Sometimes a guilty party comes to look at his victim.”
“I’ll kill the fucker.”
“Don’t go flying off the handle until we’re sure.”
“You give me the nod.”
“I will,” said Smoker, thinking—I better keep my head straight and not nod off or this guy’s going to tear someone apart.
He endured another hour of Music to Die By, and still the perp didn’t show, just more friends of Megan’s. An interesting group. What, for example, was her relation with the sorrowful little Latino clutching a Tampa Bay Rays cap in his hand?
Suddenly the brothers swiveled as if they were one and rose to their feet like a pair of gunfighters in a Western.
Smoker followed their gaze to the suspicious-looking character framed in the doorway. It’s not the guy, he quickly signaled. Unless it was the guy, in which case all his theories were wrong. The man in the doorway had long black hair and a droopy black mustache, and his tattoo-covered arms and chest were bare beneath his pirate’s vest.
Smoker moved close enough to overhear him introduce himself to the family. “I’m Megan’s tattoo artist. It was an honor to ink your daughter. And it’s a goddamn shame what happened.”
“It was a beautiful tattoo,” said Megan’s mother, wiping her eyes.
The pizza brother interjected. “She only had it two weeks. Don’t you think a partial refund is in order?”
“Megan got a lot of pleasure out of that tattoo,” his mother admonished him.
“He’s right,” said the tattoo artist. “I should give a partial refund. Maybe we could work it out in trade . . .” He dealt out four business cards.
“I’m grateful for you coming by,” said Megan’s mother.
“She was a wonderful woman.” The tattoo artist pressed the mother’s hand, then continued to the coffin and stood for a while looking down at his client. “Lord anoint my hand,” he murmured, “for this work that I do on the temple.”
Anoint my hand? thought Smoker, following the tattoo artist as he quietly left the viewing.
They stepped out into the parking lot, Smoker showing his ID and explaining his connection to Megan.
The tattoo artist climbed onto the back of a motorcycle driven by a heavily tattooed woman in a leather miniskirt. “I gotta get back to the Tattoo Show. I’m paying big bucks for my space there. You wanna talk,” he shouted over the sound of the revving engine, “I’m at the International Event Center until midnight.” He tossed Smoker a card that said Taboo Tattoos, and his tattooed mama roared off into the night. Smoker noted the license plate said inked.
He went back inside and sat down for another round of death music. The visitors were diminishing in number. The brothers were yawning. At last the funeral director tiptoed in and discreetly nodded to the family to indicate the viewing was over. Megan’s father helped his weeping wife to her feet.
The director bid them a sympathetic good-bye and assured them he would see them in the morning. As Smoker rose to follow the family out, the director stepped in beside him and murmured, “May I speak to you for a moment, sir?”
With the same sympathetic expression he’d offered the mourners, he discreetly beckoned Smoker to his office and invited him to have a seat.
“James Fiorello Junior,” he said in his hushed voice, offering a pleasantly warm, dry hand, which must’ve been an asset for a professional sympathizer. “This is a very sad occasion.”
Smoker agreed that it was very sad.
“The brother of the deceased mentioned you’re a private investigator . . .” He looked around before adding, “. . . doing surveillance on behalf of a woman who was attacked by the same assailant.”
Once again, Sm
oker took out his ID and badge.
Fiorello examined them intently, then handed them back. “I want to hire you.”
Smoker took out a copy of the contract he always optimistically carried with him, and Fiorello read it through, paying special attention to the confidentiality clause. “This will work.”
After both men signed, Fiorello wiped his hands together as if disposing of a burden, or completing a ticklish embalming job. “You can rest assured I haven’t done anything illegal,” he said in his softly measured tones. “If I’ve sinned, it’s a sin of omission.” He leaned forward. “I want you to pass some information on to the police, and keep me out of it. I know I can make an anonymous phone call, but it’ll be treated like the thousands of other time-wasting calls. With you, it’ll come wrapped up in a nice professional package.”
“Exactly what information would you like me to pass on?”
“Being entrusted with Megan’s remains, I became privy to some rather distressing facts. Are you aware that Megan was decorated after she was murdered?”
“Veils and rice.”
“The work of a psychopath.”
“No question about it.”
“And I happen to know someone who is most certainly not right in the head.”
“Don’t we all?”
“He used to work for me,” said Fiorello.
The fetal pig, thought Smoker, recalling the third profession on Dottie’s list. Maybe he’s an embalmer, she’d said.
“He’s an embalmer?”
“An embalmer? Certainly not. Though it turned out he had delusions of becoming one. No, he was just a night watchman. But he was strong as an ox, and if the deceased didn’t have enough pallbearers or if the pallbearers were too old, which is frequently the case around here, he filled in there too. I even bought him a secondhand suit.”
“Did you buy him a Hasid hat?”
“A Hasid hat? We’ve never done a Hasid funeral, not that we wouldn’t like to. Though I understand they insist on plain pine boxes . . . but why do you ask that?”
“Could a night watchman have enough contact with the corpses to smell of formaldehyde?”
Fiorello put his face in his hands, a surprising gesture for someone whose profession was calming other people.
“Is that possible?” asked Smoker softly. Now he was the one sounding like a funeral director.
“Of course it’s possible. He pulled them out at night and decorated them. That’s why I fired the lunatic. I came down on Christmas Eve to give him some eggnog and fruitcake. And he was hanging tinsel in their hair. Sticking angels up . . . well, angels. And Christmas lights. Strings of Christmas lights.”
Smoker reached into his pocket and handed Fiorello the photo of the perp.
“Yes,” said Fiorello wretchedly, “that’s Zach.”
“Tell me about him.”
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“Why don’t we take it chronologically?”
“First I have to tell you some unpleasant secrets about the mortuary business. On the very rarest of occasions, and only with the bottom-feeders at the level of unskilled labor, you get a creep who gravitates for sick reasons. He does things he shouldn’t do. With the dead, you understand. I’m not saying it’s happened in my establishment, but I wasn’t born yesterday, I know that there are people who have sexual intercourse with corpses. Or a couple of young idiots might get high, they might joke around in an inappropriate manner, even pull some disrespectful pranks. But never have I seen what I saw on Christmas Eve.”
“You said he was decorating them.”
“It wasn’t the goddamn decorations that scared me. The thing that scared me was the lunatic had no idea it was wrong. The opposite in fact. He thought he was doing something splendid and that I ought to send him to embalming school. And afterward . . .”
“He came back?”
“No, I never saw him again. But I read some girl had been attacked in the early hours of Christmas morning on a boat moored nearby. I figured it was just a coincidence. After all, girls are raped every day in Palm Beach County. So I decided not to trouble the police.”
“Perfectly understandable.”
“Then I saw his face on Crime Stoppers. The same picture you just showed me. And I knew he must’ve been the one who attacked the girl. But I didn’t report him. I told myself I had to protect my reputation, my livelihood, my family.” Again he put his face in his hands.
Smoker waited until at last Fiorello emerged.
“Now you see why the ritual murder of Megan hit me so hard. I felt in my heart it was the same person. Of course I could be wrong, and if Zach’s innocent, he’ll be proven innocent. But I made a terrible mistake, keeping quiet. My conscience is killing me.”
“Piece of advice. From professional and personal experience. Don’t blame yourself. You drive yourself nuts, it doesn’t help anyone else, and it can give you shingles.”
“Shingles?”
“You get them from stress. It’s a resurgence of childhood chicken pox. But much more painful.”
Fiorello closed his eyes as if trying to imprint the lesson on his mind, then repeated the movement of wiping his hands together as if clearing the decks for the next subject. “There’s one other thing. Maybe it’s irrelevant. When I turned Megan over and saw her tattoo, I remembered those snake bracelets Zach used to wear.”
Smoker took out his notebook. “Do you still have your records on him?”
Fiorello didn’t reply immediately.
At length he said, “I don’t always keep records. These guys come and go so fast, I don’t like wasting the government’s time. I figured Zach might stay a week, maybe a month. But he stayed for a whole year. Well, why wouldn’t he stay for a year? A necrophiliac’s wet dream.”
“So you paid him in cash?”
“As I say . . .”
“But you know his full name?”
“Zachariah Whitman.”
“Do you have an address for him?”
Fiorello gestured vaguely over his shoulder. “West of here in one of those trailer parks filled with illegal immigrants. Not that Zach was an immigrant. The irony of the thing is—I thought I had a treasure in that conscientious madman.”
Smoker handed him the notebook and pen, and Fiorello wrote the address of the trailer park.
“Did he have a phone?”
“I never needed to call him. He never missed a single night. But I’ll tell you one thing he had. He had a little digital camera, and he photographed the bodies after decorating them. He must have a computer filled with . . .” Fiorello shook his head.
Smoker was beginning to understand why Fiorello hadn’t wanted to trouble the police.
“He’s probably got a picture of Megan Berry in her veil and rice,” said Fiorello.
“No doubt. What did he drive?”
“A bike. Not a motorcycle, just an ordinary bicycle. Black and white, I think.”
“Do you know where he worked before?”
“Other funeral homes? Or the morgue?”
“Do you know if he’s married? Does he have any children? A girlfriend? Maybe friends he made here?”
“He didn’t make any friends here. Whenever I asked him personal questions, he was evasive. I tried to be friendly, like bringing him the fruitcake and eggnog. But I can’t say he ever responded. Except that final night when he asked me to send him to embalming school. That was when I realized he was out of his mind.”
“Was he a local?”
“No, but he was a Southerner. He might have come from the Panhandle. All those country boys sound the same to me.” Fiorello reached toward the box of tissues he kept on his desk for distraught mourners, and savagely blew his nose. “I hire these gonifs because they come cheap. But you get what you pay for. That’s what the public doesn�
��t understand these days, believing they can get quality caskets from Overstock.com, Costco, Walmart, Amazon. The Internet is ruining me. Caskets are the lifeblood of the industry. I say to people, go ahead and order from wherever you want, but you won’t get the workmanship. It’s the same with hiring employees. Believe me, I’m going to be more careful in future.”
And with that, he switched off Music to Die By.
Before he started up his car, Smoker called Ingersoll’s cell phone and left a message. “The name of the perp who cut my amazon is Zachariah Whitman. I’m sure he’s cut and run by now, but I’m on my way to where he used to live.” And he read out the address Fiorello had jotted in his notebook.
His route took him into the badlands of Lake Worth, where the only residents gathered on the street at night were the gang members who controlled it—the Krazy Locos, Sur 13, MS 13, Top 6. In the middle of this peaceable kingdom was the run-down trailer park. There was no official entrance, but the first trailer on the left was labeled OFFICE. He parked his car and stepped out.
Palm Beach County’s trailer parks came in many flavors. At the sweet end was the festive atmosphere of Briny Breezes in Boynton Beach, where Canadian retirees planted flower gardens and made jolly attempts at decoration. This was the bitter end, with trailers jammed in at odd angles between the weeds, the only decoration being the occasional plywood board in lieu of a window; a variation was duct-taped garbage bags.
Outside the office a gentleman was seated with his chair tilted back in the darkness, a security light beaming down on his flaming mop of hair and glinting off the gun half hidden at his waist, an appropriate evening accessory for the neighborhood. I know this face, thought Smoker.
“I’m looking for Zachariah Whitman.”
“Nobody by that name here,” said the redhead.
“I guess I’ll have to bang on every door until I find him.”
“Go ahead and bang.” The expression on the redhead’s face indicated it would be a waste of time.
“He’s gone?”
“He came, he went.”
“Forwarding address?”