"Buzz," snapped Straun, pushing a mug toward him, "get me some more coffee."
Buzz looked from me to him then back to me.
"Mr. Cuddy," he said, crestfallen, "would you like . . ."
I shook my head. Buzz picked up the mug and stepped from the room.
"You ever read Dr. Spock, Straun?"
"What?" he said.
"Skip it. In plain English, where does Al's family stand?"
"The kid's right," said Straun defensively. "Law school, Harvard Law School, can you imagine. He goes through Harvard and he's like a rabbit, you couldn't trust him to run a pony ride and do it right. But he writes a hell of a memo, that boy. He's dead right about Sachs. The guy gave up every kinda benefit we give to keep covering his draw. He was gettin' the heave-ho this week. Then he got killed.”
Straun's face changed a little, almost human. "Funny, you know the papers had how he was done in. I never figured him for a queer."
I tried to remind myself that guys like me aren't supposed to hit people older and smaller without physical provocation. "Did A1 know he was going to be fired?"
Straun blinked at me. "Yeah, he knew. I told him two weeks ago. Two weeks ago today. The state says you gotta give 'em two weeks' notice, so that's what he got."
Buzz came back in, clutching the coffee mug in both hands. His hands trembled and some spilled onto his top fingers. He winced, but kept silent and kept coming.
"Anything else?" said Straun, taking the mug in his left hand.
"Yes," I said. "The funeral's at one. Today."
Straun slurped some coffee. "Don't wait for us," he said, motioning Buzz to the paperwork.
I leaned across the table and grabbed Straun's left wrist. I thought about twisting it toward me, spilling the coffee onto the papers, but I figured that would only inconvenience Buzz. So I twisted away, toward Straun's ample lap. He jumped up screaming.
"What the fuck was that?" he shrieked, grabbing his crotch and jumping from one leg to another.
"A small gesture," I said.
Buzz ran to get some towels and ice while I let myself out.
* * *
When Beth died, Joe Mirelli, a priest and friend, said her funeral mass. I remember him delaying the beginning of the service so that the latecomers could be parked outside and seated inside. I'm sure Jake Cribbs often made the same suggestion. But not that day.
Martha and Carol, Dale and Larry, and me. The kids were at Carol's house with her sitter. The elder Cribbs and the younger Cribbs. All told, one man short on pall bearers.
We stood in the same room as yesterday. Jake Cribbs checked his watch at the stroke of one and bade us be seated. After Martha sat down, Cribbs walked over to her, bent at the waist and held her right hand with both of his. He said something, and she nodded. Then he walked graduation step to the slim podium next to Al's coffin at the front of the room.
He spoke for perhaps four minutes. Al's birth, schooling, military service. Meeting Martha, marriage, life in Pittsburgh. No mention of work, means of death, or thinness of crowd. Acknowledged each in the audience by first name, correctly assigning us to one or another part of his or Martha's life. Then a pause, then a moment of silence for Al. I recalled Beth's hour—long high mass and eulogy. Religion be damned, tradition be damned, when my time comes, let there be a quiet, sincere professional like the elder Cribbs. To recount briefly and acknowledge accurately. No incense, no ritual, no organ music.
Cribbs asked us to stand. We did so. Martha was seated immediately in front of me. Her shoulders rose and fell a bit more frequently than normal breathing would require, but no sound, no tears.
Cribbs gestured toward A1. Larry, Dale, the younger Cribbs, and I positioned ourselves two on a side at the coffin. The younger Cribbs tugged and pushed the stretcherlike contraption upon which the coffin rested, and we wheeled it down the aisle. It was a symbolic journey only, the coffin stopping at the door. We mourners filed out of the room and the home, leaving Al with the professionals for maneuvering the coffin into the hearse.
We had come from Martha's house in Carol's ten-year-old Buick four-door, but a liveried driver awaited us in the driveway. He stood at parade rest rather than lean against the black Cadillac limousine. We squeezed in, sitting close and salon-style in the facing seats. We pulled away from the funeral home, the hearse sliding behind us, headlights ablaze. Not even Dale attempted conversation for the next fifteen minutes.
The cemetery had a graveyard's gateway and ground plan. Given all the hills around Pittsburgh, the terrain was surprisingly, even disappointingly, level. I couldn't help comparing Beth's sloping view of the harbor to Al's blind, bleak valley, even though I knew her site was more comfort to me than to her.
The driver pulled to a stop at a landmark I couldn't distinguish. He got out and yanked open our door. The comfortable if claustrophobic interior of the limo had insulated us from the winter outside. An icy blade of wind plowed through the salon, giving us the shivers. All exited, we males repeating our superfluous escort of Al's coffin as we wended between already occupied plots to the open gash he would fill. I wondered what machinery was necessary to dig holes in this weather and how simpler generations managed in the old days.
Two cemetery employees materialized at the grave. I paid not much attention to the details of what came next. I was watching Martha as we arranged ourselves, buffeted by the wind and cold, on one short end of the grave.
The ceremony consisted of a neutral reading by Cribbs and the slow, steady lowering of the coffin by the cemetery staff using strong sashes which were recovered as the coffin reached bottom. The younger Cribbs produced, magicianlike, a small bouquet of roses. Beginning with Carol, we each in tum broke a blossom off its stem, bent over the grave and tossed underhand the blossom onto the coffin. Martha was last. As she edged to the opening, I edged near her. When she let go her blossom, her eyes rolled back up into her head and her right leg started to slide forward, like a driver's foot applying brake pressure in slow motion.
Carol cried out, and Dale and Larry snapped their heads up. I caught Martha at the shoulders just as she unconsciously, and perhaps subconsciously, began her slide down toward A1.
* * *
"She's still asleep. The boys too."
The television showed a boxing match silently progressing. The fighters were lightweights, neither seeing his tenth professional light yet. But at five-fifteen on a Saturday afternoon in February, beggars couldn't be choosers. I had turned the sound off during the first round to avoid some local 'caster who modeled himself on Howard Cosell.
Before she went upstairs to check on Martha and the kids, Carol had been in the kitchen, counting leftovers from last night's deli spread. Before that, she'd been curled up in one of the two chairs in the room, thumbing through a magazine while I killed three vodka/rocks. Now she took the other end of the couch. Within touching range.
"That Ruthie is a great babysitter," she said. "She wears Kenny out. All I have to do is feed him an forget him."
She gave me a big smile. I smiled back.
"And those pills. I'll have to remember the name of them. They knocked Martha clean out." I
"You'd need a prescription for them," I said.
"Easy enough. I meet a lot of doctors at the club. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, you name it."
We had gotten Martha from the cemetery to a local emergency room, where Dale and I cooled our heels in the waiting room for a few hours while Larry and Carol rode back with Cribbs to pick up her car and rejoin us. The doctor, when we finally saw her, prescribed some tranquilizer/sleeping pills, which we filled on the way home. Carol changed at her place while dismissing supersitter Ruthie, then got Martha and the boys bedded down back at the Sachs residence. She was wearing designer jeans that made a little too much of her little too ample rump. She also wore a lamb's-wool V-neck sweater and no apparent breast supporter.
"Not many private eyes, though."
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"Not many private detectives at the club. Lawyers and doctors and such, but not many detectives."
"Tough way to make a living. Most of us don't."
"I'll bet you're pretty good at it. Can you tell me about some of your cases'?"
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. Carol was exhibiting what I call the post-mortem high. When you witness your first few deaths and burials, particularly in your age group, you feel so relieved to be quit of the depressing rituals, not to mention so relieved that you're still alive, that you adopt a partylike attitude. Gregarious, flirtatious, boisterous. Different people adopt different attitudes. But they all point in the same direction, toward life and away from
death.
The only problem, I have found, is that after enough deaths, especially close ones, you wait at the departure point long after your fellow mourners have begun moving toward the destination. You remain a wet blanket at the party.
"Well, can you talk about your cases?" she said, trying to fill the clumsy silence I was creating.
"Not much," I said. "Professiona1 confidentiality."
"Uh-huh," she said terminally. "Well, I guess I'1l go check on supper again." She stood up. "What do you want?"
I suddenly found I couldn't swallow too easily.
Carol really did look a lot like Audrey Hepburn, a little harder in the`eyes and softer in the hips, but a lot.
"John? What do you want?"
"I want," I started thickly, then forced a swallow.
"I want you to sit next to me, and hug me until I fall asleep."
She blinked three or four times, then came over and knelt down on the couch next to me. She buried her face in my shoulder and clamped her arms around my neck. We started crying at about the same time, crying with each other and for each other and for all the slights and hurts and tragedies that had piled up since the last time either of us had an other to hug.
ELEVEN
-•-
I AWAKENED AT 9:30 A.M. CAROL WASN'T THERE BUT A jackhammer headache was, partly from the straight vodka itself and partly from the dehydration it causes. I ran my tongue over my front teeth. They felt furry. I heard cutlery clatter coming from the kitchen. My stomach growled in reaction. I could feel the death gloom sliding away, eroded by soothing sleep and growing hunger.
I was stretching and thinking about searching for aspirin when I heard a faint tapping at the front door. I crossed the room and opened it.
Dale blew in, borne by an arctic blast. "Christ, what a climate," I said.
"Oh," he said, pushing back his parka hood, "you get used to it." He dropped his voice. "How's Martha doing? We were afraid the telephone might wake her up."
"I think she's fine. I just woke up myself."
"John," said Carol from the kitchen, "who is it?"
Dale looked from the kitchen to me and cleared his throat. I guessed my hair and clothes looked like I had just awakened and, possibly, not alone.
Carol came out. "Oh, hi, Dale, we're just about to attack your food again. Join us?"
Dale relaxed a little. "That would be fine. All old friend of Larry's from college is in town and they're out . . . having dinner."
“Terrific," said Carol, pirouetting and heading back to the kitchen. "Martha and the boys—"
She was interrupted by a plaintive "Mommieeeee" from upstairs. She was by me like a punt returner and halfway up the steps. "Get started," she said. "I'll be right down."
Dale laid his parka on a chair, and he and I went into the kitchen. Carol had laid out the now-smaller spread in an appetizing fan around the table.
"Dale," I said, "do you have any idea where Martha would keep her aspirin? I got a little drunk after we got home, and I was just recovering from passing out when you knocked."
My explanation was a bit elaborate for a mere aspirin request, but the dismissing of my and Carol's shadow relationship seemed to relax Dale even more. "Nooo, but"—he dug into the pockets of his pants and came up with a one-dozen tin—"I'm never without these."
He popped the tin, and I thanked him for the two I took from it. I had washed them down with tap water, and Dale was halfway through his migraine tales when Carol reappeared in the doorway.
"Bad news, fellas," she said, sagging her shoulder into the doorjamb. "Kenny's sick. Fever and sore-throat. The last thing Martha needs now is a sick Al Junior, so I'm gonna take Kenny home right away."
"No problem," I said. "I'll stay here tonight and keep an eye on Martha." .
Carol nodded. "I just looked in on her. She's dead to the . . . she's sound asleep. Little Al, too."
Dale insisted on making her a sandwich to take back, and Carol went upstairs to bundle Kenny up. When she came back down, I walked her to the door.
"Here's your sandwich," I said, sliding it into her coat pocket. Kenny was completely concealed in a blanket. "Would you like some help with him?" I said.
"No, thanks," she said. "Lean down, though, will you?"
I leaned down toward her, and she gave me a quick but a shade-more-than-friendly kiss on the lips. "If you get lonely and want to talk, give me a call. I'm in the book. K-r-a-u-s-e."
"I remember," I said. "Thanks."
I opened the tundra turnstile, and she scooted outside.
When I got back to the kitchen, the vodka bottle was three fingers lower than I'd remembered leaving it. Dale sucked liberally from a tumbler with just ice and clear liquid in it. My vodka memories being too recent and still powerful, I chose a beer.
* * *
"I don't know. I just don't know .... "
It was nearly eleven o'clock. Dale and I had polished off two sandwiches each. I was only on my second beer. The vodka tide was ebbing inexorably from the bottle and toward Dale. At first I thought he was suffering a post-funeral low. Then the conversation turned to Larry.
"I just don't know," said Dale for the third time. He had put in a tough couple of days, too, so I kept up my part of the conversation.
"Know what?"
"Oh," Dale blinked and sucked up another mouthful of vodka-"life. The 'where-is-it-all-leading' problem. I'm forty-six years old. Larry's twenty-nine. I love teaching and tutoring music, but if it weren't for some family money, I'd . . . we'd . . . never have been able to afford the house. As it is, I don't know what I'd do if I needed to buy a new car. I had a German car, a VW Bug, until three years ago. But after, you know, the recession, I couldn't, I couldn't stand not buying an American car with American steel. It's not such a great car, but whenever I complain about what I've got or where I am, all I have to do is click on the TV or walk down the street. Do you know what this city's unemployment rate is?"
"No," I said. "I don't."
Dale grimaced and took another gulp of booze.
"The official rate is fifteen, sixteen percent. Unofficially, counting the people who've been out of work so long they're probably not in the computers anymore, the real rate now must be almost twenty-five percent. Walk down the streets, you'll see them. Big, strong men in bowling jackets and baseball caps just I standing on comers. Or waiting in line for any kind of job that's listed. Their jobs, the industries that made their jobs real, are gone. Some gone to other countries, some just gone for good. A man who used to make steel can't feed his family, but I can make a living teaching piano. You figure it out."
"It is out of whack, a little."
Dale sighed and seemed to run out of steam. Which was just as well, because I needed some answers before he slid into a different kind of trance.
"Dale—"
"No, not Dale," he said. "Stanislaw. That's my real name. Stanislaw Ptarski. I grew up in a little town fifteen miles from here. My father was in steel. God"—he laughed—"God, he would have cracked me good for saying that. That he was 'in steel,' like he was 'in stocks' or 'in banking'. He was a steelworker, pure and simple. Thirty-six years. He'd tell me about the Depression, how people pulled together. I'm glad he never had to see what's happened now. Or hear the name change. After he died, I fo
und that people didn't want piano lessons from a portly gay named Stosh Ptarski. I don't know, maybe it hit a little too close to home, with the ethnic name and all. So I changed it, and people were much more comfortable with a portly gay named Dale Pahner, like I had been imported from somewhere else, like I hadn't grown up with them here and still turned out . . ." He seized up for a minute.
"Dale . . ."
"Do you know," he said blinking, "do you know how I picked the names, 'Dale' and Palmer'?"
"No."
"Well, when I was younger, and TV arrived, my favorite cartoon characters were Chip 'n Dale, you know, the Disney chipmunks. And just after Dad died, this baseball pitcher, terrifically handsome guy named Jim Palmer, had a great season and was all over the papers. I was in Baltimore once and even went to see him play. And I can't stand baseball, to me it's like watching golf, you know, all tension and no real release. Not like football, where you get to take out . . . no, no, that's how I named myself, after a chipmunk and a jock."
Dale closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair.
"Da1e . . ."
"Yes," he said quietly.
"I need to know some things. To help Martha."
"Yes?" he said, opening his eyes.
"I can see for myself that this place hasn't been brought along at all. There are things that have to be done that haven't been done."
Dale's expression changed from philosophical to sad. "Nobody likes to meddle in another family's problems. But pretty clearly things weren't going too well for Al at his job. I assume they told you that this morning."
"Yes."
"Well, most of us around here, Al and Martha included, bought under a special mortgage program. Even if I weren't half drunk, it would take a lawyer to explain it to you. But basically, because of some I federal/state deal, we got low-interest mortgages to come in and try to revive this area. The catch is that renovations have to be mostly done by a certain deadline, something like two years after you move in. You also have to complete the work by something like a year later. Larry and I finished ours way ahead. Carol was just under the wire. Al and Martha had already been inspected—the state sends somebody to walk through your house—and the inspector failed them. I mean, you see the fixtures and all, he had no choice. With the economy around here, speculators are hovering like vultures over properties like this. Two families on the next block already lost their places. I never asked Al about it, but—" Dale moved his hands in a shrugging gesture that rattled the cubes ' in the glass he was holding but couldn't hurt the long-departed vodka.
The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy Page 9