by DB Gilles
Colder Than Death
by
D.B. Gilles
Colder Than Death by D.B. Gilles
Copyright 2012 by D.B. Gilles
Published by Black Mask Publishing
ISBN: 9781476004914
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.
Cover Design: Don DeMaio
Also by D.B. Gilles
Fiction
I Hate My Book Club
Non-Fiction
Screenwriters Rehab
For Screenwriters Who Can’t
Get Their Acts Together
The Screenwriter Within:
New Strategies To Finish Your
Screenplay & Get A Deal
The Portable Film School
You’re Funny!
Turn Your Sense of Humor
into a Lucrative New Career
Plays
Inadmissible
Sparkling Object
Cash Flow
Men’s Singles
The Legendary Stardust Boys
The Girl Who Loved the Beatles
Humor
W. The First 100 Days: A White House Journal
(with Sheldon Woodbury)
Table of Contens
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
About the Author
To my sister, Kathy,
for all her support, love and encouragement over the years.
Love is colder than death.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Colder Than Death
by
D.B. Gilles
Prologue
I wasn't sure if he was going to bury me alive or kill me first, but I knew that one way or another the grave I was digging was my own.
He made me dig at gunpoint. So I wouldn't scream, he put duct tape over my mouth, not that I would have been able to utter even a peep, my throat was so dry. He had me stop digging at what seemed like three feet deep and two feet across. Too narrow for a coffin, but just right for a body.
I can't remember how long it took because I was so petrified with fear that I lost all track of time. Had he said it took me four hours or thirty minutes, I would have believed him either way.
“Give me the shovel,” he said desperately, his breathing as heavy as my own.
I did, but no more than five seconds after I handed him the shovel, he raised it and swung it into my face. I fell into the hole, on my back. He hit me three more times in the head, twice over my left ear and once directly over my forehead. I tried to raise my arms to protect myself, but I was so weak from digging I couldn't. My head ached and my left eye had swollen to a point where vision was impossible. Out of my right eye, if I squinted, I could see, barely.
It was somewhere in the middle of the night. The only light was from the moon, which was slowly being shrouded by smoky, fast-moving clouds. I was able to see him raise the gun and point it at me. His hand was shaking.
“I made a mistake with the girl,” he muttered. “Got lazy. Should've put her in the ground.” I heard the cock of the hammer. “Ground burial is always better. But digging a grave by hand is hard work.”
He steadied the gun with both hands. I prepared to die. He pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Three times.
I heard no gunfire, only the deadened click of a pistol that had jammed. He mumbled something to himself, slapped the gun barrel twice, then pulled the trigger three more times. Again, silence. He threw the gun down. Within seconds, despite the darkness, I saw the three-inch long blade.
He stepped into the grave, straddled me and stuck the blade into my chest two times fast. He looked at me quizzically, no doubt trying to make sure I was dead. Roughly, he grabbed my jaw with his right hand, stared closely at me again for a few seconds, then stepped out of the hole and feverishly began shoveling dirt over me.
Almost at the precise instant that the first shovelful of cold, stony dirt smashed into my face, it started to drizzle. Another clump of dirt landed half in my hair and half on my brow. Some of it trickled into my eyes, causing me to blink in a fluttery motion.
I tried to keep my eyes shut, but a particle of some kind had found its way into the corner of my left eye and the irritation was driving me crazy. I wanted to lift one of my hands and rub my eye, but I wanted him to think I was dead, so I shut my eyes hoping that the particle would somehow settle or be dislodged by the liquid in my eye, which is what happened after about thirty seconds. By then, I was starting to drift off into what I thought would be death.
I waited for my life to begin passing before my eyes. But one thought kept running through my head: the fact that I was lying in this grave because of a murder.
I'd been head Funeral Director at Henderson's Funeral Home for seven years and, including my apprenticeship, which began eight years before that, I'd dealt with every type of death imaginable from fatal illnesses to nasty falls to crashes involving vehicles ranging from lawn mowers to wheelchairs to garbage trucks.
But the one type of death I'd had no experience with was murder. As far as murder goes, it's something else. Death I understood. But no matter how much I tried, I could never place murder in its proper context. And although I'd analyzed and thought it through from every angle, I never got to the point where I completely understood the taking of someone else's life.
Death is natural, a completion. Murder is perverse, an interruption.
The dirt being shoveled onto me was becoming heavier, but despite the pain of the knife wounds, the blows from the shovel and the indescribable exhaustion I felt, as I waited to be suffocated by the crud that was working its way up my nose and into my mouth, I had enough presence of mind to conclude that he didn't know I was still alive.
And as I wondered if anyone would find me in this unmarked grave, how it all began crashed unexpectedly into my mind.
Chapter 1
The coffins get dusty.
Two times a week I go downstairs to the Selection Room and give them a once-over. A little Fantastic and an old Fruit of the Loom t-shirt do the trick. That’s where I was on the Sunday morning the phone call came. We had no bodies on view. No one was scheduled to come in to make arrangements. I was alone. Usually, there was at least one person around to talk with, but not that day.
Lew Henderson, owner of the Home, was in the middle of a month-long vacation in Florida. It was something he'd done every October since the death of his wife seven years before. Lew considered himself semi-retired after Karen died, but he came in every day to shoot the breeze, maybe go over th
e books, handle things if I needed time off, before heading to the golf course.
Clint Barnes, my assistant, was at ten o'clock Mass at St. Ann's Catholic Church in Croybridge, the next town over, where he and his wife, Cookie, lived. Sunday was Clint's day off unless we were swamped with several funerals at once.
Nolan Fowler, our primary embalmer and restoration man, was at a weekend Seminar in Cincinnati sponsored by the National Embalmers Society. He was due back on Monday. And our cosmetologist, Elaine Whurley, only came in when we had bodies. Elaine was a fifty-eight-year-old beautician who for years had moonlighted for us and DiGregorio's, the other Funeral Home in Dankworth.
I'd worked my way through twelve of the sixteen coffins on display when the telephone across the hall in the Embalming Room rang. We don't keep a phone in the Selection Room. The process of choosing a coffin is of such a delicate nature a ringing phone might be a jarring disruption. And I always turn off my iPhone when I’m giving a showing. I dropped the T-shirt onto the base of the coffin and trotted into the hallway.
I went straight to the cream-colored door with the word PRIVATE stenciled on it in two-inch thick chocolate brown letters, opened it and stepped into the clammy aroma of formaldehyde which hung in the air like the scent of new tires in a Sears Automotive Department. The telephone was on the wall. Taped beneath it was last year's inspection certificate from the Ohio Board of Health.
“Henderson's Funeral Home,” I said. “May I help you?”
“Who've I got?” said the deep-set male voice which I recognized instantly as belonging to Perry Cobb, Chief of Police of Dankworth. ”You ghouls all sound alike.”
“It's Del,” I said, thinking so much for his perception.
Nolan, Lew, Clint and I sounded nothing alike.
Lew's rich baritone made him sound like an announcer on a classical music program, which was in contrast to my modulated, soft-spoken greeting which, I was once told, made me come off like a priest answering the phone in a rectory. When Nolan took a call he would blurt an inappropriately cheerful “Henderson's!” into the receiver as if it were happy hour at a bar. And Clint's tentative voice had a disarmingly childlike quality.
I reached for the pen in my shirt pocket, held it up to the lined yellow notepad hooked onto the wall next to the phone and prepared to write down the name and address I assumed Perry would be giving me.
“What do you need, Perry?” I asked, my tone businesslike. I ignored the ‘ghoul’ remark, just as I always disregarded his jibes. He’d been ragging on me ever since my mother and I moved to Dankworth after my father died when I was in high school. As my mother would say about someone's poor behavior, ‘It was his way,’ and I'd accepted it. I had to. When Perry Cobb called it usually put money in my pocket.
Because Dankworth is only a township we don't have our own Coroner. We fall under the umbrella of the County, so when a body needs to be transported to the Coroner's office for autopsy, Perry calls us or DiGregorio's. We get a small fee for this: fifty dollars plus gas mileage.
“I'm at Elm Grove cemetery,” he said. “How soon can you get a hearse up here?”
“Twenty minutes. What's going on?”
“Seems the grave robbers have struck again,” he said, the last word slightly slurred, no doubt because of the chewing tobacco in his mouth.
Over the last six months somebody had been breaking into turn of the nineteenth century mausoleums and above-ground crypts at Elm Grove cemetery looking for jewelry and valuables on corpses. Cemetery management considered themselves lucky that whoever was doing it wasn't interested in body parts for satanic rituals or potions.
“What's that got to do with you needing a hearse?”
“We got a body. A female.”
“You have an exhumation, Perry?”
“Not quite. There's been a murder.”
I leaned back against one of the four portable embalming tables. The icy chill from the stainless steel ran through my slacks and reached the backs of my thighs, instantly sending a mild tingle up my spine.
“Where'd you find her?” I asked.
“I didn't. Vaughn did.” Vaughn Larkin was night watchman of the cemetery and a good friend of mine.
“When Vaughn was making his midnight rounds he heard a noise. Checked it out and found that the entrances to seven mausoleums were broken into. One had the corpse in it. Hurry your ass up here. I want to get her autopsied so maybe I can find out who the hell she is... was. We're in Section Nine.”
“I'll leave right now.”
“Good. Oh, Del, do me a favor. Bring me some coffee. Milk and sugar. And a chocolate donut with those multi-colored sprinky things. Haven't had my breakfast yet.”
Perry was laughing as he hung up.
Chapter 2
I knew the request for a favor would be coming. He knew that I would have to do what he asked if I wanted him to continue throwing business my way.
There were only two Funeral Homes left in Dankworth and we were both hurting for business. More and more people were opting for cremation, which held low profits for Funeral Homes.
The drive to Elm Grove cemetery took twenty minutes. Had I not made the trip so many hundreds of times it might've been pleasant, almost scenic. A nice Sunday drive to watch the leaves change in the Fall or buy fresh fruit and vegetables from roadside stands in the Summer. But after seventeen years it had only a numbing effect on me.
Dankworth isn't quite country or suburb. The town had long promoted itself with a simple motto:
Dankworth
Where The Country Meets The City
Although it sounded like a hokey public relations blurb, in a sense it was true. Roughly thirty-five miles outside of Youngstown, Dankworth was a sprawling mixture of open space, dense forest, farmland and a hodgepodge of Pre- and Post-War housing mixed in with nineteenth century barns, mills and stone houses. The closer you were to the center of town where the Home was located, houses had good-sized frontage and back yards with shade trees. The newer homes were mainly ranch with attached double garages while the older houses were converted barns, Cape Cod bungalows, traditional A-frames and Colonials.
Less than fifteen minutes out of downtown Dankworth there were horse breeders, dairy farms, small working farms, a wildlife preserve and commercial greenhouses. In warm weather farmers sold fruit, vegetables and cider along Aberdeen Road, the tree-lined two-lane highway that ran through Dankworth and connected it to the neighboring towns and villages.
Residents perceived the area as a good place to live, close to nature and far enough from the city to feel safe.
But whatever fantasy of a tranquil existence one might feel could be tarnished upon approaching the twelve foot high wrought iron gates of Elm Cross cemetery. Any momentary yearning to live around this bucolic setting was replaced with thoughts of the dead. And to most people, living too close to a cemetery, especially a cemetery where a loved one is buried, was too much to handle.
******
From the cemetery entrance it took another minute or so to drive through the winding lanes into Section Nine, which was located in the oldest part of Elm Grove.
Section Nine is especially gloomy, not so much because of the imposing mausoleums, above ground crypts and ornate statues of apogees of angels or soulful-looking religious figures, but because of the gnarled, twisted oaks that looked like creepy versions of the heads on Easter Island. Weeping willows loom overhead like giant witches shrouded in green, their drooping branches and brittle leaves creating an overbearing sadness as they cast eerie shadows over everything on the ground.
As I approached the crime scene I saw three police cruisers parked, one in front of the other, which meant that the entire three-man police force of Dankworth was here.
One of them I got along with just fine: Wendell Eckert. He was in his late Thirties, easy going, professional and far more capable and qualified to be Chief of Police than Perry. Perry got the job because his father had been Chief. Wendell been a cop in Cincinna
ti for eleven years and had been wounded in a car chase. His wife threatened to divorce him if he didn't leave big city law enforcement. The compromise was to live in a small town where Wendell could still be a police officer, but without the stress and danger of high-risk crime.
The remaining Dankworth cop, the one I had trouble with, was Greg Hoxey. He was standing by what I assumed was the mausoleum in which the body was found. Wendell I didn't see yet. Perry was leaning against a five-foot high obelisk talking with Mel Abernathy, Manager of the cemetery, Alton Held, Head Groundskeeper and Vaughn Larkin.
None of them even noticed my arrival except Vaughn, who winked at me. I nodded back to him and arched my eyebrows. He rolled his eyes and smirked. The gestures were a silent line of communication indicative of nearly seventeen years of friendship. He was eighty-seven and had started working at the cemetery as a gravedigger as a teenager. By the time he was thirty he was Head Groundskeeper, a post he maintained until he had to take mandatory retirement at seventy-five. Mel Abernathy kept him on as night watchman, primarily because Vaughn had come to view the cemetery as his own property and genuinely cared about its upkeep.
Vaughn was my friend, father figure and mentor since I came to Dankworth. Our initial bond was built around death. I had lost a father; he had lost a son in Vietnam. He never got a last look at his boy because his remains were never found. Vaughn still smarted over the irony that the son of a gravedigger didn't get a grave. It was another link. Although my father had a grave, I never got to see him after his death. He died in a plane crash. The coffin was closed. His remains cremated. Vaughn and I filled voids in each other's lives. We considered each other family.