No Body Page 12

  As I drove, I couldn’t get out of my mind the picture of Muriel Rudolph’s teenage daughter and small sons. They would be at school now. Who would pick them up, who would tell them, and, in God’s name, how? Who would love them now, who would care if they went to college, who would convince them that a world that took both of their parents from them was a world worth living in? I felt sick to my stomach with sadness for them, and helplessly angry.

  It occurred to me that helpless was not a state of being for which I had much talent. Maybe now was a good time to go back to the funeral home on the pretext of continuing my search for the missing bodies. Maybe I would just happen to be there before Ailey Mason showed up to question the people whom Muriel Rudolph had listed on that napkin. After all, nobody knew I had been at the scene of the murder, and nobody knew I had knowledge of that list. Maybe I could use that private knowledge to the detriment of the person who orphaned those children.

  “I’m sorry,” I said silently to Miss Grant, “but your missing bodies will have to wait a little longer.” It wasn’t as if they were going anywhere. They had already gone.

  18

  It felt odd, surrealistic, to return to the Harbor Lights Funeral Home and to force a smile, to offer banal greetings, all the while holding to myself the awful secret of the murder of Muriel Rudolph, It felt as if the world should have stopped for at least a moment, that the clocks should reflect a pause in time, and have to be reset; that the people I saw in the streets and in the funeral home ought to look at each other with wide eyes and with slack mouths that released words of shock and horror; that everywhere, people should reach out to touch a solid object to reassure themselves of the reality of the moment, and their own existence in it.

  “Hi, Jenny.” Francie greeted me with a cheery smile and a steaming cup of coffee. I took the cup from her and then stared at the rising steam for a moment, collecting my thoughts and my emotions, and probably hoping for a message like the ones that Miss Grant claimed to read in cirrus clouds in the sky. If I stared long enough, would the steam form letters, and spell out the name of a murderer, the reason for life, the excuse for death? Was there any excuse for a death like the one that Muriel Rudolph had suffered? Francie asked me if there was anything wrong with the coffee or the cup. Was the coffee too strong? She would water it down. Was the cup chipped? She would fetch me another.

  “It’s fine.” I took a sip, swallowed over the apple in my throat. I forced a smile. “Francie, do you know what time school starts around here?”

  “School?” She blinked. “Which school?”

  “Elementary. High.”

  She smiled. “You are talking to the mother of four and the grandmother of five. Of course I know what time school starts. Seven-thirty for high school, eight for elementary. Unless you’re talking private?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” She arched an eyebrow. “Could there be something you’d like to tell an old friend of the family, Jenny?”

  I forced a laugh at her unexpected implication. “No, Francie. I have an old friend I’d like to surprise some morning, but I want to be sure her kids have all gone off to school before I drop by.”

  Francie laid her chin in the palm of one hand. “Oh, how well I remember those delicious moments after the last child waved good-bye. I’d have a cup of coffee and watch a game show. ‘Concentration,’ I think, or maybe it was ‘The Price Is Right’ For years, Jenny, those were the only cups of coffee I ever got to drink that stayed hot from beginning to end.”

  “Unless a salesman came to the door, right?”

  “Oh well, there aren’t many salesmen out and about at that hour of the morning,” she informed me. “If anybody came to the door, it was usually one of my neighbors after her kids left for school.” She grinned. “You’ll never truly appreciate a cup of coffee, Jenny, until you have children and they leave for school in the morning.”

  “I believe it. Who’s here today?”

  She groaned. “Everybody.”

  “Except Friedman.”

  “No,” she said surprisingly, “he dragged in just after the funeral, sneezing and sniffing and looking like death warmed over. Honestly, a sense of duty is a fine thing, but not when it spreads germs, you know?”

  “But everybody else was here right on the dot of . . .”

  “Eight,” she filled in for me.

  “. . . eight. Piling the work on you as if you were three secretaries instead of just one overworked temporary.”

  “Oh well, salespeople are never on time,” she said vaguely and waved a hand in the air. “Of course, Spitt throws a tantrum every time they walk in late. ‘Your dawdling costs me dollars!’ he says. And pity poor Stanley if he’s a minute past eight, oh my.”

  I tried to look sympathetic. “Was he late today?”

  “Stan? Oh, he hasn’t come in at all. It’s his day to call on the other businesses, plus he had that funeral, Sylvia’s, you know. But you can bet that everybody else has been in and out all day: ‘Type this, Mrs. Daniel’ ‘File this, Mrs. Daniel.’ ‘Hold my calls for an hour, Mrs. Daniel.’” She sighed. “The reason they call this a temporary position, Jenny, is that nobody could stand it on a permanent basis.”

  “You love it,” I said.

  She grinned. “I love it.”

  I sipped my coffee and tried to sound casual. “Who had you hold their calls for an hour, Francie?”

  “Spitt,” she replied promptly. “But his button was lit up the whole time, so I guess he was on the phone anyway. Before he had me hold his calls he asked me to get him the number of The Wall Street Journal.”

  “The Wall Street Journal?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Nobody tells me anything.”

  “Was Spitt mad at the salespeople this morning, Francie?” I wondered how long I could keep up the questions before she began to wonder about the odd angles of my curiosity. I could only hope she possessed the normal amount of vanity that makes most of us feel flattered if somebody shows an interest in our jobs.

  She was chuckling. “Oh, they’ve got his number. Beryl and Russell show up at 7:59, make a big point of saying good morning to Spitt, and then they disappear. On sales calls, they say.” She made a moue at me that said “sure.”

  I joined in with a cynical chuckle.

  “And then they go out for coffee, right?”

  “Or back home to sleep, more likely!”

  “Is that what they did this morning, Francie?”

  She nodded.

  “And the other salespeople?”

  “They’re part-time, I hardly ever see them.”

  “What about the gravediggers?”

  There it was, she was beginning to look at me oddly. But she replied, “Well, I don’t know, but they have to punch in, so it would be easy to find out. Is there some reason you’d like me to find out, Jenny?”

  “No, no, just curious.” Even if the Jackal had punched in, the nature of his job probably would allow him to leave the premises anytime. But long enough to drive to the Rudolphs’, kill Muriel, and get back to work without anybody noticing that he was gone?

  Francie shifted her gaze to the pile of work on her desk, and I knew my source of information was about to dry up. I also knew that I probably only had a little while longer to prowl around before Ailey showed up.

  “Francie,” I said, “would you ask Aaron Friedman if he would see me?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  He stood up behind his desk to greet me. But then he bent over, grabbed wildly for a tissue from a box on his desk, and sneezed violently. It seemed to blow all the air out of him, because he sat back down abruptly.

  “Excude me.” He looked at me, with every appearance of true misery, out of watery brown eyes, and said, “God a awful code. Wend oud without a code last nide, and caught dis code.” He seemed suddenly to be aware that the vaudeville accents sat oddly with his otherwise dignified appearance, and he blew forc
efully into another tissue. This time when he spoke, it was more normally. “I apologize, but I seem to have picked up an awful cold. I was at The Buoy last night, and a fellow stole my coat, and I went out in the cold, and got this . . .” He waved the used tissue, as if displaying proof. It occurred to me that as acts go, faking a cold is an easy one to manage. Just sneeze and cough a sufficient number of times and you’ll convince anybody that you’re truly contagious. Although, I had to admit, this cold seemed real enough.

  He sneezed twice more before I got in a word. Finally, he sighed as if exhausted, and leaned back in his chair and gazed at me.

  “I don’t know if you remember me,” I began. “I’m Jenny Cain. Stan introduced us at the graveside the day of John Rudolph’s funeral.”

  “Sure,” he said, in the same exhausted tone.

  “I’m sorry to barge in like this,” I said then, “but I have a problem I hope you can solve. You see, I’m the director of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation . . . you’ve heard of it?”

  His nod of assent turned into a sneeze.

  “Bless you,” I said, with some hesitation. “Well, we have a client, a nonprofit group, that operates out of a small building here in town. They called me this morning to say their janitor quit yesterday, because he didn’t get the pay raise he wanted. Maybe you know how it is with the social-service sector; there’s never enough money to pay decent wages. At any rate, my clients have enough to do without cleaning the building, too. So I thought I’d ask around to see if any private companies—like this one—would lend them a janitor for a few days. Just till they get somebody to replace their old one.”

  I smiled sincerely, to encourage him to buy this unlikely story. The lower half of his face was hidden behind a tissue, but above it the intelligence in his eyes had come awake; he looked alert and aware, despite the bleary appearance of his eyes and the dark circles below them. I had a sudden, strong feeling that this man played one hell of a bridge game.

  He lowered the Kleenex. “Who are your clients?”

  Damn. I thought quickly. He looked like a Republican to me. Was there any social-service agency that might awaken the sympathies of a Republican?

  “Youth for Christ,” I blurted, before I remembered he might be Jewish. I covered one of my hands with the other, crossed my hidden fingers, and plunged on without giving him time to reply. “Just one man would do a lot of good, and I noticed the other day that you have at least three maintenance men. Do you think you could spare that young one for a few days?”

  “You don’t want him.” Friedman snapped off the words. Without knowing I was doing it, I seemed to have diverted him from my problematic “client.” He began to rip the tissue apart with both hands. “Believe me, you don’t want him. How about one of the older men, instead? We’ll have to check it out with Stan, but I could probably get Freddy or Lennie to help you out for a while.”

  I feigned a surprised air. “What’s wrong with the young one? He looks strong and capable to me, just the sort of fellow they need.”

  “No.” He grabbed another tissue from the box, began to tear at it. “He’s lazy, he’s insubordinate, and he would be a terrible influence on young people.”

  “Why do you keep him around?”

  The dark, angry eyes looked once, briefly, over my shoulder as if checking to see if anybody was listening. “If I had my way, I would fire the son of a bitch this afternoon,” Aaron Friedman said with a passionate bitterness. I decided he might be a Democrat, after all.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because . . .” He stopped, stared at me, then down at the mess of torn tissues on his desk. He began carefully and slowly to brush them into a neat pile. Then he swept them off his desk into his hand, leaned over, and dropped them into a wastebasket at the side of his desk. He looked back at me, gave me a smile that seemed forced, shrugged. “Because the boss will not let me. He says the kid has potential. Potential! He has the potential to mug his grandmother, that’s what kind of potential he has. No, I will let you have one of the other men, if they’re willing to do it. All right?”

  “Yes, thanks.” I dug into my purse for a business card, and reached across his desk to hand it to him. “Would you call me as soon as you find out? If you can’t reach me at the office, my number’s in the phone book.” I had a separate listing of my own, at Geof’s place.

  He nodded, took the card, put it down to grab a tissue, tried to reply, sneezed, sneezed again. I said, “Bless you,” thanked the top of his head, and departed. I hadn’t managed to slip in any questions about his relationship with Sylvia Davis or about the night she died. Maybe I would find the opportunity when he called me later . . . if he called me later.

  Francie stopped me as I came out of Friedman’s office.

  “Jenny,” she said in a near-whisper. “I checked the time cards. All the janitors were here on time this morning.” She seemed to wait for me to explain my curiosity.

  “Thanks,” I said. “May I see Spitt?”

  19

  We went together to stand in the doorway of Spitt’s office. When we saw that he was in conference with Russell Bissell and Beryl Kamiski, we started to turn away, but Spitt noticed and called out, with a commanding wave of both hands.

  “Come on in here, girl!”

  Francie and I looked at each other, and silently, mutually, decided he meant me. She turned back to her own desk, while I went on into Spitt’s office to sit in the only empty chair. Russell Bissell, Beryl Kamiski, and I nodded at each other.

  “Damage control,” Spitt said next, and pounded his fist on the top of his desk. “It’s too damn late to prevent the publication of that damn story, so what are we going to do about it now that it’s out?”

  His employees appeared to be hanging on his every word, so he answered himself.

  “Complain to the damned newspaper, that’s what, raise holy hell like I did with the Journal this morning. I told that congenital idiot of an editor exactly what was wrong with their story, you bet I did, and I demanded that she print our side of things. ‘No two ways about it,’ I told her.” Spitt slammed one meaty fist into the other. “‘Fair’s fair!’ I told her. You got to be tough with these jokers or they’ll kill your business with their goddamned do-gooder journalism.”

  He sat back and nodded as if he agreed with himself.

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what this was all about.

  “Good for you, Spitt,” Beryl said. I looked over at her. She had on yet another elegant business suit—this one a muted red silk with a creamy blouse—and a fresh and expensive hairdo and the sort of perfect makeup that is only sold in salons where the saleswomen wear pink smocks and serve tiny cups of coffee. And yet, beneath it all, there was that barmaid I had originally seen in Beryl—the old-fashioned kind to whom tending bar is a profession, almost a mission in life. She would cross her arms on the bar, this one would, and lean forward on them until a bulging wave of bosom showed above the low, ruffled neck of her blouse, and she would offer friendly advice or a bit of a morale boost to her customers. She would have a lot of regulars, this barmaid, and she would know their favorite brands and their ex-wives’ names, and each one of them would think she secretly loved him, and that she would have told him so long ago, except that she didn’t want to hurt the feelings of her other regulars. And she would make a lot of money in tips, enough to pay for pretty clothes to wear in her real life, which existed outside the imaginations of her customers. I brought my own imagination under control long enough to hear her say, “Did they agree to print a retraction, Spitt?”

  “They damned well better.”

  She didn’t press him for a clearer answer, but gave way to Russell, who had leaned forward, his forearms pressing on the arms of his chair. He didn’t look like a man who would frequent Beryl’s bar; he looked more like a man who had spent his youth lifeguarding on a California beach and lifting weights and eating health food. If Aaron Friedman played bridge, this man played racquetball, and w
hen he sweat, it only made his body glisten. In my imagination I put his blue suit back on him, and listened. “Well, it’s lucky for us,” he was saying, “that most of our customers aren’t the type to read the Journal, you know?”

  “Yes.” Beryl nodded. “Russ is right, Spitt. Even if they don’t print our side of it, I doubt we’ll lose any business because of it. We’ve weathered worse criticism than this. One little article in one little newspaper shouldn’t do any lasting damage.”

  I was intrigued to hear The Wall Street Journal called a “little newspaper.” I cleared my throat and said, “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s up?”

  Spitt turned his face toward me. “Just when we’ve had all this publicity about Sylvia, the fools start climbing all over prearrangement again!” He turned back to face his salespeople and spread his arms wide as if gathering their agreement.

  “They don’t write about all the thousands of people who are happy they’ve prearranged their funerals, oh, hell no. No, they’ve got to find the one or two bad apples in the business and tar and feather the rest of us with them.” He turned back to me. “You’re an unbiased observer. Which would you believe . . . some unfair criticism in some snotty New York paper . . . or the word of an old and respected company that has never lied to you in your own hometown?”

  It had been an interestingly mixed metaphor, and a leading of the witness to which any prosecutor would strenuously object. I pretended to consider his question.

  “Well,” I said, “to tell you the truth, I have such faith in you that I’m kind of interested in looking into prearrangement myself.”

  The effect of my words was electric: three heads swiveled toward me, three mouths fixed themselves in warm smiles, three pairs of eyes focused brightly on my own. I hadn’t felt so interesting since I starred in the senior play.

  “Smart girl,” Spitt said.

  “Very wise,” Beryl murmured. She placed her hand on the arm of Russell’s chair.

  “I’ll be glad to tell you about it,” he offered.