No Body Read online

  I reached the edge of the crowd and lowered my face but not soon enough. Across the hall, Aaron Friedman saw me, started to smile, then looked puzzled. His expression said clearly, “What’s she doing here?” He started to make his way toward me, but suddenly stopped. He and I both stared at another woman who was just then walking through the front door. Again that puzzled expression crossed Friedman’s face, but this time it also carried hints of “Oh, God.”

  It was Muriel Rudolph, come to pay her respects to the dead woman in her husband’s coffin.

  13

  The little greeter held out his hands to her.

  She swept past him, so that he was left in an awkward position, tilting forward like half a sculpture of reaching lovers. The expression on his round face changed from sympathy to surprise to embarrassment. He regained his balance and then retreated to his post beside the door, curling into himself like a wounded possum.

  Muriel Rudolph walked toward the rest of us as if she were leaning into a high wind. Her arms in their brown sleeves were clamped tightly to her sides, but at the ends of them her tiny hands fluttered in nervous, leave-me-alone movements, like wings. She was holding her entire body so tightly clenched that it appeared a mere tap of a finger might shatter her. As she drew nearer I saw that her lower jaw was trembling.

  One by one, the gathered relatives and associates of Sylvia Davis became aware of the widow’s presence. One by one they looked, stared, grew silent. I sensed Lewis at my back, scrabbling a pencil across paper.

  Directly in the widow’s path, Aaron Friedman, looking nearly as tense as she, stood his ground. She stopped in front of him as if he had pressed a palm to her forehead. I heard him say, “Muriel,” in a low voice, but that is as far as he got.

  “Where’s the slut?” The stiff brown arms came up in fists as though she would hit him. Friedman didn’t move back or try to touch her. “Where is she, Aaron? I know everybody’s here to honor the slut . . .”

  Stan Pittman stepped quickly out of the crowd and walked to Friedman’s side. I saw Spitt step forward momentarily, too, but then hang back, nervously massaging his hands. Beryl Kamiski and Russell Bissell glided up behind the widow so that she was trapped in a circle of Harbor Lights people. Stan said quietly, gently, “Come on now, Muriel . . .”

  “Don’t come on Muriel, me!” She screamed it, defeating the privacy fence that Stan, Bissell, Friedman, and Kamiski had erected around her with their bodies. There was a nervous flurry in the crowd as if everybody had stepped back a pace. I felt my own gut contract. Muriel Rudolph’s birdlike voice, gone shrill and shrieking, stabbed my ears and traveled in a shiver down to the base of my spine. “Come on and behave, Muriel,” she screamed furiously. “Come on and be a nice little lady, Muriel, come on and shut up, Muriel! I’m supposed to take it, is that right, Stan? I’m supposed to stand by and take it while you honor the memory of that slut who ruined my life? Well, I won’t! I won’t!”

  Beryl Kamiski touched the widow’s back and was immediately and violently shrugged off.

  “How do you think I felt seeing him in there with her . . . my last memory of my husband! How do you think my children feel, oh God.” She began to sob, but when Stan tried to steady her, she jerked back from him as she had from Beryl, as if their touch offended her. “And now all you fine friends of John, all you fine and decent people . . .” Her sarcasm curdled the words. “You’re all here to pay your respects to her. Respects! Dear God! Do you think John was the only one? You know better than that, don’t you, Aaron? Don’t you, Stan? Don’t you, Russell? My God, you know perfectly well she’d sleep with anybody around here who was still breathing! Respect! You couldn’t even manage that for my John. When he died you didn’t even have the decency to postpone your party, and oh boy, didn’t she have a good time once he was gone, boy, didn’t she dance on his grave!” Her voice caught again, cracked. “Oh, I heard, don’t think I didn’t hear all about it. And now you do this for her. How could you, how could you?”

  “Muriel.” Stan tried again. “Please.”

  “No, no, no, no.” She wagged a finger under his nose in a taunting gesture. “The world’s going to listen to me now. I’m going to tell the world how you pull out all the stops for the world’s finest funeral for little Sylvia, and how awfully you treated my John. His beautiful, dignified funeral! Ruined! Gone! It was wrong, Stan, it was all wrong!”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said in a bleak voice.

  “Where is she?” Muriel Rudolph was swaying like a punching bag. “Where are you keeping the slut? Got the best casket for her, I’ll bet, nothing too good for the slut. Show me where she is. I want to dance! I want to pay my respects, too!”

  “Come on, honey.” Beryl Kamiski wrapped herself around the widow like a soft, enveloping mattress. But Muriel Rudolph went stiff, resisting, even as Beryl began to murmur to her in firm, comforting, lulling words that ran together like warm raindrops into a full stream: “Nobody meant any disrespect to John, Muriel, honey. We all thought the world of him, you know we did. It’s just one of those awful, unfortunate things that nobody ever wanted to happen. Now let’s come on along, Muriel, honey. We’ll see you home, all right?” But the soft rain of her words was not absorbed into the hard, cracked earth of the other woman’s emotions. The widow tore herself out of the comforting arms with an anguished cry.

  “No!” She broke away and ran to the front door.

  It was courteously held open for her by a scruffy-looking young man whose face was partly hidden behind the turned-up collar of a navy blue pea coat.

  She paused to stare at him.

  “You’re that reporter,” we all heard her say.

  Lewis shrank further into the coat, but nodded.

  She began to laugh, a wild and awful sound that mixed with her crying so the two ran together indistinguishably. “You want an obituary? I’ll give you an obituary this town won’t soon forget!”

  Stan broke from the semicircle of Harbor Lights employees and began to walk quickly toward her. But she and Lewis disappeared out the front door together. It slammed behind them. Stan stood for a moment looking at it as if it might speak, then his shoulders came down in an apparent sigh. He turned back to face the crowd. I had the sense of a hundred other breaths released, too.

  “I don’t believe it,” Aaron Friedman exclaimed in a shocked voice. His dark, narrow face registered, for the first time, strong emotion. “That’s my pea coat!”

  I thought I would take advantage of the general chaos to slip behind the crowd and sneak past the door of the Chapel of the Resurrection. But when I glanced in, my attention was momentarily caught by what I saw there.

  At the far end of the large room there was an oddly feminine-looking coffin of pinkish bronze. It was closed. An arrangement of pink roses hung like a blanket over the lid.

  A gray-haired man, midfifties, stood vigil at the head of the coffin, his hands clasped tightly behind his back. He had the crewcut of a man who will, at heart, always be a Marine, even if he was never in the service. His complexion was mottled red and white, as if somebody had applied suction cups to it, and he was staring stonily, blindly straight ahead. Her father, I thought. There were older women in the room, any one of whom might have been her mother, and there were young men who might have been her husband, but I couldn’t pick them out so easily. His grief alone was visible and compelling, so that for a moment, I felt myself freeze in contemplation of him. It was like another person in that room, his grief: tangible, full-dimensioned, breathing, standing watch with him over the murdered daughter’s coffin. There was no way he could have escaped hearing the widow’s accusations; they would have shot down the hall toward him like bullets, penetrating, wounding. The shock of them sat visibly on his rigid shoulders, clung to the hard, tightened line of his lips, stared out of his eyes.

  I watched as one after another, single mourners in the room worked up enough courage to approach him. He ignored them and whatever words of solace or denial they o
ffered. He stood in an invisible isolation booth that was constructed of his painfully transparent shock and grief.

  I lowered my gaze from the sight of his pain.

  When nobody seemed to be looking, I slipped through the staff entrance into the management wing.

  When I reached the display room for cremation urns, I closed the door behind me. I didn’t turn on the light inside, but simply groped my way across the small space to the coffee table.

  I got down on my hands and knees and reached under the table. My fingers brushed the carpet. I swept in a wider are, wider and wider, but my fingers only picked up a single small scrap of paper.

  “Shit,” I said elegantly to myself.

  I’d have to switch on the lights.

  I did that, only to prove the folder was, indeed, gone.

  Francie would kill me and I would deserve it. Or had she come back to retrieve it herself, not trusting me to remember? Yes, surely that was it. I nodded to myself, feeling better.

  Idly, I turned over the scrap of wastepaper in my hand.

  A skull and crossbones was drawn on it.

  “Oh shit,” I said with more vehemence. I thought of that endearing World War II cartoon figure with the clinging fingers and the big nose: “Kilroy Was Here.” This message was plain, too, but nowhere near as innocent. The tab on the edge of the Jackal’s personnel folder had said, “Gen. Main.” General maintenance usually included janitorial work, like cleaning offices after working hours. I had a sudden, overwhelming desire to go home.

  To that end, I stuffed the drawing in my coat pocket, turned out the light, and slipped back down the dark corridor. It seemed, indeed, exceedingly black to me now. I opened the door a crack and peeked out.

  Most of the crowd had fled, leaving vast, empty spaces in which I would certainly be seen if I walked through them. A few feet away from me, Beryl and Russell were picking up Styrofoam coffee cups and moving chairs back against the walls. Even nearer to me, Spitt Pittman picked up one of the used cups and held it to a light. I heard him say, “Hell, if we washed these, why couldn’t we use ’em again?” Down toward the front door, a few remaining mourners were struggling into their raincoats. I saw the gray-haired man—his head bent, his hands pushed into the pockets of his black raincoat—wait for the little greeter to open the door for him. Then he walked out into the rain, which I could see falling in the illumination from the porch light. Worst of all, an agitated trio stood near the front door: Stan Pittman, Aaron Friedman, and Lewis Riss.

  “You’d better be able to prove that’s your coat, buster,” Friedman said, “because I think you stole it from me at The Buoy tonight.”

  “Your coat?” Lewis plucked at one of the shiny brass buttons. His face was round with wounded astonishment. “Don’t tell me I’ve done it again. I do this all the time. It’s so embarrassing. I’ve got a coat just like this, and I’m always mistaking somebody else’s for mine.” I watched him look at Friedman with an eager, disingenuous expression in his eyes. “Boy, isn’t this lucky I ran into you? I’ll bet you walked off with my coat, too. Have you got it here? We can trade . . .”

  “No.” The anger in Friedman’s voice and face was rapidly fading to confusion. “I didn’t see another pea coat . . .”

  “Oh well.” Lewis waved a hand. “Don’t apologize. I’ll just drop back by The Buoy tonight and get it.” He pulled his arms out of the sleeves and held the coat out to its owner with the air of a generous master offering a good dog a bone. “Here you go. You know, you’ve got a hole in the right front pocket. You ought to get that sewn up before you lose something out of it.”

  “Oh.” The personnel director took back his coat and hugged it to his slender chest. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Stan, who had been shifting his weight from one foot to the other during that exchange, finally interrupted it. “What did Muriel say to you out there?”

  Near me, Spitt Pittman stood suddenly and absolutely still, a used coffee cup in his hand. I had the sense, in fact, of suspended movement from one end of the corridor to the other.

  “Not a damned thing,” Lewis replied. Spitt tossed the coffee cup into a wastebasket. There was a soft shuffle of people moving about again on the carpeting. “But I’m supposed to see her tomorrow afternoon. You want to predict what she’ll say, Mr. Pittman? Or maybe you’d like a chance at rebuttal tomorrow, after I see her?”

  “She’s hysterical,” Stan said, going all stiff and formal. “She’s grief stricken. It would be an act of kindness to leave her alone. But if you insist on talking to her, I hope you’ll let me present to you the other side of any facts that might be in dispute.”

  “Kinder to whom?” Lewis asked. “Her? Or the reputation of your funeral home?”

  I heard a violent whisper near me. “Dumb bunny.”

  “To her, of course,” Stan said.

  “Well,” Lewis said cheerfully, “good night, Mr. Pittman, Mr. Pea Coat . . .”

  “Friedman. Listen, I hate for you to go out in the cold . . .”

  “No, no.” Lewis ignored the little greeter and opened the front door for himself. He turned back briefly to smile and to say with a sad, brave air, “I’m not nearly as susceptible to double pneumonia as I used to be.”

  The door slammed behind him.

  Aaron Friedman slipped on his pea coat. He patted the right front pocket, then the other pockets. “Damn. I could have sworn I had cigarettes in this coat.”

  I watched the rest of them pick up the last of the litter, finally put on their coats, say good-night to each other, turn out the remaining lights, and leave. Only then did I step back into the darkened public wing.

  14

  Moonlight filtered through the heavy draperies to illuminate my path to the front door, toward which I walked rapidly. But again, despite my general sense of unease and my desire to get the hell out of there, I stopped at the door of the Chapel of the Resurrection. Again, I was caught by the sight of the bronze coffin.

  I stood there, staring, hoping the janitorial staff had all gone home and that Lewis was waiting impatiently for me.

  The coffin looked lonely without the gray-haired man to keep it company. Sadness rose in my throat as I thought of that pretty young woman, so horribly strangled with her own long hair. I touched my own hair, which just brushed the tops of my shoulders. How hideous to feel someone come up behind you . . . reach over your shoulders to grasp the ends of your hair . . . cross them in front of your throat . . . pull them behind your neck, jerking you back, down, under . . . choking you with your own body. . . .

  I grasped the hand that was creeping over my shoulder. “Don’t you do that, Lewis,” I said.

  “Nuts,” he replied. “How’d you know it was me?”

  I turned to face him. He was wearing my raincoat. “There is an air of vegetation about you. And I saw you come back in to use the phone, and then hide behind the drapes.”

  He arched his thick eyebrows and leered at me. “Show me ze vay to ze morgue, my pretty.”

  “Was that supposed to be Bela Lugosi? It sounded more like Maurice Chevalier. Lewis, it’s late. Let’s go home. To our respective homes, that is.”

  “You promised.” He drew something shiny and metallic out of my coat pocket and dangled it in front of my face. “And I have the keys to your car.”

  I slowly pushed open the door to the morgue.

  “Get a move on, will you?” Lewis whispered down my neck. “You think I like hanging around mortuaries in the dead of night?”

  “Don’t say dead,” I whispered back.

  He chuckled. It tickled the hairs on the back of my neck. I walked on in. Lewis followed close behind me, closed the door, and locked it. Immediately, we were engulfed in total blackness.

  “No windows,” I said. My voice sounded weird, eerie, like somebody talking in a shower.

  “The folks in here don’t need windows, Cain.” His voice echoed strangely, too, sort of floating and disembodied
. I reached back to grab his arm, just to make sure he was really there.

  “Jesus.” I felt him jump. “Don’t do that!”

  I smiled to myself in the dark, although I realized this was not turning out to be the best idea I’d ever had. Maybe I could get the car keys away from him.

  “Got a match?” I whispered.

  “Yeah, but what do they pickle these guys in? And why are we whispering? These guys keep secrets. I mean, do you think formaldehyde or whatever it is, is explosive?”

  “Light the match,” I said in a more normal voice. “If we explode, just think of all the time they’ll save on our autopsies. No need to open us up and . . .”

  “For God’s sake, shut up.” I heard him draw a match across a matchbook. The room became surprisingly bright as the flame reflected off the white tile walls. No wonder we had sounded as if we were standing in a bathroom. Lewis was peering at me over the sharp point of fire. “You should see your hair in this light, Cain. It’s like a halo.”

  He leaned toward me. I stepped back out of the circle of brightest light, but he kept coming, and this time it was he who grabbed my arm. In his low, hoarse, smoker’s voice, Lewis began to croon another Springsteen song, “Can’t start a fire without a spark . . . this gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancin’ in the dark . . .”

  I shook my arm free. “Morgues don’t turn me on, Lewis.”

  He snorted, then grinned. “Cain, this is stupid. If there aren’t any windows, who’s to see the light?”

  “Right,” I said, feeling stupid. “Right.”

  I found the light switch on the wall and flipped it. Fluorescent lights flickered, and then the room was brilliantly, blindingly bright. Besides all the white tile, there were a couple of drains in the floor, a lot of shiny chrome, a few plastic buckets, a lot of rubber tubing, a couple of deep washbasins, and two dead bodies on gurneys.