Basket Case

  My eyes fall skeptically on the phrase "still dazed by the tragedy," which I've used to describe Jimmy's widow. I should probably take it out, but I won't. It paints a gentler scene than if I'd written she was "knocking back screwdrivers and staring blankly out a window," which was the sad truth.

  One more detail jumps out of the obituary to give me a twinge of acid reflux: the bit about how Jimmy and Cleo Rio first met at a VH1 party. That's what Cleo told me.

  Yet she also told me her husband had broken completely from his past, and wanted nothing more to do with the music world until he'd met her. So why was he attending a Van Halen bash?

  One of many things I'll probably never know.

  I check the clock. I punch the Send key, then e-mail Emma to tell her Jimmy Stoma's on the way. I head downstairs to grab a soda. Upon my return I see Emma has responded with an electronic message of her own: "We need to talk as soon as I'm out of the news meeting!"

  She probably hasn't even read the obit—all she did was scope out the length, then freak. Minutes later I see her crossing the newsroom and I pounce like a wolverine.

  "Metro took it," she says, acting as if she couldn't care less.

  "Yeah? For out front?"

  Emma says nothing. She knows where the Jimmy Stoma obit is being played, but she won't give me the satisfaction.

  "Talk to Metro," she says, now pretending to edit a story by young Evan Richards, our college intern. Upon my approach Evan warily has drifted away from Emma's desk; he has witnessed too many of our dustups.

  "What about you?" I say to Emma. "You got enough to fill the page?"

  "I'll find something on the wires."

  She won't look directly at me; her slender hands appear bolted to the keypad of her computer, her nose poised six inches from the screen. The worst part is, the screen is blank. I can see its bright blue reflection in Emma's reading glasses.

  Unaccountably, I am overtaken by pity.

  "Rabbi Levine won't be on the wire services, Emma. You want me to make a few calls?"

  Her eyes flicker. I notice the ivory tip of a tooth, pinching a corner of her lip. "No, Jack. There isn't time."

  Back at my desk, I dial three phone numbers: the rabbi's wife, the rabbi's brother and the synagogue. I bat out twelve inches in twenty minutes flat, shipping it to Emma with the following note:

  "You were right. The hang-gliding stuff makes the whole piece."

  On the way out of the newsroom, I hear her call my name. Walking back to her desk, I see the rabbi's obituary up on her computer screen. It's easy to guess what's coming.

  "Jack, I like the brother's quote better than the wife's."

  "Then move it up," I say, agreeably. Emma needs this one more than I do. "See you tomorrow."

  Out of the blue she says, "Nice kicker on Jimmy Stoma." Not exactly oozing sincerity, but at least she's making eye contact.

  "Thanks. Was it Abkazion who bumped it to Metro?"

  Emma nods. "Just like you said. Our new boss is a Slut Puppies fan."

  "Naw," I say, "a true fan would have put it on Page One."

  Emma almost smiles.

  Dinner is a lightning stop at a burger joint. Then I go home, open a beer and ransack the apartment in search of my copy of Reptiles and Amphibians of North America. Finally I unearth it from a loose pile of Dylan and Pink Floyd CDs. At the touch of a button, Jimmy Stoma is alive and well, shaking the rafters of my living room. I flop on the couch. Maybe he's no Roger Waters, but James Bradley Stomarti is not without talent.

  Correction: Was.

  I close my eyes and listen.

  One night I fell through a hole in my soul,

  And you followed me down, followed me down.

  I fell till the blackness broke low into dawn

  And you followed me down till you drowned...

  Smiling, I drain the beer. Irony abounds! Poor Jimmy.

  Again I close my eyes.

  When I awake, it's daybreak. The phone is ringing and with chagrin I realize I've forgotten to turn off the call-forwarding from my newsroom number. It can only be a reader on the other end of the line, and no possible good can come from speaking to a reader at such an ungodly hour. Yet the interruption of sleep has made me so bilious that I lunge for the receiver as if it were a cocked revolver.

  "Yeah, what?" I say gruffly, to put the caller on the defensive.

  "Is this Mr. Tagger?" Woman's voice.

  "Yeah."

  "This is Janet. Janet Thrush. I read what all you wrote about my brother in the paper."

  Idiotically, I find myself anticipating a compliment. Instead I hear a scornful snort.

  "Holy shit," says Jimmy Stoma's sister, "did you get scammed, or what!"

  4

  When I went to work for this newspaper I was forty years old, the same age as Jack London when he died. I'm now forty-six. Elvis Presley died at forty-six. So did President Kennedy. George Orwell, too.

  It's an occupational hazard for obituary writers—memorizing the ages at which famous people have expired, and compulsively employing such trivia to track the arc of one's own life. I can't seem to stop myself.

  Not being a rotund pillhead with clogged valves, I am statistically unlikely to expire on the toilet, as Elvis did. As for succumbing to a political assassination, I'm too obscure to attract a competent sniper. Nonetheless, my forty-sixth birthday brought a torrent of irrational anxieties that have not abated in eleven months. If death could snatch such heavy hitters as Elvis and JFK, a nobody like me is easy pickings.

  Implicit in the dread of early demise is a lugubrious awareness of underachievement. At my age, Elvis was the King; Kennedy, the leader of the free world. Me, I'm sitting in a donut shop in Beckerville reading a newspaper story about a dead musician, a story I apparently have botched. Nice display, though: front of the Metro section, above the fold. The text is accompanied by a recent Reuters photo of the deceased, looking tanned and happy at a benefit barbecue for Reef Relief. Even the headline isn't terrible: Ex-Rocker Dies in Bahamas Diving Mishap. (James Bradley Stomarti, by the way, passed away at the same age as Dennis Wilson and John Kennedy Jr.)

  Janet Thrush—who else could it be?—takes the stool next to me and says, "First off, nobody calls me Jan."

  "Deal."

  "It's Janet. My ex once called me Jan and I stuck a cocktail fork in his femoral artery."

  I am careful to display no curiosity about the marriage.

  "So, Janet, exactly how did Cleo Rio scam me?"

  "She lied about her new record—'Waterlogged Heart' or whatever. Jimmy's not producing it."

  Janet has freckles on her nose and unruly ash-blond hair and green bulb earrings the size of Yule ornaments. She's wearing Wayfarers and a pastel tube top over tight jeans, and looks at least five years younger than her brother.

  "How do you know he wasn't producing it?" I ask.

  "A, because Jimmy would've told me. B, because he was too busy working on his own record."

  "Hold on." I reach for my pen and notebook.

  "Fact, I didn't even know Cleo had a CD in the works. My brother never said a word about it."

  "When's the last time you spoke?"

  "Day he died." Janet blows on her coffee, steaming up the sunglasses.

  "He called you from the Bahamas?"

  She nods. "I can't ever call him. Not with her around. Cleo goes jiggy-"

  In contrast to Jimmy's widow, Janet speaks of her late brother in the present tense, which enhances her credibility. I write down what she says, even though there's little chance of using it in another story. Obituaries tend to be one-shot deals.

  Besides, it's her word against Cleo's.

  "She didn't even mention his new record?" Janet sounds incredulous.

  "Not a word."

  "What a tramp." Her voice cracks. The coffee cup is suspended halfway to her lips.

  "She told me Jimmy was finished with the music business until he met her," I say.

  "And you believed tha
t?"

  "Why wouldn't I? He hasn't had an album out since Stomatose. Besides, you never called me back yesterday. The story would have been different if you had."

  This is low on my part, pinning a factual omission on a grieving relative. Janet, however, seems unoffended.

  "FYI," she says, "my brother's been working on that album for four years. Maybe five."

  I feel vaguely sick to my stomach. Some reporter in the music trades probably knows about the unfinished Jimmy Stoma CD, and it'll be the lead of his story. It would've been the lead of mine, too, if only Jimmy's widow had thought to tell me about it.

  "You don't look so good, Mr. Tagger. You get a bad cruller?"

  "Call me Jack. Why doesn't Cleo like you?"

  "Because I know what she is." Janet smiles tightly. "Now you know, too."

  In the parking lot, I walk Jimmy's sister to her car, an old black Miata that looks about as perky as a rat turd. By way of explanation, she says, "I clobbered an ambulance." Then she adds: "Not on purpose, don't worry."

  I tell her I've got one more question; a heavy one. "You think your brother's really dead?"

  Janet gives me a long look. "Glad you asked," she says. "Let's go for a ride."

  The mortuary is only a few blocks off the interstate. It looks like every suburban funeral home in America; pillars, inlaid brick, and a tidy hedge.

  I hate these places. Writing about death is as close as I want to get, but given a choice, I'll take a chainsaw-murder scene over a funeral visitation any day.

  "This is where I was," says Janet, "when you tried to call yesterday."

  We must climb out of the little convertible because the crumpled doors will not open.

  "So you already saw the body?" I ask.

  "Yup."

  "Then I'll take your word that Jimmy's dead."

  When Janet removes her sunglasses, I see she's been crying. "That's what they teach you in newspaper school?" she says. "To believe every damn fool thing you're told? What if I'm lying?"

  "You're not." Me, the wise old pro.

  I follow her inside. Some guy who smells like rotten gardenias and looks like a used-furniture salesman sidles into the foyer, then recoils at the sight of Janet, with whom he obviously has interacted before.

  "You cooked my big brother yet?"

  "Pardon me?" The man wears a dyspeptic grimace.

  "The cremation, Ellis. Remember?"

  "In an hour or so."

  "Good," says Janet. "I want to see him one more time."

  The funeral director, Ellis, glances at me warily. I know that look; he thinks I'm a cop. Possibly this is because my necktie could be an artifact from Jack Webb's estate.

  Ellis says, "Is there something wrong?"

  Without missing a beat, Janet says, "This is the drummer in Jimmy's first band. He flew all the way from Hawaii."

  Ellis is relieved. We follow him down a hallway to a door marked Staff Only. It is not, thank God, the crematorium.

  Four wooden caskets sit side by side, each on its own padded gurney. In Florida, every corpse gets embalmed and every corpse gets a coffin, even for cremation. It's a law that exists for no other reason than to pad the profits of funeral-home proprietors. Janet points to a blond walnut casket with an orange tag twist-tied to one of the handles. "Burn ticket," she explains.

  Ellis dutifully opens the top half of the bisected lid... and there's Jimmy Stoma.

  All things considered, he looks pretty darn spiffy. Better, in fact, than he did on some of his album covers. He's so lean and fit, you wouldn't guess he once outweighed Meat Loaf.

  James Bradley Stomarti lies before us in splendid attire: a coal-black Armani jacket over a white silk shirt buttoned to the throat. A fine diamond stud glistens in one earlobe. His cropped brown hair, flecked with silver, shines with mousse.

  Every dead rock musician should look so good.

  As his sister steps closer, I'm thinking it's fortunate that Jimmy Stoma's body was recovered right away. Ellis, the funeral guy, undoubtedly has the same thought: One more day of floating in shark-infested waters under that hot Bahamian sun, and you're talking closed casket.

  Tightly closed.

  "You did an awesome job," I tell Ellis, because that's what Jimmy's geeky drummer friend would have said.

  "Thank you," Ellis says. Then, for Janet's benefit: "He was a very handsome fellow."

  "Yeah, he was. Jack?" She beckons with a finger.

  I ask Ellis to give us some privacy, and with practiced aplomb he backs out of the room. He will return later, I know, to make sure we didn't spoil his Christmas by beating him to Jimmy's earring.

  "Diamonds won't burn, you know," I whisper to Janet.

  "That's Cleo's problem. She's in charge of wardrobe," says Janet, making me like her even more.

  "Well, it does look good. He looks good."

  "Yeah," she says.

  We're standing together at the side of the coffin. Now that I've seen with my own eyes that Jimmy Stoma is deceased, the heebie-jeebies are setting in. I'm fighting the urge to bolt from the premises. The body reeks of designer cologne; the same cologne worn by Deli Boy in the elevator. Cleo's favorite, I'm sure. Poor Jimmy will probably explode when they slide him into the flames.

  Janet says, "What do you know about autopsies, Jack?"

  "Come on. Let's go."

  "You ever seen one?"

  "Yeah," I say. A few, actually.

  "They yank out everything, right?" Janet says. "I saw a special on the Discovery Channel—they cut out all the organs and weigh 'em. Even the brain."

  Now she's leaning over the coffin, her face inches from that of her dead brother. I am gulping deep breaths, endeavoring not to keel over.

  "Amazing," she's saying, "the way they put him back together. You can't hardly tell, can you? Jack?"

  "No, you can't."

  "Well, maybe they do autopsies different in the islands."

  "Maybe so," I say.

  "Hmmmm." Janet, peering intently.

  In about three minutes I've sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Time to go. I prefer not to asphyxiate on a dead man's perfume.

  "Let's get this over with," I say.

  "What?"

  "You know."

  Janet steps away from the casket. "Okay. Do it."

  My hands shake as I fumble with the buttons, starting at the neck. Inanely, I try to open Jimmy Stoma's silk shirt without wrinkling it—like it matters for the crematorium.

  Finally the shirt is undone. The singer's chest looks tan, the fine hair bleached golden by long days in the tropics. Undimmed by death is the most prominent of Jimmy's tattoos, a florid sternum-to-navel depiction of a nude blonde rapturously encoiled by a phallus-headed anaconda.

  But that's not what grabs my eye.

  "Strange," I mutter.

  The singer's sister touches my sleeve.

  "Jack," she whispers, "where are the autopsy stitches?"

  An excellent question.

  5

  I wouldn't be working at the Union-Register if it weren't for a pig-eyed, greasy-necked oaf named Orrin Van Gelder.

  He was an elected commissioner of Gadsden County, Florida, where his specialty was diverting multimillion-dollar government contracts to favored cronies in exchange for cash kickbacks.

  Fortunately for me, Van Gelder was an exceptionally dull-witted crook. At the time of his most carefree and imprudent bid-rigging, I was covering Gadsden County for a small local newspaper. I'd like to say it was my own intrepid investigating that ensnared the corrupt commissioner—that's what my editor proclaimed in the letter nominating me for a big journalism award.

  The truth, however, is that I nailed Orrin Van Gelder simply by picking up a ringing telephone. A voice at the other end said:

  "Some prick politician is trying to shake me down for a hundred large."

  The voice belonged to Walter Dubb, whose occupation was selling buses outfitted for the handicapped. Gadsden County was seeking to purchas
e fifteen such vehicles; a worthy expenditure, all had agreed. Four competing companies began preparing bids.

  Shortly thereafter, Walter Dubb, who sold more handicapped-customized buses than anybody in the South, was approached by Mrs. Orrin Van Gelder for a private lunch invitation. In thirty years of selling transit fleets to municipal governments, Dubb had been shaken down by a multitude of public officials, but Orrin Van Gelder was the first to use his wife as a bagperson.