No Body

  “Would you?” I turned a disingenuous smile on him. “That would be lovely, Russell. When would it be convenient for you? I’m afraid, the sooner the better.” I cast my eyes down briefly. “It’s for my mother, you see, and she’s not well,”

  “How about now?” Beryl said. “Russell’s free now, aren’t you, Russ? And heaven knows, there’s nothing more important than taking the time to make the proper arrangements for one’s family, don’t you agree, Miss Cain?”

  I nodded.

  “Of course you do,” she said. “Russell, why don’t you take Miss Cain into your office?”

  “This is a fine young man,” Spitt assured me, winking broadly. “Single, too, never even been married, but then I expect he’s never found a girl as pretty as you before! Jenny, here, she’s never been married, either, Russell. Quite a coincidence, I’d say! Why, this boy’s hard-working, ambitious, smart, and honest as the day is long. They don’t come any better than Russell, here. He’ll take good care of you and your dear family, my girl.”

  “Just like Stan,” I said.

  “What?” Spitt looked puzzled.

  “Hard-working,” I said. “Ambitious, smart, honest.”

  Russell and I stepped self-consciously out of Spitt’s office just as Ailey Mason and two other cops stepped into the foyer. I touched Russell’s arm, and he turned immediately, a slightly wary look on his face, as if he were afraid that I’d taken Spitt’s matchmaking too immediately to heart.

  “Russell,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve just remembered another appointment. Do you think we could postpone this until later today?”

  “Sure.” He looked over my shoulder, back into Spitt’s office. Unexpectedly, he said, “Are you free for dinner?” Now I was afraid he had taken the hint too readily. But then he added, “We’ll let the company treat us, and I’ll tell you all about how to preplan and prefinance your mother’s funeral.”

  I could have thought of subjects I’d rather cover at dinner, but this was no time to object. I said, “As a matter of fact, I am free. Where shall I meet you, and when?”

  He named a seafood restaurant down at the harbor, 7:00. I smiled my assent, then left in a hurry, by the back door.

  * * *

  I stood on the back stoop in the cold sunshine and looked out over the memorial park. Just inside the gate, in a stand of evergreens, there was a small stone building that looked like a crypt but was really a maintenance shed. The gravedigger named Freddy was sitting on the grass at the side of the shed, his back against a fertilizer bag. His feet were flat on the ground, his knees pulled up, his hands hung limply over them. His head lay back on top of the bag, and from where I stood it looked as if his eyes were closed.

  I looked out over the rest of the park.

  About a hundred yards away, the other black gravedigger had hold of the base of a ladder whose top was lost in the branches of a tree. I watched until I saw a white arm reach down for a saw. The Jackal was trimming branches this afternoon. Having ascertained his whereabouts, I walked quickly toward the shed. Since Freddy was resting on the side away from the other gravediggers, they would have to come around the comer to see him, or me. And I didn’t want to be seen.

  “How you doin’?” said a deep voice as I approached.

  “Okay.” I stopped a couple of feet from him. “Yourself?”

  His eyes opened wider. “I know you?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry about it. We all look alike.”

  He grinned then. “You be that woman friend of Mr. Pitt-man’s, come to see us dig up the old lady the other day. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  His look changed to one of suspicion. “You ain’t come to get us to dig up anybody else, have you? I ain’t fond of puttin’ them in the ground twice. Once ought to be enough for anybody, it sure ought to be.”

  I sat down on the grass. “It wasn’t enough for poor Sylvia, I guess. Did you know her, Freddy?”

  “Sure. Everybody know’d her.” His expression was impassive, giving nothing away. Unexpectedly, he added, “Friendly girl.”

  “I guess she was pretty upset by Mr. Rudolph’s death.”

  He sniffed. “Not so you’d notice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He dragged a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, lit it, pointed it at me. “Let me put it to you this way. Your man dies, you be partyin’? You be drinkin’ and carryin’ on, like nothin’ happen?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “That’s right.” He stuck the cigarette in his mouth.

  “Maybe she was trying to forget,” I suggested.

  This time the sniff was more like a snort. “Well, if she be trying to forget, she done give herself some new things to remember.”

  I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about. “I guess she got pretty loaded at the party. It’s a wonder she could drive home, drunk as she was.”

  He squinted at me through the smoke. “Drunk don’t begin to tell it.”

  I tried again. “Well, if she was so drunk, you’d think somebody would have gone with her, to drive her home safely.”

  He shrugged. “It don’t be that far.”

  “What?”

  “Her house don’t be.”

  “From where? The party?”

  “The Seaman,” he said impatiently.

  “Oh.” I tried to assimilate this information. The Seaman was a bar for pool players and hard drinkers, one where Geof had made plenty of arrests over the years, not a few of them for charges that were as serious as they got. “You mean she went to The Seaman after the party? With you guys?”

  Suddenly he sat up straighter, and took the cigarette out of his mouth as if he needed to do that to concentrate. “What you got all this curiosity about, huh? You be some damn lady cop or something?”

  I gave him a look that said, “You crazy?”

  He settled back onto the fertilizer bag, but there was a wary stiffness to him now. I was rapidly losing the trail I had only begun to sniff out.

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “I hope you didn’t tell the cops about being with Sylvia after the party.” When he didn’t say anything, I added, “They would try to make something out of it, you know?”

  “I ain’t stupid.”

  We sat without speaking for a few moments. I had the feeling he was making up his mind about me. Finally, he stretched out his legs, folded his hands over his chest, and closed his eyes to half-mast. I’ve lost him, I thought.

  “We was takin’ care of her,” he said in a low growl. “Leastwise, Lennie and me was. She don’t be in no shape to drive, that for sure. Jack, he drive her to The Seaman. All we done is, we had us more drinks, feelin’ pretty good, you know. But she commence to climbin’ all over him, so they gets up and leaves. Lennie and me, we didn’t think that be such a good idea, but what we gonna do about it? We didn’t want to be messin’ with young Jack, he got a mean streak. So me and Lennie, we leaves and goes on home. I don’t be askin’ no more questions about it, and I be recommending that course of action, you might say, to most anybody who might be happen to ask me. You get what I be tellin’ you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded, and crossed his feet at the ankles.

  “What do you mean, she was climbing all over him?”

  His eyes flew open and he looked at me with disgust. “Your problem is you be a slow learner. And you know what happen to slow learners? They be learnin’ hard things the hard way.”

  Freddy stared at me as if trying to impress some vital piece of knowledge onto my brain, then leaned back, closed his eyes again.

  I waited a moment to see if anything more was forthcoming. When I saw it wasn’t, I got to my feet, and said goodbye to him.

  He didn’t open his eyes. “Yeah.”

  Before walking out into the open, I looked around the corner of the stone shed: the Jackal and Lennie were still trimming trees some distance away. I walked quickly to the cover of the funeral home, a
nd then around it to my car.

  * * *

  From the nearest pay phone on the road into town, I called the Port Frederick Times.

  “Have you got your story written?” I asked Lewis when he came on the line. When he told me he had, I said, “Well, considering what you’ve been through today, I suspect you could use a stiff drink.”

  “Is that an invitation, or an observation?”

  “An invitation.”

  There was a moment of silence. “This is you, isn’t it, Cain?” And when I assured him it was, he asked, “When? Where?”

  “Now. Do you know The Seaman?”

  “I never would have picked you for a Seaman type, Cain. What’s the matter, are you ashamed to be seen with me again at The Buoy?”

  “Well,” I said, “it is true that if you pinch a waitress at The Seaman you will be singing tenor in the boys’ choir this Sunday.”

  “You’re a hard woman, Cain,” he said.

  “Move it, Riss,” I replied, and hung up.

  20

  He looked the worse for wear, even for Lewis. He still hadn’t shaved or changed clothes. But the easy, impudent grin had disappeared, and his eyes were those of a man who was considerably older than he had been when he woke up that morning.

  “Do you feel as bad as you look?” I asked him when I joined him on the sidewalk outside The Seaman. He looked so worn and exhausted I was prepared to call off this excursion, if necessary.

  “Listen.” His voice was as raw as a man with a sore throat. “Compared to the guys you’re gonna see in here, I look like a goddamned preppie. Do me a favor, Cain. When we sit down, don’t order a wine cooler.”

  “Or nachos?”

  A corner of his mouth lifted.

  “Really, Lewis, are you all right?”

  “You saw the same dead body I did, lady, and you’re still standin’. Come on, let’s get a load on.” He shoved open the screen door to the bar, and I followed him inside.

  It was dark enough to blind us, and we stood in the doorway until our eyes adjusted. Even blindfolded, I would have known it was a bar, though: the smell was that warm, pungent, unmistakable one that permeates old taverns as if they mopped the floors and wiped off the tables with rags dipped in buckets of stale beer. With my other senses heightened by the loss of sight, I was also acutely aware of the near-total silence that greeted my entrance.

  “I could have walked in with a two-headed cow and been less goddamned conspicuous,” Lewis whispered. “You couldn’t at least have changed into jeans, Cain? You had to wear that I-been-to-college-and-do-you-know-a-good-tax-shelter suit?”

  I laughed softly. “Yes. I did have to.”

  A long, drawn-out wolf whistle floated in from the back of the room. It was followed by male laughter, and then there was a subdued rush of ordinary bar sounds, like water released from several dams all at once. I heard a clatter of ivory balls, a rumble of male voices, a surge of Marvin Gaye from a jukebox. I smiled grimly, inwardly, at the dramatic irony of his song: “Can I Get a Witness?” Still the bar stayed quieter than it had been when we were standing outside the screen door, and as my eyes adjusted I met several appraising, cool stares.

  “Just tell ’em you’re selling Mary Kay cosmetics,” Lewis said out of the corner of his mouth. “And you just wondered if they could use a little fine pressed powder. You know they think you’re slumming, don’t you? They resent it.”

  “I know. I don’t need an interpreter.”

  “Yeah? You’re in a foreign country, Cain.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got a passport.”

  I walked past him toward the bar and sat down on one of the high, metal, revolving stools. It had a torn, red plastic seat from which brown padding stuck out like knuckles. Lewis slouched after me, but instead of sitting down on the empty stool next to mine, he stood between them. He turned around and faced the room, leaning his upper back against the edge of the bar, crossing his legs at the ankles and his arms over his chest.

  The bartender, a mountainous black man, called down to us: “Yeah? What’ll it be?”

  “Beer,” I said.

  “What you got on tap?” Lewis asked.

  “Bud,” the bartender called back. “Busch.”

  “You got Beck’s?” Lewis asked.

  “Are you kidding?” the bartender said.

  “Busch,” I told him, and Lewis nodded.

  “Two Busch it is.” The bartender poured the draws and brought them down to us, placing them on paper napkins that bore cartoons that featured women in bikinis and men in suits. On the flap of his shirt pocket, he had pinned a large brown button that said “Ted” in white letters. Ted leaned on the bar directly in front of us. The skin around his eyes was dark, as if he hadn’t slept well in years, or had been punched in the face too often. He said, “So what do you know?”

  “Nothin’,” Lewis said.

  I brought the beer to my mouth with both bands and drank. Then I lowered my head. I shook it in the negative. The bartender started to move away.

  “You could call this a sentimental journey,” I said, my voice thick. “My sister was here the night she . . . died. I just . . . I just want to be where she was, you know? She kind of liked this place . . .” I looked around me. “God knows why.”

  The barkeep had turned back when I started talking. Now he laughed once, explosively, like a car backfiring. Immediately, he looked embarrassed, as if he were afraid he had offended me in my hour of grief.

  “You don’t look much like her,” he said coming back to lean on his bar again.

  “You remember her?” I stared at him with what I hoped was pathetic interest in my widened eyes. “You remember Sylvia?”

  He exchanged a glance with Lewis who was now facing me with an unreadable expression on his face. Ted said, “You and your sister, you ain’t exactly the run-of-the-mill type of lady we get in here, you know what I mean, ma’am? Listen, you want another beer? On the house, memory of a nice lady. What’s her name? Sarah? Susan?”

  “Sylvia.” My smile trembled. “No, thank you. If it’s all right, I’d like to buy the house a drink. In memory of my sister, as you said. Do you think they’d mind?”

  Again, an exchange of wry looks with Lewis.

  “I’ll try to persuade them,” the bartender said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He set up a long row of tall glasses into which he dumped a couple of ice cubes apiece. Then he lumbered up onto a step stool and lifted down from an upper shelf a dusty half-gallon of Wild Turkey.

  “Hey,” Lewis said sharply. “How ’bout your bar brand?”

  From his perch, Ted looked down at me. I was reminded, incongruously, of those old cartoons where an elephant climbs up on a chair to escape a mouse.

  “No, no,” I told him. “Make it good, please.”

  He filled the glasses with my dollar bills. Beside me, Lewis grunted, “My mother was right; it is just as easy to fall in love with a rich woman as a poor one.” Then he raised his voice to Ted again. “Hey. My friend here, she’d kind of like to hear about her sister’s last night, you know what I mean? Where’d she sit, who’d she drink with . . .”

  “Shut up,” I hissed, as Ted frowned at him, then at me.

  I let my lower lip quiver, and I wiped at one eye with the tips of the fingers of one hand. “I know who she was drinking with . . . it was some guys she worked with . . . Freddy, Jack, and Lennie, I think. They were just trying to keep her from driving home drunk.” I said it as if appealing to Ted to understand. “They knew she’d had too much to drink, and they were just trying to protect her, isn’t that so?”

  “Sure,” he said kindly.

  “Nuts,” Lewis breathed at my side.

  A waitress in black slacks and a pink V-neck sweater began to distribute the memorial drinks. “Who?” said a loud male voice at one of the tables. “Sylvia,” she told him in a discreet stage whisper behind my back. “Well, shit,” he said, “here’s to your hea
lth, Sylvia.” There were muffled whisperings, giggles. “Forget it, Sylvia,” the same voice said, with a drunken sadness, “too late.” There were more giggles.

  “Sorry,” Ted said. He yelled over my shoulder, “Shut up, assholes.” And then again to me, “Sorry.”

  “It’s the liquor,” I told him, as if revealing a great and surprising truth. “That’s what it was with Sylvia, too. They should have kept her from drinking any more, shouldn’t they? If she hadn’t had those last drinks, she wouldn’t have started climbing all over Jack like she did . . .”

  Ted grunted, and nodded. “Man, she was hot at him, I never seen her so pissed off before, excuse me, ma’am. Yelling at him. Man, she was beating on him like a crazy woman. I thought he’d have to beat the shit out of her before he got her out of here.” He flushed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Shit. Sorry.”

  “No,” I assured him. “It’s okay. She was my sister, I know what she was like sometimes. But I never knew her to get so mad at Jack. What was it about, do you think?”

  Ted shrugged. “We get a lot of that, folks arguing at each other, I mean. I don’t listen much anymore. Ain’t my business. Selling drinks is my business. Fightin’ ain’t my business. Used to be my business, but it ain’t no more.”

  “Well, I know what they was into about,” the waitress said. She had come up during the last exchange. Her button drooped over her left breast and said, “Marie.” Marie looked about twenty-two, with skin the color of oyster crackers and red hair that hung in long twists, like curling ribbon, and huge, eager eyes in a thin face.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “She goes, ‘I thought you was my friend!’” The waitress’s face was animated, as if she were reliving the emotions as well as the words. “She goes, ‘I trusted you!’ She just keeps yelling that, your sister does, over and over. And this Jack guy, the creepy one, he was just laughing at her to start out, you know, like she was drunk and he was laughing, but pretty soon he starts to get real mad like her, and then they was really into it, you know? He goes, ‘You done it to yourself, fool,’ or something like that, and she goes, ‘I wouldn’t of told you if I didn’t trust you,’ and he goes, ‘So what’ and the other two guys, the black dudes, they’re saying, ‘Hey, take it easy, man,’ you know. Stuff like that. And pretty soon she gets up and stomps out, you know, and Jack, the creepy one, he goes after her, and then the other two dudes, the black guys, they leave, and, you know, that’s how it went down.” Abruptly, she stopped, shrugged. She patted my shoulder in an awkward, kind sort of way and turned to answer the summons of another customer. The red curls bounced against her scalp as she walked.