No Body

  Finally, I picked up the photographs that Beryl had dropped to the table. There were only three, and each of them showed a lovely, smiling young woman who looked enamored of life. And, possibly, of men. In all three pictures, she had her arms entwined with male arms—once with Bissell, once with Friedman and Stan. The last photo caught her in a tight little group, all of them giggling into the camera: Freddy, the other black gravedigger, and the Jackal. From the expressions of guilty, silly surprise on their faces, I guessed the joke was not one you would tell at a family picnic.

  I knew I was looking at Sylvia Davis on the last night, in the last hours of her life. If the pictures were a good likeness of her that night, she had been truly beautiful and really drunk. I wished Geof were available to tell me the blood alcohol content in her body, so I’d know if my conjecture was right.

  Behind me, the door to the funeral home opened, admitting a chill breeze and a police officer.

  “Hello, Ailey.”

  “Jenny.” Ailey Mason had a build that was born to police work—muscular, stocky, taut—but not to the trench coats he affected as if he were Port Frederick’s Kojak. He crossed over and took the photographs from my hands. As he flipped through them, he said, “You do turn up, don’t you?”

  Since he was given to clichés, I said obligingly, “Like a bad penny. Ailey, was she as drunk as she looks?”

  “Yeah.” He began to take down the other photographs from the bulletin board. It wasn’t the diplomatic way Geof would have handled the removal of evidence, but then it wasn’t Geof’s case. His broad, impassive face cracked, a slight smile. “They won’t have to embalm the broad, she was already pickled.”

  I thought of the pretty face in the pictures and had to wait a moment before I was sure I could speak civilly to him again. Finally I said, “Ailey, do you think there could be any connection between her death and the death of John Rudolph? Why was she in the coffin with him? Why not in somebody else’s coffin . . . why his? They had other funerals that day, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.” As he took down the pictures, he laid the pushpins on the table, and some of them rolled off onto the floor. I bent down to pick them up and laid them back on the table.

  “Well?”

  “The other one was an open-casket funeral, any other questions?”

  “Yes. Was there anything funny about his death, Ailey?”

  “Not unless you think heart attacks are funny.” He directed another of those small, tight smiles at the bulletin board. “Some people think they’re a real scream.”

  “Good night, Ailey.”

  “See ya.”

  At the door, I turned around again.

  “Ailey?”

  He grunted.

  “There’s a really weird gravedigger who works here,” I said to his back. “His name is John L. Smith, known as Jackal, and he’s maybe nineteen. I don’t want to tell you your business, but I think you ought to check him out, because . . .”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “About you not telling me my business.”

  I stared at the back of his trench coat for a moment longer. The belt was twisted over itself between the two back loops. I opened the door, stepped outside, and closed the door quietly behind me.

  10

  At six in the evening, on weekdays, The Buoy Bar & Grill is as noisy, smoky, smelly, and crowded as the English pubs on which it was modeled many, many years ago. Like generations of Port Frederickans before me, I can’t think of any place I would rather go to drink and socialize. Sometimes. This was not one of those times.

  “Cain! Jenny! Over here!”

  The shout could have come from any one of a number of people there whom I would have been delighted to join. It derived instead from Lewis Riss.

  I climbed over several pairs of knees to sit beside him on the long wooden bench that faced a long wooden table against the far wall. My name was carved in that table someplace along the line—the only bit of graffiti in which I’d ever indulged—along with dozens, maybe even hundreds, of the names of other graduates of Port Frederick High School. We had considered it proof of something back then, maybe coming of age, certainly not literacy. Because of the crush, I squeezed in closer to him than I really wished to.

  “ ’Allo, me beauty,” he growled.

  “Lewis.”

  Lewis was medium height, thin, late twenties. His heavy mop of curly black hair hung down over his eyebrows, which were also thick and black and curly; his five o’clock shadow looked as if it dated from five o’clock on a previous afternoon. He had on a bulky, dirty white cableknit sweater over a black turtleneck over faded blue jeans. Somewhere under there was a basically good-looking man, but he was hard to spot, and I had no desire to search. He clapped a hand over one eye and leered at me like a pirate. There were curly black hairs on the backs of his hands. “What’ll it be, matey? Grog ’n flog?”

  “Grog,” I said to the waiting, grinning waitress. “Hold the flog.”

  “I heard a great joke,” Lewis said. He sucked on his funny cigarette and blew the smoke into my face. The unmistakable smell of marijuana drifted down the long bench; it was interesting to observe who looked up in startled recognition. He said, “It goes, ‘Guess who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’ “

  “Are you out of your mind, Lew?” I coughed, waved away the smoke. “This is not Cosmopolitan, U.S.A., you know.”

  “No shit.” He grinned through the smoke.

  “Well?”

  “I thought you said Bushfield’s out of town.”

  “He’s not the only cop in town, dummy.”

  “He’s the only one with his brains in the right end of his anatomy.” Lew was easy to insult, difficult to offend. But he delicately snuffed out the joint on the tabletop and slid the stub into his wallet. “All right, that’s enough fun for one lifetime, let’s get serious. What do you know about the murder of Sylvia Davis?”

  “Probably less than you do.”

  He curled his upper lip in a show of skepticism.

  “Honest, Lewis.”

  “Sure.” He shook his head. “Okay, how did it feel to be there when they found her in that coffin?”

  “You don’t really ask questions like that, do you? How did it feel? It felt just peachy-keen, Lewis. How do you think it felt! It felt awful, shocking, scary, sickening, that’s how it felt.”

  He smirked, as if I had fallen into a trap.

  The waitress arrived with my draft beer.

  “I hear you been askin’ around about those empty graves on Union Hill,” Lewis said quietly, as she placed the glass mug on a round cardboard coaster. “What’s it to you? I mean, it’s news, so it’s a natural for me. And it oughta be for the cops, but they act like crimes committed in another century are out of their jurisdiction, for Christ’s sake. I mean, you ever hear of a police force that defines its jurisdictions by time?”

  “You’ve never come across the statute of limitations?” I waited for Lewis to pay the waitress for my drink. When he didn’t, I dug the money out of my purse. “This is not Boston, Lewis, as you ought to realize every time you pick up a paycheck for mat great metropolitan newspaper you write for.”

  “That was tacky, Cain.”

  “Well? These are the provinces, kiddo. Small town, small police force. It’s all they can do to catch this year’s crop of crooks, much less try to solve something that happened around the time of the Civil War.”

  “How do you know it happened then?” he asked sharply.

  I sighed. “I don’t, Lew. I was just . . .”

  “This is what comes of living with a cop.” He put his left arm over the bench behind me and leaned toward me, a severe expression on his face. “You get co-opted by the system, you start defending the gestapo . . .”

  “Gestapo?” I laughed, drew back from him. “Lewis, the worst case of police brutality we ever had in Poor Fred was a couple of years ago when a traffic cop pulled over this old lady for speeding, and she bit him on the hand, and
he bit her back, which God knows she richly deserved. Well, he got fired, and she never even had to pay the ticket!”

  “Damn, I miss all the good stories.” Lewis cocked an eyebrow at me. “So answer the question of this bona fide, genuine reporter . . . why the big interest in Union Hill?”

  “You wouldn’t understand this,” I said a shade acidly, “being new to these sticks as you are, but we have a sense of community around here, Lew. And you don’t move out of that community just because you die. I have trustees who want to know where their ancestors are, and I’d kind of like to find my great-great-great-grandparents, too. Is that so hard to grasp, Clark Kent?”

  He took a swig from his beer mug, wiped his chin with his sleeve. “You know who else is from near Asbury Park?”

  I could only think of one man, “The Boss,” the king of rock and roll. “You mean Bruce Springsteen?”

  “Who else? He’s big on community, like you. But you and he, you got the bucks, you can afford to be happy hicks. Me, I got a living to earn. And one of these days it ain’t gonna be here, and it ain’t gonna be in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I am only sticking around these sticks till The New York Times calls me to my natural home. And if I’m ever gonna get out of here, it’s gonna be on the backs of murders and missing bodies. You hear what I’m saying? So while you’re gettin’ in my way, at least be useful, will you? For starters, you can get me in to see Miss Lucille Grant . . . the last time I called her, she corrected my grammar and hung up on me.”

  “She was only doing you a favor, Lewis. The New York Times is big on grammar.”

  I swallowed some beer.

  “Well, you gonna do it?”

  I looked him up and down. “You have a certain something, Lewis, an indefinable . . . something . . . that is remarkably easy to resist. No. You’ve hung up on me and insulted me, all in less than twenty-four hours. Why should I help you?”

  “Would it have made a difference if I’d spaced it out a little, maybe given it a day or two between the hang up and the insults?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  He pounced on his advantage. “You should do it because if you do, I’ll tell you everything I learn about the Davis murder.”

  “Why should I want to know that?”

  “Because you were there when they found her, and you’re dying of curiosity, and your number-one source is out of town, and your number-two source is a horse’s ass.”

  “You mean you?”

  “I mean Ailey.” He grinned. “And God knows you can’t believe everything you read in the paper. I’ll give you a quarter to call her.”

  I didn’t give in just out of curiosity, but because I didn’t trust Ailey to be able to handle the case alone. Lewis Riss might turn out to be a valuable source of information for me to hoard for Geof, in case he had to take over the case when he got back from Philadelphia.

  I raised my glass to his, just short of touching it. “Okay.”

  But he pursued my glass with his until they clinked.

  He smirked. “Ambulance chaser.”

  After a second beer, I began to think it was a pretty good idea to visit Miss Grant. I called her from a public phone booth near the entrance to the bar. She, without hesitation, warmly invited me to drop by with “my friend.”

  “I should warn you,” I began.

  “Yes, dear,” she said calmly. “When Mr. Riss called here, he reminded me a little of Teddy Magus, whom I had in sixth grade so many years ago. I doubt he’s changed much, Teddy Magus, that is, although, goodness, he must be fifty years old by now. I suspect he has a very patient wife. No, Jenny, dear, don’t you worry about me. I know just how to handle your Mr. Lewis Riss.”

  My friends, I noticed, were developing an unfortunate tendency to assign to me belongings I didn’t want, like “my” missing bodies and “my” obnoxious reporter. But I hung up from talking to her with a sense of anticipation that very nearly amounted to glee. I turned away from the phone in time to see Lewis reach out and pat a waitress on her rear.

  “You do that again, Riss,” she said angrily, “and I’ll serve your balls on ice.”

  When I walked up to him, he shook his head in a lugubrious fashion. “I can’t make out with the women in this town, Cain. Including you, God knows.” He held up his hands in mock defense. “I know, I know, a reporter can get into a hell of a lot of trouble for tampering with police property.” Lewis leered, as Captain Hook must have at Wendy. “What am I doing wrong, anyway?”

  “Beats me, Lewis.”

  “Hell, I would if I thought it would work,” he said, but I saw that he was distracted by something over my right shoulder. I turned, to see the gorgeous Harbor Lights prearrangement salesman, Russell Bissell, walking by me on his way into the bar. I smiled, nodded. He looked from me to Lewis and back again, then smiled with a slow, easy flash of perfect teeth. Aaron Friedman was behind him, looking like a shadow trailing the sun. The personnel director frowned as if he were trying to remember where he had seen me before, and had not yet placed me at John Rudolph’s graveside. I smiled at him, then followed Lewis, who had walked around me, toward the door.

  He lifted a navy pea coat with gleaming brass buttons from a hook, and grunted as he slipped it on. “Women.” The coat was a little snug on him; his wrists stuck out. “You’re all alike. You want the tall, cool, pretty boys.” He patted the pockets of the coat and brought out a pack of cigarettes. I was amused to see they were low tar, low nicotine, menthol. “But I’ll tell you.” He lit a cigarette, made a face at the taste of it. “Cool waters run shallow, kid.”

  “That will come as a surprise to deep-sea divers.”

  I slipped into my own raincoat and buttoned it. Once out into the cold, damp night, I hunched my shoulders, stuck my hands in my pockets. “Wish I’d worn something as warm as that coat, tonight.”

  “This?” He looked down at the pea coat, fingered one of the buttons. “Oh, it’s not mine. I didn’t wear a coat.”

  I stopped on the sidewalk and stared at him.

  “Well, don’t look at me like I’m some kind of ax murderer, Jenny. I’ll return it tomorrow, for God’s sake. You don’t want me to freeze do you? Come on, we’ll take your car.”

  Halfway down the sidewalk, he turned back to yell at me.

  “Come on, Cain!” He stamped his feet, sucked impatiently on his stolen cigarette so the end of it glowed, a point of fire in the mist. “You don’t want to keep an old lady waiting, do you? That wouldn’t be very nice.”

  Cigarette. Fire. Cremation. I stood frozen to the cement, not only in shock at his theft but also because of my own stupidity: I’d left the personnel file on John L. Smith under the coffee table in the cremation-urn display room at the funeral home. Damn. I pulled back the left sleeve of my coat, checked my watch. Only 7:00. Funeral homes stayed open late, didn’t they, for visitations, or whatever? Maybe there would be time to retrieve the file after we left Miss Grant’s apartment. I hoped so, for my sake, but mostly for Francie’s.

  “Cain! Shake it!”

  I stopped for gas on the way. Lewis didn’t offer to pay for any of it. He did, however, promise me that he wouldn’t ask Miss Grant who was buried in Grant’s Tomb.

  11

  Miss Grant set down her teacup and smiled benevolently upon Lewis. He was seated on the floor at her feet, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms resting on his knees. I was cross-legged on the floor opposite him. Miss Grant had on a flowered pink bathrobe and floppy pink slippers.

  “My grandmother attended burials there, Mr. Riss,” she said. “That’s how I know the graves were not always empty, as they are today. Will you have another cookie?”

  She held out to him a huge tin of imported English biscuits that she said a former pupil had sent her. Lewis took one. She smiled encouragingly. He took another, and laid them both on the lacy napkin that was draped like a bandage over one knee of his dirty jeans. He put one of the cookies to his mouth and a crumb dropped to the carpet; Lewis bent
quickly to retrieve it. I watched, hypnotized, and waited for him to start eating out of her hand . . .

  My, weren’t those interesting articles that Mr. Riss had written about the trash dump? And, my heavens, of course she excused him for not having shaved, why she knew how very hard reporters worked at their craft, such long hours they devoted to their stories. And how thoughtful it was of him to visit an old lady . . . Jennifer always seemed to have such attractive, intelligent, nice young friends . . .

  I was distinctly disappointed. I had hoped for something along the lines of a hickory stick to get him in line, not this sickening sweetness and light. As she talked, I munched grumpily on my third Scotch shortbread cookie.

  “Every Decoration Day,” she was saying, “my mother took us to that cemetery and related to us the details of the lives and deaths of our ancestors who were buried there, just as her mother had told it all to her.

  “Why, Mother knew everything there was to know about the funerals, even down to such details as what kind of wood Erasmus Pittman and his boys used to make the coffins. Usually, it was oak, elm, pine, cherry, walnut, but hardly ever mahogany, since that had to be imported. And they used shiny brass fittings, of course.

  “But the coffins were simple and dignified, Mother said, and in those days they were still shaped like bodies . . . you know, narrow at the feet and head, wide at the shoulders.” Miss Grant traced a grim shape in the air. “It wasn’t until long after the Civil War that the newfangled rectangular shapes and the fancy metal coffins became popular in towns as small as this one was.”