That was a guilty conscience speaking. Once locked, coffins do not open easily. It would never do to have a corpse spilled into the street if the pallbearers should somehow drop one.
That, however, wasn’t important at the moment.
What was important was that the silk and satin interior was empty, so pristine it appeared never to have been occupied.
I’d helped carry that coffin to the site on a rainy morning through the wet grass and slippery mud. Heavy as it was, we’d never have missed the slight weight of Rachel’s wasted body. And Rachel, who had been a beautiful woman but no more vain than any other, had asked that the coffin remain closed.
The cemetery manager had the drawn look of a man envisioning a huge lawsuit.
I kept my face impassive. “It’s all right. There was a private cremation ceremony. The burial was only symbolic.”
They both looked relieved, particularly the manager. It sounded so good, I almost believed it myself.
I walked away and sat down on the weathered headstone of a Farr who had crossed the mountains before there was a town, fumbling with a trembling hand for the occasional cigarette I was driven to when life whistled a fastball past my stupid head.
Grave markers of every size and shape were aligned beneath a canopy of fall color, leaves already drifting to earth. In a few weeks they would form a blanket six inches deep. I’d just consigned Ian Farr to an eternity under that blanket with an empty grave beside him, without the slightest clue to where his wife really was.
Perhaps the peace and quiet helped me think of chance meetings, and of momentary madness, and how we all reach Tobias’s toll-booth where the price is too high.
And of Alyssa’s long hours holding her mother’s hand while waiting for her to die, of secrets whispered in a dim room, of the soul cleansed in anticipation of death, and of inbred duty and obligation.
And that no one will know until Judgment Day what dark secrets are interred in any cemetery.
One more would make no difference at all.
I killed the cigarette and glanced at my watch. Just enough time to avoid Judy’s anger. We had to drive to Philadelphia that night. Concert pianist, our daughter-in-law. Appearing at the Academy of Music.
I let the car roll down the narrow, curving macadam lane to Henry’s grave, not very far away, noticing for the first time how an expanse of smooth grass alongside his marker broke the symmetry of the aligned tombstones.
The words of a local detective came back. “Six rounds? Someone sure wanted to make a point, didn’t he?”
Henry had become a legend here — the longhaired flake who lived on the island and played a polka trumpet like no one before or since, and serenaded the woman he loved by moonlight with the most beautiful music you ever heard — music you still might hear on a silvery fall evening when the moon is bright.
Skeptics say if you do hear it it’s because someone is playing one of his albums on a hundred-watt hi-fi stereo.
Maybe so. I do know I hear it occasionally. Lawyers being notoriously unimaginative, perhaps I’m only recalling a distant memory.
I don’t think so. I remember Henry’s playing as being infinitely sad and full of longing, but since Rachel died—
Well, it seems to have acquired a triumphant lilt.
A Boy Named Tzu
by Ken Lester
Hildegarde Beauregarde was an anile retentive. That is, she was an old miser. Her golden years she hoarded no less tightly than her gold, enjoying each day in the mansion where she had been born, a central Florida cracker within sound of Lake Wales’s carillon bells, savoring her parochial tintinnabulation much as a cockney his Bow Bells of London.
Grandson Jack was a penal implant. That is, he was a jailbird. Had been. Only briefly, really. For of his two-to-six at Eglin Federal Prison Camp for securities violations he had served only ninety days, and that as tennis groundskeeper. It was some technical foul sort of thing about junk bonds. Grandma thought he had vacationed in the Bahamas. A sunlamp reinforced Jack’s tan and his story.
Jack needed money bad. True, in his present digs he could watch the sun rise over the Atlantic and set in the Gulf, but the solar transit vaulted eponymous gas stations. He lived up over a candy store. What’s worse, he played his tennis on rundown sandy courts with raggedy nets. He even had to bring his own center strap.
Jack needed money bad enough to need Hildegarde dead.
Not that he wanted her dead. He really liked the old girl. But money and dead were synonyms in Jack’s lexicon. For Jack was the sole surviving heir to the Beauregarde millions.
No blood kin of Hildegarde, Jack was her step-grandson. She had raised him ever since the day the St. Elmo’s headmaster had haled him out of geography class to tell him his father and his stepmother — Hildegarde’s daughter — had lost an argument with wind shear on the final at pre-Doppler Tampa International.
“When I go, Jack,” said Hildegarde, “you will be a very wealthy man.”
“Thank you, Grandmother,” said Jack.
What Jack did not say was, “I would rather be a very wealthy young man than a very wealthy old man.” But this preference had set Jack to thinking just how and when he might get his druthers.
Enter a boy named Tzu. Jack’s classmate at Eglin Federal Prison Camp had borrowed his name from quaint sixth century B.C. philosopher Lao Tzu, the good old boy who urged mankind to go with the flow.
“Tzu sounds better than Irving in my business,” said Tzu.
Tzu sold charisma. As one hawks tomatoes from a road-stand, Tzu flogged charisma from an ashram.
“I sock these marks a thousand a week to attend my Carolina retreat, Low Tor. For this they get to mop the johns and lie on the floor moaning through one nostril. They love it.”
And they loved Tzu. Which amour was not actionable per se. But when Tzu’s Rolls-Royces outnumbered his parishioners, the friendly folks at the Internal Revenue Service opined that a tax exempt religion Tzu was not, and how about chipping in for this fiscal year and that one, and the one — millions! Which of course by now were one with the snows of yesteryear.
“I run a clean operation,” said Tzu.
“True,” agreed the IRS, running its finger along Tzu’s immaculate second set of books. No dust. But in the Examiner’s Treasury of the World’s Greatest Audits, cleanliness was still second best to godliness. The slammer it was. Two to six. Time off for good.
Tzu and Jack had emerged blinking into the blinding sun of Florida freedom hand in hand.
And mind in mind about murder.
“What will it take?” said Jack. “The dead thing.” He had tended to thing-talk like that ever since President Bush.
“Time, my son,” said Tzu. Younger than Jack, Tzu affected a full beard and granny glasses that gave him an unearned gravitas. Tzu could read the telephone directory soft and slow, and people would nod sagely.
Tzu knew more about the subtle seduction of ideas when he was three years old than Jack would know in all his life. Tzu just knew.
He knew exactly who would pay good money for no-guilt-be-cause-no-sin. Who would flee from the black-or-white of Aristotle’s binary assumptions to the comforting greys of fuzzy logic. Tzu brewed cream-of-faith stew, and the devout lapped it up.
“I must meet this granny,” said Tzu.
“What the hell for?” said Jack. “We’re talking homicide here.”
“Would you expect a doctor to cure a patient he had never seen?”
“You’ve got a point,” said Jack.
“Besides, I could use a good meal,” said Tzu. “The IRS...”
“You’re telling me!” said Jack.
They made it to Grandmother’s house just in time for angst-giving dinner.