Underneath the comptroller with the patched-up forehead, underneath the white silk and the styrofoam fed rosary, was bedding, the final support for a body that needed no support. Remo pushed back the white ash lid and with his right hand grabbed the belt of the corpse and deposited it on the other side of the lid. He paused and listened. No movement. No one was coming. He whistled a moving tune he had heard Aretha Franklin sing, remembering only the "needya, baby, baby, needya, baby."
He took the fine seam out of the silk covering at the bottom of the coffin and found cheap cardboard supports. He ripped the cardboard down to bare unfinished wood and placed it in a pile at his feet. His one hand worked like a flashing blade as he picked up the rolling beat of the song and lost the tune so totally he would never find it again.
He grabbed a handful of Bardwell's muscled stomach and hoisted the corpse up into the bare bottom of the coffin. He flattened Bardwell for a better fit, eliminating the bumps of the chest and head without breaking skin. Then, crushing the cardboard at his feet, he reconstructed the well sides around Bardwell and covered it again with the white silk, carefully tucking in the edges.
"Perfect almost," muttered Remo. "Needya, baby, baby."
He took the comptroller of the Tenafly Savings and Trust Company off the lid and put him gently into his final resting place and stepped back to examine his work.
"Shit." The comptroller was three inches too high. Maybe he could get an inch and a half off him and this time he cracked the corpse's spinal column, put a hairline midchest, and pressed down on the groin area, for the comptroller had been well padded in the posterior. Where Bardwell was slim, the comptroller was fat and vice versa. So it worked.
Remo stepped back again.
"Nice fit," he said. Of course, by the time the wake became active, with people coming by to pay last respects, the release of Bardwell's sphincter muscles might cause an unnerving smell, but for now, a nice job. Remo heard someone and quickly touched up the powder on the comptroller's cold face.
"Baby, baby, needya, baby," sung Remo and from behind him a whiny voice called out:
"You there. What are you doing with the deceased?"
Remo turned and saw a man in black suit, white shirt, and black tie with a very pale face, pale because he used the same powder on himself as he had used on the comptroller.
"Just a friend of the deceased."
"The wake's tonight. I know who you are. I know your kind. If you've played with that man's privates…"
"What?" said Remo.
"Sick," said the man. "You're sick. Sick. Sick."
"I was just saying goodbye to a friend."
"I bet, sicko. I know your kind. Hang around funeral homes trying to get jobs but you'll never get one in mine. You know why? You're sick is why. That's why."
"If you say so," said Remo.
"Glad I caught you before you could get to anything."
"Thank you," said Remo, taking it as a compliment for his work.
At the bank he saw the deputy chief again, who introduced him to the head teller, who pointed out Lynette Bardwell. She had a strong, elegant face with a faint almond shaping to her gray eyes and neat, bouncy blonde hair, streaked with just the right touch of darker blonde. Her lips were full and moist and she carried herself with a calmness. Even under the formal stiff white blouse and tweed skirt, Remo could sense the beauty of her body. He wondered what she had seen in Bardwell.
He waited until the bank was closed to customers and then, with the head teller's permission, took her into one of the private rooms where customers examined safe deposit boxes.
"Why do you want to interview me?" asked Lynette. She was only in her early twenties, yet she seemed unflustered by the interview.
"Because your husband is the man who slaughtered those bankers upstairs."
Lynette Bardwell lit a filter tip cigarette and exhaled.
"I know that," she said. "What do you want?"
"I'm interested in his friends, who might have taught him what he knew about handling himself in a fight."
"And just who are you?"
"I'm the man your husband confessed to."
"That dumb bastard," said Lynette, and her composure disappeared as she surrendered to teary sobs. "That dumb bastard."
CHAPTER FIVE
As he watched her weep, Remo realized he had overestimated Lynette Bardwell's toughness. He had listened to that nasal bray that New Jersey women called human speech, and had been fooled by it. Lynette Bardwell was just a woman, soft and yielding. He decided not to tell her that her husband was dead.
Lynette blotted her eyes with a tissue and looked up. "If you want to talk all night, you've got to buy me a sandwich."
"Don't you think Hawley will mind?" asked Remo, not really caring. For Hawley Bardwell to mind would involve his raising himself from the dead, getting past one body, and out of a sealed coffin. Remo wasn't worried.
"Suppose he does?"
"He's a pretty fast guy with his hands, I suppose. He might light into you pretty hard."
"Hah. That'll be the day," said Lynette. "Look, big magazine writer, are you on an expense account or not?"
"Yes."
"Then no sandwich. Dinner. A real dinner."
Lynette Bardwell's idea of a real dinner was a cinder block structure outside the city that had changed from diner to restaurant by adding wood paneling, tables instead of booths, and turning down the lights. No one apparently had bothered to tell the chef of the change in status because the menu was still built upon one-plate meals, most of them seeming to specialize in chopped meat.
Lynette ordered salad—"it's nice and crisp here all the time"—to which Remo did not comment, contenting himself instead with the thought that so was birch-bark. She wanted Thousand Island dressing, sirloin steak rare, baked potato with cheese mixed in, asparagus tips with hollandaise sauce, and a Tom Collins in a tall glass to start everything off.
Remo asked for a glass of water to start things off, and rice, if the cook had long-grained wild rice, with no seasoning, no salt, no pepper, no monosodium glutamate, and if they did not have long-grained wild rice, he would settle for just the water.
Which he did, because the chef had never heard of wild rice and if it was made by Minute Rice he would have known about it. The waitress snapped her gum as she told Remo this and delivered the water. He sipped it. It was good to be back home in New Jersey where the water contained trace elements of every one of the known elements, including macadam.
Lynette sipped at her Tom Collins, carefully replacing it on the paper napkin between sips, and asked Remo suddenly:
"What's wrong with your shoulder?"
"Why?"
"It looks like you're holding it funny," she said. "Like it's hurting."
"Touch of arthritis," said Remo, who thought he had been disguising the immobility of his left arm. "Where did Hawley learn his karate?"
"Oh, he's been at it for years. There are places in Jersey City that he goes to."
"You know the name of them?" asked Remo, putting the water aside for when he might really want it, like after a thirty-day trek in the Sahara.
"Not really. I don't pay any attention to that. I don't know what kick some men get out of hopping around in pajamas."
"You prefer men hopping around without pajamas?"
Lynette giggled. "Well, maybe not hopping," she said. She raised the glass to her mouth and looked over the top of it at Remo. "What makes you think Hawley killed those bankers?"