But what the hell. This is more important. While James Bradley Stomarti might be ashes, serious work lies ahead. The whole true story of his life and death remains untold, and Emma must be made aware of our duty to set things straight. I walk up and ring the bell. No reply. The duplex has a corroded, wall-mounted air conditioner that sounds like a bulldozer at the bottom of a canal. I try knocking, first with knuckles and then with the heel of my hand. Even the cat refuses to react.
"Shit," I say to myself.
Halfway to the car, I hear the apartment door openingit's Emma, and to my relief she appears neither disheveled nor recently aroused. She's wearing old jeans, a short white T-shirt and her reading glasses. Her freshly trimmed bangs are parted, and the rest of her hair is pulled back with a navy blue elastic band.
"Jack?"
"Is it a bad time?"
Briskly she descends the steps. "I thoughtI heard knocking"
"I tried to call but it kept ringing busy."
"Sorry. I was on the computer," Emma says. I think I believe her.
"What's up?"she asks.
"The Stomarti obit."
Emma looks surprised. Even when riven with errors, obituaries rarely cause headaches for editors. Legally, it is impossible to libel a dead person.
Hurriedly I tell Emma about Janet Thrush's phone call and the visit to the funeral home and the absence of autopsy stitches in Jimmy Stoma's corpse. Emma listens with an annoying trace of restlessness. At any moment I expect my buddy Juan to come sauntering out the door, zipping up his pants.
When I'm done with my pitch, Emma purses her lips and says, "You think we should run a correction?"
Christ, she's serious. I bite back the impulse to ridicule. Instead I lower my eyes and find myself gazing at Emma's bare feet, which I've never seen before. Her toenails are painted in alternating colors of cherry red and tangerine, which seems drastically out of character.
"Jack?"
"There's nothing to correct," I explain evenly. "The story wasn't wrong; it just wasn't all there."
"What do you think happened to the guy?"
"I think I'd like to see a coroner's report from the Bahamas."
"How would we handle that?" Emma is beginning to fidget. She glances over her shoulder but still hasn't acknowledged Juan's presence inside the apartment.
"We would handle that," I say, "by me flying to Nassau and interviewing the doctor who examined Jimmy Stoma's body."
Emma looks exasperated, as if I'm the one who is confused. Turns out I am.
She says, "No, what I meant wasJack, you can't do it. You've got to finish Old Man Polk right away. They say he's fading fast ... "
"What?"
MacArthur Polk once owned the Union-Register.If the clippings are accurate, he has been dying off and on for seventeen years. I am the latest reporter assigned to pre-write an obituary.
"Emma, are you serious?" My disgust is genuine; the incredulity, feigned.
She removes a green silk scarf from her back pocket and nervously begins twisting it like an eel around one of her slender wrists.
"Listen, Jack, if you really think there's something there"
"I do. I knowthere's something there."
"Okay, then, tomorrow you get all your notes together and we'll go see Rhineman. Maybe he's got somebody he can pull free to make some phone calls."
Rhineman is the Metro editor, the hard-news guy. My stomach knots up.
"Emma, I can make the calls. I'm perfectly capable of working the phones."
Stiffly she edges back toward the apartment. "Jack," she says, "we don't do foul play. We don't do murder investigations. We do obituaries."
"Please. A couple days is all I'm asking."
I can't believe I actually said please.
The retreat continues, Emma shaking her head. "I'm sorrylet's talk at the office, okay? First thing in the morning." She reaches the door and disappears as lithely as a ferret down a hole.
I sit in her driveway for several minutes, letting the rage burn out. Eventually, the urge to grab a tire iron and mess up her new champagne-colored Camry passes. Why am I surprised by what happened here? What the hell was I thinking?
Driving home, I turn up the bass for the Slut Puppies. I find myself entertaining a ribald image of Juan Rodriguez trussed with silk scarves to the bedposts while being straddled boisterously by Emma.
Emma, with her goddamn two-tone jellybean toenails.
I live alone in a decent fourth-floor apartment not far from the beach. Three different women have lived here with me, Anne being the most recent and by far the most patient. A snapshot of her in a yellow tank suit remains attached by a magnet to the refrigerator door. Inside the refrigerator is half a bucket of chicken wings, a six-pack of beer and a triangular slab of molding cheddar. Tonight the beer is all that interests me, and I'm on my third when somebody knocks.
"Yo, Obituary Boy? You home?"
When Juan opens the door, I salute from the couch. He grabs a beer for himself and sits down in one of the matching faded armchairs. "The Marlins are playing," he says.
"That's a matter of opinion."
"Where's the TV?" Juan motions to the vacant space in the center of the wall unit. "Don't tell me you launched it off the balcony again."
That sometimes happens when I try to watch music videos. "It's pathetic," I say to my friend. "I'm not proud of myself."
"Who was it this time?"
"One of those 'boy bands.' I don't remember which." I roll the cool sweaty bottle across my forehead.
Juan looks a little uptight.
"You're how old nowthirty-four?" I ask.
"Not tonight, Jack."
"You should be on top of the world, man. You've already hung in there longer than Keith Moon or John Belushi." I can't help myself.
Juan says, "Why do you do this?"
I put a Stones record on the stereo because you can't go wrong with the Stones. Juan knows most of the songs, even the early stuffhe has fully acculturated himself since arriving in the 1981 exodus from the port of Mariel, Cuba. He was sixteen at the time, four years older than the sister who accompanied him on an old Key West lobster boat. They were with a group of thirty-seven refugees, among whom were a handful of vicious criminals that Castro yanked out of prison and shipped to Miami as a practical joke. Everyone at the paper knows Juan came over on the boatlift. What they don't know is what happened forty miles at sea in the black of nightJuan told me the story after too many martinis. One of the convicts decided to have some fun with Juan's sister and one of the others offered to stand watch, and neither of them paid enough attention to the girl's skinny brother, who somehow got his hands on a five-inch screwdriver. Many hours later, when the lobster boat docked at Key West, the immigration officer counted only thirty-five passengers, including Juan and his sister in a ripped dress. The others said nothing about what had taken place on the voyage.
Juan takes a slug of beer and says to me: "Good piece today."
"Come on, man."
"What?"
"It's a goddamn obit."
"Hey, it was interesting. I remember hearing the Slut Puppies on the radio," he says. " 'Trouser Troll' was kinda catchy."
"I thought so, too." I'm eager to tell Juan about the Jimmy Stoma mystery, but I'm wondering if he already knows. If he does, it means he and Emma are tighter than I thought.
"Did she tell you?" I ask.
"Who? OhEmma?"
"No, Madeleine fucking Albright." I set my empty bottle on the floor. "Look, I hope I didn't interrupt anything this afternoon. Normally, I'd never"
"You didn't." Juan grins. "I was helping with her computer. She got a new browser."
"I'll bet she did."
"Honest. That's all."
"Then why didn't you pop out and say hi?"
Juan says, "She asked me not to."
That's just like Emma, worrying that Juan's presence as my friend and her potential sex partner would somehow undermine her primacy in the editor-reporter relationship.