“You’re cooking up some kind of deal, aren’t you?” I grinned at him.
The hostess pushed her way through the crowd and looked at us, a sweaty wisp of hair down across her forehead. “Smoking or nonsmoking?”
Walter, as he predicted, was soon slavering over the turkey supreme. I was raking up the white beans over corn-bread, washing it down with iced tea as sweet as pancake syrup.
“Ahh,” Walter sighed, wiping his mouth with a crumpled napkin. “Life in the fast lane.”
I leaned back, even sleepier and flatter than I had been up in the office. I’d hoped lunch would rekindle my pilot light. Instead, all I wanted to do was slide back into bed. I knew, with what little measure of self-discipline I still possessed, that this was impossible.
“Visiting hours start at two today,” I said. “You going?”
Walter looked at me, confused, as if for a moment he couldn’t connect. “Oh, yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll be there after work. When you going over?”
“I guess Rachel’ll be at the funeral home right at two. I’ll show up a little after that. I figure she’ll need moral support.”
Walter leaned back in his chair and ran his tongue over his front teeth. “And you’re just the guy to do that, aren’t you?”
I stared at him for a second. “Maybe. Being around Rachel again could become a habit. When the time’s right.”
His eyes narrowed. “Be careful, buddy. You don’t have any idea what you’re getting into.”
“And you do?”
Walter smiled. “Fair enough. I don’t have any idea what you’re getting into either. But I’d be very careful if I were you.”
“If you were me, you wouldn’t be wearing that suit. How much’d that thing cost you, anyway?”
“If you got to ask …” he began.
“I know,” I interrupted. “Believe me, I know.”
I managed to kill a couple of hours in my office, mostly running around in mental circles. Then I collected the Ford out of the garage and headed out West End. It was just before three, middle of the afternoon, which downtown means the rush hour had already started. It took twenty minutes to make it back out to the triangle where Division splits from Broadway.
Funny, I thought, the funeral home where Conrad Fletcher lay stretched out was only a few blocks up from Bubba Hayes’s stop-and-drop. I kept thinking that of all the people I’d met, or heard about, who didn’t care for Conrad Fletcher, Bubba Hayes was the only one I could imagine killing him. And yet something told me-for the time being-that he wasn’t a murderer. Maybe it was the timbre in his voice; maybe it was that if I didn’t believe him, he’d beat the snot out of me again. Either way, I just had a feeling that while he might know more than he was telling, he hadn’t killed Connie Fletcher.
I brought the Ford to a shuddering, smoking stop in the back parking lot of the funeral home. The last time I’d been here was when a distant uncle of mine died a few years back. As a child, funerals terrified me. As a man, they still do.
I walked in the back door of the funeral home, past a desk where a pasty-faced woman sat behind a telephone desk console that could have been the main switchboard at IBM. Didn’t know funeral homes were such busy places.
This particular funeral home was more like an antebellum mansion than anything else, with a winding staircase in the central foyer that led upstairs to offices, and parlors off to each side of the great hall where the bereaved families gathered in front of the usually open coffins. Funerals, especially Southern funerals, are pageants, deep-fried dramas, ripping passionate catharsis. I’ve been to funerals where fat ladies tore their pearls off and fainted in puddles of sweat, foam spreading across their lips as they spoke in tongues. And food … God, the food. Some poor high school dropout clerk in a 7-Eleven gets blown away at two in the morning by a demented crackhead, and what does the family do? Scream in agony, tear hair out, yell for the death penalty, then chow down like a bunch of linebackers in spring training.
I hoped that wasn’t on the agenda for this one. There was a black signboard with little white letters in front of each parlor, MR. E. GIBSON was in the room off to the right. The front room, to my left, had a sign that read DR. C. FLETCHER.
I walked into the room silently, my footsteps muffled by the thick red carpet. Long blue drapes hung down in front of floor-to-ceiling windows fourteen feet high. Victorian parlor lamps with engraved purple and gray cherubs in the glass shades lit the room dimly. The room was jammed with flowers, and the air was thick and heavy with their perfume.
And I was the only one there. Except Conrad, of course, who was lying face up in an open bronze coffin on the other side of the room. He wasn’t much company, though.
I discreetly glanced at my watch. Visiting hours had started nearly an hour ago. Where was everybody? Even in death, it seemed, people didn’t want to spend too much time around the good doctor.
I backed out of the room and checked out the visitor’s register, opened to the first page on a white stand near the door. There were three names, one a doctor. That was all. Conrad wasn’t going to break any box office records at this pace.
Back inside the parlor, I stepped across the room over to the coffin. Connie lay in the box, wearing a white shirt, striped tie, pressed blue suit. On his left lapel was an American Medical Association pin of some kind. At least I think that’s what it was; the snake wound around the shaft, anyhow.
I’ll say this much for him-he looked a hell of a lot better than he did the last time I saw him. He had some color back, his face had filled out some, probably from the funeral director’s padding, and the ghastly sunken purple under his eyes was gone.
Yeah, he looked a lot better. Not that it mattered.
I backed away from the coffin, thinking how weird it was that nobody else was there. It was still early; most people had to finish the work day. Yeah, that was it. Had to be.
The funeral home had conveniently set up a coffee room in the back of the building so the grieving and the bereaved could grab a cup of hot java and a smoke between hysterics. I went back and discovered why the front parlor was empty: everybody was in here on break.
Rachel sat at a Formica table behind a sweaty can of diet soda, dressed in a severe black dress with a white lace collar. She was staring down at her hands when I came in and didn’t notice me for a second. Mrs. Goddard, Rachel’s protective neighbor, sat to the left. She nudged Rachel when she spotted me.
“Harry,” Rachel sighed. She stood up and crossed in front of the table, her arms held out to me. “I’m so glad you came.”
I took her properly in my arms and gave her the usual shared comforting hugs one gives at a funeral home. After a few seconds, we disengaged and stood back from each other.
“How you holding on?” I asked.
“Okay. Mostly tired. The rough part’s going to be when the family arrives. My parents get in at six tonight. Connie’s are probably at the airport now.”
“That’s going to be tough, isn’t it?”
She smiled gamely, took my arm in hers, and led me out of the coffee room. “I’ll be okay,” she said, pulling me with her down toward the parlor. “I just need a little time.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You’ll get through this okay.”
We strolled casually into the room. Standard practice at the funerals I’ve attended calls for the closest, most grieving, family member to guide each visitor up to the coffin to pay respects by remarking how natural the person looks in death. I genuinely hated that custom, mainly because nobody looks natural in death. They just look dead.
Two other people were already in there now, standing close together a few feet away from the coffin. The woman was my height, within an inch or so, with striking black hair flowing down over squared shoulders. Even from behind, I could tell she was a looker. The guy standing next to her barely came to her chin: rumpled khaki suit, slightly dumpy around the waist, thinning curly mousy brown hair. Odd pair, these two, I thought. I sensed from their proximity that they weren’t strangers.