When Editor-in-Chief Bob Averill decided to computerize the morgue some years back, he knew I was too much of a Neanderthal to handle the job. So he hired Eric as my assistant. And no doubt about it, Eric is a wiz on those computers. He is not, however, a wiz at real life. He is sloppy and absent-minded. He never loses a story in cyberspace but he is forever losing his wallet, or the keys to his pickup, or his heart to the wrong kind of women. “That’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it?” I growled.
Eric gave the left side of his brain permission to pay attention to me. “What was that baked bean thing in the obit?”
“The Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society-I was puzzled by that, too.”
“So you don’t understand it either?”
“Oh, I understand it,” I said. “I’m just surprised to see it listed among all those real organizations.”
“The Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society isn’t a real organization? Hard to believe.”
I rolled my eyes in embarrassment. “It was the little group of beatniks we belonged to in college.”
Eric stopped typing and focused both sides of his brain on me. “You were a beatnik?”
I retreated. “I shouldn’t have said beatniks. Gordon hated that word. He said it was a made-up word by some smart-ass magazine writer that trivialized what we stood for.”
“Which was what? Eating beans?”
As horrible as I felt I had to laugh. “We did eat a lot of beans,” I said. “But we also stood for looking at the world in a new way. That life wasn’t all about making money and living in a big house.”
He squinted at me over the top of his soda bottle. “You majored in library science. Was there any danger of you ever living in a big house?”
“We were young, Eric. The campus bohemians. Members of the beat generation. Maybe we weren’t beaten down ourselves-we were just silly middle class kids with too much time on our hands-but we did relate to those who were. We wanted to purify America’s corrupt, materialistic soul. So we listened to jazz, drank little cups of coffee and talked and talked and talked.”
“And ate a lot of beans,” he added.
Eric was only in his thirties. Even the 1970s were ancient history to him. I could no more expect him to understand the crazy excesses of my youth than I could understand the crazy excesses of his. “It was a long time ago,” I said. “I just can’t believe they put that in his obituary.”
I sped to Dale Marabout’s desk the minute I saw him sit down. I had the clippings in one hand, my mug in the other. “You know anything more about this?”
Dale put on his reading glasses, tilted his head back until the print came into focus. “Ah, yes-the dead professor. I’m following up for tomorrow.”
“Have they arrested anybody yet?” I asked.
Dale handed the clippings back. “It’s only been two days, Maddy.”
“He was an old friend. From college. So whatever you have.”
Dale pulled a reporter’s notebook from his jacket. He squinted at his scribbles. “Single, small caliber bullet in the back of the head. Probably dead a couple of days when he was found.”
“There’s no way it could have been an accident?”
“Almost point blank.”
“Or a robbery?”
“Still had his wallet and Donald Duck watch.”
“No chance it was a suicide?”
“Not unless he used a biodegradable gun.”
“So no weapon was found?”
“Not at the landfill or anywhere else.”
“Definitely a murder then?”
“Yup-the professor is dead because somebody wanted him dead.” He flipped the notebook shut.
I was disappointed. And angry. “Nothing more?”
“Just that the grad assistant who found his body also found his car,” Dale said. “By the college ball fields. A good fifteen miles away. His name is Andrew J. Holloway III.” He put a sarcastic, lilting accent on the third.
“Do the police consider this Andrew J. Holloway III a suspect?”
Dale searched his clutter for his coffee mug-it was hiding behind a stack of old newspapers-and headed for the cafeteria. “I gather he’s piqued their curiosity.”
I followed him. “Anything in particular pique your curiosity?”
“The Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society-whatever that is.”
“I know exactly who they are,” I said. “In fact, Mr. M, I’m a charter member of that prestigious little gaggle of fools.”
Dale and I chatted for a few minutes in the cafeteria. About Gordon Sweet. About Dale’s son’s chances of graduating from high school on time. Once upon a time Dale and I had been lovers. When I was in my horny forties. When he was a pudgy young reporter thrilled to be sleeping with anyone. It went on for five years, until a young kindergarten teacher named Sharon Saporito moved into his apartment building. Now Dale and I were just friends. Full of advice for each other.
“It wouldn’t be the worse thing if your boy had to take a course or two in summer school,” I told him. “It would be a good lesson for him.”
“Now don’t get crazy with this Gordon Sweet thing,” he cautioned me. “Let the police handle it.”
Then I rushed back to the morgue and the Z files. Louise Lewendowski got the old stuff she needed on the zoo and I got my little sack of kolachkys.
Chapter 2
Saturday, March 10
Eric showed up at my house at ten-thirty, wearing an ill-fitting sports coat and the only necktie he owned, a bright red Cleveland Indians tie dotted with grinning Chief Wahoo faces. “Don’t you look nice,” I said.
I’d put on my navy blue funeral suit. I hadn’t worn it in maybe five years. The jacket was a little looser in the shoulders than I remembered. The skirt a lot tighter around the waist. I hated to face it, but I’d reached the age when a woman shrinks and expands at the same time. Caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies. Women metamorphose into caterpillars-shapeless, low-to-the-ground lumps. “You’re not looking too bad yourself,” Eric said.
“We’d better get going,” I said.
Eric offered to drive but there was no way in hell I was going to Gordon Sweet’s memorial service in a pickup truck. Not that my old Dodge Shadow was any classier. We took Brambriar to Teeple, then turned east onto West Tuckman and headed toward Meriwether Square and Hemphill College. The sky was purple. Snowflakes as fat as my fake pearls were blowing in every direction.
To tell you the truth, I was glad that Eric was going with me. After all these years even my old college friends would be strangers. There was likely to be a lot of uncomfortable small talk. Inane comments about the hereafter I knew Gordon didn’t believe in. It would be good to have company.
Eric was glad to be coming, too. “Are you kidding,” he said when I’d asked him if he wanted to tag along. “How can I pass up a roomful of old beatniks?”
We reached the campus and the statue of the college’s famous founder, Horatio Ellsworth Hemphill, pointing toward the future. H.E. Hemphill had been one of those indefatigable Renaissance men that nineteenth-century America produced by the bucketfuclass="underline" theologian, Civil War general, advocate for women’s education, pioneer in rot-resistant seed potatoes for farmers. We took the brick circle to the right and turned north on Goodhue Avenue. We parked across the street from the P.W. Leech Unitarian Universalist Chapel.
Gordon’s memorial service was nothing like I’d feared and everything I should have expected.
First of all, the music: It was not that dirgey organ music you usually hear at funerals, that squeals away at your ears like it’s being played through the snout of a gerbil. It was jazz. Bebop jazz. Played loud and live by nobody less than Shaka Bop, Hannawa’s answer to Charlie Parker. And it was not just Shaka Bop and his big silver saxophone filling the chapel. There was a drummer and a bass player. All three of them were wearing sunglasses and colorful African dashikis. Shaka was wearing a leather porkpie hat.