“Thank you,” she said and watched him leave.
The bank manager saw his chance, too. “Anything else I can do?”
When she said, “Yes,” he looked mildly surprised. “I’d like a printout of all the checks that were written against our account in the past year.”
“Certainly. Why don’t you come to my office where you can be comfortable while I get that information for you?”
When she had the copies in a neat file inside a big envelope, she took them home to study. The checking account was linked to the savings account, and both accounts had been gutted in a quiet, orderly way. Money had been deposited in the checking account from time to time, but the withdrawals were all bigger than the deposits, and the excess came out of the savings account. Phil had written one or two big checks a month for the whole year. All of them were made out to “Cash.” As she looked at them, tears of frustration welled in her eyes so she had to keep wiping them away to see. She whispered over and over, “Jesus, Phil. What were you doing? What the hell were you thinking?”
She went to the computer and ordered credit checks from the three credit bureaus. What she was really trying to do was establish the extent of the financial disaster. Were there credit cards she had not seen, or had Phil borrowed money she didn’t know about? The credit reports were transmitted, and she read them with a chill in her spine, but there seemed to be nothing in them that she had not already discovered. Nothing told her anything about Phil’s state of mind, or what he had been doing the night he was killed.
Emily became more frantic. She began to search the house. She hunted through the office for credit-card slips or receipts, then through stacks of bills that had been paid and filed. She read the last two tax returns, which she had signed when Phil had asked her to, but never bothered to examine. The figures looked normal, but there was no way for her to tell whether they were accurate. At three A.M. she fell asleep on the couch in the den.
The garbage trucks grumbling up the street and lifting cans with their hydraulic claws woke her at six thirty. She put the papers away and assessed the damage. Phil had taken all of their money and either spent it or put it somewhere out of her reach. He didn’t seem to have pushed them farther into debt than they already had been with the mortgage on the house and the payments on Phil’s car. But why would he deplete their savings? Phil had never been a gambler.
It occurred to her that he might have been sick and not told her. That might explain his mysterious absences from work. He could have been seeing doctors. She called Dr. Kalamian, the family internist, told him what had happened, and asked if Phil had been sick.
Dr. Kalamian said, “I don’t think so,” then got his records. “I saw him April 27 for his physical. He was fine. His numbers were all normal, actually quite good for a man his age. There’s very little chance anything was wrong, or it would have shown up in his tests. And if he’d had anything serious, he would have asked me to refer him to a specialist, and he didn’t. Look, Emily, this is probably the most stressful time of your life. Would you like me to prescribe something to help you sleep? Maybe an antidepressant?”
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t convince yourself you’re above it,” Dr. Kalamian said. “Just keep in mind that I might be able to make some of this more bearable. When I’m not in, one of my group is always on call.”
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. She wasn’t able to sleep more than three hours at a time, and she was depressed and anxious. But the anxiety kept her moving, thinking, alert.
On the third day, Detective Gruenthal called her and said, “The autopsy is complete and the coroner has signed off. We’re releasing Mr. Kramer’s body.”
Emily went to work on the funeral. She began by driving to Greenleaf Mortuary to make the arrangements. Phil had done a job for the owner once. There was a suspicion that one of the funeral directors or morticians was removing rings and bracelets from people just before their burials. Phil had found that they were all honest, a conclusion that he seldom reached in employee investigations. He had looked into every unappetizing aspect of their business, and said, “If I were dead, that’s where I’d go.” The owner recognized Phil’s name and gave her a break on the price of the casket.
Emily felt a bit flustered by the thrown-together quality of Phil’s funeral. She remembered having the same feeling of inadequacy when Pete had died. His funeral should have been huge and beautiful and solemn, but it had only been sad and lonely and heartbreaking. There had been plenty of people, and they had all fulfilled their roles, but she had found that they didn’t matter. What had mattered was that a seventeen-year-old boy was put in the ground. Now it was Phil, and she was alone.
She needed to make arrangements for a plot near Pete’s at Forest Lawn. She needed to call around to find a Presbyterian minister. It took her half a day to find the Reverend Dr. Massey of the Seventh Presbyterian Church in San Fernando. She spent the afternoon with him selecting scripture readings from a list she barely recognized from her childhood, and giving him a capsule account of who Phil had been. Many of the important things about Phil weren’t things that could be said.
Phil Kramer was an ex-marine. He was six four and, in middle age, a bit scary-looking to strangers, a fact he often used to his advantage in his work. He was alert, a keen observer of people’s quirks and tics that might reveal lies or vulnerabilities. Phil could tell a joke in a way that made Emily laugh. Even if it was one of those stupid adolescent jokes about sex, Phil always found it so funny that she couldn’t help laughing, too. She couldn’t tell the minister that Phil told dirty jokes, so she just said he had a sense of humor.
She couldn’t tell him that Phil had been an acceptable lover, who paid a reasonable amount of attention to her while they worked up to having sex and during it, but fell asleep instantly afterward. She couldn’t tell the minister she had come to know that was better for her than a sexual virtuoso would have been, or why she would miss those times with him.
When she had made the arrangements, she made a telephone call to her cousin Darlene, the one who had inherited the role of organizer from her mother, Aunt Rose, and asked her to spread the word to the people on her side of the family, and then asked Phil’s sister Nancy to call Phil’s relatives.
The funeral was three days later, seven days after Phil’s murder. As Emily stood in the hallway of the chapel at Forest Lawn and spoke to the friends and relatives as they arrived, the biggest feeling was how alone she was. It made her remember that when Pete had died, she’d had Phil to stand beside her. Now she had nobody.
When four of Pete’s high-school friends came in, she gaped at them because they looked so much older now. Two had wives with them, and showed her photographs of their kids. Seeing them didn’t make her miss Pete, because every day of her life for five years had been partially devoted to missing him. It only reminded her that there were new stages of Pete’s life that should have started by now, but never would.
Each person who came in would embrace her, a sensation that was mostly unpleasant, dominated by smells of perfume, hair treatment, or dry cleaning, and an awkward and uncertain placement of arms and necks, look at her with pity, and say one or more of the few available phrases of condolence: “I’m so sorry,” “Please accept our sympathy,” or “I’ll miss him.” It struck her as strange that after all of the centuries, nobody had invented anything to say that made any difference.
When she saw Sam Bowen walk in the door, she had to fight to keep from crying. Seeing that he had come down from Seattle for the funeral should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. Seeing him just reminded her of the night of his retirement party, when she had thought that the next time she saw him it would be at his funeral. It had never occurred to her that she would see him at Phil’s funeral only two years later.