“You back?” asks a gravedigger at the Hollins Ferry entrance.
“I’m back,” says Waltemeyer. “Where’s Mr. Brown right now?”
“He’s in the office.”
Waltemeyer walks across the driveway toward a small, one-room caretaker’s shack. The cemetery manager, on his way out the door, meets him halfway.
“Mr. Brown, you and me got some talking to do,” says Waltemeyer, looking at the ground.
“Why’s that?”
“Because that body you dug up and gave us this morning…”
“What about it?”
“That was the wrong man.”
The manager doesn’t miss a beat. “Wrong man?” he says. “How could they tell?”
Waltemeyer hears that and thinks about grabbing the old man by his throat. How could they tell? Obviously, the manager figures that after lying in the ground ten months, one corpse looks a lot like another. Just so long as you pull the lid off and it ain’t wearing a dress, right?
“He had an ID bracelet from the hospital,” says Waltemeyer, fighting his temper. “It says he’s Eugene Dale, not Rayfield Gilliard.”
“Jesus,” says the manager, shaking his head.
“Let’s go inside and have a look at whatever records you got.”
Waltemeyer follows the old man into the shack, then watches as he pulls three sets of 3-by-5 cards from a metal file drawer-January, February and March burials-and begins thumbing through them.
“What you say the name was?”
“Dale. D-A-L-E.”
“Not in February,” says the manager. He begins checking the March burials, stopping at the fourth card in the pile. Eugene Dale. Died March 10. Buried March 14. Section DD, Row 83, Grave 11. Waltemeyer picks up the February cards and finds Rayfield Gilliard. Died February 2. Buried February 8. Section DD, Row 78, Grave 17.
Not even close. Waltemeyer gives the manager a hard stare.
“You were five rows away.”
“Well, he ain’t in the right place.”
“I know that,” says Waltemeyer, his voice rising.
“I mean, we was at the right place, but he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”
Waltemeyer looks at the floor.
“I didn’t work that day,” says the old man. “Someone else messed up.”
“Someone else?”
“Yeah.”
“You think if we dig where Eugene Dale is supposed to be, we’re gonna find Gilliard?”
“Maybe.”
“Why? They’re buried a month apart.”
“Maybe not,” the manager agrees.
Waltemeyer picks up the burial cards and begins sorting through the lot, looking for burials on or near the eighth of February. To his amazement, the names are strangely familiar. Every other card seems to correspond to a 24-hour report.
Here is James Brown, Gilbert’s murder, that kid who got stabbed to death on New Year’s. And Barney Erely, the old drunk Pellegrini found bludgeoned in the alley off Clay Street a few weeks after Latonya Wallace, the derelict killed when he chose the wrong place to defecate. And Orlando Felton, that decomp from North Calvert Street, the overdose that McAllister and McLarney handled back in January. And Keller’s drug killing from March, that homeboy with the unlikely last name of Ireland who made a bucket of money selling east side dope. Christ, all that cash and his family just dumps him in a potter’s field. Dunnigan’s drug murder from the Lafayette Court projects… the three little babies killed in Steinhice’s arson case… Eddie Brown’s fatal shooting from Vine Street. Waltemeyer reads on, both awed and amused. This one was Dave Brown’s, this one was Shea’s. Tomlin handled this one…
“You really don’t know where he is,” says Waltemeyer, putting down the cards, “do you, Mr. Brown?”
“No. Not exactly. Not right now.”
“I didn’t think so.”
At that moment, Waltemeyer is ready to cut his losses and give up on Rayfield Gilliard; the medical examiners, however, are still insistent. They have a probable homicide and an exhumation order signed by a Baltimore County judge, and therefore Mount Zion is obligated to find the body.
Three weeks later they try again, digging down into the mud a full six rows from the spot where the state reburied Eugene Dale, Sr., in a better box than the one it tore apart. This time Waltemeyer does not ask for the logic behind the manager’s insistence on the new location, in part for fear that there is no logic. They use the same backhoe, the same gravediggers, the same ME’s attendants, who haul the second, heavier corpse to the surface, then check the wrists carefully for any identification.
“This one looks more like him,” Waltemeyer says with hope, checking the photograph.
“Told you so,” the manager says proudly.
Then the ME’s man pulls a sock from the left foot to reveal half of a hospital toe tag. W-I-L are the only visible letters. Wilson? Williams? Wilmer? Who knows and who the hell cares if it isn’t Rayfield Gilliard?
“Mr. Brown,” Waltemeyer says to the manager, shaking his head in genuine amazement, “you are a piece of work.”
The manager shrugs, saying that it looks like the right man to him. “Maybe the tag is wrong,” he adds.
“Jesus Christ,” says Waltemeyer. “Get me away from here before I lose my mind.”
Leaving the cemetery grounds, Waltemeyer finds himself walking with a gravedigger. The workman quietly confirms his worst fears, explaining that back in February, when the ground was frozen and the snow deep, the manager had them dig a mass grave down by the creek; they could get the backhoe down there without getting it stuck. Then they dumped eight or nine coffins into that same hole. Easier this way, the manager told them.
Waltemeyer squints in the morning sunlight as the gravedigger finishes his story, his eyes narrowing across the bleak landscape. From the cemetery entrance at the top of the hill, a good part of the city skyline can be seen: the trade center, the USF &G building, the Maryland bank tower. The spires of mobtown, the harbor city, the land of pleasant living. The natives like to tell one another that if you can’t live in Bawlmer, you can’t live anywhere.
So where does that leave Barney Erely? And Orlando Felton? And Maurice Ireland? What was so wrong, so irrelevant, about them that they could end here beneath this wretched patch of county mud, wasted souls, with their city’s gleaming skyscrapers just close enough to mock them? Drunks, addicts, dope peddlers, numbers men, children born to the wrong parents, battered wives, hated husbands, robbery victims, an innocent bystander or two, sons of Cain, victims of Cain-these were the lives lost by the city in a single year, the men and women who cluttered crime scenes and filled Penn Street freezers, leaving little more than red or black ink on a police department tally board. Birth, poverty, violent death, then an anonymous burial in the mud of Mount Zion. In life, the city could muster no purpose for these wasted souls; in death, the city had lost them entirely.
Gilliard and Dale and Erely and Ireland-they were all beyond reach. Even if someone wanted to rescue a loved one and preserve the memory with a real headstone, in a real cemetery, it was no longer possible. The unmarked graves and the manager’s pathetic card file had seen to that. By rights, the city ought to build some kind of monument to its own indifference-Tomb of the Unknown Victim, it could be called. Set it up at Gold and Etting with a police honor guard. Drop a few shell casings in front of it and then chalk off a fresh human silhouette every half hour. Get the Edmondson High School band to play taps and charge the tourists a buck and a quarter.
Lost in life, lost in death. The brain-deads running Mount Zion had pretty much seen to that, thinks Waltemeyer, giving the muddy slope a last look. For $200 a pop, this alleged manager was willing to use any hole he could find, because what the hell, it was ridiculous to think that anyone was ever going to ask for one of them back. Waltemeyer thinks of their first encounter with the cemetery manager. The poor bastard probably shit blue when we showed up with that exhumation order.