Robert George shook his head, a rapid motion that was more like a shudder. “No I wouldn’t care if it did at this point.” He looked up, tears swimming in his eyes. “Why me, Fred? I just want a normal life. If Eunice was right, if I really did give my soul to the devil, then where’s the payoff? The gold, the girls, the good times. When do I get that?”
“That’s a good question. Where’d you go last night?”
“Nowhere. I stayed here and played solitaire.”
“In the dark?”
“Well — mostly I slept.”
“You were sleeping when we came in. What are you doing, giving up?”
He dropped his head, his bony wrists resting on his knees, his big veined hands hanging limp between them. I looked at him a minute, then shoved my hands in my topcoat and walked slowly to the door. Then I turned. “Why’d you cut the fusebox?”
“Oh, it’s that refrigerator. Belt’s loose or something. Sounds like a chopper taking off. It finally got under my skin.”
You could have pulled the plug. I thought it, but didn’t say it. “Can I bring you something? Pizza? Cheeseburgers?”
George shook his head without looking up. “I’ve got no, appetite, Fred. Thanks, but I couldn’t eat a thing.”
I looked at him another minute, trying to think of something to say. “You just hang on, Robert. Ann Valery’ll come up with something. Don’t give up.”
He said nothing, gave no sign of having heard me. I shrugged and walked out, circled the cabin once, then walked back to the car. Ann was sitting on the hood, her legs crossed, her coat open, her cigaret burning between her lips.
She said nothing when I walked up, but slid off onto the ground and climbed into the car. I got in and drove up the lane. I opened the gate, waited for her to drive through, then got behind the wheel and shut off the engine. Then I leaned back, resting my arm on the back of the seat, and looked at her.
“Well?”
She nodded. “Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“It’s hard to explain to someone who’s... uh...”
“Stupid?”
She flashed me a quick annoyed frown. “Intelligence has nothing to do with it. I was going to say insensitive, but a better term would be unwakened. All living beings project a vital aura. This reveals the state of the psyche.
“Good psychic health comes through as a sort of electric blue shimmer, not visible to the eye, but evident to those who have opened other channels of perception. Evil, or let’s say those carnal desires which bind people to earth, comes through as a red tinge, shading to purple, and finally, when one completely gives up, black.”
I wanted to ask what my own color was, but sitting in the closed car and breathing the fragrance of her perfume, noting the way her nylon-clad knee pressed against the shift knob, I had a feeling I would register well into the red. Instead I asked what George had radiated?
“Nothing,” Ann said.
I blinked. “Nothing?”
She shook her head. “It was like standing in front of a post. As far as the psyche is concerned, Mr. George is dead.”
“Then why did you say he’d be all right?”
“What did you want me to say? ‘I see you in there, Monster?’ ”
“You really think—?” I broke off. Obviously she thought so, or she wouldn’t have said it. Ann Valery was clearly that type. I started the car and backed into the road. After about a mile I asked her if she was ready to have lunch.
“Nice of you to ask, but I think not. I’d like to visit the courthouse, if you don’t mind dropping me off.”
“No problem,” I said quickly, clamping off my disappointment. “My office is right across the street. What are you looking for?”
“Death records.”
“Oh? Whose, specifically?”
“Everybody’s. I want to find out if there are any others around here like Mr. George.”
III
Mid-afternoon. From my office over the bank, I saw Ann Valery standing on the curb with the wind blowing the hair off her face. Behind her loomed the courthouse, a three-story limestone structure of a style best known as WPA-Gothic. It looked squat and vulgar in the center of a mounded lawn spotted with evergreens and ornamental spruces.
Ann stepped off the curb and crossed the street toward me, disappearing under a corrugated iron awning. A minute later I heard her climbing the wooden steps to my floor. I jumped up, ran out through the reception room, and opened the door with my name reversed on the frosted glass.
I escorted her into the inner office, went to a cabinet, and took down a bottle of scotch. I took two water glasses off a shelf and lifted the lid of the ice bucket.
“Water or soda?” I asked her.
“I’ll take mine on the rocks.”
I tonged two ice cubes into each glass, submerged them in amber liquid, and gave her one. Then I hooked my hip on the desk and looked down at her.
“Find anything significant?”
Ann lifted her glass, sipped, and ran her tongue over her pale lips. “Not yet. But I’ve got a map of your city cemetery showing the graves of those most recently dead. Know what I need now?”
“I’m almost afraid to ask. A shovel?”
“An auger. One of those with a long shaft and a hollow center. I want to drive a probe into each of those caskets.”
I put my fist against my chest to still the sudden lurch of my heart. “I could never get the city council to agree to that.”
She nodded, taking another sip. “They never do.”
“Is it necessary?”
“Essential.”
I let out a sigh. “All right. We’ll do it after dark. I’ll pick you up at the motel around nine.”
She agreed and left. I spent the rest of the day trying to make discreet inquiries, but I didn’t find the kind of auger she asked for. Maybe I was too discreet.
And I wasn’t too clear about her needs.
I think she referred to some special tool which grave-robbers used, or some instrument for taking core samples on archeological expeditions. What I got was a line-locating bar from my friend the city engineer. It’s a long steel shaft with a crossbar on top, and they use it for locating buried sewer lines and cables.
I showed it to Ann when we met at nine. She asked me if I could sharpen it. It took time, but I used my bench-grinder to put a sharp point on it and along about midnight we drove out to the cemetery.
I felt a bit queasy sinking that steel shaft into that mound of dirt, but Ann was standing there with her pencil flashlight checking the names on her pad against the names on the stones just as if she were judging petunias at a flower show. I kept pushing until I felt the point thunk against the top of a casket, then I took a ball-peen hammer and hit it a hard lick right at the crossing of the “T”.
It popped through the metal and sank into a soft pillowy resistance that made my stomach drow up like a clenched fist. I pulled it up and Ann flashed her light on the tip. I didn’t have to look because the stench of decay hit me in the nostrils.
“A ripe old cheese: Who is it?” I asked.
“Hubert Viertel,” Ann said. “Born 1890. Died September twelve. Three weeks ago.”
“I thought embalming was supposed to keep them, pickled for years.”
“You know how it is. Everybody skimps on materials. Why should undertakers be different? Let’s try another one.”
I wiped the point of the bar on the grass and followed her. I was wearing striped coveralls of the type used by service station attendants; she wore a dark brown jumpsuit with orange laces binding it to her wrists and ankles.
I can tell you now there’s no harder place to walk at night than a graveyard; it’s an obstacle course of slabs, pillars and crypts, with the ground humping up where you least expect it.