“After all these years?”
“Mr. Cristobal, please believe me when I say this is a very serious investigation. We have reason to believe the men who paid for Hardy’s funeral are involved in large-scale racketeering and a list of other crimes, including several very recent homicides. It is most important that you cooperate with our investigation.”
“Yes, well, there’s confidentiality to think about.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“A lawyer?”
“No.”
“A priest?”
“Well, hardly.”
“Then you have no privilege of confidentiality. Of course, if you insist on a subpoena, we can always treat you as a hostile witness, Mr. Cristobal. The average penalty for an obstruction charge, if it’s your first offense, should come down in the neighborhood of eighteen months.”
“In jail?”
“No, sir. Jail’s where they book you, prior to trial. You serve your time in prison. It’s another world, entirely.”
“Good God! You can’t be serious!”
“I’m deadly serious.” The smile on Remo’s face would have unsettled Norman Bates.
Cristobal thought about it for another moment, then said, “All right. What do you want?”
“I’ll need to see the paperwork on Hardy’s funeral.”
“Impossible.”
“Now, Mr. Cristobal-—”
“I’m telling you, there is no paperwork. My father saw to that, all right?”
“I’m listening.”
“I was sixteen years old in 1965, already working weekends, nights and most of my vacations at the home. As I explained, my father liked to talk about his clients—how he fixed them up, the damage he restored, which relatives were cheapskates, who he talked into a more expensive casket, all that sort of thing. You understand?”
“Go on.”
“With Hardy, it was something else. It was the only time he ever got a client from the prison. Most were sent to Tolson’s for cremation at a discount rate, or relatives came in from out of state and took them home. This time, though, I remember Dad explaining that the client’s people were avoiding Tolson. Someone didn’t trust him, all that business he was doing with the state.”
“I see.”
“Not yet, you don’t. My father agonized about that deal. A hundred times, at least, I heard him say he should have turned the offer down, but it was twenty thousand dollars for a funeral that would otherwise have cost about eight hundred, tops, in those days.”
“Why so much?” asked Remo.
“Less is more, you might say.” Cristobal released a kind of wheezing sound that could have been a sigh or throttled laughter at his own expense. “They bought the casket and a plot, but that was all, you understand?”
“Not quite.”
“I’m telling you, the client wasn’t buried.”
“What? You mean he wasn’t dead?”
“Oh, he was dead, all right. My dad was clear on that. He wasn’t going to involve himself in breaking someone out of prison, even for that kind of money. No, the buyers wanted Thomas Hardy’s corpse, dead on delivery, no embalming. Nada. Zip.”
“For twenty grand.”
“In cash, it was. My parents kept it off the books, of course. You did say FBI? Not IRS?”
“Forget about the taxes,” Remo said. “That’s ancient history. I need to know who bought the stiff.”
From the expression on the undertaker’s face, he might as well have defecated on the coffee table. Cristobal sat back and gaped at Remo for a moment, finally found his voice.
“You mean the client.”
“Right. Whatever.”
“I’m afraid I can’t supply the name of any individuals,” said Cristobal.
“You can’t, or won’t?”
“I’m trying to cooperate. My father never mentioned any names, and as I told you, there was nothing written down.”
“You must have something,” Remo insisted.
“I do recall a corporation. There was a business card, I think, before my father threw it out. I know the name intrigued me, at the time.”
“Which was…?”
“Eugenix.”
“Spell it.”
Cristobal obliged, seemed pleased and nervous all at once. “That’s really all I know about the matter,” he continued. “Dad would talk about it sometimes afterward, but always in the context of an easy profit. He was quite the businessman.”
“I gathered that.”
“He had mixed feelings, though. That still came through. It was another eighteen months before he even touched the money. Latent guilt, I think, to some degree.”
Or careful planning, Remo thought. A twenty-thousand-dollar windfall, back in 1965, would certainly have made the tax man curious.
“And that was all you ever heard from this Eugenix Corporation. Just the one transaction?”
“Yes. There was a moratorium on executions in the state, a short while later. By the time they started up again, my mom was gone and Dad was getting on in years. The bottom line is, no one from the corporation ever came around. Got what they wanted, I suppose, and that was that.”
The undertaker stood and watched as his unwelcome visitor climbed into a sedan, switched on the engine, backed out of the driveway, disappeared from view. He didn’t make it obvious, like standing at the window with his nose pressed up against the glass, but he made sure the man was gone.
FBI, for Christ’s sake, after all these years. His father’s chickens coming home to roost when Yuli needed one more headache like he needed cancer.
Shit!
His wife was leaving him—had left him—for another man, and business wasn’t all that hot, besides. You could forget those half-assed jokes about the mortuary business—everybody’s dying to get in, and all that crap. It might be true, more people dying all the time, but fewer of them came to Cristobal and Son for processing these days, and that meant cutting back on certain luxuries around the homestead. No bright, shiny Lincoln when the new year rolled around. Less money to impress the girls down at the Crazy Horse Saloon.
But he had more important problems now.
The Hardy deal had been his father’s contract; that much of his story to the FBI man had been true. There was a catch, of course: the clause demanding secrecy forever. He had blown it, frightened by the talk of prison and obstructing justice, giving up more than he should have to a total stranger.
He couldn’t take the words back now, but he could try to mitigate the damage. Make a call. Spread the alarm. The desk had been his father’s, but the old man hardly would have recognized it, sanded and refinished to a satin shine. The lower right-hand drawer was locked. Inside it, to the back, a smallish metal strongbox, also locked. Two separate keys were required to access the ancient, address book.
It was a weird sensation, thumbing through those pages, reading names of people long since dead and gone. His father’s friends, a handful of the relatives he seldom heard from anymore.
And business contacts.
Near the back, a name. The phone number beside it had been scratched out and corrected half a dozen times. They made a point of checking in, every five or six years. The voices varied, and the number changed with every call, but letting Cristobal keep track of them was not the point. He understood that they were keeping track of him. It had been more than thirty years, for God’s sake, and the bastards never let it go. They weren’t forgetting anything.
Not ever.
Yuli’s hand was on the telephone receiver when he caught himself. The FBI was in it now, and that meant someone could have tapped his phone. He couldn’t place the call from home.
But what if they were watching him, as well? Departure from the house just now would look suspicious. They might follow him, perhaps observe him if he used a public telephone.
They couldn’t hear him, though, he told himself.