I shoved the half-empty shaving cream can and the used razor into the trash, wiped my face and head with a handful of coarse paper towels, and walked out to the taxi stand.
The angel watched me go.
Chapter 23
Greenmount was fenced in, but at various points there were gaps, places where a section of the fence had bent or fallen and not been repaired. I climbed over one of these and spent the hours before dawn wandering among the tombstones, resting on the funerary benches that dotted the grounds and looking for Dorrie’s plot. I found it finally, side by side with her sister’s, Catherine’s headstone quietly announcing the years of her birth and death, 1972–1986. The hole for Dorrie’s coffin had been dug and covered over with a canvas tarp the color of the soil around it. A lowering machine stood silently in place, ready to receive its load.
I wished I smoked. Anything to pass the time, to keep me from spending the hours with nothing but my thoughts for company. But I didn’t. And in the dim pre-dawn light, in the chill, dry air, I sat alone watching the covered hole in the ground that had been prepared for Dorrie. One by one, ghosts sat beside me on the granite bench. One by one, they hung their heads and leaned close and whispered in voices only I could hear. Miranda was there, and Dorrie, and Julia Cortenay, and my mother. All my dead women. Ramos was there, too, and Miranda’s boss from the strip club, Wayne Lenz, with that great bloody hole in his chest. All my dead men. All on one little bench.
The wind was strong. I pulled my light jacket tighter around me, wrapped my arms around myself.
Dorrie and I had gone to the cemetery with Lane when his wife died; Dorrie had stood beside me as I dropped a handful of dirt on the coffin and heard the terrible, hollow echo when it landed. She’d been stoic throughout, but on the way back to the city she’d said to me with real anguish in her voice, “When I go, I don’t want any ceremony. No minister praying over me. Just you there. That’s all.”
Well, I couldn’t stop them from bringing a minister, and I couldn’t stop them from praying. But I was here. I could do that much.
The cemetery’s staff starting showing up around eight o’clock, big men in overalls and work gloves and heavy boots. They carried shovels over their shoulders and long, coiled hoses. They beat their hands together for warmth and exhaled little white puffs of vapor. Some of them looked my way. I nodded back toward them. None of them came close, no one asked what I was doing there.
Around nine, the first cars drove in, a hearse in the lead, a Volvo following. I stood and walked past Dorrie’s grave to a stand of trees some forty yards away. They were narrow trees and widely spaced—you couldn’t hide behind them. But they blocked the view a bit and distance did the rest. I turned so I was facing in another direction, looking at a stranger’s grave.
I didn’t dare to watch openly, but I stole glances, watched out of the corner of my eye. I saw two workmen wheel the coffin up to the grave, move it from its gurney to the straps of the machine, then stand back to let the mourners come. I recognized Eva Burke, in a heavy black coat and hat, stocky and low to the ground. There was a tall man with white hair carrying a little book with a black cover—a bible, I supposed. He put his hand on Mrs. Burke’s back, and she shook it off roughly. Two younger men stood behind them, several paces back, looking uncomfortable in their Sunday suits. Relatives, maybe, or childhood friends. And one more woman, leaning on a cane. A teacher? An aunt? God knows.
When it blew toward me, the wind carried with it the sound of the service, soft words solemnly intoned. First the man spoke, his book open in his hands, then they all spoke, repeating together some useless, ancient formula.
I looked around. The place was almost empty—other than the mourners, the workmen, and me, I only saw one other man, perhaps another forty yards away in the opposite direction, pacing slowly beside a mausoleum, looking this way from time to time and then away again. The second time he did this—looked over at me and then, when he saw me watching, turned aside—my heart leaped and I considered making a hasty exit. Could the New York cops have found out where I was, radioed ahead to have someone pick me up here? But I told myself I was being paranoid. He stayed where he was and I stayed where I was, and between us the service droned to completion.
I heard it when the minister closed his bible, a crisp and final snap that rang in the still air. Then they filed off toward the main building, Eva Burke in the lead, the two young men bringing up the rear.
I walked up to the grave, hands in my pockets. The workmen stood aside as I approached, shovels in their hands, ready to start filling in the hole, eager to move on to the other tasks of the day. Their expressions held none of the phony sympathy you see in funeral home employees. This was their job, digging holes and then filling them in again, and it was cold and they wanted to get on with it. But they knew their place and waited for me to be done.
I stood at the foot of the trench they’d dug, looking down on the slightly bowed surface of the coffin, a simple cross carved into the wood. I’ve never known what to do at a graveside. You stand, you look. You don’t want to leave. I touched my fingers to my lips and held them out over the edge. Goodbye, I said. Goodbye.
I heard footsteps behind me. When I looked over, a man was standing next to me, wearing a tweed cap and a green windbreaker, his hands in the pockets as mine were. Under the cap, his black hair was starting to get a few sprinkles of salt to go with the pepper. He had an unkempt goatee and heavy sideburns and stood a full head shorter than me. He was the one who had been pacing by the mausoleum. At that distance I hadn’t recognized him, but now I did. I was a little surprised to see him here.
He said, “How did you know her?”
“We went to school together,” I said.
“Here in Philadelphia?”
“No. In New York.”
“Ah,” he said. Then: “I came in from New York, too.”
It was an odd comment, an awkward one. There was an uncomfortable invitation to intimacy in it, as if he was dying to unburden himself, to a stranger if necessary. I asked him the question I had a feeling he was waiting for me to ask. “How did you know her?”
I asked it even though I knew damn well he hadn’t known her, had never so much as held a single conversation with her, and not for lack of trying on her part either. One of the last times he’d even seen her had probably been a day like this one, twenty years before, when the grave yawning open and waiting to be filled by impatient workmen had been Catherine’s.
But he wanted so badly to be asked. So I did.
A pained smile slid onto his face. “I’m her father,” he said.
He stuck out his hand and shook firmly when I took it. “Doug Harper,” he said.
“Robert Lee.” It was the first name that came to mind.
“You’re probably wondering why the different last name,” he said. “And why I was standing way the hell over there.” He nodded toward the distant crypt. “Her mother and I...we had a falling out. Many years ago. Many, many years.”
His eyes filled with tears then. It was the first time I’d noticed any resemblance to his daughter at all. I’d seen the man several times before, through the plate glass window at Fiorucci’s where he sold overpriced Oxfords and wingtips, walking down the street on his way home, sitting out on the fire escape of his second floor apartment with a paperback and a beer. I’d even snapped a few photos of him, though all Dorrie had needed was his address; old habits die hard. But for all that, this was the first time that I’d seen him up close, in person. And his eyes...I could definitely see her in his eyes.