Always Kiss the Corpse (7 page)

“Except Garth hadn't heard from Sandro recently. Maybe he started shooting up last year.” An eye out for the Anacortes turn-off. “We don't need to find out precisely how he died, just if it's Sandro who's dead.” She mulled. “What else makes facial hair disappear?”

“Hormones?”

“Maybe just trying to have less beard?”

“Or,” Noel told a herd of cattle, “he had prostate cancer and was taking estrogen for it?”

“I don't think he'd be old enough. You know, if we could get access to DNA testing—” She spotted the sign: Anacortes–Whidbey Island. She pulled into the right lane and slowed. “And we better talk to Sandro's colleagues—find out how he looked and acted recently.”

They drove west along a two-lane highway, the sun now behind them. Noel said, “There's Mrs. Vasiliadis' comment, ‘A mother should recognize her own son.' How do you recognize someone?”

“Hmm,” Kyra murmured, thinking she'd recognize any of her three ex-husbands if they popped up in that field among the cows. “It's the whole picture, the gestalt.”

“But suppose all you have is appearance, no motion, no gesture, no slouch or stiffness.”

“Like the corpse for Mrs. Vasiliadis?”

“Once I was Christmas shopping at a mall in Nanaimo, figuring what to get my parents. I kept seeing bits of them in half the seventy-year-old couples around. Then my parents really did appear. Looking like a seventy-year-old couple, but I instantly knew it was them. Now how did I know that? And not the other couples I'd been turning into them?”

Good question. “You'll recognize your parents in their coffins because you'll have gone through their deaths with them. Like I will with mine. But this mother didn't, the death was sudden. Nobody in Sandro's family, or his oldest friend, had seen him for what, months? Years? Why? Just busy?”

Now trees loomed ahead. The flat farmland fell away, the road curved and they swept across a narrow two-lane bridge. Below, maybe a hundred feet down, the waters swirled, ignorant of direction. “Deception Pass,” said Kyra. “This bridge was a 1930s make-work project.”

“Well now.” Noel examined it. “How much is an island a real island if the island is connected to the mainland by a bridge?”

“You mean,” said Kyra, “a bridge can keep an island from being a real island? And if so, maybe Islands Investigations International shouldn't be on this case in the first place?”

“Just wondering.”

“That logic's hard on Prince Edward Island with its new Confederation Bridge.”

≈  ≈  ≈

Claude Martin's office was spare: two wooden chairs, a bare wooden desk with another chair. No computer, no family pictures, just a phone and blotter. Noel hadn't seen a blotter in years. Impressive-looking certificates hung on the wall. The receptionist had showed him in. Now Martin the mortician was taking his time. Noel sniffed hard. No embalming or other funereal odors. Despite their absence, he shuddered.

He should have insisted: the sheriff! Not that he particularly wanted to chat with some local sheriff, but he didn't want to be in a funeral home. He shifted in the chair. Now his stomach was clenching. They had taken Brendan to Brentwood Gardens in Nanaimo—the package that had been Brendan, the shell. A bald old gentleman had told Noel he could see Brendan just as long as Noel wanted. Brendan's body lay in the chapel. Noel entered the chapel. The backs of twelve rows of benches faced him, all empty; an aisle between them, a small raised platform ahead. At the end of the aisle, the coffin. A recorded organ, barely audible, had dirged through the thick chilled air.

Enough. The matter at hand was Claude Martin. Where the hell was he.

Who would decide to become a mortician? Noel could grasp garbage collecting and septic tank cleaning, jobs you needed virtually no training for. Get desperate enough, you can work on a tank-truck that sucks shit out of concrete septics. Going to school for dozens of years to become, say, a dentist, and spend the rest of your life manipulating broken teeth and patching up rotten gums, even that he could figure. But learning to clean a corpse, drain the fluids or whatever, smear makeup on dead skin? In keeping with the man's flat phone voice, yes. He wondered how Kyra was doing with the sheriff.

He preferred Kyra and himself interviewing people as a team. They functioned well together, not in any good-slash-bad cop way but with differing tactics. They heard different details and stances in the answers people gave. Besides, when they worked together they weren't working separately. Obvious but important too, because Noel worried about Kyra when she was left to her own devices. She got herself into serious trouble easily, and sometimes into danger. She didn't know when to stop pushing. Not that an interview with a local sheriff could be dangerous, but still.

The door opened and the receptionist, a round woman of preserved middle age, smiled at him. “Mr. Martin apologizes. He'll be just a couple more minutes.” She closed the door.

“Thanks,” Noel said to the doorknob. He wondered if Claude Martin liked to put visitors off their stride, keeping them waiting. No one, no one, then suddenly Martin appears: And this morning, will you have a burial or a cremation? Or, flashing open a catalogue: We could stuff you like this tiger?

No, morticians didn't have tactics. Investigators did. Like dominance in questioning. Noel usually maintained dominance, over both women and men. Begin dominant, stay dominant. Few out-managed Noel. As a young journalist he'd learned to pounce. With Brendan neither had tried to dominate, not in situations nor with each other; balance was part of how their love fitted together. Between Kyra and him, dominance often went back and forth; their kind of balance lay in the to-and-froing itself.

The door opened again. A man came in, tall, black hair, black mustache, black suit and tie, brilliantly shined black shoes. “Mr. Franklin, Claude Martin. So sorry to keep you waiting.” He reached out his hand.

Noel stood and took it. Soft, not quite limp. “Good of you to see me, Mr. Martin.”

“This is about the Vasiliadis viewing?”

“That's right.” Flat like on the phone, no sense of what Martin was thinking, feeling. “I've been retained by Sandro's mother. You met her the other evening.”

“Yes. Terrible thing. For the family. For us as well.”

“I can see it might be a nuisance for you, but why terrible?”

“Won't you sit?” He gestured to the chair Noel had risen from.

Noel sat. Sometimes dominance required letting others take the lead.

Martin sat behind the desk and leaned across the blotter. “For the body of the departed, the Oceanside Funeral Home comes as close to hallowed ground as any space not sanctified by churches and temples. If the body of an unknown lies here, it compromises the legitimacy of our other clients. There is something,” he sat straight and his eyes glowed but his voice remained unchanged, horizontal, “sacred here. It emanates from the walls, the floors. The air is filled with holiness. You must sense it?” His eyes were now on Noel's face, scanning it.

“A special place? I guess. Were you present the whole time the mourners were around?”

“Yes. I oversee every detail at Oceanside.”

“Do you know who was here?”

He shook his head. “Many people pass through Oceanside.” A flicker of his lips, a smile that never arrived. “However, if they signed, their names will be in the guest book.” He picked up the phone, pressed a button, waited. “Would you bring in the Vasiliadis guest book? Thank you.” He put the phone down. “We shall see.”

“Of the people who were here, whom do you remember?”

“The mother of course, she began this difficulty when she denied the body. I can say little about her, she was here so briefly. And the young man and woman who brought her, they seemed kind but they looked exhausted.”

“Who else?”

“The uncle, Vasiliadis. He took charge.”

“Your sense of him—?”

“A man who's used to being in charge. Everything had to be done his way. Instantly.”

“And who else?”

Martin stared at the ceiling as if searching for a film of the Vasiliadis viewing. “A young woman with items dangling from her ears and her nose. The ear ones were apparent because she had a very short crewcut. Which was dyed green.” He faced Noel again. “I don't remember the name, but I'll recognize it. She had large handwriting.”

Noel nodded. No negative reaction, no reaction of any sort, from Claude Martin. “Go on.”

“Also a large man, he said very little. I've seen him around. I think he's a physician.”

The tiniest hint of disgust, or superiority, in Martin's tone. “Anything else about him?”

“Well, let me try. You're taxing my memory.”

Again the flat lips tried to twitch up. Was Martin simply incapable of smiling? Some frozen muscle? Noel chuckled for both of them.

“He seemed taken by a fetching young woman, maybe thirty years old, dark hair. But she was clearly with—and I do mean
with,
if you take my meaning—another woman, shorter.”

“Hmm,” said Noel.

Martin sat in silence. “That's all I can remember, I'm afraid.”

A knock at the door. It opened. On a forty-five-degree angle, a head and smile thrust themselves through the opening. “Guest book?”

“Thank you.”

She handed the book across the desk to Martin, beamed her smile at Noel, and left.

“Could you match the names with those people you've been describing?”

Claude Martin glanced at the names. “I welcomed them, that's all.” He handed the guest book, open, to Noel.

Noel read: Rudy Longelli, Cora Lipton-Norton, Andrei Vasiliadis, Brady Adam, Ursula Bunche, Dr. Stockman Jones. “Only six people here?” He copied the names into his notebook.

“More. And the mother, and the two who came with her. Clearly the others didn't sign in. It was early, of course. Four or five people came after the family left. There was to be a funeral in Seattle, the uncle told me.”

“Maybe there still will be. If it's decided the body you have here is Sandro's.”

“
Had
, Mr. Franklin. When the mother denied it, we shipped it back to the morgue.”

Noel blinked. “Where's the morgue?”

“The hospital.” Martin shook his head. “I've thought about what happened, you know. The mother's reaction. Maybe I'm to blame.”

“How?”

“I may have made the body look, uhhm—too good. I take pride in my work. But sometimes the result is too perfect.”

“I don't understand.”

“In my profession one must establish the essence of the departed. One must—recreate.”

In Martin's voice a sudden tinge of—was it awe?

Recreate: what Brentwood Gardens had done to Brendan. At the head of the aisle, the coffin, its lid open. Brendan's body. His black turtleneck, gray flannels, gray running shoes, as he'd wanted. A waxen face, his hands bare. Noel had reached out to touch Brendan's right hand, a so-familiar gesture. A cold right hand, inflexible. Noel didn't want to touch Brendan, yet couldn't not. Noel didn't want to kiss Brendan. On the forehead. One last time. But he did. Against his lips, rubber cooler than the room. Not Brendan.

“One tries,” Martin said. “To return to the departed whatever it was that made him a quintessential individual. No one else could look this way. In life, we see in others only a piece of what they are. One piece, you understand. I try to bring back the whole person.”

A weird kind of humility in Martin's voice. Noel nodded again.

“I've done my best work with automobile accidents. Sometimes the body is so charred, or dismembered—This body was difficult. I worked on him for a long time.”

“Difficult how?”

“With suicide, it's always difficult.”

“You know it was a suicide?”

“Yes.”

“Has the sheriff's office called it a suicide?”

“I don't know.”

“What does the coroner's report say?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This man killed himself.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw his face when he arrived here. This was not a happy corpse.”

“I'm sorry?”

“A man who overdoses isn't happy.”

“You have many overdoses on Whidbey?”

“This was my first. But I could see his unhappiness. I could see as well, this had not always been an unhappy man.” He sighed. “I needed to recreate his essence.”

“And because you succeeded, you think his mother didn't recognize him.”

“Possibly.” He rubbed his right palm against his left. “If it was in fact her son.”

Noel stood. “We'll try to find out.”

“I wish you luck.” Claude Martin stood quickly, marched to the door, held it for Noel.

Noel said, “Thanks for your help.”

≈  ≈  ≈

After dropping Noel at the funeral home, Kyra had navigated the two empty blocks to the County seat.

The Sheriff's Office was the first room after the main door. The receptionist, identified by a plastic nameplate on her desk as Miss Brady Adam, informed an intercom that a Ms. Rachel was “—here to see you, Sheriff.”

Mutter, the intercom replied.

“You can go in,” Miss Brady Adam allowed brightly. She had rich dark brown hair styled in a short pageboy, black eyelashes nearly as thick as Kyra's, and 1930s rosebud lips.

Kyra knocked on the door indicated and opened it. Sheriff Burt Vanderhoek sat behind a desk. He'd started to rise but when she appeared he sat again. She wondered what was wrong with her appearance—clean, fairly new jeans, a blue-striped shirt under a designer—well, rip-off designer—sweatshirt in stonewashed mauve, and her only one-year-old navy and maroon Gore-Tex jacket. She'd showered and washed her hair this morning, even applied lipstick. She figured she was okay and everything else was his problem. She closed the door and proceeded to the chair on her side of the desk. “Sheriff—”