Cadillac Cathedral (9 page)

Henderson didn’t waste time with pleasantries. He lowered his voice to little more than a whisper even before Arvo had slid onto the facing seat. “Where the hell’d you get that hearse out there? Man oh man she’s a beauty.”

“Thanks for dropping by,” Arvo said. “I made a trade for her, fair and square. You bring me a box?”

“I must be crazy but I just now slid a top-grade oak casket into the back of your hearse, along with a whopping big bill for it. I figure Martin Glass deserves the best and you deserve to pay for it. I just hope you know what you’re doing. I just hope I know what
I’m
doing. Just don’t do anything that gets us into the papers.”

“It’s all legal. I’ve got nothing but Martin’s good in mind.”

“Man oh man, that’s a beauty out there! When you’re tired of playing with her I’ll take her off your hands and park her out front of the business. People will be dying for a chance to ride in ’er.” Henderson’s laughter tended to end in a snort.

“Very funny. What I want to know is do we have an understanding? You’ll fax the hospital with the proper paperwork giving me
permission to bring the body home and turn him over to you.”

“I know I know. I heard you yesterday. There’s still nothing to keep me from going down to pick him up myself.”

“Yes, but then you would be losing any hope of borrowing the Cathedral hearse in the future, once I’ve delivered it to its rightful owner.”

“Who is …?”

“You’ll find out once we’ve taken care of Martin.”

“Okay, I get it.” Henderson sighed and dropped his forehead briefly to the table. “But you don’t need to worry that I’ll follow you. I spend enough of my life creeping along the road at a snail’s pace; it would drive me crazy when I don’t have a corpse in the back.”

“Go back and fax those forms. It may take us most of the day to get there. All I want is for them to have the paperwork by the time we arrive.”

“Man oh man,” Henderson said again, pressing both palms to the table top and pushing himself to his feet. “One hint of trouble and I never talked to you, never even heard of you. You’ll be on your own, begging some cop to listen to your improbable tale of woe.”

“Just fax those forms,” Arvo said.

Once he had paid for their breakfasts and led the way outside, he saw that a short stumpy man in a red plaid sports jacket and a boater hat was sitting on the running board of the hearse. He stood up when he saw Arvo approach. “This yours?”

Before responding, Arvo opened the rear door to check that Henderson had actually left a coffin. Solid oak, by the looks of it, with Cynthia’s pots of flowers crammed in the space to one side. When Arvo had admitted to being the driver of the hearse, the boldly dressed man introduced himself as the local realtor Ernie Reynard. “You’ve probably noticed my signs here and there,” he said. “I’ve
been looking for something like this. The perfect vehicle to sit outside my Open Houses with a sign on its roof.” He slapped a dainty hand on the hearse’s hood. “You have no idea how many people slow down for a look but then take off. This’ll get them stopped and out of their cars. And once they’re out of their cars I’ll have ’em. I’ll give you a good price for her — right now, right here.” He brought a wallet out from inside his jacket, as though ready to hand over cash on the spot.

Arvo laughed and shook his head and climbed in behind the wheel.

“I can see you’re a man who drives a hard bargain,” the realtor said, stepping up onto the running board and taking hold of the steering wheel with one hand. “I’ll even consider trading you a year-old Lexus for it. Crazy I know, but it’s my boy’s car and he’s gone off to university and don’t want it any more.” He gestured towards the maroon four-door sedan parked across the street, a giant sign on its roof:
REYNARD REALTY
,
Homes for your Future
. “You better accept the offer before I come to my senses.”

Arvo started the engine. “I have a suspicion,” he said, “that a hearse may not be the best advertisement for Homes for your
Future
. Your message could be misunderstood.”

“Dammit,” the man said. He stepped down from the running board and trotted along beside the moving hearse. “All right then, you will let me be your sponsor for this journey — wherever it is you’re going. I’ll pay for all the gas this machine will burn and I’ll be your escort as well. You have no idea how much business this will bring in when people see my company sign on this lovely artefact from the past.”

He did not wait to hear Arvo’s response to this, but climbed into his son’s Lexus and swung around to pass by and pull up in front of the Henry J, which had already begun to move out onto the road. It
seemed that Arvo had little choice but to follow, though the sight of Cynthia hurrying towards him while waving her arms made him wonder if he had misunderstood her intentions.

When he’d brought the hearse to a stop, he said, “You changed your mind?”

But she stopped where she was and shook her head. “I just wanted to let you know I
haven’t
changed my mind. In case you started to worry. It was jealousy made me want to go with you. I couldn’t stand being left out while you boys go off and have an adventure. But of course I was a fool. I’ll stay home and bake for the funeral.”

“This isn’t just because I wouldn’t take you to California?”

She cocked her head to one side to think. “Well. California could’ve made a difference. But as you said, we mightn’t live long enough to get there in
this
.” She pressed both hands to her ears when she laughed — always had done, as though she didn’t want to hear herself.

“Your sister’ll drive you back to your car?”

She’d tilted her hands out far enough to hear. “Don’t worry. She owes me several lunches and at least half-a-dozen drives.”

As he moved slowly through the last few blocks leading out of town, Arvo could see in his mirror that Cynthia had remained standing in front of the restaurant, watching them depart. But as she grew smaller in the mirror he became aware that he had already accumulated a few followers who seemed uninterested in getting past. By the time he had followed the maroon Lexus and the Henry J past the row of strip malls and gas stations and the houses with
Homes for your Future
signs on front lawns and had got out onto the Old Highway beyond the town limits, a long train of cars and trucks had accumulated behind them, all apparently unwilling to pass. Horns honked, but not, it seemed, with impatience. In his rear-view mirror he could see people with heads and naked torsos out their car windows,
waving their shirts about as though participating in a football victory parade.

Only when he’d entered a long slow curve in the road could he see in his rear-view mirror that the train of vehicles following him had grown to include several cars and trucks and a large number of panel vans wearing the brightly painted logos and outright advertisements of businesses — including a well-known tourist resort, a recycling depot, a fishing lodge, a ski resort, a home-moving van, a landscape firm, a building contractor, a pest exterminator and a farm dedicated solely to the cultivation of daffodils. The last of the vehicles to appear from behind a stand of alder was an orange school bus, which pulled out and passed all the others and would have passed Arvo as well if the driver hadn’t decided to pull in right behind the hearse and, in effect, lead the parade of hangers-on. This bus, he could see now, was filled with students singing robustly out their open windows — to the fields of cattle they passed and the campers in the wooded campsite, to the mail boxes and bus shelters and private homes and to the clear blue sky and all the rest of the world that witnessed this patient parade down this paved and winding road in the general direction of the city.

CHAPTER 6

A LITTLE MORE THAN
thirty minutes south of town the Henry J suddenly turned off the road and onto the gravel parking lot between a small white stucco grocery store and a sprawling heap of wild-rose bushes. This had to mean that something was wrong. Arvo turned in as well, and pulled up to the right of Peterson, nose to a weathered log meant to prevent you from driving down the pebble beach and into the Strait. A few scrawny poplars trembled from the breeze off the water. What was left of the parade that had followed them out of town slowed down and almost stopped, probably uncertain whether to turn in as well. But then, as though they’d somehow decided all together that the slow-pokes they’d been following had finally reached
their destination, they took off in a rush, letting the roar of their collective acceleration reverberate down the avenue of broad-leaf maples.

Peterson rolled down his window and suggested that Arvo wait here for a while. “Get yourself a coffee or something — unless you want to go ahead without us. I promised Lucy we’d drop in to say hello.”

“You crazy?” Arvo got out of the hearse to say this. Lucy had been Peterson’s wife for a while, but for the past few years she’d owned a chicken ranch somewhere in this part of the world. “You meant to do this from the start?”

Peterson looked only a little sheepish. “Lucy could be dangerous if she heard I passed by this close without stopping.”

Arvo had seen enough of Lucy to know she could be dangerous even at the best of times. But would she even have known that Peterson had passed by so close without stopping? “You could’ve mentioned this before we left home. If they decide to do something else with Martin …”

Peterson raised both hands to admit his guilt. “Half an hour? Is that too much for a pal to ask?”

Arvo looked at his watch. “In half an hour I’ll leave, even if I have to go without you.” Then, as the Henry J began to move, he added: “If you’re late I’ll phone the police — The Case of the Chicken Ranch Murder.”

He was almost serious. He’d once overheard Lucy Peterson threatening to feed Peterson’s privates to her hens. She’d also promised to strangle Herbie Brewer, whom she’d referred to as “that balk-eyed simpleton camped in my sewing room.” Herbie should have got out here for his own safety but was probably too terrified to think straight.

And why had he agreed to wait? He felt the fool, sitting here like this, a prisoner to Peterson’s whim, Peterson’s poor judgement. He should have gone on without him.

He started the engine but turned it off immediately and sat where he was for long enough to watch a pair of yellow kayaks slide past: two women, both with long pale hair, one working a little harder than the other. He could hear their voices even for a while after they’d slipped out of sight beyond a rocky point.

He must have driven past this spot a hundred times in all the years since he’d last stopped on this gravel lot. This had been immediately after high school. He’d paused here to debate with himself about continuing south to the city’s vocational school for a year-long course in auto-mechanics. It was his father’s idea. “If you have to end up working for the goddam logging outfit I don’t want you up in the woods where you’ll get yourself killed. Get some skill with machines and you’ll have a chance at a job in the shop. Mechanics don’t get killed by widow-makers falling on their heads.”

He hadn’t reminded his father that Bobby O’Hara had died after being pinned beneath a truck that slipped off the hoist.

Still, he’d convinced himself to give vocational school a try.

Along with the practical courses in mechanics, he’d had no choice but to take an “English” course, presumably so that he could read directions attached to new parts he would be installing in trucks. But they were expected to read books. Forced to. There was no James Lee Burke on the course. Well, Burke would have been only a young fellow himself at the time. There were no crime novels of any sort assigned, unless you included the story of a sailor deserting a sinking ship to save his own neck when he ought to have stayed to help passengers escape. Difficult, meaty stuff. He’d got through it, but what he remembered best was the depth of the young man’s guilt. “Why did Jim jump?” the teacher wanted to know. They were all capable of answering that one:
to avoid drowning when the ship went down
. But — was it cowardice or only good sense? Apparently it was the young
man’s job to go down with the ship. Of course answering the tougher exam questions meant having to read to the end.

Unlike
Lord Jim
and the other books he was required to read, the mechanics courses turned out to be, for him, almost as straightforward and simple as the arithmetic and basic science he’d learned in elementary school. Even so, he might have jumped ship himself and dropped out in the midst of the fall term if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of Myrtle Birdsong in the cafeteria, and learned from others that she was taking a secretarial course. Probably so she could work for her father’s business. Whenever he’d seen her after that, she’d been with a clutch of other girls, probably all taking the same courses. He’d worked up the courage to approach her once, but had backed out at the last minute. She’d peered at him as though she suspected there was something familiar about him. There was some giggling behind him as he hurried away.