Death & the Brewmaster's Widow (5 page)

“He spent the night with you?”

“Captain Stone, from C shift, called Rowdy. Randy was at the firehouse when the Marine Corps tracked him down. It was his day off, but he was pulling OT so one of the guys from C shift could take his son to a ball game. The Marines called and talked to Captain Stone first and he called Rowdy to be there when Randy got the news. He called Cap, too. They came here first but eventually Rowdy brought Randy home.”

“I appreciate you looking out for him. He meant,” Death had to stop and clear his throat. “The kid meant a lot to me.”

“You meant a lot to him, too. You know that, right?”

Death nodded awkwardly and for a moment they just stood in an uncomfortable silence. It was Annie who broke it. “So, what are you going to do? Will you live here now?”

He looked around, tried to picture himself occupying this space and could not. There were so many memories here, but not a one that wasn't tinged with loss and sorrow. This was his past and his future was across the state with his feral pixie. In that moment, he missed her so much his heart hurt. “I think … I think I'll probably sell it. Keep a few mementos, let the rest go to auction. I really do appreciate the work you've all put into keeping it up.”

“It's no problem. We did it for you, because Randy would have wanted us to. An auction is going to be a lot of work. I hope you know you can count on us to help all we can.”

“Thank you, so much. I might take you up on that. First, I need to consult an auctioneer.”

_____

After some consideration, Death dialed the business number for Keystone and Sons. If he was going to use an auction as a pretext for getting Wren to St. Louis, he felt he should do so through proper channels. It was getting late in the afternoon, now, and the day's auctions would probably be over, but he knew that Leona kept an eye on the business phone around the clock. He was expecting her voice and a polite, businesslike greeting.

Instead, the phone clicked to life and an old man whispered at him to shush.

“What?”

“Shh! Dammit, boy! Don't you understand shh?”

Death lowered his voice. “Why am I shh-ing?”

“This damn phone's stuck on speaker and I can't figure out how to turn it off. Leona's coming. You don't shh, she's gonna find where I'm hiding.”

Death put his own phone on speaker, balanced it on his knee and sat back on the couch to wait. Odd knocks and rattles came over the line. Footsteps approached and a door squealed.

“Roy?” Leona's voice was distant, but not too distant. “Roy Keystone, I know you're in here somewhere. Eventually I
am
going to find you and when I do, you are going to be one sorry little man. You hear me?” The footsteps receded. The door shrieked again and then closed with a bang and Roy Keystone giggled like a naughty schoolboy.

“Do I want to know what you did to her, Roy?”

“What makes you think I did anything?” A series of scrapes and groans came from the phone. Some of them sounded like wood or metal, some of them sounded like tendons and bones. “Good Lord, this is ridiculous. I don't know how Matthew fits into these places.”

“Matthew is seven. That probably helps.”

“Blah blah blah. Did you call me up just to criticize me?”

“No, I—”

“Why did you call me up, then?”

“Well, I heard this was the business number for Keystone and Sons Auctioneers. I wanted to talk business, so I gave it a call. You still haven't told me what you did to Leona.”

“No, I haven't. What do you think you want to talk business about?”

“I'm, well, you know I'm over here in St. Louis to settle my brother's estate. I'm thinking I need to have an estate sale and I was wondering if you guys might be willing to handle that. I mean, I don't know if there's enough here to make the commission worth your while, but I thought maybe you could send somebody over to have a look at it and … ?”

“We could do that,” Roy agreed. “Say, Felix Knotty or one of the grandsons?”

“Oh. Um, well, I was thinking—”

“No, you weren't. What's your middle name?” the old man demanded suddenly. “I know you've got one. It starts with a D.”

“How do you know that?”

“Leona told me. She made you show her your driver's license to get an auction number one time, remember?”

“Yeah, but I thought that was just teasing me.”

“It wasn't teasing, it was being nosy. She plays it off real cool, but my wife is about the nosiest old biddy in the county.”

“Roy! That's no way to talk about your wife.”

“No? But it's true. And I say it with love. Anyway, Leona's seen your driver's license. She knows your height, your official eye color and hair color, your birthday, and how old you'll be. You were still using your ex-wife's address, you've dropped at least forty pounds of muscle since you got the license, when they took your picture you were just about to sneeze, and your middle initial is D. Only she can't find out what the D stands for, and it's driving her crazy.”

“So you're thinking you can use my middle name to buy your way out of whatever trouble you're in?”

“It wouldn't hurt.”

“Not you, maybe.”

“Besides, I need to know it so I can yell at you proper.”

“What?”

“I gotta have your middle name to yell at you. That's how kids know they're really in trouble. If I just holler Death Bogart, then you might think I was being friendly. But I yell Death Dwight Bogart,
then
you sit up and pay attention.”

“It's not Dwight.”

“Dwayne.”

“No.”

“Delancey?”

“What do you want to yell at me about?”

“It is Delancey!”

“It's not Delancey! Answer the question!”

“I want to yell at you for thinking you need to hire your girlfriend. Girlfriends that you hire aren't girlfriends. They're hookers. I tell Wren you confused her with a hooker and you're going to be the one who needs a cupboard to hide in. Doug.”

“It's not Doug. And I didn't … I just, I know you're trying to run a business. And Wren has a job to do. And I really do need help with this auction.”

“Just with the auction?” Roy's voice had taken on a gentle, serious undertone.

Death sighed, defeated. “No.”

“You're across the state, all alone, trying to settle your brother's estate. If you need Wren there, all you have to do is ask her. You know the only reason she didn't go with you is because she was afraid you'd think she was crowding you.”

“I wouldn't think that.”

“Of course not. That's why both of you need to learn to use your
words
, as we tell our toddlers. Dirk.”

Death just laughed. “I guess I'd better call her then.”

“Good plan. She's probably halfway to New Orleans by now.”

“New Orleans!” he bit down on a spike of bitter disappointment. “Why's she going to New Orleans?”

“Well, she isn't going there on purpose. But she left here three hours ago headed for St. Louis, and you and I both know how that woman navigates. I'd look for her in the foothills east of Jeff City.”

“She's coming here?” The room warmed and brightened around him.

“She's certainly trying. Damien.”

“It's not Dirk and it's not Damien. So what
did
you do to Leona?”

Roy giggled as if he were six instead of sixty-three. “She was complaining about the heat, so I cut off the hot water while she was taking a shower.”

Death chuckled and shook his head, even though there was no one there to see.

“Man, you know she's going to get even with you.”

“Oh, I know it. That's half the fun, son.”

five

Maria Vasquez stood, as
she did twice a day, in front of the sink
in the master bathroom. The window was open, a light morning breeze tossing the curtain and tugging at the ruffle around her apron. Mister Grey would have done that, she thought, reaching out to close it and keep the conditioned air inside. He had an odd tendency to open windows now, just one of the personality quirks he'd picked up after the stroke, just over a year ago, that had nearly killed him.

Maria set the row of pill bottles out on the counter and began carefully counting pills into little paper cups. She could do this in her sleep by now, and after a moment her mind wandered and her eyes strayed back to the view out the high window.

The stroke had changed her employer. The paralysis that made the left side of his face droop was all but gone now, and he'd regained the ability to dress himself (with help) and move around. But his memory was shot full of holes. From one day to the next he would forget people's names. He never knew where he was and had to be constantly monitored so that he didn't hurt himself. And his personality had changed. The crude, brash playboy had been replaced by a man who was polite, even diffident. Even to the servants, which annoyed his wife to no end.

Maria took a clean glass from the cupboard below the sink and filled it with water, then arranged the medicines and the glass on a silver tray. Outside the morning sun glared off the roofs of neighboring houses. Beyond and just above them, the old grain silos of the Einstadt Brewery rose into a blue and cloudless sky.

_____

“So one of the guys over at 16's got hold of these peppers. Bought them at a farmer's market somewhere and the guy selling them told him they were Thai Red Dragons, which are supposed to be some of the hottest peppers in the world. So he made up a batch of chili with them. He was being crazy careful—wouldn't handle them without rubber gloves on, wore his SCBA
when he cut 'em up. Cooks up this chili, and he dares Bogie to try it. So Bogie says—”

“What's in it for me?” Death interjected.

“That's our boy! Well, the guy had a sister who was really hot, but kind of stuck up and he offers to get Bogie a date with her if he can eat a whole bowl of chili. Only Bogie, he says he's not interested in a woman who's not interested in him and he wants …” Rowdy Tanner paused and looked at Death expectantly.

Death grinned. “Cold, hard cash.”

“Well, the guy at 16's didn't want to part with the lucre. They dickered back and forth a bit and finally agreed that, if Randy could eat a whole bowl of the chili, the guy at 16's'd eat a box of chocolate-covered ants.”

“Ugh!” Wren turned aside to address Annie Tanner. She and Death were sitting at a picnic table in the Tanners' backyard. Randy's whole crew had turned up, and they were grilling burgers and swapping stories about Randy while a small crowd of children had a water gun fight around them. “Is this a fire department thing?” she asked Annie. “The gross foods, I mean? Because the firefighters back home do that sort of thing, too.”

“The single ones, mostly,” Annie said. “I think the married ones pretty much realize that there are limits to what they can come home having eaten.”

“Lips that touch slime will never touch mine,” Rowdy recited dutifully.

“So what happened?” Death prodded. “Did Randy eat the chili? 'Cause the kid had a cast-iron stomach, I know that.”

“Oh, he ate the chili all right. Turned out the farmer's market guy was lying. They weren't Thai Red Dragons, weren't even hot. They were just ordinary sweet peppers. Dude at 16's was stuck. You should have seen his face. To this day he can't look at an ant without turning green.”

A couple kids ventured a little too close to the grill. Cap chased them away, then turned back to the conversation. “So, have you found out anything about where that badge came from?”

Death and Wren exchanged a glance. Death reached in his shirt pocket.

“When my mother-in-law returned Randy's turnouts to HQ they gave her his helmet, or they said it was his helmet, to pass along to me. This was on it.” He tossed the hat badge down on the picnic table. Cap picked it up and frowned at it.

“That's the wrong number. This is nuts!”

“I called and talked to a secretary at HQ this morning. She said that the Captain of 27's brought the helmet in the morning of the fire. So then I called and talked to him. He remembered picking it up off the ground beside where they were working on Randy. When he got word that Randy didn't make it, he took it over and turned it in to HQ.”

“What—” Wren paused and tapped the table, looking around at the men and women gathered there. “I know that nobody wants to relive this, but, what exactly happened at that fire? After you brought him out of the building?”

“We did what we'd do any time an unconscious firefighter is brought out of a building.” The speaker was a woman in her mid-thirties, with fine blonde hair and blue eyes and a light sunburn on her nose. “We stripped off his helmet and breathing gear and checked his vitals. He wasn't breathing and we couldn't find a pulse. His nose was broken and his face badly burned, so we performed a tracheotomy—that is, we inserted an airway through his neck—and put him on forced oxygen. We opened his coat, cut open his shirt, and Yering started chest compressions while I set up for an EKG. The EKG showed flatline, so we pushed epinephrine directly into the heart and continued CPR. I set up an IV port, we put him in the rig, and got him to the hospital. We worked on him all the way and they continued for awhile at the ER, but by then it was pretty clear that nothing was going to work. It was the ER physician who called TOD.”

“What happened then? Do you remember?”

“The whole crew was there by then. We just sat in the waiting room and cried like babies. He was one of ours, you know?”

There was nothing to say to that and for a few minutes they all sat there in a pensive silence. Wren slipped her hand into Death's. The Tanners' backyard was lovely with lush grass; flowers growing on the fence line; and a big, fancy wooden swing set for the kids. The Gateway Arch rose against blue sky and wispy clouds on the eastern horizon. She turned to the southeast and picked out, among the alien landscape of factories and high-rise buildings, an old brick monster with silos on the end.

“Is that the Einstadt building?” she asked, pointing. The others turned to look.

“No,” Rowdy said. “That's the Lemp Brewery. It's also abandoned. They look a lot alike, but you can't see the Widow from here. It's not far from there, though. The old breweries are all grouped pretty close together down there. They built them on top of a series of caverns, the Cherokee Caves. In the nineteenth century, before they had refrigeration, they used the caves to keep the beer cold.”

Death heaved a frustrated sigh, raked a hand through his hair, and tapped one finger on the hat badge. “I gotta figure this out. This is making me nuts. Did
any
of you notice
anything
odd that day? Anything at all?” All of the firefighters shook their heads except for Rowdy, who hesitated. Death looked to him expectantly.

“It's nothing,” he said. “Really, it's nothing. I didn't even give it a second thought at the time. It's been bugging me since, but I can't imagine that it could mean anything. Only, like you said, it's odd.”

“What, Rowdy? What was odd? What did you notice?”

“Randy was lying on his back when we dug him out.” He glanced around at his audience. Death and the other firefighters looked like they understood the significance. Rowdy must have read the confusion on Wren's face, because he spoke directly to her. “When someone passes out, they usually fall forward. He should have been lying on his stomach, probably with his legs bent. But he was lying on his back, kind of half on his side because of his air tanks, and his legs were straight. It was almost like someone positioned his body.”

_____

“You'll need some albums,” Wren said. “Some albums and some picture frames. Some of these you'll want to put up on the wall and some you'll want to put away and just take out from time to time.”

They were back in Randy's living room, looking at the wall full of pictures and mementos. The prospect of dealing with all this, of sorting out his little brother's house and car and all his possessions and somehow tidying them away so he could move on with his life, was daunting. The fact that much of this had also belonged to their grandparents didn't help. Everything was connected to a memory and even the best memories were bittersweet, tainted with loss. In the midst of it all, Wren was a calm and practical presence. She was an anchor for his spirit; the eye of the hurricane that was his life.

“Start simply,” she advised him. “Pick out the things you know you want to keep. But don't feel like you have to keep everything. It's not a betrayal if you donate his clothes to the Salvation Army or sell his living room furniture. You're just doing what you have to do. We both know Randy would understand.”

“For now, I guess we'd ought to just take them down and put them in boxes.”

Wren had arrived with the back of her truck loaded with empty boxes and crates. “This is what I do for a living,” she'd reminded him. “I know what to expect. I'll help you. Everything will be okay.”

Now she opened a sturdy carton, took out a pair of plastic boxes with snap-closed lids, and set them on the coffee table. “We can put anything small or fragile in this one, and the other can hold pins and thumbtacks.” Nails, pins, tacks, putty, and even duct tape held up the eclectic assortment of things on display. As they set to work, pulling them down and sorting them into boxes, Death shook his head in bemusement.

“I'd never have dared to put needles and tacks and duct tape on Grandma's walls. I'd have expected her to come back and haunt me. Randy, though, he always could get away with anything. He'd get this wide-eyed, baby deer look and Mom and the grandmas would just melt.”

“What's the funniest thing you remember ever happening in this room?” Wren asked, pulling down dozens of cartoons that were plastered around the door into the kitchen.

“This room?” Death thought about it. “There was the time Uncle Biggers set his butt on fire.”

“Uncle Biggers? He set his butt on fire?”

“Yeah. He wasn't really our uncle. He was my grandad's best friend. They served together on the department for nearly thirty
years. It was almost Christmas the year I was … I dunno … nine. He and Grandpa had been out shoveling snow. He and his wife lived just down the street and every time it snowed, he and Grandpa made a point of clearing the sidewalk and shoveling out the walkways for everyone on the block. Dad and Randy and I were helping, of course, but by the time we got done we were all about half frozen. We were getting warm around the fire and Uncle Biggers turned his back to the fireplace and bent over, 'cause he said his ‘other cheeks were cold too.' Well, just about that time he, uh,” Death glanced at Wren and blushed, but plowed ahead. “Well, he broke wind. The fire lit it and set the seat of his pants on fire. He had to run out and sit in the snow to put them out.”

“Oh, dear.” Wren's face was red, too, but she was smiling at him.

“Crass, I know. And I don't think the ladies appreciated it. But to a nine-year-old boy, that was comic gold, let me tell ya.”

Wren put the stack of comic strips in one of the boxes and moved back to the wall. “Oh, look,” she said, her voice gentle. “This looks familiar.”

Death shuffled the photos he was holding into as neat a pile as was possible and came over to see what she'd found. “It's the picture from the school fire safety day. The same one that Cameron gave me.”

Cameron Michaels was a friend of Wren's—they'd even been engaged once before he'd come to terms with the fact he was gay. They were still close and, when she and Death had met, Cameron used his resources as a newspaper reporter to check up on Death. One of the things he'd found was a newspaper story about Randy, dated the week before he died. He'd printed it and given it to Death before Wren framed it to hang on her wall.

It was a human interest story that had run on the front page of the paper, about Fire Station 41 hosting a fire safety day at one of the local elementary schools. Among the pictures on the front page was a shot of Randy, in uniform, explaining something to a small group of children. Studying it now, Wren frowned.

“That's odd.”

“What?” Death asked, trepidation churning his stomach. The last thing he needed in his life right now was more oddity.

She pointed. “Honey, look at Randy's badge.”

He lifted the picture out of her hand and held it up to the light. “What the—? No. That does not make sense.” In the photo, Randy's badge was clearly visible. The number on it, as plain as day, was 4183.