Smoked Out (Digger) (3 page)

Digger rewound the tape, put on his dark glasses and walked around the cemetery, looking at the mausoleums, wondering about people who spent so much money on stone things which were sure to outlive their memories. He decided that when he died he would have a papier-maché monument made. If anyone loved him, they would have to shellac his monument every seven days. Seven days after everybody who loved him died, everything would dwindle away to blotter lint and that would be that.

A flower car came down the road and parked alongside Mrs. Welles’s grave. Behind it was a hearse, and a hundred yards farther back Digger saw a procession of four Rolls Royces. It looked like Winston Churchill’s funeral. As was customary, the cars with the mourners turned away from the grave-site to tour the cemetery, while the funeral home employees did their setup work, carrying the coffin and placing it on the rack over the grave and setting the floral pieces around.

Out of view of family and friends, two men hopped out of the hearse and lugged the casket to the grave with no more ritual than if they had been carrying a case of rifles. Another man started emptying flowers from the flower car and arranging them around the grave. All three wore black suits.

Digger went to the flower car, took two standing arrangements and carried them toward the grave.

"Who are you with?" the flower driver asked him.

"Irving Schlepp. Here at the cemetery," Digger said.

The man nodded. Digger helped him arrange the flowers but was not totally pleased with the results. The man’s taste was a little too symmetrical for Digger. The two men who had carried the coffin over to the grave stood around watching. When the Rolls Royces came back down the road toward the grave, the three men walked back to their vehicles. Digger continued to adjust some of the floral pieces, finicking, as if he had finished an essay test early, wasn’t allowed to leave the classroom, so was going back over it to polish the punctuation.

The minister got out of the first car. He was a round, soft-looking man with an enormous gold cross hanging on a chain from his clerical collar.

The second Rolls held Doctor Welles, looking tan, fit and handsome, and an elderly woman with blue hair and a hearing aid who wept a lot. Glancing over from a cross of flowers, Digger decided she was Mrs. Rochelle Lindsley, the dead woman’s mother. Five more people got out of the three other Rolls Royces. They shuffled around near the gravesite. The minister looked at Digger questioningly and Digger smiled and nodded for him to begin. Digger took the sympathy card and ball-point pen from his pocket and walked up to a young, pretty brunette. He extended the card and pen to her. She looked at Digger and whispered, "Who are you?"

"From the cemetery."

"Swell. Thanks," she said, and signed her name, taking elaborate pains to write neatly.

He gave the card to another woman, a tall, trim blonde.

"What’s this?"

"Condolences. From the cemetery."

The third person, a man, signed without any discussion, and by the time Digger reached the next man, the minister had started to speak, so the man just scrawled his name and handed the card back.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today, in our grief…"

Digger got the last woman to sign while the minister was still talking. He decided to skip Dr. Welles and the dead woman’s mother.

He stood among the mourners, head bowed, as the minister gave the benediction. When Digger looked up, he saw Dr. Welles staring at him. Digger smiled back solicitously, the sort of look he would have given someone whose new Cadillac had been scratched in a supermarket parking lot. He thought that if Dr. Welles had been in mourning the past few days, he must have been doing it at poolside. He should meet Digger’s mother at a funeral. Then he should try sitting shiva for ten days, sitting on a box, wearing slippers and not shaving.

He glanced away. Behind Welles, he saw a battered green Porsche parked at the roadside. The left window was down, but he couldn’t see the driver’s face. On the back of the sympathy card, he jotted down what he could see of the license number: IBW-1-something.

Then the funeral was over and Digger went back to his hotel to go swimming and have some drinks.

Especially to have some drinks. Funerals made him thirsty.

Everything made him thirsty.

Chapter Three

Digger’s Log:

Tape recording number one, 9:30 P.M., Sunday, Julian Burroughs regarding the Jessalyn Welles insurance claim.

I have this wonderful trick for remembering people’s names. I write them down. These are today’s mourners.

Lorelei Church. Young, pretty brunette, but she thanked me when I gave her the card to sign. I’ve got a hunch she would thank a rapist for thinking of her. I suspect someone has removed the aces from her deck.

Alyne Gurney. The difference between a Hollywood blonde and a Beverly blonde is about three inches in the chest and three zeroes in the checking account. Alyne is a Beverly blonde. She oozes Beverly. But her shoes were scuffed on the tip and she had used liquid polish to cover them over.

Something that looks like Aros or Amos and then a last name with a lot of e’s in it. Etti…something. Brown-haired, mild-looking, fussy. Looks like he would play tennis with a Prince racket and get upset if he scuffed his leather Adidases. Soft hands.

Ted Dole. Midthirties, good-looking, husky, moves well. Not the kind you expect to find at anybody’s graveside ever. He would remember the dead by buying a drink. But he wouldn’t buy Dr. Welles a drink. He kept glaring at him through the service, and if Welles had been the corpse, instead of his wife, I’d have a pretty good idea how it happened.

Mary Beckwith, gray-haired, hard mileage, fiftyish. Probably an employee or servant. Kept looking around like she was trying to make sure that she wasn’t doing anything wrong.

Every one of these people share the view that The One We Loved Lived Life to the Fullest To Enrich The Lives of Others and God Remembers.

God should. He knows what that card cost.

Then, of course, there was Rochelle Lindsley, Mrs. Welles’s mother. She looked like she had arrived from Connecticut on the shoulders of native bearers. Sailing, riding, clipping coupons, inviting friends over so she could start drinking in the afternoon. Blue hair. All women with blue hair are secret drunks. Who started that particular mutilation, anyway?

And then there was Gideon Welles, M.D. Make him forty-five, but he looks better than that. No wrinkles, and no face lift, either. Tan without being leathery. Diet. Exercise. Golf. Tennis. All that sick shit. A suit with hand-stitching. I don’t like his eyes. They remind me of someone’s. They never really smiled. No matter what his mouth did.

What’s that you say? Just because he’s handsome, I’ve already got him tagged as a murder suspect?

Wrong. Don’t forget what I’m doing here. I am here as the representative of Brokers Surety Life Insurance to make sure they don’t get ripped off. Only three things concern me. Was there fraud on Mrs. Welles’s insurance application? Did Mrs. Welles commit suicide? Did Gideon Welles want to collect a million dollars?

Anything else doesn’t matter to me. If I found out that Mrs. Welles was murdered by the KGB because she had uncovered a Russian plot to overthrow America and make Idi Amin President, as long as Dr. Welles wasn’t involved in it I’d just send a memo to Kwash and let him decide what to do. My areas of interest are very limited: fraud, suicide and beneficiary-as-murderer. Anything else belongs to the cops.

I have to check the license number of a green Porsche, IBW-1-something. The driver sat there with his window down, listening to the minister talk his nonsense. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to pay our respects to good old what’s-her-face." Why does someone watch a funeral from the side of the road? Except for the fact that this is California.

Tomorrow I’ll find out.

I should call Koko. But it’s ten o’clock Sunday night, and if she’s not home, I’ll start chewing my insides wondering where she is and with who. I keep telling myself that she’s really not a hooker. She’s more like a party girl, right? Sure. She’s got a good job, dealing at the Araby. If she wants to go out once in a while, that’s her business. It stops things from getting too serious between us. A girl like that couldn’t really expect me to marry her, could she?

That’s what she said, wasn’t it? "Why do we keep having this conversation? Are you going to propose?"

No, my dear Tamiko, I am not going to propose. I’ve been there before and marriage is a wonderful way to ruin a friendship. Now, my father would propose. Every time I bring Tamiko home, he can’t keep his hands off her. I know he wants to ask me if it’s true, if it really goes sideways on Oriental women. No, Sergeant Burroughs, it doesn’t. Only the eyes slant, and they don’t even slant. It’s the eyelids that make them look like they slant. I’ve always wished the Boston Red Sox had signed that Japanese slugger, Sataharu Oh, to a contract. Then when he stopped hitting and the team died in September, like they always do, the sportswriters could blame it on the epicanthic fold. Never mind, you had to be there.

I’ll call Koko tomorrow, before her shift starts.

Today’s expenses:

Gasoline, out of pocket, $24. No, $25. I tipped the gas station man because he was so friendly and helpful.

Greeting card, $4. Ballpoint pen, $1.

Bar bill, $27. Eleven drinks at $2 each and a $5 tip. I know this sounds like a lot, but this was business. I had thought Dr. Welles hung out in the place and I wanted to see what I could find out. After eleven drinks, I learned he’d never been there. Oh, pain.

Total, $57. Don’t worry, I’m saving the company a million. Room and meals by credit card.

And so to bed.

Chapter Four

It was 9:00 A.M. on Monday, start of a new week, but Tom Langfill, the manager of the Los Angeles office of the Brokers Surety Life Insurance Company, already looked tired.

"I’m Julian Burroughs. From the main office."

Still sitting, Langfill pushed a Manila envelope across the desk toward Digger.

"It’s all in there. Application, medical forms, et cetera, et cetera, everything you need."

"Thanks. I need to know the owner of a car. Green Porsche. License plate IBW-1-something. Would you get it for me?"

"Detective stuff already? Next you’ll be sending me matchbooks with fingerprints on them."

"Probably."

"Do you mind if I ask you why?"

"No, of course not. I have this daughter by my first marriage, and she wants to be a criminologist. She’s trying to find out who stole a sandwich out of her locker. Peanut butter. She sends me clues and I have old Benevolent and Saintly check them out."

"Mr. Brackler told me about you," Langfill said.

"I’m sure he did. IBW-1-something. Please write it down before you forget. A green Porsche."

Langfill wrote the number on the top sheet in a box of memo slips on his desk.

"We think we’ve got a pretty good record in L.A.," he said. "Anything wrong with Mrs. Welles’s death, we would’ve known about it. I don’t know why—"

"I don’t know why, either," Digger said. "Suggestion. Let’s call Mr. Stevens in New York. Right now. We can both ask him what I’m doing here. Did Kwash tell you that Mr. Stevens sent me?"

"Kwash?"

"Walter Brackler. The only known victim in North America of kwashiorkor, an African disease that stunts the body and shrivels the mind."

"I didn’t know that."

"Never mind."

"Oh. Mr. Brackler did say that he did not think this investigation was really necessary. He thought it would be unproductive."

"But I’m here, anyway, so that should tell you something, like Brackler doesn’t run the company and Frank Stevens does. Call Frank. If you’ve forgotten, Landfill, he’ll be glad to remind you."

"Langfill. I don’t think that’s necessary. Of course, we’ll give you whatever help you need. We’re on the same side."

"IBW-1-something," Digger said.

"We’ll get right on it."

"Thank you. I’ll call when I have anything else—fingerprints, bribes, extortion, et cetera, et cetera."

Digger waited until he got back into his car to open the envelope and skim the material. Insurance application. With Dr. Welles as beneficiary. A medical examination and medical questionnaire. Like everyone who applied for insurance, Mrs. Welles would undoubtedly be the most perfect specimen of health who had ever lived in the world. He glanced at the application. Mrs. Welles conceded to having had German measles as a child. She had had no other diseases. In fact, she had obviously never suffered pain. She probably didn’t even have a cavity. What was the world coming to? When Digger was growing up, everybody he knew had tonsillitis for two weeks a month until the tonsils were ripped out by a doctor who needed the twenty bucks. They had measles and lay in a dark room for two weeks so they didn’t go blind. Didn’t anybody have tonsillitis any more? What happened to measles? Wasn’t anybody proud of having survived, against all odds?

Before he had gone to work for Benevolent and Saintly, he had applied for insurance in a hypochondriac fit of paranoia. He had filled in every blank. Yes. He had had his tonsils removed. He had problems with his gums. He smoked four packs a day. He drank excessively, but, he added cheerily, he was going to stop any day. He had frequent headaches and unexplained stomach pains. His blood pressure fluctuated from near-death to oil burner. He had an uncorrected inguinal hernia, a trick knee and he had gained more than ten pounds in the previous five years.

But his eyesight was excellent. He took pains to point this out on the application. And so was his hearing.

His application was rejected. Truth might be beauty and beauty truth, but they both closed on Saturday night. When he later went to work for BSLI, Brackler, as head of the claims division, had sent him an insurance application. The company, Brackler said, paid for fifty thousand dollars worth of free insurance on each employee. One of the fringe benefits. Digger sent the application back blank. He told Brackler that he wouldn’t give $50,000 to the people he knew who needed it; and the ones he would give that money to didn’t need it. Brackler had not thought this was funny. Neither had Digger.