The Dreadful Lemon Sky (6 page)

"Shall we discuss the coffin first?"

"Why not, if you wish? It is very inexpensive, as you can see."

"The decedent is to be, or has been, cremated."

"Cremation will take place this evening, I think. I can determine for sure."

"So there's no need for a coffin."

He smiled sweetly and sadly. "Ah, so many people have that misconception. It is a regulation, sir."

"Whose regulation?"

"The State of Florida, sir."

"Then you will be willing to show me the statutes which pertain?"

"Believe me, sir, it is standard practice and…"

"The statutes?"

"It may not be specifically spelled out in the law, but…"

I reached and took the pen from his desk set and drew a thick black line through the coffin and said, "Now we're down to twelve sixty-one ninety. I see you've charged for embalming."

"Of course. And a great deal of cosmetic attention was required. There were severe facial lacerations which-"

"It wasn't ordered and is not required by law prior to cremation."

He gave me a saintly smile. "I am afraid I cannot accept your judgments on these matters, sir. I must refer them to the sister of the deceased. We must bring her in on this. I must caution you that this is a very difficult situation for her, all this petty squabbling about the account as rendered."

"It's easier on her to just go ahead and pay it?"

"This is a very sad occasion for her."

"Wait right here," I said.

I went and found Susan on the bench in the hallway. I sat beside her and said, "We can cut that bill by a thousand dollars, but he thinks it will be such a rough experience for you to haggle over price, we should go ahead and pay it. What do you think?"

For a moment she was blank. Then I saw the tender jaw clamp into firmness and saw her eyes narrow. "I know what Carrie would say."

Mr. Rucker Senior stood up behind his desk when I walked in with Susan Dobrovsky. "Do sit down, my dear. We'll try to make this as painless as we possibly-"

"What's this crap about you overcharging me a thousand dollars?" she said in a high, strident, demanding voice.

He was taken aback but he recovered quickly. "You don't quite understand. For example, it may not be absolutely legally necessary for you to purchase a casket, my dear, but I think it would be a gross disrespect to your poor sister to have her… tumbled into the burning chamber like some kind of… debris."

She braced her fists on his desk and leaned closer to him. "That is not my sister! That is a body! That is debris! My sister is not in there any more and there is no reason for you to… to try to get me to worship the empty body, damn you, you greedy old man!"

He moved around the side of the desk, his face quiet as any death mask, and said, "Excuse me. I'll have this account recomputed. It will take just a few minutes."

He went out a side door. When it was open I could hear an electric typewriter rattling away. When he closed it behind him, she turned blindly into my arms. She rolled her head against my shoulder and gave three big gulping sobs and then pulled herself together, pushed away from me, honked into a Kleenex, and tried to smile. "Was I okay?" she asked.

"You were beautiful."

"I was pretending I was Carrie and it was me who was dead. She'd never let him take advantage. I was just so confused when he gave me the bill before."

"Is the memorial service to be here?"

"Oh, no. Betty Joller sort of arranged it. It's going to be on the beach there at Mangrove Lane where she used to live."

Rucker Senior came back into the room and tried to hand her the new billing. I reached across her and took it. It was far more specific. It came to $686.50. I noticed he had included a sixty-dollar urn, sixty-two forty with tax. I was tempted to strike it but decided it was best to let him have a minor victory.

"Here are the rings from the deceased," he said, holding out a small manila envelope. She hesitated, and I took that also and slipped it into my shirt pocket.

"Satisfactory arrangements for payment will have to be made," the man said.

I took out my money clip, slipped the currency out of it, and counted out seven one-hundred-dollar bills on the front edge of his desk. "We'll need thirteen fifty in change and your certification on this bill, Mr. Rucker."

He expressed his opinion by looking most carefully at each bill, back and front. He made change from his own pocket and receipted the bill. Paid in Full. B. J. Rucker, Sr.

"You may pick up the urn here between one and two tomorrow afternoon," he said.

I nodded. There were no good-bys. We walked out.

Out in the afternoon sunshine of the parking lot, she swayed against me, leaned heavily on my arm as we walked. She shook her head and straightened up and lengthened her stride.

"He had me go back in there and see her," she said. "I thought there was some mistake. Her face wasn't the right shape even. She looked like she was made of wax. He showed me how the inside of the casket is all quilted, the kind he was selling me. Would he have really had it burned up, or would he have saved it for the next person?"

"I think B.J. would have it burned up."

The lower angle of the sun had stretched casuarina shadows across our two bright little cars. Before she unlocked the Datsun she turned to face me and said, "About that money in there, I'll be able to…"

"It was your money."

"What do you mean?"

"I owed it to Carrie."

"Is that true? Is that really true?"

"Really true."

"How much did you owe her?"

"It's a long story."

"Well, I'd like to know."

"She told you to trust me."

"Yes…?"

"Trust me not to tell you now, and trust me to have good reasons not to tell you. Okay?"

She looked at me for a long moment and then slowly nodded. "Okay, Mr. McGee." Her hair was long, and a couple of shades darker than Carrie's cropped silvery mop. The face was as round as Carrie's, the cheekbones high and heavy, but her eyes had more of a Slavic tilt, and their color was a seagreen-gray.

I made her try calling me Trav, and after three times it came easier and she smiled.

"How long are you going to stay?"

"Well, I guess until the lawyer says it's okay to go back to New Jersey. I've got to sort out all her stuff in that apartment. It's in a terrible mess. Somebody broke in and tore up the furniture and rugs and emptied everything out on the floor."

"When did this happen?"

"So much is happening, I'm getting confused on the dates. She was killed Wednesday night. Betty Joller was in bed and heard it on the eleven o'clock news. Betty, being her best friend, got dressed and drove to the apartment figuring my phone number would be in Carrie's phone index someplace, and I should be told. Betty has a key to the apartment that Carrie gave her. Betty got to the apartment about midnight and found it all in such a mess it took her a half hour to find my phone number. She was crying so hard I couldn't understand what she was trying to tell me. And when she did… wow, it was like the sky falling down. Carrie was seven years older, and I saw her just once in the last six years, when she came back to Nutley five years ago for our mother's funeral. I had no idea it would hit me so hard. I guess it's because she was the only close family I had left. There's some cousins I've never seen since I was a baby."

"Did Betty Joller report it to the police?"

"I don't really know. I guess she would have. I mean it would be a normal thing to tell the police about it. I told the lawyer about it, and he asked me if there was any specific thing we could report as being taken in the robbery, and I said maybe Betty could figure out what was missing, that I wouldn't know."

"Who's your lawyer?"

"He's a good friend of a girl that lives at 28 Mangrove Lane. I keep forgetting his name. But I've got his card here. Here. Frederick Van Harn. He just has to straighten out about the will and the car and all that. I guess it will be okay because he is the one who drew up the will for her. After she broke up with Ben she wanted to be sure he didn't get a dime that was hers if anything happened to her. Ben was at the funeral too, five years ago, but I can't remember him at all." She looked at her watch. "Hey I've got to get going. Betty is coming over to the inn, and we're going to work it all out about tomorrow. You're coming, aren't you?"

"Of course."

She drove away and I drove back to Westway Harbor.

"Of course."

She had changed to a white sunback dress, and she wore heels, which put her over the sixfoot line. A big brown lady with great shoulders and other solid and healthy accessories… And a mighty cool blue eye, and a lot of composure and pride.

"I want to apologize to you for the trouble my husband gave you this noon. I am very sorry it happened."

"It's perfectly all right, Mrs. Birdsong."

"It's not all right. It was a very ugly scene. If they release him on bail, I am sure he will want to apologize personally. I'm going to visit him this evening in the hospital, and I know he will be very ashamed of himself."

"He had a few over the limit."

"A few! He was pig drunk. He never used to get like… well, I shouldn't burden you with our personal history. Thank you for giving me the time. If there is anything you need we are… always anxious to serve our customers. Oh, and I meant to thank you for not signing a complaint." Her smile was inverted and bitter. "There are enough of those to go around as it is."

"If there's any way I can help…"

She blinked rapidly. "Thank you very much. Very much."

Meyer was aboard the Busted Flush, dressing after having just gotten back from taking a shoreside shower. I broke open a pair of cold beers and took him one and sat on the guest stateroom bed and watched him put on a fresh white guayabera.

"Fifteen Hundred Seaway's one of those bachelor boys and girls places," Meyer said. "Everybody seems to laugh a lot. It's very depressing. Eighty small apartments. There's a kind of… watchful anxiety about those people. It's as if they're all in spring training, trying out for the team, all trying to hit the long ball, trying to be a star. And in a sense, they're all in training. They're pretty trim and brown. Very mod in the clothes and hair departments. They're all delighted that there's a long waiting list for Fifteen Hundred. Pools and saunas and a gym… Four-channel sound systems. Health fads. Copper bracelets. The Joy of Sex on each and every coffee table, I would guess. Water beds, biofeedback machines. There doesn't seem to be any kind of murky kinky flavor about them. No group perversion scenes. Just a terrible urgency about finding and maintaining an orgasm batting average acceptable to the peer group. Their environment is making terrible demands upon them. I bet their consumption of vitamins and health foods is extraordinary."

We went up onto the sun deck and sat in the shade of the big canopy over the topside controls. "It doesn't sound like the kind of place where Carrie would want to live."

"No. It doesn't. It isn't. I didn't say why I was asking about her. I imagine they assumed I'm some kind of relative of hers. There was a coolness toward her. They thought she was standoffish, too much of a private person. She didn't get into the swing of things. I guess the pun is intentional."

"An outcast in Swingleville, eh?"

"Not exactly. More like a special friend of the management. The management is Walter J. Demos. He owns it and manages it and is sort of a den mother to all. He lives there, in the biggest apartment. He personally approves or disapproves of every applicant. He won't accept tenants who are too young or too old. He settles quarrels and disputes. He collects the rents, repairs plumbing, plants flowers, and he laughs a lot."

"How old a man?"

"I wouldn't want to guess. He looks like a broader, browner version of Kojak. He has a deep voice and a huge laugh. He is a very charming and likable man. He is very popular with his tenants. He is Uncle Walter. I think Uncle Walter is a smart businessman. The rents start at three hundred and seventy-five a month, and his occupancy rate is one hundred percent. By the way, he told me about Carrie's apartment being burglarized the same night she-"

"I heard about it. Was the door forced?"

"No. The layout is arranged for maximum privacy. If you go from your apartment to visit somebody, there's very little chance of your being seen. And it seems to be local custom to have a batch of keys made and hand them out to your friends."

"How long had she lived there?"

"Four months only. I picked up the rumor that Uncle Walter had moved her to the top of the list. They all seemed miffed about it. Jealous, almost. They don't want Uncle Walter to have a special girl."

"Did you get the feeling from him that she was special to him?"

"He seemed very upset about it, about her being killed. He said all the usual things. She had the best years of her life ahead of her. A pointless tragedy. And so forth."

"Seems like high rent for Carrie to pay."

"That's something that kept cropping up in conversation. Those tenants seem to feel they have to give a continual sales talk about the joys of living in Fifteen Hundred. They claim that be cause they don't have any urge to go out at night or away for vacations, it really saves money to live. there. The little shopping center is so close you can walk over and wheel the stuff home. The ones who work close, some of them at least, have given up cars and use bikes. It's fascinating, in a way. A village culture. Maybe it's part of the shape of the world to come, Travis."

"Let us hope not."

"You seem a bit sour."

I stretched and sighed. "Carrie is in an upholstered box at Rucker's, her face reassembled with wax and invisible stitching. Tonight they will tote her off to the electric furnace and turn her into a very small pile of dry gray powder. So I am depressed."

"I don't think I can add anything of interest. Carrie didn't make any close friends there."

"Pun intended?"

"Not that time. Maybe you're not as sour as you act?"

"I'll tell you my adventures," I said. And did. When I had finished he said, "I suppose we'll learn that young Mr. Van Harn is the attorney for Superior Building Supplies, which would account for his doing Carrie's will and being recommended to the sister, and being with Mrs. Omaha."

"I had the same feeling."

"What next?"

"We have a drink with a little more authority, and then we find a place to eat."

"Please don't give GiI's Kitchen another chance."

"And you call yourself fair?"

"You wouldn't!"

"You are right. I wouldn't. But between the drinking and the eating, let's go see where Carrie was killed."

By seven o'clock we had found the approximate place where it had happened. County Road 858 was called Avenida de Flores. It was an old concrete road, the slabs cracked and canted. Weeds stood tall on the shoulders. The shoulders slanted down into overgrown drainage ditches. There were a few old frame houses, spaced far apart, on the west side of the road. On the east side was a grove, with high rusty hurricane fencing installed on the other side of the drainage ditch. I went on out past the city limits sign and turned around in the parking area of a large new shopping plaza and came back, driving slowly.

I pulled off into the weeds of the shoulder, car at a big list to starboard, and stopped.

"For what?" Meyer asked.

I nodded toward the house two hundred feet ahead. An old man was riding a little blue power mower back and forth across the big expanse of front yard. "We just get out and start looking up and down the shoulder, and he'll come over and tell us all."

That is one of the few bonuses when looking into a fatal accident. People do love to talk about it. In a few minutes I heard the mower cough, sputter, and die. Cars whooshed by, whipping the weeds around, blasting the hot wind against us. I looked up and saw the old man fifteen feet away, walking smartly, his face aglow with the terrible delight of someone loaded down with ghastly details.

"Hey, you wouldn't be looking for the spot where that there Mulligan woman got killed Wednesday night, would you?"

I straightened up and said, "Milligan. The name was Milligan. Carolyn Dobrovsky Milligan, Fifteen Hundred Seaway Boulevard, Bayside, tag number Twenty-four D, thirteen thirteen. Her name was not Mulligan, it was Milligan."

I used the voice and manner of the small-bore bureaucrat, petulant, precise, and patronizing. I needed no further identification as far as he was concerned. I was one of Them.

"Milligan, Mulligan, Malligan. Shoot, you're looking on the wrong side of the road is what you're doing."

"I doubt that," I said. "I doubt that very much."

He peered up at me. "Well, by Jesus H. Sufferin' Christ, you are something, you are! You may know her name right, but you don't know the first goddamn thing about the rest of it."

"I think he might be able to give us a little help," Meyer said, right on cue.

"Your partner here has got a little bit of sense," the old man said. "My name is Sherman Howe, and I've lived in that house there twelve years now, and you wouldn't believe the number of idiots get smashed up and killed on this straight piece of road in the nighttime. One drunk son of a bitch about six months ago-see over there where that fence by the grove is fixed up new? He come off the road and went through that fence, and he went weaving amongst the trees until he zigged instead of zagged and hit one dead center and mushed his skull on the windshield, dead as a fried mule. I keep my clothes on a chair by my bed and I keep a big flashlight handy, and when I hear that crunching in the night, I dress fast and come see what help I can give because that's the Christian thing to do. If it's bad, I blink the light back at the house here, and Mabel is watching for it, and she phones for the ambulance, and that's exactly what happened Wednesday night, and I was down here before that poor boy had even found the body, so don't tell me what side of the road it was on, mister. I know what side. Come with me. Watch out, now, you don't get yourself killed. Nobody slows down. Nobody gives a shit anymore what happens to anybody else in the world. Let me see now… Sure. Here's where her car was. She was heading north, out of town, when she ran out of gas and pulled over onto the shoulder right here. See where she drove in? See the tracks? And the grass is still matted where the wheels set. It happened at twelve minutes after ten by my digital clock on my bed stand, and I'd just turned out the light to go to sleep. Mabel was in the living room watching the teevee. She still likes it, but it's got to the point where all that slop looks alike to me. I think the dead woman was… wait, follow me and I'll show you where the body was. I'm the one found it. That Webbel kid didn't have a flashlight at all. It was right about here I seen her arm kind of laying up against the side of the ditch in the grass, and the grass sort of hid the rest of her. She was right here, down in this dry ditch, her head aimed that way and her feet this way, neat as you please. Would have played hell finding her if that arm hadn't been up like it was and bare, so it caught the light from my flashlight. Sixty-five feet from the point of impact. I paced it off. Lordy, she was a mess. That whole left side of her face and head… Anyway, I put the light on her and that boy fainted dead away. He fell like his spine had give way on him. I put my fingers on that girl's neck and thought I felt something, but I couldn't be sure. I ran and flashed my light three times at the window where Mabel was waiting, and she phoned it in. Then there was a terrible screechlng and nearly another accident on account of that Webbel kid had parked half on the road and half off, being so shocked by hitting her the way he did. His motor was still running, so I run the truck off all the way onto the shoulder and turned it off. He was sitting up by then, moaning to himself. Pretty soon I heard the sirens coming from way off. The cops got here first. Those blue lights tamed traffic down. They took flash pictures of the two cars and the body, and they measured the skid marks, which didn't start until he was right at or a little past the point where he hit her. Any fool could see it wasn't the kid's fault."

"Would you care to explain your… theory, Mister Howe?"

"Theory! Goddammit, it's fact! Now you look and see that she was parked real close, too close, to the pavement. Maybe it was as far as she could get, running out of gas like that. The car lights were off. That's supposed to be what you ought to do if you are over on the grass at night, because, you leave taillights on, some dumb stupid drunken son of a bitch is going to aim right for those taillights thinking he's following you. Now the Webbel boy was driving one of those big Dodge pickups that's built like a van in the front, where the driver sits high, right over the wheels. You can see that this road is two lane and pretty narrow lanes at that. They talk about widening it, but all they do is talk. I heard them question the boy. There was a car coming the other way. He couldn't swing out around that girl's car. No room. He had to cut it pretty close. Now she might have slid across and got out the passenger side so as not to open her car door into traffic. Then she walked around the front of the car and stepped right in front of that farm truck. It sort of dented in the front right corner of that truck. Busted the right headlight, dented the metal, and so on. You could see where the post hit her head. She didn't realize a car would be so close. He said he saw her out of the corner of his eyes just as he hit her. He said there wasn't anything he could have done about it, and that kid is absolutely right. He was on his way home, and my guess is she was on her way to that gas station up across from the plaza, that stays open way late. When the ambulance came the medical fellow said she was dead. Massive skull fractures, he said. But he said it would be declared a DOA and the certificate would be made out at the hospital. Let me see. They took her away, no need for sirens. They'd got'her ID from her purse in the car. The keys were in the ignition. It wouldn't start. When the wrecker came, the fellow looked at the gas gauge on the woman's car, and he had a can of gas on the back of the wrecker. He put some in and it started right up. I forget who drove it away. They took it down to the City Police Station. By that time the television truck was here, but there was nothing to take pictures of. So they just got the facts and used their radio to call them in. There was no cause to hold the Webbel boy. He was too shook to drive, but by then his father and his brother had arrived, and the brother drove the truck on back home. Their place is in the northwest part of the county. I guess that's all of it. You got any other… theory, mister?"