Whispers (43 page)

“Are you serious?” Goldfield asked.

“Oh, yes,” Hilary said. “Very serious.”

“And you thought—”

“Yes.”

“God, it must have been a shock to see him and think he’d come back!” Goldfield said. “But all I can tell you is that the resemblance must be coincidental. Because Frye is dead. I’ve never seen a man any deader than he was.”

They thanked Goldfield for his time and patience, and he escorted them out to the reception area.

Tony stopped at the desk and asked Agnes, the secretary, for the name of the funeral home that had claimed Frye’s body.

She looked through the files and said, “It was Angels’ Hill Mortuary.”

Hilary wrote down the address.

Goldfield said, “You don’t still think—”

“No,” Tony said. “But on the other hand, we’ve got to pursue every lead. At least, that’s what they taught me at the police academy.”

Eyes hooded, frowning, Goldfield watched them as they walked away.

 
At Angels’ Hill Mortuary, Hilary waited in the Jeep while Tony went inside to talk to the mortician who had handled the body of Bruno Frye. They had agreed that he would be able to obtain the information faster if he went in alone and used his LAPD identification.

Angels’ Hill was a big operation with a fleet of hearses, twelve roomy viewing chapels, and a large staff of morticians and technicians. Even in the business office, the lighting was indirect and relaxing, and the colors were somber yet rich, and the floor was covered with plush wall-to-wall carpet. The decor was meant to convey a hushed appreciation for the mystery of death; but to Tony, all it conveyed was a loud and clear statement about the profitability of the funeral business.

The receptionist was a cute blonde in a gray skirt and maroon blouse. Her voice was soft, smooth, whispery, but it did not contain even a slight hint of sexual suggestiveness or invitation. It was a voice that had been carefully trained to project consolation, heartfelt solace, respect, and low-key but genuine concern. Tony wondered if she used the same cool funeral tone when she cried encouragement to her lover in bed, and that thought chilled him.

She located the file on Bruno Frye and found the name of the technician who had worked on the body. “Sam Hardesty. I believe Sam is in one of the preparation rooms at the moment. We’ve had a couple of recent admissions,” she said, as if she were working in a hospital rather than a mortuary. “I’ll see if he can spare you a few minutes. I’m not sure how far along he is in the treatment. If he can get free, he’ll meet you in the employees’ lounge.”

She took Tony to the lounge to wait. The room was small but pleasant. Comfortable chairs were pushed up against the walls. There were ashtrays and all kinds of magazines. A coffee machine. A soda machine. A bulletin board covered with notices about bowling leagues and garage sales and car pools.

Tony was leafing through a four-page mimeographed copy of the
Angels’ Hill Employee News
when Sam Hardesty arrived from one of the preparation rooms. Hardesty looked unnervingly like an automobile mechanic. He was wearing a rumpled white jumpsuit that zipped up the front; there were several small tools (the purpose of which Tony did not want to know) clipped to Hardesty’s breast pocket. He was a young man, in his late twenties, with long brown hair and sharp features.

“Detective Clemenza?”

“Yes.”

Hardesty held out his hand, and Tony shook it with some reluctance, wondering what it had touched just moments ago.

“Suzy said you wanted to talk to me about one of the accounts.” Hardesty had been trained by the same voice coach who had worked with Suzy, the blond receptionist.

Tony said, “I understand you were responsible for preparing Bruno Frye’s body for shipment to Santa Rosa last Thursday.”

“That’s correct. We were cooperating with a mortuary up in St. Helena.”

“Would you please tell me exactly what you did with the corpse after you picked it up at the morgue?”

Hardesty looked at him curiously. “Well, we brought the deceased here and treated him.”

“You didn’t stop anywhere between the morgue and here?”

“No.”

“From the moment the body was consigned to you until you relinquished it at the airport, was there ever a time when it was alone?”

“Alone? Only for a minute or two. It was a rush job because we had to put the deceased aboard a Friday afternoon flight. Say, can you tell me what this is all about? What are you after?”

“I’m not sure,” Tony said. “But maybe if I ask enough questions I’ll find out. Did you embalm him?”

“Certainly,” Hardesty said. “We had to because he was being shipped on a public conveyance. The law requires us to hook out the soft organs and embalm the deceased before putting him on a public conveyance.”

“Hook out?” Tony asked.

“I’m afraid it’s not very pleasant,” Hardesty said. “But the intestines and stomach and certain other organs pose a real problem for us. Filled with decaying waste as they are, those parts of the body tend to deteriorate a great deal faster than other tissues. To prevent unpleasant odors and embarrassingly noisy gas accumulations at the viewing, and for ideal preservation of the deceased even after burial, it’s necessary to remove as many of those organs as we can. We use a sort of telescoping instrument with a retractable hook on one end. We insert it in the anal passage and—”

Tony felt the blood drain out of his face, and he quickly raised one hand to halt Hardesty. “Thank you. I believe that’s all I’ve got to hear. I get the picture.”

“I warned you it wasn’t particularly pleasant.”

“Not particularly,” Tony agreed. Something seemed to be stuck in his throat. He coughed into his hand. It was still down there. It would probably be down there until he got out of this place. “Well,” he said to Hardesty, “I think you’ve told me everything I needed to know.”

Frowning thoughtfully, Hardesty said, “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but there
was
one peculiar thing connected with the Frye assignment.”

“What’s that?”

“It happened two days after we shipped the deceased to Santa Rosa,” Hardesty said. “It was Sunday afternoon. The day before yesterday. Some guy called up and wanted to talk to the technician who handled Bruno Frye. I was here because my days off are Wednesday and Thursday, so I took the call. He was very angry. He accused me of doing a quick and sloppy job on the deceased. That wasn’t true. I did the best work I could under the circumstances. But the deceased had lain in the hot sun for a few hours, and then he’d been refrigerated. And there were those stab wounds and the coroner’s incisions. Let me tell you, Mr. Clemenza, the flesh was not in very good condition when I received the deceased. I mean, you couldn’t expect him to look lifelike. Besides, I wasn’t responsible for cosmetic work. That was taken care of by the funeral director up there in St. Helena. I tried to tell this guy on the phone that it wasn’t my fault, but he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise.”

“Did he give his name?” Tony asked.

“No. He just got angrier and angrier. He was screaming at me and crying, carrying on like a lunatic. He was in real agony. I thought he must be a relative of the deceased, someone half out of his mind with grief. That’s why I was so patient with him. But then, when he got really hysterical, he told me that
he
was Bruno Frye.”

“He did what?”

“Yeah. He said
he
was Bruno Frye and that some day he might just come back down here and tear me apart because of what I’d done to him.”

“What else did he say?”

“That was it. As soon as he started with that kind of stuff, I knew he was a nut, so I hung up on him.”

Tony felt as if he had just been given a transfusion of icewater; he was cold inside as well as out.

Sam Hardesty saw that he was shocked. “What’s wrong?”

“I was just wondering if three people are enough to make it mass hysteria.”

“Huh?”

“Was there anything peculiar about this caller’s voice?”

“How’d you know that?”

“A very deep voice?”

“He rumbled,” Hardesty said.

“And gravelly, coarse?”

“That’s right. You know him?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Who is he?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me,” Hardesty said.

Tony shook his head. “Sorry. This is confidential police business.”

Hardesty was disappointed; the tentative smile on his face slipped away.

“Well, Mr. Hardesty, you’ve been a great help. Thank you for your time and trouble.”

Hardesty shrugged. “It wasn’t anything.”

It was something, Tony thought. Something indeed. But I sure as hell don’t know what it means.

In the short hall outside the employees’ lounge, they went in different directions, but after a few steps Tony turned and said, “Mr. Hardesty?”

Hardesty stopped, looked back. “Yes?”

“Answer a personal question?”

“What is it?”

“What made you decide to do . . . this kind of work?”

“My favorite uncle was a funeral director.”

“I see.”

“He was a lot of fun. Especially with kids. He loved kids. I wanted to be like him,” Hardesty said. “You always had the feeling that Uncle Alex knew some enormous, terribly important secret. He did a lot of magic tricks for us kids, but it was more than that. I always thought that what he did for a living was very magical and mysterious, too, and that it was because of his work that he’d learned something nobody else knew.”

“Have you found his secret yet?”

“Yes,” Hardesty said. “I think maybe I have.”

“Can you tell me?”

“Sure. What Uncle Alex knew, and what I’ve come to learn, is that you’ve got to treat the dead with every bit as much concern and respect as you do the living. You can’t just put them out of mind, bury them and forget about them. The lessons they taught us when they were alive are still with us. All the things they did to us and for us are still in our minds, still shaping and changing us. And because of how they’ve affected us, we’ll have certain influences on people who will be alive long after we’re dead. So in a way, the dead never really die at all. They just go on and on. Uncle Alex’s secret was just this: The dead are people, too.”

Tony stared at him for a moment, not certain what he should say. But then the question came unbidden: “Are you a religious man, Mr. Hardesty?”

“I wasn’t when I started doing this work,” he said. “But I am now. I certainly am now.”

“Yes, I suppose you are.”

Outside, when Tony got behind the wheel of the Jeep and pulled the driver’s door shut, Hilary said, “Well? Did he embalm Frye?”

“Worse than that.”

“What’s worse than that?”

“You don’t want to know.”

He told her about the telephone call that Hardesty had received from the man claiming to be Bruno Frye.

“Ahhh,” she said softly. “Forget what I said about shared psychoses. This is proof!”

“Proof of what? That Frye’s alive? He can’t be alive. In addition to other things too disgusting to mention, he was embalmed. No one can sustain even a deep coma when his veins and arteries are full of embalming fluid instead of blood.”

“But at least that phone call is proof that something out of the ordinary is happening.”

“Not really,” Tony said.

“Can you take this to your captain?”

“There’s no point in doing that. To Harry Lubbock, it’ll look like nothing more sinister than a crank call, a hoax.”

“But the
voice!
”

“That won’t be enough to convince Harry.”

She sighed. “So what’s next?”

“We’ve got to do some heavy thinking,” Tony said. “We’ve got to examine the situation from every angle and see if there’s something we’ve missed.”

“Can we think at lunch?” she asked. “I’m starved.”

“Where do you want to eat?”

“Since we’re both rumpled and wrung out, I suggest some place dark and private.”

“A back booth at Casey’s Bar?”

“Perfect,” she said.

As he drove to Westwood, Tony thought about Hardesty and about how, in one way, the dead were not really dead at all.

Bruno Frye stretched out in the back of the Dodge van and tried to get some sleep.

The van was not the one in which he had driven to Los Angeles last week. That vehicle had been impounded by the police. By now it had been claimed by a representative of Joshua Rhinehart, who was executor of the Frye estate and responsible for the proper liquidation of its assets. This van wasn’t gray, like the first one, but dark blue with white accent lines. Frye had paid cash for it yesterday morning at a Dodge dealership on the outskirts of San Francisco. It was a handsome machine.

He had spent nearly all of yesterday on the road and had arrived in Los Angeles last night. He’d gone straight to Katherine’s house in Westwood.

She was using the name Hilary Thomas this time, but he knew she was Katherine.

Katherine.

Back from the grave again.

The rotten bitch.

He had broken into the house, but she hadn’t been there. Then she’d finally come home just before dawn, and he’d almost gotten his hands on her. He still couldn’t figure out why the police had shown up.

During the past four hours, he’d driven by her house five times, but he hadn’t seen anything important. He didn’t know if she was there or not.

He was confused. Mixed up. And frightened. He didn’t know what he should do next, didn’t know how he should go about locating her. His thoughts were becoming increasingly strange, fragmented, difficult to control. He felt intoxicated, dizzy, disjointed, even though he hadn’t drunk anything.

He was tired. So very tired. No sleep since Sunday night. And not much then. If he could just get caught up on his sleep, he would be able to think clearly again.