Die Smiling (20 page)

I watched Brianna stand at the front of the room and thank the people filing by for coming to pay their respects. Two granite-faced funeral home guys were rolling the casket outside to the waiting hearse. Bud finally got a minute and sought me out.

“What's up? Lohman looks as white as a sheet.”

“Yeah, and for good reason. He says his people didn't reattach the lips, and he doesn't know who did or why.”

“I don't get it.”

“Me either, that's why I'm sticking around to question the staff. This happened for a reason, believe you me.”

“Are you sayin' the perp broke in and did it?” Bud's frown was back. “Why would he do something like that?”

I shrugged. “Go on with Brianna, she needs you. At least, she doesn't have to remember her sister the way we do.”

I told Black that he needed to accompany Jude to the cemetery and then take her back to Cedar Bend, and he argued a couple of minutes, wanting to stay with me, but finally agreed. I gave the chapel time to clear out, and then I sat down in a room chock full of red-faced, mortified morticians and gave them the third degree.

I started off at the top of the heap, Mr. Lohman, himself. So far, he'd pretty much given me the three monkeys/
Hogan's Heroes
routine, i.e., I know nothing, I see nothing, I hear nothing. He also looked on the verge of having a very serious nervous breakdown, probably because he was beginning to realize what kind of lawsuit could come out of this sort of thing. His hands shook as he got out a pack of Marlboros and a Bic lighter from the inside pocket of his suit coat. He held them ready, but didn't light up even though he sure did want to.

“All right, Mr. Lohman. I want you to think about this and tell me how it possibly could have happened. I take it you didn't check the body before the service?”

“No, ma'am, not when it's a closed casket funeral. We put the departed inside and lock it down right after they're prepared.”

“When was the last time anybody opened that casket?”

“We finished her preparation yesterday morning. That's when we locked the casket and brought it in for today's service.”

“Does anybody watch the building at night? A security guard? Night watchman?”

“We've got a night watchman. I called him in right after we found that Ms. Swensen's body had been…” He strove for the right words and came up with “…disturbed. There he is, sitting in the green chair beside the door. Walter Costin is his name.” He motioned the man over. Costin had been watching us warily, like he thought he was in big trouble, and guess what, he was. He got up quickly and headed in our direction. He looked nervous, too.

Walter Costin was probably around thirty, but was dressed more like a sixteen-year-old. He had dark brown, curly hair, that almost reached his shoulders, and big, expressive eyes with long black eyelashes. About six feet tall and rather on the long and lanky side, he was wearing a black T-shirt, flared jeans, and a big silver swastika on a chain around his neck. Oooh, how cool can you get? I noticed that he also had a swastika tattooed on his right wrist.

“You a Hitler fan, Costin, or what?”

He smiled, and suddenly didn't seem so apprehensive any more. He started to talk in this deep, gravelly voice, sort of like Darth Vader's, except that Costin spoke rapid-fire with clipped-off, enunciated words. “No, ma'am. This…” he held up the swastika by its chain, “originated a long time before the Nazis ever came to power. Truth is, it's near three thousand years old and used mostly as a symbol for good. They've found coins and pottery with swastika symbols on them dating way back to ancient Troy, as far back as 1000
B.C
., I think.”

Okay, so the guy thought he was Indiana Jones. “Is that right? Troy, huh, the big wooden horse, and all that?”

“Yes, ma'am. Swastika comes from a Sanskrit word,
su
. It meant ‘good.' Pretty ironic, huh?”

“Yeah, ironic. I take it you're a history major, something like that?”

“Yes, ma'am, that I am. I commute over to Missouri State in Springfield. I got a major in Ancient Civ and I'm working on my doctorate. I picked up this medallion on an archaeology dig last summer in Turkey. University sponsored it.”

“Better watch where you wear that thing, Walter. Some people are still sensitive to what it stood for in the 1940s, and I'm one of them.”

“Yes, ma'am. I understand exactly what you're saying. And everybody calls me Walt.” Big grin.

Walter was a real friendly sort, and not precisely what I was expecting for a mortuary night security man, nope, never would've guessed such a guy to be on familiar terms with Helen of Troy's spending money and drinking cups.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Just a couple of weeks. Wanted to earn some extra money for the next dig. It's in Greece.”

“You're the one in charge here at night, right?”

“Yes, ma'am. I come in at eight o'clock in the evening and stay until around seven-thirty the next morning when Mr. Lohman gets here.”

“And you were here last night?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary?”

“No. It was real quiet, just like normal, nothing going on.”

“Where was the body when you got here yesterday?”

“It was locked down in the Swensen viewing room, ready for the service, just like all our other clients were. Nobody could've gotten access to any of those viewing rooms without the alarm going off.”

“Well, it's pretty certain that somebody did just that, now isn't it?”

He gave a little shrug, nodded, didn't seem too overly concerned that somebody had a private sewing bee with one of their clients.

“Nothing unusual happened? No peculiar phone calls, unidentified noises, bad vibes?”

“No, ma'am.”

“What about the outside doors? How do they lock?”

“They all have automatic latches. Once I get here, I can fix them to lock from the inside whenever they close. You can push the lever down to get out, but nobody can come in without a key.”

“Who has keys?”

“Me and Mr. Lohman, is all. He always gets here early and unlocks the front door for everybody else. All the other doors always lock up behind anybody leaving the building.”

“And you said nobody was here with you? You were alone the entire night.”

When he hesitated, I knew I had him.

“Okay, Walt, you gotta tell me the truth. This is a very serious matter. Who was in here with you?”

Walter Costin gave a furtive sidelong glance at his boss, who had moved away and was speaking in low tones into a cell phone and by the expression on his face just barely holding back unbridled hysteria. Talk about bad publicity for a funeral parlor. Headline: “Free Casket Spray If Somebody Tampers with Corpse. Lost Lips Found at Lohman's.”

Walter lowered his voice, finally looked concerned about our mutual problem. “I don't want to lie to you, Detective. I do have a friend who comes by here sometimes at night. We hook up my PlayStation 2, play all night long, sometimes. We don't hurt anything, but Mr. Lohman'll fire my ass, if he finds out I let somebody else in here after hours. Yeah, and my girlfriend came by last night, too, and we got together, you know what I mean.” He wiggled his eyebrows in a suggestive manner, but I didn't bite.

“Got together? What does that mean?”

“Had sex.”

But of course, they did. Probably in a closed casket, judging by the other things going on around this place. “Okay. Where did this interaction with your girlfriend occur?”

“Back in the back, in the storeroom. Don't tell Lohman, but I keep an old cot back there for me to sleep on between my rounds. We didn't hurt a thing, I swear to God. Nobody was in here but us. See, it's like this, we don't get to spend much time together 'cause she dances out at one of the gentlemen's clubs at night and I go to classes in the daytime so we meet down here and do it, you know? It's the only time we've got to be together.”

“What about the other guy? The one you said plays games with you. Where was he when you were in the back with your dancer friend?”

“He was playing in the lunchroom. He was getting close to breaking both our scores and didn't want to stop.”

“So you're saying that both these individuals were here with you last night?”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm real sorry about what happened. I feel real bad somebody got in that lady's casket, but Mr. Lohman said whoever it was fixed her up real good, expert like. I sure can't figure why anybody'd do something like that, though.”

“Yeah, it tweaked my curiosity, too. I'll need the names of both your friends. Somebody got in here last night and messed with the body, probably while you were busy humping your girlfriend.”

Costin glanced around some more; now he was getting really jittery. “Okay, okay. I'm gonna tell you the truth now. Sometimes I forget to lock the back door, maybe, once in a while, I guess, but I never thought much about it. Hell, who wants to break into a funeral parlor?”

Yeah. Who, indeed?

“And I would've heard anybody coming in that rear door, I swear on a Bible. Pam and me were in the room right beside that door and we were just in there fifteen minutes, twenty tops.”

Fifteen minutes wasn't exactly the six-hour tantric sex enjoyed at Sting's house, but still plenty of time to get the job done while some freak had his way with the nearest corpse.

“All right. I need to talk to Pam and your other friend. Give me their names and where I can find them.”

“Oh, God, no, don't do that, please. Pam'll freak out.”

“Too bad. You can call her and tell her to come down here. Or I guess I can talk to her at the sheriff's office. But I want to talk to her right now, got it?”

“Yes, ma'am. She's probably still asleep, but I'll call her.”

“What about the other guy? The one playing the game?”

“Shit, he's not gonna like getting caught up in the middle of this, either. See, he works over at the coroner's office. Everyone around here calls him Shaggy, but his real name's John Becker.”

I froze where I stood, absolutely stunned for a second or two. What? Shaggy? Here? I frowned. “How are you acquainted with John Becker, Mr. Costin?”

“We met after I got this job. He's been around at the medical examiner's morgue when I go pick up the bodies. We got to talkin' one day about PlayStation games and then started hangin' out some. You know Shaggy?”

“Yes, I know him. And I know where to find him. Get on the phone and get Pam down here right now.”

I sat down while Walt called his girlfriend and tried to figure out what the hell Shaggy had to do with all of this. One thing I did know. I didn't like his involvement, not one bit.

The day they had her Momma's funeral was rainy and overcast with gusty winds whipping through the grave markers and shaking rain from the trees above the mourners' heads. Everyone was solemn and tiptoed around whispering things about poor little abused children and how no one knew what was really going on in that house, not even the daddy, that the mother seemed so interested in her girls, entering them in all those beauty pageants and working tirelessly on their costumes and dance lessons. Then the adults would come up and hug the girls and tell them that they were safe now, that nothing like that would happen ever again, and that they should be brave and think about a very good future.

After the burial when they returned home, the older one sat on the living room sofa, watching the mourners moving around and filling their plates with the food spread out on the dining room table. Her eyes remained mostly on the boy. He was talking to a friend of his from the high school, a girl, a really pretty and popular one. She was looking up at him, smiling and seeming to hang on his every word. The older one wondered what he was saying to her, and if he wanted to lift up the pretty girl's skirt and touch her in the private places like he did with her. She felt jealousy rise up inside her in a way she'd never felt before, but then her stepdaddy sat down beside her. He was holding Sissy on his lap, and he draped his arm around the older one and pulled her head down upon his shoulder.

“I'm so sorry, girls, that she hurt you like that. I didn't know how bad it was, I swear to you, I didn't know she used that whip on you, or any of the rest of it.”

Sissy snuggled deeper into his arms, and he kissed her on top of her head, and then he kissed the older one on the temple. She did feel safer now that Momma was dead, and Stepdaddy had promised to take good care of them. He held them both for a long time, and when Bubby ran up, the older one pulled him onto her own lap, and they sat together, a regular family, at last.

In the days and months after Momma was in the ground, Stepdaddy was very nice to the older one. He said she was old enough now to have a room of her own, and he moved Sissy downstairs into Bubby's room. Sissy made no complaints, said nothing at all, just helped him move her things. She never said anything bad or unkind to the older one now, but obeyed every single thing they told her to do. The boy had the damning videocassette locked up in a footlocker in his bedroom and kept the key around his neck on a chain, and Sissy knew that all he had to do was take it to the police and she would be taken away forever for killing her own mother.

Sometimes they took Sissy with them into the Winnebago and let her play their game. She became a slave to all of them and had to do things in their quests they didn't want to do. Sissy always did what they said, especially the mean, secret things, and she seemed to like doing it. She said that being a slave wasn't so bad.

But things weren't perfect, either. Stepdaddy refused to let the older one date the boy, or anyone else, even though she had reached sixteen and all the other girls in the pageants had boyfriends. So she and the boy continued to sneak around and have sex wherever they could, and now that she had her own room, it was easy for the boy to climb up the tree at the back of the house and sneak across the roof to the window beside her bed. And the fact that Stepdaddy had started to drink more than he used to helped them a lot, too. He seemed lonely, and he often drank after the kids had gone to bed. He sat down in the den alone in the dark and drank a twelve-pack of Budweiser and watched horror movies. But it didn't matter; he always got up the next morning, fixed breakfast, and got them to school, so his drinking habit didn't hurt anything.

One night when the boy was in the older one's bed and filming their lovemaking, they finished, breathless and sated, and lay together afterward, whispering about him going off to college soon and how she could come with his parents to visit him. Then they heard the heavy footsteps coming up the stairs and knew it was her stepdaddy. As soon as the boy heard the doorknob turn, he slid down onto the floor beside the wall. The older one pretended to be asleep, and when her stepdaddy came close to the bed, she could smell the booze on him and knew by the way he was staggering that he was even drunker than usual.

“Hey, baby,” he whispered, low, slurred. “You 'wake?”

The older one pretended to rouse from sleep. “Yes, Daddy. What's wrong?”

“Nothin', jus' thinkin' 'bout you bein' up here by yourself. You okay? Not lonesome, are you?”

“I'm fine. I like it up here.”

“Good, I wan you to be happy. You know that? I wan you real happy.”

“I'm happy, Daddy.”

He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her thigh. “Gimme a hug, baby.”

The older one sat up and put her arms around him, but he smelled awful, of Camel cigarettes and beer and the motor oil he used at work. He hugged her close, too tightly, and caught his fingers in her hair. “You sure got good lookin', know it? More'n Sissy now.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” she whispered.

Her stepdaddy held on, and she wished he'd go away. “You ain't my real kid, so you can kiss me and nothin'd be wrong with it.”

She began to struggle. “No, I don't want to, please, Daddy, go away, you're drunk.”

“Gimme a kiss g'night first.”

Behind her stepdaddy's back, the older one saw the boy rise up on his knees beside the bed, but she thrust her stepdaddy away and grabbed the telephone on her bedside table. “Go away and leave me alone or I'm gonna call 911! I mean it! I will!”

When she started to punch in the numbers, he got up and staggered away. “I just wan love you, 's all,” he said groggily from the door. “You'd like it, too. You'd like bein' with me.”

Trembling, she ran to the door and listened to him stumble back down the steps, grumbling to himself and half falling in his drunken stupor. The boy came up behind her, and he was so angry that his voice shook. “That fucker. He was gonna rape you. I'll kill him if he ever touches you!”

“Ssh, or he'll hear you. He's just drunk. He doesn't know what he was doing. He won't even remember coming up here in the morning. If he wanted to rape me, he would've tried it.”

“Like hell. He's gonna be up here every night now, and I can't always be here to protect you.”

The older one liked that the boy wanted to protect her, and she went into his arms and pulled him down on the floor. “Make love to me, I love you,” she whispered.

They lay there, kissing and touching, until the girl stiffened in his arms when she heard a sound filtering up from downstairs. “Wait, wait a minute, I hear Bubby crying…”

The boy stopped kissing her, and they lay still a moment, still breathing hard. Downstairs, the younger boy's cries filtered up the stairwell. “Oh, my God, he's doing something to Bubby.”

She grabbed her robe, and he pulled on his jeans and they ran downstairs and along the corridor to Bubby and Sissy's bedroom. Bubby was standing beside his bed, crying, but he was alone. Sissy's bed was empty.

“Where's Sissy?” she whispered.

Bubby sniffled. “He took her like he always does. I never get to sleep with him, and Sissy always gets to.”

The older one's blood ran cold, and the boy cursed under his breath. They tiptoed down the hall to the master bedroom and threw open the door. Stepdaddy had Sissy spread-eagled on the bed, holding her legs down, one hand over her mouth, the other under her nightgown. They could hear her screaming muffled under his palm.

“Stop!” the older one cried, running toward him and trying to pull him off her little sister. The boy helped her, jerking the man off the bed with all his strength. Stepdaddy reeled under the unexpected attack, so wiped out that he fell to the floor and couldn't get up. He kept mumbling about how pretty his girls were before he grew still and lapsed into loud snores.

Sissy threw herself into the older one's arms, who held her tightly and tried to comfort her hysterical crying. “Has he done this before, Sissy?”

The younger girl nodded with her face hidden in the older one's nightgown, and the boy gave the man a hard kick in his side. Sissy sobbed out, “He says all daddies do this to daughters pretty as me.”

“Oh, God, he's an animal,” the boy muttered, furious.

The older one felt sick in the pit of her stomach. “Sissy, why didn't you tell us?”

“I was scared. He said he'd bring Bubby instead, if I didn't sleep in his bed.”

The boy and the older one looked at each other, and she shivered with horror at what had been going on. Then Bubby ran into the room and clung to the boy, crying and saying his daddy had parked the car in the woods where nobody could see and done things to him, too. Anger rose in the older one, so hard and fast, she was afraid of herself. She said, “Let's kill him. Right now. While he's too drunk to fight back.”

The other three kids stared at her.

Then the boy said, “Are you serious? You really want to kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too,” said Sissy.

“Me, too,” said Bubby.

“Let me think,” said the boy. They all moved away from the snoring man on the floor and went out in the hall where a small night-light barely illuminated their faces. The boy paced around nervously, his fingers entwined and squeezing each other, the way he always did when he was thinking up interesting quests.

“Okay, but I'm not gonna do this by myself. You all have to help me. We're in this together, right? I'm not gonna take a murder rap for any of you, if anybody ever finds out what we've done. You understand that? You have to do it yourselves, and then you can never tell anyone, or we'll all get the electric chair.”

All three nodded, and then all three began to cry. The older one grabbed the two younger ones against her and hugged them close while the boy continued to pace and think about what to do.

“I guess we could smother him with a pillow. He's too drunk to fight. That way there won't be any wounds or blood, or nothin' like that to clean up. And there won't be any marks on the body, either. Nobody will suspect any of you. Why would they? And nobody will ever know what happened. They'll probably just think he stopped breathing for some reason. You know, died in his sleep of indeterminate causes.”

The boy sat them on the floor around him and told them exactly what they had to do and then exactly what they had to do and say the next morning. They would get up, and the older one would get the other two ready for school as if nothing had happened. She'd tell the police later that she thought her stepdaddy was just passed out again from drinking too much because that had happened every night since his wife died.

They all nodded in agreement, and the boy went upstairs and got his video camera. Then, together, they went back into the bedroom, struggled the drunken man off the floor, onto the bed, and under the covers. He groaned and moved his head slightly but did not fight them, so the boy filmed from the foot of the bed as the other three all took hold of a pillow, put it over his face, and pushed down as hard as they could until he stopped breathing. The boy turned off the camera, herded them outside, shut the door, and told them all to remember what to do in the morning. Then he sneaked out of the house and went home. The older one took Sissy and Bubby up to her bed and held them until they fell asleep. None of them cried. None of them woke up the next morning until the alarm went off for school.