Koko (56 page)

“What do you mean, the police will be there?” Judy asked. “I think that’s completely
ridiculous.”

It was ten o’clock the next morning, and the Pooles were driving Harry Beevers and
Conor Linklater north to the small town of Milburn, New York, for Tina Pumo’s funeral.
They had been driving for two hours and, thanks to Harry’s directions, had managed
to lose their way in search of a shortcut. Harry now sat with empty hands in the front
passenger seat of Michael’s Audi, fiddling with the digital dial of the radio; Judy
sat in back with Conor and the unfolded map.

“You don’t understand the first thing about police work,” Harry said. “Are you always
this aggressive about your ignorance?”

Judy opened both her eyes and her mouth, and Harry hurriedly added, “I apologize,
I’m sorry, I should not have said that. Pardon, pardon. I take Tina’s death very personally,
and I’m also a little touchy. Honest, Judy—I’m sorry.”

“Follow the signs to Binghamton,” Conor said. “We’re about forty-fifty miles away
now, the way I figure it. Can you find something besides that noise?”

“This is a murder case,” Harry said, ignoring Conor but changing the station anyhow.
“It’s big business. Whoever is in charge of the case will be at the funeral, looking
us and everybody else over. This is his chance to meet the cast of characters. And
he’s thinking that whoever killed Tina might show up to see him buried. Cops always
come to things like this.”

“I wish Pat could have come with us,” Judy said. “And I hate big bands, all that phony
nostalgia.”

Harry switched off the radio.

For a time they drove on in silence past a landscape of snowy empty fields and dark
stands of trees straight as soldiers in formation. Slashes of grey and black stood
out starkly in the snow. Now and then a farmhouse stood like a mirage between the
fields and the woods. The map rattled in Conor’s hands, and Judy made a series of
little sniffling noises. The past had died, Michael thought, died as part of the present
so that now it was really just the past.

When he had arrived back in Westerholm, a nervous Judy had welcomed him with a kiss
in which he could taste resentment. Home. She had asked about Singapore, about Bangkok,
about traveling with Harry Beevers; she poured out measures of an expensive whiskey
that she must have bought for this moment and which, he saw, she had generously sampled
in his absence. She followed him upstairs and watched him unpack. She followed him
into the bathroom while he ran a tub. She was still sitting in the bathroom, listening
to his edited version of the trip, when he asked her if she had enjoyed her meal with
Bob Bunce.

She gave a jerky nod.

He had merely remembered to ask, but he felt as though she had shrieked at him, or
thrown something at him. She raised her glass and took a swallow of the expensive
whiskey.

He asked the question to which he already knew the answer, and she gave him a prompt,
flat denial.

“Okay,” he said, but he knew, and she knew that he did. She gulped at her drink and
walked out of the bathroom.

“It’s hard to believe that Tina Pumo could have come from a place like this,” Judy
said. “He seemed so urbane. Didn’t Tina always seem urbane?”

That’s right, Michael realized with a shock: Tina would have seemed urbane to Judy.

“Look good on his tombstone,” Conor said. “ ‘This was one urbane motherfucker.’ ”

St. Michael’s Cathedral, surprisingly imposing for so small a town, dwarfed the little
congregation that had gathered for Anthony Francis Pumo’s funeral. From where the
pallbearers stood Michael could see a handful of old women, half a dozen men with
weather-roughened faces who must have gone to school with Tina, a few younger couples,
single old men and women beautiful in their unreflective dignity, and a gaunt Asian
man holding the hand of a beautiful child. Vinh and his daughter. At the back of the
church stood a tall moustached man in a handsome suit, and another, younger man in
an even handsomer suit whose roguish face looked vaguely familiar. Among the other
pallbearers were a stocky, brusque man with a wider, less interesting version of Tina’s
face, and a short powerful old man with heavy shoulders and hands like scoops: Tina’s
brother, who managed a muffler shop, and his father, a retired farmer.

An angular old priest with shining white hair described a shy, eager schoolboy who
had served “with great honor and distinction in Vietnam” and “proved his inner strength
by triumphing in the turbulent waters of the restaurant business in the city that
eventually claimed his life.” That was how it looked from here—one of their children
had wandered into the forest of New York City and fallen prey to savage animals.

Out at the cemetery, Pleasant Hill, Michael stood alongside Judy, Beevers, and Conor
while the priest read the service. Now and then he looked up at the dull grey granite
clouds. He was aware of Tommy Pumo, Tina’s brother, staring at Vinh with outright
hostility. Tommy was evidently a difficult character.

First the father and brother, then all in turn dropped clods of earth onto the lowered
coffin.

As Poole stepped back from the edge of the grave he heard a loud voice coming from
further down the hill. Near the row of parked cars, Tommy Pumo was waving his arms
at the well-dressed man whose face had seemed familiar in the cathedral. Pumo’s brother
took a furious, almost swaggering step forward. The other man smiled and spoke, and
Tommy Pumo’s face twisted, and he stepped forward again.

“Let’s see what’s going on,” Beevers said. He began to move downhill toward the little
group of people frozen near the cars.

“Excuse me, sir,” came a voice from just behind him, and Poole looked back to see
the tall moustached man who had been in the congregation. Close up, his moustache
was thick and lustrous, but the man conveyed no impression of vanity—he seemed easily
authoritative, calm and commanding. He was an inch taller than Michael and very solidly
built. “You are Dr. Poole? Mrs. Poole?”

Harry had stopped moving downhill, and was standing still, looking back up at the
man.

“And you are Mr. Beevers?”

Beevers’ face went very smooth, as if he had just been paid some tremendous compliment.

“My name is Lieutenant Murphy, and I am the detective conducting the investigation
of your friend’s death.”

“Aha,” Beevers said to Judy.

Murphy raised his thick eyebrows.

“We were wondering when we would meet you.”

Murphy took it in slowly, easily. “I’d like to have a short talk with you back at
the father’s house. You were going there before you left to go back to the city?”

“We are at your disposal, Lieutenant,” Harry said.

Smiling, Murphy turned away and walked down the hill.

Beevers raised his eyebrows and tilted his head in Judy’s direction, wordlessly asking
if Poole had told her about Underhill. Poole shook his head. They watched the detective
reach the bottom of the hill and say a few words to Pumo’s father.

“Murphy,” Beevers said. “Isn’t that perfect? Talk about type-casting.”

“Why does he want to talk to you?” Judy asked.

“Background checks, filling in the blank spaces, getting the complete picture.” Beevers
shoved his hands in his coat pockets and swiveled around to look back at the gravesite.
Now only a few of the older people still lingered there. “That little Maggie didn’t
show up, damn it. I wonder what
she
told Murphy about our little jaunt.”

Beevers intended to say more, but he closed his mouth as another mourner approached
them. It was the man at whom Tommy Pumo had shouted.

“Good cop, bad cop,” Beevers whispered, and turned away, all but whistling.

The man turned a lopsided grin on Poole and Judy and introduced
himself as David Dixon, Tina’s lawyer. “You must be his old service friends. It’s
nice to meet you. But haven’t we met before?” He and Michael worked out that they
had met at Saigon several years ago.

Beevers had turned back to the group and Michael introduced everybody. “It’s nice
of you to come,” Beevers said.

“Tina and I spent a lot of time together, working on various little things. I’d like
to think we were friends, and not just lawyer and client.”

“The best clients do become friends,” Harry said, instantly adopting the professional
pose Poole had seen in Washington. “I’m a fellow attorney, by the way.”

Dixon paid no attention to these statements. “I tried to get Maggie Lah to drive up
here with me, but she didn’t think she could handle it. And she didn’t know if Tina’s
family would know how to take her.”

“You have Maggie’s number?” Harry asked. “I’d like to get in touch with her, so if
you do have it—”

“Not this second,” Dixon said.

Michael filled the silence by asking about the Vietnamese chef. He wondered if the
man had gone back to the house with the other mourners.

Dixon guffawed. “He wouldn’t be very welcome at the house. Didn’t you see Tommy Pumo
going nuts down there?”

“He must be taking his brother’s death very hard,” Judy said.

“It’s more greed than grief,” Dixon said. “Tina left everything, including the restaurant
and his loft, to the person he felt had done the most to help him make his place a
success.”

They were all attentive now.

“Who happened to be Vinh, of course. He’s going to keep the restaurant going. We ought
to be open again just about on schedule.”

“The brother wanted the restaurant?”

“Tommy wanted the money. Years back, Tina borrowed money from his father to buy the
first two floors of his building. You can imagine what happened to the value of the
real estate. Tommy thought he was going to get rich, and he’s hopping mad.”

Down at the bottom of the hill, one of the two old couples who had lingered at the
grave shyly approached Michael and said that they would guide him to the Pumo house.

As they drove up a long unpaved drive past thick old oaks toward a neat two-story
farmhouse with a wraparound porch, the old woman, an aunt of Tina’s, said, “Just pull
up next to the house
alongside the drive. Everybody does it. Ed and I always do it, anyhow.” She turned
to Conor, who held Judy on his lap. “You’re not married, are you, young man?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I want you to meet my daughter—she’ll be inside the house helping out with
the food and the coffee, I’m sure. Good-looking girl, and named after me. Grace Hallet.
You be sure to have a nice talk with her.”

“Grace.”

“I’d be happy to help your daughter dispense the mead and sweet potato pie,” Harry
said. “How about me?”

“Oh, you’re too famous, but this fellow here is just good folks. You work with your
hands, don’t you?”

“Carpenter,” Conor said.

“Anybody can plainly see,” said Grace.

Almost as soon as they got through the door, Walter Pumo, Tina’s father, took Michael
and Beevers aside and said he wanted to talk to them in private. In the dining room,
the table had been heaped with food—a sliced ham, a turkey ready to be carved, vessels
nearly the size of rowboats filled with potato salad, platters of coldcuts and pots
of mustard, doughy little muffins and slabs of butter. A crowd circled the table,
carrying plates and talking. The rest of the room seemed filled with women. Conor
had been taken by the hand and introduced to a very pretty young blonde woman who
had a bright distracted manner that was like a welded carapace.

“I know where we can find a little open space,” Walter Pumo told them, “at least I
hope I do. Your friend seems like he’s busy with young Grace.”

He was leading them down the hallway that led to the back of the farmhouse. “If they
come into this room, we’ll just heave ’em out.” He was a head shorter than both men,
and as wide as the two of them together. His shoulders nearly filled the hall.

The old man poked his head through a doorway, then said, “Come in, boys.”

Michael and Beevers entered a small room crowded with an old leather sofa, a round
table stacked with farming magazines, a metal filing cabinet, and an untidy desk with
a kitchen chair
before it. Clippings, framed photographs and certificates covered the walls. “My late
wife used to call this my den. I always hated the word den. Bears have dens, badgers
have dens. Call it my office, I used to say, but whenever I came in here, she’d say,
‘Going off to hide in your den?’ ” He was talking the edge off his nervousness.

Tina’s father straddled the kitchen chair backwards and waved the two younger men
toward the couch. He smiled at them, and Michael found himself liking the old man
very much.

“Everything changes on you, doesn’t it?” he said. “Time was, I’d be certain I knew
more about my boy than anyone else in the world. Both my boys. Now I don’t even know
where to begin. You met Tommy?”

Michael nodded. He could almost smell Harry’s impatience.