Limits of Justice, The (13 page)

“I really don’t want to say anymore. It’s quite distressing.”

“There’s nothing I hate more than an unfinished story.”

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t.”

“What was it you saw, Horace, that still troubles you so much after all these years?”

“Perhaps you should go now.”

His eyes were stricken as he showed me to the door. I thanked him for what he’d told me, and scratched my name and phone number on a scrap of paper in case he wanted to tell me more. Then I followed the path back through his lovely garden, past the softly splashing fountains and the music of the wild birds. At the gate, I turned to look back, hoping Horace Hyatt had changed his mind, hoping he might finish the story that so disturbed him. He was at the door, watching me through the glass as I watched him.

Then he drew down the shade, like an eye slowly closing.

While Templeton drove, Mei-Ling rode on my lap to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, where Charlotte Preston was to be buried.

Maurice had changed the dog’s pink bow to black, which I found even more ridiculous. But I kept my mouth shut about it, because Maurice was already having difficulty bidding Mei-Ling good-bye, and I figured whoever she ended up with could change the bow to any damn color he or she pleased.

At half past one, thirty minutes before the service was to begin, we rolled through the towering wrought-iron gates of Forest Lawn. I hadn’t attended a service for the dead since Harry passed, and I hadn’t been too comfortable with that one, but I was surprised at how untroubled I felt entering Southern California’s most famous memorial park. Maybe it was the larger-than-life scale of the place, designed like a multifaceted theme park for the living, where a few hundred thousand bodies just happened to be planted beneath the pretty lawn. Or maybe it was because I’d slipped back into my old reporter’s mode, separating my professional responsibilities from my personal feelings.

We collected a complimentary map and brochure at the kiosk from a polite guy in a navy-blue blazer who reminded us the dog would have to stay in the car, according to park regulations; otherwise, we were welcome to visit any of the numerous attractions, which were open free to the public year-round. As Templeton drove on past a circular pool of spewing fountains and floating swans, heading uphill through wooded slopes, we decided that I would stay in the car with Mei-Ling, keeping her company, while Templeton attended the memorial service prior to the actual interment.

Templeton insisted I follow the map, so of course I refused, and we quickly became lost, which is easy to do on eight miles of paved road that traverse three hundred acres of well-manicured grass imbedded with more than three hundred thousand memorial tablets identical in size and shape. The roadway climbed, twisted, and constantly looped back on itself, taking us past burial sections with names like Whispering Pines, Everlasting Love, Inspiration Slope, Slumberland, Haven of Peace, Vale of Memory. Babyland, set aside for deceased toddlers, was heart-shaped, like nearby Lullabyland. At the crest of the hill, which offered sweeping views of Los Angeles on one side and distant mountains across the Valley on the other, we passed the treasure-filled museum and the monumental Hall of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, which housed the world’s largest religious painting, according to the brochure we’d been handed. At the hilltop Church of the Recessional, an olde English-style chapel of stained glass and stone, a wedding was in progress. Across the park, thousands of evergreen trees trembled in the turbulent air, and silver-lined clouds scudded over the basin, clinging to the tops of the mountains and hinting at rain.

“Lovely view.”

“Yes, it is.” Templeton glanced at the dashboard clock, which showed a quarter to two. “Now could you please get us to the church on time?”

I directed her past several more points of interest: the Triumphant Faith Terraces, the patriotic Court of Freedom, the Plaza of Mexican Heritage. When we found ourselves passing the replica of Michelangelo’s David for a third time, Templeton pulled to the curb and snatched the unopened map from my hands.

“God, you can be so male.”

“I thought you wanted to see the park.”

“After the service, not before.”

“We haven’t even gotten to the Last Supper Window.”

“I’m sure Leonardo da Vinci will forgive us.”

I glanced up at the re-creation of Michelangelo’s famous statue, a full-sized replica in pale Carrara marble that left little to the imagination.

“At least I got to see David in all his glory.”

“Keep your eyes on the road and watch for signs.”

Templeton pulled out, driving downhill with the map spread out on the steering wheel. A minute later, she turned into the parking lot of Wee Kirk O’ the Heather, a charming reproduction of a cozy Scottish chapel, where Charlotte Preston was to be eulogized. Dozens of men, women, and children were drifting into the little church, dressed in proper funeral clothes.

Templeton was climbing from the car, glancing at her watch.

“Promise me you won’t go anywhere.”

I promised, and she joined the procession of mourners moving along the walkway toward the chapel doors. Mei-Ling had grown jumpy and curious with all the commotion, and I stroked her until she settled down again in my lap. A minute before the service was to begin, when all the others were inside, a chauffeur stepped from a vintage Bentley parked away from the church near the road, in the discreet shade of a cypress tree. The driver opened a rear door, and a trim woman in black stepped out. For a moment, I glimpsed the strikingly attractive face of a woman in her sixties, looking slightly anxious and reminding me in profile of Charlotte Preston. She was on the tall side like Charlotte as well, with at least an inch or two on the slightly built, dark-suited driver. The woman in black lowered her veil, received a supportive squeeze of the hand from the chauffeur, then headed toward the church, moving briskly with her head held high, the way Charlotte had walked away the last time I saw her alive.

Thinking about Charlotte got me to thinking about other dead people, people I’d helped bury. My father had been the first, when I was seventeen, finished off with six bullets from his own .38 Detective’s Special, which I’d fired into him with my own hand. My mother was next, a few years later, after suffering the guilt of what he’d done to my little sister and drinking herself to death. Then Elizabeth Jane, broken and addicted, ending things a few years after that. After they put Betsy Jane in the ground back in Buffalo, I swore I’d never attend another funeral service, never go near another cemetery. Then the eighties came along, and the plague, and there were so many memorial services, I couldn’t keep count after a while—Chris, Rand, Vito, Aurulio, Brad, Ken, Reynaldo, Joshua, Reggie, maybe half a dozen more. Then the virus had taken Jacques, and after he was cremated and his urn stashed in a crypt I never visited, I stopped attending funerals, stopped watching the dead get buried. Until Harry’s turn came a few months ago, and now Charlotte Preston’s.

You weren’t supposed to use words like
dead
and
buried
in a pretty, peaceful place like Forest Lawn. They had more respectful and dignified terms, like
deceased
and
interred.
Bodies were never shipped out, remains were transported, and never in coffins, only caskets. There were no graves, only interment spaces in these memorial parks that were never called cemeteries. The burial plots were opened, not dug, and always in the lawn, never the ground. Funerals were memorial services, undertakers referred to as morticians. Relatives and friends, not mourners, were in attendance. There was no dirt here, just earth, and during the eulogy, no disease, only illness. I’d heard all the nicer terminology over the years, and understood why some people preferred the euphemisms. But after too many deaths in too short a stretch of my life, I’d grown tough and numb, I guess, and just didn’t give a shit anymore. To me, they were all dead and buried, and when my own turn came, I didn’t give a damn what they did with my rotting corpse, or what they called it.

*

Not quite an hour after the service began, a long, black Cadillac hearse—casket coach, in mortuary language—pulled up in front of the chapel. Inscribed on one panel in tasteful gilt lettering were the words F
ARTHING
M
ORTUARY
S
ERVICES
. The driver climbed out, opened the rear doors, glanced at his watch, and waited. Charlotte Preston emerged from the chapel a few minutes after that, inside a closed casket carried by six men in black suits who shuffled forward in awkward lockstep, careful not to trip one another up. The pastor followed, wearing his vestments, with one hand lightly on the back of the veiled woman in black who’d arrived in the old Bentley. The only face I recognized among the six shuffling casket bearers was that of Dr. Stanley Miller, the most diminutive of the bunch but also the most distinctive in his trademark forties-style suit and bow tie, which was dark for the occasion but otherwise fashioned with the usual pleats, cuffs, and wide lapels. He and the others slid the casket into the back of the big car, while the rest of the mourners looked on in respectful silence, many dabbing at their eyes with hankies. Then they were milling about, chatting, or heading to their cars, while the hearse pulled slowly to the exit, where it waited to lead the procession to the interment grounds.

Suddenly, Mei-Ling leaped forward with her front paws on the dashboard, barking in a frenzy. At first, I assumed her excitement was triggered by seeing Templeton coming toward the car, but I quickly realized her attentive eyes were fixed on someone standing on the sidewalk, who’d just removed his dark glasses to pat his eyes with a tissue. He was a handsome, fiftyish man of medium height, with graying hair and dusky Hispanic coloring—the same face I’d seen in the photograph on a side table in Charlotte Preston’s den the night she died. At his side, slightly taller, was a long-legged, good-looking woman about Charlotte’s age—good-looking if you appreciated a woman who was thin as a stick, with hair an artificial, too-blond shade, at odds with her lively brown eyes.

As Templeton opened her driver’s door and slipped behind the wheel, Mei-Ling pressed her nose to the windshield and kept up her shrill yipping.

“What’s gotten into her?”

“I think she recognizes an old friend.”

I opened my door and climbed out, clutching Mei-Ling under one arm, guessing correctly at the man’s identity.

“Dr. Delgado?”

He glanced up as I approached, slipping on his dark glasses to hide eyes that were red-rimmed and puffy. At the sight of Mei-Ling, the blond woman at his side screamed and threw up her hands.

“That dog! Get it out of here!”

Delgado placed a firm grip on her anorexic arm.

“Control yourself, Regina.”

Upon closer inspection, I could see that she was not the thirtysomething woman I’d imagined from a distance. She had one of those faces that had been carved and sculpted, stretched and tucked, augmented with synthetics too many times for its own good. Age and a starvation diet had begun to reveal the truth: lips and cheeks that looked artificially plumped, bony contours too perfect to be true, natural lines and wrinkling too obviously missing. This was a fortysomething woman pushing fifty, but fighting every inch of the way, with a face that resembled a cosmetic surgery chart.

Delgado glanced at Mei-Ling, then at me.

“Yes, I’m Martin Delgado. What is it?”

I told him my name, and that I’d been acquainted with Charlotte Preston.

“Through an odd set of circumstances, I ended up with her dog. Perhaps you should be the one to have her.”

The woman named Regina thrust forward a pointy chin with a rather obvious dimple. Her dark eyes were fierce, like the tone of her voice.

“Not on your life, Buster.”

“I believe you gave Mei-Ling to Charlotte, Dr. Delgado.”

He tried hard to sound firm, but it came out like a lament.

“That was a long time ago.”

The woman spat words at us both.

“Not long enough.”

“Regina, for God’s sake.”

“You must be Mrs. Delgado.”

“Damn right, I’m Mrs. Delgado.”

She pointed a finger with a long, painted nail and cut a swath of air with it. “Now get that damn dog away from us. We never want to see it again.”

Mei-Ling was squirming in my arms, trying to get to Martin Delgado.

“The dog needs a home, Dr. Delgado. You and Charlotte were apparently close. Mei-Ling’s obviously fond of you.”

“Charlotte worked with me for a number of years. Her father had been a patient and a friend of mine.”

“I saw a photograph of you in Charlotte’s den the night she died, Doctor. Other than Rod Preston’s, yours was the only male face in the house.”

Delgado glanced at the cars lining up behind the hearse.

“We have to go, Mr. Justice. We have a graveside service to attend, one I deeply wish wasn’t necessary.”

“Any ideas where I might dump the dog?”

He winced at my choice of words.

“I believe Charlotte’s mother should have Mei-Ling. She’s Charlotte’s sole surviving relative.”

“Vivian Grant Preston?”

“Yes.”

He turned and nodded in the direction of the woman in black, who shook the minister’s hand and turned toward the old Bentley, where the chauffeur stood with the door open.

“I’d like to speak to you again, Doctor, at a better time.”

“About what?”

“Your relationship with Charlotte, some other things.”

Regina Delgado poked me sharply in the chest, causing Mei-Ling to snap. Mrs. Delgado backed off a step as Mei-Ling growled, showing her little teeth, but Regina continued to pin me with her angry eyes.

“I don’t know who you are, but we have nothing to say to you. Charlotte decided to end her life. OK, that’s too bad. But the bitch is dead, and that’s the end of it.”

“That’s enough, Regina.”

Delgado tightened his grip and stepped past me, dragging his wife across the parking lot toward a Mercedes-Benz 2000 S-Class. She had to hurry on her stiletto heels to keep up, and in the split of her black skirt, her shapely calves knotted up like dangerous fists, looking as if they might cramp at any moment.