Whispers (27 page)

Tannerton’s clients, the relatives of the deceased, would never be brought into this room, for the bitter truth of death was too obvious here.

In the front of the house, where the viewing chambers were decorated with heavy wine-red velvet drapes and plush carpets and dark wood paneling and brass lamps, where the lighting was low and artfully arranged, the phrases “passed away” and “called home by God” could be taken seriously; in the front rooms, the atmosphere encouraged a belief in heaven and the ascendance of the spirit. But in the tile-floored workroom with the lingering stink of embalming fluid and the shiny array of mortician’s instruments lined up on enamel trays, death seemed depressingly clinical and unquestionably final.

Olmstead opened the aluminum coffin.

Avril Tannerton folded back the plastic shroud, revealing the body from the hips up.

Joshua looked down at the waxy yellow-gray corpse and shivered. “Ghastly.”

“I know this is a trying time for you,” Tannerton said in practiced mournful tones.

“Not at all,” Joshua said. “I won’t be a hypocrite and pretend grief. I knew very little about the man, and I didn’t particularly like what I did know. Ours was strictly a business relationship.”

Tannerton blinked. “Oh. Well . . . then perhaps you would prefer us to handle the funeral arrangements through one of the deceased’s friends.”

“I don’t think he had any,” Joshua said.

They stared down at the body for a moment, silent.

“Ghastly,” Joshua said again.

“Of course,” Tannerton said, “no cosmetic work has been done. Absolutely none. If I could have gotten to him soon after death, he’d look much better.”

“Can you . . . do anything with him?”

“Oh, certainly. But it won’t be easy. He’s been dead a day and a half, and though he’s been kept refrigerated—”

“Those wounds,” Joshua said thickly, staring at the hideously scarred abdomen with morbid fascination. “Dear God, she really cut him.”

“Most of that was done by the coroner,” Tannerton said. “This small slit is a stab wound. And this one.”

“The pathologist did a good job with his mouth,” Olmstead said appreciatively.

“Yes, didn’t he?” Tannerton said, touching the sealed lips of the corpse. “It’s unusual to find a coroner with an aesthetic sense.”

“Rare,” Olmstead said.

Joshua shook his head. “I still find it hard to believe.”

“Five years ago,” Tannerton said, “I buried his mother. That’s when I met him. He seemed a little . . . strange. But I figured it was the stress and the grief. He was such an important man, such a leading figure in the community.”

“Cold,” Joshua said. “He was an extremely cold and self-contained man. Vicious in business. Winning a battle with a competitor wasn’t always enough for him; if at all possible, he preferred to utterly destroy the other fellow. I’ve always thought he was capable of cruelty and physical violence. But attempted rape? Attempted murder?”

Tannerton looked at Joshua and said, “Mr. Rhinehart, I’ve often heard it said that you don’t mince words. You’ve got a reputation, a much admired reputation, for saying exactly what you think and to hell with the cost. But . . .”

“But what?”

“But when you’re speaking of the dead, don’t you think you ought to—”

Joshua smiled. “Son, I’m a cantankerous old bastard and not entirely admirable. Far from it! As long as truth is my weapon, I don’t mind hurting the feelings of the living. Why, I’ve made children cry, and I’ve made kindly gray-haired grandmothers weep. I have little compassion for fools and sons of bitches when they’re alive. So why should I show more respect than that for the dead?”

“I’m just not accustomed to—”

“Of course, you’re not. Your profession requires you to speak well of the deceased, regardless of who he might have been and what heinous things he might have done. I don’t hold that against you. It’s your job.”

Tannerton couldn’t think of anything to say. He closed the lid of the coffin.

“Let’s settle on the arrangements,” Joshua said. “I’d like to get home and have my dinner—if I have any appetite left when I leave here.” He sat down on a high stool beside a glass-fronted cabinet that contained more tools of the mortician’s trade.

Tannerton paced in front of him, a freckled, mop-haired bundle of energy. “How important is it to you to have the usual viewing?”

“Usual viewing?”

“An open casket. Would you find it offensive if we avoided that?”

“I hadn’t really given it a thought,” Joshua said.

“To be honest with you, I don’t know how . . . presentable the deceased can be made to look,” Tannerton said. “The people at Angels’ Hill didn’t give him quite a full enough look when they embalmed him. His face appears to be somewhat drawn and shrunken. I am not pleased. I am definitely not pleased. I could attempt to pump him up a bit, but patchwork like that seldom looks good. As for cosmetology . . . well . . . again, I wonder if too much time has passed. I mean, he apparently was in the hot sun for a couple of hours after he died, before he was found. And then it was eighteen hours in cold storage before the embalming was done. I can certainly make him look a great deal better than he does now. But as for bringing the glow of life back to his face. . . . You see, after all that he’s been through, after the extremes of temperature, and after this much time, the skin texture has changed substantially; it won’t take makeup and powder at all well. I think perhaps—”

Beginning to get queasy, Joshua interrupted. “Make it a closed casket.”

“No viewing?”

“No viewing.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Good. Let me see. . . . Will you want him buried in one of his suits?”

“Is it necessary, considering the casket won’t be open?”

“It would be easier for me if I just tucked him into one of our burial gowns.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“White or a nice dark blue?”

“Do you have something in polka dots?”

“Polka dots?”

“Or orange and yellow stripes?”

Tannerton’s ever-ready grin slipped from beneath his dour funeral director expression, and he struggled to force it out of sight again. Joshua suspected that, privately, Avril was a fun-loving man, the kind of hail-fellow-well-met who would make a good drinking buddy; but he seemed to feel that his public image required him to be somber and humorless at all times. He was visibly upset when he slipped up and allowed the private Avril to appear when only the public man ought to be seen. He was, Joshua thought, a likely candidate for an eventual schizophrenic breakdown.

“Make it the white gown,” Joshua said.

“What about the casket? What style would—”

“I’ll leave that to you.”

“Very well. Price range?”

“Might as well have the best. The estate can afford it.”

“The rumor is he must have been worth two or three million.”

“Probably twice that,” Joshua said.

“But he really didn’t live like it.”

“Or die like it,” Joshua said.

Tannerton thought about that for a moment, then said, “Any religious services?”

“He didn’t attend church.”

“Then shall I assume the minister’s role?”

“If you wish.”

“We’ll have a short graveside service,” Tannerton said. “I’ll read something from the Bible, or perhaps just a simple inspirational piece, something nondenominational.”

They agreed on a time for burial: Sunday at two o’clock in the afternoon. Bruno would be laid to rest beside Katherine, his adoptive mother, in the Napa County Memorial Park.

As Joshua got up to leave, Tannerton said, “I certainly hope you’ve found my services valuable thus far, and I assure you I’ll do everything in my power to make the rest of this go smoothly.”

“Well,” Joshua said, “you’ve convinced me of one thing. I’m going to draw up a new will tomorrow. When my times comes, I sure as hell intend to be cremated.”

Tannerton nodded. “We can handle that for you.”

“Don’t rush me, son. Don’t rush me.”

Tannerton blushed. “Oh, I didn’t mean to—”

“I know, I know. Relax.”

Tannerton cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I’ll . . . uh . . . show you to the door.”

“No need. I can find it myself.”

Outside, behind the funeral home, the night was very dark and deep. There was only one light, a hundred-watt bulb above the rear door. The glow reached only a few feet into the velveteen blackness.

In the late afternoon, a breeze had sprung up, and with the coming of the night, it had grown into a gusty wind. The air was turbulent and chilly; it hissed and moaned.

Joshua walked to his car, which lay beyond the meager semicircle of frosty light, and as he opened the door he had the peculiar feeling he was being watched. He glanced back at the house, but there were no faces at the windows.

Something moved in the gloom. Thirty feet away. Near the three-car garage. Joshua sensed rather than saw it. He squinted, but his vision was not what it had once been; he couldn’t discern anything unnatural in the night.

Just the wind, he thought. Just the wind stirring through the trees and bushes or pushing along a discarded newspaper, a piece of dry brush.

But then it moved again. He saw it this time. It was crouched in front of a row of shrubs leading out from the garage. He could not see any detail. It was just a shadow, a lighter purple-black smudge on the blue-black cloth of the night, as soft and lumpy and undefined as all the other shadows—except that this one moved.

Just a dog, Joshua thought. A stray dog. Or maybe a kid up to some mischief.

“Is someone there?”

No reply.

He took a few steps away from his car.

The shadow-thing scurried back ten or twelve feet, along the line of shrubbery. It stopped in an especially deep pool of darkness, still crouching, still watchful.

Not a dog, Joshua thought. Too damned big for a dog. Some kid. Probably up to no good. Some kid with vandalism on his mind.

“Who’s there?”

Silence.

“Come on now.”

No answer. Just the whispering wind.

Joshua started toward the shadow among shadows, but he was suddenly arrested by the instinctive knowledge that the thing was dangerous. Horrendously dangerous. Deadly. He experienced all of the involuntary animal reactions to such a threat: a shiver up his spine; his scalp seemed to crawl and then tighten; his heart began to pound; his mouth went dry; his hands curled into claws; and his hearing seemed more acute than it had been a minute ago. Joshua hunched over and drew up his bulky shoulders, unconsciously seeking a defensive posture.

“Who’s there?” he repeated.

The shadow-thing turned and crashed through the shrubs. It ran off across the vineyards that bordered Avril Tannerton’s property. For a few seconds, Joshua could hear the steadily diminishing clamor of its flight, the receding
thud-thud-thud
of heavy running footsteps and the fading wheeze as it gasped for breath. Then the wind was the only sound in the night.

Looking over his shoulder a couple of times, he returned to his car. He got in, closed the door, locked it.

Already, the encounter began to seem unreal, increasingly dreamlike. Was there actually someone in the darkness, waiting, watching? Had there been something dangerous out there, or had it been his imagination? After spending half an hour in Avril Tannerton’s ghoulish workshop, a man could be expected to jump at strange noises and start looking for monstrous creatures in the shadows. As Joshua’s muscles relaxed, as his heart slowed, he began to think he had been a fool. The threat he had sensed so strongly seemed, in retrospect, to be a phantom, a vagary of the night and wind.

At worst, it had been a kid. A vandal.

He started the car and drove home, surprised and amused by the effect Tannerton’s workroom had had upon him.

 
Saturday evening, promptly at seven o’clock, Anthony Clemenza arrived at Hilary’s Westwood house in a blue Jeep station wagon.

Hilary went out to meet him. She was wearing a sleek emerald-green silk dress with long tight sleeves and a neckline cut low enough to be enticing but not cheap. She hadn’t been on a date in more than fourteen months, and she nearly had forgotten how to dress for the ritual of courtship; she had spent two hours choosing her outfit, as indecisive as a schoolgirl. She accepted Tony’s invitation because he was the most interesting man she’d met in a couple of years—and also because she was trying her best to overcome her tendency to hide from the rest of the world. She had been stung by Wally Topelis’s assessment of her; he had warned her that she was using the virtue of self-reliance as an excuse to hide from people, and she had recognized the truth in what he’d said.

She avoided making friends and finding lovers, for she was afraid of the pain that only friends and lovers could inflict with their rejections and betrayals. But at the same time that she was protecting herself from the pain, she was denying herself the pleasure of good relationships with good people who would not betray her. Growing up with her drunken violent parents, she had learned that displays of affection were usually followed by sudden outbursts of rage and anger and unexpected punishment.

She was never afraid to take chances in her work and in business matters; now it was time to bring the same spirit of adventure to her personal life. As she walked briskly toward the blue Jeep, swinging her hips a little, she felt tense about taking the emotional risks that the mating dance entailed, but she also felt fresh and feminine and considerably happier than she had in a long time.

Tony hurried around to the passenger’s side and opened the door. Bending low, he said, “The royal carriage awaits.”

“Oh, there must be some mistake. I’m not the queen.”

“You look like a queen to me.”