Grave Designs

by Michael A. Kahn

  An associate from Abbott & Windsor—a highly regarded young associate—was assigned to read and summarize the results. That associate spent two months alone in a windowless office plowing through the seemingly endless printout. The result was a 212-page memorandum which she gave to Graham Anderson Marshall ten minutes before she handed in her resignation. That young associate was me.

  ***

  The telephone rang just as I was leaving the office to travel to Kenilworth to meet with Marshall’s widow. It was Ralph Pinchley again from the American Language Dictionary. He sounded even more confused. There was only one version of the dictionary, and its definition of Canaan did not include a town in Massachusetts. The editorial staff had double-checked their manuscript, galleys, and research files. They found no reference to Canaan, Massachusetts.

  “Are you sure you have our dictionary there?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Well, I’m somewhat confused. Perhaps you could send me a copy of that page and, in the meantime, we’ll keep looking here. Maybe we have something in our archives.”

  I thanked him for his help, listened to a sales pitch for the dictionary and other resource materials of great interest to lawyers, and hung up.

  Chapter Nine

  The Widow Marshall was dressed in black. A black Catalina swimsuit, that is. A black beach towel, folded on a deck chair nearby, carried through the motif.

  A uniformed maid—a heavyset black woman in her fifties—had met me at the door and led me through the house to the large pool out back. Julia Marshall was reclining on a chaise by the pool, the chair angled toward the afternoon sun. There was a tall glass with ice cubes on the small table near her elbow. She was wearing tortoise-shell sunglasses with oversize round lenses and was reading what appeared to be a textbook on business administration.

  I suppose I had expected the Hollywood version of the Widow: in an upstairs room, shades drawn, wrinkled black dress, crumpled lace handkerchief, sagging shoulders, red eyes, limp hair. Instead, I saw a tanned and manicured North Shore matron, the kind that would draw furtive stares from teenaged boys as she stepped out on the diving board at the country club pool or bent over to retrieve a tennis ball on the courts. The lilac polish on her fingernails matched the shade on her toenails. Her lightly frosted hair, parted in the middle, ended just above her shoulders. She was probably in her late forties, although her figure looked at least a decade younger.

  Her husband had been dead for more than a month. Life must go on, I thought.

  I introduced myself.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, sitting up and raising her sunglasses. The skin around her large hazel eyes seemed just a tad too taut. Her chin and neck were probably the next items on her plastic surgeon’s agenda. “Ruby,” she said, “bring us a pitcher of vodka tonics.” She turned to me. “Would you like some cheese and crackers?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Just the drinks, Ruby.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  We started off talking about the weather. She admired my necklace and asked where I had found it. In one of the care packages my mother sent me from St. Louis once a month. I admired her business administration textbook and asked why she had it. For one of the courses she had signed up for at Northwestern. Ruby returned with a pitcher of vodka tonics and two tall glasses on a tray. Julia told her to place it on the umbrella table, and we both moved over there. She had good, strong features—handsome but not beautiful.

  “So,” Julia Marshall said as she poured our drinks, “you’re here about Canaan.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  She shrugged. “I can tell you what I told Harlan Dodson. I have no idea what Graham put in that grave. None whatsoever. I assume he’s already told you that.”

  “Ishmael Richardson did. I haven’t spoken with Mr. Dodson yet.”

  She settled back in her chair and rested her elbows on the armrests, her hands crossed in her lap. “I’m not the best source of information on my husband’s extracurricular activities.” She reached for her drink. “Harlan says I should just forget about it. Let him break the trust and go about my life.”

  “That’s not bad advice,” I said.

  “It’s rotten advice. You don’t just forget about something like that.” She studied me, her head tilted slightly. “What do you think he buried in that coffin?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m supposed to find out.”

  “I want to know as soon as you have something. I’ve got to know what this is all about. I have a right to know.”

  “You do. And when I find out, I’ll tell you about it myself.”

  “Good.” She took a sip of her drink. “Are you a litigator?”

  “I used to be. I used to work for your husband.”

  “Oh.” She seemed to size me up…and down. “Well, if you worked for him, you must be tough. And you must be a good investigator. Graham didn’t talk to me about his work”—there was a trace of bitterness—“but I often heard him brag to others that his assistants had balls and knew how to get out of the law library to dig up facts.”

  “I don’t know about the balls part.”

  She laughed.

  “But he sure taught me to get out of the library. My first month he had me on a plane to Little Rock to interview three ex-employees of a bottling plant down there.”

  “Ah, that sounds like Bottles and Cans,” she said. “God, what a bore that case must be.” She reached for the pitcher of vodka tonics. “More?”

  “No, thanks.” I waited until she filled her glass. “Do you recall anything unusual about your husband’s activities back in 1985?”

  Julia Marshall frowned in concentration. “Actually,” she finally said, “that was a normal year for him. At least as far as I remember. He worked late, traveled a lot, worked weekends. I didn’t see him much, and when I did, he seemed distracted.” She sighed. “I’m sorry to say that was a typical year for him. At least compared to the year before and the year after. Those were definitely unusual.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Graham almost died in 1984.”

  “I do remember he spent some time in a hospital. Was that in 1984?”

  “Yes. Down in Houston. He had open heart surgery to replace a valve in his heart with an artificial one. His heart disease wasn’t all that advanced, and it was supposed to be fairly routine.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “It was terrifying. He had a heart attack during the surgery. That’s very unusual, but it does happen. Then he had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia. Apparently an extremely rare reaction, according to the doctor. Anyway, he barely survived the operation and was in a coma for three days.”

  “God.”

  Julia gazed at the pool. “It changed him. I noticed it when we came back from Houston. He felt like he’d been brought back from the edge of the grave. Which he had.” She was still looking at the pool. “I guess everyone reacts differently. You know, someone else might drop out and go live on a mountaintop, or change careers, or something like that. For Graham, though, it just seemed to make him even more determined to throw himself into his work with all his energy.” She paused. “I had hoped it might bring us closer together.” She turned to me. “It didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair. “My husband was a very manipulative man.” She drew an index finger down the condensation on the outside of her glass. “I suppose all lawyers are manipulative, at least to a certain degree. But nothing like Graham.” She gave me a rueful smile. “I think he was happiest during his years at the State Department. He loved all those behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the cloak-and dagger part of foreign policy. He’d have been perfect for the CIA.”

  “He seemed right at home in complex lawsuits,” I said. “He loved to plot strategies.”


  Julia Marshall sighed. “My husband had a powerful need to control events…and the people caught up in them. It could be terrifying.” She paused. “Ten years ago I finally extricated myself from his grasp.” She looked at me. “To outsiders we still were the perfect couple. Graham was a master at keeping up appearances.” She turned toward the pool. “It worked quite well. He left early in the morning and came home late at night. Unless we were going to a social function, we rarely ate together. We slept in separate bedrooms.” She turned to me with a shrug. “Except for a few times a year when we were both drunk. The All-American couple.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Marshall.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “The firm hired you to investigate the Canaan grave, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “And the firm represents me in that matter?”

  “They do.”

  “So in a sense you’re my lawyer too.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Good. I want you to have that coffin dug up.”

  I looked down at my legal pad. “It may not be that easy,” I said.

  “I told you I want to know what’s in that coffin. He took forty thousand dollars of my money and sunk it in that box. I want to know whose pet it was. Dig it up.”

  “There are probably rules and regulations covering animal burials,” I said.

  “Then find out what they are. If you can exhume a human corpse, you can surely dig up a dead dog.”

  “I’ll look into it,” I said, keeping it vague.

  “See if you can get it publicized too,” she said, her voice rising. “Maybe that’ll force one of his little bimbos to come forward to claim it. She must be something special to rate forty thousand dollars for her dead pet.”

  “You don’t want that, Mrs. Marshall. Your husband is dead. That kind of publicity would only embarrass you and your children.”

  Julia Marshall stared at me, her features gradually relaxing. “Don’t humor me.”

  “Never,” I said. “I know how painful this Canaan thing must be, especially so soon after your husband died. I’m going to try to find out what’s in that coffin. For the firm’s sake, and yours.” Assuming, of course, that I could ever find the coffin.

  We were both silent for a while. I watched a fat bumblebee crawl across a yellow mum in a flowerpot on the pool deck.

  “My husband had a keen sense of irony,” she said finally. “Wherever he is now, he must be enjoying the cause of his death.”

  “I’m not following you,” I said, hoping I wasn’t. I didn’t want her to ask me about Cindi.

  “Graham told me that when he died, I’d have the goddamnedest wrongful death case in the history of Illinois. He’d even talked to a couple of big personal injury lawyers about it.”

  “I’m definitely not following you.”

  She smiled. It was a sad smile. “In the spring of 1986 he received some terrible news about the artificial valve in his heart. Several of them had malfunctioned. The FDA launched an investigation and eventually forced the manufacturer to recall all the valves in one of the lots. There were about two hundred out there, most still on the shelves. But about twenty were in people’s hearts. One of them was in Graham’s heart.”

  “My God. How awful.”

  “Believe it or not, that wasn’t the first time there’s been a valve recall. There’ve been others since, too.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He flew down to Houston and met with his surgeon. Apparently there was a ten-percent failure rate with those valves. One in ten. Based on Graham’s first heart surgery, his doctor told him he might have only a fifty percent chance of surviving another operation. Graham went with the odds.”

  “He left it in?”

  “He decided the odds were better. If the valve didn’t malfunction, he could live for years. If it did malfunction, well, he’d be dead.”

  “That’s Russian roulette for life.”

  “Exactly. He was walking around with a time bomb in his chest, except he didn’t know if or when it would explode. Frankly, I don’t know how he could stand it.”

  “Are you going to sue?”

  She laughed. “That’s what I meant about Graham’s sense of irony. The valve never malfunctioned. When they did the autopsy, they discovered the valve had nothing to do with the heart attack. That valve was in perfect working condition. That goddamn valve outlived—” Her voice cracked, but she quickly regained control.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly.

  She waved her hand. “The only part of that man’s heart that worked was artificial. I didn’t need a coroner to tell me that.” She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “So,” she said, “what else can I tell you?”

  Looking down the list of topics on my legal pad, I mentally crossed most of them off. “Well, two quick questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “Fire away.”

  “I noticed in his will he left some money to Barrett College.”

  “His alma mater,” she said. “He was very active in alumni affairs.”

  “He also left some money to the Massachusetts Historical Society.”

  “Yes. Graham believed that his ancestors dated back to the Puritans. It was his family’s gospel. But he was never able to get any confirmation in the records. He even hired a genealogist a few years back, but he could trace the family back only to the beginning of the nineteenth century. I guess Graham left money to the Historical Society because they’d tried to help him with the search.”

  “Who was the ancestor?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  She frowned in thought.

  We talked a few minutes more, mostly about her children and her studies at Northwestern. I wished her luck.

  Chapter Ten

  I was back in my office a little after five. Mary was just leaving for the day. She handed me a message from Maggie Sullivan.

  I called Maggie, who was ecstatic, having just been awarded the burial rights to the zoo’s hippopotamus. The funeral was set for one week from this Saturday.

  “Why so long?” I asked.

  “You think it’s easy to bury a five-ton hippo? I gotta arrange for a crane and two backhoes. And then I have to find some carpenters who can build me a coffin the size of a Ford pickup. Gus can wait. Hell, it’ll take two days to thaw him out. And I think they’re going to do an autopsy on him. That’ll take a few days too.”

  We both realized the importance—to her, to Graham Marshall, and to Abbott & Windsor—of keeping the grave robbery out of the press. But I wanted to explain to her the potential conflict between her interest in protecting her property rights and the law firm’s possible interest in voiding the trust fund.

  “Listen, I want you to take the case. I know you’ll be straight with me, Rachel. I could tell when I first met you. We’re a couple of tough broads, you and me. Just find the coffin.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “By the way, my brother-in-law was out here today. Carl’s brother. He used to be a cop. Now he’s a security guard over at one of the plants down here. He took a real careful look around. He said it was a professional job. No footprints, no tire tracks, no nothing. No clues.”

  I told her I had a few leads I was running down. We agreed to talk again tomorrow.

  I dictated a few letters into my machine, stuffed some court papers in my briefcase, and locked up. Benny Goldberg and I had agreed to meet for dinner at the Heartland Cafe in East Rogers Park. I reached the subway platform at State Street just as the northbound train rumbled into the station. I found a window seat, the hinged doors rattled shut, and the train lurched forward with a dull metallic groan. I settled back as the train screamed through the dark tunnel under the Loop and the Chicago River. The naked tunnel lights flickered by outside my window.

  The el train rumb
led into the Morse Station. I got off and walked to the north end of the platform and down the stairs to Lunt Avenue. Heartland Cafe is on the corner of Lunt, just across the narrow street that runs parallel to the el tracks. Benny wasn’t there yet. I took the last open table in the outdoor courtyard.

  Ten minutes later Benny pulled into a parking space in front of the restaurant and beeped the horn of his 1970 Chevy Nova as he climbed out. He was wearing sandals, blue jeans, and a red T-shirt with the white-lettered message, PLEASE HELP ME—I AM AN ENDOMORPH. His T-shirt was untucked in front, exposing a broad expanse of hairy flesh.

  “You stop off at home?” I asked.

  “You better believe it, Rachel.” Benny sat down across the table. “I was down in the bowels of the Chicago Public Library all afternoon, sweating my butt off. What a pit! No air-conditioning, no ventilation. By the time I left there, I think I had the cure for cancer growing in my armpits.” He looked around the restaurant and then picked up the menu. “A real chic place you got here, Rachel. Look at this menu. Nut-burgers? What the hell’s that? They got any ham hocks here?”

  “Try the chicken or the fish.”

  He finally settled on the chicken with fresh dill. I picked lentil soup and mushroom quiche. After we placed our orders, Benny summarized his research efforts that afternoon.

  “I think the dictionary definition must have been a misprint, Rachel. I couldn’t find anything on Canaan, Massachusetts. Nothing. I even had one of the librarians check too. The place never existed.”

  “This whole thing is crazy,” I said. “Nothing hangs together.”

  “What do you have so far?”

  “Just a lot of apparently unrelated junk. Graham Marshall buries something called Canaan in a pet cemetery. He puts up a tombstone with an odd epitaph. The tombstone has just one date: 1985. But Marshall buried it in May of ‘86. No one knows what’s in the grave, including the owner of the cemetery.”

  “That’s Maggie Sullivan, that big babe?”