Grave Designs

by Michael A. Kahn

  “But why a pet cemetery?” Maggie asked.

  I shrugged. “Ambivalence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s assume that the Canaan file in the computer contained evidence of something secret that Marshall was heavily involved with in 1985. Something very important to him. So important that he couldn’t bear the thought of erasing all evidence of it. So first he prints it out of the computer and then he erases the file. Now he has all the evidence in his own hands. But what does he do with it?”

  “Why a pet cemetery?” Cindi asked.

  “Why not?” I answered. “A safety deposit box is too obvious, too dull: He dies and his wife opens the box. Where’s the excitement? Moreover, what if his wife doesn’t understand? Or care? Or tell anyone? Marshall wanted to make sure others found out. A human cemetery is too complicated. You don’t just bury an unidentified human corpse. And a coffin that size—a coffin for an infant—would raise more than a few eyebrows. What else fits in a little coffin, he must have asked himself. Of course: a dog or a cat. A pet cemetery. Immortality for his documents and a grave marker that announces, at least to someone out there, that he was Graham Marshall and that he was involved with Canaan back in 1985.” I turned to Maggie. “Remember the coffin he picked out? And his question about whether it was watertight?” I shifted to Benny. “Graham Anderson Marshall worrying about whether a dead animal would get wet? No way. It’s got to be documents. Water damages documents—and those were documents Marshall didn’t want damaged.”

  Maggie leaned forward. “So you’re saying that fruitcake stuck a bunch of documents in a coffin and buried it in my cemetery?”

  I nodded.

  “Where they’d be safe forever,” Cindi said.

  “With Marshall’s name carved in granite on top,” Benny added. “Along with the name Canaan.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Maggie said. “What good does it do him in a pet cemetery? Who’s gonna ever know it’s there? And if none of his friends know it’s there, what’s it worth to him?”

  “Maybe he was looking to the future,” Cindi said. “Hundreds of years from now. Someone finds that grave marker and wonders what it was all about. Maybe they dig it up to see what it is. Maybe that’s what he was hoping for.”

  “He was looking to the future,” I said, “but probably not much further than his own death.”

  “What are you getting at, Rachel?” Benny asked.

  “He wanted someone to find it,” I said. “He made sure of that.”

  “How?” Cindi asked.

  “The codicil,” I said. “Something odd like that—a trust fund for the care and maintenance of the grave of a pet no one’s ever heard of. First of all, the trust fund was unnecessary.” I turned to Maggie. “Tell them what you told me. If someone wants you to take special care of a pet’s grave, what do they do?”

  “They tell me what option they want,” Maggie answered. “It’s right on the contract form I give them when they come in for a plot. There’s standard care. That cost seventy-five dollars a year. Then there’s perpetual care. One thousand dollars. And then there’s eternal loving care. Three grand.”

  “Up front,” I said. “Right?”

  “Yep.”

  “See?” I said, looking around the table. “His codicil was totally superfluous. The only thing it could possibly do was arouse the law firm’s curiosity. He knew A and W would handle his probate. And he knew that an oddball trust fund for forty thousand dollars would make them curious. No probate lawyer could ignore a trust for a mystery grave in a pet cemetery. Especially where the law firm is one of the beneficiaries of the trust. At the very least, the lawyer’s got a fiduciary duty to find out what’s in the grave.”

  “If that’s what he wanted,” said Benny, “it worked.”

  “If the grave hadn’t been robbed,” I said, “I bet the firm would have been forced to have it exhumed. They couldn’t break the trust fund without at least finding out what was in the grave.”

  “Did he leave any other clues?” Cindi asked.

  I nodded. “Take the computer data base. He printed out the contents in 1986 and then erased just the contents. He left the name of the Canaan file in the computer.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments.

  Cindi stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and looked up, frowning. “So what was on that printout that he buried?”

  I looked around the table. “Fasten your seat belts. It seems that Graham Marshall traced his family back to the Puritans in Massachusetts. In 1679, someone named Benjamin Marshall helped found a village in western Massachusetts. A village named Canaan. Benjamin Marshall was an Elder of the church there. Does Graham Marshall know this? Maybe not till he goes to college. Barrett College. And there he takes a course or hears a lecture about a book. A book by Ambrose Springer called The Lottery of Canaan.”

  “How do you know all that?” Cindi asked.

  “I talked to a faculty member at Northwestern who graduated from Barrett.” I turned to Benny. “Paul Mason. He said there was a professor back then who gave a popular lecture on the book and the village of Canaan.”

  I tried to give some sense of the original lottery of Canaan. “A secret lottery that decides people’s fates,” I concluded, “that controls people’s destinies. It’s strangely credible. It bowled me over when I read it. Imagine what it could do to a nineteen-year-old kid who thinks he’s hearing the story of one of his ancestors.”

  I took a sip of beer. “Marshall’s secretary said that back in 1985 he worked long hours on some secret matter called Canaan. The tombstone has only one date on it: 1985. No date of birth or death. So we can assume Marshall’s involvement with Canaan was in 1985. He apparently used the Bottles and Cans computer in connection with it. It was convenient and safe. He had a terminal right in his office, and there’s so much junk in that computer that the Canaan file would be a needle in a haystack.”

  “What the hell was he doing?” Benny asked me.

  “I wish I knew for sure. Based on those newspaper articles you helped me find, it looks like Marshall had something to do with four seemingly random events.” I turned to Maggie. “Bear with me on this. I’ll explain it later.” I looked at Benny and Cindi. “You can find examples of luck or chance in the newspaper every day. Maybe Marshall picked four such events at random, left the clues, buried the coffin, and hoped that whoever was assigned the job of figuring out what was in the coffin would think that Marshall had caused the events.”

  “That’s all?” Benny asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But that doesn’t explain what’s happened since Monday. Who stole the coffin? At first I thought that maybe Marshall arranged that in advance. Bury an empty coffin, have it stolen after you’re dead, and chuckle ahead of time at how crazy you’ll make the person who’s assigned to figure out what was in the coffin. But where’s the payoff for Marshall? Where’s the punch line? How does he know who’s going to find the coffin? How does he know that the investigator—me—will be able to put it all together with just an empty coffin?”

  “Good God,” Maggie said, shaking her head. “Eleven pet cemeteries in Chicago to choose from and that Graham cracker had to pick mine. Jeez.”

  “What bothers me,” I said, “is the thought that it wasn’t all just a clever little joke. What if it was a clever big joke? A cosmic practical joke? What if Graham Marshall decided to honor the three-hundredth anniversary of the lottery of Canaan by setting up his own lottery? What if Graham Marshall caused the plane crash? What if Graham Marshall caused the typographical error? What if Graham Marshall hid the money in that used filing cabinet? What if Graham Marshall fixed the beauty contest?”

  “But why?” Cindi asked.

  “Why not?” I answered. “If Benjamin Marshall could do it back in 1685, why couldn’t Graham Marshall do it in 1985?” I paused. “Look at
it this way. Marshall spent his life as a trial lawyer. Doing a trial is like writing history. What’s history but the story of cause and effect? It’s the same in a trial. If you’re the plaintiff, you try to create a link between the effect—your client’s injury—and what you claim is the cause—the defendant’s conduct. If you’re the defendant, you try to destroy the causal link. But the lawyer—like the historian—gets there after the event. He doesn’t cause it; he just tries to explain it.”

  I nodded at Benny. “So you see? That could be the appeal of a Canaan lottery. You’re not explaining history. And you’re not stuck depending on the testimony of witnesses outside your control. Instead, you go out there and create history on your own. You’re the judge. You’re the jury. And you’re the witness.”

  “But there’s no history if it’s all secret,” Cindi said.

  “But of course there is,” I answered. “All that’s happened is you’ve separated the cause and the effect. The effect gets recorded in the newspaper—the plane crash, the beauty queen, the hidden treasure, the costly typo. It’s just that no one but Marshall knows the real cause. To the rest of the world it’s just fate or luck or chance. Remember the epitaph on the tombstone? A nickname for Providence. You know what the full quote is? The librarian at A and W found it for me. Some French philosopher said it. ‘Chance is a nickname for Providence.’ Except here, chance is just a nickname for Graham Marshall.”

  “But the wrong person dug up the coffin,” said Cindi.

  “Yeah,” Benny said. “Who dug it up?”

  “And what about the second grave robbery?” Maggie said. “What’s that all about?”

  “And who broke into your apartment and drugged Ozzie?” Benny asked. “And who tried to kill Cindi? And who the hell was that guy you followed from the el?”

  “That’s where I’m stumped,” I said. “Even Marshall couldn’t do that stuff from the grave.”

  We sat in silence amid the shouting and laughter of the restaurant.

  “I’ve got to admit,” Benny said, “I could almost believe that Marshall arranged for all this.”

  “Even for the recent Canaan personals?” Cindi persisted. “And that crazy stuff in the el trains?” Cindi sat back. “What if there really is a Canaan lottery? Some big secret organization that’s still going strong after all these years? God knows, there’s enough happening all the time that can’t be explained.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it’s almost too incredible to believe.”

  “So what do we do?” Maggie asked.

  “We wait,” I said. “We keep our eyes open. And cross our fingers. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “How?” Benny asked.

  “Something else is bound to happen,” I said. “And I pray it doesn’t happen to one of us.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Cindi and I were sipping herbal tea at my kitchen table. Both of us were in our nightgowns and ready for bed. Ozzie was asleep on the kitchen floor by my feet.

  There had been another message from Paul Mason on my answering machine: “I just wanted to see how you and Ozzie are doing. Give me a call, Rachel. And give Ozzie a hug for me.” It was close to midnight, too late to call Paul tonight. I took a sip of tea. Paul was being awfully solicitous these past two days. Don’t be so suspicious, I told myself. It’s nice to have someone who’s concerned for you.

  “I keep trying to fit the Graham I knew into the Graham who ran that secret lottery,” Cindi said. “A man who could calmly decide that two men should die in a plane crash. Two men he had never met. Men with wives and children and friends.” She shuddered.

  I blew across the top of my mug of steaming tea. “You knew one Graham Marshall. I knew another. Neither one of us knew this third one.”

  “How could he do that?” Cindi said. “How could anyone just decide to kill two men at random? Just for the hell of it.”

  “I don’t think he saw it that way.” I rubbed my bare toes against Ozzie’s side. “He didn’t think he was murdering those two men in the plane crash. Graham could have seen it as carrying on his ancestor’s master plan. He was arrogant enough for that. I’ll bet it was almost a religious cause for him.”

  “When do you think he first decided to set up a lottery?”

  “In 1984. After he almost died.” I told Cindi about his heart surgery in Houston. “His wife told me that the experience seemed to have a profound impact on him. The man was already a huge success. He’d tried and won big lawsuits, he’d argued major cases in the Supreme Court. What else was left for him to achieve?” I took a sip of tea. “If he really believed he was a descendant of one of the original Elders of Canaan, then 1985—the year after he almost died—would have been a significant year. Think of it. It was the three hundredth anniversary of the first lottery. And the thirtieth anniversary of the bizarre deaths of his mother and sister. Talk about luck of the draw.” I shook my head. “You know you can’t underestimate the impact of those deaths on him.”

  Cindi nodded.

  “To someone like Graham,” I continued, “just back from his brush with death, 1985 must have seemed like that rare moment in time—when all the spheres were in perfect alignment. Maybe he thought, why not?”

  “But why stop?” Cindi asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He went to all that trouble to set up his lottery and hire those Canaan operatives. Why would he run the lottery for just one year and then stop? Why didn’t he keep on going?”

  “Maybe it was just too demanding and complicated to run for more than one year. Or maybe he planned from the outset to run it for just one year—to commemorate those anniversaries and then walk away. Or maybe”—I paused—“maybe he didn’t stop. Maybe he was still running it up to the day he died.”

  Cindi frowned. “But then why bury the coffin?”

  “Because in 1986 he learned he could die at any moment.” I told Cindi about the recall of the defective heart valves and Marshall’s decision to leave the valve in his heart.

  “How horrible.”

  I nodded. “He had his own private lottery going on inside his heart. He must have feared that if he died unexpectedly, no one would ever know what he had done. That’s why he buried the coffin and set up the secret codicil. To preserve the record of what he had done. Remember the language in that codicil? He said he wanted a memorial of the small role he had played in the eternal life of Canaan. The guy wanted people to know about it.” I shrugged. “I guess he was proud.”

  “God, that’s creepy.”

  “I agree, but it’s creepy on an almost cosmic level. What’s going on now is down-to-earth creepy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “On the surface it looks like the same old lottery—messages in the personal columns, exchanges on the subways. The Canaan operatives may even be the same ones Graham used. But I’m convinced whoever is running the show now is up to something different.”

  “How so?”

  “Look at what’s happened. A grave robbery, the fake gas explosion, the break into my apartment. Assuming these are all related, someone out there is trying to eliminate evidence of what Graham was doing—not preserve it.”

  “But why kill me?” Cindi asked. “I didn’t know a thing.”

  “Maybe this guy thinks Graham told you about the lottery.” I paused, thinking it over. “Maybe Graham told him about the lottery, and he was afraid Graham might have told you too.”

  “God. Do you think Graham picked a successor?”

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Someone to take over when he died. Or maybe Graham didn’t even realize that he had picked a successor. Maybe he got drunk one night and bragged about the lottery to someone, and that someone decided to take it over when Graham died. Whoever he is, he could have worried that Graham told others too. You’d be a likely candidate.”

  “I don�
��t know,” Cindi said. “If this guy’s that clever, you’d think he’d first try to find out if I knew anything before he had me killed.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But maybe that was too risky for him. I don’t know. Let me ask you something: How could the killer have known you weren’t around the night he had someone go up to your apartment to rig the explosion?”

  “That part would be pretty easy,” she said. “All he had to do was call the modeling agency to find out my schedule for that week. They would have told him I was out of town on that night.”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  Cindi smiled. “Oh, he’d have to pose as a potential client of the agency. You know, like some advertising outfit. A lot of them request specific models. When they’re scheduling a specific shoot and they want certain models, they call in advance to see which ones are available on what dates. The agency gets those calls all the time.”

  “So if he asked about you, they would have told him you were going to be out of town last Wednesday.”

  Cindi nodded.

  “That’s how he knew you wouldn’t be in your condo that night,” I said.

  “But the explosion killed the wrong people,” Cindi said.

  “It could have been a time bomb,” I said. “Set to go off in the middle of the day—when he thought you’d be around.”

  We were both quiet for a while.

  “You think it’s all a cover-up now?” Cindi finally asked.

  “I think it’s more than just a cover-up,” I said. “Whoever’s running the lottery now must have his own plans. That’s the really creepy part. What if this last week is just a prelude? Whoever this one is seems violent enough for anything. I just hope he isn’t as clever as Marshall.”

  “But what can we do?” Cindi asked.

  “Go to the police,” I said. “We don’t have much to give them. But we do have you.” I smiled. “A living corpse ought to get their attention.” I stood up and walked over to the sink with my tea mug. “I’m meeting with Ishmael Richardson on Monday morning to give him my report. He has enough City Hall contacts to get the police involved in a quiet way. He’ll want to keep a lid on this.”