The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2)

by Ron Franscell

  For the moment, all it meant was that Hi Goldsmith was dead, and the entwined mysteries of Laddie Granbouche and John Doe were Page Three news.

  All available hands, even Claire and Colter, helped wrap one freshly printed sheet around every copy of the week’s Bullet. The lazy union twerps down at the Post Office had closed up early, but Cal pounded on the loading-dock door until somebody answered, and he forced them to take his papers for tomorrow’s delivery. They grumbled and swore, but Cal just smiled. For all the abuse they’d heaped on him in The Bullet’s darkest days, he delighted in their displeasure.

  When The Bullet hit mailboxes the next day, it merely added detail to the stories already flying back and forth over Winchester’s back fences. Small-town readers are seldom surprised by what they see in the local paper, since they’ve usually heard the genuine news — or a version of it — in the coffee shop or the beauty parlor long before the paper arrives.

  It just makes them feel better to know the paper knows, too.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Jesus, this town is a theme park for forensic anthropologists. The Disneyland of Death.”

  Dr. Shawn Cowper plopped in the chair beside Jeff Morgan’s cluttered desk, the latest Bullet under his arm. He smelled smug, like suntan oil.

  “Well, you sure don’t see a high-ranking public official cinched to a backhoe wearing nothing but a red nightie every day,” Morgan said. “Or do you?”

  “You’d be surprised what I see, my allegedly jaded friend,” Dr. Cowper said. “People can be very creative when it comes to dying. Makes my job fun.”

  “What do you make of this one?”

  “Probably just what they say. Accidental. Killers usually don’t cover their tracks so elaborately. Besides, sexual hypoxia is more commonly practiced than you might think. But the tractor … well, that was a new one for me.”

  “Where the hell were you anyway?”

  “Funny you should ask. I drove over to Blackwater and found a little environmental testing lab with an atomic absorption device.”

  Morgan leaned back in his creaky chair, vaguely troubled by the idea of anything “atomic” in the hands of the typical Wyoming citizen.

  “Laddie’s silver?” he asked.

  “Right.”

  That was it. Nothing more. Morgan sat forward again, a new trouble on his mind.

  “Well … are you gonna tell me?”

  “Did you know rich people once stored their food in silver vessels to keep bacteria from growing?”

  “No.”

  “Oh yeah. And it worked. You’ve heard of ‘blue bloods’? They call ‘em that because they ate from silver plates with silver forks and spoons, and people believed the silver got into their veins and protected them from illness. But it wasn’t just queens and kings and dukes and stuff. American settlers often dropped silver dollars in their milk cans to make the milk last a little longer. Silver was thought to be a powerful antibiotic until the drug companies got involved.”

  “Is there a point to this fascinating little biochemical history lesson?”

  “The human body naturally contains tiny traces of silver and a lot of other metals, such as tungsten, vanadium, nickel, molybdenum, tin, aluminum, uranium, mercury, even gold. Sorta makes you feel like that liquid metal guy in Terminator …”

  “Or the Tin Man. Doc, really. I flunked biology, and I still have bad dreams about it. Humor me: was there silver in Laddie’s casket or not?”

  Dr. Cowper plucked a small notebook from his shirt pocket and leafed through it.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes? That’s it? A lot? A little?”

  “I was trying to tell you.”

  Morgan rubbed his tired eyes and spread his arms in surrender.

  “You media guys always want to cut to the chase,” Dr. Cowper chided. “No appreciation for foreplay.”

  “Yeah, yeah. By all means, let’s postpone the chase while we cop a feel of the endlessly wonderful delights of biochemistry.”

  Dr. Cowper shook his head and continued.

  “The human body contains only a trace of silver, about two milligrams,” the anthropologist said. “But that’s not much. If I could smelt all the silver from your body, I’d need about forty guys just like you just to gather a penny’s worth at today’s prices. So you’re safe … unless, of course, the price of silver rises.”

  “The casket?”

  “Well, that’s the kicker: My swabs gathered more than six milligrams of silver, three times what a normal human body would contain.”

  Morgan sat up. “No shit?”

  “Bottom line: Laddie’s box once contained an enormous amount of silver, and it wasn’t part of her anatomy,” Dr Cowper said. “The swabs showed traces of silver on every interior surface of the coffin except the lid. Basically, we have a microscopic layer of silver dust throughout the coffin.”

  “So how much?”

  “I’d guess a few hundred pounds. Not much more if Laddie was trying to fool her pallbearers.”

  Morgan was jangled by the leap from chemistry to conspiracy.

  “Hold on. You think this was some last big joke by a dead woman?”

  Leafing through equations scribbled in his notebook, Dr. Cowper smiled and shrugged like a little boy with a frog in his pocket, but said nothing. Morgan tested him.

  “Okay, let’s play this out. If the casket contained a mother lode of silver, somebody else had to put it there. Laddie was dead and, if your theory is correct, was already reduced to ashes.”

  Dr. Cowper shrugged again, unfazed by the challenge.

  “Sure. It seems obvious to me the mortician was in on it.”

  “Derealous McWayne?”

  “Is that how you say it? I was way off. Does it mean something?”

  “What?”

  “Derealous.”

  “Goddammit, I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out this whole wacky plot you’ve hatched out of thin air.”

  “It’s not wacky,” Dr. Cowper smiled. “I’m a scientist. And it’s not a wild-assed, paranoid conspiracy theory. It’s a … a hypothesis.”

  Morgan threw up his hands.

  “Fine. A scientist’s gotta have a hypothesis. And a hypothesis is never weird, right? If a scientist thinks he can prove JFK is living as a vegetable on a Caribbean island, he’s got a hypothesis. If a cabbie says it, he’s just paranoid.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Laddie’s silver?”

  “No, JFK. See, the path of the bullet was …”

  “Look, doc, I’m up to my ass in rattlesnakes here. The old sheriff is dead, the new sheriff is pissed. I have bodies in the wrong place and bodies that are NO place. I almost went to jail for printing a newspaper. State cops would love a bite of my ass. I broke into a mortuary and helped you steal evidence, which largely consists of fillets from a headless corpse stored in Tupperware in my goddamned refrigerator! What the fuck is going on?”

  Dr. Cowper calmly leaned forward.

  “Breathe.”

  “I’ll breathe. You explain.”

  Dr. Cowper put away his scientific notations. From here on, his mind and heart were in charge.

  “Let’s say Laddie ends up with some of Pancho Villa’s silver. I don’t know how. She can’t or won’t unload it. She literally wants to take it to her grave, the one place nobody will ever look. It’ll be hidden forever. She makes elaborate plans to have it entombed in her place. The one problem: she needs help.”

  “McWayne.”

  “Right. So she pays him handsomely to cremate her secretly and to bury her cache of silver bullion in her crypt … in place of her body.”

  “Okay, that’s such a great theory, it leaves only about, oh, a hundred or so questions. Like, why wouldn’t she just bury the silver in the hills? Nobody’d find it there, either, and she’d never have to let anybody in on her secret.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And if Laddie was Etta Place, you gotta think she didn’t t
rust many people. She wouldn’t just trust Derealous McWayne to seal her crypt with a fortune inside, would she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And let’s say there were three or four hundred pounds of silver in that casket. That’d be only a small part of Butch and Sundance’s Wells Fargo booty. Where’s the rest?”

  “I just don’t know,” Dr. Cowper admitted. “But I know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Laddie’s casket was full of pure silver. We don’t know where it came from or where it went … or why … but we know it was there. Doesn’t that make you the tiniest bit curious about a lot of things?”

  Now Morgan was the one without an answer.

  The repulsive morning deejays at KROK-FM swooped upon Highlander Goldsmith’s bizarre death like vultures on roadkill. No, Morgan thought, vultures chewing rancid carrion were funnier.

  “Man, I’ve heard of choking the chicken,” the Bug said, “but CHOKING the chicken?”

  “You think a guy would take a few precautions, you know,” Curtis said. “But I guess when you’re boinking a tractor, you don’t really think about safe sex, huh?”

  The Bug snorted.

  “You know, I’m sprouting a woody just thinkin’ about bumpin’ uglies with farm implements. And let’s face it, even a ditch-witch is cuter than the girls around here!”

  “Dude, you got a tractor at home, doncha?” Curtis asked, ever the twisted straight man.

  “Yeah, but it’s a Tonka tractor!”

  “Cool! Perfect size for your …”

  “Dick is on the line right now,” the Bug hollered. “What’s up, Dick?”

  The two pinheads laughed, but a distant, metallic voice hummed like evil electricity over the radio, some guy on a party line out past the Highline, possibly from Hell itself. Morgan reached across his desk and turned up the volume a little.

  “God punishes the sinner who spills his seed for wicked and iniquitous purposes,” the growling voice said. “The seed is life, and when this man disobeyed God, he was punished. In the end, he squeezed his own life out of his pathetic little root, and he died before it seeped into the dirt. God saw. He is first but not last.”

  Click.

  Curtis said the first thing that occurred to his limited vocabulary and even more limited intellect:

  “Cool.”

  But it wasn’t cool. Morgan pondered how such pure malevolence might drift on the electric airwaves, not just a tiny echo that bounced off a small Wyoming town and disappeared, but a sound-pulse that would resonate through space and time, beyond the gravitational pull of Earth, past the moons and stars and the emptiness beyond, the way they broadcast Hitler’s voice as a message from a tiny, allegedly harmless planet, to the ear of God Himself.

  In the small galaxy called Winchester, Wyoming, only one man denied space to unbelievers, doubters and sinners. Only one man believed in a special Hell for anyone who crossed him, and most did. Only one man used free speech as a sword, never a shield. Only one man would let loose the hate others kept chained in the darkest parts of their souls, like a mad dog.

  Morgan knew the voice almost as well as his own, and it twisted his gut.

  Malachi Pierce.

  “Dude’s harsh,” The Bug said. “Bet he eats his dead, huh? Raw. No sauce.”

  “You’re on Curtis and The Bug’s restaurant and kinky sex review show, caller,” Curtis said.

  A smaller voice came over the air. A child’s voice.

  “It’s not right to say those things about the man,” the boy said. “He’s dead.”

  “Wussie!” The Bug hollered. “Dead guys can’t call the FCC!”

  “I’m no wussie,” the child said, his voice a little shaky. But he stood his ground, tenuous as it was.

  “Hey, is this Grady? Sounds like the Grady-meister,” Curtis said. “Dude, you definitely got the magic vibe on the touchtone.”

  An uncomfortable silence.

  “Take it back,” the boy said.

  “Take what back?” The Bug asked.

  “What you said.”

  “Yo, Grady, chill. We’re in the media. We don’t take nothin’ back. It’s our mike, not yours.”

  “Take it back.”

  The boy was slightly more insistent, but Curtis and The Bug just chortled, as if they were bullet-proof as well as sound-proof in their soft-sided little box on the edge of town.

  “What’s the 4-1-1, Grady dude?” Curtis asked. His faux street-jive grated on Morgan’s ear, another small-town white kid trying to sound like the hip-hop music he hides from his parents.

  “Just take it back.”

  “No, you little shit!” The Bug yapped without even his usual lame attempt at humor.

  The air went dead with an electric pop. In a moment, it surged back to life in a vortex of sound: advertising jingles, country music, overlapping voices from public radio and Hitler rallies, sound effects from distant galaxies, a child laughing. Every fifteen seconds or so, a voice that sounded like Homer Simpson’s intoned: the mayor is a dorkface.

  Morgan rolled the radio dial up and down through the babble of frequencies, a single voice in a thousand places. But the electronic space occupied by 99.9 KROK-FM was a thousand voices in one place, and it was deafening to hear.

  But Curtis and The Bug were silenced, and Morgan smiled.

  Morgan got home late, past sunset in places farther west than Winchester, Wyoming. Past the time the road to Mount Eden was passable without headlights, when deer lingered in the barrow pit. Past the moment when the warm orange had bled out and turned blue.

  It was dark.

  The house was dark, too. And empty. Nothing on the stove. No night lights. No notes. No children laughing. He tossed his Colorado Rockies cap on the table and snooped around his own kitchen, hunting for signs of Claire and Colter, and scavenging for chocolate chip cookies or chips or beer or anything to distract him from an early bed. He hadn’t eaten all day.

  In the cold glow of the open refrigerator, nothing looked good. He took a bite of some cold pizza, but the cheese was as hard as garlic-flavored marzipan, the sauce cold and clumpy. A ring had congealed around the inside of a glass of undrunk milk. He found a plastic tub of French onion dip in the back, but it was splotched with mold. A foil-covered plate contained some noodle salad, which he hated, and some grilled chicken, which he didn’t, so he took a bite from a drumstick and crimped the foil back. Claire had split a fresh melon and some peaches, but late-night fruit never seemed right to him. Too responsible. Animals that foraged at twilight ate lower on the food chain.

  Then he heard Claire laughing out in the gardens. From the back porch, he could see almost nothing. An incandescent purple bug light over the back door crackled, one more insect soul dispatched to bug heaven on a wisp of ozone and moth dust. Then silence.

  Old Bell Cockins had called the magnificent garden a “pleasance,” his British-born mother’s word for the magnificent gardens at Mount Eden, and he tended it gently until he died. It spread over nearly an acre, encircled by tall pines, and he’d left it all in the care of his best journalistic pupil, Jeff Morgan.

  In the dark warmth of a summer night, Morgan couldn’t see beyond the trees, but tonight he could hear voices. His wife’s was among them, and she was laughing.

  Morgan picked his way along the path toward a flickering citronella candle in the clearing. The canopy was too thick for moonlight. Midges swarmed inside the woodland, where a stream trickled. On hot nights like this, he would walk into the grove and pass through cool puddles of air suspended there, invisible globes of air much cooler than the air around it. He figured it was a trick of evaporation or humidity, a microclimate the size of a child, no more … but he allowed for spirits, too. When he felt the coolness of these night-wraith pools of air on his cheek, he thought of Bridger and felt him close.

  But other spirits haunted him now. Laddie Granbouche was his most persistent ghost. And John Doe was his most perplexing. But the freshly
minted ghost of Highlander Goldsmith literally hung in his forebrain, a grotesque marionette whose shadow fell against a blank canvas. A blank canvas Morgan felt compelled to fill with words and color and compassion for the guy.

  The candle flickered in the garden.

  Colter slept on a bench, his skinned knees drawn up beside him. Claire said something he couldn’t understand, then giggled, and a male voice followed from the shadows. Morgan recognized it.

  “What’s up, Doc?” Morgan said, stepping into the small circle of light thrown by the bug candle.

  “Jeff,” Claire said, a little surprised. “What time is it?”

  “Late.”

  “Gotta try this stuff,” Dr. Cowper said. “The perfect muscle relaxant.”

  Dr. Shawn Cowper pulled an odd bottle from its hiding spot in the iris bed and poured Morgan a tiny glass. He sniffed and got a whiff of something intense, more than moonshine, less than kerosene.

  “Jesus,” Morgan said, “is this flammable?”

  “Grappa,” Dr. Cowper said. “Used to be poor man’s brandy, but now it’s the rage. Even the bad stuff goes for twenty-five bucks a bottle. Don’t swig. Maybe just sort of dip your tongue in it at first.”

  Morgan did. The grappa curdled the lining of his mouth. It had a vile bite.

  “My god,” Morgan said.

  “Yeah, it’s an acquired taste. They say Hemingway drank it at Harry’s Bar in Venice. No wonder he had hair on his chest, huh?”

  Claire brushed her hair back and a primrose petal fluttered to the path at her feet. She looked down and said nothing, but not in a guilty way. Nonetheless, Morgan thought she seemed a little uncomfortable, especially since she’d been laughing only a moment before. But now wasn’t the time to press.

  “Sorry about dinner,” he said as he sat beside her on the garden bench. “Film processor broke down and ruined the Class of 1960 reunion photos. Had to go shoot new stuff.”

  “No problem,” Claire said. “I made a plate for you.”

  “I saw it. Thanks.”

  After a moment’s pause, Dr. Cowper squinted close at his watch in the dark.