The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2)

by Ron Franscell

  Jeff’s grandmother had been dead for almost forty years, a farm wife who just sat down on her bed one day, and stopped. A faded, yellowing photo of her, when she was young, not old and tired, sat on Rachel’s tiny dresser.

  “Yes, Mother, I’m glad you saw her,” he said, stroking her hair.

  “Now you must get to work,” she said, abruptly shifting her attention to her new visitor. “When you bring the cats in, please make sure the gate is closed. If they get out again, we’ll never get them back. Come up to the church when you finish and I’ll pay you. What was your name again?”

  Morgan held her hand and cried, but she didn’t see. She was someplace far away.

  Crystal, The Bullet’s receptionist, was reading Town and Country magazine when Morgan got back to the newsroom. She handed him a handful of pink message slips and spoke without looking up.

  “There’s a turd in the pool,” she said.

  “Yeah, and I think we’re going fishing,” he said as he stopped at his rookie reporter’s empty desk. “Where’s Josh?”

  “Lunch.”

  Morgan glanced at the newsroom clock.

  “Dammit, it’s three o’clock.”

  Crystal licked her thumb and turned the page.

  “Check his pockets.”

  Morgan stopped cold, his head cocked at a quizzical angle, as if he’d just slammed into the invisible wall separating reality from some other dimension.

  “For what?”

  “Butter.”

  “Butter?”

  “Yeah. Butter. It’s after three.”

  “What the hell … why the hell…” Morgan stammered, not sure what the real question should be. But he was saved by the bell over The Bullet’s front door, as Josh walked in. The front pockets of his rumpled Dockers were bulging.

  “Josh, where have you been?” Morgan asked him as the young reporter sauntered through the swinging gate that separated the newsroom from the foyer.

  “Lunch.”

  “It’s three o’clock.”

  “Well, you gotta admit,” Josh said earnestly, “that’s a little early for dinner.”

  Morgan shook his head and started to walk away, then turned for one last adventure in the Twilight Zone.

  “Josh, what’s in your pockets?”

  The young reporter smiled big, exposing a set of ranch-boy teeth that had once-too-often met the dirt floor of a rodeo arena, but never an orthodontist. Whatever he had in his pockets tickled him.

  “Butter. Want some?”

  Morgan knew when to let well enough alone, and this was it. As he sat down at his cluttered desk, he tried to shake the mental image of a strung-out kid mainlining Parkay in a grimy alley. It just didn’t work.

  “Josh, you got time to do a little legwork for a possible story … or do you have to butter something?” he asked.

  “Whatcha got, Chief?” Josh beamed.

  “Don’t call me Chief.”

  “OK … Whatcha got, Coach?”

  Morgan breathed deeply, just once.

  “Some kid sent a threatening e-mail to the Mayor. That’s a story, ten inches tomorrow morning. But while you’re at Town Hall, compare all the recent stray-dog tickets to the computer data that was hacked. Look for names on both lists and see what comes up. And just for yucks, check to see whose dogs were picked up last week.”

  “Got it, Coach.”

  “Don’t call me Coach, either.”

  “Got it, Boss-man.”

  Morgan squinted hard. “Git.”

  Josh’s goofy smile crumpled. He didn’t even stop to unload his pilfered polyunsaturates as he grabbed a notebook and hit the street.

  That night, Morgan tried to write about Gabe Rodriguez, but he was still a body without a face, a life without a soul. He’d tap out a few lines on his word processor, then delete them, tap out a few more, delete. Every death needs meaning, just as every life needs meaning …

  He’d written about death before, in its every natural and unnatural shape. He had described the color of it, the smell of it, the cool, candle-wax feel of it. It was just a thing — a thing — to be described, explained, rationalized, given gravity, and gussied up for a family newspaper. Death was an event, a single moment of personal cataclysm that usually made good copy. Death was always news, and not just to the deceased, because humans have allowed endings to become the most important part of the story. Death is the banner headline, life is the footnote on the back page.

  But life is the story. In the eulogy for a legendary Tribune editor, the preacher said of all the elegant words and dates that would be carved in his tombstone, the most important symbol would be the hyphen between the years of his birth and his death. That insignificant slice represented the span of his life.

  There should be more, Morgan thought then.

  And now.

  Nothing can disappear without a trace. Not a head. Not a soul. Not a memory. Not a life. Nature doesn’t practice emptiness, only transformation. Where does a man’s story go when the man is dead? What does a good son or father or lover become when his heart stops?

  The blinking cursor taunted him, so Morgan shut down his computer. The newsroom was dark.

  He knew the house at Mount Eden was dark by now, too. Colter would be asleep, but Claire would be lying awake, waiting. In the dark, he would kiss his son, undress for bed, press himself against his wife and dream whatever absurd movie his fatigued brain was screening tonight.

  As his jiggling headlights pushed aside the buggy veil of night, he wondered: What becomes of dreams once dreamed?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Morgan stood naked in his dark kitchen, staring at the nothingness beyond the back window.

  The night was as black as an open grave, except for the faint, ancient starlight that had arrived, all but spent, in his backyard thirty million years after it first shined someplace far away.

  The only light came from the green numerals on the microwave’s digital clock: three-thirty-four.

  His reflection was a ghost in the glass, nothing more. He hoisted a jelly glass of rye and toasted his other self, and promised to make no more promises to shadows, then smiled in the dark when he realized he’d made another promise to a shadow.

  He sipped the rye he’d poured from a dusty fifth of Old Overholt, a rotgut whiskey said to be favored by the famous Wyoming ranch enforcer and killer Tom Horn. He liked it because he could tell a Tom Horn story when he poured it for friends and because it made him sweat.

  Or maybe it was just the moonless, windless night. He’d tried sleeping, but the ghost of Gabe Rodriguez kept nudging him awake as he made mental lists of questions to ask and people to call. When it no longer distracted him to feel the sweat trickle down his side or to nuzzle a fresh, cool spot on his pillow, he got out of bed and went downstairs.

  He heard a distant coyote howling, then another, in the dark pine forest beyond the back fence. He’d often listened to them on summer nights, their keening howls reassuring in an odd way. Life continued in the dark. But tonight, it was just part of the noise in his head.

  Colter’s little wooden baseball bat, bigger than he could swing but smaller than an official PeeWee baseball stick, leaned in the corner behind the front door. His leather mitt, warmed in sunlight and oiled on one of those father-son spring weekends that mothers never see or understand, was on the floor, a ball cupped in its web. Summer was almost a third over and there’d been no more of those father-son weekends beyond that first. Morgan slathered another heavy coat of guilt on himself.

  Claire had fallen asleep hours ago, but she remained distant. He had gone into Colter’s room when he got home and kissed his mouth, tasting his sweet breath.

  This time of night, past last call at even the most decadent Wyoming roadhouse, had no soul. Even the creatures of the night had given up the hunt and gone to ground. It was a time of dew forming, when the warmth of the previous day had completely dissipated. It was a time when the winter stars actually came up in the summer
sky and nobody cared. Even the crickets had gone to sleep. The only sounds he heard were the creaking of timbers as they cooled inside the walls of his old house and some horny coyotes hunting quick nocturnal couplings before dawn.

  He had just raised his glass to the night when the phone rang. He fumbled around on the dark kitchen counter until he found the cordless phone behind the coffeemaker, where Claire had likely shoved it out of Colter’s reach.

  “Yeah?”

  “You asleep?”

  It was Cowper, and he sounded wide awake.

  “At the moment? No. I was just waxing my car.”

  “Really?”

  “Fuck you, Shawn. Why are you calling at three-thirty —” Morgan glanced at the microwave “— six?”

  “Well, I was asleep four minutes ago. Dead to the world. I was dreaming about the night we sorta broke into the mortuary.”

  “Does that qualify as a wet dream for you forensic guys?”

  “No, we have the same kind of wet dreams as everybody else,” Cowper replied blithely, “except we wear rubber gloves.”

  Morgan stopped scratching himself and sighed.

  “Yeah, so in your dream that woke both of us up …”

  “Remember when we first went in and I told you I hated the smell of ether?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Well, in my dream, I smelled it again. I don’t normally believe in dreams. I mean, they’re just random electrical impulses, and the brain is just doing its job by trying to make sense of all these illogical, unrelated miniature explosions, right?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “But sometimes … I mean, Jesus, sometimes it makes sense.”

  “It’s now three-thirty eight.”

  “What are you, the atomic clock? Listen, this is weird shit. I dreamed of ether because we smelled ether at the mortuary.”

  “Dammit, go back to bed and dream of girls like everybody else,” Morgan sniped, then added pointedly, “other girls, not Claire.”

  “Jeff, morticians don’t need ether.”

  Whether it was the lateness of the hour or the ambiguity of Cowper’s late-night epiphany didn’t matter. Morgan was confused.

  “And …?”

  “Okay, ethers are organic derivatives of water, but they lack the labile negative-OH group. As a result, ethers, except for epoxides, are usually not very reactive and are often used as solvents for organic reactions …”

  “Oh, Christ …”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re thinking, ‘Isn’t ether an anesthetic?’”

  “No, I’m thinking I’m gonna hang up. Chemistry gives me a headache, especially when it’s … three-forty in the morning.”

  “Well, they don’t use ether as an anesthetic anymore because it tended to explode and induce peculiar side-effects like death.”

  “Okay, Doctor Know-it-all, what’s it used for?”

  “That’s the thing. Nothing in a mortuary. They put it in starter fluid, in gasoline to boost the octane, use it as a solvent around machinery, and some legitimate labs use it.”

  His emphasis on the word legitimate piqued Morgan’s enervated curiosity.

  “It has illegitimate uses?”

  “Yeah. A big one. Methamphetamine.”

  “Meth? Hold on. You think Carter McWayne is running a crank lab out of a funeral home? Did you close down the Buck Snort tonight? You didn’t accidentally drink their Beaver Drool homebrew, did you?”

  “There’s only one way to find out. Meet me in the alley behind the mortuary in ten minutes.”

  “No way. No fucking way, Shawn. We can call the sheriff in the morning. I have no idea what we’re looking for.”

  “I do.”

  “And what if you find it? What’re you gonna do, huh? Roust Carter McWayne in the middle of the night and bore him into confessing with chemistry trivia? This is something for the cops.”

  A long silence.

  “You trust these cops? You’re not even curious?”

  “We got no choice. You’re a ghoul, and I’m a vulture. We can’t just break and enter because we are curious.”

  “If you give this to the cops, you think you’ll get the scoop? Bullshit, Jeff. Everybody in town will know more about it than you. And I’ll never know what happened to Laddie or Rodriguez. Those country-club Gestapo boys from DCI will clamp the whole case shut.”

  Morgan sniggered, but he wasn’t amused.

  “How in the hell does this involve Laddie and Rodriguez? You need to take a deep breath, my friend.”

  “How the hell do you know it doesn’t?”

  Morgan said nothing.

  “Okay,” Cowper said. “I’m on my own. A man’s gotta know his limitations. Sorry to wake you.”

  Cowper hung up, and Morgan threw the cordless on the counter, hard. The wood floor was cool on the soles of his feet. He cursed under his breath and threw back the last swallow of Old Overholt.

  Then he snatched back the cordless and punched the redial button.

  “I wasn’t asleep. And I’ll see you there in ten minutes,” he growled and hung up.

  A dog barked again as Morgan and Cowper crept down the alley behind the McWayne Funeral Home. They walked as lightly as they could, but the gravel still crunched beneath their feet like dry corn flakes.

  Without a moon or even a streetlight, the way was dark. Morgan walked with one hand extended in front of him at crotch level, hoping to feel a garbage can before he stumbled into it and racked himself.

  The mortuary’s back door was, as always, unlocked. Inside, Cowper gently closed it behind them and locked it. Morgan would have laughed at the irony of burglars locking themselves in if his gut wasn’t already in a knot.

  Cowper clicked on a small Mag-lite and took a deep breath through his nose. He smiled, as if he’d caught the faint, metallic-sweet, medicinal whiff of ether he’d come for.

  But all Morgan smelled was death and cat piss. One was imaginary, the other wasn’t.

  “What are we looking for?” Morgan whispered.

  “Look for some jars with a clear liquid over a whitish solid on the bottom. Look for anything marked ‘iodine’ or that has a dark red or metallic purple powder in it. Look for bottles labeled as sulfuric or hydrochloric acid.”

  Morgan deflated.

  “More chemistry. Shit. This place is full of chemicals and substances I don’t want to think about,” Morgan said.

  “Then look for propane tanks with fittings that have turned blue,” Cowper said. “Beyond that, holler if you see bottles or jars with rubber tubing, glass cookware or frying pans with a powdery residue, a lot of cans of camping fuel, paint thinner, acetone, starter fluid, lye, drain cleaners or bottles of muriatic acid. Anything like that.”

  All Morgan knew about methamphetamine, or “crank,” was that it was poor man’s cocaine, cheap and easy to make. He first saw it as a cop reporter in Chicago, among the kids in the Projects. Now it was also the drug of choice among truckers, miners, oilfield roughnecks, bikers, railroaders, snowboarders and a cesspool full of social itinerants that clung to fringe of the dark.

  He knew an investment of a few hundred dollars in over-the-counter medications and readily available chemicals could create thousands of dollars worth of the white, powdery crystals, which could be bought outside any truck stop or roadhouse for about twenty-five bucks for a quarter-gram, known as a “paper.” Compared to its cuter, richer cousin, cocaine, that was a steal. In fact, on the street, cocaine was known as coke … crank was Pepsi.

  In the early days, meth was a rural product, because the stench of cooking it was an unmistakable marker. So cookers moved to the countryside where nobody was around to whiff its stink.

  Like every other drug, meth had its own argot: it was known variously as “annie,” icee,” “kryptonite” and “white bitch.” A user was a “geek,” “basehead” or “jibby.” When he was loaded, a geek was “amping,” “gakked” or “spun out.”

  There was no Colombian crank carte
l, no global meth networks, no French ice connections. The raw material could be stolen off the shelves at supermarkets and auto stores. The crank economy was all small fish, small-time entrepreneurs making a buck off a cheap, potent, enslaving high.

  A mom-and-pop meth “lab” could fit into a suitcase. Meth cooks loved small towns, where bumpkin lawmen were usually less sophisticated about drugs. Nonetheless, Wyoming cops had busted meth labs in barns, camp trailers, garages, porta-potties, root cellars, apartments, motel rooms, self-storage lockers, vacant outhouses and pickup trucks.

  But a funeral home?

  Cowper followed his nose to a carpeted, windowless hallway off the embalming lab. Morgan stayed closed behind.

  The only other light came from a street lamp outside a bathroom window just past the embalming lab. Morgan could see only a stool and a sink, and he heard the constant drip of water from the spigot as they moved down the hall.

  Several unlocked doors opened into cramped rooms. One contained a dormant furnace, a clunky water-softener, some buckets and mops. One stored office supplies. One was festooned with plastic flowers and cheap suit coats, apparently for the unprepared and indigent customer, Morgan thought.

  But one was locked. Not just securely latched, but padlocked.

  Cowper lay down on the floor and sniffed the gap under the heavy door.

  “This is it,” he said. “Why do you think a guy who leaves the back door to his mortuary unlocked would lock a door inside? You got a bolt cutter?”

  Morgan rolled his eyes. “No,” he said, “and even if I did, I wouldn’t cut that lock. Jesus, why don’t we just leave a note that says, ‘Hi. Just thought we’d drop in and burglarize your place.’”

  Cowper was thinking, not listening.

  “If he’s cooking meth, he has to vent it either to the roof or out a window,” Cowper said, his eyes and flashlight beam running the length of the low, shadowy ceiling. “Maybe he just runs it through his ventilation system from the embalming room, or maybe through the duct work from the furnace.”

  The game afoot, he pushed past Morgan, back up the hallway and went into the furnace cubby. Sure enough, a sheet-metal duct, no more than six inches in radius, had been spliced from the locked room into the main flue.