Sorrow's Crown

by Tom Piccirilli

  "What's different?"

  "He once exhibited a powerful presence. The kind of man who commanded a fundamental admiration. He exuded a natural ease and charm in his youth. Now, he hardly moves at all. I'd suspect tranquilizers."

  "Or tranquillity."

  "No, a man like him never finds peace."

  "I know. He acted the same way a few days ago, but was in full control of his faculties from what I could tell."

  The newscasters were on the move, getting better coverage than at a raging fire. They were being particularly brazen, even for Action Team Channel 3, sidling up behind the priest and getting a view of the tombstone, panning around at the throng, tight close-up of the father. The thought that Harnes was a mannequin posed in a window struck home again.

  "Anna, I've only seen him once or twice in the paper . . ."

  "Yes, he relishes his privacy, to the extreme. Curious, then, that such a recluse would allow a personal tragedy as this made into an exhibition."

  "Maybe he doesn't really consider it to be very tragic."

  She folded her hands in her lap and slowly rubbed her knuckles, which either meant she had a touch of arthritis acting up in the rain or all those hard-boiled novels were really getting to her and she wanted to jab someone in the jaw.

  She wet her lips. There are times when you want to say something like, Impossible, no father would ever kill his own child, no friend would betray a friend, and the words die in your throat because you know the bitter truth. She would never take another step again and my parents were dead because of a friend.

  My grandmother merely said, "Dreadful."

  The priest grew annoyed with all the camera equipment and started motioning for them to be set aside, or at least backed out of his face. He waited another moment before beginning the final service. His voice didn't carry far into the wind. Harnes' lack of emotion bothered him as well, giving him no one to comfort. He murmured in Harnes' ear and gripped his arm in a gesture of sympathy. Leafless branches bowed in the breeze. Harnes didn't move or reply.

  "His utter indifference is almost a cruelty to those around him," Anna said. "What kind of effect might that have had on a child?"

  "I was thinking the same thing when he picked me up in his limo," I said. "I'm getting a hint as to why five wives left him, taking the hard route." I wondered where Diane Cruthers had been buried. "You told me Diane Cruthers was pregnant. Did she have the child before she committed suicide?"

  "No."

  Jesus, I thought. "Harnes has had several lawsuits brought against him, sexual harassment, palimony. Do you think that we. . ."

  "That we might find Teddy's bastard siblings in this assemblage?"

  It bothered the hell out of me when she finished all my sentences. "It'll be a good chance to find out something about him. What did you learn from Wallace?"

  She didn't bother to ask how I'd known she'd spoken to Keaton Wallace. He stood a dozen yards away, fiddling with his dentures the way he usually did. Even from here I could see the spotting of burst blood vessels in his nose, his drinking almost as bad as my father's had been. They'd both gotten on the wagon together, though Wallace continued to leap off.

  "Virtually nothing. The wounds are consistent with being attacked with a shovel. Teddy was indeed killed by blunt trauma to the head, the cleaving of his visage induced either as he died or just post mortem."

  "Do you think Wallace might have missed something?”

  “No."

  "If he released the body to Harnes, then Wallace is satisfied the corpse is Teddy. He must've matched the fingerprints to Teddy's passport."

  "My thoughts exactly, but passports can be faked. Wallace may have been deceived."

  "Or bribed."

  "No, I don't believe that."

  We were silent for a moment, each of us lost in thought, disturbed by the fact that the killer had taken the time to eradicate his victim's face. It didn't sit well.

  I looked over at Wallace again: in his mid-fifties, the barbershop quartet haircut and bristly mustache made him look like a man reaching backward to the day of Teddy Roosevelt. He grinned too widely because his dentures didn't fit well, and his generally jolly nature could make you forget that he'd once had a mean streak that landed his ex-wife in the emergency room a few times. I liked him a lot, and as a kid I especially liked him when he was drunk.

  I wondered where he stood on the road of his life, and if he was proud of what he'd accomplished or if he felt like a failure, still full of hate, the anger hiding within him the way it had hidden inside my father. He and my Dad hadn't been especially close friends, but they had been devoted drinking buddies, and gotten into brawls that landed them in Broghin's jail more than once. The broken blood vessels lining his face depicted all the regrets and remorse of his life; and a lot of the fun, too, I supposed.

  Could he have made a mistake? Could a faked passport have gotten by him? He rubbed at his mustache, smoothing it as he licked his lips. He might still go to the occasional AA meeting, but he was so far off the wagon at the moment I could tell he was already starting to get thirsty. Could Teddy, trying to escape his father, have paid off Wallace into faking the autopsy? And if so, who was the dead man I now watched being buried?

  "We may just be dealing with a jealous psychopath who hated Teddy so much he cut the kid's face off for no real reason," I said.

  "Doubtful."

  Lowell moved off to one side, wearing a black suit and sunglasses, weaving among the crowd.

  "Deputy Tully also suspects something is amiss," Anna said. "He's studying the crowd."

  "He knows the killer might be here."

  "As does anyone who has ever seen a television police drama or read a mystery novel."

  "Yes, but only a real genius would do it covertly," I said, putting on my sunglasses.

  Finally we heard a heartfelt wail, and a girl at the front slowly drew nearer to the casket. She sobbed loudly and was comforted by a young man who looked on the verge of tears himself. Okay, I thought, now I have something to do. Harnes didn't even turn to look at her. Jocelyn didn't either, or the chauffeur. I didn't see Sparky and wondered what else he might have to do that was more important than attending the funeral for the son of his employer.

  "A girlfriend?" Anna asked.

  "Or his sister."

  "Did you hear any of the names of his personnel?"

  "More like an entourage. Just the Asian woman. Her name is Jocelyn. The others never addressed each other, and the lipless guy didn't take the bait."

  "This Jocelyn looks quite"—she searched for the right word—"formidable." There were a lot of other adjectives I'd use in describing her, but formidable worked just fine for the moment. "Regardless of the men in his company, I believe she might actually be Theodore Harnes' bodyguard."

  I wondered how many copies of Emerson's MayDay I'd have to sell in order to have enough cash to pay a body like hers to guard a body like mine. "She could certainly wallop me."

  "Oh, dear."

  I knew a lot of the people and when we caught each others' eye I understood that we all shared the same thought: why are you here? Harnes hadn't even been in the country for most of the last decade, so what kind of hold did he have on the town? Vinny Matalo and John Trusnick and Pete Wilkes, Jessica Sperling, Daphne Kupfer, some other friends I hadn't seen in months, neighbors, all of us here for whatever reason, to pay our respects to a dead kid and a wealthy man whom nobody even really knew.

  "Not like Daphne Kupfer is a business associate of Harnes, being a waitress in Pembleton's Diner, and how would she know Teddy?"

  I watched the girl crying. It was the only noise heard outside of the priest who mumbled through his service.

  I waited a while longer before I finally asked, "Do you think Harnes killed Diane Cruthers?"

  Anna remained silent. Her lips parted, but she soon closed her mouth again and cleared her throat. She looked beyond Harnes into their shared history, and I knew it hadn't only been bad, it
had been awful. It took a few seconds but she eventually shook the question off.

  She didn’t want to deal with the dead past, and said, “The truth of Teddy’s murder lies with Crummler.”

  “Yes.”

  I had to go to Panecraft.

  Seven

  Pembleton’s diner had been downtown on the corner of Broome and Maiden since nineteen-twenty-eight and looked every minute of it. Arthur Pembleton himself had stepped in front of a southbound freight a couple months following Black Monday, but none of the successive proprietors had ever decided to change the name, including the current owner, Harvey McCoy. Pe,bleton might not have had any luck businesswise, but he sported a properly high-class name, and lending it to a diner must’ve been thought to raise the general level of class in the place.

  A few coats of paint would have gone a lot further to that end, I thought, and might have made a dent in the seventy years’ worth of grime clinging to the walls. Maybe not. I’d been in worse-looking places in Manhattan, but none that served meals as bad as Pembleton’s. No one liked to eat here, and the regulars appeared to have mutated two levels further down the food chain, but the next nearest diner was several miles uptown and the lunch crowd hated to travel.

  If anybody ever went into the direct competition with Harvey McCoy they’d make a fortune. I thought about a flowershop-bookstore-diner and wondered if we could get the Leones to come and cook for us, with Katie putting fresh flowers out in the booths and me going table to table selling first editions of A. E. Houseman, Francois Mauriac, Thomas Wolfe, and books on longhorn sheep.

  Already the fumes in this place were starting to get to me. The hostess seated me with nod of her head and slapped a menu down in front of my face so hard that it bounced off the table and hit the floor. I reached down and had a perfect view of Daphne's legs as she shouldered the kitchen door open and stepped out carrying two plates of what might be passing for scrambled eggs. I didn't know what the purple stuff was, and I would make it my mission in life never to know.

  Daphne Kupfer had never stopped being twenty-one. She'd held thirty at bay with skin-tight clothing and a physique she worked hard to keep with at least four nights a week spent in the gym. Those angles and stone-hard contours of her body stuck out whenever she moved in the slightest; just turning her head or shifting her stance brought curves and veins up from all over. She still had a little girl space between her two front teeth and wore dangling earrings of unicorns leaping through hoops that jingled like wind chimes.

  Twice while Katie and I were in line at the movies we'd run into her and her dates. She went in for the boyish types who weren't so much boyish as they were boys. I thought that if anybody I'd seen at the funeral might have actually known Teddy, it would be Daphne.

  She swung by my table carrying a pot of coffee, and though she caught my eye she drifted away quickly, unsure of how to react. My skills at covert operations needed to be improved upon. I'd left my sunglasses at home.

  I beat the lunch rush by a half hour and the place was nearly empty. She spotted me again as I sat staring in her direction and a ripple of tension moved through her face. I smiled and turned up the wattage of my natural charm. She ducked her head and hurried back into the kitchen. I tried hard to recover from the blow to my ego.

  It took a few minutes before she came back out. She didn't have any choice but to eventually come over. "Jonny, hi.”

  “Hi, Daphne."

  She didn't need a pen and a pad to take my order, and just kept smiling widely as annoyance continued to slip in and out of her eyes. The muscles in her sleek neck bunched. In a fair fight she'd probably kill me. "What can I get you?"

  I glanced down at the menu. It all looked about the same so I just pointed toward the middle, hoping she wouldn't bring me the purple stuff. Her smile down-shifted into a grin and she sort of bopped her head to the side so that her hair did a wheeling twist in the air. It was a gesture that might have been cute when she was fifteen. She nabbed the menu from my hand. "Coming right up."

  When she returned I was thankful to see nothing purple on the plate. There was also nothing edible. "Can I talk to you for a minute, Daphne?"

  She tilted her head again and her hair swept back in the other direction. "Can't, Jonny, the boss might see me."

  "You've been working here for twelve years, Daphne. You think Harvey is going to fire you anytime soon?"

  "I don't like the way you said that," she told me, and two thin bands of red spread in straight lines across her cheeks.

  "I'm sorry."

  "What do you want?"

  "To talk about Teddy Harms."

  "Teddy?" She drew her chin back and frowned.

  "Yes."

  "I didn't even know him."

  "Why were you at his funeral then?"

  Now the real heat came up, and I heard something crack in her, maybe her knees as she grew rigid. Even the unicorns looked pissed off. "And what the hell business is it of yours?"

  "Listen, I…"

  "Why, do you think I killed him?"

  "No, of course not."

  "I'm a suspect? Funny, I don't remember you ever wearing a badge, Jonny. Exactly when was it again that you became a cop?"

  I was beginning to have serious concerns about my abilities to glean useful information by merely smiling. So far, I'd done nothing but rile her into throwing up a defensive wall. Her hair wagged back to the other side again. Time for a new tack. "You didn't know Teddy?"

  "I just said that. I never met him."

  "But Theodore Harnes?"

  "None of your business." Her arms crossed and appeared strong enough to break two-by-fours. "You like to think you're smooth, don't you?"

  "Uhmm, no, actually."

  "Slipping back into town, nosing around until you find something ugly you can yank out and hold up for all the cameras and newspapers, right? That's your action? Funny thing is, didn't you ever think that some people might think you're a suspect? The way you're always in trouble? Watch where you point that finger, Jonny, because there are plenty of folks around who are pointing one right back at you."

  The lunch crowd began to pile up, doorway filling, the hostess seating more customers and bouncing more menus. I'd lose Daphne in another minute.

  "The young woman at the funeral who was crying. Do you know her?"

  "Her name is Alice Conway, lives out on High Ridge. Her father was a competitor of Harnes' in some local merchandising business, I don't know what. Her old man got driven out pretty quick, lost everything. Her parents are dead. Now leave me alone, and when you see her, give the little bitch my regards."

  She caught herself at the last moment and realized she'd said more than she'd cared to say, but really didn't care that much. A nasty smile nicked the edge of her mouth as she stared at me.

  I thought I'd better turn off the goddamn charm, and I got the hell out of there.

  ~ * ~

  High Ridge seemed draped against the foothills overlooking the country, falling back one level upon the next farther and higher into the hillside: huge homes sparsely dappled the entire area, some huddled together and others keeping their distance like squatting, cagey brutes.

  The houses all appeared to be at least a century old, and I saw several Historical Society preservation plaques inlaid along the sides of boulders. Wrought-iron signs standing beside stone lions kept proclaiming which great people had done what great things in bygone eras. A statue of a revolutionary war hero stood on an empty bluff looking lonely and very confused. I knew just how he felt.

  I still didn't have a car in Felicity Grove, and all three of Duke Edelman's station trucks were up on skids, so I kept borrowing Anna's van. The hand controls were as familiar to me as using foot pedals, almost more so considering I drove her van more than I drove a standard. I hadn't owned a car in the six years since I'd moved to Manhattan. I had a CD of Pachelbel's "Canon and Other Baroque Favorites" playing, and the winsome classical music didn't match the approaching vista as
I made a sharp turn onto a private road.

  Alice Conway's house brooded behind a thick line of oak and hickory, dark except for one foreboding yellow light that shone gloomily through the shadows of abundant trees. The driveway had chipped and rutted in several spots, and last autumn's rotted leaves lay strewn against the porch. Rain gutters on the east side of the house had torn loose and hung askew, bouncing against the split wooden shingles in the breeze.

  I stepped up the porch and the stairs wobbled and creaked under me. I waited for a black cat to leap at my face or an unkindness of ravens to burst from the attic window. A '68 Mustang that looked like it had scraped every highway divider from here to the Holland Tunnel sat at an angle facing the house. Behind it, nearly kissing the bumper, was a GTO that somebody had spent a couple hundred hours restoring to mint condition.

  I rang the doorbell and then knocked loudly. It seemed like the kind of house where people might quite often say, "I didn't hear a thing." I waited a minute and repeated the process. And then again. No cats crept along the porch rafters.

  The young lady who'd wailed at the funeral finally answered the door. Only one side of her face was visible as she peered through the crack at me. We both looked at each other for a little while. Slowly she opened the door wider, exposing more of her face. She was eighteen or nineteen, with large, pink lips made for pouting that nearly drew complete attention from the deep brown circles under her eyes. A rowdy group of curls hung into the corners of her mouth. Her nerves were clearly shot, and when she said "Yes?" her voice squeaked curiously, hauling the word out and snapping it in half.

  I saw the outline of a man next to her behind the door and I dipped forward to get a better look. She jerked back and the young man who'd been comforting her during Teddy Harnes' service came into view. She said "Yes?" again and kept it to one syllable this time, the curls edging in and out of her mouth. We watched one another some more, and I understood that the depth of her sorrow was real and I suddenly felt very sorry for her.

  "My name is Jonathan Kendrick, Alice. I was hoping I could talk to you for a few minutes."