A Hard Death

by Jonathan Hayes

  “Mr. Craine is on the terrace, Ms. Craine; he’s expecting you.” Maggie had long ago given up trying to read her father’s mood from Leila’s expression; that Chip had summoned her to Stella at all was never a good sign.

  Her father kept the house glacially cold; when she was a kid, the tile in the ridiculously formal entry hall always felt like ice under her bare feet. Hugging herself against the chill, Maggie crossed the living room. The view was as gorgeous as ever, the green sweep of perfect lawn, down to the Gulf of Mexico, the water now blurred by silver haze.

  She pushed through the big glass doors and out onto the terrace, down the steps to the pool. Her father sat at the table in his robe, eating scrambled eggs and toast and reading the New York Times. He was wearing a pair of handmade Italian sunglasses that cost over three thousand dollars.

  He accepted her dutiful kiss and gestured to the other chair.

  “Coffee? Juice? I can have Rosalba make up some eggs if you’d like…”

  Maggie shook her head. “I had coffee at home.” She sat.

  “I’ll get straight to the point: I’ve been going over the bills from Palm Haven.” He tapped a leather folio on the table. “Lucy’s stay is going to cost over thirty-two thousand dollars.”

  “My God!” The number was astonishing. “But they were great with her, I think she’s doing really well.”

  He nodded. “And of course, that’s the most important thing—that Lucy keeps making progress and getting better. It’s what we all want.”

  Where was he going with this?

  He slid the folio aside and leaned back. “So, have you seen any more of the doctor?”

  She didn’t like this. “No.”

  “You spent the other night with him.”

  She flushed. She didn’t answer.

  “Of course, your affairs are none of my business.” He shrugged. “But I have to say, I don’t like him.”

  “You never like them.”

  “What?”

  “You never like anyone I date.”

  He chuckled. “That’s just silly—I liked Charlie Endicott.”

  “Charlie Endicott was a prick—you only liked him because his dad hated that he was dating me.”

  “Ah! I am a bad man indeed, comforted by the discomfort of my enemies!” Craine said. “But, anyway: I disapprove of the doctor—I mean, the man cuts up dead bodies, for crying out loud!”

  Maggie was silent a second.

  She said quietly, “I like him. He’s kind to me, patient with me.”

  “Well, I think we’ve all been very patient with you.” Craine took a sip of grapefruit juice. “But I’ve seen you do this a thousand times. You always think you’ve fallen in love, and make a fool of yourself over some man, then a few days later, a week later, you realize they were wrong for you all along.

  “You make bad decisions, we both know it. Most adults are independent, work for a living—but not you. I buy you a house, I give you an allowance, I even fund your damn shelter, so you can pretend you’ve actually done something with your life! And in the end, I always have to jump in and clean up after you. It’s like dealing with a six-year-old.”

  She was teary now. “Daddy, please. That’s so unfair.”

  “I watch you throw yourself at this doctor, and I can see it’s just one more Maggie Craine disaster in the making. I’ve had just about enough. It’s time you assumed more responsibility.”

  He opened the folio and tapped his finger firmly on the Palm Haven bill. “Lucy gives me enough to worry about without you disappearing with strange men all the time—you should be home looking after her! How on earth did you let her starve herself like that? Where were you, exactly, when she was making herself throw up?”

  He watched Maggie sob, his eyes unblinking and lizard-like.

  “Thirty-two thousand dollars! You act like the money grows on trees!” He pulled another invoice from the folio and pushed it across the table. “And the family therapy? You think that’s free? Three hundred dollars an hour. How would you like to pay for it?”

  He closed the folio firmly. “Really, Maggie, if you’re independent enough to run off and sleep with every man who comes along, you should also be responsible enough to pay for the medical care Lucy needs because of your neglect.”

  Maggie leaped to her feet, grabbed his juice glass, and threw it at him. It hit the robe silently, spattering juice onto his neck and chest and lap; Craine caught the glass before it fell to the floor.

  He called after her, “Oh, well done, Maggie! I completely take back what I said about you being immature!”

  She kept going and didn’t turn when he called to her, “It’s up to you—you just let me know how you want to cover it…”

  CHAPTER 68

  In the embalming room, Smith watched Reggie Jones open Mrs. Rosenblum. He thought it was hilarious that Tony refused to watch them pack the bodies with meth; Tony was a stone-cold bastard when it came to cutting on a live man, but he quailed like a bitch when it came to fucking with the dead.

  Reggie popped the staples the doctors had used to close the woman’s chest after the bypass, then extended the incision down to her pelvis; he would staple it back up later, and the few who saw her naked body would assume it was the handiwork of the surgeons.

  He placed a sternal retractor into the chest incision, and cranked it wide-open, then quickly and methodically removed the lungs, the heart, and opened the flat sheet of muscle that separated chest cavity from abdomen. Then Smith held the abdominal retractor while Reggie cleared out the liver, intestines, and other abdominal organs, tossing them into a heavy-duty leaf bag; they’d end up in the crematorium oven.

  Reggie looked at the clock; in less than fifteen minutes, he had hollowed out her carcass. He rinsed the cavities with a sprayer, then turned the valve and sucked all the water back up. He pressed absorbent material into the empty thorax and abdomen to dry it out.

  He looked over to the table, where Smith and Tony had stacked a dozen bricks of methamphetamine, each a kilo in weight. “You bring the leg tubes?”

  Smith nodded. He spread open his gym bag and showed Reggie the blue PVC pipes, roughly the diameter of a baseball bat, cut down to twelve-inch segments. This had been Reggie’s master stroke: with a scalpel and bone saw, he would remove the femurs and lower leg bones, along with their muscle. Then he’d wedge the tubes back in, each packed with a kilo of meth, and sew the tissue and skin shut over them. This increased the payload of each transported body by six kilos—they could usually jam two into each thigh, and a kilo into each calf.

  They couldn’t pack the legs on every case, but when Mrs. Rosenblum had surgery, the surgeons had cut into the thighs to harvest veins for her bypass; it was a piece of cake for Reggie to enlarge the incisions, tear out the flabby muscle and soft tissue, and refill her before closing her up.

  Reggie surveyed her hollowed-out body. With a bit of effort, he’d cram fifteen keys of methamphetamine into it; by the time she hit Chicago, the old bitch would have a street value of half a million dollars.

  CHAPTER 69

  When he was safely out of Port Fontaine and onto I-55, Jenner stomped on the gas pedal. The engine hummed, and the needle crept past the 80 mark, the road underneath hard and flat as an airport runway.

  Jenner floored the accelerator, pushing it down until his calf ached from the pressure. The engine pitched up to a high whine as the air blasted in and shuffled the junk on the backseat. And though it killed the sound, and warmed the car, and sent paper skidding into the front compartment, it wasn’t enough to get rid of the image of Marty, lying dead on the shroud beside the drowned car, arms uplifted, so badly decomposed that even his close friend couldn’t recognize him.

  Jenner had failed. He’d failed and he knew why he’d failed: because of his attitude. He’d failed because he wouldn’t kiss Tom Anders’s butt. Even before Port Fontaine, he’d always been failing. He’d lost his license and blown his reputation because he hadn’t been smart eno
ugh to make nice with Amanda Tucker, or to play ball with fucking Steve Whittaker, now the chief ME in New York City.

  It was Jenner’s own fault, his own fucking fault.

  And now they were cutting him out of the investigation, riding him out of town while Rudge and Halvorsen and Bartley hunted the people who’d killed Marty and Bobbie. And Jenner knew that, because of his work, in a week or two, Tommy Anders would be appearing via satellite on Amanda Tucker’s American Crime Prime Time, explaining to the nation how he’d tracked down and caught the killers.

  And it should be Jenner. Jenner should be moving the investigation forward. Jenner should be keeping his promise to Marty.

  It should be Jenner, and he’d fucked it up.

  The electric throb of his cell phone at his hip snapped him out of his thoughts. He slowed the car.

  He pulled over to the shoulder and called back. The office needed a signature on an out-of-state transport approval for Mrs. Rosenblum. She’d already been removed by the funeral home—if Jenner could stop by and sign the form, Mr. Jones, the funeral director, would pick it up later.

  Jenner asked for the funeral parlor address, then said, “If you fax the form over to Mr. Jones, I’ll head back into town and sign it there, save him some trouble.”

  CHAPTER 70

  At lunchtime, her mom still wasn’t back from the memorial, so Lucy Craine took her sandwich up to her bedroom. Rosa was supposed to watch her eat all of her food, but Rosa had been fighting with her boyfriend lately, and spending a lot of time on the phone crying to her sister in Ocala; Lucy’s eating had been good recently, so after she’d taken a couple of bites, Rosa let her finish it in her room.

  Lucy hooked her iPod into the speaker system and put on Miley Cyrus, turning the music up loud enough that Rosa wouldn’t hear her. Then she went into her bathroom and tore up her sandwich, and tossed the pieces into the toilet. Then she made herself bring up the half sandwich she’d eaten, and flushed.

  It felt good. It hurt, and sometimes when she was sick, she’d wipe her mouth and see a little blood, but the ache of her empty stomach grinding away on nothing felt good.

  In her closet, she found her old Blue’s Clues sleeping bag, and slipped the scale out of it.

  She placed it carefully on the wooden floor so that it was even, and climbed on. She watched the red needle bounce and sway, then dip below 95. Yes!

  She put the scale away, opened her MacBook, and read her affirmations in her husky whisper:

  every time you say no thanks to food you say yes please to thin

  hunger hurts but starving works

  i want to be thin more than anything, even food

  this is forever

  i will do whatever it takes

  CHAPTER 71

  A steady stream of mourners filed in and out of the viewing of the late James Prescott, a much-admired school principal. The funeral home lot was overflowing, so Jenner parked behind the Dairy Queen next door. He slipped through a gap in the ragged hedge that separated the two establishments, and found himself across from the access bay in back.

  Rather than barging into the viewing, he took the shortcut; there’d be someone in the embalming room or preparation area who’d help him. As he made his way past the attendant vehicles—two white Cadillac funeral coaches and a white Lincoln hearse—Jenner wished he’d worn his new jacket.

  It was quiet in the lower level. Reggie Jones ran a tight ship—a prosperous one, too, apparently. The two hearses in the garage were also late-model Cadillacs, one white, one black. The walls were a pristine white, the air had only the faintest whiff of formaldehyde.

  Jenner rapped on the door frame. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  He walked inside, and around the corner found a large embalming room. The body of an older black man was on one of the two tables, formalin pumping into the body through a metal cannula in the right side of the neck, waste fluid draining from the left thigh. The embalmer, a young black woman, was massaging the fluid into the left arm, bending it at the elbow, straightening it again, and squeezing the fluid down toward the hand.

  Jenner said, “Hi there.”

  Holding the arm lifted in front of her, she looked over to him, surprised. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid no one’s allowed down here.”

  Jenner said, “I’m the medical examiner—I’m here to sign an out-of-state transport permit letter for Mrs. Rosenblum.”

  “Oh, sorry, doctor—I thought you’d wandered down from the viewing.” She smiled, and laid the arm back down. “I don’t know anything about the permit, but Mrs. Rosenblum’s in the prep room across the hall. I just finished making up her face; Mr. Jones embalmed her this morning.”

  She led Jenner to the second prep room, but the door was locked. “Huh. This should be open.” She shrugged. “Anyway, that’s her.”

  Jenner peered through the viewing window. Mrs. Rosenblum lay on the nearer table, her limbs wrapped in thick plastic bags, her trunk covered in translucent plastic sheeting.

  There was something odd about her; Jenner was trying to figure out just what when Reggie Jones appeared. He wore black dress slacks and a white shirt and black tie. He came toward Jenner hastily, rolling his shirtsleeves down; Jenner caught a glimpse of his arms, which had scattered amateur-appearing tattoos. Jailhouse tattoos.

  “Doctor! I was expecting you upstairs. Thanks for stopping by.” He shook Jenner’s hand warmly and tugged him toward the hallway. “I have the permit letter just around the corner, in the office.”

  The hallway was wide and well-lit, and the basement office bordered on sumptuous, with two large computers and a big plasma TV mounted on the wall. A grid of six black-and-white monitors sat in the corner, CCTV cameras showing views of the funeral home entrances and the embalming and prep areas.

  Jenner gestured to the security array. “Problems with body snatchers, Reggie?”

  Jones grinned and said, “Ever hear of ‘Wet,’ doc? It’s pot mixed with PCP, but some kids think you can get the same effect with formaldehyde, so they break in to steal it. Some even try to huff the stuff, if you can believe it.”

  Jenner made a face. “God, I can’t imagine that.”

  Reggie beamed. “So what do you think of my place? How you like my hearses? Brand-new!”

  “Impressive. I’ll have to give more thought to Jenner & Rudge.” He glanced over the letter, than scrawled his signature. “There. Where’s she heading—Chicago, was it?”

  “Yes. She’ll go out tonight—the viewing’s this afternoon, then she’ll be on her way.”

  “And you transport her all the way there?”

  “Yes. She’ll be received by a funeral home up there; they’ll take care of the interment.”

  Jenner said, “I’m surprised they let you embalm her—was that because of the long journey?”

  Jones shook his head. “She’s not embalmed, doc, just wrapped. By the time she reaches Illinois, she won’t be looking quite so fresh. Still, she’ll be fine for her friends and family down in Port Fontaine this afternoon, and that’s what matters.”

  “You do a lot of transporting?”

  “Plenty. There are so many folks from the Northeast and the Midwest who winter down here with us, not to mention all the retirees. Lots of them have plots up there—last year, we shipped over two hundred. We work very closely with the JBFS.”

  “The JBFS?”

  “The Jewish Benevolent Funeral Service. It’s a local organization that helps out getting the bodies of Jews back up north. And not just Jews, nowadays.”

  “I see.” Jenner felt ill at ease, but couldn’t say why. “Okay, Reggie. Good seeing you—you see Rudge, say hi.”

  Reggie gestured to the stairs, but Jenner said, “I’ll just cut through the parking lot here.”

  Reggie followed him back down the hall. Jenner stopped by the door of the second embalming room, and peered in at Mrs. Rosenblum.

  “What is it, doc?”

  “I don’t know. She
looks…different.”

  “Different light,” Jones mused. “And Tonya’s done her makeup, could be that’s it.”

  What was it that was different? Reggie was probably right—the cosmeticians had all kinds of tricks, like using brown eye shadow to add extra depth to the eyes when they were viewed in the casket from above. It was probably something like that.

  He turned. Reggie was looking at him—no, not looking at him, watching him. Smiling.

  Jenner shook it off. “See you, Reggie.”

  “Doc.”

  Jenner stepped outside under the awning. The sweltering humidity had melted into a steady drizzle. He ran through the lot and, as he was about to step through the hedge into the Dairy Queen, glanced back at the lower-level entrance; he was surprised to see Reggie standing under the overhang, watching him, unsmiling now, talking into his mobile.

  CHAPTER 72

  The medical examiner’s office was still deserted. Bucky and Calvin were in the break room, sharing a big bottle of Pibb and a party-size bag of Cheetos. They nodded at Jenner.

  “Memorial finished, doc?”

  Jenner shook his head. “Don’t know—something came up, so I couldn’t go.”

  He left before Bucky could ask any questions.

  In his office, Jenner sat at his computer and opened the VeriPic photo storage software. He sifted through the cases until he found the external shots of Mrs. Rosenblum.

  There were just four. He pulled them all up onto the screen and pored over them, cursing that they hadn’t photographed her back, too.

  They were unremarkable. An elderly woman with a stapled incision over her breastbone, a couple of sutured incisions on her torso for the drains and the pacing wires to fix her heartbeat. Small incisions in her thighs where they’d harvested leg veins for the bypass.

  And that was it.

  So what had he seen?

  Jesus, had he seen anything? They’d taken her to the funeral home, worked on her, touched her up to get her ready for viewing that afternoon. Jones was probably right—just a trick of the eye, a little blush, a little eye shadow.