“Mr. Marah?” the detective says in a thin voice.
Cohen looks around the funeral home basement as if he can’t remember how he arrived there, and it feels surprisingly foreign to him, this place where he has worked nearly every day of his adult life. It’s empty now, and he hasn’t seen it that way before. He glances up at the ceiling, wishing he could see the sky. But he can only see a water-stained drop ceiling, a grid of yellowing, once-white squares. Whoever turned on the lights turned on only one switch, so half the room is dark.
“Mr. Marah?” the detective says again. “I know this is probably difficult for you. We only have a few questions. After that, you can head back to the hospital to be with your father.”
Cohen looks at him calmly. The man doesn’t look like a detective—he’s short and thin and wears large glasses. His hair is wispy and parted, and he has large hands for his size. He looks more like an accountant or the manager of a factory that makes buttons.
“Call me Cohen.”
“Of course. Cohen.”
Cohen looks over at Ava. She gives him a soft, encouraging smile.
“Cohen,” the detective says, “when was the last time you saw your father?”
“I guess the night before all this. Was that Sunday night? The days are all running together.”
“Okay, Sunday night.” Every word the detective speaks is weighed down with suspicion, as if he does not expect Cohen to answer truthfully, as if the next question might be the one to undo him. “Can you tell me about that?”
“Sure.” Cohen looks around the room. This is what he doesn’t want to talk about. He wonders if he starts down this road whether he’ll be able to stop. “To be honest, it wasn’t a pleasant conversation.”
He pauses, deciding that, all things considered, he should be as honest as possible. He feels on the verge of losing track of what’s true and what’s not. The stories inside of him are becoming tangled cords. Why he thought his father was dead. When he first arrived at the scene. When he last saw his father.
“I went up to the apartment to let Dad know I was heading home for the night.”
“This was on Sunday night?”
Cohen nods.
“I don’t know exactly. It was late. Maybe around eleven.”
“Eleven p.m.? That’s late. And your elderly father was awake? Okay. Go ahead.”
“He’s always awake at eleven p.m.,” Cohen says defensively. “This is a funeral home. People don’t schedule their deaths between the hours of eight and five.”
The detective does not respond to his sarcasm.
Cohen shakes it off. “I went upstairs.” He motions toward the back of the basement and the stairs that go all the way up to the apartment. “I was working down here, getting some things together, nothing big. So, upstairs, I knocked. He didn’t answer, so I went in. He had obviously been drinking. He drinks.” Cohen rubs his eyes. “He drank.” He shakes his head. “Whatever. Anyway, he was on the sofa, as usual. He had a drink in his hand.”
“He didn’t lock the door?”
“The door?”
“The door you entered the apartment through? You said you knocked and walked in. The door wasn’t locked?”
“Good question,” Cohen says, thinking. “I don’t remember if it was locked. I do have a key.”
“So, you can come and go as you please, here in the funeral home and also upstairs in the apartment?”
Cohen feels a rise of exasperation, tamps it down, and nods. “Yes. I come and go as I please. I lived here for many years. This is where I work, and that is my father’s apartment. Don’t you have a key to your parents’ house?”
He stops. He takes a deep breath, begins talking, stops again, and the breath eases out in a long sigh. He shakes his head, trying to clear a path through all the memories that have been bombarding him since the morning he stepped over his father’s body.
Ava speaks quietly. “You were saying that he drinks?”
“Yes. Right. He drinks all the time. Anyway, I told him I had decided I was leaving.”
“Leaving?” Ava asks.
“Yeah, leaving. I told him I wasn’t going to work here anymore.” He looks over at Ava. “I can’t do it anymore. I’m vanishing into all this. All this death. I’ve been trying to quit for years, a decade maybe? I’ve been dropping hints every so often. But he ignored them. He couldn’t imagine a future for this place that didn’t involve me. Even though my sister works here and is way more capable than me. It was always about me.” He looks around at the strangely empty basement.
“So you felt trapped?” the detective asked, peering over his glasses.
“I’m done. Anyway, that’s what I told him. I was done. I’d give him some time to find someone else.”
“How did he take it?” Ava asks. She glances at the other detective, and he gives her a barely discernible nod.
“Not well.” Cohen gives a short gasp of a laugh, air out through his nose. “Not well. This place is everything to him. Everything. I was supposed to take it over from him, and my son after that, on through the generations.” He stares at the floor. “I don’t actually have a son, in case you wondered.”
The three of them stand there in silence. Two other police officers orbit around them, taking notes and pictures and whispering to each other. The heat turns on, making the police tape flutter.
“How long are you guys going to be here?” Cohen asks.
“We’re almost finished,” the detective answers. “I brought these two back to take a last look at a few things, but we should be out of your hair in the next day or two.”
“What did your father say when you told him you were quitting?” Ava asks. There is a quiet kindness in her voice.
“He erupted. He had just finished his drink, and he pulled back his arm like he was going to throw his glass against the wall. But he didn’t throw it. He slammed it down on the coffee table. He didn’t let go of it, and he stared at it while he asked me why I had ‘such disregard for everyone but myself.’ Those were his words.” He pauses and shrugs. “He was right. I am a very selfish person.”
“Cohen,” the detective says, “was that the last time you saw him before what happened here?”
Cohen swallows. He looks not at the detective but at Ava. “Yes.”
“You didn’t see him the morning of?”
“No.”
“Where were you that morning?”
“I was supposed to be here. But I didn’t come to work, not after what we said to each other. I figured he needed some time to cool off, take in the news that I was quitting. I thought he might need some space. You can ask Beth. I think she was here all morning. I didn’t come in.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t here when it happened,” the detective says in a deliberate voice. “Were you?”
“I told you, I didn’t come in for work.”
“Where were you?”
“At home.” Cohen sighs. “By myself. With no one to corroborate my whereabouts.”
“Where do you live?”
“A few blocks over, on Lemon Street.” He looks at Ava. “I went to Johnny’s baseball game.”
“Your nephew, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Which would have been after . . . this?” the detective asks.
“I don’t know,” Cohen says, raising his voice. “What time do you think ‘this’ happened?”
“Cohen,” Ava says, “you don’t have to get upset with the detective. We’re only trying to figure out what happened to your father.”
Cohen stares at her for one loaded moment.
“Would you like to know how we found him?” the detective asks in a monotone voice.
Cohen thinks the man has already arrived at his conclusion. From here on out, everything is part of a drama already written. “Yes.”
The detective takes a few steps around one of the examination tables. “Your father was lying here, on the floor. He had fallen down. The instrument used for embalming had been thrust up through the bottom of his jaw, up through the back of his throat, and into his skull.”
Cohen winced. “The trocar.”
“The trocar?” the detective repeats.
“Yes. Trocar. It’s the instrument we use to remove everything from the body cavity during the embalming process.” He walks over to the counter that lines the wall, pointing to one of the cabinets. “May I?”
The detective nods. Cohen opens the door and pulls out a long piece of metal that looks like an oversized eighteen-inch screwdriver, except it has a three-sided blade.
“This is inserted into the body two inches above the navel and three inches over. Once it’s in and connected to the machine, it sucks out all the body fluids. You have to work it around to get everything, like a vacuum. After that’s over, we reverse the action and use this same tool to inject the body with embalming fluid.”
The three of them stare at it.
“Could it have been an accident, Detective?” Cohen asks, breaking the silence.
The detective raises his eyebrows. “You tell me. Seems unlikely, don’t you think? It would take quite a lot of force and a considerable amount of bad luck.”
Cohen shrugs, handling the trocar lightly. “The other option is foul play, right? This thing isn’t a weapon. Usually it’s attached to the tube. It’s very rare someone would be handling it on its own. Although . . .”
“What?” Ava asks.
“It does occasionally get clogged. Bits of bone or other matter get stuck inside. If that happens, you have to take it off the hose and clean it out. Dad would have disconnected it, then walked from here over to the sink on the other side of the room.” He stops where his father had been lying, frowns. “Bodily fluids could leak onto the floor. You could slip while carrying it. My father is an old man. He could have come down on the table, the blade up.”
He bends over at the table where he had once, a million years ago, stepped over his father’s body. He wedges the trocar between one of the countertops and the bottom of his jaw. He looks over at Ava and the detective, frozen in place, an accident in motion. The point of the trocar presses under his jaw, under his tongue.
He stands and walks back to the cabinet and puts the trocar back in its place. “Will that be all, Detective?” he asks, looking at Ava.
“For now, Mr. Marah. We will need to speak with your sister as well.” He pauses. “Mr. Marah?”
Cohen glances over at him.
“I wouldn’t leave the area if I were you. Not for a few days, at least, until we get some things straightened out.”
“Why would I leave the area, Detective? My father is on his deathbed.”
The detective stares at him. “Very well. Thanks for your time.”