TEN O’CLOCK MONDAY morning, under a sky as gray as last month’s bedsheets, I drove over to Edson Cemetery. I beat the cortege and parked inside along a spiked iron fence, in view of where a backhoe had boxed out Joel Castle’s final home. The earth was mounded nearby, covered with a mat of artificial turf. A canopy had been set up, and beneath that stood rows of folding wooden chairs. From the sky came an ominous rumbling. I did not have to wait long before cars with their headlights on began to wind through the gate and along the paved avenues of the dead. No one was going to accuse me of being a big Joel Castle fan, but in the end I had come to accept him. Now I wanted to lay to rest along with him any lingering rumor that I had put him here.
My charcoal wool suit had hung in the closet so long that I had brushed epaulets of dust from the shoulders that morning as I took it off the hanger. I had discovered pinned to the lining a red paper tag bearing the logo of Castle Cleen. Fate has some great gag writers.
No sooner had the mourners emerged from the cars than light rain started to fall, sizzling on the warm pavement. Black umbrellas began to snap open like bat wings. The mortuary service provided loaners for people who had not counted on this one added bleakness. Neither family nor close personal friend, I kept a distance, getting wet. The poet might claim the heavens were weeping for Castle. I say it was just raining.
The pallbearers brought the casket, a brushed bronze affair in the same rich Neapolitan blue as its occupant’s Rolls Royce. Wet buds from the maple trees pasted themselves on the metal, providing the only natural touch I could see. The ersatz turf was no more lifelike than the job the mortician would have inflicted on Castle. The ancient Egyptians sent their dead off in well-stocked boats for the after-life journey. I thought about what Syd Keyes at the Haskell and MacKay Gallery had said about jade cicadas.
I estimated the crowd at four or five hundred, including a lot of big money and a scattering of Greater Boston household faces. What did people say? That I’m going to the funeral of my dry cleaner? It didn’t sound any worse than saying you were going to send off your private eye. I spotted Bob Whitaker from the Sun in his old military poncho, keeping a discreet distance, shooting with a long lens. The editors had known it would be one of the best celebrity turnouts since they had buried Jack Kerouac a few grassy aisles away. The funeral home pros stood to one side under the dripping trees, cupping cigarettes and waiting. A stocky man with shiny dewlaps and a black Chesterfield coat began to speak about his friend in slow, reverential tones over a background of sobs.
I saw Lauren. She was on the opposite side of the grave, seated among a group of old and new friends and members of the family. She looked dignified and pained and beautiful, and it stabbed me to realize she and Castle would have been an attractive couple.
“They should plant him upright,” a voice murmured at my ear.
St. Onge stepped up beside me, buttoning his raincoat with slow fingers. Water was beaded in his moustache. “With all that pretty hair sticking up like golden grass,” he said. “Give society something for a change. God knows he didn’t while he was breathing.”
“Be charitable,” I admonished.
“Charitable my toe. Castle never was, except when it suited him.”
“I guess you didn’t idle yesterday away at the beach.”
“I spent it working, same as today.” His coal-chip eyes measured me. “I’m curious to see who his friends and enemies were.”
“Put me down as none of the above,” I said.
“Look at this crew. You know what their net worth must be?”
I shrugged. “Death’s the great equalizer. We all end up in a Cadillac. Any word on prints yet?”
“Andover’s supposed to call me.”
A priest began intoning, and the old altar boy in St. Onge emerged and he shut up. My eyes continued to rove, looking at faces and wondering if their owners felt the ambivalence I did. Once in awhile, without trying not to, I checked Lauren’s face.
Standing farther away, at the fringe of the crowd, were Castle’s personal assistant and his chauffeur. In mourning garb they looked like damp, overfed crows.
“You know those two?” I whispered to St. Onge, nodding.
He squinted. “Yeah, I know them,” he whispered back. “Oscar Loomis is the little guy with the big talk.”
Loomis, okay.
“Used to be a nag-rider, but he found his skills paid more off-track. The missing link is named Kaboski. I think he went swimming after they drained the gene pool. Between them they got a sheet you could wind a corpse in.”
“What were they up for?”
“What weren’t they?”
“Could you be more general?”
“Shut up, will you? What’re you, an atheist?”
By the time the ceremony ended, the rain had practically quit too. St. Onge began to circulate, shaking hands, doing what cops do. A lot of the job is visibility and knowing people who might be useful down the line. I took a pass on the festivities. I wanted to get hold of Ada. Yesterday when I had called her I had reached only her machine. I quit leaving messages after the third time.
On my way back to where I had parked I spotted the Trouble Twins leaning against a car which was in front of mine but was not theirs. They were probably going to ask me to sign the guestbook. Actually I had been hoping to ask them a few questions, perhaps over a beer. Seeing me, Loomis rocked onto the balls of his feet. The heavy guy—Kaboski—stood glumly still, watching me with cold, deep-set eyes. He had his hands in his coat pockets to keep from scraping them on the ground. The pockets bulged like sacks of onions.
I grinned winningly. “Here to do a few grave rubbings?”
“Wanna talk to you,” Oscar Loomis said, stepping away from the car and coming over to block my path. He was wearing a stone gray fedora. Under the black coat if he didn’t have a white tie on a dark shirt I was going to be disappointed. He said, “We heard you were at Mr. Castle’s domicile the night he passed away.”
“When I found him, he’d already cashed out,” I said, returning the euphemism. “I squealed for the heat from there.”
“Funny you were there at all.”
“Funny you weren’t,” I said. “Castle wasn’t paying you for your twinkling wit.”
Loomis touched the scar tissue on his forehead. “That’s another funny thing,” he said. “I get a call that afternoon saying Mr. C. wants a business associate picked up at Logan—only when we fucking get there, there’s no such party. You know anything about that?”
I frowned, remembering that the state police had confirmed the airport trip to the Andover detectives. “Castle called you?”
“The message service.”
“You didn’t confirm it?”
“We get messages all the time. What’s it to you? I still wanna know what you were doing there.”
“A case I’m working on. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Yeah? Suppose I make it do with me.”
“Come on,” I said equably, “this isn’t a day for hassles.” I moved to go around him, but he barred me.
“I’m making it one,” he said.
I sighed. “I bet you were tough in the third grade.”
Kaboski, who had kept back, came forward in a ding-toed shuffle, like the punch-drunk boxers Anthony Quinn used to play, only he wasn’t playing. He had his hands out of his pockets. I braced as he moved alongside Loomis.
“I don’t like you, rat-ass,” he said.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I said. “Take two bullets and call me in the morning.”
I started past them when Kaboski’s furry fielder’s mitt of a hand dropped on my shoulder. I pivoted, grabbed a thumb, and yanked it up in a come-along hold that had him tap-dancing in surprise. He tried to knee me, but I stomped on his other foot, rooting him to the ground with pain.
Loomis I had not accounted for, but I should have. He had the rod out in a second, aimed right at my face. It was a reaction as automatic as the twitching of a mule’s ear to shoo a biting fly. The gun was no collector’s item. It was a blue-black Saturday nighter, the sort they stamp out in case lots in some Florida factory. I could see its castings and knew it would be studded with rust on the bottom of the river a day after it punched a sloppy, lethal hole in someone’s head. Mine maybe. I kept the big guy moon-walking, trying to put him between me and the gun, trying to think. Loomis was fidgeting like a kid who has to pee. “I’m gonna pop you, sonuvabitch!”
“Smart,” I said. “I’m dead and five hundred witnesses make you both pen pals the rest of your lives.”
He wasn’t stupid. He had done time before. He glanced toward where the funeral crowd was dispersing, drifting back to their vehicles. A flicker even passed across Kaboski’s cold eyes as if back in there someone had discovered fire. The gun disappeared, and I let go of the thumb. Kaboski clamped hold of it with his other hand and began to massage it. The three of us stood there, breathing hard. In a moment the hearse eased by, big tires swishing on the wet pavement. We caught our reflections in the dark glass, like an intimation of mortality. When the other cars had gone, we had all quieted. I briefly considered my idea of buying them a beer, but I had had enough excitement for one day. I opened my car door. “Peace?” I said.
Oscar Loomis pointed a finger. “Screw peace. Sleep with the light on, Jack. I see you again, you’re gonna wish I didn’t.”
“Alas,” I said, “I was wrong. It was your twinkling wit.”