The next day, a little before noon Stone and Gabriel stepped from his apartment and rode the elevator down. The cop led the former professor out the side door of his high-rise onto Rosebury Avenue.
“We’ll walk. It’s only a few blocks and there won’t be any parking anyway.”
Stone nodded.
The midday sky hung crisp, dry, calm, and cloudless. A beautiful day for a funeral. They walked down the middle of the plowed street, though many of the apartment-building sidewalks still held a half foot of snow.
“You okay?” Gabriel asked.
“Just.”
“I’m sure it will be a media circus. You up to it?”
“Yeah, but is all this necessary?”
“You agreed to the plan.”
“I mean the twenty-four-hour babysitting.”
“I need to show Cira I’m best situated to control and deal with you. We don’t want him sending anyone else to supply some ‘closure.’”
“If you’re trying to scare me, you’re doing a good job.”
“I’m scared, too, but don’t want to rush in. I need to solidify my position. Besides, we still don’t know for sure if Ellen killed herself or whether Cira was somehow involved. If the latter, the stakes go even higher.”
“Seem pretty freaking high already.”
“Right you are, professor. Lots of potential downside if we fuck up. Not like teaching English, where the worst that can happen is to leave your participles dangling. We’re balls out, my friend, both of us.”
Gabriel was right about parking: Even two blocks away there was no curb space. On Clayton Road, TV trucks with their satellite dishes sat in front of the mortuary, a white stone building from which a hearse- and limousine-led cortege fed double-parked down Concordia Lane.
Once inside, Stone moved to the front of the chapel and bent to embrace a sixtyish couple—the Cantrells, apparently—who sat facing a closed maple casket next to a large flat-screen TV. Stone sat beside the father. Gabriel stood beyond the last row, back to the wall cop-like.
He spied Laura Berkman seated near the front on the far right. He looked around but did not see the mayor. After a few minutes, however, he appeared, Chief Donnewald at his side. They moved up the aisle and sat midway on the left, where chairs had been reserved. As they sat, the service began.
First came a video of Ellen Cantrell’s life—childhood stills; tape of her as on-air newswoman in college and in St. Louis; more of her as City Hall mouthpiece. No Jonathan Stone to be seen except for a single wedding photo.
When the screen went blank, a middle-aged man who had been sitting next to Mrs. Cantrell rose and introduced himself as the pastor at the First Presbyterian Church of Kirkwood, an old St. Louis suburb. As he went on about the Cantrell family and Ellen, Gabriel tuned him out, focusing instead on Stone. When at last the minister invited the audience to bow their heads in prayer, Stone turned. His eyes met those of Gabriel, who shifted his gaze to the left, toward the mayor and the chief. Stone turned back ahead.
As the service concluded, Stone moved first, brushing by his in-laws and striding down the center aisle to Cira and Donnewald. Gabriel moved against the flow toward them. He arrived as Cira, holding out his hand expecting Stone to shake it, was saying, “If there’s anything I can do, Jonathan, just let me know.”
“I think you’ve done enough already.” Stone ignored the mayor’s outstretched hand.
“You’re rightfully upset. Give it time.”
“Time? An interesting choice of words. I think you’ll be the one doing time.” He turned to Donnewald whose mask of sympathy had vanished. “You, too, if I have anything to say about it.”
With that Stone strode away to the waiting limousine that would carry him graveside. Cira and Donnewald scowled at Gabriel.
“‘Subdued,’ Carlo?”
“I better stick with him,” Gabriel said, moving to follow Stone.
Cira clutched Gabriel’s elbow. “We need to talk. Soon.”
Gabriel nodded and hurried down the aisle after Stone. He joined him inside the warm limo, which had been waiting, engine idling.
“How’d I do?” Stone asked.
Gabriel grimaced. “I think it worked, but I wanted more determination and dementia, loose cannon personified. Instead you go all professorial, ‘An interesting choice of words, that.’”
“I did not say, ‘that.’ Anyway, I told you I couldn’t act. Besides, I was scared shitless. When Donnewald glared at me I thought I’d soil myself.”
Gabriel nodded. “He’s one tough son of a bitch. Better buy some diapers, my friend. It’s only going to get worse.”
The cortege moved west down Clayton Road. Stone sat mute staring out the window. Gabriel likewise remained silent. At Lindbergh Boulevard they turned south. After another ten minutes they were pulling into a snow-shrouded cemetery and soon stopped near a green tent erected over a freshly dug grave. As they emerged into the cold, Stone moved toward the tent. Gabriel slipped away.
He walked past the arriving cortege, where friends, family, co-workers, and likely some curious citizens seeking to rub elbows with the downtown media/political crowd rose from their automobiles buttoning coats and pulling on gloves.
He moved over the hilltop and down into a shallow valley where, stepping off the plowed lane into ankle-deep snow, he found a blue spruce—his mother’s favorite—that he had planted some ten years earlier and not seen since. There with gloved hands he brushed snow from a marker for Theresa Sanchez Abregon de Gabriel and Samuel Joshua Gabriel—the final date yet to be added to the latter.
His mother would be near eighty now. Both his mother and father were from a different era, people who remembered the Great Depression and World War II. Folks from simpler times who believed in black and white, right and wrong, no room for discussion.
He offered up a silent prayer:
Don’t make them suffer, Lord. They’re good folks, despite his tough hide. Show them forgiveness for their shortcomings and remember their goodness, and I’ll try to do the same. Grant me some forgiveness as well. And some guidance. Most of all protect me. I’m going to need someone to cover my back. Amen.
Gabriel crossed himself, turned, and made his way back up the hill.