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I KIND OF hated swiping the brooch. It made a real fashion statement for the corpse, who, need I mention, was the best-dressed person at the Leonard T. Ahearn and Sons Funeral Home.
Nobody dresses anymore. Have you noticed? Shorts at the office. Flip-flops in church. In church. Okay, so I’m not what you’d call a churchgoer, aside from the occasional paid-mourner gig, but you get my point. It’s a matter of respect. I mean, if it were your blue-haired granny packed into that satin-lined box, all decked out in a yellow Chanel suit and Hermès scarf, with a manicure to die for, would you show up for the wake in plaid flannel dorm pants and fuzzy slippers?
Fuzzy bedroom slippers, I kid you not, as if locating an actual pair of flip-flops would have taken too much effort for the grieving granddaughter. The girl, who looked around eighteen, sat slumped in the front row between her pimply younger brother and nose-picking boyfriend, playing Rabid Zombie Babysitter on her iPad and whining about missing the latest episode of Bungled Boob & Butt Jobs! because she’d maxed out her DVR for that time slot. Your basic sullen Long Island youth.
I shouldn’t care. Colette O’Rourke wasn’t my blue-haired granny, she was an assignment. Which might come across as pretty cold considering I knew her, but it had been years since our paths had crossed. Thankfully, none of our mutual acquaintances were here at the moment.
How was I dressed? Glad you asked. Conservative gray skirt suit, crisp white blouse, two-inch black pumps. Strawberry-blond hair pulled back in a French twist. Tasteful faux pearls and just enough makeup to keep my pale brows and lashes from doing a vanishing act. It was my standard funeral-home uniform and had served me well, though if I really wanted to blend in with the mourning crowd nowadays, I should probably buy some of those light-up sneakers. Maybe a housedress and hair curlers.
My name is Jane Delaney and I do things my paying customers can’t do, don’t want to do, don’t want to be seen doing, can’t bring themselves to do, and/or don’t want it to be known they’d paid someone to do. To dead people.
No, really, it’s all legal. Well, okay, sometimes there’s a kind of gray area. Like with the brooch. Irene McAuliffe had hired me to salvage her property before it ended up six feet under the lovingly tended sod of Whispering Willows Cemetery. Had I demanded proof of ownership before accepting the assignment? Had I demanded to know why, if the brooch belonged to Irene, it was now pinned to the lifeless bosom of longtime frenemy Colette O’Rourke? No, I had not, but she’d cheerfully filled in the blanks.
Irene was a crusty old buzzard who didn’t take crap from anyone. She was also my steadiest client—my very first client, as a matter of fact, from way back when I was in high school. She’d been putting food on my table and pants on my ass for two decades. Irene had money, along with specific ideas about how she wanted that money spent. Most of those ideas had to do with imparting stern lessons to individuals who, due to the fact they’d stopped breathing air, were less than receptive to such teachable moments.
You know that saying about how revenge is best served cold? Irene believed that revenge was best served to those who were cold. A subtle distinction, I’ll grant you, and one I chose not to dwell on as I crossed myself and rose from the kneeler next to Colette’s casket. I’m not Catholic, but I have the moves down.
The brooch was a cheap bauble, but one with powerful sentimental value. Not that Irene was the sentimental type, aside from the smother-love she lavished on her toy poodle, but she’d known Colette her whole life. They’d grown up in the same grimy apartment house in Bay Ridge and had at one time been closer than sisters. The brooch had been a sweet-sixteen gift from Irene to Colette and had cost all of $4.39 back then.
When you have no money, you remember the cost of things. Irene’s words. She’d saved up nickels and dimes from baby-sitting for weeks to buy that brooch.
Why, you might ask, if their lifelong friendship meant so much to Irene, had she boycotted Colette’s wake? Their relationship, always volatile, had been on a downward trajectory for the past decade or so, the result of an infamous row over the minimum bet in the weekly poker game Irene hosted.
And then there was the brooch itself. Ages ago, Colette had specified in her will that she was to be buried with it. Irene, the repository of an inexhaustible supply of obscure and suspiciously convenient Unwritten Rules, had insisted that Colette, the Recipient of the Gift, was morally bound to offer the trinket to Irene, the Giver of the Gift, if the alternative was Burial of the Gift.
Colette had greeted this pronouncement with her signature dry cackle and single-digit salute. It was on to Plan B: What better nyah-nyah than for Irene to snatch the thing from her erstwhile BFF when said BFF was in no position to do a damn thing about it?
Irene was big on getting the last word.
I know you’re wondering what this brooch looked like. It was made of some kind of white base metal, two to three inches long and in the shape of a mermaid holding a mirror and running a comb through her hair. The entire piece was heavily encrusted with fake gemstones of various shapes and sizes. The lines of the mermaid’s body were graceful and feminine, from her flowing red hair to the sweeping fan of her tail. The fishy lower parts were done in dark blue and green stones, the human upper half in cubic zirconia or whatever stood in for diamonds back then. Rhinestones probably. The perky breasts were bare and tipped with tiny red nipples—no clamshell bra for this brazen mermaid. Daring stuff for that era, but then, I get the sense that Irene and her friend were not exactly the shy, bookish type.
There was something just plain wrong about the sight of that sexpot mermaid in such close proximity to the rosary beads clutched in Colette’s cold fingers. Still, I was impressed by the artistry and workmanship of the piece, despite its being worth approximately what Irene had paid for it in her youth. By contrast, she was shelling out three hundred clams, pun intended, for me to snatch the thing from under the very noses of Colette’s clueless kinfolk.
The wake was scheduled for seven to nine p.m. My arrival had been timed for the final few minutes when the last visitors would be saying their good-byes and the family would be too tired and distracted to notice me liberating the brooch one-handed and slipping it into my jacket pocket as I executed a slow turn away from the casket. Plus, there’d be scant time afterward for anyone to notice something was missing. I’d practiced the moves at home and had them down. All I needed was a few seconds of alone time with the stiff.
Behind me a trio of Colette’s gal pals converged on the occupants of the front row. The eyes in the back of my head saw the old ladies bending over Colette’s son and daughter-in-law, squeezing their hands and filling their field of vision in a most fortuitous way. “Lenny Ahearn did such a nice job, she looks so natural,” they murmured, and “What a shock, I ran into her just before Easter at Whole Foods,” and “Will you be putting the house on the market? I might know someone.” What they were no doubt dying to say but didn’t have the nerve was, “What in the world possessed you to pin that vulgar brooch to a genuine Hermès scarf?”
Meanwhile Fuzzy Slippers and her brother squabbled like rabid wolverines over the iPad. “It’s mine,” she hissed, jerking it out of the boy’s grasp. “I bought it with my own money.” She called him a filthy name and he responded in kind.
It was show time.
I commenced my well-rehearsed sleight of hand, angling my body to conceal my fingers as they darted over the side of the—
Feet shuffled on the carpet directly behind me. I jerked my hand back and turned to see a good-looking, fortyish man waiting to pay his respects to Colette. The man had sandy hair cropped so close it was practically shaved. He wore a black shirt and black pants. And a white clerical collar.
Can you sprain your eyeballs? Because I swear, when mine zeroed in on that collar, they practically dislocated.
A priest. I’d almost been busted by a priest.
My heart attempted to sledgehammer its way out of my ribcage as I wondered giddily which particular circle of hell was reserved for those caught stealing from the dead by a man of the cloth.
“Please.” The padre gestured toward the guest of honor and took a half step back. “Take your time. I can wait.” The words were indulgent, the body language reassuring. So why did it feel as though that unsmiling blue gaze was boring into my skull, rummaging through my brain, and reading my guilty, guilty thoughts?
“Oh...that’s okay.” I scooted away from the casket. “You, um, go ahead. I’ll just, you know...”
He dipped his head in thanks and approached the casket.
I sank into the chair next to Colette’s son and dragged in a deep, steadying breath, nearly gagging on the cloying scent of the floral arrangements. The three old ladies bestowed final cheek-pecks and shuffled toward the exit. Well, that particular window of opportunity had officially slammed shut. I sneaked a peek at my watch. I had a couple of minutes left. I would do this thing. I had to. The funeral was tomorrow morning. It was either swipe that brooch here and now or invest in a shovel and flashlight. I’d never failed a client, and I wasn’t about to start now.
Plus, if I had to fail a client, it sure as heck wasn’t going to be Irene McAuliffe, who’d recently become even more irritable and demanding than usual. True, we had a long history. She was the grandma I never had—though I’d be willing to bet my real grandmas never planted stinkweed on a grave or mixed an unloved one’s ashes into a bag of kitty litter. For twenty-two years I’d managed to keep out of Irene’s crosshairs. Return to her empty-handed? I had a better idea. I’d change my name and move to Rangoon. Less trauma in the long run.
Also, I could really use the three hundred bucks.
As the priest knelt and prayed, Colette’s son turned to me. He was lean and rangy, wearing a dandruff-specked corduroy sport coat and loosened tie. He looked older than the sixty or so years I knew him to be. “Thanks for coming. Patrick O’Rourke.”
The hand I shook felt rough as bark. I’d never met Patrick before, but I’d heard whispers around town, none of them flattering. Terms such as troubled and misfit and loser had followed the guy since adolescence.
He tried to introduce me to his wife, Barbara, a well-nourished bottle blonde encased in a bedazzled stretch-denim ensemble, but she was making her own grab for the iPad and yelling at their kids to shut the hell up and show some respect. “So did you know my mom?” Patrick asked me.
You might think this is where it got awkward, but in fact, I could do this part in my sleep. “Not as well as I would have liked,” I said. “I’m Mary Filcher. I just recently started working at the senior center here in Crystal Harbor. One thing about Colette, she could always drum up a poker game.”
That produced a half smile. “She was one hell of a player. Never rubbed off on me. I couldn’t manage a poker face to save my life.”
I always come armed with a factoid or two about the dearly departed. Also, I routinely leave my purse in the car so if I find myself in a tight spot, I can pretend to be an employee of the funeral home. The suit-and-pearls uniform helps to pull that one off, besides being just plain good manners. This evening, though, since I’d been observed in civilian mode actually visiting with the corpse, that particular ploy wasn’t an option.
Okay, let’s get something out of the way so we won’t have to deal with it again. I can hear you thinking, Oh, that Jane Delaney, how does she live with herself? Pretending to be something she’s not. For money. Taking advantage of grieving families. For money. Stealing from dead people. For three hundred bucks cash money.
Well, I think I explained that last thing. It wasn’t really stealing—the brooch belonged to Irene. Kind of. And anyway, this particular job wasn’t what you’d call typical, even for Irene. My usual assignments involve activities as benign as placing flowers on graves or scattering ashes at sea. Plus that thing I mentioned before, being a paid mourner, which I’ll have you know is a career with a long and distinguished... well, a long history, so don’t turn up your nose.
Okay, I’ll admit there have been a few assignments over the years that might be described as offbeat, the current one being a splendid example. And for the record, I had nothing to do with the kitty-litter episode. That was before my time.
The bottom line is, I help my clients deal with their grief and loss, and I have a strict moral code regarding what kinds of jobs I’ll accept. You think swiping jewelry is bad? You should see what I’ve turned down. Once word gets around that there’s this person called the Death Diva—no, I did not choose the nickname!—willing to perform all manner of chores for grieving folk, at reasonable rates and with the utmost discretion, well, you’re going to get the occasional kook slithering out of the woodwork. There’s a reason morgues are locked up at night.
I watched the priest as he rose from the kneeler. Bless me, Father, for I have noticed what a fine, firm butt you have. You want to know why I don’t go to church? How could I pray to a God who lets a swell-looking man like that go to waste? And I don’t even care if he’s gay. Someone should have the pleasure.
Patrick yammered on about Colette’s fatal stroke, the EMTs and emergency room, all the gooey details family members seem compelled to share and that no one wants to hear. Meanwhile I kept one eye on the casket, hoping I didn’t look as impatient as I felt. I heard a low, Latinate drone as the priest prayed for Colette’s irascible soul. I saw his arm move as he blessed her with the sign of the cross.
I assumed that meant he was wrapping things up. Sure enough, within moments he was strolling toward the exit.
Show time, take two. I stood and smoothed my skirt. “I’m just going to say good-bye to your mom one last time.”
“We going to see you tomorrow?” Patrick asked. “At the funeral?”
“I wish I could, but I have work in the morning. I’m so glad I got to meet you.”
All right, so sometimes I do feel like a heel. Are you happy?
“It’s nine,” Fuzzy Slippers informed her parents as I stepped up to the casket. “Let’s go.” Her brother announced that he had stuff to do. From behind me I heard Barbara ordering them, in hushed tones, to park their butts and wait until the last visitor—that would be me—was finished.
I welcomed the bickering. Something to occupy the family while I accomplished my dark deed.
My fingers began to slink into the casket, then froze. I stood paralyzed for an endless moment, staring at Colette’s scarf, specifically at the spot on the scarf where a cheap mermaid brooch should have been pinned—the spot where it had been pinned less than two minutes earlier. Abandoning any semblance of stealth, I yanked at the scarf, peered under and around it.
Colette’s meticulously lipsticked mouth was curved in a taunting little Mona Lisa smile that I swear was new.
Behind me the boyfriend drawled, “Is that lady supposed to be, like, doing that to your grand—”
“Son of a bitch!” I took off running after the priest.
The pencil skirt and heels slowed me as I raced for the main entrance. I yanked open the heavy door and nearly took a header on the building’s rain-slick marble steps. Through the gloom and early-spring shower I spied, in a far corner of the parking lot, a dark figure mounting a motorcycle. I turned on the juice and ran straight for him.
“Hey!” I cried. “Wait!”
He seemed in no hurry, giving me hope that I could catch up to him. In the instant before his helmet settled into place, I saw clearly that it was indeed the priest, now wearing a black motorcycle jacket. With maddening calm he observed my awkward dash through the lot.
“I need to talk to—!” I tripped on a fast-food cup and went down with a screech. Pain exploded in my knee. He was still a good twenty yards away. “Stop!” I bellowed, on all fours now, struggling to rise. “Give me that damn brooch!”
The priest started the motorcycle, executed a lazy turn out of the lot, and disappeared down the street.
