CHAPTER 44

When apples are ripe they must be plucked from the tree.

Martin Luther

“Look at this,” said Homer, handing his wife the Metro section of the Boston Globe. “Unidentified woman killed by a truck.”

Mary took the paper and looked at the picture of a couple of medical corpsmen lifting a stretcher into an ambulance. There was a slight mound on the stretcher, under a blanket. “Poor old girl. Homeless woman sleeping on the street.”

“The truck backed over her. The point is, she’s just what you would need if you were looking for a dead body to burn up in a car.”

“Ah, I see. Unidentified, so nobody would miss her. That is, except the people who keep records in the medical examiner’s office. More coffee, Homer?”

He held out his cup. “I can’t believe there isn’t some way to get around all the rules and regulations. Suppose you needed a body. Here’s one right here in the paper, nice and fresh, happened last night, just what the doctor ordered. What else would you need? A release from a fictional funeral home, requesting the body, signed by a fictional relative, who just happens to have turned up.” Homer took a large bite of English muffin. “Mmmmph. Documents can be manufactured. Nothing to it. You’d get somebody like George Beanbag to do it.”

“Bienbower.” Mary blew on her coffee. “George Bienbower with his desktop publishing equipment. And you’d need something else. A hearse.”

“Right, a nice cozy hearse. Now where would you borrow a hearse if you wanted to do a bit of body snatching?”

“Back in the sixties,” said Mary dreamily, “young hippies lived in hearses. Maybe some middle-aged hippie would lend you one.”

“No, no, it’s easier than that. Boozer Brown’s got a hearse. And he’s so easygoing, I’ll bet he’d lend anybody anything, including the hearse. Tell you what, after I teach my class this morning, I’ll go out Route One and speak to Boozer.” Jumping up, Homer crammed the rest of the English muffin in his mouth, licked his sticky fingers and pulled on his coat.

Mary got up too. “Fine, and in the meantime I’ll go to the library and look through their newspaper file. Oh, God, I’ll bet it’s on microfilm, and I’ll get a headache from looking at all those pages whizzing across the screen. But we’ve got to find a nice serviceable unidentified dead woman. What was the date of the car fire? I’ll try to find somebody who turned up dead immediately beforehand. If there isn’t anyone, our whole theory’s no good.”

“Well, Boozer, good morning!”

“Oh, yeah! Hey, whasha know? Hiya!”

“Say, Boozer, that’s a nice big limo you’ve got there. Used to be a hearse, right?”

“A hearshe? Oh, right, thash right. Usheta be a hearshe.”

“It’s in beautiful condition, I must say.”

“Oh, sure. Only, shee, itsh got thish big dent on thish shide. Other shide’zh perfect.”

“Nice inside, too. Mint condition. Beautiful.”

“Oh, yeah, exshep for a few stainzh inna back. Embalming fluid. You know. Leaksh out shometimezh from the desheashed. You know.”

“Of course. Common knowledge. Listen, Boozer, did you ever lend this thing to anybody? Say, back around the middle of January?”

“In January? Shay, you know, thasha funny thing, it dishappeared lash January. Gone overnight. Kidzh, thash what I thought.”

“Really! It disappeared? Did you call the police?”

“Me? Call the polishe? No, no, uh-uh. Me and the polishe, we ain’t got much in common. I clozhe my eyes, they clozhe theirzh. Better that way. Anyway, I don’t need no limo. Plenty other good carzh around here. Shee that little Honda over there? All it needed wazh a new tranzhmission. And the Chevy, no kidding, itsh good azh new. And take a look at the Pontiac, honeshta God—”

“Boozer, you’re amazing. It’s a vehicular resurrection studio you’ve got here. I’m really impressed. Well, I’ll be getting along. Tell me, did you get a look at the kids who borrowed the limo?”

“Not a glimpshe. One day she wazhn’t there, nexsht day, zheezh! There she wazh, parked downa hill, can’t shee the playzhe from here.”

“Well, thank you, Boozer, you’re a national treasure, that’s what you are.”

“Sho long. Hey, watchit, Mishter Kelly, watchit. Oh, whoopsh, shorry about that. Gotta move that ole axshel. I trip over the louzhy thing myshelf, alla time.”

Homer picked himself up, hobbled to his car and drove home, congratulating himself. He found Mary trying to wrench a leaf rake out of the toolshed, where it was entangled in the coils of a garden hose. She was wearing a baseball cap and a long dragging skirt sprinkled with sequins.

Grasping the rake, she watched him limp up the porch steps. “Homer, what happened to you?”

“Tripped over bits and pieces of the starry heavens. You know that divine emporium of Boozer Brown’s. Barked my fool shin.”

“Good grief, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. And somebody stole Boozer’s hearse in January, kept it overnight, brought it back.”

“Really! Well, wait till you see my little collection of unidentified cadavers.”

They sat at the kitchen table and looked at Mary’s list. “Three of them,” she said, “only a couple of days before the burning car was seen by that jogger, down in the ditch below the road.”

“Three!”

“One was a homeless man, he froze to death. Remember him? There was a lot of flak at the time. People were mad at the city for letting a citizen freeze to death on the street.”

“I remember. Pitiful case. But a man won’t do. It’s got to be a woman.”

“Okay, here’s a woman, but she won’t do either. She’d been lying in the woods since last fall. Here, look at the third one. A little note on the obituary page. It’s just what we’re looking for. She’s perfect.”

Homer read it aloud: “‘An unidentified woman, about thirty, was declared dead on arrival in the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital. The cause of death was listed as unknown. She was found on that part of Washington Street known as the Combat Zone. No one has so far claimed the body, which has been transferred to the Mallory Institute of Pathology at Boston City Hospital.’”

Homer glanced at his wife. “The Combat Zone. Probably a hooker.”

“That’s what I thought too. Now suppose somebody read the paper, learned about the body at Boston City, borrowed Boozer’s hearse and somehow managed to steal the body from the morgue? Then it was shoved behind the steering wheel in Rosie’s car, the car was rolled into the ditch and ignited, and afterward the police came along and took the burned body back to the morgue, assuming it was Rosalind Hall. That’s all fine, but how did they avoid the autopsy? The medical examiner would surely have discovered it wasn’t Rosie, it was somebody else.”

“Well, there was that providential slipup, and they cremated her by mistake.”

Mary looked at Homer wisely. “Accidental or intentional, that slipup?”

“Either way, it was a fortunate development for the sleazeball masterminding the whole thing.”

Mary began plucking leaves from the hem of her long skirt. “Not the best gardening attire, I’m afraid. Of course we may be wrong. Maybe that poor hooker is still in the morgue, not burned up at all. You know, waiting for somebody to claim her. If she’s still there, we’re back to square one.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

“By impersonating that young lieutenant detective from the office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County? Oh, Homer, isn’t it a misdemeanor or a felony to impersonate a public official?”

Homer snickered. “You only get thirty years.” He sat down at the telephone and worked his way through the bureaucratic hierarchy at the Mallory Institute of Pathology. There were delays, accidental disconnections, recorded messages, transfers to the wrong department. At last the Chief Medical Examiner for Suffolk County returned his call.

“Oh, Dr. Smythe,” said Homer, “thank you for getting back to me. I’m looking into the death of Rosalind Hall, whose body was found in a burned car on the thirteenth of January in the town of Hudson. There’s something we’d like to inquire about, if we might.” Homer’s editorial we implied an entire department of stalwart police officers standing beside him at the salute. “We wonder if you can tell us what happened to the body of a young woman turned over to you from MGH at that time. According to our records she was unidentified. Do you still have her in—ah—storage? Or has someone come forward in the meantime to identify her and remove the body?”

“Just a minute, I’ve got my book right here. Let me see. November, December, January. Ah, here it is. No, Mr. Kelly, that particular body is no longer with us. It was removed on January sixteenth by—just a minute, the handwriting is hard to read—it looks like Kerliss, or perhaps it’s Kooliss? Tooliss? Funeral home in Woburn. The signature of the driver is—well, it’s totally illegible.”

“Tell me, Dr. Smythe, do you know that particular funeral home? Is it one you’re familiar with?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. We often transfer bodies to funeral homes we never hear from again. People seldom end up in the medical examiner’s office from nice suburbs like Woburn.”

“You don’t ask for accreditation from the driver? Proof that he belongs to a legitimate outfit, the Academy of Accredited Embalmers, or something like that?”

“Perhaps we should, but we don’t.”

“Well, thank you, Dr. Smythe. Oh, one thing more, what was the name by which the body was identified when it was taken away?”

“Let me look. Yes, here it is. Opal Downing Dew. That’s D-E-W, Opal Dew.”

“Opal Dew! Well, thank you, Dr. Smythe.”

Homer hung up, and went looking for his wife. He found her in the kitchen, turning pieces of chicken in a frying pan with a pair of tongs. “Opal Downing Dew, did you ever hear of a woman named Opal Dew?”

“Opal Downing Dew! It has a sort of familiar ring. One of those three-named women of days gone by, like Aimee Semple McPherson and Carrie Chapman Catt. Wait a minute, I’ll try the encyclopedia.” Mary wiped her hands on a towel and went to the kitchen bookcase, and groped on the bottom shelf for the D volume of the children’s encyclopedia she had used in grade school. It was full of patriotism, optimism, incorrect information and pictures of beaming little girls with pumpkins and Boy Scouts saluting the flag. “Homer, look, here she is, Opal Dew. Look at her, the pince-nez, the marcelled hair, the immense bosom. Formidable! They don’t make women like that any more. She died in 1955.”

“Well, what was she famous for? Why is she in the encyclopedia?”

Mary looked up from the book and laughed. “She was an organist. I remember now. She used to play in music halls, big thunder-and-lightning concerts to immense crowds. Opal Dew!”

“No kidding. That’s interesting. The body snatcher needed a name, and he came up with one that was lying around in his mind, a familiar one. An organist! The body snatcher was an organist! Who else would think of Opal Dew but another organist?”