ELROD BROWN WAS BUILT like Chilly Willy and dressed like a black caricature of a white undertaker. His black suit and gray cotton gloves with matching spats came straight out of the mortician’s catalogue. (Lydell swore the silver rims of his eyeglasses had come from his customers’ fillings.) He spoke with a pronounced lisp, and his infrequent laughter, intended to be obsequious, was uncomfortably close to a giggle. Following Brown through the big display room behind the main parlor, listening to the relative merits of options and standard equipment, box springs, and aerodynamic engineering, Quincy felt as if he were shopping for a new car instead of just a box to put Congo in and cover up with dirt.
The fat man stopped and slapped the curved lid of a casket the color and general shape of a Luden’s cough drop. “This is the top of the Eternity line,” he said. “Solid bronze. Guaranteed not to collapse or leak for a thousand years.”
Lydell said, “Who we see if it falls apart in nine hunnert and ninety-nine?”
“Pop the hood,” Quincy said. “Let’s see what she’s got.”
Brown lifted the lid. Lydell said mm-mm! and stroked the white satin lining. “This is nicer than my apartment.”
“Marcus Garvey was laid to rest in a casket just like this one.” The mortician giggled.
Quincy asked how much.
“Six thousand dollars. Now, that’s the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. I can let you have it—”
“Ain’t you got nothing more expensive?”
Brown lowered the lid. His hand shook a little. “This is the Jeroboam. The Nebuchadnezzar is the same model with fourteen-karat gold fittings and an Italian silk lining. Eighty-five fifty.”
“We’ll take it. How much does that come to with the flowers and the white hearse and limos?”
“Don’t forget the choir,” Lydell said.
Brown scribbled some figures in a leather-bound notebook. “Eleven thousand five hundred. A fifteen percent deposit is customary.”
“Pay the man, Lydell.”
He took a roll of bills out of his pocket. “Hundreds okay?”
“Body’s at the Wayne County Morgue,” Quincy said. “Vernon Kress is the name. You pick up?”
“Pick up? Oh, sure.” The mortician watched the bills piling up on his outstretched palms. “When do you want to hold the services?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Independence Day.”
“It is for Congo.”
“That isn’t much time. They have to ship the casket from Lansing, and, er, I understand the remains are not in the best repair. They may require extensive reconstruction.”
“For eleven and a half grand you can let bids,” Quincy said. “C’mon, Lydell. We’re late for church.”
Quincy drove the Sting Ray. Lydell no longer wore a sling, but the pain pills the doctors had prescribed for him at Receiving made him too giddy for Quincy’s taste as a passenger, especially since he washed them down with rye. It was a blistering, tar-smelling Sunday morning and the top was down. The radio in a pink-and-black DeSoto cruising along next to them carried details of John Kennedy, Jr.’s recovery from first-and second-degree burns suffered when he fell into a bed of hot coals during a trip to Hawaii with his mother. A plastic surgeon who had treated the late President’s five-year-old son in the Honolulu home of Henry J. Kaiser reported that reconstructive surgery would not be necessary.
“Poor little fucker,” Lydell said. “Gots his lily-white butt blistered at a luau, and here you and me’s worried about someone blowing our heads off. Makes you ashamed.”
“His old man got his blowed off, don’t forget. You never heard John-John piss and moan. He saluted at the funeral.” Quincy nicked a red light at Fourteenth and flipped the bird at a trucker who leaned on his air horn.
“Bet it didn’t cost half as much as Congo’s.”
“I thought about renting a black horse. You know, with the boots stuck backwards in the stirrups? But I didn’t want to look like a copycat.”
“It’s too much bread to spread on the dead. You going to do the same for me next time DiJesus comes around dressed like John Clawed Killy?”
“He behaved himself this morning.”
In fact Gallante’s man had not showed his face in the blind pig at all during business hours, stationing himself downstairs instead to scrutinize the customers on their way up. No one complained. Gallante had reported shortly after dawn to count the policy receipts, with DiJesus looking on. They had done a little better than the week before. Quincy was pretty sure conditions would continue to improve now that the Sicilians were in residence.
Lydell assumed Elrod Brown’s lisp. “This here’s the Jeroboam. The Nebuchadnezzar comes with bucket seats and air conditioning. You believe that shit?”
“I liked the His ’n’ Her Sweetheart Burial Plot. With the stone shaped like a big old heart.”
“Shiiit. When my time comes you can stick me in a bag and leave me out by the curb.” Lydell leaned forward out of the slipstream and lit a Kent.
Quincy considered the subject. “Not me. I want a Viking funeral. Like in Beau Geste. Float me out in the middle of Lake St. Clair and set me on fire. Right in front of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.”
“I don’t know what you see in them crummy old movies, bro.”
“Endings,” Quincy said.
The Second Baptist Church, at Monroe and Beaubien, was the oldest of its kind in Detroit, purchased from the Lutherans in 1857 and serving the needs of a Negro congregation organized in 1836. At eighty-six, the Reverend Otis R. R. Idaho had been its pastor for almost fifty years, longer than any other minister in the city. They found him standing on the chair behind his desk in his walnut-paneled study in the basement, pounding a nail into the only section of wall not already covered by a photograph in a frame. He was still wearing his white surplice from the morning services over gray pinstripe pants and white scuffed sneakers.
“Have a seat, children,” he said without turning.
Lydell sat down, stretched out his legs, and closed his eyes; the secondary reaction to the pills and liquor was setting in. Quincy wandered around the room looking at pictures. The minister was in all of them, shaking hands with local and visiting luminaries from Soupy Sales to Martin Luther King. Many of them were autographed. George Washington Carver had a large sprawling hand.
“A sinful vanity.” Idaho, who seemed to be able to see backwards, for he still hadn’t turned, finished pounding and hung a recent likeness of himself posing with the Supremes. “We’re all equal under Christ, but since the day Teddy Roosevelt pressed a nickel into my hand for opening the door for him at the Detroit Opera House in nineteen sixteen …” He trailed off. Half a century up North had taken none of the molasses out of his deep Mississippi drawl.
Quincy said, “I know what you mean. I seen Cootie Williams once at the state fair.”
The minister used the tail of his surplice to wipe a smudge off the glass and climbed down. His height surprised Quincy, who would have found himself looking up at him before Idaho’s shoulders had begun to stoop, and his grip on Quincy’s hand was firm despite the fact that all his bones showed under a thin sheeting of flesh. His ears stuck out on stalks from his head with its fringe of white hair. The cord of a hearing aid snaked down inside his clerical collar. Quincy thought he looked like Mahatma Gandhi.
“Your friend looks done in,” Idaho said.
Lydell was asleep with his ankles crossed and his hands folded on his stomach.
“He had a rough week.”
“You ought to send him home from the blind pig once in a while.”
“You know about us?”
“I baptized half the population of Twelfth Street. They tell me things they wouldn’t tell their brothers and sisters.”
“I’m surprised you agreed to see us,” Quincy said.
“A professional sinner may reclaim his soul as well as an amateur. Besides, I play three-one-nine once a year. That’s the date I was ordained. Sit down, son.”
Quincy waited for the old man to lower himself into his chair before he took a seat. “Thanks for seeing us on short notice.”
“Death is difficult to reschedule. Was Brother Kress a Baptist?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he request a Baptist ceremony?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did he attend services here?”
“I don’t think so.”
Idaho examined the hammer he had used to hang the picture and set it aside. “I assumed you were close. Not many employers would arrange a funeral for a worker. Your particular business is not known for its generosities.”
“Well, he didn’t have any people.”
“Interesting. One wonders who will come.”
Quincy changed the subject. He had started all wrong, anticipating the usual octogenarian density. He would have liked to see the minister shoot craps against Lydell.
“You said on the phone tomorrow would be okay for the service. I want to go over the arrangements with you, see if they’re okay.”
“Have you arranged dancing?”
“No.”
“Then I’m sure they’ll be fine.” Idaho glanced at Lydell. “Your friend looks done in.”
Quincy hesitated. “He’s on medication. What’s the usual donation?”
“Three hundred dollars.” The minister uncovered a full set of false teeth. “It’s an old church. Old churches need new roofs. The last one came courtesy of a fellow who called himself Big Nabob. That would be before your time.”
“I heard about him. Joey Machine killed him.”
“I never saw such a fine funeral. People today have no imagination. Your friend looks done in.”
This time Quincy let it slide. Idaho’s brain seemed to have picked up a scratch or two like an old record, “There’ll be a choir and a lead singer. His name’s Mahomet.”
Idaho reached-up under his surplice. His hearing aid released a high-pitched squeal. Quincy flinched. He wondered how it sounded in the minister’s ear.
“Sorry. The batteries are going. What is the singer’s name?”
“Mahomet.”
“It wasn’t the batteries,” Idaho said. “No.”
“No what?”
“No Mahomet. I won’t have that man in my church.”
“It’s God’s house.”
“God doesn’t have to kick the radiator when the pipes clog.”
“If it’s his name—”
“I wouldn’t have him if his name were St. Thomas Aquinas. The last time he appeared here I almost had a riot in the congregation.”
“What’d he do?”
“He interrupted his own interpretation of ‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow’ to deliver an oration on the dignity of man. Specifically the black man. By the time he was finished he had the entire attendance ready to march on the City-County Building.”
“He’s big on dignity,” Quincy averred. “When I met him—”
“There is a time and place for that sort of thing. I submit that regular Sunday services at the Second Baptist Church do not answer. No Mahomet.” He placed his palms on the desk. “You’d better take your friend home now. He looks done in.”
“What about a donation of five hundred?”
Idaho had started to rise. He paused halfway out of the chair with his sharp elbows bent above his head, looking like a daddy longlegs. “You’ll see he confines his vocal exercises to the hymnal?”
“I’ll shoot him in the head if I got to.”
“Don’t hit the big crucifix.” The minister stood.