"Will there be a viewing?"
"Uh, well, there usually is, but I'd have to check. Can you hold?"
"Yes…"
The woman was gone for three or four minutes. When she returned, she asked, "Are you a member of Mr. Druze's family?"
"No… I'm from the theater…"
"Well, Mr. Druze's mother made some tentative arrangements which did not include a viewing, but now we understand that several theater people will be coming, so we're planning a viewing from seven to nine o'clock tomorrow night in the Rose Chapel, with burial at Shakopee. We will have to contact his mother again for approval."
"Tomorrow night, from seven to nine…" Bekker closed his eyes. The burial was sooner than he'd expected, or dared to hope. Druze had died two days before, and he would be buried in another two days. Bekker had been afraid that it would be a week, or even more, before the body was released. He could hold out for a week, he thought, with the right medication. Longer than that, and he'd have to let go, he'd have to go down and face Druze in the territory of dreams.
But now that would not happen. Tomorrow night and it would be over.
CHAPTER 31
Bekker saw Druze twice more, or thought he did: he couldn't decide, finally, whether he was seeing Druze or an image within his own eye.
He saw him two blocks from his house, a dark thing drifting around a corner. Bekker stood, his mouth open, the newspaper in his hand, and the figure disappeared like a wisp of black fog. He saw him again at midafternoon, passing in a car half a block away. Bekker's eye was caught first by the car, then by the obscured dark form behind the driver's-side glass. He could feel the eyes peering out at him…
He was eating Equanil like popcorn, with an occasional taste of amphetamine; he was afraid to sleep, was living out of his study, from which he'd removed all the glass. If he could spend the day staring at the carpet…
He had trouble thinking. He would be all right after Druze was done. He could clear himself out for a while, go off the medications… What? He couldn't remember. Harder to think. The units of thought, the concepts, seemed bound in threads of possibility, the threads tangled beyond his ability to follow them…
He struggled with it: and time passed. • • • The funeral home was a gloomier place than it had to be, dark red-brown brick and natural stone, with a snaky growth of still leafless ivy clinging to the stone.
Bekker, shaky, anxious but anticipating, black beauties nestled in his pocket, drove past once, twice. There were few cars on the street but several in the funeral home driveway. As he was making his second pass, the front door opened and a half-dozen people came out and stood clustered on the steps, talking.
Older, most of them, they were dressed in long winter coats and dark hats, like wealthy Russians. Bekker slowed, eased the car to the curb, watched the people on the steps. Their talk was animated: an argument? He couldn't tell. After five minutes, the cluster began to break up. In ones and twos, they drifted out to their cars and, finally, were gone.
Bekker tried to wait but couldn't. The pressure to move… and there was nobody in sight. He didn't much credit the funeral home receptionist's comment that theater people were expected, but you never knew with theater people. He climbed out of the car, looked around, walked slowly up the driveway to the funeral home. A car cruised past and he turned his head. A man watching him? Druze again? He wasn't sure. He didn't care. In five minutes, he'd be done…
The net was with him:
"He's out of the car, looking at the door," the close man said, driving on by. He didn't look at Bekker, who was walking slowly up the driveway.
There was no place to hide in the Rose Chapel, but the other rooms were worse. Lucas finally decided he could drive a nail through the top panel of one of the double doors, then pull the nail and have a hole large enough to peep through. The manager wouldn't let him use a nail, but did loan him a power drill with a sixteenth-inch bit. When Lucas, standing in the dark behind the doors, pressed his eye to the hole, he could see the entire coffin area.
"Go up there, bend over him," he told Sloan. Del was leaning against the wall, faintly amused. Sloan stood over the coffin and looked back at the doors. The hole was invisible.
"Put your hand on his head, or over it, or something," Lucas called from behind the doors. Sloan put his hand over Druze's head. A moment later, the doors opened.
"Can't see your hand," Lucas said. He looked around the room. "But I think any other arrangement would look wrong."
"Yeah, with the alcove like that," Sloan said, nodding toward the coffin.
Del grinned. "We could, like, put, you know, a spring with a clown under his eyelids, and when Bekker pulls it open, see, it pops up…"
"I like it," Sloan said. "Motherfucker'd have a heart attack…"
"Jesus," Lucas said, glancing toward the body. "I think we'll settle for the hole in the door."
"He's moving," said the voice on the handset.
Sloan looked at Lucas. "You cool?"
"I'm cool," Lucas said.
"So'm I," Del said. He unconsciously dropped his hand back to his hip, where he kept a small piece clipped to his belt. "I'm cool, too."
The receptionist came from Intelligence and spent his nights working undercover. "No problem," he said. "I could win a fuckin' Oscar, the work I do." There were two squads immediately available, and the surveillance team coming in with Bekker.
"He's here," the radio burped ten minutes later. "He's going past."
Bekker rambled through the neighborhood, looking it over, and made another pass at the front of the funeral home before he stopped.
"He's out of the car, looking at the door," the radio said.
"Everybody…" Lucas said.
A finger of joy touched his soul. In five minutes…
Bekker wore a trench coat and a crushable hat, with leather driving gloves. The scalpel, a plastic tube protecting the point, was clipped in his shirt pocket. The funeral home door, he thought, looked like the door on a bad ski chalet…
The funeral home was overly warm. An antique mirror, like those collected by Stephanie, surprised him just inside the door. He flinched, jerked his eyes away, but found them drawn back…
Druze was gone. Beauty looked back at him. Beauty looked fine, he thought, but tired. Unusual lines crossed his wide brow, gathered at the corners of his eyes. A different look, he thought, but not unattractive. French, perhaps, a world-weariness… like the actor with the home-rolled cigarette. What was his name? He couldn't concentrate, his own image floating in front of him like a dream. And then a gathering darkness behind his image, and…
He pulled his eyes away. Druze was there, still waiting.
"Buchanan?"
"What?" Bekker jumped. He'd been so engrossed in the mirror that he hadn't heard the funeral home receptionist until the man was virtually on top of him.
"Are you here for Mr. Buchanan?" The receptionist seemed ordinary, a thin man in a conservative coat and flannel slacks, a man with no particular relationship to death, although he worked in the middle of it. No imagination…
"No…" Bekker said, "ah, Mr. Druze?"
"Oh, yes. That would be the Rose Chapel. Down to your right…" The receptionist pointed like a real estate man giving directions to the third bedroom, the one that was a little too small.
"Thank you."
The funeral home was quiet, all sounds smothered by plush drapes and heavy carpets. To quiet the weeping, Bekker guessed. As he stepped into the Rose Chapel, he glanced back at the receptionist. The man had turned away and seemed about to go down to the next room, when a phone rang in the entry. The receptionist stopped, picked up the receiver and launched into a conversation. Good. Bekker stepped into the chapel.