Two ambulance personnel came out, wheeling a collapsible gurney. They did not hurry. The body on the gurney was zipped to the scalp in a black vinyl bag.
The nurse came out fast behind them. Her face was wet with tears and red with rage. ‘Murphy’s in DeKalb, not Wiley’s, you hear?’ she shouted to the ambulance crew. ‘Murphy’s Funeral Home in DeKalb!’
‘You sure, Mrs Milner?’ one of the men shouted back, opening the ambulance’s back door. ‘The sheriff played cards with Mr Wiley.’
Mrs Milner was not a large woman, but she raised her fist and came toward him. ‘You need me to drive the damned ambulance?’ she screamed.
‘No, ma’am.’
As the two men collapsed the wheels and slid the gurney into the back of the ambulance, Mrs Milner doubled over and fell to her knees. The young deputy left the front door and ran across the lawn.
‘We’ll go to DeKalb,’ the ambulance driver shouted. ‘Clamp says whatever you want.’
He climbed in and they drove off, lights flashing but in no hurry. The young deputy got Mrs Milner to stand, and together they walked into the house.
The tall cop got out of the second cruiser and began walking toward the Volkswagen. His face looked angry. Ridl gave him a faint wave and drove away.
Most probably, Milner had been dropped by a heart attack. He was overweight, and had been sweating too hard the first time Ridl had seen him down in the sheriff’s office. He’d looked no better the next time. He’d been ashen-faced addressing the townspeople from the arch in the courthouse, reporting a trucker’s tip and encouraging them to search the land and the cabins south of Poor Farm Road. That Milner had gotten sick at the sight of Betty Jo Dean at the Devil’s Backbone fit too. Clearly, the man had not been well.
Mrs Milner was a nurse, a medical professional. She’d have known, more intimately than anyone else, how sick he was. Even so, her shock and her screams were understandable. Her husband was dead.
Only one thing nagged: she’d insisted hysterically that her husband be taken out of town, away from Wiley’s, to another funeral home in DeKalb.
He caught up with the ambulance three miles east, and hung back the thirty minutes it took to get to DeKalb. Murphy’s Funeral Parlor was on the main drag. He parked in front of a Rexall pharmacy, two doors down, where he could see when the ambulance left, and called Eddings from a booth out in front.
‘The prodigal deigns to call,’ Eddings, ever the wordster, said. ‘You do recall you and your story were supposed to be in my office today at noon?’
‘Too much is wrong here. The sheriff just got carted away, dead.’
‘Murdered?’
‘Probably a heart attack.’
‘Now who’s talking ordinary, Jonah?’
‘I have to hang around.’
‘For what? Spetter at the Trib gave it barely a hundred words this morning.’
‘I’ll have at least two thousand for openers. I can call later, to dictate?’
Eddings sighed and gave him the name of the night man to call.
‘One more thing,’ Ridl said. ‘I’ve got someone working with me. Laurel Jessup.’ He spelled it out. ‘I told her we’d share the byline.’
He smiled, imagining her strutting on campus with a well-worn clip from the Sun-Times. And for the first time he felt the weight of the last six months start to lift. It was slight, to be sure; he’d never be completely free of a kid shot dead in a Chicago alley, but Laurel was a start, a way back. Maybe even an amends.
‘Never heard of her,’ Eddings said.
‘Journalism major at Illinois. She’s got a source – lines into a motive that no one else knows about. I’m calling her this afternoon.’
The ambulance, emptied of Delbert Milner, appeared at the end of the street and turned toward Grand Point. He told Eddings he’d call the night man and walked to Murphy’s front door.
A man and a woman were seated in an office to the right, their backs to the door, facing someone across a desk. The man’s shoulders were hunched. The woman’s were shaking. She was sobbing.
A white-haired man in a black suit came out of a viewing parlor and crossed the foyer to close the office door. ‘Always especially terrible when a young person dies,’ he said. ‘May I help you?’
‘I said I’d follow along behind the ambulance but I got stuck behind a truck.’ It was only the first of the lies he’d planned.
‘You’re here about Sheriff Milner? Not to worry. He’s safe in our hands.’
Ridl chewed at his lip. ‘Terrible, terrible thing.’
The white-haired man put on an appropriately consoling face. ‘We’ll oversee every possible detail, though it will have to be a closed casket viewing…’
Closed casket. Words too searing for a death by heart attack.
‘Closed casket,’ Ridl repeated.
He hadn’t kept the question out of the words. The funeral director’s eyes narrowed from consoling to cautious. ‘Forgive me; I thought perhaps you were a son. You are family, sir?’
‘I wasn’t at the house.’ It was all he could think to say.
‘Wiley’s is a fine establishment, to be sure.’
He almost wanted to laugh. The funeral director wasn’t being protective of Milner’s family; he was worried about being accused of poaching a stiff from another mortician’s turf.
‘You’re wondering why we’re not using Wiley’s?’
The man in the black suit smiled, obviously relieved that Ridl understood the delicacy of the situation.
Because Grand Point’s own funeral director was up to his own formaldehyde in covering up big things, along with the town’s doctor, newspaper publisher and maybe half its sheriff’s department, Ridl wanted to say, and the newly widowed Mrs Milner didn’t want any of their dirty hands touching what was left of her husband, who perhaps hadn’t wanted to conspire anymore.
‘I’m fully prepared to put in a reassuring word,’ Ridl said instead, ‘so long as I’m comfortable with your decision-making.’
The mortician beamed.
‘To best communicate the need to restrict the viewing,’ Ridl went on, ‘and for my information only…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Exactly how bad is the…?’ He let the question dangle – a guess, but one he had to make.
The funeral director leaned forward. ‘You do understand, reconstruction in the case of gunshot is tenuous at best?’
‘How close was the shot?’
‘There is no doubt.’
‘That close?’
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he said, trying to soothe. ‘I merely meant… well, you understand, depression’s a disease.’
The office door opened and the bereaved couple came out, accompanied by a younger version of the white-haired funeral director.
‘She’s safe in our hands,’ the younger mortician said to the couple, echoing the same line his father had used with Ridl. The woman sobbed. The man’s face was tight, but dry. He carried a purse. The victim must have been a woman.
The older director touched Ridl’s elbow and nudged him ever so gently away. ‘There are papers…?’
‘The family will be contacting you shortly,’ he said, and left. Sheriff Milner had died of gunshot. Whether it had been a suicide or murder wasn’t something he was likely to learn on his own, anytime soon.
Someone with better sources might know. And it was time anyway. He stepped into the phone booth outside the Rexall, fed in a dime and called Laurel Jessup.
TWENTY
The phone rang nine times before a child answered. It was her younger sister, perhaps.
‘Laurel Jessup, please.’
The girl started crying. A soft thud came then, as though she’d dropped the receiver.
An older woman must have picked it up. ‘Yes?’ she asked softly.