"No."
Jesus, I thought. "Harnes has had several lawsuits brought against him, sexual harassment, palimony. Do you think that we. . ."
"That we might find Teddy's bastard siblings in this assemblage?"
It bothered the hell out of me when she finished all my sentences. "It'll be a good chance to find out something about him. What did you learn from Wallace?"
She didn't bother to ask how I'd known she'd spoken to Keaton Wallace. He stood a dozen yards away, fiddling with his dentures the way he usually did. Even from here I could see the spotting of burst blood vessels in his nose, his drinking almost as bad as my father's had been. They'd both gotten on the wagon together, though Wallace continued to leap off.
"Virtually nothing. The wounds are consistent with being attacked with a shovel. Teddy was indeed killed by blunt trauma to the head, the cleaving of his visage induced either as he died or just post mortem."
"Do you think Wallace might have missed something?”
“No."
"If he released the body to Harnes, then Wallace is satisfied the corpse is Teddy. He must've matched the fingerprints to Teddy's passport."
"My thoughts exactly, but passports can be faked. Wallace may have been deceived."
"Or bribed."
"No, I don't believe that."
We were silent for a moment, each of us lost in thought, disturbed by the fact that the killer had taken the time to eradicate his victim's face. It didn't sit well.
I looked over at Wallace again: in his mid-fifties, the barbershop quartet haircut and bristly mustache made him look like a man reaching backward to the day of Teddy Roosevelt. He grinned too widely because his dentures didn't fit well, and his generally jolly nature could make you forget that he'd once had a mean streak that landed his ex-wife in the emergency room a few times. I liked him a lot, and as a kid I especially liked him when he was drunk.
I wondered where he stood on the road of his life, and if he was proud of what he'd accomplished or if he felt like a failure, still full of hate, the anger hiding within him the way it had hidden inside my father. He and my Dad hadn't been especially close friends, but they had been devoted drinking buddies, and gotten into brawls that landed them in Broghin's jail more than once. The broken blood vessels lining his face depicted all the regrets and remorse of his life; and a lot of the fun, too, I supposed.
Could he have made a mistake? Could a faked passport have gotten by him? He rubbed at his mustache, smoothing it as he licked his lips. He might still go to the occasional AA meeting, but he was so far off the wagon at the moment I could tell he was already starting to get thirsty. Could Teddy, trying to escape his father, have paid off Wallace into faking the autopsy? And if so, who was the dead man I now watched being buried?
"We may just be dealing with a jealous psychopath who hated Teddy so much he cut the kid's face off for no real reason," I said.
"Doubtful."
Lowell moved off to one side, wearing a black suit and sunglasses, weaving among the crowd.
"Deputy Tully also suspects something is amiss," Anna said. "He's studying the crowd."
"He knows the killer might be here."
"As does anyone who has ever seen a television police drama or read a mystery novel."
"Yes, but only a real genius would do it covertly," I said, putting on my sunglasses.
Finally we heard a heartfelt wail, and a girl at the front slowly drew nearer to the casket. She sobbed loudly and was comforted by a young man who looked on the verge of tears himself. Okay, I thought, now I have something to do. Harnes didn't even turn to look at her. Jocelyn didn't either, or the chauffeur. I didn't see Sparky and wondered what else he might have to do that was more important than attending the funeral for the son of his employer.
"A girlfriend?" Anna asked.
"Or his sister."
"Did you hear any of the names of his personnel?"
"More like an entourage. Just the Asian woman. Her name is Jocelyn. The others never addressed each other, and the lipless guy didn't take the bait."
"This Jocelyn looks quite"-she searched for the right word-"formidable." There were a lot of other adjectives I'd use in describing her, but formidable worked just fine for the moment. "Regardless of the men in his company, I believe she might actually be Theodore Harnes' bodyguard."
I wondered how many copies of Emerson's MayDay I'd have to sell in order to have enough cash to pay a body like hers to guard a body like mine. "She could certainly wallop me."
"Oh, dear."
I knew a lot of the people and when we caught each others' eye I understood that we all shared the same thought: why are you here? Harnes hadn't even been in the country for most of the last decade, so what kind of hold did he have on the town? Vinny Matalo and John Trusnick and Pete Wilkes, Jessica Sperling, Daphne Kupfer, some other friends I hadn't seen in months, neighbors, all of us here for whatever reason, to pay our respects to a dead kid and a wealthy man whom nobody even really knew.
"Not like Daphne Kupfer is a business associate of Harnes, being a waitress in Pembleton's Diner, and how would she know Teddy?"
I watched the girl crying. It was the only noise heard outside of the priest who mumbled through his service.
I waited a while longer before I finally asked, "Do you think Harnes killed Diane Cruthers?"
Anna remained silent. Her lips parted, but she soon closed her mouth again and cleared her throat. She looked beyond Harnes into their shared history, and I knew it hadn't only been bad, it had been awful. It took a few seconds but she eventually shook the question off.
She didn’t want to deal with the dead past, and said, “The truth of Teddy’s murder lies with Crummler.”
“Yes.”
I had to go to Panecraft.
Pembleton’s diner had been downtown on the corner of Broome and Maiden since nineteen-twenty-eight and looked every minute of it. Arthur Pembleton himself had stepped in front of a southbound freight a couple months following Black Monday, but none of the successive proprietors had ever decided to change the name, including the current owner, Harvey McCoy. Pe,bleton might not have had any luck businesswise, but he sported a properly high-class name, and lending it to a diner must’ve been thought to raise the general level of class in the place.
A few coats of paint would have gone a lot further to that end, I thought, and might have made a dent in the seventy years’ worth of grime clinging to the walls. Maybe not. I’d been in worse-looking places in Manhattan, but none that served meals as bad as Pembleton’s. No one liked to eat here, and the regulars appeared to have mutated two levels further down the food chain, but the next nearest diner was several miles uptown and the lunch crowd hated to travel.
If anybody ever went into the direct competition with Harvey McCoy they’d make a fortune. I thought about a flowershop-bookstore-diner and wondered if we could get the Leones to come and cook for us, with Katie putting fresh flowers out in the booths and me going table to table selling first editions of A. E. Houseman, Francois Mauriac, Thomas Wolfe, and books on longhorn sheep.
Already the fumes in this place were starting to get to me. The hostess seated me with nod of her head and slapped a menu down in front of my face so hard that it bounced off the table and hit the floor. I reached down and had a perfect view of Daphne's legs as she shouldered the kitchen door open and stepped out carrying two plates of what might be passing for scrambled eggs. I didn't know what the purple stuff was, and I would make it my mission in life never to know.
Daphne Kupfer had never stopped being twenty-one. She'd held thirty at bay with skin-tight clothing and a physique she worked hard to keep with at least four nights a week spent in the gym. Those angles and stone-hard contours of her body stuck out whenever she moved in the slightest; just turning her head or shifting her stance brought curves and veins up from all over. She still had a little girl space between her two front teeth and wore dangling earrings of unicorns leaping through hoops that jingled like wind chimes.