A lot of people in that room were keeping an eye on Sly. The course of life is rarely a straightaway; his certainly had not been. But it seemed to me that he was handling the curves thrown at him recently with grace.
I looked around, checking on Guido’s crew, camera placements and lights, caught his eye and got a nod that meant all was well. The cameras were fairly unobtrusive, but they were a presence just the same. As I turned back around, I saw that Thornbury was staring at me.
I leaned in close to Sly and whispered, “Don’t worry, kid, if they put you in the slam, I’ll bake you a cake.”
He slid his eyes toward me and managed a smile. “Promise, Maggie?”
“Promise,” I said.
“What kind?”
“What else? Devil’s food.”
Uncle Max cleared his throat, a signal for me to shut up as well.
Sly mouthed, You okay? I nodded, gave his arm a squeeze, mouthed, You? He smiled gamely.
The big gymnasium doors swung open and six men, all of them wearing dark suits, all members of the college administration except for handsome Trey Holloway, the dead man’s son, wheeled the mahogany coffin in out of the rain.
I saw the basketball coach scowl. I don’t know how Coach felt about Park Holloway, but it was basketball season and Coach had protested mightily against holding the memorial service for Holloway in his gym. But it was still raining heavily, predicted to continue into the afternoon, and with the auditorium closed for earthquake retrofitting there was no other indoor space on campus large enough to contain the five- or six-hundred members of the campus community who had come to pay their last respects to the murdered man.
To appease Coach, the highest paid and to some the most valuable member of the faculty, the gym floor was covered with heavy canvas drop cloths borrowed from some ongoing construction project on campus, and we all traded our shoes for athletic socks. I didn’t mind. The socks were warmer than the wet pumps I placed on the tarp beneath my chair.
As the coffin came down the center aisle the crowd stood as they would for a bride and watched the mortuary trolley progress toward the out-of-bounds line where a priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a Methodist preacher and a Chumash Indian shaman waited in front of a bank of potted palms and Easter lilies. That lineup of men dressed in their various forms of clerical garb would certainly be fodder for corny jokes once this collegiate congregation was sprung. A priest, a rabbi, and a shaman walked into a bar…
Lew Kaufman leaned across Sly after the coffin passed us and whispered, “Damn, Maggie, I was hoping for an open coffin. You know, just to make sure the bastard’s dead.”
I shuddered, and not because the gym was cold. “Trust me, he’s dead.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” He gripped my elbow by way of apology. “Just a stab at a bad joke. I forgot for a sec; you found him. It was ugly, huh? You never said.”
“Not pretty.”
Lew saw something on my face that made him defensive. “It’s not just me, Maggie. Look around, see any tears?”
“Be careful what you say, Lew.” Sly canted his head toward the side of the gym where the detectives still stood watch.
“Why?” Lew said. “The fuzz going to arrest me for being honest?”
“Not you,” Sly said, his narrow face pale. “They’re going to arrest me.”
Lew scoffed. “Get over yourself, kid.”
Sly turned to me. “Aren’t they, Maggie?”
“Shh,” I said as Max reached forward and nudged Sly’s shoulder.
“That’s crazy talk, Sly,” Lew said. “Half the people in this room had better reason than you to want him dead. Not that you didn’t. I’m just saying that lots of people had fights with Holloway. Worse fights than you.” Lew, though he whispered, could be heard by people around us. Some tittered, others shushed him.
Lew wasn’t wrong in what he said, though his timing stank. In common with many people in that packed gym, Sly and I were only there for the sake of appearances, and not because of any affection for the murdered man. But this was the wrong place to say so. I put my hand on Lew’s arm and whispered, “Not now.” He fell silent, though all through the service he kept checking to make sure the two detectives were still there. As did Sly.
It seemed to me that if Detectives Thornbury and Weber were watching anyone, they were watching Uncle Max.
Clarice Snow and her son, Frank Weidermeyer, AKA Franz von Wilde, arrived late and slipped into seats in the back row. She was dressed appropriately for a funeral in an old Hollywood movie: black hat, black suit, black gloves. Frank wore a narrow Italian-cut suit and his mop of dark hair was combed, but he still looked as if he had just fallen out of bed, puffy-eyed and sullen. She saw me, raised her brows as if surprised that I was there, and whispered to her son. He glanced my way and shrugged in response to whatever she had said to him. I had a feeling she would not be happy to see me the next time I entered her posh gallery, but it was the son I thought I should be on the lookout for.
Kate was near the front of the gym with Bobbie Cusato, Hiram Chin, and a member of the Board of Trustees I had met somewhere. I hoped to see Joan Givens with them, but she wasn’t. I didn’t see Joan at all, but considering her feelings toward Holloway that was understandable.
The service seemed interminable. College campuses are loaded with people accustomed to speaking before captive audiences. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advice to the public speaker, “Be sincere, be brief, be seated,” held no sway that morning as one speaker after another endowed the audience with generous outpourings of verbiage, even as the gym grew hot and airless and heads began to nod. It was interesting to me that Hiram Chin, who probably had known Holloway better than anyone else in the room, perhaps including his son, did not speak.
I may have dozed and missed an encomium or musical offering or two. Still, I never heard an expression of genuine sadness or affection. In sum, the audience was given generic paeans, scrubbed of the essence of the dead man; it had become unpopular to be the man’s friend once rumors of his financial perfidy circulated.
During the service there was no reference to the violence of Holloway’s leave-taking, the details of which fascinated every person in the room more than the details of his “vision” for the college.
Eventually, the Chumash shaman waved smoking bundles of sage, signaling the end, and the pallbearers wheeled Holloway’s remains back out into the rain. As the crowd rose and began shuffling out behind it, I stayed seated with Sly and Lew, with Max standing sentinel behind us. The detectives didn’t move, either.
“That’s a wrap,” Guido called to his crew. “Let’s tear down and get the equipment back to the truck. Time is money, kids.”
He came over for a quick conference. He reminded me that his crew of five was due for a union-mandated lunch break in half an hour, a break that would add rental time to the equipment. I recommended a couple of the Village restaurants, and he went back to work.
“Lot of yakety-yak,” Max said after a big yawn. “That mob of eggheads could out-talk a gaggle of trial lawyers.”
Sly turned to look at him. “The cops can’t take me as long as I’m in here, right?”
“Why’s that?” Max asked, scowling.
“Sanctuary, you know?” Sly said. “This was, like, a religious thing, right?”
“No, sorry.” Max clapped a hand on the youth’s shoulder. “This is a college gym in a public school, son, not a church. Just stay put. We’ll let the dicks come to us if they want to talk to us. And remember what I told you.”
“Keep my mouth shut.”
“Exactly.” Max tightened his grip on Sly as the detectives stirred and began to walk our way. “No one can question you unless I’m present so…”
Sly finished the sentence. “Don’t volunteer anything.”