“I’ve got a crow.”
“Yeah?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Male or female?”
“All birds are males,” I said. “Especially crows.”
“What’s his name?”
“He hasn’t got one.”
“Oh, good, I’ll think of one,” Maria said.
“Don’t bother. I’m letting him loose as soon as he’s healthy.”
“Is he sick?”
“He was in an automobile accident.”
“Was he driving or just a passenger?” Maria asked.
“I don’t find anything comical about this bird,” I said.
“All right, grouch, call me later,” she said.
“I will,” I promised.
I put the receiver back onto its cradle and looked down at the bird. He was beginning to show some signs of life now, his eyes blinking, his black wings flapping weakly. I took a roll of masking tape from the bottom drawer of the desk and crisscrossed strips of it over the open top of the carton, just in case he came to and decided to fly all over the house while I was gone. Then I picked up the receiver again.
Through years of experience, I’ve learned that all garage mechanics are named Lou. Lou, the mechanic who usually serviced my car, first advised me that I ought to get rid of the heap, it was more trouble than it was worth, and it was also un-American to own a foreign car. He then told me he’d have to turn the car over to a body and glass shop and they’d probably be able to put in a new windshield by the early part of next week, and the job would probably cost around two hundred dollars. I told him I’d drop the car off in just a little while, and then hung up and looked sourly at the blinking, flapping goddamn two-hundred-dollar bird. I went out into the kitchen then, drank a glass of cold milk, told Lisette I wouldn’t be home for dinner, and left the apartment.
Ten
I taxied downtown from the garage to the first funeral parlor on Henry’s list. It was much more sumptuous than Abner’s modest establishment, with eight viewing rooms and two chapels, a managing director, an assistant director, and a staff of twelve, not including hearse and limousine drivers. The director was a moon-faced man named Hamilton Pierce. I identified myself as a city policeman investigating these mysterious break-ins, and then asked him how many bodies were on the premises at the time of his break-in last night.
“Four,” he said.
“Embalmed?”
“All of them.”
“Male or female?”
“Three women, one man.”
“Can you describe the man to me?” I said.
“He’s here now, if you’d like to take a look at him.”
He accompanied me to one of the viewing rooms. A woman in black sat alone at the back of the room, facing the open coffin. She sat erect on a wooden folding chair in a row of identical chairs, her hands clasped in her lap. The room was filled with the overpowering aroma of the floral wreaths bedecking either end of the open coffin. I nodded respectfully to the woman in black, and then approached the coffin and peered into it. The dead man looked to be in his late sixties—it’s sometimes difficult to tell with a corpse. He was perhaps five feet six inches tall, partially bald, a thick mustache over his upper lip: I estimated his weight to be about a hundred and fifty pounds. His hands were crossed over a Bible on his chest. His eyes, of course, were closed.
“What color are the eyes?” I whispered to Mr. Pierce.
“Blue, I believe.”
“Had he been embalmed before the time of the break-in?”
“Yes.”
I thanked Mr. Pierce for his time, jotted a description of the dead man into my notebook, and then hailed another taxi.
By six p.m. I’d hit all four mortuaries, and had compiled a list of the five male bodies the thief had passed up and the one male body he’d finally decided to steal. I automatically eliminated any of the dead women because I assumed the thief had been looking for a man’s corpse; he had, after all, settled upon Anthony Gibson’s. The page in my notebook looked like this:
The comparison list told me only that the thief had been looking for an embalmed male corpse, forty-two years old, with brown hair and brown eyes, measuring five feet eleven inches and weighing a hundred and eighty-five pounds. In short, the thief had been looking for Anthony Gibson—which brought me right back to square one. I suppressed an urge to giggle; big men look enormously foolish when they giggle, especially if they’re standing on a street corner waiting for a taxicab. Instead, I tried to think like the thief.
I am the thief, I told myself, and I learn that Anthony Gibson has been killed in an automobile accident. How do I learn this? Well, in any number of ways. Despite the fact that Rhoda Gibson is not advertising it around, word of fatal accidents spread very quickly. So let’s assume that I—as the thief—hear about Gibson’s death, and for some reason want his corpse. All right, I then assume the body will be taken to a mortuary somewhere in the vicinity of the Gibson residence, but I don’t know which one. Then why don’t I simply call the family of the deceased and ask where I can pay my respects? Well, perhaps I don’t know the family of the deceased, in which case I couldn’t possibly call to ask where the body will be laid out, especially if body snatching is on my mind. All right, so far so good. I draw a circle on a street map, using the Gibson residence on Matthews Street as the center of that circle, and I settle on an arbitrary radius of twenty blocks, figuring the body will be taken to a mortuary somewhere within that radius. I then look up the names and addresses of every funeral home inside my circle, and in the dead of night I begin searching for Anthony Gibson’s body. I hit pay dirt on the fifth funeral home I break into. I take Gibson’s body, and then...
Then what ?
I return it!
Jesus, it didn’t make sense, it still didn’t make sense. I was back to zero again, I was stymied, I was beginning to feel a creeping sense of elation.
I decided to buy a present for the crow.
Eleven
The cage I bought was large and ugly, but I considered it only a temporary convenience for the bird, whom I expected to turn loose as soon as he was again able to cope with the perils of the city. I set the cage on the kitchen counter top, and then checked the bulletin board near the refrigerator. The note from Lisette was short and simple:
The Bird is out. So am I!
Lisette
Quickly, I went through the apartment to my study. The cardboard carton was still on the corner of the desk there, alongside the telephone. But the masking tape had been torn in several places, and the bird was nowhere in sight. I took off my jacket, pulled down my tie, and began searching the apartment.
I found him in the bedroom, perched on a lamp near the bed, shoulders hunched, beady eyes challenging, looking for all the world like a vulture.
“Come on, bird,” I said pleasantly. “I bought a cage for you.”
The bird did not answer.
“It’s just until I can take you back to the park and let you loose.”
The bird still said nothing.
“It cost me seven dollars,” I said.
The bird uttered a distinctly threatening sound at that moment, and seemed ready to take off and fly directly into my face. I backed away toward the window. The bird was still crouched for flight, his beak opening and closing menacingly, his wing feathers bristling. He watched my progress across the room, and then stared at me intently as I opened the window.