Dancing Aztecs (32 page)

So here was Jerry in midtown in a car, and he had to get into that building over there. Oh, well. A bunch of trucks were parked along here—another element in the Manhattan madness being that trucks can do any damn thing they please—and Jerry tucked the station wagon in among them. He dashed into the building, and was still studying the directory when out of the corner of his eye he saw Bobbi Harwood emerge from one of the elevators, pushing ahead of herself some huge black triangle on wheels.

What the hell was
that?
It was black leather, like a suitcase, but it was huge, taller than the girl pushing it, and it was an elongated triangle in shape. Could it possibly contain the statue? And if it did, how in hell was Jerry going to get it away from her?

Watching her cross the lobby, the truth suddenly hit him. Orchestra. The damn thing was a harp!

Walking around with a harp. You're supposed to have a statue, lady, not a harp.

Jerry followed the girl back out to the street, where a Police Department tow truck was
already
attaching itself to the front of the station wagon. “Well, crap,” Jerry said.

Bobbi Harwood had turned left, toward Fifth Avenue, pushing the wheeled harp without too much apparent difficulty across the uneven sidewalk. Her head was up, her shoulders were back, her arm was firm as she guided the harp, and she moved along like a person with a purpose.

Argue with a bunch of cops over a twelve-hundred-dollar station wagon? Or keep an eye on a girl with maybe a million-dollar statue in her possession? Pausing only to say to the stolid policemen, “Keep up the good work, guys. We got to clear all these cars out of the way so the cars can get through,” he hurried along in Bobbi Harwood's wake.

IN MOURNING …

Maleficent White was in mourning. She mourned her last youth, and she mourned the lost sylphlike slenderness of her girlish figure. (Actually, she never did have a sylphlike girlish figure, although for one brief period in her late adolescence she'd been blessed with a rather attractive luxuriance; what people farther downtown call “zoftik.” But a traditional part of mourning is overstatement of the virtues of the mournee, so what the hell.)

Beyond the above, Maleficent mourned also the failure of so many of her good intentions. She mourned all those Dunkin' Donuts she'd engorged today. But most of all and above everything else, she mourned the death of her marriage with F. Xavier.

Dead. It must be dead, utterly dead, after all these years. And she was its murderess. Fat had made her bad-tempered, and bad temper had made her fatter, and the combination of fat and bad temper had driven her husband away.

Into the arms of Theodora Nice. Yes, that's right, Theodora Nice, the undertaker's cosmetician who regularly put out for the drivers on the cosmetology table and who was reproducing Pam Grier in today's spectacular. Maleficent had never read a Simenon novel, yet the logic of the progression was obvious to her. F. Xavier was the successful merchant, she was the unappreciative wife, Theodora Nice the attractive young employee. Was it life that imitated art, or art that imitated life? Whatever the answer, there was no question in Maleficent's mind as to what had happened in her own life. She was seeing everything clearly now, after years of selfish bindness, and she
knew
.

It had started with F. Xavier whupped her with that floor lamp. When she'd got over her rage, and had come out of her room again with Dunkin' Donut sugar all over her cheeks, she had for the first time in years seen F. Xavier as the agile, clever, admirable go-getter he really was. And had she ever appreciated him? She had not She had nagged at him, complained at him, dragged him down every chance she got, and he had never once argued back, never once defended himself, never once raised a hand against her. It wasn't until he was at the riskiest moment of his life, not until he was walking in the shadow of Bad Death Jonesburg, that he had been driven even beyond
his
endurance and had turned on her, popping her one time with the floor lamp.

Popping sense into her head, too late. F. Xavier was out in the world right now, going through either the greatest triumph of his career or its final disaster, and where was Maleficent? Here in the mortuary, alone. Fat had her body, and Theodora Nice had her husband, what was left?

Suicide, that's all. Leave F. Xavier to rest in peace with Theodora. Put this big fat body away forever.

Suicide, yes. But how? One look at the fleshy folds of her wrists told her she's never be able to saw down through those things to the veins. The F. Xavier White Funeral Home was four stories tall, and a jump from its roof would surely do
anybody
in, but it had been years and years since Maleficent could climb that many stairs. She'd drop dead before she reached the third floor.

Poison. That was the answer. Eating and drinking had been her abiding vice, now let them bring her abiding peace. The embalming rooms in the basement contained a sufficient variety of deadly liquids for any taste, so that was where Maleficent headed, step by heavy step down the wide stairs—wide to permit the passage of caskets—to the chemical-smelling white-walled room where the last remains were prepared for that final transformation.

The cosmetology table leered at her. Mirrors reflected her. In the cold storage room two customers patiently waited their turns. The smells down here were sharp and acid, but they were also clear and clean. Soon it would all be over.

What Maleficent didn't know was that Frank and Floyd McCann, having gained access to the alley behind the building and having climbed the fire escape past a series of locked windows, had just forced the lock on the door to the roof and were starting down the stairs toward the top floor.

Maleficent, far below in the basement, having selected the liquid with which she would dispatch herself, poured it into a beaker. A clear watery liquid, vaguely blue in color, it was one of the few things Maleficent had ever seen that did
not
look appetizing. But that at last wasn't the point, was it?

Frank and Floyd, believing the funeral home to be empty because everyone had gone off with the funeral, made a quick search of the top floor without finding the golden statue.

Maleficent, about to drink, stopped with the sudden realization that she had best write a note, or else the police would surely believe F. Xavier had murdered her so he could get together with his paramour, Theodora Nice. (Amazing that she had never read a Simenon novel.) A note, a note. Carrying the beaker of evil fluid, she looked around the bare antiseptic rooms, but could find neither pen nor paper. She Would have to go upstairs, a long and difficult process, involving a pause for breath at every second step.

Frank and Floyd, not having found the golden statue, moved down to the third floor.

Maleficent reached the tenth step, and paused to catch her breath.

“Gotta hustle,” said Frank. “Christ knows
when
they'll come back.”

“Right, right,” said Floyd, and the two of them started their search of the third floor.

During her pause at the twelfth step, three from the top, Maleficent sniffed a bit at the nasty blue fluid in the beaker. It smelled
awful
. It smelled like ammonia, mothballs, and Days-Ease all mixed together in a rusty pot. Probably gonna taste like that, too.

Well, what did it matter what the stuff tasted like? She was
done
with taste, wasn't she? Too many sweet things altogether; time for a little something sour. Time and past time.

Hustling, Frank and Floyd continued to ransack the rooms of the third floor.

During her pause at the fourteenth step, one from the top, Maleficent began to wonder if maybe there just might could possibly be some small tiny scant reason for hope after all. What if—just what if, now—what if she
really
went on a diet? What if she gave up that quack and charlatan, Dr. Erasmus Cornflower, and simply
stopped eating
for a while? And what if she was kindly and friendly with F. Xavier from here on? What if she turned over a new leaf and became a changed woman? A
better
woman. Would there still be hope?

No golden statue on the third floor. Frank and Floyd hustled down to the second floor. Neither of them was in any hurry to meet Bad Death Jonesburg again.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Maleficent paused for a final time, looked at the beaker of poison, and realized she was just fooling herself. She was just hoping against hope, when there wasn't any hope. The damage had been done. F. Xavier would be happier without her, happier with Theodora Nice. He
deserved
Theodora Nice.

“A sign,” she murmured, and lifted as many chins as she could in order to gaze heavenward. If there was hope, if she should stay alive and go on a
real
diet and treat F. Xavier nice from now on, then let Heaven give her a sign. Something, anything, to let her know she could go on hoping.

She waited, watching and listening.

Was that a muffled thump, from the direction of Heaven?

Apparently not.

With a sigh, Maleficent gazed into the beaker again, saw that the fluid had not miraculously changed color nor disappeared, and realized there was nothing for it. She had to go through with it now. Write the note, drink the poison, die.

Pen and paper would be in F. Xavier's office, beyond the room in which casket models were displayed. Sad, sighing, Maleficent made her slow way in that direction.

Frank and Floyd finished on the second floor, and hustled down the stairs to the first floor, the business part of the mortuary. “You go that way,” Frank said, “and I'll go this way, and we'll meet back here at the stairs.”

“Right,” said Floyd.

Floyd's path took him to the casket display room. Entering, he saw through an open doorway on the far side what appeared to be an office; the corner of a desk, a leatherette chair with wooden arms, a tall filing cabinet. And what was that on top of the filing cabinet? Wasn't it a Dancing Aztec Priest?

The room Floyd was in was long and fairly narrow, lined on both long sides with casket models, some open and some closed. A dark brown strip of carpet ran down the middle to the open office door, and Floyd was moving quickly along this when he heard the sound behind him.

Someone was coming.

Bad Death Jonesburg, that's all Floyd could think of. It had to be Bad Death without Frank.
“Damn damn damn!”
Floyd whispered, and looking around he knew he'd have to hide. Furthermore, you and I and Floyd all know
where
he had to hide. So into an open casket he went, lickety-split, a waist-high one on a metal stand, and yanked the lid down over himself as the door at the far end of the room opened and Maleficent waddled in, muttering to Heaven under her breath.

A word about subjective time. One minute is sixty seconds (a thousand one, a thousand two, a thousand three, and so on), as everyone knows, but those sixty seconds can expand or contract something wild, depending on what's happening. For instance, to a couple on the first night of their honeymoon, sixty seconds can go by in one delicious shiver, but on their return home, when their flight is stacked up over Kennedy Airport for two hours, sixty seconds can outlast a marriage.

Maleficent, at the best of times, was not a fast walker, and this was not the best of times. Probably nobody ever jogs toward the room where they will write their suicide note, and poor Maleficent wouldn't have been able to jog if her underwear was on fire. It would take Maleficent, in other words, much longer than sixty seconds to traverse the entire distance of that room, along the brown carpet aisle between the rows of caskets.
Much
longer.

For Floyd, on the other hand, who hadn't discovered until he'd closed the lid that the satin lining in this coffin wasn't attached, and who was now being smothered by the lid lining, which had fallen down onto his face and body, sixty seconds had lost
all
meaning, since he didn't believe he could stand this for
one
second. In pitchblackness, in a
casket
, believing someone named Bad Death Jonesburg to be in the near vicinity, and at the same time to be smothered by heavy clinging satin, is one of the least pleasurable experiences available in this world of ours, and Floyd didn't like it
one bit
. He didn't want it. He didn't want that awful clingy slickness against his face, he didn't want his nose and mouth clogged with it every time he tried to draw a bit of air into his lungs, and he didn't in any way at all want to be lying on his back in darkness inside a casket. No!

Surely sixty seconds had passed by now, and with them the other person, Bad Death or whoever it was. Surely he or she had gone on by now to some other room. Surely it was safe to get out of here now, because surely surely
surely
it was NECESSARY.

Which tells us again about subjective time. It had been exactly forty-two seconds since Maleficent had entered this room and started across it when all at once the lid was flung off the casket just to her right and some great gleaming pink
creature
sailed up out of it, beating its great gleaming pink wings and moaning like the souls of all the damned hooked up together.'

And,
“Yow!”
said Maleficent, throwing her hands up in the air. (The beaker, with its noxious contents, arced across the room and utterly spoiled an expensive set of draperies on the side wall.)

“Yow!”
echoed Floyd, who could neither see nor breathe nor get this goddam stinking rotten filthy
satin
off his head, and who in his thrashing dislodged the casket on its rickety stand, and over went everything, Floyd, satin, casket, stand …

… and Maleficent, who simply gave herself up for dead and swooned on the spot. Over on her back she went, out like a light, rocking gently.

When Frank, who had heard the ruckus, dashed into the room, he found Floyd struggling his way out of a mélange of splintered wood (casket), bent metal (stand), and torn cloth (lining), while a dead woman lay on the floor with her arms spread out. “Jesus Christ!” Frank said. “You didn't have to
kill
anybody!”