Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (33 page)

Brady used Thing Two for almost two years, stealing PKEs and unlocking cars so he could toss them for valuables and cash. The income from these ventures was uneven, but the thrill never faded. His first thought on finding the spare key in the glove compartment of Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes (it was in a plastic bag along with her owner’s manual and registration) was to steal the car and joyride it all the way across the city. Bang it up a little just for the hell of it. Maybe slice the upholstery. But some instinct had told him to leave everything just as it was. That the Mercedes might have a larger role to play. And so it had proved.

Brady hops into his car and puts Thing Two back in his own glove compartment. He’s very satisfied with his morning’s work, but the morning isn’t over. Hodges and Olivia’s sister will be going to a visitation. Brady has his own visitation to make. The MAC will be open by now, and he wants a look around. See what they have for security. Check out where the cameras are mounted.

Brady thinks, I’ll find a way in. I’m on a roll.

Also, he’ll need to go online and score a ticket to the concert Thursday night. Busy, busy, busy.

He begins to whistle.

11

Hodges and Janey Patterson step into the Eternal Rest parlor of the Soames Funeral Home at quarter to ten, and thanks to her insistence on hurrying, they’re the first arrivals. The top half of the coffin is open. The bottom half is swaddled in a blue silk swag. Elizabeth Wharton is wearing a white dress sprigged with blue florets that match the swag. Her eyes are closed. Her cheeks are rosy.

Janey hurries down an aisle between two ranks of folding chairs, looks briefly at her mother, then hurries back. Her lips are trembling.

“Uncle Henry can call cremation pagan if he wants to, but this open-coffin shit is the real pagan rite. She doesn’t look like my mother, she looks like a stuffed exhibit.”

“Then why—”

“It was the trade-off I made to shut Uncle Henry up about the cremation. God help us if he looks under the swag and sees the coffin’s pressed cardboard painted gray to look like metal. So it’ll . . . you know . . .”

“I know,” Hodges says, and gives her a one-armed hug.

The deceased woman’s friends trickle in, led by Althea Greene, Wharton’s nurse, and Mrs. Harris, who was her housekeeper. At twenty past ten or so (fashionably late, Hodges thinks), Aunt Charlotte arrives on her brother’s arm. Uncle Henry leads her down the aisle, looks briefly at the corpse, then stands back. Aunt Charlotte stares fixedly into the upturned face, then bends and kisses the dead lips. In a barely audible voice she says, “Oh, sis, oh, sis.” For the first time since he met her, Hodges feels something for her other than irritation.

There is some milling, some quiet talk, a few low outbursts of laughter. Janey makes the rounds, speaking to everyone (there aren’t more than a dozen, all of the sort Hodges’s daughter calls “goldie-oldies”), doing her due diligence. Uncle Henry joins her, and on the one occasion when Janey falters—she’s trying to comfort Mrs. Greene—he puts an arm around her shoulders. Hodges is glad to see it. Blood tells, he thinks. At times like this, it almost always does.

He’s the odd man out here, so he decides to get some air. He stands on the front step for a few moments, scanning the cars parked across the street, looking for a man sitting by himself in one of them. He sees no one, and realizes he hasn’t seen Holly the Mumbler, either.

He ambles around to the visitors’ parking lot and there she is, perched on the back step. She’s dressed in a singularly unbecoming shin-length brown dress. Her hair is put up in unbecoming clumps at the sides of her head. To Hodges she looks like Princess Leia after a year on the Karen Carpenter diet.

She sees his shadow on the pavement, gives a jerk, and hides something behind her hand. He comes closer, and the hidden object turns out to be a half-smoked cigarette. She gives him a narrow, worried look. Hodges thinks it’s the look of a dog that’s been beaten too many times with a newspaper for piddling under the kitchen table.

“Don’t tell my mother. She thinks I quit.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Hodges says, thinking that Holly is surely too old to worry about Mommy’s disapproval of what is probably her only bad habit. “Can I share your step?”

“Shouldn’t you be inside with Janey?” But she moves over to make room.

“Just taking a breather. With the exception of Janey herself, I don’t know any of those people.”

She looks him over with the bald curiosity of a child. “Are you and my cousin lovers?”

He’s embarrassed, not by the question but by the perverse fact that it makes him feel like laughing. He sort of wishes he’d just left her to smoke her illicit cigarette. “Well,” he says, “we’re good friends. Maybe we should leave it at that.”

She shrugs and shoots smoke from her nostrils. “It’s all right with me. I think a woman should have lovers if she wants them. I don’t, myself. Men don’t interest me. Not that I’m a lesbian. Don’t get that idea. I write poetry.”

“Yeah? Do you?”

“Yes.” And with no pause, as if it’s all the same thing: “My mother doesn’t like Janey.”

“Really?”

“She doesn’t think Janey should have gotten all that money from Olivia. She says it isn’t fair. It probably isn’t, but I don’t care, myself.”

She’s biting her lips in a way that gives Hodges an unsettling sense of déjà vu, and it takes only a second to realize why: Olivia Trelawney did the same thing during her police interviews. Blood tells. It almost always does.

“You haven’t been inside,” he says.

“No, and I’m not going, and
she
can’t make me. I’ve never seen a dead person, and I’m not going to start now. It would give me nightmares.”

She kills her cigarette on the side of the step, not rubbing it but
plunging
it out, stabbing it until the sparks fly and the filter splits. Her face is as pale as milk glass, she’s started to quiver (her knees are almost literally knocking), and if she doesn’t stop chewing her lower lip, it’s going to split open.

“This is the worst part,” she says, and she’s not mumbling now. In fact, if her voice doesn’t stop rising it will soon be a scream. “This is the worst part, this is the worst part,
this is the worst part
!”

He puts an arm around her vibrating shoulders. For a moment the vibration grows to a whole-body shake. He fully expects her to flee (perhaps lingering just long enough to call him a masher and slap his face). Then the shaking subsides and she actually puts her head on his shoulder. She’s breathing rapidly.

“You’re right,” he says. “This is the worst part. Tomorrow will be better.”

“Will the coffin be closed?”

“Yeah.” He’ll tell Janey it will have to be, unless she wants her cuz sitting out here with the hearses again.

Holly looks at him out of her naked face. She doesn’t have a damn thing going for her, Hodges thinks, not a single scrap of wit, not a single wile. He will come to regret this misperception, but for now he finds himself once more musing on Olivia Trelawney. How the press treated her and how the cops treated her. Including him.

“Do you promise it’ll be closed?”

“Yes.”

“
Double
promise?”

“Pinky swear, if you want.” Then, still thinking of Olivia and the computer-poison Mr. Mercedes fed her: “Are you taking your medication, Holly?”

Her eyes widen. “How do you know I take Lexapro? Did
she
tell you?”

“Nobody told me. Nobody had to. I used to be a detective.” He tightens the arm around her shoulders a little and gives her a small, friendly shake. “Now answer my question.”

“It’s in my purse. I haven’t taken it today, because . . .” She gives a small, shrill giggle. “Because it makes me have to
pee
.”

“If I get a glass of water, will you take it now?”

“Yes. For you.” Again that naked stare, the look of a small child sizing up an adult. “I like you. You’re a good guy. Janey’s lucky. I’ve never been lucky in my life. I’ve never even had a boyfriend.”

“I’ll get you some water,” Hodges says, and stands up. At the corner of the building, he looks back. She’s trying to light another cigarette, but it’s hard going because the shakes are back. She’s holding her disposable Bic in both hands, like a shooter on the police gun range.

Inside, Janey asks where he’s been. He tells her, and asks if the coffin can be closed at the memorial service the following day. “I think it’s the only way you’ll get her inside,” he says.

Janey looks at her aunt, now at the center of a group of elderly women, all of them talking animatedly. “That bitch hasn’t even noticed Holly’s not in here,” she says. “You know what, I just decided the coffin’s not even going to
be
here tomorrow. I’ll have the funeral director stash it in the back, and if Auntie C doesn’t like it, she can go spit. Tell Holly that, okay?”

The discreetly hovering funeral director shows Hodges into the next room, where drinks and snacks have been arranged. He gets a bottle of Dasani water and takes it out to the parking lot. He passes on Janey’s message and sits with Holly until she takes one of her little white happy-caps. When it’s down, she smiles at him. “I really do like you.”

And, using that splendid, police-trained capacity for telling the convincing lie, Hodges replies warmly, “I like you too, Holly.”

12

The Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, aka the MAC, is called “the Louvre of the Midwest” by the newspaper and the local Chamber of Commerce (the residents of this midwestern city call it “the Loovah”). The facility covers six acres of prime downtown real estate and is dominated by a circular building that looks to Brady like the giant UFO that shows up at the end of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. This is Mingo Auditorium.

He wanders around back to the loading area, which is as busy as an anthill on a summer day. Trucks bustle to and fro, and workers are unloading all sorts of stuff, including—weird but true—what looks like sections of a Ferris wheel. There are also flats (he thinks that’s what they’re called) showing a starry night sky and a white sand beach with couples walking hand-in-hand at the edge of the water. The workers, he notes, are all wearing ID badges around their necks or clipped to their shirts. Not good.

There’s a security booth guarding the entrance to the loading area, and that’s not good, either, but Brady wanders over anyway, thinking No risk, no reward. There are two guards. One is inside, noshing a bagel as he monitors half a dozen video screens. The other steps out to intercept Brady. He’s wearing sunglasses. Brady can see himself reflected in the lenses, with a big old gosh-this-is-interesting smile on his face.

“Help you, sir?”

“I was just wondering what’s going on,” Brady says. He points. “That looks like a Ferris wheel!”

“Big concert here Thursday night,” the guard says. “The band’s flogging their new album.
Kisses on the Midway
, I think it’s called.”

“Boy, they really go all out, don’t they?” Brady marvels.

The guard snorts. “The less they can sing, the bigger the set. You know what? When we had Tony Bennett here last September, it was just him. Didn’t even have a band. The City Symphony backed him up.
That
was a show. No screaming kids. Actual music. What a concept, huh?”

“I don’t suppose I could go over for a peek. Maybe snap a picture with my cell phone?”

“Nope.” The guard is looking him over too closely. Brady doesn’t like that. “In fact, you’re not supposed to be here at all. So . . .”

“Gotcha, gotcha,” Brady says, widening his smile. Time to go. There’s nothing here for him, anyway; if they have two guys on duty now, there’s apt to be half a dozen on Thursday night. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.”

“No problem.”

Brady gives him a thumbs-up. The security goon returns it, but stands in the doorway of the security booth, watching him walk away.

He strolls along the edge of a vast and nearly empty parking lot that will be filled to capacity on the night of the ’Round Here show. His smile is gone. He’s musing on the numbfuck ragheads who ran a pair of jetliners into the World Trade Center nine years before. He thinks (without the slightest trace of irony), They spoiled it for the rest of us.

A five-minute trudge takes him to the bank of doors where concertgoers will enter on Thursday night. He has to pay a five-dollar “suggested donation fee” to get in. The lobby is an echoing vault currently filled with art-lovers and student groups. Straight ahead is the gift shop. To the left is the corridor leading to the Mingo Auditorium. It’s as wide as a two-lane highway. In the middle of it is a chrome stand with a sign reading NO BAGS NO BOXES NO BACKPACKS.

Also no metal detectors. It’s possible they haven’t been set up yet, but Brady’s pretty sure they won’t be used at all. There are going to be over four thousand concertgoers pushing to get in, and metal detectors booping and beeping all over the place would create a nightmarish traffic jam. There will be
mucho
security guards, though, all of them just as suspicious and officious as the sunglasses-wearing ass-munch out back. A man in a quilted vest on a warm June evening would attract their attention at once. In fact,
any
man without a pigtailed teenybop daughter in tow would be apt to attract attention.

Would you step over here for a minute, sir?

Of course he could blow the vest right then and there and scrag a hundred or more, but that isn’t what he wants. What he wants is to go home, search the Web, find out the name of ’Round Here’s biggest song, and flick the switch halfway through it, when the little chickie-boos are screaming their very loudest and going out of their little chickie-boo minds.

But the obstacles are formidable.

Standing there in the lobby amid the guidebook-toting retirees and junior high school mouth-breathers, Brady thinks, I wish Frankie was alive. If he was, I’d take him to the show. He’d be just stupid enough to like it. I’d even let him bring Sammy the Fire Truck. The thought fills him with the deep and completely authentic sadness that often comes to him when he thinks about Frankie.