Basket Case Page 4

  Implicit in the dread of early demise is a lugubrious awareness of underachievement. At my age, Elvis was the King; Kennedy, the leader of the free world. Me, I'm sitting in a donut shop in Beckerville reading a newspaper story about a dead musician, a story I apparently have botched. Nice display, though: front of the Metro section, above the fold. The text is accompanied by a recent Reuters photo of the deceased, looking tanned and happy at a benefit barbecue for Reef Relief. Even the headline isn't terrible: Ex-Rocker Dies in Bahamas Diving Mishap.(James Bradley Stomarti, by the way, passed away at the same age as Dennis Wilson and John Kennedy Jr.)

  Janet Thrush—who else could it be?—takes the stool next to me and says, "First off, nobody calls me Jan."

  "Deal."

  "It's Janet. My ex once called me Jan and I stuck a cocktail fork in his femoral artery."

  I am careful to display no curiosity about the marriage.

  "So, Janet,exactly how did Cleo Rio scam me?"

  "She lied about her new record—'Waterlogged Heart' or whatever. Jimmy's not producing it."

  Janet has freckles on her nose and unruly ash-blond hair and green bulb earrings the size of Yule ornaments. She's wearing Wayfarers and a pastel tube top over tight jeans, and looks at least five years younger than her brother.

  "How do you know he wasn't producing it?" I ask.

  "A, because Jimmy would've told me. B, because he was too busy working on his own record."

  "Hold on." I reach for my pen and notebook.

  "Fact, I didn't even know Cleo hada CD in the works. My brother never said a word about it."

  "When's the last time you spoke?"

  "Day he died." Janet blows on her coffee, steaming up the sunglasses.

  "He called you from the Bahamas?"

  She nods. "I can't ever call him.Not with her around. Cleo goes jiggy-"

  In contrast to Jimmy's widow, Janet speaks of her late brother in the present tense, which enhances her credibility. I write down what she says, even though there's little chance of using it in another story. Obituaries tend to be one-shot deals.

  Besides, it's her word against Cleo's.

  "She didn't even mention his new record?" Janet sounds incredulous.

  "Not a word."

  "What a tramp." Her voice cracks. The coffee cup is suspended halfway to her lips.

  "She told me Jimmy was finished with the music business until he met her," I say.

  "And you believed that?"

  "Why wouldn't I? He hasn't had an album out since Stomatose.Besides, you never called me back yesterday. The story would have been different if you had."

  This is low on my part, pinning a factual omission on a grieving relative. Janet, however, seems unoffended.

  "FYI," she says, "my brother's been working on that album for four years. Maybe five."

  I feel vaguely sick to my stomach. Some reporter in the music trades probably knows about the unfinished Jimmy Stoma CD, and it'll be the lead of his story. It would've been the lead of mine,too, if only Jimmy's widow had thought to tell me about it.

  "You don't look so good, Mr. Tagger. You get a bad cruller?"

  "Call me Jack. Why doesn't Cleo like you?"

  "Because I know what she is." Janet smiles tightly. "Now you know, too."

  In the parking lot, I walk Jimmy's sister to her car, an old black Miata that looks about as perky as a rat turd. By way of explanation, she says, "I clobbered an ambulance." Then she adds: "Not on purpose, don't worry."

  I tell her I've got one more question; a heavy one. "You think your brother's really dead?"

  Janet gives me a long look. "Glad you asked," she says. "Let's go for a ride."

  The mortuary is only a few blocks off the interstate. It looks like every suburban funeral home in America; pillars, inlaid brick, and a tidy hedge.

  I hate these places. Writing about death is as close as I want to get, but given a choice, I'll take a chainsaw-murder scene over a funeral visitation any day.

  "This is where I was," says Janet, "when you tried to call yesterday."

  We must climb out of the little convertible because the crumpled doors will not open.

  "So you already saw the body?" I ask.

  "Yup."

  "Then I'll take your word that Jimmy's dead."

  When Janet removes her sunglasses, I see she's been crying. "That's what they teach you in newspaper school?" she says. "To believe every damn fool thing you're told? What if I'm lying?"

  "You're not." Me, the wise old pro.

  I follow her inside. Some guy who smells like rotten gardenias and looks like a used-furniture salesman sidles into the foyer, then recoils at the sight of Janet, with whom he obviously has interacted before.

  "You cooked my big brother yet?"

  "Pardon me?" The man wears a dyspeptic grimace.

  "The cremation, Ellis. Remember?"

  "In an hour or so."

  "Good," says Janet. "I want to see him one more time."

  The funeral director, Ellis, glances at me warily. I know that look; he thinks I'm a cop. Possibly this is because my necktie could be an artifact from Jack Webb's estate.

  Ellis says, "Is there something wrong?"

  Without missing a beat, Janet says, "This is the drummer in Jimmy's first band. He flew all the way from Hawaii."

  Ellis is relieved. We follow him down a hallway to a door marked Staff Only. It is not, thank God, the crematorium.

  Four wooden caskets sit side by side, each on its own padded gurney. In Florida, every corpse gets embalmed and every corpse gets a coffin, even for cremation. It's a law that exists for no other reason than to pad the profits of funeral-home proprietors. Janet points to a blond walnut casket with an orange tag twist-tied to one of the handles. "Burn ticket," she explains.

  Ellis dutifully opens the top half of the bisected lid ... and there's Jimmy Stoma.

  All things considered, he looks pretty darn spiffy. Better, in fact, than he did on some of his album covers. He's so lean and fit, you wouldn't guess he once outweighed Meat Loaf.

  James Bradley Stomarti lies before us in splendid attire: a coal-black Armani jacket over a white silk shirt buttoned to the throat. A fine diamond stud glistens in one earlobe. His cropped brown hair, flecked with silver, shines with mousse.

  Every dead rock musician should look so good.

  As his sister steps closer, I'm thinking it's fortunate that Jimmy Stoma's body was recovered right away. Ellis, the funeral guy, undoubtedly has the same thought: One more day of floating in shark-infested waters under that hot Bahamian sun, and you're talking closed casket.

  Tightly closed.

  "You did an awesome job," I tell Ellis, because that's what Jimmy's geeky drummer friend would have said.

  "Thank you," Ellis says. Then, for Janet's benefit: "He was a very handsome fellow."

  "Yeah, he was. Jack?" She beckons with a finger.

  I ask Ellis to give us some privacy, and with practiced aplomb he backs out of the room. He will return later, I know, to make sure we didn't spoil his Christmas by beating him to Jimmy's earring.

  "Diamonds won't burn, you know," I whisper to Janet.

  "That's Cleo's problem. She's in charge of wardrobe," says Janet, making me like her even more.

  "Well, it does look good. Helooks good."

  "Yeah," she says.

  We're standing together at the side of the coffin. Now that I've seen with my own eyes that Jimmy Stoma is deceased, the heebie-jeebies are setting in. I'm fighting the urge to bolt from the premises. The body reeks of designer cologne; the same cologne worn by Deli Boy in the elevator. Cleo's favorite, I'm sure. Poor Jimmy will probably explode when they slide him into the flames.

  Janet says, "What do you know about autopsies, Jack?"

  "Come on. Let's go."

  "You ever seen one?"

  "Yeah," I say. A few, actually.

  "They yank out everything, right?" Janet says. "I saw a special on the Discovery Channel—they cut o
ut all the organs and weigh 'em. Even the brain."

  Now she's leaning over the coffin, her face inches from that of her dead brother. I am gulping deep breaths, endeavoring not to keel over.

  "Amazing," she's saying, "the way they put him back together. You can't hardly tell, can you? Jack?"

  "No, you can't."

  "Well, maybe they do autopsies different in the islands."

  "Maybe so," I say.

  "Hmmmm." Janet, peering intently.

  In about three minutes I've sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Time to go. I prefer not to asphyxiate on a dead man's perfume.

  "Let's get this over with," I say.

  "What?"

  "You know."

  Janet steps away from the casket. "Okay. Do it."

  My hands shake as I fumble with the buttons, starting at the neck. Inanely, I try to open Jimmy Stoma's silk shirt without wrinkling it—like it matters for the crematorium.

  Finally the shirt is undone. The singer's chest looks tan, the fine hair bleached golden by long days in the tropics. Undimmed by death is the most prominent of Jimmy's tattoos, a florid sternum-to-navel depiction of a nude blonde rapturously encoiled by a phallus-headed anaconda.

  But that's not what grabs my eye.

  "Strange," I mutter.

  The singer's sister touches my sleeve.

  "Jack," she whispers, "where are the autopsy stitches?"

  An excellent question.

  5

  I wouldn't be working at the Union-Registerif it weren't for a pig-eyed, greasy-necked oaf named Orrin Van Gelder.

  He was an elected commissioner of Gadsden County, Florida, where his specialty was diverting multimillion-dollar government contracts to favored cronies in exchange for cash kickbacks.

  Fortunately for me, Van Gelder was an exceptionally dull-witted crook. At the time of his most carefree and imprudent bid-rigging, I was covering Gadsden County for a small local newspaper. I'd like to say it was my own intrepid investigating that ensnared the corrupt commissioner—that's what my editor proclaimed in the letter nominating me for a big journalism award.

  The truth, however, is that I nailed Orrin Van Gelder simply by picking up a ringing telephone. A voice at the other end said:

  "Some prick politician is trying to shake me down for a hundred large."

  The voice belonged to Walter Dubb, whose occupation was selling buses outfitted for the handicapped. Gadsden County was seeking to purchase fifteen such vehicles; a worthy expenditure, all had agreed. Four competing companies began preparing bids.

  Shortly thereafter, Walter Dubb, who sold more handicapped-customized buses than anybody in the South, was approached by Mrs. Orrin Van Gelder for a private lunch invitation. In thirty years of selling transit fleets to municipal governments, Dubb had been shaken down by a multitude of public officials, but Orrin Van Gelder was the first to use his wife as a bagperson.

  "Here's the deal, Walt," Pamela Van Gelder informed him over crabcakes at a local catfish joint. "Even if you're not the lowest bidder, Orrin will see to it the county buys your buses, and onlyyour buses. His fee is five percent."

  "Fee?"

  Mrs. Van Gelder smiled. "Call it what you like."

  "I call it a corncobbing," said Walter Dubb.

  The commissioner's wife didn't flinch. "My husband's a reasonable man. He'll settle for a flat hundred grand, plus one of those fancy Dodge minivans with the electric lift."

  "Like hell."

  "For Orrin's mother," Pamela Van Gelder explained.

  "She's in a wheelchair?" Walter Dubb, experiencing a pang of sympathy.

  "No, she's a whale. Can't hoist her fat ass up and down the steps."

  The bus contract was worth $3 million and change, so Dubb had some thinking to do. Dubb didn't object to reasonable briberies but he was disgusted by Van Gelder's greedy gall. So, one Saturday morning, Walter called up the city desk to nark out the commissioner. A preoccupied editor cut him off mid-sentence and transferred him to my line. (The only reason I answered is because I thought it was my then-girlfriend calling to explain why she hadn't yet returned from Vancouver, where she was shooting a pantyhose commercial. She never did come home.)

  After hearing Walter Dubb's story, I made a couple of calls. The following Wednesday night, Commissioner Gelder and his co-conspiring spouse sat down for dinner with Walter Dubb and a man named George Pannini, whom Dubb had introduced convincingly as the vice president of his bus-customizing division. In fact, Mr. Pannini was employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and was wearing both a sidearm and a microphone.

  I was sitting at another table with a photographer, who was discreetly shooting pictures over my left shoulder. Orrin Van Gelder, who had the appetite of a tapeworm, had ordered a T-bone steak, stone crabs, a dozen oysters, a tureen of potato soup and a whole fried onion the size of a softball. His gluttony would be fully documented in my story the next day, along with his crime. The decibel level in the restaurant made eavesdropping difficult, but the gaps in conversation would be filled in, colorfully, by a broadcast-quality FBI tape recording.

  The bust went down in the men's room, where Agent Pannini had lured Van Gelder with the promise of a $25,000 down payment on the kickback. It was at a urinal, with one hand on the cash and the other hand on his pecker, that the commissioner was arrested for bribery.

  It was a glorious scandal, and my byline stayed on the front page for a solid week, a personal record that stands to this day. Even better, the heavy news coverage flushed from the muck three other vendors who'd been hustled by the commissioner. Each of the aggrieved businessmen consented to an interview, including the fellow who'd sold $1.7 million worth of self-cleaning toilets to the county airport. Van Gelder had insisted that in addition to his customary cash kickback, he wanted a deluxe model self-cleaning commode installed in his private master bathroom. The fixture later malfunctioned while the commissioner himself was enthroned upon it, an errant geyser of bleach scalding both buttocks and his scrotum.

  The story, needless to say, was golden. Orrin Van Gelder wound up copping a plea and doing nineteen months at Talladega. I wound up winning that journalism award and being wooed away to a bigger place and a bigger newspaper, where I did some pretty decent work until the shitstorm struck.

  And here I am.

  Janet drops me off at the donut shop.

  I offer to make some phone calls and find out about her brother's so-called autopsy. She's not listening.

  "Damn, I almost forgot," she says, and starts to drive away.

  "Hey, where you going?"

  She hits the brakes. "Back to the funeral place. I've got something that belongs with Jimmy. Something special he gave me."

  "Can I ask what?"

  She reaches behind the seat and pulls out a white paper shopping bag. She opens it to display a rare gem—a genuine long-playing 33 rpm album. The jacket is faded, and one corner appears to have been gnawed by a puppy. I'm smiling because I recognize the record. The Soft Parade.

  "1969," I say.

  "Jimmy loved the Doors. This one was his favorite—he gave it to me for my birthday." Janet studies the band's photograph on the cover and asks, "How old was Morrison when he died?"

  You bet I know the answer. "Twenty-seven."

  "Jimmy told me where it happened, but I forgot."

  "In a bathtub."

  Janet busts out with a laugh. "No, I meant where, like what city."

  Now we're both laughing. "Paris," I say.

  Janet gathers herself. "I remember now. My brother went to see the grave. Listen, I better get rolling before they light the bonfire, or whatever."

  "You're putting the album in the coffin?"

  "Yeah." Sheepishly she slips it back into the bag. "I mean, I've got to do something.Cleo won't ever know."

  "Janet, don't you think you should tell somebody about what we saw. Maybe it's not too late to—"

  "I don't know." She shrugs drearily. "I don't know anything except Ji
mmy's gone." And off she goes, peeling rubber.

  Moments later I'm in a phone booth talking to my friend Pete, a forensic pathologist at the county Medical Examiner's Office. When I tell him about James Bradley Stomarti's lack of autopsy stitches, he gives a sour chuckle.

  "Whenever there's a death in a foreign country, it's dicey. The protocol drives you nuts—plus everybody wants to be so damn polite about the cutting."

  "What do I do?"

  "Try to stop the cremation," he suggests. "You could get a court order, but for that you'll need immediate family."

  "How about a sister?"

  "Perfect. But she's gotta call the State Attorney's Office and get them to find a judge. Then the judge needs to send a deputy out to the funeral parlor right away, because once your boy goes into the oven—"

  "Adios."

  "That's right, Jack. Case closed."

  Next I try Rick Tarkington, a state prosecutor who once helped me on a story about a mob murder in exchange for tickets to a Springsteen concert. Being a rock fan, he'll probably remember Jimmy and the Slut Puppies.

  Unfortunately, Rick's surly and unhelpful secretary says he's in depositions and cannot be interrupted.

  "It's an emergency," I plead. "Can't you give him a message?"

  "Not today, sir. I'm leaving early for a doctor's 'pointment."

  "Oh? Something serious, I hope."

  Janet Thrush is my only chance. The battered Miata is still parked in the lot when I return to the funeral home. After a quick search I find her among the mourners at an open-casket viewing in one of the lavender-scented chapels. According to the remembrance cards being distributed at the door, the deceased is Eugene Marvin Brandt, who was born in 1918.

  Janet is quite a standout in her tube top, poised beside a spray of gladiolus and tulips. She's chatting with a spry-looking elderly woman dressed in widow black.

  "Gertie, this is Jack," Janet says. "Jack, this is Mrs. Gertie Brandt. Gene's wife."

  Gene?

  "Nice of you to come." Gertie shakes my hand. She is dry-eyed and composed, leading me to conclude that her husband had been ill for some time, and that his death might have been a blessing. Either that or he was a miserable jerk and she's glad to be rid of him.