Basket Case Page 5

  Gertie asks, "How do you know my Gene?"

  "Professionally," I say. "It was years ago, but he made quite an impression."

  Gertie smiles fondly. "He always does." She gestures toward the coffin. "Did you see him? They did a wonderful job."

  "He looks real peaceful," Janet chimes in. "And handsome, too," she adds with a wink.

  Gertie beams. "Go on, Jack. Have a look."

  So, like a moron, I'm standing here admiring a dead stranger. It would appear that Eugene Marvin Brandt is heading for the pearly gates in his favorite golf ensemble, including spikes. Janet appears at my side and squeezes my arm.

  "You're a good sport," she whispers.

  "And you are one twisted sister."

  "I didn't want to be alone."

  "So you crash a viewing?"

  "Everyone's been so nice," she says. "What a sweet-looking man, no?"

  With her chin Janet points at the eternally recumbent Mr. Brandt. "Guess what he did for a living!"

  "We need to talk."

  "Catheters. He sold them."

  "That would have been my second guess."

  "And other medical supplies," Janet adds.

  This room, too, is rapidly emptying of oxygen. I take an audible gulp and clutch the rim of the coffin.

  "Cancer," says Janet Thrush. "Case you were wondering."

  "Can we go now?"

  "Cancer of the prostrate."

  "Prostate."My voice is raspy and ancient. I'm wondering if it's medically possible to choke to death on the scent of stale flowers.

  Janet says, "Once I had a noodle cut out of my armpit."

  "A nodule, you mean."

  "Whatever. Main thing, it was benign. But still it freaked me out—somethin' growing in my armpit!"

  Her words are spiraling down a long gray tunnel. Any second now, I'll be fainting. No joke, I'm going to pitch face-forward into the casket of a dead catheter salesman wearing golf spikes.

  "Jack, you don't look so hot."

  Firmly Janet steers me out the door, into the fresh air. We sit on the grass under a black olive tree near a small stagnant pond. Slowly I lie back and squeeze my eyelids shut. Two stiffs in one day, Sweet Jesus!

  A breeze springs up and I proceed to drift off for an hour, maybe longer. The next thing I know, a cold soda can is being pressed into my right hand. I raise up and take a sip and my eyes tear up from the carbonation. Janet is next to me, sitting cross-legged. Folded in her lap is the white paper shopping bag, now empty.

  "You did it," I say, pointing at the bag.

  "What?"

  "The Soft Parade.Somewhere Jimmy is smiling, I'm sure."

  Touching two fingertips to my forehead, Janet says, "Jeez, you're in a cold sweat."

  "I'm a wimp," I admit. "The sight of poor old Gene did me in. Gene, all decked out for the eternal dogleg."

  "Drink the Coke. You'll feel better."

  And soon I do. Taking her by the hand, I lead her back toward the funeral home. "Listen, I checked it out. As Jimmy's sister you can stop the cremation. We'll get a court order," I tell her. "You're a blood relative. You can demand a proper autopsy."

  "No, Jack—" Janet, pulling free as we enter the front door.

  "Meanwhile we've got to put the fear of Almighty God into young Ellis. Scare him into thinking you're going to sue his ass off if he goes ahead with it today—"

  "No," Janet says again. She looks sad and exhausted, holding the empty shopping bag to her breasts. "Jack, it's too late."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "When you fell asleep, I went inside. Back to that room," she says. "He's gone. It's too late."

  "Goddammit."

  "I know."

  I sag against a planter featuring a lovely plastic rhododendron.

  "But what about the album? I thought you put it in with—"

  "Too late. So I threw it in the pond—it was a stupid idea, anyway," Janet says. "I mean, the record's vinyl. All it's gonna do is melt all over his damn bones."

  I'm thinking Jimmy wouldn't mind.

  "Come on," she says, sniffling. "Let's get outta here."

  "In a minute."

  I see oily-fingered Ellis alone in his cubicle, intently tapping on a portable calculator. Janet hangs back while I peer in the doorway.

  Ellis quickly turns his head sideways while simultaneously swiveling his chair toward the wall. "Can I help you?" he squeaks over his shoulder.

  "Nice earring, dickhead. But it looked better on Mr. Stomarti."

  Ellis claps one hand over his right ear in a futile effort to conceal the stolen diamond.

  "I don't know what you're talking about!" he yelps. "Doesn't anybody ever knock anymore!"

  6

  Emma is off on Mondays, but this can't wait.

  The phone rings busy for an hour so I do the unthinkable and drive to her apartment, a duplex on the west side. I know how to get there because I gave her a ride on the day her car got stolen from the newspaper's parking lot. The car was a silver two-door Acura, a gift from her father. The cretin who drove off with it later tried to rob the drive-through window of a bank. He was shot by a guard and died bleeding copiously on Emma's gray leather upholstery. The car was impounded as evidence.

  So I agreed to give Emma a lift, which was risky. I feared she might be so upset that she would require consoling, which I couldn't offer. To show sympathy would have thrown slack into a relationship that had to remain as taut as a garrote. If I was to save Emma from the newspaper life, I couldn't become someone in whom she confided, or even (God forbid) a casual friend.

  As it turned out, the drive proved uneventful. Emma was remarkably philosophical about the dead robber in her Acura; at no time did she appear in need of a hug or even a pat on the hand. She said she'd spoken to her father and he'd offered to buy her another car once the insurance money came through. She'd told him thanks just the same, but she was a grownup and it was time she paid for her own wheels. Good for you, I said mildly. Then, dropping her off at the duplex, I heard myself asking if she needed a ride to work the following morning. What possessed me, I cannot say. Luckily, Emma already had lined up a rental.

  Her apartment is a block off the main highway, but it takes two passes to find the right side street. In the driveway sits Emma's new car, a champagne-colored Camry with the paper license tag still taped in the rear window. Parked on the swale by the road is a familiar black Jeep Cherokee. It belongs to Juan Rodriguez, a sportswriter at the paper. He also happens to be my best friend.

  Juan recently began dating Emma, an unnerving development. There was a time when Juan and I could go have a couple beers and bitch self-righteously about the newspaper. Not now. Whatever I might say about the deplorable state of journalism would come off as a rap against Emma, and I don't want to offend Juan. However, his interest in Emma is vexing—for two years he listened to me rail about her, and still he asked her out.

  She's different in all ways from the other three women that Juan dates—one is a professional figure skater, one is an orthopedic surgeon and one is a halftime dancer for the Miami Heat basketball team. Contrary to appearances, Juan is in serious pursuit of a lifetime partner. Maybe Emma's the one, but a selfish part of me hopes not. It would suck dead toads to have my best friend romantically involved with my editor.

  The question of the moment: Have Juan and Emma started a sexual relationship? If so, there's a strong possibility that I'm about to interrupt an act of copulation, which is hardly ever a good idea. In Emma's windows the blinds are open, but no movement is visible except for a bony calico cat, grooming itself on a sill. Apprehensively I check my wristwatch—at four-thirty in the afternoon, it's more likely that Juan and Emma are screwing than watching Oprah.

  But what the hell. This is more important. While James Bradley Stomarti might be ashes, serious work lies ahead. The whole true story of his life and death remains untold, and Emma must be made aware of our duty to set things straight. I walk up and ring the bell. No
reply. The duplex has a corroded, wall-mounted air conditioner that sounds like a bulldozer at the bottom of a canal. I try knocking, first with knuckles and then with the heel of my hand. Even the cat refuses to react.

  "Shit," I say to myself.

  Halfway to the car, I hear the apartment door opening—it's Emma, and to my relief she appears neither disheveled nor recently aroused. She's wearing old jeans, a short white T-shirt and her reading glasses. Her freshly trimmed bangs are parted, and the rest of her hair is pulled back with a navy blue elastic band.

  "Jack?"

  "Is it a bad time?"

  Briskly she descends the steps. "I thoughtI heard knocking—"

  "I tried to call but it kept ringing busy."

  "Sorry. I was on the computer," Emma says. I think I believe her.

  "What's up?"she asks.

  "The Stomarti obit."

  Emma looks surprised. Even when riven with errors, obituaries rarely cause headaches for editors. Legally, it is impossible to libel a dead person.

  Hurriedly I tell Emma about Janet Thrush's phone call and the visit to the funeral home and the absence of autopsy stitches in Jimmy Stoma's corpse. Emma listens with an annoying trace of restlessness. At any moment I expect my buddy Juan to come sauntering out the door, zipping up his pants.

  When I'm done with my pitch, Emma purses her lips and says, "You think we should run a correction?"

  Christ, she's serious. I bite back the impulse to ridicule. Instead I lower my eyes and find myself gazing at Emma's bare feet, which I've never seen before. Her toenails are painted in alternating colors of cherry red and tangerine, which seems drastically out of character.

  "Jack?"

  "There's nothing to correct," I explain evenly. "The story wasn't wrong; it just wasn't all there."

  "What do you think happened to the guy?"

  "I think I'd like to see a coroner's report from the Bahamas."

  "How would we handle that?" Emma is beginning to fidget. She glances over her shoulder but still hasn't acknowledged Juan's presence inside the apartment.

  "We would handle that," I say, "by me flying to Nassau and interviewing the doctor who examined Jimmy Stoma's body."

  Emma looks exasperated, as if I'm the one who is confused. Turns out I am.

  She says, "No, what I meant was—Jack, you can't do it. You've got to finish Old Man Polk right away. They say he's fading fast ... "

  "What?"

  MacArthur Polk once owned the Union-Register.If the clippings are accurate, he has been dying off and on for seventeen years. I am the latest reporter assigned to pre-write an obituary.

  "Emma, are you serious?" My disgust is genuine; the incredulity, feigned.

  She removes a green silk scarf from her back pocket and nervously begins twisting it like an eel around one of her slender wrists.

  "Listen, Jack, if you really think there's something there—"

  "I do. I knowthere's something there."

  "Okay, then, tomorrow you get all your notes together and we'll go see Rhineman. Maybe he's got somebody he can pull free to make some phone calls."

  Rhineman is the Metro editor, the hard-news guy. My stomach knots up.

  "Emma, I can make the calls. I'm perfectly capable of working the phones."

  Stiffly she edges back toward the apartment. "Jack," she says, "we don't do foul play. We don't do murder investigations. We do obituaries."

  "Please. A couple days is all I'm asking."

  I can't believe I actually said please.

  The retreat continues, Emma shaking her head. "I'm sorry—let's talk at the office, okay? First thing in the morning." She reaches the door and disappears as lithely as a ferret down a hole.

  I sit in her driveway for several minutes, letting the rage burn out. Eventually, the urge to grab a tire iron and mess up her new champagne-colored Camry passes. Why am I surprised by what happened here? What the hell was I thinking?

  Driving home, I turn up the bass for the Slut Puppies. I find myself entertaining a ribald image of Juan Rodriguez trussed with silk scarves to the bedposts while being straddled boisterously by Emma.

  Emma, with her goddamn two-tone jellybean toenails.

  I live alone in a decent fourth-floor apartment not far from the beach. Three different women have lived here with me, Anne being the most recent and by far the most patient. A snapshot of her in a yellow tank suit remains attached by a magnet to the refrigerator door. Inside the refrigerator is half a bucket of chicken wings, a six-pack of beer and a triangular slab of molding cheddar. Tonight the beer is all that interests me, and I'm on my third when somebody knocks.

  "Yo, Obituary Boy? You home?"

  When Juan opens the door, I salute from the couch. He grabs a beer for himself and sits down in one of the matching faded armchairs. "The Marlins are playing," he says.

  "That's a matter of opinion."

  "Where's the TV?" Juan motions to the vacant space in the center of the wall unit. "Don't tell me you launched it off the balcony again."

  That sometimes happens when I try to watch music videos. "It's pathetic," I say to my friend. "I'm not proud of myself."

  "Who was it this time?"

  "One of those 'boy bands.' I don't remember which." I roll the cool sweaty bottle across my forehead.

  Juan looks a little uptight.

  "You're how old now—thirty-four?" I ask.

  "Not tonight, Jack."

  "You should be on top of the world, man. You've already hung in there longer than Keith Moon or John Belushi." I can't help myself.

  Juan says, "Why do you do this?"

  I put a Stones record on the stereo because you can't go wrong with the Stones. Juan knows most of the songs, even the early stuff—he has fully acculturated himself since arriving in the 1981 exodus from the port of Mariel, Cuba. He was sixteen at the time, four years older than the sister who accompanied him on an old Key West lobster boat. They were with a group of thirty-seven refugees, among whom were a handful of vicious criminals that Castro yanked out of prison and shipped to Miami as a practical joke. Everyone at the paper knows Juan came over on the boatlift. What they don't know is what happened forty miles at sea in the black of night—Juan told me the story after too many martinis. One of the convicts decided to have some fun with Juan's sister and one of the others offered to stand watch, and neither of them paid enough attention to the girl's skinny brother, who somehow got his hands on a five-inch screwdriver. Many hours later, when the lobster boat docked at Key West, the immigration officer counted only thirty-five passengers, including Juan and his sister in a ripped dress. The others said nothing about what had taken place on the voyage.

  Juan takes a slug of beer and says to me: "Good piece today."

  "Come on, man."

  "What?"

  "It's a goddamn obit."

  "Hey, it was interesting. I remember hearing the Slut Puppies on the radio," he says. " 'Trouser Troll' was kinda catchy."

  "I thought so, too." I'm eager to tell Juan about the Jimmy Stoma mystery, but I'm wondering if he already knows. If he does, it means he and Emma are tighter than I thought.

  "Did she tell you?" I ask.

  "Who? Oh—Emma?"

  "No, Madeleine fucking Albright." I set my empty bottle on the floor. "Look, I hope I didn't interrupt anything this afternoon. Normally, I'd never—"

  "You didn't." Juan grins. "I was helping with her computer. She got a new browser."

  "I'll bet she did."

  "Honest. That's all."

  "Then why didn't you pop out and say hi?"

  Juan says, "She asked me not to."

  That's just like Emma, worrying that Juan's presence as my friend and her potential sex partner would somehow undermine her primacy in the editor-reporter relationship.

  "Hell," I say, "I thought she had you lashed to the bed."

  "I wish." Juan, smiling again. Sometimes he's too charming for his own good.

  "Did she tell you or not?"

/>   "Why you stopped by? Sure, she told me."

  "And did she tell you what she said?"

  Juan nods sympathetically. "It really blows."

  "That's why I'm drinking."

  "Three beers is not drinking, Jack." He has counted the bottles on the floor. "Three beers is sulking."

  "What should I do about Emma?" I rise out of a slouch. "Wait—why the hell'm I asking you?"

  "Because I'm wise beyond my years?"

  "Do me a favor," I say. "If you're screwing her, please don't tell me. Just change the subject and I'll get the message."

  "Deal," says Juan with a decisive nod. "Hey, there's a rumor Marino's coming out of retirement!"

  "Very smooth, asshole."

  "Jack, I'm not sleeping with Emma."

  "Excellent," I say, "then you're free to advise me. This woman intends to dump Jimmy Stoma on the Metro desk. Mystory, Juan, and this cold-blooded wench wants to give it away!"

  "And I thought the Sports desk was a pit."

  I hear myself asking, "What can you possibly see in her?"

  Juan hesitates. I know he's at no loss for words because he is a fine writer, much better than I am, even in his second language.

  "Emma's different than the others, Jack."

  "So is a two-headed scorpion."

  "You want, I'll talk to her."

  "No!"

  "Just trying to help."

  "You don't understand," I say. "There's a complicated dynamic between Emma and me."

  Juan's right foot is tapping to the music; Jagger, singing of street-fighting men.

  "It's my story," I grumble, "and she won't let me do it."

  "I'm sorry, man." Juan knows what happened to me, the whole odious business. He knows where I stand at the newspaper. He calls me "Obituary Boy" to keep things light, but he truly feels lousy about the situation. It can't be helped. He's a star and I'm a lump of jackal shit.

  "Quit," he says earnestly.

  "That's the best you can do?"

  Juan has been advising me to resign ever since my demotion to the Death page. "That's exactly what Emma wants—didn't she tell you? It's what they allwant. So I'm not quitting, Juan, until the day they beg me to stay."