“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-Register if 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 only your 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.