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 thought I 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 know there’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.”