The call came from a pay phone outside a Denny’s in Coral Springs, which makes it worthless as a clue. Of course I’d hoped that the number would trace back to Jimmy’s widow, but no such luck. I’ve been curious about what Cleo’s up to, besides dodging my phone calls and blowing her record producer and meeting with her dead husband’s ex-bandmates. So I figured what the hell, let’s send young Evan to her condo to scope out the domestic situation. The deli bags would get him past the doorman, but then he’d be on his own. Evan said that’s cool, he’d know how to play it out. Perhaps I should have let on that Cleo might be a cold-blooded murderess, but there seemed no point in making him more excited than he already was.
Not ten minutes after Emma hangs up, Evan calls from ground zero.
“Yeah, uh, this is Chuck.”
We’d worked out a rough script in advance. Evan picked the name “Chuck” because he thought it fit a delivery guy.
“This run to Palmero Towers,” he’s saying, “you sure it was for 16-G?”
“Hi, Evan. Everything okay?”
“Well, check it again, wouldya,” he goes on, ‘”cause the lady says she didn’t call for no subs.”
“Cleo’s home?”
“Yeah.”
“Excellent. She alone?”
“Nope.”
“Here’s what you do,” I tell him. “Tell her your boss is checking on the order and he’ll call you right back. I’ll wait about five minutes, that ought to be long enough.”
“Absolutely.”
“Hang out. Be cool. Don’t ask too many questions. But try to remember everything you see and hear.”
“Hey, ma’am,” I hear Evan saying to Cleo on the other end. “My boss says he’ll check on this and call me back. What’s the number here?”
“Five-five-five”—Cleo, impatiently in the background—”one-six-two-three. What’s the problem—did you tell him we didn’t order anything? Is that Lester? Let me talk to him—”
“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” Evan says, smoothly cutting her off. Then, to me: “Boss, the number’s 555-1623. That’s right, apartment 16-G, but it ain’t her order.”
“You’re a natural,” I tell him.
Six minutes later I’m dialing Cleo’s number.
“Chuck here,” Evan answers.
“Still cool?”
“Yep.” Keeping his voice low. “She got a long-distance call on another line.”
“When she gets off, tell her they screwed up. Tell her the order was supposed to be delivered to 16-G instead.”
“But now she wants to keep it.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she got a whiff of the meatball sub and it made her hungry. What do I do, man? She gave me a fifty.”
“Hell, give her the food.”
“Sure?”
“Evan, what would a real deli boy do?”
“Guess you’re right.”
“And don’t forget to ask for an autograph.”
“Done,” he says.
“Fantastic.”
Some things they don’t teach in journalism school.
Emma’s on her way over, and I’m thinking about the last time I slept with a woman. It was the last Friday in March, five months ago, though it seems longer. Karen from the county morgue. She works for my friend Pete, one of the medical examiners. Lovely Karen Penski; we went out four or five times. She was straw blond and nearly as tall as I am—a serious long-distance runner. Age thirty-six, the same as Marilyn Monroe when she died. Also: Bob Marley. Karen couldn’t have cared less. She took no stock in fate, karma or black irony. Every morning she saw death on a slab; to her it was just work product.
We met over the phone when I called the morgue for cause-of-death on a Florida state senator named Billie Hubert, whose obituary I was composing. A famous yellow-dog Democrat, Billie had exited this mortal realm at the same age (seventy) and in the same manner as Nelson Rockefeller, a famous moderate Republican—that is to say, porking a woman who was not his legal spouse. And, like Rockefeller’s lover, Billie Hubert’s companion hastily had attempted to re-dress him post mortem, with comical results. The owner of the motel, not unacquainted with the local vice patrol, offered no theories as to how the dead man in Room 17 had gotten his left shoe on his right foot, and vice versa.
The news story, carrying Griffin’s byline, was plenty tawdry enough to make the front page. My chore was the day-after obit, which was to be mildly worded and played solemnly inside the newspaper. The only reporting left was to nail down the medical reason for Senator Billie Hubert’s demise, which the autopsy revealed as an aortic aneurism. This fact came from the lovely Karen, who was also kind enough to mention that Billie’s right arm bore the explicit scarlet image of a horned vixen riding a pitchfork—a magnificent detail I could not in good conscience omit from the obituary. That, and the squalid setting in which the senator passed on, somewhat diminished his standing with the Christian Coalition, whose members conveyed their disappointment in him (and in the Union-Register) via multiple mass e-mailings.