It was clear to Brazil why the media, the unimaginative, the insensitive, the resentful, and those citizens not indigenous to Richmond often trivialized Hollywood Cemetery by referring to it as the City of the Dead.
As Brazil and Weed walked deeper into having-no-idea-where-they-were, Brazil’s respect for history and its dead was greatly diluted by fatigue and frustration. The famous cemetery became nothing more than a heartless, unhelpful metropolis of ancient carriage paths, now paved and named, that had been laid out by first families who already knew where they were going.
It wasn’t possible to find sections or lot owners or the way out unless one had a map or an a priori knowledge or was lucky as hell. Brazil, sad to say, was heading west instead of east.
‘Is it hurting?’ Brazil asked his prisoner.
Weed had cut his chin when Brazil tackled him. Weed was bleeding and Brazil’s day had just gotten worse, if that was possible. The sheriff’s department would not accept a juvenile who was visibly injured. Weed would have to get a medical release, meaning Brazil would have no choice but to take Weed to an emergency room where the two of them would probably sit all day.
‘I don’t feel nothing.’ Weed shrugged, holding one of Brazil’s socks against his chin for lack of any other bandage.
‘Well, I’m really sorry,’ Brazil apologized again.
They were walking along Waterview to New Avenue where Weed stopped to gawk at tobacco mogul Lewis Ginter’s granite and marble tomb. He couldn’t believe the heavy bronze doors, Corinthian columns and Tiffany windows.
‘It’s like a church,’ Weed marveled. ‘I wish Twister could have something like that.’
They walked in silence for a moment. Brazil remembered to turn his radio back on.
‘You ever had anybody die on you?’ Weed asked.
‘My father.’
‘Wish mine was dead.’
‘You don’t really mean that,’ Brazil said.
‘What happened to yours?’ Weed looked up at him.
‘He was a cop. Got killed on duty.’
Brazil thought of his father’s small, plain grave in the college town of Davidson. The memories of that spring Sunday morning when he was ten and the phone rang in his simple frame house on Main Street were still vivid. He could still hear his mother screaming and kicking cabinets, wailing and throwing things while he hid in his room, knowing without being told.
Again and again the television showed his father’s bloody sheet-covered body being loaded into an ambulance. An endless motorcade of police cars and motorcycles with headlights on rumbled through Brazil’s head, and he envisioned dress uniforms and badges striped with black tape.
‘You ain’t listening to me,’ Weed insisted.
Brazil came to, shaken and unnerved. The cemetery began closing in, suffocating him with its pungent smells and restless sounds. The radio reminded him that he should call again for a 10-25, but he wasn’t going to do it. Brazil was not going to let the entire police department, including West, know he was lost inside Hollywood Cemetery with a fourteen-year-old graffiti artist.
They headed out again on New Avenue. It eventually curved around the western edge of the cemetery and turned into Midvale, where in the distance they could see what appeared to be a long black hearse traveling toward them at a high rate of speed.
Cemetery monuments and markers and holly trees streamed past Governor Feuer’s tinted windows as he ended another phone call, having by now lost all patience and willingness to give second chances.
Jed was driving too fast. It was taking longer to find Jefferson Davis’s statue than it had probably taken to paint it. The unmarked Caprices and their EPU drivers were nowhere to be seen.
‘Jed.’ This time Governor Feuer hummed down the glass partition first. ‘What happened to our backups?’
‘They went on, sir.’
‘Went on where?’
‘Back to the mansion, I believe, sir. I’m not sure, but I think Mrs. Feuer needed to run an errand or something.’
‘Mrs. Feuer is on her way to the Homestead.’
‘I hear that’s quite a resort, up there in the mountains with spas, unbelievable food and skiing and everything. I’m glad she’s going to relax a little,’ Jed prattled on nervously.