‘I don’t want to go on vacation,’ Weed said.
‘You want to die?’
‘No. Uh uh, Pigeon. I don’t.’
‘Then get locked up somewhere ‘fore the devil gets you,’ Pigeon said. ‘Maybe by the time you get out, someone will’ve got him first. People like him don’t live too old.’
three blocks south on Spring Street, Brazil and West were inspecting a section of fence encircling the final resting place of presidents, governors, Civil War heroes, Richmond’s first and finest families, and more recently, citizens of all sorts who wished to be interred there, realizing, of course, that all lots with river views were taken.
Early morning sunlight was touched by cool fingers of shade in a remote section of Hollywood Cemetery where low-lying ground gave way to brambles and the river. West and Brazil had discovered a hole in the fence that was big enough to allow unlawful passage to an average-size adult. But there was too much rust to suggest the chain links had been cut in recent months or possibly years.
‘He didn’t come in this way,’ Brazil decided as he looked around.
West was irritated by the deduction, mainly because she had not made it first.
‘Didn’t realize you were a detective. Thought you were flack,’ she said.
‘I’m not flack.’
‘All right, P.R., a reporter, a novelist.’
Brazil was reminded of the op-ed piece due pretty soon and he hadn’t even started it. He couldn’t do anything about the newsletter for the website, either, because the computer system was still frozen on the same fish map. Nor had Brazil given even a moment’s thought to the computer manual he was supposed to help write, as if it mattered right now, anyway.
‘My obvious point is he certainly could have gotten in easily,’ West said.
Brazil stepped through the hole, careful not to snag his uniform or cut himself.
‘You’re right,” he said. ‘You coming in?’
‘No. This is your hunch, not mine. I, for one, don’t think he’s going to return to the scene of the crime, as you put it. What makes you so sure of that?’
‘Because what he did was very personal and emotional,’ Brazil said. ‘I think he won’t be able to resist taking another look. To him the statue’s not Jeff Davis. It’s a monument to Twister. There’s got to be a lot of stuff going on inside Weed’s head, and I intend to get to him before the Pikes find him first.’
‘Maybe they’ve already found him,’ West said.
Brazil thought about that as he scanned leaning headstones so old the inscriptions were ghosts of words no longer readable. Trees that had been around before the Civil War cast thick shadows, and leaves rustled with breaths of wind.
‘Look, Virginia, I’m going to hang out here for a while,’ Brazil said. ‘I’ll radio someone to come get me when I’m done.’
She hesitated. Brazil sensed she was bothered that he would stay, that he didn’t seem to care if she went on without him.
‘Well, anyway.’ West hesitated again, then was disagreeable. ‘All I can say is it’s amazing the problems in this fucking city and what? They’ll spend a fucking fortune on a fucking cemetery.’
‘Actually,’ said Brazil, who had done much research on Richmond and its surroundings, ‘Hollywood’s a nonprofit, nonstock corporation owned by its lot owners, not the city.”
‘Huh,’ retorted West as she stalked off. ‘Who cares.’
Lelia Ehrhart did. She was serving her eighth term as chairman of Hollywood Cemetery’s board of directors, which required very little of her time, really. The majority of lot owners were dead, the annual meeting with the board always poorly attended, suggestions and complaints few.
Ehrhart had never needed anyone at meetings. She had never needed the opinions or suggestions of others. It had been her idea, and her idea alone, to ban picnics, snacks, alcoholic beverages, bicycles, jogging, motorcycles, skateboards, Rollerblades, recreational vehicles, vehicles pulling trailers and boom boxes from the grounds. Ehrhart was passionately devoted to the cemetery and its importance as a tourist attraction and celebration of lives faded but not forgotten, especially those Ehrhart claimed as her relations.
‘This is far more than vandals,’ Ehrhart declared in the private boardroom of the Commonwealth Club, where she had called the meeting and then changed the time of it. This is a front to our unalien rights, to their liberty and happiness, to our very civilization. These vandals, these unrepentent, cold-bloody juvenile delinquents that call themselfs Pikes have descegraded everyone sitting in their room.’