Where There’s Smoke

10

I taxied downtown from the garage to the first funeral parlor on Henry’s list. It was much more sumptuous than Abner’s modest establishment, with eight viewing rooms and two chapels, a managing director, an assistant director, and a staff of twelve, not including hearse and limousine drivers. The director was a moon-faced man named Hamilton Pierce. I identified myself as a city policeman investigating these mysterious break-ins, and then asked him how many bodies were on the premises at the time of his break-in last night.

“Four,” he said.

“Embalmed?”

“All of them.”

“Male or female?”

“Three women, one man.”

“Can you describe the man to me?” I said.

“He’s here now, if you’d like to take a look at him.”

He accompanied me to one of the viewing rooms. A woman in black sat alone at the back of the room, facing the open coffin. She sat erect on a wooden folding chair in a row of identical chairs, her hands clasped in her lap. The room was filled with the overpowering aroma of the floral wreaths bedecking either end of the open coffin. I nodded respectfully to the woman in black, and then approached the coffin and peered into it. The dead man looked to be in his late sixties — it’s sometimes difficult to tell with a corpse. He was perhaps five feet six inches tall, partially bald, a thick mustache over his upper lip: I estimated his weight to be about a hundred and fifty pounds. His hands were crossed over a Bible on his chest. His eyes, of course, were closed.

“What color are the eyes?” I whispered to Mr. Pierce.

“Blue, I believe.”

“Had he been embalmed before the time of the break-in?”

“Yes.”

I thanked Mr. Pierce for his time, jotted a description of the dead man into my notebook, and then hailed another taxi.

By six P.M. I’d hit all four mortuaries, and had compiled a list of the five male bodies the thief had passed up and the one male body he’d finally decided to steal. I automatically eliminated any of the dead women because I assumed the thief had been looking for a man’s corpse; he had, after all, settled upon Anthony Gibson’s. The page in my notebook looked like this:

The comparison list told me only that the thief had been looking for an embalmed male corpse, forty-two years old, with brown hair and brown eyes, measuring five feet eleven inches and weighing a hundred and eighty-five pounds. In short, the thief had been looking for Anthony Gibson — which brought me right back to square one. I suppressed an urge to giggle; big men look enormously foolish when they giggle, especially if they’re standing on a street corner waiting for a taxicab. Instead, I tried to think like the thief.

I am the thief, I told myself, and I learn that Anthony Gibson has been killed in an automobile accident. How do I learn this? Well, in any number of ways. Despite the fact that Rhoda Gibson is not advertising it around, word of fatal accidents spread very quickly. So let’s assume that I — as the thief — hear about Gibson’s death, and for some reason want his corpse. All right, I then assume the body will be taken to a mortuary somewhere in the vicinity of the Gibson residence, but I don’t know which one. Then why don’t I simply call the family of the deceased and ask where I can pay my respects? Well, perhaps I don’t know the family of the deceased, in which case I couldn’t possibly call to ask where the body will be laid out, especially if body snatching is on my mind. All right, so far so good. I draw a circle on a street map, using the Gibson residence on Matthews Street as the center of that circle, and I settle on an arbitrary radius of twenty blocks, figuring the body will be taken to a mortuary somewhere within that radius. I then look up the names and addresses of every funeral home inside my circle, and in the dead of night I begin searching for Anthony Gibson’s body. I hit pay dirt on the fifth funeral home I break into. I take Gibson’s body, and then...

Then what?

I return it!

Jesus, it didn’t make sense, it still didn’t make sense. I was back to zero again, I was stymied, I was beginning to feel a creeping sense of elation.

I decided to buy a present for the crow.