Where There's Smoke

Ten

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.