“How’d he die?”
“The death certificate listed metastatic lung cancer. Gone untreated. We shall soon find out the truth.”
“You don’t think it was lung cancer?”
Pendergast smiled dryly. “I am skeptical.”
One of the shovels thunked on rotten wood. The men knelt and, picking up mason’s trowels, began clearing dirt from the lid of a plain wooden coffin, finding its edges and trimming the sides of the pit. It seemed to D’Agosta the coffin couldn’t have been buried more than three feet deep. So much for the free six-foot hole—typical government, screwing everyone, even the dead.
“Photo op,” said the Yonkers sergeant.
The gravediggers climbed out, waiting while the photographer crouched at the edge and snapped a few shots from various angles. Then they climbed back in, uncoiled a set of nylon straps, slipped them under the coffin, and gathered them together on top.
“Okay. Lift.”
The medics pitched in. Soon the four had hoisted the coffin out of the hole and set it on the free tarp. There was a powerful smell of earth.
“Open it,” said the cop, a man of few words.
“Here?” D’Agosta asked.
“Those are the rules. Just to check and make sure.”
“Make sure of what?”
“Age, sex, general condition . . . And most importantly, if there’s a body in there at all.”
“Right.”
One of the workers turned to D’Agosta. “It happens. Last year we dug up a stiff over in Pelham, and you know what we found?”
“What?” D’Agosta was fairly sure he didn’t want to know.
“Two stiffs—and a dead monkey! We said it must’ve been an organ-grinder who got mixed up with the Mafia.” He barked with laughter and nudged his friend, who laughed in turn.
The workers now began to attack the lid of the coffin, tapping around it with chisels. The wood was so rotten it quickly broke loose. As the lid was set aside, a stench of rot, mold, and formaldehyde welled up. D’Agosta peered forward, morbid curiosity struggling with the queasiness he never seemed fully able to shake.
Gray light, softened by the misting rain, penetrated the coffin and illuminated the corpse.
It lay, hands folded on its chest, upon a bed of rotting fabric, stuffing coming up, with a huge stain of congealed liquid, dark as old coffee, covering the bottom. The body had collapsed from rot and had a deflated appearance, as if all the air had escaped along with life, leaving nothing but a skin lying over bones. Various bony protuberances stuck through the rotting black suit: knees, elbows, pelvis. The hands were brown and slimy, shedding their nails, the finger bones poking through the rotting ends. The eyes were sunken holes, the lips lopsided and drawn back in a kind of snarl. Beckmann had been a wet corpse, and the rain was making him wetter.
The cop bent down, scanning the body. “Male Caucasian, about fifty . . .” He opened a tape measure. “Six feet even, brown hair.” He straightened up again. “Gross match seems okay.”
Gross is right, D’Agosta thought as he looked at Pendergast. Despite the appalling decay, one thing was immediately clear: this corpse had not suffered the ghastly, violent fate that met Grove and Cutforth.
“Take him to the morgue,” Pendergast murmured.
The cop looked at him.
“I want a complete autopsy,” Pendergast said. “I want to know how this man really died.”
{ 41 }
Bryce Harriman entered the office of Rupert Ritts, managing editor of the Post, to find the mean, rodentlike editor standing behind his enormous desk, a rare smile splitting his bladelike face.
“Bryce, my man! Take a seat!”