Nancy’s funeral was scheduled for eleven Monday morning in the Methodist church she had attended as a child. I seem to spend too much time at the funerals of friends—I have a navy suit associated so strongly with them that I can’t bring myself to wear it anywhere else. I dawdled around in panty hose and a blouse, unable to shake a superstitious dread that putting on the suit would make Nancy’s death final.
I couldn’t set my mind to anything, to Chigwell or Humboldt, to organizing a plan to beat the police to Nancy’s killer, or even to organizing the spreading papers in my living room. That was where I had started the morning, thinking with a few hours on my hands I could get things put away. I was too fragmented to create order.
Suddenly at ten of ten, still in my underwear, I looked up the number for Humboldt’s corporate offices and phoned. An indifferent operator switched me through to his office, where I reached not Clarissa Hollingsworth but her assistant. When I asked for Mr. Humboldt, after a certain amount of dickering I got Ms. Hollingsworth.
The cool alto greeted me patronizingly. “I haven’t had a chance to speak to Mr. Humboldt about seeing you, Ms. Warshawski. I’ll make sure that he gets the message, but he doesn’t come in every day anymore.”
“Yeah, I don’t suppose you call him at home for consultations, either. In case you do, you might add to my other message that I saw Dr. Chigwell last night.”
She finished the conversation with a condescending speed that left me shouting into a dead phone. I finished dressing as easily as I could with my hands shaking and headed south once more.
Mount of Olives Methodist dated to the turn of the century, its high-backed dark pews and giant rose window evoking a time when it was filled with women in long dresses and children in high-buttoned shoes. Today’s congregation couldn’t afford to keep up the stained-glass windows showing Jesus in Calvary. Places where Jesus’s brooding ascetic face had been broken were filled in with wired burglar glass, making him look like a sufferer from an acute skin disease.
While Nancy’s four brothers served as ushers their children sat in the front pews, shoving and poking at each other despite the near presence of their aunt’s draped casket. Their harshly whispered insults could be heard throughout the nave until drowned by some melancholy bars from the organ.
I went up to the front to let Mrs. Cleghorn know I was there. She smiled at me with tremulous warmth.
“Come over to the house after the service,” she whispered. “We’ll have coffee and a chance to talk.”
She invited me to sit with her, glancing distastefully at her grandchildren. I disengaged myself gently—I didn’t want to be a buffer between her and the wrestling monsters. Besides, I wanted to go to the back so I could see who showed up—it’s a cliché, but murderers often can’t resist going to their victims’ funerals. Maybe part of a primitive superstition, trying to make sure the person is really dead, that she gets truly buried so her ghost doesn’t walk.
After I’d settled myself near the entrance Diane Logan swept in, resplendent in her silver fox. She brushed my cheek and squeezed my hand before moving up the aisle.
“Who was that?” a voice muttered in my ear.
I gave a start and turned around. It was Sergeant McGonnigal, trying to look mournful in a dark suit. So the police were also hopeful.
“She used to play basketball with Nancy and me; she owns a Gold Coast PR firm nowadays,” I muttered back. “I don’t think she slugged Nancy—she could outplay her twenty years ago. Today, too, come to think of it. I don’t know everyone’s name—tell me which one the killer is.”
He smiled a little. “When I saw you sitting here I thought my worries were over—little Polish detective is going to nab the murderer in front of the altar.”
“Methodist church,” I muttered. “I don’t think they call it an altar.”
Caroline clattered in with the group of people I’d seen in the SCRAP office with her. They had the preternatural earnestness of those who don’t often find themselves at solemn functions. Caroline’s copper curls were brushed into a semblance of tidiness. She wore a black suit designed for a much taller woman—the bunched clumps of material at the bottom showed where she’d hemmed it with her usual impatient inefficiency. If she saw me, she gave no sign, moving with the SCRAP contingent to a pew about halfway up the aisle.
Behind them came a handful of older women, perhaps Mrs. Cleghorn’s pals at the local branch of the library. When they’d passed I saw a thin young man standing in their wake. The dim light picked out his angular silhouette. He looked around uncertainly, saw me staring at him, and looked away.
The self-deprecating embarrassment with which he turned his head brought back to me who he was: young Art Jurshak. He’d made just such an effacing move in talking to the old ward heelers at his father’s office.
In the half-light from the windows I couldn’t make out his beautifully chiseled features. He sidled into a seat toward the back.