“Grease” was Burton DeVriess, Esq., Knoxville’s most colorful and aggressive attorney. Over the years DeVriess and I had sparred repeatedly and roughly, in murder cases where I’d testified for the prosecution and he’d defended accused killers. A masterfully manipulative cross-examiner, Grease had always managed to get my goat, or at least infuriate my goat, on the witness stand—not by successfully refuting my forensic findings but by baiting me into losing my temper. After years of antagonism, though, Grease and I had turned an unexpected corner a couple of years back: Confronted with an unusual situation—namely, a client who was actually innocent—Grease had hired me to help clear the man’s name. The so-called murder victim had not, I was able to show, been stabbed to death but had died of injuries sustained in a bar brawl. During that case I’d grown to respect DeVriess’s intelligence and commitment to his client. My respect had later turned to deep gratitude when DeVriess helped me clear my own name. Framed for the murder of a woman with whom I’d just begun a love affair—Chattanooga medical examiner Jess Carter—I’d swallowed my pride and turned to DeVriess for legal help. He’d responded by saving my reputation, my career, and my skin. In the process he lightened my bank account by fifty thousand dollars, but he’d earned every penny of it and more. He’d also revealed more human decency than I’d suspected he possessed. Grease wasn’t a saint—not unless the ranks of the saints included materialistic, cutthroat lawyers—but he was a far better guy than most of Knoxville gave him credit for being.
Miranda’s eyes tracked the sedan—it was a Bentley, one of several thoroughbreds in DeVriess’s automotive stable—as it eased toward us, curve by curve. She frowned, probably out of habit, then laughed at herself. “Much as it pains me to admit it, he does seem to have a warm-blooded mammalian heart beating somewhere in that chest, beneath the reptilian scales,” she said. “But I think maybe I see a pitchfork in the backseat of the car.” She paused. “And get a load of that tag.” A vanity plate on the front bumper read $2BURN. I assumed it was a reference to a multimillion-dollar settlement Burt had won recently, in a class-action suit against a crematorium that was caught dumping bodies in the Georgia woods rather than incinerating them. The tag’s combination of cleverness and boastfulness was classic DeVriess. But as I read the plate again, I realized it also sounded like an offer: a taunting Faustian bargain, rendered in stamped metal on a luxury sedan bumper. And that, too—the in-your-face frankness of the crass equation—also smacked of pure Grease.
The sedan eased off the pavement and hushed to a stop on the brown grass, its mirror finish reflecting the leaden sky and my bronze pickup truck. The driver’s door swung open, and DeVriess slid off the glove-leather seat. His car was worth more than my house; his outfit—a suit of pale gray wool, probably handmade in Italy, the trousers draping onto lustrous black shoes—was probably worth more than my car. Walking toward us, he stepped into a stray clod of clay, which oozed up the side of the shoe and clung to the cuffs of the trousers. He stopped, glanced down, and then laughed. “Morning, Doc,” he called over the din of the backhoe. “And the Amazing Miranda,” he added, bowing slightly and smiling broadly. Miranda—possibly in spite of herself—gave a tiny mock curtsy and smiled back. DeVriess walked to the edge of the grave, where more mud coated his shoes and oozed up his cuffs, and he peered in. The backhoe was now chewing through waterlogged clay at the base of the vault, and water seeped from the surrounding walls and poured back into the grave each time the operator lifted another bucketful of soil from the opening. The man had evidently foreseen this complication, for he paused, easing the machine’s giant mechanical arm toward the ground, resting its weight on the curved underside of the bucket. It put me in mind of a human wrist, flexed into an acute, bone-breaking angle, and I flashed back briefly to my son’s tumble from his bicycle twenty years before, and the way his hand had hit the driveway at just that angle.
Clambering down from the backhoe, the operator lifted a torpedo-shaped pump from the ground and lowered it into the watery grave. A muddy, flattened fire hose, connected to one end of the pump, slithered down the slight slope behind the backhoe and into a swale at the edge of the cemetery. The man clambered up onto the machine again and flipped a switch, and the rumble of the diesel engine was joined by a higher-pitched whine as the impeller of the pump spun up and began sucking water from the grave. The hose swelled slightly, pulsing occasionally as the pump’s intake slurped and gasped. Judging by the granite obelisk that towered above the grave and above our heads, Trey Willoughby’s burial had been quite an affair. His unburial, though less posh, was something of a production as well. Thirty minutes later—a half hour marked by three repositionings of the sump pump and two wrestling bouts with a sling of steel cable and a bracelet of heavy chain rattling from the wrist of the backhoe—the steel vault emerged from the grave, trailing muddy water and watery mud. The operator swung it expertly to one side and set it gently on the ground. Then, after opening a pair of latches at the base of the vault, he hoisted the domed top off the vault, exposing the coffin underneath.
“Kinda like Chinese boxes,” said DeVriess, “one inside the other.”
“Or Russianmatryoshkas ,” added Miranda. DeVriess looked puzzled, so she added, “Those nesting wooden dolls.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “I was thinking that, too. Russianmatry -whatevers.”
“Or Egyptian burials,” I said. “Be interesting if the vault and the coffin were painted with Willoughby’s image, like King Tut’s sarcophagus.”
The coffin was gunmetal blue, its glossy finish dulled by years of dampness and postmortem vapors. A few patches of superficial rust marred the lid, but considering that it had been in the ground for years—eight, according to Willoughby’s death date—its condition was superb. Miranda glanced from the coffin to my truck. “You should park in the underground garage on campus instead of the outdoor lot,” she said. “That coffin’s paint job is holding up a lot better than your truck’s.”