Colder Than Death

To Wendell, Perry said, “Find anything?” and Wendell said “No.”

Perry paused for a few seconds, as if he were thinking something deep, then said, “Greg? Wendell? Let’s talk.” He glanced at me. “Be right with you.”

As the three of them huddled, I noticed that Mel and Alton were in deep conversation and that Vaughn was off by himself. I went over to him.

“How’d you manage to find the open mausoleum?” I asked. “It’s so remote back here.”

“Only thing left of me that’s not falling apart is my hearing. Heard a scream. Had a hunch it came from around that direction. My guess is that it was the knucklehead who stumbled onto the corpse. Actually, it was more of a shriek. By the time I got here the punks were gone.”

“It was more than one?”

“People who sneak into cemeteries at night tend not to be alone.” He shot me a terse look and raised his thick eyebrows. “Well, not everybody.” I looked at him sheepishly. Years ago, on the night I met Vaughn, I had broken into Elm Grove cemetery, alone. I was about to respond to Vaughn’s remark when Perry called out.

“Del? Let’s go.”

I waved to Vaughn and headed towards Perry who stood with Greg and Wendell on either side.

“I’ll be riding with you,” Perry said.

I knew someone would be coming along because of a regulation that required an appropriate law enforcement representative to accompany the remains while in transit to the morgue. If it was Wendell the trip was mostly BSing and telling jokes. If it was Greg, there was attitude and long silences. If it was Perry, it would be him pontificating on the problems of the world.

Perry instructed Wendell to put up some yellow crime scene tape around the mausoleum. then he told Greg to meet him at the Coroner’s.

“What for?” Greg asked.

“To drive me back,” said Perry.

“Why can’t Del drive you back?” he whined like a ten-year-old.

I would’ve asked the same question. In the past, I drove whoever came with me back to Dankworth.

“I’ll need to spend some time talking to the Coroner,” said Perry curtly. “That could take awhile. I don’t want to hold up Del.” I was surprised by his consideration. “Ask Alton to drive my car back to the station house. Wendell, you bring Alton back out here.”

Wendell nodded his head yes, tipping his index finger off of his forehead in mock salute. Greg said, “Got it.” As he turned away he mumbled softly, “Asshole.”

Perry slid into the passenger side of the hearse. I started the engine and was about to pose a question.

“Don’t ask me,” he said as he proceeded to remove a container of Skol chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and stash two fingers worth into his mouth.

“Don’t ask you what?” I said.

“If I have any idea who killed her.”

“I was going to ask if you thought that the grave robbers might’ve had something to do with it?”

“No way.”

He raised his left hand, then pointed his thumb towards the rear of the hearse. “Whoever that is… she’s been dead for years. The assholes who broke into the mausoleum saw the body, shit a brick and took off. The other coffins in the other mausoleums were all yanked out of their crypts and pried open. There’s a family buried in the mausoleum where the girl was found. Six people. According to the inscriptions on the outside of the door the last one to die was buried ninety-eight years ago. Only one coffin had been touched.”

“Where was the body?”

“Stashed in a corner. I figure the jerks who broke in were using a flashlight and had started in on the first coffin, then they stumbled onto the body and bolted.” He smirked.

“How do you know it’s a female? I mean, when you say ‘girl’ you’re implying that she was young. How can you tell?”

“The clothes she had on say so. For one thing, she was wearing one of those funny Virgin Island T-shirts. You know. In large letters across the chest it says I’M A VIRGIN, then in little tiny letters underneath it says… Islander. Get it? “I’m a Virgin… Islander?” He laughed.

“Plus, she wore a pair of cut-off jeans and sandals. A couple of cheap bracelets were on her wrists and two rings on her left hand and three on her right. Middle-aged women tend not to dress like that.”

“Interesting that she had all those rings on her fingers. The grave robbers didn’t take them. Considering they were looking for jewels, wouldn’t they have grabbed them?”

Perry nodded his head. “My feeling is that if you’re the kind of creep who’s gonna break into mausoleums and steal jewels, it’s one thing to take it from a body that’s been in a casket for a hundred years, but it’s something else to rip off a corpse that shouldn’t be there.” He paused, looking straight ahead. “What kind of fuckhead can go into a grave? How sick do you have to be to do that?”

He scratched the tip of his nose with his left index finger. I noticed the wedding ring. He had never removed it despite the fact that his wife, Jeanne, divorced him at least ten years ago. The story he wanted people to believe was that because of his weight gain during the marriage, he couldn’t pull the ring off. But I held to the notion that he still carried a vicious torch for Jeanne.

“Can I make a suggestion about the killer, Perry?”

Perry looked at me, his left eyebrow arched slightly, not so much out of irritation, but amusement. “Shoot.”

“Whoever did it probably knew something about cemeteries.”

“How so?”

“He hid the body in an old mausoleum in the oldest Section of a really old cemetery. Better than half the graves in that particular Section and all the Sections around it are between ninety and a hundred-fifty years old. Some are even older. Nobody visits graves that old because paying respects is a generational thing.”

“Talk my language, Del.”

“Let’s say you’re a kid. Your grandfather dies. Maybe for a few years you go with your parents to visit his grave. But as you get older, you move out of your folk’s house… you don’t go to the cemetery to visit grandpa’s grave anymore. Over the years your parents die. You pay your respects to them. You have a child. He never knew your grandfather so he’s not gonna be very motivated to visit his grave. But he’ll visit your grave, but chances are his kids won’t have too much of an inclination to say a prayer over your father’s or grandfather’s grave. Get the picture, Perry?”

“What you’re saying is nobody gives a good Goddamn about you after you’re dead forty, fifty years.”

“A better way of putting it is that there’s no one alive to give a damn about you after you’re in the ground forty or fifty years. That’s why the Old Section at the cemetery is such a perfect place to hide a body.”

“Where there’s not a lot of traffic. Sonofabitch!”

“Other than the periodic great granddaughter of somebody, who for curiosity sake, decides to visit a grave or a family plot, the only ones who come around are the cemetery buffs.”

“Cemetery what?”

“Buffs. People who get a kick out of visiting old cemeteries and finding interesting headstones or the graves of famous people.”

“You gotta be yankin’ my chain,” Perry sneered.

“Nope. People do tracings of birth and death dates. The epitaph. Whatever. I’ve seen people taking tracings at every cemetery I’ve visited. They take a piece of wax paper, press it on the headstone and trace over it with a pencil. Other people take photographs. Some people go to cemeteries all over the country, or the world, doing tracings. You’d be surprised at some of the things that are carved into headstones, especially the older ones. Some of them are somber and spiritual, others are hokey and sentimental. Some are funny. I have one from a graveyard in New Mexico that says: Here Lies Les Moore. No Less, No More.”

“You’re a cemetery buff? And I thought I was screwed up for collecting old Mad magazines.” He laughed.

“Perry, it’s just a harmless way to pass the time for people with a morbid fascination with death.”