Book of the Dead

through the speaker: “Who is this?”

“Meddicks’ Funeral Home. I have a delivery….”

“You brought a delivery here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stay inside your vehicle. I’ll be right there.”

The southern charm of General Patton, Lucious thinks, somewhat humiliated and irked as he climbs back into his hearse. He rolls up his window and thinks of the stories he’s heard. At one time Dr. Scarpetta was as famous as Quincy, but something happened when she was the chief medical examiner…. He can’t remember where. She got fired or couldn’t take the pressure. A breakdown. A scandal. Maybe more than one of each. Then that highly publicized case in Florida a couple years back, some naked lady strung up from a rafter, tortured and tormented until she couldn’t take it anymore and hung herself with her own rope.

A patient of that TV talk-show shrink. He tries to remember. Maybe it was more than one person tortured and killed. He’s quite sure Dr. Scarpetta testified and was key in convincing the jury to find Dr. Self guilty of something. And in a number of articles he’s read since, she has referred to Dr. Scarpetta as “incompetent and biased,” a “closet lesbian,” and a “has-been.” Probably true. Most powerful women are like men or at least wish they were men, and when she started out, there weren’t many women in her profession. Now there must be thousands of them. Supply and demand, nothing special about her anymore, no-sirree-bob, women all over the place — young ones — getting ideas from TV and doing the same thing she does. That and all the other stuff said about her sure as heck would explain why she moved to the Lowcountry and works out of a tiny carriage house — a former stable, let’s be honest — which certainly isn’t what Lucious works out of, not hardly.

He lives in the upstairs of the funeral home the Meddick family has owned in Beaufort County for more than a hundred years. The three-story mansion on a former plantation still has the original slave cabins, sure isn’t some itty-bitty carriage house on an old narrow alleyway. Shocking, downright shocking. It’s one thing to embalm bodies and prepare them for burial in a professionally outfitted room in a mansion, quite another to do autopsies in a carriage house, especially if you’re dealing with floaters—greenies, he calls them — and others who are hard as hell to make presentable to families, no matter how much D-12 deodorant powder you use so they don’t stink up the chapel.

A woman appears behind her two sets of gates, and he begins to indulge in his favorite preoccupation, voyeurism, scrutinizing her through the dark-tinted side window. Metal clanks as she opens and shuts the first black gate, then the outer one — tall with flat, twisted bars centered by two J-curves that look like a heart. As if she has a heart, and by now he’s sure she doesn’t. She’s dressed in a power suit, has blond hair, and he calculates she’s five-foot-five, wears a size-eight skirt, a size-ten blouse. Lucious is darn near infallible when it comes to his deductions about what people would look like naked on an embalming table, jokes around about having what he calls “x-ray eyes.”

Since she so rudely ordered him not to get out of his vehicle, he doesn’t. She knocks on his dark window, and he starts to get flustered. His fingers twitch in his lap, try to rise to his mouth as if they have a will of their own, and he tells them no. He snaps himself hard with the rubber band around his wrist and tells his hands to stop it. He snaps the rubber band again and grips the wood-grain steering wheel to keep his hands out of trouble.

She knocks again.

He sucks on a wint-o-green Life Saver and rolls down his window. “You sure got a strange location to be hanging out your shingle,” he says with a big practiced smile.

“You’re in the wrong place,” she tells him, not so much as a good morning or nice to meet you. “What in the world are you doing here?”

“Wrong place, wrong time. That’s what keeps people like you and me in business,” Lucious replies with his toothy smile.

“How did you get this address?” she says in the same unfriendly tone. She seems like she’s in a real big hurry. “This isn’t my office. This certainly isn’t the morgue. I’m sorry for your inconvenience, but you need to leave right now.”

“I’m Lucious Meddick from Meddicks’ Funeral Home in Beaufort, right outside of Hilton Head.” He doesn’t shake her hand, doesn’t shake anybody’s hand if he can avoid it. “I guess you could call us the resort of funeral homes. Family-run, three brothers, including me. The joke is when you call for a Meddick, it doesn’t mean the person’s still alive. Get it?” He jerks his thumb toward the back of the hearse, says, “Died at home, probably a heart attack. Oriental lady, old as dirt. I reckon you’ve got all the information on her already. Your neighbor up there some kind of spy or something?” He looks up at the window.

“I talked to the coroner about this case last night,” Scarpetta says in the same tone. “How did you get this address?”

“The coroner…”

“He gave you this address? He knows where my office is….”

“Now, hold on. First off, I’m new when it comes to deliveries. Was bored to death sitting at a desk and dealing with bereft families, decided it was time to hit the road again.”

“We can’t have this conversation here.”

Oh, yes, they will, and he says, “So I bought me this 1998 V-twelve Cadillac, dual carburetors, dual exhaust, cast aluminum wheels, flagstaffs, violet beacon, and canyon black bier. Couldn’t be more fully loaded unless the fat lady in the circus was in it.”

“Mr. Meddick, Investigator Marino’s on his way to the morgue. I just called him.”

“Second of all, I’ve never delivered a body to you. So I had no idea where your office is until I looked it up.”

“I thought you said the coroner told you.”

“That’s not what he told me.”

“You really need to leave. I can’t have a hearse behind my house.”

“See, this Oriental lady’s family wants us to handle the funeral, so I told the coroner it may as well be me for transport. Anyway, I looked up your address.”

“Looked it up? Looked it up where? And why didn’t you call my death investigator?”

“I did, and he never bothered to call me back so I had to look up your location, like I said.” Lucious snaps the rubber band. “On the Internet. Listed with the Chamber of Commerce.” He cracks the sliver of Life Saver between his back teeth.

“This is an unlisted address and has never been on the Internet, nor has it ever been confused with my office — the morgue — and I’ve been here two years. You’re the first person to do this.”

“Now, don’t get huffy with me. I can’t help what’s on the Internet.” He snaps the rubber band. “But then if I’d been called earlier in the week when that little boy was found, I would have delivered his body and now we wouldn’t have this problem. You walked right past me at the scene and ignored me, and had you and me worked that one together, sure as shooting you would have given me the right address.” He snaps the rubber band, pissed off she’s not more respectful.

“Why were you at that scene if the coroner didn’t ask you to transport the body?” She’s getting very demanding, staring at him now like he’s a troublemaker.

“My motto is ‘Just Show Up.’ You know, like Nike’s ‘Just Do It.’ Well, mine’s ‘Just Show Up.’ Get it? Sometimes when you’re the first one to show up, that’s all it takes.”

He snaps the rubber band, and she stares pointedly at him doing it, then looks at the police scanner inside his hearse. He runs his tongue over the transparent plastic retainer he wears on his teeth to stop him from biting his nails. Snaps the rubber band around his wrist. Snaps it hard, like a whip, and it hurts like hell.

“Head to the morgue now, please.” She looks up at the neighbor looking down at them. “I’ll make sure Investigator Marino meets you.” She steps away from the hearse, suddenly noticing something at the back of it. She stoops to take a closer look. “The day just gets better,” she says, shaking her head.

He climbs out and can’t believe it. “Shit!” he exclaims. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Chapter 4