“Oh, shit, there’s Chad,” Matt said. “And the very pregnant Daffy and friend.”
“Why are you surprised, and why ‘oh, shit’?”
“I would just as soon not see them just now.”
Mr. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV glanced down the drive as the station wagon drove up, recognized the occupants, and touched the arm of his wife. Mrs. Nesbitt in turn touched the arm of Miss Amanda Chase Spencer, a strikingly beautiful blonde who was wearing a black silk suit with a hat and veil nearly identical to Mrs. Nesbitt’s. All three stopped and waited on the lower of the shallow steps leading to the flagstone patio before the mansion’s front door.
“How are you holding up, buddy?” Chad asked, grasping Matt’s arm.
“Oh, Matt,” Daffy said. “Poor Matt!”
She embraced him, which caused her swollen belly to push against him.
“Hello, Matt,” Amanda said. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Thank you,” Matt said, reaching around Daffy to take the gloved hand she extended.
“I still can’t believe it,” Daffy said as she finally released Matt.
“I’m Amelia Payne,” Amy said to Amanda.
“How do you do?”
“I thought this was supposed to be family and immediate friends only,” Matt said, gesturing at all the cars.
“Matt, I can’t believe you said that!” Daffy said, horrified.
Matt looked at her without comprehension.
“Amanda’s been staying with us, for Martha Peebles’s engagement party,” Chad said coldly.
“Oh, Christ, I wasn’t talking about you, Amanda,” Matt said, finally realizing how what he had said had been interpreted.
“I know you weren’t,” Amanda said.
“I didn’t see you out there,” Matt said.
“I didn’t want you to,” Amanda said simply.
“Penny and Amanda were very close,” Daffy said.
“No, we weren’t,” Amanda corrected her. “We knew each other at Bennington. That’s all.”
Good for you, Matt thought. Cut the bullshit.
Chad Nesbitt gave her a strange look.
“Shall we go in?” he said, taking his wife’s arm.
Baxley, the Detweiler butler, opened the door to them. He was a man in his fifties, and wearing a morning coat with a horizontally striped vest.
“Mr. Detweiler’s been expecting you, Doctor,” he said.
The translation of which is that Mother D is about to lose control. Or has already lost it, Matt thought.
“I’ll go up,” Amy said. “Thank you, Baxley.”
“Coffee has been laid in the library,” Baxley said. “Miss Penny is in the sitting room.”
“Thank you, Baxley,” Chad Nesbitt said. He put his hand on Matt’s arm.
“Take care of him, Chad,” Amy said. “I’ll go see Aunt Grace.”
“I will,” Chad said. “Coffee first, Matt?”
“Yeah.”
As they walked across the foyer, Matt glanced through the open door of the sitting room. He could see the foot of a glistening mahogany casket, surrounded by flowers.
Shit, I didn’t even think about flowers.
Mother certainly sent some in my name, knowing that I wouldn’t do it myself.
Heads turned as the four of them went into the library. There were perhaps twenty-five people in the room, most of whom Matt knew by sight. A long table had been set with silver coffee services and trays of pastry. A man in a gray jacket and two maids stood behind the table. A small table behind them held bottles of whiskey and cognac.
Chad propelled Matt to the table.
“I need a little liquid courage myself to face up to going in there,” Chad said, indicating to the manservant to produce a bottle of cognac. “Straight up, Matt? Or do you want something to cut it with?”
I don’t want any at all, strangely enough. I don’t need any liquid courage to go in there and look at Penny’s body. For one thing, it’s not Penny. Just a body. And I’m used to bodies. Just the other day, I saw two of them, both with their brains blown all over the room. If that didn’t bother me, this certainly won’t. I am not anywhere close to the near-state of emotional collapse that everyone seems to think I’m in.
“It’s a little early for me, Chad,” Matt said. “Maybe later.”
“Suit yourself,” Chad said, taking the cognac bottle from the man behind the table, pouring half an inch of it into a snifter, and tossing it down.
“I wish I could have one of those,” Daffy said.
“Baby, you can’t,” Chad said sympathetically.
“If it’s a girl, I want to name her Penelope,” Daffy said.
Matt saw this idea didn’t please the prospective father, but that he was wise enough not to argue with his wife here.
“You’re not having anything?” Amanda asked, at Matt’s elbow.
“Probably later,” he said.
“Let’s get it over with,” Chad said.
“That’s a terrible thing…” Daffy protested.
“Unless you want to go in alone first, Matt?” Chad asked solicitously.
Anything to get away from these three. Go in there alone, stay what seems to be an appropriate period for profound introspection and grief, and then get the hell out.
“Thank you,” Matt said softly.
“ Thank you,” the hypocrite said, with what he judged to be what his audience expected in grief-stricken tone and facial demeanor.
He smiled wanly at Chad, Daffy, and Amanda and walked away from them, out of the library, across the foyer and into the sitting room. There was a line of people, maybe half a dozen, waiting for their last look at the mortal remains of Miss Penelope Detweiler. He took his place with them, and slowly made his way to the casket, looking for, and finally finding, behind the casket, a floral display bearing a card reading “Matthew Mark Payne” and then noticing the strange mingled smells of expensive perfume on the woman in front of him and from the flowers, and comparing it with what he had smelled in the office of the Inferno Lounge, the last time he’d looked at mortal remains. There it had been the sick sweet smell of the pools of blood under the bodies, mingled with the foul odors of feces and urine released in death.
And then it was his turn to look down at Penny in her coffin.
She looks as if she’s asleep, he thought, which is the effect the cosmetic technologist at the undertaker’s was struggling to achieve.
And then, like a wall falling on him, and without warning, his chest contracted painfully, a wailing moan saying “Oh, shit!” in a voice he recognized as his own came out of it, and his chest began to heave with sobs.
He next became aware that someone was pulling him away from the casket, where his right hand was caressing the cool, unmoving flesh of Penny’s cheeks, and then that the someone was Chad, gently saying, “Come on, ol’ buddy. Just come along with us,” and then that Daffy’s swollen belly was pressing against him as they led him out of the sitting room past those next in line, and that, when he looked at her, tears were running down her cheeks, cutting courses through her pancake makeup.
“Inspector Wohl,” Peter answered his telephone.
“The funeral’s over,” Amy said.
“I was hoping you’d call. How did it go?”
“Matt has a way with words. When we got here, he said it was ‘intimate friends, and the morbidly curious, with a soupcon of social climbers thrown in for good measure.’”
“How did he handle it?”
“He broke down when he saw her in the casket. Really broke down. Chad Nesbitt and his very pregnant wife
