Janey Patterson is dressing carefully in her late mother’s condominium apartment: dark hose, black skirt, black jacket over a blouse of deepest midnight blue. She’s thinking of how she told Bill she’d probably fall in love with him if she stayed here. That was a bodacious shading of the truth, because she’s already in love with him. She’s sure a shrink would smile and say it was a daddy thing. If so, Janey would smile right back and tell him that was a load of Freudian bullshit. Her father was a bald accountant who was barely there even when he was there. And one thing you can say about Bill Hodges is that he’s there. It’s what she likes about him. She also likes the hat she bought him. That Philip Marlowe fedora. She checks her watch and sees it’s quarter past nine. He’d better be here soon.

If he’s late, she’ll kill him.

16

He’s not late, and he’s wearing the hat. Janey tells him he looks nice. He tells her she looks better than that. She smiles and kisses him.

‘Let’s get this done,’ he says.

Janey wrinkles her nose and says, ‘Yeah.’

They drive to the funeral parlor, where they are once more the first to arrive. Hodges escorts her into the Eternal Rest parlor. She looks around and nods her approval. Programs for the service have been laid out on the seats of the folding chairs. The coffin is gone, replaced by a vaguely altarish table with sprays of spring flowers on it. Brahms, turned down almost too low to hear, is playing through the parlor’s sound system.

‘Okay?’ Hodges asks.

‘It’ll do.’ She takes a deep breath and repeats what he said twenty minutes before: ‘Let’s get this done.’

It’s basically the same bunch as yesterday. Janey meets them at the door. While she shakes hands and gives hugs and says all the right things, Hodges stands nearby, scanning the passing traffic. He sees nothing that raises a red flag, including a certain mud-colored Subaru that trundles by without slowing.

A rental Chevy with a Hertz sticker on the side of the windshield swings around back to the parking lot. Soon Uncle Henry appears, preceded by his gently swinging executive belly. Aunt Charlotte and Holly follow him, Charlotte with one white-gloved hand clamped just above her daughter’s elbow. To Hodges, Auntie C looks like a matron escorting a prisoner – probably a drug addict – into county lockup. Holly is even paler than she was yesterday, if that is possible. She’s wearing the same shapeless brown gunnysack, and has already bitten off most of her lipstick.

She gives Hodges a tremulous smile. Hodges offers his hand, and she seizes it with panicky tightness until Charlotte pulls her into the Hall of the Dead.

A young clergyman, from the church Mrs Wharton attended until she was too unwell to go out on Sundays, serves as master of ceremonies. He reads the predictable passage from Proverbs, the one about the virtuous woman. Hodges is willing to stipulate that the deceased may have been worth more than rubies, but has his doubts about whether she spent any time working with wool and flax. Still, it’s poetical, and tears are flowing by the time the clergyman is finished. The guy may be young, but he’s smart enough not to try eulogizing someone he hardly knew. Instead of that, he invites those with ‘precious memories’ of the late Elizabeth to come forward. Several do, beginning with Althea Greene, the nurse, and ending with the surviving daughter. Janey is calm and brief and simple.

‘I wish we’d had more time,’ she finishes.

17

Brady parks around the corner at five past ten and is careful to feed the meter until the green flag with MAX on it pops up. After all, it just took a parking ticket to catch Son of Sam in the end. From the back seat he takes a cloth carry-bag. Printed on the side is KROGER and REUSE ME! SAVE A TREE! Inside is Thing Two, resting on top of the Mephisto shoebox.

He turns the corner and strides briskly past the Soames Funeral Parlor, just some citizen on a morning errand. His face is calm, but his heart is hammering like a steam-drill. He sees no one outside the funeral parlor, and the doors are shut, but there’s still a possibility the fat ex-cop isn’t with the other mourners. He could be in a back room, watching for suspicious characters. Watching for him, in other words. Brady knows this.

No risk, no reward, honeyboy, his mother murmurs. It’s true. Also, he judges that the risk is minimal. If Hodges is pronging the blond bitch (or hoping to), he won’t leave her side.

Brady does an about-face at the far corner, strolls back, and turns in to the funeral home drive without hesitation. He can hear faint music, some kind of classical shit. He spots Hodges’s Toyota parked against the rear fence, nose-out for a quick getaway once the festivities are over. The old Det-Ret’s last ride, Brady thinks. It’s going to be a short one, pal.

He walks behind the larger of the two hearses, and once it blocks him from the view of anyone looking out the rear windows of the funeral parlor, he takes Thing Two out of the shopping bag and pulls up the antenna. His heart is driving harder than ever. There were times – only a few – when his gadget didn’t work. The green light would flash, but the car’s locks wouldn’t pop. Some random glitch in the program or the microchip.

If it doesn’t work, just slide the shoebox under the car, his mother advises him.

Of course. That would work just as well, or almost as well, but it wouldn’t be so elegant.

He pushes the toggle. The green light flashes. So do the Toyota’s headlights. Success!

He goes to the fat ex-cop’s car as if he has every right to be there. He opens the rear door, takes the shoebox out of the carry-bag, turns on the phone, and puts the box on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He closes the door and starts for the street, forcing himself to walk slowly and steadily.

As he’s rounding the corner of the building, Deborah Ann Hartsfield speaks again. Didn’t you forget something, honeyboy?

He stops. Thinks it over. Then goes back to the corner of the building and points Thing Two’s stub of an antenna at Hodges’s car.

The lights flash as the locks re-engage.

18

After the rememberances and a moment of silent reflection (‘to use as you wish’), the clergyman asks the Lord to bless them and keep them and give them peace. Clothes rustle; programs are stowed in purses and jacket pockets. Holly seems fine until she’s halfway up the aisle, but then her knees buckle. Hodges darts forward with surprising speed for a big man and catches her beneath her arms before she can go down. Her eyes roll up and for a moment she’s on the verge of a full-fledged swoon. Then they come back into place and into focus. She sees Hodges and smiles weakly.

‘Holly, stop that!’ her mother says sternly, as if her daughter has uttered some jocose and inappropriate profanity instead of almost fainting. Hodges thinks what a pleasure it would be to backhand Auntie C right across her thickly powdered chops. Might wake her up, he thinks.

‘I’m okay, Mother,’ Holly says. Then, to Hodges: ‘Thank you.’

He says, ‘Did you eat any breakfast, Holly?’

‘She had oatmeal,’ Aunt Charlotte announces. ‘With butter and brown sugar. I made it myself. You’re quite the attention-getter sometimes, aren’t you, Holly?’ She turns to Janey. ‘Please don’t linger, dear. Henry’s useless at things like this, and I can’t hostess all these people on my own.’

Janey takes Hodges’s arm. ‘I’d never expect you to.’

Aunt Charlotte gives her a pinched smile. Janey’s smile in return is brilliant, and Hodges decides that her decision to turn over half of her inherited loot is equally brilliant. Once that happens, she will never have to see this unpleasant woman again. She won’t even have to take her calls.

The mourners emerge into the sunshine. On the front walk there’s chatter of the wasn’t-it-a-lovely-service sort, and then people begin walking around to the parking lot in back. Uncle Henry and Aunt Charlotte do so with Holly between them. Hodges and Janey follow along. As they reach the back of the mortuary, Holly suddenly slips free of her minders and wheels around to Hodges and Janey.