‘You don’t mind sort of being the department’s representative, do you?’ Luther asked.
‘No,’ Ben said.
‘Good,’ Luther said. He smiled. ‘You know how it is, when a cop goes down, there needs to be a little blue in the boneyard.’ He laughed. ‘No matter who he was.’
Kelly Ryan was buried at three o’clock in the afternoon in a small cemetery not far from his house. A single hearse delivered the body, and no one came with it but an old preacher who’d long ago been designated Police Chaplain and who usually showed up at cop funerals when no private minister was indicated.
‘Did you know Mr Ryan very well?’ the preacher asked as he stepped over to the grave.
‘No.’
‘I didn’t either,’ the preacher said. ‘I just got a call from the Chief’s office. They just said they needed me over here at the cemetery.’ He looked at Ben intently. ‘I don’t suppose there are any relatives?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Ben said. He shrugged. ‘I’m just here to represent the department, I guess.’
The preacher nodded slowly as his eyes fell toward the coffin. ‘I guess he was a good cop.’
Ben thought of Kelly alone behind the battered metal desk of the Property Room or standing by the rows of plain brown file cabinets that lined the walls of the Records Department, of Kelly trudging up the steps with one young girl on either side, taking them to their VD examinations, of Kelly in the bar, soaking up one drink after another: ‘I haven’t had a drink with a cop since I left Bearmatch,’ he’d said, his eyes lolling left and right as if almost unable to look a fellow officer in the eye.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said, ‘I guess he was.’
‘Young man?’
‘Yeah.’
The preacher shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Terrible for a man to die young. Of course, it happens The heart is a tricky thing.’
‘What?’
‘The heart,’ the preacher explained. ‘Sometimes it just gets you, young or not.’
‘Heart attack, you mean?’ Ben asked.
The preacher nodded. ‘That’s the way they say he died. Nobody told you that?’
Ben shook his head. He could see Ryan’s body swinging beneath the lamp, the overturned chair, the black, swollen tongue and round, protruding eyes.
‘No, nobody told me,’ he said.
The preacher smiled politely, then stepped to the head of the grave. A mound of reddish earth stretched out before him, naked as a corpse.
‘Okay to begin?’ he asked Ben.
Ben nodded.
The preacher bowed his head slowly and began to speak, but Ben could hardly hear him over the roar of the diesel trucks that swept loudly up and down the street, groaning under the weight of so much iron and steel. He glanced away from the grave and down the long avenue that led up to it. At the end of it, he could see the high storm fence of the rubber plant, and he realized that if his vision could rise above the line of trees which blocked it, he would be able to see the cold round eye of the storm drain, and then, sweeping to the right, the gray, unpainted goalpost that had briefly marked the grave of Doreen Ballinger. In his mind, they seemed to form a triangle, these three bleak, impoverished graves, but as he continued to consider it, he realized that it was one which was made up of little more than lines drawn over a vast and empty space.
The bar where Kelly had taken Ben the night he died was only a few blocks from the cemetery, and as he sat in the same booth through the evening, Ben tried to imagine the way Kelly had had to live during the long years before he’d finally decided to end it. In his mind, he could see his body hanging grimly at the end of the rope, circling slowly in the small breeze that swept through the bedroom, turning, turning, as if sleeplessly in search of some impossible deliverance. ‘The thing is, I loved her,’ he’d said over the night’s final drink, with his eyes already hooded, his words vaguely slurred. For that, he’d paid a heavy price, living more alone than even Ben could now imagine, alone in a tiny, dilapidated house set down among a raw assortment of clanging factories, without family or friends, mocked by the people he worked with. Death would at last seem lovely after such a life.