Where There's Smoke полностью

I called Maria to tell her I’d probably be out for the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening, but if she’d like some company later on tonight, I’d be happy to oblige— provided nothing else developed. Maria said she’d be delighted to see me at any hour of the night or day, and just about then the bird in the box squawked and twitched.

“What’s that noise?” Maria asked.

“A bird,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got a crow.”

“Yeah?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Male or female?”

“All birds are males,” I said. “Especially crows.”

“What’s his name?”

“He hasn’t got one.”

“Oh, good, I’ll think of one,” Maria said.

“Don’t bother. I’m letting him loose as soon as he’s healthy.”

“Is he sick?”

“He was in an automobile accident.”

“Was he driving or just a passenger?” Maria asked.

“I don’t find anything comical about this bird,” I said.

“All right, grouch, call me later,” she said.

“I will,” I promised.

I put the receiver back onto its cradle and looked down at the bird. He was beginning to show some signs of life now, his eyes blinking, his black wings flapping weakly. I took a roll of masking tape from the bottom drawer of the desk and crisscrossed strips of it over the open top of the carton, just in case he came to and decided to fly all over the house while I was gone. Then I picked up the re­ceiver again.

Through years of experience, I’ve learned that all garage mechanics are named Lou. Lou, the mechanic who usually serviced my car, first advised me that I ought to get rid of the heap, it was more trouble than it was worth, and it was also un-American to own a foreign car. He then told me he’d have to turn the car over to a body and glass shop and they’d probably be able to put in a new windshield by the early part of next week, and the job would probably cost around two hundred dollars. I told him I’d drop the car off in just a little while, and then hung up and looked sourly at the blinking, flapping god­damn two-hundred-dollar bird. I went out into the kitchen then, drank a glass of cold milk, told Lisette I wouldn’t be home for dinner, and left the apartment.

I taxied downtown from the garage to the first funeral parlor on Henry’s list. It was much more sumptuous than Abner’s modest establishment, with eight viewing rooms and two chapels, a managing director, an assistant direc­tor, and a staff of twelve, not including hearse and limou­sine drivers. The director was a moon-faced man named Hamilton Pierce. I identified myself as a city policeman investigating these mysterious break-ins, and then asked him how many bodies were on the premises at the time of his break-in last night.

“Four,” he said.

“Embalmed?”

“All of them.”

“Male or female?”

“Three women, one man.”

“Can you describe the man to me?” I said.

“He’s here now, if you’d like to take a look at him.”

He accompanied me to one of the viewing rooms. A woman in black sat alone at the back of the room, facing the open coffin. She sat erect on a wooden folding chair in a row of identical chairs, her hands clasped in her lap. The room was filled with the overpowering aroma of the floral wreaths bedecking either end of the open coffin. I nodded respectfully to the woman in black, and then ap­proached the coffin and peered into it. The dead man looked to be in his late sixties—it’s sometimes difficult to tell with a corpse. He was perhaps five feet six inches tall, partially bald, a thick mustache over his upper lip: I esti­mated his weight to be about a hundred and fifty pounds. His hands were crossed over a Bible on his chest. His eyes, of course, were closed.

“What color are the eyes?” I whispered to Mr. Pierce.

“Blue, I believe.”

“Had he been embalmed before the time of the break-in?”

“Yes.”

I thanked Mr. Pierce for his time, jotted a description of the dead man into my notebook, and then hailed another taxi.

By six p.m. I’d hit all four mortuaries, and had com­piled a list of the five male bodies the thief had passed up and the one male body he’d finally decided to steal. I au­tomatically eliminated any of the dead women because I assumed the thief had been looking for a man’s corpse; he had, after all, settled upon Anthony Gibson’s. The page in my notebook looked like this:

The comparison list told me only that the thief had been looking for an embalmed male corpse, forty-two years old, with brown hair and brown eyes, measuring five feet eleven inches and weighing a hundred and eighty-five pounds. In short, the thief had been looking for Anthony Gibson—which brought me right back to square one. I suppressed an urge to giggle; big men look enormously foolish when they giggle, especially if they’re standing on a street corner waiting for a taxicab. Instead, I tried to think like the thief.