فصل سی ام

CHAPTER 30

In Chicago, Freddy Lounds’s funeral was under way. The National Tattler paid for the elaborate service, rushing the arrangements so that it could be held on Thursday, the day after his death. Then the pictures would be available for the Tattler edition published Thursday night.

The funeral was long in the chapel and it was long at the graveside.

A radio evangelist went on and on in fulsome eulogy. Graham rode the greasy swells of his hangover and tried to study the crowd.

The hired choir at graveside gave full measure for the money while the Tattler photographers’ motordriven cameras whizzed. Two TV crews were present with fixed cameras and creepypeepies. Police photographers with press credentials photographed the crowd.

Graham recognized several plainclothes officers from Chicago Homicide. Theirs were the only faces that meant anything to him.

And there was Wendy of Wendy City, Lounds’s girlfriend. She was seated beneath the canopy, nearest the coffin. Graham hardly recognized her. Her blonde wig was drawn back in a bun and she wore a black tailored suit.

During the last hymn she rose, went forward unsteadily, knelt and laid her head on the casket, her arms outstretched in the pall of chrysanthemums as the strobe lights flashed.

The crowd made little noise moving over the spongy grass to the cemetery gates.

Graham walked beside Wendy. A crowd of the uninvited stared at them through the bars of the high iron fence.

“Are you all right?” Graham asked.

They stopped among the tombstones. Her eyes were dry, her gaze level.

“Better than you,” she said. “Got drunk, didn’t you?”

“Yep. Is somebody keeping an eye on you?”

“The precinct sent some people over. They’ve got plainclothes in the club. Lot of business now. More weirdos than usual.” “I’m sorry you had this. You did . . . I thought you were fine at the hospital. I admired that.” She nodded. “Freddy was a sport. He shouldn’t have to go out that hard. Thanks for getting me in the room.” She looked into the distance, blinking, thinking, eye shadow like stone dust on her lids. She faced Graham. “Look, the Tattler’s giving me some money, you figured that, right? For an interview and the dive at the graveside. I don’t think Freddy would mind.” “He’d have been mad if you passed it up.”

“That’s what I thought. They’re jerks, but they pay. What it is, they tried to get me to say that I think you deliberately turned this freak on to Freddy, chumming with him in that picture. I didn’t say it. If they print that I did say it, well that’s bullshit.” Graham said nothing as she scanned his face.

“You didn’t like him, maybe – it doesn’t matter. But if you thought this could happen, you wouldn’t have missed the shot at the Fairy, right?” “Yeah, Wendy, I’d have staked him out.”

“Do you have anything at all? I hear noise from these people and that’s about it.”

“We don’t have much. A few things from the lab we’re following up. It was a clean job and he’s lucky.” “Are you?”

“What?”

“Lucky.”

“Off and on.”

“Freddy was never lucky. He told me he’d clean up on this. Big deals everywhere.”

“He probably would have, too.”

“Well look, Graham, if you ever, you know, feel like a drink, I’ve got one.”

“Thanks.”

“But stay sober on the street.”

“Oh yes.”

Two policemen cleared a path for Wendy through the crowd of curiosityseekers outside the gate. One of the gawkers wore a printed Tshirt reading “The Tooth Fairy Is a OneNight Stand.” He whistled at Wendy. The woman beside him slapped his face.

A big policeman squeezed into the 280ZX beside Wendy and she pulled into the traffic. A second policeman followed in an unmarked car.

Chicago smelled like a spent skyrocket in the hot afternoon. Graham was lonely, and he knew why; funerals often make us want sex – it’s one in the eye for death.

The wind rattled the dry stalks of a funeral arrangement near his feet. For a hard second he remembered palm fronds rustling in the sea wind. He wanted very much to go home, knowing that he would not, could not, until the Dragon was dead.