Fidelity (5 page)

“No, thanks.”

“Don’t convince yourself you’re above it,” Dr. Kalamian said. “Just keep in mind that I might be able to make some of this more bearable. When I’m not in, one of my group is always on call.”

“I’m fine.”

She wasn’t fine. She wasn’t able to sleep more than three hours at a time, and she was depressed and anxious. But the anxiety kept her moving, thinking, alert.

On the third day, Detective Gruenthal called her and said, “The autopsy is complete and the coroner has signed off. We’re releasing Mr. Kramer’s body.”

Emily went to work on the funeral. She began by driving to Greenleaf Mortuary to make the arrangements. Phil had done a job for the owner once. There was a suspicion that one of the funeral directors or morticians was removing rings and bracelets from people just before their burials. Phil had found that they were all honest, a conclusion that he seldom reached in employee investigations. He had looked into every unappetizing aspect of their business, and said, “If I were dead, that’s where I’d go.” The owner recognized Phil’s name and gave her a break on the price of the casket.

Emily felt a bit flustered by the thrown-together quality of Phil’s funeral. She remembered having the same feeling of inadequacy when Pete had died. His funeral should have been huge and beautiful and solemn, but it had only been sad and lonely and heartbreaking. There had been plenty of people, and they had all fulfilled their roles, but she had found that they didn’t matter. What had mattered was that a seventeen-year-old boy was put in the ground. Now it was Phil, and she was alone.

She needed to make arrangements for a plot near Pete’s at Forest Lawn. She needed to call around to find a Presbyterian minister. It took her half a day to find the Reverend Dr. Massey of the Seventh Presbyterian Church in San Fernando. She spent the afternoon with him selecting scripture readings from a list she barely recognized from her childhood, and giving him a capsule account of who Phil had been. Many of the important things about Phil weren’t things that could be said.

Phil Kramer was an ex-marine. He was six four and, in middle age, a bit scary-looking to strangers, a fact he often used to his advantage in his work. He was alert, a keen observer of people’s quirks and tics that might reveal lies or vulnerabilities. Phil could tell a joke in a way that made Emily laugh. Even if it was one of those stupid adolescent jokes about sex, Phil always found it so funny that she couldn’t help laughing, too. She couldn’t tell the minister that Phil told dirty jokes, so she just said he had a sense of humor.

She couldn’t tell him that Phil had been an acceptable lover, who paid a reasonable amount of attention to her while they worked up to having sex and during it, but fell asleep instantly afterward. She couldn’t tell the minister she had come to know that was better for her than a sexual virtuoso would have been, or why she would miss those times with him.

When she had made the arrangements, she made a telephone call to her cousin Darlene, the one who had inherited the role of organizer from her mother, Aunt Rose, and asked her to spread the word to the people on her side of the family, and then asked Phil’s sister Nancy to call Phil’s relatives.

The funeral was three days later, seven days after Phil’s murder. As Emily stood in the hallway of the chapel at Forest Lawn and spoke to the friends and relatives as they arrived, the biggest feeling was how alone she was. It made her remember that when Pete had died, she’d had Phil to stand beside her. Now she had nobody.

When four of Pete’s high-school friends came in, she gaped at them because they looked so much older now. Two had wives with them, and showed her photographs of their kids. Seeing them didn’t make her miss Pete, because every day of her life for five years had been partially devoted to missing him. It only reminded her that there were new stages of Pete’s life that should have started by now, but never would.

Each person who came in would embrace her, a sensation that was mostly unpleasant, dominated by smells of perfume, hair treatment, or dry cleaning, and an awkward and uncertain placement of arms and necks, look at her with pity, and say one or more of the few available phrases of condolence: “I’m so sorry,” “Please accept our sympathy,” or “I’ll miss him.” It struck her as strange that after all of the centuries, nobody had invented anything to say that made any difference.

When she saw Sam Bowen walk in the door, she had to fight to keep from crying. Seeing that he had come down from Seattle for the funeral should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. Seeing him just reminded her of the night of his retirement party, when she had thought that the next time she saw him it would be at his funeral. It had never occurred to her that she would see him at Phil’s funeral only two years later.

In the end, Dr. Massey presided about as well as anyone could have. He gave a brief generic speech about how Phil had been her husband for twentytwo years, had plenty of friends present at the funeral, had been a private detective who had owned an agency. Dr. Massey was not able to resist guessing that Phil must have been a man of strong faith, who had believed deeply in the Lord. The hair on the back of Emily’s neck stood up at the unintentional imposture. She hoped people knew that she had not told Massey to say that. She looked surreptitiously at the guests standing along the side and caught Billy Przwalski and one of the guys from Jailbreak Bail Bonds looking at each other skeptically.

Ray Hall and Dewey Burns both sat through the service in stonefaced silence, unmoved and unsurprised, like a pair of poker players. Both of them had brought women with them. Emily was glad that Dewey Burns was not the only dark face in this crowd. His date was somebody Emily had never seen before, but she was very thin and elegant in a black suit, and probably would have been nearly as tall as Dewey if she hadn’t been too smart to wear heels to a cemetery. Ray Hall looked as though he were in the middle of some kind of binge. His eyes were bloodshot and his face tired. The woman he had brought was too young for him and not really as attractive as she had looked at first, once a person took the time to study her. She wasn’t even slutty. She looked like a college girl who was getting straight A’s in a dull subject.

At the graveside, while Dr. Massey droned through a prayer, Emily’s eyes moved to April Dougherty and stayed there. April was sitting in the front row on the other side of the aisle between the two sets of folding chairs that the Greenleaf people had set out, and she was holding a handkerchief with a lace border to her face and weeping silently. Emily watched her for a few seconds, dry-eyed. Then she looked past the mourners and stared at each car within her field of vision and tried to detect one that had a person in it. She looked along the ridge at the upper end of the cemetery, and at the two other groups of people at other graves. One of them was another funeral, and the other was a family of four-mother, father, and two kidsputting flowers in the vase next to one of the flat grave markers. Nobody seemed to be carrying any object that had a lens.

It was frustrating because Emily was sure the killer must be watching, but she couldn’t see him. If she had been the one who had killed Phil, she would have gone to his funeral and made sure she saw everyone who was there. Men like Phil had relatives and friends who might come after his killer. She hoped the police were up on the hill unseen but watching, and they would see someone she had missed.

The minister finished his remarks and then delivered the final prayer. The man from Greenleaf said solemnly, “This concludes our service. Well-wishers are invited to share a lunch at Mrs. Kramer’s home immediately after we leave the graveside.”

Emily quietly thanked the minister and the funeral director, and accepted a few hugs and mumbled words of comfort. Before even the first people to leave could make it to their cars, the cemetery’s efficient gravediggers had lifted the wreaths of flowers off the casket and begun to lower Phil Kramer into the earth. Emily stopped and stared at the coffin as it sank. “Sorry it had to end like this, baby,” she whispered. “The rest of it was okay.”

When Emily arrived at her house, her cousins Darlene and Betty had already opened the door and laid out the buffet on the sideboard and the dining-room table. There were three natural divisions of people in the house balancing plates of food on their knees and trying to find socially acceptable places to put their drinks while they ate. There were the Kramers, all of them over six feet tall except Phil’s sister Nancy, who was five feet ten inches in flat shoes. There were the McCalls, Emily’s family, who were all about a foot shorter than the Kramers and blond or redheaded except Emily and Darlene. And there were the people who had known Phil from the detective agency, who were much more varied, but who all stood, seemed more interested in drinking than eating, and had a way of speaking to each other in very low voices while looking at some point across the room.

It occurred to Emily that this was probably the last time the Kramers and McCalls would be gathered together in one place. Now that Phil was gone, the relationship was going to weaken, then dissolve. The only connection had been the marriage of Phil and Emily, and that was over. People would forget. It made the hugs and the kind, solicitous words of the Kramers more poignant, because she knew that she might never see some of these people again.

Phil’s sister Nancy wrapped her arms around Emily in a bear hug that left her breathless, then held her by the shoulders and stared into her eyes in a way that made her uncomfortable. “Who did this?”

“We don’t know yet,” Emily said. “The police are working on it, but they haven’t found any leads yet.”

Nancy shook her head, stared at Emily in despair for a few long seconds, and walked away.

Phil’s aunt Toni cornered Emily and told her that she must force herself to come to the Kramer family picnic in September, but there was a distant look in her eyes when she said it that confirmed Emily’s sense that things had already begun to change. Then Phil’s uncle Bill intercepted her and said, “It’s terrible. Just terrible. I told the big son of a bitch years ago that making a living snooping in other people’s business was dangerous. He wouldn’t listen.”

“I know,” Emily said. “It’s the way he was. He loved the business.”

“Well, I suppose if you want a lot of money, you’ve got to take some risks. I guess he left you pretty well off, didn’t he?”

“Bill!” Aunt Toni said.

“What? He was practically a son to me.”

“He always spoke well of you,” Emily said, and moved on.

She tried to make the rounds of the relatives and friends, thanking people for coming and trying to feel grateful that they had. She made an effort to speak to the detectives, the bail-bond people, the lawyers and off-duty police officers. Many of them were people she didn’t know, but she found she could cover it by speaking to them in little groups, which was the configuration they seemed to prefer, and then moving on.

At four o’clock, when her cousins Darlene and Betty were beginning to cover casserole dishes and hors d’oeuvres trays and collect cups and glasses from strange, precarious spots around the living room, Emily sensed that she had lost the last of her energy. She sat at the end of the couch under the front window, and then her cousin Dave’s wife Sandy sat down beside her. Dave stood over them for a few seconds, then pulled a chair close so his knees almost touched Emily’s. Sandy said, “We’re all so sorry, Emily. You’ve really had more than your share of bad luck over the years.”

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “It’s hard to say what someone’s share is.”

“Well, Dave and I just wanted to let you know that we’re always here for you. If there’s anything we can ever do to help, or to make things easier for you, we really want to do it.”

“That’s right,” Dave said.

“Well, thank you.”

“No, we really mean it,” Sandy said.

They seemed so sincere, and somehow so sane and strong as a couple, that Emily thought about their offer. It occurred to Emily that Dave was a successful lawyer-Aunt Lily had been bragging for fifteen years about their big house and their vacation home and how powerful Dave’s firm was-and Sandy had some kind of important job in advertising. “Well, I don’t know what to say. You’re very kind.”

“Come on.” Sandy stroked Emily’s back, petting her like a cat.

“Well, if you’re really able to do it. With the funeral expenses and so on, I’m feeling a little pressed. I wonder if you could make me a small loan, just until I can straighten things out. I haven’t been able to untangle our finances yet. Phil didn’t tell me some things I probably should have known, and it’s taking time.”

At the word loan, she felt Sandy’s hand stop on her back, then felt her withdraw it. “That’s Dave’s field,” Sandy said. Emily could hear from her voice that she was glaring at her husband, ordering him to handle this.

“I’d love to, Emily,” Dave said. “What we’ve got is kind of tied up right now, and locked in, but I might be able to help you out with a few ideas. I assume he had life insurance.”

“We did at one time, term policies for both of us. But they were really for Pete, and when Pete died, I think Phil may have stopped paying the premiums.”

Dave didn’t pause. “You’ll get his retirement, of course, and there’s no tax for you because you were his wife.” Dave looked very cheerful about that.

Emily didn’t tell him that whatever retirement plan Phil had was gone. She just wanted this conversation to end.

“Then there’s the house.”

“I hadn’t thought about moving.”

“Well, think about it now. If you’re alone, you don’t need three bedrooms, a den, and an office.” He looked around. “Even places like this have gone way, way up in the past few years. I think you’ll be surprised.”

“I guess so. I’ll look into it. I’m sure everything will be fine.” Emily wished fervently that she had not asked them for help.

“And then there’s Phil’s car.”

“His car?”

“Well, one woman doesn’t need two cars, and I assume his is the one you’ll sell. Hey! You know, we’ve been looking for a good used car for Charlotte to take to school. I’ll bet we can make a deal that’s good for both of us.”