Duma Key

The fifth message was indeed from Jerome Wireman. He sounded tired and stunned. "Edgar, I know you've got a couple of days earmarked for family and friends, and I hate like hell to ask you this, but can we get together at your place this afternoon? We need to talk, and I mean really. Jack spent the night here with me at El Palacio - he didn't want me to be alone, that's one helluva good kid - and we were up early, hunting for that red basket she was on about, and... well, we found it. Better late than never, right? She wanted you to have it, so Jack took it over to Big Pink. The house was unlocked, and listen, Edgar... someone's been inside."

Silence on the line, but I could hear him breathing. Then:

"Jack's severely freaked, and you got to prepare for a shock, muchacho. Though you may already have an idea-"

There was a beep, and then the sixth message started. It was still Wireman, now rather pissed off, which made him sound more like himself.

"Fucking short-ass message tape! Chinche pedorra! Ay! Edgar, Jack and I are going over to Abbot-Wexler. They're..." A brief pause as he worked to keep it together. "... the funeral home she wanted. I'll be back by one. You really ought to wait for us before you go in your house. It isn't trashed or anything, but I want to be with you when you look in that basket and when you see what got left in your studio upstairs. I don't like to be mysterious, but Wireman ain't putting this shit on a message-tape anybody might listen to. And there's one more thing. One of her lawyers called. Left a message on the machine - Jack and I were still up in the fucking attic. He says I'm her sole beneficiary." A pause. "La loter a." A pause. "I get everything." A pause. "Fuck me. "

That was all.

iii

I punched 0 for the hotel operator. After a short wait, she gave me the number of the Abbot-Wexler Funeral Parlor. I dialed it. A robot answered, offering me a truly amazing array of death-oriented services ("For Casket Showroom, push 5"). I waited it out - the offer for an actual human being always comes last these days, a booby-prize for boobs who can't cope with the twenty-first century - and while I waited I thought about Wireman's message. The house unlocked? Really? My post-accident memory was unreliable, of course, but habit wasn't. Big Pink did not belong to me, and I had been taught since earliest childhood to take especial care of what belonged to others. I was pretty sure I had locked the house. So if someone had been inside, why hadn't the door been forced?

I thought for just a moment of two little girls in wet dresses - little girls with decayed faces who spoke in the grating voice of the shells under the house - and then pushed the image away with a shudder. They had been only imagination, surely, the vision of an overstrained mind. And even if they had been something more... ghosts didn't have to unlock doors, did they? They simply passed right through, or drifted up through the floorboards.

"...0 if you need help."

By God, I had almost missed my cue. I pushed 0, and after a few bars of something that sounded vaguely like "Abide with Me," a professionally soothing voice asked if it could help me. I suppressed an irrational and very strong urge to say: It's my arm! It's never had a decent burial! and hang up. Instead, cradling the phone and rubbing a spot over my right eyebrow, I asked if Jerome Wireman was there.

"May I ask which deceased he represents?"

A nightmare image rose before me: a silent courtroom of the dead, and Wireman saying Your Honor, I object.

"Elizabeth Eastlake," I said.

"Ah, of course." The voice warmed, became provisionally human. "He and his young friend have stepped out - they were going to work on Ms. Eastlake's obituary, I believe. I may have a message for you. Will you hold?"

I held. "Abide with Me" resumed. Digger the Undertaker eventually returned. "Mr. Wireman asks if you would join him and... uh... Mr. Candoori, if possible, at your place on Duma Key at two this afternoon. It says, 'If you arrive first, please wait outside.' Have you got that?"

"I do. You don't know if he'll be back?"

"No, he didn't say."

I thanked him and hung up. If Wireman had a cell phone, I'd never seen him carrying it, and I didn't have the number in any case, but Jack had one. I dug the number out of my wallet and dialed it. It diverted to voicemail on the first ring, which told me it was either turned off or dead, either because Jack had forgotten to charge it or because he hadn't paid the bill. Either one was possible.

Jack's severely freaked, and you got to prepare for a shock.

I want to be with you when you look in that basket.

But I already had a pretty good idea about what was in the basket, and I doubted if Wireman had been surprised, either.

Not really.

iv

The Minnesota Mafia was silent around the long table in the Bay Island Room, and even before Pam stood up, I realized they had been doing more than talking about me while I was gone. They had been holding a meeting.