Brimstone (Pendergast #5)(81)
Pendergast and D’Agosta showed their badges.
“Fine.” The policeman turned to the two workers in jumpsuits, who were busily unshouldering their equipment. “He’s all yours, guys.”
The diggers attacked the tombstone with vigor, crowbarring it up and rolling it aside. They cleared an area around the grave with brush hooks, then laid several big, dirty tarps across the clearing. Next they began cutting out the weedy turf with turf cutters, popping out squares and stacking them like bricks on one of the tarps.
D’Agosta turned to Pendergast. “So how did you find him?”
“I knew right away he had to be dead, and I assumed before his death he must have been either homeless or mentally ill: there could be no other reason why he’d prove so elusive in these days of the Internet. But learning more than that was a very difficult task, even for my associate, Mime, who as I mentioned has a rare talent for ferreting out obscure information. Ultimately, we learned Beckmann spent the last years of his life on the street, sometimes under assumed names, cycling through various flophouses and homeless shelters in and around Yonkers.”
The turf was now stacked and the two workers began digging, their shovels biting alternately into the soil. The medics stood to one side, talking and smoking. There was another faint roll of thunder and light rain began to fall, pattering onto the thick vegetation around them.
“It appears our Mr. Beckmann had a promising start in life,” Pendergast continued. “Father a dentist, mother a homemaker. He was apparently quite brilliant in college. But both parents died during his junior year. After graduation, Beckmann couldn’t seem to find out what it was he wanted out of life. He knocked around Europe for a while, then came back to the U.S. and sold artifacts on the flea market circuit. He was a drinker who slid into alcoholism, but his problems were more mental than physical—a lost soul who just couldn’t find his way. That tenement was his last place of residence.” Pendergast pointed toward one of the decaying tenements ringing the graveyard.
Chuff, chuff, went the shovels. The diggers knew exactly what they were doing. Every movement was economical, almost machinelike in its precision. The brown hole deepened.
“How’d he die?”
“The death certificate listed metastatic lung cancer. Gone untreated. We shall soon find out the truth.”
“You don’t think it was lung cancer?”
Pendergast smiled dryly. “I am skeptical.”
One of the shovels thunked on rotten wood. The men knelt and, picking up mason’s trowels, began clearing dirt from the lid of a plain wooden coffin, finding its edges and trimming the sides of the pit. It seemed to D’Agosta the coffin couldn’t have been buried more than three feet deep. So much for the free six-foot hole—typical government, screwing everyone, even the dead.
“Photo op,” said the Yonkers sergeant.
The gravediggers climbed out, waiting while the photographer crouched at the edge and snapped a few shots from various angles. Then they climbed back in, uncoiled a set of nylon straps, slipped them under the coffin, and gathered them together on top.
“Okay. Lift.”
The medics pitched in. Soon the four had hoisted the coffin out of the hole and set it on the free tarp. There was a powerful smell of earth.
“Open it,” said the cop, a man of few words.
“Here?” D’Agosta asked.
“Those are the rules. Just to check and make sure.”
“Make sure of what?”
“Age, sex, general condition . . . And most importantly, if there’s a body in there at all.”
“Right.”
One of the workers turned to D’Agosta. “It happens. Last year we dug up a stiff over in Pelham, and you know what we found?”
“What?” D’Agosta was fairly sure he didn’t want to know.
“Two stiffs—and a dead monkey! We said it must’ve been an organ-grinder who got mixed up with the Mafia.” He barked with laughter and nudged his friend, who laughed in turn.
The workers now began to attack the lid of the coffin, tapping around it with chisels. The wood was so rotten it quickly broke loose. As the lid was set aside, a stench of rot, mold, and formaldehyde welled up. D’Agosta peered forward, morbid curiosity struggling with the queasiness he never seemed fully able to shake.
Gray light, softened by the misting rain, penetrated the coffin and illuminated the corpse.
It lay, hands folded on its chest, upon a bed of rotting fabric, stuffing coming up, with a huge stain of congealed liquid, dark as old coffee, covering the bottom. The body had collapsed from rot and had a deflated appearance, as if all the air had escaped along with life, leaving nothing but a skin lying over bones. Various bony protuberances stuck through the rotting black suit: knees, elbows, pelvis. The hands were brown and slimy, shedding their nails, the finger bones poking through the rotting ends. The eyes were sunken holes, the lips lopsided and drawn back in a kind of snarl. Beckmann had been a wet corpse, and the rain was making him wetter.
The cop bent down, scanning the body. “Male Caucasian, about fifty . . .” He opened a tape measure. “Six feet even, brown hair.” He straightened up again. “Gross match seems okay.”
Gross is right, D’Agosta thought as he looked at Pendergast. Despite the appalling decay, one thing was immediately clear: this corpse had not suffered the ghastly, violent fate that met Grove and Cutforth.