Jeremy appeared at my side. We were alone at the front of the church. “My, my,” he said, glancing at the photographs. “There’s an unhappy fellow.”
“Unhappy?” I side-mouthed. “Are we looking at the same guy?”
“Learn to isolate, Carson. Cover the white teeth. Cut away the happy eye crinkles and brow furrows. Strip off the upturned lips.”
My brother positioned his hands over an eight by ten shot, blotting out as much face as possible. Only the eyes were left, Burton staring between my brother’s fingers like a man peering from a bunker.
“Jesus,” I gasped. “I see hate.”
My brother removed his hands, leaving the full-face shot of a happy man. I stared like seeing a palimpsest, a Bosch nightmare hidden beneath a Thomas Cole landscape. “The eyes are five per cent of the total, Carson. Burton had the other ninety-five trained to mimic happiness. Practiced from early on in life, it can be completely convincing.”
My brother tapped a photo taken at a birthday party. Burton’s arm circling the shoulders of a gangly, small-framed teen boy with liquid, feminine eyes. A cone-shaped party hat perched atop his head. He was grinning through braces.
Burton’s palms were touching the boy’s body, fingers pressing wrinkles into the fabric of his white shirt. I mentally walled off sections of face, isolating Burton in the slitted bunker. It was like another sense had been turned on. I smelled lust rising from the photograph.
“Burton looks aroused,” I whispered.
“What a fast learner you are,” my brother said.
We moved up to view the deceased himself. There was nothing to learn there but the skill of the cosmetologist. Burton looked as airbrushed as a centerfold, his heavy hands crossed over the chest where last week a truck had rested. I figured a pillow or air bladder beneath the black suit had been the mortician’s restoration of Burton’s ribcage to pre-truck standards.
We hustled toward the front door just as Cherry was entering, nearly bumping heads.
“Dr Charpentier?” she said, surprised at seeing my brother.
“I began feeling better,” Jeremy said. “I thought I’d accept your invitation.”
“Thank you for coming,” Cherry said.
Jeremy nodded and glided outside, hands in his pockets and walking slowly, a man innocent of everything in the world, even care. Cherry went out to check cars for nonlocal license tags. I sat in a middle pew and watched a fast-thinning crowd drift in and out for several minutes. The visitation was nearly over.
A slight man in his early forties caught my eye. He stood a dozen feet from Burton’s casket, holding a box of flowers, roses perhaps, the box long and slender. His choice of flowers seemed out of place at a funeral, but he didn’t look overly sophisticated. His thin and sallow face looked nervous, and I put him among the people unsettled by ceremonies of the dead. In that, we shared the same feeling.
My scan was broken as the elderly woman from outside passed by, still mumbling to herself, unsteady with the cane. When she glanced at the man something seemed to click behind her bifocals and she turned for further study. He seemed to feel the woman’s stare and looked away, clutching his flower box tighter. The woman pursed her lips in thought, then turned and muttered from the church, leaving only stragglers in the room.
I heard the man’s footsteps cross the room to the casket. I looked up to see him studying Burton. I could only see a portion of the man’s face and noted a nervous tic twitching his cheek. Had it just started?
The man stood still as stone. When he moved it was to untie the bow on the box of flowers. The bow fell to the floor. Followed by the lid.
Not flowers in the box, but a baseball bat. The man lifted the bat like a sledgehammer and brought it down on the corpse’s face. A hideous chunking sound. Face powder exploded into the air like pink smoke. The bat came down again, this time the head blew apart, pink clots of gelatinous goo flying through the air. I heard screaming and running at my back.
The bat was lifting for a third shot when I got there, diving at the guy. He jumped aside, swinging the bat after me, catching me behind the ear. I went sprawling to the floor. My dizzy attempts to push to my feet resulted in a slow-motion breaststroke. The man was six feet away, still hammering. More cold goo splattered my face. A table leg below the casket broke under the onslaught and the coffin tumbled, spilling Burton to the floor beside me. His face was a puddle, a single eye floating in the middle. An inflated bladder had been provided to give volume to the deceased’s chest, but it was damaged in the attack.
I watched in horror as Sonny Burton, now a Cyclops, stared at me, his chest deflating with a rubbery, blubbering hiss.
I was too unsteady to stand. The knot behind my ear was a beaut. Cherry lashed together a bag of ice from the church’s fridge and held it to my head. Jeremy stood to the side, arms crossed, concern on his face. Krenkler crouched in front of me, face filling my vision.
“Who was it?” she snapped. “What did you see?”
“I, uh—” trying to get words to fit in my mouth.
“Come on, Ryder, spit it out.”
“He had, uhm, slight build, brown hair and eyes, I think. Cheap gray sport coat over … gray flannel slacks. Brown shoes like Hush Puppies.” I felt a wave of nausea and rode it out.
“I was out back grabbing a smoke,” a man said to Cherry. “The guy went in the woods. Not even running, just walking fast.”
Krenkler turned to her adjutants. “Get on it!”
I tried to stand but Cherry’s hands kept my shoulders down. “How about you wait right here and we’ll go take a look.”
Krenkler stood to follow Cherry, stopped. She narrowed her eyes at my brother.
“What’s your name?”
“Dr Auguste Charpentier, at your service.”
“You don’t leave until we’ve had a chance to talk, you hear me?”
“Certainement.”
Cherry was back in minutes, Krenkler and the boys at her heels. I raised an eyebrow in question.
“It’s just a strip of trees behind the church, a fouracre wood lot for the family a block east. A block west is a failed restaurant. I figure our batter parked there, walked over, had his inning, zipped back to his vehicle. No one saw a thing. How’s your head?”
“He could have slammed a home run into my skull. But he didn’t. He bunted.”
“He tried to murder you,” Krenkler scoffed. “You got lucky.”
I looked through a cloudy recollection. “I’m sure he choked up on the bat and thunked me pretty lightly, all things considered.”
Krenkler shook her head like I was an idiot. I heard an ambulance in the distance. “Your ride’s on its way, Ryder,” Krenkler said. “Consider yourself lucky it’s not a hearse.”
I felt a wave of nausea and bent forward. Krenkler turned the eyes to my brother, scoping him from hair-part to Florsheims. She didn’t look happy with the results.
“Let’s