Notorious Nineteen(78)

I sliced off a piece of the birthday cake and sat down to eat it. “Let’s think about this. We’re pretty sure they had Cubbin. We saw the Yeti push something out in the laundry hamper. And the Yeti said he was looking for Cubbin’s money, so obviously Cubbin talked to him. If Cubbin escaped he would have gone to the police. At the very least he would have tried to access some of his money. If he didn’t escape, he’s dead. He wasn’t in the freezer. And he wasn’t in the rest of The Clinic. So he must be . . .”

Lula and Connie stared at me.

“In the cemetery,” I said. “That’s where they disposed of the bodies.”

“Uh-oh,” Lula said. “I’m not liking this turn of events. I like cemeteries even less than I like hospitals.”

I finished my cake and thought about taking a second piece. Not a good idea, I told myself. I’d go into a sugar-and-lard-induced coma.

“I’m going to the cemetery to take a look around,” I said. “Anyone want to come with me?”

“I guess I need to make sure you don’t get into more trouble,” Lula said. “The one day I’m not with you all hell breaks loose what with crazy people getting exploded in your foyer.”

A half hour later I turned off Route 1 into Sunshine Memorial Park. It looked a lot less sinister during the day, but it would never win any awards for beauty. The first couple acres were flat. No trees. No shrubs. No flowers. Just small headstones sunk into the ground. I followed the road to the part of the park that was undeveloped. There were some hills there and an occasional tree. The grass was scrubby. I drove past the large excavated pit that Sunshine and the Yeti had tried to bury me in. The grass around it was trampled from police and emergency vehicles. The pit was still open. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered on stakes in the ground.

I parked and Lula and I got out and walked to the hole in the ground.

“This had to be scary as snot,” Lula said. “It’s creepin’ me out and it’s not even nighttime.”

“I was okay until I got pushed into the hole.” I left the grave site and returned to the road. “Cubbin hasn’t been missing all that long. If they buried him here the ground would still be freshly disturbed. You look on one side and I’ll look on the other.”

After a couple minutes Lula called out that she’d found some freshly dug dirt.

“Me too,” I said. “I have two potential grave sites here.”

“How’re we going to know which one of these is Cubbin?” Lula asked.

“I guess we have to dig them all up.”

“Nuh-uh. Lula doesn’t dig up dead people. You get cooties like that. And they don’t like being disturbed. They get pissy and put the whammy on you. You don’t want to do it either. You get in enough trouble all on your own. You can’t afford to have the whammy.”

“If I go to the police it’ll take forever. They’ll have to get special permission and court orders and grave diggers. And I need the money. I just ran my credit card over my limit sending Tiki back to Hawaii.”

“What we need is our own grave digger,” Lula said.

“And I know just such a person.”

“You’re thinking about Simon Diggery,” Lula said. “I’d rather dig the grave myself than have dealings with Diggery. Last time we went to his crap-ass trailer you opened a closet door and a twenty-foot snake fell out.”

Simon Diggery was a wiry little guy in his fifties. His brown hair was shot with gray and usually tied back in a ponytail. His skin was like old cracked leather and he had arms like Popeye’s. He lived in a raggedy double-wide in Bordentown with his wife, his six kids, his brother Melvin, Melvin’s pet python, and their Uncle Bill. They were like a bunch of feral cats living in the woods, and Simon Diggery was Trenton’s premier grave robber.

“I have a shovel in the trunk,” I said. “We could start digging.”

“Okay,” Lula said. “I was bluffing. Let’s go talk to Diggery.”

I was bluffing too. I didn’t have a shovel in the trunk.

It took almost forty minutes to find Diggery’s trailer. It was off Route 206, down a winding two-lane road filled with potholes. The rusted-out cankerous trailer was up on cinderblocks and held together with duct tape.

I knocked on the door and Lula stayed about ten feet behind me with her gun drawn.

“Put the gun away,” I said. “You’ll scare him.”

“What if the snake attacks us? That snake could eat you in one gulp. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s the King Kong of snakes.”

Diggery opened the door and squinted out at me. “I didn’t do it,” he said.