The sun beat down. Wet places bloomed on people's clothes. The priest went from talking to chanting then suddenly stopped. Two morticians approached the coffin, which was resting on a platform that resembled a small painter's scaffolding. They fitted cranks to the base, then, with a medieval literalness, started jacking Lefty up to heaven. Soon he was above the level of the mourners' heads; next he pulled even with the lower fronds of the Christmas palms. The mahogany coffin glinted richly in the sunlight; the cranks made a lugubrious and rhythmic squeaking as the struts unfurled and stretched into big X's. Like the last passenger on a balky elevator; the dead man finally reached his floor. One of the morticians fitted his crank into a different socket, and the bed of the platform slid slowly into the open crypt. Lefty was deposited with a chilling thud; the withdrawn platform made a soft ringing scrape, like that of a pizza peel.
A single whimper broke through the steamy motionless air. I guess Lefty had a wife. I guess she was too short to be seen at the front of the group.
The heat-sapped party broke up quickly after that—too quickly for me to slip away ahead of it. The crowd opened so that close family had easy access to the limos waiting in the lane. To my horror; I found myself standing—exposed, conspicuous—squarely on the fault line where the group had split. I tried to shrink back among the other sweaty bodies; short of throwing elbows, there was no way I could retreat. I sidled as far as I could go, and braced for the moment when the dead man's daughter would walk right past. I imagined her meeting my eye, remembering, then pointing, accusing, maybe even screaming. The big men unaccustomed to their suits would lumber through the crowd and grab me. Would they regard me as police business or as an enemy better dealt with privately?
I stood there. Half a dozen very old Ortegas moved past at a pace that was maddeningly sedate. Finally, the daughter; her arm around a tiny woman who must have been her mother, turned to follow. I held my breath. I thought to look away, but realized that such inappropriateness would only be a magnet for attention. I composed my face and fixed my gaze.
And just as I'd feared, Lefty's daughter's eyes clamped on to mine nearly at once. She was wearing a tiny black hat with a veil. I hadn't known that women wore veils anymore, and I'm sure I'd never before been caught in a stare through one. I found it Gothic and riveting. Webby shadows stretched across her brow; her eyes were dark inside of dark, as sexily elusive as nakedness through gauze. Stripped of context, swelling into sunlight, the full red lips were almost lewd. Feeling weird and doomed and dizzy, I thought: If I have to be undone, let it be by such an archaically erotic graveyard stare as this.
But Lefty's daughter didn't flinch, didn't accuse, didn't signal to her father's friends. Instead, she quickly, deftly reached down with the arm that was not around her mother and pressed a scrap of paper into my hot hand.
I swallowed hard and squeezed it tight, and didn't dare even to uncurl my fingers until the crowd had wandered off, and I was safely on my bicycle once more.
———
I went straight home, peeled off my sodden clothes, and immediately jumped into the pool. I swam a few laps of three or four strokes each, then curled into a ball and let myself sink slowly to the bottom. I liked it down there. There were no sounds, except for a soft hum that you felt more than you heard. Light congealed into a cool thin greenish batter. There was no one there to bother you. I wished I could have stayed there longer.
Surfacing, I did the next best thing—waded to a shady corner and stood there chest-deep in the water. I thought about the note that Lefty's daughter had pressed into my hand. It was a very short note, consisting of nothing more than an address and a time. What intrigued me, though, was the question of when she'd found the opportunity to write it. She could not have noticed me before she was already front row center at her father's funeral. Did she rummage through her purse for pen and paper while the priest was chanting, while the body was ascending?
Another possibility occurred to me—one I didn't like at all. Maybe the note had been written beforehand. Maybe it was part of a stratagem, a trap. The daughter, together with her father's thuggish friends, perhaps, had guessed correctly that the unknown man who'd visited the hospital might also show up at the funeral. But Conch decorum would disallow a violent scene at such a solemn event. Better, then, to lure the poor doomed sucker into an ambush.
One gruesome notion leads to another, and for the first time in the couple of years since I'd stashed it there, I caught myself thinking about the never-fired nine-millimeter in the wall safe.
The mere fact that I was thinking about it made me shiver in the tepid water. Guns really, really scare me; I wished I hadn't let myself be talked into getting one. I'm of the school that basically believes that soft middle-class people like myself should never own a firearm. The first time you whip it out, someone tougher, meaner, and with less to lose takes it away from you and shoots you with it, and you end up with your own bullet stuck in your liver like a garlic clove.