Free Nightwork by Joseph Hansen

handed it across the sunny little flowers to Wrightwood. “Thank you.” He got to his feet. “I appreciate it.”
    “It’s on file at the Hall of Records.”
    “You were nearer,” Dave said. “I’m sorry for the trouble. Anyway, you’ve told me things they couldn’t at the Hall of Records.”
    Wrightwood turned his head slightly, wary. “It was a heart attack. Big, heavy man. He’d overworked himself.” Wrightwood got to his feet, buttoned his jacket. He didn’t appear worried about his own weight. “Hypertension kills a good many of my people. I see men who have gone down in their prime all the time.” He had come around the desk again, and now took Dave’s arm to walk him to the door. His grip was as gentle and comforting as if Dave had just brought him a dead friend. “You interest me.” He didn’t let go Dave’s arm. With his free hand he gripped the fancily wrought bronze handle of the tall office door, but he didn’t move it. “Just what have I told you besides the obvious?”
    “That the widow came here.” Dave didn’t want a cigarette, but he wanted the undertaker’s hand off his arm. Nobody was dead around him—he didn’t want to be treated as if somebody was. So he reached for a cigarette, found it, found his slim steel lighter, lit the cigarette. “Did the oldest son come too? Melvil?” He put the lighter away.
    Wrightwood shook his head. “A woman came. I assumed she was a nurse—perhaps the doctor’s receptionist.”
    “What made you think that?”
    Wrightwood turned the handle and opened the door. “She fit the role. You develop an instinct about people in this business. She had that self-assured way about her. They boss their bosses.” They were in a quiet reception room now. He gave the slim, pale black, fortyish woman at the desk a grin. “Don’t they?”
    She looked up at him, wide-eyed, and patted her beautifully set hair. “I can’t think what you’re talking about.” Her laugh was soft and dry.
    Dave smiled at her and moved toward the doors that would take him along a hushed corridor hung with ferns and caged canaries, a corridor that passed rooms where the embalmed dead slept in coffins, rooms where damp-eyed families sat on spindly chairs, and past the chapel. It was the route he had taken to get here. With the door open, he turned back. “Can you describe her for me? Stocky, middle-aged, well-dressed?”
    Wrightwood tilted his head. “You know this woman?”
    “Not yet,” Dave said. “But I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for your help.”

8
    T HE PLACE HE LIVED in had, he judged, started life as riding stables. He left the Jaguar beside Cecil’s van, walked past the end of the long, shingle-sided front building, crossed the uneven bricks of a courtyard sheltered by an old oak. He unwrapped and laid on plates in the cookshack pastrami sandwiches he’d picked up on Fairfax, built Bloody Marys, and carried these on a bent-wood tray across to the long, shingle-sided rear building. The arrangement of the place was awkward, but it amused more than bothered him. The last of his dead father’s nine beautiful wives, Amanda, had made the buildings handsome and livable inside. If, during the short winter, getting from one building to another meant being soaked by rain or chilled by wind, novelty was on its side. It was never boring.
    The back building was walled in knotty pine. There was a wide fireplace. The inside planking of the pitched roof showed, and the unpainted rafters. Above, Amanda had designed a sleeping loft. Climbing the raw pine steps to it now meant climbing into heat. The smell of sun-baked pine overlaid the old, almost forgotten smell of horse and hay that always ghosted the place. Cecil sat naked, propped black against white pillows, in the wide bed, sheet across his long, lean legs. He gleamed with sweat. His collarbone and ribs showed. Dave kept trying to fatten him up. It didn’t seem to be working.
    “Hey.” Cecil tossed aside the