Free Mausoleum by Justin Scott Page A

“decisive.” They had to be. The gang world—prison or slum or criminal enterprise—is not big on bureaucracy, so the slow-witted have no place to hide.
    â€œSo what he did for Georgia is why you hired Charlie to fill in for Donny Butler?”
    â€œI tried to thank him with money. He wouldn’t take it. When the cemetery job came along, I thought I could do him a favor.”
    â€œHow’s Georgia doing?”
    Rick brightened. “A little better, actually. It was a kind of a wake up call. Like discovering that she is not indestructible. That acts have consequences.”
    â€œShe looked great at the Notables.”
    â€œShe’s like a child, Ben. But maybe she’s growing up.”
    I said, “Good luck,” instead of “maybe.”
    â€œSo you’ll keep trying to find out what the hell really happened?”
    I said, “I thought I would lean on Tim or even Ira to represent Charlie pro bono when they catch him. Could you contribute to expenses?”
    â€œOf course—but privately. I can’t get the association involved.”
    â€œYou know it will come out, somehow, that he worked for the cemetery.”
    â€œThat’s why I’m hoping you’ll find out who really killed that son of a bitch before they catch poor Charlie.”
    â€œRick, they have two powers I don’t—manpower and the power of arrest.”
    He went home to Georgia.
    I didn’t feel like going home to an empty house—by this hour the cat would be out hunting for things to kill or mate with—so I ordered another glass of wine and stepped outside to phone Sherman Chevalley getting, again, no answer. Back at my table I took out my note pad and made a list of plans for tomorrow, starting with the people I could call in New York to turn me on to a Spanish-speaking investigator.
    â€œHey!”
    I looked up into the angular face of Lorraine Renner, noticed that the hair she had collected into a bun to keep out of the camera while video-ing Scooter’s graveyard pirate act, was long and loose, and said, “Hi, how’ve you been?”
    Though Newbury was small, and we had been born when it was smaller, we knew of each other more than we knew each other. We had older fathers in common—hers and mine had swung the occasional joint real estate deal and had served side by side on the Board of Selectman. One time when I was home for Thanksgiving we had talked at some family and friends gathering about the pleasures of leaving home to go to college. But she was eight years younger than I, which meant that when I was in high school she was a little kid in elementary school, and by the time she graduated from high school I was a lieutenant in Naval Intelligence. When she was in college I was on Wall Street, and when she went to film school in Los Angeles I was in enrolled in Leavenworth. Still, it couldn’t have slipped either of our minds entirely that we represented a very small set of Newbury citizens: youngish, single, never married and child free. And in fact, as she stood there smiling in dark jeans and a white blouse, it occurred to me that features I had thought a trifle austere formed interesting planes. And the long hair that framed them looked more reddish brown than brunette in the soft light of the Yankee Drover’s cellar bar.
    â€œWould you like a glass of wine?”
    She held one up half full. “I’m okay, thanks.”
    She folded into the chair opposite and looked me over the way you might look at a bush that had been in your yard for years and discovered one day it was covered in berries. But curiosity was cloaked in wariness. Newbury was way too small a town to dodge each other if curiosity worked out badly.
    I said, “I saw you taping Scooter at the Notables. “
    â€œHe wanted a fifteen minute DVD.”
    â€œFifteen minutes of ‘Yo ho ho?’”
    â€œI added some of the others for