Free The Suicide Murders by Howard Engel

trip to the laundromat, about how I nearly nailed the sock thief in the drier, how I pan-handled on James Street for dimes to see me through the second load after the change machine jammed. There’s a lot I’m going to leave out by jumping from Saturday afternoon and landing in Victoria Lawn in time for Chester’s obsequies on Monday.
    Funerals make me nervous. I don’t care whose they are. I watched them bury Churchill and Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the other Kennedy on television, where you could see that even when you’re dead it helps to have money to bring the right tone and taste to the send-off. I skipped the church service. That’s another thing that gives me the willies. Ever since I was a kid, churches and me have kept our distance from one another. I kept thinking that because of my religion they might have to have the place reconstructed or something. I was in a religious play once. I was just a teenager, and the play was Good Friday by the English poet laureate, John Masefield. It was all about the trial of Jesus, and I played an old geezer who kept breaking through the crowd and pleading with Pilate to spare the life of this upright man, Jesus. And the crowd kept laughing at me and throwing me offstage and calling me a madman. That was a little of the old Masefield irony there in that part about me being mad. Anyway, while I was offstage, the director had me join in with the crowd shouting “Crucify him! Crucify!” It was a schizo situation, and I wonder how I got out of it alive and not even converted.
    I walked up the gravel path toward an assembly of the city’s finest, planning to watch from the background. I’d parked my car about a mile back along the twisting road behind the last in the funeral procession. I worked my way between granite headstones that caught the afternoon sun on their polished fronts and back. I could hear the Anglican priest giving Chester his last shove into the next world; he stood at the head of the grave which was surrounded by brass rails. Flowers covered the casket, and green imitation grass covered the earth on either side. Myrna looked brave, wearing a black hat and veil. She made a lovely widow, standing there, still looking less than forty. Next to her, a tall, sandy-haired man of about fifty, but admitting to forty-five, with the widow’s arm on his. My guess made him William Allen Ward. Next to his stood my old pal, Vern Harrington. The other mourners include the mayor and most of the other aldermen. There were no children or even any young people. From the looks of them, I could see a lot of “ought” written on a lot of faces. Faces that “ought” to be seen to have come: colleagues, cronies, and people whose presence was expected, each wearing his face for the occasion, hats doffed, eyes fixed on the flowers on top of the coffin.
    “I am the resurrection and the life …” The priest’s white vestments were caught by a spring breeze. Squirrels went about their own affairs, and I stood at the back.
    I tried to put names on the people standing there. There were few women. Most of the aldermanic wives had begged off, but there was a girl or two from his office. I noticed Martha Tracy had found a suitable hat, and stood with a clutch of office girls around her, like an iceberg with its chips.
    When the deed had been done, the crowd started moving back toward the cars in twos and threes. Two cemetery workers who had come up behind me watched them recede through the tall monuments and along the gravel path. They started talking Greek to one another and set about making the final earthly arrangements for Chester’s eternal rest.
    I was about to turn away and follow the winding herd myself, when I felt someone sharing the view over my shoulder. It was Pete Staziak from Homicide wearing a light gabardine raincoat and carrying a green tyrolean felt hat. He put it on. It looked too small for his head.
    “Hi, Benny. You sleuthing?”
    “Sure, Pete. Only