Free Bomber's Law by George V. Higgins Page B

ill, or anything that disagreeable, not at all. In your case, it would be purely for tax-purposes.’
    â€œNot that my father’d do that. He’s ’way too conceited. That’s what I think really ticks him off about death: the possibility that the world could ever get along without him, now that he’s been in it. He’s the type that wouldn’t be discouraged by the fact that no other lawyer’s ever managed to find a way to get around death. He’d most likely figure that’s just because until now there hasn’t been a lawyer who’s been as smart as he is. So, if there
is
a way out of death, and anyone’s going to find it, he of course would be the boy who would do it. Hasn’t yet, as far as I know, but I’m sure he’s still working on it, there, boy. But anyway, if your mother-in-law and your father-in-law were close …” Dell’Appa had said.
    â€œUh-uh,” Dennison had said. “Well, no closer’n any other couple that’s been married over thirty years, I mean. And besides, the conversations she started having—or started admitting she was having, after he died; could be they weren’t something new. Just something she’d thought she’d better keep to herself until he died; didn’t want him to have her put away. But her people on the Other Side, in the Great Beyond? After he died, and they had their meetings with her, they didn’t have him along with them. He wasn’t one of her callers. Far’s she ever let on to us, at least. If he did attend, he apparently didn’t have much to say. Or if he did, it didn’t seem to have made a real lasting impression on her. She didn’t allow him any more air-time after he was dead’n she had when he was still alive. Not that there was anything new in that. She never had been all that interested in what Stan had to say, anyway, even back when he was alive, right in the same room with her.
    â€œSo: no,” Dennison had said, “it wasn’t the house, when she got the house, that the dead people’d started talking to her. That’d been going on for a long time. I dunno as you could properly classify what she had with them as
conversations
, though, come to think of it—so far’s I ever heard, they only talked to her; she didn’t talk to them. At least not in the beginning, and I don’t think after that, either. If they ever did let her have a two-way hook-up, send as well as receive. I don’t believe so. If they did, she never let on. When she told us about something she’d learned, say, from Douglas MacArthur or somebody, it was always what this particular famous dead person’d had on
his
mind to say to
her.
‘Mister Poe,’ for example.”
    â€œAs in ‘Edgar Allen’?” Dell’Appa said.
    â€œThe very fellow,” Dennison said. “ ‘Mister Poe told me that he served in Battery H of the First Artillery at Fort Independence on Castle Island under the name of Edgar A. Perry, and rose to the rank of lieutenant,’ she told us. ‘This would’ve been in Eighteen-and-twenty-seven, he was there, when he was eighteen years old. Mister Poe said that while he was in Boston some of the other soldiers told him about how another young lieutenant by the name of Robert Massie had been killed in a duel on Christmas Day ten years before, and his friends had become so angry that they got the other man drunk and took him down to the dungeon in the fort and chained him to the floor and then bricked up the wall and went away, left him in there to die by himself. And Mister Poe said he wrote a story about that, he did change it somewhat, but he didn’t say what it was. So I wouldn’t know about that.’ ”
    â€œYou’re shittin’ me,” Dell’Appa said. “ ‘The Cask of Amontillado’?”
    â€œ
Hey
,” Dennison said. “For