The waiter came by and took our order. I got a big breakfast sandwich, minus the ham, even though it was after 9:00 p.m. Roxi liked the sound of it and ordered the same, plus the ham. In fact, she made the waiter put my displaced ham on her sandwich.
He wrote everything down like it all made perfect sense, and when he left, Roxi asked me what I was working on. I told her about it, or as much as I knew.
"Wild," she said.
"About as wild as it gets."
"And you're doing it all for free?"
"Not quite. For two tacos."
She shook her head sadly. "You give away too much of your time. You could be doing paying work, you know." She next held up her hand, stopping me. "Wait. I already know what you're going to say."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah," she said. "You're going to tell me that it's not about the money, that it's about helping those who can't help themselves, about making things right in the universe."
"That, and I want those tacos."
"You can't help everybody, Spinoza," she said, using my last name like most people do.
"Nope, but I can sure as hell help some."
"But this case is...gross. You're looking for a corpse, for Christ's sake."
"And giving a young man peace of mind, and perhaps setting him up for the rest of his life."
"Because his birth mother left him an inheritance."
"An inheritance that is rightfully his."
"After the DNA testing confirms it," she said.
"Right."
"So how does one look for a corpse?"
"No clue," I said, as the waiter came by with our food. My breakfast sandwich looked glorious. Huge and leaning and dripping with hollandaise sauce and ripe avocado slices. Roxi's looked even bigger, with her two fat slices of ham.
"Do me a favor," she said, as she picked up her sandwich. "Let's not talk about corpses while we eat."
Chapter Six
I started looking for the corpse at the only place I could think of: the cemetery where David's birth mother, Evelyn, had been buried. Where her coffin had been exhumed. And where, later, it had been found to be empty.
Weird shit.
It was early the next morning when I pulled over to the side of one of those narrow cemetery roads and parked my Camry under an elm tree. I was tired but alert. I don't sleep well these days, and if I was a betting man, I would bet that I would probably never sleep well again.
The Forest Lawn Cemetery here in Burbank, on the other side of the infamous Griffith Park, is epic, covering an entire hillside. If I had to be buried anywhere, it would be here. Granted, I would want to be buried near my son, but I doubted he would want anything to do with me, even in the after life, and especially for all eternity.
There were a few others here. This is greater L.A., after all, with nearly 30 million people, and so one rarely, if ever, finds themselves alone. Anywhere. About seven or eight people were presently brushing off burial plaques or standing solemnly in the early morning light. I heard the faint sound of weeping from somewhere. Most were dressed in business attire, no doubt on the way to work.
Myself, I was here for work.
Sipping a latte something or other from Starbucks, I made my way through the cemetery, picking my way carefully behind grave markers. I've never put much stock into the supernatural (well, that is, until recently...long story), but walking over somebody's grave just seemed wrong. After all, everything they had ever done and everything they ever were was summed up into one spot of earth. The least someone could do was avoid walking over them.
Like a good investigator, I already had Evelyn's plot location in hand, and after studying a map of the grounds upon entering the cemetery, I had a fairly good idea where I was going.