up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead.
It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibis’s played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen with tubs and with saucepans and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral home’s front room with hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and ribs and black-eyed peas, and by mid-afternoon the house was filled with people weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis. The burial would be on the following morning.
When the telephone in the hall rang (it was Bakelite and black and had an honest-to-goodness rotary dial on the front) Mr. Ibis answered. Then he took Shadow aside. “That was the police,” he said. “Can you make a pickup?”
“Sure.”
“Be discreet. Here.” He wrote down an address on a slip of paper, then passed it to Shadow, who read the address, written in perfect copperplate handwriting, and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. “There’ll be a police car,” Ibis added.
Shadow went out back and got the hearse. Mr. Jacquel and Mr. Ibis had each made a point, individually, of explaining that, really, the hearse should only be used for funerals, and they had a van that they used to collect bodies, but the van was being repaired, had been for three weeks now, and could he be very careful with the hearse? Shadow drove carefully down the street. The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although he could barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways.
A dark blue police cruiser was parked on a side street, and Shadow pulled up the hearse behind it. There were two cops inside the cruiser, drinking their coffee from thermos tops. They had the engine running to keep warm. Shadow tapped on the side window.
“Yeah?”
“I’m from the funeral home,” said Shadow.
“We’re waiting for the medical examiner,” said the cop. Shadow wondered if it was the same man who had spoken to him under the bridge. The cop, who was black, got out of the car, leaving his colleague in the driver’s seat, and walked Shadow back to a Dumpster. Mad Sweeney was sitting in the snow beside the Dumpster. There was an empty green bottle in his lap, a dusting of snow and ice on his face and baseball cap and shoulders. He didn’t blink.
“Dead wino,” said the cop.
“Looks like it,” said Shadow.
“Don’t touch anything yet,” said the cop. “Medical examiner should be here any time now. You ask me, the guy drank himself into a stupor and froze his ass.”
“Yes,” agreed Shadow. “That’s certainly what it looks like.”
He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeney’s lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a sandy moustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpse’s neck. He kicks the corpse, thought Shadow, and if it doesn’t kick him back…
“He’s dead,” said the medical examiner. “Any ID?”
“He’s a John Doe,” said the cop.
The medical examiner looked at Shadow. “You working for Jacquel and Ibis?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
“Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity photos. We don’t need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got that? Do you want me to write it down for you?”
“No,” said Shadow. “It’s fine. I can remember.”
The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Shadow, saying, “Give this to Jacquel.” Then the medical examiner said “Merry Christmas” to everyone, and was on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle.
Shadow signed for the