Whispers (30 page)

“Would you like me to stay a while longer, just to see if he calls again?”

“That's sweet of you,” she said. “But I guess you're right. He's not dangerous. If he was, he'd come around instead of just calling. Anyway, you scared him off. He probably thinks the police are here just waiting for him.”

“Did you get your pistol back?”

She nodded. “I went downtown yesterday and filled out the registration form like I should have done when I moved into the city. If the guy on the phone
does
come around, I can plink him legally now.”

“I really don't think he'll bother you again tonight.”

“I'm sure you're right.”

For the first time all evening, they were awkward with each other.

“Well, I guess I'd better be going.”

“It is late,” she agreed.

“Thank you for the cognac.”

“Thank you for a wonderful dinner.”

At the door he said, “Doing anything tomorrow night?”

She was about to turn him down when she remembered how good she had felt sitting beside him on the sofa. And she thought of Wally Topelis's warning about becoming a hermit. She smiled and said, “I'm free.”

“Great. What would you like to do?”

“Whatever you want.”

He thought about it for a moment. “Shall we make a whole day of it?”

“Well . . . why not?”

“We'll start with lunch. I'll pick you up at noon.”

“I'll be ready and waiting.”

He kissed her lightly and affectionately on the lips. “Tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow.”

She watched him leave, then closed and locked the door.

 

All day Saturday, morning and afternoon and evening, the body of Bruno Frye lay alone in the Forever View Funeral Home, unobserved and unattended.

Friday night, after Joshua Rhinehart had left, Avril Tannerton and Gary Olmstead had transferred the corpse to another coffin, an ornate brass-plated model with a plush velvet and silk interior. They tucked the dead man into a white burial gown, put his arms straight out at his sides, and pulled a white velvet coverlet up to the middle of his chest. Because the condition of the flesh was not good, Tannerton did not want to expend any energy trying to make the corpse presentable. Gary Olmstead thought there was something cheap and disrespectful about consigning a body to the grave without benefit of makeup and powder. But Tannerton persuaded him that cosmetology offered little hope for Bruno Frye's shrunken yellow-gray countenance.

“And anyway,” Tannerton had said, “you and I will be the last people in this world to lay eyes on him. When we shut this box tonight, it'll never be opened again.”

At 9:45 Friday night, they had closed and latched the lid of the casket. That done, Olmstead went home to his wan little wife and his quiet and intense young son. Avril went upstairs; he lived above the rooms of the dead.

Early Saturday morning, Tannerton left for Santa Rosa in his silver-gray Lincoln. He took an overnight bag with him, for he didn't intend to return until ten o'clock Sunday morning. Bruno Frye's funeral was the only one that he was handling at the moment. Since there was to be no viewing, he hadn't any reason to stay at Forever View; he wouldn't be needed until the service on Sunday.

He had a woman in Santa Rosa. She was the latest of a long line of women; Avril thrived on variety. Her name was Helen Virtillion. She was a good-looking woman in her early thirties, very lean, taut, with big firm breasts which he found endlessly fascinating.

A lot of women were attracted to Avril Tannerton, not in spite of what he did for a living but because of it. Of course, some were turned off when they discovered he was a mortician. But a surprising number were intrigued and even excited by his unusual profession.

He understood what made him desirable to them. When a man worked with the dead, some of the mystery of death rubbed off on him. In spite of his freckles and his boyish good looks, in spite of his charming smile and his great sense of fun and his open-hearted manner, some women felt he was nonetheless mysterious, enigmatic. Unconsciously, they thought they could not die so long as they were in his arms, as if his services to the dead earned him (and those close to him) special dispensation. That atavistic fantasy was similar to the secret hope shared by many women who married doctors because they were subconsciously convinced that their spouses could protect them from all of the microbial dangers of this world.

Therefore, all day Saturday, while Avril Tannerton was in Santa Rosa making love to Helen Virtillion, the body of Bruno Frye lay alone in an empty house.

Sunday morning, two hours before sunrise, there was a sudden rush of movement in the funeral home, but Tannerton was not there to notice.

The overhead lights in the windowless workroom were switched on abruptly, but Tannerton was not there to see.

The lid of the sealed casket was unlatched and thrown back. The workroom was filled with screams of rage and pain, but Tannerton was not there to hear.

At ten o'clock Sunday morning, as Tony stood in his kitchen drinking a glass of grapefruit juice, the telephone rang. It was Janet Yamada, the woman who had been Frank Howard's blind date last night.

“How'd it go?” he asked.

“It was wonderful, a wonderful night.”

“Really?”

“Sure. He's a doll.”

“Frank is a doll.”

“You said he might be kind of cold, difficult to get to know, but he wasn't.”

“He wasn't?”

“And he's so romantic.”

“Frank?”

“Who else?”

“Frank Howard is romantic?”

“These days you don't find many men who have a sense of romance,” Janet said. “Sometimes it seems like romance and chivalry were thrown out the window when the sexual revolution and the women's rights movement came in. But Frank still helps you on with your coat and opens doors for you and pulls your chair out and everything. He even brought me a bouquet of roses. They're beautiful.”

“I thought you might have trouble talking to him.”

“Oh, no. We have a lot of the same interests.”

“Like what?”

“Baseball, for one thing.”

“That's right! I forgot you like baseball.”

“I'm an addict.”

“So you talked baseball all night.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “We talked about a lot of other things. Movies—”

“Movies? Are you trying to tell me Frank is a film buff?”

“He knows the old Bogart pictures almost line by line. We traded favorite bits of dialogue.”

“I've been talking about film for three months, and he hasn't opened his mouth,” Tony said.

“He hasn't seen a lot of recent pictures, but we're going to a show tonight.”

“You're seeing him again?”

“Yeah. I wanted to call and thank you for fixing me up with him,” she said.

“Am I one hell of a matchmaker, or am I one hell of a matchmaker?”

“I also wanted to let you know that even if it doesn't work out, I'll be gentle with him. He told me about Wilma. What a rotten thing! I wanted you to know that I'm aware she put a couple of cracks in him, and I won't ever hit him too hard.”

Tony was amazed. “He told you about Wilma the first night he met you?”

“He said he used to be unable to talk about it, but then you showed him how to handle his hostility.”

“Me?”

“He said after you helped him accept what had happened, he could talk about it without pain.”

“All I did was sit and listen when he wanted to get it off his chest.”

“He thinks you're a hell of a great guy.”

“Frank's a damned good judge of people, isn't he?”

Later, feeling good about the excellent impression that Frank had made on Janet Yamada, optimistic about his own chances for a little romance, Tony drove to Westwood to keep his date with Hilary. She was waiting for him; she came out of the house as he pulled into the driveway. She looked crisp and lovely in black slacks, a cool ice-blue blouse, and a lightweight blue corduroy blazer. As he opened the door for her, she gave him a quick, almost shy kiss on the cheek, and he got a whiff of fresh lemony perfume.

It was going to be a good day.

 

Exhausted from a nearly sleepless night in Helen Virtillion's bedroom, Avril Tannerton got back from Santa Rosa shortly before ten o'clock Sunday morning.

He did not look inside the coffin.

With Gary Olmstead, Tannerton went to the cemetery and prepared the gravesite for the two o'clock ceremony. They erected the equipment that would lower the casket into the ground. Using flowers and a lot of cut greenery, they made the site as attractive as possible.

At 12:30 back at the funeral home, Tannerton used a chamois cloth to wipe the dust and smudged fingerprints from Bruno Frye's brass-plated casket. As he ran his hand over the rounded edges of the box, he thought of the magnificent contours of Helen Virtillion's breasts.

He did not look inside the coffin.

At one o'clock, Tannerton and Olmstead loaded the deceased into the hearse.

Neither of them looked inside the coffin.

At one-thirty they drove to the Napa County Memorial Park. Joshua Rhinehart and a few local people followed in their own cars. Considering that it was for a wealthy and influential man, the funeral procession was embarrassingly small.

The day was clear and cool. Tall trees cast stark shadows across the road, and the hearse passed through alternating bands of sunlight and shade.

At the cemetery, the casket was placed on a sling above the grave, and fifteen people gathered around for the brief service. Gary Olmstead took up a position beside the flower-concealed control box that operated the sling and would cause it to lower the deceased into the ground. Avril stood at the front of the grave and read from a thin book of nondenominational inspirational verses. Joshua Rhinehart was at the mortician's side. The other twelve people flanked the open grave. Some of them were grape growers and their wives. They had come because they had sold their harvests to Bruno Frye's winery, and they considered their attendance at his funeral to be a business obligation. The others were Shade Tree Vineyards executives and their wives, and their reasons for being present were no more personal than those of the growers. Nobody wept.

And nobody had the opportunity or the desire to look into the coffin.

Tannerton finished reading from his small black book. He glanced at Gary Olmstead and nodded.

Olmstead pushed a button on the control box. The powerful little electric motor hummed. The casket was lowered slowly and smoothly into the gaping earth.

 

Hilary could not remember another day that was as much fun as that first full day with Tony Clemenza.

For lunch, they went to the Yamashiro Skyroom, high in the Hollywood Hills. The food at Yamashiro was uninspiring, even ordinary, but the ambience and the stunning view made it a fine place for an occasional light lunch or dinner. The restaurant, an authentic Japanese palace, had once been a private estate. It was surrounded by ten acres of lovely ornamental gardens. From its mountaintop perch, Yamashiro offered a breath-taking view of the entire Los Angeles basin. The day was so clear that Hilary could see all the way to Long Beach and Palos Verdes.

After lunch, they went to Griffith Park. For an hour, they walked through part of the Los Angeles Zoo, where they fed the bears, and where Tony did hilarious imitations of the animals. From the zoo they went to a special afternoon performance of the dazzling Laserium hologram show in the Griffith Park Observatory.

Later, they passed an hour on Melrose Avenue, between Doheny Drive and La Cienega Boulevard, prowling through one fascinating antique shop after another, not buying, just browsing, chatting with the proprietors.

When the cocktail hour arrived, they drove to Malibu for Mai Tais at Tonga Lei. They watched the sun set into the ocean and relaxed to the rhythmic roar of breaking waves.

Although Hilary had been an Angeleno for quite some time, her world had been composed only of her work, her house, her rose garden, her work, the film studios, her work, and the few fancy restaurants in which the motion picture and television crowd gathered to do business. She had never been to the Yamashiro Skyroom, the zoo, the laser show, the Melrose antique shops, or Tonga Lei. It was all new to her. She felt like a wide-eyed tourist—or, more accurately, like a prisoner who had just finished serving a long, long sentence, most of it in solitary confinement.

But it was not just where they went that made the day special. None of it would have been half as interesting or as much fun if she'd been with someone other than Tony. He was so charming, so quick-witted, so full of fun and energy, that he made the bright day brighter.

After slowly sipping two Mai Tais each, they were starving. They drove back to Sepulveda and went north into the San Fernando Valley to have dinner at Mel's landing, another place with which she was not familiar. Mel's was unpretentious and moderately priced, and it offered some of the freshest and tastiest seafood she had ever eaten.

As she and Tony ate Mel's steamed clams and discussed other favorite places to eat, Hilary found that he knew ten times as many as she did. Her knowledge did not extend much beyond that handful of expensive dining spots that served the movers and shakers of the entertainment industry. The out-of-the-way eateries, the hole-in-the-wall cafés with surprising house specialties, the small mom-and-pop restaurants with plainly served but delicious food—all of that was one more aspect of the city about which she had never taken time to learn. She saw that she had become rich without ever discovering how to use and fully enjoy the freedom that her money could provide.