My life is weird, I thought, as the groundskeeper led me through a rear wood shop where a guy with goggles was actually building a coffin.
I learned that the cemetery offered these simplified boxes to those who could not afford the more expensive wooden caskets. I found the whole business of death unnerving. The coffin builder stopped working and watched us quietly as we moved through his shop. Saw dust rested lightly on his shoulder and there was a nail in his mouth. His eyes were impossibly big behind the goggles. The hair on my neck was standing on end.
I nodded politely and pardoned myself as we moved past him. He made no sound or movement. Instead he watched us until we exited through a side door. The hair on my neck and shoulders prickled.
"Why do I feel like I just walked onto the set of a horror movie?" I asked in the next room, shivering a little. A very discomfiting experience, to say the least.
"Probably because Boyd is about as weird as they come," said the caretaker. And I figured that if a cemetery caretaker was telling me someone was weird, well, you could damn well take that to the bank.
We walked through a storage room full of gardening equipment...and then I saw it. Lying flat on the ground with the lid closed was a freshly exhumed coffin. Yellow police tape encircled it and the staff themselves had placed some cones around it.
With the steady - and disturbing - sounds of coffin-making going on behind us, I found myself slowly circling another eternal bed for the dead.
I said, "How often does your cemetery exhume graves?"
"Not often."
"How much is not often?"
"Once every other year or so."
"Was there anything unusual about this exhumation?"
"Other than the coffin being empty? No. It was a routine dig."
The caretaker stood off to the side of the cones. He looked bored and a little nervous. I would be nervous, too, if a coffin showed up empty on my watch.
"Have you ever experienced anything like this before?" I asked.
"A missing body? No."
"Have you heard of any recent cases of grave robbing?"
"Not at the cemeteries, no. There were a few cadavers stolen from a research facility over at UCLA, and there were a few misplaced cadavers at a nearby crematorium, but that's all I've heard."
I nodded like this all sounded normal. Yesterday I had been sitting in my office, wondering if my phone would ring. Today I was circling an empty coffin in a creepy back room of a cemetery.
Yeah, my life is weird.
"Other than the corpse being missing, was there any indication of foul play?" I asked.
"If you're asking if the grave looked like it had been freshly turned, the answer is no. There was old-growth grass."
"Can I see inside the coffin?"
"The detective said not to mess with it."
"I won't mess with it. I'm just going to look."
The caretaker looked long and hard at me. The back room was mostly dark, although a few open doors permitted the bright morning sun in. A single dusty, yellow bulb was on overhead. The caretaker continued staring at me behind his thick glasses. There was sweat on his brow, even though the morning was still fairly cool. If the guy wanted to pull out a nail gun and shoot me between the eyes and then bury me in an undisclosed plot in the cemetery, no one would ever know.
"Fine," he said. "The detective seemed to know you, and I'm not the police. You fuck things up, you can answer to LAPD, not me. I'll be in my office."
He left the room and I went over to the casket, walking between the cones and stepping over the police tape. I didn't know much about caskets, but it was obvious to me that this one was nice. If I had to guess, I would say the stained, polished wood was solid cherry. Presently, there were clumps of dirt embedded in the various grooves and fittings, caked especially where the poles, the long wooden handles, lay against the sides. Soil wafted up strongly from the whole thing. I thought I would smell death, too, but I didn't. Or maybe, hanging out here all morning, I was already getting used to it.
I stood over the casket for a good minute before I mustered the courage to open it. I took in some air, reached down, grabbed the wooden lip and lifted....
I held my breath, holding the open lid, and could not have been more relieved to see that the coffin was clean. Not perfectly clean. There was some darkish stains that could have been soil or even make up. Or perhaps even hair dye. But all in all, I had gotten lucky. A good thing, too, since my pumpkin scone was hovering somewhere between my heart and throat. I swallowed hard, forcing it down and went to work examining the inside of the coffin.
I wondered how thoroughly the interior of the coffin had been examined, and decided probably not too much. Once the coffin had been found to be empty there had probably been an initial investigation, and then the case was sent off to Hammer. A missing corpse, for a busy L.A. homicide detective, ranks fairly low on the to-do list.
I found myself drawn to the cushions in the top half lid; that is, the part of the casket that would cover the face and upper torso. The material here was thickly padded silk, and I shortly discovered something odd. The padding here was compressed somehow. Smashed. I had no explanation for it, other than the mortician might have damaged it during the funeral preparation, or perhaps the body itself had bloated during the decaying process, or even the crane they used to lower the casket had swung about, shifting the body, causing pressure on the padding.
I didn't know. But I knew that pressure was one thing, this was another. This was smashed. By my estimation, the area in question was directly above where her chest would have been. Most of the padding here was soft, except the small area, perhaps a diameter of six inches, where it was pressed down noticeably.
I stood straight, hands on hips, perplexed.
Was this simply an irregularity in the design? A place where the cushion was attached to the wood behind it, perhaps? I reached down again but could not find a seam. But I did find something else.
I reached into my jeans pocket and extracted my key chain. And from it I selected a little light, which I turned on. I aimed the light on the depressed cushion and leaned in a little closer.
Ah. There was a tear. Very faint. And a slight discoloration to the fabric.
I stood straight again, frowning. I considered the ramifications of what I was seeing and feeling. Had the grave robbers caused the damage? Had the body even made it into the grave? Or had it been stolen, let's say, before the burial?
Too many questions. Too much gorge, which I continued to fight. Damn pumpkin scone.
A thought occurred to me. A really horrible thought that made my heart race and sweat break out on my brow. I knew what I had to do next. I had to test my theory, even if to discount it. I paced the big storage area. Hammering from the next door wood shop seemed to keep pace with my creaking footfalls.
This is nuts, I thought.
I continued pacing.
Seriously nuts. I don't get paid enough for this shit.
Hell, I'm not getting paid at all, tacos notwithstanding.
But a young man needed help, needed answers.
I stopped pacing and moved over to the casket. I took in a lot of air. And I mean a lot of air.
And then I climbed inside.