Caught Dead by Andrew Lanh Page A

joining us at the table. I shredded a placemat while the two flirted with each other, danced around their mutual attraction. They’d been playing this game for a long time. Gracie’s in her late seventies, maybe early eighties, a tall woman, a string bean, her hair tied back into a chaotic bun, her face pale. She refuses to wear makeup but creates the illusion that she does. I can never quite figure it out: a flick of an eye, her tongue rolling over her lips, even an upward thrust of her head into a shaft of window light. She has high, pronounced cheekbones and an aging dancer’s spent body, all angle and wrinkle. She looks like she got lost, years back, on the way to the opera, what with her scarlet-lined Dracula cloaks and oriental scarves and whalebone hairpins. Sometimes she has the mouth of a street thug.
    Gracie often stops in at my apartment, lingering, gabbing, annoying, trying to convince me to get remarried as quickly as possible, to eat more, to go to church. Some of the time Gracie is flamboyant and wacky, but other times she’s rock-bottom rigid. She’d been a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall a thousand years back, had entertained the troops with Bob Hope in Korea, done some minor acting in failed Broadway reviews, and then followed a wealthy businessman husband to Connecticut. When he died, she inherited the elegant, sparkling Victorian home. She lives on the first floor, rents out an apartment on the second to me and one on the third to an old guy. Gracie considers us her boys, smothers us, loves us, admonishes us, abuses us, tries to run our lives. Her mission is to steer us into lives she would never want for herself. And we often let her.
    Her smile reveals a showgirl’s faded teeth: chipped caps, murky as puddles.
    I ordered her another beer and she nodded her thanks. She always drinks from the bottle. Like a man, she says. After all, she entertained troops, in her words, “north of Seoul.” Sometimes she recalled it as “north of Panmunjam.” One time Jimmy, a little too drunk, said it was north of Jersey. She gave him a look that would have withered a lesser man.
    Finishing her beer, she stood to leave, convinced she’d left some burner on or some gas jet flickering in the basement or some water running somewhere. It was always the same. Jimmy watched her leave.
    â€œChrist, you two love playing this game,” I told him.
    â€œAnd what game is that?” Snippy. He sipped his beer.
    â€œNever mind.”
    â€œYou’re damned right—never mind.”
    My cell phone rang. Liz was in the neighborhood. “But let me guess, Zeke’s?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œThe land that time forgot. The place where the bodies are buried.”
    â€œOnly the dreams of mankind.”
    â€œThen you must be real comfortable there.”
    â€œAre you joining us?”
    â€œWho is ‘us’?”
    â€œJimmy and me.”
    â€œI love that man.” She waited a second. “I’m a couple streets away.”
    Jimmy was happy to see her, the two of them hugging like father and daughter. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek. She asked about Mary’s funeral, but was shaking her head.
    â€œSo what I still don’t get, Rick—and this is a big what-I-don’t-get—is this: What does Hank’s family want you to do about this drive-by shooting? If the Hartford cops can’t locate any past shooters in those little urban bang-bang episodes, then what can you do? I mean, you’re not a homicide investigator. Especially, too, if Mary Vu’s killing was just wrong place, wrong time.”
    â€œI don’t know,” I agreed. “Grandma thinks I’m Superman.”
    Jimmy was nodding furiously. “Yeah, I can see if there was a motive for Mary’s killing, like someone knew she had hidden money in her home, broke in, surprised her. Or something to do with business, maybe. Like she was actually