Another Dead Republican (5 page)

I shrugged. “She said she didn’t know how she was going to pay for the funeral. There’s not much else to do at the moment. I might as well start now.”

“I’ll help,” Scott said.

We used the key Veronica had left me.

I was reasonably familiar with end of life details: insurance papers, powers of attorney, and that kind of stuff. Years ago Scott and I hired a gay lawyer who was familiar with what needed to be in a gay couple’s wills, and with all the things a gay couple needed to have to ensure each other’s future in case one of them died. There were a lot of legal papers to go through and sign. Including simple things like power of attorney for medical decisions, power of attorney for financial decisions, pre-paying for our funerals, investments, who inherited precisely what, who was the beneficiary of every single thing. Scott was listed as the person for me in all these matters as I was listed for him. We especially made sure we had the kinds of things we could wave in the face of legal and medical personnel if they gave us hassles about end of life decisions.

We entered the room. It was a size between a regular closet and a walk-in closet. A tiny desk in one corner had a straight-back wooden chair in front of it. Except for that space and a few feet between them and the door, the room was filled with boxes; floor to ceiling, side to side, with barely enough room to open the door more than half way.

I looked at Scott. I said, “It’s always best to begin at the beginning.”

I took down the top box from the first stack on my right. He took one from the top of the heap in the middle of the floor. We each took our box to the large desk. I carried my box around to the back and pushed aside more of the paraphernalia from the top of the desk to the far sides. The stuff from the box Veronica had started on, I put to the far left side. Scott and I put our separate boxes on the half of the middle closest to us.

Scott paused before opening his box. “Maybe we should go through the desk first. He might have kept the most up to date or most important stuff in there.”

I agreed.

I started with the center top drawer. As I looked through his desk I thought perhaps I’d find something that redeemed Edgar as a person. A picture of him with a warm fuzzy puppy? Edgar serving food to the homeless in a shelter? And if I found something, would that redeem the life of a mean spirited, racist, sexist, homophobic son-of-a-bitch? What would redeem such a person?

Unbidden into my imagination came the old joke. A man dies and shows up at the pearly gates, and St. Peter asks what good work have you ever done for your fellow man. The guy thinks for a long time and finally says that he once gave twenty-five cents to a homeless man. St. Peter calls out loudly to the Lord asking what he should do with the guy. There’s a long pause and a then a great voice says, give him back his twenty-five cents and tell him to go to hell.

I wondered if that joke would have even more resonance with me if I believed in heaven, pearly gates, St. Peter, and/or god. Probably not.

But the center drawer confirmed the mundane: pencils, pens, erasers, scissors, paperclips, markers, transparent tape, stapler. Drawers only on the right: the top one had an unopened ream of blank copy paper and a box of manila folders, the second different sizes and colors of blank note pads. In the largest drawer on the bottom were three thick books on computer programming followed by two books on how to build guns.

I flopped each book out on top of the desk. Page after dense page of instructions on building computers, programming computers, and making guns, but nothing of financial significance to help Veronica at this moment.

Edgar read these? I had no notion of his IQ level. Certainly, from the bigoted and ignorant comments he made, he showed no inclination to use any intelligence he did have in the service of sense and reason. And really, when someone says they don’t believe in evolution, how can you not think they’re an ignorant rube?

The gun books were fascinating in a can’t-look-away-from-a-train-crash way.

“Check these out.” I showed them to Scott. “Maybe he built the gun that killed him.”

Scott said, “That’s ghoulish and scary.”

“Did he go around armed?”

Scott said, “The few times we saw him, I never noticed a gun.”

I opened the box I’d gotten from the storage closet. On top was a brochure from a local pizza place for a dollars-off bargain. I checked the expiration date; four years ago. The next item was a receipt printed out from a porn site for 39.99 for one month on Mona Moans For You. The date was six months prior. It was a payment for a one-month non-recurring membership.

I held it up and showed it to Scott. I said, “He was definitely straight.”

Scott said, “Not as comforting a thought as we might like.” He glanced at the picture. “She looks nice in a big breasts kind of way, if you like big breasts.”

I said, “I’m indifferent.” I checked the bookmarked sites on the computer. “It matches one of these.” I examined the desk top. “She’s on here, too. I’m just not sure I care.”

The papers quickly began to settle into logical patterns. Bills: we put these in chronological order by company. Receipts: from the local fast food restaurants to exclusive Parisian three star restaurants and a million places in between, again time order by venue. Travel brochures: mostly from hunting lodges around the globe. Coupons: for discounts on anything from pizza to airlines, to the local grocery store. He clipped coupons? Whatever for? He could probably buy the whole restaurant, but coupons he had.

Early in the process of sorting, the computer and the zip drive concluded their successful relationship. I pocketed my zip drive and let the computer rest.

For an instant I thought about hiding the porn receipts, then dismissed it. Fear of porn in the face of death, a nonsensically absurd notion. Besides, Edgar wouldn’t care anymore if someone found out; he was dead. Veronica’s opinion of him might change? That wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t going to alter reality. Who knew what would or would not help?

The desk top was soon filled with receipts set out by category, venue, and year. We began to make piles on the floor. I even used the grizzly bear’s out-stretched arms. Scott placed some of his stuff on the bronze closest to him, the wolf whose head was up, mouth open, howling soundlessly at the moon.

Most of the brochures and the coupons we dumped into a trash can that quickly began to overflow.

A half hour in and Veronica had still not reappeared. I expected her back any moment. Telling your children about such a tragedy must be horrific. I could only imagine what my sister and her kids were going through. I was tempted to find her and see how she was doing. If there were books for what to say and do at a time like this, I didn’t know about them. Even if there were such books, there wasn’t time to read them and get their advice.

I presumed she’d be explaining to them, comforting, reassuring them. Sudden death was bad enough, but murder?

I didn’t want to disturb a moment of such profound intimacy. To make the presumption that any intrusion of mine would be of help was on a level of arrogance I’d never want to display. I was less than thirty feet from where she was. If she needed help, I could get there in seconds.

I wished I knew of a way to make things better for her or them. There wasn’t, really. Just to be here and help, offer assistance, and do things like sort through tons of crap.

I stopped at one point and said to Scott, “Why aren’t the cops doing this?”

“You’re asking me impossible questions. I have no answers.”

“I knew that,” I said.

“Sorry.”

I asked, “Are we just sorting this stuff and the cops come in here and use it to prove someone guilty. We’re doing their work?”

Scott added, “Or we find something that proves he was in some criminal conspiracy that got him killed?”

I could hope.

The fourth box in had insurance information.

I sat in Edgar’s chair and began to read through the stacks of dense prose. A whole lot of them were from businesses who offered accidental death life insurance policies. You paid a minimal fee and got a payout if you died in an accident. Did murder qualify as an accident? I clicked onto the Internet and Googled double indemnity. The site I read claimed that such policies did pay out in the case of murder or accident, as long as the murder was not done by someone who benefited from the policy. Edgar had five of these. Veronica was the beneficiary.

I used manila file folders I’d found in the top right-hand desk drawer. With a fine point marker, I labeled one insurance and stuck those forms inside. I began another for investment companies, a third for bank accounts.

Five minutes later Scott said, “Why are there voter registration rolls in here for Harrison County?”

“Huh?”

He flipped through a stack of print outs that might have come from a laser jet printer in the early nineties. “These cover from nineteen forty-four to nineteen ninety-two.” He glanced into the box and took out the next stack of papers. They were about as thick as a ream and a half of paper. He flipped through the first few and the last few. He said, “These go from ninety-two to this year.”

“Strange.”

“No stranger than hunting lodge brochures.”

Forty-five minutes in, I found the tax forms from five years before. It was a start in organizing the income folders, making it far easier. Any company they had income from would have sent a form of some kind, normally a 1099. If he was making money from businesses that didn’t send tax forms, I think he and now Veronica at least peripherally, were in trouble. Taxes were due late next week. My guess was Veronica would need to find Edgar’s accountant or hire one of her own.

NINE

Wednesday 8:44 A.M.

I’d just placed the first investment form into the tax folder when the door to the den burst open. Edgar’s father, Charles Dudley Grum, marched into the room.

“Where’s Veronica?” he demanded. His voice was nearly a shout.

I said, “She’s telling the children their father is dead.”

He added a snarl to the loudness of his voice. “What’s taking so long?”

There was a timetable for announcing the death of a parent to children? How cruel? How absurd?

I didn’t really want to deal with this guy right now. Then I reminded myself, for it seemed like the thousandth time already, that he’d just lost a son, and he deserved a lot of slack.

At their wedding, Edgar was drunk from before the ceremony began. He swayed at the altar. I remember glancing at the family across the church aisle. The gargantuan Mrs. Grum slopped over the edge of the pew across from my mother. My sister’s moments-from-officially being mother-in-law’s gargantuan face radiated hate. Not disapproval, hate.

When I met him, I thought Edgar was a fool. When I saw him at the wedding, I thought he was a drunken fool. My sister loved him. Who was I to tell her he was a disaster? And she wouldn’t have listened. She was in love.

During the entire reception, her mother-in-law sat in a corner and barely seemed to alter an ounce of her posture. The dog didn’t move much either. Didn’t the poor thing ever have to relieve itself? The alternative was too odious to consider. I felt sorry for the poor critter.

It wasn’t the drunken Edgar or my sister’s hate-filled mother-in-law, I found most offensive at the wedding. It was Charles Dudley Grum, the father-in-law, whom I found most odious.

At the reception when Scott and I began to dance, one of Edgar’s dad’s minions came over and told us to stop. I knew it was a minion from someone who talked to me later.

Scott’s dancing is a sight to behold. The man is all grace and athleticism on the baseball field. Put him on a dance floor to any kind of fast music, and he looks like a man in the midst of electro-shock therapy in a video where someone keeps pressing the pause button, kind of spastic jerking on steroids. On the other hand slow dancing with him is a joy. His body swaying, dipping, and dancing next to mine, up against mine, pure bliss. And yes, our doing so at such an event is still a political and moral affront to many. Good.

We’d even taken dancing lessons at one point. The lessons didn’t do an ounce of good for his dancing to rock and roll.

I’m afraid I committed one of the great sins at that moment of attempted minion intervention. I was neither afraid, intimidated, or much interested, that was normal. No, the great sin was that I laughed at the minion attempting to remove us from the dance floor.