Missing Persons by Clare O'Donohue Read Free Book Online Page A

shoot. Are you up for it?”
    I shrugged. “A sudden and unexplainable tragedy. Looks like that’s becoming my specialty.”
    “This probably isn’t the time, but the police called me today. They were asking where you were the day Frank died.”
    “They were what?” My voice had gotten an octave higher and a tad too loud, so I pulled Andres out of the room and into a side area where people had brought food and coffee.
    “It was some detective,” Andres told me as he poured me a coffee. “He said he was just looking into some concerns there were about Frank’s death. He asked me, you know, what you said about Frank since the separation.”
    “What did you tell him?”
    “I told him that we worked together sometimes. When we worked, we talked about the shoot and where we would eat lunch, that’s it. I told him I never heard you say an ill word about Frank.”
    I smiled. “So you lied.”
    “You said a few things, okay. But you didn’t kill the guy.”
    “Did the detective say Frank was murdered?”
    “No. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions, just kept asking me what I knew. A real-life Dragnet episode.” Andres looked around. There were two people in the room, both Frank’s cousins, but they were engaged in a serious conversation about the stock market and weren’t paying attention to us. “Do you think he was murdered?” he asked me.
    “Of course not,” I said. “The doctor got this all started. The wife and the mistress were hanging out together in the emergency room. I guess we looked suspicious, a little too cozy. But the paramedics said it was a heart attack.”
    “They told you that?”
    “They told Vera.”
    Andres nodded, deep in thought. “Man, if he was murdered, Mike’s going to want to feature it on an episode of Caught! ”
     
     
    An hour later, friends and relatives had begun to say their good-byes. Everyone offered a comforting squeeze of the hand, but no one knew what to say. Under normal circumstances it’s tough to know what words to offer a grieving widow. In my case, the not-quite-ex-wife, not-really-widow situation, few managed to look anything other than embarrassed.
    Vera outlasted even Frank’s parents. Then she and Susan quietly left. As they were leaving, Susan promised me Vera would not attend the funeral and thanked me for being so understanding.
    “How that guy managed to get two such wonderful women, I’ll never know,” she said. It broke my heart a little to realize that even in his new life, he wasn’t fooling anyone but the woman who loved him.
    Once I was alone I did what I had managed to avoid all night. I went to the casket and saw Frank’s body lying there. It didn’t look like him. They never do. His chin was pushed into his chest, making him look far heavier than he actually was. His normally tousled hair was swept back and gelled, and he was wearing a suit. His parents must have bought it, since Frank didn’t own a suit. It looked expensive and serious, the kind a prosperous banker might wear. In death his parents finally got the control over Frank’s image they’d always wanted.
    I knelt at the casket and started a prayer, but I didn’t know what to pray for. Finally I gave up.
    “I hate you,” I said to Frank. “I just thought you should know that.”
    He didn’t answer, which wasn’t entirely unexpected.
    “Your girlfriend wasn’t what I pictured. Well, she is a little wacky but she’d have to be to fall in love with you. I would know.”
    I smiled, wanting to make it clear to him, to what was left of him, that I was only kidding. I wanted to touch his hand, but I couldn’t work up the nerve.
    “This is so stupid. I don’t know what you did to put yourself here. I don’t even want to think what you’ve been doing that strained your heart so much.”
    I wanted to shake him or hit him, somehow wake him up. But I just knelt there and stared at his waxy face.
    “Now your life is just one more thing you’ve left