A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [106]
Stratton had arrived in San Francisco with a simple strategy: geography. He could think of no other logical way to go at it. He had booked a flight to Miami where he had planned to begin the search, moving north, following his death list.
Molly Friedman had been first. A death notice published in the Fort Lauderdale News had announced that Molly was at rest at the Temple of David Mausoleum in Hallandale. A brief memorial service had been held four days after her sudden death in Peking. Rabbi Goren had kindly presided.
Stratton had found his way from the newspaper offices to the Temple of David. Bearing a small parcel of flowers from a Moonie working the stoplights on Federal Highway, he had been greeted at the door by a small balding man dressed in a dark wool suit. “Molly Friedman, please,” Stratton had whispered, and the greeter had led him down a chilly hallway with high granite walls. They had entered a huge vault bathed in purplish light that filtered from stained-glass panels set high in a rectangular ceiling.
The balding man had consulted a small, leatherbound directory. Then he had taken ten steps forward and pointed high up the wall. “There,” he had whispered. “G-one-two-oh.”
Stratton had squinted to see the name. Molly Friedman’s remains lay seven rows up, on a granite ledge—in an urn. A Chinese urn.
“Your flowers,” the greeter had whispered. “We can arrange them.”
“That will be just fine,” Stratton had said. Two hours later he had been on a plane to St. Petersburg.
And now the trail was red hot. Stratton rocked the chair, gripping the cheap desk by its corners. He was jittery, restive. How easily all the old hunting instincts had returned. He envisioned the icy-eyed old Chinese prowling a foreign graveyard, a remorseless night bandit. Why not go to New York tonight? Stratton thought. The grave of John Bertecelli waited. He could end it there.
Stratton thought of the old caretaker with the lawn mower at the St. Petersburg cemetery. He thought of the stinking garbage on the graves, the bloody swastikas, the vulgar poem—all doubtlessly the work of Harold Broom, relishing his role as a teenage vandal. If Wang Bin was a man to be feared, Broom clearly was a man to be hated. And not to be taken for granted. What if the despoliation was a double-blind, a misdirection on the off chance someone was following them? Unlikely, but …
Stratton resolved not to leave St. Petersburg without seeing the evidence with his own eyes, erasing what little doubt remained. He would do the work swiftly and neatly, leaving no clues.
He changed into jeans and a black T-shirt, and tied on a pair of Puma jogging shoes. At an Army-Navy store a few blocks from the motel, Stratton purchased a heavy-duty flashlight and a portable screw-down shovel. At midnight, he headed for the graveyard near the bay.
Stratton parked in a municipal lot not far from the gate. Carrying a shovel under one arm, he melted into a stand of pines and scouted the cemetery on foot. The caretaker had mentioned a security guard; Stratton found him in a matter of minutes. He was sitting in a compact car, reading a magazine by the dome light—a silver-haired black man, wearing the usual rent-a-cop uniform.
Stratton crossed behind the guard’s car, running low to the ground. He chose a path through the trees and scrub and purposely stayed clear of the water, which shimmered revealingly with the lights of Tampa. After about a hundred yards, Stratton flicked on the flashlight.
The caretaker had worked earnestly to clean up Broom’s foul mess. The trash was gone, and most of the glass had been swept up. The old man had scrubbed the Melmans’ grave marker until only a shadow of the swastika was visible. He had obviously devoted equal energy to the stone of Sarah Rose Steinway, although the orange crayon had proved stubborn. The Nazi emblem had become a permanent greasy smudge between the “Sarah” and the