The Recycled Citizen Read Free Page B

middle. Max checked to make sure his impending offspring was in no danger of being squashed, then took his place behind the wheel. Theonia sat in back with Brooks on her right and Jem on her left, like a hybrid tea rose between two Boston baked beans.
    All but Dolph lived on Beacon Hill. Jem shared a memento-filled flat on Pinckney Street with his long-suffering henchman, Egbert. Brooks and Theonia were at present managing the historic brownstone on Tulip Street that Sarah had inherited from her first husband, Alexander Kelling, and then had turned into a remarkably high-toned boardinghouse. Sarah herself had retreated with Max to a small apartment next door while waiting for their new house at Ireson’s Landing to be finished.
    At this time of night it was about a twenty-minute run from Chestnut Hill. Max made it in fifteen. “I’ll drop the rest of you at the boardinghouse and get Sarah up to bed before Dolph and I go on to the morgue, if that’s okay.”
    “I don’t want to go to bed,” Sarah protested.
    “Then stay with us till Max gets back. Mothers-to-be must be humored,” said Theonia.
    Theonia herself had never been a mother, but she had a way of investing her pronouncements with an authority it would have seemed folly to question. She might have acquired the knack during her earlier career as a tea-leaf reader, but anyway, Max yielded. Sarah went into the house with the rest and accepted a glass of hot milk in deference to her delicate condition. Jem asked for black coffee. Brooks and Theonia drank something called Snoozybye Tea, and thus it was that Max found them when he got back from his direful errand.
    “It was Arthur, all right,” he told them. “Dolph’s pretty cut up. This is the first violent death they’ve had among the SCRC members, and he’s blaming himself. He thinks it wouldn’t have happened if he’d got that warehouse remodeled sooner.”
    “Poor Dolph,” said Sarah. “Mary’s right about him, you know. Where is he now?”
    “I ran him back to Chestnut Hill. We weren’t long at the morgue. There was nothing to stay for. Dolph promised to send an undertaker around in the morning, and they presented us with Arthur’s personal effects.”
    He held up a worn and ripped brown paper shopping bag with SCRC stamped in big green letters on one side. “This is it, except for the membership card in his pocket and the clothes on his back. He’d been bit over the head from behind with a tire iron, which was left at the scene. Dolph thinks he might have had a little money on him. Arthur was a conscientious collector and came in with a bunch of bottles and cans to be redeemed every day. The cops who picked him up said there were maybe a dozen empty soft-drink cans scattered around the body, presumably from the torn bag.”
    “Died with his boots on, eh?” said Brooks. “I suppose there might be worse ways for a person in his situation to go. Will there be a funeral?”
    “Oh yes, it’s a perquisite of membership. The members are all elderly, you know, so they lose one to Father Time every so often, and they always make a point of giving them a decent send-off. Dolph says it was Mary’s idea. Maybe it doesn’t help the dead person much, but it makes the rest feel better. They go to a community church nearby, one of their members who used to be janitor in a church or something conducts a nonsectarian service, then they troop back to the center for coffee and cake.”
    “How perceptive of dear Mary,” said Theonia softly, “letting those dear people know they’ll be decently cared for even after they’re gone. Brooks darling, do you think I ought to bake something?”
    “Why don’t you check with Mary in the morning, my dear? She’ll know better than I. Max, can I offer you something? Tea? Brandy?”
    “Brandy, if you don’t mind. I could use it.” Max was fiddling with the tattered shopping bag. “Poor bugger. Hadn’t a damn thing but this, and some son of a bitch