Janet Evanovich - Notorious Nineteen

“If I go to the police it’ll take forever. They’ll have to get special permission and court orders and grave diggers. And I need the money. I just ran my credit card over my limit sending Tiki back to Hawaii.”

“What we need is our own grave digger,” Lula said.

“And I know just such a person.”

“You’re thinking about Simon Diggery,” Lula said. “I’d rather dig the grave myself than have dealings with Diggery. Last time we went to his crap-ass trailer you opened a closet door and a twenty-foot snake fell out.”

Simon Diggery was a wiry little guy in his fifties. His brown hair was shot with gray and usually tied back in a ponytail. His skin was like old cracked leather and he had arms like Popeye’s. He lived in a raggedy double-wide in Bordentown with his wife, his six kids, his brother Melvin, Melvin’s pet python, and their Uncle Bill. They were like a bunch of feral cats living in the woods, and Simon Diggery was Trenton’s premier grave robber.

“I have a shovel in the trunk,” I said. “We could start digging.”

“Okay,” Lula said. “I was bluffing. Let’s go talk to Diggery.”

I was bluffing too. I didn’t have a shovel in the trunk.

It took almost forty minutes to find Diggery’s trailer. It was off Route 206, down a winding two-lane road filled with potholes. The rusted-out cankerous trailer was up on cinderblocks and held together with duct tape.

I knocked on the door and Lula stayed about ten feet behind me with her gun drawn.

“Put the gun away,” I said. “You’ll scare him.”

“What if the snake attacks us? That snake could eat you in one gulp. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s the King Kong of snakes.”

Diggery opened the door and squinted out at me. “I didn’t do it,” he said.

“What didn’t you do?” I asked him.

“Whatever it is you’re gonna arrest me for.”

“I’m not going to arrest you. I want to hire you.”

“You mean a job?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t need a job. I get food stamps.”

“What about the snake? Can you get snake food with food stamps?”

“We just let him loose under the trailer to catch rats. We got enough rats to feed a whole pack of pythons.”

“I’m outta here,” Lula said. “I heard that and I’m not staying around with no snakes and rats. I got peep-toed shoes on and my big toe could look like a snack.”

“It could be fun,” I said to Diggery. “I know where there are some unrecorded graves.”

“Unrecorded graves? It’s hard to find them these days. Mostly you have to go to the landfill in Camden. I might be interested in some unrecorded graves.”

“Terrific. Grab a shovel and let’s go.”

“Hey, Melvin,” Simon Diggery yelled into the dark trailer. “We got some unrecorded graves to dig. Put your pants on and let’s go.”

Simon and Melvin followed us in a pickup that was in worse shape than their trailer. It was eaten up with cancerous rot, spewing black smoke, its tailgate held on with clothesline.

“It’s never gonna make Route 1,” Lula said. “I think I just saw the muffler fall off.”

I was praying that the truck would hold together long enough to get to the cemetery because I really didn’t want to put Melvin and Simon in the Buick.

We turned in to Sunshine Memorial Park and the truck was down to fifteen miles per hour, lurching and belching fire from the undercarriage. We made it to the unmarked graves, the truck gasped to a shuddering stop, and Simon and Melvin jumped out and got shovels. All excited. Ready to go.

“Jeez,” I said. “Sorry about your truck.”

“What about it?” Simon said.

“It sounded like there might be a mechanical problem.”

“It’s just tempermental,” Simon said. “It gets ornery when we go a distance. Where’s these graves you were talking about?”

“There are three of them in this area. Two on this side of the road and one on the other.” I showed him my file picture of Geoffrey Cubbin. “I’m looking for this guy. If you find him he’s mine, but I’ll give you his jewelry if he has any. The others are all yours.”

“Sounds fair,” Simon said. “Let’s get to work.”

“We’re going to hell for this,” Lula said. “This here’s sacrilegious or something. I’m pretty sure it’s a sin.”

Thirty minutes into the dig Simon yelled out that he’d found something.

“I think this might be your man,” he said. “Come take a look.”

“I’m not looking,” Lula said. “I get nightmares about these things. I get chased by boogeymen all the time. Sometimes they look like people I know.”

I walked over and forced myself to look beyond the pile of dirt Simon had accumulated. I caught a glimpse of a black body bag partially unzipped, and what was in the bag wasn’t in perfect shape.

“He’s still pretty good,” Simon said. “I’ve seen a lot worse. Sure he’s a little wormy and all, but you could see he’s got the right color hair. Some of that’s left. And I took a ring off him that had his initials on.”

“Good enough for me,” I said. “Zip him up and get him in my car.”

Simon and Melvin lugged the body bag to the Buick and shoved it into the trunk.

“He don’t all fit,” Simon said. “He’s not at that stage yet where he bends easy. Problem is as you can see he’s a little gassed up.”

“Maybe I could borrow your clothesline to hold the lid down,” I said to Simon.

Simon took the clothesline off his tailgate, the tailgate fell onto the road, and he picked it up and tossed it into the back of his truck.

Simon and Melvin tied the lid of my trunk to the bumper so Geoffrey Cubbin wouldn’t slide out onto the highway, and we were good to go. I gave Simon and Melvin each a twenty and they thanked me profusely and went back to digging.

“I have to say I admire your determination to get the job done,” Lula said when we were back on Route 1. “I’m freaked out about it all, but I gotta hand it to you, you got guts.”

“Hey,” I said. “No guts, no glory.”

“That’s so true,” Lula said. “I say that all the time. That’s practically my motto.”

I turned off Route 1 onto Olden and slowed down. “Keep your eye on Geoffrey in case he bounces out when we go over the railway tracks,” I said to Lula.

“He seems like he’s okay,” Lula said. “I think a lady just run her car up on a curb looking at him, but he’s holding tight.”

I swung into the police lot and parked near the back entrance. Lula and I ran around to the back of the Buick, untied the clothesline, and lugged Cubbin in to the docket lieutenant.

“Geoffrey Cubbin,” I said, setting him on the floor. I pulled my documentation out of my messenger bag and presented it. “I need a body receipt.”

There were a bunch of cops, keeping their distance, gawking at us.

“Lady, that smells really bad,” one of them said.

“He’s a little gassy,” I told him.

“Yeah, and we can all relate to that,” Lula said.

“How am I supposed to know it’s Cubbin?” the lieutenant at the desk asked.

“Some of his hair is left,” I said. “And he’s got most of his teeth. You can identify him by his teeth.”

Clumps of dirt were still clinging to the body bag, falling off onto the floor.

The lieutenant grimaced. “What did you do, dig him up?”

“Of course not,” I said. “That would be illegal, right?”

“Right,” the lieutenant said.

“We found him on the side of the road,” Lula said. “We was driving along and we saw this body bag and stopped to investigate and lo and behold we realized it was Geoffrey Cubbin. He must have fallen off a truck or something.”