The Baby Blue Rip-Off by Max Allan Collins Page A

sleep.
    I walked to the top of the stairs, where I found Debbie standing in the doorway, her face ashen. But she said nothing.
    We spent a quiet evening listening to old records that had been popular when we were in school, and when we talked, it wasn’t about Pat, but about old times and old friends, and sometimes about her daughter Cindy. We slept on the couch under a light blanket that protected us from the chugging air conditioner; it was cramped there on the couch, but Debbie was small and we made a nice fit, and neither one of us felt like sleeping in their bed—Pat’s and hers—though it never came up in conversation.

16
    It wasn’t a good day for a funeral.
    The morning sky was as clear and blue as the surface of a quiet lake. The sun was a cheerful yellow ball. A cooling breeze rolled in off the trees surrounding the cemetery. In those same trees, birds were chirping pleasantly, almost disrespectfully. By all rights it should’ve been miserable. Overcast. Maybe raining. But it wasn’t. It was beautiful. Not a good day for a funeral at all.
    Which was okay, because Edward Jonsen had decided against it, anyway. Having a funeral for his mother, that is. He’d had no crystal ball to predict this nonfunereal day; he had just decided to spare all expense.
    So there had been no funeral. The paper last night had said, “Graveside services” in lieu of anything else, and here I now was, watching Mrs. Jonsen get planted in the earth, a cold seed not expected to grow. The final resting place for Edward Jonsen’s mother was the family plot, next to her long-gone husband Elwood; her half of the stone had been inscribed years ago, with only the death date freshly chiseled in, unweathered. The casket was a black metallic thing, hardly lavish, but at least it wasn’t a pine box. The service consisted of three minutes of mumbling from some clergyman acquaintance of Jonsen’s.
    There were, however, lots of flowers crowded around the graveside, and lots of friends, too: over twenty of them huddledaround the hole, looking irritated at the son’s lack of respect for his mother and her death. Most were elderly, peers of Mrs. Jonsen who had made a real effort to come out here, suffering the inconvenience out of a desire to say good-bye to a friend.
    Next to Jonsen was an attractive woman of about forty who resembled Mrs. Jonsen a great deal. I took her to be Jonsen’s sister. She was a dark-eyed brunette and was dressed in black, of course, but with no hat and veil, and looked vaguely irritated herself. Whether with Edward Jonsen or just who, I didn’t know.
    I was soon to find out.
    Directly after the mumble-mouth minister dismissed the disgruntled flock, she approached me. “Are you Mr. Mallory?”
    “I’m Mallory, yes,” I said, apprehensive. After all, her brother had pulled a gun on me just the day before.
    “I’m Ann Bloom. Ann Jonsen Bloom. Edward is my brother, and....” She glanced over at the open grave. “... that sweet woman was my mother. Could I have a word with you?”
    “Sure.”
    We walked over to a clump of trees. Edward, in a tentlike gray suit, was standing alone by the graveside. Only one or two people had stopped to speak a word of consolation to him; the others were evidently bitter about what they considered to be his hasty and thoughtless farewell to his mother. Now he was staring at us, his sister and me, clenching and unclenching his fists, obviously wishing he could hear our conversation, and also obviously resenting that conversation.
    Ann Jonsen Bloom said, “Forgive my brother. He’s the product of too much pampering... the self-centered baby of our family. One of these moments he’ll realize he’s lost the only person in the world who cared about him, and it’ll hurt him.Right now all that is on his mind is the money he’s lost because of the robbery.”
    She paused and gave me a chance to say something, but I had nothing to say. She said, “Edward’s prime concern is money.