Notorious Nineteen

“Cubbin hasn’t been missing all that long. If they buried him here the ground would still be freshly disturbed. You look on one side and I’ll look on the other.”
    After a couple minutes Lula called out that she’d found some freshly dug dirt.
    “Me too,” I said. “I have two potential grave sites here.”
    “How’re we going to know which one of these is Cubbin?” Lula asked.
    “I guess we have to dig them all up.”
    “Nuh-uh. Lula doesn’t dig up dead people. You get cootieslike that. And they don’t like being disturbed. They get pissy and put the whammy on you. You don’t want to do it either. You get in enough trouble all on your own. You can’t afford to have the whammy.”
    “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 wasoff 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