" "Is he dead, Doc?" George said.
" "Oh gorry, he"s been dead at least four hours and probably six or more," Doc says. (It was right about then that I came pulling in and parked my Chevy beside George"s Ford.) "He"s as stiff as a board. Rigor mortis."
" "So you think he"s been here since...what? Midnight?" George asks.
" "He coulda been here since last Labor Day, for all I know," Doc says, "but the only thing I"m absolutely sure of is that he"s been dead since two this morning. Because of the rigor. Probably he"s been dead since midnight, but I"m no expert in stuff like that. If the wind was coming in stiff from offsh.o.r.e, that could have changed when the rigor set in-"
" "No wind at all last night," I says, joining them. "Calm as the inside of a churchbell."
" "Well lookit here, another d.a.m.n country heard from," says Doc Robinson. "Maybe you"d like to p.r.o.nounce the time of death yourself, Jimmy Olson."
" "No," I says, "I"ll leave that to you."
" "I think I"ll leave it to the County Medical Examiner," he says. "Cathcart, over in Tinnock. The state pays him an extra eleven grand a year for educated gut-tossin. Not enough, in my humble opinion, but each to his own. I"m just a GP. But...ayuh, this fella was dead by two, I"ll say that much. Dead by the time the moon went down."
"Then for maybe a minute the three of us just stood there, looking down on him like mourners. A minute can be an awful short s.p.a.ce of time under some circ.u.mstances, but it can be an awful long one at a time like that. I remember the sound of the wind-still light, but starting to build in a little from the east. When it comes that way and you"re on the mainland side of the island, it makes such a lonely sound-"
"I know, Stephanie said quietly. "It kind of hoots."
They nodded. That in the winter it was sometimes a terrible sound, almost the cry of a bereft woman, was a thing she did not know, and there was no reason to tell her.
"At last-I think it was just for something to say-George asked Doc to take a guess as to how old the fella might be.
" "I"d put him right around forty, give or take five years," he says. "Do you think so, Vincent?" And I nodded. Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it"s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It"s a man"s most anonymous age.
"Then the Doc seen something that interested him. He went down on one knee (which wasn"t easy for a man of his size, he had to"ve gone two-eighty and didn"t stand but five-foot-ten or so) and picked up the dead man"s right hand, the one that"d been lying on the beach. The fingers were curled a little, as if he"d died trying to make them into a tube he could look through. When Doc held the hand up, we could see some grit stuck to the insides of the fingers and a little more dusted on the palm.
" "What do you see?" George asks. "Doesn"t look like anything but beach-sand to me."
" "That"s all it is, but why"s it sticking?" Doc Robinson asks back. "This litter basket and all the others are planted well above the high-tide line, as anyone with half a brain would know, and there was no rain last night. Sand"s dry as a bone. Also, look."
"He picked up the dead man"s left hand. We all observed that he was wearing a wedding ring, and also that there was no sand on his fingers or palm. Doc put that hand back down and picked up the other one again. He tipped it a little so the light shone better on the inside. "There," he says. "Do you see?"
" "What is that?" I ask. "Grease? A little bit of grease?"
"He smiled and said, "I think you win the teddy bear, Vincent. And see how his hand is curled?"
" "Yuh-like he was playin spygla.s.s," George says. By then we was all three on our knees, as if that litter basket was an altar and we were tryin to pray the dead guy back to life.
" "No, I don"t think he was playing spygla.s.s," Doc says, and I realized somethin, Steffi-he was excited in the way people only are when they"ve figured something out they know the likes of them have no business figuring out in the ordinary course of things. He looked into the dead man"s face (at least I thought it was his face Doc was lookin at, but it turned out to be a little lower than that), then back at the curled right hand. "I don"t think so at all," he says.
" "Then what?" George says. "I want to get this reported to the State Police and the Attorney General"s Office, Chris. What I don"t want is to spend the mornin on my knees while you play Ellery Queen."
" "See the way his thumb is almost touching his first finger and middle finger?" Doc asks us, and of course we did. "If this guy had died looking through his rolled-up hand, his thumb would have been over his fingers, touching his middle finger and his third finger. Try it yourself, if you don"t believe me."
"I tried it, and I"ll be d.a.m.ned if he wasn"t right.
" "This isn"t a tube," Doc says, once again touching the dead man"s stiff right hand with his own finger. "This is a pincers. Combine that with the grease and those little bits of sand on the palm and the insides of the fingers, and what do you get?"
"I knew, but since George was the law, I let him say it. "If he was eatin somethin when he died," he says, "where the h.e.l.l is it?"
"Doc pointed to the dead man"s neck-which even Nancy Arnault had noticed, and thought of as puffy-and he says, "I"ve got an idea that most of it"s still right in there where he choked on it. Hand me my bag, Vincent."
"I handed it over. He tried rummaging through it and found he could only do it one-handed and still keep all that meat balanced on his knees: he was a big man, all right, and he needed to keep at least one hand on the ground to keep himself from tipping over. So he hands the bag over to me and says, "I"ve got two otoscopes in there, Vincent-which is to say my little examination lights. There"s my everyday and a spare that looks brand-new. We"re going to want both of them."
" "Now, now, I don"t know about this," George says. "I thought we were gonna leave all this for Cathcart, on the mainland. He"s the guy the state hired for work like this."
" "I"ll take the responsibility," Doc Robinson said. "Curiosity killed the cat, you know, but satisfaction brought him back snap-a.s.s happy. You got me out here in the cold and damp without my morning tea or even a slice of toast, and I intend to have a little satisfaction if I can. Maybe I won"t be able to. But I have a feeling...Vincent, you take this one. George, you take the new one, and don"t drop it in the sand, please and thank you, that"s a two hundred-dollar item. Now, I haven"t been down on all fours like a little kid playin horsie since I was I"m gonna say seven years old, and if I have to hold the position long I"m apt to fall on top of this fella, so you guys be quick and do just what I say. Have you ever seen how the folks in an art museum will train a couple of pin-spots on a small painting to make it look all bright and pretty?"
"George hadn"t, so Doc Robinson explained. When he was done (and was sure George Wournos got it), the island"s newspaper editor knelt on one side of that sittin-up corpse and the island"s constable knelt on the other, each of us with one of the Doc"s little barrel-lights in hand. Only instead of lighting up a work of art, we were going to light up the dead man"s throat so Doc could take a look.
"He got himself into position with a fair amount of gruntin and puffing-woulda been funny if the circ.u.mstances hadn"t been so strange, and if I hadn"t been sort of afraid the man was going to have a heart-attack right there-and then he reached out one hand, slipped it into the guy"s mouth, and hooked down his jaw like it was a hinge. Which, accourse, when you think about it, is just what it is.
" "Now," he says. "Get in close, boys. I don"t think he"s gonna bite, but if I"m wrong, I"ll be the one who pays for the mistake."
"We got in close and shone the lights down the dead man"s gullet. It was just red and black in there, except for his tongue, which was pink. I could hear the Doc puffin and grunting and he says, not to us but to himself, "A little more," and he pulled down the lower jaw a little further. Then, to us, "Lift em up, shine em straight down his gullet," and we did the best we could. It changed the direction of the light just enough to take the pink off the dead man"s tongue and put it on that hanging thing at the back of his mouth, the what-do-you-call it-"
"Uvula," Stephanie and Dave said at the same time.
Vince nodded. "Ayuh, that. And just beyond it, I could see somethin, or the top of somethin, that was a dark gray. It was only for two or three seconds, but it was enough to satisfy Doc Robinson. He took his fingers out of the dead man"s mouth-the lower lip made a kind of plopping sound as it went back against the gum, but the jaw stayed down pretty much where it was-and then he sat back, puffing away six licks to the dozen.
" "You boys are going to have to help me stand up," he says when he got enough wind so he could talk. "Both my legs are asleep from the knees on down. d.a.m.n, but I"m a fool to weigh this much."
" "I"ll help you up when you tell me," George says. "Did you see anything? Because I didn"t see anything. What about you, Vincent?"
" "I thought I did," I says. The truth is I knew friggin well I did-pardon, Steff-but I didn"t want to show him up.
" "Ayuh, it"s back there, all right," Doc says. He still sounded out of breath, but he sounded satisfied, too, like a man who"s scratched a troublesome itch. "Cathcart"ll get it out and then we"ll know if it"s a piece of steak or a piece of pork or a piece of something else, but I don"t see that it matters. We know what matters-he came out here with a piece of meat in his hand and sat down to eat it while he watched the moonlight on the reach. Propped his back up against this litter basket. And choked, just like the little Indian in the nursery rhyme. On the last bite of what he brought to snack on? Maybe, but not necessarily."
" "Once he was dead, a gull could have swooped in and taken what was left right out of his hand," George says. "Just left the grease."
" "Correct," Doc says. "Now are you two gonna help me up, or do I have to crawl back over to George"s car and pull myself up by the doorhandle?" "
8.
"So what do you think, Steffi?" Vince asked, taking a throat-cooling swallow of his c.o.ke. "Mystery solved? Case closed?"
"Not on your granny!" she cried, and barely registered their appreciative laughter. Her eyes were sparkling. "The cause-of-death part, maybe, but...what was it, by the way? In his throat? Or would that be getting ahead of the story?"
"Darlin, you can"t get ahead of a story that doesn"t exist," Vince said, and his eyes were also sparkling. "Ask ahead, behind, or sideways. I"ll answer anything. Same with Dave, I imagine."
As if to prove this was indeed so, The Weekly Islander"s managing editor, said: "It was a piece of beef, probably steak, and very likely from one of your better cuts-your tenderloin, sirloin, or filet mignon. It was cooked medium-rare, and asphyxiation due to choking was what went on the death certificate, although the man we have always called the Colorado Kid also had suffered a ma.s.sive cerebral embolism-your stroke, in other words. Cathcart decided the choking led to the stroking, but who knows, it might have been vicey-versa. So you see, even the cause of death gets slippery when you look at it right up close."
"There"s at least one story in here-a little one-and I"m going to tell it to you now," Vince said. "It"s about a fella who was in some ways like you, Stephanie, although I like to think you fell into better hands when it came to putting the final polish on your education; more compa.s.sionate ones, too. This fella was young-twenty-three, I think-and like you he was from away (the south in his case rather than the Midwest), and he was also doing graduate work, in the field of forensic science."
"So he was working with this Dr. Cathcart, and he figured something out."
Vince grinned. "Logical enough guess, dear, but you"re wrong about who he was workin with. His name...what was his name, Dave?"
Dave Bowie, whose memory for names was as deadly as Annie Oakley"s aim with her rifle, didn"t hesitate. "Devane. Paul Devane."
"That"s right, I recall it now you say it. This young man, Devane, was a.s.signed to three months of postgraduate field work with a couple of State Police detectives out of the Attorney General"s office. Only in his case, sentenced might be the better word. They treated him very badly." Vince"s eyes darkened. "Older people who use young people badly when all the young people want is to learn-I think folks like that should be put out of their jobs. All too often, though, they get promotions instead of pink-slips. It has never surprised me that G.o.d gave the world a little tilt at the same time He set it spinning; so much that goes on here mimics that tilt.
"This young man, this Devane, spent four years at some place like Georgetown University, wanting to learn the sort of science that catches crooks, and right around the time he was coming to bud the luck of the draw sent him to work with a couple of doughnut-eating detectives who turned him into little more than a gofer, running files between Augusta and Waterville and shooing lookie-loos away from car-crash scenes. Oh, maybe once in awhile he got to measure a footprint or take flash photos of a tire-print as a reward. But rarely, I sh"d say. Rarely.
"In any case, Steffi, these two fine specimens of detection-and I hope to G.o.d they"re long out to pasture-happened to be in Tinnock Village at the same time the body of the Colorado Kid turned up on Hammock Beach. They were investigating an apartment-house fire "of suspicious origin," as we say when reporting such things in the paper, and they had their pet boy, who was by then losing his idealism, with them.
"If he"d drawn a couple of the good detectives working out of the A.G."s office-and I"ve met my share in spite of the G.o.ddam bureaucracy that makes so many problems in this state"s law enforcement system-or if his Department of Forensic Studies had sent him to some other state that accepts students, he might have ended up one of the fellas you see on that CSI show-"
"I like that show," Dave said. "Much more realistic than Murder, She Wrote. Who"s ready for a m.u.f.fin? There"s some in the pantry."
It turned out they all were, and story-time was suspended until Dave brought them back, along with a roll of paper towels. When each of them had a Labree"s squash m.u.f.fin and a paper towel to catch the crumbs, Vince told Dave to take up the tale. "Because," he said, "I"m getting preachy and apt to keep us here until dark."
"I thought you was doin good," Dave said.
Vince clapped a bony hand to his even bonier chest. "Call 911, Steffi, my heart just stopped."
"That won"t be so funny when it really happens, old-timer," Dave said.
"Lookit him spray those crumbs," Vince said. "You drool at one end of your life and dribble at t"other, my Ma used to say. Go on, Dave, tell on, but do us all a favor and swallow, first."
Dave did, and followed the swallow with a big gulp of c.o.ke to wash everything down. Stephanie hoped her own digestive system would be up to such challenges when she reached David Bowie"s age.
"Well," he said, "George didn"t bother cordoning off the beach, because that just would have drawn folks like flies to a cowpie, don"tcha know, but that didn"t stop those two dummies from the Attorney General"s office from doin it. I asked one of em why they bothered, and he looked at me like I was a stark raving natural-born fool. "Well, it"s a crime scene, ain"t it?" he says.
" "Maybe so and maybe no," I says, "but once the body"s gone, what evidence do you think you"re gonna have that the wind hasn"t blown away?" Because by then that easterly had gotten up awful fresh. But they insisted, and I will admit it made a nice picture on the front page of the paper, didn"t it, Vince?"
"Ayuh, picture with tape reading crime scene in it always sells copies," Vince agreed. Half of his m.u.f.fin had already disappeared, and there were no crumbs Stephanie could see on his paper towel.
Dave said, "Devane was there while the Medical Examiner, Cathcart, got a look at the body: the hand with the sand on it, the hand with none, and then into the mouth, but right around the time the Tinnock Funeral Home hea.r.s.e that had come over on the nine o"clock ferry pulled up, those two detectives realized he was still there and might be getting somethin perilously close to an education. They couldn"t have that, so they sent him to get coffee and doughnuts and danishes for them and Cathcart and Cathcart"s a.s.sistant and the two funeral home boys who"d just shown up.
"Devane didn"t have any idea of where to go, and by then I was on the wrong side of the tape they"d strung, so I took him down to Jenny"s Bakery myself. It took half an hour, maybe a little more, most of it spent ridin, and I got a pretty good idea of how the land lay with that young man, although I give him all points for discretion; he never told a single tale out of school, simply said he wasn"t learning as much as he"d hoped to, and seeing the kind of errand he"d been sent on while Cathcart was doing his in situ examination, I could connect the dots.
"And when we got back the examination was over. The body had already been zipped away in a body-bag. That didn"t stop one of those detectives-a big, beefy guy named O"Shanny-from giving Devane the rough side of his tongue. "What took you so long, we"re freezin our b.u.t.ts off out here," on and on, yatta-yatta-yatta.
"Devane stood up to it well-never complain, never explain, someone surely raised him right, I have to say-so I stepped in and said we"d gone and come back as fast as anyone could. I said, "You wouldn"t have wanted us to break any speed laws, now would you, officers?" Hoping to get a little laugh and kind of lighten the situation, you know. Didn"t work, though. The other detective-his name was Morrison-said, "Who asked you, Irving? Haven"t you got a yard sale to cover, or something?" His partner got a laugh out of that one, at least, but the young man who was supposed to be learning forensic science and was instead learning that O"Shanny liked white coffee and Morrison took his black, blushed all the way down to his collar.
"Now, Steffi, a man doesn"t get to the age I was even then without getting his a.s.s kicked a number of times by fools with a little authority, but I felt terrible for Devane, who was embarra.s.sed not only on his own account but on mine, as well. I could see him looking for some way to apologize to me, but before he could find it (or before I could tell him it wasn"t necessary, since it wasn"t him that had done anything wrong), O"Shanny took the tray of coffees and handed it to Morrison, then the two sacks of pastries from me. After that he told Devane to duck under the tape and take the evidence bag with the dead man"s personal effects in it. "You sign the Possession Slip," he says to Devane, like he was talking to a five-year-old, "and you make sure n.o.body else so much as touches it until I take it back from you. And keep your nose out of the stuff inside yourself. Have you got all that?"
" "Yes, sir," Devane says, and he gives me a little smile. I watched him take the evidence bag, which actually looked like the sort of accordion-folder you see in some offices, from Dr. Cathcart"s a.s.sistant. I saw him slide the Possession Slip out of the see-through envelope on the front, and...do you understand what that slip"s for, Steffi?"
"I think I do," she said. "Isn"t it so that if there"s a criminal prosecution, and something found at the crime scene is used as evidence in that prosecution, the State can show an uncorrupted chain of possession from where that thing was found to where it finally ended up in some courtroom as Exhibit A?"
"Prettily put," Vince said. "You should be a writer."
"Very amusing," Stephanie said.
"Yes, ma"am, that"s our Vincent, a regular Oscar Wilde," Dave said. "At least when he"s not bein Oscar the Grouch. Anyway, I saw young Mr. Devane sign his name to the Possession Slip, and I saw him put it back into the sleeve on the front of the evidence bag. Then I saw him turn to watch those strongboys load the body into the funeral hack. Vince had already come back here to start writin his story, and that was when I left, too, telling the people who asked me questions-quite a few had gathered by then, drawn by that stupid yellow tape like ants to spilled sugar-that they could read all about it for just a quarter, which is what the Islander went for in those days.
"Anyway, that was the last time I actually saw Paul Devane, standing there and watchin those two wide-bodies load the dead man into the hea.r.s.e. But I happen to know Devane disobeyed O"Shanny"s order not to look in the evidence bag, because he called me at the Islander about sixteen months later. By then he"d given up his forensic science dream and gone back to school to become a lawyer. Good or bad, that particular course correction"s down to A.G. Detectives O"Shanny and Morrison, but it was still Paul Devane who turned the Hammock Beach John Doe into the Colorado Kid, and eventually made it possible for the police to identify him."
"And we got the scoop," Vince said. "In large part because Dave Bowie here bought that young man a doughnut and gave him what money can"t buy: an understanding ear and a little sympathy."
"Oh, that"s layin it on a little thick," Dave said, shifting around in his seat. "I wa"nt with him more than thirty minutes. Maybe three-quarters of an hour if you want to add in the time we stood in line at the bakery."
"Sometimes maybe that"s enough," Stephanie said.
Dave said, "Ayuh, sometimes maybe it is, and what"s so wrong about that? How long do you think it takes a man to choke to death on a piece of meat, and then be dead forever?"
None of them had an answer to that. On the reach, some rich summer man"s yacht tooted with hollow self-importance as it approached the Tinnock town dock.
9.
"Let Paul Devane alone awhile," Vince said. "Dave can tell you the rest of that part in a few minutes. I think maybe I ought to tell you about the gut-tossing first."
"Ayuh," Dave said. "It ain"t a story, Steff, but that part"d probably come next if it was."
Vince said, "Don"t get the idea that Cathcart did the autopsy right away, because he didn"t. There"d been two people killed in the apartment house fire that brought O"Shanny and Morrison to our neck of the woods to begin with, and they came first. Not just because they died first, but because they were murder victims and John Doe looked like being just an accident victim. By the time Cathcart did get to John Doe, the detectives were gone back to Augusta, and good riddance to them.
"I was there for that autopsy when it finally happened, because I was the closest thing there was to a professional photographer in the area back in those days, and they wanted a "sleeping ID" of the guy. That"s a European term, and all it means is a kind of portrait shot presentable enough to go into the newspapers. It"s supposed to make the corpse look like he"s actually snoozin."
Stephanie looked both interested and appalled. "Does it work?"
"No," Vince said. Then: "Well...p"raps to a kid. Or if you was to look at it quick, and with one eye winked shut. This one had to be done before the autopsy, because Cathcart thought maybe, with the throat blockage and all, he might have to stretch the lower jaw too far."
"And you didn"t think it would look quite so much like he was sleeping if he had a belt tied around his chin to keep his mouth shut?" Stephanie asked, smiling in spite of herself. It was awful that such a thing should be funny, but it was funny; some appalling creature in her mind insisted on popping up one sicko cartoon image after another.
"Nope, probably not," Vince agreed, and he was also smiling. Dave, too. So if she was sick, she wasn"t the only one. Thank G.o.d. "What such a thing"d look like, I think, would be a corpse with a toothache."
Then they were all laughing. Stephanie thought that she loved these two old buzzards, she really did.
"Got to laugh at the Reaper," Vince said, plucking his gla.s.s of c.o.ke off the railing. He helped himself to a sip, then put it back. "Especially when you"re my age. I sense that b.u.g.g.e.r behind every door, and smell his breath on the pillow beside me where my wives used to lay their heads-G.o.d bless em both-when I put out my light.