At the Scene of the Crime Page 8

  “A school ring, yes,” I said, and shrugged. I hadn’t put it on that day. I glanced at the commander’s left hand as he toyed with a collector’s pen our troop gave him last Christmas. His wedding ring was still on. I pictured his wife, Mallory, how she must look today, turmoil in her face, heartache visible in her robot motions, her walk, her interactions with her children. Commander Ooten sat there interviewing me about Erin Flannery while his family was torn apart because of his unstoppable urges toward a woman who wound up dead on the floor of her home.

  No doubt his wife would be quickly cleared in Erin’s case. Ridiculous, when you think about it, how she got tied to it at all. Who in this world would figure that she and Erin had in common a love of the oboe, I kid you not, a love of the oboe, which found the two of them in weekly classes at community college. Mrs. Ooten had lent Erin an old instrument her father gave her as an eleven-year-old, the name “Mallory Parsons” engraved on a gold plate on the case. The very fact that Mallory Ooten was innocently in the home of her husband’s lover gave me a pang, my sympathy for her as tender as my own scoured nerves.

  What I did not tell my superiors is that the night of Erin’s injury she had consumed too much plum wine, and I had been the one to buy it. “I’ve been a little stressed out,” she said. “Things.”

  “It can get that way.”

  “You know what? You’re way easier to be around than I would’ve guessed.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “It’s just that on the job you’re so serious.”

  “Is that bad or good?”

  “It is what it is. Could go either way.” Her hair looked like shined copper.

  This was a couple of weeks after Jarhead. Ooten was out of town at a confab in Pittsburgh. Maybe that’s why Erin weakened when I asked her out. I felt low about my reasons and almost sorry she accepted. Here she was already involved in deceit with Ooten, and now she was deceiving him with me. Of course, it wouldn’t go so far as to be labeled true betrayal, I wouldn’t let it go that far. But even if it did, at least the two of us were single.

  We met at a Japanese restaurant, a new place I said I wanted to try near the Bethlehem Brew Works. Erin insisted on separate cars again, saying she had things to do that would put her in the vicinity anyway. We sat at one of the table-sized, stainless steel grills where the food is prepared before our eyes Teppanyaki style. The flames flew high on the volcano of onions the chef built. We marveled at his antics with thrown eggs and knives, and, with others, applauded each performance.

  In between I looked for a way to caution Erin about her activities with Commander Ooten. I wanted to ask her what in the world did she think she was doing. Ask in a nice way but one that left no doubt that her new friend, myself, was there to help set her straight.

  While waiting for the check, I said, “I’m going to tell you something.”

  She tilted her head, a smile on her lips. “Okay.”

  “Don’t take this wrong.”

  “Oh boy,” she said. She peered into her wine glass, refilled once already, and lifted my saké cup to drain the last few sips. Then she went for the pitcher. “Guess I’ll have to do without,” she said, shaking it as if more would loosen and come free. “How bad is it, what you’re going to tell me?”

  “You can handle it.”

  “Ah, thank God.”

  “You’re a mystery to me, is all.”

  “Come again?”

  “I can’t quite figure you out.”

  She winked at me and reached for her puffy pink jacket from the back of the chair, saying, “Have you figured out I’m a little wasted? If I had any more I couldn’t drive. You’d have to arrest me.” The way she said it, like a flirtation.

  We stood in the parking lot by her car, talking, and then she said, “Ugh. You know, I’m really feeling sick. I don’t think I can make it home without urping.” She hunched in, and I stood by her and put my arm around her. This could be the most unusual of come-ons, perhaps the same as she used on the commander to get him to take her home.

  “It must be the food. It couldn’t be the wine and saké. A certain person kept me from that,” she said, looking at me sideways, a pixie tease in her smile.

  Icy mud sprayed us as a car sped by faster than the driver should have in the lot. The snow was about three inches deep, the woods woven with chalky fog ahead of us.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you home. In the morning I’ll pick you up at your apartment and we can go get your car.”

  When she quickly met my eyes, I realized she hadn’t mentioned whether she lived in an apartment, a house, or a boxcar.

  She lived just a few miles away, near a Moravian cemetery. “I go there sometimes and just wander down the lanes. All the headstones lie flat to show that everyone is equal in the sight of God. Rich next to poor, whites next to blacks next to Mohican Indians.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m from Montana. We stuff ’em and put ’em in museums.” She gave a soft laugh. Her eyes were closed and her head was back on the seat as I’d instructed. It’s where my own should have been. I could feel the hot drink still in my veins, the sweet burn that beckons so many, the frayed ends strangely comforting.

  “All but the women,” Erin said. “The women are buried in their own section. Separate. Inside the church, too.”

  Her lips shone pink in the boomeranged light. I wanted to kiss her there, then. Instead, I turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto the road, driving well within the speed limit, sight often flicking to the mirrors. I disdained the fact that Trooper Flannery would let herself get blotto even off duty, but the truth was I also knew in saner times I would not get behind the wheel either. She did it again, that woman. Getting men to tread over boundaries.

  She seemed to feel better, once inside. “I guess it was the wine after all,” she said. “I didn’t eat lunch today. Hey, want some ice water? Or coffee? I’ll be glad to make some.” I said yes to the coffee.

  That’s when she got up from the couch we were sitting on. Perhaps I was sitting a little too close for comfort. I shifted to be farther away when she returned, but then I stood up and went into the kitchen with her. She faltered as she took a step, galumphing forward off the rug and slapping soles onto the tile. Laughing, she said, “Holy shit. I really am drunk . . . or something. You know what? I’m sorry, but I think I should just go on up to bed.”

  Sure, sure, I told her, meaning it.

  “Just help me get upstairs and I’ll be fine. Thank you, Justin. Thank you, really.”

  Was it this way with Ooten? But then she also seemed really embarrassed. Who was she? How could one woman do this to two men?

  With my help she managed to mount four of the stairs. “Just flip the lock on the way out, will you, Justin? I can make it the rest of the way.”

  She smiled and thanked me again. I started to go down but then reached the next step up before she did, hardly aware of my action. I brought her around and pulled her to me and sank into her lips. “No,” she said . . . and let me kiss her again.

  What I wanted to do . . . what I intended to do . . . was scoop her up like Rhett Butler did Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but it didn’t turn out that way, oh no, it didn’t. She jerked back and then . . . as I try to recall this, I am not sure just what happened. All I know is I tried to grab her to keep her from falling. Instead, as she sank she twisted, and my fist connected to the left jaw. In her dive down, her head shot against the square platform of the end stair-rod, and then she flipped and her head went smack! on the tile, a gray tile with tan swirls in it until joined with the brightest of red.

  Even as early as then I wondered if I’d let her fall. If I’d caused her to fall. My reactions are supposed to be quick. How could I let her slip by?

  She was on the floor with her eyes rolled partway up. I began CPR.

  You might suppose it crossed my mind to eat the hornet. Oh, I practiced caressing my weapon the way I’d seen it don
e in movies. And I drew other dramatic scenarios in my mind. My illicit favorite: death by scumbag. I would insert myself into a bad street scene and, while making like a hero, arrange for my own end.

  I even imagined a sequence where my body would be found among the homeless at the Bethlehem mill. Once, on a perimeter canvass after a series of home break-ins, I went in at a downed section of fencing near the rear of Blast Furnace Row. Inside the steel skeleton crows flutter. Cat eyes gleam in the alcoves. Scruffy-looking souls, both men and women, cook their meals over fifty-five-gallon drums, glance at you with little interest, as though even in uniform you’re just another wanderer there. That is where I belonged. Now I lay me down to sleep . . . forever. But to involve them in my final act would be to pile wrong upon wrong.

  Again I was summoned to headquarters. It was a whole month after the first interview with Major Manning and the commander. This time it was two sergeants from the homicide unit.

  I won’t drag it out. What they laid on me I knew was coming; knew it yet pretended it wasn’t imminent, that each day I awakened would be like any other before the incident.

  At the autopsy for Erin Flannery it was discovered that her sternum and two ribs were cracked from the compressions I had rendered. When I first began, I did not want to remove her bra. To do so would seem a trespass of its own variety. Because I didn’t remove it, the first several thrusts downward scored the flesh over her sternum. In due time I also heard a crackling, like the sound of a cereal bag being pinched tight, but I thought it was interference from the bra. With clumsy fingers, I unhinged the plastic hook in front and just kept on pumping, calling her name before I put my mouth to hers to force in another breath.

  It must have gone on for thirty minutes, or so it seemed. And then, when I had no positive response, no reaction at all, curse me, I looked around trying to think of anything I’d touched, and then I fled.

  The medical examiner, upon noting those injuries to the chest, instructed her assistant to swab around the mouth and to perform another separate swab on the lips of the deceased. Even this action, through DNA testing, would not have implicated me, save for the fact I volunteered a sample in one of the extra criminal investigation classes I took after joining the force. The sample was sent to the state laboratory as though it were any other, not a student’s. It would be held as an unidentified profile. These are kept in the database in the hope that someday they will “hit” in another case that had other trace evidence with which to bust a suspect. Like Mrs. Ooten’s fingerprint on the oboe case, my identity would not be known from that saliva sample—except that eventually my superiors pressed for a new sample to be taken. And of course, I complied.

  There was the ring the commander asked about—the twist in the garrote, you might say. Nothing at the scene of Erin’s death would have pointed my way. I left no fingerprints. I had not touched a glass, nor the banister. I did open the door with Erin’s key, but I had on gloves, as I did when I left. Even while rendering CPR, I avoided the blood on the floor. But the ring . . .

  The sergeant who studied the evidence seized on a peculiar mark on Erin’s jaw, a curved flame shape with a slight space below, and beneath that a kind of pear shape, a teardrop with a touch of high waist. Two of each shape. Sergeant Geerd Scranton showed me a photo of it. “What does that look like to you, son?”

  “I don’t know, crooked carrots? With a blotch below?”

  “I took up an interest in Indians when I was a boy.”

  “Did you,” I said. Where was this going?

  “My name,” he said, “means ‘spear brave’ in Dutch. Piscataway Indians used spears. They’d hunt fish and bear with them.”

  “Are you onto something, Sergeant?” I asked, feigning only an intellectual interest in the case.

  “It’s part of a bear print. The nails, the pads. See? Perfect in the photo.” He turned the photo my way.

  “You could be right.”

  “I’m told you wear a ring with a bear print on it, Justin. Trooper Buttons says you always have it on.”

  “Hah. I do. Or almost always. I guess I left it on the sink this morning.” I smiled. “I spent some time in Montana with my dad and uncle. God, what beautiful country. Have you ever . . . ? The grizzly is the state mascot. Lots of people wear it on jewelry.” I said.

  He nodded, waited a few beats, or maybe it was minutes, or maybe it was an hour, before he said, “Why don’t you just tell me about what happened, Justin? It must be very uncomfortable for you. Sergeant Kunkle, myself, Major Manning—we know there must have been some pretty powerful extenuating circumstances or you would have done the right thing. Isn’t that so, son? Look, we know that sometimes we get pushed to extremes. Maybe you tried to romance her? Maybe you had a little too much to drink?”

  I sat looking at him, stunned he would suggest such things, but not arguing because arguing would only deepen what he already believed.

  Again he went on like that, and I shook my head as if I just couldn’t believe what test they were putting me through now. I did say I was clueless as to what response they wanted.

  And then he used the tool of silence. Crows could have been squalling in the steel mill shadows. The wails of warning cats went chasing their own echoes around. The hollow laughter of the homeless kept piercing my ears.

  There is a certain terror in the veins of those who would do right always. I am the junior to the senior, our standards so high there is no true escape.

  Perhaps my father knew that, and maybe that’s part of why he left us, his daily companions a fifth of whiskey, a bottle of bennies, and tricked-up tubing duct-taped to the exhaust pipe of his cruiser, snaked into his window on the passenger side as it sat hub-deep in mud on the side of a cornfield, a stand of trees blocking the scene from the main road, no reason known, no final written note to tell us why.

  As a child, nights, I’d be in bed listening to my parents argue, my mother’s voice loud and clear, my father only sometimes shouting back. After his death I tried recalling what all they argued about. I couldn’t then, but today I remember a woman’s name. An odd name, to me even then: Clarabelle. I remember my mother calling her “whore” and my not knowing what the word meant but that it had an awful sound, the way a roar issues deep from within a throat. Perhaps I should have known, but I was a quiet child and did not hang with any special friends.

  It wasn’t until I was twenty and spent a final summer with my uncle outside of Butte that I learned the real story of my father’s death. Until that time, and even after, I kept hearing of what a good man he was. How positive. How good, how perfect. A model of a man. My image of him was forever ruined by what my uncle revealed and, later, by other things I came to know. I longed to be better than Enoch “Eddie” Eberhardt, and determined to shape my longing into action to become, if it is possible in this world, the truly moral man.

  Commander Ooten became my model. I would learn to be like him. Anything or anyone that got in the way to diminish the image I had must only be possessed of a fierce and terrible magic. In my obsession to know what the power was that did trip him up, I laid out a woman who in no way deserved an early end, whose only fault was to be a friend to a family and to a lonely madman.

  To this day I do not know if I deliberately put my fist to her jaw. But does it even matter? I either committed or omitted, failed to do what I should have, and encouraged what I should not.

  It may be two years now that I’ve lived on the banks of the Pocono River, there until weather drives me and my fellow campers to find a collapsed barn, a forgotten shed, a building in wait for a bulldozer. Days, we hook fish and toss whatever’s left to forever-hungry cats skulking in the bushes. We keep watch on our meager holdings and quickly drive out any offenders. Draw straws to see who will go buy the wine. Days are good. Blackbirds chainsaw the nights. I tell those of you who would listen that even the strongest of girders rust. We are all just wanderers here.

  I/M-PRINT A TESS CASSIDY SHORT STORY

&nbs
p; BY JEREMIAH HEALY

  TESS CASSIDY, CARRYING HER CRIME SCENE UNIT DUFFLE BAG over a shoulder, heard the uniform at the house’s front door say to Detective Lieutenant Kyle Hayes, “Bad one, Loot.”

  Hayes just nodded, then, almost as an afterthought, glanced back at Tess. “How’s your stomach, Cassidy?”

  Stung by the implied dig at her professional ability, she said, “Never had a problem so far.”

  Hayes moved past the patrol officer. “Always a first time.”

  As Tess followed the detective, she noticed the uniform was a little green at the gills, and, suppressing a shiver, she remembered what the other techs in the CSU called a “debut”: covering your initial homicide and autopsy.

  “Well,” said Hayes to the uniform inside the den, “I don’t think we have to wait for the ME on cause of death.”

  Tess looked at the body sprawled over an oriental throw rug, then looked away, drawing a deep breath.

  The house—a McMansion—had a huge living room they’d had to cross before reaching the den, which was more a library. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and not the artsy, leather-bound volumes she’d seen in other rich people’s places. No, lots of novels and travel guides, jackets worn, even torn from being handled, and, Tess figured, read more than once. She wasn’t that involved in books herself, thanks to dyslexia. In fact, Tess nearly flunked seventh grade before her big sister, Joan, made the principal see what their parents had ignored. But Tess always, secretly, admired anyone who loved reading.

  As, apparently, the dead man on the rug had. Hayes said to the uniform, “We got a name?”

  “Decedent’s Zederberg, Martin, middle initial ‘D’ as in ‘David.’”

  “Who found the body?”

  “His wife. Nanette. Kollings is with her in the kitchen.”