Code 61 (10 page)

When the hearse arrived, it came complete with two attendants. One of them was about seventy, and the other was a small man in his thirties. This meant that Borman, Hester, and I had to glove up again, and help lift Edie's body from the tub. Messy, if you didn't watch your step. We got the chromed portable stretcher up the stairs, noticing how the bend in the stairway at the first landing was going to make this a tough movement on the way down. Once in the bathroom, we tried to position it near the tub and yet not have it be in our way. Not possible. We were going to have to hold Edie up at about chest height while we slid the stretcher under her. Ugh.

Both attendants were gaping at the body, but neither of them said anything.

Rigor mortis raised its ugly head at that point. Borman had squeezed between the tub and the far wall, and he and I had linked hands under her knees and behind her back near her buttocks. Hester had her feet, and the younger attendant tried to slide his hands under her armpits. No go; a bit too stiff now. So he had to hold her left elbow and her head.

“On three … ” said Hester. “One, two, three.”

We started the lift, and it became obvious that Edie was pretty well stiffened in her sitting position. She also seemed to sort of stick to the bottom of the tub. The cold flesh had flattened at the pressure points, and as she came up, I could see that her right breast and chest bore a large dent from her arm and part of the tub. Some blood, strangely, appeared to have pooled under her buttocks, and that was the cause of the sticking when we started to lift. That should not have been there. Not if the fatal wound had been inflicted when she was in the tub. I caught Hester's eye. She gave an almost imperceptible nod. Evidence like that was not to be discussed in front of noninvestigative personnel, civilian or otherwise.

As we placed Edie on the stretcher, we saw that the knife was stuck to her right thigh by the congealed blood. Congealed, but not yet clotted. We took photos, made another note, and then Hester carefully pulled it free. I got a paper bag out of my camera case, and we placed the knife in that.

“Your camera bag reminds me of my purse,” she said.

I snapped three shots of the interior of the tub. The blood under where her buttocks had been was very apparent. It even showed a slight wrinkle pattern from the flattened flesh.

Edie couldn't have weighed more than 125 pounds alive, and having lost all that blood volume, she was down to about a hundred or less. The blanched and flattened areas of her buttocks were very obvious, the result of her weight pressing her into the tub. Her mouth, which had been hanging open as she sat there, now looked as if she were about to cough. Interestingly, her eyes no longer had that “alive” appearance that had startled me before. Must have been the light, that first time. Whatever it was, it was a relief.

Now I was able to get a really good look at the wound in her neck. “Deep” hardly did it justice. But it was a cut, all right. Even, smooth edges.

I took several more photos before she was finally covered.

While Borman and the two attendants maneuvered the gurney to get Edie out of the room, Hester and I had one of those fast chats that, if you hadn't known we were talking about the blood in the wrong place, you'd never have guessed.

“You caught that, too?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Conclusive?”

“Possibly. Very possibly. But maybe not.”

“Really?” It looked pretty conclusive to me.

“Reflex lunge or hip thrust.”

“Ah.” Well, sure, she could have spasmodically arched her back, for example, and then sat back down in the blood she was leaving. Except … “No fountain, though.” I said that because there surely should have been secondary evidence that there had been a forceful gush or spurt, or something to deluge the tub area sufficiently for blood to flow under her when she might have moved. Something that very likely would have squirted past the perimeter of the tub, and onto the floor and maybe even the walls. Especially since the knife had been pulled free.

“True.” She grimaced. “Not enough data.”

“Think it could have slipped free? I'd say pulled out. You agree?” I was referring to the knife.

“Agree. I think it would tend to stay in.”

She finished her sentence as we emerged into the hall to help get Edie down the stairs.

We'd zipped up the white body bag, covered the lump that had been Edie with two blue blankets, and strapped her tightly to the stretcher with all three belts. We had to lift her and the stretcher to about shoulder level to clear the banister at the first landing, but from then on it was a piece of cake. We went by the parlor, and the three residents saw her. They followed us out to the hearse, and watched while we pushed the stretcher into the back.

“Remember,” cautioned Hester, “there will be an autopsy done there. Under no circumstance is she to be embalmed until we say so. There will be a forensic pathologist up shortly.” There had been an instance several years ago when a funeral home had embalmed a murder victim before the pathologist got there. Ever after that, the officer always made very certain that the funeral home understood the situation.

“Yes, ma'am,” said the elder of the attendants. He was lucky. Hester hates that term, and if it had been the younger who'd said it, he would likely have had to ride down the hill in the back with Edie.

As the hearse drove off and we turned back in toward the house, I felt this familiar urge. I really wanted a cigarette, and this was the stage in an investigation where I'd normally have one. I looked up toward the porch. The three looked pretty dejected.

Toby spoke up. I was beginning to think he was compelled. He was smoking again. “Why do you need an autopsy? Isn't it pretty obvious what killed her?”

Hester took that one, while I tried to smoke his cigarette vicariously. “There's a big difference between 'pretty obvious' and certain,” she said.

“Why are you coming back into the house? Aren't you done?” There was no malice in Toby or his questions. Just the same sort of question you always heard from the one kid in class who always had his hand in the air. Questions designed to focus attention on the asker, not the subject.

“Ask us again in five or ten hours,” I said. “In the meantime, we can't leave the scene unprotected, and the best way to protect it is to have one or more of us here.”

“Oh. But, why—”

Hester cut him off. “Done with your written statement yet?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then, would you be kind enough to show me just where everybody's bedroom is?”

Toby, being the compulsively cooperative sort, immediately launched into his task. “And the kitchen,” she continued, as they headed up the stairs.

In the meantime, I sat down with Melissa and Hanna to have what turned out to be an interesting but pretty fruitless chat about Edie that lasted nearly an hour. Regrettably, they both smoked, as well.

Melissa and Hanna seemed quite a bit more self-possessed than they had appeared even an hour before. A good sign, and I thought it was due to seeing Edie leave, and the relief that seems to come to the household when the body is finally removed from the premises.

We walked into the parlor. Hanna offered coffee, which I accepted. As I sat on the couch, I felt a jab in my hip. The copy of the
Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch
that I'd put in my back pocket. I pulled it out and laid it on the coffee table in front of me. Melissa reached out for it.

“Do you mind? Is it today's?”

“Yep, it is. Feel free.”

She sort of browsed through it as we sat and talked. Interesting.

Neither of them could offer much insight into Edie's character, at least not much that I didn't already know from Lamar. She did have a daughter, about three years old, who lived with Edie's mother. Edie didn't like her mother at all, and according to both Melissa and Hanna, with good reason.

Edie had lived, or had been living, at the Mansion longer than any of the rest of them, and she was the one that the owner would talk with if anything needed to be taken care of. According to Melissa, it wasn't anything particularly special, but Edie was a pretty reliable person, and could be counted on to attend to things.

Edie didn't appear to have been noticeably depressed the last few weeks, and hadn't shown any remarkable signs of mood changes. Both acknowledged they had no idea why Edie would take her own life, although they both thought she had plenty of reason to be depressed. Hanna shared the fact that she, herself, had attempted suicide once before, with what turned out to be something less than a fatal overdose of her sister's phenobarbital.

So, my questions about Edie's emotional state had elicited suicide-oriented thinking among others in the household, with the assumption I was on a suicide track. They seemed very sincere in their efforts to help, and almost apologetic that they hadn't observed any of what they termed “suicide triggers.” I did think it a little unusual that both of them were that familiar with the subject of suicide. I said as much.

“We've read about it,” said Melissa, “because some of our friends have been really depressed sometimes. We worry about them.”

“But Edie didn't fit in that category?” I asked.

“No. I mean, there's depressed, and then there's
depressed,”
said Melissa. “Things not going right, that can depress you, but it's something you get over. Lover leaving, grandparent dying, that sort of thing. You know. But, the kind of thing where you just have to end it, that's much deeper, and much more prolonged. Oppressive, always there.”

“Okay.”

“I'm afraid I'm not saying this very well,” she said, and looked toward Hanna.

“It feeds on itself,” she said, helping Melissa. “It controls you. The suicide kind.”

“But Edie didn't show any sign of that?”

She hadn't, and according to them, Edie really seemed to have her life under control. They were both sorry they hadn't been more help.

What they'd actually done was to inadvertently add another bit of weight to the side of the scales that was labeled “murder.”

“So, then,” I said, “let's just say for the sake of it that it wasn't a suicide. Do either of you know of anybody who might be, say, an enemy; that would want to kill Edie?”

Absolutely not. They were both in complete and emphatic agreement on that point.

I persevered. “Anybody threaten her? Been bothering her? Harassing her?”

“Just her lame excuse for a mother,” said Melissa. “That's been happening for years, I guess. Not new. Why? Do you really think she didn't commit suicide?”

I shrugged. “We have to treat every unattended death as a homicide, until we're sure it isn't.”

“Sure,” said Melissa.

“Okay,” I said, “now, I don't want you to take this in the wrong way at all. But I'd like to know if either of you could tell me if Edie was doing any dope, or alcohol, or anything even prescription, that could affect her moods.”

“Is that really your business?” asked Melissa. “Not to be taken in the wrong way, of course.”

“Fair question,” I said. “The answer is, probably wasn't my business yesterday. Now that she's dead, and my problem for now, yep, it is.”

“Aren't you going to do a blood test? I mean, won't you know from that?”