Death in the Polka Dot Shoes (11 page)

Chapter Seven

Ever since the drowning, I have had two recurring dreams about my brother. The first was of his body rolling around in the waves, being gently tossed and turned by every spasm of the ocean until the seaweed and foam finally drew back and left him anchored on the beach. The second was of his unrecognizable body after it had been nibbled, and dibbled, and dabbed by every little fish in the sea. I read that description in a novel once and it froze in my mind like a song from childhood.

The Sheriff of Hatteras, North Carolina had called at daybreak to say that Jimmy's body had washed ashore during the night, and he asked that I come immediately to help make arrangements. Identification might take some time. Somehow I knew that.

I didn't look forward to the days ahead, except for the somewhat quizzical comment by the Sheriff that there were some strange aspects to his discovery. I packed a small bag with some underwear, a shaving kit, socks, one pair of blue jeans, two shirts and a dozen cigars, which I could live on for a couple of weeks if necessary. I tossed a tie and blue blazer in the back seat of the car and headed for Hatteras, a place I had never been, but a name with some intrigue.

Driving, for me, is a mystical experience. I daydream, never watch the signs, spend a good part of every trip lost and turning around or asking directions from convenience stores, and never remember where I've been. But I'm a safe driver, even with a convertible, and will set off for any destination with the certainty that sooner or later I will get there. But often it's later. After about three miles, I realized there was no hurry in getting to Hatteras. Jimmy wasn't going anywhere. And even after I satisfied this identification business, and arranged with the local funeral director to ship his body back to Parkers, there still would be no hurry. Maybe this is what Jimmy intended to do for me in his will, take away the hurry. Life was now a process, not a series of ambitious goals. And there was no boss to please.

On a long stretch of road through Virginia, I remembered Jimmy once telling me that he liked taking the boat out alone because no one was there to say return. And sometimes he didn't. Once he left Mom a note that said, “Back soon,” but he didn't return for five days. He took a small sailboat down to Crisfield, an island off the eastern shore of the Bay where the remnants of a waterman culture live in quiet and diminished circumstance. He tied up at the town dock, and was actually angry when Mom called the Coast Guard to report his disappearance. Even after his return, he was silent on the details of his trip, fearing an inquisition about the many disasters that could have befallen a small boat in stormy seas. “I'm home,” was about all he said.

When I found the Hatteras Sheriff, he was leaning against the counter in his reception area, talking to a young female deputy in a starched brown uniform whose hair was pulled back and held in place by a headphone. Her eyes caught me coming through the door. When the Sheriff turned, I held out my hand and introduced myself.

“Come in Mr. Shannon,” he said. “We've been expecting you.”

He nodded to his deputy in a way that put the phones on hold, and led me into his office, a spartan affair with a couple of pictures of fishermen standing beside their tuna on the local dock. He motioned me to a wooden captain's chair, and lowered himself into a slightly larger chair that rocked back.

“I hope my call didn't reach you at a bad time,” the Sheriff said. “I'm very sorry about your brother. We found him down on the beach yesterday by PJ's Bait Shop. I don't know if you can identify him or not, but we'll go over to the medical examiner's in a minute. He's just across the street.”

I thought I had a lot of questions, but didn't know where to begin. I decided to start with the present and work back.

“Is his body… can it be shipped home?” I asked.

“Well, we need to do an autopsy,” he said. “That will take a couple of days, but I've asked Doc Winters to start today, knowing you'd be coming down. There are a number of hotels out on the highway. I assume you'll want to stick around.”

“I'll stay as long as necessary.”

“Good,” he said. “We do have a lot to go over.”

“You said on the phone there were some strange aspects,” I said. “What are they?”

My memory of law school training was remarkably short on criminal law and long on torts. But even if I did know the law, I had no idea about dead bodies or drowning, or what people look like after weeks in the ocean. Furthermore, it was an open question just how much I wanted to learn. Even if it was my own brother, I didn't relish the prospect of identifying his body.

The Sheriff kept flipping through some papers on his desk, presumably about my brother, but it looked like he might be trying to decide how much to tell me. So I figured a well directed question might let him know that I expected to get some answers.

“Any foul play?” I asked, not exactly scaring him with ferocity. “You know, some of the watermen back in Parkers think this ‘tuna did it' business is a little far fetched. What do you think?”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “First of all, your brother spent a couple of months in the water. Good that it was ocean, because the salt keeps the skin from decomposing. Fresh water, he would have split open like a ripe watermelon. And it wouldn't take long either.”

I almost got sick. I told myself to buck up, get some steel in my gut, think of this as a police report, a piece of paper, not a description of a real person. But I wanted to know, and I feared the Sheriff would censor himself if he saw I couldn't take it.

“Was my brother recognizable?” I asked.

“Not to me,” the Sheriff said. “But maybe to you. Anyway, identification isn't really the problem.”

The Sheriff shuffled the papers some more until he came to three or four photographs that I could see were of a body laying on the sand. I couldn't help myself, and looked away.

“The autopsy isn't done yet, so I shouldn't be going into this. But knowing you're a lawyer, and a brother, I think I have to tell you that it looks like the boy's death might not have been an accident.”

“You mean on purpose!” I exclaimed. I reached for my forehead, and planted both feet on the floor. “You mean somebody killed him.” That's about as far as I could reason.

The Sheriff clearly was uncomfortable with this part, even though he had done it several times. He didn't like describing the injury. The medical examiner had explained to him once that in order to examine possible brain damage, he cut an incision across the top of the corpse's head, then peeled the face right off the skull. The image was so strong the sheriff could never shake it.

“It looks like your brother has taken a pretty good lick on the back of the head,” the Sheriff said. “But we won't know for sure till the M.E. looks at the skull.”

My body went limp. I slouched in the chair, without feeling in my legs or arms, simply numb. This had happened once before. I was visiting Aspen, Colorado in the summer and rode one of the chairlifts to the top of Highlands' mountain. I had skied there before, and never had any fear of heights. But in summer, the lift would sometimes swing wildly, and would rise over deep gorges and blind rims on its path to the summit. What looked like a smooth climb upward over peaceful snow in winter now had a menacing quality of varying heights over jagged rocks. The final lift up the mountain disgorged its passengers about thirty feet from the top of the mountain. One could get off the lift at that point, and cover the final distance to the pinnacle on a winding cow path of a walkway that circled the summit to a concrete platform at the very peak. With a handrail around it, the perch allowed tourists the final spectacle of mountaineering, standing at the summit and surveying the world. But I never made it that far.

Perhaps ten feet from the top, I looked down the mountainside, realizing the edge was only inches from my feet, and fear melted every bone in my body like water on a wafer. I just collapsed on the path. I lay on the ground, pressing my face into the dirt and gasping for air, wanting to sink into the mountain and feel the comforting arms of earth hold me in warm embrace. My mind was racing. I couldn't figure out how to get up, or how to get down to the lift. Then my girlfriend was beside me. She bent close and whispered that she would help me down. I rose to my hands and knees, turned slowly on the path, and crawled down to the lift. Normally my sense of manhood would be shattered by this show of wimpish behavior. But the fear was so great that I had no embarrassment, only gratitude. And now it was happening again.

The Sheriff just looked at me, as if he could see the collapse of my physical systems. But he said nothing. Then he started to fill the space with words.

“You see, we can't figure out how he would hit the back of his head if he went overboard tied to a fish. Maybe he hit the rub rail or something as he went over. Anyway Doc Winters will figure it out.”

The Sheriff was starting to ease up a bit, realizing I was still struggling with composure.

“Normally, you'd receive a written copy of the autopsy in four to six weeks,” he said. “But if you can stick around, I should be able to tell you what happened in a day or two.”

Pulling myself together, I asked, “You all had an inquest, didn't you? What did that determine?”

“Well, there you go,” he said. “The Captain said there wasn't anyone else on the boat. Normally, he has a first mate to help bait the hooks and all that. But apparently your brother said he was a fisherman and didn't need any help, especially if the Captain would cut the price. So just the two of them went out.”

“That doesn't sound right to me,” I said. “I just started running my own boat, but I know Captains don't like to go out without a mate. Although sometimes the mate gets drunk and over sleeps, so the Captain doesn't have much choice. And I don't know any Captain who would cut the price either. A day of fishing is a day of fishing.”

“Well, that's what the captain testified. Of course, if your brother was killed, then all bets are off. We better try to find that captain… and the first mate that didn't show.”

“What do you mean killed?”

“Well,” the Sheriff said, “if Doc Winters doesn't find any water in his lungs, he might not have drowned.”

I couldn't concentrate. “You mean,” I said, “that hit on the head may have killed him?”

“Maybe. But we don't want to rush this. We'll know tomorrow.”

“Can I take his clothes and stuff?”

“I think we better wait. We'll need it for the investigation.”

“Let's go do the identification,” I said. “I think I need to go for a walk and think about all this.”

“There is one other thing that seems a little strange,” the Sheriff said.

Oh no. I could feel my heart sink again. Now what was I going to learn? Maybe I should have brought Martha with me. No, this would drive her crazy. I started wondering if I should call her, or what to do if she calls me.

“That other thing relates to his shoes,” the Sheriff said. “Do you know what kind of shoes he wore?”

“Shoes?” I repeated, a little edgy from the Sheriff's habit of asking me questions I couldn't possibly answer. “I have no idea.”

“When we found him, he had one tennis shoe on his left foot,” the Sheriff said. “The strange thing, though, it was blue with yellow dots.”

“What do you mean,” I asked.

“Does that seem normal? He had on cut off blue jeans and a blue denim shirt. Pretty basic stuff.”

“That sounds about right,” I said, “but blue tennis shoes with polka dots are definitely out of character. On the other hand he's an outgoing guy, and a crazy waterman. He was here on a vacation of sorts, so who knows.”

“One other thing,” the Sheriff said. “We think it's a woman's shoe. Pretty hard to tell if it fits because of the condition of the body. But it was on his foot, and I'd guess about a size eight.”

“I don't know his size, but it's probably not too big. He was average height,” I said. My references to Jimmy kept alternating between present tense and past tense as the picture in my mind fluctuated between the brother I knew so well, and the body on the beach. And then the Sheriff produced the shoe.

“I can't take this out of the bag,” he said, holding a plastic bag that he pulled from under his desk, “because it may be evidence. The State boys are going to look for evidence, DNA or whatever they can pull out. But does this look familiar to you?”

I nodded no.

“I should have told you this first, but I have to ask you not to tell anyone about this polka dot shoe business,” the Sheriff said. “We're withholding it from the press. God only knows what kind of story those boys would make of this. And if somebody gave him this shoe, we don't want to scare them off.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“This raises an awful lot of questions. We went looking for that Captain yesterday afternoon and it seems he's taken his boat south, or at least it's gone from the marina and nobody seems to know where. Seems nobody really knows much about that Captain either. Not a local boy.”

“What are the questions?” I asked.

“Well, I don't want to get into that. But the doc can tell a lot of things in that autopsy.” The Sheriff paused as if in afterthought. “You know about diatones. There's jillions of them in the water. They're the skeletal remains of plankton, and they differ depending on the water they're in. Almost like a DNA for water. Doc can take a little water from your brother's lungs, if there is any, and tell us just about where it came from. He might even be able to tell us if the body drowns in one place and was thrown overboard in another. Hard telling what else he can find.”

“What else?”

“Down here we get a lot of drowning. Doc can test something called ‘pupal cases,' which I guess are bugs, and tell you within four or five days when the person drowned, even if it was two or three years ago.”