Unpaid Dues (7 page)

The damage will be
done, and it will haunt her into her next life.

* * *

The coroner 's office was in downtown L.A., so St.
John went alone. Wednesday was the earliest Sugarman could schedule
the autopsy of Jane Ferrar. Cassiletti had an appointment with a
brickyard in Ontario.

St. John entered the coroner's office through the
side entrance, the one the meat wagons used for deliveries and
pickups. There was an empty steel gurney by the door, and a coiled
green garden hose with a still-dripping nozzle. The smell of wet
concrete vied with petrolemn and alcohol fumes.

Dr. Sugarman was in his office and on the phone. "I'm
sorry for your loss," he was saying. St. John wondered how many
times a day the pathologist uttered that line.

St. John remained standing in the doorway; Sugarman
looked up at the clock as he hung up the phone. It was eight in the
morning.

"
You're here for the Jane Ferrar post?"

"Yeah," St. John said.

"Haven't seen you for a while," Sugarman
said. "How are you feeling?"

St. John rubbed his chest, slightly left of center,
out of reflex. "I'm all right."

"Good. Good to hear it."

Carrying his own camera, St. John followed Sugarman
through navy-blue doors into the powder-blue tiled chamber of the
autopsy suite. The neon bug-zapper buzzed as insects were drawn to a
purple death. Sugarman's assistant opened the door to the cooler and
wheeled out a body covered with an opaque plastic blanket. Even that
was tinted a pale blue in the reflected light.

Sugarman and St. John donned surgical gowns and
gloves. In the old days, medical examiners never wore gloves. The
gloves inhibited dexterity and sensitivity and were a hassle to put
on. It struck St. John that the same arguments could be used against
condoms.

"We should buy stock in the company that makes
latex," St. John said.

"
This AIDS epidemic is going to get worse before
it gets better," Sugarman said, checking the body's toe tag.
"Mark my words."

St. John grabbed a face mask from the box by the door
and pulled it on over his nose and mouth. The only sound above the
hum of the refrigeration was the buzz of the bug zapper. The ME swept
the plastic tarp off the body with a practiced flourish, and what
remained of Jane Ferrar lay spread out naked on the cold steel table.

Sugarman verbally documented every injury into the
microphone hanging suspended over the table. Most notable was the
throat wound, cut all the way through to the spine. There were also
numerous facial lacerations, two other long shallow slashes on her
torso, and a large shallow dent in the back of her skull, which they
were attributing to either the initial drop into the storm drain or
her head bashing against the wall as the current carried her body
downstream. The bruising on her upper arms appeared to have been made
by fingers. The ID techs took picture after picture. St. John took a
few of his own.

Naked and supine, the body revealed another
abnormality that became clear to the investigators. Jane Ferrar's
right leg was considerably smaller than the left. Sugarman found a
two-inch discrepancy in length, and when St. John reexamined the
woman's shoes, he noticed that the right shoe was a size four and the
left shoe was a size seven.

"
Polio?" St. John asked.

"Most likely The poliomyelitis virus usually
attacks the spinal column and brain stem of children and causes this
lack of development."

X-rays revealed that both of her forearms had been
broken within the last few years.

St. John envisioned her in a defensive pose. In his
imagination she was on her knees, begging for mercy that never came.

X-rays also revealed a years-old fracture of her
right eye socket. The inside of her thigh was peppered with both
fresh and ancient needlemarks. A tattoo on the back of her left
shoulder read PROPERTY OF THOR.

Sugarman spent many minutes on the neck wound before
drawing St. John's attention to the color and texture. "She was
dead before her throat was cut. I'm seeing seepage around the wound,
but the veins would have flared open more if the heart had still been
pumping?

"So it was the head trauma?" St. John
asked.

Sugarman nodded as he parted the hair above the right
ear to show St. John a star-shaped wound; then he spoke into his
microphone. "The victim has a three-inch stellate scalp
laceration with several branches running laterally and distally to
the right ear. The skin is split rather than sliced, which indicates
blunt force trauma."

St. John leaned in for a closer look at the gray
mushroom of brain matter poking out from the hole in her skull.

Sugarman moved on to the pelvis, swabbing the woman's
orifices, and checking for signs of sexual assault. "I'm seeing
no signs of vaginal trauma and no traces of semen. And judging from
the pelvic structure, this woman never gave birth."

Jane Ferrar's arms lay flat at her side. The buttons
from the doll's dress had left impressions in the soft flesh of her
lower arms where she'd clutched the plastic baby to her chest. St.
John looked again at the slashes on her abdomen. There was a
deliberateness about the two lines that came together just above the
navel. The letter V standing for what? Victim? Victory? Vengeance?

"What do you make of this, Doc?"

Sugarman peered at the cuts with a magnifying glass.
"Nonserrated blade, I'd say"

St. John took another photograph. Had the killer
signed his work?

Sugarman made the Y cut, commented on the cirrhosis
of the liver as he removed and weighed it. An hour later, as the
pathologist was sewing the body back together, St. John told him that
he was leaving.

"I'll call you when I get back the tox results."

Sugarman said.

"
Yeah. Let me know."
He needed to get back to the station, contact Missing Persons, and
see if anyone had been close enough to Jane Ferrar to notice her
absence. He also wanted to put out feelers for an asshole named Thor
aka Mac Ferrar.

* * *

Jane, 1974
She is not
Thor's first choice. Jane has eyes. She sees the way he watches
Munch, how he puffs out his great chest, even makes an effort to
brush his hair when he thinks he might be seeing her. But Munch isn't
interested and Jane is.

Lately, Jane wonders why she and Thor bother to
think of themselves as a couple. They are not faithful to each other,
though her sexual encounters are usually business while his are more
matters of control, conquest, and opportunity. She fears him and that
fear is one of the few emotions that touches her. He says he wants a
kid from her, a boy. She makes her tricks use condoms, especially the
ones who don't have red hair He pretends she only screws white men,
and she knows it's best to let him believe what he wants.

Thor broke her nose when he was in one of his
moods; afterward he brought her flowers and a new pair of sunglasses
to hide the black eyes. She was back on the street within days, and
he was extra sweet to her for almost a week. She even explained to
all their friends that she had asked for it, been mouthy at the wrong
time, and really hadn't left Thor much of a choice. Munch just snorts
when she hears Jane's version.

"He's an asshole," she says. "I
don't care how big his dick is."

Sometimes days will pass and Jane doesn't see
him—her supposed old man—but she keeps track of him through their
network of bartenders and connections.

Once, after not hearing from him in days, Munch
said that Jane needed to have a little fun and that she had earned a
girls' night out—the other girls being Deb, Roxanne, and Crazy
Ellen. Munch and them took her barhopping over to a dive on Lincoln,
and there was Thor with some floozy, some little blonde bitch sitting
on his lap. Jane had to hide in the bathroom until he left. He would
have broken her nose again if he found her out on the town without
him.

Her dad asked her once what she was doing with
these guys, these men who treated her like shit. He didn't understand
and Jane couldn't explain that she liked being with the baddest of
the bad, a man feared by all. She was envied every time she walked in
a bar with him, could feel the respect trickle down to her. He was
her pirate, her Jesse James. She would do anything for him, whatever
the cost.

One day Thor'd wake up and notice what he had, and
they'd all just see.
 
 

Chapter 7

Nathan was gone when Munch and Asia woke up. He'd
left his clothes and made a halfhearted effort to straighten the
blankets on the couch. The towel he used the night before was still
damp and crumpled in a corner of the bathroom floor. Munch picked it
up and hung it over the shower stall. She was going to need to set
some ground rules.

She went outside and retrieved the morning paper. The
story was on page three of the metro section with the headline NAME
OF WOMAN FOUND IN STORM CHANNEL IDENTIFIED. The one-paragraph article
went on to remind the reader that a Caucasian woman had been
discovered dead in the storm drain near the Riviera Country Club. The
woman was identified as Jane Ferrar; the apparent cause of death
pending autopsy and toxicology reports was bludgeoning.

Munch sat down heavily Jane had spent her life
getting beat up by one man after another. She had been pretty when
Munch first met her. She had one of those heart-shaped faces with
high cheekbones, cat eyes, and a narrow jaw, but every few months,
some new trauma would chip away at those looks. The straight nose was
broken and healed slightly crooked. One of her front teeth was
knocked out and the replacement tooth was too white. It wasn't all
Thor, the son of a bitch, although he'd done his share.

Munch checked the time and then reached for the
phone.

Five hundred miles away her old friend Roxanne
answered with a sleepy hello.

"
Good morning," Munch said. "I'm going
to ruin your day"

"What's up?"

Munch told her about Jane being murdered and the
visit from Mace St. John.

"
What did you tell the cop?" Roxanne asked,
sounding fully awake now.

"Pretty much the truth, that I hadn't seen Jane
in a long time, and that as far as I knew she didn't have a kid
although Thor wanted one."

"
You mentioned Thor?"

"
Yeah, well, the two names went together."

"Yeah, but still."

"
I know. " Munch looked at the newspaper
article and how much it didn't say "I also talked to my sponsor
about it. I told her about Jane and Thor and Sleaze John being
involved in something heavy ten years ago."

"
Just them?"

"I told her that there was one other person who
was way out of the life now."

"Can you trust her?"

"
Sure, she's my sponsor. It's like talking to a
priest or something."

"Not exactly" Roxanne said. "You
shouldn't have said anything. Now there's one more person to worry
about."

"
She'll be cool."

"I hope so. "

"
By the way" Munch said, "speaking of
lost causes, have you heard from Deb?"

"Oh yeah. She's back in Amsterdam."

"I knew about that"

"You'll never guess who arrived on my doorstep
last month."

"Calling himself Nathan?"

Roxanne laughed. "So you're on his list too?"

"It appears so."

"
Yeah, I put him up for three weeks. I even
found him a job with an outfit that unloads freight from train cars.
They were paying eighteen bucks an hour. He went through the whole
training program and then split."

"Well, you can't expect the kid to be a model
citizen with the upbringing we gave him."

"
That's what I told myself when the phone bill
came with about a hundred bucks' worth of long-distance calls."

Munch clicked her tongue. Mother and son were cut
from the same cloth all right. "Send it here. He said he has a
job lined up. He's got to learn to be responsible for his debts."

"No, it' s okay "

"I'm serious. We won't be doing him any favors
letting him slide on his obligations."

"
All right, I'll do it today"

"
And, Roxanne . . . ? If anyone were to ask why
I called?"

"
You don't need to tell me. It was about the
boy." Roxanne paused. "You know, Thor 's probably in
prison."

"
You think?"

"
That's where he belongs," Roxanne said.
"There but for the grace of God . . ."

"
I hear you."

"
Do you know his last name?"

"
Something Irish, I think."

"What? Like McButthead?"

"
Yeah, that could have been it. I remember
writing it out when we went to visit him at Chino that time, but it
was so long ago."