Walkers (8 page)

And yet, she could not put out of her mind the picture of Death in black armor astride the white horse with the blazing eyes. The skull face under the upraised helm glared at her with empty eyes. The skull swam in Joana's mind, and blurred into the face of the woman behind the wheel of the station wagon.

Joana shook her head vigorously to clear away the troubling thoughts and cranked the little car's engine to life.

Up on the porch Peter Landau watched the Datsun turn around and head down the hill and out of sight. Then he went back inside the house. The late clouds had begun to drift inland from the ocean, and it was growing cold.

Peter walked over and sat down on the love seat. He stared at the table where he had laid out the Tarot cards for Joana. It was the first time anything like this had happened to him, the first time he had lost control of a reading.

It had been his plan to give her one of his standard flattering readings, with the subtle suggestion that the time was ripe for a new romantic adventure in her life. That approach had worked many times, leading him into more beds than he could remember. With Joana, though, it was different. He had been uncomfortable from the start with the familiar routine. For the first time he could remember, the

cards seemed to be actually telling him something. Something he did not want to know.

Years ago Peter had memorized the standard interpretations for each of the seventy-eight cards. He could weave them together glibly into any kind of a story he wanted to tell. For some reason, today he could not seem to talk his way around the portents of bad news, violence, and disaster. And then there was that damned Death card in the crucial number-ten position. Jesus, was he starting to believe in this crap?

Idly he scooped up the deck, shuffled, and cut it to his left into three piles. He chose the Magician, as usual, to represent himself, and began laying out the Keltic cross. It always relaxed him to weave brilliant futures for himself by giving his own special interpretations to the meanings of the cards.

He laid out the six cards of the cross and frowned. Many swords, a sign of strife. Especially bad, the Nine, Ten, and Page of swords. Sorrow, desolation, misfortune, pain, and an impostor exposed. How the hell could he make anything good out of that?

Peter was tempted to sweep up the cards and put them away, but some compulsion made him continue. Deliberately he put down the seventh, eighth, and ninth cards in the vertical row.

First came The Fool, that unheeding young man about to step over the brink of a precipice. Folly, indescretion, thoughtless action. Then The Tower with its fearsome lightning bolt and falling bodies. And The Hanged Man, bound and suspended from a T-cross of living wood. The most ambiguous of the Tarot deck, but with a dark and sinister look. Bad news, all of them.

What the hell was he doing? This was only a game, wasn't it? He could make the cards say anything he wanted, couldn't he?

One more to go. The tenth card, the final outcome. Peter hesitated a long time. His fingers rubbed the crisscross design on the back of the card, and seemed to sense what it would be.

Don't turn that card
, he told himself silently. If he did not actually see it, then it wouldn't exist.

His fingers moved without his willing them and slid the next card from the top of the deck. He flipped it face up in the tenth position. It was no surprise. It was Death.

The air in the elevator grew rapidly cooler as Dr. Hovde rode down to the basement of the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. The car came to a stop, the doors slid noiselessly open on oiled rollers. The doctor shivered when he stepped out into the tiled hallway. Powerful fluorescent lights gave the scene a harsh, blue-white clarity.

Dr. Hovde walked quickly past a row of heavy drawers set into the wall. One of the drawers was rolled out. The outlines of a body could be seen under a green sheet. One naked black foot protruded from under the sheet. A cardboard tag was attached to the big toe.

Horde continued to the end of the hall and through a door with
Pathology Lab
lettered on frosted glass. Inside, the smell of disinfectant was sharp in his nostrils. There were four tables spaced across the room. The tops of the tables were metal grillwork with troughs underneath to catch the spilled body fluids. At one end of each table was a stainless-steel sink, at the other a hanging scale for weighing organs as they were removed from the cadaver. Three of the tables were empty. On the fourth lay the naked body of Mrs. Yvonne Carlson.

Dr. Kermit Breedlove, the chief pathologist, a lanky man with an unruly shock of black hair, stood over the body with his arms folded. A wooden toothpick danced from one side of his mouth to the other. Dr. Hovde had always thought he would look more at home playing the piano in a saloon than cutting up dead bodies.

"Hello, Warren," Breedlove said. "What brings you down to the icebox? Things slow upstairs?"

"For the moment." Hovde walked over and stood next to the pathologist, looking down on Mrs. Carlson's body. "I'm a little curious about this one."

Breedlove shrugged. "What you see is what you get. Female Caucasian, middle to late fifties. Old

appendectomy, more recent gall bladder."

"Will you be doing an autopsy?"

"Got to," said Breedlove. "According to the sheet, there was no doctor in attendance at the time of death."

"I know. She died in a traffic accident."

"That so? Doesn't look very banged up."

"It was her heart or something."

"We'll find out for sure when we go into her," said Breedlove.

"Doesn't the coroner usually handle these?"

"Normally, yes, but they're crying short-handed downtown. Proposition 13, you know. As long as we've got the time and the facilities, I don't mind helping them out now and then."

Dr. Hovde remembered the manila folder under his arm. He took it out and passed it to Breedlove. "Here's the police report."

"Thanks." The pathologist scanned the two typewritten pages and shook his head, making a disgusted sound.

"What's the matter?" Hovde asked.

"Just another L.A.P.D. fuck-up. Nothing out of the ordinary."

"What do you mean?"

"This here report doesn't go with this here cadaver, that's all."

Dr. Hovde felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. "Why do you say that, Kermit?"

The pathologist gave the folder a contemptuous slap with the back of his hand. "According to this, the dead woman here was driving a car in Westwood"—he looked up at the electric wall clock—"just a little

over an hour ago."

"So?"

"So, the woman here on the table has been dead at least twelve and possibly twenty-four hours."

"Are you sure?"

"This is my specialty, Warren, remember? I'll be able to tell more when I cut her open, but just by looking at her I can assure you she wasn't up and around this afternoon. Feel the epidermis."

Dr. Hovde touched the woman's pale forearm. The flesh was rubbery-firm and cold.

"Under normal conditions," said Breedlove, "a body will retain some of its heat, especially when the weather is warm like today and the body is clothed like this one was, for six to twelve hours. This one is cold as a mackerel." He used his thumb to peel back an eyelid. "Take a look at that."

The woman's eye was dry and lusterless, with a cloudy film over the cornea.

"If it was only an hour after her death, the fluids would still cover the eyeball, making it glisten," Breedlove said.

"Aren't there other conditions that could account for these things?"

"Maybe. Like I said, I won't know everything until I go into her. I'll tell you another funny thing about this one. Look at her feet."

Dr. Hovde followed the pathologist's pointing finger and saw that Yvonne Carlson's feet and lower legs were discolored a dark purplish-red. Breedlove slipped both hands under the body and expertly flipped it over onto the stomach.

"Now look at her back."

The woman's flesh was unnaturally pale from the neck all the way down to the midpoint of the calves, where the discoloration began.

"She is supposed to have died in a supine position, according to the police report," said Breedlove.

"That's right. She got out of the car after it stalled, took a couple of steps, and fell. Nobody moved her, and she lay there on her back until the ambulance came.

"And in the ambulance they'd have her strapped down, again on her back."

"That's the procedure."

"And when you saw her she was on her back, likewise when she came down here."

"What are you getting at?"

"If that was the way it really happened, the blood, when the heart stopped and circulation ceased, would have settled into the lowest part of the body. With the body in the supine position, that would be the subcutaneous vessels of the back of the neck first, then the shoulders and the rest of the back. The shoulder blades and buttocks, where the skin was compressed by the supporting surface, would have remained free of blood and pale. The stagnant blood would congeal there, giving us the characteristic discoloration. As you can see, the woman's back has no sign of postmortem lividity, but there is advanced lividity in the feet and lower legs."

"Thanks for the lecture," Hovde said drily, "but what does it mean?"

The pathologist ticked off one finger. "It could mean she died by hanging, but as there are no abrasions or discolorations at the throat, and none of the usual signs of asphyxiation, we can eliminate that."

"We
know
she didn't die by hanging," Hovde said impatiently.

Breedlove ticked off the second finger. "Then we go to another possibility." His eyes twinkled mischievous]y.

"Get to it, Kermit."

"This woman was walking around for some hours after she was dead."

The pathologist's laughter rang in the tile-walled laboratory. Dr. Hovde stared at him.

"Just having my little joke," Breedlove said.

"Oh, that's funny. That's very funny."

"Look, Warren, if you're going to come down with a case of sensibilities, go on back upstairs and patch up your emergencies. Down here, without some kind of a sense of humor a man would go crazy in a hurry."

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry. When are you doing the autopsy?"

"As soon as the husband comes in to I.D. her. Hey, this wasn't somebody you knew, was it?"

"No. I think it might involve somebody I know, though. I'd like to hear what results you get."

"Sure. Give me a call."

Dr. Hovde left the laboratory and walked back up the hall past the refrigerated drawers. They were all closed now. He rode back up in the elevator, and as the temperature warmed he felt as though he were returning to the land of the living.

Things were still quiet in the emergency ward. The young resident was removing a splinter from the foot of a little girl who stared at him with huge adoring eyes.

Dr. Hovde washed his hands and dropped a quarter into the machine for a cup of bitter coffee. He carried it back into the office cubicle and sat down at the desk to think about Mrs. Yvonne Carlson, lying dead on an autopsy table downstairs, and young Joana Raitt, nearly hit by a car seemingly driven by this woman many hours after she died.

Hovde lit a cigarette, holding it down below the window out of habit so no one could look in and see him smoking. He tried to relate the strange automobile accident to the story Joana had told him this morning about the hallucinations she experienced after her near-drowning. Hallucinations, or whatever the hell they were. Was there a connection? He concentrated, trying to remember exactly what Joana had told him.

His thoughts were shattered by the ringing of the alarm bell. Two ambulances wailed up to the door with victims of a gasoline-tank-truck explosion on the San Diego Freeway. In the frenzied activity of the next several hours Dr. Hovde put out of his mind the puzzle of Joana Raitt and the dead woman downstairs.

Joana awoke on Friday with a vague feeling that all was not well. Her brain felt sluggish with the residue of troubled dreams. The dreams slipped away as quickly as she tried to remember them. Then the cobwebs cleared and she remembered the unsettling experiences of the last two days. She pushed the images out of her mind and concentrated on immediate tasks.

Out of habit she rolled over to look at the clock. Seven-fifteen exactly. In another five minutes the alarm would beep if she allowed it to. She punched off the alarm button and switched on the radio. A manic morning disc jockey yammered away nonstop while Joana collected her thoughts.

She reached up and drew back the curtains across the bedroom window. The morning was overcast. It was June, what could you expect? Joana allowed herself five more minutes curled up under the covers, then swung out of bed.

She pulled on a robe and went outside and down the path to where the morning
Times
lay, folded and tied with string. She carried the paper inside and scanned the headlines. There had been a terrorist bombing in Tel Aviv, a student riot in Mexico City, and a congressman censured in Washington. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Back inside, Joana walked through to the kitchen and plugged in the electric coffeepot. The water and coffee she had measured in the night before. Then she returned to the bedroom, peeled off her robe and pajamas, and got into the shower.

It felt good to get back to the schedule of little things she did every day. The familiar routine was welcome after the violent disruptions of her life in the past forty-eight hours. She looked forward with pleasure to returning to work this morning. The job was interesting and challenging, and Joana was good at it. When her boss moved up, which figured to be in two or three years, she would have a good shot at becoming advertising manager.

She turned off the shower and dried herself vigorously. From her closet she selected a plaid skirt-and-vest outfit and carried the newspaper with her into the kitchen, touching things as she walked past, enjoying the familiar look and feel.