Critical Conditions

Six

I declined Mitchell’s offer to take me inside to Sam.

Maybe five minutes later, he found me where I had parked my butt on a lacquered teak bench behind an entryway pillar about the diameter of a giant sequoia. The bench was flanked by large cement statues that looked like artichokes.

“I heard you were here, Alan. Been waiting for you to come inside and act nosy.”

“This is more pleasant. It’s a nice evening, I can smell the lilacs. The alternative aroma where you’ve been hanging out isn’t so pleasant.”

“Vic is ripe now, I’ll give you that. Friday’s mail was picked up, Saturday’s paper was still on the driveway, so it looks like he’s been fermenting since Friday afternoon or Friday night. Though I think I’m getting immune to the smell. It’s the bugs that make my skin crawl and he doesn’t have any. Why is that, do you think?”

“You mean, why aren’t there any flies on his body?”

“No, I mean, why do I hate bugs on dead people?”

I shrugged. Analysis of Sam’s necro-insect phobia could wait for another time. I was glad I was outside.

“The smell could have been much worse-air conditioner was on when his wife found him around noon. She’d been gone all weekend. If the air had been off, whoa, I don’t even want to think about it.”

“I talked to Scott Truscott and Mitch Crest already. Sounds like quite a puzzle inside.”

“They filled you in?”

“You know Scott. He was discreet. Mitch told me a little more.”

“It is a confusing scene. But my part is done for tonight. I’m just a dwarf on this one, fortunately. Malloy is playing the role of Snow White for now. But I bet the sergeant, maybe even the chief, will be on it like white on rice.”

“Which dwarf are you, Sam?”

He smiled. “Sherry says that depending on my mood, I’m all the dwarfs, all seven of them. Though she thinks there should be nine in all, that Snow White should add Farty and Horny to the menagerie.”

“Do you have to go write this up before the game?”

“No, I’ll do that after.” He looked at his watch. “We still have a little time before we have to hit the road. Do me a favor before we go. Take a look inside. Tell me if anything strikes you.”

“Sam…I really don’t want-”

“Don’t whine, Alan. Be flattered by my faith in you. Come on. I just want an initial impression. I can impress my sergeant by showing him what a humanist I am, involving the mental health profession and all.”

“Sam, you always say you just want me to have a look. Then there’s always something else. And then before I know it, I’m knee deep in police shit.”

He ignored my protest and held out a hand to help me up from the bench. “Sometimes there’s shit. Not today, though. A lot of blood and some dried urine, but no shit.”

I admit to being overwhelmed by proximate murder. I don’t easily find my bearings. The stimuli seem to rush at me from five different directions at once. Smells, sounds, and new things to see, all blend together in a cacophony that I don’t filter against well.

I don’t do so well at cocktail parties, either.

I barely noticed the details of the fancy house we were in before Sam’s voice intruded. “Hey, hey, try not to touch that banister. The CSI’s cleared a path for us but they’ll be lifting latents all night. This place is big. You want gloves?”

“No. I’m fine, I’ll be fine,” I said, stuffing my hands in my pockets as I followed him downstairs. The foot of the stairs faced some large sliding glass doors, a big yard, a pool, and a lot of prairie.

“Over here.”

Across the big room, two crime scene techs were packing up their gear outside a door that opened into a wood-paneled room. Numbered evidence tents were scattered across the entire basement. A colleague was dusting the glass on the sliding doors. Another was on her hands and knees just outside the doors doing something my quick glance couldn’t decipher.

Sam stood next to the doorway across the room. “This way. Go ahead, go inside. Go, go. It’s harder if you hesitate. Dive in, go.”

To my profound relief, the body of Dr. Edward Robilio had already been bagged. The dark plastic sack was on the floor, parallel to the front of a clubby brown leather sofa. Unfortunately, the smell of Dr. Robilio’s decomposition had not been successfully bagged along with him.

“What do you want, Sam?” I made a point of breathing through my mouth.

“That’s him, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. Lucy said the patrol guys are already calling him Dead Ed. It’s a good one, I think it’s going to stick. Funny how cops do that, the nickname thing. Probably a distancing mechanism, don’t you think? What do I want from you? Don’t really know. Sometimes you surprise me. Whatever strikes you is what I want.”

Dead Ed?

I treaded carefully across the room, which was about fourteen feet square. I avoided the evidence markers and danced around the most obvious stains on the carpet. Below the room’s solitary window sat a chair that matched the sofa. The chair was badly stained with long swipes of dark pigment that I assumed was blood.

“He was sitting there, I take it?”

Sam said, “Yep, at one point he was. It’s going to go downtown later tonight. Soon. The chair, I mean.”

“Has anything been removed? Was the room this neat when he was found?”

“I’ll show you pictures later if you want. We took a few little things as evidence already. Address book. Checkbook. Mail. Answering machine. But it was a neat place, just like the rest of the house. Wife may have cleaned something up when she found him, though she says she didn’t. She says that a housekeeper comes three times a week, but not on weekends.”

“You don’t believe her, the wife?”

“When people are dead and smelly and full of bullet holes, I don’t believe hardly anybody. Call it a character flaw. Don’t worry, I’m working on it.”

“No note?”

“If there was, the wife has it. And the handgun that goes with it.”

“Are you thinking murder?”

“I’m thinking.”

A thin palmtop computer sat beside the phone on the pristine desktop. It was open, the screen exposed. “What’s on the computer? Anything? Was he working on something?” The palmtop was a tiny Compaq, the same model Lauren used to keep track of her schedule.

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet. We’re getting an addendum to the search warrant to cover it. We’ll have it examined by our computer guys. They’ve been called.”

I noticed the flashing light above the lilliputian keyboard. “Do you know that it’s turned on already? It’s in hibernation mode. That light there, the green one, it indicates that it’s hibernating. That means that it was left on and when he stopped using it, it went to sleep after a while to protect the batteries.”

“Lucy has a laptop. I think she uses it to manage her money. She said the same thing when she was in here. But she hit the keyboard and nothing happened. She said that hitting the keys should have brought anything back up that the guy was working on. She said that he must not have had any software running.”

That didn’t make any sense. “Generally, that’s true. Lauren has a machine just like this, Sam. After a while it goes into a deeper sleep. You actually have to hit the on button to get back to where you were. Give me a pair of gloves, I’ll show you how to do it.”

Sam called to someone in the next room. “Do you have that addendum to the warrant yet?”

A deep voice replied, “Yeah, five minutes ago.”

Sam pulled gloves from inside his coat. I pulled the powdery latex onto my right hand and touched the tiny off/on button. The palmtop emitted a static-laced whir and the screen came slowly alive.

Sam stepped forward and bent toward the screen. “Amazing little thing, isn’t it?” He leaned back again, doing the dance of farsightedness. He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out some half-glasses, which he perched on the end of his substantial nose.

“When did you start wearing glasses?”

“I don’t wear glasses. I got these at Kmart.”

“They look like glasses.”

“They’re from Kmart, they don’t count. It doesn’t count if you don’t go to an eye doctor.”

Sam had apparently already worked out the details of his denial. I realized that he hadn’t answered my question. Nothing new about that.

Over his shoulder, I read a few words on the computer screen and said, “Wow. What do you know?” The screen was half-covered with single-spaced type. I fought an impulse to scan; instead I forced myself to read the words carefully.

Sam said, “That looks like a damn suicide note. This doesn’t make any sense.”

It did look like a suicide note. “I wonder if he wrote it himself.”

“What, you think he’d need some help? You suspecting a ghostwriter, or you think that Dr. Kevorkian was here? Too bad, far as I know, they can’t do handwriting analysis on a word processor.”

“It’s not made out to his wife. That’s odd.”

“Why?”

“Who else was going to find him?”

“Maid? Who knows?”

“Maybe there are latents on the keys, Sam.”

“Maybe,” he said dismissively. “That’d be too easy.” He stared hard at the screen, then scanned the room as though a fresh look was going to tell him something. “Shit. There shouldn’t be a damn suicide note here.”

I said, “Let me see something. May I?”

“As long as you don’t erase anything.”

I touched one of the function keys to check the battery status of the tiny computer. “The battery is almost dead, Sam. You want me to save this screen to disc so you don’t risk losing it?”

“If the battery dies, we’ll lose that note, what’s on that screen?”

“Yes, unless it’s already been saved.”

“Has it?”

“I don’t see a file name assigned to it. It needs a file name to be saved. So I’d guess that it hasn’t been saved. I can search for previous files named ‘suicide note’ if you would like.”

He ignored my offer. “How much time does the battery have left? What does it say?”

“The meter isn’t that precise.” I pointed at the little icon. “It currently shows virtually no reserve. If it functions the same way Lauren’s does, that could mean two minutes or two hours.”

Sam turned and yelled over his shoulder, “Is Harker still here?”

A bored voice replied, “Gone, ten minutes ago.”

“Then somebody call and get Macready down here to pick up this computer. Now, not later.”

Someone said something back to Sam in a quiet voice that I couldn’t quite hear.

Sam could. He barked, “I don’t care about her dentist. Call her back. I want her here an hour ago. Second best is right now. We’ve apparently got some evidence that’s disappearing into cyberspace.”

He turned to me and said, “You really know what you’re doing? You won’t screw this up for me if I tell you to go ahead?”

I nodded. “I promise that I do know what I’m doing. But all I can tell you is that I’ll try not to screw things up. That’s not a promise. What’s your badge number, Sam?”

He told me. I used the touchscreen and the keyboard and saved the note on the screen to disc using Sam’s badge number as a file name.

We waited for Macready, the department’s computer guru, to show up and claim the computer. When she arrived, Sam told her what we had done, never mentioning me. He talked as though he knew exactly what he was doing, as though he were describing the act of pushing down a lever to make toast, an act he had done a thousand times.

Macready didn’t look old enough to drink, let alone wear a badge. She resembled a contestant I had seen recently on Singled Out. The woman had picked a real geek for a date, and they’d had to go bowling.

She collected the little machine and said, “No problem. I’ll get a printout and a report to you tomorrow.”

Sam said, “Not me. Route it to Malloy. Hope your teeth feel better soon.”

As we walked toward my car to drive to Denver, I told Sam that I thought Scott Truscott would really appreciate Sam’s extra seat to the game.

Sam seemed to be considering it. “He’d owe me one, wouldn’t he? Big time.”

“Yeah, I’m sure he would. He sounded desperate for a ticket.”

A shiver seemed to work slowly up Sam’s spine. He said, “It’s tempting, the leverage. But hockey’s sacred to me. I don’t mix home and work, and I don’t mix hockey and work. I don’t think I can do it.”

An hour later we settled into our seats in Denver to watch Gretzky and Sandstrom and Sakic and Forsberg do their things.

Simon Purdy’s seat sat empty next to Sam.

The Avalanche opened badly; they lost a player for a game misconduct in the first five minutes. Sam wasn’t upset by the penalty, explaining that the player had been defending his goalie. “It was a necessary hit. The guy had been screwing around in Roy’s crease from the moment they dropped the puck, and he wasn’t getting the message. This is only one game. But the guy whose face ended up in the glass will remember the lesson when the stitches come out. And he’ll remember about justice the next time he sees the Avs. And, most important, he’ll remember when the playoffs come in a couple of weeks.

“Keep that in mind, Alan. In hockey, you’re always thinking about the playoffs. The rest is just setting the table.”