Dead of Night

7

By 11:30, I’d finished giving my edited statement to detectives. During the interview I told them that, because I’d left my cell phone with Applebee, I’d checked the log. The last two numbers dialed were unfamiliar. They’d been made while I was chasing the bad guys.

“It was either Applebee or whoever killed him.”

The cops were not pleased that I’d retrieved the phone. They said I’d maybe screwed up any chance of fingerprints. They copied the numbers, letting me see they were pissed off.

So maybe that’s the reason they told me I couldn’t leave: a mild punishment.

At twenty minutes before midnight, and with nothing else to do, I took aside an investigator from the Bartram County Medical Examiner’s Office to ask if she’d come to any conclusions about Jobe’s death. I’d assumed murder, but realized there was another possibility.

The investigator, whose ironic name was Rona Graves, replied, “Are you a relative? A close friend?”

“No. His sister’s a friend. I’d never met him.”

“Are you wondering suicide or murder? It’s really impossible to say right now. Too soon. Too much to sort out.”

We were standing outside, Applebee’s porch light casting tree shadows on sand, stars beyond the tree canopy, the two of us separated from a handful of curious neighbors by yellow crime scene tape. Ms. Graves, in jeans and a blue blouse with rolled-up sleeves, was an interesting-looking woman, with her Appalachian face, Latina cocoa skin, wild black surfer-boy hair cropped short. She had all the professional mannerisms, didn’t have to think about it: the voice, the wording, body language that served as a barrier. She’d been in the business for a while. But she could also wrinkle her nose to show you how hard she was thinking, or brush an elbow. Ways of letting you know there was a human in there.

She was wrinkling her nose now, tapping thoughtfully on a clipboard. “I probably shouldn’t discuss this any more than that. We’re all going to have to wait for the autopsy.”

I nodded and looked toward the house-silhouettes of busy cops-then down a sand trail that led to more dilapidated houses. This island was prime for one of the big developers to move in, get the title problems resolved, then start all over demanding really big bucks.

It would happen.

“This could be a really nice place.”

I said, “Lots of waterfront, good trees. Yeah.” Startled we’d shifted to a similar pattern of thought.

“When the nightshade blooms here, it’s like snowdrifts. All those white blooms. But you’ve got to be careful, especially with kids. The berries are poisonous. We’ve done several of those cases.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Two died.”

She was still tapping on the clipboard. I got the impression she was marking time, just like me. Her preliminary examination was done. Now she was waiting for detectives to finish so she could bag the body and be on her way.

“Do you have any nonrelated questions, Dr. Ford?”

“Just Ford. Or Marion.”

“Okay. Ford. Anything else I can do for you?”

There was something else on my mind. I was concerned about the young constable.

I said, “The teenage girl who was here, the one the EMTs treated for shock? Her name’s Melinda Voigt. Local girl. She’s never been through anything like this. I think she’s going to need some help.”

“I haven’t met Melinda, but I know who she is. What kind of help?”

“Maybe a couple of visits with your shrink buddy. Better yet, the kind of help where someone with some authority-like you-tells the girl a small lie. A lie of kindness. I think someone needs to get the girl off alone and tell her that Applebee was dead before she arrived here.”

“She feels responsible?”

“The girl was on his porch when I arrived. She hadn’t gone in. She refused to let me in. After we found the body, she started wondering if maybe she could have saved him. If she hadn’t waited. Behaved a little more human and a little less hard-ass.”

“She played the role, huh? The big boss in charge.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m not surprised. The cops tell me she’s a pompous ass. Even before she got elected constable, they say she was a pompous ass. Do you know what the vote was? Four to three. Only seven island voters. She’d cooked up the constable idea herself. A title, some power. I hear she comes from big money.”

“Acting like a pompous ass is one of the stages most of us go through, isn’t it, Ms. Graves?”

“I’m not so sure. Are you including yourself?”

“Sure. I’ve got lots of experience. Not just the pompous ass stage, either. On a regular basis, I invent all kinds of ways to behave like an ass. Thoughtless ass. Clumsy ass. Dumb ass. Myopic ass. Name one.”

She was grinning as I added, “The kind of guilt Melinda’s starting to feel could become permanent. The kind too heavy even for us experienced asses to deal with. She told me she’s only twenty. A small lie of kindness might help.”

Graves thought about it for a moment, letting me see that her professional side was uneasy with the idea, before she said, “From what I was told, Applebee was still alive at a little after nine when you telephoned 911. Slightly more than an hour later, you called to say that he was dead. What time did the girl arrive on scene?”

“Nine-forty. That’s what Melinda told me. I showed up about twenty minutes later.”

The woman was shaking her head. “The window’s too small. We can’t pinpoint the time of death that closely.”

“I’ve read there’s a way by measuring the body’s core temperature-”

“Yes, I’ve already done that, but not with any…” She paused to organize her explanation. “Let me put it this way. After somatic death-that’s when the body as a whole stops functioning-a corpse’s core temperature can remain normal for one, even two, hours afterward, depending on conditions. Then it drops by one to one and a half degrees per hour. That’s what you’re talking about. I did my preliminary examination at eleven-thirty. Applebee’s temp was thirty-five Celsius, which is only two degrees below norm. See what I mean?”

Intentionally ignoring the point, I said, “Then he could have died half an hour or so before the girl came on scene. What a relief if Melinda heard that. It might spare her one hell of a lot of emotional turmoil down the road.”

Ms. Graves began to chuckle, her tone saying, Okay, you win.

I said, “It’s a good cause.”

“You’ve never met the girl before, Ford?”

“Nope. But she needs help.”

“Are you always so persuasive? If the motivation wasn’t so noble, I might be offended. Instead, I might let you persuade me to have a cup of coffee after we’re done. There’re a couple of all-night places near Kissimmee. But we can’t stay long. I’ve got an early call.”

I said, “I’d like that. I really would. But there’s another detective coming to talk with me, and it’s already close to midnight.”

The woman was nodding, looking at me, stroking her brown cheek, amused. She waited for a while, letting me see that she knew something I didn’t, before asking, “Why can’t men just come out and say that they’re already involved with a woman? Is it because they want to leave their options open? Or is it because they’re embarrassed?”

“Embarrassed?”

“Embarrassed to be in love.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“Not until I asked you out for coffee. That expression on your face. Talk about panic. For a second, I thought you might run away and hide.”

“For the record, Ms. Graves, the answer would have been yes. Under different circumstances.”

“Rona.”

“Rona.”

It was true. I’ve met enough decent, interesting women over the years to wish that we lived lives proportionate in number to the number of strangers we’d like to get to know better.

The woman gave me a fraternal pat on the shoulder. “You really are a persuasive one. The professor type, but with charm. I’ll speak with the girl. You’re right. It could be a good and healthy thing for me to do. If Her Highness the constable reads the official report, though-well, there’s no way to control that.”

My cell phone began to ring as I thanked her. Watched her walk across the lawn toward Applebee’s brightly lighted house.

With the phone to my ear, from across eleven hundred miles of America, I listened to my old workout pal, my lover, and the expectant mother of our unborn child say, “Ford, what bullshit excuse do you have this time? Have I told you lately what a gigantic pain in the ass you are? If I haven’t, let me say it again just to be sure you’ve pulled your head out of your butt long enough to listen.”

I waited until she’d repeated herself before I replied with affection, “Hello to you, too, dear Dewey Nye. You expect to kiss an infant with that sailor’s mouth of yours?”

“You’d give a week’s pay to get a wet one from me.”

“More.”

“Really. Then I may start charging.”

She could. Dewey is a very kissable woman: Blond, fit, five-ten, and 160 pounds or so of raging, self-reliant pregnant female. She was once ranked among the top-ten tennis players in the world, and plays mostly golf now, beach volleyball, and some racquetball. Still competitive and outspoken. It’s hard to tell from her locker-room vocabulary, but she’s also intuitive and sometimes overly sensitive.

“How much would you pay?”

It was fun talking with her. Nice not to be locked inside my own brain, launching from a ski ramp over and over, seeing Applebee in the closet, so I played along. “Money is so awkward between friends. I was thinking more of a barter system. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. So to speak.”

“Oh sure. Take it out in trade. Trouble is, it’s tough to remember what you look like. I see you so seldom. Or even hear from you.”

I thought, Uh-oh. She wasn’t playing anymore.

“I’m serious, Doc. I got a bellyful of baby, and I can’t carry the load alone.”

“Dewey, I tried to call twice this morning, got that damn recorder. And my evening has been-unbelievable.”

“Bite me, Thoreau. So what’s your excuse? It’s ten o’clock in farm country, which is beddie-bye time, sport, for those of us ladies who happen to be knocked up.”

She was calling from the little farm she’d inherited outside Davenport, Iowa. It’s a house and barn on two hundred acres where the Mississippi River flows west, then turns sharply southward toward Missouri. Cornfields, rolling hills, white two-story houses, red barns, hickory and oak, narrow gravel roads. Because she was pregnant, Dewey had decided the family farm was the right place to be.

“A good luck sorta deal,” she explained it. “Something I can feel, but can’t explain.”

It was one of those instinctual judgments that I’m incapable of understanding, so take pains not to contest. Why risk offending someone you care about?

So I’d been commuting to Iowa when my schedule, and my lab work allowed-not often enough, obviously. Flying back and forth between the west coast of Florida and Quad City International Airport, Moline, Illinois, at least once a month. When I wasn’t visiting, I telephoned often, and always, always just before bed.

I apologized again, adding, “Trust me, you’ll understand when I explain. Not now, though, Dew. Tomorrow, if that’s okay.”

She didn’t want to let it go, but at least sounded playful again. “Tomorrow, huh? Why don’t you let me guess? You probably had those Coke bottle glasses of yours glued to some test tube. Or maybe you discovered some kind of insect that’s new to science. If that’s what it is, I hope the thing crawls out of the jar and bites you on the ass. Or on something that’s a lot more delicate.”

The woman cracked herself up. She was making her familiar chortling noise, as I replied, “Nope, Dewey, I keep that particular item reserved for you. Only you.”

“You’d better, Thoreau. If you don‘t, I’ll… I’d get you blind drunk one night, then tattoo my name on that pecker of yours. ‘Dewey Aubrey Nye’ ”-she spoke louder to prevent me from interrupting-“the whole thing. Middle name and all. That way, when you’re in some freezing locker room all shrunken up, or just before you started boinking some new chick, she’d look and see DAN. My initials in capital letters. Get it? She’d be like, ‘Hey, get this fruit loop away from me!’ Like some sweetie boy had branded you. Your own special butt buddy named Danny Boy!”

Dewey has lived as a gay woman, so maybe that’s why she uses language she wouldn’t tolerate from outsiders. Not that she seems to worry about offending. You never know what she’s going to say or do next. It’s one of the reasons I like her. The only predictable thing about Dewey Nye is that she always does the unexpected. Each and every day, she reinvents herself in some small way-a new quirk, a favorite new word, an unexpected interest. Every morning, she opens the door to a secret little carnival that is going on inside her head and chooses a different ride to try, a new attraction to investigate, or flavor to taste.

If you’re among the lucky few, she’ll sometimes invite you to travel along.

Over the years, she’s invited me into that private place several times… but then always uninvited me later. Usually for good reason.

This time, though, we seemed to be sticking. Maybe because there was more at stake.

Trying to sound stern, I said into the phone, “Jesus, that’s a tired old joke. I’m not even going to reply until you stop making that awful hooting noise. It’s disgusting.”

“Awww-hoo-hoo-hoo. I can just see it! Your pecker with a guy’s name on it. Three letters in red, blue… no, lavender -and all it says is DAN unless I’m around, get you in bed, and make the thing angry. Then it’ll say my whole freakin’ name. Some of it, anyway. Ohhhh… Awww… Oh, my poor ribs.”

“Stop,” I said. “You’re making me wince. Don’t babies sleep inside the womb? At least try to pretend you’re normal.”

Baby.

Live your entire life alone, it’s a scary word. We’d both given it a lot of thought. The subject was not without fresh scars.

The previous spring, Dewey discovered that she was pregnant. It was unplanned; a surprise to us both. But that didn’t make it any easier when she miscarried near the end of the first trimester.

Only a few weeks before she lost the baby, a blind ex-carney and fortune-teller named Baxter had told me something bad was about to happen to a child of mine. I’d shrugged it off until I got Dewey’s hysterical call. It gave even a skeptic like me pause.

He’d also told me that I would soon end the life of a friend.

Unsettling. If I believed in such things.

So, in June, I visited the lady in Iowa where we talked it over. Discussed all the pros and cons, all the many obligations, responsibilities, the amount of time, money, and dedication that were necessary.

When we both felt certain, we gave it another try. Dewey’s the one who insisted that the smart thing to do in any business partnership is hash out the details of dissolution before starting. We did that, too, even though I secretly believed it trivialized the commitment-but I was also secretly relieved. Each had the right, we agreed, to end the partnership, but parental rights, and financial obligations, remained.

In September, we found out that she was pregnant again. So I’d been commuting when I could. Lately, I’d also been working my butt off so that I could get away and spend the holidays with her as promised.

Still chortling, though not nearly so hard, she reminded me of that promise now.

“But you can’t use this tattoo gambit as some lame excuse for not showing up for Christmas. You will be here a week from now? Sunday, the nineteenth.”

As I replied, “I’ve already got my flight booked,” I was also watching Rona Graves, the medical investigator. Watched, puzzled, as she rushed out onto Applebee’s porch, then trotted down the steps. She was in a hurry, but also in distress, judging from her jerky, uncertain movements.

Graves was searching for someone, head scanning, as Dewey told me, “Tomlinson’s welcome, too. But no dope smoking on my property. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m not sure Iowa’s ready for someone as weird as Scarecrow. It’s so freakin’ cold here tonight, they’d stick him in a padded cell if he went out wearing one of his sarongs, and no underwear.”

Scarecrow-a pet name for one of her favorite people. She still credits him for healing her after she’d been badly injured. A spiritual intervention. Another instinctual conviction beyond my understanding.

I was about to say something when I noticed that Graves was waving at me, calling, “Ford? Dr. Ford! Get in here quick. Hurry, please.”

Her turn to panic.

I told Dewey, “Hey, something’s come up. Gotta run. Call you later.”

Before I hit the terminate button, I heard her say quickly, “Make sure you do, Thoreau, because there’s somethin’ important we need to discuss. Guess who called me, who wants to visit-”

I told her, “I will. I will,” already walking fast toward the house.