Dust

41

I’m alone inside the PIT, where I’m known for my sardonic, cutting quips, because to resort to such extreme technology is to admit how utterly and completely it has failed us.

It’s moments like this when I’m keenly aware that if the world wasn’t flawed and people weren’t limited, I wouldn’t need a Progressive Immersion Theater equipped with multi-touch tables, tactile interfaces, projection mapping, and data tunnels to discover what bad or sad thing resulted in tragedies that might be better understood but not undone.

As my father used to say when he was dying and could no longer get out of bed or eat on his own, If my wish was my reality, Kay, I’d be sitting in the backyard in the sun, peeling an orange. The dead Dr. Schoenberg wished he could stop his dead patient Sakura Yamagata from wishing she could fly to Paris on wings she didn’t have and the dead Gail Shipton wished to break through what had blocked her since she was too young to be blocked, but given a choice none of them wished to be drug-addicted, dishonest, weak, depressed, and no longer here.

People fail, everything fails, the magic we’re born believing in and working for and then doubting and finally fearing eventually rusts, rots, fades, breaks down, withers, dies, and turns to dust, and for me the response is always the same. I clean up. It’s what I do and I’m doing it now as I stand at a long glass interactive table with data projectors under it that display computer images of documents and photographs I lightly touch with my bare hands to slide out of virtual files and move and flip through as if they’re pages of paper, to zoom in and out, as I review Gabriela Lagos’s autopsy, lab, and investigative reports.

Nearby on a curved wall her virtual image glows hugely and grotesquely in 3-D, and I’ve been going back and forth from the glass table to a smaller one where a wireless keyboard and mouse are set up. It’s as if I’m in that room with the tub and its scummy water and bloated body and I can see every vein and artery etched greenish-black beneath translucent skin that’s slipping and underneath where it’s blistered and red from full-thickness burns. I move images in a way that gives the sensation I’m walking around and looking as if I’m there, as if it’s up to me to work the scene instead of my former deputy chief Dr. Geist, in his late seventies now and comfortably ensconced in an upscale northern Virginia retirement home.

When I call him he’s cordial enough at first, saying it’s a nice surprise to hear from me after all these years and how much he loves retirement, consulting on a case here and there, not as many as he used to, just enough to keep his feet in it because it’s important to keep the brain young. He gets more condescending and gruffer as the conversation goes on and then he’s combative when I push him on the details of Gabriela Lagos, the same details he and I argued about in 1996. But now I know what I didn’t then.

On the third of August, he responded to her home at one-eleven p.m. and quickly determined her death was an accident because he’d already determined it. He knew what he was going to find and how he would interpret it, and that’s the part I didn’t put together until tonight.

“I remember her body in the tub and there was water in it, maybe filled up halfway,” he says to me over the phone and it’s about half past ten and I can tell he’s been drinking. “An obvious drowning that wasn’t suspicious. I seem to recall you and I had a professional difference of opinion.”

“In hindsight are you sure there was nothing staged about what you saw?” I wonder if the years might have covered his lies until he can’t make out the reason for them anymore or maybe he’d like the chance to finish up his existence on earth as an honest man.

But unsurprisingly I find him the same as I left him. He says he remembers how hot and airless it was inside her house and that flies blackened the bathroom windows, the droning of them infernally loud as they batted between the drawn shades and the glass. The stench was so terrible a cop threw up and then two others began to gag and had to escape into the yard. Gabriela Lagos had been drinking vodka before taking a hot bath and this increased her risk for an arrhythmia, which rendered her unconscious, and she drowned, Dr. Geist recites to me.

There was nothing unusual about the scene; he says what he’s said before, his story not changing because nothing has happened over the past seventeen years to cause him to revisit or revise or cover his ass. Before I called he probably hadn’t thought about the case in almost that long.

“And nobody straightened up the bathroom in your presence or perhaps before you got there,” I suggest.

“I can’t imagine it.”

“You’re absolutely sure of that.”

“I don’t appreciate the insinuation.”

“The kitchen door that led outside was unlocked and you must have noticed the air-conditioning had been turned off, Dr. Geist. And it wouldn’t have been turned off by her while she was still alive. It was late July and in the high eighties.”

I go through photographs on the data table as I talk with him. The thermostat with its turned-off switch. The unlocked door and through its windowpanes a large, densely wooded backyard where it would have been easy for someone to access her house after dark and tamper with the crime scene. Someone who knew what investigators would look for, someone well informed and comfortable with conspiracies, with created perceptions and outright lies, and not even Dr. Geist would have been so brazen as to commit a criminal act. But he would have overlooked certain details if persuaded by a government official that it was in the best interest of everyone.

“Her blood alcohol level of point-oh-four very likely was due to decomposition.” I move that report in front of me next. “There’s no toxicological evidence that she consumed any alcohol.”

“I seem to remember the police found an empty vodka bottle, an orange juice carton in the kitchen trash.” His nasty tone and arrogant argument are like a recording he’s played many times before.

“We don’t know who was drinking vodka. It might have been her son or someone else —”

“At the time I knew nothing about the son and what he eventually was accused of, accused of largely because of your insistence to turn the case into a sensation and create a damn uproar,” he interrupts me rudely and that is nothing new with him. “It’s not the job of a forensic pathologist to make deductions and I’ve always said you’d be better served if you wouldn’t get so damn involved. I might have thought you would have learned that after you resigned, which of course was a dark day for all of us.”

“Yes, and I have no doubt that my position in this very case had a little something to do with that dark day and its resulting in your having a few good years with no chief second-guessing you and creating uproars before you retired and made a very good living consulting on cases, mostly federal ones. I apologize for calling so late but I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.”

“I was always respectful in my assessments of you as hardworking and competent,” he says and I can only imagine what spiteful reviews he gave about me to whoever might have weighed in about my staying on as chief. “But you’ve always gone too damn far. The body is what you’re responsible for and not who did it or didn’t do it or why or why not. We’re not even supposed to care about that or the outcome in court.”

He lectures me the same way he used to and my dislike of him is as fresh as it was the last time I saw his stooped gait at a meeting after I’d left Virginia for good. He greeted me with his hawkish face and yellow teeth as he pumped my hand, sorry to hear the news, but at least I was young enough to start over or maybe I could teach at a medical school.

“I have a copy of the entire file, including call sheets,” I say to him and by now he’s openly belligerent. “And I’ve noted that the FBI called you about a matter that must have related to the Gabriela Lagos case since it’s in her file and marked with her accession number.”

“She was of interest because she had a security clearance to work at the White House. Something to do with art exhibits and she used to be married to an ambassador or something. I need to go.”

“The Assistant Special Agent in charge of the Washington field office, Ed Granby, called you at three minutes past ten a.m. on August second, 1996, to be exact.”

“I fail to see what you’re getting at and it’s getting very late.”

“Gabriela’s body wasn’t found until the next day, August third.”

Before he can butt in or get off the phone I go on to remind him it was believed she died on the early evening of July thirty-first and on August third a concerned neighbor noticed her newspapers on the driveway and windows swarming with flies and called the police.

“So I’m curious why Ed Granby would have contacted you about this case a day before the body was found.” I get to a point he never thought I’d make. “How would he have known about something that hadn’t happened yet?”

“I think there was concern because the boys were missing.”

“Boys? As in more than one?”

“I don’t remember except there was a concern.” He raises his voice like a weapon he might strike me with.

“I suspect the reason Granby chatted with you was to make sure there would be no concern if and when something unfortunate was discovered. And it was about to be,” I reply bluntly. “Coincidentally, the very next day.”

“I would appreciate your not calling me again about this!”

“It won’t be me who calls you next, Dr. Geist.”

In 3-D and high-resolution my former colleague’s deliberate deception couldn’t be more apparent. I’m looking inside the bathroom, with its traditional old-style décor, at the open doorway now, peering in, getting the perspective from the outside in as if I’ve just arrived and haven’t been here before. Then I move inside again.

The black lid of the white toilet is down, as if someone might have been sitting on it, and on the black-and-white tile floor in front of it a plush white mat is indented by large sneakers that were approximately an eleven or twelve in a men’s size. I imagine a male, probably a young one, perched on the toilet lid with his big sneakered feet resting on the mat while Gabriela was taking her ritualistic bath, and that’s consistent with the diary Benton went through on fifteen-year-old Martin Lagos’s computer disk, pages of it displayed on the data table.

She smears that gross chalky white shit all over her face & calls me over & over again. “Martin! MARTIN!” Until I come in & find her staring at me the fucking scary way she stares when she’s in her sick mood, don’t know how to describe it & I shouldn’t have to & I don’t know why I’d go in there. I hate myself so bad for going in there but she’d yell & so I’d go. I hate it, hate it!

HATE! I feel hate & I don’t want to. But that’s what human nature of people does to you after you start out relatively okay & then people do things to bring you down. I know for the rest of my life I’m going to see her white face as white as a clown face or the Joker surrounded by flames & steam that smells like the shit she rubs all over me when I have a cold & I remember it started like that when I was six & in bed & she’d come in & I’d want to die. It’s what I think of each time I walk in & she’s screaming at me. “Martin, come here! Come sit down & talk to your mother!”

The small flames were votive candles that after Gabriela’s death were arranged on the edge of the tub and it couldn’t have escaped Dr. Geist’s attention they were streaked with spilled wax, two of them chipped and cracked, and a spatter of pinpoint waxy droplets were on the floor and floating on top of the water. I’m seeing them clearly in the photographs Lucy stitched together and projected onto the curved wall and it’s obvious that at some point the candles were knocked over. They fell on tile and into the tub and the liquid wax hardened unevenly, and then someone rearranged the candles, spacing them just right like everything else.

I observe big white towels perfectly folded on racks and small, elaborately framed paintings perfectly straight on a gray stone wall, a robe hanging neatly from a hook next to the glass shower stall. On a washcloth spread open on the counter by the sink are a jar of white-tea face mask with a price tag from the spa store called Octopus, and next to it a bottle of eucalyptus body oil that would have permeated the humid air with the sharp, pungent aroma of a vapor rub. Items were tidied up to set the scene, to tell the story that Dr. Geist wanted told, which was of Gabriela applying her mask and pouring aromatic oil into her bath before having the misfortune of suffering some episode that caused her to lose consciousness and drown.

While my former deputy chief was clever and competent, he wasn’t flawless in his execution. Thank God most amoral people aren’t, especially ones with no personal investment in what they’re lying about. He didn’t care what happened to Gabriela Lagos. As far as he was concerned he had nothing to do with it and in his lofty learned way he could argue the case a number of ways and almost believe his conclusions.

Dr. Geist cared only about himself and probably assumed ASAC Granby’s interest was to avoid creating a sensation about her death because people over him in the Department of Justice, the attorney general’s office, and who knows how far up it went were worried about any political fallout. The presidential election was three months off and no point in casting a smutty shadow on the White House, where Gabriela Lagos was well known for pulling together exhibits and acquiring fine art for the First Family. It didn’t matter. Dr. Geist would have been more than happy to comply if in his mind it did no real harm and there was some benefit for him.

What I couldn’t see in printed-out photographs I reviewed at the time were the perspectives of the two people who might have been together in that bathroom before everything went so horribly wrong. I need the PIT for that. Had Martin been sitting on the closed toilet lid with his large feet resting solidly on the mat he would have been looking directly at his mother’s stark-white face while she looked directly at herself in the large mirror on the wall next to him. He mentions it in his diary, an electronic document that Benton believes is genuine in what it implies.

She looks at both of us in a mirror & no matter how much I don’t want to I watch her watching both of us & I want both of us dead. How did everything get this fucked up? It’s so bad for me right now (not that it’s ever good)…but I finally told Daniel, my best friend ever.

I’m tortured by thinking I shouldn’t have but I told him the entire fucking story going back as far as I remember. We were drinking beer in his basement & I was upset because of what the shit at home is causing with my grades & everybody hates me. I don’t know what the hell’s happened, it’s like I was okay & then I hit this wall. SLAM! I feel people looking at me like I’m a freak & I’ve finally figured out existence is nothing but a punishment & what the hell do I have to look forward to?

At least he didn’t call me sick cuz he says it’s her fucking fault & if I keep putting up with it he won’t have anything to do with me anymore. He says I need to record it cuz he needs “evidence” or he won’t believe me. So that’s what I have to do, hook up the spy camera & after he’s convinced he’ll fix “the bitch” & I felt nothing when he said it. I HATE her & that’s the truth & if he leaves I’ll be so lonely w/o a friend. I plan to go to Radio Shack tomorrow & get one of those spy video recorders & I need to get money out of the safe w/o her knowing…