Hotspur

CHAPTER 20

Diminutive, intense, levelheaded, Gaston B. Marshall became a pathologist by default and county coroner by fiat. When Vee Jansen, the coroner since 1949, died of a heart attack in 1995, Gaston inherited the job.

In other counties, especially above the Mason-Dixon line, county commissioners might have grumbled at having such an ancient coroner as Vee Jansen performing autopsies. This would have been superseded by a new wave of grumbling as a much younger man assumed the duties. But in central Virginia, in this county, where everyone claimed everyone else as shirttail cousins, Gaston was readily accepted when he became coroner. He was a homeboy. Gaston B. Marshall, a professor of medicine at the university, now had two jobs. The extra stipend from the county was useful. Gaston was the father of three grade-school children. The university, for all its grandeur, paid poorly.

The other good thing about this job was Gaston was left to his own devices. If he wanted students to assist him, no one quibbled. If he wanted to utilize his findings in his lectures, names of the deceased changed, he could do it. Being county coroner proved a rich source of teaching material. His students could see things they might not see at the university hospital. During one autopsy of a drunken gentleman, well born but bone idle, when he attempted to lift out the liver it literally disintegrated in his hands. If nothing else, those students witnessing the diseased liver would think twice before drinking too much.

On the Sunday the body was recovered from the river, he had but one assistant, a female intern utterly enraptured by pathology, Mandy Collatos. Perhaps the appeal was you were always right but one day late. In the case of Guy Ramy their findings were twenty-one years late almost to the day.

Walter Lungrun stood in scrubs over the stainless-steel table, the channels on the side sloping downward for drainage.

Ben Sidell, a by-the-book man most times, wanted Gaston to see the drum, so he delivered that as well. It sat near the table. A large double sink, also stainless steel, ran along the wall.

All three physicians wore thin rubber gloves.

“You know if there hadn’t been punctures in the drum I believe he would have been mummified.” Mandy was proud that they had extracted the skeleton doing precious little damage to it, no easy task.

“Yes.” Gaston finished placing the bones in their proper position. The major joint areas had come apart when the skeleton was removed, much as a joint pulls out of a chicken leg. Plus the anvil in the bottom of the drum had broken bones probably on the drop into the river. The drum had settled after that.

Walter watched intently.

“Dr. Marshall,” Mandy said, pointing to two ribs, left side.

Gaston bent down, his upturned nose almost touching the graceful, thin rib bones. “Uh-huh. When a body has been out this long, you hope for the best. We were lucky Nola was buried in red clay. It preserved her longer.”

“The methods of killing were different for these two,” Walter said.

“Yes. Interesting . . .” Gaston noticed that Guy’s right shinbone was shorter than the left and thicker. “Old break.”

“Casanova Point-to-Point Races. Late seventies,” Walter said. He marveled at the body’s ability to knit itself back together.

“You were there?”

“Actually, I was. My mother took me. I was always crazy for horses. Guy crashed a timber fence. No fault of his own. The jockey in front of him bobbled in front of the jump, flew off, and Guy’s horse braked hard.” Walter smiled slightly. “He threw Guy straight into the timber. He was out foxhunting the next week in a cast. At least that’s what I heard.”

A knock on the door made Gaston pause in his examination. “Come in.”

Larry Hund, the dentist, entered the room. He was carrying a folder. “Still has a jawbone.”

“Larry, we see a lot of strange things in here—including one another.” Gaston motioned for him to step up to the table.

Larry pulled out the dental charts and swiftly checked the teeth, most still in the jawbone. “Guy Ramy.”

Gaston and Mandy, nothing if not thorough, finished up in another hour, obsessively checking and double-checking, measuring bones, making detailed notes.

Larry inspected the drum before leaving. “Boy, someone wanted him to stay put. Got an anvil in there.”

“But he didn’t stay put, did he?” Gaston yanked a paper towel off the dowel.

“I don’t know how you can do your work.” Larry smiled. “It’s one thing when bare bones are on the table. But when you have to cut into a corpse that’s been out there for days or weeks . . .”

“You get used to it, but I don’t think any of us look forward to working on a body exposed for a few days. When it’s hot, one day will do it. I can smoke cigars, shove Vicks VapoRub up my nose or camphor oil, the damned stench still gets through. After they’ve been out a week, unless, of course, they’re frozen, it actually begins to improve.”

“What’s the fascination?” Larry rarely had an opportunity to talk to Gaston like this.

“Answers. I can often get the answers and, in the case of wrongful death, clues to the killer.”

“Well, I don’t know about this one.” Larry picked up his folder. “How will you ever find the killer?”

“I don’t know.” Gaston sighed.

Mandy put the body in a cooler drawer, slid it shut with a thunk, and inserted a paper card in the small slot in the front, with a number on it.

“Anyone else in here?” Larry was curious.

“No, it’s been quiet.” He finished toweling off. “You did a good job on Nola, by the way. I don’t remember if I thanked you. So many teeth were missing. I don’t know if her killer smashed her skull in first or hit her in the face first.”

“Do you think it’s weird—pathology?” Mandy asked Larry.

“In a sense,” he honestly answered. “The typical response to death is aversion, even repulsion.”

“True,” Gaston agreed. “I had to overcome that myself in med school. But then, I remember it as clear as yesterday, we were in lab working on the circulatory system and I was lifting up the aorta, like rubber those cadavers, and I stepped back to look at the body. The arteries and the veins were a tracery of life. It was beautiful. I looked at bodies differently after that, and let’s face it, I wasn’t meant to be a plastic surgeon. No bedside manner.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to talk to your patients,” Walter said, smiling. He regularly dealt with people in acute distress.

“Right,” Larry laughed at Gaston and Mandy, “your patients don’t talk back.”

“Oh, but they do,” Gaston countered, “they do.”