Mission Flats

3

The usual cant is that we are blase about violence, that movies and TV inure us to it. Real violence and injury are not supposed to shock us because we have seen the hyperreality of movie violence. The truth is precisely the opposite. Filmic violence — all those bursting blood bags and death poses, all those actors holding their breath, all that artful realism — only increases the shock value of an actual corpse. The primal weirdness of a dead body, it turns out, is in its very reality — in its lumpish, implausible nearness.

I was horrified by the body of Robert Danziger. It assaulted the senses. That glistening cleft in the scalp, the distended and discolored torso. The skin rubbery and taut over the swollen calves. The overpowering stink that hung like smoke in the sinuses. I made it to the woods a good ways off from the cabin before vomiting. Even that did not still the vertigo. I lay down on the pine needles and closed my eyes.

That afternoon was filled with state troopers, assistant AGs from Portland and even Augusta. The prosecutor in charge of the state’s investigation was a larval politician named Gregg Cravish (it rhymed with crayfish). He had the waxy, artificial look of a TV Game-Show Host. Even the crow’s-feet sprouting on his temples looked like they had been placed there intentionally to add a little gravitas to his too-handsome face. Cravish explained that the staties would handle the investigation. Under Maine law, the AG’s office has jurisdiction over all murders. ‘Standard procedure,’ the Game-Show Host assured me with a little squeeze on my shoulder. ‘We’ll sure be needing your help, though.’

So I stood aside and watched.

A team of state-police techs pored over the cabin and grounds like archaeologists on a dig. The Game-Show Host peered in the cabin door now and then but spent most of his time leaning against a car, looking bored.

After some time, I was asked to block the roads leading to the cabin. Beyond that, it was clear, my job was just to stay the hell out of the way. I put an officer about a mile up the access road to the north, and I covered the road from the opposite direction myself. Occasionally cars would pass — troopers, more Game-Show Hosts, the ME to collect the body. They waved as they drove by. I waved back, then returned to scrubbing little spatters of vomit off my shoes with spit and Kleenex. The nausea receded, replaced by a headache. And I realized that I could not simply wait. I had to act. For there were two choices at this point: either allow the investigation to proceed without me, as it had already begun to do, or inject myself into it somehow. The first — taking a pass on the whole thing — was not really an option. I was already involved, however unwillingly. I could not walk away from this case, a homicide in my own town.

It was past noon by the time I returned to the cabin, determined to take my rightful place in the investigation. Cravish and his team were already packing their gear into trunks and loading the trunks into the vans. They had gathered enough fibers, photos, and dead bodies to keep them busy for a while. The cabin was trussed up in yellow crime-scene tape like a big Christmas present, and a second cordon of tape had been strung along wooden stakes around the building to deter anyone from venturing near. I was able to walk through this scene unnoticed. To the Game-Show Hosts, I was invisible.

The corpse lay curled on a steel-top gurney, forgotten. In the open air the smell of it had dissipated a little, enough at least that the odor no longer made my head swim. I found myself wandering toward it, fascinated. There was a lurid appeal to the thing. The bare limbs, swollen and pallid and hairless. The face distorted by the fatal wound. It seemed inhuman, this creature. A snail shucked from its shell, left to wriggle about unprotected, to burn in the sun.

I was staring down at the corpse when Cravish and another man came up to the opposite side of the gurney. The new man was small but he had a stiff, combative look, like a rooster. Cravish introduced him as Edmund Kurth from Boston Homicide.

‘Boston?’ I asked.

The Bostonian Kurth stared at me. He seemed to be scrutinizing me for signs of rural stupidity. I should say right up front that there was something disconcerting about Ed Kurth, even on this first meeting. He was the sort of man one is anxious to get away from. He had a severe, angular face dominated by a narrow nose and two dark eyes. His skin was pitted with acne scars. Thick eyebrows imparted to his face a permanent scowl, as if he had just been shoved in the back.

‘The victim was a DA in Boston,’ Cravish explained to me. He gave Kurth a look: Do you see what I have to deal with?

‘Boston,’ I repeated, to no one in particular.

Kurth bent over the body, examining it with the same unblinking focus he had directed at me. The detective snapped on rubber surgical gloves and prodded the thing with his finger as if he were trying to wake it up. I watched his face as he came nose to nose with Bob Danziger’s remains. I expected a reaction, a flinch. But Kurth’s face remained impassive. To judge by his expression, it would be hard to tell if he was looking into a dead man’s ruptured eye socket or just poking through his glove compartment for a map.

‘Well, maybe that’s why he was killed,’ I ventured, eager to show my instinct for sleuthing. ‘Because he was a DA.’

Kurth did not respond.

I babbled on. ‘ If he was killed. I mean, it could be a suicide.’ Now, here was an insight. In crime-scene training, I vaguely recalled, we learned that gunshot suicides invariably shoot themselves in one of three places: the temple, the roof of the mouth, or between the eyes. That this man might have killed himself struck me as a profound observation, though I imparted it with calculated cool — in a tone that suggested, Yes, sir, I’m an old hand at the homicide game. ‘Maybe he went to kill himself and he flinched, wound up shooting himself in the eye.’

Kurth said, without looking up, ‘He didn’t kill himself, Officer.’

‘It’s Chief, actually. Chief Truman.’

‘Chief Truman. There’s no gun here.’

‘Ah, no gun, well.’ My ears went hot.

A little smile puckered the lips of the Game-Show Host.

‘Maybe he inserted the bullet manually.’

‘That would be unusual,’ Kurth informed me.

‘It was a joke.’

He glared another moment as if I were the back-wardest country clod imaginable, then returned to the creature on the gurney, which he seemed to find less repulsive.

The Game-Show Host asked me, gesturing toward the body, ‘Did he have any connection to this place?’

‘Not that I know of. I spoke to him a little bit while he was up here-’

‘You knew him?’

‘No, I didn’t know him. I just spoke to him. He seemed like a nice guy. Kind of… gentle. I certainly didn’t expect-’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Nothing really,’ I said. ‘We just kind of talked for a while. We get a lot of tourists come through here. I don’t bother with them, most of the time.’ I nodded toward the hills around the lake. The trees were daubed with yellow and red. ‘They come to look at the leaves.’

‘So he was just here on vacation?’

‘I guess so. Some vacation…’

We stood shaking our heads over Danziger’s body. I did remember meeting this Bob Danziger. He had a shy little wave, a smile nearly hidden under the eaves of his mustache. We’d met on the sidewalk in front of the station. Hi, he’d said, you must be Chief Truman…

I began to say to the Game-Show Host, ‘I’d like to be involved-’

But a cell phone chirped on his belt. He held up one finger to silence me while he answered it. ‘Gregg Cravish.’ He kept that finger up as he uttered monosyllables into the phone. ‘Yes. Don’t know yet. Fine. Good.’

When he was done, I said again, ‘I’d like to be involved in the investigation.’

‘Of course. You found the body. You’re an important witness.’

‘Right, a witness, sure. I meant, I’d like to do more than just guard the road.’

‘Securing the scene is important, Chief. The last thing I need is to get OJ’ed in front of a jury. If the crime scene is contaminated…’ Cravish looked at me portentously, preassigning the blame for a contaminated crime scene.

‘Look, the guy died in my town,’ I told him. ‘And like I said, I met him once. I’m just saying, I’d like to be in the loop, that’s all. I’m supposed to be the chief here.’

The Game-Show Host nodded to signal he understood. ‘Okay, sure, we’ll keep you in the loop.’ But his expression said, I understand. You’re supposed to be the chief and it wouldn’t look good if all these flatlanders swooped in and chased you off your own case. So I’ll humor you, I’ll let you hang around awhile.

Kurth straightened up from examining the corpse. ‘Officer, does the press have the story?’

‘The press?’

‘Yes, the press — newspapers, TV.’

‘No, I know what the press is. It’s just, we don’t really have a press here. There’s a newspaper, but it’s more of a community thing. David Cornwell puts it out by himself. It’s the schools and the weather mostly. The rest he just makes up.’

‘Don’t give him any information,’ Kurth ordered.

‘Well, I have to tell him something. In a town like this-’

‘Then withhold the details. Or get him to. Will he do that?’

‘I guess so. I’ve never asked.’

‘Ask.’

And that was as much conversation as Edmund Kurth cared to lavish on me. He snapped off the gloves, dropped them on the gurney, and stalked off without a word.

‘Mr Kurth,’ I called to him.

Kurth paused.

I stood there blinking at him. A sentence made its way to the back of my throat but no farther: It’s Chief Truman, not Officer. ‘Never mind,’ I said.

Kurth hesitated. I imagine he was weighing whether to ignore me completely or tear out my heart and show it to me still beating. In the end, he just gave a little nod and moved on.

‘Have a nice day,’ I murmured, once he was out of earshot.

In a few minutes the caravan of official vehicles — cruisers, late-model Tauruses, a modified camper marked CRIME SCENE SERVICES, a black van from the Medical Examiner’s office — started their engines and pulled away. The clearing around the cabin was quiet again. The loons were rhonking over the lake.

Dick Ginoux appeared out of the gloomy woods. It occurred to me he’d been hiding there until the strangers left. He came over and stood beside me as the parade rumbled away down the access road. He shuffled the pine needles with his feet. ‘What do we do now, Chief?’

‘I don’t know, Dick.’