Motion to Kill

CHAPTER FOUR

Doc Eddy greeted Mason and Pamela at the mortuary. He introduced Malcolm Listrom as the finest mortician in Pope County, able to restore the departed to grandeur they had never achieved while among the living. He was so effusive in his praise of Malcolm’s gift that Mason decided the coroner was in for a cut.

Malcolm basked in Eddy’s praise while emitting appropriate solicitous sounds of sympathy for the bereaved. When Mason told him that the deceased was just passing through and would be buried in Kansas City, he became a waiter trying to turn his table. Kelly arrived a few minutes later and Malcolm led them to the room where he prepared bodies for burial.

Malcolm plied his magic in a ceramic-tiled, circular operating room dominated by two large surgical tables in the center. Glass-covered cabinets filled with unfamiliar solutions and tools lined the walls. The air was heavy with disinfectant that made their eyes water. Sullivan lay on one of the tables covered in an off-white sheath and adorned with a vanilla toe tag marked John Doe.

“I’m afraid I haven’t repaired the damage, Mrs. Sullivan,” Listrom apologized. “We’re not allowed to prepare the body until the authorities approve.”

Pamela nodded, but Mason wasn’t certain she had really heard him. He stood behind her as Listrom pulled back the sheet.

“No, you bastard, not like this,” Pamela said as she slumped into Mason’s arms.

He half carried her into a waiting room and set her onto a sofa beneath a comforting portrait of Jesus, smiling beneficently, hands outstretched. Kelly followed them, murmured her condolences to Pamela, and motioned Doc Eddy and Mason to an adjoining office.

Mason asked, “Has anyone made a determination of the cause of death?”

“Can’t tell yet,” Doc Eddy said. “He’s got a knot on the back of his head. May have fallen and hit something. Won’t know for sure until we give him the canoe treatment.”

“Canoe treatment?”

Eddy laughed. “The incision goes stem to stern. Just like hollowing out a log for a canoe. It’s an old coroner’s joke.”

His crack made Mason punch up his defense of Pamela a notch. “I doubt if Pamela will want an autopsy. She’s been through enough.”

“An autopsy is required in the case of all suspicious deaths. Doc Eddy will do it this afternoon,” Kelly said.

“Wait a minute! You just said he hit his head and fell in. He probably drowned. There’s nothing suspicious or unexplained about that. There’s no reason to put Pamela through that.”

“A ski boat belonging to Sullivan was found tied up at the Buckhorn marina this morning. We found an earring on the boat, and your partner doesn’t look like the earring type. I doubt if he hit his head, fell in, and the boat drove itself back to the marina. I’m betting someone helped him into the water. I’m sorry if that’s hard on Mrs. Sullivan, but that’s the way it is.”

“If you’re going to question her, you’ll do it in my presence and you’ll stop when I tell you.”

He was drawing lines for a client who hadn’t retained him. Claire would have told him he was finally showing some promise. He and Kelly eyed each other, trying to guess when the confrontation that was brewing between them would finally erupt.

“Take her back to her house, and I’ll meet you there in an hour. Questioning is always more productive immediately following a death. I’ve been through this enough times to know that.”

“Yeah, Sheriff, I’ll bet that the lake is a real hotbed of murder and mayhem.”

Her withering stare confirmed that he’d just made an ass of himself. He conceded the moment to her and shepherded Pamela to the car.

They made it back to Sullivan’s just before eleven. Diane Farrell, Sullivan’s legal assistant for ten years, was sprawled on the doorstep. She was leaning against a brown grocery bag filled with fresh fruit for the brunch, flicking ashes from her cigarette into clay pots brimming with red, pink, and violet impatiens. Pamela walked past her without comment, too dazed to speak.

Diane was plain and thick with a blocky face bolted to a rectangular body. Her hair was a washed-out brown matching the grocery bag. She had dark, wide-set eyes, a nose too small for her broad face, and thin lips on a downturned mouth.

She promoted and protected Sullivan as if he were her own. Try to go around her or behind her and you’d probably end up just going-to another firm. Office scuttlebutt had her madly in love with Sullivan, though no one could picture them together. Sullivan played only with beautiful women. Ordinary need not apply. But she had job security and a kinship with Pamela, who welcomed her as a link to her wandering husband.

“Mason, what’s going on? Where’s Sullivan?” she asked.

Mason knew Diane well enough to dislike her, and he disliked her enough not to soften the blow.

“He’s dead, Diane. Someone found him floating in the lake this morning. Pamela and I just identified the body.”

She studied his face for some hint that it wasn’t true. Her eyes were like black holes, sucking in everything and emitting no light. When he didn’t recant, she went inside, calling for Pamela. Her stoic response made him feel like a heel for smacking her with the news.

Mason spent the next twenty minutes telling his colleagues, as they arrived for brunch, that even though the firm’s biggest producer was dead, everything would be fine. They didn’t believe it and neither did he, but it was the sort of thing people said and accepted when bad news was too fresh to argue with. Some wanted to stay and help. But he told them there wasn’t anything for them to do.

He was waiting for the sheriff. Claire’s voice wouldn’t let him leave Pamela to be questioned without a lawyer. When the last group drove away, he picked up Diane’s fruit and went into the house.