The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Thomas Lynch Blood Sport

From Witness

Most times the remembrance was triggered by color — that primary red of valentines or Coca-Cola ads — the color of her toenails, girlish and perfectly polished. He remembered her body, tiny and lifeless and sickeningly still as she lay opened and autopsied on the prep room table. He could still bring to mind, these many years since, the curl of the knot in the viscera bag the pathologist had tied, with all of her organs examined inside, and the raw edge of the exit wound in her right leg and the horrible precision of the hole in her breast where the man who murdered her put the muzzle of the gun.

And he remembered the dull inventory of detail, the hollow in her mother’s voice the morning she called him at the funeral home.

“Elena’s been shot, Martin. Up in Baldwin. She’s at the Lake County Morgue. Go and get her, Martin. Bring her home.”

Elena had been only fifteen when her father died — the darkly beautiful daughter of a darkly beautiful mother and a man who’d had cancer. He was laid out in an eighteen-gauge metal casket. The funeral was huge. Martin could remember standing between them, Elena and her widowed mother, when they’d come to see the dead man’s body. He figured he was ten years older than the daughter, ten years younger than the mother. He had asked, as he’d been trained to ask, if everything was “satisfactory.” It was the failure of words that always amazed him.

“He got so thin.”

“Yes.”

“At least he’s not suffering anymore.”

“No.”

“Thank you, Martin.”

“Yes.”

And he remembered how Elena, after trying to be brave for her mother, after standing and staring at the lid of the casket as if she could tough it out, as if she could look but not see, had let her gaze fall on the face of her dead father and cried, in one great expiration of pain, “Oh Daddy! Please, no,” and nearly doubled over at the middle holding her tummy and how her knees buckled and how he grabbed her before she fell to the floor. And how she had pressed her sobs into his shirt and how he’d hugged her close and felt her holding on and could smell her hair and feel the form and perfect sadness in her shaking body and how he’d said that everything would be all right because he really didn’t know what to say. It made him feel necessary and needed and he wanted to hold her and protect her and make everything better, because she was beautiful and sad and though he could not fix it he would not let her go until she could stand on her own two feet again. And he thought that being the only embalmer in town was no bad thing when you stood among the widowed and orphaned and they would thank you for the unhappy work you’d done on their people.

Five years after that and it was Elena, killed by her husband with a gun.

Martin could not get his mind off how mannish the violence was, how hunter-gatherly, how very do-it-yourself, for the son of a bitch to stand on the front deck of their double-wide out in the woods while she loaded the last of her belongings in the car — her boom box and a last armful of hanging things — how he must have carefully leveled the rifle, his eyes narrowing to sight her in. He put the first bullet through her thigh. An easy shot from fifteen yards.

He must have wanted to keep her from running.

“The way you would with any wild thing,” the fat pathologist, smelling of stale beer, had told Martin in the morgue, taking the cigar out of his mouth to hold forth like an expert. “You hobble it first, then you don’t have to chase a blood trail through the woods all night.” He warmed to his subject. “Bow hunters go for the heart or lungs most times. They don’t mind chasing through swamps and marshes after a wounded buck. It’s part of the sport to them. But shooters go for the head shot or the legs.”

And as she lay in the thick leaf-fall beside the car, bleeding from the severed femoral artery, he’d walked over, put the barrel to her left breast and squeezed off another round.

“She’d have bled to death either way,” the pathologist said. The sight of that fat hand with the cigar touching the spot on Elena’s thigh where the bullet tore its exit out sickened Martin. And when the same hand pulled the sheet back to show the terrible carnage to her torso — the postmortem incisions very loosely stitched up and the black and blue and red little wound where her killer must have reckoned her heart would be, Martin quickly moved his stretcher beside the morgue tray, covered her body and took charge before the pathologist carried his hapless lecture any further. He signed the log book beside Elena’s name and case number, got the death certificate marked “gunshot wounds to leg and chest” in the section that asked for the cause of death and “homicide” where it asked for manner and had her name and date of death, all of it scrawled in the sloppy hand of the pathologist, and got her out of there.

All the way home he tried to imagine how it must have happened — if anyone could have heard it, the small caliber outrage of it, as if she’d been a doe feeding among the acorns or come to the salt lick, her large brown eyes full of panic and stillness. He wondered if she knew he was dangerous. He wondered if she realized, after the first shot, that he was going to kill her. He wondered if she died with fear or resolve. He wondered if bleeding from the first wound, she might have passed out, and never saw the face of her killer or the barrel of the gun or felt it on her body or saw his eyes as he pulled the trigger.

Taken as a thing itself, undistracted by his professional duties, considered as a bit of humanity, the aberration was incomprehensible. How could someone kill someone so coldly, someone with whom you had made plans, had sex, watched television, promised love? It left him with a functional ambiguity. Martin tried to assemble a reasonable sentence in which the last line went like and then he shot her, twice, because… but he was always unsuccessful.

He looked in the rearview mirror at the length of the stretcher in the back of the hearse with its tidy blue cover under which Elena’s body was buckled in, her head on the pillow, a small bag with her bloodied clothes, her jewelry and personal effects beside her. He tried to connect this horror with his remembrance of a sad, beautiful girl sobbing at the graveside of her dead father a few years before, waiting for the priest to finish with his prayers.

The morning was blue and sunlit, the buds of maples just busting loose, the men who’d been pallbearers lined up on one side of the grave, Elena and her mother and grandmother on the other. And all around, a couple hundred who’d come to pay their respects — women who worked with Elena’s mother at the real estate office, men who worked with her father at the shop, parishioners from Our Lady of Mercy and kids from the freshman class of the high school. And after the priest had finished, Martin had nodded to the pallbearers to remove their gloves and solemnly place them on the casket — a little gesture of letting go. And then, from the pile of dirt next to the grave, under the green grass matting, he’d given a small handful of dirt, first to the dead man’s mother, then to the dead man’s wife, and then to Elena; and at his direction, each stepped up to the casket and traced a cross on the top with the dirt that Martin had given them. He put a hand on their elbows as they stepped on the boards in a gesture of readiness and ever-vigilant assistance. And after that, Martin made the announcement he had practiced saying out loud the night before.

“This concludes the services for Mr. Delano.”

He reminded himself to speak slowly, to enunciate, to articulate, to project.

“The family wishes to thank each of you for your many kindnesses — for the floral tributes and Mass cards and most especially for your presence with them this morning.”

He took a breath, tried to remember what part came next.

“You are all invited to return now to Our Lady of Mercy Parish Hall where a luncheon has been prepared in Mr. Delano’s memory. You may step now directly to your cars.”

At this direction, people began to move away, relieved at the end of the solemnities, talking freely, trading news and sympathies. Martin had been pleased with the performance. Everything had gone off just as he’d planned — a fitting tribute, a good funeral. The pallbearers walked away as a group, looking official. Someone assisted the grandmother from the grave. Elena’s mother, her eyes tired and red, took Martin’s arm as they walked to the limousine, holding the rose Martin had given her, the crowd of people parting as they made their way. And Martin was thinking this is no bad thing for people to see what a dependable man their new funeral director was — a reliably upright, lean-on-me kind of man — less than a year out of mortuary school, mortgaged to the eyes for the business he’d bought from the widow of the man who’d been here before, but clearly a responsible, dependable citizen, someone to be called on, night or day, if there was trouble.

At the door to the car Mrs. Delano stopped, turned toward Martin with a brave smile, tilted her head slightly, opened her arms, and Martin, sensing that she wanted him to, without hesitation bent to embrace her. She was saying, “Thank you, Martin,” and “I could never have made it through this without you,” loud enough for bystanders to hear and he was patting her back professionally, all caring and kindness as you would with any hurt or wounded fellow human, saying to her, “You did good; he’d be proud of you,” and she was patting his shoulders and then, once the hug was over, holding the hankie to her eyes, she quickly disappeared into the back seat of the car in a rush of grief and relief and gratitude, and Martin straightened up and held the door.

Elena, who’d been following Martin and her mother to the limousine, holding two roses she’d picked from her father’s casket spray, paused at the car door and, perhaps because she was following her mother’s lead, perhaps thinking it was the proper thing to do, looked Martin in the eyes and said, “Thank you, thank you for everything,” and reached up to lock her hands around Martin’s neck and just as Martin was starting to say, in a voice all caring and kindness, “You’re very welcome, Elena,” she rose on her tiptoes, pressed her body firmly against his and kissed him squarely on the mouth. Martin could feel her chest on his chest, her small hands holding the sides of his face, and her soft mouth opening and the wet tip of her tongue on his lips. He let go of the door handle and held her at the waist, first pulling her toward him, then opening his eyes, gently pushing her away, and when she stopped kissing him, he could feel his face reddening and he was wondering if the priest and the pallbearers and the townspeople could see his blush and the flash of desire he could feel in himself and the wish beginning to form in his mind that everyone would disappear so that he could hold her and touch her and comfort her and have her and then, before he could pat her on the back professionally, before he could say, “There, there, everything is going to be all right,” before he had a chance to restore the air of solemnity and order, Elena proffered, with a brave smile, one of the roses she was holding. He took it from her, and as her mother had, Elena disappeared head first into the back of the long black Cadillac, which then drove away.

There was a safety in dealing with only the parts — the arteries and chemistries, the closure of eyes and lip lines, the refitting of cranium and sternum, the treatment of cavities and viscera, the placement of hands, the suturing of wounds and incisions, the rouge and lipstick and nail polish, the dressing and hairdo and casketing. Duty had a way of separating Martin from what it was he was doing. Stuffing the opened cranium with cotton, fitting the skull cap back in place and easing the scalp back over the skull (thereby restoring the facial contours), and minding the tiny stitches from behind one ear to behind another were only part of the process of embalming and embalming was only part of the process of laying out the dead which was only part of the process of the funeral and the funeral was only a part of the larger concept of a death in the family and a death in the family was a more manageable prospect, more generic somehow, than the horror — round and witless and recognizable and well beyond his professional abilities — of a lovely girl, grown lovelier as a woman, who leaned on him and counted on him and had kissed him once as if she meant it and who moved away and then got shot like an animal in the woods by a man about whom Martin knew next to nothing.

For months after her father’s funeral, Martin kept an eye out for Elena. Her mother came to pay the bill, and pick up more holy cards and thank-you notes. And then she came to order a stone. “Beloved Husband and Father” is what it said. Martin had advised her against a double marker. She was young and would surely remarry he thought.

And Martin would always ask, “How is Elena doing?” in his most professional, caring voice.

“She’s having some trouble with her schoolwork. She doesn’t sleep well. I’ma little worried.”

Martin gave Elena’s mother a list of grief support groups, run by the local hospice and area churches. He reminded her that there used to be “a year of mourning” and said that Elena’s feelings were probably “very normal” and that “time heals all wounds.”

“Yes,” said Elena’s mother. “It’s just so hard.”

She thanked Martin again for everything and said she hoped he’d understand if she said she hoped she wouldn’t be seeing him again.

Martin smiled and nodded and said he understood completely.

The next June, Martin read in the local paper how Elena had been captain of the debate team that went to the regional finals in Ann Arbor, and the year after that she had gone to Italy on a Rotary Exchange Scholarship, and in her senior year she was pictured on the front page smiling in her prom dress beside the son of the man who owned the Lincoln-Mercury dealership in town, over a caption that read “A Night to Remember” and Martin remembered how very happy she looked, how very pretty. After that he pretty much lost track of her.

“After her father died,” Elena’s mother told Martin when she came in to pick out a casket and arrange the funeral, “she seemed a little lost.”

Martin listened and nodded as Elena’s mother, looking so much older now, outlined the details of her dead daughter’s life. She’d finished school, applied to college, spent the summer after graduation waitressing in a bar-restaurant in western Michigan, to get out on her own and earn a little money.

“She met him there. At the Northwoods Inn.” He worked for the county road commission and came in weeknights after work and weekends after fishing or hunting. He was handsome and chatty. He had a trailer in the woods. He gave her compliments and brought her flowers and bought her beer and cheeseburgers. And when it came time to go to the university, to get the education her father had saved for, she called her mother and told her that she was moving in with this man.

“I didn’t approve but what could I do, Martin? Her father would never have allowed it. But what could I do?”

Martin shook his head and nodded.

“I told her she was throwing her life away on a summer fling, but she said she loved him. She loved him and he killed her, shot her like a damn dog, Martin.”

Elena’s mother’s sobs grew heavy. Martin poured her a glass of water, moved the box of Kleenex nearer to her. “Thank you, Martin,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s OK.”

“In no time she was pregnant and he said he wanted to ‘do right’ by her. I told her he would always feel trapped, or always feel like he had done her a big favor, always feel like he was such a big man and she was just nothing without him, but she said she loved him and maybe it was all meant to happen like this and what could I do, Martin? What could I do? Her father would have gone up there and brought her home, but I had no one, no one.”

They were married in the county offices in a civil ceremony, Elena wearing her prom dress and her new husband wearing a cowboy hat and a blue jean jacket and a string tie.

Elena’s mother took the wedding snapshot out of her purse and told Martin, “Cut him off of there and use that picture for the paper and the holy cards. She was so happy then.”

Elena miscarried in her third month and took a job working dispatch for the sheriffs office. By the following midsummer things were getting bad. Her husband’s appetite for Budweiser and blood sport hadn’t abated.

“She’d call home crying, Martin. He still went to the bar week-nights and came home boozy and, well, unpredictable. And he spent the weekends tramping through the woods shooting small game which he’d bring home for her to clean and cook.

“He’d go out at night and snag spawning salmon and bring them back to freeze and smoke and put up in jars.

“Her letters home got so sad, Martin. ‘He doesn’t bathe enough,’ she wrote me once. ‘He seems so angry.’”

She had taken from her purse a packet of pink envelopes and was holding them and rocking a little in the chair across the desk from Martin.

“She had such beautiful handwriting.”

Martin nodded, smiled, understood.

“She called me crying horribly once and I asked her if he’d hit her but she said no, no. He had killed a fawn, right outside their trailer. It had come with its mother to feed at the pile of carrots he baited them with. They were in bed. Sunday morning. He sat up, walked to the window, went to the door where he kept his rifle. It was months before the legal season. He shot it right from the door. The fawn, Martin. The little fawn.”

She was shaking now again, sobbing and rocking in the chair.

“Do you know what he told her, when she yelled at him for shooting the fawn?”

Martin shook his head.

“He told her it couldn’t live without its mother anyway.”

Now she was sobbing and shaking fitfully and Martin reached across the desk to take hold of her hands in which she held the packet of her daughter’s letters.

“We don’t have to do this now,” Martin told her.

But she wanted to go on, to get it out, to get this part behind her.

After he killed the baby deer, Elena applied to the state university in Mt. Pleasant, using as return address the sheriff’s office. When the letter came from the admissions department, beginning “Dear Ms. Delano: Congratulations!” she made a copy and mailed it home with a note asking her mother if there was still money left for her education.

“Of course is what I told her,” Elena’s mother told Martin. “I wanted her to get her education before she settled down. After she lost the baby, she had no reason to stay with him. And he was drinking and depressed. He worked and drank and grew more distant. She could see she had made a big mistake. I could tell she wasn’t happy.”

Elena told her mother how she gave her husband back his leather coat and the tiny diamond ring and said she would always care about him but that she had been too young and she felt she owed it to her father to return to school and get her life on track and she would always treasure their time together but she really had to go. She thought it would be the best thing for them both. She was sure he wasn’t happy either.

The night before she had planned to leave, she did her hair and polished her nails and cooked him pheasant and they ate by candlelight — “for old times’ sake” she had told her mother when she called to say she’d be home tomorrow. She really wanted no hard feelings. It had been her mistake and she was sorry to have involved him in it. Surely, they would always be friends.

“He’s OK with it. He doesn’t like it but he’s OK with it” is what she told her mother when her mother asked her how he was taking it.

And, near as the coroner and the sheriff could piece it together, it was after everything she owned had been loaded in the car, the trunk full of books and photo albums, the back seat packed with her stereo and a rack of hanging clothes and the front passenger seat with the one suitcase full of toiletries and socks and underwear; maybe she was turning to wave goodbye before going, or maybe he’d been drinking Budweiser all night, or maybe he’d helped her and then went berserk but whatever happened, whether it was passion or calculation, before she sat into the driver’s seat, he got the rifle from wherever he kept it. Near as they could figure by the angle of the wound, he stood on the front porch, aimed and fired, then walked over to where she lay in the leaf-fall beside the car and shot her again, in the breast.

This was the part that Martin could never imagine — the calculation of shooting her in the leg, then slowly, deliberately walking over and pressing the barrel against her left breast and pulling the trigger. Wouldn’t such madness in a man give signs before? Wouldn’t the first gunshot wake him from the dream?

Elena’s mother was rocking in the chair across from Martin, sobbing quietly, clutching the letters, staring at the snapshot of her daughter on the desk standing next to the man who had just killed her.

“You pick out the casket, Martin. I can’t do it. Something like her father’s. Please, Martin. You do it.”

He used the cherry casket with the moss pink velvet interior and though it was considerably more costly than what Elena’s father was buried in, he charged the same and thought it was the least he could do.

And now, twenty years since, nearing fifty, he could still not shake the sense of shame, that the men in her life had let her down badly. The father who died too young, the husband who murdered her, even the embalmer who could only treat her viscera with cavity fluid, inject her arms and legs and head, stitch the horrible incisions of the postmortem — from left shoulder to breastbone, breastbone to right shoulder, then breastbone to pubic bone — the little bulge in her tummy where the bag full of organs made her look almost expectant, then cover the stitches with cotton and adhesive. And then put a little blush on her cheeks, brush her lipstick on, curl and comb her hair. He had dressed her in the sweater and jeans her mother brought in and lifted her into the casket, put her First Communion rosary in her hand, a crucifix in the head of the casket and put an arm around her mother when she came to look.

“Oh no, no, no,” she sobbed, her shoulders rising and falling, her head shaking, her body buckling at the sight of her daughter’s dead body. Martin held her at the elbows, whispering, “Let it go; I’m so sorry,” because he never could think of the right thing to say.

Over time Martin learned to live with the helplessness and the sadness and the shame. He quit trying to figure the right thing to say. He listened. He stayed.

Still, all these years since, whenever the right shade of red turned up, he could see the fat old pathologist and his cigar and stupid tutorial manner there in the morgue with its cold smell of disaster and formalin, and the hearse that he drove up to get her that October. And the way they lay in coolers in the corner of the room, the two bodies in trays beside one another — Elena and the son of a bitch that shot her.

He had shot himself, after killing her. He walked back in the house, sat on the edge of the bed and taking the muzzle of the rifle in his teeth pulled the trigger with his thumb, dividing his face at the septum in the process.

“Isn’t that always the way?” the old pathologist had said, yanking the tray out with Elena’s body on it. “It’s love sickness. A man kills his wife then kills himself. A woman kills her man then does her nails.”

Martin hated those sentences and couldn’t forget them. That they rang true sometimes and false at others had never been a comfort.

Eventually, after the wake and Mass, her body was buried beside her father’s, leaving another grave on the other side for her mother. It was all Martin could do — to get her where she was supposed to be. Her mother had a stone cut that read “Beloved Daughter” with a rose between her dates and another with her own name on it and her year of birth and a dash and had it placed over the empty plot beside her husband. She moved away some few years after that. Martin never heard from her again.