The Chinese Doll

Chapter 5

There is usually an idle cab or two parked in front of Milkshake Mike’s place, but this time I had to wait for one.

Maybe the heavy snow and the cold weather were responsible. Alike himself was nowhere in sight, so to kill time I first went to the City Hall and filed an application for the renewal of my license, and then walked over to the library to see what the woman had found.

She had a south-side Chicago address for me, the name of the recruiting chairman of the Fantasy Amateur Journalism Society. I thanked her again and hit her up for a penny postcard. The expression on her face told me she expected a penny for it.

On the card I scribbled a short note to the recruiter, telling him I had recently acquired an interest in amateur journalism, that I expected to be in Chicago the next day, and that I wanted very much to drop in on him. I used my office as the return address but didn’t mention my line of business. The bloke at the General Delivery window in the postoffice said it would go out on the afternoon train and be delivered in Chicago tomorrow morning.

Then I walked back to Mike’s for a cab. A checkered one was just pulling into one of the two parking spaces reserved for them. The driver, a weazened, runtish man in a black cap and glasses whom I knew only slightly as “the Sultan,” was out of his cab and half way across the sidewalk before I could stop him.

“Sure bud, be gladda run you, but not’ll I have a cuppa coffee see?”

I hadda cuppa with him. He paid both our checks and left the waitress a nickel tip but he didn’t fool me: I’d pay it all back when he counted up the fare.

“Wheretobud?”

I described the old barn standing out behind the lake. He squinted up at me.

“Joint’s closed up untildarkbud,” he counseled.

“Someone will be in the office.”

I sat in the front seat with him. It was warmer there. We followed the same route the Chinese babe had driven the night before. The Sultan had no more to say.

When we reached the park he pulled the cab around in an easy curve into the rutty path I had traversed last night in the darkness. In broad daylight the Sultan was less sure of himself than the babe had been. The fender tips flirted with the edge of the frozen lake.

Down at the far end of the lake a sluggish knot of men were cutting ice. They were using a team of horses and as I watched the team hauled a huge slab up out of the water and pulled it to the shore line. We drove on past the lake to the barn and stopped on the shack side.

I got out and told the Sultan to wait. I tried the little shack first but five minutes of insistent pounding brought no response. Around on the other side of the barn I found a push button at the bottom of the railing that ran down alongside the steps. Five minutes of that brought nothing.

Feeling damned uncertain and uncomfortable, I climbed the stairs and banged on the outside door. They let me wait for several more minutes. Finally it opened.

The character with the knife scar peered out at me. He didn’t seem pleased at my appearance.

“You said you wouldn’t come back,” he pointed out.

“—unless I was invited,” I reminded him.

“You haven’t been.” The voice was flat, unfriendly.

“And I have no intention of coming in. You have something of mine.”

He raised his eyebrows mutely. It made him resemble a “wanted-dead-or-alive” picture I had seen in the postoffice.

“My gun. The Judge has it. He said he would return it to me when I left last night. He didn’t.”

The character glared at me and abruptly shut the door in my face. I waited. When it opened again the gun and holster were in his hand. He seemed as happy as a dead fish. Undoubtedly he was wishing I was anywhere on earth but at the top of those stairs, in his company.

“Thanks,” I said, and pulled the gun from the holster to examine it. The chamber was empty.

I tried to make my voice flat, “Well?”

He dropped a half a dozen cartridges in my outstretched hand. I put them in my pocket, pushed the gun down in the holster and turned to go. On the second step I thought of something and turned back.

“Tell the boss I also want to thank him for that other favor he did me. He’ll know what I mean.”

He closed the doors without a sound.

The Sultan watched rather curiously while I slipped the cartridges into the chamber. The motor was still running.

“Downtown bud?”

“Right. We — wait a minute.” I pointed across the lake. “What the hell’s going on over there?”

The ice-cutting operations had ceased. One of the men stood on the bank to one side, holding the team of now skittish horses.

A commercial ambulance, one belonging to Boone’s leading undertaking establishment, was pulling away from the lake edge. A motionless knot of men stood staring after it. The ambulance picked its way leisurely across the park, reached the rutted lane and finally the highway. It turned towards town, still taking its time. At the intersection where the lane met the highway two cars had pulled up in mute deference to it, but as it continued its slow pace they soon picked up speed and passed it.

“The poor guy’ll croak before that wagongetsthere,” the Sultan complained half aloud.

“The poor guy is already dead,” I contradicted him. “There’s no reason to hurry — now. Come on, let’s go.”

We trailed the ambulance as far as the first drugstore and a pay phone. I got out to call the sergeant.

“I know,” he complained, “it’s you again. Are you trying to make the phone company rich?”

“Sergeant, the wagon just passed me, coming in from the lake. Who was it?”

His answer took all the wind out of me.

It was a long time before I could mumble, “What’s the coroner’s verdict? How’d it happen?” But I knew the answers to both questions.

“You sound sort of funny, Horne. How should I know? The Doc is probably coming in with the wagon. Some kids found the body in a hole in the ice. They’re sick.”

So was I.

I hung up and walked back to the cab. My little Chinese doll would never, ever smile across the breakfast table at anyone. Not any more.

The Sultan looked at me: “Sick atyourstummick?”

“Yeah. And sick at heart. Shut up and drive.”

The doctor-coroner straightened up from the operating table, tugged feebly at his bow tie, and said to nobody in particular, “There’s very little water here.”

I grunted. “Huh?”

He stared at me as if I were an intruder. Which I was. His tired, constantly overworked eyes burned into mine. With the load he carried, I’d be snappish, too.

The desk sergeant, no doubt deeply touched over the loss of my license, with a word and a wave of his hand had provided me with a front seat ticket to the autopsy of the drowned girl. Not that these things are unduly private.

I remembered the coroner’s sarcastic words when I had walked in. His name is Burbee; everybody calls him just “Doc.” He is addicted to gaily colored bow ties of large dimensions and is forever nagging them as though they were tight around his neck.

In this county we usually elect a doctor to the Coroner’s office. Maybe we save money this way or maybe the medical profession is in solid with the political machine, I don’t know. Burbee is a good doctor and had been in the office for two or three terms running.

When I walked into the basement room Burbee had silently watched me look at the girl — it was an identification I had to make for myself — and bit out, “This is by far the most popular autopsy I’ve yet conducted. How many more are there behind you? I might charge admissions.”

My grin was hollow and I looked to see who had preceded me. There was only one other visitor, the young State’s Attorney named Donny Thompson. He had, I thought then, little spine and less crime to prosecute.

And there was an attractive woman in that basement room, a live one, a nurse, I suspected, although she wore no uniform. She turned gray eyes and a warm smile on me to take the sting from the doctor’s words. I returned the smile and looked to see what she was doing there.

She was seated at a workbench near the foot of the operating table; the bench held a rack and the rack held small vials of plain and colored liquids. It was her job to make various chemical tests on certain parts of the body. She also had a notebook with the uppermost page partly filled, and a long, yellow pencil parked in her hair.

This was my first autopsy; perhaps it would have been wiser to have stayed away. I knew in a general way what went on at these affairs — or rather, what must go on to produce the results announced later — but somehow I didn’t expect it to be as cold-blooded as this.

The larger cities of course have their own morgues, usually attached to the police department. Small towns in stick counties like this one use a hospital, or an undertaker’s spare room, or sometimes the victim’s bedroom. It all depends upon the circumstances and how the guy died. This basement room was the undertaker’s business department. The long stone slab having the shallow crevices running the length and breadth of it wasn’t there for artistic purposes.

The room itself suggested something unhealthy to an outsider like me. I saw that it affected Thompson too. The floor was a dull gray painted cement with rubber strips here and there, and sewer drains spotting it. The walls were whitewashed brick, having small ventilating windows high up, just about the outside ground level. Huge and powerful lights hung from the ceiling.

The doll’s body lay under the lights.

“Very little water in the lungs,” the probing doctor repeated with a glare at me. The nurse jotted something down and went on with her vials.

“Enough to drown her?” the State’s Attorney asked.

He was nervous, and watching him with some amusement helped me to overcome my feelings. He carefully kept his back turned to the table. Thompson seldom attended these things.

Doc straightened up again and gave the bow tie another brief tug. He stared at the Attorney’s back.

“One can drown in a teacup of water.”

“If you’re a midget,” I added.

That turned him on me again. The tie suffered another hitch to port. “Pour a cupful up your nose, son,” he advised. His voice was quiet and humorless. “I’d enjoy working on you.”

“Thanks,” and I was securely put in my place. I shut up and glanced at the nurse. She was bending over the notebook. The liquid in a vial she held was slowly turning color.

Doc returned to the body and I looked at my feet while Thompson counted whitewashed bricks.

Pretty soon Burbee began a sentence that was really an afterthought of a previous one.

“But I don’t think this one did,” he stated.

Thompson whirled around, found himself looking at something upsetting and just as quickly whirled away again.

“No?” he asked in a strangled whisper.

“No,” Burbee echoed. “Tell you more about it in a moment.”

He worked on the girl’s throat and chest for several moments, the scalpel glimmering in the brilliant overhead lights. Some of those moments I watched him in fascination and some I held my teeth tightly clenched and stared at my feet.

Finally he said, “No. Definitely.”

The nurse looked up, interested. She held the pencil poised over the notebook, expectant. I squinted at the body, found I could take it, and opened both eyes.

I watched the doctor insert a small pair of tweezers into the throat and come up with a burnt match. He laid it in a shallow dish on the workbench. We bent to inspect it.

There were indentations made by the tweezers near the blackened head, and just below that another, single dent probably made by a sharp thumb nail as the spent match was being flicked away. That was all. Some of these paper matches carry a minute-sized printed line to indicate their origin; this one was gray and soggy and blank.

“Strangulation,” Doc Burbee said to the nurse. “Paper match, used. Inhaled through the mouth while under water. Lodged in windpipe. Moisture in lungs secondary.”

To Donny Thompson he continued in the same breath, “Take your choice son, either would have been fatal.”

That worthy replied abstractedly, “We ought to make them clean that lake.”

“By all means!” The old sting had come back into Burbee’s voice. “She probably would have lived a couple of heartbeats longer if it hadn’t been for that match.”

“Is this sort of thing usual in drowning cases?” I asked.

He shook his head and hefted his tie in a new direction.

“I once heard of a small fish being found in the mouth, but it did not contribute to the death. This is my first experience with such an occurrence.” He stepped back a pace and wiped his hands.

The State’s Attorney stamped out another cigarette. “I ought to be getting along,” he murmured, but he stayed right where he was, counting bricks.

I wondered what the coroner would do next and looked to find him doing it. He was running deft, examining fingers lightly up and down one nude leg. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he got a buzz out of that, but I thought better of it.

He placed his hand under the arch of the foot.

“Well developed,” he commented. “Strong muscles.”

“Lousy skater,” I offered for no reason.

“That right?” He lifted the girl’s right leg shoulder high and beginning at the heel, fingered it up to the body. “I’d have thought differently. Muscles indicate constant use.”

“Maybe she rode a bicycle.”

He shook his head and would have grabbed his tie if he had a third hand. “Lungs don’t indicate such. That makes for lung power.”

It was then that I opened my mouth once too often.

“She wasn’t doing so well when I saw her last night.”

All three of them stared at me in varying degrees of interest. I was probably staring at myself in consternation.

The State’s Attorney ripped out, “When did you see her?” But he meant when, where, why and how I saw her.

So I inserted a lie between two truths. You are probably familiar with that dodge of mine, Louise.

“I came past the lake on my way into town. I had a few drinks, sure, but I wasn’t seeing dragons. She was skating around the lake and doing a pretty bad job of it. I could have done better.”

“At what time last night?” came the next lash.

“I don’t know. I was downtown by midnight.”

“Alone?” still sharp.

“Who? Me or her?”

“Her. She, the skater.”

“Sure. At least, no one else was in sight. And say, you can’t count too heavily on what I saw. I wasn’t close enough to be sure it was this girl.”

“It was. We’ve already established the time of the accident as between midnight and three A.M.”

“Well... it does fit.”

And the subject seemed to be closed.

Doc Burbee turned back to the corpse to lay the flat of his hand on the abdomen. He picked up the scalpel and tapped the blade against one rubber-encased finger. Donny Thompson whirled back to his bricks; I turned my attention to the voiceless wonder seated at the workbench.

The nurse had just completed a test of some sort with a pair of vials and was thoughtfully staring at the contents of one of them.

Some time later Burbee broke the silence, “Bit of water in the stomach. Small ulcer, too.”

The nurse wrote it down, but not like that. She accepted the brusque words and phrases and transformed them into neat, precise and formal statements on paper. Something involving the correct medical terminology. I couldn’t read it from where I was sitting but she put down more than nine words.

The coroner added in a conversational tone, “Also pregnant.”

The nurse smiled at the vial she had been studying and wrote down a single word.

But the State’s Attorney jumped. “The hell you say!”

“Yes, the hell I say.”

“How much?... I mean, how long?”

Several seconds later, “Oh, nine to twelve weeks.” The nurse jotted that down.

“Suicide?” I suggested.

“I doubt it. There is the knot on the head.”

“Meaning...?”

“Indicating she fell in head first, striking her head on the broken ice, rather than jumping in feet first.”

“Yeah,” Thompson added, “the water is only three feet deep around that hole. If she had jumped in the skates would have been driven into the mud on the bottom; her head would have remained above water — or ice.”

“So she tumbled in head first. But maybe she was unconscious from the bump on the head?”

“No,” Burbee objected. “Don’t forget the burnt match. That was sucked in while she was under water — through the mouth. She lacked the remaining strength to spit it out.”

I studied the match in the dish.

“Damn funny place for a match.”

“I know a man who lost his upper plate in that lake,” the State’s Attorney offered.

I got out of there.

I’m too damned sentimental. I know that and you know it, Louise. It hits me the wrong way. And two hours of sitting here in the office, doing nothing but moping and batting this letter off to you hasn’t pulled me out of the blue dumps.

Let me hear from you — fast. Please, I feel awful.