Where There's Smoke

Twenty-Six

The Tolliver Street Bridge spans two sections of the city, crossing the Meredith River at its narrowest point downtown. Warehouses line the streets in most of the sur­rounding area, and the neighborhood is deserted after dark. The approach road to the bridge runs along the river’s edge, on Avenue L. There is a metal guardrail sep­arating the road from the steep embankment dropping away to the river, but a twenty-five-foot section of it was under repair, and it was precisely at this spot that the Volkswagen bus had crashed through the erected sawhorse barricades. It now lay smoldering on its side some fifty feet below the road surface. Firemen were still dragging hoses up the incline when we arrived. A pair of radio motor patrol cars, their red dome lights flashing, were parked across either end of Avenue L, sealing off the block. Another patrol car was parked alongside one of the two fire engines. The driver of that car was the man who’d radioed the accident report to the Fifth Precinct.

The desk sergeant there had recognized the license-plate number as the one in Coop’s teletype, and had immedi­ately phoned the Twelfth.

In the Police Department’s Homicides and Suspicious Deaths Manual, the investigating officer is advised to ask six questions of the first officer at the scene. It is further suggested that he can remember these six questions by utilizing the code word NEOTWY, which is composed of the last letter in each of the key words used to frame the questions. Anyone but an amnesiac would remember the six key words, but in this city the Police Department takes no chances with its hired help. These six words are:

N —When

E — Where

O —Who

T — What

W — How

Y — Why

The investigating officer is told to use these words in their exact order. Detective Daniel O’Neil used them in their exact order now as he questioned the patrolman who’d called in the report. Coop and I stood beside him, listening. Everywhere around us, fireman were reeling in hoses and carrying equipment back to their engines. In the distance, I could hear the shriek of an ambulance siren.

“When did you discover the accident?” O’Neil asked.

“Must’ve been around seven-thirty,” the patrolman said. “We just finished a circle of the warehouses, and was heading north up Avenue L when we spotted the fire down there. I called it in while Freddie, my partner, ran down the embankment with a fire extinguisher. It didn’t help a damn, that thing was really blazing. Freddie come back up to the car, gave me the license-plate number, and I called that in, too. He was lucky. He was no sooner up here than the gas tank blew.”

O’Neil skipped the “Where” question. He already knew where the VW bus was; it was fifty feet down the embankment. He went on to the “Who,” phrasing his question somewhat differently than prescribed in the manual.

“Anybody in the bus?” he asked.

“There’s a guy behind the steering wheel,” the patrol­man said. “Or what’s left of him, anyway. I told the sergeant we were gonna need a meat wagon.”

“You didn’t touch him, did you?”

“No, sir,” the patrolman said. He seemed offended that such a question had even been asked.

“Find anything on the street up here?” O’Neil asked. This was a variation of the “What” question. He was try­ing to determine exactly what had happened to cause the bus to crash through the wooden barricade.

“Like what, sir?” the patrolman asked.

“Skid marks, broken glass.” Either of these might have indicated that a second vehicle had been involved in the accident; O’Neil was asking the right questions.

“I didn’t see none, sir.”

“Anyone witness the accident?”

“Not to my knowledge, sir. This area’s pretty dead at night.”

“Were mere any vehicles on the street?”

“No, sir, not a single car. There’s no parking allowed on the approach road, you know.”

“I meant was there any moving traffic?”

“No, sir, the street was deserted.”

“Okay, thanks,” O’Neil said. He knew he wasn’t going to get any valuable answers to the How or the Why sug­gested in the manual, and he didn’t want to waste further time. Instead, he walked to where the car had gone off the road and through the barricade. Skid marks are usually visible to the naked eye, even on a surface that isn’t wet or dusty, but there were no marks leading to the spot where the barricade had been breached. Nor were there any glass fragments on the road or on the muddy em­bankment beyond. Two of the sawhorses had been bro­ken, apparently by the weight of the bus as it rolled over them; tire tracks in the mud showed the direction the bus had taken in its downward plunge. We were studying these tracks when we heard the ambulance approaching. The sound of the siren apparently reminded O’Neil that he’d need a medical examiner at the scene. He walked over to the patrol car and asked the driver to radio a re­quest for one. He still didn’t know who the victim of die accident was, but he knew he had a dead man on his hands. I didn’t tell him that I already knew who was in that smoldering bus.

The interne and the ambulance attendants were an­noyed at having to wait around till the M.E. arrived. O’Neil sent one of the patrolmen out for coffee, in an at­tempt to mollify them. It took forty minutes for the assis­tant M.E. to arrive. The fire engines were gone by then. He half slid, half ran down the muddy embankment to where the bus lay on its side. The front end had hit a huge boulder, and part of the roof and one door had been de­molished in the resultant explosion. The subsequent fire had undoubtedly been intense; even the paint on the out­side of the bus had been partially scorched away. The rear end of the bus was a total wreck, the metal torn open and twisted into sharp black tendrils of steel.

A man sat behind the steering wheel. The assistant M.E. turned away at the stench of burned flesh and hair. He tied a handkerchief around his face, covering his nose. A police photographer was busy taking pictures. His flash bulbs kept popping into the night, lending a curiously cel­ebratory air to the macabre scene. When all the photos had been taken, the M.E. asked if it was all right to move the body out of the bus. O’Neil said it would be all right, and then asked the ambulance attendants and the interne to move it. They did so without comment, but it was plain to see they wished they were elsewhere. The M.E. put down his black satchel and got to work. O’Neil strolled over to me. We had been on the scene for an hour and a half already, but nobody yet knew who’d been inciner­ated inside that bus. Except me.

“What do you think?” O’Neil asked. His question sur­prised me. I hadn’t expected him to ask me for an opin­ion.

“What do you think?” I said. I had been told by two cops I respected that O’Neil was a good cop. So far, he had done nothing to disabuse their opinions.

“It bothers me that there’s no skid marks,” he said. “There should be skid marks, don’t you think? If the guy went off the road, there should be marks.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Also, did you notice those tracks in the mud? The car was pointed straight downhill. That’s unusual, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I mean, if the guy lost control and went off the road, it’s unlikely he Would’ve gone through the barricade at that angle.”

Coop walked over. “Danny,” he said, “the MJE.’s got some stuff you’ll want to tag,”

“Thanks, Captain,” O’Neil said, and walked back to the bus. Coop and I followed him.

The M.E. had found a scorched wallet in the dead man’s pants pocket. The clothing covering his upper torso had been completely burned away, but tatters of fabric still clung to his legs. The M.E. handed the wallet to O’Neil, who immediately tagged it for identification and then went through it. The only things he found were twenty dollars in fives and singles and a browned but still partially legible driver’s license. O’Neil read it, and then said, “Arthur J. Wylie.”

“Let me see that,” Coop said.

We looked at it together. The driver’s license had been issued a year ago August, and would not expire for two years yet. The address on the license was 574 Waverly Street. The M.E. was removing a signet ring from the dead man’s right hand. He told O’Neil which finger on which hand the ring had been taken from, and then handed it to him. The initials on the ring were AJW. O’Neil slipped it into an evidence envelope. From the dead man’s left hand, the M.E. removed a wedding band. Again he identified the finger and the hand, and then passed the ring on to O’Neil. On the inside of the band the names Arthur and Helene were engraved, and imme­diately following them, the date 8/8/54.

I looked down at the body. The face, the hands, and the front of the trunk had suffered the worst of the fire. Al­most all of the head hair had been burned away, but sev­eral blond patches had escaped the inferno. The face was unrecognizable, a charred and shapeless mass of cooked meat. The burned and blackened fingers were hooked like claws. The stench was intolerable. A Police Depart­ment truck was inching its way down the embankment. The body was brightly illuminated for just a moment until the headlights turned away. Coop turned away, too.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Fourth-degree burns,” the M.E. said. “You can put that down as your cause of death.”

The driver of the truck cut the engine. He came out of the cab and walked over to where they were standing. “Who’s in charge?” he asked tonelessly.

“I am,” O’Neil said.

“You want the bus lifted, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we’ll get the winch on it,” he said.

“I’m finished here,” the M.E. said. “Let’s tell the am­bulance crew.”

As we climbed the embankment, I fell in beside the medical examiner. He was a portly little man, and he was puffing hard against the grade.

“How are the teeth?” I said.

“The teeth?”

“The corpse’s teeth. Did the fire damage them?”

“They’re charred,” he said, “but they’re still in his head.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Below us, the men from the truck were shouting to each other as they attached their cable to the bus. When we got back to the road again, O’Neil was waiting for the M.E.

“What do you figure happened, Doc?” he asked.

The M.E. wasn’t paid to make guesses, but he made one now. “Tank probably exploded on impact,” he said. “The burns are typical. With explosions of this sort, the parts nearest to the blast are the ones that get most se­verely burned. In addition, he’d probably been cooking inside the bus for some time before the fire was extin­guished. The dermis is contracted and brittle—did you notice those wide elliptic cracks? And the hair’s all but gone, of course, cornea of the eyes opaque.” The M.E. shrugged. “That’s about it,” he said.

O’Neil went over to tell the ambulance crew they could take the body. Some ten feet away, the police photogra­pher was snapping pictures of the smashed sawhorses and the tire tracks in the mud. A reporter from the city’s morning tabloid was on the scene. He asked Coop what had happened.

“No comment,” Coop said.

“Hey, come on, Captain,” the reporter complained.

“The area’s restricted,” Coop said. “I suggest you leave it.”

The reporter put his hands on his hips and glared at Coop as he went down the embankment again. The winch had lifted the Volkswagen, and it was resting on all four wheels now. O’Neil had walked over to the motorized patrolmen who’d discovered the burning bus. Both of them were drinking coffee from cardboard containers. He was talking to the driver of the car when I approached.

“... got on the scene,” he said, “what’d the fire look like?”

“What do you mean?”

“Which part of the bus was burning?”

“The front end. You know where the driver’s seat is? That’s what was burning.”

“And you ran down there with an extinguisher, huh?”

“My partner did. Freddie?” he said, and turned to him.

“Yeah,” Freddie said, “I tried to squirt it through the windshield. The windshield was busted, and flames were leaping out of it, and all I could think of was the poor bas­tard behind the wheel. I guess I was trying to save him, you know what I mean? Though, prolly, he was already dead. Anyway, the extinguisher wasn’t worth a shit against that kind of fire.”

“Then what happened?” O’Neil asked.

“The extinguisher ran out, and I was afraid the tank might blow. So I took a quick look at the license plate and ran back up the hill.”

“When did the tank explode?”

“Right after I got back to the car here. Ain’t that right?” he asked his partner.

“Couldn’t’ve been more than two or three minutes.”

“Thanks,” O’Neil said. As we started down the em­bankment again, he turned to me and said, “This stinks.” He was right. It stank to high heaven. Coop was already down at the bus, going through the interior. He’d found the car’s registration in the glove compartment, and he handed it to O’Neil now. The registration was made out to Arthur J. Wylie at 574 Waverly Street. The key was still in the ignition. There were several other keys on the chain. Two of them looked like house keys.

“I’ll bet these fit the Waverly Street apartment,” O’Neil said. He put the keys in an envelope, and then went into the rear section of the bus, where he found several charred remnants of what had once been a blue rug. The scraps were almost threadbare. One of them had a dark-brown stain on it.

“Blood?” Coop said. ^!

“Maybe,” O’Neil said. “The lab’ll tell us.” He tagged the scraps and put them in a large manila envelope. Then he turned to me and again said, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re right about the absence of skid marks or broken glass,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “There’re a few other things that bother me, too.”

“Like what?” Coop said.

“The burns. The M.E. said they were fourth-degree burns. On the face, the hands, and the front of the torso. Typical in an explosion. But the gas tank’s in the rear of a Volkswagen bus. If the tank exploded behind Wylie, how’d he get the worst burns on the front of his body? Pa­trolman up there says only the front of the bus was on fire when he came down here with the extinguisher. The tank blew after he went back up the bill.”

Coop was silent, thinking. I let them work it out to­gether. I had no desire to step on O’Neil’s toes. He was young, and not too experienced, but he was smart as hell, and he was covering all the bases.

“What’s your guess?” Coop asked him.

“I think somebody doused the driver’s seat and the dri­ver with gasoline,” O’Neil said. “Or some other volatile liquid, it doesn’t matter. That bus was pushed over the embankment. When it hit the rocks down there, it exploded. Then the tank went up later.”

“Benny?” Coop said.

“I think he’s right.”

“But you know what else bothers me?” O’Neil said. “If the guy wanted an explosion, how could he be sure he was going to get one? Even if he closed all the windows, how could he have known all that enclosed vapor would blow?”

“Maybe he just tossed a match in before he shoved the bus over,” Coop said.

“Yeah, but that would’ve given him a fire, not an ex­plosion. I’ve seen cars roll over a dozen times and not ex­plode.” He shook his head. “Well, however he did it, he damn well did it. This was no accident. Somebody killed Wylie.” He was pleased with his deduction. So far, he had answers to the When, Where, Who, and What of NEOTWY. He was only partially sure of the How, but he was wondering about the same thing that bothered me: How could the man have been certain he’d get an explo­sion? And, of course, he still didn’t know Why. I decided to risk helping him.

“I don’t think it was Wylie behind that wheel,” I said.

Neither he nor Coop looked terribly surprised. The idea I’d expressed had not occurred to them before this moment, but they didn’t grimace in derision, or exchange smiles or glances or winks. Even though the bus had been loaded with all sorts of identification, they knew the body had been incinerated beyond recognition, and so they waited for me to elaborate.

“Can you get Hiller’s dental chart?” I said.

“Hiller?” Coop said.

“The corpse Wylie swiped last night,” O’Neil ex­plained. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah, his dental chart. Yeah.” He shook his head. “I’ve been going nuts trying to figure out why anyone would want to steal a dead body.”

Coop was a little slower to follow the line of reasoning. When he caught on, he said, “Oh, I get it.” His voice sounded almost childlike. “I’ll be damned,” he said, and he, too, shook his head.

O’Neil suddenly thought of something. “Jesus,” he said, “the fire didn’t ruin his teeth, did it?”

“No,” I said. “The M.E. told me they’re okay.”

“Good,” O’Neil said. He sounded enormously re­lieved. Teeth are as good as fingerprints when it comes to positive identification. All he had to do now was compare Hiller’s dental chart with the teeth in the head of the in­cinerated corpse. That wouldn’t tell him where the real Arthur Wylie was, but at least he’d then be certain his killer was still on the loose. “I want to get moving on this,” he said. “Smoke,” he said, and hesitated, and then awkwardly stuck out his hand. “Thanks.”

He seemed very happy as we started the climb to the road. I did not tell him how depressed I was. There are some things employees of the Police Department simply do not understand.