The Investigation

by Sharon Mollerus

It was my case. The woman died and nobody knew why. Clara Thompson: age 22. Cause of death: inconclusive. The coroner was no help. All organs fine, except the heart, as noted. A huge amount of blood loss, almost seven of the ten pints always in circulation, with no entry or exit wound and no blood deposited anywhere around the body. This is the inexplicable thing: the heart had a neat slice in it, about the length a bowie knife would make, and the fluid siphoned off, but leaving the skin smooth, seamless, all over. They checked, and then I made them check again. It was like death by embalming with just enough blood left for some pretty color in the cheeks. The corpse was surprisingly flush even when I saw it.

Whoever saw something like this? Not me, and I’ve been going around the nastiest block in the neighborhood for some fifty years now. Something entered and made that hole, that leak in the dike, and she had to spill it out somewhere, somehow, but how? There are ten possible outlets: eyes, ears, nostrils, throat, plus those below, but there were no signs of her lifeblood around her. No mop up job which would have to include healing ripped skin. Blood isn’t so easy to hide once it leaves its borders, not like water or semen or such.

The boyfriend Alan doesn’t know anything, but I could have told him that. People don’t just die, as everyone knows. Something bad has to happen first: either a direct hit by nature, or someone or other, including oneself, intervening to help death along.

When I interviewed the lady’s friends, it looked like the classic suicide. She starts giving things away: jewelry, books, knickknacks, electronics. This 27-inch color TV given to a next-door neighbor she’d spoken to three times. Then she says goodbye to people, all kinds of people, people at the bus stop for chrissakes. “Goodbye, it has been so great to see you here every day, so cheerful, how much you made my day each day,” she told some old biddy, practically a bag lady, who probably never passed the time of day with anyone but this Clara. And she gave the old woman a tin with homemade chocolate chip cookies and a blue ribbon tied on top. Apparently she was baking for people for a month—pies, cakes, cookies, even dietetic sweets for some invalid man who lived in her building. That’s not so typical for someone that depressed.

Then she patches things up with her family—that’s got to be a story. They hadn’t talked at all, except for supervised visits (she was the one supervised, not the parents), since she was booted out at fourteen. Seems, according to mom, she tried to burn the house down. Ran away from her group home at fifteen—nobody can keep track of these kids—and then she made her own way. A real survivor. Camping out on the couch with friends and their families, at shelters, and she actually gets her own job and some crappy room. She moves up and becomes assistant manager of a hardware store, though she never moves out of her rathole; told her neighbors she liked to be with them. It’s one of those old motels converted into apartments or “condos” with the doors facing out for the convenience of drug-running, scamming, and painted girls on the make, close to the freeway for a quick getaway. She goes up to the second floor every night with her fistful of keys and locks herself in with three deadbolts.

Then she doesn’t break up with her fiancée, but tells him she can’t get married because she won’t be around long enough. So he says. She doesn’t want to hold him up, so to speak.

“Didn’t that disturb you?” I ask the boyfriend. I’m interviewing Alan, my prime suspect of course.

“Hell yeah, it disturbed me. What do you think? What if your girlfriend told you that?”

“Well you know, buddy, my wife never told me that when we were going out, and she for better or worse still happens to be around.” I shouldn’t even get into it, Trina and me being divorced, it’s irrelevant. Goes with the job, everybody’s job or just life, seems like, these days.

“Didn’t you recognize the signs?”

“Life is full of signs, but what exactly is it you’re referring to?” Alan answers. Signs, yeah right. Like he’d know the first place to look.

“Suicide,” I said. You always have to spell it out. Doesn’t anybody watch TV, read the papers? But he was distressed, I’ll give him that. Always a good sign for the boyfriend. He’s still the suspect, of course, automatically.

“Not Clara. She wouldn’t.”

“You sure? So what’d you say when she told you she wanted to go out with other guys now and didn’t want to marry. You willing to give her her freedom and all?”

“That’s not what she said. You have no clue.” The kid kind of spluttered at me. A redhead freckled kid. Rumpled, but polite; his answers were sort of impatient but respectful. He took off his baseball cap when he came in and held it in his lap, for example. Kids don’t think to do that anymore; I’m sure most of them wear them into the shower, in bed. I didn’t tuck my kids in at night too much, not with this job, but I made sure Trina taught them some manners. You’d never see this kid spitting in public. What the hell does he know about getting married? Go sow your wild oats; there’s time enough for the responsibilities, but not for this poor girl anymore.

“I asked her if she wanted to break up with me, and that if so she just had to say it. It would be hard, but I’d deal with it. Because you see she was always kind to me, good as gold. But …”

“Tell me, sorry, here you’re saying she’s good to you, and I know it might be a bit personal, but we were a little surprised to find Miss Thompson was a virgin. Maybe she was being frustrating?”

“A virgin, that’s impossible. But not with me.”

“So like you didn’t even try? I mean in like 99% of these cases, ya know.” Like buddy, Tom’s been around.

“Cases? So I’m a suspect?”

“Hey, I have to look at all the possibilities. I’m sure you more than anyone want me to do my job, to find out what happened to this young lady, gold as you say.”

For sure, I don’t tell him what I know about that body. Maybe the heart had some undiagnosed defect, maybe she coughed up the blood or the equivalent over time and cleaned up, but that seems impossible at that rate, and what about that heart wound. We found her lying in her bed dressed like for a prom, stockings, high-heels, her hair heaped on her head, perfectly done like at a parlor, but no one I interview knows the hairdresser and it’s not in her address book. She had a curl coiling down over her eyebrow, as if bending down to give her a last kiss. The dress draped down her in gold sparkling lame, every fold looking like she’d been laid out. And nobody’d seen her wear it before or buy it. But it also makes someone like me very suspicious—it’s very weird the way we found her. As if someone wanted to keep her for himself. And you can see why. Beautiful girl.

They’re checking into the heart defect, asking forensic cardiologists, looking at the previous medical records. Or I should say looking for them. No insurance, of course. Free clinics don’t keep track of everybody so well, if she ever showed up at one. Of course, since she’d been estranged from her mother, the old lady wasn’t able to tell me too much. Mothers are usually the best for getting all the nitty-gritty of the illnesses, every symptom, complaint: they hear it first. They’ve got it all down pat, and they’ll add the diagnosis for free, their own--so kind of you, thanks heaps. Her friends didn’t even report a sneeze or a cough. She wasn’t complaining of anything, just saying she wasn’t staying. The mother’s on my list. This whole childhood family thing might give the defining clue, some personality volatility, a tendency to stir things up.

“So who else might she have turned down?” I had to ask.

“Turned me down? Is that how you’re seeing it?”

“Look, let’s back up here. You were engaged right?”

“Wrong. Not at the time of her death.”

“OK, before, but you were still going out at the time of the demise.”

“Correct.”

That was enough for the first time. What I’d do is interview some other people, catch the perp in some inconsistencies, and confront him and make him cough up a confession. What kind of chemical he might have used. Who knows, there’s some odd stuff out on the market, all these new pharmaceuticals and people stealing and swapping pills with each other. We don’t even know all the effects yet. Anecdotal stories of bizarre brain and nerve disorders and such. There’s designer drugs possibly, black market, but that’s still pretty much in the sci-fi range. I’m wondering if she has another boyfriend though, possibly someone higher up on the food chain.

Lynn was her best friend, so she says. The boyfriend confirmed it.

“Yes, Clara talked to me about it.”

“About it?”

“About her death.” Suicide, but again, how?

“What did she tell you?”

“She said she wouldn’t be here for long and that there were some things she wanted me to have.” I’m in the friend’s room at her parent’s house. She’s got the usual posters, skinny moony guys with curls and some hobgoblins and elves tramping through the woods, and her computer is sparking with squares of chatters.

“What things did you get from the deceased?” I ask. Let’s get this wrapped up for the weekend so I can get out fishing—that’s what I’m thinking at the time.

“A belt. Blouses, jeans, a wool skirt. Macadamia nut white chocolate cookies, my favorite.”

“Cookies made to order. And you’re the same size then.”

“Yeah.” The dead girl takes shape in my mind again, dazzling, at rest. Her priest was the one to identify the body since the mother wouldn’t come. Said he saw her in church for early Mass every day. But he didn’t know anything useful about her.

“And a ring. It’s a birthstone.”

“What’s the stone?”

“Diamond. That’s for April. We had birthdays the same month.”

“Right.” Her friend now wore it on her pinkie. The sleeping girl has these small delicate hands. Her burial is a little delayed, because of the investigation. She’s still in my custody.

“A diary. She left it for you.”

“You mean for you.” I got this shiver like maybe she meant it like that, like the dead girl already knew I’d be coming. Stay objective, Tom. Can’t rule out anything. “I’ll need to take a look at that. She can’t be embarrassed any more.”

“She was never embarrassed,” Lynn said.

“That so? Sprightly type.”

“Peaceful.”

“Why didn’t she give it to Alan?”

“She knew he wouldn’t understand.”

“I see. A little tangled triangle, perhaps?”

“Triangle?”

“Somebody Alan might be jealous of.”

“Oh I see,” she laughed. “No, I just meant that Alan wasn’t first in her life.”

“Interesting.”

“By the way, I have something she left for you.”

“Clara? I never met her.” My scalp was tingling.

“Your name is Tom Dalton, right?” She handed me a round tin with a country scene on it, fields and cows, a red farmhouse and a yellow ribbon. A lot like my grandparents’ place, sold decades ago. I used to run in the fields there all summer long, go fishing in a pond just like that one painted in the scene. Tucked underneath the knot was a little card addressed to “Tom Dalton.” I tore open the envelope. Inside just two words: “Blessings, Clara.” I opened it and there it was, peanut brittle. My grandmother used to make it fresh for me like this. I loved the sweet and salty taste, the snap to it.

Holy crap.

It took some doing, but I finally found a hostile witness. I’m trying to break away from this sweet girl who has everybody wrapped around her pinkie finger, even me. Can’t find a hypothesis being this close. The peanut brittle had to be some joke someone pulled on me from the office. Chuck, I’ll bet, the jokester. I’ll get him back later. He’ll get it for messing with an investigation that way, that’s hands off. Anyway, I have to stay objective, need my distance. I take a few deep breaths and go on. This classmate’s name was Stephanie, and, from the sounds of it, she was the corpse’s worst enemy.

“She sure knew how to work everybody,” Stephanie said, smacking the words around her gum. This was exactly my own feeling; now we’re getting somewhere. I clicked down the lead in my pencil and wrote “worked people.” This girl shared an apartment with three others, boys and girls. There were dirty dishes in the sink and all across the tables, windowsills, furniture. I could see the towels and clothes on the floor in the bathroom and open bedroom. I had a little sympathy because my flat looked about that bad this morning—I’ll get to it this weekend. She had to push away some stuff to give me a corner of the couch to sit on.

“Let’s get specific. What kinds of things. Who would she make mad?”

“Everybody. I hate fake people. If you looked her boyfriend up and down, she would just smile at you, like she was stupid. We went to a party at her house and drank all the beer, and she just went out and bought more for us and sent us home in cabs. Everybody else waits until someone offers to buy drinks, then nobody offers, and it’s like this game of who can outlast who. Or you go home with someone for the night, someone who says, I’ve got some beer at home, let’s you and me go.” For beer, you can just substitute crack, pot, crystal, but that’s OK, just keep compiling the clues, the evidence.

“And who did she go home with or have stay over?”

“Nobody but herself. Alan went home when we did. She was in love with herself, smiled to herself all the time.”

“Narcissistic, you’re saying.”

“Yeah, I guess. Her boyfriend’s hot.”

“Did other people think so?”

“Everybody. I sure did. But he wouldn’t look at anybody else. Believe me, I tried. Any girl would, unless she’s, you know. I heard they broke up.”

“Not according to him.”

“Everybody called her a prick tease. He was never getting it off her. She just kept him dangling.”

“She was supposedly religious.”

“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes and brushed a finger along one brow.

“Was there someone else for her, do you think?” I was about to start chewing my pencil again, bad habit. Prefer to not do that during the interview, even when I’m not getting anywhere.

“Everybody and nobody. Maybe someone the rest of us never saw. We used to think maybe some college guy from State.”

“I see.” Look into out of town boyfriends, jilted lover motive. So we know she partied, led on her boyfriend. Obviously he must have been more frustrated than he’s letting on.

“Thanks for your help.”

“Sure.” She brushed her hair off her face and her piercings jingled off her open belly as she swung into the kitchen.

I let myself out. So much for the fishing trip; this is going nowhere in a big hurry. All those trout escaping my hook, swimming away--they’ll be grateful at least. Innuendos, flirts, nothing concrete. It’s always a matter of time, more time.

As for the diary, a lot of pious stuff not worth mentioning. Other than being sweet and again a bit on the religious side, including something about an illusion, locution or some such with God Almighty, it’s not a particularly helpful document, and there’s not too much about any other guys. I may have to write that off completely. Alan is her buddy in Jesus. People grow out of that by their thirties, with a new boyfriend or sudden pregnancy or a pink slip from their big fat career. It never lasts. As for Alan being churchgoing, that’s fine. But, priests and ministers, fine pious mothers and fathers, people wearing yarmulkes and crosses and robes of every kind—I don’t care who—even a Buddhist once, a vegetarian who wouldn’t step on a cockroach-- each one a human being: put them in the right set of circumstances, they’re jilted, cheated on, ripped off, or whatever, and they’ll never forgive, no way, no how. You know something, this is my secret: anybody can kill, I mean anybody; I never dismiss the possibility of evil. In fact I believe in it. It’s my church and religion; it comes from long experience and close observation. It takes no more than a second’s click on the clock to ignite a full-blown murderous passionate rage. Tom’s seen it all, in this job. Truth be told, I thought about it myself, with my ex-, but she wasn’t worth it. Had to take a chill pill, actually drink after drink, but that’s under better control now.

If I’d known the mother would be so helpful—but then mothers are always helpful—I wouldn’t have needed the hostile witness. She provided that side in spades. Told me the whole ugly story. How they adopted her when she was a toddler out of an abusive family and then they couldn’t do anything with her. Police on a tip found her in her crib at eighteen months, malnourished, bruised, naked; her druggie mom nearly OD’d but didn’t quite kill herself. Then all kinds of trouble with the child until eventually she tries to burn down the house, so her family put her back into the custody of the state. Strange thing, no firehouse record of that incident. Must have caught it pretty fast. Anyway, the fruit falls from the diseased tree and all that. At fourteen she goes to a group home. Same old, same old. Personally, I don’t get it. You’d think the warranty would expire within thirty days or so. Unadopting? But the mom said the girl was running away from them all the time. She was on drugs already, hanging out with older guys, a little lost soul. This incendiary event started with her little sister’s room, the five-year-old darling of the family, according to mother. The sweetheart had smoke inhalation she says, though the records are archived now, but otherwise the blonde curly-headed snot lived and prospered. After a stretch at juvey, Clara was sent to the group home. I’m sure that helped with her attitude. Put her in with the best of the best. Whatever she hadn’t figured out up to then she got the crash course in. By fifteen she had needle marks up and down her arms. They still had monthly “family” visits. Around that time she ran off and no one made a big effort to find her.

This version was so oddly different from the young woman I’d been investigating, I had to ask myself where the new life and different friends all came from. I checked them all out, and none of them had records of any kind. Alan confirmed it, that she had a history but had walked away from it. A previous boyfriend had apparently converted her to his childhood faith, just as he was leaving his own practice of it, like he was holding the door open for her to go through as he was walking out, and screwing her all along of course. But then she joined the church choir, got a job, an apartment, and went clean. Like that. It happens, seldom, but I admit it does. Everything happens. Every possible thing, and even sometimes the impossible.

Cases can take years to crack, but if you put in enough effort, gather enough data, do enough interviews, track down every clue, you’ll eventually find out. I truly believe every case can be solved definitively, as long as you don’t give up on it. Problem is, sometimes new cases come along which become more compelling. That’s how some fall through the cracks, so to speak; the trail goes cold. Hey, this city can only afford so many investigations. How wide is the net?

So you have to understand later there was the murder of the Johnson family in their beds, the drive-by near the college, and the disappearance of a young mother of two for which I was trying to nail the live-in boyfriend. Besides, apparently this young lady was aware of her death and wasn’t all that unhappy about it. Her family doesn’t press us on it, nor do her friends. No one seemed particularly surprised or even upset. And that’s part of it too: it’s the squeaky wheel that always gets the grease.

2005