“Yes?” She was having trouble placing the voice.
“Vince Conti.”
“Vince, hi,” she said, finding herself pleasantly surprised to be hearing from him. With everything else going on in her life, she’d forgotten about their little repartee at the open house.
“I’m afraid I haven’t started playing the lottery yet,” she said once the mandatory greetings had been observed. She kicked off her shoes and settled herself on the couch.
“Just as I feared.”
Rory could hear the smile in his words. “In my defense, I did warn you that could be a problem.”
“I believe you did. But I’m hoping you’ll let me work on my sales pitch over dinner.”
“I think we could arrange that, as long as you’re sure you can handle more disappointment.”
Vince assured her that he thrived on it. They spoke for several more minutes and then set the date and time to try a new restaurant in Huntington that had received an impressive review in the
New York Times
.
The doorbell chimed as Rory hung up the phone. She glanced at her watch; it wasn’t yet noon and she wasn’t expecting anyone. None of her family and friends knew that she’d taken the day off, but even if they did, they would never drop by without calling. They were old-school that way.
Since there were no windows near the door and Mac had never felt the need to have a peephole installed, Rory had no choice but to open the door in order to see who was there. When she did, she found herself looking at her empty front porch and the lawn and street beyond it. Had she imagined the sound? She looked around once more, then closed and locked the door, wondering who she should call to have a peephole installed and whether she could find such a person in the yellow pages.
As she turned away from the door, she nearly ran smack into Zeke. She jumped back with a little yelp of surprise.
“What the hell happened to making the lights flicker?” she demanded once she’d regained some of her composure.
“I did,” he said, winking away to reappear leaning against the newel post of the stairway. “I guess you didn’t see it.”
Rory realized that he might be right. The living room was so bright with sunlight during the day that she could have missed a flickering light if she wasn’t paying attention. And with Vince on the phone, she had definitely not been paying attention to the lights.
“This Vince fella your beau?” Zeke inquired.
For a second Rory worried that the marshal was reading her mind, which would make staying on in the house with him completely untenable. Then she remembered with relief that she’d said Vince’s name aloud. But another troubling thought occurred to her.
“You were eavesdropping on me, weren’t you?”
“I was waitin’ for the right moment to ring the bell. You didn’t want me interruptin’ your conversation, now did you?”
Rory gave him a withering look, but she didn’t say anything. “Vince is a friend,” she said evenly. “We were making some dinner plans. Does that meet with your approval?”
“I wouldn’t know, seein’ as how I never met the man.”
“Then I guess you’re just going to have to trust my judgment.”
“I suppose I will, for now. But I gotta tell you, courtin’s a whole lot different these days than it was back in my time. Some of the things I’ve seen on that television set are hard to abide.”
“Was there something else you wanted to talk to me about?” Rory asked, hoping to derail a discussion on morality in the twenty-first century.
“As a matter of fact there is.” Zeke spent a minute raking his hand through his hair as if that chore required his immediate attention. Rory was about to point out that he should just change the way he was projecting himself if he wasn’t happy with his hair, when he finally started speaking again.
“There’s this case I worked on some years ago that I’ve been wantin’ to tell you about.”
“The case that brought you out here?” Rory asked, walking past him to take a seat on the bench.
He shook his head. “No, it was in my early days as a marshal.”
“Oh, well I’m sure it’s very interesting,” she said, trying to hide her growing impatience, “but can’t it wait until after lunch?” She hadn’t had anything to eat since the latte hours earlier, and there was a slice of pizza calling to her from the refrigerator.
“You need to hear about it now.” His tone left no room for negotiation, and Rory wondered if he’d forgotten what hunger felt like.
“Back in sixty-nine—1869, ’a course—we had us a couple of murders in the Arizona Territory. First an old hobo by the name of Paco fetched up dead near the train tracks in Yuma. He was in pretty bad shape; looked like he’d taken a nasty tumble from one of the freight trains he rode. Now everyone knew he drank when he had the money, so nobody really questioned his death. We gave him a decent burial, though. Even had a preacher say a few words over him.”
Rory shifted her weight, wishing that he’d get to the point, if in fact there was one.
If Zeke noticed her impatience, he didn’t let it bother him. “Like I said, we didn’t think much more about it,” he went on in the same languid drawl. “But ’round about the same time there was a bank robbery up in Phoenix. Three men killed the guard and got away with ten grand—a big haul in those days. And they were wearin’ masks so no one could identify them. We had no reason to think that the deaths of Paco and the guard were connected, till Henry stopped in. Henry rode the trains with Paco from time to time, you see. Anyhow, Henry was so scared he couldn’ stop stammerin’ long enough to get two sensible words out. When I finally got him calmed down, he told me how he and Paco had seen the robbers runnin’ out of the bank that day in Phoenix. Seen them pull off their masks. So when Paco turned up dead, poor Henry was sure he was gonna be next. But once we knew that both deaths were connected to the same bank robbery, we were able to catch up with the robbers before they got to Henry.” Zeke finished his story with a satisfied nod.
“So you’re trying to tell me that you think Mac was murdered?” Rory asked, the pizza all but forgotten.
“I’m just sayin’ that sometimes when things don’t seem to have any connection, they’re connected right down to the core.”
“But we know that Mac died of a heart attack,” she protested. At least the doctors and her parents were certain that he had, and she had no concrete reason to believe that they were wrong. Still, as she’d said to Jeremy, when someone dies alone there are always questions left unanswered.
“Did they do an autopsy?” Zeke asked.
She shook her head. “His doctor said it was a massive myocardial infarction. My folks didn’t see any point in violating his body with an autopsy.”
Zeke looked her squarely in the eye. “You listen to me, Rory. If Mac was murdered ’cause he was lookin’ into Gail’s death, then you could be next. And that car that was followin’ you could’ve been the first step in that direction.”
Chapter 15
I
n spite of Rory’s own difficulty in accepting her uncle’s sudden death, she was not ready to buy into Zeke Drummond’s theory that he’d been murdered. The marshal had altogether too much time on his hands, and it was no doubt easy for him to see murder lurking everywhere, since he himself had been a victim of that crime. Still, she struggled over what if anything she should tell her parents. On one hand, they had a right to know if there was even a slight chance that Mac had been killed. On the other hand, such an investigation would no doubt involve exhuming Mac’s body, and she preferred to spare them that trauma if possible. In the end, Rory decided that she owed it to her uncle, as well as to her parents, to find out whether his heart had actually been attacked by something more sinister than saturated fat.
She made an appointment to see Dr. Barrett Browning III, the chief medical examiner for Suffolk County. She’d met the man on two other occasions and then only briefly. It was common knowledge that he came from a long line of distinguished physicians, and that his family, expecting him to follow in his progenitors’ footsteps, had given him a name commensurate with that lineage. Rory could only imagine their horror when Barrett eschewed private practice to become a coroner and chose to go through life known simply as BB. But even though he was the blackest sheep in the Browning family, everywhere else he was well loved.
Rory agreed to meet BB where he worked at the Department of Health Services. With one of his assistants away and another out sick, he was almost literally up to his neck in cadavers. When she reached the door to the autopsy suite, she peered through the panel of glass. BB was hard at work on one of his corpses. With age, the patrician features he’d inherited from a long line of Brownings were melting into the doughy roundness of his face. Rory wondered if he ever worried about his own mortality as he spent his days digging through the remains of his fellow man. But by all accounts, BB was a happy man, clever, upbeat and fun to be around.
As Rory watched, he removed a dark red organ from the body cavity and deposited it in the scale above the table. She took a deep breath to steady herself. Although she’d been at the morgue on several occasions as part of her police academy training, her stomach was never completely at peace there. To her way of thinking, there were some sights and smells that were better left to the imagination. She knocked on the door, glad that she’d skipped lunch.
“Entrez,”
she heard him say, his jovial voice muted by the door. “
Bienvenido
, come on in.”
Rory let herself in but stopped several feet shy of BB and the autopsy table, which was fine since she had no intentions of shaking his gloved and gory hand. For his part, BB greeted her without missing a beat as he went about disemboweling his subject. After assuring one another that they were “quite fine, thank you,” Rory explained why she was there.
“I guess what I’m asking, is whether there are drugs that can precipitate a fatal heart attack and make it seem as if it occurred from natural causes.”
BB didn’t stop working, but his brows bunched together in a frown. “If you were a writer asking me that question, I’d figure you were plotting out a murder mystery. But you’re not. You’re a cop. An artist cop, but still a cop. So now I’m thinking you have a decedent and very possibly a murder on your hands. Am I getting warm?”
“Toasty,” she replied.
“Mac.” BB nodded as if he didn’t need her confirmation.
“Everyone was so sure his lifestyle killed him that an autopsy seemed like an unnecessary indignity.”
“Don’t torture yourself, Detective,” he said, piling intestines onto the scale like a butcher weighing sausages. “There’s a good chance an autopsy wouldn’t have found anything anyway. There are drugs that don’t stay in the body long enough to be detected. And there are injection sites that the best coroner could miss.
“So there wouldn’t be any point in exhuming the body?”
“I don’t think there’d be much if anything to gain from it.”
“But there might be?”
BB turned to face her. “Do you mind if I ask why you think your uncle was murdered?”
Rory hesitated. She had to be careful about how she worded her reply. She couldn’t mention Zeke’s name, nor did she want to sound as paranoid as she was beginning to feel.
“His passing was so sudden, it just never seemed right somehow,” she said. “And then I found out he was investigating another suspicious death at the time he died.” She gave BB a quick rundown of what she knew, ending with the theory that the two deaths might be linked. She made a silent apology to Zeke for stealing his theory.
“I see.
Entendu.
Understood.” BB’s jowls drooped like a hound dog’s as he considered this new information.
“I’d still have to say that in all likelihood his heart just gave out. Hard as it is to bear, it happens more often than you’d think. As for the timing? Probably coincidental. Do you happen to remember who autopsied the Oberlin gal?”
“Blake,” Rory said, having seen the name on the autopsy report.
“Tom Blake’s a good man, bright man, conscientious. I’d be surprised if anything got past him.”
“So, if you were in my position?”
“Well, you still don’t have any hard evidence that Oberlin was murdered. If you’re able to establish that she was, then I might push for an exhumation and autopsy on Mac. But time is not on your side here, Rory. The fact is, even if you were to exhume his body today, I doubt we’d be able to come up with anything definitive.”
“That’s pretty much what I was thinking. I guess I just needed to hear it from an expert.”
“Always glad to accommodate.”
“One more thing,” Rory said before he could turn back to his work. “Since this theory is still just a theory . . .”
“Not to worry.” BB smiled like a giant Pillsbury Doughboy. “Mum’s the word. Silence is golden. My lips are sealed.”
A
t four o’clock Rory left what she now thought of as her paying job and went to Mac’s office to continue her pro bono work. She had to be out of there by tinue her pro bono work. She had to be out of there by the end of the month if she didn’t want to pay additional rent. It was taking her longer than she’d anticipated to transcribe the notes in Mac’s files and send them out to the respective clients. Between her paying job, moving into Mac’s house and investigating Gail’s death, she was often too tired to put in additional hours on the languishing files. But as the month drew to an end, the prospect of having to pay more rent was proving to be a great motivator.
When she arrived at the office and turned her key in the lock, it met with no resistance, as if the tumblers weren’t engaged. Her first thought was, “Great, I’m so preoccupied that now I’ve even forgotten to lock the door.” But as she stepped across the threshold into the reception area, it was clear that her memory was not at issue. She’d had a visitor during her absence. And it wasn’t the cleaning lady. The desk drawers that she’d emptied shortly after the funeral had been pulled out and thrown onto the floor.