Death Was the Other Woman Page 14

  He looked over at me with a smirk, though the smirk held a shadow of something more. “We’re going to see a dead guy, Kitty.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  WHILE WE DROVE, Dex told me that he’d followed Dempsey’s trail around the city. It had grown cold after a while, but then one of his police sources told him that Dempsey’s body had been found in the bay that very afternoon, fished up by a workboat. There hadn’t been a lot of detective work in that, Dex explained: the man’s wallet was still in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, making it easy enough to identify him, as long as you could read.

  “The stiff still had his driver’s license on him,” Dex explained as he drove. “Presumably the same one I looked at the other night.”

  “OK, wait,” I said, holding up a hand. “A couple of things here aren’t sitting well with me.”

  “Only a couple?” This time Dex’s grin was unimpeded by anything besides good humor.

  “Well… in the first place, it’s after midnight. Just where do you think you’re going to see a dead guy at this time of night?”

  “An old army buddy of mine works in the morgue here. He said if I wanted to see the body, he’d only be able to get me in after midnight.”

  “So you’re not supposed to be there?”

  “Not really,” he said, parking the car on what seemed to be a completely deserted street.

  “What do you need me for?”

  “Well, you were there, kiddo. You found him. I figured two sets of eyes were better than one.” Dex had started to get out of the car. I followed him.

  “But then what’s the hurry to get back to Los Angeles, Dex?” I said, while I scurried to keep up with him. “Couldn’t we just stay in town and then travel back tomorrow?”

  “We could,” he said, not slowing his pace while he nodded. “But we’re not. If this is the stiff we saw in the house on Lafayette Square—if this is Dempsey—then our business here is done. I’d just as soon get home.”

  I fumed a little while I continued to struggle to match Dex’s long strides. Sure, I’d been having fun and had been looking forward to spending the night at Morgana’s and catching up some more, but this wasn’t my junket, after all. I’d bummed the ride from Dex. That meant he got to call the shots. He didn’t tell me I could like it or lump it, but I got the general idea.

  I was so engrossed in these and other faintly mutinous thoughts that at first I scarcely noticed our surroundings. What brought me out of it was a smell, antiseptic yet slightly sweet, as though the sweet part were an additive used to cover something deeper.

  The building was long and low; the corridor we tracked down, dimly lit. Badly lit, really. It made me think the lights had been added long after the building’s construction; the morgue had probably been here since before the city got electricity.

  The sounds of our footfalls echoed slightly off the concrete floors, polished by a million feet, a hundred thousand gurneys, the brushstrokes of thousands of sweepers.

  Dex ignored several doors with vaguely medical-sounding names until we came to one marked Josiah Elway, M.D., Assistant Medical Examiner. Dex rapped on the door, once and sharply, before letting himself in.

  The face of the man who sat behind the desk moved quickly from surprise to genuine pleasure. He seemed to me to be painfully thin, made to appear even more so by the faintest whisper of the mustache that marched under his nose.

  “Dex, old dog,” he said, clapping him on the back. “You are a sight for sore eyes.” I was surprised at the clipped sound of his voice. He had a way of speaking that was similar to Dex’s. Judging by the way he pronounced certain words, he and Dex might have come from the same small Ontario town.

  “Doctor Elway,” Dex said carefully. “Huh! They’ll give anyone that title these days, won’t they?”

  “Just about,” Elway said, indicating we should sit. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, sliding open a desk drawer and pulling out a bottle of something amber—bourbon or scotch or Irish or rye—I could never tell the difference if I didn’t see a label, and this bottle didn’t have one.

  “I wouldn’t say no, but Kitty here will likely pass. She doesn’t much care for the stuff.” Dex introduced me then, if slightly belatedly, and the two of them settled in for a chin-wag that made me seethe all the more at having to leave my friends so I could come here and listen to Dex with his.

  I let them reminisce and tiffle for about fifteen minutes. To hear their stories, you would have thought that the war had been a jolly undertaking indeed. They had apparently had peerless fun in the trenches and almost had a party avoiding mustard gas. And too many of their sentences started with things like “Remember that Cagey Watson from Swift Current? What a guy! Poor kid had never been off the Prairies. France wasn’t ready for him.”

  Thinking back to what Dex had told me about what he’d seen in France, it was likely that this banter masked deeper feelings about the experiences the two men had shared. Shared and survived. Under different circumstances, I would have had more patience for it all. As it was, in that quarter hour I could feel the temperature of my blood slip ever upward until I knew I had to either say something or risk bursting something vital inside my head. Should that happen, I thought darkly, at least I was in the right place.

  “Dex,” I said, more tentatively than I felt, “it’s getting late. …”

  “Late?” he boomed. “Hell, it’s early. It’s first thing in the morning.” Both men guffawed heartily at this small joke, but I wasn’t having any of it. Not when I could already hear the slight thickening of Dex’s voice.

  “Please, Dex. You said you wanted to drive back to Los Angeles tonight. If we don’t get going soon …”

  “All right, all right,” he said, putting up his hands as though to ward off my words. “We’ll get going. But Josiah’s just poured us fresh drinks, so … we’ll finish those and then …”

  Another fifteen minutes and what seemed to me to be innumerable war stories later, Dr. Elway led us to the crypt. Outside the double doors I hesitated.

  “What’s wrong, kiddo?” Dex asked, when he saw me stop. “Your first time, huh?”

  I just looked at him. He knew the answer.

  “Well, I won’t soft-soap it. It may not be pretty.” He shot a glance at the doctor, who shook his head no. It wasn’t going to be pretty at all. “But it’ll be over soon, and then we’ll head back to L.A. No bad dreams, ‘cause we’ve got a lot of miles to cover before we sleep. OK?”

  I nodded and bit my lip. Oddly, as we moved into the crypt, the thing that pushed into my head was the face of Mrs. Bee-son. All of the work she’d done, preparing her charges for the “journey of life” she was always going on about. And none of her preparation had been about this or anything like it.

  Either side of the long room was lined with highly polished metal drawer units that reminded me of giant filing cabinets. The far wall looked as though it might have held windows, but these were blocked over with dark curtains, and I couldn’t tell if the windows were blocked to keep out the eyes of gawkers or the light.

  Dr. Elway led us to a shrouded form on a gurney.

  “I knew you were coming,” he said, “so I left him out.”

  Elway moved as though to pull back the sheet, but Dex stopped him. “Wait a second, Jos.” And then to me: “You ready, kiddo?”

  I bit my lip and nodded my head. I was as ready as I was going to be.

  But when Dr. Elway pulled the sheet away, I discovered I was wrong.

  The body we’d seen in the bathtub had looked decidedly human. As though, but for the mortal wound, Harrison Dempsey could have just gotten up and walked away. He’d looked lifelike. Rather, he’d looked close to life, if not in it.

  What was left of the body we’d seen at Lafayette Square was not like that. For one thing, the face and most of the extremities were gone. For another, what was there was the dark purple of a bad bruise. All of it. And the smell… the smell was beyond description. I’d r
ecognize it if I encountered it again though. It was the odor of death.

  “How’d that happen?” Dex asked gruffly.

  “Well, they found him in the bay. So it was most probably sharks.”

  Sharks! I looked at the body again, and I could see it: it looked as though some creature—maybe several—had nibbled on him and found that he wasn’t as tasty as had been hoped.

  This thought brought the nausea that had been lurking just below the surface. Mortified, I turned away from the table, spied a bucket nearby, and barely made it there in time to heave what was left of my two Kir Royales into it.

  “You all right, kid?” Dex was there with a hand on my back, pushing a clean handkerchief at me while politely averting his eyes.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, taking it. Then I added, “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK. It’s always rough the first time, eh, Jos?”

  “Rough. Yes. It’s true,” he said encouragingly, from across the room. “One forgets, doesn’t one?”

  “That’s probably why that bucket was right there,” Dex pointed out, with a forced cheerfulness.

  “I’m OK now,” I said, forcing myself back toward the body. “Just ignore … never mind. Where were we?” I pushed the soiled handkerchief in my purse so I could return it to Dex in its original condition. “Yes …. sharks …”

  The corpse had no face. His right hand was gone, as were parts of his left arm, though the hand itself was still there. But even though the body had spent some time in the drink. I recognized the rich, shiny finish of the man’s suit and the pattern of his tie. There was no doubt that this was the guy we’d seen in the bathroom of the house on Lafayette Square.

  “It’s the same guy, isn’t it, Dex?” I said quietly.

  “Sure looks that way, kid.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. Dex’s look stopped me from saying anything more. The doctor may be an old friend, but it was clear Dex didn’t want me going over the case in front of him.

  “You have a time of death, Jos?” Dex asked the other man.

  The doctor looked thoughtful. “It’s hard to say exactly, Dex. The cold water slows decomposition on the one hand, and as you can see, sea creatures can speed things up on the other. But educated guess? I’d say two days. Maybe three.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Well, that’s easy, isn’t it? Even with the corpse in this condition.” He indicated the place in the fabric of the suit where the bullet had ripped through. Then he pushed aside the unbuttoned shirt and gave us a look at the spot in the corpse’s chest where the bullet had gone in. Then to my horror, he said, “Give me a hand here, would you, Dex?” The two of them flipped the corpse face-down. “See,” he said, pulling the shirt aside and pointing to a spot on the dead man’s back. “Exit wound. Clean as anything. Fairly large caliber, I’d say.”

  “The bullet went right through him?” I asked, surprised.

  “Sure,” the doctor said. “It’s not uncommon. You see it with big bullets, especially at close range.”

  “So this was close range?”

  “Again, the time he spent in the water and the damage the sharks did make it more difficult than it would be if someone had brought him in here fresh.” I cringed at his choice of words. “But, yeah, based on what we’ve got here, I’d say no more than ten feet. Maybe less, like eight or even six.”

  There wasn’t a lot more that this particular corpse could tell us. Before we left though, I asked if we could take fingerprints from the hand he had left.

  “Why, Kitty?” Dex asked. “We know who he is. It’s not like he had a police record or anything. There won’t be anything to find.”

  “I dunno, Dex. It feels like the right thing.”

  “Women’s intuition?” Dex smirked.

  “Sure,” I said, humoring him. “Call it that. But can we do it?”

  Dex looked at Josiah, who shrugged. “Why not?” he said.

  I left them to it. I couldn’t even watch. A girl has to have limits, has to know where they are. I didn’t have any of my lunch left to lose.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I’M CONFUSED,” I said to Dex as we blazed southward into the night. I was driving, for the moment. I’d seen how much of the amber liquid Dex had consumed while he was wagging chins with his pal. I insisted, and Dex finally gave in, but he told me he’d take over if I got tired.

  “What are you confused about?”

  I thought for a moment before answering. “Well, everything really. We find a dead body. Fine.” It hadn’t been fine, but there were degrees of everything. “Then witnesses said he was alive. And now he’s dead again.”

  “And there’s no question about the man’s identity,” Dex said. “His wallet was still in his pocket. His I.D. said who he was, plain as day.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “So what happened?”

  Dex shrugged. “Beats me. But ours is not to reason why—”

  “Don’t quote Tennyson on me, Dex. It’s too damn early in the morning.”

  Dex grinned at me sleepily. “It’s funny when you curse.”

  “Another thing I was wondering,” I said, ignoring him. “Your pal, the doctor, back in Frisco?”

  “What of him?”

  “Well, you seemed a little cagey around him.”

  “I did?” Dex sounded genuinely surprised.

  “You did,” I said, nodding. “Back in the … in the crypt. I got the distinct impression you didn’t want me to say anything in front of him.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Sure. That was because I didn’t want you to say anything in front of him.” looked at Dex to see if he was teasing me. And he was, but only just.

  “See, it wasn’t about my friend, kiddo. Just anyone. You and I know things no one else knows. When you think about it, a lot of things. Like only you and I seem to have seen the dead man in the tub. Next thing you know, everyone says he’s right as rain and visiting in San Francisco.”

  “And now he’s dead again,” I supplied.

  “Right. And that he owed money to some pretty serious muscle in Los Angeles. People knew that”

  “And that someone shot at you outside the Town House the other night. That’s probably related. Because you were asking questions, right?”

  “Right. But it’s not just knowing one thing, Kitty. It’s knowing all the individual things, then putting them together. So now Dempsey is dead, and it looks like our case is closed again. But you still hold on to the pieces. In case knowing them later is a good thing.”

  I wasn’t quite sure I followed exactly, but it did remind me of something else.

  “I’ve got another piece, Dex. Last night, at the club with the girls, I’m pretty sure I saw Rita Heppelwaite.”

  Dex suddenly looked interested.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I forgot, more or less. What with you coming in and rousting me out of there.” I told him about going into the back room with Morgana, about what we’d seen then, and—more importantly—what we hadn’t seen.

  “The gunsel at the door knew her. But he knew her as Rita Mayhew, which kinda got me. Why would she have a different name?”

  Dex looked thoughtful. In the dim light of the car’s interior, I could see the lines on his face deepen while he considered my words.

  “Lots of reasons,” he said finally. “Most of them to do with not wanting to leave too strong a trail. But which is the real name? That might be an important thing to know. Which is the trail she’s trying to cover up? Ah, well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? Not to us anyway.”

  It was my turn to contemplate quietly. While I did so, I focused tightly on the road in front of us. The way the car’s headlights seemed to swallow the white lines between lanes, like it was hungry for the miles we were covering.

  I struggled for some type of answer, but then a sound in the car made me realize I didn’t need to worry about answers for the moment. A sort of light snore echoed out o
f my boss, and when I looked at him, I realized he was fast asleep.

  I thought about waking him, but decided he needed to sleep as much as he needed to sleep it off. I pushed on for another hour or so, but not far south of Santa Cruz, the urge to sleep caught up with me as well. I thought about waking Dex to take over the driving, but I knew it hadn’t been long enough for the alcohol to have worked its way out of his body. When I saw a small road leading down to the ocean, I pulled the big car off the main highway, pulled over to the side of the road, killed the engine, and gave in to the demands of my body. The day had been too long. I told myself I needed ten minutes of rest. Maybe fifteen. I think I fought sleep for about a minute. But when the urge became too strong, I gave up the fight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “WAKE UP, sleepyhead.” It wasn’t the voice that woke me, but a gentle poke in the ribs.

  I looked around groggily. It was not full day, but it would be soon. Light was exploding across the ocean in front of us. Somehow, in the full dark and in my sleepy state, I’d managed to park the car facing the ocean full on. The gold and red lights of dawn were chasing away the remnants of night across an endless sea. It was beautiful. Before I said anything at all to Dex, I just sat there for a moment and drank it in.

  The day was going to be hot; you could feel it in the way the sun belted off the car. But for the moment, it was cool enough to be comfortable, and the scent of the ocean chased the stale smell of Dex’s booze out of the car.

  Dex got out and stretched his legs, then walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door. “Here,” he said, “skootch over. We’ve gotta get a move on. And if I don’t get some coffee soon … well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but neither of us wants to find out.”

  “Santa Cruz isn’t far back,” I said, while I did as he asked. “Maybe ten or fifteen minutes.”

  He started the engine. “Naw, I’d rather not go in that direction. I’d rather not go back. We’ll find something along the way.”