The Other Side of Death Read online

  I stop by Crossroads Park now and then just to stay in touch. The guys with the bedrolls are, in at least one sense, my peers. They seem to be about the same age—middle to late thirties—although maybe a little worse for wear; sleeping outside takes its toll. They look like Vietnam vets, but who knows whether they are—it’s their age, the long hair, the camouflage clothes, and something wounded but kind of gallant about them. Just like the women who take their pillows to seminars in Santa Fe, they carry their bedding with them, rolled up under their arms, children of God, seekers after something, even if it’s only a place to lie down. I bought an iced tea to go at The Stuffed Croissant and, as I walked through the park, one of the guys hit me up for thirty-six cents. “Just thirty-six cents,” he said, as if being specific meant he wasn’t begging. I didn’t begrudge him the thirty-six cents, but I didn’t want to stand there, holding my iced tea in one hand, fishing through my purse for the money with the other, so I kept on going.

  I turned down Central and got stuck behind a fat guy in a T-shirt wearing a large tattoo of a heart pierced by an arrow on his arm. He was too slow to follow, but too fat to pass. You lose your maneuvering skills when you don’t walk much. At the library a bunch of guys hung around waiting for a bus, smoking joints. A man sat on the curb wearing a white suit and dark blue glasses that reflected the Kimo Theatre and maybe even myself. One of my colleagues was about to open an office in the black glass building at 500 Marquette Street, so I went over there to take a look. There were huge ficus trees, a mass of greenery behind the glass, and when I got into the lobby and tried to read the black glass directory, all I could see was the reflection of the trees. There was a time when visual distortions seemed to sharpen one’s perceptions, but these reflections made it impossible for me to find the guy’s name.

  Before I got back into my car and drove the five blocks to my office like a true American, I sat in the wide open spaces of Civic Plaza for a few minutes. There weren’t many of us here; all the courthouse staff had finished lunch and gone back to work. Only the unemployed and the self-employed like me take time off in the middle of the afternoon. My excuse was that, like visual distortions, breaking habits can help you to see. The purple petunias were blooming in their concrete containers. A homeless person poked through a garbage bin looking for his share of somebody else’s lunch. I sat on a bench under a massive concrete pavilion that made pagodalike shadows on the ground, watched a girl in a red T-shirt run through the plaza and thought about what you notice as a person approaches. First would probably be the color the person wore, then the person’s general shape and size, sex, age, attractiveness or lack of same, how the person is dressed, what that reveals about them, all the obvious. Then there was the other side, the side you don’t usually look at that might reveal something else. I began watching the shadows of the people who walked across the plaza. With the clear air and the ever-present sun, shadows are prominent here. First I saw a fat, round cloud follow an ebullient woman, and then two thin shadows, about the same length, walking in unison step for step, shadowing each other. The old couple they followed were in sync, too.

  My thoughts led to Lonnie, as all thoughts tended to these days. The police and the medical director were looking at this case in the way they had gotten accustomed to seeing a case, examining the obvious. But maybe there was something that couldn’t be seen, something not evident but implied, something conspicuous by its absence. I remembered a man named Robert Fitch who I met at Bailey’s, the singles bar where the young professionals hang out, a few years ago. He had been a paramedic and a medical investigator. He’d called me several times for dates, but I’d always turned him down. I got my car out of the underground garage, went back to my office and gave him a call. It was a few minutes before he remembered who I was. “Neil Hamel,” I said, “remember? We dated a couple of times a few years ago?” It was an exaggeration but it did the trick. I asked if I could buy him a drink after work.

  “As it happens, I’m free,” he said.

  7

  I MET HIM at Bailey’s on Louisiana, filled with potted plants and uprooted people and about as crowded at this time of day as a Mexican bus. It was a good place to have a private conversation because everybody else was too busy scoring to listen. Robert Fitch was dressed in hiking boots and the kind of boring outdoor clothes you get in army-navy stores. His hair fell across his forehead in lopsided bangs that told me he’d cut it himself. He was tall and thin with the look of a large, awkward and solitary bird. He stood up and his arms flapped when he saw me.

  “Neil,” he said, “how have you been?” He bent over to give me a peck.

  “Good,” I replied, kissing the air near his left cheek.

  He’d gotten there before me and I was happy to see he had been able to find us a booth; I think better sitting down. Robert had a German beer sitting in front of him, and I ordered a margarita from a waitress I didn’t know. Sally, my favorite bartender, didn’t work here anymore. She’d had a brief relationship with Brink and shortly thereafter moved to California, probably to get away from him.

  “So how’s the medical investigator business?” I asked Robert for openers.

  “I got out of it.”

  “You did?”

  “I’m out of the paramed business, too. I always wanted to be a writer, you know.”

  I didn’t, although I probably should have. Scratch the surface of most people in northern New Mexico and you find an aspiring something. “What kind of writing do you do?”

  “Well, I used to write mysteries, and I thought doing medical investigations would give me ideas.” Medical investigators come from all walks of life in New Mexico: funeral directors, paramedics, writers. Only the medical director has to be a doctor.

  “Did they?” My margarita arrived heavily encrusted with salt.

  “I learned a lot, but it was depressing getting up in the middle of the night to look at the remains of people who had self-destructed or been wiped out by someone else. It was bad enough to be doing it, I found I didn’t want to be writing about it afterwards.”

  I licked my way through the barrier reef of salt, arrived at a sheltered cove of triple sec and tequila, took a sip. “So what are you doing now?”

  “Technical writing, computer manuals, that sort of thing.”

  “You like it?”

  “Actually, I do. It’s a steady source of income, the work is challenging, I enjoy working with computers. I’m thinking about moving up to Los Alamos. That’s where most of the work is.” I could see it. He had the lack of concern for physical appearance that was typical of Los Alamoseños, the kind of lost-in-the-stars, interested-in-the-way-things-work, uninterested-in-what-I-wear look. The kind of guy who would pay $500 over the sticker price for a Toyota because he liked the engineering and spend $25 a year on clothes. He had a mind that was good at detail and facts, the mind of a technical writer, not a novelist, but that was okay with me; it was detail that I was after.

  “Would you mind if I picked your brain a bit?” I asked.

  “Not at all.” He leaned forward eagerly, knocking over what little beer was left in his glass. “Oops, sorry,” he said. I helped him wipe it up with paper napkins.

  “I’ll get you another.” I flagged down the waitress.

  “I’ll get it.”

  “No, it’s on me. I could use your help.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I’m representing the family whose daughter was found dead at the ruins last weekend.”

  “Oh, yeah, I read about that one. Suicidal or accidental combination of drugs and alcohol, right?”

  “That’s what the medical director said. The parents don’t want to believe it.”

  “Well they wouldn’t, would they?”

  “No, but the other alternative’s murder. Is that any better?”

  “In a way; it absolves them of responsibility. If a daughter is depressed or careless enough to kill herself, it doesn’t say much for the parents, does
it?”

  It didn’t say a whole lot for the friends either.

  “Have you seen the medical director’s report?” Robert asked me.

  “Yeah, and I’ve got a copy of it here if you’d like to take a look.”

  His beer arrived and I paid for it while he looked at the report. “Alcohol and Valium in her system, although not all that much. Ordinarily it takes a lot of Valium to kill someone, but if she took it all at once mixed with alcohol, who knows? Everybody’s different. It’s not the best drug to commit suicide with because it does take so much. You’re more likely to end up in a coma than dead, but maybe she didn’t know that. It’s a drug you build up a tolerance for, too. Had she been taking it for a long time?”

  “Long as I’ve known her.”

  He continued studying the report. “No signs of hypothermia, no defense wounds, no scratches, no needle marks, only some bruises that were probably caused by consensual sex.”

  “How do they know the bruises were caused by consensual sex? Couldn’t she have been raped?”

  “Maybe. A medical director couldn’t necessarily tell.”

  “Since they made a determination that drugs and alcohol killed her, couldn’t they have been more specific?”

  “Not necessarily. Autopsies are not an exact science, especially when it comes to drugs and they’re acting in synergy. The mere presence of a substance doesn’t mean it killed someone either. It’s not like you can zip a body open and find a marker that says this is what caused the death. A good medical director has to consider more than physical evidence. Witnesses can help, if you have any. You also have to consider history and circumstances. Apparently she was a despondent substance abuser who was alone when she died.”

  “Who knows whether she was alone? Police aren’t always noted for their attention to detail at crime scenes.”

  “That’s true.” He gave the report back to me. “The police are not supposed to touch the body or move anything until we get there, but more often than not they do. That’s another reason I don’t do medical examinations anymore—the lack of cooperation from the police. Every case of sudden death should be considered a homicide and investigated as such, but they aren’t necessarily. Who’s in charge of the investigation?”

  “There isn’t any investigation, but the person who should be in charge is Michael Railback.”

  “Oh, him. He’s a stubborn shit. Once he makes up his mind, you’ll have a hard time convincing him to change it.”

  “Believe me, I know.”

  Robert sipped at his beer, I licked more salt off the rim of my glass.

  “There’s one thing you should consider, Neil, parents are never happy with a determination made about a child’s death. It’s just too awful to face, so they blame the police, the medical investigator, anyone but themselves.”

  “Lonnie Darmer was also a friend of mine, Robert. I was with her the night she died.”

  “So you can’t let go of it either.”

  “No. Just for the hell of it suppose she wasn’t alone at the ruins. Is there any way she could have been murdered without leaving a mark on the body?”

  “Actually, there are a couple, but they’re rare around here; murderers in New Mexico tend to leave a mark. I suppose someone could have mashed up the Valium, dissolved it in a drink and given it to her, but if they really wanted to kill her, why didn’t they give her more?”

  “Maybe they gave her all there was. An empty pill container was found at the scene.”

  “There’s suffocation, although that would require a certain passivity from the victim. If you smothered somebody in their sleep, say, and the victim didn’t struggle, there might not be any marks. Of course, there could be saliva, hairs, makeup, etcetera, on the pillow or whatever was used to smother, but you’d have to find it first.”

  “How about a sleeping bag?”

  “That could do it. You can also kill someone by compressing the carotid arteries and cutting off the supply of blood to the brain.” He put his fingers to his throat to show me where the arteries were. “Again, if the victim didn’t struggle, there might not be bruises. Compressing the artery and cutting off the blood supply to the brain causes dizziness and blacking out. Supposedly it intensifies orgasm; it also incapacitates a victim. Lovers do it to their partners, and rapists to their victims—they call it the carotid sleeper. Carotid, incidentally, comes from the Greek word karos, meaning heavy sleep. It’s a dangerous practice; seconds of blood deprivation to the brain can be fatal.”

  “Could that produce hallucinations or visions if it didn’t cause death?”

  “God knows. A heightened awareness anyway. There’s something teenagers do—pulling against a rope or a scarf around their neck while they are masturbating—that can result in death. It’s called autoerotic asphyxia. I don’t know if the thrill comes from oxygen deprivation or blood deprivation or both. It must be intense for anyone to take the risk. Of course, in that case there would be rope burns. There’s cartilage in the neck that doesn’t become bone until a person is in their forties or fifties. In an older person pressure on the neck might result in broken bone, but in a younger person it wouldn’t. In some cases of strangulation, but not all, you see petechiae, pinpoint hemorrhaging on the lining of the eyelids. Anyway, to answer your question, yes, there are ways a person could be murdered with no marks on the body, but it would take a passive or trusting victim. Given the facts of this case, I probably would have made the same determination the medical director did. Unless you can find a murder weapon or a witness or get a confession, you’re going to have a hard time proving otherwise. I’ll give you some criminal profile tips, however, that might help. Stranger murder is on the rise, but most murderers know their victims and sex murderers are usually the same race and around the same age as their victims. A lot of these guys are stalkers and it’s the chase that turns them on. Sexual aggression isn’t always evidenced at the crime scene, and the victims aren’t necessarily raped. Some of these guys masturbate over the victim after she’s dead.”

  I leaned over to take a look at a clock hidden behind a large spider plant. The subject had a certain morbid fascination, but I had an appointment at home and I’d learned what I needed to. “Many thanks, Robert, you’ve been a big help,” I said. “If I can ever return the favor, give you advice about the law, say, I’d be happy to.”

  “I’ll let you know.” He flapped his arms in preparation for flight. “What are you doing for dinner?” he asked.

  “I’m seeing someone now. He’s coming over.”

  “Just my luck,” Robert said.

  ******

  I would have told the Kid about Lonnie eventually. In fact, I intended to the very next time I saw him, but Anna did it first when he called the office while I was out. Anna neglected to tell me that she had told him, however, and he surprised me by showing up with a six-pack of Tecate, a bag full of tacos and a red rose in a jar. The rose floated in some kind of pickling solution that would keep it velvety and red for eternity.

  “Kid, you shouldn’t have!” I said.

  “I’m sorry about your friend, Chiquita.” He handed me the rose.

  “Thanks.” I gave him a kiss.

  “The live flowers smell good but in a couple of days they’re dead.” He shrugged. “This one will last forever.”

  “You’re right.”

  The obvious place for the rose was the mantel, over a fireplace that got used about once a year when some guy showed up at the doorway with an armload of piñon to sell. Piñon smells good but burns fast, and most of the aroma goes up the chimney in smoke. Since the fireplace was used so seldom, the mantel had become a catchall for keys, gloves and objets d’art. There was a picture of a white bird against a blue sky, various candles and candlesticks, an arrangement of dried flowers, a photograph of the Kid and two white cow vertebrae that I found years ago while hiking in the Pecos Wilderness. The vertebrae looked like flying zeros, circles surrounded by wings of bone, wings that start
out as cartilage but end up as bone. Georgia O’Keeffe said that when she came to New Mexico she picked bones because she couldn’t find any flowers, but now I had both, flowers and bones that would last forever. I placed the pickled rose right smack in the middle of the mantel. “It’s beautiful, Kid,” I told him. “Thanks a lot.”

  “It’s nothing, Chiquita,” he said.

  8

  THE NEXT DAY was Thursday, the day of Rick’s party and the day I get to watch “L.A. Law” if I arrive home on time, a day on which I went to see Detective Railback once again. He was ready for me, sitting at his desk playing with a paper clip. I sat myself down and handed him the sleeping bag knob in its plastic Baggie. “I found this in the cave where Lonnie Darmer died,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “The knob from a sleeping bag.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve seen them attached to sleeping bags.”