“In France, we do not have these men who do these things,” she said.
I remembered that France was the land of the Marquis de Sade, but I was gracious enough not to mention it. “Come on,” I said, “we’ve got work to do.”
The police station in Calusa is known as the Public Safety Building. According to my partner Frank, this is another of the city’s attempts to lend respectability to everything under the sun. A euphemism, plain and simple. Frank insists that a spade should be called a spade, and that calling a police station a public safety building is like calling a garbage man a sanitation engineer.
In any case, that’s what it’s called, the Public Safety Building, the words lettered discreetly in white on the low wall outside. Less conspicuously lettered to the right of the brown metal entrance doors, and partially obscured by pittosporum bushes (as though to prove my partner’s theory) are the words POLICE DEPARTMENT. The building itself is constructed of varying shades of tan brick, its architecturally severe face broken only by narrow windows resembling rifle slits in an armory wall. This is not unusual for Calusa, where the summer months are torrid and large windows produce only heat and glare.
At the main desk, Michelle filed a complaint charging that her husband, George N. Harper, residing with her at 1124 Wingdale Way had on Sunday, November 15, at 11:45 P.M., committed upon her person assault and battery in the following manner: he broke her nose, he blackened both her eyes, he split her lip, he knocked three teeth from her mouth, and he bruised her arms, legs, and breasts. The officer who took the complaint told us that they would start looking for her husband at once, and would inform us if and when he was apprehended.
We left the police station ten minutes later, driving back to the office where Michelle had left her car — a Volkswagen Beetle of uncertain vintage — in the parking lot. Before she got out of my car, she said, “Merci, monsieur, vous êtes très gentil.” I assured her that everything would be all right, and that it would only be a matter of time before the police picked up her husband and held him to account for what he had done. When she asked me what would happen if they set him free on bail, I told her we would file a petition for an order restraining an abusive spouse, which could be granted when a divorce action was pending or if criminal charges had been filed. I promised I would call her the moment I had any word from the police and, in any event, early in the morning, if only to see how she was.
I never got a chance to call her.
Detective Morris Bloom called me first, at home, at seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, to say that a woman identified as Michelle Harper had been found dead on the Whisper Key beach, some thirty yards from the pavilion there. Her hands and legs had been bound with wire hangers, and she had apparently been burned to death.
2
I had never before now been inside a morgue.
In the movies, an attendant dressed entirely in white rolls out a drawer and a relative of the deceased looks down at the body while the attendant gently pulls back the sheet covering the face, and then the relative sobbingly makes identification, and the attendant rolls the drawer back in, and that’s that. In the movies, that is a morgue. In real life, a morgue is a handful of medical examiners in bloodstained green surgical gowns, sawing open skulls, or studying the contents of a stomach removed from a corpse; a morgue is dead meat on cold steel surgical tables with blood running down narrow troughs into a basin at the end; a morgue is total exposure, the human being reduced at last to a beast of the field, three pounds of brain and twelve ounces of heart; a morgue is the permeating stench of decomposing flesh, a faintly sweet putrescent aroma that seemed to invade not only my nostrils but every pore of my body.
Michelle Harper had struggled mightily against the wire hangers binding her hands and feet and the flames that had consumed her. It would seem contradictory to use the word frozen in describing the posture of a body burned to death, but frozen she was, her large frame contorted and stiffened into a position one would have thought the human body incapable of achieving. She had died in anguish; her body expressed that anguish more completely than any autopsy report would ever reveal.
“Found an empty five-gallon gasoline can maybe ten feet away from her,” Bloom said. “We’ve got it at the lab now, see maybe we can find some latents on it. Whoever did this must’ve doused her real good.”
Morrie Bloom was six feet three inches tall, and now that he’d abandoned his diet, he had to weigh at least 230, a heavyset man with the oversized knuckles of a street fighter, a fox face with a nose that had been broken more than once, shaggy black eyebrows, and dark brown eyes that almost always seemed on the imminent edge of tears, a bad failing for a cop.
“Are you sure it’s her?” I asked.
“Found her clothes and her handbag in the sand, wallet and driver’s license in it. That means she went out there under her own steam. Lady doesn’t take her bag with her if she’s being dragged someplace. We’re still looking for the husband, this George N. Harper. I understand you were in yesterday to file a complaint. We can’t find hide or hair of him. Do you know what the N stands for? Did she happen to mention it?”
“No. Why? Is it important?”
“I’m just curious,” Bloom said, and shrugged. “I can’t think of many men’s names beginning with an N. Norman? Nathan? Can you think of any? Beginning with an N?”
“Nelson,” I said.
“Yeah, Nelson, that’s right,” Bloom said.
I could not believe we were having this conversation here in this place with the charred and grotesquely contorted body of Michelle Harper on a steel table before us, and open cadavers everywhere around us, and the stench of death in my nostrils and in my throat.
“And Neil, I guess,” Bloom said.
“Yes, Neil.”
“Anyway,” Bloom said, “I sure as hell would like to find him. From what I read in the complaint...”
“Do we have to talk in here?” I asked.
“What? Oh, you mean the stink. I’m used to it, I guess. I spend a lot of time in morgues, occupational hazard, huh? When I was just starting as a detective, out on Long Island, I used to wash my hands a lot. I’d get back from the morgue, I’d wash my hands ten, twelve times, trying to get the stink off. You’ll see, Matthew, you’ll wash your hands a lot today. Come on, let’s go outside.”
We sat on a low white wall outside the hospital. The sunshine was bright, the air was balmy — but the stench lingered.
“I must be coming down with a cold,” Bloom said, reaching for a handkerchief in his back pocket. He blew his nose, blew it again, and then said, “I moved to Florida because you’re not supposed to get colds down here. I catch more colds down here than I ever did up north. Goes to show.” He put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I called you because you were in the office with her yesterday...”
“That’s right.”
“To file the complaint.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
“So she was one of your clients, am I right?”
“After yesterday morning, yes.”
“But not before then?”
“No.”
“First time you ever saw her was yesterday morning?”
“Yes. Well, no. I’d seen her on the beach Saturday.”
“Oh? Did you talk about her problem then?”
“No, no. I didn’t even know who she was. She was just walking by on the beach.”
“But you remembered her when she came in yesterday, is that it?”