“Strangulation,” Doc Burbee said to the nurse. “Paper match, used. Inhaled through the mouth while under water. Lodged in windpipe. Moisture in lungs secondary.”
To Donny Thompson he continued in the same breath, “Take your choice son, either would have been fatal.”
That worthy replied abstractedly, “We ought to make them clean that lake.”
“By all means!” The old sting had come back into Burbee’s voice. “She probably would have lived a couple of heartbeats longer if it hadn’t been for that match.”
“Is this sort of thing usual in drowning cases?” I asked.
He shook his head and hefted his tie in a new direction.
“I once heard of a small fish being found in the mouth, but it did not contribute to the death. This is my first experience with such an occurrence.” He stepped back a pace and wiped his hands.
The State’s Attorney stamped out another cigarette. “I ought to be getting along,” he murmured, but he stayed right where he was, counting bricks.
I wondered what the coroner would do next and looked to find him doing it. He was running deft, examining fingers lightly up and down one nude leg. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he got a buzz out of that, but I thought better of it.
He placed his hand under the arch of the foot.
“Well developed,” he commented. “Strong muscles.”
“Lousy skater,” I offered for no reason.
“That right?” He lifted the girl’s right leg shoulder high and beginning at the heel, fingered it up to the body. “I’d have thought differently. Muscles indicate constant use.”
“Maybe she rode a bicycle.”
He shook his head and would have grabbed his tie if he had a third hand. “Lungs don’t indicate such. That makes for lung power.”
It was then that I opened my mouth once too often.
“She wasn’t doing so well when I saw her last night.”
All three of them stared at me in varying degrees of interest. I was probably staring at myself in consternation.
The State’s Attorney ripped out, “When did you see her?” But he meant when, where, why and how I saw her.
So I inserted a lie between two truths. You are probably familiar with that dodge of mine, Louise.
“I came past the lake on my way into town. I had a few drinks, sure, but I wasn’t seeing dragons. She was skating around the lake and doing a pretty bad job of it. I could have done better.”
“At what time last night?” came the next lash.
“I don’t know. I was downtown by midnight.”
“Alone?” still sharp.
“Who? Me or her?”
“Her. She, the skater.”
“Sure. At least, no one else was in sight. And say, you can’t count too heavily on what I saw. I wasn’t close enough to be sure it was this girl.”
“It was. We’ve already established the time of the accident as between midnight and three A.M.”
“Well... it does fit.”
And the subject seemed to be closed.
Doc Burbee turned back to the corpse to lay the flat of his hand on the abdomen. He picked up the scalpel and tapped the blade against one rubber-encased finger. Donny Thompson whirled back to his bricks; I turned my attention to the voiceless wonder seated at the workbench.
The nurse had just completed a test of some sort with a pair of vials and was thoughtfully staring at the contents of one of them.
Some time later Burbee broke the silence, “Bit of water in the stomach. Small ulcer, too.”
The nurse wrote it down, but not like that. She accepted the brusque words and phrases and transformed them into neat, precise and formal statements on paper. Something involving the correct medical terminology. I couldn’t read it from where I was sitting but she put down more than nine words.
The coroner added in a conversational tone, “Also pregnant.”
The nurse smiled at the vial she had been studying and wrote down a single word.
But the State’s Attorney jumped. “The hell you say!”
“Yes, the hell I say.”
“How much?... I mean, how long?”
Several seconds later, “Oh, nine to twelve weeks.” The nurse jotted that down.
“Suicide?” I suggested.
“I doubt it. There is the knot on the head.”
“Meaning...?”
“Indicating she fell in head first, striking her head on the broken ice, rather than jumping in feet first.”
“Yeah,” Thompson added, “the water is only three feet deep around that hole. If she had jumped in the skates would have been driven into the mud on the bottom; her head would have remained above water — or ice.”
“So she tumbled in head first. But maybe she was unconscious from the bump on the head?”
“No,” Burbee objected. “Don’t forget the burnt match. That was sucked in while she was under water — through the mouth. She lacked the remaining strength to spit it out.”
I studied the match in the dish.
“Damn funny place for a match.”
“I know a man who lost his upper plate in that lake,” the State’s Attorney offered.
I got out of there.
I’m too damned sentimental. I know that and you know it, Louise. It hits me the wrong way. And two hours of sitting here in the office, doing nothing but moping and batting this letter off to you hasn’t pulled me out of the blue dumps.
Let me hear from you — fast. Please, I feel awful.
Chapter 6
Boone, Ill.
Early Thursday A.M.
Dear Louise:
Baby, I’ve been places and had my eyes opened!
As you can easily guess from that, things are beginning to pop. I’ve been to Chicago and back, I’ve just paid a very informative visit to our county jail, I’ve been picked up by another girl in a coupe—
But wait a moment; if I keep on like this I shall succeed in only confusing you. For clarity’s sake, perhaps I had better start yesterday afternoon before I caught the Chicago train. Bear with me, this might be rather long-winded.
The inquest into the death of Harry W. Evans had gone as I’d predicted and the pronouncement meant nothing at all. I immediately called the Croyden attorney to point out my honors as a prophet, but he had commented nothing at all. A second telephone call to the boys’ agency in Croyden had found Rothman in, but he knew nothing at all. He promised to wire if anything turned up; he said Liebscher was out scouting around.
By midaftemoon Boone was giving me a gorgeous case of the jitters. And over nothing at all. That’s what rankled: there was nothing stirring. I had been in and out of Thompson’s so often Judy was giving me the suspicious eye. The colored porter audibly made remarks about my tracking in the snow.
The upshot of it was a clean shirt and a pair of sox stuffed into my traveling bag and a quick trip to the railroad station. The station was jammed. The Illinois Central man behind the ticket agent’s window was wearing a pained expression even before I asked about getting a ticket. He pointed out in rather helpless tones that apparently everyone in Boone and their grandmother was trying to get to Chicago that afternoon, and what in the hell was going on, anyway?
I paid for that ride! The train was a local, one of those milk-and-mail casuals that stopped at every wayside station it happened across; if none were to be found the engineer imagined he saw one and stopped anyway. If I didn’t know better, I’d be willing to swear the train crew often climbed down and helped the farmers with the milking.
I never succeeded in getting a seat, but a woman with five children — the lot of them occupying two adjoining seats — allowed me to sit on the arm of the seat which held three of the kids. All of the kids were sucking noisily on large chocolate suckers. My suit is going to the dry cleaners as soon as I can get out of it.