Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  “I thought she was funning.” he said.

  “Funning. You mean joking?”

  Orlo did. It was the night before Halloween, and he thought she was tricking him. He’d finally awakened to the pounding on his door, thrown on his overalls, and come downstairs. When he turned on the porch light, her face was pressed to the glass.

  “It was streaky,” he said. “Like she’d walked into a black spider web.”

  When she saw him, she slumped, disappearing from his sight and blocking the door. He was mad, goddamn her, for waking him out of a sound sleep, for teasing him, for scaring him like that. But she’d never come to his place before, and she didn’t move when he tried to open the door, and he didn’t know what to think.

  “She was just laying in a heap. Right on the steps. God damn her, then I thought she was dead.”

  He dipped the bandana in the bucket and wrung it out.

  “My lord, she was bloody. Her back and her head.” He waved his arm around over the back of his own head. “Looked like somebody’d spread her with jam.”

  He applied the wet bandana to one of the marks on the door. When he pressed, two orange lines flowed down toward the steps.

  “What’d you do?”

  Orlo got a blanket, popped a screen, and crawled out the window to get to her. He’d wrapped her in the blanket, and, best he could, carried her inside to his couch.

  “She talked shit in my arms,” he said. “Didn’t understand a bit of it. Shit about robbers and hoodlums.” He pronounced it hoodlooms. “About how they’d shot the babies. Said they wouldn’t, but they did. And she’d laid there. She’d heard it. I needed to get up there, she said. I needed to plug it, she said.”

  Orlo paused and passed the back of his hand across his forehead. “I wasn’t going up there.” His head was bowed, as though he was ashamed. “Not with the shape she was in. Not knowing what was up there.” He shrugged. “I just called it in.”

  “Did she say how many there were?”

  Orlo shook his head.

  “Men, women, both?”

  He shook his head again and started to wipe down the other side of the door. “Just said she saw ‘em. ‘Can’t sleep now,’ she said. ‘Got to remember.’”

  He paused and looked away, out over the fields.

  “I told her to tell me. I’d help her. I’d help her remember. But she said no, no she couldn’t, like I was too dumb. I said I’d write it down, but when I got back with a pad, she was out.”

  His resignation was palpable.

  “Did she say why they didn’t kill her, too?” I asked.

  “I reckon her wig.”

  Lotty was embarrassed about her hair, Orlo said. It was thin, and her scalp showed through; she nearly always wore a gray wig. Before she passed out, she made him wrap her head in a towel because she didn’t have on her wig. I thought of the sodden, tangled mass lying next to the couch and jumped ahead of him.

  “They thought they’d blown off the back of her head when all they did was blow off her wig?”

  “Yes sir. She played possum. Or they left her for dead,” Orlo said. “Either way, the sons a bitches.”

  That’s what the cops thought, but in Orlo’s opinion, they were sons of bitches, too.

  “They said, ‘Bet you were surprised, Bunny.’” He pitched his voice to mock. “’Bet when she showed up at your door you filled your pants.’ ‘How come didn’t you finish the job? You had time. You think better of it? The children preying on your mind?’”

  But Orlo was working backward now. The sheriff’s deputy who had arrived first had been nice enough, he said. He’d steered Orlo into his kitchen and helped load Lotty into the ambulance. He wouldn’t let Orlo go with her when he found out they were not kin, Orlo said, but he did talk with him quietly until two troopers and a guy in a suit arrived a couple of hours later.

  “Suit or sport coat?” I asked.

  “Blue suit coat, gray pants.”

  “McConegal?”

  “Could be. Don’t remember. He was real friendly at first. Said he was sorry. Wanted me to tell him what happened. Asked if his mens could look around, and I said sure.”

  Orlo poured the remains of the wash water down the sides of the door. The scrubbed areas were several shades whiter than the rest of the house.

  “They found the guns and he wasn’t so friendly anymore. Said I didn’t have to say nothing and I could have a lawyer.”

  “Did you ask for one?”

  “What for?”

  I sometimes forget how quick an opinion expressed can kill a story. I had sensed that people too often treated him as stupid, but that didn’t stop me from saying, “Jesus, Orlo.”

  “Didn’t need one,” he shouted at me. “Didn’t do nothing.”

  He stood shaking and glaring at me. He picked up the bucket, the brush, and the rifle and went inside. The clean, porch door banged on the frame.

  I put my dignity on the shelf a long time ago, when I got into this business, maybe before. I pounded on the door and shouted for him to come back. I said I didn’t think he’d done anything. I said I was sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. I said I couldn’t tell his story unless I got back to town. I stepped back when he swung open the door.

  “Where’s your car?” he said.

  I’d about had it with that question. “In town. Let me call for a ride.”

  He looked back into his house, measuring how much he wanted me inside.

  “I’ll drive you,” he said.

  Orlo made me wait on the steps while he pulled on a pair of work boots, went into the barn lot, and came back with an old pickup.

  “Didn’t do nothing,” he repeated as we pulled from his drive.

  “Orlo, I never said you did.”

  There was a lot of play in the wheel and Orlo spent most of his time jerking it back and forth compensating as we bounced along the gravel road.

  “And I didn’t need no lawyer,” he said. “That county lawyer came.”

  “Crandall?”

  “Him. He did Mama and Sister’s wills. That cop and him got into an argument about when he should’ve told me about not having to say nothing and having a lawyer. Told that cop he’d best start ever’ f’ing conversation with anyone with that from now on. Told me I shouldn’t go anywhere for a while.”

  Orlo had become practically gregarious, but I’d already heard enough to know that that part of Orlo’s story could be covered by a sentence that said a man whom police declined to identify had been questioned but no arrest had been made.

  When I told him to take me to Poteet’s funeral home, he looked doubtful. When we pulled up there and I took out my wallet and offered him a ten, he shook his head and looked hurt.

  “Where’d they take her, Orlo?” I said.

  Maybe I’d changed topics on him too fast because he said, “Who?”

  “Lotty, Orlo. Who else?”

  He thought a long time before he said, “Can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  He thought about it some more. He was a methodical man and, in the end, an honest one. He said, “Both.”

  On days like this one, Poteet’s door—the back one next to the garage—is always open. The question I always ask myself is: Do I really want to go in?

  Two shiny black hearses and a silver Cadillac sedan were parked in the bays. Beyond them, on the other side of the garage, was a red Harley-Davidson, a big one, and a door into the funeral home proper.

  I always stopped for a deep breath before I opened it. You can’t call gasoline and motor oil fumes fresh air, but they are better than what’s on the other side, the cloying floral scent and the odors that underlie it.

  I opened the door and stuck my head through.

  “Lyle? Hey, Poteet. Ambrose here.”

  A long,
wide hall, white and brightly lit, what Poteet calls the “stairway to heaven,” leads to the main office.

  “Yes,” Poteet called down “the stairway.” “Yes, Clay, I’ve been expecting you.”

  There are two sets of double doors about halfway up the hallway on the left and the right. The doors on the left lead to the viewing rooms. The doors on the right open into what Poteet calls the “way station.” One of those doors was opened a crack, and I went in.

  The white, tiled walls and chrome fixtures make it look like an operating room, only with a lot more plumbing and tubes. There is a large, adjustable, overhead light in the middle of the room and a long metal table below it. That morning, the contours of a baby-blue sheet draped over the table suggested it was occupied by a tall woman.

  Poteet sat at a cluttered desk in a small office he keeps off the work room, still wearing a white shirt and tie. He is in his early fifties, bald, round, and compact.

  More so than most, perhaps, the nature of his business requires Poteet to have one face he turns to the public and another he turns on himself. The public face is implacable; it glides and hovers, projecting a sense of solemnity, ceremony, and grace. The public face holds the hand of a father just learning to grieve and discretely directs that his children ride together to their autopsies. The private face rides a red Hog, but only at night, and sits slouched and alone in a cramped office, staring at nothing, smoking a cigarette with which, like the Hog, he would not otherwise wish to be seen.

  “’I’ve been expecting you?’” I said. “A guy in your business, is there anybody you don’t say that to?”

  It was not an inappropriate remark to make to Poteet. I once asked him the cause of death of a teenage boy who had been killed in a traffic accident. The boy lay naked between us on the table in the way station. Poteet raised his fist, struck the body a thumping blow to the sternum, and said, “Crushed chest,” with a mischievous grin and just the slightest trace of anger at the waste.

  This morning, Poteet was considerably more subdued. With the hand that held his cigarette, he rapped his thumb knuckle on his front teeth and gave thought to what I’d said.

  “I don’t think that’s true of the three I’m taking delivery on later,” he said.

  We watched the smoke spiral toward the ceiling from his gesture.

  I said, “Can I use your phone?”

  Poteet put out the cigarette, hauled himself up, and waved me toward the empty chair.

  Bob Marley always brings out the child in me, the hyperactive one that tries to be good and polite but can’t quite. Which is why answering the phone by shouting, “Where the hell are you?” was a mistake on his part. It made me respond, “Oh hi, boss. Well, you know, I’ve been up all night, but I’m fine. Really. Thanks for asking. And you?”

  It was about 7 a.m. Marley would have been at the paper an hour already, maybe more if somebody had called him about the murders. I heard him pause and take a deep breath.

  “I’m going to assume that since you’ve been up all night you’re at least aware that three children have been murdered,” he said.

  “I’m going to assume you want their names, their parents’ names, their ages, their grades in school, their afterschool activities, and a set of details about their deaths that is relatively complete for this time of day,” I said.

  “Can I assume you have them?”

  “Sure,” I said and gave him a sampler of the facts.

  “Arrests?”

  “Not last I knew.”

  “Can I assume art?” There was an edge in the question. He meant, did I have photographs?

  I paused. “Assuming that would be a mistake.”

  Marley paused. “We’ve talked about this.”

  “So we have. Here’s where you can send the shooter.”

  I gave him Aunt Lotty’s address and described the double-wide.

  “If you want something beyond garden gnomes, probably he’ll need to get inside,” I said. It was too much; I knew it soon as I said it.

  “So maybe you’ve been inside and could’ve saved us the trouble,” Marley said.

  Between the chaos of deadlines and the amnesia induced by the energy and attention required to put out each subsequent edition, it was the closest he and I ever came to actually discussing what I’d done at the crime scene.

  “It’s a small paper,” Marley said finally when I did not respond. “Everybody carries a camera.”

  “I only do one thing at a time well,” I said, relieved that he’d moved on.

  “Really? We’ll see. Deadline’s two hours away. Get your ass back here.”

  “I’ve got a few loose ends to tie up. I’ll see you in about a half hour.”

  I hung up. I was pretty sure I’d told him where I was in case he wanted to call back, but maybe not.

  Poteet was on the other side of the table stooped over the stiff. He wore a protective eye glasses, gloves, clear plastic sleeve guards, and a black rubber apron over his white shirt and tie. In one hand, he held a scalpel; in the other, clear tubing that ran from a machine he had rolled up to the side of the table.

  He had pulled back the sheet from the woman’s naked, custard-colored torso so he could work on her, but her face remained covered with a blue hand towel. The cool temperature at which Poteet kept the room mitigated but did not eliminate the high-low smell of acidic chemicals and earthy body fluids.

  “Anybody I know?”

  Poteet looked up from inserting the tubing. “I doubt it.”

  I cocked my chin toward the towel covering the woman’s face. “You’re not usually so discreet.”

  “She’s 42 years old. She has three relatively young children. She died of ovarian cancer after some brutal radiation and chemo.”

  He went back to inserting the tube into her.

  “Her name’ll be your paper today, and I have to fairly quickly figure out how to make a bald woman with a yellow face look human again to her kids.”

  He was threading the tube with both hands, the scalpel held like a cigarette between his index and middle fingers. He shrugged without looking up.

  “Maybe she deserves a little privacy.”

  I looked around at nothing in particular. The secret to these interviews with Poteet was to concentrate on him and not what he was doing. The other person in the room was best considered only out of the corner of your eye.

  “The three you got coming in, that would be the three from Aunt Lotty’s?” I said.

  “Yes,” Poteet said. “Did I see you out there?”

  The reason to talk to Poteet, aside from the fact that as coroner he was the person with the legal authority to declare cause of death, was that he was an elected official the same as Wood. He didn’t have to answer to Wood and often gave out information that Wood and the other cops would not. I was still a little nervy after my run-in with Wood and Crandall, though, and Poteet’s question made me wonder whether he was being polite or acting as the cops’ agent.

  “I saw you,” I said quickly and pulled out my notebook and pen. “Ruling them homicides?”

  “Of course.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “The forensic doc’s doing the autopsies now.” Poteet straightened up, turned to a machine standing next to the table, and began to adjust dials.

  “So why aren’t you there?” I said.

  “What’m I going to tell him? They’re dead?” In this circumstance, his snort was as good as a laugh. “The law doesn’t say I have to be a doctor to be coroner; I just have to rely on one. Beside the cops are observing. Cuts a link from the chain of evidence, you know.”

  “Not to mention the fact that it lets you clear your decks here when you got three more coming in.”

  “The profit motive is always reliable,” said Poteet, who made no bones, so to speak, about the amount of money he
made.

  The clock on my deadlines hums constantly in my head, but sometimes it’s louder, like a mosquito at my ear. Besides, Poteet was going to turn on that damned pump in a minute. It was time to persist.

  “Pending the results of the autopsies, apparent cause of death?”

  “Shotgun blasts, back and head, each victim.” With the scalpel, he reached back over his shoulder to point to the places on his own body. “I don’t know yet which blast would’ve killed them. And until I do I’d appreciate it if you phrase that as ‘appears to be the cause of death’.”

  “What gauge on the shotguns?”

  “That’ll have to wait on ballistics, I imagine.”

  “They didn’t find any shells?”

  “Nope.”

  “Which means?”

  “Since shells are usually ejected automatically or manually, probably they picked them up.”

  “‘They’” I said. “’They’ as in someone generally or ‘they’ as in specifically more than one person?”

  Poteet turned from the machine and smiled.

  “You’re very quick for this time of day. But yes, at least two.”

  “More than two?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “How do you know two?”

  “The angles of the wounds and the spatter patterns make it appear that you had persons firing from different sides of the room.”

  I looked up from writing and waited for him to tell me that was off the record. Not that it would’ve done much good once he said it. Instead, the look I got back was knowing.

  “That’s what you’ve been pushing me toward, isn’t it?” Poteet said. “Quotes?”

  “Always,” I said and looked back at my pad.

  “By my count, you’ve now got two.”

  Dill would employ reporters who wrote only in the third and fourth person. The first-person accounts—the I-rode-the-mean-streets-with-the-ambulance or the I-was-Santa-for-a-day that appeared on the front page of the Lifestyle section, that whole Tom Wolfe personal journalism business—she hated.