by G B Joyce
The charge on my BlackBerry was down. It was registering low battery and any minute now I was going to be SOL. I Googled attorney general and Saskatchewan , found the information for the Office of the Chief Coroner in Regina, and hit Call, praying I had enough juice to last a minute or two and wasn’t put on hold or directed to an automated response. It turned out that my charge lasted three minutes. Unfortunately, the list of options and the “one moment please” timed out at three minutes and one second. I had to go looking for a payphone. Even though a trip to Swift Current is like Sherman setting the Wayback Machine for 1955, finding a payphone there was no easier than it is anywhere else. Chief drove the Bug downtown and I scoped the streets for a booth. People pointed and laughed at us. Even a couple of Mounties in a cruiser were yukking it up. We passed a Mennonite family in their nineteenth-century best, and the patriarch with his beard in finest Smith Bros. form had his earphones in and was in deep conversation with the local pastor for clarification on the avoidance of oaths. I was all for stopping and asking him if I could impose and make one call, but we were coming up on the Imperial and Chief said he had seen a payphone in there.
Just inside the door there was a payphone hanging tenuously to a chipped and long-ago painted plaster wall that had been lovingly defaced by a hundred For a Good Time Call Gladyses and a hundred more pieces of dipsomaniac artwork portraying foggily remembered genitalia. I picked up a receiver that had been the filter for ten thousand Guess What Happeneds, all lies and excuses for coming home late or not at all, and a few more thousand It’s Overs. I suppose that there had even been a few long-distance calls.
Again, the list of options and the pregnant pause until an operator came on board.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m calling from Swift Current in connection to the death of a friend. We’re looking to ascertain the cause of death to assure his widow that there was no foul play. The RCMP are treating it as a suicide, although there was no note and no indication of any sort of despair or depression.”
“If you have legitimate concerns you should contact the coroner in your jurisdiction …”
Just the way she said “legitimate” let me know that she presumed my concerns weren’t. And I was hoping to be out of Swift Current soon enough that I’d never think of it as my jurisdiction.
“… and you said it’s Swift Current. Let me look that up for you. Hold, please.”
And I held. A drunk staggered through the double doors and into the hall. He presumed he’d entered the men’s room. He unzipped his zipper. Thankfully, he was holding too. He walked back into the main room to continue his search for the lost lavatory without bothering to zip up.
She came back on the line. “Sir,” she said, “the interim coroner in Swift Current is Albert Daulton.”
“Excuse me,” I sputtered. “Daulton?”
My first thought was that this was a common family name in the area and that perhaps this Daulton was a cousin or even a son of the source of a good fraction of my freshest miseries.
“Let me look. Sir, I don’t see any notation that he’s a doctor or is affiliated with a local hospital.”
I was rattled. My proper business manner became something more in keeping with the setting, minus the profanity and slurring.
“So what, you have a coroner who is not a pathologist or even a doctor?”
“In the various regions of the province, because of the shortage of doctors, the ministry appoints lay coroners. They might be law-enforcement officials. They might be lawyers. Maybe even teachers. I don’t have a listing here for Mr. Daulton’s occupation but I do have his phone number.”
She read it off. I went to punch the number into my phone. I was rattled enough to have forgotten that the whole reason I was on this payphone was my cell dying. I didn’t have a pen so I asked her to hold on for a second. I let the receiver dangle and walked into the main room. All the denizens from the previous night were in attendance and, in fact, in exactly the same place. I asked Flora and Fauna if either had a pen. They looked right through me but Flora reached into her purse and pulled out a laundry marker. I thanked her and told her that I’d be right back. I had no reason to suspect that she’d be going anywhere and every reason to think she used the marker for eyeliner.
I picked up the receiver and the receptionist dictated the number. I didn’t have any paper handy so I scrawled it on the wall. I hung up the phone, dug out change to make the call, and then prayed. It just wasn’t the venue for an answered prayer.
“RCMP headquarters, Staff Sergeant Daulton’s office, Constable McMaster speaking …”
I slammed the phone down.
I started back into the main room to give Flora her pen back but stopped.
I wrote down a user review on the wall beside Daulton’s number.
I called the ministry back and got the same receptionist on the line. This call represented a doubling of her usual daily workload and she had made a mental note when the payphone number showed up on the caller ID.
“Can I help you, again?”
“I just wanted to ask you, you said the interim coroner for Swift Current …”
“Yes, there has been a changeover. Swift Current actually had one of the longest serving coroners in the province until a few weeks back. That’s when Dr. Russell Hodges stepped down. He retired from his position and cut back his practice because his wife is encountering health problems. He’ll be deeply missed …”
“If Daulton is the interim, do you have a line on a successor?”
“I’m not a party to the decision and the person who would know is on vacation the rest of this week and next,” she said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you any more than that.”
She lied. She wasn’t afraid at all.
15
My gut was aching with the Celebrex kicking in. It didn’t kill the pain. It just moved it from my knee to my gut. I had Chief drive over to the hospital. Whisper had landed at emergency DOA Sunday morning. That was about as unambiguous as you could get; not a terribly loose end, but still worth checking out.
It happened that Dr. Dale Goto was on call. In white-bread Swift Current, a Japanese single young professional woman seemed so exotic that many townspeople presumed there had to be a scandal in there somewhere. She looked impossibly young and, for Swift Current, impossibly stylish, even in her hospital greens. She was clearly no Sweetheart of the Rodeo. When she told a nurse to “carry on,” she flattened out her A like a well-born Montrealer. She had probably leaned over textbooks day and night in the Starbucks nearest to McGill’s med school. That she had to go all the way to Swift Current to get her career rolling was probably a sign that she wasn’t in the top of her class. That she went all the way to Swift Current was a fair reading of her determination. She was the type who wouldn’t have given me a second look when I was in my twenties. She would have thought I wasn’t serious enough. She might have been right.
“Excuse me,” I said and got her attention, although she stopped mid-step without turning to face me. She intended to give me seconds of her time and not a whole minute.
“Doctor, I’m Brad Shade. I’m a friend of Mitzi Mars, the widow of Martin Mars, who was brought to emergency Sunday …”
“Yes, I remember,” she said, with a get-on-with-it impatience. “He was found … in his car.”
She developed a case of acute sensitivity mid-sentence. That I was a friend mattered, even if I wasn’t as close to Whisper and Mitzi as she’d presumed, and she made the leap from the clinical to the bedside manner.
“Yes, I was wondering if you recall any details from …”
I struggled to come up with the right word.
“… his arrival.”
It was recent enough that she didn’t have to go to her notes.
“Lividity,” she said.
I was clueless. She went on without my needing to ask.
“Livor mortis. Put simply, Mr. …”
“Shade.”
&nb
sp; “Mr. Shade, his colouring was normal.”
She turned to face me. I had been deemed worthy of a minute or two of her time, so long as she wasn’t called away to attend to a frostbitten kid or a guy who’d been run over by a snowplow.
“I was told that he had died of carbon monoxide poisoning … that he had taken his own life in a car with exhaust. And I’m saddened by that. Still, I was struck by the fact that his colouring was normal. In cases of carbon monoxide poisoning the skin virtually always turns red. Cherry red is the way they describe it. And it was absent with Mr. …”
“Mr. Mars.”
“Yes, Mr. Mars. Several hours after death in other cases the skin goes blue. That was the case, at least as I observed it in my notes. Blotchy too. Again, this would have been consistent with death by most causes but not with carbon monoxide poisoning. Very unusual. I doubt that one case in a thousand is like that, one case in ten thousand.”
“So you had reason to suspect that the cause of death wasn’t what they suspected.”
“I’ll just say that it was a very unusual case. His blood was an unusual colour as well. A purple tinge. I don’t know what other contributing factors there might have been. Cold weather? A reaction to the prescription he was on? I don’t know. That would be work for a pathologist more than someone like me here in emerg.”
“Was there any follow-up?”
“I assumed there would be an autopsy. I extracted urine and twenty mils of blood. I sent the samples off for testing, which would be blood type, alcohol, poison, and so on. I made a notation with the samples that the suspected cause of death was carbon monoxide. And then when I came in for my next shift I was told that there wasn’t going to be an autopsy.”
“Were you surprised by that?”
She sighed. “I’d be surprised if a summer wind blew through here,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was brought in with alcohol poisoning or some type of overdose. I get that enough. I had it on Saturday night and Sunday morning—it was busy enough before they brought your friend in.”
I tried to drag her out of the social morass and back on to Whisper’s file. “Did the blood work come back?”
“The results have come back but I haven’t had a chance to look at them. I’ve been run off my feet, to tell you the truth.”
“I know I’m asking a lot,” I said, “but is there a chance you could have a look at the blood work?”
She told me that she would make a point of squeezing it in if she had a spare moment in her chock-filled shift, which was going to end in a couple of hours.
And finally I asked her if she knew of any way that she could put me in touch with the recently retired coroner, Dr. Hodges.
“A very nice man,” she said, going to her BlackBerry and scrolling through her phone book, “and it’s just awful about his wife.”
16
We pulled up to the gas station on the east side of town. The sign read MARS GAS, the letters set against the ages-old company logo, a crudely drawn version of the fourth big rock from the sun, canals and all. The sign wasn’t lit up. On a night when the Red Planet was lit, it would have been as remote as the real thing. There wasn’t a business or home within a quarter mile, only one other commercial property, what used to be a KFC that had gone out of business and been boarded up for ten years. The rest of the landscape was a wheat field that was in no danger of being consumed by Swift Current’s suburban sprawl, all the mall and big boxing and franchising gravitating closer to the town’s centre. When you’d pull off the Trans-Canada, a sign on the ramp pointed you north for Mars Gas and nothing else because there was, in fact, nothing else.
The streetscape wasn’t scenic. The layout of the station was as diagrammed by Daulton.
I had called the Joneses and asked them to meet us. I wanted to check with the son for yet another blow-by-blow of the morning in question. I wanted the father along for the ride in case he had any input and to keep the son at ease. We sat in the car for a couple of minutes, idling, waiting for their arrival. Another RCMP cruiser went by, this time with two young Mounties in the front seat and somebody hunched over in the back. The cruiser slowed down and they gave me the Prairie Malocchio, but after taking a radio call they moved along.
All the coffee I had drunk was overtaking me and I had to use the john. Thankfully, I had the key that Derek Jones had given me and got out to avail myself of the facilities.
I went up to the front door. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE read an improvised Magic-Markered sign taped to the window. I peered through the window. I saw little green men on the desk, giveaways for kids. Cans of oil, antifreeze, and windshieldwasher fluid passed for decor. And just as Daulton had laid it out, Derek Jones would have had no view of the back of the building until he walked through the back door.
I took out the key that Derek Jones had given me and unlocked the main entrance. At that point the Joneses arrived and they took it on a jog up to the door in my wake. Chief brought up the rear in a walk. I slipped my boots off at the rubber mat by the door and stepped onto the cold tile in my socks. The floor was immaculate except for one set of boot prints, Derek Jones’s from his tardy sweep of the building on the fateful Sunday. No site inspection by the RCMP officers on the scene, no surprise.
“Just stand here, don’t walk on the floor,” I said and the three stood by.
It looked and smelled like every other service station that you’d come across. No matter how big the operation got, this was still where Whisper hunkered down to do his office work. Given the annual revenues, Whisper seemed to have been determined to keep it looking like a humble operation. His desk was lined with photos of Mitzi, group shots with his employees, even one of him on the ice a few years back with a bunch of eight- or ten-year-olds at a charity skate. Letters of thanks from charities hung on the walls scattershot and crookedly.
Other than the wind howling outside, the younger Jones rubbing his ungloved hands, and Chief exhaling, the only sound in the place was the low hum of an old refrigerator in the office. And the only thing that mitigated the smell of gas, oil, and exhaust was the scent of coffee coming from an ancient Bunn-O-Matic machine perched on the counter of a mini kitchen unit. I opened the refrigerator and was careful not to leave fingerprints on the handle. Just one lonely egg-salad sandwich spoiling in there. I shut the door and looked at the coffee machine. It was still on. That stood to reason, I figured. Once Derek Jones had called emergency and the Mounties arrived on the scene, the station had been taped off, for once going by the book and treating it like a crime scene. There was no going in to turn the coffee machine off. I did. The coffee had evaporated and the glass was hot enough that it might shatter if left any longer on the burner. In a sense I might have been tampering with a crime scene, if a crime had been committed. It just seemed like the safe and practical thing to do.
“This is how you found everything?”
“Yeah, exactly. I didn’t touch anything and this is how I remember it.”
“The alarm wasn’t on?”
“No, I gave the police the number when they got here and it turned out that Mr. Mars had spoken to them and told them he was working late and would call them when he was through.”
“The coffee machine on?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Don’t guess,” Ed said, looking ready to swat the kid in the back of the head.
“I didn’t turn it on,” the kid said. “I’m not much of a coffee drinker.”
“The floor was mopped?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said and caught himself before he saw his father’s withering look. “Yes, it was mopped.”
“Is that out of the ordinary?”
“I hadn’t thought of it, but maybe. It was pretty sloppy out there.”
“And the mop …”
“They keep it in a closet off the men’s washroom that you go into from the one side of the building.”
“So you can mop your way out and leave no boot prints?”
“Don’t guess,” the father said.
“Yeah,” the chastened son said.
“You haven’t talked to anyone about what happened besides the Mounties, right?”
“They told me not to and I wouldn’t want to. Nobody. Nobody.”
When I turned off the coffee machine it made me think of the photo on the front page of the Booster, Whisper holding his coffee mug from the Berlin Ravens. I grabbed a pen from the counter and used it on the handle to open the single cabinet. There were a couple of glasses, left over from some promotion, each featuring the logo of the Swift Current juniors. There were two generic coffee mugs in the sink. No Ravens mug. I presumed that the photo must have been shot elsewhere, at one of the other locations. Maybe it was a file photo from last year or years before. At least that’s what I thought when I went to pitch the gum I had been chewing for a couple of hours. I pushed open the lid of the trash out by reception and it was full to overflowing. Sitting on top of a week’s worth of detritus was the Ravens mug. It looked intact. I left it there and held on to gum until we were off-site. It didn’t add up, holding on to a mug for more than a decade and then tossing it for no reason.
Ed Jones said no repairs would be done on the site for a while “out of respect” and that he and his son were going to shuttle the Taurus in the bay and the wrecks out back to the garage downtown, where they would be serviced. Derek found the key for the Impala and was able to start it without a boost. When it rolled uncertainly out of the lot his father followed in the almost as shaky Ford. They’d be back for the Summer of Love microbus about twenty minutes later and the Taurus twenty minutes after that.
In the meantime, I scoped out the location, the main reason for the trip out to the station. I wanted to figure out if anyone driving by or in and around the station might have seen what went down. One walk around the building, though, confirmed what Jones had told the Mounties and what they had told me: There was no way Jones could have seen Whisper’s car out back and he wouldn’t have heard it idling. He wouldn’t have heard it even if the pedal had been to the floor. And if he couldn’t have seen or heard it, no one driving by could have either.