N is for NOOSE

by Sue Grafton

“See you there,” I said, but she was gone by then.

  I spotted her from a distance, sitting on one of the swings in a yellow slicker with the hood up. She had swiveled the seat sideways, the chains forming a twisted X at chest height. When she lifted her feet, the chains came unwound, swiveling her feet first in one direction and then another. She tipped back, holding herself in position with her toes. She pushed off. I watched her straighten her legs in a pumping motion that boosted her higher and higher. I thought my approach would interrupt her play, but she continued swinging, her expression somber, her gaze fixed on me.

  “Watch this!” she said and at the height of her forward arc she let herself fly out of the swing. She sailed briefly and then landed in the sand, feet together, her arms raised above her head as though as the end of a dismount.

  “Bravo.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Geez, the things I’ll do in the line of duty, I thought. I’m a shameless suck-up when it comes to information. I took her place on the swing, backing up as she had until I was standing on tiptoe. I pushed off, holding on to the chains. I leaned back as I straightened my legs and then pumped back, leaning forward, continuing in a rocking motion as the trajectory of the swing increased. I went higher and higher. At the top of the swing, I released myself and flew forward as she had. I couldn’t quite stick the landing and was forced to take a tiny side step for balance.

  “Not bad. It takes practice,” she said charitably. “Why don’t we walk? You got your bumbershoot?”

  “It’s not raining.”

  She pushed her hood back and looked up. “It will before long. Here. You can share mine.”

  She put up her umbrella, a wide black canopy above our heads as we walked. The two of us held the shank, forced to walk shoulder to shoulder. Up close, she smelled of cigarettes, but she didn’t ever light one in my presence. I placed her in her late forties, with a square face, oversized glasses set in square red frames, and shoulder-length blond hair. Her eyes were a warm brown, her wide mouth pushing into a series of creases when she smiled. She was large-boned and tall with a shoe size that probably compelled her to shop out of catalogs.

  “You don’t work today?” I asked.

  “I’m taking a leave of absence.”

  “Mind if I ask why?”

  “You can ask anything you want. Believe me, I’m experienced at avoiding answers when the questions don’t suit. I turn fifty this coming June. I’m not worried about aging, but it does make you take a long hard look at your life. Suddenly, things don’t make sense. I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it.”

  “You have family in town?”

  “Not any more. I grew up in Indiana, right outside Evansville. My parents are both gone… my dad since 1976, my mom just last year. I had two brothers and a sister. One of my brothers, the one who lived here, was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and he was dead in six months. My other brother was killed in a boating accident when he was twelve. My sister died in her early twenties of a botched abortion. It’s a very strange sensation to be out on the front lines alone.”

  “You have any kids?”

  She shook her head. “Nope, and that’s another thing I question. I mean, it’s way too late now, but I wonder about that. Not that I ever wanted children. I know myself well enough to know I’d be a lousy mom, but at this stage of my life, I wonder if I should have done it differently. What about you? You have kids?”

  “No. I’ve been married and divorced twice, both times in my twenties. At that point, I wasn’t ready to have children. I wasn’t even ready for marriage, but how did I know? My current lifestyle seems to preclude domesticity so it’s just as well.”

  “Know what I regret? I wish now I’d listened more closely to family stories. Or maybe I wish I had someone to pass ‘em on to. All that verbal history out the window. I worry about what’s going to happen to the family photograph albums once I’m gone. They’ll be thrown in the garbage… all those aunts and uncles down the tubes. Junk stores, you can sometimes buy them, old black-and-white snapshots with the crinkly edges. The white-frame house, the vegetable garden with the sagging wire fence, the family dog, looking solemn,” she said. Her voice dropped away and then she changed the subject briskly. “What’d you do to your hand?”

  “A fellow dislocated my fingers. You should have seen them… pointing sideways. Made me sick,” I said.

  We strolled on for a bit. To the right of us, a low wall separated the sidewalk from the sand on the far side. There must have been two hundred yards of beach before the surf kicked in; all of this looking drab in current weather conditions. “How are we doing so far?” I asked.

  “In what respect?”

  “I assume you’re sizing me up, trying to figure out how much you want to tell.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “Tom confided in me and I take that seriously. I mean, even if he’s dead, why would I betray his trust?”

  “That’s up to you. Maybe this is unfinished business and you have an opportunity to see it through for him.”

  “This is not about Tom. This is about his wife,” she said.

  “You could look at it that way.”

  “Why should I help her?”

  “Simple compassion. She’s entitled to peace of mind.”

  “Aren’t we all?” she said. “I never met the woman and probably wouldn’t like her even if I did, so I don’t give a shit about her peace of mind.”

  “What about your own?”

  “That’s my concern.”

  That was as much as I got out of her. By the time we’d walked as far as the wharf, the rain was beginning to pick up again. “I think I’ll peel off here. I’m a block down in that direction. If you decide you have more to tell me, why don’t you get in touch.”

  “I’ll think about that.”

  “I could use the help,” I said.

  I trotted toward home under a steadily increasing drizzle that matted my hair. What was it with these people? What a bunch of anal-retentives. I decided it was time to quit horsing around. I ducked into the apartment long enough to run a towel through my hair, grab my handbag and umbrella, and lock up again. I retrieved my car and drove the ten blocks to Santa Teresa Hospital.

  Chapter 15

  *

  I caught Dr. Yee on his way to the parking lot. I’d left the VW in a ninety-minute spot at the curb across from the hospital emergency room and I was circling the building, intending to enter by way of the main lobby. Dr. Yee had emerged from a side door and was preparing to cross the street to the parking garage. I called his name and he turned. I waved and he waited until I’d reached his side.

  Santa Teresa County still utilizes a sheriff-coroner system, in which the sheriff, as an elected official, is also in charge of the coroner’s office. The actual autopsy work is done by various forensic pathologists under contract to the county, working in conjunction with the coroner’s investigators. Steven Yee was in his forties, a third-generation Chinese American, with a passion for French cooking.

  “You looking for me?” He was easily six feet tall, slender and handsome, with a smooth round face. His hair was a straight glossy black streaked with exotic bands of white that he wore combed straight back.

  “I’m glad I caught you. Are you on your way home?

  I need about fifteen minutes of your time, if you can spare it.”

  He glanced at his watch. “I’m not due at the restaurant for another hour,” he said.

  “I heard about that. You have a second career.”

  He smiled with pleasure, shrugging modestly. “Well, the money’s not great, but I make enough here. It’s restful to chop leeks instead of… other things.”

  “At least you’re skilled with a boning knife,” I said.

  He laughed. “Believe me, nobody trims meat as meticulously as I do. You ought to come in some night. I’ll treat you to a meal that’ll make you w
eep for the pure pleasure.”

  “I could use that,” I said. “You know me and Quarter Pounders with cheese.”

  “So what’s up? Is this work?”

  “I’m looking for information about a man named Alfie Toth. Are you familiar with the case?”

  “Should be. I did the post,” he said. He hooked a thumb in the direction of the building. “Come on back to my office. I’ll show you what we have.”

  “This is great,” I said happily, as I followed him. “I understand Toth’s death may be related to a suspected homicide in Nota Lake. One of the sheriff’s investigators there was working on the case when he died of a heart attack a few weeks back. His name was Tom Newquist. Did he get in touch with you?”

  “I know the name, but he didn’t contact me directly. I spoke to the Nota Lake coroner by phone and he mentioned him. What’s your connection? Is this an insurance claim?”

  “I don’t work for CF these days. I’ve got an office in Lonnie Kingman’s law firm on Capillo.”

  “What happened to CF?”

  “They fired my sorry butt, which is fine with me,” I said. “It was time for a change so now I’m doing mostly freelance work. Newquist’s widow hired me. She says her husband was stressed out and she wants me to find out why. Nota Lake law enforcement’s been very tightlipped on the subject and the cops here aren’t much better.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  When we reached the elevator, he punched the Down button and we chatted idly of other matters as we descended into the bowels of the building.

  Dr. Yee’s office was a small bare box down the hall from the morgue. The ante-room was lined with beige filing cabinets, the office itself barely large enough for his big rolltop desk, his swivel chair, and a plain wooden chair for guests. His medical books had been moved to the shelves of a freestanding bookcase and the top of his desk was now reserved for a neat row of French cookbooks, trussed on either side by a large jar of murky formalin in which floated something I didn’t care to inspect. He was using a gel breast implant as a paperweight, securing a pile of loose notes. “Hang on a second and I’ll pull the file,” he said. “Have a seat.”

  The chair was stacked with medical journals so I perched on the edge, grateful Dr. Yee was willing to trust me. Dr. Yee was never careless with information, but he wasn’t as paranoid as the police detectives. He returned with a file folder and a manila envelope and took his seat in the swivel chair, tossing both on the desk beside me.

  “Are those the photographs? Can I see?”

  “Sure, but they won’t tell you much.” He reached for the envelope and extracted a set of color photographs, eight-by-ten prints showing various views of the scene where Alfie Toth had been found. The terrain was clearly rugged: boulders, chaparral, an ancient live oak. “Toth was identified through his skeletal remains, largely dental work. Percy Ritter’s body in Nota Lake was found in much the same circumstances; same MO and a similar remote locale. In both cases, it took a while before anyone stumbled across the remains.”

  I paused, staring at one close-up view with perplexity, not quite sure what I was looking at; probably the lower half of Alfie Toth’s body crumpled on the ground. The pelvic bones appeared to be still joined, but the femur, tibia, and fibulas were tangled together in a heap, like bleached kindling. The haphazard skeletal assortment looked like a Halloween decoration badly in need of assembly.

  Dr. Yee was saying, “Ritter’s mummified body was found fully clothed with various personal items in his pockets… expired California driver’s license, credit cards. Identification was confirmed by his fingerprints, which had to be reconstituted. Must have been dry out there because bacterial growth and putrefaction are halted when the body moisture diminishes below fifty percent. Ritter’s flesh was as stiff as leather, but Kirchner managed to retrieve all but the right-hand thumb and ring finger. Ritter’d had his prints in the system since 1972. What a bad ass. Real scum.”

  “I didn’t know you could salvage prints like that.”

  He shrugged. “You sometimes have to sever the fingers first. To rehydrate, you can soak ‘em in a three percent lye solution or a one percent solution of Eastman Kodak Photo-Flo 200 for a day or two. Another method is to use successive alcohol solutions, starting at ninety percent and gradually decreasing. With Ritter, the first presumption was of suicide, though Kirchner said he had big doubts and the county sheriff did, too. Keep in mind, there wasn’t any suicide note at the scene, but there was also no environmental disorder and no signs of trauma on the body. No fractured hyoid to suggest cervical compression, no evidence of knife wounds, skull fractures, gunshot ���”

  “In other words, no signs of foul play.”

  “Right. Which is not to say he couldn’t have been subdued in some way. Same thing with Toth, except there was no personal ID. Sheriff’s department went back through months’ worth of missing-persons reports, contacting relatives. They made the initial match that way.”

  “So what are we looking at?” I asked, turning the photograph so he could see.

  “To all appearances, both guys tied a rope around a boulder, put a noose around their necks, pushed the rock through the Y of a tree limb, and hung themselves. It wasn’t until later that the similarities came to light.”

  I stared at him. “That’s odd.” I glanced down at a photograph, in which I could now see the crisscross of rope circling the circumference of a rock about the size of a large watermelon. Toth’s torso and extremities had separated, falling in a tumble on one side of the tree while the upper half of his body, pulled by the weight of the boulder, had fallen on the other still attached by the length of rope.

  “Nothing remarkable about the rope, in case you’re wondering. Garden variety clothes line available at any supermarket or hardware store,” he said. Dr. Yee watched my face. “Not to be racist about it, but the method’s more compatible with an Asian sensibility. Some dude out in Nota County, how’d it even occur to him? And then a second one here? I mean, it’s possible Toth heard about his pal’s alleged suicide and imitated his methodology, but even so, it seems off. As far as I know, the Nota Lake cops kept the specifics to themselves. That was information only shared between agencies.”

  “Really. If Alfie Toth wanted to kill himself, you’d think he’d blow his brains out; something simple and straightforward, more in keeping with his lifestyle.”

  Dr. Yee shifted back in his chair with a squeak. “A more plausible explanation is that both victims were killed by the same party. The reason the cops are so paranoid is to avoid all the kooks and the copycats. Someone ups and confesses, you don’t want anyone other than the killer in possession of the details. So far the papers haven’t gotten wind of it. They know a body was found here, but that’s about the extent of it. I’m not sure reporters have put two and two together with the deceased in Nota Lake. That didn’t get any play here.”

  “What’s the estimated time of death for Ritter?”

  “Oh, he’d been there five years from Kirchner’s estimate. A gasoline receipt among his effects was dated April 1981. Gas station attendant remembers the two of them.”

  “Quite a gap between deaths,” I said. “Have you ever run across a methodology like this?”

  “Only in a textbook. That’s what makes it curious. Take a look at this.” He reached backward and pulled a thin oversized volume from the bottom shelf. “Tornio Watanabe’s Atlas o f Legal Medicine. This was first published in ‘sixty-eight, printed in Japan, so it’s hard to find these days.” He flipped the pages open to a section on hangings and turned the book so I could see. The photographs were of Japanese suicide victims, apparently supplied by various police headquarters and medical examiners’ offices in Japan. One young woman had wedged her neck in the V of a tree, which effectively compressed her carotid and vertebral arteries. Another woman had made a double loop of long rope, which she wound around her neck and then put her feet through, achieving strangulation by ligature. In the method Dr. Yee’d
referred to, a man tied a rope around a stone, which he placed on a chair. He’d wrapped the same rope around his neck, sat with his back to the chair back, and then tilted the chair forward so the stone rolled off the seat and strangled him. I studied the photographs on adjoining pages, which depicted in graphic detail the ingenuity employed by human beings in extinguishing their lives. In every case, I was looking at the face of despair. I stared at the floor for a moment, running the scenario through my head like a piece of film. “There’s no way two men on opposite sides of California would have independently devised the same method.”

  “Probably not,” he said. “Though, given the fact they were friends, it’s possible they overheard someone describe the technique. If you’re intent on suicide, the beauty of it is once you topple the boulder through the fork in the tree, there’s no way back. Also, death is reasonably quick; not instantaneous, but you’d lose consciousness within a minute or less.”

  “And these are the only two deaths of this kind that you know of?”

  “That’s right. I don’t think this is serial, but the two have to be connected.”

  “How’d you hear about Ritter’s death?”

  “Through Newquist. He’d known about Ritter since his body was discovered back in March of this past year. When a backpacker came across Toth, he reported it to the local sheriff’s department and they contacted Nota Lake because of the similar MO.”

  “Isn’t there a chance Toth killed his friend Ritter, hoping to make it look like suicide instead of murder, and then ended up killing himself the same way? There’d be a certain irony in that.”

  “It’s possible,” he said dubiously, “but what’s your picture? Toth commits a murder and five years pass before he finds himself overwhelmed with guilt?”

  “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” I said, in response to his tone. “I talked to his ex-wife and from what she said, he wasn’t behaving like a man who was terminally depressed.” I checked my watch. It was close to 4:45. “Anyway, I better let you go. I appreciate the information. This has been a big help.”