by Ken Brigham
He pulled out his cell phone and forwarded the photograph of the suicide note to Shane along with a message, “An interesting development, you will agree. I guess you were right about the murder, and here’s your culprit, confession, and justice done by her own hand. Hope you aren’t disappointed. Let’s talk later in the day.”
“Maybe he mixed up the labels or something,” Shane said.
He and Katya were just finishing their morning brioche and coffee, and she was recounting an odd occurrence at the medical center. Someone in the pharmacy had been caught pilfering pills. Not so rare an occurrence given the value of drugs on the street. But these were sugar pills…placebo. Why would anyone risk his job by stealing placebo pills? Didn’t make sense.
“I guess,” KiKi responded. “But still seems strange to me.”
“Since when does strange behavior by human beings baffle you, my love?”
Shane’s cell phone signaled an incoming email. He looked at the screen and saw that it was from Hardy. Yet another early morning communication from his usually late-rising friend. How interesting.
“I need to look at this,” Shane said, punching the appropriate buttons on his phone.
“No problem,” KiKi said. “I should be leaving anyway. Ta-ta.” She kissed him on the forehead, retrieved her briefcase from beside the bar, and headed for the elevator.
Shane read the note five times, pausing to reflect on its meaning between readings. He then retrieved his laptop, called up the pictures Hardy had taken of the death scene, opened his tooled leather backpack, and took out the copy of the final autopsy report that Hardy had obtained for him.
The pictures were essentially as Fiona Hayes described them in her suicide note. When he first looked at them, Shane had thought that there was something symbolic about the exposure of the old man. The note seemed to confirm that. The killer wanted the symbolic exposure to trigger revelation of a deep secret sin successfully concealed for years by the old man. Fiona knew his secret sin firsthand. Shane could imagine that a strong enough motive for murder. He had seen many people kill for lesser sins.
The autopsy report was another matter. He read it through again several times—advanced cardiovascular disease, large heart, fatty liver—all attributed to age and dissipation. Elevated tissue lead levels but not enough to be lethal. “Death from natural causes,” the coroner had concluded. But the findings in the brain troubled Shane. A small area of infarct in the right cerebral hemisphere was revealed when the pickled brain had been methodically sliced up. It was interpreted as consistent with a stroke, but the pathologist had been unwilling to declare that the cause of the old man’s death. Even with that finding, “death from natural causes” was still the conclusion.
Shane was convinced that the old artist had been murdered, but he did not believe that Fiona Hayes was the person who had done it, regardless of her motive and intent. The brief story in the suicide note didn’t ring true. He was convinced that the autopsy findings conclusively disproved the Hayes woman’s story. But why would she feel guilt powerful enough to cause her to take her own life if she didn’t do it? Was she covering for someone else whose life she valued more than her own? She didn’t seem to be the kind of person who would do that.
Shane was not a pathologist. He needed expert corroboration. He was also thinking that there might be another source of evidence. He decided to place two phone calls. With great reluctance, recalling their interactions in the past, Shane first called Harry Jensen, MD, the Nashville-Metropolitan area coroner for more years than anyone who had to interact with him cared to remember. There was no official reason why Doc Jensen should feel obligated to provide Shane with any information, but the aging and lonely pathologist would frequently respond to a bit of attention and indulgence of his faux Irish persona by revealing more than was strictly appropriate. Shane had used that approach with success in the past, but it had been a long time.
“Top o’ the mornin’ to ya,” Jensen answered the call on the first ring. “To what do I owe the honor of such an early morning call from the venerable Sherlock Shane Hadley?”
Although Shane liked the fact that caller ID identified incoming callers, he didn’t like that it took away the element of surprise in his calls to other people. It didn’t really matter in this case, but there had been occasions when Shane thought that he had been robbed of potentially important information by the device. Of course, he could block caller ID, but he feared if he did that too many of his calls would go unanswered. He thought that the effects of technology were a mixed bag.
“Good morning, Harry,” Shane responded, adopting as amiable a tone as he could muster. “How have you been?”
“Jolly good, lad,” Jensen answered. “As jolly good as a lad who lives among the dead can rightly expect to be. And you? Are you missing your old mates and the thrill-a-minute business of detecting?”
“Actually, I’ve been rather unofficially aiding Hardy Seltzer’s detecting on occasion. The department is still grossly undermanned. And I have the time. As to thrill-a-minute, I’m not so sure about that. The detective business is much less exciting than it looks on TV.”
“Ah, yes, I’m sure of that. But I suppose everything is relative. You fellas’ investigations are certainly livelier than mine.”
“True,” Shane responded, “but no more important, my friend. The reason I called…”
Jensen interrupted, “No doubt you seek information about our local celebrity, the former artist known as Bechman Fitzwallington.”
“You are a perceptive man, Dr. Jensen.”
“I do read the papers on occasion, Shane. Information is a much greater asset than perception. At least I find that to be true in my business.”
“Difficult to argue with that, my man. Imagination is a poor and often inaccurate substitute for the truth of a matter.”
“So, what information do you wish, laddie?”
“About the Fitzwallington postmortem, Doc,” Shane wasn’t quite sure how much to reveal about the information he was already party to. He certainly didn’t want to get his friend Hardy Seltzer in any trouble for betraying police confidence. “I understand from the autopsy report that you concluded that the old guy died of what you experts sometimes call ‘natural causes.’ Is that right?”
“Entropy, my lad. The old guy’s body was a wreck. End of the line.”
“But there was an infarct in his brain that could have meant a stroke. Couldn’t that have been the terminal event?”
“That’s possible,” Jensen adopted a more professional tone. “But without some observation of the manner of his death, it is difficult to make that conclusion. The correlates of vascular events observable after death with the manner of dying are not always obvious without knowledge of exactly how the person died. That was true with this case. I suppose the small brain infarct might have resulted in a stroke. But a stroke is a clinical diagnosis, not a postmortem finding, unless there is extensive hemorrhage or more evidence of tissue damage than we have in this case. And, like I said, his whole body was a train wreck.”
“Interesting. Is it possible that he was smothered to death with a pillow held over his face as he slept?”
“I think not. No evidence of that—no mucosal petechiae, no down bits in his mouth and nasal passages. Of course, he was a weak old man and might not have put up much of a struggle. That could minimize that kind of evidence.”
Just as Shane had suspected. Fiona Hayes had not suffocated the old guy to death with a pillow, as she claimed. She might very well have killed herself for no good reason. Unless she had other reasons not revealed. That was a possibility.
Shane thanked the pathologist for his help and ended the call. He opened the small notebook where he had accumulated information about the case, found the number of the Hayes Street office of Dr. Frederic delaGuardia, and punched it into his cell. After a brief but informative conversation, Shane made an additional call to a number that the good doctor had suggested.
/> Hardy Seltzer’s cell phone summoned him just as he wound his way around the backside of the state capitol on his way back to police headquarters. It was Marge Bland.
“Hi, Marge, what’s up?” Hardy answered the call, wondering why she would call him at this time of day, just a little past noon.
“Just thought you might like to know. I’m working the early shift today, and just as I was organizing the bar for the early drinking lunch crowd, who should drop into our establishment but our friend Mace Ricci? He’s here now drinking a double Dewars and appearing to settle in for a spell.”
“Thanks, Marge. Listen, we need to bring him in for questioning. Keep him occupied until I can get a couple of boys in blue there to collar him. You’re better than an APB any day. Should get you on the payroll.”
“A paycheck would be nice,” she said. “I like paychecks.”
Chapter 32
SalomeMe’s wardrobe contained not a single black garment. She didn’t like black. She feared black. She avoided black like the plague. But she was determined to attend her old friend Fiona Hayes’s funeral and thought that she had to go clothed in black, preferably a lot of it. Maybe even a veil. She mourned her friend’s death. A part of her thought that by rights it was she, SalomeMe, who should have been the sacrifice, not Fiona, if there had to be a sacrifice. Of course, there had to be a sacrifice. There was a price for sins of this magnitude. They must be dealt with—exposed and dealt with.
SalomeMe was determined to attend the funeral. And she was determined to go covered head to toe in black. One of her Goth friends came to mind. She phoned the friend and requested a loan of the kind of outfit she had in mind. Her friend did not see that as a problem since every item in her friend’s entire wardrobe was midnight black. Not only did she volunteer to supply SalomeMe with the outfit she was looking for, but she would deliver said outfit to her forthwith.
Thus, the gravesite of the deceased Fiona Hayes in Woodlawn Cemetery at the northeast edge of town was ringed about by a motley crew of artists, past and present lovers, some family whom no one recognized, and the spectral presence of SalomeMe draped in a shroud of intense and uncharacteristic midnight black totally obscuring the ink and piercings that usually defined her. She stood by the grave and wept. She did not often weep, although she recalled many occasions when that would have been an appropriate thing to do.
Lurking quietly at the perimeter of the gathering were both Hardy Seltzer and Shane Hadley. It was Shane who had insisted that the two of them attend the memorial. And Hardy managed to collect him from Printers Alley, maneuver him out of his wheelchair and into the aging LTD, stow the chair in the trunk and drive the two of them over to the cemetery. Exactly why Shane thought it so important for them to be there was not clear to Hardy, but OK, he would try to understand that later. Shane allowed as how he was close to solving the riddle of the death of Bechman Fitzwallington and only needed a little more time to be sure of the story. For some odd reason, Fiona Hayes’s graveside service seemed important to him.
Maybe the clue was in the identity of the other attendees. Hardy looked around. Parker Palmer was there with someone Hardy didn’t recognize. Of course, the Hayes woman’s partner, Vernon LaVista the somethingth, Hardy couldn’t remember the appropriate Roman numeral. And oddly enough, the local drug kingpin, Wilton Argent. Maybe the old guy had a soul after all. Hardy nodded recognition to Argent who responded in kind. Then there was the skinny kid with the birthmark and the lisp, Issy something. Why was he there?
Shane spent several minutes maneuvering himself around the margin of the little gathering. He appeared to be making an effort to get a face-on look at each of the attendees in turn. There was a rhythm to his movements—wheel a short distance, pause for a few moments, then move a bit further, pause—until he had completely circled the group and had apparently seen what he was looking for. Hard to tell for sure. He arrived back beside Seltzer, where he sat for a few minutes without speaking. The service seemed to be slow getting started, as though no one was quite sure what to do or expect.
Shane touched Hardy on the arm, leaned up to him and said sotto voce, “We can go now.”
They rode for a while back toward town without speaking, but eventually, Hardy’s curiosity got the better of him.
“What were you looking for, Shane?” Hardy said.
“I think more looking at than looking for,” Shane responded. “I was looking at faces, facial expressions. Faces can sometimes say things that resist translation into words.”
“So, what did you learn?”
“Nothing new, my man. Nothing new. I think I have the story pretty much fleshed out. Find me some time, preferably on a sunny afternoon on the Printers Alley deck in the company of a generous glass or two of sherry, and I will be pleased to share my version of this little episode and then leave it to you to do as you see fit.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Jolly good, Hardy, my man. Jolly good indeed.”
A couple of days earlier, the guys in blue had nabbed Mace Ricci at TAPS after Marge Bland’s call to Hardy, brought the New York cop to the station, and installed him in an interview room to incubate alone for a couple of hours as Seltzer had instructed—stew in his own juices, so to speak. Before talking with Ricci, Seltzer had called the FBI agent in Chicago to find out anything he could about where their investigation was going. Seltzer was told that their snitch, Dudley (The Dude) Sysco, had implicated Ricci in the Hadley abduction and possibly other things, but that was all they had so far. They were also trying, unsuccessfully, to locate Bruce Therault in New York and were intensely interested in finding out what the Galleria Salinas proprietor, Blythe Fortune, knew about any of this. The FBI had a strong suspicion that this was a much bigger deal than it originally appeared.
There was nothing implicating Ricci that was solid enough to hold him. He was certainly not going to divulge anything and would be, he assured Seltzer, very shortly lawyered up. Seltzer sent him on his way with a strong urging to leave some local contact information and to stay in town until further notice. Hardy had little expectation that Ricci would do either of those. It might not matter anyway, depending on what happened in New York.
So, Seltzer’s assigned case, the abduction of Shane Hadley, was sort of partially solved, but it seemed very unlikely that it would be completely solved until there was progress with the broader investigation being conducted by the FBI and probably involving organized crime types. Hardy could wait for that. Local media interest in that story had almost disappeared so that the pressure of the earlier public outcry was no longer a major factor. The interest of the department brass in the matter had also cooled.
There remained the problem of explaining Fitzwallington’s death. Of course, as soon Seltzer had informed his boss of Fiona Hayes’s suicide and showed him her farewell note, Goetz took that information directly to the chief who immediately declared the case closed. There was nothing left to explain. The chief arranged a press conference at which he announced the fact that the Hayes suicide note confessed to killing the old artist and described the murder in sufficient detail to be completely convincing. He did not go into the other details and did not release the actual note to the press. There was a minor clamor of demands to see the note from the more inquisitive reporters, but the chief held his ground. Hardy thought that the note should have been made public. After all, exposing Fitzwallington’s sins seemed to have been a major motivating factor for Fiona. In a sense, continuing to conceal that history was perpetuating the old guy’s misdeeds, protecting a false reputation, and distorting Fiona Hayes’s reasons for killing herself. Someone ought to leak the note, Hardy thought, but it wouldn’t be him. Subterfuge was not in his nature. Not to worry. Someone would do it.
Seltzer had deliberately avoided telling his boss anything about Shane’s continued interest in this case. Too late now. It would have been extremely awkward to reveal Shane’s involvement now, especially if, as Seltzer strongly suspected, Sha
ne was going to come up with a story that was much more complicated than the department’s official story that the chief had fed with some enthusiasm to the media. Hardy wasn’t sure exactly what Shane’s version would be, but all the signs were that it would be complicated. Was it possible that the tables were rotated a hundred eighty degrees from where this case started, the official conclusion now being murder and Shane’s Hadley’s conclusion being something different? That seemed like a possibility. It was at least obvious at this point that Shane didn’t buy Fiona Hayes’s farewell note, although Hardy didn’t see what else could explain her suicide. Maybe Shane had figured that out. Hardy would find out the next afternoon.
It was the lawyer Jimmy Holden’s abiding conviction that truth was an existential good in human affairs that was the proximate cause of the strategy session between Parker Palmer and J. Hayworth Combs, Esq. After what he considered a decent interval following his discovery that the DNA tests excluded his client, SalomeMe, as Fitzwallington’s daughter and realizing that it would mean the big fee he had imagined was toast, Holden had phoned Jay Combs and revealed to him that particular truth. Combs thanked him politely but didn’t seem all that surprised. Combs wasn’t surprised, of course, but did realize that as this became more common knowledge, and that was inevitable, there might well be a need for some lawyerly maneuvering in order to protect his friend and client. Thus, a strategy session seemed in order.
Parker Palmer certainly agreed with that. He was anxious to get Jay Combs seriously involved. Although he desperately hoped that Fiona Hayes’s suicide and confession would put the Billy Wayne Farmer matter to rest once and for all, Palmer still feared that Shane Hadley might not give up so easily. If that was true, there was a better than even chance, Palmer feared, that he could wind up being accused of murdering his uncle. Although he never intended to do that, he was not completely sure of his innocence in the matter. Maybe their argument was too much for the frail old guy. But, if so, then why did Fiona make up a different story and do herself in. Palmer certainly would never have considered Fiona capable of killing anybody, including herself. That is the dilemma that Palmer posed to his lawyer friend, hoping there was a lawyerly solution.