South of Nowhere: A Mystery

by Minerva Koenig

  He laughed at that and followed me back out to the loading dock, where Chipped Tooth was still sitting on his bucket, smoking a cigarette.

  CHAPTER 45

  The buildings on the block the garbage collector had pointed out looked like they’d all been built at the same time—around 1945—by the same guy. They were one-story brick with flat roofs and concrete floors. Some of the brick had been painted and none of the storefronts looked original, but the buildings were all the same size and shape, five in a row along a wide sidewalk that ran all the way to the curb. The other side of the street was the start of the residential area—small, run-down rent houses that formed a barrier between downtown and the nicer homes farther in.

  There was a Dumpster in the alley behind the commercial buildings, near the south end of the block. The other side of the alley was the back of the bank, with its parking lot alongside.

  The Dumpster was one of the single green ones, with those plastic lids that make an annoying banging noise in the middle of the night when the trucks come by to empty them. In other words, anybody who wanted to could have walked by and dropped in a bag of bloody laundry at any time. It wouldn’t be my quarry, since it had been six months before Orson died, but that didn’t shut down my interest. Hunting season in these parts was a winter affair, as I remembered from hearing echoing rifle shots daily between September and February, and nothing but a large mammal bleeding out produces the quantity of blood described.

  I stood there thinking about it for a couple of minutes, then walked down to the end of the alley and turned toward the square. Benny was walking into the cop shop as I came around the courthouse, and paused to let me catch up. He held the door for me, not saying anything, and came in behind.

  “What was last August like on your beat?” I asked him as we went into his office.

  He strode around his desk, putting his hand on his trusty laptop. “Lemme look.”

  I watched him do his thing until he made a face and shook his head. “Pretty quiet. A couple of B-and-Es, the usual speeding tickets and DUIs, domestics, that kind of stuff. Only thing out of the ordinary was somebody hitting a cow out on 281 around the end of July. Sent a couple of locals to the hospital.”

  “Bad injuries?”

  “Not life threatening, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Did anyone bleed a lot?”

  “Yeah, the cow,” Benny said, looking amused.

  My heart sank. “Who did the cleanup?”

  “We did,” Benny said. “It wasn’t bad, just some glass and shit from the car.”

  “No, I mean the blood.”

  He gave me a surprised look. “Nobody. The driver and his passenger were banged up, but they weren’t bleeding. We sent ’em to the ER because of possible closed head injury—the driver had face-planted pretty hard on his steering wheel, but it didn’t break the skin. The cow was in the ditch. We just left her there.”

  I made a face and Benny explained, “If somebody complains, we’ll have Hazardous Waste go out and get roadkill, but this was outside town. No reason to waste tax money on it when the buzzards will take care of it for nothing.”

  “Well, damn it,” I muttered.

  “What’s the problem?”

  I told him about the bag of bloody clothing, and he went back to tapping and scrolling on his laptop. “Nothing that summer to explain it.”

  “Well, where the hell did it come from, then?”

  “I dunno, but I can see why it would get your panties in a wad,” Benny said, pulling at his lower lip, like he often did when thinking.

  “The collector said he reported it to his boss.”

  “Never made it over here.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Sheer ornery laziness, most likely,” Benny said. “Far be it for me to bad-mouth my fellow city employees, but those guys want to go home at the end of their shift. They don’t want to have to fuck around with anything extra, even if they get paid overtime.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t make any sense to try and test that Dumpster for blood now, would it?” I asked him hopefully.

  “We could test it,” he allowed, “but I wouldn’t trust the result at this late date.”

  “What about DNA? If it could be matched to Orson?”

  “Orson wasn’t dead until February,” Benny reminded me.

  “Maybe Liz fucked up somewhere. Forgot to carry the one or something.”

  “She’s never been wrong before, but I guess it’s possible. I’ll ask her to check her math.”

  “And test that Dumpster for DNA?”

  He sighed. “Sure. What the hell.”

  CHAPTER 46

  My phone rang as I walked over to the bar. It was Liz Harman.

  “Speak of the devil,” I said.

  “What’d I do now?”

  I relayed the salient details, and she said, “If we were talking the difference between January and February, maybe, but no, I wouldn’t be off by six months.”

  “Could there have been some kind of environmental thing that made the body look newer?” I asked her.

  “Several things,” she said, “but they’d only change the date by maybe a week, at most, and I don’t see how I could be off on any of that. I checked the almanac and averaged the local daily temperature and humidity percentage for the time period. Since that house is so old and didn’t have any environmental systems running, I feel pretty confident that the indoor and outdoor conditions would have been equivalent.”

  “The hole where I found him was the top of an old heating chase,” I said. “Those are typically built a lot tighter than the rest of a house.”

  “OK, fine, but in old wood-framed houses, especially those with no heat or A/C or weather stripping, everything tends to normalize to environmental conditions, tight or not. Especially with nobody living in it. I’ve never measured a statistical difference in indoor versus outdoor climate in a place like that. Plus, like I said, it’s not going to make a January time of death into a June one.”

  I trusted what she was saying but I was reluctant to let the issue go. “Just for laughs, could you do a DNA test on a Dumpster for me?”

  There was a brief silence, then Liz sighed, and I heard her shuffling papers. “I’ll need an order from Benny.”

  “It should be in your fax machine right now.”

  I heard her grunt and the squeak of her desk chair. “You want me right now?”

  “If you can.”

  She sighed an assent, and I gave her the address. She said she’d be over in a few minutes, then added, “Oh, the reason I called was, Jean Conroy, my psychiatrist colleague, can see you this evening, if you’re open.”

  “This evening?” I said. “A doctor?”

  “She’s leaving for Maui in the morning.”

  There was spite in the doctor’s voice, and I chuckled. “In her Mercedes?”

  She chuckled back. “Don’t get me started.”

  “What time?”

  “Here, give her a call.” Liz relayed the number, and I dialed it after we hung up. A light feminine voice with an Alabama twang in it answered, and I asked for Dr. Conroy. To my surprise, the voice replied, “This is she.” She sounded like she was barely out of high school.

  I told her who I was and we made arrangements to meet at her home office, which was just a couple of blocks from Liz Harman’s, at six.

  It was hotter than hell in the apartment, as usual, and I gave myself some shit for not thinking to schedule meeting Liz in the morning instead. That alley was going to be an odiferous swamp at this hour—close to four—and I kind of wanted to lie down for a little while before meeting with the shrink.

  Instead I splashed my face with cold water, and turned on the fan to ventilate the place while I was gone, then headed down through the bar and out the back. I crossed the vacant lot behind the bar and turned south, walked the block to Porter, and went around behind the row of commercial buildings. Liz was parked at the other end of the alley, gett
ing out of her car.

  “I’m too old for this shit,” she puffed as she trundled up to me with her field case in hand. She wiped her face and neck with a white cotton handkerchief and nodded past me at the Dumpster. “This our victim?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not happy to see that it had been a while since the trash guys had been by.

  Liz put her field case down and got out some latex gloves, which she handed to me. I took them, giving her a puzzled look.

  “I ain’t climbing up in that thing,” she said.

  “I’ve never taken a DNA sample,” I told her. “I don’t know how to do it.”

  “Nothing hard about it. I’ll give you a couple of sterile wipes and you just run them over whatever areas you think might have what you’re looking for on them. Then we throw the wipes in a plastic bag and send ’em off.”

  I gave the Dumpster a sidelong look. “There’s going to be all kinds of stuff on there.”

  “That’s right, there is,” Liz said, getting out the wipes. “Including, probably, human DNA from the trash collectors, from people’s home trash, from any bums or Dumpster divers who might have been in there—you name it.”

  “But they can run all of them against a profile from a specific person and get a match, right?”

  “Sure, but it’s gonna take a while, and depending on how long the sample’s been in there, it will have degraded over time. Matching DNA doesn’t work like you see it on TV.”

  I hesitated, wondering if it was worth it. Neffa’s sighting of the car at my house in February suggested that the doctor’s timeline was correct, but a bag full of bloody clothes and rags, even at the wrong time, was too provocative to ignore. I put my foot up on the Dumpster bracket and held out a hand toward Liz. She stepped forward and steadied me while I climbed up. Her hand was dry and slightly rough on my arm, like a dog’s paw.

  I didn’t look down to see what I sank ankle deep into as I dropped from the Dumpster’s edge. The smell was bad enough, I didn’t need a visual. Breathing through my mouth, I opened one of the packages of wipes and shook one out, then ran it around the rim of the Dumpster and handed it to Liz. I used six in all, covering everything except the stuff I was standing in, then climbed out.

  Liz made a face at my shoes as I jumped down. “Shoulda brought some hip waders.”

  “Do you smell something burning?” I asked her. I’d just caught a faint whiff of smoke.

  Liz looked at me, her eyebrows up, and shook her head. The smell grew stronger, overpowering the scent of garbage. It was Hector’s Cuban cigar again.

  “God damn it,” I muttered.

  Liz gave me a quizzical look, sealing up the last bag of wipes.

  “I’m having a moment,” I told her.

  Her tools clinked as she dropped the bag of wipes into her leather bag, and the smell of the cigar grew stronger. I started to cough, my eyes watering.

  She gave me a severe look. “You make an appointment with Jean?”

  “Yeah, for six,” I said.

  “Let’s go sit for a minute,” she suggested, gesturing toward her car.

  I followed her and eased into the plush passenger seat. She set her case on the hood and got out a stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff. I waved them off, but she barked, “I humored you, now you humor me.”

  The cigar smell persisted while she took my blood pressure and pressed the frigid stethoscope against my chest, her eyes intently averted. She listened for what seemed like a long time, then wrapped up her instruments and put them back in her case. The cigar odor grew, impossibly, even stronger. I felt as if I were almost choking. I got out of the car, alternately taking deep breaths and coughing.

  “You take drugs?” she asked, putting one hand on her hip.

  I laughed between coughs, and her scowl deepened. I held up one hand. “OK, it’s a fair question, but the answer is no. The inside of my head is weird enough already, thanks.”

  “It’s something, all right,” she agreed.

  She came around to put her case in the trunk, and as she slammed it shut, the cigar odor disappeared. I took another couple of deep breaths, feeling like I’d just stepped out of a burning building. “It’s gone now.”

  Liz shook her head, getting out her keys. “Keep that appointment, will you?”

  CHAPTER 47

  Jean Conroy was a tallish redhead in her early forties who looked and sounded a lot younger. Part of her youthful air was her hair, which she wore in loose waves down around her shoulders, and part of it was her vernal wardrobe: linen shirt over a tank top, skinny jeans, and flip-flops. She looked about as much like a psychiatrist as I did.

  “All right,” she sighed, dropping down into the comfortable-looking armchair in her neat office and opening a folder. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  She pursed her small mouth, peering at the notes in front of her. She read over them for a few minutes, then took off her tortoiseshell horn-rims and tucked her legs up under her in the big chair. She looked like a college coed at a slumber party. “So what’s going on?”

  I told her and watched her face take on the same look of concern that Connie’s had when I described my little mental vacations.

  “No memory of anything that happens in the time going by?” she said, returning her glasses to the bridge of her freckled nose. “At all?”

  I shook my head, and she made a note in the folder.

  “You guys are starting to worry me,” I told her. “Have I got something terminal?”

  “Most mental illnesses won’t kill you, in and of themselves,” she said. “But some are easier to manage than others. That’s where the mortality risk is with these things—when a psychiatric condition becomes so difficult to live with that the patient decides death is easier.”

  The comment made me remember the thing that had hit me out in the desert, taking the sun away from Mikela. “Is that always a conscious decision?”

  “That depends on what you mean,” she said, giving me a guarded look over her glasses.

  I didn’t want to recite my entire life story, so I just said, “Sometimes I do dangerous things.”

  “Hmm,” she said, putting a slim white finger to her lips. “Do your episodes seem to coincide with those times?”

  I thought about it. “It’s hard to say.”

  “Why don’t you describe what you were doing the last couple of times you’ve had a spell. Maybe I’ll notice a theme you’re not seeing.”

  The word “spell” made me smile, especially the way she said it, but I hesitated, and she looked up from her notes.

  “How ironclad is your doctor-patient confidentiality thing?” I asked.

  “I’m legally required to report child abuse, domestic violence, or criminal activity, but I’m allowed professional discretion on all those things,” she said. Her fine-featured face had grown curious.

  Salt-and-Pepper’s death was the only thing that might technically fall into any of those categories. I wasn’t the one who’d shot her, but I didn’t know enough about Conroy yet to depend on her personal discretion, so I left it out.

  “The most recent was hearing that a coworker had undergone a disabling stroke. Previous to that, it happened after a dead body had been found in my house. I checked out when the cops were moving it.”

  “Hmm,” the doctor said, listening intently. I could tell she wanted to ask questions, but was holding back.

  “Oh, and I sometimes hear and smell things that aren’t there,” I added, thinking about the cigar, and Luigi’s verbal skills from last winter.

  “Do those hallucinations occur along with the dissociative episodes?” the doctor asked.

  “Yeah, near them, usually, but I get them on their own at other times, too. Like, I just hallucinated the cigar smell a couple of hours ago, but I didn’t dissociate. Well, that I’m aware of.”

  The doctor was scribbling in her folder. She had her feet on the floor now.

  “The other thing is, a lot of times, as I’m waking u
p, I have this feeling like I’m drowning or suffocating.” I hesitated, then decided to come clean. “I had occasion to talk to my mother recently, and she told me that she tried to drown me when I was little.”

  “How old?” the doctor asked.

  “Less than a year, she said.”

  “So you’ve had this waking-up thing all your life?”

  “No, it only started recently, along with this dissociation stuff.”

  “Hmm,” Conroy said again. “And how long ago was that? That this all started?”

  “About three years, give or take.”

  “And what happened to you three years ago?”

  I widened my eyes at her, and she made a rueful face. “People always react like it’s rocket science, but it’s just simple math. You’ve got all the symptoms of PTSD, starting at a particular point in time. So the T part must have happened at that point.”

  This again. Irritated, I said, “I wish you people would make up your minds.”

  The doctor gave me a quizzical look.

  “I’ve heard the PTSD suggestion before,” I told her, “but I don’t buy it. Another shrink told me she didn’t think I had it.” I didn’t tell her that the other shrink was in prison for trying to kill me.

  “Give me the history,” she urged gently, “and I’ll give you my opinion. That doesn’t mean you have to accept it.”

  “My husband was shot and killed in front of me,” I said.

  She took this in without batting an eyelash. “Yep, that’ll do it.”

  “I’ve seen people killed before,” I said.

  Her curious expression returned. “In what context?” I hesitated again, and she said, “OK, I can tell there are things there you don’t want to talk about, and that’s fine. Let’s just concentrate on physical symptoms, shall we?”

  “I thought you guys wanted to hear all about my unhappy childhood,” I said, perplexed.

  “No, psychotherapists do that,” the doctor explained. “I’m a brain mechanic. I look at physical symptoms and figure out how to fix those, if I determine that they have an organic cause. There’s some overlap, but I try to stay out of counseling. I’m no good at it.”