Other Resort Cities

by Tod Goldberg

  “Hell,” I said, sitting back down at the kitchen table. My eyes fixed on a pair of pale blue Nikes, unattached to legs, pointing out from the bottom of the grave. I wanted to just sit there and cry for those boys, but I knew it wouldn’t do either of us any good.

  I got to the medical examiner’s office late that next morning, figuring I didn’t need to see her slicing and dicing. But it turned out I was right on time. The ME, a young kid named Lizzie DiGiangreco, had been working in Granite City for just over a year. Her father, Dr. Louis DiGiangreco, had been ME in Granite City for a lifetime and had practically trained Lizzie from birth. She went to medical school back East and then moved home after her father died at sixty-four from heart failure. I was one of Louis’s pallbearers, and I remember watching Lizzie stiffen at the site of her father in his open casket. I knew then that her profession had not been a pleasant choice for her, but that she was duty bound.

  Lizzie greeted me with a handshake just outside the door to her lab.

  “Glad you could make it, Sheriff,” Lizzie said, only half sarcastically.

  “Miller said you were a little queasy up on Yeach,” I said. “I can get someone else to do this, if you want.”

  Lizzie made a clicking sound in her throat, a tendency her father displayed when he was about to be very angry, and then exhaled deeply. “I don’t like to see kids like that,” she said. “Maybe Miller is used to it, but I’m not.”

  “Understandable,” I said and then followed her into the lab.

  The four bodies were covered with black plastic blankets and lined up across the length of the room. Lizzie’s assistant—what they call a diener—an old black man named Hawkins, was busy gathering up the tools they would need for the procedure. I’d watched a lot of autopsies in my thirty-five years as sheriff in Granite City, but it never got any easier. Hawkins had been Lizzie’s father’s assistant, so he knew what I’d need to make it through the next few hours.

  “There’s a tub of Vicks behind you in that cabinet, Sheriff,” Hawkins said. “These folks ain’t gonna smell so fresh.”

  Lizzie glared at Hawkins, but she knew that he didn’t mean any harm. Hawkins could probably perform an autopsy just as well as she could, and Lord knows he never went to medical school.

  Hawkins pulled back the first blanket, and there was James Klein’s naked, handless, body.

  “Where’d you put the hands, Hawkins?” Lizzie asked.

  “I got ’em in the jar by the back sink,” he said. “You want them now?”

  “No,” she said. “But make sure not to cross them up with Mrs. Klein’s.”

  Hawkins nodded in the affirmative, and I was struck by how, for these two people, this was a day in the office. For Lizzie, maybe, seeing those children would be different. But for Hawkins, they would be nothing but cargo, something to load onto a table and then something to haul back to the refrigerator.

  Lizzie sliced James Klein with a Y incision, starting from his shoulder, across his chest, around his navel, and down through the pelvis using a scalpel. The room filled with a smell like raw lamb. It was the muscle tissue, the meat.

  For the next two hours, Lizzie spoke quietly and clinically into a tape recorder, noting the condition of James Klein’s vital organs as she examined and weighed them. I had to leave the room only twice: when Hawkins sifted through the intestines and when Lizzie and Hawkins peeled back the top of James Klein’s head and removed his brain.

  After they’d removed all of James Klein’s vital organs, his corpse sat opened on the examining table: his trunk resembled the hull of a ship under construction. Both Lizzie and Hawkins were covered in blood and tissue.

  “Well,” Hawkins said to me, “he’s dead all right.”

  “Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee, Hawkins,” Lizzie said. “The sheriff and I need to go over a few things before we sew up.”

  Hawkins licked at his lips then, and I saw that his hands were shaking a bit. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but doing these things damn near starves me! You want something, Doc?”

  “No, Hawkins,” she said, and when he was gone, she started back up. “Off the record, because I’ll need to look at the tox screens and some of the neuro X-rays, but I’d say the cause of death for Mr. Klein was suffocation plus blood loss from his hands being chopped off.”

  “Suffocation?”

  “Look here,” Lizzie said, pointing at James Klein’s lungs. “He had severe hemorrhaging, probably caused by inhaling so much dirt, and there’s bruising along the back of his neck. See that?”

  There was a dark purple bruise along the base of James Klein’s neck, but what was odd was the shape of the bruise. It was a pattern of small squares.

  “What do you make of those marks?”

  “Probably the bottom of a work boot or hiking boot,” Lizzie said. “ike someone was standing on his neck, pushing his face into the dirt, while they cut off his hands.”

  “Using his head for leverage,” I said, not as a question, and not really to Lizzie, but to myself. Said it because I had to hear myself say it.

  Lizzie nodded, and I saw that she was looking over my shoulder at the bodies of the two boys. “Yeah,” she said finally, her gaze averted back to James Klein, “that’s probably what happened.”

  “All right,” I said. “How long will it take you to finish the rest of these up?”

  Lizzie exhaled so that her bangs fluttered in the air for a moment. “About two hours for each of them.”

  “Okay,” I said. “The families are flying in this afternoon. Can you get me something preliminary on paper tonight?”

  “I’ll try,” Lizzie said, and then both of us were silent for a minute.

  “I miss your dad,” I said, because at that moment I really did. We’d been good friends for many years, and when he died I knew that the old school in Granite City was getting close to recess time. “He was a good man, Lizzie. I’m sure proud of the way you’ve stuck around here, and I know he would be, too.”

  Before Lizzie could reply, Hawkins walked in with a Danish in his teeth and two cups of coffee. As I walked out, Hawkins and Lizzie started dumping James Klein’s internal organs back into his body in no particular order.

  Just after noon, a helicopter containing James Klein’s mother and father, plus Missy Klein’s mother, a Mrs. Pellet, landed on the football field at Granite City High School. Lyle and I were there waiting for it.

  “I’m real sorry about this,” I said to Mrs. Klein when I shook her hand.

  “You said you’d find him,” she said.

  Before I could answer Mrs. Klein, before I could tell her that we’d found him just as I knew we would, her husband placed a hand on her shoulder and directed her away from me.

  “This is a hard time for her,” he said, and then he, too, was gone, squiring his wife into the back of a rented Aerostar we’d brought for them. Mr. Klein wore a houndstooth sport coat that hung off his shoulders like a dead vine and a pair of expensive sunglasses that day. I knew that behind those tinted glasses were the eyes of a man without hope. I’d seen that look on the face of every man who’d lost a son.

  Lyle helped Missy’s mother off the helicopter, and I could tell that, like Mr. Klein, she was face-to-face with the dead end of life. She was older than I’d remembered her from the months she’d spent in town, but I guess waiting for bad news would do that to you.

  We drove the three of them to the Best Western on Central, none of us speaking until we arrived there.

  “When do we get to see them?” Mr. Klein asked. We were waiting for the elevator to take the Kleins and Mrs. Pellet up to their rooms.

  “Tomorrow, I’d guess,” I said.

  “We’ll want to bury them in Connecticut,” Mr. Klein said, and Missy’s mother, Mrs. Pellet, nodded in agreement.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “The medical examiner still needs to finish getting some information though.”

  “For what?” Mr. Klein said. “So that we can be
told my son suffered? I don’t need to know any more to understand that he’s gone. That all of them are gone.”

  “It’s a murder investigation,” I said. We’d told both families that their loved ones had been found, though not the condition of their bodies. Foul play, we’d told them, was suspected. “There are procedures that must be followed. I’m sorry if you have to stay here one minute longer than you want to, but this is my job, and I’m planning on doing it.”

  “Sheriff Drew,” Mr. Klein said, “do you have any children?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know my son wasn’t a good person,” Mr. Klein said. “My wife and I have reconciled that much. He was a drug addict and probably a pretty good one, if you want to know. He was also a gifted liar. I am sure he made enemies in many parts of the world or else why would he come to a place like this?” Mr. Klein swallowed, and it seemed then that he was at some point, that he’d figured out a troubling problem that had always been just within reach. “So, you see, Sheriff, I don’t need to know who did what. I don’t need that kind of element in my life. I’d prefer to think that my son was the decent person he pretended to be.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  “Sheriff,” Mrs. Pellet said, her voice soft and tired, “I just want to bring my baby home. Whoever killed her, if anyone did, is gone. If you haven’t found who did this yet, you never will.”

  “She’s right, you know,” Lyle said as we walked back to our van. “They’re both right, sort of. We went through every lead we had on this case over a year ago, Morris.”

  “But there’s all kinds of new technology, Lyle,” I said. “There’s a national database of violent crimes, advances in science. DNA. We can try, can’t we?”

  Lyle reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one. I’d known Lyle for half my life, and he’d always been someone I could depend on. He wasn’t what you might call book smart, but he knew things instinctively like no one I’d ever known, before or since. “Tell you what,” he said, smoke drifting out of his nose in smooth wisps of gray. “I get cable just like you. I see all those forensic shows on Discovery and I think they’re fantastic. I’m glad the cops in LA are solving crimes from the 1950s using space shuttle technology. But you know what, Morris? This ain’t LA.”

  He was right, of course, which made it all the more difficult to take.

  I was sitting at the counter of Lolly’s Diner eating meatloaf and reading the autopsies of the Klein family when Miller Descent walked in and sat down next to me. It was near nine o’clock.

  “Lyle said you might be here,” Miller said.

  “Just reading about that family,” I said, holding up the autopsy report. “And trying to swallow some food. Can hardly do either.”

  Miller chuckled and then paused. “I wanna ask you something, Sheriff,” he said cautiously, “and I don’t want to offend you in any way by asking it.”

  “That’s a tough order now.” Lolly came by then to refill my coffee cup, and Miller asked if he could have a slice of apple pie. “Well,” I said when Lolly left, “spit it out.”

  “Do you think maybe you should turn this case over to someone else?” Miller said.

  “That doesn’t sound like a question, Miller,” I said. “It sounds like a request.”

  “Assistant DA upstate saw some of the crime scene pictures,” Miller said. There was a sheepish quality about him then that I wasn’t used to, and I realized that this wasn’t something he was enjoying. “I probably shouldn’t have shown him a damn thing, but you know how favors work around up there, right Sheriff?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, he thinks this is something the Brawton police, maybe the homicide unit they got out there should get involved with, or at least maybe a more . . .” Miller trailed off when Lolly dropped his pie off. “Hell,” he said. “You know what I’m trying to say here, right? Talk to the family, let them know it’s an option.”

  What he was trying to say was that there was some glamour to this case: Wealthy young family found murdered in ski hamlet downstate. $500,000 sitting in evidence room gathering dust. And glamour means an assistant DA upstate becomes DA, or mayor, or worse—a congressman.

  I also think Miller was trying to say that I didn’t have a chance in hell of finding a killer and that maybe I should let the blame fall on somebody upstairs.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I understand.”

  Miller sat there and ate his slice of pie in silence after that, never once asking to see the autopsy file wedged between us.

  “All right then,” Miller said, standing up to leave, his plate cleaned of all remnants of apple pie.

  “Don’t you want to know how they died, Miller?”

  Miller stuffed his hands into his pockets and sort of bowed, biting his bottom lip hard until it looked painful, and then shook his head from side to side. “This is what I know about these things,” Miller said. “There ain’t a cause or an effect once they’ve started to rot and such. They’re dead and they’re not coming back. If they were meant to still be alive, if God wanted them here right now, then goddamn it, they’d be here. Time’s up, that’s all.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, suddenly angry with Miller, angry with the DA who wanted a big city detective to run this case, angry with my wife Margaret for dying three years ago and leaving me alone. “There is cause and effect, Miller. People don’t just punch in and punch out. Kids died up there, Miller. Kids. You can’t apply your mumbo jumbo to them. No one deserves that. You know what? You’re wrong, Miller. This isn’t about rotting bodies and old bones. You can’t just toss a blanket over every body you see and pretend that they aren’t someone. Do you know that Miller? Do you know?”

  Miller frowned at me and started backing toward the door. “Acute hemorrhaging of the lungs, and occulation of the blood vessels around the eyes and face, suggesting suffocation. General failure of the major organs due to severe blood loss and the ensuing shock,” Miller said. The words tumbled out of his mouth like he was reading from a textbook. “Wounds consistent with a number of drug related murders in a hundred different towns that aren’t Granite City. I’m sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “I really am.”

  I watched Miller climb into his car, a beat-up El Camino, and drive off. I knew then that I didn’t want to end up like Miller Descent: a hard man unable to shake the horrors from his mind. I also knew that I was halfway there and closing the gap. So, with an envelope filled with the pictures of a dissected family in my hand, I left Lolly’s Diner and headed home, where I knew what I had to do, and where I knew I would not sleep.

  Mr. and Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Pellet were sitting in the lobby of the police station when I came in the next morning. It was chilly that day, and I remember thinking that maybe winter wasn’t over, that Yeach Mountain might once again get a coat of snow. And I thought, seeing Mr. Klein in his linen pants and his crème-colored polo shirt, that maybe my time in Granite City was coming to a close; that I couldn’t bear to see despair in people’s faces anymore. That, most of all, I couldn’t keep on thinking about the daily rituals that still call to people even in their times of need: the soft pleat ironed down Mrs. Klein’s pant leg, the way Mrs. Pellet had put on a nice dress and gold earrings.

  “Been waiting long?” I asked.

  “No,” Mr. Klein said. His voice was low, and I decided that he probably wasn’t long for this place either. “Didn’t get much in the way of rest last night.”

  “I’ve got the autopsies for your son’s family,” I said. “You can read ’em if you want to.”

  Mrs. Klein let out a short sob and squeezed her husband’s arm. Mr. Klein kissed her on the forehead and patted her hand. “Did he suffer, Sheriff?” Mrs. Klein asked.

  “No,” I said. “No, it looks like he died peacefully.”

  “What about my Missy?” Mrs. Pellet asked. “And the kids. What about the kids?”

  “The same,” I said. “I think they got lost in the
woods is all. A real tragedy.” A look of relief passed over their faces, and though I believe they each knew that their children and grandchildren had died terribly, that in fact they’d been butchered, I had helped them in some way. Had eased something in them for at least a moment.

  Lyle walked out then and tapped me on the shoulder. “Dr. DiGiangreco called for you,” he said. “Needs you to call her right away.”

  I told the families to wait for just a little bit longer and I’d get the bodies of their loved ones released. Lyle followed me back to my office.

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” Lyle said. “I thought I heard you tell them their kids died peacefully.”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Morris,” Lyle said, “their damn hands and feet were cut off !”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Lizzie said some DA called her,” Lyle said. “You aware of that?”

  I opened the door to my office and let Lyle stand in the hall. “You talk to your kids lately, Lyle?”

  “You know, Morris, when I can,” Lyle said. “Why?”

  “How about you take today off and drive down and see your daughter,” I said. “Shoot, take the whole week off. Fly out to California and see your son. When was the last time you saw him?”

  Lyle squinted his eyes at me and rolled his tongue against his cheek. “Whatever this is, Morris,” he said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Lizzie answered on the first ring. “They’re all wrapped up and ready to go,” she said.

  “How do they look?” I asked.

  I heard Lizzie sigh on the other end of the line. “I had to use fishing line to sew the boys’ feet back on; Hawkins had some thirty-five-pound test that worked great,” she said. “It should hold for a long time.”

  “I appreciate this Lizzie,” I said. “More than you’ll ever know.”