Dead Body Language

by Penny Warner

  I’m taking some liberties with American Sign Language here. Basically a few superfluous words are omitted and the syntax is reordered—it somewhat resembles Chinese. But that was the gist of it. What he actually signed was more like, “None, Fox, Crow, none. Sorry. Got few Lulu—Look! 1–9-5–6 B-E-T-T-Y, V-E-R-O-N-I-C-A. Whoa! You want, you?”

  Miah does a great job of matching facial expression to content, which helps with comprehension—head shakes, eyebrows raised, that sort of thing. He gets his point across most of the time and that’s what counts. To tell you the truth, I have a little crush on him. He has these long, smooth, lanky fingers that were born to sign, among other things. So what if he’s only twenty-five.

  I don’t really need to use signs with Miah. Most of the time I can understand his speech, when he isn’t trying to shake his long forelock out of his face. But we primarily sign to each other to give him more practice. Part of the job requirement at my newspaper was the knowledge of sign language, but there weren’t a lot of folks in the area who knew ASL. Miah was willing to learn, had taken a course down at the local community college, and in the past six months had become proficient enough to interpret for me in most situations. He was a natural.

  “Both Lulus have Witch Hazel,” he signed, crooking his finger across his nose in an unsuccessful attempt to make the sign for “witch.”

  I laughed. “Thanks a lot. You just called me ‘ugly.’ ” I showed him the correct way to move his crooked index finger to make “witch”—arched outward from his nose, not dragged horizontally across the middle of his face. He shook his head and spoke without signing. “Damn! I always get those two mixed up!” Then he made the sign for “pea brain,”

  I unlocked my office door and asked Miah to take down phone messages and start typing ads while I checked my desk for the damn mystery puzzle I had scrawled on the restaurant napkin. I’d had a great idea at the reservoir about how to kill the high school principal without having to unlock the door and was ready to finish it up. But the search proved useless—the napkin seemed to have mysteriously disappeared, until it occurred to me where I might have left it.

  I knocked on Boone Joslin’s office door and turned the knob. This time the door opened. I pushed it slowly—remembering the surprise I’d received the last time I had burst into Boone’s office.

  But it was the smell, not the sight, that stopped me cold this time.

  “Whoa!” I shouted, then inhaled again as if it were my final breath. “Is that sourdough bread? I haven’t had real San Francisco sourdough since I left the city! Where’d you get that?”

  Dan Smith was hovering over the hot buttered bread and a file folder on Boone’s desk, tapping his pencil in a rhythmic beat. There was a trace of butter on his mustache that he licked off as he looked up.

  I knew the radio was playing because I could feel the vibrations of a bass guitar or drum through the floorboards.

  “Murrf,” I think he said. I don’t know what it meant. He was a little hard to read with his mouth full of sourdough bread. He gulped down the large bite with a swallow of cola, wiped his mustache and lips with the back of his hand, and extended the remainder of the loaf to me. “Want a bite?”

  I tried to shake my head, but I don’t think I looked very sincere. “Where’d you get it? Not in Flat Skunk.”

  “Stopped overnight in San Francisco on my way here. It’s day-old, but I heated it up in Boone’s microwave. Tastes like fresh.” He set the torn loaf down next to the open file and steam wafted up, along with the pungent aroma. Warm bread. I tried not to drool.

  Boone’s office was practically a home-away-from-home, complete with all the necessities—a microwave oven, convertible sofa bed, exercise bike (“like new, never used”), portable TV and VCR, and Nintendo Entertainment System. Everything a good private investigator needs.

  I moved in slowly, my attention temporarily distracted from the bread by a legal-size envelope on the desk. It was tinted the shade of raspberry sherbet and almost obscured by the file Dan had been reading. Peeking out from the envelope were enough twenty-dollar bills to wallpaper my office.

  “I … I think I lost my napkin in here.” With great effort, I tore my eyes from the money and glanced around the room, which looked considerably tidier than earlier in the day.

  “You need a handkerchief?” he asked tentatively, pulling a white hanky from a deep Levi’s pocket.

  “No, I wrote something on a paper napkin from the café. I thought I had it with me when I stopped by this morning and now I can’t seem to find it.” In my once-over search for the napkin my eyes fell upon the cash again. I looked up at Dan Smith.

  He did a quick body search, then shrugged. “Sorry. Seems like quite a few things have disappeared around here lately.”

  “No word from your brother?” I asked, edging toward the desk for a closer look at the bills.

  He frowned and rubbed his jaw. “Nothing.” He looked at the envelope, then at me. “It’s five thousand dollars.”

  I picked up the envelope. Five thousand dollars. That rang a bell.

  “Where’d it come from?” A familiar perfume rose from the envelope.

  “Believe it or not, I found it in the microwave when I went to zap my bread. Boone’s always hiding his stuff in strange places, ever since he was a kid and Mom found his Playboy collection in the all-too-predictable bottom drawer. I assume this is what our mysterious office visitor was looking for. Guess he missed it.”

  I frowned. Something wasn’t adding up. Too many odd things had occurred since Dan Smith had arrived in Skunk.

  “Did you call the sheriff?”

  He scratched his beard again. “No. I didn’t think it would be a good idea. Like I said, Boone doesn’t like people going through his stuff, especially the cops. But I am getting a little concerned about my brother. That’s a lot of money to have lying around. Why didn’t he take it with him?”

  I studied Dan Smith as he stroked his mustache back and forth with a thick, tanned finger. The stroking was disconcerting. “You think the money has anything to do with that file you’ve been looking at?” I indicated the folder on the desk.

  He picked it up and closed the cover.

  “I found it on the floor near the filing cabinet. Nothing inside, only ‘Whiskey Slide’ written on the cover and a name on the inside. The rest of the files seem intact. I’m afraid it doesn’t tell me much.”

  “What name?”

  He looked puzzled.

  “What name was written inside?” I repeated, more insistently.

  “Lisa … uh …” He pulled open the cover. “Risa Longo.”

  Risa Longo! The woman Lacy Penzance was searching for. The long-lost sister. Had Boone found her in Whiskey Slide?

  “I think you should have called the sheriff,” I said, watching him for a reaction. His face remained blank and he had stopped rubbing his mustache. “I realize Boone has a habit of going off for days when he’s working on a case. But this—this is different. His office has been broken into. One of his files has been tampered with. And all that cash …”

  Dan’s eyes shifted suddenly toward the door, and a chill ran up my back. I turned around abruptly.

  Miah was standing in the doorway looking very upset.

  “What?” I signed, turning my palm up and shaking my open hand forcefully.

  “Phone. Someone—” He signed without mouthing the words, presumably so Dan wouldn’t understand him. But the curious expression on his face told half the story. “Woman. Refuse leave name. Said, tell you run ad—not! Sounded like she crying, upset, much. Finish, hung up.”

  I turned back to Dan to see if he had caught any of this. Some of the signs were obvious—telephone, crying, hung up—but he looked more puzzled than Miah. That was fine. Miah and I had an understanding. When talking business in front of others, we don’t use speech.

  “What’s up?” Dan asked.

  “Uh, got a phone call. From … my mother. Her car … broke down, you know
how it is.”

  Dan didn’t move.

  “Gotta go,” I said bluntly. I pulled off a small hunk of bread, then followed Miah back to my office.

  It was probably Lacy Penzance—she was the only advertiser who could have been upset about the ad she placed, unless the woman with the lost poodle had heard bad news. The rest of the ads were the usual collection of garage sales, help wanted, and run-of-the-mill lost-and-found. I keyed in a computer command and watched Lacy’s ad appear on the screen.

  “Damn! I didn’t get her phone number when she was in this morning,” I said to myself out loud, then turned to Miah. “Try the phone book. If you can’t find her number, maybe it’ll be in that frog-jumping committee file. Or the Friends of the Pioneer Cemetery file. If you find it, give her a call and I’ll tell you what to say.”

  Bless Miah—he had some surprising talents. He got the number by calling Mickey Arnold at the sheriff’s office. Mickey was like an older brother to Miah, what with the sheriff being Miah’s father and all. It didn’t hurt that the deputy had a little crush on me either. He was a great source of information at times.

  Miah dialed Lacy’s number but there was no answer. What, I wondered, was her problem now? Had she found Risa Longo herself? Was that why she was canceling the ad?

  Reluctantly I told Miah to pull the ad, then I gave up on Lacy Penzance for the time being.

  By seven that evening half of the inside pages were neatly ready to go to press—mostly ads. In the next two days I had to finish the front and back pages—mostly news—plug in a few fillers, and complete that damn mystery puzzle, which had become a mystery in itself. Although everything was done by desktop publishing on my PC, it would take me all of Thursday to add the finishing headers and footers, graphics, and fonts. Then I had to get it over to the printer in time to publish by Friday night for distribution Saturday morning.

  It might be tedious work to some, but I loved every minute spent at the computer creating my newspaper. Being a deaf student in a hearing high school, I was prepared primarily for the secretarial route. My teachers thought that was about all I could do in life with my disability. But I mastered the computer, read every manual ever written for my word processing and desktop printing programs, and watched my growing expertise open doors at a number of interesting jobs. That, along with a degree in journalism, helped me get the position at the Chronicle. I’m convinced the computer will change the Deaf community’s way of life in the very near future.

  I grabbed my backpack and rode my bike the half-mile home, eager for dinner.

  My home, if you can call it that, is a reconverted fifties restaurant once known as the Claim Jump Diner. It was owned by my grandparents, Jack and Constance Westphal, until they died a few years back. The place had sat empty for longer than that before I took it over. I’ve been as faithful as I could be to the original art moderne style, restoring and recovering the small booths and stools in red-and-white Naugahyde, refinishing the countertop with swirled black-and-white Formica, and replacing the peeling linoleum with black-and-white tiles.

  Old Life magazines helped a lot with decorating ideas. So did my grandmother, who had saved a lot of the original decor in storage. Only the kitchen has been modernized, with all the latest accoutrements—dishwasher, microwave, espresso maker. You want to take authenticity only so far in the kitchen.

  I even kept the fifties look in the back room where I live and sleep, accessed through swinging doors in the kitchen. The entire place consists only of the diner and the small back area that provides my living quarters, complete with a tiny bathroom. I have a print couch that looks like a Disney version of the space age—something the Jetsons would covet. A blond wood couch frame with jutting arms and stubby blond legs supports four cushions covered in circular design fabric. A couple of wing chairs flank the couch, alongside two blond end tables. The almost matching coffee table sports a heavy marble ashtray, now used for holding chocolate candy that I take for medicinal purposes. I found a couple of black cone-shaped pole lamps at a garage sale, and an old RCA Victor TV console that I gutted and replaced with a new Zenith screen inside that features captioned viewing. Though I haven’t been able to realize it yet, my dream is to open the diner as a haven for the mocha-less of Flat Skunk. Ultimately, I’d divide my time between my two loves, the Eureka! and caffeine.

  Opening the door, I got an exuberant greeting from my other love, my signal dog Casper, a cream-colored Siberian husky who “hears” for me, and responds to sign language when she’s in the mood. After a hands-and-knees workout with the dog, I helped myself to a stomachful of leftovers which I shared with her, and a hot lilac-scented bubble bath which I didn’t. I changed into a long oversized T-shirt, and plopped on the couch with an ice-cold Sierra Nevada ale. Thinking momentarily of Dan Smith, I made an uncompleted TTY phone call to my ex-boyfriend, then downed the beer to take the edge off the loneliness. The last thing I remembered was lying on my couch watching Jimmy Stewart peer out his rear window at a murderer.

  When I awoke the next morning to the flashing lights of daybreak television news, with kinks in my neck, arm, and side, I was staring at our own Sheriff Elvis Mercer waving an arm in a long shot of Flat Skunk’s Pioneer Cemetery.

  I sat up, checked the time—7:35—and tried to read the captions as they danced across the bottom of the screen, but I only managed to catch the wrap.

  “I’m Robert Goll and this is Channel Five News.”

  I stood as the story ended abruptly with a freeze-frame. A very lifeless body lay on a stretcher next to a waiting ambulance. A corner inset on the screen featured a snapshot of the victim’s familiar face.

  It was Lacy Penzance.

  Lacy?

  I dug frantically into the couch pillows for the remote. I found it under my left foot and switched the channels, hoping to catch another report. Channels 3 and 7 featured flapping mouths, serious eyebrow work, and plenty of photographs of Lacy Penzance, but neither station was captioned at that hour.

  What had happened to her? I had just seen her the previous day, and now she was—dead? God! She’d been asking for my help … it was unthinkable!

  It took only a few more seconds to realize I could cover the story for my paper—if I got myself to the sheriff’s office fast enough. The hell with my column on frog fricassees. This was a real story, the solid kind of story I had been wanting to write since I got here. But did it have to be this? The death of Lacy Penzance, who already seemed to have her share of sorrow lately with the death of her husband such a short time ago. I would have settled for a nice sex scandal or drug bust. This wasn’t just a story. This was someone’s life. Someone’s death.

  I headed down the hall for a quick change, ran brushes over my hair and teeth, and washed my face, adding the becoming mandatory moisturizer and makeup. Relatively clean and markedly fresh, I rummaged through my clean laundry pile for just the right outfit to wear to a sheriff’s office. Pulling on a pair of brown jeans, I searched until I found a long-sleeved beige cotton sweater that I felt conveyed the casual confidence of an investigative reporter. I slipped on my black Converse All Stars and black blazer, grabbed some muffins and a carton of juice from the fridge, poured Casper the dog food equivalent of a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, and hopped on my bike.

  The most populated part of Flat Skunk is Pioneer Cemetery, where the interred bodies outnumber the living residents. Its five acres are a nationally registered historic site and attract almost as many tourists as the depleted gold mines and booming cowboy bars.

  I rode through town and cruised slowly past the cemetery where the televised action had taken place, honoring the yellow “Police Line—Do Not Cross” barrier. The crowds and reporters had dissipated, and only a few town residents remained on the periphery, pointing, whispering, and shaking their heads. I turned around and rode back to the sheriff’s office at the other end of town.

  The Flat Skunk sheriff’s office, more like an outpost, is housed in an old brick building that
was once an assay office. Sheriff Mercer uses the barred section on one side as a temporary holding cell for the few crooks and criminals we get on occasion—mostly drunks. The other side is a large room taken up by three desks: the sheriff’s, Deputy Arnold’s, and the dispatcher’s. No one was in the office when I opened the door and let myself in, but the smell of lingering cigarette smoke told me someone was nearby.

  I pulled the bran muffins and orange juice from my backpack, set them on the sheriff’s desk, and called his name. Then I scanned the top of his desk for information that was probably none of my business. I spied two burglary reports, two assaults, one DUI, and a handful of business cards from the local television stations.

  Nothing about Lacy Penzance.

  I lifted a few more papers and spotted the Polaroids tucked into a large manila envelope. Suddenly the scent of cigarette smoke grew stronger, so I snatched my hands away from the pile, and turned to greet Sheriff Elvis Mercer, forcing a casual grin.

  “Hi, Sheriff.” I sat on the corner of his desk trying not to look guilty. He came out of the bathroom buckling his holster and tucking in his shirt, the cigarette dangling precariously from his lips, and greeted me with a wave of his hand when it finally became free.

  The sheriff’s hands were smooth, hairless, and nicely manicured; not what you’d expect from a person who was supposed to whip a lot of butt, slice a lot of karate chops, or fire a bunch of high-powered weapons in the course of duty. These were office hands that typed reports, answered phones, and patted victims of stolen bicycles.

  “C.W.! Didn’t know you were here!” he said, removing the cigarette from his lips and dousing it in an old cup of coffee on the deputy’s desk. He smoothed his wandering eyebrows, wiped something from the corner of his mouth, then went to his desk and began to search among the pile of papers.

  In the short time I’d been in Flat Skunk, Sheriff Mercer and I had become friends for a number of reasons. One, I needed information for the weekly police blotter and he graciously supplied it, as long as I spelled his name correctly.