We settled into his musty old office looking out on, well, absolutely nothing but a brick wall. He had a metal desk with four or five Rolodexes on top, a smattering of reports which I assumed represented the recently deceased, and the standard-issue cup of pens and pencils. Shoot me if I ever have one of those on my desk. Actually, forget the shoot me part. That’s not really funny anymore.
“So what in the hell are you doing back here at the state morgue?” he asked me. He had a kind of resigned look in his eyes that people get when they work with the dead rather than the living, as if he had a better understanding of our ultimate destiny than the rest of us.
“Good question,” I replied. “The paper’s starting to feel like a morgue currently, so I figured I’d cut out the middleman.”
He didn’t laugh. Hey, no one bats a thousand percent at the comedy game. But I deserve to be cut a little bit of slack these days. You think for a second that Lyer has ever done the underwater breast stroke in a Florida swamp?
I said, “I’m trying to get my hands on some of the reports surrounding John Cutter’s death and was hoping you might be able to help me out.” Direct, factual, easy.
Lyer cocked his head slightly to the left and asked, “That was about five years ago, right?”
I nodded.
“Might be on the computer,” he said as he rolled his chair toward the keyboard and pecked away for a moment.
“John Ellis Cutter?” he asked as he bore in on the screen.
It felt inexplicably strange to hear his full formal name said aloud these many years later. “Yes,” I replied.
He pressed some more buttons and watched as some information spilled across his screen.
I regarded his features for a moment—fair-skinned, blond, to the point of appearing washed out, as if he had no discernible features at all. Put it this way, his hair and forehead were the same color. I’d guess he was about forty years old, but could be one of those ageless guys—and I don’t mean that in a good way—who was as easily thirty as he was fifty. If boring had a face, it might well be that of Josh Lyer, and if it had a style of dress, it would probably be the thin navy blazer and the tired gray slacks he was wearing that very day.
Lyer said, reading from his computer, “Okay, died on April 24—that’s today—at his condominium at the Four Seasons Hotel, sixty-one years old at the time, determined by assistant medical examiner Justin Cobain of this office to be caused by a heart attack.”
He looked at me to see if this was everything I needed, and added, “This should have all been on the death certificate, I believe.”
“Yeah, it was,” I said. “I was wondering if you had any individual test results in there.”
He turned his attention back to the computer screen. He was a tidy man, obsessively neat, even, most comfortable dealing with the types of finite numbers—heart weight, blood alcohol content, and the like—upon which doctors of death usually base their findings.
“Like what,” he said, matter-of-factly while he scrolled down the computer and brought his face closer to the screen. “You want the kidney sizes, the stomach contents, the eye dilation measurements?”
I hesitated, not wanting to play my trump so soon, but I didn’t see much of a choice. I said, “I was wondering what the toxicology tests say.”
“Ah, the toxicology tests,” he said, giving me a painful W.C. Fields imitation. He seemed to be having a little bit of fun, which struck me as ghoulish. You work in the coroner’s office, you take fun wherever you can find it, I guess. “Let’s take a look.”
He continued to scroll down the screen, peering hard and silently at the words and numbers. You could have heard a liver drop. Luckily we didn’t.
After what mystery writers—and bad newspaper reporters—might call a pregnant pause, he kept his eyes fixed on the monitor and said, “I don’t see any toxicology test results.” He looked across the desk at me and asked, “Do you know for a fact that there were tests done?”
I hesitated again before saying, “Well, I just kind of assumed so.”
He looked back at his screen. “No, I don’t see it. That doesn’t mean for certain that the tests weren’t done. They could be in his file and just weren’t entered into the computer.”
One of the first things any young reporter learns in the newspaper business is that there’s always another hoop to jump through before certitude can be reached, always another file someplace else, always another person to call. If you’re looking for a John Jones and there are nine of them in the phone book and one has an unlisted number, rest assured that’s the one you need.
“Where’s the file? Can we get a look at it?” Notice the use of the wordwe, which is by no means an accident. One of the more effective tools of the trade is to subscribe others in your needs, especially others in a position to help, such that they’ll see personal benefit in finding information for you.
Lyer grimaced in thought as he stared across the room. “I think they’re in the basement. It depends how long we keep them here before we ship them over to the state archive.”
He abruptly got up and said, “I might as well go check it out.”
“Can I join you?” I asked, standing up.
His albino-like features flashed darker with indecision. He wavered for a fraction of a second. Then he said, “Sure, c’mon.”
We both strode out of his office and onto the rickety old elevator at the end of the dank hallway, then down to the musty basement. If the rest of the upstairs was as bad as this, just imagine what the cellar was like. The lighting was poor to the point of being bleak, the walls bare concrete, the floors unadorned by even so much as a braided mat. I kept looking for rats, and because of that, saw little wisps of movement out of the corners of my eyes.
We walked down a warren of hallways and ended up in front of a room blocked off by a floor-to-ceiling chain-link fence. Lyer fingered through his key ring, found the right key and opened the metal door. We both stepped inside. He walked back out and over to a nearby wall, where he flicked on a set of fluorescent lights.
As the lights slowly brightened with a pointed hum, I saw that we were in a sort of cage-like place where manila files lined several rows of shelves all along the periphery and in a couple of rows in the middle. The odor was of mold and old paper, of history. Every file represented another death, and since they were here in the coroner’s office, a family tragedy of some sort, with anguish and tears and years of inevitable regret.
None of which seemed to mean a damned thing to Josh Lyer. He had a pen pressed against his lips as he mumbled, “John Ellis Cutter. John Ellis Cutter. I’ll bet it’s aisle four.”
He walked ahead of me into a long, dark, narrow row of files that looked to be arranged by date of death. You go through life marked by a birthday. You go through eternity marked by a death day. Go figure.
He rifled his hand along some files, then pulled one out and opened it up. As he did, I saw the typewritten sticker placed on the cover: John Ellis Cutter. I got a chill on the back of my neck.
He read it in silence in the dim light of aisle four in the cellar of the medical examiner’s building while I stood there like a statue, waiting, wondering, hoping. For what, I didn’t know, but I didn’t know much these days, which was the essential problem, my core dilemma.
Finally, he looked up at me like a doctor holding a lung x-ray. “It doesn’t say here that there were any toxicology tests done. That’s why there was nothing on the computer.”
“If tests were ordered, would that order be listed there?”
I was trying to seek information while not revealing what I already knew.
He flipped through the few sheets of paper that were in the surprisingly thin file and said, “I don’t see any orders for tests here, but if there was an order, I can’t even guarantee that it would be in here.”
“Where else would they be?”
“Tough to say.”
A classic, bureaucratic answer, representative of a
classic bureaucracy. Even the dead get burdened by the absurdities of government.
“Are the crime scene—I mean, death scene—photographs in there?”
My mind flipped back to Hank Sweeney sitting at that cheap little table in his tidy side yard in the grotesquely hot Florida sun, telling me casually about all the evidence he had collected in his whirlwind tour of John Cutter’s apartment.
Lyer looked over at me sharply, his eyes uncharacteristically bright even in the gloom.
He asked, “You know that there were pictures taken?”
“I just assume. Isn’t that standard?”
“Sometimes, sometimes not. There is no standard.” He looked through the papers again and said, “I don’t see any pictures in here. I can’t tell if there were any taken.”
“You mind if I look at the file?”
He hesitated, looking from me to the folder, and back to me, before he held it reluctantly in front of him. “I guess you’re not just press, but almost kin in this case.”
I gingerly opened the folder and came across the death certificate, which stated that John Ellis Cutter died of cardiac arrest. I flipped that over and saw another sheet that listed all the autopsy results—weights of vital organs and the like. I skimmed down with my index finger toward the bottom. Where it listed, “Toxicology results,” there was only white space. I flipped that sheet and there was only one other page that had Justin Cobain’s signature and the time and date of the autopsy.
In the entire file, no mention of suicide, no reference to foul play. Maybe John Cutter’s death was as straightforward as it seemed. Still, why weren’t the tests done as Hank Sweeney ordered?
I handed it back to him and asked, “Do you guys hold onto the actual evidence anywhere else?”
“It’s tough to say whether there’d even be any evidence in this case. It was ruled a heart attack, so anything they had they probably just discarded shortly after the autopsy. But when there is evidence to be stored, we keep it”—at this point, he turned and waved the folder toward the entrance to the cage—“in there, in the archive vault. We’ll hold onto some stuff in there for twenty years or more.”
He said that last sentence with some pride in his voice, though I’ll be damned if I could figure out why.
I asked, “You mind if we check in there to see if there’s anything worthwhile?”
He immediately shook his head in a self-satisfied, I’m-a-ninth-grade-girl-and-I-sit-in-the-front-row-and-raise-my-hand-all-the-time-because-I-know-all-the-answers kind of way. Why is it that I’m not a violent person, yet I find myself nearly overcome by a strong desire to punch just about everyone I come in contact with lately?
“Can’t. Even I’m prohibited from that room without proper clearance. These files are as far as I can go before I have to get authorization from one of the assistant medical examiners. It would be chaos otherwise.”
Chaos. Yeah, right. Like a regular Grand Central Station down here with every Tom, Dick, and Jack Flynn coming and going to find out the hidden truths about their publishers’ deaths.
“Can we go get authorization?” Even to me, thewe was starting to fade in its impact.
He turned around and put the file back up on the shelf. I thought about trying to steal it, because it seems like that’s what people do in musty archives that are filled with intrigue and a sense of death. But the file was worthless for what it contained, important only for what it didn’t say.
“Look, Jack, there’s nothing else. This looks to be a cut-and-dried case of a death by natural causes—a heart attack. I don’t think there was any evidence to store, and if there was, we certainly wouldn’t have held onto it for this long. This should all be good news for you, no?”
I didn’t say anything, pondering, as I was, how to get into that evidence locker.
Lyer said, “I’ve got to get back to work.”
Liar.
We headed out of the cage. He locked it up and flipped the lights out. Then we walked silently back down the concrete hall, to the elevator. We both got out at the lobby level, and I thanked him profusely for his time. I casually asked if there happened to be a side or back exit that I could use. Well, all right, there’s really no way to ask that question casually, but he did me the favor of ignoring the obvious and directed me to an employee entrance in the rear. Surrounded by death and nagged by the memory of the mysterious gunman the prior morning, I had a strange feeling about what was to come.
Outside, in a morbid alley where I suspected hearses often called in the middle of the night, I still had the odor of deteriorating documents in my hair and skin. What I didn’t have was any better sense of what had happened in John Cutter’s apartment at the Four Seasons on this very day five years before.
Or maybe I did and just didn’t know it yet.
Fourteen
THE DINING ROOM OFthe University Club was filled with the clink of fine china and the gentle chatter of the working rich as I glided through the front doors and up to the bar, where Lou, the nation’s foremost mixologist, was ready to fulfill my libational desires. This being a lunch, I ordered a Coke.
“Sorry about your publisher,” Lou said, sliding me a tumbler filled with ice and soda. “I know you two were tight.”
He knows a lot more than that. Lou, all five feet and nine inches of him, knows my likes, my dislikes, my ambitions, my fears, my desires, and my secrets. Not that I’ve ever told him. Lou, he just knows. It’s what he does, which is what makes him as great as he is.
“Thank you,” I replied.
“You have a visitor waiting for you,” he said, nodding toward the end of the bar. With a bemused look, he added, “I told him cell phones are banned in here, but he ignored me.”
I walked down to the far end, and of course, there was Mongillo, his enormous girth squeezed tightly into a booth as he said to someone on the other end of the line, “It’s either you or the other guy who’s going down. You decide.”
He saw me coming and abruptly said into the phone, “Gotta go.”
To me, “Hey, Fair Hair. Christ, you smell like shit. You moonlighting at a funeral home?”
Kind of, but I didn’t feel like getting into it right now. I sat on the other side of the booth. Lou came out from behind the bar and handed us a couple of lunch menus. I said to Mongillo, “Tell me you have something.”
“Issue one, Lance Randolph. I’ve been on the telephone all morning with every district attorney in Massachusetts. A couple of them tell me they were surprised—meaning, suspicious—when Randolph’s gubernatorial campaign put out word that he had the best prosecution record in the state. The truth is, they just didn’t think he was all that good. Now they’re not saying he was bad—just not the best.”
Lou returned and we both ordered burgers, medium. Mongillo asked for a glass of pinot noir. Some things in life you just can’t figure.
He continued, “Randolph jumped so far ahead so fast in the polls that these guys felt they couldn’t call him into question, because most of them are Democrats, and they didn’t want to look like they were challenging their own candidate. And as you’ve learned, these rates are hard to quantify.”
Don’t I know it. It took several weeks of sometimes arduous, but usually tedious work, poring over court documents, annual reviews, and state records, trying to put some semblance of a conviction rate together. Bizarrely, there is no clearinghouse for the statistics. What I had might be good enough to put in print, but the numbers still felt soft to me. I wanted anecdotes and quotes to support my cause.
I said, “We need to put something in the newspaper by the end of the week. It’s not an option to sit on this.”
Mongillo nodded. His cell phone rang, and not just any ring but a Hungarian marching song. Half the dining room looked over at us in disgust, as if I’d just cracked a lewd Pilgrim joke. “Turn that damned thing off,” I whispered.
“Sure. And take this knife here and disembowel me.”
He punched a button on th
e phone and it went silent. He said, “We’ll be in the paper. Let’s start to sketch something out at the computer today and see how fast we can put it together. Randolph have any clue this is coming?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t asked him about it yet, or any of his people, but word might have gotten back to him from one of the courthouses where I’ve been researching.”
The burgers arrived with Lou’s usual aplomb. Mongillo lovingly spread mustard, mayonaisse, and ketchup on his roll and his fries. I bit into mine plain.
He said before taking his first bite, “Issue two, Terry Campbell. I did a full clip search on him. Serious guy. Rich guy. Conservative guy. Some people say a deadly guy. He plays for keeps, that’s for sure. Ask the union out in Columbus. According to the stories, he bought the paper one day, and the head of the pressmen’s union was found dead of an alleged suicide the next day. The union guy was a tough son of a bitch who planned to fight Campbell tooth and nail, and then he’s gone.”
Mongillo started in on his food. It looked like he was holding one of those little White Castle burgers, his hands are so big.
I said, “Did you check his political and 501C contributions?”
“No, bro, I’m so fucking new at this game that unless I have a nationally acclaimed superstar like yourself telling me exactly when I should remove my hands from my sweaty balls and precisely what numbers to dial on the phone, I’m liable to just sit there like a drooling goddamned idiot until dinnertime, at which point I’m more than fully equipped to handle myself.”
I mean, is that really necessary?
I chose to ignore the quiet outburst, and asked, “What’d you find?”
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