The Irish Goodbye
Kaspar Totmann
THE IRISH GOODBYE
An Izzy Bishop Mystery 1
© 2018 by Kaspar Totmann
All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novella are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Also by Kaspar Totmann
Snuff: A Horror Novella
The Irish Goodbye
One
The corpse on the slab was male. Approximately thirty-five to forty years of age, by Izzy Bishop’s estimation. White, slightly overweight, close-cropped reddish-brown hair. The left nipple was pierced, through which a steel ring was inserted and held together with a ball clasp. On the right shoulder, a tattoo—USMC. The body belonged to a Marine, or a former one.
The morgue was on the basement floor of the University Medical Center, Stoneridge, just west of the heart of downtown Austin. In less unusual circumstances, the body might have been taken to the Travis County Medical Examiner’s office for examination and possible autopsy, but today the man got a hospital visit for the trouble of having died. The ME, evidently, was overwhelmed with automobile fatalities—hardly uncommon in a Texan college town.
The room was cold and well-lit. To the left was a bank of drawers where the cadavers were stored between 36 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit. Izzy stood at the head of a metal table toward the back, pressing against the runners. Nearer to the swinging doors was another table, presently vacant. All attention was on the star of the afternoon’s show, the bluish-white corpse on table two.
The corpse’s name, according to the chart, was Adam Doakes. Izzy was right about the age, which was given as thirty-seven. His goggles resting on top of his head, Izzy leaned close to inspect the small, dark entry wound on Doakes’ left side.
Forbes watched him through the lenses perched on her narrow, hawkish nose. She said, “What do you see?”
“Notching,” Izzy said. “Change of direction. Relative to the movement of the body and the knife. This was a struggle.”
“Ribs scored?”
“One at least,” Izzy said. “I’d bet on it. Not a pointed weapon, though. Squared off, or possibly split.” He pointed his pen light at the autopsy tech standing by, gazing at the screen of his cell phone. “Everett will see when he cuts him open.”
Everett shrugged.
“Then what makes you say it was a knife?” Forbes asked, leaning back.
“That’s—shit. You’re right. Depending on the depth of the wound, it’s only a few millimeters from where we’re standing. Screwdiver?”
“Usually long enough to do some damage,” she said. “And if he was putting up a fight…”
“He’s Marine Corps,” Izzy pointed out. “I’d say he put up a fight.”
“…then that sucker was twisting around in whatever it hit. Probably the poor guy’s liver. Look at the wound. Sort of a star shape.”
“They found him at home?” Izzy asked, looking back over the chart.
“In his girlfriend’s apartment,” Forbes said. “Alone. Had he called 911, he’d likely be alive now. For some reason he didn’t, and this injury killed him.”
“Maybe the girlfriend tried to take care of him,” Izzy suggested. “Didn’t cut the mustard.”
“I’ll put in a call to look for a screwdriver or something like it. I can’t imagine the attacker would leave it behind—or that it would be overlooked. But I’ve seen stupider things.”
“And the girlfriend?”
“Somebody else’s problem. She’s not on the slab, Bishop.”
Izzy said, “Not today.”
The Forensic Nurse Death Investigator for Travis County, Alana Forbes did not cut a particularly imposing figure. But Izzy knew her, and in knowing her found the diminutive woman a little more imposing every time he assisted her on something like this—be it an autopsy, a body at the scene of discovery, or a living victim capable of giving answers wounds and patterns could not. Even over coffee in fresh scrubs in the hospital cafeteria, Forbes intimidated him nearly as much as she impressed him. Izzy couldn’t exactly say he wanted to be anything like Forbes, but he certainly wanted her title on his nametag and business card someday. Sooner than later.
“Do you take them with you?” he asked, blowing on the coffee in his Styrofoam cup.
“The decedents?” Forbes asked.
Izzy nodded.
Forbes said, “No. Well, almost never. It’s a job, Bishop. An important one, sure. No doubt about that. Kids, sometimes. That can be hard as hell. This guy? We’ll sort it out, figure out who stabbed him, why he just laid there on his couch until he died. Maybe there was a Kardashians marathon on and he didn’t want to miss it.”
Izzy grinned. “Gallows humor,” he said.
“You’re going to need it,” she advised. “More now than just the ER stuff you’re used to. You never got them DOA in there.”
“A lot of them leave that way.”
She nodded. He tried the coffee, but it was still too hot.
“The living hit me harder than the dead,” he said at some length.
“Some folks get sentences they can’t ever shake,” Forbes agreed. “At least the dead ones are free of that.”
“Grim way of looking at things.”
“Get used to grim, my friend,” Forbes said. “You want to be a forensic nurse? That’s the name of the game.”
Izzy exhaled through his nose and sipped the coffee at last.
Trish showed up at a quarter to ten, at which point Izzy noted the time and was marginally impressed that she was less than an hour late. He opened the door and stepped aside to let her into his apartment. She came into the narrow foyer, her sandy blonde, shoulder-length hair mussed around her freckled face, and she gave a sheepish, apologetic smile.
“I spent my day with corpses,” he said, locking the door and crossing the living room in his bare feet. “Who were all on time, if you can believe it.”
Trish delivered a quick peck to his mouth and floated past him into the kitchen, where she set to uncorking an inexpensive bottle of Chardonnay she brought in a brown paper bag.
“On a Tuesday?” Izzy said.
“I want to hear all about it,” she said, ignoring the question and pouring a glass. Izzy filled a water glass at the tap.
“Not much to tell,” he said, sipping his water and sitting beside her on the couch. The one-bedroom apartment was not exactly roomy, but apart from sparse furniture and an ever-expanding collection of records, Izzy did not have much to cramp the place.
“Liar,” Trish said.
“The ER is much better story fodder than the morgue. Today was three bodies. Poking around in entry wounds, collecting trace evidence, that sort of stuff. Not even all that high-tech shit from TV, most of which is total sci-fi, incidentally.”
“I’ve never even seen a dead body,” Trish said.
Izzy sniffed.
“I don’t know how many I’ve seen. I never counted.”
“Does it freak you out at all? Not just the corpses, but the bad stuff that happened to them?”
Izzy smiled and drank some more water. He crossed his legs and said, “No, not really. If it did I wouldn’t be a good candidate for the job I have, never mind the one I’m aiming for.” He narrowed his eyes, gazing blindly ahea
d. “We’re all flesh and blood. Finite organisms like everything else. I’ve dissected pigs and I’ve assisted autopsies. There really isn’t as much difference as you’d think.”
“So people are just pigs to you?”
She showed her teeth to hint at her partial sarcasm. Izzy gave her a look, then set his glass down on the table and leaned over to kiss her.
“Wouldn’t you rather take this pig to bed?” she asked him.
“Couch is fine,” he said.
“Thought you’d be interested to know the investigators did find the murder weapon, which was a Philips-head screwdriver like you suspected, and was right there in the apartment with the body the whole time. It had been thoroughly cleaned and put away. They glossed right over it, but found enough presumptive blood with Fluorescein for a charge.”
Izzy shook his head, the phone cradled against his shoulder, as he filled his travel mug in the kitchen. Even over his own clatter and Forbes’ voice in his ear, he could hear Trish softly snoring in the bedroom. He’d gotten her there eventually, and evidently hadn’t kept her up with his nightmares for once.
“Suspect?” he asked.
“The girlfriend, naturally,” Forbes said. “I doubt much of our work will even make it to trial, apart from the prosecution showing photos to make clear how nasty it was to the jury. I’ll testify, I’m sure. Such fun.”
“Crime of passion?”
He overfilled the cup, frowned at the mess, and reached for a paper towel.
“Doakes was trying to keep her clean. Meth, apparently.”
“Wasn’t working, apparently.”
“Apparently not.”
“Shame,” Izzy said, thinking of his lunch date. Cynthia Ramos, something like a friend, no stranger to a little recreational drug use herself, now and again. He wondered if it would come up, and decided there wasn’t much reason for it to. If she still had a job and a place to live, he’d be mostly satisfied.
“I’ve got an inquest this morning ‘til about noon,” Forbes said, “but I’ll be around after lunch. I’ll try to drop in and see how things are going, if there’s anything you can come work on with me. Just wanted to catch you up.”
“Appreciated, boss.”
“Boss,” she parroted. “Let’s not make that a habit, Bishop.”
“Ten-four.”
He hung up, pocketed the phone, and finished mopping up coffee from the counter, cabinet door, and floor tiles when Trish staggered from the bedroom, her eyes crusty slits.
“Do I have to go?” she asked.
“No. But lock up if you leave.”
“Was that your boss?”
“The FNDI, yes. Not my boss yet.”
“Are you seeing that crackhead today?”
Izzy sighed and made a thin line of his mouth.
“Do you have to?”
“I’m sorry,” Trish said, affecting contriteness. “That was a bit harsher than it sounded in my head.”
“Cynthia is—she’s had a tough go. Way tougher than most people have to deal with.”
“And you’ve seen her naked.”
“Oh for God’s sakes, Trish. I’m a nurse. I see a lot of people in compromising positions.”
“Like this woman you see all the time.”
“Once in a while,” Izzy countered. “To check up on her.”
“Out of hundreds of patients you’ve seen over the years, probably thousands, why her? You don’t just check up on everybody, Iz.”
“Because sometimes it seems like I’m the only one in the world she thinks she can trust. Damn near everyone she’s ever known has let her down, herself included. I helped her put that scumbag in prison, and no one ever did anything like that for her before. Not family, not the police—nobody.”
Knitting her brow, Trish leaned against the fridge and pouted.
“She’s probably in love with you,” she muttered.
“I doubt it,” Izzy said. “And besides, she’s well aware I’m with you. Listen, remember what I said about flesh and blood, and pigs and people, and that shit last night?”
Trish nodded, pouting.
“I think I was dissembling. Coming down from a weird day. I care about people in general but don’t tend to like them much on an individual basis. Most people I meet on a given day are their own worst enemies, but Cynthia? She’s a good person, deep down in there, and I think she just needs a little moral support from time to time to keep her head above water. If I’m able to do that for her, why shouldn’t I?”
“Well,” Trish said, “most people really are pigs.”
“Oink, oink,” Izzy said.
Two
“Isaiah.”
“Hi, Cynthia.”
Izzy touched her shoulder in lieu of a hug, knowing she did not respond well to them, even from him. Though they were both survivors, but he knew no two people progressed the same in the aftermath. For Cynthia, physical contact was largely an anathema. Izzy empathized.
Small in both stature and disposition, she wore her jet black hair long, letting it curl and spiral wildly out of control. She had on a white men’s long-sleeved undershirt on top of which was a black tee shirt with CBGB’s emblazoned across the front. Izzy was comfortably certain she’d never been there.
She already had a soda and a basket of fries in front of her, from which she absent-mindedly plucked one or two at a time and stuffed into her mouth. The table she’d chosen in the burger joint she preferred was way in the back, near the toilets, where she could sit with her back to the wall facing the entrance. Izzy suspected she had an escape plan.
He sat across from her, back to the restaurant.
Cynthia said, “Will Bill Hickok.”
“Shot in the back, playing cards.”
“Dead man’s hand,” she said. “Wasn’t careful.”
“People rarely are.”
“You can sit next to me,” she said, keeping her eyes on the table. “If you want to feel safer.”
“I feel pretty safe,” he told her. “It’s Austin, not Deadwood. And I don’t have enemies.”
“Everybody has enemies,” she said, poking another fry into her mouth. She never used ketchup, or any other condiments. Everything had to be separate, compartmentalized. Coping technique. Izzy had a few of his own, even now, so he could understand.
“Oh? Who are your enemies?”
Cynthia smiled.
“Not you,” she said.
“That leaves about seven billion other people, though.”
“Most of them.”
“That’s a lot.”
She sucked at the straw in her soda in lieu of saying more. The straw slipped from her mouth and slid around to the far side of the large plastic cup. When she reached for it to stick it back in her mouth, Izzy noted the fresh red marks on her otherwise light brown forearm. They ran diagonally one way, from her wrist to her elbow, then cross-hatched all the way back up. He had an impulse to grab the arm before she withdrew it, but held it back.
“Still cutting?” he said instead.
Cynthia shrugged.
“How’s the living situation?” he said, changing the subject.
“Okay,” she said. “Just a room.”
“Other girls? Roommates?”
“Some people.”
“Friends, then?”
“No. I don’t have any friends.”
“I’m your friend,” Izzy said.
“You feel responsible for me,” she answered.
He sat back in his chair, looking at her. She hadn’t met his eyes since he came in. Now the waiter sauntered over, a big lifter with an outmoded flattop, from whom Izzy ordered an iced tea and a Caesar salad.
“I did,” he said to Cynthia, once the waiter left. “When we first met. And after, at the trial. I was responsible for you in those senses.”
“See?”
“But he’s in prison now. All of that is over—all but the healing, I suspect.”
“So you’re still responsible.”
/> “No,” Izzy said. “That would make me your psychiatrist, which I’m not. I was only your nurse in the ER. Now I am your friend.”
“My friend,” she whispered, inspecting a fry. It was broken in half, so she discarded it on the table beside the basket and opted for a whole one.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to fuck me?” she said, and finally her gaze met his. Her brown eyes opened wide, as though she was afraid to blink and miss anything.
“Cynthia…”
“I’d probably let you. But I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like it at all and you should know that.”
The tea and salad arrived while Izzy gaped. Cynthia returned her attention to the straw, her arms tight at her sides and hands in her lap.
When the waiter left, Izzy said, “That’s a lot like ‘Do you still beat your wife?’ A loaded question with no good or satisfactory answer.”
“That’s called a complex question fallacy,” she said, almost robotically.
“And the simple answer you’re getting is, no, I don’t see you that way at all, and I wouldn’t even if I wasn’t involved with somebody.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to anyone.”
“It does to me.”
“Are you gay, Isaiah?”
“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
He laughed, nervously, and got to work spooning dressing over the salad.
“These roommates of yours,” he said, “both guys and girls?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“People come and go. I don’t really talk much to anyone.”
“Sounds like a squat.”
Cynthia shrugged again.
“If you need a better situation, there are agencies here in town that…”
“It’s fine,” she interrupted him.
“Well, if you decide it isn’t fine, you know my number.”
“It’s fine.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” he said. “That’s all.”
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 1