The Death of Blue Mountain Cat

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  The glass panes in the security door were intact, but the lock was broken. Thinnes and Oster entered a pumpkin-orange stairwell grayed with grime. Each landing was lit by a sash window—two-and-a-half by five feet, with an old, ornate, cast-iron radiator below it. The wooden steps and door and window frames were blackened by the same accumulation of dirt and old varnish as the woodwork in the lobby. A gaudy, threadbare striped carpet clung to the steps.

  Thinnes took them two at a time out of habit. He ended up waiting for Oster on the third-floor landing, noticing—really for the first time—how out of shape his partner was. When Oster finally got to the top, he had to lean over the landing rail, resting on his forearms and breathing hard for several minutes, before he was ready to face the mother. He wiped a glaze of sweat from his face and neck with a handkerchief.

  Thinnes rapped on the door of 3B, and it opened a crack. He could see a chain and a pale blue eye. He held his star up.

  A woman’s voice said, “If it’s about Rory, I ain’t seen him since he went to jail.” Her accent was vaguely Southern. One of the city’s scores of Appalachian immigrants. A hillbilly.

  “Could we come in, ma’am?”

  The door closed, and he could hear her fumbling with the chain. She opened the door six, then eight inches but didn’t move to let them in.

  Caucasian. Five five. Rail thin. No makeup. Washed-out blond hair. It had been a while since she’d dyed it; the dark roots outlined a center part. Thinnes wondered why she’d chosen such a lackluster color. He guessed her age about forty-five, but an old forty-five. Marking time. Ground down by poverty or poor health or loss—he didn’t want to know. She wore a faded flowered housedress and cheap slippers of a clashing pattern. She looked wary, fearful but resigned, as if she’d been expecting bad news all her life and was seldom disappointed. Thinnes had met her many times before. Victims’ kin.

  He didn’t try to sympathize. Her kind was different. They may have been created equal, may even have been born equal, but a lifetime of living without hope had changed them into something else, something smaller and meaner than most people or than what they, themselves, might have been. Knowing that kept him from having delusions about making a difference. He was doing his job. Nothing more he could do.

  He said, “Are you Mrs. Emmalynn Wilson?”

  Her right hand gripped the doorjamb above her shoulder. It was rough skinned and heavy veined, with enlarged joints. “Somethin’ happen to Len?”

  “Not that I know of. Len your husband?”

  She seemed to relax. She nodded.

  “Are you the mother of a Jolene Wilson, North Leavitt?”

  It seemed to take her a minute to understand the question, then her initial panic seemed to return in spades. “Oh, Lord! Not Jolene!” She sagged away from the doorway, letting the door gape open.

  Thinnes reached to touch, then take hold of her forearm. “Mrs. Wilson, maybe you’d better sit down.”

  She backed into the room, pulling her arm free with an absent sort of annoyance that didn’t seem to apply specifically to Thinnes. He followed her—not too closely.

  She couldn’t seem to meet his eyes. “What happened to my baby?”

  There was no way to break it gently—nothing soft about homicide. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Wilson. Jolene’s been murdered.”

  He waited. The first stage of grief is disbelief—denial, the shrinks called it. Thinnes called it shock. Emmalynn Wilson looked like she’d been poleaxed. He looked around. The room was clean but bare, symptomatic of poverty of the spirit if not actual lack of money. There were no pictures, no family mementos. A reclining chair posted in front of a thirty-two-inch TV set told him plenty about the Wilsons.

  Thinnes took Emmalynn’s arm and steered her to the faded couch at right angles to the recliner’s line of sight. She moved like an automaton. “Mrs. Wilson,” he said, as he settled her on the couch, “is there someone I can call for you?”

  Oster, who’d followed Thinnes in, crossed the room and disappeared through a doorway at the far side.

  “Mrs. Wilson,” Thinnes persisted, “would you like me to call your husband?”

  She seemed to find the question puzzling. She shook her head. “Be soon enough when he gits here.”

  Why not? The girl had been dead two days already.

  Oster reappeared with two glasses. One was three-quarters full of water, the other had what looked like a double shot of bourbon in the bottom. He offered her the latter glass.

  The woman took it, sniffed it. Her expression told Thinnes Len was probably a drinker and that his wife didn’t approve.

  “Medicinal,” Oster said.

  Emmalynn shuddered but took it and swallowed the contents in a single swig. Oster took the glass and handed her the water.

  “Mrs. Wilson,” Thinnes repeated, “is there someone we can call for you?”

  She had to think for a minute. “Marge. Downstairs.”

  Even before the double shot took effect, questioning her was like interrogating a drunk. Her answers came after pauses long enough to make him wonder if she’d heard him, and not all the answers made sense. Gradually, he ascertained that Jolene Wilson had been a medical transcriber, the first—and only—in her family to go to college. She’d been a good girl. “The best thing I ever done,” to quote her mother. She’d had no close female friends her mother knew of. She’d dated several men from work—none extensively. Her mother couldn’t even imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.

  Thinnes finally sent Oster downstairs to find Marge, who turned out to be the building manager. Then the two of them escaped the apartment with relief.

  “God!” Oster said, when the outer door had closed behind them. “I need a drink!”

  For once Thinnes—who generally was scrupulous about not bending an elbow while on duty—had to agree.

  Forty-One

  It wasn’t as bad as a child’s autopsy would’ve been, but Jolene Wilson’s post mortem was getting to him. Usually Thinnes could ignore the smell of meat and bleach that permeated the back rooms. Not today. What did they say about it? Not so bad if you don’t think about it. Impossible today. He was glad he hadn’t eaten. Dr. Cutler was the same pathologist who’d autopsied David Bisti. Dead children bothered him, too. And this death—viciously intended—was getting to him. Thinnes could tell. There was none of the black humor that usually lightened the gravity of the situation. When his assistant started cracking jokes, Cutler silenced him with a dead stare.

  Thinnes felt like a fighter too tired even to raise his gloves, and every insult to the body of the young woman laid out before him was another blow.

  Jolene Wilson had been pretty, well developed, and well-groomed. Mostly, she’d been young. The autopsy assistant, in his blue gown, removed the black plastic sheet covering her and straightened her out on the stainless-steel tray that formed the top of the gurney. The photographer pulled his wheeled stepladder up and began documenting the injuries Jolene Wilson had suffered. Bruises and contusions. Massive blunt-force trauma. Bites, both on her breasts and thighs—these post mortem, according to Dr. Cutler. There was a small, round hole in her left temple, surrounded by gunshot residue. The bruises on her throat resembled those Thinnes had seen before—on other murder victims.

  When everything was photographed and Cutler had described it in detail to his pocket tape recorder, the AME turned her over and the process was repeated. Then they turned her over again.

  Thinnes handed Cutler the rape kit he’d brought, its labels already filled out with name and case number. He watched with feigned uninterest as the doctor swabbed the remains for semen and combed through its pubic hair for foreign fibers. Its. Not hers. Not ever again. Otherwise, Thinnes wouldn’t be watching. But the dead suffer no embarrassment. Damn good thing. They have no privacy.

  Then the AME took his scalpel to the back of the victim’s head, cutting the scalp along the hairline. He flipped the whole scalp forward. Covering the face of the dead was an old traditio
n Thinnes thought of every time he saw it done. Ironically respectful. The sightless eyes wouldn’t look on the next indignities.

  Cutler muttered into his tape recorder as his assistant opened the body: cut through the skull and ribs with a little stainless saw that made a noise like a vacuum cleaner and created a small cloud of bone dust, and sliced the skin in an obscene Y, shoulders to sternum to pubic bone.

  Thinnes took careful notes against the time he would be called to testify, forced to recall the details replaced by more recent images, details of autopsies yet to be performed on people not yet murdered. It was the only thing he could do for Jolene Wilson.

  “Cause of death was manual strangulation,” Cutler told Thinnes, finally. “The gunshot wound was overkill.”

  It wasn’t an atypical death. A disorganized killer had found a moment of opportunity. The victim had been unlucky—wrong place, wrong time. She’d probably struggled, and he beat her, put his hands around her throat and squeezed until she stopped fighting. Then, unwilling to pass up a silent, passive victim, he’d raped her. Never mind she was a corpse by then. She was available and uncomplaining. Forever. The gunshot wound had probably been to hide the necrophilia. Trading up, some doctor once told him. Murder was more acceptable than the violation of a corpse.

  Forty-Two

  “Thinnes, you be the bad guy and I’ll be father confessor,” Oster said. “Leon already hates your guts.”

  “Yeah,” Thinnes said. “After what I’ve just seen, I promise you, the feeling’s mutual.”

  They were standing outside the interview room where Thinnes had deposited Mark Leon. He was handcuffed to a giant staple in the outer wall of the room—hanging on the wall, they called it—opposite the see-through mirror, slouching on his spine in an uncomfortable, plastic contour chair.

  “I’m going to try a variation of one of the chief’s old routines,” Thinnes said. “Wait out here until he starts to look real uncomfortable.”

  Various detectives in the squad room had been watching Leon for two hours through the open door. The door was closed now. Leon hadn’t yet been informed of the charges against him or advised of his rights. In fact, apart from periodically asking if he needed to relieve himself, no one had spoken to him since before Thinnes went to watch Jolene Wilson’s autopsy. He looked like he was sleeping—a dead giveaway he was guilty.

  Thinnes went in and closed the door behind him and didn’t try to hide his dislike as he recited Miranda. “You understand your rights as I’ve explained them to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Thinnes put one of the state’s attorney’s statement forms in front of Leon and pointed to the part on the top that said he understood his rights. There were spaces for a date and a signature. Thinnes pointed at the form. “Okay, then sign here.” The form was Thinnes’s only deviation from SOP. The department didn’t have such forms because an unsigned form gave defense lawyers something to work with they wouldn’t otherwise have had. Thinnes didn’t really have any business asking Leon to sign a state’s attorney’s form, and he’d have had to stop everything until the ASA arrived if Leon got cooperative and decided to sign it. But Thinnes had a very strong hunch he wouldn’t.

  Leon didn’t even look at the form. “I ain’t signing nothing till I talk to a lawyer.”

  “Why’d you kill her?”

  Leon shifted and squirmed on the hard plastic seat. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Jolene Wilson.”

  “I don’t know any Jolene Wilson.”

  “Maybe you didn’t know her, but you killed her.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “How do you explain the fact that we found her in the trunk of the car you were driving?”

  Leon was quiet for a minute, no doubt trying to come up with something plausible. Then he said, “I stole the car. I didn’t know there was a body in the trunk.”

  Thinnes stood up and let some of his pent-up rage show for a minute. He pointed at Leon, suddenly, with his index finger, thrusting it forward with the weight of his whole arm behind it. “You’re a fucking liar!” He pointed again. “And I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I don’t need your fucking statement to make a case. In fact, if you talk to me, you might give me some extenuating circumstances that would prevent me from hitting you up with murder one. So you just shut up.”

  He went out and got a small wheeled stand on which he put a typewriter, several blank departmental forms, and some blank sheets of paper. He wheeled the stand into the room, in front of a chair opposite Leon’s. He sat down and put one of the forms in the typewriter and began to fill in the blanks. He used only two fingers, although he was an excellent typist. Two fingers take longer. It didn’t make sense for Thinnes to be doing his paperwork in the interview room, but if Leon was smart enough to figure that out, he probably wouldn’t have killed Jolene Wilson.

  After about twenty minutes, Oster opened the door and stood in the doorway. “Phone for you, Thinnes.”

  Thinnes motioned him into the room. “Yeah, okay.” He finished typing the line and pulled the sheet out of the typewriter. He picked up the SA’s form and motioned Oster to a chair between the door and the two-way mirror. “Keep an eye on this bastard, will you? But don’t talk to him. He hasn’t consulted with his lawyer yet, and we don’t want to violate the SOB’s civil rights. The asshole won’t even sign that we read him his rights.”

  Oster shook his head as if he thought that very sad.

  Thinnes added, “Just as soon as I get done with this goddamn paperwork and decide how many counts I can hit him with, he can talk to all the fucking lawyers he likes.”

  “Okay.” Oster said it as if he didn’t want to set Thinnes off further. He sat on the chair.

  Thinnes left the room, slamming the door. Outside, he stopped and crumpled the papers he was carrying and tossed them at a wastebasket. The balled paper teetered on the rim and tipped out onto the floor. Thinnes whirled and faced the see-through side of the two-way mirror through which Ferris, Swann, and Viernes were watching the drama in the interview room.

  Oster was studying his hands, recleaning his immaculate fingernails.

  Leon fidgeted, twisted around to look at the clock over his head and around again to stare speculatively at the mirror. “Now what?” he said, finally.

  “Sorry,” Oster told him. “I can’t talk to you. Thinnes is the boss. And you refused to sign that we’ve given you your rights.”

  A long silence passed before Leon said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You understand your rights?”

  “Yeah.”

  Oster waited.

  “Get the paper back in here,” Leon said. “I’ll sign it.”

  Oster shook his head. “I’d like to do that, but Thinnes is probably halfway Downtown with it by now.” He shook his head again. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

  “I just want to ask you something.”

  “What might work,” Oster said, as if he was working it out as he went along, though he wasn’t, “is if you just wrote something out.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just that you understand your rights and I’m not forcing you to say anything against your will.”

  Leon seemed to be thinking about it.

  “Hey, kid,” Oster added. “We’ll get through this.”

  Leon licked his lips and nodded. “Okay.”

  Oster shuffled through the papers Thinnes had left on the typewriter stand, locating one that was blank. He handed it to Leon along with a pen. Leon held it up as if not sure what to do with it, and Oster quickly removed the extra papers and the typewriter from the stand, putting them on the floor near the wall. He pushed the stand over in front of Leon. “There you go, son.”

  Leon put the paper down and looked at it, then at Oster. “What do I say?”

  “Well…” Oster fumbled in his pockets and “found” his Miranda card. “What if you just copy this? It about covers everything.”

  Leon took i
t. Read it. Shrugged.

  On the other side of the view-through window, Ferris said, “He’s not stupid enough…”

  Thinnes and Viernes smiled.

  Swann laughed. “You want to put five bucks on that, Ferris?”

  Ferris looked in at Leon and said, “No.”

  Leon was copying the card. When he finished, he asked Oster, “I just sign it?”

  Oster said, “Hold on a second.” He crossed to the door and opened it, stuck his head out. He looked them all over quickly and said, “Viernes,” motioning “come in” with a jerk of his head and backing into the room. Viernes followed him in and closed the door. Leon looked alarmed. Oster told him, “Go ahead, son.”

  Leon jerked a thumb at Viernes. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Just witnessing your signature.”

  Leon glared. The two detectives waited.

  Out in the squad room, Swann ventured an opinion: “He’s got too much invested to back out now.”

  Thinnes agreed. “If he signs, you go find the ASA. And tell him to bring his statement forms.”

  Inside the room, Leon was signing the paper. Oster nodded. Solemnly. Like a father approving a son’s work. Then he took the pen from Leon and printed “witnessed” below Leon’s signature. He wrote the date and signed his own name. Viernes took the pen and did the same.

  “Now,” Oster said to Leon, “what was it you wanted to ask me?”

  Leon was still glaring at Viernes. “Does he have to be here?”

  Oster shook his head. “Not if you don’t want him here.” To Viernes, he said, “Could you wait outside?”

  “Sure.”

  Viernes closed the door quietly on the way out. As he resumed his place in the audience, Swann, who’d just left the squad room, reentered it with the ASA in tow.