The Tail of the Tip-Off

by Rita Mae Brown

  As the game ended and people filed out, Little Mim climbed over a row to reach Susan. Blair joined Harry, Fair, and BoomBoom. Harry waved to Miranda and Tracy on the opposite side of the court. They returned the wave.

  By the time the group of friends had reached the parking lot, Susan had the latest on the H.H. drama.

  The cats and dog, noses pressed against the driver’s side window, couldn’t wait for Harry. Herb passed them and rapped his fingers on the window.

  “Guess he still doesn’t know.” Pewter put both her paws on the window as a greeting to the pastor.

  “Maybe he’s gotten over it,” Tucker thought out loud.

  “No way.” Pewter smiled big as Herb smiled back and then headed toward his old car, on its fourth set of tires. He’d need new tires soon or a new car.

  “He’ll find out before the first Sunday in February. He needs them for communion.”

  “Maybe not, Murphy. Maybe he has an extra stash in the church itself. Bet Elocution and Cazenovia don’t get in there very often, because Elo eats the flowers on the altar,” Pewter said.

  “That’s true.” Mrs. Murphy laughed. “But if those two wanted to get into the church I bet they’d find a way. They’re pretty smart.”

  Fred stomped by them.

  “What an old grouch,” Tucker noted.

  “Humans get the lives they deserve.” Pewter then quickly added, because she knew there’d be an uproar, “Short of war or famine or stuff like that.”

  Before the last word was out of her mouth, H.H., shepherding Anne and Cameron, was three vehicles away. He jerked his head up, sweat poured down his face, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his knees collapsed. He dropped down in a heap.

  Anne knelt down. Then she screamed for help.

  Tucker noticed Fred turn. He saw who it was and hesitated for a moment. With reluctance he walked over to Anne.

  “Help me!”

  “Daddy, Daddy, wake up!” Cameron was on her knees shaking her father.

  Harry, Fair, Susan, and Ned heard the commotion. Susan’s daughter, Brooks, was with her friends, behind her parents. Matthew and Sandy, his wife, sprinted toward the fallen man. From the other side of the parked cars, Tracy hurried up.

  Fair bent over, took H.H.’s pulse. None.

  “Matt, help me get his coat off.”

  Matthew and Fair stripped the heavy winter coat off H.H., Fair straddled him and pressed hard on his heart. He kept at it, willing H.H.’s heart to beat, but it wouldn’t.

  Tracy looked gravely at Jim, who’d just reached them. He already had his cell phone out.

  “Ambulance to U-Hall. Second row from the main entrance. Hurry!” Jim called the rescue unit closest to the university. As mayor of Crozet, he knew everybody in an official capacity.

  The ambulance was there within five minutes.

  Fair, sweat rolling off him, kept working on H.H.’s chest. He stood up when the rescue team arrived.

  Little Mim had the presence of mind to wrap her arms around Anne because she didn’t know exactly what the woman would do. Big Mim held Cameron.

  They all watched in complete dismay as John Tabachka, head of the ambulance squad, quietly said, “He’s gone.”

  Herb knelt down, placing his hand on H.H.’s head. “Depart in peace, thou ransomed soul. May God the Father Almighty, Who created thee; and Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, Who redeemed thee; and the Holy Ghost, Who sanctified thee, preserve thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth, even forevermore. Amen.”

  “Amen.” Everyone bowed their heads.

  “Amen,” the animals said.

  * * *

  6

  Fair and Ned Tucker accompanied the corpse to the morgue. Ned, as the family lawyer, wished to spare Anne further distress. Fair thought Ned might need some bolstering.

  Little Mim and Susan Tucker took Anne and Cameron to their home in the Ednam subdivision just west of the Clam on Route 250.

  Each person, after ascertaining if they could do anything, finally went home.

  A subdued Harry flipped on the light in the kitchen. She made a cup of cocoa, feeding her pets treats as she sipped. She felt miserable.

  Ned felt miserable, too. He’d never witnessed an autopsy. Fair had. All living creatures fascinated him, how they functioned, how they were put together. He often thought that an autopsy was a way to honor life. How could anyone view a horse’s heart or a cat’s musculature without marveling at the beauty of it? Any chance he had to learn, he seized. The human animal was complex in some ways and quite simple in others. For instance, humans had simple dentition. Sharks, by contrast, had a mouthful of really complicated teeth.

  Tom Yancy, the coroner, had been called by John Tabachka and had everything ready. Anne had insisted on an immediate autopsy. Grief stricken and shocked as she was, she wanted to know exactly how her young husband had died.

  Yancy for his part was only too happy to comply. By the time he got to a body it had usually been in the cooler or worse.

  Even laid out on the gleaming stainless steel table, H.H. was a handsome man, a man in seemingly good physical condition.

  Yancy knew him, of course, but not well. Tom Yancy and Marshall Wells, the assistant coroner, often knew many of the corpses they examined.

  “Ned, stand back.” Yancy looked up at him as he pulled on his rubber gloves. “If you faint I don’t want you falling on the body. Occasionally, organs will, uh, be under pressure. They may somewhat pop out, the brain especially. It sounds grotesque but it really isn’t. After all, the inside of the body is experiencing light and air for the first time. If you can’t take it, leave the room.”

  “I will.” Ned felt nervous. He didn’t want to disgrace himself, but he wasn’t sure he would be up to the process.

  Yancy’s blue eyes met Fair’s. “Put on a coat, will you? Just in case I need you.”

  Fair lifted a doctor’s white coat off the peg against the door. He, too, put on thin latex gloves.

  “All right, gentlemen, let us closely inspect the outside before we get to the inside.” Yancy measured H.H. “Here.” He handed Ned a clipboard, thinking having a task would help the lawyer. “Height, six feet one-half inch. Race, Caucasian. Weight, one hundred and eighty-five pounds. Age, I’d say between thirty-three and thirty-six. Of course, I know he is thirty-six because I knew H.H. and we have his driver’s license, but you can still tell age by teeth. Not as well as we once could thanks to advances in dentistry, but they wear down.” He opened H.H.’s mouth, pointing to the slight irregularity on the surface of those molars not capped. “Fillings can help us. Silver fillings have a shorter life span than gold.”

  “Remember Nicky Weems with his gold front tooth?” Fair recalled a man, old when Fair was a teenager, who flashed a gold grin.

  “Used a lot before World War Two. Expensive but prized. It’s still good stuff. Now, dentists, the advanced ones, use ceramics, and who knows what they’ll come up with next? The stuff doesn’t even discolor.”

  All the while he was talking, Yancy carefully felt over the body. “His temperature has dropped a few degrees.”

  “When does a body go into rigor mortis?” Ned was becoming interested. He was beginning to realize one could read a body like a book.

  Of course, it’s better to read it while it’s still alive.

  “Depends. On a blistering hot August day a corpse can go through the stages of death, light death, if you will, to advanced death, in a matter of hours. Putrefaction can begin rapidly especially on battlefields where the temperatures can be over one hundred degrees because of the guns. Gettysburg was a real mess, I can tell you. July.” He shook his head. “And the little muscles go into rigor first. But on a temperate day, say sixty degrees to seventy, a corpse exposed to the elements, no rain, will begin to stiffen in two to three hours. Unless”—he held up his hand—“a person has ingested strychnine. By the time they are finished with their convulsions, which are so severe all the ATP in the mus
cles is depleted, they’re in rigor. It’s a horrible, horrible way to die. That and rabies. ATP is a molecule that releases energy for muscle contraction. When it’s used up, so are you.”

  Yancy returned to H.H.’s head. He brushed back the nice-looking man’s straight hair, cut in the old Princeton style. He checked his eyes, nose, ears.

  Then he felt at the base of his neck, running his fingers upward to the ears. Fair, standing just a step to the left of him, squinted for a moment. Yancy, too, stopped.

  “What’s this?”

  Fair bent over. “Looks like a hornet sting without the swelling.”

  The door opened. Kyle Rogers, the photographer, stepped in. “Sorry. I got here as soon as I could. The roads are okay, but—” He realized Yancy was intent so he shut up.

  As Kyle removed his coat, taking his camera out of his trusty carry bag, even Ned was drawn closer to the body.

  Ned kept telling himself that this was no longer H.H. H.H.’s soul had gone to its reward. The toned body on the slab before him was a husk. But while H.H. had bid goodbye to that husk, it was hard for his friends to do so.

  “Kyle, get a close-up of this right now.” A note of urgency crept into Yancy’s voice.

  Kyle, all of twenty-five, quietly snapped away.

  Yancy glanced over at Fair as he reached onto his tray of implements, what he called his “tool kit.” He pulled out a calibrated probe so fine it was thinner than a needle. He leaned down and expertly inserted this into what looked like the sting. “Penetration, an inch and a quarter.” He pulled out the probe. “No bleeding.”

  “No discoloration,” Fair said in a low voice. “It’s as though he were hit with a microdart.”

  “Yes.” Yancy drew out the word.

  “I was in the row behind him. If he’d been hit with a dart I would have noticed.” Fair thought a moment. “I hope I would have noticed.”

  “Odd, how every scene is different when you try to reconstruct it in your mind. The most commonplace object takes on new significance.” Yancy plucked up his scalpel. “All right.” He cut a Y, with the top of the Y looking like a large necklace, the bottom going directly to the pubic bone.

  Ned gulped.

  “The first cut is the hardest.” Fair’s voice had a steady reassuring quality.

  Kyle worked quietly.

  Ned blinked and as Yancy began removing and weighing organs he got ahold of himself. The science of it took over and H.H. as a person began to recede from view.

  After weighing the heart, Yancy expertly opened the stilled pump. He pointed to Fair, and Ned even came over to look. “See the scarring?”

  “Ah,” Ned exclaimed because he could see tiny, tiny scars, tissue different from the striations around it.

  “Cocaine. I’ll know from the blood tests if he used any within forty-eight hours.”

  “I think that part of H.H.’s life is long past.” Fair defended H.H., who had enjoyed a wild youth.

  “That’s just it. It’s never truly over because everything you do leaves its mark on the body.”

  “So The Portrait of Dorian Gray is the truth?” Ned held the clipboard tightly.

  “In a fashion, yes.” Yancy intently studied the heart. “Left ventricle contracted. M-m-m, right ventricle normal.”

  “He died of a heart attack?” Ned was furiously writing on the clipboard.

  “Ultimately we all die when our hearts stop beating. No, I wouldn’t say he died of a heart attack. It’s just that the left ventricle is not relaxed. Something . . .” Yancy’s voice trailed off as he studied the stilled heart, blood seeping through the ventricles. He snipped tissue samples from the heart as well as the other organs. Intent, Yancy was in a world of his own, not conversing again until he was sewing up the body.

  As Yancy and Fair washed up, Ned took a last look at H.H., a sheet covering him, as he was rolled into the cooler. H.H.’s body would soon be prepared for its last journey.

  “Kyle, get those photographs on Sheriff Shaw’s desk as fast as you can.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kyle packed up his gear and left.

  The coroner folded his arms across his chest. “Gentlemen, H. H. Donaldson did not die a natural death. The blood work will certainly help me pinpoint what was used to kill him because I can’t tell from this exam what poison was used.”

  “Poisoned?” Ned gasped.

  “Absolutely.” He hung up his lab coat. “One looks for the classic symptoms, like the odor of bitter almonds for arsenic. Certain types of internal bleeding, the condition of the gums.” He paused. “None of those changes are present in H.H.’s body, except the abnormality in his left ventricle. I’m willing to bet you the poison was delivered by whatever pierced his neck but—” He held up his hands.

  “My God.” Fair shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, I’m sure he had enemies. A man can’t go through life without gathering them, and if a man doesn’t have a few enemies, then I really don’t trust him. Know what I mean?”

  “An enemy is one thing. An enemy who kills you is quite another.” Ned’s jaw set.

  “We’d better go to Anne.” Fair dropped his eyes to the floor then looked up at the ceiling. He hated this.

  Yancy put his hand on Fair’s big forearm. “Simply tell her there are irregularities. Wait until—” He stopped mid-sentence, walked to the phone in the lab, and dialed the Sheriff’s Department.

  “Coop, is Rick there?”

  “No.” The young deputy, usually a regular at basketball games, answered. She’d pulled extra duty thanks to the weather.

  “Can you come over here a minute?” He explained why.

  As the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t far from the coroner’s office, Coop managed to get there despite the snow within twenty minutes.

  Yancy rolled H.H. out of the cooler and pulled off the sheet. Wordlessly he pointed to the mark on his neck. “Kyle will have the photos on Rick’s desk in an hour or however fast he can work. I’ll have my report faxed over within the hour, minus all the lab work, obviously. Deputy, I believe he was murdered.”

  She exhaled. Cynthia Cooper, a tall, good-looking blonde, could make decisions swiftly. She pulled out her cell phone.

  “Sheriff, I’m sorry to disturb you at home. I’m going to seal off the Clam. I need as many people as we can round up.”

  After speaking to Rick, whom she genuinely admired, she walked back and inspected the mark one more time. “Yancy, how soon before the blood work comes back?”

  “I’ll put a rush on it, but you never know. Normally it takes three to four weeks. Like I said, I’ll beg for promptness.”

  “I was at the game,” Fair said. “I can show you where H.H. sat, where he fell.”

  “Me, too,” Ned volunteered.

  “Good.” She smiled tightly. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  “I’m used to it,” Fair replied.

  Ned halted a moment as they opened the door. “What about Anne?”

  Cooper turned to Yancy. “Will you call the Donaldson house? I’m sure someone is with her.”

  “Little Mim and my wife,” Ned said.

  “Well, one of them will probably answer the phone.” Cooper weighed her words. “Just tell Little Mim or Susan that Anne can go ahead with funeral plans. Don’t tell them more than that. Not even your wife. Rick will talk to Anne tomorrow.”

  “If you cordon off the Clam people will know something’s not right,” Ned sensibly observed.

  “That’s true, but it’s eleven-thirty now. How many people are going to be out tonight? And if they are, they won’t know what we’re doing. We’ve got a little window of time. Let’s use it.”

  * * *

  7

  The phone felt clammy in Susan’s hand as her husband informed her Anne could go ahead with funeral plans. She and Ned had been married nineteen years. She knew Ned inside out. She wasn’t getting the whole story or even half the story and she knew it.

  She hung up the wall p
hone in Anne’s high-tech kitchen. Anne and Little Mim sat at the table. Cameron had finally gone to bed. The adults were thankful the child could sleep.

  “Anne, you can make arrangements.” Susan’s voice sounded strangled to her.

  “Tomorrow.” Little Mim, not the warmest person, genuinely wanted to spare Anne further distress.