Garden of Evil

by Edna Buchanan

  “What do you think?” I asked Emery, as he peeled off his rubber gloves.

  “No bullet holes, or stab wounds,” he said. “We’ll know more when we get a name on her. Most likely what we have here is an accidental drowning.”

  “Is the ME coming out?”

  He shook his head. “The wagon’s on the way.” Medical examiners didn’t normally go to drownings these days except in cases of mass casualties, obvious foul play or refugee smugglers who routinely dumped human cargo off shore—sometimes too far off shore.

  “My Raymond saw her first!” The little boy’s proud mother finally made her appearance. She wore big sunglasses, a bikini that exposed a hysterectomy scar on her glistening belly and pink hair curlers under a floppy sunhat. She smelled strongly of coconut scented suntan oil and spoke in a New York accent.

  Raymond, pail and shovel forgotten, still stared at the sheet covered corpse.

  “Unbelievable,” the mother told all who would listen. “Raymond kept trying to tell me, but I didn’t pay attention. That kid is always into something.” She shook her head smugly. “I shoulda known.”

  She and Raymond’s father, she said, had partied on South Beach ’til the wee hours. He was now in their hotel room, convalescing, nursing a hangover and yesterday’s sunburn. She had brought Raymond to the beach, intending to nap and work on her tan, but her son gave her little rest.

  “Mommy, mommy, there’s a lady with no clothes on,” she quoted her pride and joy. “I was half asleep,” she said. “Thought it was another one of them damn foreign models, you know, stripping topless on the beach. Most got nothing to show anyhow. The worst are the ones with their nipples and belly buttons pierced,” she complained, snorting in disgust.

  She had waved Raymond away, she explained, with a warning not to look. But the boy persisted. “He’s tugging at me. ‘Mommy, mommy, it’s a dead body!’ Wouldn’t gimme a break. Finally, I take off my little plastic eye shields, sit up, and, my God! It is a goddamn dead body! Ya can’t even take your kid to the beach any more! His grandma is always nagging, saying the beach is bad for ’im, nagging about sun screen, the sand fleas and jelly fish. Now this! What the hell is going on?”

  I approached the boy, aware that it would be tough to compete with the naked lady. “Raymond? My name is…” The child reluctantly took his eyes off the corpse and stared up at me.

  “Does she have wings now?” he asked. “Can she fly? Like on TV?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  His mother had used the cell phone in her beach bag to dial nine one one. But Rochek said she had not been the first to dial police. The initial call had come from a housebound resident on the twelfth floor of the Casa Milagro, a high-rise condominium, he said. A regular caller who liked to scan the horizon with high-powered binoculars, he had spotted the body riding the incoming tide facedown.

  Murmurs suddenly swept the crowd. A sighting. Something floating just beyond the breakers, a hundred yards down the beach. A man broke into a run, pursued by several others who splashed into the sea in a race to retrieve the prize.

  “Take it easy. Don’t kill each other over it,” Rochek shouted after them.

  A young Spanish-speaking man with a killer tan and astonishing pecs, flashed a triumphant smile as he waded out of the surf waving the trophy above his head like a banner. It was a rose red bikini bathing suit top.

  The detective dangled it by its thin strap, then held it up for me to scrutinize. “Whattaya think, Britt. Her size?”

  “Looks about right. Only one way to tell if a bathing suit fits.”

  “We’ll try it on Cinderella at the ME office. No sign of the bottom half. Some pervert probably thought it was a souvenir,” he said.

  Lottie left for a feature assignment at the Garden Center. I knew I should go back to headquarters. Instead I walked the sand as far north as 34th Street, looking for an unattended beach towel or lounge chair the dead woman may have left, along with her personal belongings, but found nothing. That didn’t mean they hadn’t been there. It would not be unusual for them to have been stolen.

  Rochek was talking to a physical fitness buff in his late seventies when I got back. A local who had been around for years, the man jogged, did push ups and head stands on the sand each day, then swam miles along the beach, rain or shine. I occasionally encountered him in the supermarket. Slightly hard of hearing, he spoke loudly, with an eastern European accent.

  “I saw her.” He nodded, gesturing broadly. “This morning. She vas svimming, right there.” His gnarly index finger indicated a deep blue spot in the water opposite a row of pastel hotels and condos. “She looked like a good svimmer. It was early, vhen it looked like rain, before the sky cleared up. There vas almost nobody on the beach.”

  “She was alone?” Rochek asked.

  The man paused. “There vas another svimmer. A man in the vater. I thought he was vid her, but,” he shrugged, “maybe not.”

  He had not seen her arrive or leave, could not describe the other swimmer, or even say for sure what color her bathing suit was.

  “I was exercising,” he said. “I vastn’t paying attention. I guess the guy vastn’t vid her…”

  “Why do you say that?’” Rochek asked.

  “Vell, if he was vid her,” he shrugged and extended his hairy arms, “vhere is he now?”

  “Good question.”

  “You think they both got in trouble and there’s another body out there?” I asked. I knew women have a higher fat-muscle ratio than men, whose leaner bodies are less buoyant. If both drowned, she would likely surface first.

  We stared at the sea, valleys and troughs, rising and falling like the ebb and flow of life, with all its pain and joy.

  “Terrible.” The old man shook his head. “A terrible thing. She was young, so attractive.”

  Azure sea and sky normally refreshes my spirit. Instead, sadness washed over me as I walked back to my car, illegally parked at a bus stop, my press identification prominently displayed on the dash. Head throbbing in the blinding sun, I felt thirsty and dehydrated.

  I sat in my superheated T-Bird, wondering if her car was parked nearby. If so, the meter must have run out by now. Expired, like its driver.

  The woman’s image haunted me all the way back to the Miami News building. What were her plans when she awoke this morning? Did she have a premonition, a bad dream, any clue that this day was her last? How many hearts would break, how many lives change because this one ended prematurely?

  Bobby Tubbs was in the slot at the city desk. His chubby face wore its perpetual scowl of annoyance. “Did you get the stax for the art department? They need them right away.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve a story for tomorrow. A drowning on the beach, an unidentified woman.”

  “Keep it short,” he snapped, after I filled him in.

  I double checked the figures, turned in the crime statistics, then went over my notes on the dead woman.

  I made some calls. The beach patrol reported no other victims, no rescues and no evidence that rip currents were to blame.

  My lead depended on who she was. I was sure she would be identified by deadline. But I was wrong. A medical examiner’s investigator returned my call at six P.M. She was still Jane Doe, and would not be autopsied until morning. I called Rochek.

  “Nuttin’,” he reported grimly. “Do me a favor, would-ja, kid? Put her description in the newspaper.”

  “That’s why I called.”

  “Good girl, you’re a woman after my own heart.” I heard him flipping the pages of his notebook and imagined him adjusting the gold-rimmed reading glasses kept in his shirt pocket.

  “Les’ see. You saw ’er yourself, probably early thirties. Nice figure, good looking, Five feet, four and a half, weight 121. Hair blondish, a little longer than shoulder length. Eyes blue, bikini tan line. Nice manicure, good dental work. We’ll know more after the post.”

  “And the earring,” I reminded him.


  “Yeah, we shot pictures,” he said. “Maybe you can put one in the paper if we don’t have her ID’d by tomorrow.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “If you find out who she is before our final, at one A.M., call me so we can change the lead.”

  “You’ll be home?”

  “If I’m not, leave a message.”

  I led my story with a police appeal to the public for help in identifying the victim.

  Lottie stopped at my desk, her turned up nose sunburned, hair frizzy from the humidity. “So who was she, the floater?”

  “No clue,” I said.

  Lottie frowned. “Think she just swam out too far?”

  “Could be, or maybe she had a seizure.” One of my first stories at The News had been about a teenager from Brooklyn who drowned in a hotel pool in full sight of witnesses who thought he was playing. They didn’t realize he was suffering an epileptic seizure. “Maybe she lives alone,” I mused, “and nobody will miss her until she fails to show up for work tomorrow. Then somebody will see the story in the newspaper and put two and two together.”

  “She didn’t look like the type who’d live alone,” Lottie pointed out. “Somebody who looks like her…”

  “We live alone,” I reminded her.

  “Damn it to hell, you never miss the chance to rub it in, do you?” She laughed.

  “Don’t knock it. With our jobs and the hours we keep,” I said wistfully, “maybe we’re lucky.”

  As I left the newsroom, I sw that some wag from the photo desk had posted one of Lottie’s unused prints on the newsroom bulletin board. Skinny little Raymond, standing knock-kneed in the sand, clutched his pail, his little shovel in the other hand, the covered corpse lay in the foreground. A caption had been added, a Miami Beach tourist slogan: Miami, see it like a native. Not humorous, I thought, glaring around the newsroom. But the usual suspects were all hunched over their terminals. I yanked the photo off the board and locked it in my desk.

  As I drove home through the twilight’s tawny glow, I wondered what the story would reveal about the dead woman tomorrow. That’s the beauty of this job, I reminded myself, it’s as though I live at the heart of an endlessly complex novel, rich with character, ripe with promise and rife with mystery.

  I took Bitsy for a long walk, over the boardwalk. We sat in the moonlight for a time, watching the surf, then strolled home along shadowy streets.

  No messages waited.

  In the morning I called the Miami Beach detective bureau but Rochek was out, across the bay at the medical examiner’s office they said. I took the MacArthur Causeway west, dodging the tourists in their careening rental cars as they eyeballed and photographed the cruise ships. The Ecstasy, the Celebration and the Song of Norway were all in port readying for departure to destinations such as Cozumel, Ocho Rios, Half Moon Cay, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe, the ships and trips that dreams are made of.

  The cheerful receptionist at Number One Bob Hope Road said Rochek was “with the chief, down in the autopsy room.” She called for permission, then waved me on.

  I left the soothing pastel lobby through the double doors, descended the stairs, and went through the breezeway into the lab building, my footsteps echoing along the brightly lit hallway. Poster-size photos of the towering oaks and resurrection ferns along the Witlacoochee River in Inverness lined the walls. The chief medical examiner shot them himself in a place as unspoiled today as when Chief Osceola and his band of warriors holed up there during the second Seminole War. U.S. Army Major Francis Langhorn Dade led his troops into an ambush at the now historic battleground there. On bad days in the city I often wonder if Miamians brought themselves bad karma by naming the county for a leader whose sole claim to fame was being massacred.

  I passed the photo imaging bureau, the bone and tissue bank and found the three people I was looking for at an autopsy room station: the chief, known worldwide as “the titan of medical examiners” and the genius who masterminded this one-of-a-kind building, the scowling Miami Beach detective, and the star attraction, the woman who had brought us all here.

  She lay supine, her body incandescent, bathed in the powerful light from sixteen overhead fluorescent bulbs. The wooden block positioned beneath her shoulders had tilted her head back, exposing her throat. Her internal organs had already been scrutinized under the glare of a high-powered surgical lamp on a stainless steel dissection table rolled up beside her.

  The fiberglass and epoxy resin tray on which she lay was neutral gray for color photo compatibility and designed to facilitate X-ray transmission. Mounted on wheels, it was custom-built for minimal labor, guaranteeing that the bodies it transports need only be lifted twice: on arrival and departure.

  The autopsy had been completed, the Y-shaped incision in her torso and the inter-mastoid cut that ringed her skull loosely sewn shut with a running stitch of white linen cord. Despite the procedure, every surface was scrupulously clean, no drop of blood spilled. Spotless instruments gleamed, and the chief’s surgical scrubs and apron remained immaculate, a matter of pride with the man who acknowledged my arrival with a cheerful nod.

  “Hey, kid,” the detective growled. He too, wore an apron. He stood near the woman’s head, just outside the splash zone.

  “Got an ID on her yet?” I slipped out my notebook.

  “Not a single call. Not even the usual nut cases who wanna chat. Zip, zilch, nada.”

  “Huh.” I was surprised. “Maybe she was a tourist…” I stepped closer, then stopped short. My jaw dropped.

  “What happened to her?” I gasped. When I last saw her, the dead woman had been haunting, as ethereal as Botticelli’s Venus emerging from the sea. Today she looked like the loser in a nasty bar fight. It was not the autopsy incisions; I was accustomed to them. What shocked me was her nose, her knuckles and ears, all raw and scraped, and the ugly red-brown bruising on her wrists, forearms and legs.

  “Nothing new.” The chief spoke briskly. “Abrasions and other injuries are almost invisible on moist skin and don’t show up right away. They become noticeable after the body is dried off and refrigerated. Drying tends to darken wounds.”

  “But her eyes,” I protested. Still slightly open, the whites had turned to black on either side of the irises.

  “Tache noir,” he said. “Black spot. Though to be literal, it’s actually dark brown. Another part of the evaporation process. Common in sea water drownings.”

  The changes in her appearance made me queasy.

  “The water’s five percent salt dehydrates the tissues causing tache noir,” he was saying. “Salt water, being hypertonic, draws out the moisture. When the tissue dries, it’s dark brown.”

  “But what are all those marks, fish bites?”

  The chief shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “The news ain’t good.” Emery nodded at the doctor.

  “It appears our detective friend here has himself a homicide,” the chief said pleasantly. “She was murdered.”

  “Why me?” Emery sighed.

  I was not sympathetic. She, after all, was the one murdered.

  “So,” I said, “you mean somebody attacked her, then dumped her in the water?”

  “No,” the chief said. “As I was just apprising Detective Rochek, she was deliberately drowned.” The chief consulted his notes. “Those bruises on her wrists and upper arms were inflicted as she struggled, fighting against being submerged. See here?”

  He turned her head to one side with a gloved hand. “See the bruises on the back of her neck? That’s where someone grabbed her from behind and slightly to her left, and pushed her head down. See the marks? His right hand was here,” he demonstrated, fitting his own fingers over the bruises, “on the back of her neck. Fingers on the right, thumb on the left. You can see some little horizontal, linear fingernail abrasions that also showed up after she was dry, where his nails penetrated the skin on the back of her neck as she twisted, trying to escape his grasp.”

  Chills rippled ac
ross my skin, and the room, a constant seventy-two degrees, seemed colder. My heart thudded as I imagined her panic, her gasps, her snuggles to breathe as she inhaled water. I nearly drowned twice. Once in a dark Everglades canal in a car, later in the ocean, the bright lights of Miami in sight. Somehow I survived both experiences. But nobody had been deliberately holding my head under water.

  The chief was pinpointing injuries to the woman’s left arm, “…bruising beneath the skin, about a centimeter in diameter, three or four fingernail abrasions here, where he apparently grasped her wrist with his left hand to stop her from flailing and grabbing at him. There are visible bruises on the flexor, the underpart of her left wrist, and another fingernail mark.”

  “None of them were visible at the scene,” Rochek said morosely.

  “The guy swimming near her,” I said, “it had to be him.”

  “Could be,” the detective said.

  “How did he do it?” I asked. “A healthy young woman struggling to survive in the water had to be difficult. Why didn’t anybody see them, or hear her scream?”

  “Looks like he used a scissors grip from behind, wrapped his legs around hers, pinned her ankles together,” the chief said, “then he used his own body weight to submerge her. Her body supported his while he held her down.”

  “How long does it take to drown somebody like that?” Rochek asked.

  “Two to three minutes. She’d be struggling of course, choking and ingesting sea water. Most likely unable to scream out for help.”

  The thought of this woman’s terror, helpless in her last moments, both infuriated and saddened me. She had been savagely attacked in the ocean, like in the movie Jaws, but this savage predator was a man.

  “All these bruises and abrasions,” the chief mused, peering thoughtfully, “makes it difficult to be certain what’s post and what’s anti mortem. Some are obviously the result of the wave action, as it swept her body back and forth on the sandy bottom.”