An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  At the house, when Irene asked to see the doctor, Yvonne protested in a long string of excited French, out of which Irene deciphered non, non, non! and dormer, hands to cheek miming sleep. “Si,” said Irene firmly, Spanish being the only foreign language she knew at all, and flashed her badge in a muscular show, which was successful in persuading Yvonne to lead her up the narrow stairs.

  The original farmhouse had been enlarged over the years by lean-to additions which had created the kitchen, a back bedroom and the long porch which housed the bathroom and woodshed; but the old part of the house consisted of four rooms: two tall downstairs rooms, now a living room and a dining room, and above, two bedrooms on opposite sides of a small sunlit landing.

  Irene had been here before. On the first day of the investigation she had searched Anne’s room, a plain white room with a pumpkin yellow floor, a brass bed and otherwise unremarkable old furniture. Irene had looked in drawers, flipped through books, investigated the contents of the wastebasket. She’d flung back the sheets, searched beneath the mattress, emptied the pockets of all the pants, jackets, and shorts hung in the closet or strewn on the chair. She therefore had known without being told, among other things, that Anne smoked. There were half-empty packs of Camel Lights in the pockets of a Levi jacket and a pair of shorts. And another in the back of a small top drawer of a tallboy chest where Anne kept her underwear—thongs like the one in the Donley loft mingled with prim white cotton briefs. A satin pouch contained amethyst earrings, a double strand of gray freshwater pearls, and an astonishingly large diamond in a platinum setting in a turquoise Tiffany’s box. Who, Irene wondered, had bestowed that?

  Irene knew Anne took birth control pills and wore hospital scrubs for pajama pants. She wasn’t tidy. Her shoes were finely made and size nine. Her nightstand was cluttered with textbooks and professional journals, but the August Vogue was on top of the stack. Irene dropped prescription vials containing Flagyl and Xanax into an evidence bag. In an old-fashioned drop front desk she found stamps, string, some letterhead engraved with an outdated Cambridge address, crayons, paper clips, a roll of unprocessed thirty-five millimeter film—which Irene also confiscated, a book of matches from the Spencer Lake Tavern, and a sheaf of labels soaked off of wine bottles. A wooden trunk under the window contained Clue and Monopoly, Bicycle playing cards, a box of plastic poker chips, a mayonnaise jar full of beach glass, and a stack of letters and postcards in rubber bands, which Irene also took. Anne’s handbag, a massive Botega Veneta affair of woven leather, a kind of quintessential repository holding everything from sunscreen and a zippered cosmetics bag to file folders of patient records, a bulging Daytimer, wallet, and passport—Anne’s face tilted slightly, smiling directly into the camera—Irene took in its entirety.

  As Yvonne tapped on the door opposite, Irene reminded herself she must find time for a more detailed scrutiny of the confiscated items. By now the lab would have processed the film and the photos would be awaiting her attention.

  WHEN THERE was no response to Yvonne’s timid knocking, Irene shouldered her aside and rapped sharply before opening the closed door and stepping in, pulling the door to behind her. In contrast to the bright landing the room was dim behind drawn shades. As her eyes adjusted Irene made out Dr. Paris supine on the bed, lying fully dressed on top of the coverlet, a black handkerchief tied around his eyes. He looked like a corpse, the victim of an execution, but one long white hand flapped at the interruption. “What?” he asked, “Who’s there?”

  “Dr. Paris,” said Irene, “it’s me, Irene Chavez.” As soon as she uttered the words, she realized the grammatical mistake. It is I, she should have said. This, she thought, was what was wrong with her whole entire investigation—these people reminded her of who she was and where she’d come from, a sawyer’s daughter from a backwater mill town. Get over it, she scolded herself. No good cop could afford to be impressed by anyone’s standing in the world or education or sophistication.

  “I have nothing to add to what you already know,” Dr. Paris said, “and I’m suffering at the moment from a migraine. This isn’t a good time for an interview. Noise disturbs me and I must remain perfectly still or I’ll vomit.”

  “Well,” said Irene, tapping into a well of resolve, “sometimes no time is a good time for an interview. I’ll talk softly and you don’t have to move. I don’t have a whole lot of questions anyway.”

  Her phone was vibrating against her hip but Irene ignored it. Whatever it was, it could wait. She had interrogated Dr. Paris briefly on the first day. Just the standard protocol of when did you see her last, did she seem despondent, any reason to think anyone might mean her harm. He had provided no useful information then, but even so she needed to follow up. She wondered why he was so reluctant to talk to her. Most people close to an unexpected death pressured and badgered for theories and developments.

  “I don’t think your daughter died by accident,” Irene said bluntly.

  Silence from the bed.

  “She didn’t drown, and the head injury that killed her is inconsistent with the boom of the sailboat,” Irene went on, “We’ve ascertained that.”

  “How can you tell?” he asked.

  “Forensics can tell,” she said, “the coroner and medical examiner. They look at the wound and they look at the boom. You know that, you’re a doctor.”

  “Maybe she fell.”

  “Maybe,” said Irene dubiously. “But you’ve still got to wonder how it is that her body wound up in the slough. The boat was found two miles south.”

  “A southerly wind on an incoming tide.”

  “The wind was from the north,” said Irene.

  “It’s incomprehensible that she’s gone,” said Dr. Paris after a moment, “completely implausible that she won’t be coming through the door. You’re young, Detective Chavez. You have no idea what it means to lose someone”—Irene stifled the impulse to set him straight on this point—“but do you have any concept of how little I care about the particulars of her death? She’s gone. The light of my life.”

  “If she was killed, don’t you care by whom?” Grammatically correct this time.

  “Not really,” he said. “What does it change?”

  Irene tried to imagine circumstances in which a father wouldn’t want to know. As a wife, she had wanted to know. For years as she’d driven Ventura Boulevard, she’d looked at the faces of boys and men hanging out on the street corners and wondered if they were the ones. Sometimes during an arrest or an interrogation, out of the blue she’d lean into someone’s face demanding, “What do you know about a guy who got jumped at the CitiBank ATM on Van Nuys?” Her partners got used to it and just stood back and looked away when she went down that road. Sometimes another officer yanked her off and shoved her into the hall saying, “Chill.” Sometimes she scared a kid into confessing to something entirely unrelated. The fury that in those years boiled just under the surface eventually subsided, replaced by grief and later resignation—just like in the books, she thought, the stages of loss. But even now Irene sometimes wondered if whoever had done it was ever troubled by remorse—somewhere in the world someone else besides her lying awake at night thinking about Luis—or troubled by other kinds of consequences that having gotten away with murder might have on a person. Not knowing had made her wary: any random stranger might hide terrible secrets. She was alert and suspicious. Good qualities in a cop. But knowing what she knew about criminal behavior, Irene could make the assumption that by now Luis’s killers were likely dead themselves or in jail for some other crime.

  Luis’s death was senseless but impersonal. But if Irene was right, Anne had known her killer. “Who had reason to mean her harm?” Irene asked.

  “Reason? No one. Everyone loved her.”

  “When you say everyone, who do you mean?” asked Irene.

  “I mean everyone. Ask anyone.”

  “Ira?”

  “Ira, yes.” But there was a hesitation.

  “They were on the outs, we
ren’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Some strain perhaps.”

  “Libby?”

  “Libby, yes.”

  “And Leland?”

  “Of course.”

  “What does your will say about your estate? Won’t Libby and Leland benefit by Anne’s demise?”

  A chilly pause. “Only time will tell you that,” he said.

  “So what,” said Irene, “it’s all going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation?”

  “This is not a subject I’ll discuss with you or anyone.”

  “What about Mr. Guevara?” asked Irene, frustrated.

  “What about Mr. Guevara?” asked Dr. Paris. “Mr. Guevara had reason to dislike me but he didn’t even know Anne.”

  “I’ve got news for you,” said Irene.

  Dr. Paris pushed the handkerchief up onto his forehead and hitched up on his pillow, looking at her. Now that he was sitting up it was harder to bully him. His face was pale and slack, his pupils dilated.

  “You may not care about the particulars, Dr. Paris, but I do,” said Irene. “The law does. My supervisor is going to come back from vacation and close the case and call it accidental if I’m not able to give him some compelling reason not to. Is that what you want?”

  “Suits me,” he said.

  “Maybe too many people loved her,” Irene said, taking another tack.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “Who’s the man squatting in the Donley cabin?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Someone’s broken into the Donley cabin down the beach and was living there.”

  “And so?”

  “Anne’s been there.”

  “I don’t believe that, but what of it?”

  “Well,” said Irene, “I’m not going to argue, but I found your New Yorker there,” she said, pulling the folded magazine out of her hip pocket, flattening it and putting it on his bedside table. Dr. Paris was silent.

  “There was a ring among her things,” she said, “a big diamond from Tiffany’s. Is that from Ira or who? Whom?” correcting herself.

  “Maybe my mother’s,” he said.

  “So not an engagement ring?” asked Irene.

  “My mother had a diamond,” he said, “but I don’t think you’d say it was big. Just a little chip of a diamond in a plain gold setting that my father gave her before they were married. A long time ago. When Mother died I let Anne have it.”

  “Not the same ring,” she said. “This one is big and set in platinum. Was she engaged, do you know?”

  “No one asked permission of me,” he answered.

  “Is that something you’d expect?” she asked.

  He gave her a look that answered the question. Oliver Paris would indeed expect a formal request for his permission and blessing by anyone who wished to marry his daughter.

  “Well, Ira Logan is broke,” Irene said, “it isn’t from him. Was there some suitor before Ira who might have given her a ring? I mean, is this an artifact from some previous relationship?”

  “Detective Chavez,” he said, “I don’t know what ring you’re talking about. I’ve never seen such a ring so I have no idea where it came from or how she got it or under what circumstances or with what understanding.”

  Irene was frustrated by Dr. Paris’s impenetrability, and at the same time the unwelcome thought of Victor and his long empty summer days was intruding on her focus. What was he doing now? Where was he? His work schedule at the market and his lawn-mowing obligations were noted on a calendar stuck to the refrigerator, but she didn’t have any of it in mind. She wondered who it was who’d called and if there was a message on her phone. Her interview with Dr. Paris was going nowhere and she wanted to call home.

  XIV

  “Theo Choate, prosecuting attorney,” the message said tersely—tightening a band of anxiety around Irene’s chest—along with the county number and an extension to call.

  Out on Highway 3 headed back to town, she got a signal and left a message with the secretary—Mr. Choate was in court— saying that she’d be in her office through the afternoon. It was not a good sign, she thought, that he was so on top of Victor’s minor infraction. She had hoped he’d lob it right back down the hill into the municipal court where it belonged, if it belonged anywhere. New in the job and overly zealous, she feared.

  Her anxiety eased incrementally in town when she detoured to swing past the corner market and saw Victor’s bike locked up outside. Accounted for, for now at least.

  HER DESK, when she got there, was piled with paperwork. Everyone who had done anything on the case on the first day, when they were all out on Gustavus Island, had funneled their documentation to her. Department procedure required that everyone take notes of whatever they did on any aspect of an investigation. All the witness statements, handwritten or tape-recorded and transcribed, along with each deputy’s narrative of events and an inventory from the evidence department, had found their way to her. Normally, on a potential homicide case Inspector Gilbert would be reviewing everything, but since he was away on vacation, Irene was on her own. Lead on this one. Solo, in fact, on this one.

  It would, she thought, be a good use of her afternoon to sift through all the material produced thus far. Try to impose some system and order onto the chaos churning in her head and piled on her desk.

  She started with her own photographs, overlapping the ends of the images to create panoramas and pinning them at eye level on the partition next to her desk. When she was done she stood back. These kind of composite panoramas weren’t realistic because they captured more than the thirty-five degrees the human eye took in; and unlike a photo taken by a wide angle lens, there was no fish-bowl distortion. Like cinemascope they suggested a surreally vast landscape. Unless you knew you were looking at a crime scene, you wouldn’t make out the body floating at the edge of the slough in the center of her first panorama. You wouldn’t know what the thing in the water was. You’d take it for a log and look instead to the left at the orchard, the gnarled old trees, gray with lichen and heavy with fruit.

  Next was the sequence she’d shot standing on the dune and looking inland, showing on one side the phalanx of volunteer fire personnel with Rosalie in the lead approaching through the orchard, then the slough and on the other side the Guevara mansion. Then the sequence she’d taken facing the other way, out toward the Sound. And last, a close-up panorama that included the tips of her own boots, which showed the cigarette butt she remembered seeing in the grass. She had collected that butt and it was now secured in the evidence locker. Someone’s DNA was on that butt, if things ever progressed far enough for that to matter.

  Irene was pleased. Her photography did what she had intended—it drew her back into the first moments before she had learned anything or developed any theories.

  The roll of thirty-five millimeter film Irene had found in Anne’s desk turned out to be disappointing, snapshots from some previous summer—Owen and Neal at younger ages and Julia Paris, a strangely beautiful woman, chiseled cheeks and haunting, hooded eyes—photos taken on the beach on some forgotten cloudy afternoon. Oliver on the dune in a beach chair reading.

  Irene shuffled through the sheaf of soaked-off wine labels. Some of the collection had notations in pencil on the back, dates and descriptions—‘nice tannins, full-bodied, earthy’—and the occasion when it was served—‘my birthday’—or a serving suggestion— ‘good with paella’—and the name of the person who provided it or shared it—‘Daddy’ ‘Nigel’ ‘Leland,’ or names Irene didn’t recognize—‘Otto’ ‘Storey’—guests perhaps from past summers. Among the labels was a 1982 Latour à Pomerol. No notation to enlighten Irene as to when it was drunk, on what occasion or with whom, but she wondered if this might be the label belonging to the bottle she’d discovered in the Donley cabin; and if it might be the one that had gone missing from Oliver’s crate in the barn, purloined perhaps by Dr. Paris’s own daughter, its
absence now making her father anxious and paranoid.

  The initial investigation of Anne’s laptop had turned up almost nothing. She hadn’t had internet reception since she’d left Boston, except for one occasion when apparently she’d connected from somewhere in Shelton that had Wi-Fi, and had read and responded to her email. Nothing jumped out at Irene as interesting or helpful. There were a lot of messages, a lot of it spam. She read a couple of messages in their entirety from Nikki, who had arrived some days after the Paris family, and who was asking about logistics—should she rent a car or would she be picked up—and wondering ‘how are you, darling?’ And one from the landlord, Julian Bernstein complaining that he had not heard from her and wondering ‘how things stand.’ The unpaid rent.

  There was a printout of some patient notes—the patient identified only by initials—and an outline and some narrative paragraphs that appeared to be the beginning of a paper Anne was writing, having to do with the treatment of certain kinds of pathologies.

  Felix Guzmán’s report held no surprises. Cause of death was blunt trauma to the back of the head and nothing else noteworthy was contained in the initial findings. Later, when results came back from tissue samples and lab reports, maybe they’d learn she’d taken a Xanax or there was a lesion in her lung, or a faulty heart valve—but there would be nothing that would change anything for Irene’s purposes.

  Dr. Paris had opposed the autopsy and tried to block it. Irene knew what an autopsy entailed—any physician would too, and Dr. Paris was a physician—it was a gruesome and irreverent process. It left the body of the deceased eviscerated, all the organs removed, sectioned for slides, then stuffed back in willy-nilly to fill out the vacant cavities, the cadaver stitched and stapled closed and left to the mortician to make presentable.