by Ken Brigham
Looking at herself in the mirror as she dressed after showering, Beth felt that her history as an athlete and the continuing attention she paid to her body served her well. She was still trim and firm at forty. Cy was still interested in her body at least occasionally, and that was enough for her. She would die if Cy lost interest in her. She couldn’t live without him. She had to make certain that he stayed interested and would do whatever it took to make sure of that. She desperately needed Cy to need her. She must be indispensable to him. Her addiction to physical exercise wasn’t really a sacrifice. She enjoyed the process as well as the outcome. But she was prepared to make real sacrifices too. She would do whatever she had to. She had proven that.
Shane’s physical therapist came to his Printers Alley flat on Monday mornings. Although Shane was making some progress toward being able to walk, the progress was incredibly slow, and the sessions with the therapist were physically and psychologically painful. In his wheelchair, Shane could relax and sometimes almost forget about his paralysis. He had become quite skillful at maneuvering the chair, had adapted to the challenges that his injury forced on him. But attempting to use his legs was humiliating. He was still embarrassed by the awkwardness, even with the sympathetic and professional therapist. He frequently thought of giving up on recovering any function of his legs, firing the therapist, and resigning himself to his fate. But KiKi wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that he had to keep at it. You could never tell. There might yet be some gratifying results. So Shane kept at it. KiKi was the expert. But Monday mornings were not the highlight of his week.
“How much do you know about gait, Mike?” Shane asked.
Mike Borden’s head was shaved slick and his lean body reeked of virility. He moved with the easy grace of the professional athlete that he had been. Over time, he and Shane had developed a comfortable relationship, comfortable but with a healthy professional space between them.
“Shane,” Borden answered, “I think you should be concentrating on walking at all at this point. We can worry about how you walk after you’ve mastered the basics.”
Borden slipped a muscular arm around Shane and helped him up. Shane emitted an involuntary grunt as the searing pain shot down his right leg. He gripped the arms of the walker and tried to steady himself in the now-unfamiliar erect position.
“That’s not it, Mike,” Shane said, taking a deep breath and suppressing a grimace with difficulty. “For reasons that you don’t need to worry about, I was interested in a pigeon-toed gait. What causes that?”
“I’m not sure. I think it happens in childhood, maybe congenital, I’m not sure,” Borden answered.
Shane thought that he would get on the computer for some serious Googling on the topic as soon as he could get through the ordeal of trying to coax his reluctant lower extremities to do their job. He was regaining some strength in his legs recently, but the process was excruciatingly slow and Shane was not by nature a patient man. Learning patience may have been the heaviest burden of his incapacity.
After resting a while from the ordeal with the therapist and polishing off a couple glasses of sherry, Shane fired up his laptop and Googled, “pigeon-toed gait in adults.” Over 4 million hits. As he scanned through the first fifty or so titles, several caught his eye. The gait is far and away more common in women than men. It seems that some athletes think that running that way actually makes them faster. Babe Ruth was given as an example, although Shane didn’t think the beefy Babe was a very good example of athletic speed. Some track stars have deliberately altered their natural gait to a toes inward style without, apparently, any real reason to think that it helps. Then, there was a string of blogs claiming that a knock-off imitation of a popular brand of women’s boots could cause a pigeon-toed gait. And, finally, the fascinating claim under, Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany, that a pigeon-toed gait had recently become, “endemic among intelligent young women,” with no apparent explanation for the phenomenon. All fascinating trivia but Shane couldn’t readily connect any of it to the diminutive person in the dark blue hoodie who shot Bonz Bagley and triggered Shane’s interest in the topic.
He switched off the computer, wheeled over to the bar, refilled his Oxford sherry glass, and rolled out onto the deck. The guys in the Blues Bar just opposite the deck were apparently testing their sound system, checking things out for when they would open up later. The loudspeakers aimed directly at Shane blared Koko Taylor’s earthy raunch. He liked blues, especially the Chicago variety, better than country, really. And Koko was a favorite. The volume was a little high, but good hard-driving blues—Everything’s gonna be alright, yeah.
He pondered what information he had about Bonz’s killer, sorting through the pieces in his mind and trying to assemble them into a picture. Small person of unknown gender, race, and physical characteristics. Probably a wealthy collector of rare guns. Most likely handy with such rare firearms (many collectors were). Except for the fact that the shots were to the head, this had no signs of a contract job, quite the contrary. And now, add the pigeon-toed gait information. Either an athlete, a wearer of Ugg knockoff boots, or an intelligent young woman. Or all of those. The knockoff boots didn’t make sense. Why would a rich person buy imitation boots? And why wear them in the summer heat?
Shane had learned from painful experience that the criminal had to fit the crime. There had to be motive. And what possible motive could a wealthy, intelligent young woman athlete and rare gun collector have had for killing Bonz Bagley in broad daylight in the middle of Printers Alley on a sunny summer Sunday morning in front of God and everybody? He was also puzzled by the nagging feeling that there was something familiar about the person he had seen fleeing the scene. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t think of anyone he knew who fit this concocted description.
Maybe he was off base. But the possibility that the killer was female seemed real. Remembering what he had seen, Shane thought the person could well have been a woman. The size was right. And, on reflection, maybe there was something feminine about how the person ran. He should discuss this with Hardy Seltzer. Maybe by now, Hardy had some more information that would help make sense of it.
Shane rang Hardy’s office and the detective answered, “Seltzer,” an answer that seemed ironically appropriate to the dyspeptic tone of his voice.
“Cheerio, Hardy,” Shane said. “Have I caught you at a bad time?”
“Oh, Shane,” Hardy answered, surprised at the call. “Seems like anytime is a bad time lately. But what’s up?”
“I’ve been doing some spadework that may be relevant to the Bonz Bagley murder case. Do you have anything new?”
“A bit,” Hardy replied. “And the autopsy is today. That may tell us something. Tell you what. Let’s meet and compare notes this afternoon after I’ve got at least the preliminary results from the autopsy.”
Seltzer had decided to include Shane Hadley in the investigation without asking permission from the front office brass. Because they were seriously shorthanded, Hardy had been assigned the case by himself for the time being and he didn’t see how using Shane could hurt. Seltzer was also intrigued by the prospect of seeing firsthand how Sherlock Shane would go about trying to solve the crime. God knows, Hardy needed all the help he could get with this one. It wasn’t going to be easy, and what with the publicity, there would be a lot of pressure to get it solved as fast as possible.
“That’s super,” Shane replied.
“I’ll come by your place in the alley around four if that’s OK?”
“Jolly good,” Shane said. “I’ll watch for you.”
The morgue and the coroner’s office were in the basement of the aging and largely deserted city hospital, a red brick anachronism perched atop a hill overlooking the Cumberland River that snaked along the eastern edge of downtown. Hardy Seltzer maneuvered his black unmarked LTD down Lower Broad past the honky-tonks and souvenir shops and turned right on First Avenue away from the giant replica of the iconic Les Paul model Gibson guitar
that fronted the Hard Rock Café on its Broadway side. He wound along the river’s edge for a block or two and then hung left and climbed the steep hill. The entrance to the hospital grounds was at the crest of the hill through a sagging pair of rusting wrought iron gates that had never, in Hardy’s memory, been closed and so were both ugly and useless.
The hospital complex was a cluster of decaying buildings scattered over several acres. The only activities there since the inpatients were moved to the historically black medical college in the north part of the city several years earlier, were an outpatient AIDS clinic and the morgue. There were periodic plans to renovate the buildings, convert them into shops and condos. The hilltop site overlooking the river was attractive. But that hadn’t happened yet for whatever reason. It would happen.
Seltzer virtually always attended the autopsies of the victims of murders that he was charged with investigating. He felt obligated to do that, but he hated doing it. He was overtaken by a sense of foreboding as he drove the few blocks from the police station to the morgue. And the hospital grounds had the eerie feeling of a cemetery, largely abandoned by the living, left to the morbid necessities of dealing with the dying and the dead. By the time he arrived at the door to the autopsy suite, swiped his access card, and entered the haunting cold silence that dwelt there, he was, as usual on such occasions, depressed.
“Ah, if it’s not the Maestro of Murder, the good detective Al K. Seltzer,” welcomed Dr. Jensen, the rotund coroner with the shock of white hair, fake Irish accent, and disquietingly morbid sense of humor. “Good to see you, Al K., feeling fizzy, are you?”
Hardy had long ago tired of jokes about his name and the fact that Jensen seemed incapable of refraining from such feeble attempts at humor even when Hardy was obviously displeased, did not make for a particularly amiable relationship between the two men. Hardy just wanted to get this morbid business over with.
“You started on Bonz yet?” Hardy asked.
“Your timing is impeccable, detective,” Jensen replied. “I am just about to grant what remains of the unfortunate Mr. Bagley the benefit of my skills. Please, if you would don a gown and mask, you may observe.”
Hardy went to the small dressing room, put on a green surgical gown over his clothes, tied on a mask, and returned to the autopsy table where Bonz’s pale corpse lay naked, except for a green drape that covered his head. Cold and dead. Only a few days ago, he was sitting in front of his club, the poodle wriggling about in his lap, chatting with the alley passersby. Hardy was often struck with how suddenly death struck. In the space of a few seconds, the exotic bullets of an unknown murderer propelled Bonz Bagley suddenly from the sunny confines of his small piece of the living world into the darkness of whatever there was on the other side. At least it was sudden. If there was anything Hardy feared, it was a protracted death. He wasn’t afraid of dying, only of doing it too slowly.
The buzz of the bone saw ripping through Bonz’s ribs jarred Hardy from his reverie. Jensen had flayed back the skin and subcutaneous tissue over the chest, exposing the muscles and ribs, and after a careful inspection of the area, sawed through the ribs on each side and lifted off the thoracic shield—sternum—anchoring the protruding rib stumps. It was like removing the carapace of a clam. The insides of Bonz’s thorax were strikingly pale and dry. The heart lay flaccid, silently reclined against what remained of the left side of the chest wall. Fine black spidery patterns covered the gray-pink surfaces of the deflated lungs.
Jensen dictated his observations into a recorder microphone suspended over the table as he went about his grisly work. Once Jensen started an autopsy, he was totally engrossed in what he was doing. He was very fast at it and Hardy was glad of that. Jensen rummaged about in the chest cavity, taking samples here and there and dropping the pieces of tissue into the formalin- filled vials proffered by his young assistant, while maintaining a running monologue into the recorder.
Hardy listened to Jensen’s dictation to see if he could pick up anything of note, but there weren’t any real surprises. Jensen stopped the recorder with a foot switch and turned to Hardy.
“Nothing much here,” he said. “The real action will be in his head, or what there is left of it.”
He touched the foot switch again to restart the machine and resumed the rhythmic monotone with which he described the unremarkable findings in an old man’s abdominal cavity. Jensen took about an hour and a half to finish everything but the brain. Removing the brain was always left to last, and Hardy stayed to the bitter end.
It was not as though Hardy had never witnessed the havoc wreaked on a human face by a handgun at close range, and he had seen the results in this case earlier at the crime scene, but the sight of what had been Bonz Bagley’s face still shocked him. The coroner whisked away the drape that had covered the face during the rest of the autopsy with a flourish revealing the horrific site. In place of what should have been a left eye, there was a gaping hole. The right cheek area was also distorted by an entrance wound, giving the face an eerie lopsided asymmetry—intact cheekbone but no eye on the left and a glazed staring dilated eye on the right with a glob of mangled flesh beneath it where the cheekbone should have been. Two additional entrance wounds were evenly spaced on either side of the midline of the forehead. While Bonz’s intact face had been nothing to brag about, the killer had distorted his features into something grotesque and inhuman by the apparently careful placement of the four fatal gunshots.
“Jesus Christ,” Hardy blurted.
Jensen was dictating in careful detail the description of the facial wounds into the suspended microphone. Interrupted by Hardy’s exclamation, he touched the foot pedal switching off the recorder.
“Pretty gross, huh, detective?” Jensen said. “Four shots directly into his face. Inside will be a bloody mess.”
“Yeah,” Hardy replied. “Yeah. Why four? Looks like one would have done the job. Why would the killer hang around in broad daylight long enough to fire four times and also increase the likelihood of being discovered by making all that unnecessary noise?”
“Well,” Jansen responded. “Of course figuring out such things is why you detectives get paid the big bucks, but in my experience, this kind of overkill suggests vengeance of some sort. Somebody driven to a desperate act by pent-up rage, settling a long-festering score. Or a betrayed lover, which in Mr. Bagley’s case doesn’t’ seem very likely.”
Jensen switched the recorder back on and finished describing the gross appearance of the head. With a scalpel, he cut a deep line that circumscribed the top of the head, traversing the occiput and aiming just below the two entry wounds in the forehead. Having retraced the scalpel’s path to make sure the incision had penetrated to the bone throughout its course, Jensen lay the scalpel aside, cranked up the Stryker saw and cut through the bone along the path of the incision creating a detachable piece of bone that Jensen could not help but think of as a skull cap. He lifted up the cap of skull to reveal a gelatinous mass of dark magenta clotted blood and macerated brain. Jensen switched off the recorder again.
“Bloody mess,” he said. “Lucky if we can tell anything about the brain.”
He reactivated the recorder and began describing the gory cranial contents. He suctioned away as much of the blood clot as he could and reached into the cavity, a hand on either side of what tissue he could grasp. He elevated the brain, severed the spinal cord just below the medulla and lifted what appeared to be a shapeless mass, depositing it on the stainless steel table. He returned to the empty cranial cavity and felt around. After a few minutes, Jensen retrieved four slugs and held them up for Hardy to see.
Again stopping the recorder, he said to Hardy, “Since there were no exit wounds, the slugs had to be in the cranium. The fact that they entered and just rattled around in there is why they did so much damage to the brain tissue. I’ll formalin fix what’s left of the brain, but not sure how much of the structure is still intact. Maybe the brainstem and cerebellum. Not sure. At any rate, th
e brain will have to sit in the fixative for a couple of days before we’ll be able to tell what’s left. At least ballistics can identify the slugs.”
There was no real reason for Seltzer to be there the whole time. He didn’t know why, but he felt obligated. That was an especially strong feeling in this case. Bonz had been a presence in the life of the city where Hardy had been born and raised. And he loved the city, warts and all. Granted, his chosen profession exposed him to the warts more than to the city’s more pleasant features, but it was his city. Bonz had been a part of the city’s reality, and whoever killed him had done violence to the place as well as to Printers Alley’s honorary mayor.
Hardy stopped for a drink at a seedy beer joint a block or so toward town from the old hospital. He knew the barmaid there although he hadn’t seen her in a while. In his distant and innocent past, he had known her quite well. They had been classmates at North High School. Hardy still remembered Marge Bland as a cheerleader and senior prom queen who was married for a while to the jock who had been captain of the football team. Early success had taken a turn downhill in the last few years, but she had handled her declining fortunes pretty well. It had been a while since he’d visited the bar at the Dew Drop Inn and chatted with Marge, and he felt a strong need for the familiar face of a living breathing person. And for a drink.
“Hi Hardy,” Marge Bland greeted him as he took a seat at the far end of the bar, away from the couple of guys in work clothes downing their third beer and talking too loudly. "Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“It’s been busy, Marge,” Hardy answered. “Too damn busy.”
“You involved in the Bonz murder case?” she asked. “That’s all anybody around here talks about. Sad thing. Really sad. Who’d do a thing like that?”