by Clark Howard
“Papa, he’s a policeman friend of Mama’s,” Meralda said.
“Oh? Well, I am George Mendez,” the man announced somewhat pompously. “I am Meralda’s father. I do not wish her to be further upset by this suicide talk.”
“Papa, please, I want him to know—”
“I will not have any more of this talk, Meralda. I am in charge here—”
“Who put you in charge?” Kiley asked quietly. The man did not look clean; his moustache was untrimmed and he needed a haircut. The thought of him even touching Gloria made Kiley’s skin crawl.
“I am in charge,” George Mendez repeated affectedly. “I am her husband—”
“Husband or ex-husband?” Kiley asked. His voice grew softer but somehow threatening. Gloria had never mentioned Meralda’s father to him, but it didn’t take much for Kiley to put the picture together. A macho phony who had probably looked pretty slick seventeen years earlier when he got the young Gloria pregnant; then, like a lot of the homeboys, had turned out to be worthless as shit, and left mother and child to get out of the barrio on their own—if they could. Gloria had been one of the smart ones: she had taken a civil service exam; she would have gotten out—in spite of macho George.
Would have gotten out if Kiley hadn’t come along.
“We,” Mendez stated with forced authority, pointing at Gloria again, “are still married in the eyes of the church. You are out of place here.”
“We’re both out of place here,” Kiley said evenly. “But I’ll be leaving as soon as I finish talking to Meralda.” Gently he took the girl’s arm. “Come outside.”
“Please, Papa,” Meralda said, holding back. Gloria had raised her properly. This man, regardless of his noninvolvement in Meralda’s life, was nevertheless her father, and she had learned that he was entitled to her respect.
George Mendez, like the young Latin Prince on the porch with Meralda that night when Kiley visited, must have seen something in Kiley’s eyes that gave him pause for thought, and generated in him a sudden caution, because he finally waved a hand, as if in dismissal and, saving face, said, “All right, go. I permit it. But only briefly.”
Meralda walked out to the parking lot with Kiley, where they had all the privacy they needed. “Go on with what you were saying,” he told the girl.
“I went on a movie date Friday night,” Meralda said. “With a Latin Prince named Hector—only Mama didn’t know he was a Prince; he didn’t come to get me, I met him there. But I had to be home by eleven-thirty, that was my curfew. I would have come home anyway, because it was our party night, Mama’s and mine. And I even came home a little earlier on that night, about eleven-fifteen, because Hector is just a friend, you know, not really a boyfriend; I mean, Hector and me, we don’t make out, you understand?”
“I understand. What kind of mood was your mother in when you left?”
“Kind of, like, real tired. I think she had something on her mind, something she was worried about—” Meralda fixed her eyes on Kiley. “I thought maybe you and her were getting involved, and had a fight or something—”
“We weren’t and we didn’t,” Kiley said. “She never told you what she was worried about?”
“No.”
She wouldn’t have, Kiley thought. Wouldn’t have shared her burden of concern, her dread of the future, with her daughter, because it probably would have upset Meralda very much, even though undoubtedly being of some comfort to Gloria in the sharing.
“Was your mother dead when you got home at eleven-fifteen?” Kiley asked.
“Yes. But I didn’t know it right away. The bathroom door was closed, so I just yelled, ‘Mama, your baby girl is home safe and sound, underwear intact.’ That was our little joke, you know. Anyway, I saw the Scrabble game set up on the middle cushion of the couch, and I went into the kitchen and looked in the fridge to see what Mama had bought for our party. It was chocolate eclairs, four of them. So then I went into the bedroom and got undressed and put on my nightgown and robe; that’s what we always wore for our parties. And I got out some polish remover and stuff, because we usually do our nails between turns, see.” Meralda sighed heavily. “I guess I was home for about fifteen minutes before I went back to the bathroom door, and I yelled—” At this point she began to weep. “Oh, my God, I just remembered—sweet Jesus, forgive me—I yelled, ‘Hey, Mama, did you die in there?”’ The girl’s weeping turned to sobbing, and Kiley awkwardly put an arm around her shoulders and let her cry up against him. He did not say anything to her, did not try to comfort her with words; they would have been the same platitudes about time healing everything that he had been exhausting with Stella. They had not worked that well with her, and probably, Kiley thought, wouldn’t work at all with this sixteen-year-old. So he just held her until she got through it.
When Meralda’s crying began to subside, Kiley asked, “Did you finally open the bathroom door and find your mother?”
“Y—yes—She—she was slumped down against the side of the tub, with—with one arm draped into the tub—and her head was back and her—her mouth open. There was a small empty whiskey bottle on the floor next to her. She had on her—her nightgown and robe for our party—” Now Meralda suddenly regained much of her composure and quickly began to dry her tears. “That’s why I know Mama didn’t kill herself,” she said firmly. “If she was going to do that, she wouldn’t have had everything ready for our party like she did. I’m sure of that. Plus she never ever had a little bottle of whiskey around like that. She had one big bottle of whiskey that she kept on hand for visitors, but never a little bottle like that—”
“The Valium was hers, right?” Gloria had once given him one.
“Yeah,” Meralda shrugged, “she’s been taking that for years. She had a regular prescription for it.” The girl shook her head emphatically. “I know she didn’t kill herself, Mr. Kiley—”
“Do you think it could have been an accident? That she could have taken too many pills by mistake—”
“Mama? Come on, you must know better.”
She was right; he did know better. “Meralda, you got home at eleven-fifteen. What time had you left?”
“Just a little after eight, maybe five minutes.”
Kiley’s mind was racing. A little after eight until a quarter after eleven. Three hours plus. Plenty of time for anything to have happened. It could have been an impulsive thing, a moment when full-blown desperation came crashing down on her and she needed an urgent, immediate release from the pressure. Or it could have been a lengthier scenario: a couple of hours of intense brooding, pill-popping, a whiskey chaser each time, until the cumulative effect totaled her. As for the unfamiliar small whiskey bottle, Gloria may have been sipping a little on the side, picking up an occasional pint so that she didn’t have to tap the guest bottle, which Meralda probably would have noticed. There was a reasonable explanation for everything Meralda was denying.
But none of it took into consideration Kiley’s telephone call to Gloria around eight-thirty; a call that had to have made Gloria Mendez feel better, had to have given her fresh hope for the future.
And the business of the Scrabble game and the eclairs was too compelling to discount. Meralda’s instinct on that could not be refuted—at least not without solid evidence to the contrary. A depressed, suicidal woman probably wouldn’t have prepared their party. Except—Kiley had already decided that Gloria had been concealing her problems from Meralda, so wouldn’t it have been natural to have the party as usual?
Kiley had to have some answers—quickly.
“Listen to me,” he said, taking Meralda by her upper arms, capturing her full attention. “I’m going to look into this, see what I can find out. I’m not promising anything—but I’ll work on it.” Kiley lowered his head a little. “I liked your mother, Meralda. She’s one of the best people I ever met. I’m sorry you’ve lost her.”
“If you liked her that much, then prove that she didn’t do it to herself,” Meralda said grimly. “Please p
rove that.”
“I will if I can,” Kiley told her.
At Steiner Center, Kiley skipped the elevator and walked up two flights of stairs to a hallway that housed the offices of half a dozen deputy examiners who made up the medical support staff of the county coroner. Stepping into the first unoccupied office he saw, he used the telephone to call B-and-A. When the secretary answered, he said, “Aldena, it’s Kiley. Got anything for me yet?”
“Have I!” she said almost gleefully. “I may just have the key that unlocks your whole case, Detective. Vital stats didn’t show no birth certificate, but civil litigation records did.”
“Civil litigation—?”
“You heard me. See, your suspect’s original name was not Winston; he was born Harold Paul Codman. His mother, Bernice Codman, divorced his father, Aaron Codman, and married Jerome Winston a year later. The birth father, Mr. Codman, went over to Saudi Arabia to work for a couple of years—his employment records show that—and apparently while he was gone, Jerome Winston adopted little Harold Paul, and in the absence of the birth father, the adoption court granted a motion changing the kid’s name from Codman to Winston. Reason you didn’t find no previous utility service is that he lived at home with his mother and stepfather until he was almost forty. School records and voter’s registration both show him living in the Winston home in Elk Grove until April 1990 when he went out on his own. But—and this is interesting—he has also lived from time to time with his birth father since Mr. Codman returned from Saudi Arabia. Codman also remarried, also lives in Elk Grove, and sometimes when Harold Paul stayed with him, he used the name Harold Paul Codman. In fact, he’s got a driver’s license under that name, listed at the father’s address. And he took some city college courses at Wright Junior College registered under that name. How you like them apples?”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Kiley said quietly. “Aldena, you’re wonderful.”
“’Bout time you noticed,” she said.
“You have time to keep playing with this a little?”
“In among and between my other important responsibilities, I might have a few minutes. Where do you want to take it?”
“Let’s see if he ever had a job under the name Codman—transit authority, in particular. And find out what his records show out at Wright College.”
“Got it.” Aldena paused a beat, then asked softly, concerned, “You doing okay?”
“Yeah,” his voice became quieter, “I think so.”
“Well, hang in,” she told him bluntly, and broke the connection.
Kiley stood for a moment with his hand still on the replaced receiver. Aldena, he thought, you are a gem. And Hal, you are a lying little son of a bitch. Born in Detroit, grew up in Dayton, my ass. The little bastard had laid a totally false story on Kiley, and Kiley had fallen for it. Maybe it wasn’t totally false: the part about his parents divorcing but still living in the same area, shopping at the same stores, was apparently true; but the background cities—and that little scam he’d run on Kiley as they were parting company the last time: “What about pollution?”—all of that was pure bullshit. Kiley’s instinct in the bar that night had been dead on target: Get out of there before Winston began handling him. Kiley just hadn’t left soon enough.
But the good thing about it was that Winston was probably overconfident now, smug in the belief that Kiley, sour on the department, was really his drinking buddy; Kiley had confessed to and apologized for the lie he had told Winston, so now Winston would probably believe that Kiley spoke only the truth to him—while he, Winston, was free to fabricate at will, and good old honest Joe Kiley would believe him.
You are mine, Hal, you son of a bitch, Kiley thought, finally letting go of the receiver.
Going down the hall, Kiley found the office of the deputy coroner who had handled the Ronnie Lynn homicide call, and whom Kiley and Nick had prompted for a little advance information on what the autopsy report would probably reveal. Tapping on the open door, Kiley said, “Hello, Doc.”
“Oh, hello, Joe,” the deputy coroner said, looking up from a selection of grisly photographs on his desk. He took a toothpick from his lips. “Come on in, pull up a chair—” After Kiley sat, he said, “I sure was sorry to hear about Nick, Joe—”
“Thanks, Doc—”
“He was a damn fine officer—”
“Yeah, he was.”
Reaching across the photographs, the deputy coroner retrieved several stapled pages and rifled through them. “I saw on the stat report somewhere that Homicide closed the case on that dancer—”
“Yeah. It was the club’s janitor did it. He was standing with those other guys over by the back door when you and Nick and I were talking.”
“I’ll be damned. We do lead interesting lives, don’t we, Joe?”
“Can’t argue that one, Doc.”
The deputy coroner returned the toothpick to his mouth and with a forefinger scratched what might have been an imaginary itch where his hairline was receding. “What’s on your mind, Joe?”
Kiley leaned closer to the desk. “Autopsy report on a case that’s not supposed to be any of my business.”
“On?”
“Gloria Mendez.”
Eyebrows raised. “The policewoman—?”
“She was a friend, Doc. Of Nick’s too.”
“You have a problem with the statement given to the media?”
“Not exactly. Gloria has—had—has a sixteen-year-old daughter who’s naturally pretty shaken up by the death. She doesn’t believe her mother would pull the plug like that.”
“Well, I didn’t handle the call, Joe, but I’m familiar enough with it to know that it couldn’t have been accidental because everything was ingested at once. So if it wasn’t suicide, there’s only one other alternative. Does the kid think somebody forced the pills and booze into her?”
“I haven’t gotten that far with her yet,” Kiley said honestly. “I thought if I could get a copy of the autopsy—” He let his words hang.
The deputy coroner shook his head. “I won’t give you a copy of it, Joe. That’s too risky on my part if something should develop. But I’ll pull it up on the monitor and go down the hall to the john for a few minutes.” “Fair enough, Doc.”
Swiveling, the deputy coroner switched on a terminal and monitor next to his desk and keyed input for several seconds until a printed page filled the document window. Then he rose and without further comment left the office.
Kiley immediately stepped behind the desk and scanned the report, skipping past the preliminary information regarding the brain, heart, lungs, liver, and other organs—mention of which made Joe feel queasy and uncomfortable, because he knew that for the autopsy Gloria’s body had been surgically invaded so that every part of her could be examined, weighed, analyzed, and put on record before her body was finally turned over to Fuentes Mortuary for cosmetic work and dressing to conceal that invasiveness; Kiley skipped past that disturbing part of it, realizing that in all his years as a cop, this was the first autopsy report he had ever read on anyone he had known while they were alive; it made a lot of difference. But he skimmed through the beginning of the report and got to the part he wanted to see: the contents of her stomach and the chemical analysis of her blood.
There was no doubt what had killed Gloria. A massive quantity of diazepam, combined with a lesser quantity of chloral hydrate, both of them washed down with enough alcohol to raise her blood alcohol content to four times the legal limit for driving a car.
Chewing agitatedly on the inside of his mouth, Kiley moved the pages back to the beginning of the report. He was not well versed in the medical technicalities of autopsy reports, his experience with them limited primarily to the cause of death of a given victim. In fact, it now dawned on him that he had never actually read an entire autopsy report before; so now he began to read this one, from the beginning, starting with the preliminary remarks dictated by the person who had performed the procedure. It read:
Case number CCM 10482, identified as Gloria Arenas Mendez, is a normal appearing female with light brown skin, black scalp and pubic hair, and brown eyes. Subject is 64” in length and has total body weight of 132 pounds, appearing to be well formed physically, bearing an old incision scar which appears to be from a caesarian section. She has a small black mole on the underside of her left breast—
Kiley had read about half the report when the deputy coroner returned to his office. Joe got up and gave him his chair back.
“Satisfied as to the cause of death?” the deputy coroner asked.
“I guess I’ll have to be,” Kiley replied.
Neither man spoke for nearly a minute. The deputy coroner seemed to study Kiley during that time, his lips pursed, again scratching at the spot where his hair had receded. Finally he said, “You haven’t had much experience analyzing medical exam reports, have you?”
“No,” Joe admitted. “Homicide always handles the real details. The GA report just needs the cause of death.”
“Well, as I said, this isn’t my case, and I don’t know how your department is handling it, but as I recall when I read the report—no matter whose case it is, we usually all read the report if it’s on a cop, a public official, a celebrity; gives us something to chat about at coffee—but when I read this one, it was pretty clear, as I told you before, that the subject’s in gestion of both the drugs and the alcohol had been very rapid; in other words, she probably took all of the pills as quickly as she could swallow them, and drank nearly a pint of whiskey immediately thereafter. The alcohol was absorbed directly into the bloodstream almost like an intravenous infusion, and the pills began to metabolize at the same time. She was unconscious in probably ten minutes, dead in thirty.” He turned off the terminal and sat back in his swivel chair. “Pretty cut-and-dried report, Joe—” he paused a beat, “except for those bruises.”
“Bruises?”
“Yeah. You might have missed it in the report because it wasn’t related to the cause of death. But the subject had a quarter-inch-wide bruise about three inches long, across the back of each hand between the top knuckles and the wrist. One of them could have been made when she fell and her hand hit the side of the tub; but the other one—well, let’s say it’s unusual for there to be similar bruises on both hands—unless, well—” He stared at Kiley. Kiley stared back. Until the words registered meaning.