by Gerald Duff
J.W. looked at McComick until the officer dropped his eyes as he juggled his hat into position.
“Who’s here?” J.W. said. “Whose city vehicle is that yonder?”
“The M.E.,” Shaquita Lawson said, “and the assistant M.E. with him.”
“Is it Hoot?”
“Yessir, him and somebody I ain’t met before, a lady assistant. She’s a new one, I believe.,” Shaquita Lawson said.
“I bet old Hoot’s wearing a tie today then,” J.W. said, “along with his pretty white coat.”
“I never noticed,” the male street cop said. “I did see his white coat, though.”
McComick’s Memphis Police hat was now firmly in place at the regulation angle, but J.W. ignored what he’d just said. Damn if I’ll buddy-buddy right off with a police officer that needs to be told to keep all his clothes on when he’s in uniform.
“What we got here, Officer Lawson?” J.W. said. “Run it on down for me.”
“Sergeant Ragsdale,” she said, flipping pages in a small composition notebook in her left hand, “we got a deceased female, African-American, blunt trauma and stab wounds, as I ascertain, the cause of her death.”
“Let Hoot Sarratt tell us, Shaquita,” J.W. said. “He’s got to do something to earn his keep.”
“Yessir, it’s in there in the front room, half on and half off of a sofa. Neighbor looked in the window and saw her an hour or so ago.”
“Why’d he say he looked?”
“Says he saw glass on the porch when he was walking by headed for Pop Eye’s up on Poplar. Says he knew that wasn’t right. She would’ve swept up anything that was broke or was a mess, you know, on her porch. “
“How old a woman was she?”
“Old,” McComick said. “Not real old, but old.”
“How old was she?” J.W. said again, still looking at Shaquita Lawson.
“She was eighty-three. Name of Beulahdene Jackson. Lived alone.”
“Busted out the window in the door to get in,” J.W. said. “I guess early morning. Have y’all done your door-to-door yet?”
“Not across the street yet,” Shaquita Lawson said. “Just the one neighbor we talked to so far.”
“Well,” J.W. said. “Officer McComick, you see that line of houses over yonder. Go to it.”
McComick stepped off the porch and marched down the sidewalk at a good clip, hat firmly in place, and polished shoes winking in the sunlight.
“Who is that, Shaquita?” J.W. said, watching McComick head for a yellow stuccoed house directly across the street.
“He’s new to us,” Shaquita Lawson said, “new to Memphis, but he’s been on the job in Nashville for several years already.”
“Why ain’t I surprised?” J.W. said. “You the first one in the house, Shaquita?”
“Yep, we was out here on Poplar just passing the intersection of Cleveland when the call come. So we responded.”
“How’d it look when you went in? Same old, same old?”
“It looked usual, but it looked a little funny, too.” J.W. didn’t speak, and Shaquita Lawson went on. “You know, all kinds of stuff was throwed in the floor, drawers upside down and scattered, knick-knacks and things here and yonder, ransacked and all, TV throwed down on the floor.”
“Just one of the brothers looking for a way to buy him some medicine, I reckon,” J.W. said.
“Yeah, but the way he got out of the house was what was different. See, what he did was to go out through a side window up pretty high off the floor.”
“Didn’t use the door he come in through?
“Don’t look like it, no. He kindly jumped up and busted through that window, knocked out the casing and the curtains on it, left bloodtrail on the glass he busted, and by the time he hit the ground outside, he had to’ve fell eight feet.”
“High jump artist, showing out, huh?”
“I guess. Didn’t make sense to me. Glad we got the blood, though.”
“Let’s go on in, Shaquita,” J.W. said. “See what our crack M.E. can tell us.”
A smallish man was leaning over the body sprawled in the middle of the room. Viewed from behind he looked normal in configuration, but J.W. knew that if you turned David “Hoot” Sarratt sideways for examination, he would appear to be carrying a fullterm pregnancy, maybe twins, beneath the white coat he was wearing.
“Hoot,” J.W. said. “You got on your tie today.”
“Yeah, Sergeant Ragsdale, I do,” the Memphis M.E. said. “I woke up feeling kind of formal this morning.”
“I can see that,” J.W. said, and he could see why, too, as he looked at the woman standing to Hoot Sarratt’s side, some sort of shiny instrument in her hand. She didn’t look up immediately at the entrance of J.W. and Shaquita into the room of the crime scene, and J.W. was glad she hadn’t, since he got a chance to see her in profile, face and torso both.
Her forehead, nose, and chin looked as though they had been cut out by some artisan a few centuries back as a model for a silver coin, one probably high in value. We’re talking the equivalent of a silver dollar here, J.W. noted, not a commemorative state of Arkansas quarter with a flying duck on it. Somebody took some pains on getting that profile done right, he paid some attention to his engraving, and he got it exact.
Although he couldn’t tell from the advantage of his current viewpoint, J.W. Ragsdale know that if and when she turned to look in his direction, the woman would have the cheekbones you are liable to see in good number on women in Mississippi and Alabama and Tennessee, but hardly one in a thousand north of a line you might draw on a map marking the division between the Delta and the state of Missouri and all points Midwest.
“How you doing?” J.W. said in the direction of the woman, not meaning to say anything yet to her but discovering himself doing it without meaning to act like he’d seen her at all. Hell, keep on talking, you’ve showed your hand now, damn it. Two of a kind with Hoot Sarratt, not a dime’s worth of difference in his response to a good-looking woman from that of the man wearing a tie spattered with egg yolk.
“What you seeing there?”
“Well, a dead woman,” the female assistant said, “probably been that way for five to six hours.”
“This here is Nova, Sergeant Ragsdale,” Hoot Sarratt said, grinning at J.W. as though he’d just seen him trying to sneak something out of a location where he had no business putting his hand. “Let me introduce y’all to each other.”
“Hello,” J.W. said. Shaquita Lawson, standing beside him, cleared her throat and looked down at her fingernail, holding her fingers straight out the way a woman will do in contrast to a man who will turn his palm up and curl them back toward himself to take a look-see. Why is that, J.W. wondered.
“This is Nova Hebert, my assistant. That homicide detective there is Sergeant J.W. Ragsdale, up from Panola County, Mississippi.”
“Nova?” J.W. said, trying not to babble, but feeling it about to get away from him. “Like the name of the Chevrolet? That one G.M. made with Nissan back in the seventies?”
“Yes, you got it,” the female assistant said, looking back down at what she’d been doing when J.W. and Shaquita Lawson came through the front door. “That’s what they named me for, though I didn’t know Nissan had anything to do with the Nova.”
“Oh, yeah,” J.W. said, “sure, that’s why it was a good economy-sized car, see. It had a lot more than Detroit going for it.”
Thinking to himself as he spoke, goddamn, why can’t I keep from rattling on about a car that there ain’t been any made of for over twenty years? Thirty, maybe. Shut your fool mouth, dummy.
“Why would your folks name you for a brand of automobile?” Hoot Sarratt said, still grinning like a jackass eating briars. “Didn’t they know what that name nova means in Spanish?”
“No sir,” Nova Hebert said. “I expect they didn’t know about that. There was a lot they didn’t know about a lot of things.”
“What it means in Spanish is it won’t go, see,” Hoot said. “Y
ou got to break it down first, though, see, to its constituent parts. No, that means no in Spanish, just like it does in English. Then va, that means go. So no go, that’s what that name means.”
“It’s a nice name,” Shaquita Lawson said. “It sounds pretty to say.”
“Thank you, officer,” Nova Hebert said. “So does Shaquita.”
“Not nearly as pretty as Hoot, though,” J.W. said, thinking he had to get this thing refocused on the only one in the house that seemed to be showing any sense of dignity at the moment, the dead woman in the middle of the room.
“What did the job?” he said. “Whatever it was that hit the victim on the side of the head, I guess it was.”
“Naw,” Hoot said, sounding a little miffed at J.W.’s comment about his nickname which had always seemed fine to him. It was jolly and short and nobody ever had a problem remembering it. “It wasn’t that that did it. You tell him, Nova.”
“She bled out,” the female assistant with the profile said, pointing with the instrument in her hand at several spots on the body before her, moving her hand up and down with short, precise jerks as though she was sprinkling drops of water on some object.
“See all these amounts of blood in profusion at the throat, the upper torso, both right and left lateral? Her heart was pumping for some space of time, probably even after the killer exited the scene.”
“Something scared him,” J.W. said. “Made him leave before he was finished picking stuff up.”
“We don’t know about that,” Hoot Sarratt said. “That ain’t part of our job, right, Nova? We just process the scene, tell you what we see, and leave the rest of the job up to you homicide detectives.”
“You got that right, Mr. Medical Examiner,” J.W. Ragsdale said. “I’ve never seen you meddle yet in what I’ve got to do.”
“You got to stay focused, J.W.,” Hoot said, over his pout about the aspersion cast on his name. “Focus sharpens the mind, understand, lets a man do his job right.”
“You can see footprints in the blood trace all around the room,” Nova Hebert said. “So the perp was here for a while as the victim was bleeding out.”
Nobody said anything for a space, but for Hoot Sarratt’s humming tunelessly as he looked from his assistant to J.W. and back again, beaming like a basketball coach who had witnessed his only child sink two game-winning free throws in an overtime period.
“Then,” Nova Hebert said, pointing toward the small window set high in the north wall of the room, the one with the pane of glass missing and the curtain hanging partway outside the house, “he did his high jump through that hole he made for himself.”
“Suppose it was a western roll or a Fosbury flop he did, J.W.?” Hoot Sarratt said.
“Yeah, Hoot,” J.W. said. “You pick up on the funny part, all right. Shaquita, let’s you and me walk around in the rest of the house. See what we can see.”
“He went headfirst through that window,” Shaquita Lawson said, “like it was something after him.”
“Like it was biting him on the ass,” J.W. said. “He was motivated, all right.”
I wish I hadn’t said ass in front of that woman named Nova, J.W. thought as he left the living room of Beulahdene Jackson’s house, headed for the kitchen, that kind of talk is for sure a no go.
FOUR
J.W. and Tyrone
By the time J.W. Ragsdale arrived back at the Midtown station a couple of hours later, Tyrone Walker was already at his desk punching on his keyboard.
“You done got it figured out, I see,” J.W. said. “Made your arrest and listened to a full confession, just like on TV. When’s the execution date?”
“Just as soon as he figures out what he wants for the last supper, J.W.,” Tyrone said, giving his keyboard a last flurry of punches and looking up from across the desk. “I wish it was that quick, all right. It’d save us a whole bunch of trouble.”
“What’d you find out about that fan smothering the lady?”
“This is your kind of deal, J.W., for sure,” Tyrone said. “The way you love to hear lies and people making up crazy stuff. See, here’s the way it happened, according to the husband, the man who called 911 all in a uproar.”
“Run it down for me,” J.W. said. “I need some uplift after what I been looking at on Montgomery Street.”
“All right, Mrs. Sirhan Barsamian was napping on the king-size bed in the master bedroom, it being that time of day for the lady, and she was lying under a big ceiling fan, one of the top-of-the-line units from Hunter.
“Turns out it hadn’t been mounted right, there in that nice house on Peabody and when Mr. Sirhan Barsamian came home after a hard day at the International Food Mart, he found that the fan had shook its way loose and descended upon his lovely bride enjoying her nap in all that cool air underneath it.”
“Did it cut her throat or something?” J.W. said. “I wouldn’t have thought wood blades would slice through anything. They’d knock hell out of you, of course, but that ought not to kill you. Was that the first story he told you?”
“Naw, J.W.,” Tyrone said, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head from side to side for dramatic effect, “the fan smothered her, that’s what Mr. Sirhan Barsamian told 911, and the officer responding, and me when I got there. And he would’ve told Jesus the same thing if He’d showed up.”
“What? The fan laid on her face? That don’t make sense. How did he expect to get that by you?”
“See, it was a language problem, J.W. It’s like most misunderstandings in this old world we live in. It just comes down to problems in communication. A failure to communicate, like old Strother Martin says in that Paul Newman flick.”
“That’s before my time. What then?” J.W. slapped at the breast pocket of his shirt as though something had just stung him, felt nothing, realized what he was doing, and began searching through the drawers of his desk to see if there might be a piece of hard candy left to sacrifice to his nicotine hunger.
“You done ate all that candy up,” Tyrone said. “And I never have had any over here, and I don’t now. So don’t be asking me.”
“All right,” J.W. said. “I guess you hadn’t got any Juicy Fruit, either, do you? Not stick one.”
“No,” Tyrone said. “What had happened, you understand, was that high-dollar Hunter ceiling fan, model number A one four seven, worked itself loose, fell on Mrs. Sirhan Barsamian as she peacefully napped, and choked her to death.”
“How? Couldn’t she fight it off? Not a stick of gum left, huh?”
“No, you know I stopped using it. Chewing gum metabolizes as a carbohydrate, even the diet brand, and the body converts and stores that crap as fat.”
“What a shame,” J.W. said. “How did the fan do it, then? This model whatever it is.”
“A one four seven. I just entered it into my report.”
“You’re an efficient bastard, ain’t you?”
“I give good report, J.W., unlike some detectives of homicide. Anyway, that fan had wrapped its chain that hangs down so you can adjust speed and all that business, clear around that woman’s neck and choked her to death. And then tied a knot in the chain so it wouldn’t work loose and let her catch another breath.”
“Bullshit.”
“That was precisely my experienced and expert opinion and response. The very remark that came to my mind, and I said it.”
“He thought we’d buy that, this Food Mart guy?”
“This is a different culture than what the man’s used to, J.W., here in Memphis. I expect where he’s from people fly around on carpets and turn into bullfrogs just on a whim. Why wouldn’t we buy it, he figured.”
“You got to give him credit, I reckon,” J.W. said, “for being a good storyteller. What finally broke him down?”
“He gave it on up, Sergeant Ragsdale, after I pointed out to him how all the finger and thumb marks had started rising up on his wife’s neck just as pretty as a picture. Even an old-school police officer would’ve seen it.”
“Did he start squalling and stuff?” J.W. said, refusing to rise to Tyrone’s bait. Old school. I’m so damn old school I don’t know what old school means. “This grieving Food Mart man?”
“That he did, yes, and praying in a foreign language and trying to explain to his dead wife why he’d done what he did and how he hadn’t seen a single alternative.”
“Do you suppose the AK forty seven fan did fall down on her and Mr. Barsamian saw his chance and like a good Memphian took it?”
“Not AK forty seven, J.W. It’s A forty seven. We’re not in Vietnam now, so don’t start having an AK forty seven flashback on me. But no to your question. The fan came down after the wife was already done. The fool left his tools stacked up on a dresser drawer thing right there in the room.”
“He dismantled the fan, then, to cover up the strangling he’d done put on her?
“Mr. Sirhan Barsamian did just that. And you know what else? That fan was well-secured, too, before it came down. He had to use a screw driver, a wrench, and a wire cutter to get it to tumble.”
“Phillips head?” J.W. said, turning to his computer to get it cranked up to receive his notes so far on the Montgomery and Peach killing. The way the machine began to whir and groan put J.W. in mind of an old man rising from bed after tossing around all night and not sleeping a wink.
“Do you sleep good at night, Tyrone?” he said. “Can you still do that?”
“Of course,” Tyrone said. “I got them half-grown twins to wear me out when I get home at night. I sleep like a baby every time I get a chance to lie down. Why do you ask?”
“Brag on,” J.W. said. “Your time’s coming.”
“I guess the thing over at Montgomery and Peach is not going to be so easy for you as the fan smothering was for me, huh?”
“No,” J.W. said. “All we got’s some blood from the perp and some pissant bloody footprints.”
“No real prints, I reckon.”
“No, you know they all wear them little old rubber gloves now, Tyrone. The dumbest crackhead in Memphis is learned to do that these days.”
“Damn television,” Tyrone said.
“Easy for you to say, buddy. You got a woman living in the house with you. A single man like me would be a lonely bastard without his TV set.”