I took Brian to McCloskey’s funeral. He was ten years old. We sat in the back of the chapel at the funeral home, behind a capacity crowd of weeping, grieving anti-Semites, and I said to my boy, “Look around, at what your daddy did.” I had never been so proud.
“Who are those guys?” he asked, pointing toward a cluster of good ol’ boys who were glowering in our direction.
“Klan, I reckon,” I told him. “But I know just what to do about them.”
And we skipped the eulogy and went out to the parking lot, where Brian helped me examine all the cars and write all the license plate numbers into my notebook. We rejoined the funeral in time to watch McCloskey go into the ground, and later on I pulled the DMV records for all of the attendees and made a special project of Henry’s Klan buddies, looking into their affairs and seeing if they had skeletons in their closets. I put two of them in prison for wife-beating, which a white man could usually get away with in those days, unless he drew the ire of a mean-spirited kike with a badge and some time to kill. I referred a third to federal agents who ultimately charged him with financial fraud and tax evasion.
A fourth Klansman, a stout middle-aged shitkicker by the name of Gerald Hart, got mighty peeved at me when I was executing a search warrant on his house, on account of my own ethnic persuasion and the fact that I was assisted in tossing his domicile by several colored officers hand-selected for this particular task. Hart had a bulbous nose as cracked and florid as the back of his neck, and his whole face flushed to match it as I directed the boys to start cutting up his furniture with big hunting knives to see if anything was concealed inside. The warrant was for illegal weapons, so we weren’t particularly surprised when Hart stormed into a back room and came out of it brandishing a snub-nosed revolver. I had the distinct pleasure of putting four rounds into his chest in a nice tight grouping. It turned out he was a Grand Dragon in the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. To think, I killed me a Dragon! How many people can say that? And it wasn’t just a regular Dragon! I killed a Grand Dragon!
Indeed, the ’60s were a decade of progress, with folks like me on the way up and folks like my erstwhile persecutors on the way out. And so, in the later years of my career, despite being descended from a duplicitous race, I was afforded most of the respect owed to a white man by my peers in the department, who had come to admire my careful eye, my preternatural intuition, and my verve for busting skulls. That meant I didn’t have to be the one sent to deal with houses that smelled like they might have dead bodies in them.
But this biology class smell didn’t signify an ordinary unattended death. Accidental deaths and heart attacks and suicides didn’t smell like that. The normal process of decomposition happens when bacteria get into the tissue of a body that is no longer protected by a functioning immune system. The germs that live in the gut and aid digestion while the host is alive multiply out of control and begin liquefying the organs, and the sweet, fermented smell of death comes from those little guys doing their work.
The smell the officers described, however, was the smell of flesh disintegrating in some solution corrosive enough to kill off the bacteria. Unless somebody tripped and fell into a vat of acid, that’s something you only smelled when someone was trying to clean up a very bad mess. I explained this in my affidavit to the magistrate, informed Captain Heller that I was planning to search the Alton Avenue residence, and messengered the documents over for my warrant.
An hour later, I was supervising an officer as he broke the locks off the front door with a prybar. Once we got inside, the stink was damn near overpowering. Even with my nose and mouth covered with a handkerchief, the noxious air made my eyes water.
In the kitchen, we found a woman’s body in a large plastic tub, not quite covered with a cloudy chemical solution. Her skin was in the process of liquefying and melting off the body, revealing fibrous stretches of exposed muscle tissue and blobby yellow mounds of subcutaneous fat.
I stepped outside the house to await the coroner and took a look around. This South Memphis neighborhood had been mostly white and middle class after the war, but it had begun to turn when the schools were integrated and the whites started fleeing to the outer-ring suburbs. Evelyn Duhrer had been one of the few remaining white holdouts. Maybe sticking around hadn’t been such a good idea. This wasn’t one of the more dangerous places in the city, but it certainly wasn’t as nice as it used to be. Then again, neither was I.
I looked up and down the street. Most of the houses had well-tended lawns and flower beds, but a few were overgrown. John Clifton, the neighbor who had reported the smell, was standing at the edge of his yard next door. I waved him over.
“What did you find in there?” he asked. He was a black man, maybe six feet tall, with a short Afro-style haircut and a mustache. He looked a little bit like my son’s favorite foulmouthed comedian.
“What do you think I found in there?” I replied.
He scratched his chin. “Well, we hadn’t seen Mrs. Duhrer in a while, and then the house started stinking. Over the next few days, the smell kept on getting worse. I don’t suppose the news is good.”
“I suppose whether you consider the news is good depends on how much you liked Mrs. Duhrer,” I told him. “We found her in a big bucket of acid, about halfway melted.”
Clifton clapped his left hand over his mouth and put his right on his knee as he doubled over. I thought his reaction seemed overly dramatic, but when he looked up, he had tears in his eyes. “I consider that bad news indeed, Detective,” he said. “Mrs. Duhrer was a very kind woman.”
“You know anyone who’d wish her ill?” I asked.
Clifton blinked dumbly. “You mean, you think she was murdered?” he asked.
I considered whether I was far enough away from the house for it to be safe to ignite a flame. I thought it probably was, but I stepped around to the other side of Clifton, to make sure he’d go up with me if I was wrong. Then I reached into my pocket for my cigarettes, but came out with a big double-pack of Juicy Fruit.
I’d quit cold turkey eighteen months previous, after forty years of steady smoking. Brian had been on me about the Luckys ever since he’d started hearing lectures about the dangers of tar and nicotine in his health class at school. When he’d graduated from Knoxville, I asked him what he wanted for a gift. I was ready to buy him a car. He told me all he wanted was for me to give up cigarettes. I told him to go jump in a lake.
But the more I’d thought about it, the more it made sense. I’d always dismissed the dangers of smoking because, between the war and police work, I had always figured something else would do me in before the cigarettes burned my lungs up. But I’d been taking things a little easier on the job as I neared retirement age, and soon I’d be taking my pension. Smoking was just about the most dangerous thing I was still doing. It made sense to give it up, so I could get the most out of my golden years.
But the smokes were like a phantom limb. I was always itching for them, patting my pockets for the lighter I’d stopped carrying. I felt awkward when I wanted to offer someone a cigarette and I didn’t have one. Sometimes, in conversations, I found myself unsure of what to do with my hands. And when I reflexively reached for my cigarettes and found chewing gum instead, there was always a momentary shock of confusion and disappointment.
The air stank, and I wanted to smoke. I thought about trying to bum one off of Clifton, but instead I opted to stuff two sticks of gum into my mouth.
Then, I said, “I don’t reckon she dunked herself into that bucket of chemicals.”
“I see,” said Clifton. This wasn’t actually an unusual response. Most people didn’t know what to say when I told them there had been a murder. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to harm her. She was a very kind woman.”
“Do you know if she had anything of value in the house that somebody might want to steal?” I asked.
Clifton shook his head. “She could not have had much. She told us she was left in a tough spot after her husband
passed. That’s why she took in the tenant.”
“The tenant?” I asked. “Somebody else is living in there?”
“Yes, a man rents rooms on the second floor. Mrs. Duhrer figured she might as well rent out the second story since she doesn’t go upstairs very well anymore. Or didn’t, I guess.”
“When was the last time you saw the tenant?”
“Day before yesterday, maybe?”
“He was in there after you noticed the smell?”
“I think so. But it wasn’t as bad as it is now.”
That didn’t matter. The smell wouldn’t have been there at all while the victim was still alive. “You know this fellow’s name?” I asked.
“Yessir,” he said. “It’s March. Chester March.”
20
In twenty years with the detectives’ bureau, I had busted hundreds of killers and thieves and forgotten most of their names. But I remembered Chester March. I remembered the way he’d acted like he was better than me, and I remembered the way McCloskey had let him skate, because, as far as the brass was concerned, March actually was better than me.
And I remember that I caught him, that I had a solid eyewitness who had picked him from a lineup with certainty and accurately described his car. And that he’d gotten off anyway, because my work wasn’t trusted. And now here was Chester, twenty years later, still killing women.
“Describe Chester March to me,” I said to Clifton.
“He’s a white man, in his fifties. Close-cropped hair. Receding hairline. Funny sort of nose, a little bit bent, like he broke it real bad and then somebody tried to fix it.” That sounded like my old friend.
“How long has he been staying here?”
“Maybe three months? I think he mentioned once that he’d come back from California.”
“You’re sure you saw him go into the house the day after you first smelled chemicals coming from in there?” It would have taken at least a few days of the body marinating in that sludge before enough of it would be floating around in the air for people to smell it from outside. That meant Chester was in the house for days while the dead woman was dissolving in the kitchen.
“Yessir,” Clifton said.
“And when was the last time you saw Mrs. Duhrer?” I asked.
“Two, maybe three days before I last saw Mr. March.”
I wanted to have a talk with Chester, but if he was already on the run, it was going to be hard to find him. If he had any sense, he had already blown town, and if he had, he was out of my reach. All I’d be able to do was get a warrant sworn for his arrest and send it to the Tennessee Highway Patrol and maybe notify authorities in Jackson, Little Rock, St. Louis, and Nashville, in case he popped up in one of those places. But I was going to do my best to throw out the nets, on the slim chance he might still be in Memphis.
I pointed at the dull-gray import parked in the victim’s carport. “Is that Mrs. Duhrer’s car?”
“Yes, it is.”
“When was the last time you were aware of this car being moved?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t really paying attention, but probably the last day I saw Mrs. Duhrer.”
“Does Mr. March have a car?”
“Yeah. He drives an old Chevy.”
“How old?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know a lot about cars. Maybe ten years?”
“Two doors or four?”
“Two.” That would make it a third- or fourth-generation Impala. Fast car, if he’d taken good care of it. He’d seemed careless, last I’d seen him, but that was a long time ago.
“Hardtop or convertible?”
“Hardtop.”
“What color was it?”
“Metallic blue.”
I could put an all-points bulletin out on the car. That was a long shot. The four door was more popular than the coupe, and the car’s age and color might stand out. But most likely, if I put an APB on a blue Chevy Impala, the officers would just laugh at me and ignore it. There were an awful lot of blue Chevys on the road, and nobody had time to stop them all.
“Did you happen to see the license plate?” I asked. I offered him my pack of gum. He took a piece, but gave me an odd look. Giving people gum felt weird. I missed my cigarettes.
“There’s no way I’d remember the number,” Clifton told me.
“That’s all right,” I said. “Do you happen to recall if the car had Tennessee plates?” If I knew the car was registered in Tennessee, I could pull all the records for cars matching its description, and that could get me the number or, if the car was registered to a known associate, a lead on who might be sheltering him.
“I’m sorry,” Clifton said. “I didn’t pay attention to that.”
So the car was probably a dead end.
“Did March have any friends? Did you ever notice anyone coming to visit him?”
Clifton shook his head. “Nobody ever came to see him here, but he said he had some rich relatives. He seemed bitter that they weren’t doing more for him.”
I nodded. “If he were in trouble, do you have any idea where he’d go, or who he might turn to for help?”
Clifton showed me his empty palms. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t know him very well.”
That seemed reasonable. I thanked Clifton, gave him my card in case he remembered anything else, and returned to the house. While I’d been talking to Clifton, Dr. Engels, the medical examiner, had arrived with an ambulance to take away the body. I found him inside the house standing over the tub, looking at the corpse. He turned toward me as I approached, and I saw that he was wearing goggles and a surgical mask. I wondered how safe it was to breathe the air in the house if the coroner was taking such precautions. I figured it was probably okay, as long as I didn’t stay inside for too long. Engels was a wimp.
“This is a troublesome situation,” he said. “I don’t know how to get her out of there. This corpse has roughly the consistency of a Jell-O mold. Even the bones have softened. I am afraid if we attempt to lift her out of the solution, the cadaver will burst. What I would like to do is puncture the bottom of the tub, drain off the liquid, and then cut the side off the vessel so we can slide her onto a gurney. But we can’t dispose of this fluid here. It needs to be strained, and any solids that are suspended in it need to be examined during autopsy,” he said.
“Sounds like a fun evening you’ve got planned,” I said. I offered Engels my pack of gum. He held up his hands, which were sheathed in thick, elbow-length rubber gloves. The gloves were covered in corrosive Evelyn Duhrer soup. He sighed in a way that let me know he thought I was the dumbest idiot who ever lived. I wanted very badly to blow a cloud of smoke in his face, but I didn’t have any goddamn cigarettes.
“Maybe we should get a lid for the tub, and transport the entire thing, with the corpse inside it, and then figure out how to drain the fluid and remove the body once we get her to the morgue. But God help us if we spill any of that liquid during transport. If any of that comes in contact with somebody’s bare skin, the chemical burns will be horrific. And if the body is damaged, it will be more difficult to identify wounds inflicted by the killer. This is troubling.”
That possibility troubled me as well. In cases where coroners had failed to distinguish between fatal injuries and postmortem damage to a body, criminal defense lawyers sometimes pursued a strategy of admitting that their client had tried to dispose of the body, but denied that a murder had occurred, claiming that the defendant panicked and tried to get rid of the evidence after the victim suffered a natural or accidental death. And juries had sometimes believed them.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” I said. “Do you know what kind of chemicals he put her in?”
“It’s sulfuric acid,” Engels told me. He waved a paper pH testing strip in front of my face, in case I needed further proof. The end of it was charred, and it smelled terrible. I pushed his arm away.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. I’d have to check the file, but I was prett
y sure that I’d found sulfuric acid in Chester’s garage twenty years earlier.
“It’s the same stuff they use to unclog drains,” he said.
“Drain opener will dissolve a human body?” I asked.
Engels waved a soiled glove in front of my face. “Drain opener isn’t quite this concentrated. But yes. Drains get clogged with organic materials. Hair, soap, food waste. Drain cleaner dissolves organic materials. People are also made of organic materials. Acid will dissolve people. But you need at least forty gallons to liquefy a body. There’s only maybe twelve to fifteen gallons in here. This killer is clearly an imbecile. If he’d done this right, he would have dissolved the body completely in about seventy-two hours. Since he didn’t, I have to devise a way to transport these delicate remains and perform what will be an unpleasant autopsy.”
“When I catch him, I’ll ask him to consult with you on body-disposal techniques before he kills again,” I promised. “What can you tell me about the body?”
Engels bent over the tub. “Preliminary examination suggests the victim was killed by beating and strangulation. I’ll figure out which of these wounds killed her and which are postmortem burns when I perform the full autopsy.”
“I’ll let you work, then,” I said. I figured I’d breathed enough fumes for the moment. I took a short detour outside to gulp some fresh air—or fresher air at least. The stink hung over the yard and was noticeable all the way down the block. When I thought I could stand to go back in there, I returned to search the house. I checked all the floors and walls for blood, but didn’t find any. Under normal circumstances, I might be able to identify an area where bloodstains had been cleaned by the smell of bleach or ammonia, but even if March had performed a cleanup here, it was impossible to smell anything but the dissolving body.
However, I noticed an oddity in the great room: Next to the fireplace, there was a shovel and a pair of tongs, but no poker. There was an empty peg to hang an extra implement on the rack for the fireplace set, which meant something was missing. Happy for an excuse to leave the house, I went outside and searched the yard. I found a spot in the flower bed where the soil appeared to have recently been turned. I photographed it and then dug it up and found the poker, visibly stained with blood. I took more pictures to document the location of this discovery and then had this likely murder weapon bagged for further forensic testing. This substantially assuaged my fear that March might try to deny he had committed murder and claim that his decision to place a woman’s body in a tub of acid was the result of some misunderstanding.
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