Left Field

by Elizabeth Sims

  It took about twenty minutes for the first police cruiser to arrive, which, given the current state of the DPD, was actually astonishingly fast, and in those minutes I observed the body.

  The dead woman appeared to be in her late thirties and seemed well-groomed. I couldn’t tell if she wore any makeup—it looked like she might have had some eye shadow on, but her eyes, sunken in death as they were, were darkening as I watched, it seemed. Hard to tell. Maybe she had a little lipstick on.

  It seemed the bruise on the woman’s head might have had something to do with the fact that she was dead, but then maybe not. Maybe she’d had a seizure or a stroke or something and had hit her head falling. Except there wasn’t anything hard to fall on here, just grass.

  Her aurora of blond hair looked somewhat matted, as if it had been wetted, then dried in the morning sun, back to some fluffiness. Maybe from dew? Then I remembered there had been a thunderstorm last night. Her clothes, too, looked stiff as they clung to her body.

  Her outfit was like any office worker’s: “nice” blouse and slacks, in Midwestern white-lady tradition. She was wearing gold hoop earrings. Her fingernails were office-worker nails too—not short, not long, with perhaps clear polish on them. Something peculiar about her fingertips, though: the ones I could see looked raw, as if they’d been scraped. Had she fought with an attacker? I didn’t see any broken nails.

  She wore tan leather lace-up shoes with thin trouser socks. The shoes were what office workers might call fashion oxfords: sort of sleek, not clunky, but practical. The heels looked fairly worn.

  How long had she been dead? Not long enough to rot much. The face was still a face; the body was still a body, though I guess bloating was starting to happen—her slacks seemed very tight around her middle. A bluebottle fly landed on her left eye, and I waved it away. Because of TV watching and reading books, I’d thought I knew some stuff about forensic pathology, but as I stood there looking at this dead person, I was like, Christ, I don’t know. I thought I smelled a waft of decay.

  Flora stood next to me, shading her eyes from the sunshine in her characteristic gesture, her elbow extravagantly raised. “My God. My God,” she murmured.

  We looked at the house behind us. No movement, so sign of anyone being home. I noticed a large stack of firewood crammed under the patio overhang. Four or five portable propane tanks were lined up next to a gas grill. A soup pot sat on the rack beneath the grill. That was a little unusual, I thought, but hey, maybe grilled soup is the coming thing.

  “Do you know the people who live there?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes! They’re a young couple, kind of bohemian!”

  I hadn’t heard the word bohemian in ages. “Like they’re hippies?” I said.

  “Oh, they’re free spirits, they’re artists. Blair and Donna. He does sculpture and she paints. I took over some cookies when they moved in.”

  “What’s their last name?”

  Flora paused. “I forget. I don’t know if they’re married actually. See how nicely they’ve been keeping the yard? The place was getting run-down. Not that I should talk.”

  “Your yard looks like a primeval forest. I’d be glad to spruce it up for you.”

  “Ah. Well.”

  “Do this Blair and Donna cook out a lot?”

  “Come to think of it, yes! I never smell any meat, though. I think they just cook plants.”

  “How long have they lived here?”

  “About six months, maybe. They keep to themselves.”

  “Are they the owners?”

  “Well, I assume so.”

  “Do you think this woman could be a friend of theirs?”

  Flora shrugged.

  We heard a car pull up, and I went around to greet the police.

  The Detroit police department, like most big-city cop shops, struggles with reputation issues. They’ve been exposed for corruption and brutality, and you can’t tell by looking whether you’re talking to a good cop or a bad cop. Having gotten to know a fair number of cops in my day, I’ve learned that practically no bad cop is all bad, and practically no good cop is all good. They’re just like everybody else. Except with a badge and a gun. Which does make a difference.

  After the responding officer got a look at the situation, he radioed for detectives and more personnel, and I hung around.

  The lead detective was a lanky black man named Lieutenant Leon Sorrel. His eyes were wide set and protruded slightly, giving him an intense aspect. He wore a gray suit with knife-creased pants and perfectly shined black shoes. I told him I’d spotted the body and that was all. He squatted to look. “Well,” he said, “it certainly looks like she received some blunt-force trauma.” He straightened up with athletic, male ease.

  He wrote down what I told him about finding the body, took down my name and address and all, and asked me the questions you’d expect, like, “Do you know her? Did you hear anything? See any suspicious cars or people around?” No, no, and no.

  Lieutenant Sorrel went to the house and knocked and rang, but no one answered. Then he came over to the Pomeroys’ and talked to Flora and Domenica, neither of whom could provide much help.

  He went back to the scene and the Pomeroys and I watched the proceedings from an upper window. We saw officers combing over the yard next door. I didn’t see anybody act like they found anything of interest.

  The police set up as if it were a crime scene, though it wasn’t clear, at least to me, whether the woman had been murdered. People die all the time, of course. You could be hanging out in somebody’s backyard and keel over dead. A photographer moved around, snapping pictures. The media didn’t show up, because even though the dailies and the TV stations monitor the police band, the cops weren’t positively calling it a homicide yet.

  The neighborhood rent-a-cop pulled up in his little white car, and the uniformed guard got out and talked to the police for a few minutes. Given how he shook his head and spread his hands, it looked like he hadn’t seen anything, though he probably hadn’t been on duty overnight.

  Domenica retreated into her chair and went into a super-quiet state, and I wondered if her paranoia was running wild. Maybe she thought the dead woman had been the one haunting her or something. I went to a window at the front of the house to see if anything was going on there.

  A white Subaru wagon was parked in front of Blair and Donna’s house. A cop wrote down the plate number then went over to his cruiser to type it in.

  A few minutes later, Lieutenant Sorrel, wearing a crime-scene glove, tried the doors to the Subaru, indicating he believed it belonged to the dead woman, but they were locked. If the body had the keys in her pocket, I thought they’d stay there until she was processed at the ME’s office.

  In the midst of all this, the Happy Van pulled up in the Pomeroys’ drive, and a man dressed in scrub pants and a short white doctor coat got out. I ran down to answer the door and he bounded in.

  “I’m Dr. Briggs, here to see Domenica Pomeroy.” He wore an ID badge from Metro Mobile Medical with his picture on it. He was a handsome older guy—in his early seventies perhaps—fit and well-groomed. His face was round and ruddy, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. Thick silver hair was combed back from his temples in a sporty way, and I remembered with a jolt that his hair had been brown, many years ago.

  “Dr. Briggs!” I said.

  He looked at me. “Yes?” I remembered that deep, penetrating voice, too.

  “You were my pediatrician!”

  “Oh, mercy. Well, which little one were you?”

  Of course he didn’t recognize me. “I’m Lillian Byrd. When I was in the first grade I fell off a fence and broke my arm. I had the measles at the same time.”

  “Oh, ha!” He still didn’t remember me, but then something struck him. “I remember…” His face clouded. “I remember your parents.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was a terrible tragedy.”

  “Yes.”

  My mom and dad died in a fire when I w
as twelve. My Uncle Guff and Aunt Rosalie took me in and attempted to finish the job of bringing me up. I remember Aunt Rosalie driving me all the way across town to see Dr. Briggs, just to provide a bit of continuity for me. He’d pulled me through all the pox, mumps, and bumps with warmth, confidence, and lollipops. He was a special personality—he zoomed around on a racing bike, and his office featured trophies he had won in various target sports. I remember a cool trophy on a shelf in the waiting room, a statue of a warrior with bow and arrow at full stretch. So thrilling! Kids found him wonderful, even when he had to give you an injection or poke hard where it hurt.

  Moreover, he was principled. I remembered the news coverage, back when I was a teenager, about Dr. Briggs blowing the whistle on a high-profile couple who had been sadistically abusing their children, then trying to bribe him to keep it quiet. He was so young and full of energy then, and I wasn’t surprised to see him vigorous today.

  “Well, Lillian, it’s wonderful to see you again.” He smiled kindly and squeezed my arm just like he used to.

  It felt good to be in his presence. I said, “Now you’re a doctor for grown-ups?”

  “Yes, I changed my practice. Medicine’s changing. To keep going, what with the bureaucratic hoops, I had to limit my time with patients to six minutes each. You can’t practice medicine like that.”

  “Gosh. Yeah. I remember you used to tell me jokes. You never hurried.”

  “Ha! Those days are gone. But this situation’s better. With my van, providing care under DeMedHo, it’s easy to keep my books, my overhead’s lower, and I don’t have to rush my patients.”

  I told him I was a friend of the Pomeroys and followed him up the stairs. He knew the way.

  “What’s going on out there?” he asked as we ascended.

  “A body was discovered next door.”

  “You mean somebody expired in there?”

  “No, she was lying in their backyard.”

  “Oh, mercy.”

  He looked at me and I explained. “I think the body’s still down there,” I added.

  Dr. Briggs just shook his head, being no stranger to death and unusual occurrences.

  Domenica was happy to see him. He caught sight of what was going on from the window. I saw him stiffen.

  “Who is that?” he asked suddenly.

  “You mean the body? We don’t know,” Flora said. “It’s a woman.”

  I looked out too. The morgue people had brought a cot and were covering the body.

  “I’m sure the police know who the victim is by now,” I commented. “I saw them checking her car out front—at least I assume that’s her car.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. He shrugged then turned to Domenica. “Well, let me wash my hands. I have your test results, but first I want to have a look at you. You seem pale.”

  “I feel pale,” muttered Domenica.

  Flora stayed, and I took off. I approached one of the cops out front, a very young guy who looked abnormally happy.

  I introduced myself as a friend of the ladies next door. “They’re wondering whose car this is. Could you please tell us?”

  Smiling, he shook his head.

  Well, it was worth a shot. “Are you having a particularly good day today?” I asked. “You seem like you’re in such a terrific mood.”

  He shrugged.

  Another, older cop overheard me and said, “It’s his first day out of the academy. First dead body.”

  The young cop looked at the older one.

  “Most of them make you puke,” said the older one.

  7

  At home I wrote up notes of everything I’d seen then phoned Ricky Rosenthal at the Motor City Journal, in spite of the fact that it was a monthly magazine and unsuitable for breaking news. Ricky wanted blood, but only in feature form.

  I could have called the dailies, but their freelance rates sucked, and anyway I knew they’d want a staff reporter on this if it turned out to be a murder, which seemed likely.

  Ricky told me to keep an eye on it and try to find an angle the dailies might miss. This was a meager bone to be tossed, but it was enough to arouse my reportorial instincts, and I was game to see what I could do.

  I didn’t have any special connections with the DPD, but Lieutenant Sorrel had given me his card. Knowing how insanely busy the Detroit detectives were, I reserved that and used my credential with the Journal to access the bare-bones information from the preliminary crime reports. Over the next couple of days, between checking in with the police and following the local media, I learned that the woman’s name was Abigail Rawson; she was thirty-nine years old; she lived alone in an apartment on the east side; she was a caseworker for Detroit Medical Home Services, also known as DeMedHo; and she had died from blunt-force trauma to the head. Although it was unclear how the blunt force came to fracture her skull, causing her brain to hemorrhage to the point of unconsciousness, then death, the police were treating the case as a homicide.

  So far no witnesses had come forward, and as far as I knew, there were no suspects. No weapon had been found either. I wondered what Abigail Rawson’s business had been with the Pomeroys’ next-door neighbors.

  The fact that the victim was a white woman who was not a prostitute was, no doubt, the main reason the case got a lot of media play at first.

  Through Flora I knew the police had talked to the neighbors, Blair and Donna, and they claimed not to know Abigail Rawson or why she had come to their house.

  On Sunday night I spent some time printing out stories from the dailies and the TV-news websites, starting a file on the case. She’d had no ID on her, which suggested she’d been carrying a purse or briefcase, which probably had been stolen.

  Mugged for the purse? Possible, but what a strange place for it to happen.

  Raquel got bigger every day, it seemed. I had a cage crate left over from Todd and housed her in it unless I got her out to play. I kept plenty of old towels in there for her to burrow into and keep warm. Also, I put a shallow litter box in there, and to my relieved amazement she took to it. Lou told me to start offering her apple chunks and a little cat food, but keep up with the bottle for a little while.

  She was fast, and she really liked a particular yellow squeak toy I’d picked up, in the shape of a fish with a toothy grin. It was an ugly thing actually, and it was nice to watch Raquel try to destroy it. Her forepaws were incredibly dexterous, and I had to watch her every second she was out of the cage. She wanted to run, climb, scratch, open things, and chew. I didn’t know how much of this was normal or whether she was particularly high-strung.

  Tonight she seemed especially restless. I felt restless too, so I got out my mandolin. Tunes always used to settle Todd, and playing settled my spirit. I liked the ritual of tuning and warming up. Although you can buy sophisticated electronic tuners (that break if you drop them and use fussy tiny batteries and tell any idiot whether their string sounds a D or not), I prefer to keep my small A-440 tuning fork, wrapped in a scrap of cloth in my case.

  You boing it on your kneecap then hold the end to your mastoid bone, or touch it to the resonant top of your instrument, where the pure tone is amplified into the air. You listen close, and you listen until you have it inside you, before the tone decays.

  I yearned for one of the gorgeous carved-top mandolins made by Weber or Gibson—full-throated, serious, able to hold their own in jam sessions—and costing thousands of course—but I did love my little old flattop.

  Once you get your As in place, you work up your other strings, listening for the intervals. The intervals on a mandolin are in fifths, like the violin, and those fifths are poetry.

  In days past, whenever I’d get out my mandolin and tune up, sitting on the carpet, Todd would come bumping over and rest his head on my thigh. I’d play his favorite tune, “Wildwood Flower,” and we’d both relax and enjoy the simple, pretty music.

  Well, so Raquel’s crate was a few feet away, in a pool of light from my ship lamp. I saw her watching me,
her eyes moist and suspicious behind her tiny burglar’s mask. She shifted uncomfortably as I tuned, and I thought I heard her growl low in her throat.

  I played a simple tune, “Ida Red,” just taking it medium, just warming up. Raquel made a sound, and I thought maybe she was singing, you know, like dogs or even cats do sometimes.

  But no. The sound was not peaceful; it was a sound of…could it be pain?

  Raquel roamed her crate, scurrying and shuffling.

  I stopped, and she stopped.

  Then, with hope in my heart, I played “Wildwood Flower,” and she started growling again, crying almost.

  I stopped and put my hand near the crate door, and she rushed at it, teeth bared.

  Because I really felt the need, I played some more—I don’t know what tune—and Raquel stirred and growled and suffered. I stopped and hung up the instrument.

  This was not good.

  My phone burbled. It was Mercedes Lewis, an old pal from Wayne State. We’d taken a few literature courses together, and unlike others in our circle, neither of us subsequently had escaped Detroit.

  “Hey,” she said, “have you seen in the news about that woman who was found dead in somebody’s backyard in Palmer Woods?”

  “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I’m the one who called it in.”

  Silence. Then she found her voice. “Oh, my God. As in you found the body?”

  “Yeah. Do you know her?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  8

  The next morning at six-thirty, I met Mercedes at Café Yokey-Dokey in Ferndale. We got their wonderful fried-egg sandwiches and coffee, and I headed toward my favorite table by the front window, but she said, “Let’s eat fast at the counter then go out for a power walk.”

  I looked at her, realizing she was dressed for work except for a pair of spongy white sneakers. She said, “I have to take my morning power walk every day or I go insane.”