Lucky Stiff

by Elizabeth Sims

  Was he freaked into a stunned state, or was he on guard and coolly shutting down, having gone on the defensive as soon as I'd questioned him the other day? Or were his feelings just…not there?

  He got up, rainwater cascading from the folds of his slicker, and approached the edge of the pier. There was no railing. We had set up our folding stools and our stuff a safe body-length-and-a-half from the edge. It looked as if he had decided to walk right off into the river. But he stopped, the toes of his battered work shoes even with the edge of the last plank. A sudden gust would have blown him in.

  He spoke my name loudly, as if calling me from across the channel.

  "Yes," I said from behind him.

  He turned quickly and took a step away from the edge. He appeared to be gathering strength for a tremendous task. His hands at his sides were lightly curled as if ready to either grasp or punch.

  He came over and sat down, scooting his stool a few inches closer to mine. He cleared his throat. "Umph." He paused. "You know how you made friends with that golfer in California? And then somebody got killed?"

  "Yeah, I remember that."

  "You were trying to solve a mystery. A mystery to you."

  "Yeah."

  "And remember the first time when you pretended you were a detective, and you tried to help the police, but then you got shot? Remember that?"

  "I do quite well."

  "I think you're starting to see everything that way."

  He got up again, restlessly. He stood over me and put his hand on my shoulder. I looked up into his strong blue eyes. I saw dread in them. "Lillian," he said, "you're starting to think that this thing is something you should investigate. Like a mystery. Listen to me. It isn't."

  Chapter 8

  Before I climbed the steps to my flat, I knocked on the McVitties' door and offered them some fish. They owned the house and lived in the lower flat; I paid them rent for the upper. They were good people, although Mr. McVittie got crabby and emotional at times.

  They accepted the fish enthusiastically. I'd put eight perch on a stringer for them, enough for a light meal.

  "Oh, those look good!" said Mr. McVittie. "Not as big as the ones me and the boys get out of Lake Superior, you know, but—"

  "Thank you, dear," Mrs. McVittie chimed. She was a sweet old thing.

  "You're welcome."

  The first time I'd given them perch, I'd cleaned and filleted them, small as they were. Mr. McVittie ridiculed that, so I gave them their fish whole from then on.

  Todd watched me clean the fish I'd kept for myself and fry them with some sliced potatoes. I wrapped the fish guts in newspaper. "If you were a kitty, you'd be singing," I told him. I offered him some bunny chow and ate my dinner on the balcony with a can of Stroh's. These days I couldn't afford Scotch, my beverage of choice. The rain had stopped. It was warm and damp out.

  I felt keenly lonely, because usually after fishing—whether we caught anything or not—Uncle Guff and I would go home to his place and eat with Aunt Rosalie.

  But I'd felt rebuffed by Uncle Guff, scolded, and unfairly so. His tone had been distinctly edgy. I told him I had to cover a city meeting for a freelance job and took off after we unloaded his stuff.

  Those dreadful events of yesteryear were utterly over for him. He'd been a grown-up and had experienced it from a grown-up's perspective, with a grown-up's life experience. I had not.

  Obviously, he feared I would make trouble, possibly embarrass myself. Or perhaps he thought I'd make myself unhappy chasing after something that didn't exist. Trying to force a new version of events. Trying to alter the past.

  I set aside my hurt feelings and decided I'd put his mind at ease when I saw him next. I had to make him understand I wasn't about to do anything stupid—not deliberately, anyway—and I wasn't about to go chasing after imaginary criminals.

  "Only real ones," I muttered to Todd.

  I took my newspaper-wrapped bundle of fish by-products out to my garbage can in the alley. The night was soft. Venus, bright and near, hovered above the treetops. I thought about a special friend of mine, and wondered whether I should call on her. I pulled a few raspberry leaves from a patch of canes in the McVitties' backyard and took them up to Todd, who had nosed at his bunny chow indifferently. He loved raspberry leaves.

  In the morning I began with the Detroit Fire Department arson investigation office, where I had already inquired about the Polka Dot fire. The clerk told me she'd found the file. The DFD kept routine fire reports for only ten years, I learned, then they purged them. But arson investigations were kept for much longer. If a fire "has a fatal," as the clerk put it, the bodies go to the medical examiner's for autopsy and the fire is investigated for arson as a matter of routine. And those files stay around a long time.

  I asked when I might come in and take a look at it.

  "Oh," she said. "Please hold."

  A Lt. Minetti came on the line. After ascertaining that I wasn't a law enforcement professional, he told me I couldn't just boogie in and look at the file.

  "Isn't it public information?" I asked.

  "Not exactly," he said.

  "But isn't the case closed?"

  "Oh, no. New information could come in anytime, on any case. No matter how old."

  I tried to persuade him but quickly realized I wasn't going to get anywhere.

  I hung up and called Lt. Tom Ciesla of the Eagle Police Department. He and I went back a long way, starting with my last steady job, at the Eagle Eye weekly newspaper. We'd lost track of who owed whom how many favors. To be honest, though, mostly I owed him. And it was time to shamelessly ask for one more.

  Fortunately, he was in the mood to listen. "Well, it's been a while, Lillian," he said. "What've you been up to?"

  I sketched out the bones, sparing most details for the sake of a compact narrative. He had not before heard how my parents died.

  "I'm sorry," he said, when I described it.

  "Thanks, Tom. So you see, my quest is a personal one. I had a conversation with someone the other night that makes me think—well, that this case maybe should be made active again."

  I practically heard his eyebrows rise. He started to ask a question, but I went on, "It's not even worth me explaining things totally right now, because I think the stuff in the arson report might make me realize, no, this is over, there's nothing to support my suspicions. So essentially, Tom, all I need is a look at that arson investigation file. They'll fax it over to you, you being a cop and all. You could tell them you need it for some, uh, reason, uh…I don't exactly know what you could trump up, but something. Then I could come in and take a look at it, and tell you a little bit more, and hopefully get your advice as to how to proceed."

  "That's all, huh?"

  "Yep."

  He paused. "That's it."

  "Right."

  "OK."

  An hour later I was seated next to him at his desk at the Eagle PD. The other cops had said hi to me nicely, remembering when I used to come in to look through the weekly arrest summaries.

  "Is Erma around?" I asked Ciesla.

  "She's in court today."

  Det. Erma Porrocks shared an office with Ciesla. I liked her too, and wondered how she was doing.

  "Oh, you know Erma," Ciesla said. "Kicking ass with her size fives."

  I laughed. Ciesla was looking spruce: nice sport coat, as always, good oxford cloth shirt, clean tie, polished shoes. He'd grown a black mustache since I saw him last. I looked for any ravels or missing buttons but didn't find any; catching a whiff of fragrant aftershave, I wondered if he'd gotten himself a steady girlfriend.

  Before he let me look at the file he said, "The guy I talked to, Minetti, said this report was done by their top investigator in those days. Said he was legendary in figuring out how fires got going. He wondered why I wanted a look at this."

  "What'd you tell him?"

  "That I had somebody on my back about it, a family connection with a screw loose."

 
; "Oh."

  "I said if I tell her I've looked into it, she'll be pacified and will forget about it."

  "Have you done much arson work?"

  "As a matter of fact, I have. Remember the Smithy Machine Tool fire last year?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, two guys owned that company, and they were in financial trouble. One night the place got torched, and the next day each guy accused the other. It was actually rather brilliant for them to do that. I worked with the fire department on it after they determined arson, and eventually we got them. They'd been sloppy with their taxes, so we got the IRS to put pressure on, and to save themselves they each tried to cut a deal whereby they said they witnessed the other one setting the fire. So they both went down for it."

  "What a couple of assholes."

  "Yeah. I took some courses too. Arson's pretty interesting."

  He smoothed the stack of pages on the Polka Dot fire with his hands. "So you want to see this? I looked through it while you were driving over. I'll go over it with you."

  "Can I take it with me?"

  "No. Take notes."

  I got out my notebook and pencil.

  Ciesla said, "The report starts with the date and time, the dispatch time was oh three-thirty, arrival at the scene was oh four hundred—you see, it's military time, they got the call at 3:30 in the morning—"

  "And they didn't get there until half an hour later?"

  "That's the arson investigator, not the engine company. The engine company calls for the investigator."

  "Oh. And there was an investigator up in the middle of Saturday night?"

  "They work different shifts, you know. As you can see, it says that a preliminary inspection took place after the fire was out, at 5 a.m., then he came back at 7 a.m. for a better look in full daylight."

  Together we looked at the first paragraph, and Ciesla read it aloud. "'I observed a two-story brick building, commercial use as a tavern on the first floor, a one-family residence on the second floor. Investigation revealed that fire originated at electric deep-fry unit (see diagram) on ground floor. I observed blackened oily residue in the cooking vat, indicating overheating. The appliance was not fully consumed. Capillary line to the temperature probe was broken. Corrosion on capillary line not observed.'"

  "What's the significance of that?" I asked.

  Ciesla made a sound of admiration as he looked sideways at me. "He put that in, that's a bit of inside knowledge, an inside observation. You see, he can't suggest why and how the capillary line got broken. Corrosion does it sometimes. Every arson investigator knows that. Here he's saying, whatever it was, it wasn't corrosion."

  "What could have done it?"

  "Those cookers—they're much better made now. They're safer. If you ever saw one of those old ones, you could easily see how overenergetic cleaning, for instance, could've broken that line. Or someone could have just reached in and broken it with their hand or a pliers. Not while it was filled with hot oil, though, of course—that would have to be done beforehand."

  "How do you know this stuff, Tom?"

  "I told you, I worked a lot of arson cases in my early days on the force. Some restaurant fires. This is taking me back. Anyway, that's how that capillary line could've failed."

  "And would that have made a short circuit?"

  "It would've disabled the thermostat. The cooker would have just stayed on and never shut off, not knowing that the oil was hot enough, thereby heating the oil past its flash point. These days appliances like this are made to fail safe: to shut off if the thermostat breaks."

  He handled the pages of the report firmly, grasping them between thumb and forefinger, careful to keep the pages in order. "Here he describes the burn pattern on the wall as being consistent with that point of origin. And here's the clincher: 'No accelerant found.'"

  "Accelerant—meaning like gasoline?"

  "Yeah. Ninety-nine arsonists out of a hundred use a flammable liquid to spread the fire. This inspector found none."

  "Tom, forgive me, but I don't get it. Wouldn't the liquid get burned up? Can they tell stuff from residue? Could they tell so much from so little even back then?"

  "An investigator looks for burn patterns consistent with an accelerant. You know how you spill something on the floor and it puddles and runs, and gathers in low places, if any? Arsonists pour their accelerant around to make pathways for the fire. Most people are amazed at how much evidence arsonists leave behind."

  "I see."

  "He wouldn't have run any lab test of materials from the building because he found nothing suspicious to test. Today's tests are better, of course—they've got quicker and cheaper ways to identify accelerants. OK, now, we see he found no other points of origin. That is consistent with the failure of this electrical appliance. And so here's the key word in his conclusion: accidental."

  Ciesla turned a page, then hesitated, his hand hovering over the pages. He looked at me closely. "Now, here's the summary of the autopsy reports. Want to go on?"

  I nodded.

  "Sure?"

  "Yeah."

  "OK. 'Postmortem examination concluded that cause of death for all three victims was asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation.' The medical examiner found soot in their windpipes, you see. And the diagrams here, showing where the bodies are found. Here's the fryer."

  "One body was burned really badly," I said.

  He sorted through the pages. "There are copies of the complete autopsy reports here too. No photos, though. They didn't fax those. Let's see, yes, it's this one… 'Extensive charring,'…mm…uh…Yeah, this one was on the ground floor. But the medical examiner says cause of death, asphyxiation. She succumbed to the smoke first, then her body burned after she was dead."

  I saw from the diagram that the body identified as Trix's had been found draped, or collapsed, across the bar at the end nearest the fryer. "OK," I said, "so are there ever times when somebody is, like, knocked out or something, and their body is placed in a fire?"

  "Well," said Ciesla, "they find people who've been shot and then the murderer tries to cover it up with a fire. But there you've got a bullet hole, of course. There have been cases of people being drugged and then burned, but then that would show up on the toxicology report. Which the medical examiner would do if there was anything suspicious about the fire. Otherwise, they more or less do it at their discretion. Let's see. Yes, here. This Patricia Hawley's blood alcohol was one eight. That's drunk. What's her body weight? The body weighed 122 pounds. She didn't have to drink all that much to get drunk at that body weight."

  "What's this?" I said, pointing.

  "Other intoxicants…drugs. The M.E. said she'd ingested two things besides alcohol. He pronounced them carefully: "Propoxyphene hydrochloride—that's Darvon."

  "A painkiller, right?"

  "Yes. And chlordiazepoxide. I'm not sure what that is, right off the bat. A CNS depressant, obviously. Uh, central nervous system depressant."

  I copied down the word.

  "So," I said, "she was strung out?"

  "Looks like she was, to some extent. But not to a fatal extent. See, the M.E. noted the presence of these drugs, but he still says cause of death was asphyxiation."

  I looked at him and he said, "Just because she had drugs in her system doesn't mean she'd been drugged by somebody."

  "Right, I understand. Could she have been restrained in some way?"

  "Well, the autopsy would've showed that—I take that back. Could've showed that. If she was tied up, you'd expect there to be marks or residue of the rope or tape."

  "But the body was burned up."

  "It was burned, but it wasn't anywhere near totally consumed. There were 122 pounds left of her. There might've been some evidence of restraints. Just like the arson investigators, you'd be surprised how much information the M.E. gets out of corpses."

  Of course, I'd watched enough television and read enough Calico Jones books, among others, to know very well that medical examiners are wizards of
death.

  "And wait," said Ciesla, "let's look at the diagram again. OK, this is a rough sketch, but—look at how her limbs are drawn."

  I saw a drawing of a sprawled body, arms flung out, legs apart.

  Ciesla went on, "And let's look at the ME's sketches: Yes, here, see, she'd have been in rigor mortis, all stiff, you know. If she'd died with her hands and feet tied together, they'd have stayed that way, whether the rope or whatever burned up. See? But her hands are at her sides, her feet are slightly apart. The way they force them to put the body on a stretcher."

  They were only sketches. But just beneath them in that folder, if Ciesla lifted a few pages, were my parents' autopsy reports, with sketches of their bodies, remarks on what their organs were like when they were cut open, and toxicology reports on them. Their blood, their urine. Their stomach contents.

  "Excuse me," I muttered, and fled to the corridor. I rushed into the washroom, where I was good and sick, twice.

  I washed my face and hands and rinsed my mouth with cold water, then returned to Ciesla's desk.

  "I'm sorry," I told him. "I don't think I can look anymore."

  "You got pretty green there all of a sudden," he said. "I appreciate that you made it to the bathroom."

  "Will you tell me what the toxicology reports say on my parents?"

  He sorted through the pages in his firm-handed way. "Um, let's see…Sophie Marie Byrd, negative, everything negative for her…Martin James Byrd, negative except for alcohol. Point oh three. He'd had one beer, about. Small amount of alcohol."

  "Thank you." I blotted my upper lip with a hankie. "It's hot in here."

  He took my wrist. "You feel clammy. Breathe."

  "I'm all right. What if I could cast some doubt on these conclusions? What if I could show the fire to have been deliberately set?"

  "How?"

  "I don't know how yet."

  "Well, if you did, we'd be looking at murder. Very old murder."

  "What if I showed that Patricia Lynn Hawley was not this victim? That…I mean, that it's somebody else's body in Patricia Lynn Hawley's grave?"