Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  I whipped my feet up on my desk. “Come on, Mike, Chuck's never been worried about me before. This isn't about my job, or any danger I'm in.”

  Mike was clearly uncomfortable telling tales on his men friends. Chucky may have sent him to me, but Mike didn't want to be there. He twisted in his chair, staring at the phone, probably hoping it would ring and get him off the hook. “Jesus, Shannon, maybe he's worried about losing you. You know I don't like getting involved in this shit. I feel like a pimp…”

  “Because Chuck is married—”

  “Yeah, damn. Because he's married, and he should just let you be. He has no hold on you. He should just let you go to have your own life.”

  Mike was right, of course. But he was being paternalistic. If I really wanted to go—leave Chucky for Tom, Dick, Harry, or Scott Boardman—nothing Chuck did or said could stop me. That's what Mike didn't get. Mike didn't understand my part in the adulterous triangle Chucky and I had drawn. Mike couldn't accept that women really do have free choice and it wasn't just a mindless mantra that feminists chant while they're folding their husband's underwear.

  “What exactly does Chuck want you to do, Mike?”

  “The chief thinks you're losing perspective with this guy. He thinks it's because of Boardman that you lost the Cohen case—”

  “Last week, when I was trying Cohen, I hadn't even met Scott Boardman. ‘Losing perspective? That's what he said?”

  “Not exactly. But the chief isn't as eloquent as I am, so let me paraphrase. He said he saw a zing in your eyes when you and Boardman were at the station together. He thinks you're raging hot for the guy and the only way to break the damn spell is to show you Boardman's bloody hands.”

  “So is that what Marianna likes about you? Your eloquence? It must make up for that little bedroom problem.”

  Mike's eyes were daggers as he laughed the kind of laugh that I imagine a hit man laughs right before he puts the bullet through your forehead. “Oh yeah, Shorty, you can count on it. We're gonna find blood on Boardman's hands all right,” he sang. “I'm just afraid by then you'll have it all over yours too.”

  GOOD GRIEF!

  VIBRATIONS FROM MY CELL PHONE PREVENTED me from delving too deeply into Mike's suggestion of blood on my hands. Mike tended toward spaghetti-western hyperbole, so his prediction that I was getting myself into some serious trouble in the Scott Boardman fiasco didn't faze me. Trouble kept me from boredom, and lately life had gotten routine. I'd been falling asleep before Letterman and rising in the morning before the alarm clock rang—without a hangover and cigarette breath. And how long had it been since my last cigarette? Hours? Days? And not only was I not craving one, but the yellow stain between my fingers was beginning to fade. So a tad of trouble didn't scare me. Maybe it's what I needed to catapult me back into high gear and away from this recent tendency to fall in love like I was Lucy in a Charles Schulz colorized joke.

  I pointed to my door and said, “Later, bro,” signaling Mike to get lost and leave me alone with my cell phone, where Scott Boardman's number was registering as a missed call.

  As soon as I heard Mike's footsteps down the hall, I hit redial. Scott answered on half a ring.

  “Hey. I miss you already. It's cold here without you.”

  “What do you want, Scott? You're good, but I wasn't born yesterday.”

  “My lawyer just called. The autopsies are this afternoon. Do you attend those things?”

  “I can, but I don't. What's the attraction for you?”

  “I don't know. Maybe if I found out exactly… maybe then I'll know if it was me…”

  “Oh, please. We're back to that? Make up your mind. Either you think you did it or you know you didn't. Can't be both.”

  “I'm asking you. Just go and let me know. And as far as my confession… If I did it, I'll be the first to own up to it. But if I didn't do it and I confess… well, then I'll be as guilty in people's minds as if I had done it.”

  “What makes you think I'm free to tell you what the autopsy findings are? Why do you assume you have an open line to everything I know? Just because I'm hot for you—”

  “Stop it, Shannon. I was passed out in a bathroom. I didn't find out who you were until we were back at your place, already in bed. Maybe you should have just left me on the bathroom floor at that restaurant.”

  But that was my real question: Did he know who I was beforehand? But how could he have known that three prosecutors from the AG's office would be dining at Al Forno as he left the scene of a murder? How could he have known I'd even want to catch him when he fell? In the interstice of my silence, he read my mind.

  “Do you think I knew that a lead prosecutor at the Rhode Island AG's office would be a striking blonde, who would just happen to be dining at Al Forno, and she would just happen to need the bathroom just as I was passing out, and then she would just happen to find me attractive enough, in my sorry inebriated state, to actually take me home with her? Even I can't plan that well, and if anyone knows strategy and spin, I do.”

  The stereo knock on my office door was Marianna and Laurie. I disconnected quickly with Scott, promising him nothing but a call later that evening. My two partners in the crime-fighting game were on their way to the ME's.

  “Vince actually wants us to go this time,” Marianna said like a kid being sent to the candy store. “I'll let you know what we find out.”

  “If you're both going, maybe I should come,” I said.

  Almost cross-eyed, Marianna looked at me. “Since when do you go to autopsies?”

  She was looking at me—hard—making sure I knew she was serious with her next words. “Everything I know about you is subtly changing,” she said. “What's going on, Shannon? Are you sick? Don't be stoic. We'll stand by you. I have three kidneys if you need one—”

  “Shut up, Mari. You and Laurie are going, so I'm going. Let's just get Beth and call it a party.”

  They assumed my suggestion to take Beth was sarcasm. But there's comfort in numbers, and none of them really knew how much I hated death at the morgue.

  Murder scenes had life in them; a passion of violence; the blood unleashed and still alive, searching for its lost host. For a brief time, death is warm, and on site the setting of life pretties it up. But take that death to the morgue and slide it into a freezer drawer? The fluids coagulate, oils cool, skin becomes sheathed in a waxy coating, filmy cataract eyes stare open, gray toes are freakishly polished from the last pedicure. A shiver ran up my back. A room of cold dead bodies unnerved me, as if the departed souls in the morgue-dead had left an empty space for the invasion of some foreign thing— a body snatcher. Maybe my distorted fears were from a movie I'd seen as a child, a blocked-out memory, or a dream long forgotten, but I hated the morgue—the systematic storage of bodies—and nothing—no one—ever got me to go there except my shame at admitting the weakness of fear—and now, Scott Boardman's request.

  WE LEFT BETH BEHIND AND THE THREE OF US drove up to the back door where the bodies were unloaded. No guest to the place, Marianna was a regular. She practically had a designated parking spot. She knew everyone by first name, and, like the biblical scene of Moses parting the Red Sea, everyone moved aside to let her through when we entered. With a pope's nod she walked into the main autopsy suite, where a fresh-faced young doctor gave her a toothy smile.

  “Tim Gannon,” Marianna said by way of introduction. “Doc, you know Laurie and Shannon?”

  “Laurie and I have met, but Shannon… I don't believe I've had the pleasure.” He was busy giving me the up and down while Mari talked.

  “Shannon prefers hot bodies,” she said. “But I convinced her that your charms warm the place up.”

  Gannon smiled while reading the chart in his hands. I figured he and Marianna had some professional flirtation thing going on, but what she saw in him I'd yet to discover. He was obviously one of those sociopathic individuals who enjoys sawing skulls in half and then scooping out the brains—a Hannibal Lecter type whose decision t
o dabble in the barbaric mayhem of body mutilation just happened to settle morally on the right side of the law.

  “It's friggin’ cold in here,” I said. “Can't you turn the heat up?”

  “Nah, the smell will only get worse,” Marianna said, while she looked around for the one thing missing from this ghostly room. “Who's the first victim?” she said to Gannon, rubbing her hands together, enjoying her infantile double entendre.

  “I did the wife this morning. Nothing there but a clean bullet to the back of the head. The Booth woman is coming in now. She'll be a bit messier….”

  I had somehow managed to slink to the corner of the room closest to a pair of double steel doors. I hadn't even felt myself moving as I inched backward just in time to hear the crack of metal against metal as a stainless steel gurney came whipping through the doors with the zip-locked body bouncing on top. I darted away as a new smell hit me seconds after the thing rolled past me.

  Blood, metal…but something else too. Marianna was watching my face and read its question.

  “Body fluids,” she said. “We never smell them because they're always locked up inside the packaging. But did you ever floss your teeth and then smell the—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Mari! I have had it with you.”

  Laurie was laughing as she donned a pair of rubber gloves and a mask. Marianna joined her and took a pair for herself, but the cocky bitch wouldn't put on a mask. She was making me feel like a limp-dicked slug.

  “You're so cocksure of yourselves,” I said to them. “I have fucking issues with this stuff, and I don't see either of you caring a whit about what they might be.”

  I tried to avoid looking at Gannon and the tech (who was eyeing me suspiciously) as they unzipped the body bag.

  Laurie yanked her mask down. “We've known you for six years, Shannon. Maybe your real problem is that you keep too much of your past to yourself. As far as I know, you were born six feet tall with the mouth of a quahogger. I always kind of pictured you as some scruffy knock-kneed street kid from a Dickens novel, but you never talk about it. Ever.” She looked at Mari. “Am I right or what?”

  Marianna shrugged and nodded.

  “So how the hell,” Laurie continued, “are we expected to be sympathetic to issues we've never been privy to?”

  “Okay, ladies,” Gannon said. “Let's save the psychology lesson for another time. I got work to do. Those who wish to stay may either don some gloves and come observe or go throw up in the little girls' room.”

  “Fuck you, Gannon,” I said, walking straight to the box of gloves marked Medium and whipping them on. Damn things were too small, but by then I was too friggin' humbled to start trying them on for size.

  I looked down at this once-human thing wishing Lucky were there, standing beside me. I'd never been at the morgue unless he was present. And that's when I realized for the first time, there was something about Lucky—who had always been at the morgue the few times I went, and always at the death scenes with us— that had made death tolerable for me. My serenity at bloody murder scenes had something to do with Lucky Dack.

  Standing just slightly behind and left of Marianna, Laurie was talking, “… I can't believe this is the Muffie Booth, of the Newport Booths.” She continued talking with a dry edge in her lockjawed voice. “You know, the goat lady who bought the multibillion-dollar estate so that a gaggle of goats could graze and frolic by the sea?”

  Marianna shook her head. “Not her,” she said. “Virginia Booth is in her seventies. Muffie is the daughter, recently divorced. Not only is a senator's wife shot to death, but we've got a dead Newport billionaire socialite outed as gay. The press is so all over this.”

  “Okay, so right off there are no obvious wounds in front,” I heard Gannon say. “Nothing defensive either. Hands are clean of cuts, abrasions. Dack took fingernail swabs so we'll see what that gives us….”

  Lucky, I thought again.

  “I'm turning her over. Mari, can you give me a hand here?” Gannon said.

  I watched Marianna move in close, happy to help. Her gloved hands held the lifeless thing steady so Gannon could move it without pushing it over the lip of the table. Mari, who was emotional jelly, was suddenly rolling this thing around like it was a Thanksgiving turkey she was getting ready to stuff. I watched her face, serious and intent. There was nothing here that frightened her, or made her want to cry, or asked her to analyze it beyond what it was in flesh and blood. Maybe it was all those Italian wakes and funerals. But Christ, I was Irish. We prettied and painted our dead like waxen mannequins, finally letting go after the scotch was drunk and the bottles empty. Laurie was the one who should have been quaking around all these fermenting body fluids. Six feet and twenty-four hours after the last breath was gasped, the Jews said good-bye.

  “Whoa,” Marianna said. “That's what we saw on the boat. That head wound. How deep you think? And was it done by that heavy vase?”

  She leaned in close, with Laurie hovering just over her shoulder. Again I'd managed to inch away from the table as if I were standing on a cloud drifting backward. The dead woman lay still and flaccid as Gannon's fingers burrowed into the hole in her head.

  “Looks so. And thrown from a distance with enough force, it would make a mush of the whole area.”

  “What's this?” I heard Laurie say. She was looking at the woman's head. I forced my legs to step closer. Gannon's hands pushed hair away from the skull. “Another hit to the head?”

  “Bullet.”

  “That makes no sense,” Laurie said. “Why a vase and a bullet?”

  “Maybe to make sure she was dead from the vase,” I whispered hoarsely as if I'd been gasping for air. “Or maybe we're looking for two killers. Where's Lucky?”

  Marianna took off her gloves and threw them in the trash can. “Why? What's Lucky got to do with this?”

  “I don't know. Nothing. I need some air.”

  And then I took my gloves off, threw them on the floor, and walked back to my office alone.

  CREAM AND SUGAR

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE OFFICE, ANDY WAS straightening out the furniture in Vince's office.

  “I'd better scoot before Macho Man gets back,” he said, eyeing the distance between the chairs in front of Vince's desk. “You heard anything more about him firing me?”

  “He can't. The ACLU would be after him faster than the FBI after Whitey Bulger. You're safe as long as you whisk all heterosexual dreams out of your head. Which reminds me, where's the Stanford broad this morning? Giving her hundredth news conference?”

  A narrowing of Andy's eyes and a sly tilt of his head gave me all the answer I needed. He went into overtalk anyway. “I told you that little bumblebee was trouble. She's too gorgeous to be anything but a fluffy bundle of stingers.”

  I pulled out one of the chairs Andy had just straightened with the tape measure of his calculating eye, and inched it about two and a half millimeters closer to Vince's desk. Then I plopped into it, waiting for Vince to arrive. Andy emitted a hyperbolic harrumph at my attempt to best his precision, then sat in the chair next to me, leaning conspiratorially close. “So?”

  “She's lying and he didn't do it.”

  “Oh, tell me, please, before Vincent arrives and turns me into a pumpkin.”

  “Well, Andy my eager little pet, here's how I see it. Little Miss Sunshine was with us at the bar in Al Forno, acting very alone and looking like she'd just love to join the girls and me in our dinner plans if only we'd say the word. There was nothing in her behavior to suggest she was there with someone, namely a famous and powerful Connecticut senator. And knowing Brooke's entrepreneurial self-aggrandizing nature, I'm fairly certain she would have broadcast that information to the entire restaurant if she had been there with him. I think Miss Stanford came up with that story after she found Boardman and me in the bathroom and then learned the next day that his wife had been murdered.”

  Andy thought a second and then shook his head at me. “Shannon, light of my d
ay and alter ego supreme, sorry to disappoint you, but Boardman has to be in on this alibi. He's not disputing it, so either it's true, and they were together all night—making him innocent, as you say—or he and Cookie Cakes are both guilty. So either way, the man lied to you.”

  I was already ahead of Andy. “Sometimes innocent people are scared, and they lie just because they know how guilty they look. Don't forget, I was with the guy alone for a while that night. He was scared, crying on my pillow.”

  Andy tossed his blond cropped hair (we went to the same barber) and raised his eyebrows to his hairline. “On your pillow literally or figuratively?”

  “None of your business, but the fact is, the man's a mess and susceptible to undue influence right now. He might not be thinking clearly.”

  “And you intend to save his soul? Isn't that so Marianna-ish?”

  “Get out of here, Andy, or I'll tell Vince you were coming on to me.”

  As if on cue, Vince steamrolled through his office door. “Both of you sexual deviants clear out.” He headed straight for the open pack of Merits sitting wantonly on his desk. “Get me coffee,” he said to no one in particular.

  And no one in particular listened, except maybe Andy, who popped up from his chair and strutted to the door while mumbling under his breath, “Well, at least I'm secure in my own sexual identity.”

  Before he got out the door, Vince mumbled “Asshole” under his breath, and Andy shoved in the last word on the subject. “Cream in it, boss?” And walked out the door.

  I'd have to remember to give Andy a few specialized lessons on Vince Piganno and some general ones on diplomacy, or not even the ACLU could save his job.

  “I want him out, Lynch. Do the legal research and find a way.”

  “Cool it, Vince. Andy's doing a lot for your public image. Think about all the great PR you get by having an openly gay receptionist at the attorney general's office.”