The second trait that distinguished Samuel Afton was a bottomless hatred for his mother. It was impressive. That he expressed his loathing in the same dreamy voice only made it that much more poisonous.
Samuel Afton’s parents had split up when he was a baby, his mother remarrying a guy named Jose Manuel Provencio. That marriage lasted longer, but it, too, ended in divorce. Instead of continuing to live with his biological mother, however, Samuel Afton had chosen to stay with his adoptive father.
Now Afton was in his mid-thirties, and Jose Manuel Provencio had died without sufficient funds to pay for burial. Samuel Afton did not have sufficient funds, either. The only person in the immediate picture who had the money was Samuel Afton’s biological mother, Provencio’s ex-wife. She had in fact offered to pay, which I thought was pretty nice of her, all things considered.
Samuel Afton would not permit her to pay. No sir. No how.
For two months, the body of Jose Manuel Provencio had lain in the cold chamber of a Fremont mortuary, occupying valuable real estate. The funeral director was going bananas, begging me to cremate Provencio as a county indigent. I’d already put that suggestion to Samuel Afton, who had declined. He’d promised to find a relative of Provencio’s to cover burial costs.
We’d been having this conversation for weeks.
“Hi, Mr. Afton. What’s up.”
“Yes, I have been trying to reach you but I have not been able to do that.”
“Sorry. I’ve been out of the office. What can I do for you? Did you get a chance to speak to Mr. Provencio’s nephew?”
“Ahhh, okay. So I left another message, but honestly, he hasn’t called me back. He’s in Virginia, you see. I don’t know what it is over there, do you know the time difference?”
“Three hours.”
“Oh my goodness. What is that, is that around seven in the evening?”
“Something like that.”
“Ah-haaah, so yeah, that is why I have been unable to reach him, probably because probably he’s engaged in some activity at the moment.”
I opened up Google. “Right.”
“Probably he went to get something to eat.”
“Right.” I typed risperdal alcohol interaction into the search bar.
“So,” Samuel Afton said, “what I would like to determine is your time line, because you see that would be helpful for me to know that right there—”
Combining Risperdal with alcohol could trigger a host of unpleasant outcomes: seizures, dizziness, fainting, coma, arrhythmia.
“—about when you need an answer, what’s the longest you can wait.”
I rubbed my eyes. “There’s no set time, legally.”
“Ah-hah.”
“But,” I said, “it’s a matter of us needing to act. He’s been at the mortuary since July.”
“Ah-hah, yes. I understand.”
“So if the blood family is not going to pay for the burial—”
“Yes, I don’t know that, though, you see, cause to tell you the truth his nephew hasn’t called me back.”
“Right, but if you can’t get ahold of him, or some other relative…And you still don’t want your mom paying for it, even if she’s willing to do that?”
“No sir, I do not want that.”
“I get that you and she have had your differences.”
“Oh my goodness, yes sir. That bitch—”
“I get that, but—”
“That bitch took all my money,” he said. “That’s my own mother right there, you understand.”
“I do. My question is what we do about your stepfather, because he’s lying there, and at some point I have to go ahead and classify him as county indigent, and you told me you don’t want that, either. So it’s fine if you want to keep trying his blood, I can say okay, let’s do that a little while longer. But at some point. Out of respect for him.”
“Yes sir, I understand. I appreciate your assistance.”
“Have a good day, Mr. Afton.”
“You too, Deputy.”
I rang off. I felt tired.
With the browser still open, I searched for the doctor who’d written Rennert’s prescription for Risperdal.
I expected a psychiatrist. Maybe an internist.
I did not expect that Louis Vannen, MD, would run a urology practice in Danville.
The internet yielded plenty of off-label uses for risperidone—depression, OCD, PTSD—but none that targeted areas below the neck, let alone the belt.
I craned around to address my deskmate. “Hey Shoops.”
Our fourth DC, Lisa Shupfer, hunkered down opposite me, hiding in her screen, pointedly ignoring the debate raging over low-fat versus low-carb. “Mm.”
“You ever heard of a urologist prescribing Risperdal?”
“Urologist?”
“Yeah. Some condition I’ve never heard of.”
Shupfer shook her head. “Ask Dr. Bronson, he’ll know.”
“He left for the day,” Daniella Botero said. “It’s his son’s birthday.”
Moffett said, “Know what?”
“My decedent was taking Risperdal,” I said.
“He kept it with his liquor,” Zaragoza said.
“He needs psych meds,” I said, “why isn’t he going to a psychiatrist?”
“Maybe he was ashamed,” Shupfer said.
A fair point.
“Maybe his penis was delusional,” Moffett said.
“Find one that isn’t,” Daniella Botero said.
CHAPTER 6
I spent most of Sunday at my desk. Samuel Afton called three times with updates. He’d given up on his stepfather’s nephew but had obtained the name of a cousin in El Paso.
I said that sounded promising.
I attacked my backlog, did crappy EDRS cases, and filled out as much of the Rennert case narrative as I could, leaving voicemails for Drs. Gerald Clark and Louis Vannen.
The following Wednesday I came to work to learn that Walter Rennert’s autopsy had been completed on Monday afternoon. I’d guessed AMI, and while I was off about the precise cause of death, my hunch that we were looking at a cardiac event proved correct. If anything, the pathologist’s finding was more conclusive: rupture of the aorta, brought about by acute aortic dissection.
The largest blood vessel in Rennert’s body had basically exploded. No going back from that.
I wondered how Tatiana would react to the news.
Not well, I suspected. There’s often an inverse relationship between intelligence and adaptability. Smarter people—and Tatiana seemed smart enough—tend to dig in harder, largely because they can. They have the resources to draw on. They comb the internet for talking points. They can produce a million arguments for why I am wrong, why I must be wrong. They can sound awfully convincing. The more supple the brain, the more easily it’s enslaved by that furious bloody little dictator, the heart.
I remember a mother and father in Piedmont whose teenage daughter died shooting a hot dose. By all appearances, they were upstanding folks: educated, professional, and—as far as they were concerned—involved in their children’s lives. In short: totally unequipped to cope with the gash in their reality.
For months they kept calling the office, pleading with and eventually screaming at me to manner it a homicide. They did the same to the cops, demanding the arrest of the unknown dealer. Over and over I had to explain to them that, in the eyes of the law, the death was an accident. I felt like some cruelly defective vending machine, spitting out their dollar again and again. And I’ll admit that I came to resent them a bit for forcing my hand, for making me reopen their wound.
In the eyes of the law, Walter Rennert had died naturally. I needed the final autopsy protocol to close out the case, but based on the finding and my own notes, I had more than enough to manner it and issue a death certificate.
I found it disturbing, then, to realize that a corner of my mind had begun exploring other avenues, ones more pleasing to Tatiana.
&nb
sp; That I could entertain such thoughts underscores the inherent murkiness of the process. Where’s the starting point? How do you decide? These questions apply at every juncture, but they feel especially relevant when you’re talking about death, the end result of all prior causes.
A hot dose kills you. So does the decision to try heroin. Same for the history that leads to that decision. Family. Friends. Experience. Coincidence. I can understand how bringing a child into the world might make you feel responsible for everything that follows. I can understand why you’d prefer to blame the dealer.
Five manners of death, and that’s by design. Restricting ourselves to a few choices, we prevent philosophical thumb twiddling. The mercy of a death certificate lies in its limitations. It omits reference to your choices, big or small. It puts a cap on the past. It says This is what you need to know about what happened.
With few exceptions, its judgment stands forever. It’s important to get it right, both for the dead but more so for the living.
Say I were somehow able to nudge Walter Rennert’s manner from natural to accidental. Would that satisfy Tatiana? I doubted it. The story she was writing was about a homicide. It was fiction. I opened up my case narrative and began to type.
—
AN HOUR INTO my work, I got a call from Gerald Clark, MD.
Clark had been Rennert’s primary physician for three decades, and his demeanor reflected the length and nature of their relationship. He confirmed Rennert’s history of hypertension, sounding saddened but unsurprised by the autopsy finding.
“The drinking was the main issue,” he said. “Everything else flowed from that, so to speak. It gives you an idea of how much he drank, that he could play tennis all the livelong day and still be overweight.”
“His daughter made it sound like he was more of a casual player.”
“You’ve obviously never seen him on the court,” he said. “He belonged to the Berkeley Tennis Club. I happened to be there once, meeting a friend. We sit down at the bar, and out the window, lo and behold, there’s Walter, running around like a madman, rivers of sweat, red in the face. I mean bright red. He looked like a goddamn gummy bear. It was all I could do not to go toss a bucket of water on him. The next time he came into my office, I said, ‘Walter, you’re not more careful, you’re going to kill yourself.’ ”
“What did he say to that?”
“He just laughed and told me to mind my own business.” Clark laughed himself, at the memory. “He didn’t look like he was having much fun out there. Frankly, he looked miserable. I told him that, too. ‘Why don’t you take up something more relaxing? Swim.’ He could be very stubborn.”
“Was he depressed?”
“I never treated him for depression.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t.”
Clark sighed. “Did I think he was a happy person? No. He’d been through one hell of an ordeal.”
“By ‘ordeal’ you mean…”
“With the university.”
“His daughter mentioned a test subject of his who killed a girl,” I said. “I’m a little hazy on the details.”
“There’s not much else to know. It was a fiasco, and not only because of what happened to the victim. The fallout was awful. Her family sued the school, who forced Walter out. Of course, he blamed himself.”
It ruined him.
Perhaps feeling he’d overstepped, Clark said, “I’m not telling you anything that isn’t public knowledge. It was all over the news. You can imagine the effect it had on him. I wanted to write him a prescription for Prozac. He wouldn’t take it. I said, ‘Find someone to talk to, at least.’ He wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I know psychologists, I am a psychologist, I don’t want to talk to a psychologist.’ Stubborn. But, look, Deputy, I’ve known Walter a long time. Even before any of that happened, he wasn’t exactly an optimist.”
“Did he ever end up getting help?”
“He never would’ve admitted it to me.”
“This might sound a little out of left field here, but did you ever refer Dr. Rennert to a urologist?”
“Really, now, I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with anything whatsoever.”
I told him about the prescription from Louis Vannen.
“I don’t know the name,” Clark said. “He gave Walter Risperdal?”
“Seems that way.”
“Huh.” I heard the phone shift; a mouse click; his breathing slow as he read. “There’s nothing in his chart about it.”
“Would there be?”
“We keep track of current medications. Unless he failed to mention it to the nurse.”
“Can you think of a reason why he’d need it?”
“Well, some of these atypicals work for depression or bipolar. He wasn’t bipolar.” More clicking. “Dammit.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I had him on Lasix and Lopressor for his blood pressure. They both interact with Risperdal.”
“How serious of an interaction?”
“Moderate,” he said, the unease in his voice steepening. “Some cardiac effects.”
Presumably the pathologist had taken note of these interactions and written them off as immaterial to cause of death. I said, “Thanks for your help, Doctor.”
He hung up. The poor guy now had to wonder if he’d helped kill his patient.
He hadn’t. I felt reasonably confident of that. And nothing he’d told me had altered my opinion on Walter Rennert’s manner of death. To the contrary. I had a seventy-five-year-old man who had endured major life stress, drank to excess, and cherished a hard-charging brand of tennis. The real wonder was that he hadn’t dropped dead sooner.
I thought about how best to present these facts in a way that would make sense to Tatiana. I quickly gave up. I’d just have to wait for her to call me up and scream.
—
IT MIGHT HAVE ended there.
It should have. I’d called both doctors prior to learning the cause of death. Now that I knew it, I had no reason to chase them down. Had Clark not bothered to return my message, we likely never would have spoken. It might have ended there.
It didn’t.
Because I took an active step, small but crucial. At that very moment, it felt harmless. Meaningless.
I called the office of Louis Vannen, MD.
Looking back, I’m not sure why I did this. I could claim I was trying to marshal extra evidence for when Tatiana did start yelling at me. But I knew well enough that piling on facts rarely changes anyone’s mind.
Nor did I call out of morbid curiosity. At that point in my career, I didn’t have much of it left.
I explained to Vannen’s receptionist who I was and what I was after. Citing confidentiality, she could not confirm whether Walter Rennert had been a patient. She would convey my message to Doctor. Doctor would call me back as soon as he had a chance.
CHAPTER 7
On Friday, a hearse from Mountain View Cemetery arrived to take away the body of Walter J. Rennert.
I felt relieved. The family had chosen a nice place; hopefully that meant they’d resolved to move forward and not raise a stink. I chided myself for assuming the worst of Tatiana, for regarding her not as a person, but as a variable in my caseload.
I thought about her eyes.
Wished her well and made my own resolution to forget about her.
—
THURSDAY NEXT, I received a notification request from Del Norte County. A man up in Crescent City had shot himself in the chest, leaving behind an adult daughter in our neck of the woods. We make visits on behalf of other counties, just as they do for us; it’s more humane than cold-calling the next of kin, especially with suicides or when they’re estranged. Both were true here. I copied down the daughter’s address, and Shupfer and I climbed into the Explorer and headed east for Pleasanton.
While I get along with all of my colleagues, there are moments when I’m grateful for one more than the others. On that day, I felt no great need to t
alk. The morning rush had died off, leaving us to ride most of the way in silence—a situation really only possible with Shoops. Outside, tract homes bobbed on wave after wave of dry yellow grass. My legs kept cramping up, forcing me to shift around, angling for room. She, on the other hand, had racked her seat all the way forward to reach the pedals, the steering wheel lodged in her belly.
Here’s Shoops: soft and square and rounded off, as tall as five-two gets, with hair that starts each day slapped down to her scalp but finishes in a frizzy brown halo. She could be the star of a Sesame Street sketch teaching kids about disappointment.
Say you were an inmate at the jail, back when she was a guard. You might fool yourself into believing, as a certain idiot in a certain legendary story once did, that you could call her an obscene name. Or that you could suggest an obscene activity she enjoyed in her off hours. You might get cocky enough to grab a part of her body.
Those are mistakes you’d only make once.
Technically, Shoops has been around longer than the rest of our team. She joined the Bureau during the changeover, when the county stopped hiring civilian coroners and replaced them with peace officers. An extended family leave reset her status, so I have seniority on her. When December rolls around and we have to bid for shifts, she’s low lady on the totem pole. Better believe I don’t gloat. Nobody does.
The GPS guided us off the freeway, through a welter of extended-stay hotels and chain stores, along the divided main drag. Thirty minutes inland hardly seemed enough for the terrain to have morphed so dramatically. Topography flatter; vegetation bleached. The architecture belonged to everywhere and nowhere. That’s not a knock on Pleasanton, which is as its name implies. More a statement about where we’d left from.
Shupfer said, “I still get nervous.”
I glanced at her.
“Before a notification,” she said.
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