JG02 - Borderlines

by Archer Mayor

  “Well, then you’re right, statistically at least.

  Very few people of this approximate age group die from such a fall.

  Most of the time, they’re nimble enough to take some sort of evasive measures. They might break something in the process, but they rarely die, and they rarely get knocked unconscious.” “Rarely.” She nodded.

  “True-the exception proves the rule. But there’s something else. Are you aware of the AVPU scale of consciousness?” “AVPU? Sounds like something hatched in the Pentagon.” “It does. It’s a mnemonic, actually, with each letter standing for a key word in the descending order of consciousness: a patient is either Alert, responsive to Verbal stimulus, responsive to Painful stimulus, or totally Unconscious.” She drew the letters in the air for emphasis.

  “Painful stimulus is usually a pinched ear or a knuckle rub on the sternum-some physical way of disturbing this artificially deep sleep, in other words.” I was finally beginning to follow her train of thought.

  “Or putting your hand on a hot stove.” She smiled. “Right. You do something like that, and all but a deeply unconscious person will react, usually by pulling away from the stimulus. Again, it’s not a guarantee; it’s just a statistic.” “But if it’s true, this man was out like a light before he hit the e.” “That’s not all. Look at his flesh, high on the chest.” I followed her pointed finger. Fox’s skin had split in several places, ch as a hot dog’s does when it’s been cooked too long. “What color is it?” she asked. “Sort of beige; a little pink, maybe.” “The classic sign of carbon monoxide poisoning is the cherry-red or of the skin after death. Of course, where the skin is charred, you k for the flesh underneath for the same indicator.” “So he was dead before he hit the stove.” “He might have been dead before he hit the stove.” She wagged finger at me. “And don’t you tell anyone I told you so.” Ron Potter sat on the toilet seat and shook his head. “The BCI arson teams are here. They helped Dr. Hillstrom get the bodies out.

  e burned one kept falling apart; I don’t know how she does what she s.

  I spat into the sink. “It’s interesting. If it gets to you, just think being a proctologist-now there’s a curious line of work.” He made a face. “They had to get three different funeral homes carry the bodies to Burlington. Nobody had enough body bags we five people killed simultaneously in this state, and it’s considered official disaster.

  The guys in New York must have racks in their recesses.

  We were upstairs in Buster’s house. I’d just spent four hours trying to catch up on last night’s lost sleep, with negligible success.

  Potter had looked in on me fresh from a shower, while I was brushing my teeth, he had been asking me questions. He watched my technique for a moment. “You think Bruce Wine killed them?” I rinsed my mouth out and squeezed by him to cross the hall to bedroom. He followed me. “I think the fire killed them, at least st of them.” “Come on, Joe.” I began putting on a fresh shirt. “Maybe. I want to see what we get from the scene before I draw any conclusions. We may find out it was an accident, that Fox had a heart condition and died of it on the way downstairs.” “What about the locked door, then?” “I don’t know. Maybe they had an argument and he locked them in.

  Maybe he locked them in every night. People do strange things, especially this Order bunch, from what I hear.” Potter sat on the windowsill and stared out gloomily. He had not been the brightest cop I’d ever worked with; he lacked the flair it often took to get people to open up. He’d been hard-working and earnest most of his fellow officers had found him a grind-but it hadn’t seemed to do him much good. I’d thought maybe his lackluster style was because being a cop was a means to an end; according to him, he’d always dreamed of becoming the state’s Perry Mason, carrying the cop’s hard work up to the bench and convincing judge and jury that the bad guys deserved hard time. I’d never pointed out to him that Mason was a defense attorney; it was his flat-footed opponents who were prosecutors.

  I wondered now, looking at him, whether that kind of misconception should have told me more at the time. Judging from his present lack of enthusiasm, it appeared the idea of his job was more appealing than its reality. It reminded me, albeit cynically, that the State’s Attorney was an elective post, as open to politicians as to qualified prosecutors. I made a mental note to keep that distinction in mind before putting all my trust in his hands.

  I finished dressing. “Any objection to my tagging along with the arson people?” He stood up quickly. “Objection? God, no.” “Well, I’m your boy now. I could drop this whole thing and go after your embezzling town clerk.” He waved his hand. “Oh, forget her.

  Do what you got to do.” Like a model at a fashion show, the burned house had again changed appearances. From the scene of a fight to a five-alarm inferno, it was now playing host to a full police investigation. Instead of fire trucks and hose, State Police and Sheriff’s cruisers clustered near its blackened walls. Men in uniform and in plainclothes milled about, measuring, photographing, and collecting evidence. As I approached the front door, one of them came up to greet me. He was about my age, but with more hair and more gut, and was dressed in filthy blue overalls with “State Police” stenciled in white letters across his shoulder blades. “You Gunther?” he asked, sticking out a dirty, ham-sized hand.

  I almost winced at the grip. He was also about my height-five ten inches-but built like a brick. “Yeah.” “I’m Dick LeMay State Police arson investigator. Thanks for ing the scene clean.” I looked for some irony there. Arson sites, aside from their natudirty nature, are notoriously abused by others: Firemen, rescuers, s, medical examiners, homicide teams, and sometimes even insure adjustors and gawkers trample on the evidence before the arson investigator gets his first glimpse.

  More often than not, important things that could have told the story of the fire right off are ground into vion.

  “Unless you’re pulling my leg, you ought to thank Corporal Wirt.

  roped it off before it was even cool.” “Yeah, well, I don’t like him. I also heard you and Hillstrom were dainty going in for an early look.” We were standing in front of the house, by the front door.

  Suddenly, there was a crash from inside.

  “That’s the boss.” LeMay grinned, and motioned me to enter ad of him.

  Another man in blue overalls was moving slabs of plaster and ing away from the middle of the floor. The air was thick with acrid smoke.

  I could see already that a lot had been done to restore the room’s appearance prior to the fire. The space around the wood stove was clear down to the bare floor-or what was left of it-and of the stairs had been cleared as well. The body was gone. LeMay made the introductions from the door. “Jonathon, this is Gunther-he’s the SA’s man we were expecting. This is Detective geant Jonathon Michael; that’s Jonathon with an 011 at the end ead of an-parents were either hippies or illiterate. He’s my superout of St. Albans and he’s real sensitive about his name, so get ight in your reports.” “You can spell it any way you want; everyone else does.” Michael ed to me from across the mess.

  “Glad to meet you.” Michael was the Stan Laurel to LeMay’s Oliver Hardy, thin and tall, with a narrow face and steel-rimmed granny glasses that gave a perpetually surprised look.

  “So, what have you found so far?” LeMay maintained center stage. “Well, the fire started at the me burned straight up and out. You can see the V pattern clearly, g with the downburn pattern over here. All that started secondary eups, especially when the ceiling started to go, but you can tell they me all offshoots.” He guided me around the room, showing me one burned area after another. I nodded-I hoped intelligently-but I couldn’t tell one from the other. To me, the whole room looked trashed and burned to a crisp.

  We all turned at the sound of someone entering the front door. A small, neat man with carefully combed brown hair and an immaculately trimmed mustache stood there watching us. His hands were buried in the pockets of his tan overcoat, giving him an oddl
y proprietary look, as if he were appraising the building for possible purchase. LeMay sounded surprised to see him. “Hullo, Crofter. I thought Appleby was on this.”

  The small man’s face didn’t change. “He is. I just wanted to take a look.” He shifted his gaze to me. “Who are you?” “The SA’s guy-Joe Gunther.” LeMay answered for me. “What are you doing here?” There was a momentary pause. The question wasn’t harsh, but the inflection was so loaded with suspicion that even LeMay was rendered mute.

  Michael cleared his throat. “Hamilton okayed it.” “He did?” LeMay regained his voice, although he kept it low-key. “Yeah.

  You can check with him if you like. We’re going to be here for a while.” The small man didn’t answer, but looked at me carefully once more, turned on his heel and left. The tenseness in the room followed him out like a cloud of after-shave. I looked to the other two. “Who was that?” Jonathon Michael answered. “Crofter Smith. He’s the senior BCI man under Hamilton at the St. J. barracks. He’s a little reserved good cop, though.” “Even if he does look like a shoe clerk,” LeMay added. Michael gave a short laugh. “Better that than sanitation workers, like us.

  He’s just not real fond of outside investigators; makes him a little aloof.” “I think he’s a cold fish.” Michael shrugged. Years back, SA investigators used to be state policemen on rotation. Then the legislature, for whatever reasons, broke up the marriage. It didn’t alter the basic system to any great extent, but it did affect the ease that once marked communications between State’s Attorneys and the State Police. Many of the latter, and obviously Crofter Smith among them, felt the loss of direct representation in the SA’s offices had been a major mistake. LeMay pawed at the ground for a moment, muttering, “Where was I?” He then grabbed my elbow and steered me over to where the stove had stood.

  “Okay, so here we have the origin-nice and tidy. But it dumped? Was coal shoveled out of it onto the floor? Was it sed with an accelerant to make it explode?” I noticed Michael had found a seat on an evidence can and was tching LeMay’s show. I wondered what he was thinking, until I sed in his expression the simple admiration of a shy man for an berant one.

  “I know there’s not much left of the floor lucky there’s any at really, or you and Hillstrom and the SA would have ended up in basement.” He peered up at me from his crouching position. “Bet never thought of that, did you? First thing we did was shore it up. “Anyway, look at the alligatoring here. See where the wood has n burned into squares? Well, we had a little debate about that, athon and me. You can get a pretty good idea from the size of those le squares whether the fire was slow and smoldering, or fast and hot. blem is, if the fire goes for long enough, then everything gets coned, and you have no way of telling whether it started fast or slow. at’s where you get into figuring out the layers of a fire, and somees you’re helped because something falls on a piece of wood, extinshes the flame, and preserves the alligatoring up to that point, so it’s dy sometimes to have the ceiling fall in.” “Gotcha,” I muttered, feeling I had to say something, even if it n’t reveal the depth of my wit.

  LeMay jumped on it. “Gotcha, you say. But got what? Here’s the dence. Was it fast or slow to start?” I stared at where he was pointing, feeling my face flushing slightly. all for slow, large for fast… “Slow.” LeMay slapped his knee. “Damn. Brilliant. You were looking at wrong piece, by the way that’s fast char but you’re right anyMichael spoke up from his corner. “He guessed wrong, too, at t.”

  LeMay chuckled. “That just puts you in good company.” I straightened, looking for a punch line in all this. “So what pened here? Can you reconstruct how it started?” Jonathon Michael finally got up and joined us, his voice quiet and asured compared to LeMay’s.

  “We’ve taken samples for testing at crime lab-in those clean paint cans there-but we think what pened is that the man you found lying here fell up against the stove dumped it over; it wasn’t very sturdy, and it wouldn’t have taken ch.” LeMay chimed in. “The fire smoldered for a while, maybe half an r, building up a lot of smoke; that’s what killed the people upstairs.

  Then, when things got hot enough, whoosh. The whole place went.

  That’s why it was a little confusing telling the fast char from the slow. You have both here.” “So there’s no sign of arson?” I asked.

  Michael shook his head. “Nothing blatant. There are problems, but nothing that outright says arson. “What problems?” “Oh, it’s mostly law of averages, like the position of the body.

  We know he was lying on the stove-a good indicator that he fell on it to make it topple over-but we found him facing up. Usually, they face down.” Again, LeMay pitched in. “See? Unusual, but not really suspicious.” I glanced at the stairs. “What about up there?” LeMay led the way upstairs, the irrepressible tour guide, pointing to the details.

  “We didn’t find anything up here. The fire spread along the ceiling, just like in a chimney. You can see on the walls how it seeks the highest spot. Then it got to the landing, had nowhere to go, spread out to all four walls, and then began to eat its way through to the attic.”

  We were now standing between the two bedroom doors, opposite the bathroom, and in full daylight from the hole above. The floor had not been as carefully cleared as the one below. I pushed at a small piece of debris with my toe.

  “So there were no signs of any fire being set up here?” LeMay dropped to his knees, pointing out the details. “You can see char here, just like downstairs, but that’s from fall-down, junk from the burning ceiling. See? You can see the outlines of individual pieces of wood and stuff. We took photographs before we moved it, of course, so you can see from those, too.” As he moved, his foot brushed against a small, flaky pile near the mop board at the top of the stairs. Something briefly twinkled and caught my eye. I bent over to look more closely.

  “What have you got?” Michael asked, squatting next to me. “Damn,”

  muttered LeMay, on his hands and knees by my other side. “I better get the camera.” As he clambered downstairs, Michael and I just looked at the object, wondering what to make of it. It was the shiny spent cartridge casing for a 9-mm bullet.

  By the time I climbed the front steps of the Rocky River Inn that ing, I was seriously wishing I could just go home to Buster’s and into bed.

  The day had been spent crawling all over every square inch hat charcoaled house, looking for anything that might explain that spent cartridge. We had found nothing-no bullet hole, no gun, no cartridges nothing to justify wrapping up the day with a celeion at the Inn.

  Buster, however, had told me in no uncertain terms this was where I was to be tonight.

  My weariness from both lack of success and lack of sleep was ed by the realization that the Rocky River had evidently been gnated this evening’s official hot spot. Every window blazed with t, and the suppressed tremor of dozens of blended voices seeped out he street.

  I stepped through the front door, and was greeted by a seriously xicated Rennie Wilson, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hey, hey, rybody. Here he is, the hero of the hour, that man among men, that man’s fireman, the son of a bitch who really truly pulled my fat from fire: Mr. Joe Guntherrrrr.” A ragged cheer followed his announcement. I gave a feeble wave found a beer bottle thrust into my hand. Several people, none of m I knew, slapped me on the back. The air was almost as full of ke as it had been during the fire, and the noise, now that I was in midst, was deafening. Greta probably hadn’t had a crowd like this ears.

  By my rough estimate, there were over a hundred people flowing een the cafe’, the entrance hall, and the Library. At first glance, I n’t recognize anyone aside Rennie, whom I could see lurching off he bar.

  That, of course, wasn’t surprising-the crowd was mostly de up of younger people, in their twenties and thirties, and many of m were firemen and their relatives from the surrounding towns. There were a few older faces, I saw finally, some of whom were iously residents of the establishment, dressed in bathrobes o
r wearundershirts; one was only in pajamas. Greta ran less of an inn than etirement home/hostel for the itinerant; people stayed anywhere two hours to ten years, and could do so, if they wished, in total ation. The air was hot and stagnant. I put my coat on the back of a chair near the wall and hoped I’d find it later. Then I made my way slowly toward Buster’s den.

  Greta found me at the door and tried to push a beer bottle into my hand. It clinked against the one I already had. “Someone beat me to it, huh? Want a refill?” “It’s still full. Thanks.” Actually, I no longer drank beer, or anything else, for that matter. Over the years, the appeal had gone out of it.

  She kissed me on the cheek, a lifetime first. “You’re a good man, Joey, and Rennie’s a ]ucky one. Your drinks are on the house tonight, so enjoy.” I could see the top of Buster’s head through the bodies and steered toward it. When he saw me, he punched the arm of the man sitting next to him and motioned him to leave.

  “No, stay put,” I motioned.

  Buster eyed the beer in my hand. “I thought you didn’t go in for that stuff anymore.” “I don’t. Want it?” I had to shout to make myself heard. “Hell, yes.” He drained the one he was holding and took mine.

  “Greta’s doing’ all right, I guess.” “She told me I could drink free all night.” “Shit, Joe. She knows you don’t drink. I told her so.” I watched him take a long pull from his bottle. “Hard to believe five people died today.” He gave me a long, philosophical look, a little on the blank side for all the beer inside him. “That’s true, Joey, but it just doesn’t weigh the same to most people in this town-sad but true.”