You Only Die Twice

by Edna Buchanan

  “You don’t even know him,” I protested.

  “He’s a cop, so I know you’re too good for ’im.”

  I smiled. Rychek was funny and smart, with a professionally acquired insight into human nature. I hoped he was wrong about my love life, but maybe not. I had begun to seriously question it myself.

  I led the story with a police appeal to the public to help identify the victim.

  Lottie stopped at my desk, her turned-up nose sunburned, hair frizzy from the humidity. She is forty-one, a statuesque five-eight, eight years older, four inches taller, and twenty pounds heavier than I am. “So who’d your floater turn out to be?”

  “No clue,” I said.

  She frowned. “Gawd, think she just swam out too far?”

  “Could be, or maybe she was on drugs or had a seizure.” One of my first stories at the News was about a teenager from Brooklyn who drowned in a hotel pool, in full sight of witnesses who thought he was playing. They didn’t know, until too late, that he suffered from epileptic seizures. “She may live alone,” I said, “and won’t be missed until tomorrow, when she doesn’t show up for work. Then somebody who reads the story will put two and two together.”

  “She don’t look like somebody who’d be high as a lab rat or living solo,” Lottie said. “A woman with her looks…”

  “We live alone,” I reminded her.

  “God-dog it to hell, you just got to rub it in, don’tcha?” She laughed. Born in Gun Barrel, Texas, she has seen it all in the pursuit of breaking news all over the world, capturing heart-stopping moments in every major trouble spot. Long divorced, no children, she wants nothing more than to settle down.

  “Don’t knock it,” I said wistfully. “Maybe we’re lucky that our jobs and the hours we work keep us single and celibate.”

  “We need to get you a blood test, to see if any is getting to your brain. Like I keep telling you,” she said, in her molasses-smooth Texas twang, “you ain’t gonna catch any fish if you don’t throw your bait in the water.”

  I passed on the invitation to join her for a night of line dancing at Desperado’s. Leaving the newsroom, I noticed that some wag from the photo desk had posted one of Lottie’s unused prints on the bulletin board: skinny little Raymond knock-kneed in the sand, clutching his pail, his tiny shovel in the other hand, the covered corpse in the foreground. A caption had been added: a tourist slogan—MIAMI, SEE IT LIKE A NATIVE. Not funny. I glared around the newsroom. The usual suspects were all hunched over their terminals. I yanked the photo off the board and locked it in my desk.

  As I drove home through twilight’s tawny glow I wondered what tomorrow’s story would reveal about the mystery woman. That’s the beauty of this job, I thought; it’s as though I live at the heart of an intricate and endless novel, rich with characters, ripe with promise, and rife with mystery.

  I fed Bitsy and Billy Boots, the cat, and then took Bitsy, the tiny mop of a poodle I inherited from a dead cop, over to the boardwalk. We sat on a wooden bench in the moonlight, watched the surf, and then walked home along shadowy streets.

  No messages waited. The sense of melancholy acquired on the beach earlier was still with me. I didn’t bother with dinner. Instead, I poured a stiff drink from the first-aid kit in my kitchen cabinet, drank it down hopefully—as though Jack Daniel’s Black Label was a magic elixir concocted to erase the images better left unseen—and went to bed.

  In the morning I called the Miami Beach detective bureau but Rychek was out, they said, across the bay at the medical examiner’s office. I took the MacArthur Causeway west, dodging tourists, their rental cars careening as they eyeballed and snapped photos of the Ecstasy, the Celebration, and the Song of Norway, all in port preparing to depart for such exotic destinations as Cozumel, Ocho Rios, Half Moon Cay, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe, the ships and trips that dreams are made of.

  The cheerful receptionist at number 1 Bob Hope Road said Rychek was “with the chief, down in the autopsy room.” She called for permission, then waved me on.

  I left the soothing pastel lobby, trotted past records, through the double doors, descended the stairs, and hurried through the breezeway into the lab building. My footsteps echoed along the brightly lit corridor, its walls lined with poster-size photos of the towering oak trees and resurrection ferns along the Withlacoochee River in Inverness. The chief medical examiner, a history buff, shot them himself in a wilderness as unspoiled today as when Chief Osceola and his warriors holed up there during the second Seminole War. U.S. Army Major Francis Langhorne Dade led his doomed troops into ambush at that now-historic battleground. On hot and bloody city nights I wonder if Miamians invited bad karma on themselves by naming their county after an inept leader whose sole claim to fame was being massacred.

  I passed the photo-imaging bureau, the bone and tissue bank, and found the star attraction at an autopsy room station, attended by the chief, known both as “the titan of medical examiners” and the genius who designed this one-of-a-kind building, and a scowling Emery Rychek.

  She lay supine on a tray, her body incandescent, bathed in the light of sixteen fluorescent bulbs. A rubber block beneath her shoulders had tilted her head back, exposing her throat. The tray she occupied, neutral gray for color-photo compatibility, was designed to facilitate X-ray transmission and mounted on wheels, so that bodies only need to be lifted twice, on arrival and on departure.

  They had finished the autopsy. Her vital organs had been scrutinized beneath a high-powered surgical lamp on an adjacent stainless-steel dissection table. The Y-shaped incision in her torso and the intermastoid cut that opened her skull had already been sewn shut with loose running stitches of white linen cord. Every surface was scrupulously clean, not a single drop of blood. Instruments gleamed, their blades as immaculate as the chief’s surgical scrubs and apron, a source of pride with this man. He acknowledged me with a cheerful nod.

  “Hey, kid,” Rychek growled. The detective stood at the woman’s head, just outside the splash zone. He, too, wore an apron.

  “Got an ID yet?” I slipped out my notebook.

  “Not a single call. Not even the usual nutcases who love to flap their yaps. Zip, zilch, nada.”

  “Huh.” That surprised me. “Maybe she was a tourist….”

  I stepped closer, then gasped in shock.

  “What happened to her?” When I last saw her, the dead woman was as ethereal and haunting as Botticelli’s Venus emerging from the sea. Today she looked like the loser in a bad bar fight. The autopsy incisions were routine. What shocked me was her nose, raw and skinned, as were her knuckles and ears, and the ugly red-brown bruising on her forearms, wrists, and legs.

  “Nothing new.” The chief spoke briskly. “Abrasions from the sand and other injuries are almost invisible on moist skin. They don’t show up right away. They only become noticeable after the body’s been dried off and refrigerated. Drying tends to darken wounds.”

  “But her eyes,” I protested. Still slightly open, the whites were now black on either side of the irises.

  “Tache noir: black spot,” he said. “Though to be literal, it’s actually dark brown. Part of the evaporation process. Common in seawater drownings. The water, being five percent salt, dehydrates the tissues and draws out the moisture, and when the tissue dries it’s dark brown.”

  “But all those marks. Are they fish bites?”

  The chief shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “The news ain’t good.” Rychek nodded at the doctor.

  “It appears our detective friend here has himself a homicide,” the chief said pleasantly. “She was murdered.”

  “Why me?” Rychek sighed.

  I was not sympathetic. She was the one murdered.

  “So,” I said. “You mean she was killed, then dumped in the ocean?”

  “No,” the chief said. “As I was just apprising Detective Rychek, she was deliberately drowned.” The chief consulted his notes. “Those bruises on her wrists and upper arms were inflicted
during a struggle, as she fought being submerged. See here?”

  He turned her head to one side.

  “Note the bruises on the back of her neck. Someone grabbed her from behind and slightly to her left and pushed her head down. See the marks? His right hand was here”—he placed his own gloved fingers over the bruises—“on the back of her neck. Fingers on the right, thumb on the left. Look close and you can see the little horizontal linear abrasions where his fingernails penetrated the skin on her neck as she twisted, trying to escape his grasp.”

  Chills rippled across my skin, and the room, a constant 72 degrees, felt colder. I imagined her fighting to breathe, coughing and choking as she inhaled water, her panic. I have nearly drowned—twice. Once in a dark Everglades canal, the second time at sea, in sight of Miami’s bright lights. Somehow I survived both, but nobody had been deliberately holding my head under water.

  The chief was pointing out injuries to the woman’s left arm, “…bruising beneath the skin, about a centimeter in diameter, three or four fingernail abrasions where he apparently grasped her wrist with his left hand to stop her from flailing and grabbing at him. See the visible bruises on the flexor, here, on the underpart of her left wrist, and another fingernail mark?”

  “None-a them were visible at the scene,” Rychek said morosely.

  “The guy swimming near her,” I said. “It had to be him!”

  “Could be,” the detective said.

  “How did he do it?” I asked. “She had to be difficult to subdue, struggling for life. Why didn’t anybody see it or hear her screams?”

  “The pattern of injuries looks as though he used a scissors grip,” the chief said. “Wrapped his legs around hers from behind, pinned her ankles together, and used his own body weight to submerge her. Her body supported his while he held her down.”

  “How long would it take to drown somebody like that?” Rychek asked.

  “Two to three minutes. She’d be struggling, of course, ingesting seawater. Most likely unable to call out for help.”

  The thought of her terror, her helpless last moments, outraged and sickened me. Savagely attacked in the water, like a victim in Jaws, she had to be so scared. But this primitive predator was a man.

  “All these bruises and abrasions make it difficult to ascertain what’s post-and what’s antemortem,” the chief mused. “Some are obviously the result of wave action sweeping her body back and forth on the bottom.”

  “What else?” Rychek peered over his little half glasses, notebook in hand.

  “See this?” The chief pulled down her lower lip to expose the pinpoint hemorrhages. “On the inside, a linear abrasion, the shape of a tooth. Apparently done when he grabbed her face to push it underwater or stop her from screaming.

  “And here, on the earlobe, a one-millimeter tear where an earring was forcibly ripped off. She was still wearing the other one when found.”

  “What about the bathing suit?” I asked.

  “That top could be hers. It fits,” the chief said. “No way would a swimsuit simply fall off in the water. The killer either removed it deliberately or tore it off accidentally during the struggle.”

  “Was she raped?” I asked.

  “There’s no trauma to the genitalia,” the chief said. “The rape workup was negative, but of course that doesn’t rule out sexual battery.”

  “It starts out a simple drowning,” the detective said, his tone aggrieved, “and now it’s not only a whodunit, it’s a who-is-it.”

  Our eyes met across the dead woman’s body.

  “You will catch the SOB who did this,” I told Rychek. “Right?”

  “No way,” he said, “till we know who got killed. We need her name.” He turned to the chief. “Whattaya say, Doc? Anything else here that could help me out?”

  The chief frowned at her chart. “Dental work looks excellent. Porcelain veneers on numbers eight and nine. Good work. Expensive, sophisticated. We’ll have Dr. Wyatt take a look and do an impression. And we’ll have her prints for you shortly.”

  A slender olive-skinned morgue attendant had joined us. He uncurled and stretched out the fingers of the dead woman’s right hand. One by one he inked, pressed, and rolled them into a spoonlike device lined with narrow strips of glossy fingerprint paper.

  “She had a bikini wax,” I murmured, thinking aloud, “and her hair…when you release her description, be sure to mention that she has frosted highlights, probably done in an expensive salon. See those lighter streaks? They cost big bucks and half a day at the beauty parlor. Somebody might recognize that.”

  “So that ain’t natural, from the sun? Humph.” The detective peered more closely at the dead woman’s hair. “What else? She healthy, doc?”

  “No signs of disease, prior injuries, surgeries, or chronic conditions,” the chief answered. “But there is one other thing that might help. She was a mother.”

  “She has children?” I was startled. “How can you tell?”

  “She had some stria—stretch marks—on her abdomen, and the cervix of her uterus showed an irregularity. The nipples tend to be a bit darker, as well.”

  “How many kids?” the detective asked. “More than one?”

  “No way to know.” The chief shrugged. “But she’d experienced at least one pregnancy. Possibly more.”

  Somewhere there was a child, or children, without a mother. Why does no one miss her? I wondered, as we left. As birds sang in the sunny parking lot outside and traffic thundered along the nearby expressway, Rychek filled me in on what little he knew. The condition of the body indicated a time of death four to five hours before she surfaced, placing the murder at between 5:30 and 6:30 A.M.

  “More likely closer to six, when that elderly jogger saw her,” I told him. “He’s probably right on target about the time. He’s a creature of habit, a good witness. I see him every morning that I run. I can set my watch by him.”

  Rychek gave me two black-and-white five-by-seven photos: a close-up of the earring next to a small ruler, to demonstrate scale, and a head shot of the corpse. “Think you can get these in the paper?”

  “The earring, sure. On the other…I’ll try,” I said, frowning. My editors have an unreasonable prejudice against pictures of dead bodies in the morning paper, when readers are at breakfast. “They probably won’t go for it,” I warned.

  The last time I talked Tubbs into using a morgue shot, it was an absolute success. Readers quickly identified the corpse, a college student dead of a drug overdose in a motel room. Instead of praise, we received reprimands. He still had not forgiven me.

  The argument I had used to persuade him was that the overdose victim didn’t look dead, he might have been sleeping. The woman in this photo was definitely dead.

  It wouldn’t matter, I thought, if the right message was waiting for me in the newsroom. Rychek had had no calls. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t. Some people will talk freely to cops but not reporters—and vice versa.

  Unfortunately, none of my messages were in response to the morning story. The sole new clue came from an unlikely source: my mother.

  I had comp time coming for working on my day off and had arranged to meet her at La Hacienda for lunch.

  Her white convertible was parked jauntily outside, the top down. At age fifty-four, she looked stunning in cool ice blue. I basked in her bright and bubbly chatter about her burgeoning social life, her career in high fashion, and the new winter cruisewear, grateful that she was not criticizing my clothes, my job, or my love life.

  I enjoyed a delectably seasoned crisp-crusted baked chicken with moros and green plantains. Lunch was relatively uneventful until I fished through my Day Timer for my credit card and the photos, tucked inside, fell out.

  “Oh,” my mother chirped cheerfully, as she picked one up to study before handing it back. “Those are my favorites.”

  “Excuse me?” I said. “You recognize this earring?”

  “Of course, the Elsa Peretti open heart. Exclusively for T
iffany’s.” She shrugged. “Everybody knows that.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She stared, as though I were not her only child but some alien creature from a third world planet.

  “Of course. They’re a signature design for Tiffany’s.” She snatched up the second photo.

  “Good God!” She squinted at the image. “Is this woman…alive?”

  “No,” I murmured unhappily. “Not anymore.”

  She slapped it face down on the table like a playing card, shoulders quivering in an exaggerated shudder.

  “What happened to her? No, no.” She held up one hand like a frazzled traffic cop. “Please. Don’t tell me. Spare me the details. I don’t want to know.”

  She studied me in pained silence for a long moment, her expression one of suspicion. “What on earth would you be doing with a thing like this?”

  I realized again what a disappointment I am to her. Most women my age happily share baby pictures, while my handbag reveals close-ups of corpses.

  Appetite gone, I pushed away my caramel flan and fortified myself against the usual barrage with the dregs of my café con leche.

  Instead, she turned up one edge of the photo with a beautifully manicured fingernail for another peek, her expression odd.

  “Gruesome.” She grimaced as she turned the photo face up. “I swear, something about this poor creature…who is she?” Her questioning eyes rose from the photo to me.

  “You think you know her?” I leaned forward. “She’s the unidentified woman who drowned at the beach yesterday.”

  “I saw your story,” she said pointedly, as if the tragedy had somehow been all my fault. She stared at the photo, closed her eyes for a moment, studied it again, then pushed it toward me. “I guess not,” she whispered. “Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her now, I’m sure.”

  “You know,” I said quickly, “it’s entirely possible that you do recognize her. You meet so many people: the fashion shows, the models, the buyers, your clients. She may have moved in those circles. Here, take another look,” I urged. How ironic, I thought, if my mother could help solve this mystery.