The Reluctant Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  “I don’t have any experience at being a coroner. I still have one class to go before I finish my degree.”

  “You’ve got a good five years of medical experience. The first coroner elected was an EMT, and you’re a nurse.” He paused. “Practitioner.”

  Fenway looked in McVie’s blue eyes. “Why me?”

  “To be honest, Fenway, it was your dad. He called me up after my first choices went nowhere. He told me your background, he told me you were arriving soon, and he told me you’re in the perfect position to take this full-time job, even if for just six months.”

  The food came. Fenway picked up her fork and knife and dug in to her salmon benedict.

  The sheriff picked up his fork but didn’t start. “So, I dug into your background. I saw your job history, your school transcripts, and I saw some of the work you’ve done, and the recommendations you have from your supervisors and instructors. Even your dad didn’t know you had straight A’s in your forensics program.”

  Fenway kept eating.

  “Look, I know this seems like your dad is trying to be a puppet master here. And I was skeptical at first. But given your background, and given our situation, I think you’re the best person for the job. So, I’d like to formally appoint you as county coroner.”

  Fenway took another bite.

  McVie put down his unused fork. “Look, I know there was bad blood between your parents.” Fenway’s eyes cut to him. “I know you and your mom were on your own for a long time, and that your dad didn’t see you very often. I don’t know if your father is trying to make amends for the past, or what, but I know that this would give you a lot more options right away. You’d get salary and benefits while you finish your master’s, and while you apply for certification with the California nursing board. We both know you can’t find work as a nurse until you get the state certification, no matter how good you were in Seattle. So, it’s a win-win, if you ask me.”

  Fenway swallowed carefully. “Well,” she began. “This conversation was totally not what I expected this morning.” She took another drink of coffee and set the mug down. “Although if my father is involved, I guess I never can tell what to expect.”

  “What do you think?” His eyes were soft; asking, but not pleading.

  Fenway tapped her fingers on the table. “Honestly, I’m not sure whether to be insulted, or flattered, that you’ve done so much research on me, my career, and my finances.”

  “Flattered.” McVie smiled warmly.

  She didn’t want to, but she found herself smiling back. It sounded intriguing—she wanted to be angry at her father for so much meddling, but the frank assessment of her situation was accurate. “It sounds like there are a lot of positives. I guess I’d be interested in interviewing.”

  He laughed, another genuine laugh. “What do you think this is?”

  Fenway knew that Nathaniel Ferris had put McVie up to this. Although her father never seemed to care that she and her mother had been living hand to mouth in Seattle, apparently he didn’t want her starving or living off her meager savings now. Maybe it was because his ex-wife was gone—or maybe, more cynically, it wouldn’t look good to the rest of the town if his black daughter were to struggle financially while he was so well off.

  Fenway cut another bite of her benedict. “At first, I thought it might be an ambush by my father to try to make up for being a crappy father,” she said. She caught herself; her tone was harsher than she intended. “Then, I thought maybe it was a welcome-to-Estancia breakfast. Now, I think I need to at least see where I’m going to work and who I’ll be working with before I accept.” Fenway narrowed her eyes. “And don’t you want to know more about me, and stuff like my work ethic and problem-solving skills before you just offer me a job?”

  “Offer you an appointment.”

  “Whatever.”

  The sheriff was silent for a minute. McVie, though obviously not blind to the strain between Fenway and her father, was playing to her empathy and sense of reason. Fenway was annoyed at her father—the “puppet master,” as the sheriff put it—but with no prospects on the horizon, it didn’t seem like she could say no. She hoped her father wouldn’t bring it up constantly when he suggested they spend some quality father/daughter time together.

  She took another bite.

  “Well, certainly I want you to feel comfortable with the working environment, and with your co-workers,” the sheriff said. “But I’d like to stress that we’re kind of over a barrel.”

  “And my dad told you not to take ‘no’ for an answer,” she deadpanned.

  “It pays a lot better than your old job at the clinic in Seattle.”

  Fenway took another bite, a big bite, and chewed very thoroughly before she swallowed. “When can we go to see the office?”

  He breathed a sigh of relief. “How about this afternoon?”

  Once Fenway had agreed to go to the office, Sheriff McVie was visibly more relaxed. He talked easily about how the sheriff and the coroner worked together, what a collaborative environment it was. How the coroner—both Harrison Walker for the last five years, and the coroner who preceded him—had been vital to solving several homicides. Fenway found it surprisingly easy to talk to the sheriff, and she even felt some excitement about working on cases.

  “Would I be expected to do autopsies?” Fenway asked.

  He deflected the question, saying instead that neighboring San Miguelito County was doing the autopsy on Walker. Then he changed the subject, talking about how Dominguez County really wasn’t big enough for a press conference, but he thought a prepared statement to the press, announcing the appointment of a replacement, would be effective. “Especially if we can say it’s someone with a medical background and an advanced degree in forensic nursing.”

  She also thought, but didn’t say, that her minority status would be politically helpful with the local environmentalists and university population. Instead, she said, “I’m still a class short.”

  “You’re taking the class online starting next week, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but you can’t say I have the degree when I don’t.”

  The sheriff waved his hand at Fenway. “We’ll get the communications team to make sure it sounds good. The community will like this. They’ll like you. And if we get this appointment done quickly, people might actually think we have our act together.”

  After they had finished and paid, McVie drove them back to her apartment. Their conversation transitioned easily from work to personal. He talked about how he had gone to Reno with some of his friends ten years before and scored tickets to see James Brown. His friends didn’t want to go, so he went by himself, he had said, which was totally unlike him—he never even ate dinner alone or went to a movie by himself. But he saw what was one of the Godfather of Soul’s last concerts before he died the next year.

  “You know he never had a number one hit?” The sheriff pulled into the parking lot. “The Macarena was number one for three months straight, but James Brown never had a number one hit. That’s a crime right there.”

  “You’re lucky,” Fenway said. “I never got to see James Brown.”

  “You’ve probably seen some interesting concerts.”

  “I was always too busy with school,” Fenway said. In reality, she never had enough money to go, but didn’t want to have that conversation with the sheriff. “And then the hours in the ER and the clinic don’t really gel with concerts.”

  “Yeah,” McVie said. “I’ve certainly had my share of Friday and Saturday nights wrecked too.”

  As they pulled into Fenway’s assigned parking spot, she saw her mother’s dresser, the one her mother had hung the seascape painting above back in Seattle, the one with her mother’s charcoal numbers on the bottom of each of the drawers, being moved. Deputy Callahan was on one side, and a burly guy with a long beard and plaid shorts was on the other as they started the awkward trek up the staircase to the second floor.

  Fenway thought about her mother�
�s charcoal marks on the bottom of the drawers and promised herself that she would go back to Seattle to pick up more of the paintings she had put in storage. Although she felt somewhat empty when looking at her new apartment, and as much as Nathaniel Ferris might have engineered the possibility of the coroner appointment, Fenway still had hope that she would find a purpose in Estancia beyond just trying to get by.

  She looked up at the second-floor landing, at all the strangers going through her apartment, and it hit her just how lonely someone could be even surrounded by people.

  Chapter Three

  With six people unloading all the boxes and moving the furniture, the truck was empty before lunchtime. Fenway’s new apartment met her definition of livable in just another couple of hours: bed assembled; dresser, sofa, dining table and chairs in place; boxes of linens and clothes in the bedroom; and plates and silverware in the proper cabinets and drawers.

  Fenway offered to get pizza and beer, but everyone said they had to start their shifts.

  Only the sheriff accepted. “Actually, why don’t we get pizza on the way to the county administration buildings?” he suggested. “You can see where the coroner’s office is, and meet the staff too.”

  “I’m not meeting the staff in sweats,” she said. “Give me half an hour. I’ll meet you at the Coffee Bean.”

  She wrapped her hair and showered, then pulled out some decent clothes: black trousers that weren’t great, but were at least no-iron, and a crisp, pale-pink Henley top with a tab collar. She checked herself in the mirror; the ocean air had been kind to her skin but not her hair, though she didn’t have time to fix it. She put on a pair of black-and-white flats and headed to the Coffee Bean to meet McVie.

  He was just finishing a coffee as she came in, and they continued their conversation back in the cruiser as they drove toward downtown. “You have a car?”

  “Not right now. I sold it before I left Seattle. I thought I’d buy a used one once I got here.”

  He nodded. “If you need it, the number 14 bus stops in front of the Coffee Bean every half hour or so. Drops you off right at City Hall. It’s just across the street from the county offices.”

  “It’s nice that you assume I’ll like the office enough to take the job.”

  “Like you said, The Owner won’t take no for an answer.”

  Fenway turned to look at McVie. “The what?”

  “Oh.” He stopped. “I guess I shouldn’t call him that. A lot of people call him The Owner, capital O, because he owns so much in the county: the refinery, a few restaurants, a bunch of real estate—that apartment complex you’re in.”

  “The Owner,” Fenway said, chewing her words. Fenway reacted to the charged word, but looked at McVie’s face—there was no malice in it.

  “Yeah.”

  She sighed and decided to let it go. “Well, I’ve called him worse when I was growing up.”

  Estancia was the seat of Dominguez County, and Fenway thought that the downtown was actually pretty cute. The cruiser made a left from Broadway onto Fifth Street, which narrowed into a two-lane boulevard with angled parking on each side, and a median with grass and small trees. Fenway looked out of the windows. There was an ice cream shop, a music store, a tattoo parlor, a theater with a sign for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and a bakery before the government buildings appeared.

  City Hall, with its white stone facade and thick, unadorned columns, sat back about two hundred feet from Fifth Street, behind a plaza that looked like a small amphitheater, with a quarter-circle of cement benches cascading up in short steps. The plaza didn’t look like a serious theater space, though Fenway could envision a local Shakespeare in the Park production there on a hot summer day.

  On the other side of Fifth Street were a pair of four-story utilitarian-looking office buildings, reminiscent of Spanish-style architecture. The police car turned into a short parking structure just after the second building, and Sheriff McVie pulled into a designated spot for law enforcement vehicles.

  “Here we are.”

  They emerged from the parking structure into the hazy sunlight. The fog had almost entirely burned off. The air was still a bit cool, but the sun felt good on Fenway’s face. They started walking toward one of the office buildings, McVie leading the way.

  Fenway looked over at the sheriff. “We didn’t get pizza.”

  “We will afterward. There’s a great place on Fourth.”

  “Does it have good beer?”

  “I’m glad you’ve got such intense focus on this job,” McVie said, though he was half-smiling. “I feel good about recommending someone so focused on the right priorities.”

  “You promised me food and then denied me,” Fenway pointed out. “I’m not responsible for what I say when I’m hungry.”

  “Duly noted.” He held open the front door for her and smiled. She noticed the cute crooked tooth in his smile again. “The Coroner’s Office is first door on the left.”

  It felt a little odd to Fenway that the office was in full swing; even though it was a Tuesday, sitting in that truck for two days made it feel like a Saturday or Sunday for her.

  “Everyone should be back from lunch by now,” McVie said as he followed Fenway into the suite. She looked around; it was a fairly small space, about a thousand square feet. There was a counter near the door that looked like it served as a reception area, and four modern office-style desks behind it. It looked like each desk had a two-drawer rolling file cabinet underneath. There was a small conference room behind the desk area.

  Three six-foot-wide filing cabinets, painted a beige color that didn’t match the desks, lined the wall between the window and the reception area. A glass-enclosed office took up half the wall with the window. A faux-wood nameplate next to the door was inscribed with “H. Walker,” and “County Coroner” in smaller letters underneath. Police tape was affixed at three heights across the entrance to the office. Fenway figured that Harrison Walker’s work effects were still in there. She noticed that it was a nice office: a large mahogany desk, a big monitor, and a commanding yet comfortable-looking chair. It was a masculine office, but Fenway could picture herself behind the desk.

  The sheriff interrupted her thoughts. “A lot of counties on this part of the coast have a combined sheriff/coroner position. We’re the only county around here that has two positions—for almost ten years now. The sheriff position was still an elected position after we made the change, and the voters still wanted their chance to okay the coroner too.” He cleared his throat and addressed the room. “Everyone, sorry for the interruption, but I’d like to introduce you to Fenway Stevenson.”

  Fenway held up her hand in greeting.

  McVie indicated a young man behind the desk. “This is Migs, our legal advisor.”

  Migs stood up and came forward. He looked to be in his early twenties; thin and well put-together in his burgundy long-sleeved dress shirt, black and gray striped tie, black slacks, and oxfords that were a little scuffed on the toes. He had olive skin and short black hair, spiked just a little bit on top. “Miguel Castaneda.” He shook Fenway’s hand, firmly but not too hard.

  “Migs is a paralegal who makes sure we’re not doing anything that gets us in trouble,” McVie explained. “And he’s getting his law degree at night.”

  “So he can figure out how to get the criminals we catch off on a technicality, and make a shitload of money doing it,” piped up a woman behind Fenway. She turned around, and the woman laughed. Fenway thought she was probably just giving Migs a hard time. The woman looked to be in her early fifties; a striking woman with large but jaded eyes, dark chocolate brown skin, hair short and cropped close to her head. Fenway didn’t think many women could pull that hairstyle off, but this woman could. Like McVie, she was in the sheriff’s department uniform.

  “And this is Sergeant Desiree Roubideaux.” McVie gritted his teeth a little.

  Sergeant Roubideaux stood up and shook Fenway’s hand, then turned to McVie. “I thought
you were bringing in The Owner’s daughter today.”

  “Shut up, Dez,” Migs said, quietly.

  “Oh.” She looked Fenway up and down. “Sorry. I was expecting a white girl.”

  Fenway smiled sweetly at Roubideaux. “Yeah, so were my first boyfriend’s parents.”

  Roubideaux laughed. “You’re all right, Miss Stevenson. Sorry, you’ll have to excuse me. I never met a black girl named after a baseball stadium before. It obviously threw me off my game.”

  “Awesome,” grunted McVie. “A paragon of decorum as always, Roubideaux. All right. Over there is Sergeant Mark Trevino.”

  A white man with a short white beard stood. He had a tan hound’s-tooth sportscoat on over a white polo shirt. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “And I’m Rachel.” A short, petite woman at the far desk raised her hand. “I’m the coroner’s assistant.” She must have realized that she was still sitting and awkwardly stood up. She wore a crushed velvet blazer and dark slacks. She came over to shake Fenway’s hand. She was only about five feet tall, at least a head shorter than Fenway, with high cheekbones and light brown hair. She looked like a teenager, although Fenway realized that her height and slender build made her look several years younger than she probably was.

  “And that’s the office,” McVie said. “Two sergeants to investigate, an assistant, and a legal advisor. It’s small, but it’s about par for the course for these coastal counties.”

  “Pleased to meet you all.” Fenway smiled what she hoped came across as a heartfelt smile with a touch of sympathy. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  McVie cleared his throat and addressed the room. “As you might have heard, with the tragedy that hit us on Sunday night, I’m obligated to appoint someone as coroner. My appointee will hold the position until the next election in November. I’m hoping I can convince Miss Stevenson to accept the appointment so the coroner’s office can get back up to full speed.” The sheriff turned back to Fenway. “And, as Sergeant Roubideaux has already clued you into, folks around here already know you’re Mr. Ferris’s daughter. So.” He shrugged in punctuation.