The Reluctant Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  The team began to regale Fenway with stories about Harrison Walker, and Rachel called for another round.

  “Cranberry and soda for me,” Fenway said. “I’ve got a long night of unpacking ahead of me.”

  “The coroner is dead,” Mark toasted. “Long live the coroner!”

  After they had another round—everyone with another shot of Johnnie Walker Red, except Fenway with her cranberry and soda—the stories got a bit rowdier.

  Mark told Fenway about the time Walker made a sexual joke to a female server at a catered event.

  Migs started a story about Walker calling him names during an annual review, but his smile faltered. Dez rapidly changed the subject to another story: Walker realized he was late to a golf game, and as he ran out of his office with his bag, he tripped over his untied shoelaces and landed on his backside, right in front of Migs. Walker had blamed the departed assistant for not letting him know how late it was.

  The air seemed to go out of the room a little bit after that, though, and only Rachel ordered a third shot. Soon, Mark was looking at his watch and saying he had to leave. “I think I can get a last-minute ticket to see Joseph tonight. They usually don’t sell out weeknights.”

  “How many times have you seen that stupid show?” Dez said.

  “Oh, be quiet, Dez. You’re just jealous of how hot Randy looks in the shirtless Elvis costume.”

  Dez cracked up with laughter. “Yep, that’s me, Mark, you caught me. Jealous of your man.” She looked at her watch. “Well, happy hour’s over anyway. You have fun with your Pharaoh Elvis, Mark.”

  Dez and Mark walked out.

  Rachel hopped her five-foot frame off the barstool and stood up a little unsteadily.

  “You okay?” Fenway said.

  “That last shot was probably not the best idea,” Rachel said. “I, uh, probably need to sober up a little before I drive home.”

  “I took the bus. I could drive you in your car back to your place if you want.”

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “I’m offering. Come on, you can give me a reason to procrastinate from unpacking tonight.”

  Rachel paused. “Okay.”

  They walked out to the parking lot behind Winfrey’s. Rachel pulled a key out of her purse and handed it to Fenway. Fenway looked at the key.

  “BMW?”

  “Yeah. The silver one right there.”

  Fenway unlocked the car and got in. This was the first time she had been behind the wheel of a BMW. She felt the leather-wrapped steering wheel underneath her fingers. She looked for where to insert the key, finding that it was a push-button ignition instead. It was a far cry from the ten-year-old Nissan Sentra she had owned in Seattle.

  She loved the way the engine hummed when it turned on, and how she could even feel the road as she was backing up. Rachel was buzzed, but not out of it; she gave competent directions to the Scarlet Oak Townhomes, which was down Broadway, on the other side of the freeway from Fenway’s place.

  The complex was arranged in narrow, two-story apartments, with a single door on the ground floor, with paint and siding mimicking separated buildings. There was an empty parking space right in front of number 19, and Fenway pulled the BMW in.

  They got out and Fenway locked the car, reaching out to hand the keys over. “Here you go, Rachel. Hopefully I’ll see you soon if this all works out.”

  Rachel took the keys. “Thanks for the ride, Fenway. How are you getting home?”

  “I don’t know. I can probably get a taxi or an Uber.”

  “Want to wait inside? My husband’s out for the evening.”

  “Your husband?” Fenway said, shocked.

  “I know, I know. I’m young to be married. Sheesh.”

  Fenway laughed as they walked to the door. “Well, I get ‘you’re named after a baseball stadium’ all the time, so I guess you can get the ‘you’re really young to be married’ thing.”

  Rachel opened the door. The apartment was a two-story townhome, with the stairs on the other side of the entry. To the right of the stairs was a good-sized living room, sporting a large television and two video game consoles, then the kitchen.

  “You play?” Fenway said, motioning to the gaming setup.

  “Video games? Sometimes. Not very often. Dylan likes to play with his brother.”

  Fenway looked at the pictures on the walls: a Georgia O’Keeffe print above the sofa, three small framed pictures of Rachel and her groom at their wedding. The background looked suspiciously like a Las Vegas chapel.

  “Thanks for inviting me, by the way. Happy hour was fun.” Fenway smiled and looked at Rachel, and to Fenway’s surprise, Rachel looked upset. “I—I didn’t mean it was fun. I know that Mr. Walker was just killed. Sorry. That came out wrong.”

  Rachel looked at her, right in the eyes. Then burst into tears.

  “Oh, hey. Hey, hey.” Fenway moved awkwardly over to Rachel. Rachel leaned into Fenway, and she sobbed. Fenway had no idea what to do. She finally put her arms on Rachel’s shoulders and waited for her to get control of herself. It took a minute or two, which to Fenway seemed like she spent forever in an awkward hug, but Rachel’s sobs started alternating with deep breaths.

  “Ugh. Sorry. I’m so sorry.” Rachel righted herself and wiped her eyes with her hand.

  “That’s okay.” Fenway grabbed a paper towel from the kitchen.

  “No. No, it’s not, and it was unprofessional, and I just met you and you’re going to be my boss.”

  “It really is all right.” Fenway didn’t know what else to say.

  Rachel sat down on the sofa. “Okay, I guess now I pretty much have to tell you what happened. Why I’m so upset. And if you do become coroner and start investigating, you’re going to find out anyway.”

  “Investigating?” Fenway asked. She sat at an angle on the other end of the sofa.

  “Investigating Mr. Walker’s death. That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  Rachel took a deep breath. “He kept harassing me at work.” Rachel paused. Bit her lip. “Sexually harassing me at work.” She looked down at the floor. “First it was just some flirtatious talk, and I didn’t really think anything of it, because he’s married, and he’s so much older than I am, and I just thought he’d get the hint that I wasn’t interested, and I thought he was being a creep.” She paused. “But it kept getting worse.”

  She took a deep breath, and she looked up, focused halfway across the room at nothing in particular.

  “He kept at it, and he started asking me out. And I kept saying, ‘Mr. Walker’—and he kept saying, ‘call me Harrison,’ and I never did because I never wanted him to think I had any interest in him—and I kept saying, ‘Mr. Walker, you’re a married man, and besides, I don’t date co-workers,’ but then his requests for dates turned into asking me away for the weekend.”

  Fenway balked. “He asked you to go away with him for the weekend when you refused going on a date with him?”

  “I know. I know. And he left me a silver necklace with an opal pendant on it, just sitting on my desk. That’s my birthstone. And I walked into his office and said, ‘Mr. Walker, I really cannot accept this,’ and he just said, ‘Rachel, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and refused to take it back. I looked under it to see if there was a card from the jeweler, so I could return it and he could get refunded, but underneath the box was a hotel keycard with a room number and a time on it.”

  Fenway made a face. “Ick.”

  “Yeah, ick. Yeah, ICK. And I went to the HR department, and Lana—that’s Lana Cassidy, she’s on the third floor—she told me she couldn’t do anything without proof, and I’m like, ‘He gave me a hotel keycard, it’s right here.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.’”

  She looked at her feet. “And so, I set up a webcam on my computer. Just clipped it to the top of my monitor. I started recording stuff all the time, wh
enever he was around. Because I didn’t think he was going to stop.” She looked at Fenway defiantly. “And he didn’t stop.”

  Fenway nodded. Well, of course he didn’t stop, she thought. They never stop.

  “We had a murder-suicide out by Cactus Lake about three weeks ago,” she continued. “There’s a motel out there that has a pretty bad reputation, and there are a lot of drugs, and a lot of parties, and a lot of prostitutes out there. It was kind of messy when Mr. Walker got there, and it was hard to tell who had killed who, and there was a lot of information that the medical team needed to get, and we had to call a team in from San Miguelito County. So, by the time everything was finally put together, it was the end of the month, and Mr. Walker insisted that the paperwork had to be filed by midnight on the 30th. I argued with him, because Mr. Walker’s never had an issue like this at the end of the month before, especially when there’s really no time crunch. But Mr. Walker was insistent that I work late to finish it.

  “So, I cancelled plans with Dylan—that’s my husband—that night, and Mr. Walker left the office around 5:30. Everyone else left by 6:15, except me, but Mr. Walker came back around 7. I was just finishing up, I think I was on the last page, and I heard a car in the parking lot.

  “A minute later, I hear the outside door, and I know, I just know, that it’s him. So, I immediately go to my PC and start recording on the webcam, and sure enough it’s him. He’s got this look on his face, like he’s determined to get what he wants.

  “I say to him, ‘Mr. Walker, if you’re here to help me with the filing, I’m just about finished, unless you want to take this up to the third floor.’

  “He says, ‘Don’t play with me, Rachel. We both know what I’m here to help you with.’” Rachel raised her head and looked, without focusing on anything, across the room. “Then he comes over and he’s just on me.”

  Rachel put her hands in her lap and stared at them. “His hands are pulling my blouse open, and he’s biting my neck, and I just scream for him to get off me, but he rips my blouse, and he puts his hand between my legs. He’s telling me that I’m going to like it. He’s telling me to just relax—that no one has excited him this much for years, like it’s some sort of compliment. I yell ‘no’ in his ear, but he knocks my chair over with me still in it, and then he pins my arms to the ground.

  “So, I kick at him, as hard as I can on my back. I get his knee, or his shin, or whatever, and it surprises him because he lets go of my right arm. Then I clock him in the face as hard as I can, and he’s off me enough where I can get up.”

  “I get across the desk from him, and I grab my purse, and I tell him to stay the hell away from me. He’s bleeding from his cheek where I hit him, and he pulls himself up, and says, ‘Don’t bother to come in Monday, you whore.’ Then he spits at me, like full-on spits, and tells me to get out. And I got out. I got out of there fast.”

  Rachel’s voice was calm, but it broke a little bit as she finished her story.

  Fenway was quiet. She was feeling a lot of things that she hadn’t felt in a while. She was remembering being held down too, not being able to get away. She remembered the same ick-ICK feeling that Rachel described. But it wasn’t Fenway’s boss, it was her Russian Lit professor who, feeling as equally entitled as Harrison Walker must have felt to pretty girls in his orbit, held Fenway down on his office floor and licked her face as he pushed her dress up.

  Fenway blinked hard, trying her best to stay with Rachel. To stay in the moment with her.

  “I got out of there and I came back here, and I couldn’t sleep. I came downstairs so I wouldn’t wake Dylan up, and I watched TV until the sun came up. I made myself a pot of coffee, and then I went to Wal-Mart and bought myself a USB drive, and I drove back to the office, and I got the recording of me and Mr. Walker, and I copied it to the USB drive, and then I got out of there again. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I wanted to tell someone, but I didn’t know who to tell. I didn’t want to tell Dylan. I didn’t want to tell my dad. I didn’t want to tell any of my friends, or Dez, or Migs.”

  Rachel paused. “I didn’t even want to tell Lana. But I knew I had to. I didn’t think she would be on my side, I think she’d just want me to go away. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, and I had it all recorded. The camera was centered on my chair, so you can see the whole thing. You can’t see me when I’m on the floor, but you can hear me yelling ‘no.’ And you can’t see me when I went around the other side of the desk, but you can hear him loud and clear telling me off. It’s as open-and-shut of a sexual harassment case as you can get.”

  “Sexual assault.”

  Rachel’s head tilted. “What?”

  “Sexual assault. He tried to rape you. This isn’t him telling a dirty joke in the office. This is a full-on sexual assault case, not sexual harassment. He would have gone to jail.”

  “I don’t think he would have gone anywhere. He’s too powerful.”

  Fenway curled her lip slightly and nodded.

  “Anyway, I started thinking of all these different scenarios. Like in movies. If Lana had said, ‘Is this the only copy?’ and if I said ‘yes,’ maybe she just would have smashed the drive up because she wouldn’t want the county to get sued. So, I went back to Wal-Mart, and I got two more USB drives. I went back to the office, and I copied the video onto the other two USB drives. I kept one of them here, in the junk drawer in the kitchen.”

  “In the kitchen?”

  “I wanted to have access to that recording. I wanted to keep it close.”

  “You didn’t think Dylan would find it in the kitchen?”

  “So what if he had? It’s a USB drive in a junk drawer. No way would he ever think to see what’s on there.”

  “You don’t have a safe or anything?”

  “Yeah, we have a fire safe where we keep our birth certificates and passports, but if I had put the USB drive in there, Dylan would have been like, ‘What’s a USB drive doing in the safe?’ Then he would have been curious enough to see what was on there.”

  Fenway nodded.

  “I kept the second one in my purse, and the third one is in my glove compartment. I wanted to be able to get to them wherever I was.” Rachel sighed. “I was a mess the rest of the day. I cancelled plans to go out with Kelly and Jordan, and I just watched TV like a zombie. Dylan was kind of mad at me because I wouldn’t really talk. I wound up taking a sleeping pill around 2 a.m. so I could finally get to sleep. I woke up a little past noon on Sunday, and I decided I’d go into Lana’s office first thing Monday morning. I thought about what I’d say, how I’d insist that she take action, or I’d sue. I even thought of telling her that was the only copy to see how she’d react. I know it sounds paranoid.”

  Fenway shook her head. “It doesn’t sound paranoid.” She was remembering her sleepless nights after her professor raped her. Wondering if she was going to get attacked again. Wondering how she’d ever make it through the rest of the semester in his class, as it was after the drop date; how could she be so stupid? Wondering if she could afford to take an F—or maybe she could just show up for the final and try to salvage a C. Wondering what she did to make him do that. “It doesn’t sound paranoid at all.”

  “You’re sweet,” Rachel said, “but it totally sounds paranoid.” She took a deep breath. “I forced myself to go out on Sunday night, just to be with people, not alone with my thoughts. But when I got home, I was dreading going to sleep again. I couldn’t keep my mind focused, not on a book, not on TV again. Then Dez called me at about midnight and told me that Mr. Walker had been found dead, and could I come into the office by six to help her out. And so I did.”

  “And what did Lana say about the USB drive?”

  Rachel shook her head. “I didn’t end up talking to Lana. I didn’t give anyone the USB stick. And I haven’t told anyone about what Mr. Walker did to me on Friday night.”

  “Until now?”

  “Yes, until now.”

  Fenway wanted to ask R
achel why she chose to tell her, but she thought she knew why. She thought Rachel could sense in Fenway a shared history; that even if she didn’t know intellectually that Fenway had been in the same situation years before, she could feel it. Fenway was a lifeline. That’s why Rachel chose her.

  “Rachel—”

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I don’t know why I told you.”

  “Because you needed to tell someone, and I’m a good person to tell.”

  And then Rachel’s eyes went wide. “Oh, God. I’m a suspect.”

  Fenway paused, considering. “Well, probably. And whoever investigates this will need to hear your story, and will need to hear exactly what you told me.”

  Rachel was fighting back tears again. “I know, I know. But I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Yes, Rachel. You can do it. It might be hard, but you’ve already shown me how strong you are. You can do it.”

  Rachel nodded, a tear running down her cheek again. She swallowed hard to regain her composure.

  “Whoever investigates this is going to ask you if you own a gun. Do you own a gun?”

  “Yes. My dad gave me his Smith & Wesson Model 41 when I moved out on my own,” she answered. “I don’t usually carry it with me, though. It’s on the top shelf of my closet.”

  “Okay. I don’t know what kind of gun was used to kill the coroner, but it probably wasn’t a .22 like that. I haven’t heard what kind of gun it was, but I got the impression it was a larger caliber weapon.”

  Rachel paused, chewing her lip. “You know guns?”

  “Probably not enough yet. I’m getting my master’s in forensics. Just one class away.”

  Rachel swallowed hard again.

  Fenway stood up. “Listen—do you need anything? I mean, it’s only been a couple of days since it happened, and—well, I don’t know. He did a horrible thing.”

  Rachel was silent.

  “The county has a good health plan, right? You can see someone. Like a therapist. I bet it would help to talk to someone about this.”