“Harry, you’re drunk.”
“When I speak French,” the painter said, “you can bet on it. English too, for that matter.”
“One more thing,” Dennis continued, picking up the thread of his concern—”what doesn’t happen here is that anyone marries someone from the outside and goes away to live there. The mate who’s not from Springhill comes to Springhill to live. Isn’t that so?”
“Not always,” Harry said. “I have a nephew, went to USC, met a gal out there, got her in the family way, and married her. Stayed there to become a rich land developer in Orange County. Dumb kid, and that sure proves it. And I knew one or two others like that.”
“I suppose what I meant is…” Dennis hesitated. “Sophie wouldn’t consider leaving.”
“Not at her age,” Harry said.
“She’s only thirty-eight.”
Harry was cleaning some sable brushes as he talked. “I only meant that the life here is pretty simple. Pure, even. It’s hard to beat it. After a while, staying here is as easy as getting up after you sit down on a thumbtack. What’s out there that any of us needs? I’ve been around longer’n dirt and I sure don’t know. Why would anyone want to give away the store, so to speak, and go back on the bricks? You tell me. You’ll see.”
You’ll see … Sophie’s favorite words to him too. What was it that he would see?
As for purity and simplicity, Dennis was no longer so sure to what extent they existed here. It depended on how you defined things. He’d known since his June midnight ramble along the creek that there was a sexual sophistication among the older generation that didn’t exist anywhere else he’d ever been. Harry had been in that hot tub too. So that when Harry said to him, “Life here is pretty simple … what’s out there beyond old Springhill that any of us needs?” Dennis had reason to wonder how Harry defined his terms.
He had also learned, to his surprise, that along with Sophie, Grace Pendergast, a young coal miner named Amos McKee, and Oliver Cone, Harry was a member of the town’s five-person Water Board. The board’s principal function, aside from keeping tabs on the genetics of the town population, Dennis still did not understand. “What is this Water Board?” he asked Harry, smiling. “Are they the ones who approve of marriages to skibtails?”
Harry reached for the vodka bottle. “You got a good memory. No, I like to joke. Aside from all the other stuff they dump on us, the Water Board is just what it says it is. We monitor the supply, check for fecal chloroform, lead, stuff like that. Bacterial contamination. Groundwater here can kill you, man. Comes into contact with mine tailings, all kinds of shit. I don’t give a bedbug’s ass about any of it, but under Colorado law every community has to file an annual goddam report to the state about its water.”
“And you take part in all that?”
“I help, that’s all.”
Dennis laughed. “Harry, you’re not just an artist—you’re a con artist too. I don’t believe any of it.”
“Believe, man. It’s a fact. The town supports me—remember that. Gotta pay the piper. So I go to the meetings. Half the time I’m so soused I can’t hardly remember what goes on or how I vote.”
He was still thinking and dreaming about Harry when suddenly he realized he had reached the stoplight at Cemetery Lane in Aspen. To his left the broad expanse of Red Mountain and the garish palazzos of the rich rose under the blue morning sky. Traffic was backed up on the two- lane road entering Aspen; the workforce was arriving from downvalley.
The world is going about its business, Dennis thought, and so am I. My business is to find out why my mother-in-law is a suspect in a murder case.
Chapter 11
The Second Injection
WITH A HUFF and a snort, Josh Gamble twisted his bulk around in his swivel chair and glanced up at the grandfather clock in the far corner of his office. The clock ticked with the utmost gravity, as though apportioning the hours of humankind. The sheriff waved his hand in the general southerly direction of Aspen Mountain, which he couldn’t see, since his office in the basement of the Pitkin County Courthouse faced the rear. Its single window offered a view of a mound of frozen dirt.
“Seven inches overnight!” he boomed. “I hate working on a day like this!” He pointed a blunt finger at Dennis. “You were up there yesterday. I can see my mamma was right—I should have gone to law school. I’ve got to sit here and battle evildoers, but you can hit the mountain whenever you feel like it. That’s undemocratic. You know what sperm and lawyers have in common?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Dennis said. “Only one in a million has a chance of making it as a human being. I heard that one my first year at Yale.”
“Age don’t diminish truth.”
Dennis sat on the sofa next to plump Queenie O’Hare. The lower part of Coroner Jeff Waters’s torso had all but vanished into a sagging easy chair under the head of a ten-point elk.
“And to answer your earlier question—yes, yesterday I was up on the mountain in the powder until I was rudely interrupted by events that still haven’t been properly explained to me.”
Ray Bond, the county deputy district attorney in the Ninth Judicial District, was the only person standing—he lacked the patience to sit and be confined. A former football star from the University of Colorado, he was now a redheaded man in his late thirties and a bodybuilder, more muscular than sinewy. He still helped coach the perennially winless Aspen High School football team. He owned a powerful baritone voice that he exercised not only on the playing field but also pacing the Pitkin County courtroom asserting the rights of the county’s citizens. He was a man on the move. He twitched and fidgeted, stretched and paced. He was known to rush at the jury and roar, “Ladies and gentlemen, the defense attorney represents the accused. I, on the other hand, represent the state of Colorado, but even more I represent the victims of this crime. I speak for them … and of course for the people …“
“I would have liked to ski too,” he said to Dennis now—”but let’s face it, we don’t get a double murder every day.”
Picking some breakfast pancake out of his teeth with a gold toothpick, Josh Gamble nodded. “Yes, Ray, maybe once every hundred years, if we’re lucky.”
He meant that there had not been a double murder in Pitkin County since the previous century, when a local banker had shot his wife and her Ute Indian lover and been sentenced to three years at hard labor, of which he served six months. So Ray Bond was excited. He leaned forward from his standing position to listen to the sheriff’s every word and to the words of all others in the room, which resembled more a book-lined hunter’s den than a sheriff’s office. There were complete sets of Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Jane Austen, an ancient Encyclopaedia Britannica, and six volumes of Dunsterville and Garay’s Venezuelan Orchids. Like Sophie, the sheriff had a greenhouse.
“Dennis,” he said, “the others know this, but I need to enlighten you. We do things a little different here in backcountry Colorado than you might be used to in bad-assed New York. A little less formal. Sometimes downright friendly. We—and by that I mean all the county officials—are going to tell you everything we know about this alleged crime. Of course you don’t have to do the same, and you’d be a lousy lawyer if you did, because you’ve got a client to represent, and that client might be guilty of some heinous act that you’re unaware of, and might need all the help he or she can get. Is all that clear?”
Dennis nodded, pleased. It was what he had expected of his friend and college chum.
The swivel chair creaked under Josh’s bulk. “Right now we’re only interested in figuring out what happened up there at Pearl Pass. I guess you are too.”
“Absolutely,” Dennis said.
“And maybe,” Josh said, “since we hicks ain’t quite as stupid as some people would like to think, the bunch of us here, if we don’t play lawyer-and-lawman games, can figure it out together. Work as a team. You game to try?”
Dennis was more than game: he was enthused.
The s
heriff turned to the young coroner. “Jeff, tell us everything you know. If I get bored I’ll yawn visibly, and you can take that as a signal to go into third gear. Dennis, if you have any questions, don’t be shy. But I guess you never were, were you?”
It was going to work out fine, Dennis decided, and turned toward the coroner.
On the morning after the bodies had been brought down on snowmobiles from Pearl Pass—Jeff Waters said—he and Otto Beckmann, the forensic pathologist and medical examiner for Garfield County, had conducted a six-hour autopsy. It took place in Valley View Hospital, in Glenwood Springs, forty miles downvalley from Aspen.
The victims’ bodies had spent the night in cold storage at forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but still, splayed out on the steel gurneys, they smelled. There had been several months of rot. At high altitudes in winter a certain amount of mummification occurs, but it was clear from the outset of the autopsy that the bodies had been placed in their common grave during warm weather. To offset the smell, Drs. Beckmann and Waters wore surgical masks smeared with Vicks Vaporous.
One of the victims was male, the other female, Waters related in the sheriff’s office. “We could tell because the uterus and the prostate gland are remarkably resistant to decomposition. Both victims were over the age of sixty-five and under the age of seventy-five—we could tell that from bone deterioration, particularly in the spinal column. If you need to narrow it down, I’d say the male was about seventy and the female maybe a couple of years younger. Any questions?”
There were none.
The pathologist and coroner sliced away bits of liver, heart muscle, and spleen, which they would need for tissue studies. They collected dried blood and cardiac fluid and a small amount of vitreous humor from one eyeball of the female corpse. The male corpse had no eyes. “Coyotes go for the soft stuff first,” Dr. Beckmann had explained to Waters. He had considerable experience at examining bodies recovered in summer following the previous winter’s avalanches. “Ears, nose, lips, eyes … This bother you?”
“Yes,” Waters admitted, wishing he hadn’t had poached eggs and pork sausages for breakfast.
Waters said now, “They had no broken bones. There was no evidence of violence. They both suffered sudden cardiac death. Heart attacks.”
Dennis said, “Does that mean it was a natural death?”
“Not at all. I’m just telling you the technical cause of death. Normally if we can’t find an obvious reason for death and people are far along in years, we call it ‘sudden cardiac death.’ It’s a catch-all. In this case, however, because of the peculiar circumstances, we did preliminary tissue and blood studies, and we found evidence of Versed and Pentothal in both bodies.”
“Tranquilizers,” Ray Bond explained, his face twitching.
“They’re a bit more than that,” Waters said patiently. “Call them control drugs. Versed is a quick-acting, strong sedative, a Valium derivative but more powerful than Valium. Hospitals use it before major operations. It’s for conscious sedation. If you had a badly dislocated shoulder and the doctor wanted to work on it without you screaming so that the patients in the waiting room would freak out, he’d use Versed. It’s also used in death-penalty states, like Texas. It precedes the lethal injection. Pentothal, on the other hand, is an anesthetic. Combined with Pentothal, Versed puts you to sleep, and for a couple of hours you don’t feel a damn thing.”
Dennis made some notes, then asked, “How available are Versed and Pentothal?”
“Hospitals, medical supply houses, and pharmacies all have them.”
“Then they’re not hard to find.”
“Not if you have access to those places.”
“Can either of those drugs cause a heart attack?”
“I personally don’t know of any cases where that’s happened. Neither did Otto Beckmann.”
Dennis frowned. “So Versed and Pentothal did not kill the two people at Pearl Pass.”
“That’s correct. I told you they died of a heart attack. But the heart attacks were induced. There was a second set of injections administered after the Versed and Pentothal—in other words, after the Does had been sent off to sleep. You follow?”
Dennis nodded. “What was in the second set of injections?”
“Beckmann and I did a study of liver tissue in both bodies, and we found a trace of potassium chloride. You know what that is?”
“A lethal poison.”
“Right. Quick-acting but not necessarily painless, unless the subject is premedicated with something.”
“Like Versed and Pentothal,” Dennis said.
“You see the sequence?”
He saw it: sedate them, then kill them. Theoretically a humane way to go, if the deaths were in any sense necessary.
“Potassium chloride goes into a vein with a hypodermic needle,” Waters said. “It induces immediate coronary infarction. You quit breathing, although in some instances the heart may actually keep on beating weakly for twenty or thirty minutes. Then you die. Heart stops, brain quits functioning. Dead by any definition.”
“How available is potassium chloride?” Dennis asked.
“Same deal. Hospitals, supply houses, pharmacies. Veterinarians too.”
“If it’s a lethal poison, how come it’s so readily available?”
“For doctors to give to people who have a major potassium imbalance. But I’m talking about very small doses, like three cc’s in a thou- sand-cc bag.”
“How much of it would you use if you wanted to kill someone?”
“It comes in vials of twenty milliequivalents mixed in with ten cubic centimeters of fluid for injection. Altogether, about a teaspoon. Ten of those vials—maybe a tenth of a liter—would do the job easily.”
“So you’re saying these people were tranquilized first and then murdered.”
Waters smiled thinly. “Murder is a legal term, isn’t it? I’m just telling you how they died. It could just as well have been euthanasia.”
“Wait.” Josh Gamble raised a hand. “In this state,” he said, for the benefit of both Dennis and the young coroner, “euthanasia is classified as murder.”
Dennis digested that and didn’t like the feel of it going down.
“Who would know how to mix up those injections?” Queenie O’Hare asked. “And how to administer them, and in what amounts? I sure as heck wouldn’t know. Would you, Josh?”
The sheriff shook his head. “I have trouble mixing a margarita.”
“And you, Mr. Conway?”
“Please call me Dennis. And the answer is no.”
Queenie was making notes on her yellow legal pad even as she spoke. “You’d have to be a doctor or nurse, or a medical technician of some sort, wouldn’t you?”
“Probably,” Waters said.
The sheriff groaned. “So have we got another Dr. Kevorkian in business around here?”
“Kevorkian never used a bow and arrow to kill his patient’s dog,” Queenie said.
“Yes, the dog.” Dennis leaned forward. “Would you mind backtracking a bit? I’d like to hear a little more about this dog.”
Queenie told Dennis about the Clark brothers’ discovery of the dead Scottish deerhound, the probability that the deerhound had been shot with an arrow, and how she tracked down its ownership to the late Henry Lovell Sr. of Springhill. She told him about her peculiar phone call to a less than candid Jane Lovell, and then to Hank Jr. at the Springhill marble quarry.
“There were no ID tags, so there’s no proof that it was that Scottish deerhound,” Dennis pointed out. Granted, it’s a rare breed. However, it could have been a different dog.”
“Faintly possible,” Queenie agreed. “But highly unlikely.”
She was naive on that score, Dennis realized. She didn’t understand that criminal defense attorneys made a handsome living pointing out to juries that faintly possible was the equivalent of reasonable doubt.
Josh Gamble, like a man conducting a small orchestra, waved back at the coroner.
“There’s another reason you’d have trouble drawing an analogy to Dr. Kevorkian in this instance,” Waters said.
“And what is that?” Dennis asked.
“I told you we found the cause of death,” the coroner said. “But we also searched the corpses for evidence of disease. Degenerative tissue, a tumor, anything. There was none. These people weren’t dying. These were remarkably healthy older people. Excellent muscle tone, all organs in good condition. Why would anyone need to commit a mercy killing?”
No one answered.
The sheriff said slowly, “Jeff, isn’t it possible that you guys missed something? Some esoteric brain or bone disease?”
“Possible,” Waters said. “Beckmann isn’t perfect. But it’s unlikely.”
Another unlikely to remember.
“Anyway”—Jeff Waters continued—”the bodies were pretty much mummified and frozen after the cold weather set in this past October, although the animal population up there had had their share of the extremities. We think both people died about the second week of August, but we could be off by as much as two weeks either way. We got good fingerprints, because there’s what we call skin slippage. The epidermis detaches, just like a glove.”
Josh nodded at Queenie. She said to Dennis, “But those prints don’t match up anywhere. Neither of the Does had a criminal record. Neither one was in the armed forces.”
“What about teeth?” Dennis asked.
“Dr. Beckmann called in the forensic odontologist, who also happens to be my dentist.” Queenie showed those near-perfect white crowns again, as well as some ingrained laugh wrinkles around the eyes. “His name is Howard Keating. I’ve got a little crush on him but he’s married to an ex-model from L.A. and they’ve got three-year-old twins, so I’ve given up a long time ago. Anyway, Howard produced a full set of postmortem X-rays for Jane and John Doe. I took them up to Springhill. Before I went to see your mother-in-law, Dennis, I dropped in on the local dentist, the one that Jane Lovell works for. You know him?”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Page 10
