“How old?”
“Fifty-seven.”
“You said girlfriend. Is there an ex in the picture?”
“He was a widower.”
“What did the autopsy show?”
“When he first arrived at the hospital, a scan showed that he'd had a brain hemorrhage. The autopsy confirmed that as the cause of death. They didn't find any scalp wounds or cracks in his skull. He'd been taking a blood thinner for the past three years for heart trouble. You know how it is—one foot in the proverbial grave . . .”
“And the other on the proverbial banana peel. So why are we having this conversation?”
“Because Rentz's Quick time was infinity.”
Auburn pondered silently for a moment. “Is that poetry?”
“Not exactly. They measure the effect of blood thinners with a test called the prothrombin time, which was developed by a guy named Quick. The thinner the blood, the longer it takes to clot in a test tube. They're still waiting for Rentz's blood to clot.”
“Meaning an overdose of blood thinner?”
“Suggesting it, anyway.”
“Accident . . . suicide?”
“Possible, but not likely. Doc Valentine says it would probably have taken a whole fistful of pills, and maybe several overdoses given over a period of days, to thin his blood that much.”
Valentine was the forensic pathologist under contract to the coroner's office.
“So why is the girlfriend thinking homicide?”
“She says the day before Rentz suffered his stroke he had a violent argument with his two sons about some changes they wanted to make in the business. Rentz retired from active involvement a couple of years ago on the advice of his doctor, but he was still the sole proprietor.”
“Nothing more substantial than that?”
“She's coming here at two o'clock today. You're welcome to sit in. Then again, if you're really looking forward to that manicure . . .”
“See you in an hour or so.”
When Auburn reached Stamaty's office in the courthouse across the street from headquarters, Joy Lynn Robiche had already arrived. She was lanky, fortyish, and plain featured. Her fawn-colored hair was pulled back tightly into a bun. She wore little or no makeup and no jewelry. According to the photo ID clipped to her sweater, she was employed by county social services.
Stamaty made introductions. “I was just telling Ms. Robiche that Mr. Rentz's brain hemorrhage could have been a side effect of his blood thinner even at a normal dosage.”
“But the point,” retorted Ms. Robiche, with the doggedness and drive of a social worker standing up for the rights of a downtrodden waif, “is that somehow he got a massive overdose. He couldn't have made a mistake like that himself. He was as careful about his pills as he was about his money.”
“I understand,” said Auburn, “that you have some specific reasons for thinking his death was a homicide?”
“Tuesday was Howard's birthday, and his family all went to his place for a party. But celebrating the birthday wasn't the only thing on his sons’ agenda. They've been running the family heating and cooling business since Howard retired after his heart bypass three years ago, but he was still the legal owner and he made all the important decisions.
“They wanted to buy out another business that went bankrupt, and he absolutely refused even to discuss it. And when they told him it was time he made them partners instead of employees, he really blew up. He told them they were going to inherit the business when he died, and they could just wait. Two days later he was dead of an apparent overdose of medicine. Doesn't that look pretty suspicious to you?”
“How do you think they did it?”
“Howard had a sweet tooth. His blood sugar was normal, so the doctor said he could eat all the carbohydrates he wanted as long as he kept his weight down and stayed away from fat and cholesterol. One of his daughters-in-law, I'm not sure which, brought a chocolate pie just for him. Even before the party got underway, he kept sending his grandchildren into the kitchen to bring him samples. The rest of us had ice cream and cake.”
“Was anybody at the party besides you and Mr. Rentz's family?”
“A couple of neighbors—the men who live on either side of him, Mr. Ricedale and Mr. Snederle. I'm sure they'll both confirm that the atmosphere was . . . poisonous.”
“You're suggesting the family put an overdose of his medicine in the pie? But they would have had to do that in advance, before they had this argument you mentioned. And where would they get enough of the medicine to make up a fatal overdose?”
“Do I look like a detective? Maybe they foresaw how the discussion was going to turn out even before the party started. Maybe somebody else in the family is on a blood thinner. Heart disease is hereditary, you know.”
Auburn was finding it hard to preserve a cordial manner toward this dowdy, outspoken citizen. “May I ask why you brought this to Mr. Stamaty instead of to the police?”
She blinked hard. “I guess because I work for the county. That's how I knew about the autopsy results as soon as the hospital pathologist phoned them to the coroner's office this morning.”
She stood up to terminate the interview. “If you'll excuse me, I have an appointment in just a few minutes out on Whitney Avenue.”
Auburn and Stamaty, who had both been properly reared, also stood up, and Stamaty thanked her for coming in.
“What do you think?” asked Auburn after she had left the office. “Are you going to investigate this one?”
Instead of answering, Stamaty picked up the phone. “Art, this is Nick . . . Oh, real good. Yourself? . . . Listen, Art, this Howard Rentz you posted this morning . . . I know, subdural hematoma. But we're calling it a coroner's case . . . Nothing definite, just some questionable circumstances we need to look into. Don't release that body to the family's funeral director. Our guys will be there to transfer it to the county mortuary just as soon as I find out which pool hall they're smashing up this afternoon.”
Stamaty made two further calls while Auburn touched base with headquarters on his cell phone.
“Are you in on this one, Cy?”
“Provisionally. Where do you plan to start?”
“I'd like to see Rentz's private physician first, a Dr. Lamprecht. We can't do much else till we have control of the remains.”
Since Stamaty was nominally in charge of the inquiry, they traveled in the white van from the coroner's department. “How much can Dr. Valentine find by examining a body that's already been autopsied?” asked Auburn as they left the parking lot behind the courthouse.
“Only so much,” said Stamaty. “What I mainly want to do is make sure we get samples of Rentz's blood before some embalmer drains every drop of it into a hazardous waste container.”
“Can you still get good blood samples from somebody who's been dead this long?”
“You can't say that anymore,” said Stamaty, with a severe shake of his head.
Auburn glanced at him in bewilderment. “Can't say what anymore?”
“What you just said Rentz was.”
“I said he was dead—”
Stamaty jumped as if he had been shot. “I told you, Cy, you can't say that anymore. It's not politically correct.”
“So what do we call it nowadays?” asked Auburn, finally realizing that he was being put on.
“Vitally challenged. A person who is no longer living is said to be vitally challenged. According to my son Basil.”
“Is he the one who's going into sports medicine?”
“No, that's Elena. Basil wants to be a race car driver.”
“Well, I hope he doesn't get vitally challenged before he has a chance to get chronologically disadvantaged.”
* * * *
Stamaty parked the van around the corner from Dr. Myron Lamprecht's office to spare the doctor any embarrassment. The waiting room was full of disconsolate-looking oldsters and harried moms with blubbering babes in arms.
“Maybe we should ha
ve called ahead,” suggested Auburn in a murmur as they stood waiting near the reception desk.
“Not my style,” Stamaty murmured back.
At length, they were admitted to a small, tidy office where a plastic heart and a real skull sat side by side on the windowsill. Dr. Lamprecht, a heavy man with a bald crown and a monkey fringe of reddish beard streaked with gray, joined them almost immediately.
Before saying a word, he examined their credentials through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses clamped firmly on his squashed fig of a nose. His hands shook slightly as he sat behind his desk and opened Howard Rentz's medical record. An official inquiry into the death of a patient can be a prelude to a malpractice suit, not to mention criminal charges.
“All I have here are his office records and lab reports,” he said. “I don't have anything from the hospital yet, and the final autopsy protocol won't be available for a week or so. Dr. Noguchi was his neurosurgeon, but Mr. Rentz was gone before they could get him set up for a craniotomy.”
Stamaty asked, “How long had he been on an anticoagulant?”
“About three years.”
“Any recent change in dosage?”
“Not for more than a year.”
“How closely was the blood thinning monitored?”
Lamprecht handed Stamaty a thick bundle of slips held together with a spring clamp. “He went to the lab on Santa Cruz Boulevard every two weeks for a prothrombin time. As you can see, his results were consistently within the therapeutic range. That includes the last one, done a week ago Friday.”
“What other medicines was he taking?”
“A coronary vasodilator, a beta blocker—” He consulted a tabular medication record inside the cover of the chart. “—a mild tranquilizer, bedtime sleep medicine as needed. No recent changes in any of those.”
“You're aware that his pro-time at the hospital was off the charts? How do you think that happened?”
“Frankly, I think it's a lab error.” Lamprecht leaned back in his chair, palpably more at ease now that the worst seemed to be over. “Howard Rentz's coronaries might have been full of sludge, but his mind was as sharp as a college kid's. He would have had to swallow a month's supply of pills at one gulp to stretch out his pro-time that far. And he was too much of an egotist to take a deliberate overdose.”
“But he did die of a subdural hemorrhage,” Stamaty reminded him.
“Did he suffer a hemorrhage and fall?” asked Lamprecht rhetorically. “Or did he fall and suffer a hemorrhage? It's an age-old question, a recurring question. We'll never know.”
To his present audience the doctor's studied pose of mature wisdom and boundless benevolence carried no more conviction than that of an out-of-work actor in a white coat touting joint cream in a television commercial. They thanked him and returned to the van.
As expected, they found Howard Rentz's house locked and uninhabited. Stamaty took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, donned rubber gloves, and began sorting through the contents of a forty-gallon galvanized steel garbage can at the end of the driveway.
“If Public Safety gets involved in this case,” Auburn told him, “you're going to incur the wrath of a certain forensic lab director for tampering with evidence.”
“How terrifying!” replied Stamaty, whose repeated clashes with Sergeant Kestrel, the police evidence technician, sometimes assumed Homeric proportions. “Thing is, the garbage collectors might get here before Kestrel does, and then where will the evidence be?”
Auburn couldn't fault his reasoning, but chose not to participate in the search.
“Newspapers, cardboard cartons, pop cans,” reported Stamaty. “Apparently Mr. Rentz didn't believe in recycling.”
They walked around to the back and climbed the steps to the deck. Here Stamaty attacked a plastic trash bucket containing what could only have been the remnants of the birthday party. “This is more like it.”
“Any traces of chocolate pie garnished with little pink pills?” asked Auburn.
“Not so far. I've got paper plates and paper napkins, plastic forks and plastic spoons, cake going stale and melted ice cream going sour.”
“Are you looking for evidence, or are you just trying to ruin my appetite for dinner?”
“Aha! An earlier stratum. Traces of burgers, fries, and sodas for two.”
The sound of male voices raised in friendly dispute, punctuated by occasional brisk snips with a pair of pruning shears, reached them from the other side of a hedge. Whereas Rentz's backyard was little better than a weed patch, the neighbors on either side had formal gardens, now largely running to seed. Approaching with no attempt at secrecy, they came up behind two elderly men, one of whom was hacking at the hedge in seemingly random fashion, somewhat like a painter putting the final touches on a canvas.
“I don't care what you say,” insisted the other man, a roly-poly creature with thick glasses and a beak like a bird of prey. “Poison is much cheaper, and it's permanent. What did you pay for that trap?”
“None of your beeswax,” retorted the man with the shears. “Anyway, it was worth it. Since I got that trap I've caught and relocated twenty-three of those little rascals.”
“In your dreams. I'm telling you, Ricedale, you trapped one squirrel twenty-three times. And every time you turned it loose up in the cemetery, it got back here before you did.”
“Excuse me,” said Auburn. “Mr. Ricedale?”
The man with the shears jumped as if a hornet had stung him on the back of his neck. “Yo! You got in under my radar. Help you, gentlemen?”
Auburn showed identification. “If you have a minute, we'd like to ask you a few questions about an incident that occurred here a couple of days ago.”
“What incident would that be?” asked Ricedale, his nasal voice seasoned with a tang of mockery.
“A birthday party for Mr. Rentz.”
“The late Mr. Rentz.” Ricedale nodded and pointed with his shears. “Tuesday afternoon, there on his deck. Vanilla ice cream, angelfood cake, chocolate pie. Wally and I were both there.”
Auburn turned to the other man. “Your name, sir?”
“Walter Snederle.”
Auburn thought Snederle looked vaguely familiar, but he decided the old man probably just represented a type of character—elderly, eccentric, slightly grotesque—that he'd seen portrayed dozens of times in movies and on TV.
He turned back to Ricedale. “You mentioned chocolate pie . . .”
“Only for the birthday boy. The rest of us had to settle for standard fare.”
“Some of you got standard fare,” said Snederle, in something like a whine. “I had a cup of coffee. Without.” He shook his left wrist until a metal bracelet identifying him as a diabetic slipped into view from under his cuff.
“Were either of you present when Mr. Rentz had an argument with his sons?”
“We both were,” said Snederle. “But I wouldn't exactly call it an argument. They did all the talking, till Howard told them to shut up.”
“How well did you know Mr. Rentz?”
“Oh, we were bosom buddies.” When Snederle smiled, his moon face curdled into a blur of wrinkles and his upper lip retreated into the shadow of his monumental nose. “On days like this, Howard and I used to sit out on my patio in the afternoon drinking coffee and pretending it was scotch. And watching the squirrels and rabbits hop right past his weeds to eat my flowers.”
Ricedale had abandoned his pruning. “So you think somebody put the chill on old Howard?” he asked.
“We didn't say that.”
“You don't have to. Those rubber gloves say it for you.”
As they climbed back into Stamaty's van, Auburn expressed the view that they were probably on a wild-goose chase.
“You probably are,” concurred Stamaty. “I agree this doesn't look much like a homicide. But I have to file a report one way or the other because after that second autopsy there won't be much doubt that Rentz is dead.”
“Don't
you mean vitally challenged?”
* * * *
The Dragnet theme, executed in a pungent electronic bleat, announced a call on Stamaty's cell phone. “Nick Stamaty. They did, huh? I can't blame them, considering how things went. . . . I can do better than that. I'll go see them.” After ringing off, he pulled over to the curb and parked.
“Corky says Rentz's family are spitting mad,” he told Auburn, “because the hospital wouldn't release their Dad's remains to the funeral director. Sound like a good opportunity to shake them down?”
A check with headquarters informed Auburn that the city directory showed two Rentzes besides the late Howard. Both were listed (not quite accurately, it seemed) as owners-operators of Rentz Heating and Cooling.
Stamaty had formulated his policy of not calling ahead while employed, years before, as a police detective in a midwestern city riddled with violence and riven by warring criminal factions. Even nowadays, when working with law enforcement personnel on a possible homicide, he found the cost of gasoline wasted on futile trips more than offset by the occasional gain from a surprise visit.
Virgil Rentz and his wife Cary lived on Silverhurst Drive in an older residential neighborhood with mature trees and front yards just large enough to be a nuisance during the mowing season. The Rentzes were at home, seemingly holding a gloomy vigil over a late or much protracted lunch.
Stamaty introduced himself and Auburn with his habitual courtesy, sympathy, and authority. Auburn didn't envy him the task of justifying to these people his interference in their funeral plans, but Stamaty handled it with aplomb.
“I'm sorry I didn't have the opportunity to contact you before you made arrangements with the funeral director,” he said, “but I'm here now, and I'm ready to answer your questions.” He went on before they had the chance to ask any. “I don't expect our investigation to delay your dad's funeral by even one day.”
“What I don't get,” said Virgil, “is what you're investigating. Dad had a stroke, didn't he?”
“Probably,” nodded Stamaty, “but there's a chance that the stroke was caused by one of his medicines. If it was, then it's the coroner's responsibility to identify that as the cause of death.”
AHMM, July/August 2012 Page 3
