The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  The city inspected his warehouses and rendered a clean bill of health.

  I could see Max now, alone in his office, trying to find a way out. And, in the end, he found it.

  Since there were no samples of the offending olive oil left, the only proof would be in the victims’ autopsies. So Max attacked the autopsies. What was the contaminant? Had obvious evidence of such a substance been found? Could the coroner swear there were no other pathologies? Max had his own out-of-state pathologist disinter the victims and render his own equivocal decision. The result was confusion regarding the causes of the deaths.

  At the very least, the coroner was shown to be criminally sloppy and the Orleans Parish health inspectors were shown to be lazy and inept. To the surprise of everyone, except maybe Max, his client, Fallaci, went free.

  Until the next week, when the Fallaci grocery burned, incinerating everyone inside, including the owner and his wife. Max called for an investigation, and when he didn’t get one his campaign began.

  First he attacked the coroner for incompetence and implied he might even have been bribed to try to get a troublesome Fallaci out of the way. The coroner, a Dr. Dupuy, reacted angrily. Next Max went after the City Hall crowd, especially the health inspection unit, but the bureaucracy protected its own. No one knew anything. And as for Napoli Foods, it was an example of what made America great.

  And it was about then, I figured, with Max stinging everyplace he could like a horsefly, that someone sent him the list of names.

  One of the issues Max had brought up was Dr. Dupuy’s failings as a pathologist. The coroner, it turned out, had been trained as a gynecologist.

  A picture of Julius Chantry flashed into my mind, except that it wasn’t Julius, it was someone else, an older man whose picture I had seen in Lydia Chantry’s house.

  I went to the Tulane library and found a helpful librarian. She dug out the old Who’s Who and city registers for 1946; I carried them to a carrel to read.

  Arsine St. Clair Dupuy, born Nov. 12, 1907, married the former Helene des Glaises, 1928; B.A., 1927, Tulane University; M.D., 1931, Tulane University; residency, obstetrics & gynecology, 1933, Johns Hopkins; private practice, New Orleans, 1934–, Coroner, Orleans Parish, 1941–…

  I skipped over the rest and went to the letter “S.”

  Frederick Alcide Sonnier, born July 1, 1907, married the former Cecile Patin, 1927; B.A., 1927, Tulane University; M.D., 1931, Tulane University; residency, obstetrics & gynecology, 1933, Johns Hopkins; private practice, New Orleans, 1934– …

  Lydia’s father and the coroner—classmates all the way through.

  Was old Dr. Sonnier connected with it? Probably not. But Max had attacked Sonnier’s friend. It was food for thought: the unwelcome son-in-law.

  I went back to the house. I could see that there was enough to do that staying dead wouldn’t work. Sandy protested, but I think she understood. I began by calling John O’Rourke.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not dead.”

  “Tell me about it,” the lawyer said tersely. “I called your old man to give him my condolences and he didn’t seem very broken up. We talked a little while longer and he let it slip. Thanks for trusting me.”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I promised. “Believe me, it was for your own good.”

  “That’s what my draft board used to say.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “I’ll survive. But you owe me for some flowers.”

  Next I called Jake Kelso:

  “I’m sorry not to have called you. Things were touch and go.”

  “Jesus, boyo, you know how to give a man a start! And here I was thinking you were dead. Look, where are you? I’ll be right over.”

  I hesitated. “We’re moving to another location. But I’ll call you there.”

  “You do that, boy. And if you leave me hanging again …”

  “I won’t, Chief. I promise.”

  Sal arranged a motel overlooking Clearview, where security could be controlled from the lobby.

  “You would’ve gotten an el cheapo,” Sal said wryly. “But it looks like you’ve got some pull. Some old-timer with friends jerked some strings.”

  “Kelso?” I asked.

  Mancuso smiled. “You got it. You’ve got a hideout only the top brass uses. All courtesy of the city.”

  “Damn. Well, you never know.” I sat down and poured myself a drink from the bar. “What about the others?”

  “They’ll be along.” The detective got up and walked to the bar, where he examined the various labels.

  “Glenlivet. Can you believe this? I only dream about stuff this good.” He turned back to face me and leaned against the counter.

  “You figure the Marsh woman was having some kind of fling with Max and the family paid her off to shut up.”

  “I had the thought,” I said. “But why set her up like that? What does she know that makes her worth a pension for life?”

  “Blackmail,” he said. “The same thing occurred to me. But over what?”

  “Max’s bones were cremated. Does that tell you anything?”

  “Only if his wife is a Catholic. We don’t believe in cremation. I never figured out just why. Something about having all your parts together when you rise up on the last day.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “that’s what they’re afraid of.”

  That night I had another anxiety dream. But this one wasn’t about Max; it was about me. And when I finally woke up, I realized it hadn’t been a dream but a memory, replayed in my mind like a slow-moving film, with every glitch and scratch intact.

  In it I was lying in the navy hospital in Guam. I was asking the nurse when they were going to take the bandage off my arm and she was looking away.

  “Pretty soon now,” she said.

  “And then?”

  Her eyes came up slowly to meet my own. She was blond, young, and the best thing I’d seen since our last R&R.

  “You’ll have to talk to the doctor about that.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t know. There may be some nerve damage.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re lucky to still have it.”

  “Will it work, though?”

  “I can’t say. You really ought to talk to the doctor. He’s supposed to make his rounds at fifteen hundred.”

  “He won’t give me a straight answer. You will.”

  She let me have a little nod and I saw her age ten years in front of me.

  “It won’t work,” she said. “Too much nerve and muscle damage. You’ll have to learn to get along with one arm. You’re right-handed, though, so you won’t have to relearn everything. It’ll just take you longer to do things.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I’m through in the Corps,” I said.

  She nodded again. “Yeah.”

  “I guess I’ll have to work for a living now.”

  “I have a feeling you’ll make it.”

  But I almost didn’t.

  It’s hard to adjust to being a member of a new class, called the handicapped. I watched men with no limbs at all, or no feeling below the waist, and I told myself I was lucky. I watched the doctors and nurses come and go and told myself I wasn’t.

  Sometimes, walking on the grounds, and seeing the wheelchair cases, I could pretend to myself that I hadn’t really been hurt at all. During physical therapy I could tell myself I would eventually get back the use of my muscles, forgetting they were gone.

  The third week I was there a marine with no face took an overdose and killed himself. Later, they decided he’d been hoarding his painkillers, enduring the unendurable until he had enough to make the world go away. I overheard the nurses talking. One of them said she didn’t blame him. She said she’d seen a picture of him from before.

  We were all struggling with the before.

  There was a man with a missing right hand who cried himself to sleep at night. They
scheduled sessions for him with the navy psychiatrist. But there was another with no legs who acted like nothing had happened. He treated physical therapy as another challenge, and never complained of the pain. When he fell, using his new legs, he dragged himself up without help. Everyone marveled at his ability to adapt.

  Until the day I saw a corpsman walking by and glimpsed the legless man’s eyes.

  They were filled with hate.

  He was released and discharged. I never saw him again and I didn’t have much time to wonder about him, because I was facing my own rehabilitation.

  It took me a long time to admit I would never have the use of my left arm. For months I forced it through the strength-building exercises I had learned in therapy. Then I bought a book with others. I would tie the dumbbell to my hand and push my arm upward with my right.

  For a while I told myself my bicep was getting larger, what was left of it.

  I even thought I had restored some feeling.

  Next I rigged up a pulley system with a rope, and a punching bag. Pull back the right, the left would jerk forward. I made myself believe that the “plop” against the bag was a sign of increasing power.

  When I realized it wasn’t working I went home and drank myself into a stupor.

  I married a woman who felt sorry for me and didn’t understand that I didn’t want her pity. After a couple of years she left me and I told myself it was because she didn’t want to be saddled with a cripple.

  Cripple. That was the word I hated, the word my worst self used to upbraid my other self when I failed.

  And I failed often. I failed at eating, I failed at driving, and I failed, most of all, in what I most wanted: to stay in the Corps.

  There was no way around it: The Corps doesn’t have room for cripples.

  I drifted to New Orleans and got a one-room apartment uptown. I collected my disability and told the college kids I’d been hurt in an accident. I got a job as a security guard and was about to lose it when I ran into a lawyer named John O’Rourke.

  He recognized my Annapolis ring while I was working security in a Schwegmann’s and we started talking. He’d never been to Annapolis; he’d been a war protester, and taken a beating from cops that left him with a limp. It was a time for reassessment and we found that we both had insights into different sides of America.

  He hired me for one of his own investigations and I wondered if I could manage.

  I found myself thinking about the man with no legs: He’d refused to accept that he was not the same man that he had been before, and the refusal had turned into hatred for the world.

  It was time I accepted what I was and got on with it.

  I wasn’t a cripple: I was just a guy with one lame arm. Hating the world wouldn’t do anything the exercises hadn’t.

  I got a shave and a turning knob for the steering wheel of my car, and I got on with my life.

  And now, years later, I lay in bed, high over the city, wondering about a man who had died forty-three years before.

  Which of the men in the hospital was he?

  CHAPTER 20

  I met Gerald Sessoms at my office at nine-thirty the next morning. A thin, wiry man in his early fifties, Sessoms ran an electronics-supply house. But in his off hours he did security checks for businesses that suspected they’d been bugged. He’d worked for me on several occasions.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said, spitting into a small bottle, which he set on the edge of my desk. “What changed your mind?”

  “It’s too hot down there,” I said. He gave me a thin smile. He ran a detector over my walls and checked my phone.

  “I think you’re okay.” He put the detector back into the small suitcase he carried with him. “But why don’t you borrow this?”

  He handed me a box the size of my hand, with an on button and a dial.

  “This’ll pick up most anomalies. Not the most sophisticated stuff, but it’s better than nothing. You think these folks have access to state-of-the-art?”

  I thought of Tommy Noto.

  “I think they could bug the Vatican,” I said wryly.

  “Well, take this then.”

  He finished packing and picked up the snuff jar, which he carried out to the balcony and emptied into the courtyard.

  “Look,” he said, turning around to face me. “Don’t get killed again, hear?”

  “I hear,” I said, and shook his hand.

  When he was gone I felt the shakes starting up again.

  Because there was only one way to go now, and that was to pull the security away from myself, make myself a target, and try to draw them out.

  I closed up and went down to Sandy’s car, where I placed the bug detector on the seat beside me.

  I wasn’t sure just where I was headed. Maybe, I thought, I would play out the search for Idola Marsh, making them think she hadn’t been found.

  It would give them another chance.

  I reached into my guayabera pocket. The two speed loaders held six rounds each, and the Colt in my belt was loaded with five, military fashion. I could empty it and be reloaded with a full cylinder in a matter of seconds.

  If I had the opportunity. If …

  I pulled the big bar off the wooden gate, tugged the gate inward, and then got into the car and drove out. Once I was straddling the sidewalk, I got out again and closed the gate behind me.

  I was about to slip back behind the wheel when another car came out of nowhere and slammed on its brakes only a bare few feet away. My hand went under my shirt as the driver’s door opened, and then I relaxed.

  Jake Kelso was stepping out of the other vehicle.

  “Chief.” I exhaled. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Being your damn bodyguard,” he answered. “You almost got yourself killed the other day. Even made me think you were dead. I’m not gonna let that happen again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry, hell. You think I’m too damn old. Well, I’m not.” He came up close, eyes narrowed. “Look, boyo, don’t shuck me off. You need me. And I’m in it to the last.”

  I stared into his eyes for a long second and then nodded.

  Maybe, I thought, we needed each other.

  “All right, Chief. You’re on.”

  His face split in a grin.

  “That’s the ticket. Where to?”

  “Park your car. We’ll talk about it on the way.”

  I watched him find a space in the next block, wondering if I’d made the right decision. My gut told me I had, and right now it was all I had to work with. But it didn’t seem like much.

  My eyes fell on the little plastic box on the seat and I idly flipped it on to be sure the batteries were working.

  It emitted a high-pitched shriek. I stared down at it, confused. Maybe the damn thing was on the blink.

  Then reason took over. With a sinking feeling, I moved the box over the front seat, but the shriek stayed constant. I cut off the engine to minimize electrical interference and the sound continued.

  Holding the box out like a snake that might turn around and strike, I placed it on the seat and then pushed the door open on the driver’s side. I picked up the box and walked toward the rear of the car.

  The shriek grew louder.

  I squatted near the trunk and the sound almost deafened me.

  Now I knew what I’d find. I turned the volume down and reached under the bumper.

  My hand came away with a small button of metal and plastic. The metal was a magnet. For a split second I thought of leaving it in place, to draw them, but then the full implications of the device’s presence hit me. I dropped it into the street and ground it under my heel. It could only mean one thing: Frake—or whoever had hired him—had watched my office, seen Sandy come and go, and put a device under her bumper as well as under my own.

  I pulled up alongside the Chief and told him what I’d found.

  “All they had to do was stay out of sight and monitor the signal,” I told
him. “They could’ve followed me anywhere.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about Idola Marsh.

  I broke a few dozen traffic laws getting over there, which wasn’t smart, because Sandy’s car was not adapted for a driver with only one working arm. It wasn’t something I thought about, though, and the old man next to me was just as impatient.

  “In the old days,” he lamented, “we’d’ve cleared the street with the siren.”

  As it was, it took us twenty minutes. And when I stopped in front of the apartments, for a few seconds I let myself think we’d made it.

  When I got to the front door and saw the guard seated on the ground, rubbing his head, I knew we hadn’t.

  “What happened, boyo?” Kelso demanded, helping the dazed doorman to his feet. “Somebody hit you?”

  “Damn right. Man came in to do some telephone repair. When he came out again I asked him to sign in my book and he coldcocked me. That’s a new one for South Central Bell. Usually they get you at the end of the month.”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  The watchman rubbed his temple. “Like the fucking Phantom of the Opera. He had a white face.”

  “Call the police,” I said. “We’re going in.”

  “Hey, who are you?”

  The Chief flashed a badge.

  “Just call our backup, boyo.” Kelso reached down, detached the keys that hung from the man’s belt on a ring. “Will these get us into all the rooms? Good.”

  “Hey …”

  “Just make the call,” Kelso said.

  We took the stairs, Kelso not far behind me.

  We came to the second floor and headed down the hall. A face peeked out of a doorway and Kelso waved them back in.

  “Police business,” he said. “Stay inside.”

  We came to number 225 and he reached under his coat.

  “Big Blue,” he said, pulling out a long-barreled revolver. “Never let me carry it on the force. Shoots through walls.”

  “I don’t think there’s anybody to use it on inside,” I said.