The Last Death of Jack Harbin

by Terry Shames

  I’m not expecting much from the medical examiner who performed Bob Harbin’s autopsy. No one likes to do autopsies, and most MEs do just enough to satisfy the job requirements. This is especially true in Bob’s case, where there’s no reason to suspect that his heart attack was anything but a natural death.

  The ME, Jim Hadley, makes it clear that he’s only seeing me as a favor. He’s a lean, agile man of forty. He wears a stethoscope around his neck just to make sure everybody knows he’s a doctor. I assure him I won’t take much of his time. He sits down behind a desk that takes up most of the room in the little box of an office, and waves me to a straight-backed chair across from him.

  He flips through Bob’s autopsy report. “My girl told me you had some questions about this. It looks pretty straightforward to me.”

  “Here’s the thing. At the time Bob died, we assumed it was due to natural causes. But with his son being murdered so soon afterward, it brought up some questions. First, what was the condition of Bob’s heart? Was he a likely candidate for a heart attack?”

  Doctor Hadley takes his time reading the relevant section of the report. “A good question, but one that’s almost impossible to answer. There’s no evidence of past scarring, so he hadn’t had any prior episodes; at least not anything major. And I didn’t find any sign of blockage. But unfortunately, a fair percentage of people who die of ventricular tachycardia don’t present any good reason for it. So in the absence of indications to the contrary, my conclusion was warranted.”

  “What about the Benadryl in his system? I understand that the dose was sufficient to put him into a sound sleep.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Here’s the problem. I talked to Jack right after he got the autopsy results and he swore his dad would never take anything that might make him sleep so soundly that he wouldn’t hear Jack in the night. So I’d like you to set my mind at rest here. Could someone have drugged him with Benadryl and then done something to induce a heart attack?”

  Hadley steeples his fingers and stares in my direction, but he’s not seeing me. He’s thinking hard. “Yes. It’s something I wouldn’t have looked for, of course. But somebody could have given him a shot of something like digitalis to bring on an arrhythmia.” He gets up abruptly. “We keep some tissue samples for several months after an autopsy. Let me do a couple of tests, and I’ll get back to you.”

  Just like that, I’m dismissed, but with more possible answers than I expected. I don’t know what I’ll do if my hunch is right. But having all the facts at my disposal is my first priority.

  I stop for a quick sandwich, so it’s almost two o’clock when I get to the motorcycle shop. But I’m in for a disappointment. Walter Dunn has gone off to San Antonio to deliver a motorcycle and won’t be back until tomorrow.

  I’m almost home when I decide on a detour to Woody’s house. The kids are in school today, so there’s not the uproar it was the last time I was here. Laurel is at work, and her mother opens the door. She’s a fussy old woman, known to have a sharp mind and a sharp tongue. She’s eaten up with curiosity about what I want with Woody, but I manage to sidestep her questions and find Woody out back, working.

  He’s sanding a big cupboard, and doesn’t see me at first. When he stops the sander and sees me, he puts it down, and dusts his hands off.

  He greets me flatly, in a voice that isn’t like him. “What can I do for you?”

  “Thought you might have a minute to visit.”

  He cocks his head at me. “‘Visit.’ A neighborly visit, or an official visit?”

  “Somewhere in between.”

  I don’t know what Taylor was lying about yesterday, but I intend to get to the bottom of it. I’m here to find out if Woody knows more about the California affair than Taylor let on.

  We sit down at his little picnic table, this time with iced tea that he’s fetched for us. He tucks tobacco under his lip and crosses his arms across his chest. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  “Taylor told me a little bit about her trip to California to bring Jack home. I was wondering if you had anything to add.”

  “Taylor said she brought Jack home? That’s not true. She didn’t bring him home. That big guy did, Walter Dunn.” He spits onto the ground.

  “I was wondering why you didn’t go out there with her.”

  His look is not particularly friendly. “What did Taylor tell you?”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  “Couldn’t afford it.”

  “Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”

  “Take your pick. Jack asked for Taylor, so he got Taylor.”

  “Sounds like you weren’t too happy about it.”

  He spits again. “Samuel, that’s a long time ago. And if you’re thinking I held a grudge against Jack and killed him because Taylor went to California to see him, you’ve treed the wrong possum.”

  “What did Taylor tell you about Jack when she got back?”

  He takes his time answering, “She said Jack had gotten himself into a bad situation and he needed help getting home. She said she straightened things out and she called Walter Dunn and he went out there and brought Jack back.” He runs his thumb along his bottom lip. “I got the feeling she wasn’t telling me everything. But by then we were fighting so much, my judgment wasn’t as good as it could have been. She could have told me anything. I didn’t really care what the truth was. I wanted to be done with both of them.”

  “If you were so mad at Jack, how come you changed your mind after Bob died?”

  He shifts in his seat, picks up his tin of tobacco, changes his mind, and sets it back down. “Oh, I’d changed my mind a long time before Bob died, but Jack wasn’t having any of it. I had burned my bridges. When Taylor went out there to California, I thought Jack was a threat to our marriage. She kept telling me it wasn’t true. I knew he’d lost a leg and his eyes, but I was eaten up with jealousy.” He opens the tobacco tin and slips a plug into his cheek. “When Jack got home I went storming over there to tell him to keep away from her. What was I thinking? When I saw him, I realized I’d been an idiot. Now I can see that I’d blamed all my problems with Taylor on Jack, thinking she wished she hadn’t married me so she could marry him. I couldn’t see the real truth, that she needed wider pastures than this town, and that’s something I never could give her.”

  “But when you saw Jack, you couldn’t let it alone, even though you saw how damaged he was, could you?”

  He shakes his head, his face full of regret. “I was looking right at him, seeing him all bunged up like that, knowing there could never be anything between him and her, and I still told him he was a son of a bitch, and accused him of trying to take Taylor away from me.” He gives a humorless laugh and spits a stream of tobacco. “When Taylor found out, she called me every name in the book. She said Jack had been through hell and I was only making things worse for him.”

  He spits one last time and takes a sip of tea. “That’s what jealousy will do to you. Makes you into a maniac. If I was going to kill Jack, it would have been then. So I lost both of them. Wasn’t a month later that Taylor put in divorce papers. And Jack never spoke to me until just before he died.” He looks toward his house. “I got lucky. Laurel is a damn good wife for me.” His voice is suddenly husky. “I might have lost my mind if it hadn’t been for her.” He wipes his eyes. “I look at those boys out there on the football field Friday nights, and I wish I could tell them that whatever they imagine their life is going to be, it’ll be different from what they think.”

  “Tomorrow! Why didn’t you tell me before? How am I supposed to get ready that fast? You think I can drop everything and go off with you?” Loretta is flustered because she doesn’t like last minute arrangements. Still, she loves to gamble, if you use the word loosely. Her upper betting limit is quarter slot machines. Every so often the Mercantile Trust Bank in Bobtail sponsors trips for their senior depositors, one of them being a trip to Grand Coushatta in Louisiana. I’ve gone there with Lore
tta a time or two and seen her come home as much as ten dollars down.

  “If you’ve got something to do, we’ll go another time.”

  “Well why does it have to be tomorrow?”

  The moment of reckoning has come. We’re sitting in her kitchen in the late afternoon drinking coffee. I’ve put off telling her about my knee surgery, but now she’s got to know. “I have a doctor’s appointment at the orthopedic hospital in Houston tomorrow.”

  “A doctor’s appointment.” She glances down at my knee, then hastily away. “You must have known about it longer than today. And I thought we were going to Coushatta.”

  “We have to go right through Houston, and I’ll stop off for my doctor’s appointment.”

  “Samuel, you aren’t making sense. Why didn’t you tell me about this doctor’s appointment before?”

  She’s right. I’m not making sense, because this knee thing has me nervous. “I didn’t want anybody to know until I’ve seen the doctor in Houston, but I’m probably going to have an operation on this knee. And the idea about Coushatta just came to me this afternoon. I thought it would be a way to make the trip a little more fun.”

  She looks at me suspiciously, as she has every reason to do. The only reason I’m combining a trip to the doctor with an excursion to the casino is that my investigation of Jack’s murder is taking me there.

  “It’s all right if you don’t want to go,” I say.

  “No, you need somebody to go with you to the doctor anyway. Why men are so pig-headed about asking for help is beyond me. What time do we leave?”

  For some reason, the traffic in Houston is a lot worse than usual, as if they’ve let all the beginners out of driver’s education early. I dodge SUVs and old, big-finned Cadillacs and little BMWs right and left. I wish we’d taken my pickup, which feels more substantial than Loretta’s Chevy Malibu.

  “Goddamn traffic,” I snarl.

  Usually she jumps on me about cursing, but now she wisely keeps her opinion to herself, although I can feel the disapproval simmering at my side. “You’re just nervous about going to the doctor,” she says. Then, as I swerve to avoid a bicycle, “Pay attention.”

  By the time we’re parked at the orthopedic hospital, my palms are slick with sweat. Although I’m snappish with Loretta, she keeps her calm, and I’m glad she’s with me.

  Two hours later, we’re headed out the east side of Houston, and I’m a new man. I liked Doctor Filbert right off, and he assured me that the surgery would make my knee right. “You’ll be surprised,” he said. “We have so many new surgical techniques these days that within a couple of months you’ll wonder if your leg was ever injured.” He also told me that like most people my age I’ve got traces of arthritis in my knees, but nothing to make a fuss over. “I’ll clean that up while I’m at it.”

  Now that I’ve been sprung from the doctor, I’m actually looking forward to our excursion to the casino, and the closer we get the chattier Loretta becomes. We’re spending the night, so she’ll get a good twenty-four hours to indulge what she calls her “little vice.”

  It takes a few hours to get to the Coushatta Casino, just over the Louisiana border, and it’s six o’clock by the time we check in to our rooms. We agree to meet for dinner in an hour, giving Loretta time to gamble and me time to strategize.

  The place is packed, from a gaggle of cocky young men who can’t possibly be twenty-one to one old man who walks with two canes and has trouble slipping coins into the slots.

  I don’t know how I thought I was going to get information from people working the tables. They are all completely absorbed in what they’re doing. But then a blind man in a wheelchair is not your everyday gambler. One of the dealers just might remember Jack.

  Walter Dunn told me that Jack liked to play craps and blackjack. “Because of the name, you know. Back in the service he had the nickname Blackjack, because he was pretty good at it. And you don’t have to see to play either of those games. You just need somebody trustworthy standing by to tell you what comes up.”

  There are only a few people at the craps table. I don’t really understand the game, but I pick out somebody to copy, and trust that the croupier will pay me when I win. I give up a few dollars and win them back. Just about the time I’m supposed to meet Loretta, somebody relieves the croupier and I figure I’ll have a word with him.

  He’s not too keen on being approached, but I tell him who I am and what I’m after, and he says he’ll talk to me, but that he’s got to eat his dinner while we talk, as he only has a thirty minute break. He’s about forty, tall and rangy, with hair slicked back and a wolfish look about him.

  “Yeah, I remember those boys. They come in every now and then. Hard to forget a blind man playing craps.” We’re sitting in a cramped employee break room with a few plastic tables, where they can eat, and vending machines. The croupier, Felix, is eating a baloney sandwich. There are a few other people in the room, and he calls to one of them. “Harry, you remember that motorcycle group comes in here with the blind guy every so often?”

  An older man with a potbelly hauls himself up from another table and joins us, bringing his can of Pepsi and bag of chips. “They have a good time,” he says to me. “Why are you asking?”

  I tell them what happened to Jack.

  “That’s a damn shame,” Harry says. “What’s your interest?”

  “Our chief of police is swamped and I’ve been asked to help out in the investigation. I was chief a while back, and I told him I’d do what I could.” Sort of sliding into the explanation, but it seems to work.

  “I don’t know what we can do for you,” Felix says, his mouth full.

  “Ever see any signs of problems between any of them? Arguments? People can get funny around money.”

  “Ha! Don’t I know that! We had a couple in here last week came to blows. You hear about that, Harry? She was hitting him as hard as he hit her. Security had to pull them off each other.” He gets up and asks if I want some coffee.

  “I wouldn’t mind a cup.” It’s past time to meet Loretta, but I’m not worried. She’ll be glad of the extra time with her slots.

  “Any of that kind of trouble with these men?”

  Both of them shake their heads. Harry says, “They have a lot of laughs. I’m a vet myself, and I appreciate them looking out for the one in the chair.”

  I tell them what hotel room I’m staying in and ask them to mention Jack to their coworkers. “I’d appreciate a call to my room if anybody saw anything out of the ordinary.”

  Loretta was so busy at her Texas Tea slot machine that she didn’t even realize what time it was. She’s tickled because she has managed to win $50. Loretta and I have a reasonably good spaghetti dinner and when we go back to the gambling floor, it’s much busier. Loretta goes back to her slots and I play a little blackjack and slip in a few questions to the dealers, but I come up empty. But I do manage to come away with a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket.

  The next morning I talk to the manager of the casino, a guy who looks disconcertingly like an actor I can’t place, with a smirk on his face and a lord-of-the-manor attitude. He assures me that if there had ever been any trouble with the vets, he would have known it. “Tell the truth, I hope he took away more money than he dropped. I’m all for helping out someone who has sacrificed life and limb for his country.”

  In a way, I’m glad there were no problems among the vets who brought Jack here. It would be troublesome to find out they weren’t as close-knit as it seems. Loretta and I are all checked out and ready to go after lunch. In the daytime there isn’t so much action, and I sit down at a blackjack table I hadn’t seen before, the only one in the house that requires a $20 bet. I’m up a couple of hundred dollars, so I figure I can get rid of it faster here.

  The dealer, Elsie, is a big, bony woman with frizzy hair and a mouth full of teeth so white they look like they were just polished. I let a couple of hands slide by before I broach the subject of Jack and his friend
s.

  “I remember them. You always remember good tippers. And then there’s the wheelchair and all.” Her voice has the silky undertone of someone who grew up speaking with a Cajun accent.

  I tell her about Jack’s death. For a split second she pauses, then glances up at the pit bosses’ surveillance room and picks the pace back up. “I’m so sorry to hear about that.” She deals the cards smartly. “Look at that. You’ve got twenty-one.” She’s got twenty and turns over a three.

  “You ever see any problems among the guys?”

  “Problems?” She shakes her head. “Not among them. But,” she glances back up. “Listen I can’t talk. It’s against the rules. I’m off at one o’clock. How about if you meet me here and I’ll tell you about something that did happen.” After that she manages to win some of my money back for the house.

  When we get back together, she takes me back to the break room I was in before. Elsie has been working here for ten years. “I’ve supported me and my boy pretty well on what I earn.”

  I take the hint. “Well, I’d be glad to pay you for your time, seeing as how I’m butting into your dinner.” I take out a twenty, and when I see the little frown lines between her eyes, another twenty.

  She smiles, and slips the money into her pocket. “I don’t know if this is a big deal, or if it’s what you’re after, but it’s something I remember. Your friend Jack was gambling with two of his friends. One of the guys glanced over toward the craps table and he says, ‘Well I’ll be damned. Jack, you’ve got a friend over there.’ And Jack says, ‘Who is it?’ And the guy says, ‘I don’t know his name; I’ve just seen you talking to him at the café.’ So Jack says, ‘Let’s go say hi.’ So they cashed out and left the table.” She’s eating fruit salad with yogurt. Doesn’t seem like much of a dinner.