Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  At length he sucked his teeth clean, neatly wiped his mouth with a napkin, then proceeded to roll it into a tight ball between meaty palms.

  “Pretty hard to fall off there by accident,” he said. “The sill is wide, not sloped or slippery or anything. Maybe he could have been leaning out to see something?”

  Since the wall around the parapet was nearly chest-high, that sort of tumble wouldn’t be plausible unless Hatch already had his legs on the downhill side. “Him sitting, smoking, something happens down below, he leans out for a better look?” Anna suggested.

  “Could be.”

  They both thought about that; their eyes on the towering pedestal, the visitors dwarfed to ant size in its shadow. Even Hatch, come through familiarity to be comfortable on the parapet, wouldn’t treat the sixty-foot drop with the casual disregard it would take to merely lean too far, lose one’s balance and fall.

  “Probably not,” Anna said, discarding her own suggestion.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Andrew agreed. He tossed the rolled napkin at a trash barrel and missed by three feet. “Underprivileged youth,” he excused himself as he retrieved his litter. “No inner-city midnight basketball for this child. I’m from Wyoming. Green River.”

  A cowboy. Anna had always had a weak spot for cowboys.

  “That leaves murder and suicide,” she said.

  “It’s early yet. There’ll maybe be a note.”

  Tourists, girls of about twelve or thirteen, descended upon them like a flock of starlings, all racket and flutter. Andrew patiently answered the vacuous questions they’d dreamed up to get the pretty cop to pay attention to them. Anna waited. It was one of the things she liked about the Park Service—liked about America, when one thought about it in the grand scheme of things. Policemen were still the good guys. They were still the ones people turned to in times of trouble, the ones lost children sought out in crowds. People in the United States didn’t scurry indoors and hide when a uniform appeared. Watching this microdrama unfold within shouting distance of Lady Liberty’s elephantine ear pleased Anna’s sense of symmetry.

  “Let’s walk,” Andrew said as the girls giggled away. “Moving targets are harder to hit.” Taking the initiative, Anna sauntered down the walk circling old Fort Wood. “Where were we?” Andrew asked, then answered his own question. “Suicide note. Right. I didn’t know Hatch that well. Working alone, day shift, night shift, you only see each other in passing. I heard he was upset about the kid that jumped. I also heard he was under investigation. Good reasons to check out if your mind works that way. Mine doesn’t. Suicide makes no sense. Why crash a party you’re going to be invited to sooner or later anyway?”

  Anna had nothing to say to that. Andrew was apparently too well adjusted to realize that by the time one is suicidal not only does the word “party” carry no cheery connotations but real-world logic has gone by the wayside.

  ANNA’S PILGRIMAGE TO Molly’s shrine was short. When she arrived Frederick, half-glasses with magnifying lenses of the sort one might purchase at Wal-Mart perched near the end of his beaky proboscis, was reading a sonnet aloud. Sonnet 29 if Anna wasn’t mistaken. She left before his heart did the “lark at break of day arising” part, and though she exited amid a storm of protest, she seriously doubted she’d be much missed. As an excuse for her early departure she said she wanted to look up Dr. Madison before he went off shift. This brought her those gee-there’s-hope-for-Anna-yet smiles that she would never learn to appreciate.

  Knowing full well Molly would check up on her to see how the “romance” was going, Anna asked a passing nurse how to find David Madison. The woman verbally mapped out the way to his office. TV would suggest doctors do not have these havens of sanity but dash about from patient to patient, eternally free of paperwork. Anna had to either give up on television as even a distorted mirror of reality or believe Dr. Madison was highly placed in this particular organization.

  The doctor was not in, but his door was ajar and, having carried the charade thus far, Anna decided she’d stay long enough to leave him a note—quick thanks, door open for future possibilities sort of thing. She edged inside, feeling out of place and mildly sneaky though her motives were no more underhanded than usual.

  His office was utilitarian but by no means sterile. Evidently the man never threw anything away. Or filed it. Medical journals were piled along the walls. Out of knee-jerk snoopiness, she glanced at a couple dates. The old-timers had graced his floor since June of 1988. Manila folders in various colors and states of disrepair were packed into a bookcase behind a desk lost beneath more of the same, loose papers and what looked to be Mardi Gras trophies—cheap beads and plastic cups.

  Madison might have one of those minds gifted with a Gestalt location system. Anna had had an aunt like that, Aunt Margaret. Margaret could dive into any of the many rat’s nests in her study and within moments produce whatever yellowed newspaper clipping or antiquated recipe she had in mind. Researchers were just beginning to uncover evidence that the female brain was built for big-picture thinking and the male for categorization and separation.

  That or Madison was just a slob. Since Anna had matriculated into middle age, it took very little to knock a man off her “possible” list. A slob was borderline. She tucked this away without even being aware she did so, and moved to the desk to find paper and pen for the intended note.

  This seemingly simple task was thwarted by the plethora of documents. A Post-it note, a Bic pen, the necessities of life, were lost in the debris. She circled around the desk and sat in a maroon leatherette ergonomically correct and, because it was designed for a man six foot five, uniquely uncomfortable chair. Her feet barely touched the floor. For an unsettling moment she felt like a very little girl playing where she shouldn’t be playing.

  Then, in essence, that’s what she became. Before her eyes were two dreadfully tantalizing folders awash in the sea of pulped trees. One, a corner protruding, was labeled “Dr. Pigeon, Molly, Mary, Margaret.” Thinking there might be but one daughter, Anna’s parents had taken the precaution of naming their firstborn after every female relative still living on either side of the family. Seven years later, when Anna made her appearance, there was no one left. Fortunately her mother had been reading Anna Karenina, or she might have ended up being named Tiger or Coco or Potkins or Skeeter after a favorite family pet. The other, less obvious but equally enticing folder was labeled “Consultant-NYC Med Ex.” A connection with the person who had autopsied Hatch’s Jane Doe and, perhaps, would do Hatchett himself.

  Giving in to her baser instincts after a moral struggle lasting a nanosecond or two, Anna pulled Molly’s file from the heap after noting precisely where it had been so her deviltry might leave no traces. There were several sheets of medical gobbledygook which she scanned without much understanding. Then two tag lines written by hand, the penmanship as appalling as tradition could have hoped. The first read: “Molly P: looking good. Recovery astonishing. Boyfriend?” and the second, the one that, despite herself, pleased Anna: “Sister (married?).”

  A glance at the door: nothing, nobody. She carefully replaced Molly’s folder and extracted the one labeled “Consultant.” Another folder slid out and she kept it rather than screw up the order of the pile—a deviation from the chaos-as-usual that mightn’t go unnoticed. The consultant file was regarding the details of the death of one Josh Redkin. Nothing of interest there.

  Before she could restore it to its place, the door opened and her heart leapt as if she’d been nailed making off with the monthly payroll. Madison stood, shoulders stooped, as if he had never come to believe doorways were built for men with a six-foot-six-inch frame and he had an inch to spare.

  When unavoidable, confession is good for the soul. Anna said, “Redhanded,” and held up the file.

  Dr. Madison blinked twice, his exophthalmia giving him an aspect of perpetual confusion. Anna expected disgust, anger, outrage, irritation, those good emotions so enjoyed when an opportunity for righte
ous wrath presents itself, but he seemed more embarrassed than anything and, for an instant so fleeting she wasn’t sure she’d seen it, afraid. Not big fear—life, death, large spiders—but a cringing that rippled down from the rounded shoulders. This passed in the time it took him to step over the clutter and take the folders from her hands. No snatching—he merely took them and opened the top one as if interested in any questions she might have. The bottom file, the unmarked folder she had scooped up incidentally to the medical examiner’s file, he slid into a side drawer and nudged it closed with his thigh. Furtive, Anna thought, but he was so calm she figured the past week had given her, if not a full-blown case of paranoia, then certainly one of hypervigilance.

  “Are you interested in Redkin, Josh?” the doctor was asking.

  Anna made herself focus. “No. Nosy on another account. Do you remember the jumper I told you about?”

  Madison nodded and folded himself into the chair she had vacated on his arrival. He finished closing the desk drawer into which he’d secreted the file with a casual push of tapered fingertips. Such was the man’s length that sitting, he and she were eye to eye. Despite his gesture toward a chair, she chose to remain standing. “Hatch, James Hatchett, was found this morning. He went off the pedestal at the Statue of Liberty. A sixty-foot fall. Suicide is what they’re saying.”

  “He’s the man who chased that little girl you told me about?” Anna nodded. “Now he jumps because of the girl jumper—guilt?” Madison’s beautiful hands were folded on a neatly trousered knee, well-defined lips crinkling his beard in a look of concern that would have melted the reserve of Freud himself.

  Bumping the pile on the corner of the desk, she rested her hip on it. The desktop was high. She’d not noticed it from David’s oversized chair, but it had been raised by the expedient of putting the base on two lengths of four-by-fours painted black to blend with the soulless storage-unit decor. “So it would seem,” she said.

  “But you don’t think so.” Behind the bifocals and the blue eyes Anna saw a glimmer of mockery or just good-natured teasing. As a potential paranoid, she wasn’t willing to decide which.

  “Nothing to say it wasn’t.” She backed down, feeling childish, not knowing why but not liking the sensation.

  “Redkin, Josh?” Madison brought the matter back to the folder she’d been prying into.

  “I just saw ‘consultant to the medical examiner’ and couldn’t resist seeing if it had anything to do with the little girl, Hatch’s Jane Doe.” The desire to escape to a realm where she was again a grown-up was strong within her. She lifted herself off his desk.

  “I don’t get those. Nothing straightforward: blunt trauma, car versus pedestrian, gunshots. They call me when there’s some kind of an anomaly and they need a cardiothoracic expert.”

  Anna should have known that.

  “But I know people who know people,” Madison said. “Would you like to visit your Ms. Doe? Talk with the forensic types?”

  Bait Anna could not but rise to.

  He made two calls and wrote her a note. She was to be treated as an honored guest of the dead in New York City. On leaving, she found herself accepting a theater date for that evening. It wasn’t till she was on the elevator, one floor down, that she remembered the file hidden in the desk drawer. For three more floors she lectured herself on physician patient privilege, breaking and entering, and the just deserts of generally being a Nosy Parker. Nothing availed. At the second floor, she stepped off and, bored with standing and waiting, took the stairs two at a time up six flights.

  The coast, as the dime novelists would have it, was clear. Walking purposefully down the hall, spine straight, head high, she still felt like Pantalone sneaking through an Italian comedy. Dr. Madison’s office door was again ajar: Feeling the rush of adrenaline that hooked burglars so viscerally into their chosen profession, she slipped inside.

  The top right drawer of his desk, the drawer into which he’d put the unlabeled file, was locked. The good doctor had taken the time and trouble to secure it. There was something about a secret, any secret, that brought out the cop in her. For a brief moment she considered searching for the key, but decided she lacked the motivation—or the foolhardiness—to do it. She left without being seen and again took the stairs, mercifully deserted by a sedentary population.

  Brought on by New York City or Frederick and his sonnets—or maybe the nearness of the ghost of Zachary—theatrical allusions continued to haunt her. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”—the much-quoted line from As You Like It came to mind. If she didn’t get a grip, she was going to slide those immortal words into a modern Bellevue bastardization: “All the world’s a plot, and all the men and women merely suspects.”

  She needed occupation for her fevered brain: first the morgue, then the wilds of Ellis. Entertainment, distraction, and in ten days or less, she’d be back on Delta to Denver and then a puddle jumper to Durango; to reality as she had chosen to know it.

  As usual, the subway got her within walking distance of her goal. Dr. Madison’s note in hand, she presented herself at the New York City morgue like a tardy third-grader. With the impersonal brusqueness out-of-towners often mistake for unfriendliness, a bespectacled man with one eye that didn’t track—giving the impression he kept one eye on the visitor and one on the security cameras—led her to an autopsy room, where Gentry, the doctor who had autopsied Liberty’s Jane Doe, was working. As Anna pushed open the door, she cast down a quick prayer to the gods of this underworld that Gentry wasn’t in the process of hacking up James Hatchett.

  The room wasn’t as gloomy as Anna deemed suitable for its purpose. With its cracked and moldering concrete, body cabinets and dirt-encrusted windows, the morgue on Ellis was more in tune with imagination. This one was brightly lit. The rocking cadence of Jerry Jeff Walker singing “Navajo Rug” made the place downright chipper. At one of several spotless tables, Dr. Gentry, draped, gloved and goggled against giving or receiving contamination, raised a welcoming instrument. “One of David’s friends?” she asked.

  Anna nodded and the doctor waved her in with whatever shiny implement of dissection she was holding. It looked bloody but it could have been Anna’s imagination. She took a step inside. The swinging door gave her a gentle smack on the behind. Thus encouraged, she moved toward the doctor. A glimpse at the operating table—if tables for dead people went by the same name as those for the living—reassured her it wasn’t Hatch. Whoever was under the knife had long wavy brown hair.

  “Dr. Gentry?” Anna asked, keeping her eyes well above cadaver level.

  “Call me Colette,” the woman said, and dug into some portion of the body. Colette had a soft southern accent, more song than drawl. Louisiana, Anna guessed. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands. Unsanitary practice. How do you know David?”

  “He’s my sister’s doctor,” Anna said, glad of the small talk. Chatting over the rotting dead took a little getting used to. “Does he work with you?”

  “Has. Off and on.” She laughed for no apparent reason. “As needed. Good doctor. Great backdoor man.” Colette Gentry reached deep and pulled out a bit of red and slippery stuff that forced itself into Anna’s peripheral vision. Anna was not a regular in morgues: it was not a duty rangers often performed. Another good reason to work for the National Park Service. Morbid curiosity urged Anna to peek, but her mental library was already sufficiently stocked with grisly images. She kept her eyes on Dr. Gentry. Or the parts of her that showed. Colette had brown hair, cropped at earlobe level. She was short, stocky, and looked strong. Her hands were blunt and her eyes, above mask and behind goggles, a very attractive brownish gray.

  “Did you do the girl from the Statue of Liberty?” Anna asked.

  “That I did. Poor little bugger. Basic. Except she lit nearly square on her head. I guess she dove rather than jumped. Her legs weren’t broken. Skull, neck, upper spine, all suffered serious damage. Wrists and forearms shattered. Unless they’
re unconscious, most people, even though they think they want to die, try and stop themselves when it comes down to it. I don’t see many going headfirst like that.”

  The doctor laid aside the instrument with which she’d ushered Anna in, said, “Excuse the racket,” and began working with a power tool. The sound conjured up graphic pictures of bone being sawed. Spatters of dull red, blood without oxygen, flecked the front of the pathologist’s plastic apron. Anna stepped away and feigned interest in the floor, a predictable washable tile, white crosshatched in gray.

  Little Miss Doe didn’t jump, she dove. That went better with the flight theory than the suicide theory. Flight from what? Was the child mentally unbalanced or was her reaction sane, at least to the adolescent mind? Did she willingly sacrifice her life to keep a secret, to avoid a discovery that would cause her or someone else pain? Heroics came more easily to the young. If anyone would bite down on a cyanide capsule, choose death rather than betray a cause, it was a good bet that person was under thirty. If Miss Doe was a runaway, was death preferable to what she would be sent back to? There was no sign of sexual or physical abuse. Emotional abuse? Maybe.

  Anna would lean on Frederick again, get him to see if there had been any escapees from mental institutions or juvenile detention facilities who fit the time frame and the physical description of the girl.

  It crossed her mind that she was intentionally overlooking the obvious: that the girl had fled from exactly what it looked like she was fleeing from—James Hatchett. Was there something between them that made a sixty-foot plunge onto granite more acceptable than letting him lay hands on her? Having talked with Hatch, it didn’t seem likely, but Anna knew her perception to be worthless in this area. Everybody’s was.

  When she was in college in San Luis Obispo, California, she’d gone out to the Atascadero prison for sexual offenders. The inmates were child molesters, rapists, perverts from every walk of life. The reason she, along with other students, visited Atascadero was to socialize with the “white-card holders,” men soon to be released. The idea was that it would be helpful for these men to have some practice with regular (and preferably female) citizens before they were thrust into society.