by Stuart Woods
“Harmon, you’re going to have to exercise a little restraint on this.”
“You trying to muzzle the press, Will Henry?”
“No, I want this in the paper, but I don’t want my investigation hampered by a lot of sensationalism.”
“You think the Messenger runs to sensationalism?” Harmon was shifting irritably in his seat.
“No, Harmon, I don’t. But what’s happened has some sensational aspects, and I don’t want them in the paper.”
“Well, you’re just going to have to trust my judgment, Will Henry.”
“No, I don’t have to do that, Harmon. There’s still time to get this in tomorrow morning’s Constitution, and I’m sure the Atlanta papers would be happy to print it. Now, if you’d rather have it that way, you can pick up your story from them in time for next week’s Messenger. Or I’ll write you out a short statement and won’t answer any questions.”
“Now, listen here, Will Henry—”
“I don’t want to do it that way, Harmon. What I’d like to do is tell you what I know, every step along the way, but have you print just the basic facts for the moment, until I think it’s time to print the whole story. Now, if you’ll give me your word to print only what I authorize, then I’ll tell you everything.” Everson squirmed even more. He clamped his jaws together and stared angrily at Will Henry. “It’s a murder, Harmon. A nasty case of manslaughter, at the very least.”
“All right, Will Henry,” Everson exploded. “You have my word. But you better not hold out on me. I want to know it all, theories and everything.”
“I’ll give you the facts as I know them. I’ll keep my theories to myself.” Will Henry squirmed a bit himself. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little short of theories.”
“All right, all right, let’s have it. We’re holding up a press run.”
Will Henry told him everything that happened, omitting only the identity of his Klan source.
“How much of this can I print?”
“For the moment, I think you’d better just say that the body of a young man was found at the foot of Hodo’s Bluff and that he apparently fell off while walking through the woods the night before. You can say that we haven’t identified him yet, but that we don’t believe he’s a local boy. You might say that if anybody knows of a young fellow missing from home they should get in touch with me right away.”
Everson was scribbling rapid shorthand on a pad. “Description?”
“About five feet eight, a hundred and thirty pounds, sandycolored hair.” Will Henry paused for a moment, remembering. “Blue eyes.”
“Age?”
“I don’t want to be too specific about that until the doctor from Columbus has seen him, but I think you can safely say he’s in his teens.”
“Can I say you think somebody killed him?”
“For the moment say it appears to be accidental, but I’m investigating any possibility of foul play, if only to rule it out.”
“Accidental! With the boy naked like that?”
“I don’t want a word printed about his being naked, Harmon. That’s the sort of thing that will get people a lot more upset than is good for anybody. Except for you and those of us who’ve seen the boy, nobody but whoever is responsible for this knows the boy was naked. I think it might be important to the investigation to keep it that way. Just print the straightforward story. You come meet the doctor at Lamar’s and then have supper with us at Frank Mudter’s tonight, and maybe you can say more next week, but I’m not promising anything.”
“Do you think he was sexually abused?”
“What?”
“Did anybody cornhole him? There are people who do that kind of thing to youngsters, you know.”
Will Henry was horrified. The thought had never even occurred to him. “How the hell should I know?” He was aware that he was blushing. “You can ask the doctor.” He got up to leave. “He’s due at the funeral home at about four. I’ll see you there.”
By the time Will Henry reached the front door, Everson was already banging away on his typewriter, and the Chief was feeling a new kind of unease about his case.
15
ALTHOUGH WILL HENRY had had no real idea of the sort of man the visiting doctor would be, Carter Sauls surprised him. He was well over six feet tall and heavily built. Will Henry guessed he had been an athlete, probably a football player, in his college days, and he had only slightly run to fat. He was jocular and a bit loud, and he greeted Frank Mudter with gusto.
When the greetings were over and the small talk finished, Lamar Maddox ushered them into his workroom. A chemical smell, mixed with that of a kerosene heater, greeted them. The room was about twelve feet square and had a cement floor slanting into a drain in the middle. There was a large, deep sink on one side, beneath shelves stacked with bottles of chemicals and strange instruments. In the center of the room was a metal table, slanting slightly from head to foot, imprinted with a herringbone pattern of gullies, all emptying into a deeper one which ran down the center to the foot of the table. A large porcelain bucket stood ready to catch whatever might run from the table. The place was very neat.
“I think you’ll find pretty much what you need,” said Lamar Maddox, not without pride.
“Looks fine, fine,” replied Carter Sauls. “Now all we need is a cadaver.”
Maddox went into a back room and returned pushing a trolley containing the boy’s body, covered with a heavy muslin sheet. A blast of cold air entered the room with him. “Had him in cold storage,” said Maddox.
“He’s not frozen, is he?”
“Oh, no. It’s only about forty degrees back there.”
The doctor had brought with him two cases; one a large black leather bag; the other an even larger wooden box with leather handles nailed to each end. He opened the box and began setting up a big bellows camera and a tin flood lamp.
“Thought we’d get a few pictures for both our files,” he said to Will Henry. “I may do a book on forensic medicine one of these days.” Will Henry nodded.
Lamar Maddox and Frank Mudter lifted the corpse from the trolley to the table and removed the sheet. Will Henry was again struck by the youth and vulnerability of the boy. He was lying in much the same position as they had found him, and the undertaker straightened his limbs and turned him onto his back. “Rigor’s gone,” said Maddox. Harmon Everson, the hard-boiled newsman, seemed frozen with pity. Sauls quickly took several photographs of the corpse from different angles, including closeups of the wrists, the rib cage, the buttocks, the neck, and the ankles. He began repacking the camera equipment into the wooden case.
“The boy was bound hand and foot and made to sit on something pretty uncomfortable,” the doctor said to Frank Mudter and Will Henry, “and for quite a long time.” Will Henry and Dr. Mudter exchanged a glance, but said nothing. “He was also beaten about the ribs and upper arms, but not, so far as I can see at the moment, about the face and head. Unusual.”
Before Will Henry could question him further, the pathologist opened his bag and began to arrange his instruments neatly beside the sink. On the counter he placed three small scalpels of different sizes, large and small saws, forceps, a pair of heavy shears, scissors, and a large scalpel, the blade of which Will Henry nervously estimated to be at least eight inches long. The doctor also set out several gummed labels and a number of small fruit jars filled with a colorless liquid. Finally, he opened a leather notebook and placed his open fountain pen next to it. He began to pull on a pair of rubber gloves.
Will Henry felt uneasy about what seemed about to happen. “Uh, Doctor, are you going to do some kind of surgery?”
Sauls looked at him in surprise. “I’m going to conduct a thorough postmortem examination. I thought that was what you wanted. It’s certainly what you need. You don’t even know how he died, yet.”
“Well, he fell—”
“Maybe he died from that fall, maybe he didn’t. He could have died and then been thrown from that b
luff. He could have died in any of a large number of ways.”
Frank Mudter interrupted. “This is the way these things are done, Will Henry. This whole thing will just be a great big question mark until we have a postmortem. I’ve already told you about Carter’s reputation in this field.”
“Doctor, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interfere with your work. I guess I just have a pretty sketchy idea of what goes on in these cases. Please do whatever you think is necessary.”
Sauls smiled slightly, nodded, turned, picked up the large scalpel, inserted it at the point of the boy’s chin, and drew it firmly down the abdomen, stopping in the scanty pubic hair. Harmon Everson made a kind of strangling noise. Will Henry was too stunned to make any sound.
Sauls made several quick incisions around the neck and chest, then picked up the shears, clipped the cartilages joining the ribs to the breastbone, and with both hands pulled away the entire front of the chest, leaving the abdominal cavity completely exposed, the boy’s internal organs displayed. There was a loud dripping noise as the corpse began to leak into the bucket.
Sauls then cut around the lower jaw and freed the tongue muscle from its moorings. He took hold of the tongue and pulled downward through the open neck. Grasping the trachea and making deft motions with his scalpel, he pulled the attached heart and lungs from the corpse and dropped them into the sink.
Will Henry said dully, “I don’t think you gentlemen need me for this,” and repaired to the parlor of Lamar Maddox’s funeral home, closely followed by a rather green Harmon Everson. The two men sank into the overstuffed furniture.
Everson’s muffled voice came from between his knees, where he had placed his head. “Goddam butchers, all of ‘em!” Will Henry was too weak to say anything.
There was a quiet moment after Carter Sauls had finished eating most of a fried chicken. Frank Mudter’s house made tiny noises mixed with the muffled ticking of a huge clock in the hallway next to the dining room. A large crystal chandelier cast a weak light over the heavy dining-room table where the four men sat. Sauls had insisted on a supper uninterrupted by any talk of business. He and Frank Mudter had reminisced about their medical-school days and Sauls’s football career. Dr. Sauls finally heaved a deep, satisfied sigh and began rummaging in a briefcase. “Frank, that colored woman of yours knows how to fry a chicken. And I never had a better biscuit in my life.”
“You appeared to enjoy it, Carter. You can leave a little something for her in the kitchen if you want to.”
“Hell, I may mention her in my will. Biscuits like that are a dying art.” He straightened up a sheaf of notes and fished in a vest pocket for his reading glasses. “Now—” He looked at Will Henry and Harmon Everson, both of whom had eaten little and said less during the meal. Will Henry still felt weak.
“Fracture-dislocation of the cervical spine, at the level of the second and third vertebrae.”
“We’re laymen, Doctor,” Everson said, pencil poised over notebook.
“The boy died of a broken neck, most probably suffered in the fall from the bluff.”
“Probably?”
“I wasn’t there, Mr. Everson. I can only surmise from the available evidence what happened to this boy. The injury is also consistent with hanging, for instance, but there are no other signs of hanging, either internal or external. If you’ll permit me to continue without interruption until I’m finished, then I’ll give you a better-educated guess than you’ll get anywhere else in the southeastern United States, all right?”
“Sorry, Doctor, do go on.”
“Thank you. I’ll start at the beginning and give you the best summary I can of what I think happened to the boy. And I’ll keep it colloquial for you, Mr. Everson.” Everson nodded. “The boy was tied by the wrists and ankles to some sort of seat, something like an old-fashioned toilet chair, and beaten repeatedly with some sort of heavy whip, probably a length of ordinary rubber garden hose. At some time during this part of the beating, his hands were untied from the chair and retied over his head, and the beating resumed. I say this because there were fewer bruises on his upper arms than on his rib cage, and tying his hands above his head is the only way his arms could have been removed from the line of fire, so to speak. Also, either before or after the beating, he was made to kneel and he was beaten or spanked with a board or paddle. I’ve seen very similar markings and discoloration on boys who have been through fraternity initiations. In fact, I’ve seen worse on such boys. This was no initiation, though, no prank. This was an interrogation.”
Will Henry sat upright. “Interrogation?”
“Nobody gets beaten with a rubber hose as a prank, and if the assailant’s aim is simply to cause pain, he could have caused more with a buggy whip or a stick. The rubber hose is a police technique.”
“Police?” This time it was Harmon Everson who sat upright.
“I’ve seen it in Columbus and one or two other, bigger cities. It’s what you might call moderate torture, to extract information as part of an interrogation. It’s painful, but it doesn’t break the skin or bones. The victim can take a beating one day and make a court appearance the next. It’s illegal, of course, and a policeman could be charged with battery if he were caught at it, but cops don’t like testifying against other cops, any more than doctors like testifying against other doctors.
“Incidentally, speaking of the police, the boy’s wrists may have been handcuffed rather than tied. The marks on his wrists are somewhat different from those on his ankles. Could have been metal instead of twine or rope. Although I can’t imagine how he could have escaped from his persecutor if he was handcuffed. But let me go on. There are scratches on his legs, indicating that he ran through some dense brush before his fall. His feet were rather badly cut, too, although they were heavily calloused, so I think he was probably running rather than walking just before his death. By the way, I’d say he was a poor farm boy. A kid eighteen or nineteen like that still with callouses on his feet. There were blisters, too. He had probably walked some distance in shoes he wasn’t accustomed to. His hands were very rough, too, nails broken and some red dirt under them he hadn’t been able to scrub out. I’ll bet you he was doing farm work only a day or two before he got into this.
“Where was I? Oh, he probably stumbled over the bluff while running, rather than being taken there and thrown off. He landed near enough to head first, breaking his neck and his left forearm and dislocating his left shoulder. He didn’t get up.
“He hadn’t eaten for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, although he had been given some water. It seems logical to assume that he hadn’t been a captive for more than twenty-four hours. I think that, apart from the damage suffered in the fall, his injuries could be described as superficial and not serious. There is no indication whatever that whoever beat him intended to kill him or even seriously injure him, although a case could be made that his captor could hardly afford to let him go free for fear that he would inform the police. Also, we don’t know what would have happened next if the boy hadn’t escaped. His injuries up to that time may have merely been the preliminaries to something much worse.”
Sauls shuffled through his notes in a silence that even Harmon Everson did not feel inclined to break, as they all tried to picture what had happened. “I think that’s about it, except for one thing I’d like to point out. As far as I can determine, all the blows he received, both with the hose and with the paddle, were delivered in equal numbers and with equal force to both sides of his body. That’s unusual. It would be more common if one side took more punishment, depending on whether his persecutor was right-or left-handed. It indicates to me that the beating was accomplished by only one person, because two or more persons wouldn’t be so neat. Given that it was one man—or woman, we can’t rule out a woman—I’d say he has an obsession with orderliness, specifically with symmetry. He had to deal an equal number of blows on each side. His life is probably full of expressions of this symmetry thing. I’d be willing to bet
he parts his hair in the middle.”
Will Henry said, “I part my hair in the middle.”
“I noticed that. In fact, if you weren’t so new to the police job and if Frank Mudter didn’t know you as well as he does, I’d figure you for the Chief suspect, Chief.”
“What?”
“My first guess would be that whoever did this had a police background. The rubber hose isn’t a common weapon. Its whole purpose is to extract information, not to maim or kill. It’s the sort of thing that’s passed by word of mouth from cop to cop and police force to police force. Your average member of the public wouldn’t know about it and wouldn’t have any use for it if he did. If two fellows get into a knockdown, drag-out fight, they’ll hit each other with bottles or two-by-fours or whatever else is handy; but not with rubber hoses. A rubber hose is the sort of weapon that’s chosen coldly, deliberately.”
There was another silence, then Harmon Everson asked, “Was he sexually assaulted?”
Sauls shook his head. “He wasn’t sodomized, if that’s what you mean. There was no evidence of bruising in the anal passage and no semen present. But there’s sex with a capital S written all over this thing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Will Henry.
“I mean that whoever beat this boy up probably got a sexual thrill out of doing it, enjoyed it, and if the boy hadn’t got loose, it might have gone further. That sort of psychology isn’t really my field, but there are a couple of doctors in Europe could write you a book on the sexual ramifications of this one incident.”
“It’s hard to believe there could be anything like that in a place like Delano,” said Will Henry.
The doctor took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Chief, when you’ve been a policeman a little bit longer, you’ll get to know that there is just about every possible kind of person in Delano, or in the county, anyway. You’ll get to look under the rock and see what peculiar lives even perfectly ordinary people lead. I see it as a doctor and especially in my work with the Columbus police and the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office. I expect Frank sees it right here in Delano, because people will tell a doctor things they wouldn’t tell their dearest friend.” Dr. Mudter nodded agreement. Sauls heaved another sigh and put down his notes. “There isn’t anything in the world that could happen in Columbus or Atlanta or New York or Paris, France, that couldn’t happen right here. Believe me, there isn’t.”
