Nobody Lives Forever

by Edna Buchanan

  Ransom lit a cheap cigar. He usually did at scenes where a body was no longer fresh. Rick always said it was difficult to discern which was worse, the stench of death or Jim’s big stogie.

  Rick and the young marine patrolman pulled on rubber gloves, dragged the dead man clear of the roots, counted to three and rolled him over. The body had obviously been in the water for some time, yet sea life had done little damage, even to the eyes and face. The usually voracious fish and crabs had found this corpse unappetizing for some reason.

  Rick hunkered down to scrutinize the body, then looked up with a wry half smile. “We lucked out, Jimbo. There is a God, after all.”

  “What the hell?” Ransom lumbered closer, aching back and queasy stomach forgotten. “Just what we don’t need,” he mourned. “Another whodunit. We’ll never get to go home.”

  A fact of death is that the more sudden it comes, the longer it takes to sort out the facts and clean up the mess.

  “What does that look like to you?” Rick asked. A half-inch hole gaped at the left of the man’s navel, just below the ribs.

  Jim stared in the fast-fading light. “Like about a .45-caliber.” He frowned at Rick’s positive expression.

  “Only if the killer screwed it in. Look closer.” The young Cuban cop stood openmouthed. Uniforms closed in around the body.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ransom said squinting. “You’re right.” The hole in the man’s body was ringed by thread marks. “What do you wanna bet that it’s that damn Morningdale Mortuary again?”

  “This is no homicide. The guy’s been embalmed,” Rick told the others, as he rocked back on his heels, elbows resting on his knees. He used a pencil as a pointer. “See here, no bullet made that hole, it was a trocar, an undertaker’s tool. It’s attached to a pump that sucks out the body fluids. Embalming solution is forced in. Then they plug it up. The plug is obviously missing.”

  “But what’s he doing out here, Sarge?” The young officer looked bewildered. “How come they didn’t bury him?”

  “They did,” Ransom said. “At sea. Probably … six, eight months ago. That damn Morningdale is still screwing up. Six months sitting in saltwater, on the bottom, the casket falls apart around him and he just pops up.”

  “I’m surprised nobody spotted him before now,” Rick said. Shadows and reflections of the water dappled his tanned face. “They must have missed the Gulf Stream when they dropped him in, otherwise he would have gone north. He must have floated back in south of Fisher Island, between Stiltsville and the reefs and Soldier Key, completely across the bay.”

  “Like a homin’ pigeon,” Jim said, forming the words around the cigar still clenched between his teeth. “This guy’s done some cruising.”

  “Caskets,” Rick told the rookie, “are built to be put in the ground, that’s the problem.” In a proper sea burial, the casket is weighted, holes drilled in the top and the lid secured with strapping iron. Tricky business, just uncommon enough to baffle the inexperienced help at some funeral homes.

  On the way back to the dock, Rick entertained the young marine officer with the story of another Miami funeral home’s maiden attempt at a sea burial. Mourners had sung a farewell hymn as the casket was slid over the side of their hired vessel into the Atlantic, a mile east of Government Cut. It had not sunk. The box had bobbed about on a choppy sea until the lid came off. Waves had wafted the body up and out. Wind and current had carried the corpse, dapper in a dark blue suit and a tie, into the lanes used by big cruise ships out of the port of Miami, and into the path of the Song of Norway. In response to a cry of “man overboard!” hundreds of Caribbean-bound tourists had rushed to the rails to watch the crew launch a lifeboat.

  That evening the detectives interviewed a number of young Rob Thorne’s shocked school chums, baseball teammates and a few tearful girls he had dated. Chances were remote that anything in young Thorne’s life-style had led to his murder, but the investigators had nothing else and intended to leave no avenue unexplored. Rob Thorne was clean, or seemed to be. So was the Corley family. It had seemed depressingly clear from the start that the shooting had stemmed from a random encounter in the dark.

  “Whatta we do now, bro?” Jim said, as they wearily compared notes back in the office that night. He tossed a half-eaten slice of pizza back into the box. “Christ, this stuff is lousy. You can’t tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard begins. Why the hell do we order from them?”

  “Because they deliver at three A.M., and they won’t take any money from cops.” The low-pitched voice came from Detective Sergeant Rudy Dominguez in the next cubicle.

  “They must be trying to kill us,” Jim grumbled.

  “It must be bad if you won’t eat it,” Rick said. “It looks like the only thing left for us to do is finish the paperwork, beat the bushes one more time, talk to all the snitches and then beg. I’ll see the parents in the morning. I think they want to post a reward, and I won’t discourage them. We can appeal to the public for information, dangle the reward money, sit by the phone and hope somebody drops a dime on us.”

  “I sure as hell hope we come up with something, because if this one takes us years to solve, buddy boy, I ain’t gonna be here. I ain’t waiting around.” Jim worked the phones while Rick talked to a reporter from The Morning News. One of the unwritten rules of their partnership was that Rick was point man with the press.

  Quotable, photogenic and personable, he felt at ease with reporters and rarely shot himself in the foot. They flocked around him at major crime scenes, usually ignoring Jim, who liked it that way. He often said that if the best reporter in town was on fire, he wouldn’t piss on him, or her, to put it out.

  His attitude stemmed from an unfortunate incident following the rescue of a housewife abducted from a shopping center parking lot. A reporter—female—had asked if the victim was injured. “Nope,” Jim had said. “She wasn’t hurt. She just got raped.”

  He was quoted. What had begun as a positive news story ended in a public relations disaster. A storm of outrage boiled up among local feminists. One group named Jim as the Male Chauvinist Pig of the Month. The chief was furious once somebody explained to him why the statement was offensive. He issued a written reprimand. Jim had been sentenced to three months of sensitivity training, on his own time. The entire experience had taught him one important lesson: Never trust a reporter. “Burn me once, it’s your fault. Burn me twice, it’s my fault”—that was his philosophy when it came to the media.

  Hunched behind his desk in the glare of the electric-orange office partitions, his face settled slowly into a squinty-eyed scowl. Somebody in charge had decreed that bright international orange panels were de rigueur when the new ten-million-dollar police station was built. The panels offered a semblance of privacy to the hyper, the hysterical, the homicidal and the distraught as they were interviewed by detectives.

  Jim believed that the blinding orange agitated half-crazed suspects and caused even docile witnesses to grow irritable and argumentative. The color made his head throb, especially when he was short on sleep. Peering through reading glasses, he riffled through his telephone calls. “Oh shit,” he said. The message in his hand was brief and to the point: “I’m being poisoned again.”

  The full moon brought them all out of the woodwork. Terrance McGee worked in the downtown public library and was periodically convinced he was being poisoned. Whenever he suffered a bellyache or an upset stomach, or thought that his coffee, soft drink or burger had a peculiar taste or that his urine was not the right color, he was sure that they were at it again. Who they were or why they wanted to kill him was never precisely clear. Sometimes he suspected coworkers, other times perfect strangers. Occasionally it was the CIA. Sometimes it was Castro’s agents.

  He was fortyish, never married and a pain in the ass. The overworked detectives had long ago agreed that they were the only people on earth with a real motive to kill McGee.

  Hoping to defuse his fixation a
nd wash him out of their hair, they had agreed to analyze the contents of a sugar bowl he swore had been poisoned by a mysterious someone who had slipped into his apartment undetected. The crime lab report had reached Jim’s desk. He scanned it and dialed McGee’s number. It rang four times, then someone carefully lifted the receiver but said nothing. Faint but rapid breathing could be heard at the other end of the line. “McGee! This is Detective Ransom, Miami Homicide.”

  “Don’t hang up, Detective! I’m here! I’m here! I didn’t know who it was.”

  “You don’t find out unless you say hello,” Jim growled.

  “There was another attempt this morning. It was in my…” The intensity in McGee’s voice left him almost breathless.

  “I’ve got news,” Jim interrupted.

  “The lab report?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Should we discuss it over the telephone?”

  “I don’t see why not. I have the results before me. That stuff will kill you, McGee. It was one hundred percent sugar granules. You got to lay off that sugar, it’s bad stuff.”

  “You mean they didn’t find anything?” McGee was incredulous.

  “Nada.”

  “But how do you explain the chills, the sweats, the runs?”

  “Maybe you were coming down with a bug, it’s been going around. But read my lips, nobody wants to poison you. Get off that kick, and get a life.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, nobody wants to kill you. It should be a load off your mind. Now forget it.”

  “Thank you, thank you, Detective.” McGee sounded unconvinced by the clean bill of health.

  Jim hoped this would be the last they heard from him, but he was doubtful. The man’s paranoia seemed cyclical. Sometimes he was quiet for months. When he did resurface, fearful and full of conspiracy theories, it seemed always to be when the detectives were at their busiest. “Why,” Jim would patiently ask, “would all these people go to all this trouble? Why would anybody care enough to break into your apartment and poison your sugar bowl? What makes you so special?”

  Instead of seeing the logic, McGee’s eyes would smolder with new intensity. “I have no idea, Detective, that’s why I need your help, before it’s too late.”

  Rick insisted there was no point in trying to reason with McGee. “It’s all real to him,” he said. “There is no logic in craziness.”

  McGee called again ten minutes later. A secretary took the message, and Jim shuffled it to the bottom of the stack. Then, the corners of his pale lips curved into a sly smile. He decided to leave it for Dusty. She would be in tonight. Let her deal with him, he thought.

  Six

  Alex heard what Harriet was thinking as she scrubbed herself in the shower. He hated to be criticized. He emerged furious, stalked into the dining room and turned up the volume on the police scanner, trying to drown out the clamor from the others. Not my fault, he thought. That dumb asshole! If that kid had stayed where he belonged, none of it would have happened. What the hell was he trying to do? Be a hero? Well, look at what all that macho shit got him. Dead. He deserved it for not minding his own damn business.

  Roughing me up, bellowing that he had a gun. Stupid bastard left me no choice. Better to waste a jerk like that anyway.

  He sat drumming his fingers on the table, his face softening as little Jennifer began to sob. She could not find her blankie, and Alex had frightened her by firing the gun. She hated guns. She wanted to go play with Benjie, the little boy next door. She cried more when Alex told her she could only come out to play with Benjie when they baby-sat for him.

  The tears dried as Marilyn came out, prowling the room, sulking as usual and puffing a cigarette. She sat down at Laurel’s dressing table and carefully outlined her apple-green eyes with mascara and pencil. Then she doused herself with cheap perfume and painted her fingernails blood-red, a shade she knew Laurel would hate. All the while she bitched and complained about not getting enough sex. She knew the others were listening. All but Laurel, who could not hear any of them.

  Marilyn was pissed off at Alex for blowing away the nice-looking young Thorne kid just as she was getting to know him. She was also pissed at that fat-ass Sandy Corley, who had caught her out in the driveway earlier, flirting with Larry. He had stopped by to chat while walking their new Doberman, but Sandy had rudely interrupted their tête-à-tête and steered him home.

  Chagrined, he had marched along docilely. He probably would not be allowed out again for a month, Marilyn had thought angrily. Pussy-whipped, that’s what he is. Pussy-whipped She had even said it aloud, hoping they overheard.

  When Marilyn’s nails were dry, she filled out an order form for a leather G-string pictured in a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. Then she strutted over to the kitchen cabinet in her four-inch stiletto heels, hips swaying provocatively, and downed two slugs of bourbon. “If nothing else,” she said, hips slung to one side, tossing back her long hair, “it makes life easier to take in this damn monastery.”

  Marilyn might be a slut, Alex thought from his place down in the tunnel that joined their minds, but she was not so difficult to deal with. At least he could reason with her. Sometimes they even thought alike. In fact, at times, like now, she was not bad to have around. Even though she didn’t particularly like kids, Marilyn had fixed Jennifer a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows, fished her blankie out of the clothes dryer and promised that she could watch cartoons on TV in the morning. Marilyn was a good ol’ girl most of the time, not like that homemaker. Harriet had raged unmercifully, calling Alex stupid and sloppy. “You’ll ruin it for all of us!” she cried.

  Who is she to talk, he thought, that bitch, with all the shit she pulls.

  Jennifer came back, her mouth still chocolate-stained, clutching her blankie, sucking her thumb and whining. That did it. He was fed up. He burst back out, using his growing strength. “You cunts think about nothing but yourselves!” He smashed his right fist into his palm, put on his clothes and stormed out.

  That near disaster the other night was awkward, he thought, but think how awkward it turned out to be for the Thorne kid. He suppressed a chuckle, determined not to let one slipup stop him. He was growing stronger and feeling better about himself all the time. Temporarily, however, Alex knew he had to use extreme caution. The others were right, it could have been a goddamn catastrophe. If he could only get rid of them ail for good, especially that bitch Harriet. And Laurel, who could cause all of them real problems when she panicked, which she always did when she realized she was losing time. Stupid and hysterical, she had no idea what was going on. Occasionally one of the others came in hands when he got in a tight spot, but their nagging and complaining frosted his ass. Somebody was going to pay, he swore, for all of it. What about his pain, all his lost time? He had to find a way.

  He drove within the speed limit and was careful to signal properly. It wouldn’t do to be stopped. That could ruin his plans. The moonlight was radiant and the night air was wonderful, soft and warm. He sighed. The days always took so long to die.

  The convenience store was one he had visited before, some time ago. There would be more cash on hand now, since they had started selling Florida lottery tickets. He felt like a winner tonight. It was time to act.

  The store glowed in the dark, jutting out of a small strip shopping center. Closed shops, a shoe repair and a take-out pizza joint slumbered on either side. The front entrance was guarded only by pay phones and trash receptacles. Nobody browsing in the racks of magazines. The only customer strolled out with a six-pack. Alex pulled on his cap, adjusted his shades and stepped boldly through the front door into the light, heart swelling with excitement. He could see anyone approaching through the big plate-glass storefront. Of course, that meant they could see him, too, so he had to be quick.

  The thin, dark man behind the counter—flanked by the frozen slush machine and the sausage sticks—was Pakistani.

  “Is late a
t night for sunglasses,” he said. Alex smiled and showed him the gun. The cold metal was far more eloquent than words.

  Alex enjoyed the man’s stricken expression. His brown eyes were wet and enormous, his body twitched. Alex gestured impatiently toward the cash register. Frightened, the man abruptly reached for something below the counter. Alex squeezed the trigger. He did so without thinking. The clerk sank to his knees, then crumpled over onto his side, his body jerking and convulsing. Alex peered over the counter to see what the man had reached for. A paper bag, to hold the money.

  Too late. Now, more trouble. It is harder than ever to make a living in Miami, he thought. He never intended to hurt anyone. Shit just happens.

  He emptied the cash drawer and eagerly stuffed a handful of lottery tickets into his jeans. Humming, as though a casual shopper, he strolled by the case of ready-made sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, through the door and out to his car. What was that song running through his mind? Very catchy, a show tune—“If They Could See Me Now”—that was it. He did a little dance step, eased himself into the front seat and drove away. He couldn’t help but smile. Wouldn’t the next customer be surprised? He wished he could stay for the excitement.

  What had happened was not his fault, Alex told himself. The counterman made a bad move. This case would not generate as big a deal as the next-door neighbor of a hotshot homicide detective, but it would keep the cops on their toes. Nothing like keeping the cops on their toes.

  They say these things become easier with experience. They’re right, he thought. Pawing through the bills and the coins on the front seat with one hand, he fingered the lottery tickets. A huge smile spread across his face, and he broke up, into high-pitched laughter. Hey, asshole, he asked himself, what are you going to do if you have the winning ticket?

  Seven

  The city stayed busy. Detectives Dominguez and Mack Thomas went out to investigate a shooting at an all-night convenience store. Rick and Jim eventually quit to catch some sleep. But Jim did not go directly home. He glanced at his watch and saw that he would be able to make it on time after all.