by David Staats
In the Justice Center, we finally came into a room with a long counter. Behind it two women were sitting at desks and behind them were lots of rows of filing shelves.
“Hello, Ada,” said Mr. Dure.
“What do you want?” said the woman closest to us in a brusque tone.
“Got a subpoena for you,” he said.
“You know the procedure,” she said.
“I do,” he said. “That’s why I came to you.”
She burst out laughing and got up from her desk and came to the counter. She was a heavy-set woman with a beautiful smile. “Whaddya got?” she said. He handed her the subpoena.
She looked at it and went back into the rows of shelving. I could hear her singing softly to herself. “La-di-da-di-Lordy-Lordy-la-di-da-di …” In a moment she came back and handed Mr. Dure a thin folder.
There was a small, beat-up table against the wall behind us with two chairs, and we took the document there and sat. Mr. Dure read it quickly, then studied the photographs at the back of it. He photographed the report and its attachments with his phone. Then he slid it over to me to look at, while he got up and went to the counter again.
I studied the document carefully. It was a police Incident Report about the unaccompanied death of Richard Hargrave. It was a simple two-page printed form which had been filled in by, I guess, the police officer. The writing was neat block printing. A typed continuation page and several photographs were stapled to it. The report gave a bunch of details, including the time the patrol officer had “responded to the scene,” 06:36 a.m. The photographs showed the interior of the sauna we had inspected an hour ago. In the corner was the corpse. It was sitting on the upper bench, naked, stretched out and leaning back into the corner, with its feet on the lower bench. The photos were in color. The face was kind of purplish and the rest of the skin a brownish-red. What was really disgusting was that the skin was stretched taut, like it had shrunk, and it had long furrows in it, like I have seen on over-cooked turkeys. The champagne bucket was on the floor. It was large and oval shaped, like Blake Culler had said. From the angle from which the photograph had been taken, you couldn’t see the inside bottom of the bucket.
“Alright. You owe me, now.” I heard the voice of the woman who had got the file, and then a clank of metal. I got up and took the report back to the counter. The champagne bucket was there on the counter in front of Mr. Dure. He was taking pictures of it with his phone.
“Look this over,” he said to me.
It was the biggest champagne bucket I’d ever seen – not that I’ve seen that many. It was bright silver – I could tell it was silver because there was some tarnish underneath the lip. The name “Dom Dormeur” was etched into the side of it.
Mr. Dure got from the clerk the form necessary to obtain the release of the bucket back to his client. “Let’s go,” he said.
We walked back across the street. As we went in the front door of his office, he said to me, “Something I saw in that police report troubles me.”
Before I could ask him what it was, he was speaking to Kara. “Get me a medical authorization,” he said.
Then to me he said, “I want you to take this authorization to Mortimer Golden. He’s the executor of Mr. Hargrave’s estate. Get him to sign it.” He looked at the clock. “It’s too late for us to talk to the doctor, but you probably can get it signed yet today. We’ll use it first thing in the morning.”
To Kara again, “Call Dr. Amalfitano’s office and make an appointment for us to visit him first thing in the morning.”
“What time?” said Kara.
“First thing,” said Mr. Dure. “As early as possible.”
He took the form which Kara gave him, quickly filled in some blanks, and gave it back to her. Then he disappeared back into his own office, leaving me, with Kara’s help, to figure out where Mr. Golden’s office was. I never did get lunch that day.
The next morning was the first morning I that I felt a reluctance to go to work. It was because I hadn’t gotten the medical authorization signed. Mr. Dure had said that the first thing we were going to do was to visit Dr. Amalfitano, but without the authorization, it probably would be useless to do so. I felt like I did a long time ago, in the fourth grade, when I didn’t have my homework done.
But I had to go in and face the music. The morning sun was harsh. Other people on the sidewalk and crossing the street seemed happy or in a hurry to go to work, walking with quick steps, sipping to-go coffees, talking in pairs. Let me get it over with, I said to myself as I pulled open the door.
Kara was already at her desk in the reception area. She gave me such a nice cheerful greeting that I had to be nice to her. Because I had been so anxious when I got up, I had decided to wear one of my favorite dresses as a boost to my spirits. It was forest green with small yellow and white flowers. Kara noticed and gave me a nice compliment on it. It cheered me up, and I said “Good morning, Kara,” as if there was nothing wrong.
However, the unsigned authorization in my purse was like a radioactive thing. I decided to go right into Mr. Dure’s office and tell him, rather than wait for him and prolong my agony. His door was open and I crossed the threshold. He was at his desk working. As soon as I entered he looked up. “Ready to go?” he said.
“Mr. Golden wouldn’t sign the authorization,” I said.
I had a hard time reading his face, but it seemed unfriendly. “You couldn’t get it done,” he said. “Hmm. Sit down and tell me what happened.”
I sat down and he questioned me in detail. What had Mr. Golden been doing when I first saw him? What was the first thing I said, exact words? What had been the first thing that Mr. Golden had said? The next thing? Where had I spoken with him? He questioned me in detail like he had done Mr. Culler the day before. He did not seem angry, but I could not understand the intense questioning. After a while he stopped and looked at me with a thoughtful expression. He steepled his fingers under his nose as he often does. “Alright,” he finally said. He picked up his phone and spoke to Kara, asking her to get Mr. Golden on the phone for him. Then we sat and waited in silence.
“He might not be in so early,” I offered. It was ten minutes to eight.
Mr. Dure made no reply. He said nothing and it seemed like we sat forever, but according to the clock, it was only three minutes later when Kara transferred a call to Mr. Dure’s extension.
“Mr. Golden, good morning,” said Mr. Dure into the phone. He put a smile in his voice.
Pause.
“I understand that you had some objection to signing the medical release that my associate brought over to you yesterday.”
Pause.
“Can I answer any questions about it for you?”
Pause.
“Would you prefer that I serve a subpoena for your deposition?”
Pause.
“I’ll have my secretary e-mail the form to you. You can sign it and fax it back.”
Pause.
“Yeah. We’ll do it right away. I appreciate your cooperation.”
He hung up the telephone. He called Kara and gave her instructions.
“We should have the form in a few minutes,” he said to me.
* * *
We drove through Canterbury’s morning traffic for about twenty minutes and came to a complex of medical buildings on the outskirt of town. Mr. Dure drove right to Dr. Amalfitano’s office as if he knew the way. I tried to study the signboard with all the different names and practices listed on it, but he drove past it so quickly that I could only get a glimpse.
The waiting room had lots of people in it. At the nurse’s window, Mr. Dure didn’t say anything, but just handed her his card. “Go on back,” she said, pointing to a door to our left.
I followed him. We came to an office to which the door was open and he reached his arm in and knocked on the open door. “Walter, come in!” said a cheerful voice. He and I went in, and the doctor was standing up behind his desk and smiling. The doctor and Mr. Dure g
reeted each other as if they were old friends, and then Mr. Dure introduced me as his “colleague,” and the doctor reached across the desk to shake my hand. His hand was warm and dry and had a friendly feeling in it. We all sat.
“What brings you to my office today?” said the doctor. His eyes twinkled.
“Angie, I’ve got some questions about a guy for whom you did an insurance physical,” said Mr. Dure. (The doctor’s first name was Angelo. I really liked that Mr. Dure called him “Angie.”) Mr. Dure took the medical authorization from his jacket pocket and handed it to the doctor, who took it and glanced at it for no more than three seconds. “This is my copy?” he said.
Mr. Dure nodded. “You know that Mr. Hargrave died?” he said.
“Saw it in the paper,” said the doctor.
“So you know he died in a sauna,” said Dure. “The death certificate says ‘acute myocardial infarction secondary to hyperthermia.’ But, he was healthy enough to get a three million dollar life insurance policy just three weeks before he died.”
“Right.” The doctor nodded.
“He also was used to the sauna,” said Dure. “Belonged to the health club, been taking saunas for years. Does this add up?”
“The guy was as strong as an ox,” said the doctor. “Gave him a stress test, EKG,” the doctor was shaking his head, “Passed with flying colors.”
“Wouldn’t that make him an unlikely candidate for a heart attack?”
“Medicine is an inexact science. I had a patient once, about Hargrave’s age in fact, and a bit heavy like him too, but active. He cycled regularly. Had a group of fellows would go for a long ride on Saturdays. One week the group met, and while they were waiting for everyone to arrive, this guy bends over his cycle to adjust the toe strap on his pedal. After a while, the other guys notice that he has been fiddling with that strap for a long time, they start to tease him, but he doesn’t respond – he was dead. Heart just gave out while he was bending over. Should never have happened, but it did. Am I surprised that Hargrave had a heart attack? – yes. Am I shocked? – no.”
“However,” said Mr. Dure, “this cyclist patient of yours, you did not give him an insurance physical and an EKG a week before he died, and conclude that he was in excellent health?”
The doctor’s eyebrows went up as he nodded his head and said, “That is true.”
Mr. Dure took out his phone. I could see that he was bringing up the pictures he had taken of the police report yesterday. He pulled up a picture of the corpse and handed his phone across the desk to the doctor. “That look like a heart attack?” he asked.
The doctor’s eyes went round and his eyebrows went up another click. “That’s quite a specimen,” he said. “It could be myocardial infarction … there’s the cyanosis in the face … of course, I can’t make a diagnosis from a photograph.” He handed back the phone.
“The guy’s wife is suing his ex-wife, claiming that the ex-wife, who runs the health club where that sauna is located, negligently caused his death. I don’t know how much of this is motivated by old rivalries and maybe some preexisting hostility between the two women … I don’t know how much of it is about money … but in any event, I’m going to need expert medical testimony. You’re already familiar with the decedent because you did the physical. You think we could work together on this case?”
“Don’t know why not,” said the doctor.
Mr. Dure started laughing. This surprised me. In the brief time I had been working for him, I had not seem him laugh or smile much. “Remember that case we had with the guy who got punched in the mouth?” he said. “You wired up his jaw and sutured the inside of his lips? and only gave him a little hole at the side of his mouth where he could use a straw?”
The doctor nodded and laughed quietly, his chest and stomach quivering like jello.
A mellow moment ensued with no one saying anything. It seemed to me that the two men were contemplating a better world that was just out of reach, or that had once, briefly, existed and then disappeared.
Mr. Dure stood up. “Thank you for your time, doctor,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.” They shook hands and Dr. Amalfitano reached across and shook my hand, and said how nice it had been to meet me.
Chapter 7. The benefits of life insurance
The mood at the large round table at the front of the restaurant at the lunch hour at the Great Catch Sports Bar would not settle. It oscillated from up to down, from smiles to long faces, from a sense of abundance to a sense of loss. Elizabeth MacCreedy had invited her children, plus Stephanie’s husband and John’s fiancee, for lunch. “Might as well spend it while I’ve still got it,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Stephanie, rolling up her eyes while leaning forward to raise a spoonful of soup to her mouth. Her husband, Adam, sitting next to her, had an expression of perplexity on his face.
“I’m afraid that the lawsuit which your step-mother filed is going to cost a fortune,” said MacCreedy. “And what if I lose!”
This remark occasioned a moment of quiet, of cessation of eating and exchanging of glances between Stephanie and Adam, between John and his fiancee, Brooke, and lastly, between John and Stephanie.
“Don’t worry, Mom --” said John.
“No insurance!” said his mother, interrupting him.
“What I was going to say,” said John, “is that Stephie and I are going to get a million each in life insurance money. You don’t have to worry about money. Right Sis?”
“That’s nice of you kids,” said MacCreedy. “But your father wanted you to have that money” – at the mention of the recently deceased paterfamilias, sad expressions came out, and sighs – “and, um ….” She did not finish her thought.
“Look, Mom, a million bucks is way more than either of us need,” said John.
“That’s right,” broke in Adam, with an overeager smile on his face. He patted his wife on the back. “We don’t need the full million. Don’t worry about anything.” He turned to look his wife full in the face with a big grin.
“Apparently, there’s no telling when the estate will be settled,” said MacCreedy. “The whole situation is just a nightmare.”
Brooke said little during the lunch. She rested her hand under the table on John’s thigh as if to keep herself steady in a rolling sea.
* * *
On the south-western outskirts of Canterbury, just beyond the far edge of the university campus, was a busy four-lane highway, Route 366. A number of businesses were located on a certain stretch of this heavily trafficked road because they drew their customers from a wide radius, extending far beyond Canterbury itself. The atmosphere of sterile anonymity created by endless whizzing traffic and the littered shoulders bestrewn with loose gravel, fast food litter, and scraps of broken tractor-trailer tires, just suited those who patronized the pawn shops, massage parlors, cocktail lounges and low-rent motels.
On a hot, muggy afternoon a man drove into the empty parking lot of the Big Sleep Motel on Route 366. He drove his light blue Chevrolet Malibu along the row of single-story rooms, made a U-turn at the end and drove back to the registration office. Killing the engine, he sat in the car just looking at the surroundings. The bright sun quickly heated the interior of the car to roasting temperature and forced him out.
He was of middle height, his build like that of a boxer who had let himself get out of shape. He had a pasty complexion, short, something darker than blond hair, and looked to be in his early 30’s. He opened the rear door of the car and took from the back seat an inexpensive, nondescript, pale gray suit jacket and, with a casually arrogant air, put it on. He stretched his arms out to get the shoulders of the jacket to rest in the right place, and finished his ritual with a sharp shrug to make the sleeves and front panels fall into their comfortable places.
He went into the motel and negotiated ten dollars off the rate the clerk quoted him for a two-night stay. The name he wrote on the registration card was Benton Wright. His name had made him the
subject of some inept teasing when he was in school, but he was secretly proud of three things about the way he had conducted his life so far: his Associate of Arts degree from the Metropole Community College; forty thousand dollars in cash in a safety deposit box in a bank in a town where he had no other presence; and, like a diamond encased in molybdenum and hidden in the center of his heart, his determination to be rich.
He had grown up in upstate New York in a smallish town on the remoter outskirts of a city. Due to several universities in the city and a number of defense industries in the area, his town had a surface luster: the highly-rated public schools, the newly-constructed, palatial library and uber-palatial fire department, and several old, but well-maintained churches. But underneath this upper layer of prosperity and weal was a roiling culture of decadence supported by crime, drugs, and prostitution, and which produced in its turn, lives of intoxication, sexual depravity, and violence.
The old factories which had manufactured consumer goods, the huge light-bulb plant, the television plant, the air-conditioning manufacturer, had all fled overseas, even a small candle factory gone out of business, leaving behind unemployment for thousands of persons with mere high school diplomas. Benton’s father was one of the unemployed, and as far as Benton could tell – he didn’t know for sure what his father did while Benton was in school – when Benton was at home, his father sat in front of the television drinking beer. His mother supported the family by selling real estate.
It was probably unavoidable that in junior high and high school Benton should become involved in the decadent subculture which pervaded the small town. One thing which astounded him was that the children of those who seemed to him to be the highest class, the doctors, lawyers, scientists, even the school principal, were among the most corrupt and ruthless. Apparently their parents had no clue what their children were doing.
But one thing became clear to him, that he did not have what it would take to run with the worst, that is, the most dominant and powerful, of this underworld. He somehow knew, and felt it to be a weakness and defect on his part, that he could not have done some of the acts of wanton cruelty and amorality which he observed. So, to get a reputation that would keep him from being a victim, he learned to box and competed as an amateur. He felt lucky when he was able to escape the town and attend community college.
