The Candidate Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  “Western Washington is rather pedestrian for a rich family.” Fenway laughed. “Anyway, thank you for saving me from having to talk about Terrance Ivanovich.”

  “You know I’ve got your back.”

  “So,” Fenway said, “we didn’t really have time to brief on this dinner.”

  “You’ll just be introduced. No big speeches at this one. It’s more of a rub-elbows thing, and the press shows it off as a who’s-who in Estancia.”

  “Cameras?”

  “You can see them out here,” said Millicent, “like this is some sort of red-carpet event before the Oscars. But they usually don’t let cameras in there. I’ve been requesting they make an exception for weeks now. Flattery, freedom of information requests, offering to pay to record the university president’s speech—they haven’t even returned my calls. I’m not surprised—most of the candidates don’t want to be filmed in a poorly-lit ballroom with a mouthful of dry chicken. I’ll do what I can, but I think they want the cameras to stay in the foyer.”

  They both started to walk toward the double doors to enter the banquet hall. “Did Ivanovich ever make some sort of statement about what happened with his son?” Fenway said in a low voice. “Maybe that’s why Cynthia brought it up.”

  Millicent shook her head. “I haven’t heard a peep from Ivanovich, unless you count seeing his ridiculous ad a few times today.”

  “Think he’s going to say anything about it tonight?”

  “Not if he’s smart,” Millicent said. “I heard a rumor he was going to blame it all on you, saying you somehow framed his son, you’re bringing race into it, blah blah blah. But we had the son’s prison record ready for release, and we even found Dr. Ivanovich’s name on a donation list to the local chapter of White Storm.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Now—it’s possible he simply thought his kid was having a fundraiser and didn’t know what it was for. But I think he heard we had more ammunition than he could deal with.”

  “How come you didn’t hit him with the son’s prison record and the White Storm stuff when you saw his ad?”

  “Because,” Millicent said, “the ad we just talked about will be far more effective. It uses his momentum against him. It doesn’t allow him to change the subject, and the point he makes will become a point for you.”

  Officer Young in his dashing tuxedo appeared by Fenway’s side. “Sorry,” he said. “The line was long at the bar. They started calling for everyone to sit down before I could get you champagne.”

  The lights started to dim and Millicent stepped away. “Okay, now go in there and sit.”

  “You’re not sitting with me?”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  Fenway realized she wouldn’t have a lot of choice where to sit because she waited so long to go in, but she hoped it would work in her favor: she didn’t want to sit anywhere near Dr. Richard Ivanovich or her father, and perhaps the seats at their tables would all be taken. But even in the fading light she could see the larger tables at the front of the banquet room were empty, with name cards on them. Her heart sank.

  She approached the tables, and spied her name on one of the cards. A placard simply stating Guest was above the next placesetting.

  “That must be me,” Officer Young said. He pulled Fenway’s chair out for her, and she sat. Officer Young took the guest seat to her right.

  She looked at the small menu card on the table; dinner was a spinach salad, then pheasant in mushroom and wine sauce, then a chocolate mousse for dessert. Better than the barely edible food she was used to at most of the campaign events.

  She looked to her right; her father’s placard was next to Officer Young. She didn’t see him. She looked to her left; the placard read Imelda Ivanovich. Ah, she thought, the missus. She wondered what had happened at home to make the son turn into a white supremacist. She looked behind her, toward the entrance.

  She saw Dr. Ivanovich and a thin, raven-haired woman in a cream dress with a gauzy burgundy wrap coming toward the table.

  “Not a word about Terrance,” she breathed to Officer Young. “We’re trying to keep the conversation somewhat decent before the election.”

  “I saw those commercials he ran today,” Officer Young said. “I don’t call that decent.”

  “Still,” Fenway said, “it looks better for me if I keep things decent.”

  “I don’t work for your campaign,” Officer Young said. “Maybe I should arrest Ivanovich as an accessory.”

  “Please, Todd.” Fenway looked in his eyes, pleading.

  He sighed. “I’ll keep my mouth shut,” he said, “but only because I need to stick with you tonight. As soon as I’m off Fenway Protection Duty, I’m going to give that guy both barrels.” He coughed. “Not literally, of course.”

  “Thank you,” Fenway mouthed, squeezing his hand gently as the Ivanoviches sat down. Fenway put her hand in her lap. She looked at Imelda Ivanovich and smiled. Imelda shot daggers at Fenway with her eyes.

  Maybe she believes her husband’s press, Fenway thought.

  Fenway turned back to the front of the room.

  A white man with a salt-and-pepper van dyke, in a beige suit inappropriate for autumn, got up to the lectern in front of the hall. He cleared his throat and his thin, reedy voice sliced through the silence of the room.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Dr. Alfred Pruitt, the president of Nidever University, and I’m proud to host our forty-seventh biannual George Nidever Dinner. When this tradition began, the school was in its infancy, and Dominguez County wasn’t the international crossroads it is today.”

  Fenway looked closely at Dr. Pruitt, but found no trace of joking or irony in his face.

  International crossroads. As if Estancia, whose international airport had two weekly flights to Guadalajara, could reasonably be called an international crossroads.

  Although as she looked around the room, there were a lot more people of color in the room than she expected. She wasn’t the only person of color running for office; there was a black candidate for associate judge, and two Filipinos, a man and a woman, running for the state assembly seat and the board of education, respectively.

  “Back then, after World War I had ended, California was nowhere near the populous state it is today. This area was full of orchards, and a fur trapper and explorer named George Nidever inspired a group of academics from the east coast to journey west to found this great university.”

  Fenway looked around the room and caught Catherine Klein yawning. Mrs. Klein was in a bright red evening gown, more red-carpet formal than Fenway’s dress, but as the potential first lady of the town, Catherine could get away with wearing a cocktail dress, where a candidate couldn’t.

  Fenway looked around the room, hoping a camera had been let in by some miracle, and might be aiming right at the yawning Catherine Klein. But no such luck.

  Barry Klein was on his wife’s right, with Sheriff McVie on her left, with an empty seat on the sheriff’s other side. He obviously didn’t have a guest to bring, going through the divorce from Amy.

  Dr. Pruitt continued to drone on about the storied history of George Nidever, and put a glossy sheen on the story of Nidever and the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, and embellished the legend of Nidever staring down a grizzly bear, and bragged of Nidever’s influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson...

  Fenway allowed her mind to drift. She wondered if she could surreptitiously sneak her phone out and text Dez. And then start cleaning up some of the voicemails in her inbox. Millicent herself probably was responsible for ninety percent of them.

  She quietly pulled the phone out of her purse and texted Dez.

  We’re on the wrong track with the Kapp murder

  While she waited for Dez to respond, she brought up her voicemail. She dug around in her purse until she found one of her wireless earbuds. She put it in her ear—one would do—and heard the tone as the phone connected. She put the phone
underneath the tabletop and angled it so only she could see it. She looked around; everyone seemed to be pretending to pay attention, and if she could focus mostly on Dr. Pruitt and only occasionally look down at the screen, she could get away with cleaning up her voicemails during his coma-inducing introduction.

  Sure enough, the first five voicemails were from Millicent Tate on Friday night, each one asking where she was, why she wasn’t checking in, and asking for a phone call as soon as possible. The number of swear words in each message seemed to increase logarithmically.

  The next voicemail was from her father, hurried and frantic, not the calm demeanor he usually possessed. Fenway looked at the screen; he must have left it right after Charlotte had been led away in handcuffs.

  Another four voicemails from Millicent Tate from Saturday, and then another two this morning. A reminder about the eleven o’clock therapist appointment with dear old Dad. Then another with the screaming and swearing, again with the not knowing where Fenway was, missing the senior center event.

  A text came in. Fenway glanced down, hoping Dez had responded. But it was from Millicent.

  Put your phone away or so help me I will come over there and shove it up your ass in front of all these people

  Fenway clicked her phone off, pulled the earbud out of her ear, and as stealthily as she could, put them back in her purse. She looked to her right: the Channel 12 camera was coming back up the side of the room toward her table.

  As maddening as Millicent could be sometimes, she was often right.

  Just as she put her purse down on the floor again, she caught her father out of the corner of her eye. He was clumsily moving between the seats, bumping the backs of chairs in his effort to get past the people and up to the front of the room.

  Fenway turned around so he could see her better, but his focus was down on the ground, looking where he was stepping, trying to avoid toes and the bottoms of long dresses.

  She had never seen him so disheveled; he wore a rumpled black suit with a dark tie, although Fenway couldn’t tell in the low light if the tie was navy or black. He owned a tuxedo; in fact, Fenway thought he might have owned more than one. Why wasn’t he in a tux?

  His hair was jutting up in the back, as if he didn’t put any of his normal styling mousse into it, and his shoes were scuffed around the sides.

  His face, though, worried Fenway.

  Though Nathaniel Ferris was nearly sixty, he often had the confidence and bravado of a much younger man. But the lines on his face and the weariness in his eyes told Fenway there was something wrong.

  Of course there was; Charlotte was in jail.

  Fenway wouldn’t have believed it—Nathaniel Ferris loved Charlotte, the twenty-five-year-old girl he had married a decade earlier, so much that he would go to pieces in front of Fenway’s eyes when Charlotte wasn’t around.

  Charlotte had always seemed vapid, vacant, unfeeling; obviously Fenway hadn’t seen the things in Charlotte her father had.

  Ferris finally got to the table and sat down heavily next to Officer Young. He leaned over and caught Fenway’s eye.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he mouthed.

  Fenway nodded and shrugged, hoping her father would understand the shrug meant no worries, you didn’t miss much. She looked to the back of the room and saw Millicent sneak out into the foyer.

  Then she was surprised by sudden applause. She looked up; the two candidates for assembly stood up and waved, a spotlight focused on them. Fenway adjusted the skirt of her dress and pushed the chair back a bit so she could easily get up when the two coroner candidates were asked to stand.

  A few offices were introduced before the coroner candidates, but when Dr. Pruitt finished talking about how Dominguez County separated their coroner and sheriff positions over a decade previous—nothing Fenway hadn’t heard or even explained herself a dozen times in the last six months—he finally said, “And for county coroner, two candidates: Dr. Richard Ivanovich and Acting Coroner Fenway Stevenson!”

  Applause broke out around the room. Fenway thought it sounded much more enthusiastic than for the other offices, and she looked around. A lot of people seemed to be casting admiring looks her way.

  Dr. Richard Ivanovich stood up, and Imelda, right next to him, stood a split second afterward. Fenway caught McVie’s eye across the table and he gave her a warm smile. She pushed her chair back slightly and stood, looking around at everyone in the room with her warmest, friendliest smile, feeling fake, the spotlight blinding her.

  Then the spotlight moved off them, and Imelda Ivanovich was staring at her, a sneer on her face.

  She spit at Fenway, and it landed on her left cheek.

  Fenway heard a few gasps.

  Then an arm shunted her out of the way. She was pushed back against the chair and almost lost her balance, but she caught herself on the table just in time.

  Officer Young stepped in front of her—he must have pushed her to the side. He had a pair of handcuffs out, and Imelda Ivanovich’s sneer changed to a look of terror. Dr. Ivanovich turned his head to see his wife taken to the floor by Officer Young and rolled on her stomach.

  Richard Ivanovich raised a fist to hit Officer Young,

  “Stop!” Fenway shouted, and grabbed his arm.

  “Get off me, bitch,” he snarled.

  McVie jumped into the middle of it and pulled Ivanovich away from Fenway and Officer Young. “Richard! You don’t want to do that!”

  And Imelda was screaming a stream of racial slurs.

  “Imelda Ivanovich,” Officer Young said, trying to catch his breath, “you’re under arrest for assault and battery of a peace officer under California Penal Code 240.”

  Fenway looked up. Most of the other attendees had looks of shock on their faces.

  And she saw Millicent Tate, in the back the room near the double doors, next to a man holding the Channel 12 camera, aimed directly onto the action, the red light brightly lit. Fenway reached up to discreetly wipe the spit off, then realized being discreet would waste an opportunity. She turned to face the camera, picked up a napkin off the table, and dabbed her face. McVie had pushed his way through and was standing next to her.

  “Are you okay?” said McVie.

  “I’m fine. It’s just spit,” Fenway said, a little louder than she normally would have if the camera hadn’t been on her. “It’s not like she threw a brick through my window.”

  “My son’s a good boy,” Imelda Ivanovich yelled from her prone position on the floor, hands cuffed behind her. “You broke his hand! And for what? You’re ruining his life!”

  The camera had picked up that, for sure.

  Fenway wondered how this was going to play out. Had enough people in the room seen Imelda Ivanovich spit on Fenway? Had the Channel 12 camera entered the room in time to capture it? Would the events unfold in the media showing Fenway in a positive light, a victim standing strong in the face of adversity, or as a bully, using the politics of color to intimidate her opponents into submission?

  From her position next to the cameraman, Millicent Tate grinned widely and gave Fenway a thumbs-up.

  “I guess that answers that,” Fenway muttered.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  BY THE TIME THE CROWD had settled down, it was clear the coroner candidates were no longer going to be part of the forty-seventh biannual George Nidever Dinner. A man in a tuxedo with an earpiece shunted Fenway into one of the classrooms off the main hall. Her stomach growled, loudly this time.

  She sat in one of the student chairs, remembering her last on-campus class, barely seven months before, at Seattle University. It had been a half-lecture, half-lab class, and she fondly remembered her professor and the lab work they had done. At one point they had done work identifying insects on rotting pig meat—the closest analog for human flesh without using actual cadavers. Her lab partner, a tall white man, about twenty-three, with sixteen-inch biceps, couldn’t make it through any class that week without throwing up. “I don’t know how you do it,
” he said, turning green again on the last day, when she was taking South American dung beetle larvae out of a pit in the pig flesh. He bolted for the door.

  She smiled fondly at the memory, and the door opened to reveal Dez.

  “Why Miss Stevenson, fancy meeting you here,” Dez said. “I’ve come to take your statement on what happened before the, uh, mêlée.”

  “They introduced the coroner candidates,” Fenway said, “and Imelda Ivanovich turned around and spit on me.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Seems pretty straightforward.”

  “Channel 12 caught it on camera, right? I don’t think my memory is any different than what the camera caught.”

  “I saw the footage,” Dez said.

  “And it’s the same, right?”

  “Well,” Dez said, “technically I’m not supposed to tell you if your statement matches the footage.”

  “I know, Dez,” Fenway said, “but there’s a roomful of witnesses.”

  “I heard the names she was calling you, too.”

  “Yep,” Fenway said. “I think I’ve been called names more times in the last three days than the last ten years.”

  Dez shook her head. “Sometimes I think we’ve come so far,” she murmured, “and other times I realize we’re a few hundred votes away from going back a hundred fifty years.”

  Fenway nodded. “Hey—I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, I got your text. You think we’re on the wrong track?”

  “I do.” Fenway paused. “You have some time now?”

  Dez shook her head. “Are you kidding? With the shitstorm going on outside?”

  “But we’re talking about a murder.”

  “And I’m talking about a riot. Sorry, Fenway, I know it’s important, but I’ve got to prioritize. Maybe after I’m done here. Besides, there’s a gentleman outside who’s insisting on speaking with you.”

  “A gentleman?”

  “A detective. Came all the way from up north.”

  “Oh,” Fenway said. “From the Bellingham Major Crimes unit.”