At the Scene of the Crime (31 page)

“Of course, my duties as local medical examiner didn’t relieve me of my responsibilities as the Taconite Company staff physician, however distracted I felt. So the next morning, a Wednesday, I went by Ralph Parker’s office to discuss the results of the blood drive and my plans for TB screening. I could hardly bear the thought of seeing him, but there was no way to avoid it.

“From the outset I’d despised Parker, known inevitably as ‘Ace.’ I’d known we weren’t compatible as soon as I interviewed with him in Minneapolis, before I even got the job. Parker was the mine superintendent, Taconite’s top man in Sioux Junction, and the embodiment of everything I’ve always detested: loud, vulgar, facile in his dealings with others, glibly charming when he wanted to be, ever the glad-hander and coarse jokester. The kind of man who was always touching people. A big hand grasping your bicep, a squeeze to the secretaries’ shoulders, a little pat or too-long kiss for the wives.

“He was popular, of course; such men usually are. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he had a sort of animal virility that women seem to find irresistible, without making men feel threatened. He wasn’t a large man, no more than five-ten, but he had a good physique and was bull strong, liked to pitch in from time to time on some job at the mine requiring muscle, which endeared him to the workers. I’d seen him leave a group of miners with eighth-grade educations laughing like he was their best friend, while he hosted touring groups of steel company executives with the bluff self-assurance of a man utterly in command of his domain. The secretaries found his boorish innuendo vastly amusing, while the younger men in management thought Parker the ideal boss. They’d traipse off with him to Hibbing, and a few times a year to Minneapolis or Chicago, and when they’d return I’d have to suffer through raucous accounts of the drunken revels, the women they picked up, the idiotic references to ‘ore houses,’ followed by gales of laughter.

“Mrs. Parker was a meek, washed-out blonde with smeared, crimson lipstick. I’d met her when they’d had me over for huge slabs of burned meat
shortly after I arrived. She seemed cowed by him, following him with her eyes, the first to laugh at his jokes, hanging on his blather.

“There was a group of us that night in the Parkers’ back yard: loud, tipsy laughter and everybody kissing someone else’s spouse. I’d turned down the next invitation and they stopped asking. I’d heard remarks, sickening remarks, that implied Parker might have struck his wife on occasion, but it was a measure of the degraded standards by which men like that are measured that these stories seemed to have done nothing to diminish his standing, even with the women. Perhaps, especially with the women.

“Men like Parker, who seemed to go through life as though it existed solely for their gratification, had always disgusted me. By the time I came to his office that morning, I loathed the man. But there was business to be done.

“Parker started each day with a visit to the pit, and hadn’t arrived when I got to his office, so I availed myself of his bathroom, noting with disgust the bottles of aftershave and hair pomade. Then I settled in a chair and tried to distract myself by flipping through Parker’s copy of
Mine Journal
, but nothing would keep the image of that poor girl’s broken body out of my mind.

“For the fact was, Madelaine Birney had occupied a far larger role in my life than my account to the sheriff had implied. I had, in fact, been in love with her, the first woman for whom I’d ever held this feeling. Indeed, the only woman for whom I ever would.

“I’d met her at the church, as I’d said. What I hadn’t told them, because it seemed . . . pathetic . . . in light of events, was that I had been wildly, insanely smitten from the first I laid eyes on her. I knew it would eventually come out that we’d been seen together, but under the circumstances I’d been in no mood to share my shattered dreams with strangers.

“I’d approached her after choir practice, that first night. I’d nervously praised her playing, stumbling awkwardly and feeling the fool, but she’d at once put me at my ease, as no girl had before her. She had blue eyes that looked right into mine, and freckles on her nose, and a quiet self-assurance
that wasn’t at all like the brassy familiarity of the other single women I’d encountered.

“Somehow I found myself having coffee with her that night. Then, a few days later, dinner, then a drive in the country, a tour of the reservation, once a deliriously perfect picnic in the woods on a hot August day. She had even had me over for dinner. She burned the chicken. I thought it ambrosial. I fixed her lamp, and felt so . . . manly.

“She punctured my pomposity, but in such a kind, gentle way that I simply felt better for it, and I was quite convinced that she was my destiny. I had never even worked up the courage to kiss her, yet for a few perfect months my every waking moment had been filled with visions of a life with her, with Mrs. Lester Stork. She would play the piano and I would sing. I would come home to perfect meals and perfect children, and we would lie in front of the fire and listen to records. I could even see the house, a perfect little cottage down a country lane. Maddie would soften my father, then humanize him. There would never be a word of reproach or anger between us.

“It was a married life such as can only exist in the mind of a man or woman who has never married, and for whom the other is an unrealizable ideal. I know that now. Maddie was sweet, and gentle, and pretty in the way of clean, wholesome young women scarcely out of girlhood, but she was no more ready or able to carry the weight of my fantasies than any other real person would have been. In the days just before her death I think I’d begun to realize that Maddie had never held the feelings for me I’d harbored for her, that in my inexperience I had mistaken her natural kindness and warmth for something more. Had there been time, had she lived, I expect I would have come to see her as I gather so many men see their first loves, as warm and amusing memories. But evil robbed us of that time.

“Parker blew away my thoughts with his sudden arrival, the random, animal energy so at odds with the clinical detachment I’d forced myself to adopt in my dealings with him. I literally flinched under the heavy weight of his hand as it fell on my shoulder, had to clench my teeth at the unfeeling jocularity of his ‘How ya doin’ Doc,’ that on previous occasions had set my teeth on edge.

“I was relieved, actually, by his manner, which was normal for him. I’d had some concern that the sheriff would have spoken to him of Maddie’s death, simply because nothing went on in Sioux Junction that wasn’t thought to be properly the business of the Taconite Company’s representative. I’d even feared a crude remark about Maddie, some foul irreverence that would have put me at his throat, but the sheriff had evidently followed his own orders, and the news had not spread. After Parker had kept me waiting long enough to remind me of my insignificance, and I’d gotten his signature on a requisition, I left, pleased, and at the same time rather shocked, that I’d been able to comport myself as though it was simply another day, as though Madelaine’s body wasn’t awaiting me at the mortuary.

“You ask how I became a criminalist? Well, it was that night, after a day of obsessing about Maddie, a day that had included the single most difficult thing I have ever done, her autopsy. No doubt I could have left it to the state medical examiner. Perhaps I should have. It never occurred to me. I conducted the procedure in a thoroughly professional manner, with an icy dispassion. And I doubt the most experienced pathologist in the country could have done more than I did.

“There is a popular belief that the time of death can be fixed, almost to the minute, but this is a myth. There is an almost infinite number of variables that can affect the indicia, and the truth is, lacking an eyewitness any estimate of time of death is at best a skilled guess. Nonetheless, when I finished I was prepared to say, with reasonable medical certainty, that Maddie had been killed some time between ten and midnight the previous Monday, October sixteenth. I won’t go into the clinical details, but I recorded them in my notes, and was confident any other competent pathologist would concur with my conclusion. I called the sheriff ’s office and left this information with Deputy Tongren.

“I recorded only one other thing of significance, that even now, after having given it no thought these many years, leaves me feeling hollow. I determined that she had had intercourse, apparently consensual, shortly
before she was murdered.

“Now, it seemed to me, the man responsible for her death had first robbed her of her innocence, that quality that had drawn me like nectar, and I was more determined than ever that he should pay, and at my hands. DNA testing didn’t exist then, so I went back to her apartment to find the evidence that would attach a name to her killer. I was sure I’d find it.

“It wasn’t difficult. Afterwards, people said I’d ‘broken the case’ through ‘painstaking detective work.’ The local paper made me sound like a latter-day Sherlock Holmes, and that was indeed why I got the offer in Chicago, but it was nonsense. I was motivated, certainly, far more motivated than a police investigator for whom this would have been just another murder, but I have worked on vastly more difficult cases since.

“I made no effort to conceal my presence. I was the authorized county medical examiner, and if anyone challenged me, I felt I had every right to make any reasonable investigation into the circumstances of Madelaine Birney’s death. The sheriff, I knew, would not be pleased, but I really didn’t care.

“I knew, from dropping Maddie off, that she kept a spare key under a flower box. I found it, unlocked the door, and went up the stairs.

“I had only a moment’s hesitation, when I stood on the threshold of the apartment, and the smell of dried blood and the sight of that ghastly brown stain on the carpet made my knees buckle. But I forced myself to proceed. Maddie had mentioned once that she was a devoted diarist, and I had a notion that her journal, if I could find it, would help me destroy her destroyer. So I pressed on.

“I had never been in a woman’s bedroom. Under other circumstances I probably would have been overwhelmed by the assault on my senses, but my purpose took me straight to the bedside table, and in the drawer, just as I had guessed, I found the diary, bound in red leather. I opened it at random.

“The malicious fate so active that week had taken me to the entry for August seventh, in her fine, even, light-blue script: ‘Picnic and walk in woods with funny old L.’

“‘Funny old L.’ My stomach heaved and I flipped back to read sequentially, from the beginning. And gradually, sickeningly, it became clear.

“‘April 4—Flat tire. Nice man stopped to help.’ ‘April 5—Man who changed tire called to see if OK.’ ‘April 8—Crazy! Drink with tire hero—sweet man.’

“Flipping ahead: ‘May 18—Oh, God—think I’m falling in love. But he’s married!’

“‘May 23—Dinner in Hibbing. Kisses, such a yearning. He wanted to go to a hotel, I said no. Such a yearning, how can it be wrong? Oh, God!’

“‘May 27—Am I evil? I don’t care he’s married! His wife is a horror. Father rolling in grave, and I don’t care!’

“And then: ‘May 30—I did it! Did it, did it, did it! I am a wanton WHORE, and I love it!!! And HE loves ME!!!’

Sick, numb, turning the pages mechanically: ‘June 17—Ralph’s wife is a bitch, he’s never loved her, but he can’t leave her.’

“‘Ralph.’ The name swam before my eyes, but there it was again: ‘June 23—“Mrs. Ralph Parker”—Oh, God, can it ever be? We love each other so. When I am in his arms, when I feel him in me, I . . .’

“I read on, every sickening word, more and more graphic. Now it was clear, now I could see why she hadn’t responded to me.

“You must understand, this was nineteen fifty-four, and I knew nothing of women’s inner lives. In my sheltered fantasy world, women, especially a woman I could care for, were pure, vestal, unsullied by anything base or animalistic. For me, then . . .well, to say I was horrified wouldn’t begin to describe what I felt toward Parker. Revulsion, disgust, and most of all, blind, unreasoning hatred. I felt only pity for her, and love.

“I came to the last entry, October fourteenth, the previous Saturday. ‘I can stand it no longer, I must have Ralph. I told him we had to tell his wife, that if he wouldn’t, I would. We quarreled horribly, he says it would cost his job. Is this the end? I have never been more miserable, I think I shall die.’

“And so a man I had already despised had robbed me of the chance for love. I left then, seeing my course clearly.

“I was busy that night. First, I went to the office. It was late, and no one was there. I often worked late, on my research, so I went in quite openly, and did my business. And then . . .

“Well, the next morning I went to the sheriff ’s office. He was out but over a cup of coffee Deputy Tongren told me they’d had a break. ‘The nosy neighbor called this morning. Just remembered she’d seen someone, from the size she thinks it was a man, leaving the girl’s apartment Monday night. Ten-thirty sharp, she knows ‘cause she waited’ til her show ended to let the cat out.’

“My heart jumped. Parker! ‘Could she identify him?’ I asked.

“‘Too dark, but it confirms your time of death estimate.’

“I nodded, pleased at that. The sheriff arrived and I gave them the diary, quickly summarizing the contents and the conclusion: ‘Ralph Parker killed her. She was going to tell his wife, and he killed her.’

“The sheriff was aghast. ‘God, man—you can’t be . . .’ He broke off as he thought about the insult to his authority. ‘You went in there? You had no right—’

“I had no time for his posturing. ‘I don’t think you’ll be complaining about that when you bring in the man who did this, since you’ll get the credit. Now, suppose we conduct the search that should have been conducted two days ago?’

“He wasn’t happy with me, but had no choice, and soon we were back in the apartment. This time I felt none of the dislocation that had afflicted me before, and very much in charge. ‘Sheriff, why don’t you and I search the bedroom, while Deputy Tongren searches out here?’ I didn’t wait for his concurrence.