Dead Body Language (25 page)

We’d had enough smoke to take five years off our lives. It was time to depart or get oxygen masks. We thanked the bartender for the half-drunk beers and unopened chips and left in search of a place to take a real food break. The bartender had recommended a restaurant called Al the Wop’s, located in the neighboring ghost town of Locke. Once a Chinese camp for the railroad workers, Locke now featured little more than the restaurant, a couple of Chinese museums, and a handful of antique stores.

“Mind if I make a couple of phone calls before we eat?” Dan asked. “I don’t want to leave Rio Vista without checking the hospital and sheriff’s office.”

I waited in the car while Dan stopped at an antique-looking pay phone and made the calls. I watched his lips repeat the same questions to the phone receiver; he seemed to get the same responses to each call.

Until the last one. Dan’s body language changed dramatically after he asked if there had been any unidentified men who had turned up recently. He stiffened abruptly, placed his finger in his other ear, and turned away so I couldn’t see his lips.

I got out of the car.

“What is it?” I mouthed the words through the glass when I caught Dan’s attention. He turned away from me again. I sat down on the fender of my car and waited, my stomach in knots.

After a few minutes Dan hung up the phone, then paused a moment before leaving the booth, his hand still on the receiver. I got to my feet and moved to the door. Dan slowly pulled open the shattered shatterproof glass door and stepped out.

“That was the local sheriff. They’ve got a floater, a John Doe, pulled from the Delta a few days ago. Sheriff says he’s pretty far gone, but I think we ought to take a look. Are you up for it?”

How do you get up for something like that? I got into the car.

We drove to the next town of Isleton and located the sheriff’s office between a secondhand thrift store and a video parlor. It was definitely a small-town operation, with a main room for greeting the public, a couple of offices, and a one-body morgue located at the back, where we were led.

“You think this might be your brother, huh?” Sheriff Cosetti asked matter-of-factly. “He doesn’t look like much, so prepare yourselves. A body floating in water for a few days can really be a mess. Putrefaction, it’s called. They get kind of bloated, and their skin turns a yellowish white and pasty, and it’s hard to make out the features …” I stopped watching his lips at that point and fell in behind the two men as we walked to the end of the building.

“Well, here we are. Take your time, now. There’s an emesis basin over yonder if you feel queasy, little lady.”

The sheriff opened the door and swept his hand forward, gesturing for us to lead the way. He followed us in, opened up the small refrigerated compartment, and pulled out a body, covered in a translucent plastic body bag. The sheriff unzipped the bag. The blurred features were indistinct.

I almost lost it at the smell, a reek of chemicals and decay forming a sickly sweet odor. I had smelled a variation of it when a mouse had died in my diner and I couldn’t locate it for days. Where was that emesis basin?

The sheriff spread the bag open to reveal the rest of the dead man’s mottled body. “He didn’t have a wallet or anything else that could help us identify him. We figured he must have been a drifter, ’cause nobody in town reported anything. His clothing’s in that bag over there. That’s all that was left.”

“He wore a gold ring—” I started to say, but the sheriff cut me off with a shake of his head.

“No jewelry. The guy was cleaned out, except for his clothes. They even took the earring out of his ear. And his shoes.”

I watched Dan as he braced himself for a thorough viewing. I didn’t want to look anymore than I already had.
But I almost couldn’t help myself. It was like peeking through fingers at a horror movie climax.

The face looked like it had been shaped from gray clay, soft, moist-looking, and mostly colorless. The body was bloated, bluish-white at the top of the chest and abdomen, and dark purplish underneath, where the blood had collected. There was a small bruise above his right nipple. I’d have nightmares for weeks. I started to turn away when Dan grabbed my arm for support.

“It’s him,” he said. I knew.

I could feel nearly the whole of Dan’s weight on my shoulder. I put my arm around his back in my feeble attempt to hold him up.

“It’s him,” he repeated. He lowered his head and covered his eyes.

The sheriff gave him a moment before he spoke. “The tattoo?” He was pointing to the bruise, which on closer inspection was actually a small black-and-red engraving of a heart pierced by a knife.

Dan pressed his eyes.

“I didn’t know he had a tattoo,” I said, surprised. “He never showed it to me. I guess I never saw him without his shirt.”

Dan dropped his hands to his side. His eyes were red-rimmed and welling. “He got it right after … his father died …” I thought he was going to continue but he turned abruptly and walked out of the room.

I met him in the hallway, took his arm, and walked with him to a chair in the main office. He pressed his eyes again with his fingertips, then raised his head. “I’m all right. Sheriff, I’ll … make arrangements for him when I get back to his, uh, the office.”

The sheriff pulled out a clipboard of paperwork Dan needed to complete before we left. At Dan’s insistence, I waited outside in the late afternoon sunlight and thought of old Boone Joslin. He’d had a tough life. And now he was dead. Drowned. Nobody knew why or how. Had he been drunk and fallen into the water? Or had he been drowned deliberately? By a man with the gold ring? I suppressed a wave of nausea.…

Forty-five minutes later Dan and I entered the restaurant recommended by the bartender. Although neither of us had much of an appetite for lunch, we needed a place to think, and a cool beer sounded soothing.

From the outside, Al the Wop’s looked condemned. The small one-lane main street was flanked on either side by rickety, distressed buildings that didn’t appear as if they’d last through the next rainstorm. Locke truly looked like a ghost town, in every sense of the word.

But inside, the restaurant brimmed with energy and life. The restored teak-and-mirrored bar was choked with patrons, most of whom seemed to know one another. The place was filled with the usual country-western bar decor—a stuffed moose, velvet paintings, burl clocks, and silly signs. Dan pointed upward with his thumb and I followed the direction of the gesture; hundreds of dollar bills were glued to the ceiling.

We were seated in the restaurant area away from the bar, in wooden booths painted so thick with layers of lime green paint and Verathane, they might one day be studied by a geologist. We pulled menus from between bookends made from jars of crunchy peanut butter and grape jelly.

Only two choices were listed for lunch and dinner: steak or chicken. If you didn’t like either, you could make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the slices of fluffy white bread the waitress brought to your table. The food smelled good, reminding us we hadn’t eaten for hours—it was nearly two o’clock. I ordered the chicken, Dan had the steak. We split a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the side.

“I’m … sorry about Boone,” I said after awhile, not knowing what else to say. “I didn’t know him all that well, but we were becoming friends. He was always there to help me if I had a problem.”

Dan half smiled. “I didn’t know him that well either, to tell you the truth. He was so much older than me and we didn’t always get along. We had different ways of viewing the world, I guess. I thought maybe this time we’d
find something in common, maybe be able to work together. But I guess he’d gone back to drinking.”

“That surprises me, too. He’s been sober since I’ve known him. I think he attended A.A. meetings on a pretty regular basis. He had one of those ‘One Day at a Time’ stickers on his desk. I asked him about it once and he told me he went to meetings. He didn’t share a lot more, though.”

“He always had a drinking problem,” Dan said. “I was hoping he’d licked it for good, but maybe you never beat something like that. He had a few ghosts he probably wanted to keep at bay. I guess he thought vodka was one way to do it. Unfortunately, it just makes the ghost greater—and more dangerous.”

I wondered if there was something more personal beneath that last statement. It wasn’t the time to ask.

“What do you think happened to him?” I asked, when my mouth wasn’t too sticky from the peanut butter.

“I don’t know. Maybe he was drunk, fell in, couldn’t get out. But what puzzles me is, who was the guy Boone left with?”

“And what about the missing jewelry and shoes? A looter of some kind who preys on drunks?” I took another bite of peanut butter and jelly. I hadn’t had white bread since fifth grade. I wished I could taste it, but right now it was just filling the hole in my upset stomach.

After a few minutes of sitting in silence, the waitress brought the order. I halfheartedly cut up my chicken, while Dan poked his steak around as if it were alive.

“Tell me about Boone,” Dan said, laying his fork down and folding his arms on the table.

I swallowed the piece of chicken I had in my mouth, and took a drink of the beer, composing my reply.

“He was … interesting. Unpredictable. I liked him, but not many people did. He had strange, irritating habits that bothered people. Boone could be loud, I guess, from what people said. Never bothered me of course. He said ‘fuck’ a lot. Used it as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, whatever. Your brother didn’t seem very happy, didn’t laugh much. Never saw any women that I know of. Didn’t
have any close friends. Once a week we’d share a pizza and watch
Murder, She Wrote
on his little TV. We’d both try to guess whodunnit. He never did.”

“How about you?”

“Always. Made him madder than hell. We had a bet going. Whoever guessed the right person didn’t have to pay for the pizza. I never had to pay. But other than that I didn’t see him a lot. We both had our work to do.”

Dan sipped his beer and stabbed the steak distractedly with his fork.

“And you?” I asked. “You were his brother. What was he like for you?”

“Like I said, I didn’t see him a lot. He grew up with a different father, who took off after a while. Then when he was ten, father number two came along, and I arrived soon after. I think both those events kind of displaced him. He started rebelling, getting into trouble, drinking. The drinking seemed to numb a pain he carried with him. I found out later he had beaten pretty regularly by his real father. When his dad finally left, I think Boone was relieved. But when Mom married again, Boone never gave the guy a chance. He left home around fifteen or sixteen, when I was five or six years old.”

“Where did he go? What did he do?”

“We didn’t know for a long time. Heard he joined the service eventually.”

“So you pretty much grew up without him.”

“Yeah. I went to school, got a degree in Administration of Justice, then became a cop for the City of New York. Classic, huh?”

“Wow. You were actually a cop? Why’d you quit?”

“Long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

He chugged his beer and ordered another. I followed suit.

“Boone changed after he got out of the army. I used to get an occasional phone call or letter, depending on whether he was drunk or sober. He seemed to settle down after Vietnam. Went back to school and got his degree, then went on to law school. Kind of ironic. While I was
sending the guys to jail, he was getting them out. Anyway, his drinking was still a problem. He’d attend A.A. for a while, then go for weeks, months, without taking a drink, thinking he had it conquered. Then something would happen, like he’d lose a case or a girlfriend, and he’d go into a three-day binge, complete with blackouts.”

“Could that have happened to him this time?”

“Possibly. When he’s having a blackout he has no idea where he is or what’s happening. He can’t remember anything the next day. He’s done some pretty crazy stuff. Used to strip all his clothes off and run around the hills naked, fall asleep when the booze ran its course, then come to and not know where he was, how he got there, or what he had done.”

“How frightening.”

“Tell me about it. So one day he came by our house. He’d been drinking. I don’t think he knew what he was doing.”

“What happened?”

“By then my father had died. Mom was alone again. I was out on a homicide when Boone dropped by and found Mom with his real father. I guess the old guy had been showing up again. Anyway, he’d been beating on her.”

“What did Boone do?”

“Neighbors called the police when they heard my mom screaming. I was sent on a domestic and it turned out to be my mom’s address. I got there and found Boone’s father. He’d been shot to death.”

“Oh, my God.”

Dan hesitated, took another sip of beer, and stared down at the fork protruding like a sword from the middle of his untouched steak. He spoke slowly and with some difficulty.

“Boone had shot him with the gun Mom kept in the house. The gun I gave her to protect herself. When I got there Boone was delirious, drunk, crying, out of his mind. Mom was hysterical. I knew they’d throw the book at Boone, even though his dad had been beating on Mom and probably would have killed her. I figured if I stepped in, claimed the shooting myself, I could keep him from
going to jail and ruining his life. After all, I’m a cop. Cops shoot people.”

“So you took the blame.”

He pressed his lips together for a moment. “Boone never even knew what he had done. He woke up the next day with no memory of anything, and I made Mom swear not to tell him. He promised to go to A.A. again, and this time he sounded like he meant it. He left town, moved as far away as he could—‘out west’ he used to say—and became a private investigator. We heard from him now and then over the years, but I never saw him again … until today.”

“What happened to you? Did you get off?”

Dan shrugged. “Not exactly. There were some holes in the story. They took me before Internal Affairs and decided it wasn’t a justified killing, that I could have done more to stop the guy, arrest him, or get him out of the situation. They asked me why I hadn’t used my own gun, why I had used the gun in the house—which was registered to me. I’m not a very good liar, I guess. I couldn’t make it work. They knew there was more to it, but I stopped talking at that point.”