Death Was the Other Woman (13 page)

“ONCE A WEEK
, like clockwork, this guy went to his barber for a haircut and a shave. One day he goes in to get his ears lowered and his chin scraped and notices there's a different barber. Doesn't think anything of it. Sits down in the chair, starts talking baseball, the weather, the price of biscuits, who knows? Next thing you know,
fffft.”
Dex sliced his index finger across his own throat. “Straight razor. They left him in the chair in front of the big picture window as a sign.”

“What kind of sign?” Gladys asked shakily. Our other friends were just as mesmerized, their faces never leaving Dex's. And he does so love an audience.

“The kind of sign that says: This man messed with the wrong people.” Dex shrugged his shoulders, as though acknowledging another element of the universe's great inevitable. “There you are, kid,” he said, noticing me. “I was startin' to get worried.”

Though he'd been putting on a show for my friends, I could see something was different about him tonight. Something that had been absent when he'd dropped me off earlier in the day. And then I realized that the brightness he'd worn since his near escape the night of Brucie's shooting was gone. He looked like the old Dex again. I'd barely gotten to know sunny Dex, and I missed him already.

“Dex, what are you doing here?”

“Your boss has been regaling us with tales from the underbelly of Los Angeles,” Susan Hammond said with a delicate shudder. “I didn't realize your life had taken such a dangerous turn.”

“How did you find me?” I said to Dex.

“I'm a detective, remember?” he said, smiling.

Morgana snorted. “I'll bet Smith told him, is what. Or he flattered one of the house girls.”

“You were right the first time,” he said, extending his hand to Morgana. “Your houseman told me. How do you do? I'm Dexter J. Theroux.”

“I figured that much,” Morgana fairly purred. “And I'm—”

“I know who you are,” Dex interrupted, keeping her hand in his just a beat too long. “The girls here told me who Kitty was with.”

“Kitty!” Edwina Bryson twittered. “That's funny. I never would have thought of you as a Kitty, Katherine.”

I didn't like the way this was going. Not any of it. “What are you doing here?” I asked again.

Dex was suddenly more serious. “We've gotta go” was all he said.

“What? Now?” I asked. “But it's almost midnight. Where are we going?”

The other girls had fallen silent, watching the exchange between Dex and me with rapt expressions. “You're on a case,” Morgana breathed. “You didn't tell me you were on a case,
Kitty.”

“I'm not. It's almost midnight,” I said again. “And don't call me Kitty.”

“Why?” Morgana pouted prettily.
“He
does.”

“I can't make him stop,” I said.

“We gotta go,” Dex said again.

“Oh, for heaven's
sake”
I said, exasperated now. “All right. But will you at least tell me where we're going?”

Dex shook his head. “Not here.”

The girls were all watching this exchange closely. I could see that they'd suddenly cast me in a role from a detective novel, something shoddy and forbidden, where there's a woman on the cover doing a lot of heavy breathing. If I'd been in a lighter mood, I would have laughed, seeing my exchange with Dex through their eyes. Here I was—Katherine Pangborn from school—in a nightclub in San Francisco sought out by a darkly handsome man with a dangerous demeanor. A man who told stories threaded with violence and who was now urging me into the night with him. I saw admiration in their faces. And unexpectedly, I saw some envy there as well. I could have told them about how I often didn't have the nickel I needed to take Angels Flight, but I did not. I didn't mind them thinking I was in the middle of an adventure. And anyway I presently had my hands full with Dex.

“Fine,” I said to him, “we'll go, if it's so all-fired important. But when will we be back?”

I was dismayed when he shook his head. “We're not coming back. We're heading straight back to L.A.”

“But my things ...” I started to tell him that I had to get my valise from Morgana's house, but he intercepted me.

“Already in the car.”

“And my dress ...” I indicated the evening dress I wore.

“You can keep it, Katherine.” I started to protest, but Morgana's eyes beat me down. It wasn't charity, the look said. It
was
too small, though she wouldn't have liked to say that in public.

Defeated, I slumped back in my seat, taking a final sip of my Kir Royale before saying good-bye to my friends. Short as the visit had been, it had been wonderful to see them. We all made promises to keep in touch, which none of us probably meant even while we said the words. Envy or no, our lives had gone in very different directions.

Dex and I had a few minutes to wait for the attendant to bring the car. “I was having a really good time, Dex,” I said, as we stood at the curb. And even while I said it, I hated how plaintive my voice sounded.

“I know you were, kid. I could see that. They're nice girls too. They care about you. You'll come back sometime. See them.”

“Will I?” I asked.

“Sure you will, kid. Sure you will. You'll do whatever you like, you'll see.”

It wasn't until we were under power that I asked Dex what had been so all-fired important that he needed to roust me out of my perfectly fun evening.

He looked over at me with a smirk, though the smirk held a shadow of something more. “We're going to see a dead guy, Kitty.”

WHILE WE DROVE
, Dex told me that he'd followed Dempsey's trail around the city. It had grown cold after a while, but then one of his police sources told him that Dempsey's body had been found in the bay that very afternoon, fished up by a workboat. There hadn't been a lot of detective work in
that,
Dex explained: the man's wallet was still in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, making it easy enough to identify him, as long as you could read.

“The stiff still had his driver's license on him,” Dex explained as he drove. “Presumably the same one I looked at the other night.”

“OK, wait,” I said, holding up a hand. “A couple of things here aren't sitting well with me.”

“Only a couple?” This time Dex's grin was unimpeded by anything besides good humor.

“Well... in the first place, it's after midnight. Just where do you think you're going to see a dead guy at this time of night?”

“An old army buddy of mine works in the morgue here. He said if I wanted to see the body, he'd only be able to get me in after midnight.”

“So you're not supposed to be there?”

“Not really,” he said, parking the car on what seemed to be a completely deserted street.

“What do you need me for?”

“Well, you were there, kiddo. You found him. I figured two sets of eyes were better than one.” Dex had started to get out of the car. I followed him.

“But then what's the hurry to get back to Los Angeles, Dex?” I said, while I scurried to keep up with him. “Couldn't we just stay in town and then travel back tomorrow?”

“We could,” he said, not slowing his pace while he nodded. “But we're not. If this is the stiff we saw in the house on Lafayette Square—if this is Dempsey—then our business here is done. I'd just as soon get home.”

I fumed a little while I continued to struggle to match Dex's long strides. Sure, I'd been having fun and had been looking forward to spending the night at Morgana's and catching up some more, but this wasn't my junket, after all. I'd bummed the ride from Dex. That meant he got to call the shots. He didn't tell me I could like it or lump it, but I got the general idea.

I was so engrossed in these and other faintly mutinous thoughts that at first I scarcely noticed our surroundings. What brought me out of it was a smell, antiseptic yet slightly sweet, as though the sweet part were an additive used to cover something deeper.

The building was long and low; the corridor we tracked down, dimly lit. Badly lit, really. It made me think the lights had been added long after the building's construction; the morgue had probably been here since before the city got electricity.

The sounds of our footfalls echoed slightly off the concrete floors, polished by a million feet, a hundred thousand gurneys, the brushstrokes of thousands of sweepers.

Dex ignored several doors with vaguely medical-sounding names until we came to one marked Josiah Elway, M.D., Assistant Medical Examiner. Dex rapped on the door, once and sharply, before letting himself in.

The face of the man who sat behind the desk moved quickly from surprise to genuine pleasure. He seemed to me to be painfully thin, made to appear even more so by the faintest whisper of the mustache that marched under his nose.

“Dex, old dog,” he said, clapping him on the back. “You
are
a sight for sore eyes.” I was surprised at the clipped sound of his voice. He had a way of speaking that was similar to Dex's. Judging by the way he pronounced certain words, he and Dex might have come from the same small Ontario town.

“Doctor
Elway,” Dex said carefully. “Huh! They'll give anyone that title these days, won't they?”

“Just about,” Elway said, indicating we should sit. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, sliding open a desk drawer and pulling out a bottle of something amber—bourbon or scotch or Irish or rye—I could never tell the difference if I didn't see a label, and this bottle didn't have one.

“I wouldn't say no, but Kitty here will likely pass. She doesn't much care for the stuff.” Dex introduced me then, if slightly belatedly, and the two of them settled in for a chin-wag that made me seethe all the more at having to leave
my
friends so I could come here and listen to Dex with
his.

I let them reminisce and tiffle for about fifteen minutes. To hear their stories, you would have thought that the war had been a jolly undertaking indeed. They had apparently had
peerless
fun in the trenches and almost had a party avoiding mustard gas. And too many of their sentences started with things like “Remember that Cagey Watson from Swift Current? What a guy! Poor kid had never been off the Prairies. France wasn't ready for him.”

Thinking back to what Dex had told me about what he'd seen in France, it was likely that this banter masked deeper feelings about the experiences the two men had shared. Shared and survived. Under different circumstances, I would have had more patience for it all. As it was, in that quarter hour I could feel the temperature of my blood slip ever upward until I knew I had to either say something or risk bursting something vital inside my head. Should that happen, I thought darkly, at least I was in the right place.

“Dex,” I said, more tentatively than I felt, “it's getting late. ...”

“Late?” he boomed. “Hell, it's early. It's first thing in the morning.” Both men guffawed heartily at this small joke, but I wasn't having any of it. Not when I could already hear the slight thickening of Dex's voice.

“Please, Dex. You said you wanted to drive back to Los Angeles tonight. If we don't get going soon ...”

“All right, all right,” he said, putting up his hands as though to ward off my words. “We'll get going. But Josiah's just poured us fresh drinks, so ... we'll finish those and then ...”

Another fifteen minutes and what seemed to me to be innumerable war stories later, Dr. Elway led us to the crypt. Outside the double doors I hesitated.

“What's wrong, kiddo?” Dex asked, when he saw me stop. “Your first time, huh?”

I just looked at him. He knew the answer.

“Well, I won't soft-soap it. It may not be pretty.” He shot a glance at the doctor, who shook his head no. It wasn't going to be pretty at all. “But it'll be over soon, and then we'll head back to L.A. No bad dreams, ‘cause we've got a lot of miles to cover before we sleep. OK?”

I nodded and bit my lip. Oddly, as we moved into the crypt, the thing that pushed into my head was the face of Mrs. Bee-son. All of the work she'd done, preparing her charges for the “journey of life” she was always going on about. And none of her preparation had been about this or anything like it.

Either side of the long room was lined with highly polished metal drawer units that reminded me of giant filing cabinets. The far wall looked as though it might have held windows, but these were blocked over with dark curtains, and I couldn't tell if the windows were blocked to keep out the eyes of gawkers or the light.

Dr. Elway led us to a shrouded form on a gurney.

“I knew you were coming,” he said, “so I left him out.”

Elway moved as though to pull back the sheet, but Dex stopped him. “Wait a second, Jos.” And then to me: “You ready, kiddo?”

I bit my lip and nodded my head. I was as ready as I was going to be.

But when Dr. Elway pulled the sheet away, I discovered I was wrong.

The body we'd seen in the bathtub had looked decidedly human. As though, but for the mortal wound, Harrison Dempsey could have just gotten up and walked away. He'd looked lifelike. Rather, he'd looked close to life, if not in it.

What was left of the body we'd seen at Lafayette Square was not like that. For one thing, the face and most of the extremities were gone. For another, what
was
there was the dark purple of a bad bruise. All of it. And the smell. . . the smell was beyond description. I'd recognize it if I encountered it again though. It was the odor of death.

“How'd that happen?” Dex asked gruffly.

“Well, they found him in the bay. So it was most probably sharks.”

Sharks! I looked at the body again, and I could see it: it looked as though some creature—maybe several—had nibbled on him and found that he wasn't as tasty as had been hoped.

This thought brought the nausea that had been lurking just below the surface. Mortified, I turned away from the table, spied a bucket nearby, and barely made it there in time to heave what was left of my two Kir Royales into it.

“You all right, kid?” Dex was there with a hand on my back, pushing a clean handkerchief at me while politely averting his eyes.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, taking it. Then I added, “Sorry.”

“It's OK. It's always rough the first time, eh, Jos?”

“Rough. Yes. It's true,” he said encouragingly, from across the room. “One forgets, doesn't one?”

“That's probably why that bucket was right there,” Dex pointed out, with a forced cheerfulness.

“I'm OK now,” I said, forcing myself back toward the body. “Just ignore . . . never mind. Where were we?” I pushed the soiled handkerchief in my purse so I could return it to Dex in its original condition. “Yes . . .. sharks ...”

The corpse had no face. His right hand was gone, as were parts of his left arm, though the hand itself was still there. But even though the body had spent some time in the drink. I recognized the rich, shiny finish of the man's suit and the pattern of his tie. There was no doubt that this was the guy we'd seen in the bathroom of the house on Lafayette Square.

“It's the same guy, isn't it, Dex?” I said quietly.

“Sure looks that way, kid.”

“But that doesn't make any sense,” I said. Dex's look stopped me from saying anything more. The doctor may be an old friend, but it was clear Dex didn't want me going over the case in front of him.

“You have a time of death, Jos?” Dex asked the other man.

The doctor looked thoughtful. “It's hard to say exactly, Dex. The cold water slows decomposition on the one hand, and as you can see, sea creatures can speed things up on the other. But educated guess? I'd say two days. Maybe three.”

“Cause of death?”

“Well, that's easy, isn't it? Even with the corpse in this condition.” He indicated the place in the fabric of the suit where the bullet had ripped through. Then he pushed aside the unbuttoned shirt and gave us a look at the spot in the corpse's chest where the bullet had gone in. Then to my horror, he said, “Give me a hand here, would you, Dex?” The two of them flipped the corpse face-down. “See,” he said, pulling the shirt aside and pointing to a spot on the dead man's back. “Exit wound. Clean as anything. Fairly large caliber, I'd say.”

“The bullet went right through him?” I asked, surprised.

“Sure,” the doctor said. “It's not uncommon. You see it with big bullets, especially at close range.”

“So this was close range?”

“Again, the time he spent in the water and the damage the sharks did make it more difficult than it would be if someone had brought him in here fresh.” I cringed at his choice of words. “But, yeah, based on what we've got here, I'd say no more than ten feet. Maybe less, like eight or even six.”

There wasn't a lot more that this particular corpse could tell us. Before we left though, I asked if we could take fingerprints from the hand he had left.

“Why, Kitty?” Dex asked. “We know who he is. It's not like he had a police record or anything. There won't be anything to find.”

“I dunno, Dex. It feels like the right thing.”

“Women's intuition?” Dex smirked.

“Sure,” I said, humoring him. “Call it that. But can we do it?”

Dex looked at Josiah, who shrugged. “Why not?” he said.

I left them to it. I couldn't even watch. A girl has to have limits, has to know where they are. I didn't have any of my lunch left to lose.