Chapter Eighteen
If I thought that Thursday had been a long day up to then, it just got longer after I found Peter Crane’s dead body. What had begun as a quick stop on the way home turned into a mass of people and paperwork.
Sheriff Martin had me and Sally Ann sit downstairs in the parlor while he phoned the station and got Lucas to call the medical examiner. Lucas arrived with lights flashing and sirens blaring about twenty minutes later, prompting the sheriff to mutter, “I hate when he does that.” Lucas then took statements from me and Sally Ann, writing notes on an old-fashioned steno pad he kept in his back pocket.
The medical examiner arrived as Sally Ann was giving her statement, and I followed him upstairs to see what
he did with the body. I had always wondered about that. The truth of the matter is, he didn’t do much. He
puttered around a bit, looking here and there. He took Crane’s temperature and noted that, and he inspected his hands and his mouth and the back of his head, all the time clucking to himself. When he was done, he came out into the hallway and spoke to Sheriff Martin. I listened in. “Damn it, Jimmy,” he said, “I don’t see much of anything. I’ll have to cut him up to find out any more, and I don’t know if they’ll want that.”
“No marks, are there,” said the sheriff.
“Not that I see,” replied the doctor. “I’ll take a better look over at the hospital, but for now I’d say you’d better assume heart failure. Strange, though, to find him on the toilet like that. You say he was moved?”
“Must have been,” said the sheriff. “Crane had no use for it. He had a bag.”
“Um hmm,” said the doctor, glancing back at the body. “Well, by the temperature, I’d say he’s been dead anywhere from six to ten hours. Don’t know if he was moved before or after he died. I’ll check more at the hospital. Have a car take him over.”
The doctor packed away his little tools and left the musty old house. I followed Sheriff Martin downstairs to where Sally Ann sat. Lucas was puttering around from room to room, presumably looking for clues. “What did he say?” Sally Ann asked me as I sat down next to her on the sofa.
“Not much,” I replied. “He’s going to do an autopsy at the hospital, if the family agrees.”
“Oh,” she said, and was quiet for a minute. Then: “This is a sad house, isn’t it? All these memories.” She looked wistful. “I remember Momma Hattie from a long time ago. She’s kind of hazy to me now--I don’t really remember what she looked like.”
“There’re some pictures on the wall over there,” I told her. She got up and went partway up the stairs to peer at the pictures.
“Yep, that’s her,” she said. I joined her on the stairs. “That’s what she must have looked like when she was younger,” she told me, looking at the photograph of Crane in uniform with a young woman at his side. “She was older when I knew her.” She looked at the other pictures for a moment, then glanced up the stairs and sighed. “This is sad,” she repeated.
She was right. The whole place was a shame. We waited awhile longer downstairs and then decided to go outside. We wanted out of the house, away from the aura of death that lingered there. We walked down the front steps and stood in the yard. She came close to me and I held her.
A while later, her father came out and told us he had to go back to the station. It was about 8:30 p.m. by that time and he looked as tired as I felt, but he said he had reports to do that couldn’t wait. “Do you want me to drop you both at home?” he asked.
“I think I’d better go home tonight,” I told him. He nodded and Sally Ann didn’t argue--she was tired, too. We sat in the back seat of his police cruiser and held hands in the dark as he drove me to my grandmother’s apartment. I gave Sally Ann a quick kiss goodnight when we arrived, and as I was getting out she told me, “See you tomorrow.”
Sheriff Martin added, “I’m afraid I’ll need to see you in the morning, Carey, down at the station. I’ll need help with some reports and we have to talk about what’s going on.”
I looked at him quizzically, not getting his meaning.
“I think you know what I mean,” he said, and winked. I smiled and said okay, but I really didn’t know what he was talking about. The cruiser drove away and I let myself into the apartment with my key. It was dark and
stuffy. I put the lights on, flooding the living room with brightness, and turned the big air conditioner on high. After getting cleaned up and calming down a bit, I called the hospital. An ICU nurse told me my grandmother was stable and
asleep, so I pulled out the sofa bed and settled in for the night. I slept soundly and didn’t wake up till the phone rang the next morning at 8:30 sharp.
No comments:
Post a Comment