Amagansett

Seven

‘You’re early,’ said Dr Hobbs, dropping the liver on to the tray of the hanging scales with a loud slap.
‘I just wanted to make sure the paperwork’s in order before the family get here,’ lied Hollis.
‘Five pounds, four ounces,’ said Hobbs, reading off the weight of the organ to his assistant who was taking notes at a table. A sign on the wall read: This is the Place Where Death Rejoices to Teach Those Who Live. The maxim was accompanied by an image of the Grim Reaper standing beside a blackboard, scythe in one hand, stick of chalk in the other.
The cadaver on the autopsy table was that of an elderly woman. Her large breasts, laced with veins, were splayed across her torso, hanging down over her arms so that they gathered on the enameled surface like wax at the base of a candle. There was a gaping Y-shaped hole in her abdomen where Dr Hobbs had been at work.
Hollis’ natural curiosity drove him towards the body, Dr Hobbs evidently intrigued by his lack of squeamishness. ‘Want to hazard a guess at the cause of death?’ he asked.
Hollis glanced at the weighing scales. ‘The shape of the liver, its color, weight…’
‘Its weight?’
‘Almost twice as heavy as it should be.’
Dr Hobbs raised an eyebrow.
‘I don’t know,’ continued Hollis. ‘Liver failure brought on by chronic alcoholism? The contusions on her knees and forehead suggest she collapsed forward on to the ground; the lividity in her face and neck that she lay there for some time.’
Hollis regretted the words as soon as they had left his mouth. As a rule, he played his cards close to his chest, finding it far more advantageous to be underestimated by his colleagues and associates. It was a sign of how low he’d sunk that he felt the need to impress the likes of Dr Cornelius Hobbs.
‘Local woman, Anne Hamel, notorious lush,’ confirmed Hobbs, ‘bottle and a half of gin a day. Neighbor found her on the bathroom floor.’ He removed the liver from the scales. ‘I can see you’re something of a dark horse, Hollis. I’m going to have to keep my eye on you.’
Yes, he should have kept his mouth shut.
‘As for the paperwork on your girl,’ continued Hobbs, ‘I can’t complete the Death Certificate or body-release form before identification by next-of-kin. But then I figure you already know that, so you must be here to cast an eye over the autopsy report.’
Hollis shrugged. ‘Just out of curiosity.’
‘Go ahead, it’s on my desk, last office on the right down the hall.’ Hobbs couldn’t resist a parting shot as Hollis left through the swing doors. ‘You’ll let me know if I missed anything.’
The office was small, immaculately tidy, with windows on to the parking lot at the side of the building. There were graduation photos of two youngsters on the desk—gowns and caps, black tassels dangling—instantly recognizable as Hobbs’ son and daughter, something that must have been a source of considerable consternation to the girl.
The autopsy report sat beside the phone, a sheet of ruled paper pinned to the front on which someone, Hobbs presumably, had written in a neat, cursive hand: Lillian Wallace (to be confirmed). Death by Misadventure: death from drowning.
Hollis settled into the chair at the desk and picked up the report. He paused a moment before starting to read. What was he looking for? He wasn’t sure. Maybe he was still grasping at straws. He admonished himself for thinking that way, cleared his head and started again. Discrepancies. Yes, discrepancies between the report and what little he knew of Lillian Wallace and the last hours of her life.
The few scraps he had to work with had been provided by the maid, Rosa, the previous day. After breaking the news, Hollis had sat with her for ten minutes while she tried to choke back the shock and grief, tears pouring down her face.
When her sobbing had subsided, he gently prized his hand free of hers and went and made a cup of tea for her. She joined him in the kitchen, a room larger than the footprint of his whole house, with a cathedral-cold stone floor. They sat at a table and she answered his questions while he took notes in his memo pad.
Lillian Wallace had been twenty-six years old, the youngest child of George and Martha Wallace, sister to Gayle and Manfred. Her mother had died four years previously from a cancer of the throat. Her father had not remarried. Ordinarily, Lillian lived at her apartment in New York, but she had been staying at the house in East Hampton since January, following a separation from her fiancé, the engagement broken off.
When asked if Lillian was depressed, Rosa replied that she’d been very low at first, but within a month or so she was her old self again—spirited, full of life and humor. She said this in such a way as to warn him off the notion that Lillian might have taken her own life.
For much of the time Lillian had been alone in the house. Rosa lived with her husband and three children on the other side of town and only stayed in the house on Friday and Saturday nights during the season, when the whole family came out for the weekend. Since Lillian had taken up residence though, Rosa would come in for a few hours every morning to air the rooms, clean a little, make Lillian’s bed, and prepare an evening meal for her.
Lillian kept herself pretty much to herself during the week, although Rosa said she played tennis with friends at the Maidstone Club every now and then. She read a lot, walked a lot, and swam whenever she could, in the swimming pool out back and in the sea.
Her evening dip in the ocean had been an established ritual. Even weekends, when her family was around, while the others indulged in pre-prandial cocktails on the terrace Lillian would head off to the beach, out of the back gate in the garden and across the dunes. Rosa’s eyes misted over again as she described this daily pilgrimage, the one that Lillian had never returned from.
Hollis had asked if he could take a look at Lillian’s bedroom, and Rosa accompanied him upstairs. He would have preferred to inspect the room on his own, taking his time, but Rosa loitered protectively at the door.
There was nothing overtly feminine about the room, very little besides the clothes in the closet to suggest the gender of its occupant. The walls were painted cream and were hung with prints and etchings—a cart passing down a country lane, Montauk Lighthouse, an abstract female nude by some well-known European artist whose name Hollis couldn’t recall.
On the wall beside the bed was a framed photo showing a group of young women gathered on a stage. The caption on the matt read: The Experimental Theatre, Vassar College 1942. Lillian Wallace stood out like a beacon, her beauty and the breadth of her smile animating the photo, lending life to those around her. The image was in stark contrast to Hollis’ first sight of her, face frozen with rigor mortis, pinkish foam oozing from her blue lips.
He was left in little doubt as to what she had studied at Vassar. The shelves of a mahogany bookcase bowed under the weight of volumes of English and French literature, and there were more books stacked on the desk in front of the window. Hollis’ eyes grazed over the clutter on the desk, looking for a suicide note. Despite Rosa’s assertions, he didn’t dismiss the possibility that Lillian Wallace had taken her own life.
There was no note, not on the desk, not on the nightstand, not in any of the drawers in the room. This didn’t rule out suicide. Relatives or friends sometimes destroyed the suicide note of their loved ones. Sometimes this was done for simple, if misguided, reasons of decency. On other occasions it was no doubt done to protect themselves.
There was no denying the genuineness of Rosa’s grief, but it didn’t preclude her discovery of a note that morning when she had come to work. And as Hollis picked his way around the room, he was able to construct an alternative sequence of events—Rosa’s horror on finding the note, the anxious hours spent waiting, praying that Lillian wouldn’t see it through, that she would turn up, then the dashed hopes when he had appeared on the doorstep, the subsequent surge of emotion in Rosa indistinguishable from genuine surprise, and no less authentic.
This could also explain what Rosa was doing at the house at three o’clock in the afternoon when by her own account she only ever came in for a few hours in the morning.
‘Have you touched anything in here?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘So the bed was already made?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did that strike you as strange?’
‘Strange?’
‘You say you make her bed every morning. You come in one day and it’s already made. Has it ever happened before?’
Rosa hesitated before replying. ‘No.’
‘So you must have been a little…surprised.’
‘Yes,’ she said, regarding him mistrustfully. Her mind was working hard, too hard.
There was a door in the corner of the room. Behind it lay a bathroom, painted pale blue. There were some cosmetics on the glass shelf above the basin, nothing elaborate. Across the room, a linen skirt and a white blouse lay neatly folded on a wicker chair, a pair of leather sandals on the floor nearby.
Sensing Rosa behind him in the doorway, he spoke without turning.
‘This is where she would have changed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are these the clothes she was wearing yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
Hollis lifted the lid of a laundry hamper. It was empty. ‘Did she wear a brassiere?’ Rosa, understandably, was a little put out by the question. ‘I’m just wondering where her undergarments are. They’re not on the chair, not in the laundry hamper.’
‘They were in the hamper. I emptied it this morning.’
Hollis ran the scene in his head. It’s early evening, Lillian comes into the bathroom, she removes her clothes—first her blouse, then her skirt—folding them before placing them on the chair. She then takes off her brassiere and panties and puts them in the laundry hamper. Now she pulls on her dark blue swimsuit.
‘The times you saw her leaving for her swim, what was she wearing?’
‘A bathrobe.’
‘Shoes?’
Rosa thought before replying. ‘No.’
‘Did she take a towel?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘And jewelry?’
‘Jewelry?’
‘Earrings, for example, did she keep them in or take them out?’
‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’ Her eyes were filling with tears again.
‘I’m sorry, it’s routine procedure.’
‘She didn’t wear jewelry.’
‘Never?’
‘Special occasions.’
Well, death was certainly a special occasion.
‘One more question, Rosa. What are you doing here midafternoon? You said before you only come in for a few hours in the morning.’ He felt bad springing this on her, given her state, but he had to know the answer.
‘I wasn’t worried at first,’ she said defensively. ‘I thought…I thought maybe she went out last night.’
‘And didn’t come back? Stayed out? With someone?’
‘You know how the young people are these days.’
It bugged him that she chose to include him with her in the ranks of the elderly.
‘I went home,’ she continued, ‘I made lunch for my family. Then I couldn’t stop thinking…’ She broke off, gathering herself. ‘Maybe she never came back from her swim.’
‘So you headed back here.’
‘She always leaves her swimsuit there, with the bathrobe.’ She pointed to a hook on the back of the bathroom door. ‘I should have looked earlier, I wasn’t thinking, I should have looked…’ She started to cry again.
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ said Hollis gently. He made to rest a hand on her shoulder, but she hurried away, across the bedroom and out of the door, deep sobs resounding in the corridor. He didn’t blame her for evading his touch; he had brought her to tears again with his persistent questioning, the mildly accusatory tone designed to unsettle, to dislodge the truth.
Well, at least he was able to throw out the theory of a missing suicide note. The deep affection Rosa clearly felt for her young mistress wouldn’t have allowed her to return home to make lunch for her family if she’d discovered such a note that morning. He couldn’t see it, it just didn’t fit.
He turned back and surveyed the bathroom. Everything in order, as it should be, nothing that might lend weight to his gut feeling that Lillian Wallace’s death wasn’t an accident.
Feeling foolish, his heart already going out of the matter, he crossed to the sink, filled his cupped hands with cold water from the faucet and drank, splashing his face as he did so. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, and disliked what he saw staring back at him—a nondescript man, brown hair, brown eyes, average height—no distinguishing features besides a strong inclination to see the very worst in situations and in people. To question what most were happy to take in good faith. To doubt where others trusted.
And to what end? Not in the name of Justice; that was a lofty notion he had abandoned within a year of leaving the Academy. He knew that the true injustices in life lay far beyond the scope and remit of the police. They were merely flies buzzing around the dung heap, giving some semblance of order and activity.
No, he was as he was because he was good at it, because that’s what he did best. And for the first time in his career he’d seen with blinding clarity that it was no longer enough of a reason to carry on doing it.
Casting his mind back to Lillian Wallace’s bathroom, it occurred to Hollis that he wouldn’t even be there, seated at Hobbs’ desk in the morgue, if he hadn’t wet his face with water at her sink. It was in the nature of destiny that you could trace your own back to the very smallest events.
Searching for a towel, he had spotted one hanging from a rail in the recess that housed the bath. Wandering over, he saw that there was also a toilet in the recess.
Only after he had dried his face and replaced the towel did it leap out at him: the wooden seat of the toilet was raised, suggesting that the last person to use it had been a man.
Hollis finally opened the autopsy report and started to read. He made notes; to ask for a copy would only alert others to his interest in the affair.
The first section dealt with the external examination. In describing the general appearance of the corpse, Hobbs began by stating that rigor mortis was well established, suggesting a time of death somewhere between six and twenty-four hours previously. Starting at the head and working his way down the body, he noted small conjunctival hemorrhages in the eyes (green, as Hollis had guessed). These were evidence of asphyxiation, though not necessarily by water. The pinkish foam exuding from the mouth and nostrils, however, was strongly indicative of drowning, and led Hobbs to opine that the victim had been alive at the time of submersion.
The report then turned to the abrasions over the prominent parts of the face and the anterior trunk. Apparently this was concomitant with drownings off the ocean beach. Hollis read on, intrigued. He knew that when a person drowned they soon sank to the bottom where they remained until putrefaction filled their belly with gases that refloated them. He wasn’t aware that the submerged corpse always lay suspended in the same position—face down with the head lower than the rest of the body. The abrasions were the result of Lillian Wallace’s face and upper torso scraping along the sandy sea-bed as the currents carried her to and fro. The downward angle of the body also accounted for the faint and blotchy lividity in the head, neck and anterior trunk.
The hands were next. The skin of the fingerpads and palms was blanched and wrinkled, what Hobbs called ‘washer-woman hands’, a direct consequence of prolonged immersion. The fact that this maceration had not progressed to the backs of the fingers and the backs of the hands led him to narrow his estimate of time of death to between twelve and seventeen hours prior to the body’s recovery from the ocean.
The passage of the report that dealt with the internal examination was far more technical, and Hollis was obliged to read it several times over.
Core body temperature lent weight to Hobbs’ revised time of death estimate. The blue-purple discoloration of the bone of the mastoid air cells was typical of drowning, though not proof of it. However, a close examination of the stomach and the lungs placed the matter beyond question. There was seawater in the stomach, with associated blanching of the gastric mucosa. The lungs were described as bulky and ballooned, and as having a marbled appearance to the pleural surface, with blue-gray areas interspersed with pink and yellowish zones of more aerated tissue—typical of ‘emphysema aquosum’. When sectioned, seawater flowed from the lungs.
These appearances pointed to active inspiration of air and water and could not be produced by the passive flooding of the lungs post mortem. This was further confirmed by the existence of hemorrhagic subpleural bullae, resulting from tears in the alveolar walls, which also accounted for the blood-tingeing of the foam in the airways, nose and mouth.
There were further tests on the blood, bile and vitreous humor. These revealed low levels of alcohol, certainly not enough to have played a contributory part in her death.
In conclusion, wrote Hobbs, the pathological evidence established beyond any doubt that the decedent was alive when she entered the sea, and that she drowned in it some time between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. the day before her body was found.
Hollis laid the document on the desk. He had misjudged Hobbs. The report was as impressive as any he had read—authoritative and thorough, circumspect in its judgments until the forensic evidence proved indisputable. What had he expected, some slapdash affair by a second-rate provincial medical examiner? Dr Hobbs’ jurisdiction covered miles of coastline noted for its treacherous waters. Drownings were commonplace, and he surely had more experience of them than the vast majority of pathologists. A little dejected, Hollis abandoned the idea of running the information by Paul Kenilworth, a former colleague back in New York.
A movement outside caught Hollis’ eye. A brougham was pulling into the parking lot. Not seen as often since the war, it was the sort of vehicle that made a discreet yet unequivocal statement about the owner’s wealth and standing. The uniformed chauffeur in the open driver’s compartment guided the car to a halt. Getting out, he opened the rear door, offering his hand as he did so.
For a brief instant, it occurred to Hollis that the whole thing had been a terrible mistake, that Lillian Wallace hadn’t drowned off the ocean beach. For there she stood, tall and slender, squinting against the sunlight.
It was a few moments before Hollis realized he was looking at Lillian’s older sister, Gayle. Physically, there was little to distinguish between the two women. Gayle’s hair was maybe a little longer and neatly coiffed so that it curled like two breaking waves around her neck and beneath the ears, but the oval face, the wide-set eyes and the mouth were the same. What differences there were lay not so much in the physiognomy as the presentation—in particular the clothes.
Hollis had seen nothing in Lillian’s wardrobe that came close to the elegance of the outfit Gayle was wearing. Her skirt was cut long and full in the new French style, her blouse was fashionably free of padded shoulders and tailored to accentuate her narrow waist.
A gentleman who could only have been George Wallace was next out of the car. Of medium build, he was dressed in a dark gray summer suit, white shirt and blue necktie. For a man who must have been into his sixties he was remarkably well preserved, displaying very little extra weight around the midriff, and a full head of silver hair, parted at the side. He stood tall and straight, exuding the easy patrician air of a long-standing member of the privileged class.
The same could not be said of his son, who was the last to exit the vehicle. The poor fellow was clearly upset and doing his best to conceal the fact, but the set of his brow and the stoop of his shoulders betrayed him. What was his name again? Hollis turned to his memo pad. Manfred.
Looking back through the window, he saw George Wallace direct a few words to his son, who then visibly pulled himself together, smoothing his sandy hair. Manfred smiled weakly at something his sister said, then she took his arm and they started making their way towards the building.
Hollis arrived in the lobby as they were entering through the main door. ‘Mr Wallace? Deputy Chief Hollis. We spoke on the phone yesterday.’
George Wallace accepted the hand with a cold, firm grip. ‘My daughter, Gayle. My son, Manfred.’ There was something soothing about the depth and resonance of his voice.
‘I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances,’ said Hollis. He felt insincere uttering the line he had used on many such occasions in the past. ‘The Medical Examiner will be with us shortly. Please, take a seat.’
They glanced disapprovingly at the diminutive waiting area, where a lean, shabby young man was sucking dejectedly on a cigarette. It struck Hollis that this must be one of the few instances in their lives where they had little choice but to do as others did, sit where others sat. Ordinarily, they lived sheltered from the world, moving between their houses, clubs and offices cocooned in chauffeured limousines, supported wherever they went by a loyal staff who shopped, cooked, cleaned, laundered and generally shielded them from the less appealing realities that most accepted as an elemental part of life. Maybe he was doing them a disservice, but somehow he couldn’t see any of them waiting in line at a grocery store for a pack of cigarettes or haggling with a taxi driver over the fare.
Here at the County Morgue, however, there were no private boxes, no members-only enclosures, no first-class Pullman compartments. It was a low, ugly, antiseptic building where all and sundry were obliged to mingle. Death, the Great Leveler.
Gayle picked nervously at the out-of-date magazines on the low table. Manfred removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offering one to his sister, who declined. Unexpectedly, he then held the pack towards the young man who had just put out his own cigarette.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said the man. From his eyes it was clear he had been crying. Manfred lit the fellow’s cigarette, and then his own, with a gold lighter.
‘Who’d you lose?’ asked the young man.
‘My sister.’
‘Mother,’ said the young man. And that was the end of the conversation, to the evident relief of George Wallace, who observed with a cool, dispassionate eye. Hollis looked at the young man, considering the likelihood that the woman with the swollen liver had been his mother.
‘How does this…work?’ asked Manfred.
Hollis turned. ‘One of you will need to identify her.’
‘We would all like to see her,’ said George Wallace, though Gayle’s expression suggested otherwise.
‘You’ll then need to sign the body-release form, and that’s it.’
‘That’s it?’ Manfred said.
‘The funeral directors can then take her away. I imagine they’ll be coming up from the city…’
‘She wanted to be buried here,’ said Gayle.
‘We don’t know that,’ interjected George Wallace.
‘Father, we’ve already had this conversation.’
‘She loved East Hampton.’ Manfred’s words were directed at Hollis, but intended for his father’s ears. George Wallace had evidently conceded defeat on the matter, but had wished to flag his disapproval one final time.
‘Can you recommend a local funeral home?’ Wallace elder asked.
‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to do that. There are several in town.’
‘Livingstone’s is best,’ interrupted the young man. ‘Buried my Nan, Grandpa, and my old man, good and deep, no frills, don’t need ‘em, not where they gone.’
‘Thank you,’ said Manfred.
‘Ain’t no skin off my nose.’
Hollis suspected that, thanks to the young man, Livingstone & Sons now stood little chance of attracting George Wallace’s custom.
At that moment, the receptionist manning the front desk approached. ‘Mr Hamel, like I said, it’s going to be several hours before we’re ready for you. There’s really no point in you waiting around.’ The young man looked at her long and hard. If he suspected he was being moved on for the benefit of the others, he gave no indication of the fact.
‘So long,’ he said, getting to his feet and leaving. The receptionist waited for the door to swing shut behind him.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’
Hollis had been wrong. Even here in the morgue, the Wallaces and their kind received preferential treatment.
‘No thank you,’ said George Wallace.
‘A glass of water, please,’ said Manfred.
‘Yes, water, thank you,’ said Gayle quietly.
The receptionist left without even glancing at Hollis.
He placed a brown-paper parcel on the table. ‘These are Lillian’s, her bathrobe and towel, from the beach. I went down there when I was at the house yesterday.’
Following in her final footsteps, he had wandered past the swimming pool, out of the back gate in the garden, down the bluff and across the sandhills. He hadn’t expected to find anything, but a short search revealed the bathrobe and towel folded beside a clump of beach grass on the frontal dune. They were clearly visible from the beach, and it was evidence of the class of bather frequenting that stretch of shoreline that in almost twenty-four hours no one had taken them.
He had approached the spot carefully, but the soft, windblown sand had absorbed any tracks there might have been. Back at headquarters, a closer examination of the articles had revealed nothing out of the ordinary, just a hair band and a brush in the pocket of the terry-cloth bathrobe.
Hollis removed two documents from his pocket and laid them in front of George Wallace. ‘A personal-effects form, to say you’ve received them.’ George Wallace took the pen offered him and signed both copies. Hollis replaced one in his pocket.
‘There’ll be another form to sign for the effects found with her.’ He threw in a brief pause. ‘Her swimsuit…and her earrings.’ Mention of the earrings triggered no reaction.
‘Do you know what happened exactly?’ asked Manfred.
‘It’s hard to say. There were no witnesses that we know of. I’m sure you’re aware, the currents can be pretty dangerous. The autopsy confirms that she drowned.’
Manfred straightened in his seat. ‘The autopsy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mean you cut her up!?’
Hollis took a moment to formulate his response. ‘An internal examination was conducted by the Medical Examiner. The law calls for it in all cases of unattended deaths.’
‘Unattended deaths’: what was he thinking, reducing the tragic loss of their loved one to a piece of police-manual jargon?
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Manfred, ‘they cut her up!’
‘Manfred…’
‘Don’t you at least have to ask for our consent or something!?’
‘Manfred.’ This time, George Wallace raised his voice.
‘They should have asked for our consent.’
‘It’s not required,’ said Hollis.
George Wallace turned to him. ‘All the same, it would have been good to know.’
Hollis had to concede the point. It was an oversight on his part, and one he wouldn’t have committed if he hadn’t been so caught up in his own private speculations. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I apologize.’
‘What exactly did you do to her?’ Manfred’s tone remained accusatory.
‘Manfred, the gentleman has apologized,’ said George Wallace firmly. ‘He has explained the situation and he has apologized.’
Thankfully, at that moment the receptionist reappeared with the glasses of water. ‘The Medical Examiner will see you now, if you’d like to come with me.’
Manfred stared forlornly at the glass in front of him. Without touching it, he got to his feet and followed his father.
Gayle lingered a moment longer, sipping from her glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘They were very close.’
As she left, Hollis called after her. ‘Miss Wallace.’ She turned back. ‘Try Yardley’s Funeral Home. They’re on Newtown Lane.’
‘Yardley’s. Thank you.’
And she was gone.