Authors: Robert W. Walker
"Was she with anyone to lean on, a man?" asked Lucas.
"No, alone she was...all alone. I recall how sad that was, but she was stern, you know, like a rock"—he held out a fist to emphasize this point—"how do you say it, stoic...yes, stoic. Said her mother was a lifelong alcoholic, a victim of her chosen lifestyle, and as sad as it was, you know, a wasted life, that her overdosing came as no surprise to her, the daughter, I mean."
"That was her attitude? Matter-of-fact?" asked Lucas.
"She was under a lot of stress...depressed, you know," said Giorgio. "It is common under the circumstances of a death in the family. It is something I see every day."
Carlotta, who obviously did not work the wakes, wore a multicolored neck scarf, a halter top, and jeans. Hearing Giorgio's words, she leaped to her feet and came around from behind her desk like a charging bull, getting into Giorgio's face, shaking her head and waving a stem index finger. "She wasn't all that broke up, Giorgio! Don't confuse a stone-cold heart with honest depression!"
"You are too harsh, Carlotta!"
"She took you, Giorgio! We lost on that service, thanks to your thinking with your little head!" She said to Lucas, "That tramp was stone cold and cheap and flirting with my man the whole time. You...you men!"
Giorgio piped in. "Flirting? Come on! Yeah, all right, she was cool perhaps, and cheap, sure. I give you that, but she said the trip to get here on a moment's notice had emptied her bank account, and that she had only come in to bury her mother. I told her all about our memory-preservation and plot-maintenance programs, you know, how we send out anniversary cards with Mom or Dad's picture each year on the date of death, and how we keep up the grounds, place flowers on the grave every other week, but—"
"—but she wanted no frills, just the pine-box special," finished Carlotta. "She went all out for dear ol' Mom," Carlotta facetiously added. "She walked in here wanting to pay nothing, and short of that, as little as possible. And when I told her how easy it would be to take the maintenance plan out of her credit card each month, she said she didn't do credit cards. I had to pry a home address out of her."
"Did you see what kind of vehicle she arrived in?"
" 'Fraid not," replied Giorgio.
"And at the funeral service?"
"Arrived in a cab."
"Alone or with a man?"
"Alone, always alone, she was."
Carlotta let out a low growl like an angry cat. "All I know, she kept coming onto you, Giorgio, to get the price down, and you dummy, you let her. She got a sweet deal on a plot out at Berwyn too, I can tell you."
"Is this her?" asked Meredyth, flashing the open yearbook before the pair.
"Ahhh...hmmm..." hedged the man. "She was older, sexier. No kid like this," he emphasized, as if to say he didn't chase kids.
His wife disagreed. "It's her in the picture, Giorgio, only not wearing that skintight dress she came in here with."
"Yeah, if Carlotta says it's her, it's her. She's got a thing for faces."
Carlotta laughed. "And you, you got a thing for asses."
"Hey, so I got a thing for bodies—ain't it my business? Look around you, Carlotta. Come on, I'm jokin' here. Don't you get it?" Giorgio's arms went up and out, the ruffled cuffs flitting like two downy birds as he spoke. In an aside to Lucas, he winked. "Get it, my business? Bods?"
Carlotta gave her man a cold glare, her arms folded.
Lucas thanked them for their time and escorted Meredyth, clutching the yearbook to herself, out and onto Lowe Street. A ship came into view at the end of the street as if cruising the neighborhood, and it gave a blast of its fog horn, startling Meredyth. "Houston Ship Canal," Lucas explained as she watched the giant dark side of the ship disappear behind warehouses lining the canal. "Doubt you've ever had occasion to visit this side of town."
"What next?" she asked. "Raid Momma Croombs's house?"
"May be impossible to get a warrant. I spoke to Jorganson. He thinks we've got flimsy cause, a string of coincidences, he calls it, but he's going to wake up Judge Diehl. She's our best hope for a warrant."
"Meanwhile?"
"I'd like to see the police report on Katherine Croombs's death. How 'bout you?"
"Well...we have the date of death and her address. Getting hold of the report should be a simple matter."
They drove back for the precinct house and made inquiries, soon getting hold of a computer-generated copy of the police report on the death of one Katherine Croombs, occurring July 17th in the 29th Precinct. The body was autopsied in Leonard Chang's crime lab by Dr. Lynn Nielsen.
The police report, on the surface, appeared a routine mop-up after an unintentional death by overdose of sleeping pills and drink. Lucas commented on how cut and dried the report read, and in fact he thought aloud, "Perhaps too cut and dried."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning when cops don't want to spend all night in the station filling out a report, they resort to generalities like the ones we're seeing here. A cliche-ridden report is like a good paint job—covers a multitude of sins in quick time."
"What're you saying, Lucas?"
"In all my time with the COMIT program, going through all those thousands of Cold Case files, I know when a pair of cops have made up their collective minds to go along with surface appearances, and once an assumption of suicide or accidental overdose is made, it's hard to buck."
"You think this might be the case here?"
"If Lauralie is as dangerous as we've been led to think, yes. I may be out on a limb here, but the reports're too pat, the woman dying of an overdose without any question being raised, especially since—look here at the autopsy report."
She followed his finger to the line on the report he wanted her to read.
"She didn't swallow a lot of pills."
"Although her bottle was found empty on her night- stand," Lucas pointed out. "Cops at the scene made the assumption she swallowed the bottle of pills along with the alchohol."
"She died in bed in a peaceful pose," Meredyth said, pointing to one of the crime-scene photos he'd brought up on screen.
"That's screwy too. Death brought on by alcoholic poisoning doesn't fit with the neat, orderly position on the bed, folded arms, body perpendicular to the edge this way. Nahhh, no way."
"She laid down on her back, folded her arms, readying herself for death," Meredyth said, shrugging, playing devil's advocate.
"When people drink too much—and she had over three fifths of straight bourbon with gin chasers—they don't wake up all ready fixed and folded in bed. Someone posed her body after death. Now it may've been the neighbor who called it in...the one with the key...come in to check on her, but given testimony of the lady, it could've been her daughter, purportedly living with her and in Chicago at the same time."
Meredyth stared again at the digital computer images showing the deceased posed in death, as Lucas theorized— arms folded across her chest, ankles overlying one another. "Could still be an overdose, Lucas, and Lauralie, finding her mother in an unflattering position, poses her. Doesn't mean she killed her mother."
He nodded. "Could be...could be. Report does say she discovered the body and called it in." He paced the Cold Room floor now. "Could also be she did a lot more than pose Mommie Dearest."
"Could be she had to lift her off the floor, the sofa, the bathroom toilet," replied Meredyth, sitting cross-legged on the edge of his desk.
"That's where you find most falling-down drunks, and the investigators look the other way when a loved one moves the body out of a sense of...propriety."
"So you're not buying any of it."
"Lauralie is an effective actress, capable of lulling anyone into any belief she dangles before them. I believe she staged the body and the murder, just as she staged the death of the Mother Superior at age twelve."
"She does have a theatrical flare.
"Had Tebo's temperature rising, Father Will, and I'd bet a month's pay on Giorgio."
"How then did she do her mother in? Simply by providing her with the booze? Going out to a movie and returning?"
"There were unexplained marks on her wrists and ankles, Mere."
"Where does the report say that?"
"Coroner's protocol here." He brought it on screen. "Chalked up to clumsy handling of the body, men holding onto wrists and ankles when moving her from bed to body bag. Called a coroner's contusion. They can tell if it occurred after death from the discoloration of the skin. There's a reason you grab the deceased under the arms, and there's a proper way to hold the ankles tucked against your body."
"Sounds like you've hefted a few."
"I have. Look here too, the broken neck—chalked up to what they call a coroner's fracture. Likely from the same manhandling. Not easy properly elevating and hauling deadweight."
"So you're suggesting the M.E. wrote off restraint marks to coroner transport wagon bruises?"
"Possibly, yes."
"Are you saying that the cops lied so they could get off duty on time? And that the M.E. helped them out?"
"No, no, no. I'm saying they made a tacit blanket assumption and acted on it, and they justified that assumption with their language on the report. They didn't he so much as they convinced themselves of what their eyes told them."
"So while the detectives on scene may have had misgivings, they all turned into smoke?"
"Look, I still have doubts about how Marilyn Monroe was supposed to've died. Why? The scene was too clean, too damned neat, and she lay posed in bed, her body recently washed clean and dressed for the coroner, dead of an overdose. But God forbid she be found under the bed. Gives a guy doubts."
"And I suppose you think Elvis still lives?"
"Only as an icon for his estate and his legions of fans. He lives in that he's still number one. But that's show biz. No, I can easily accept the prognosis of an overdose in Elvis's case."
"Why Elvis yes, but Marilyn no? Because the death scene was not doctored or candy-coated?"
"Exactly. Elvis, unlike the Queen of Hollywood, was found dead at the foot of his toilet. No posing of the body, no gussying it up. Now that's unquestionably an overdose no one had a hand in but Elvis—an honest-to-God unintentional suicide."
"You buy into Marilyn's having been murdered?"
"At least assisted into her overdose by someone. Most cops know the body would at least be half on, half off the bed, and not posed in a peaceful slumber against the pd- lows."
"Then you suspect Lauralie's desperate hunt for her birth mother all those years—"
"Desperate's not too far from determined, the word Mother Elizabeth used to describe her tenacity in the search for Mom and Dad."
"From the beginning, all that effort in order to kill Katherine?"
"Some reason, huh?"
Meredyth's mind filled with the thought. 'To search for so long, only to learn that no one was searching for her..."
"Sounds like a motive for anger, and take anger up a notch to hatred, ratchet it up to acting on your hatred, and whataya got?" he asked.
"Imagine, though, seeking out one's own mother for the express purpose of killing her. It's almost too much to comprehend."
"Yeah, but it'd make a hell of a movie of the week."
"Perhaps there were extenuating circumstances, a falling-out, an argument that escalated to...to murder."
"Or assisted suicide?" asked Lucas.
"All we know for sure is that Lauralie did find her mother," she replied, clenching a fist.
"And within weeks of finding Mom, the daughter is having Mom prepped for burial at Greenhaven Cemetery by Giorgio and Carlotta. Or we could give little Lauralie, poor orphaned child, the benefit of doubt."
"Perhaps...perhaps she got caught up with—"
"Crazy Joe Boyfriend? Who not only planned and executed the abduction and murder of Mira Lourdes, but who also offered her mother, and maybe is the brain who devised the eerie mailings to you and me, Mere. No, it has to be they're equally involved—her with a motive for vengeance, him with a means to that end and a skill for dissection."
"If she selected Mira as a victim because of Mira's name—Lourdes—if she did that, then perhaps she is directing all the traffic, planting the clues she wants us to find, planning the abduction, the murder, the mutilation...which begs the question—"
"—did she plan her own mother's death?" he finished.
"—and did she have help even then from the mysterious boyfriend? Damn, a person could go crazy trying to decipher what floats here and what doesn't."
"Easy, Mere."
"And I hate it...I hate the thought of my contributing to all this insanity, however unwittingly."
He lifted her off his desk and into his arms, holding her close. "I'd say let's talk to the investigators on Katherine Croombs's overdose case, but it'd likely be a waste of time. No one's going to admit to sleepwalking through a case."
"What about talking to the M.E. in charge of the death?"
"That'd be Dr. Lynn Nielsen, very sharp. No way she couldn't've had doubts, but she'd just come on—new woman on the totem pole. Perhaps she held back pursuing it as a result."
"Do you think she'd admit that?"
"No, not unless we can convince her of its relevance to what's going on now. Maybe then..."
"You mean it's worth a try?"
"Let's do it."
He made a call and Frank Patterson answered, telling Lucas that Nielsen had just put on her coat and disappeared into the elevator.
"Thanks, Doctor."
"Anything I can do for you, Detective?" But before Patterson could finish his sentence, Lucas had slammed down the phone, grabbed Meredyth by the hand, and rushed her out.
"Nielsen's on her way out of the building. Let's catch her."
When they found Dr. Lynn Nielsen, she'd already exited the elevator on the main floor, but she'd been held up by an intern from a lab who'd chased her down with a clipboard and a form she had to sign. Nielsen briskly signed, waved good night to the young intern, and made for the exit.
Lucas and Meredyth caught her on the stairs outside the precinct, one on each side, Lucas proposing they buy her dinner.