Simon Said (9 page)

"That's right."
"I'm glad you have the time. You must be carrying a pretty light load."

Andrus got up and left the room. Judy Smith poked her head around the corner of the door.

"Are you in one piece?" she asked.
"Barely."
"Would you like me to get you some coffee?"
"Is that politically correct?"
"I won't tell anyone if you won't—just this once."
"Yes, please."

Why on earth had he let Andrus make him so defensive? Probably because Simon felt the man had some right to a grudge. Andrus had been at Kenan for two years when Simon arrived. Simon won a Pulitzer and got tenure when Andrus didn't. Simon was carrying a light teaching load while he recuperated from emotional problems. It was all true. But exactly what was he supposed to do about it?

Judy came back into the room with his coffee. "Here it is," she said. "Hot as hell and sweet as love."

"Thank you," Simon said.
"You should not let Alex Andrus talk to you that way," Judy said. "It makes me sick."

"I know," Simon said. "But I don't know how to deal with someone like him. I don't have the right weaponry."

"Sugar, you're not even fighting on the same battlefield. Just because you're polite and fair doesn't mean everyone is going to treat you the same way. You've got to learn to cover your tail."

"I suppose. But I think this business about the grade is finally over. It's not going to be appealed."

"There'll be something else."
Suddenly, Simon could not stand the sight of his chaotic office.
"Do you think you could help me in here for a while this morning?" Simon asked. "Sure thing. Let me forward the phone to your extension."

Between the two of them, they quickly made progress in the tiny office. She filed while he threw away. Simon feared finding neglected responsibilities tucked into the stacks of papers, and he was not disappointed. He found an entire manuscript that had been sent to him by a publisher to be critiqued.

"Damnation," Simon said. "This is really inexcusable."
"Let me see," said Judy. "Oh, that's nothing."
"How's that?"

"I'll just write and say it got put on the wrong shelf in the mailroom or something, and that if he still wants you to read it, you'll do it right away."

 

"But that's not true. The truth is, I screwed up."

 

"Let's not worry about that today. Let's just get you out of trouble. You can be honest and forthright starting tomorrow."

 

Even worse, Simon found a request from a student for a job recommendation, and he knew he had never written it.

 

"I deserve to be tarred and feathered," he said. "Every word Alex has ever said about me is true."

"Relax," Judy said. "I wrote it."
"You wrote this letter for me?"
"Sure. I knew the girl as well as you did. I can sign your name good, too." "I really owe you, don't I?"
"Don't worry, I'll collect someday."

By the end of the morning, Simon's office looked like a human being worked there. Not a perfect human being, but a functioning one. He was hugely relieved. In retrospect, to uncover only two big screwups was not too bad. It could have been worse.

"Let me take you to lunch," Simon said to Judy.

 

"Some other time," she said. "On Mondays, a bunch of us order in Cooper's barbecue and watch The Young and the Restless."

 

Simon remembered the fax. He followed Judy back to her office. The fax basket was empty.

"Is this thing on?" he asked.
"Absolutely," Judy said. "Scoot. I need to lock up."

Simon talked her into letting him stay in the office while she went to meet her friends. He drank a Coke and ate a package of Nabs and a Moon Pie while watching the machine. Nothing.

At quarter to one, just as Simon was losing hope, the machine began to hum. Paper slipped slowly out of it, curling into a tube and then dropping into the basket. It was a cover sheet with a Pinkerton logo. "Bingo," Mark wrote. "You're out a Reuben all the way and potato salad for a week. Call me and let me know what happens. Mark."

The machine gave birth to the next sheet of paper very, very slowly. Simon thought he would get a headache waiting for it. Finally, he had it in his hands, smoothing the curl out of it and trying to decipher Charles Bloodworth's handwriting, made more difficult by the facsimile reproduction.

Anne Bloodworth had been five foot five, with curly black hair in a bob and brown eyes. She had broken her lower left arm falling out of a tree when she was eight. She wore magnifying glasses to read or do needlework. She was wearing her mother's cameo earrings and brooch when she left—Bloodworth felt that she would not part with them under any circumstances. He thought she could easily make her own living if necessary, either as a governess or as a music teacher. Interesting observation for the wealthy father of a daughter in 1926, thought Simon. That was all, but Simon was excited. Surely the break in her arm would show on the skeleton.

To Simon's surprise, another piece of paper began to emerge from the fax machine. He wasn't really expecting anything else from Mark, so he assumed it was a different letter addressed to someone else. He picked it up, prepared to route it to one of the faculty mailboxes outside in the hall. Instead, he stood rooted to the floor, staring at the neat hand-drawn diagram of Anne Bloodworth's dental chart. It was drawn on a dentist's letterhead, dated April 13, 1926, and signed "Louis J. Pegram, D.D.S."

At quarter to two, Simon's Thunderbird screeched out of the entrance to Kenan College on its way to the city morgue. He wanted to hand over this information personally to Dr. Philip Boyette, the medical examiner, who didn't care about the identity of the corpse he was about to examine. By God, Simon thought, now I can force him to pay attention. Simon had known since he saw what was left of her that she was Anne Bloodworth, and now the rest of the world was going to know it, too.

Dr. Boyette, masked and gowned in pristine green scrub clothes, was extremely annoyed to be interrupted in the middle of an unusually gruesome autopsy by a jubilant Professor Simon Shaw. He stood in the outer office of prepared to dress the young man down for creating the morgue autopsy rooms,

such a commotion that the receptionist had been compelled to summon him from the autopsy room, scalpel still in hand—that is, until Boyette looked at the documents Shaw had brought.

"I'll be damned," Boyette said. "Where did you turn up these?"

"From the Pinkerton archive in New York City," Simon said. "Her father sent the description and the dental chart to them a few days after her disappearance. The archivist just faxed them to me this morning."

"Are you sure they're the real thing?"
"Look," Simon said. "Cutting open bodies is your job. History is mine. These are authentic documents. I'll vouch for Bloodworth's handwriting and signature personally. And the dentist was practicing down the street in Raleigh at the time. We can probably verify his signature, too."

"I'll be damned," Boyette said again. "Well, let's go look. Want to come?" "I said that cutting open bodies is your job. I'll accept your word for whatever you find," Simon said.

In fact, Simon was beginning to taste a little bile in his mouth just thinking about the scenario in the next room. So he got directions to the nearest Coke machine and chugged his second of the day. By the time he returned to the anteroom of the morgue, Boyette was waiting for him.

"It's her," Boyette said. "No question about it. There are a couple of teeth missing, but otherwise the dental records match perfectly. I found the broken arm, too." "Can you say she was murdered?"

Boyette shrugged his shoulders. "After so many years, real physical evidence of the cause of death is impossible to detect, but for heaven's sake, she was nineteen years old and shot in the back of the head. And buried secretly in her own backyard. Of course she was murdered. Officially, we'll call it 'death by misadventure.' "

"The question now is, who killed her, and why?" said Simon.

"We'll probably never know," said Boyette. "But look, if you can wait until I finish up, we can talk. My report will get to the police department eventually, but there's no reason I can't tell you now what I've found. It's public information."

Simon was willing to wait as long as necessary.

When Boyette returned, he was dressed in street clothes. He led Simon into his office, which was as prim and excessively neat as he was. Simon was not sure why the medical examiner made him feel the way chalk scraping against a blackboard did, but he did. If only his mustache was a little fuller or his matching Cross writing implements didn't line up across his breast pocket so martially, he might be a little less grating on one's nerves. At any rate, Simon thought he had converted Boyette to his mission.

"Here," Boyette said, handing Simon two sealed plastic bags. One contained a pair of reading glasses with half lenses and black rims. They looked exactly like ones you could buy in the Rite Aid today, except the rims were metal, not plastic. In the other bag was a small pebble.

"We found the glasses loose in the quilt when we unwrapped it," said Boyette. "The bullet was inside the skull, just as I thought it would be."

 

"This is a bullet?" said Simon. He looked at the object more carefully, rolling it around with his fingers inside of the bag.

"It's been inside a corpse in the ground for seventy years," said Boyette. "It was deformed when it hit the skull to start out with. But it's a bullet all right. Large-caliber one, too."

"Do you keep these?" Simon asked.

 

"No way. Police property. Got to send them to Sergeant Gates. Chain of evidence and all that."

He took the plastic bags away from Simon and put them in a large manila envelope, sealing it carefully with paper tape, which he dated and initialed. Then he addressed it to Gates.

"The police department is right across the street," Boyette said. "But interdepartmental mail takes three days to get there."

 

"Let me walk it over," Simon said. This would give him an excuse to talk to Gates, if he was in, and maybe see Julia, although he didn't know where her office was. "Why not," said Boyette, handing Simon the envelope. "Just make sure you initial and date it, too."

Simon walked across the street to the Public Safety Center, an enormous concrete structure that housed all of the Raleigh police and emergency-services offices, and the Wake County jail to boot. With the help of a uniformed person manning an information desk in the lobby, Simon found his way to the investigative-services area and finally to Gates’s tiny cubicle. Not only was the sergeant in; Julia was with him. They were in the only two available chairs, so Simon perched on the arm of Julia's. The only other furniture in the office was a file cabinet, and most of Gates’s desk was taken up by his computer. The bulk of the man himself made the room seem even smaller. There was no window, either.

"I'm sorry this place is so uncomfortable," Gates said. "I think it's intentional—makes us want to get out of the office and into the field, where we're supposed to be anyway." "Boyette called and told us about the results of the autopsy. I've been trying to convince the sergeant to proceed with an investigation," Julia said.

Julia was wearing another prim lady-lawyer suit, complete with severe blouse and tie. At least this outfit was midnight blue, a color that suited her better than gray. Simon much preferred her in denim and T-shirts.

"Come on, Julia. This is wearing me out," said Gates. "You know we can't spend any money investigating this. We don't have the budget to indulge your curiosity. Be happy we got an identification so this poor woman can have a decent burial."

"But you will open a file?" asked Simon.
"Of course," said Gates. "We have to do that."
"What about the bullet?"
"We can determine the caliber here," Gates said.
"I think you should send it to the FBI," Julia said.
"In your dreams," Gates answered. "Do you know how much that costs?" "What are we talking about?" Simon asked.

"The FBI operates an information bureau called the Criminalistics Laboratory Information System," Julia said. "One of their databases is the General Rifling Characteristics file, which can be accessed to identify the manufacturer and type of weapon that may have been used to fire a bullet. You send the bullet to them, they analyze it and then send it back with a complete report."

"I wish you would stick to Miranda warnings and leave the police work to me," Gates said.

 

"They also have some other files—firearms and stolen-property lists—that they could check to see if the bullet was fired from a known firearm."

 

"They would never have a record of a gun this old."

 

"You don't know that. The weapon could have had a history for years after this crime occurred."

"This is very interesting," said Simon. "And they charge you for this?" "The FBI charges for everything," said Gates.
"How about if I pay for it?" asked Simon.

"Out of the question. We can't have private citizens making decisions for the police department."

"Look," Julia said. "No one will ever know. You have the authority as investigating officer to send the bullet to the CLIS. You'll get the report back. You'll put it in the file. The invoice will get paid by the accounting office, just like a thousand other invoices. You haven't done anything wrong."

Gates groaned. "The chief will kill me."

"He'll never know," said Julia. "Besides, you just say that in your professional judgment, this was a necessary step to take before closing the file. You're in the clear. Trust me—I'm your lawyer."

"It was a dark day when you came here to work, Julia. All right, I'll send the damn thing out. I have to admit, I'm curious, too."

 

"Okay, so we send the bullet off for analysis, and we open the file today," Julia said. "Then what?"

"I think it's our historian's call," Gates said.
Both of them looked at Simon expectantly.

"Well," said Simon. "I'm not exactly sure. I've been so obsessed with getting the body identified, I haven't given any thought to where to go from here."

Simon was running out of research ideas. He had completely searched the newspapers and the Bloodworth papers. Julia had found Peebles's report, which seemed to be the only document in police files. The offices of the local detective agency hired by Charles Bloodworth had burned, presumably with all its records.