Backstab (20 page)

“No, but I still have the story.” She checked her computer list, called it up and read from it: “Police said the victim was born Michael Delmer. His surviving relatives included his mother in Florissant. He lived with a roommate in the 3400 block of Crittenden on the city's South Side. Mr. Delmer was a female impersonator, known professionally as Maria Callous.”

“Ralph was right! It was Maria, the Ass with Class!” I said, much too loudly, and a few heads turned at nearby desks. “That was the rest of her slogan,” I said to Tina.

“I know,” she said. “I wasn't even going to try to get that in the paper. I should tell you that her roommate was also her manager.”

“Maybe the roommate-manager can help me,” I said. “Maria disappeared during the Miss American Gender Bender Pageant, and most people thought she'd dropped out because she didn't have much chance of winning. Instead,
the poor thing was murdered. You've been a huge help. Can I ask you one more question? Who did the autopsy for the Medical Examiner's office?”

“I couldn't forget that one,” said Tina. “It was Cutup Katie. That's Dr. Kathryn Granito. You're in luck. She likes to talk about her work. She'll tell you everything you need to know. I have her number here somewhere.” Tina rooted around in the pile of papers and old newspapers that covered her desk, pulled out a fat leather address book, looked up the number for me, and wrote it on a Post-it note.

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll call her tomorrow and do lunch at the city morgue.”

“Couldn't be any worse than the
Gazette
cafeteria,” said Tina.

“I
need to pick your brain,” I said to Cutup Katie when I called her the next day.

“You've come to the right place,” she said. “I've been picking brains all morning. Also freezing, slicing, and staining sections.”

Katie is a pathologist with the St. Louis Medical Examiner's office. Her job at the city morgue gave me the creeps, but I liked Katie right from our first conversation. Tina told me she has a string of honors and medical degrees. But Katie grew up in the country, and it gave her a down-to-earth outlook about her job: People die. Sometimes it's sad. Mostly, it's interesting.

“I need to ask you questions about an autopsy you did last month,” I said. “It's okay, there are no traps. It's not a high-profile case. In fact, that's why I'm getting in touch with you. This death hardly made the
Gazette
at all. All I want is information that's on the public record.”

“No problem,” said Katie. “My work is stacked up to the ceiling, but I can meet you for lunch.”

I hoped it was paperwork Katie had stacked to the ceiling, but I was afraid to ask.

“I'll eat lunch with you,” I said, “but not in your office. Tina said her last lunch with you there was disgusting.”

“It was good,” said Katie. “I had the daily special sent in from the lunchroom around the corner, and they have terrific spaghetti.”

“Too bad you didn't change for lunch. She said those smears on your lab coat looked a lot like the daily special. She lost her appetite.”

“I'm sorry,” said Katie, and she sounded contrite. “I'm so used to my job, sometimes I forget how it affects people. Listen, if we go to lunch today, I'll trade my lab coat for a nice suit jacket.”

“In that case, the
City Gazette
will take you to Kemoll's if you'll tell me all about the autopsy you did on a female impersonator named Michael Delmer.”

“All right,” said Katie, with enthusiasm. “A great lunch spot. An unusual case, too. I'll meet you at Kemoll's about one o'clock.”

She didn't get there until one twenty, but I didn't mind waiting. Kemoll's is an old St. Louis restaurant that successfully survived a transplant to a new upscale location downtown. Now it was a favorite with the business lunch crowd. I sat in a comfortable chair and raided the bread basket while I waited.

I knew it was Katie coming across the room,
even without Tina's description. She looked the way she talked: smart and sensible. She had a no-nonsense brown suit and shoes, short brown hair, and brown eyes. She was about thirty-five, and as they say in her trade, she had “the body of a well-nourished well-muscled Caucasian female.” These weren't gym-rat muscles. Katie played softball and pool. She drove a pickup truck, kept a big old dog, went deer hunting, and made her own gourmet deer jerky, which was so good the city kids in her office lost their reservations about eating Bambi. I'd never guess she was a doctor until she revealed her guilty secret: she loved golf with a passion that bordered on, well…the pathological.

We didn't discuss the autopsy until after we finished lunch. Katie held back out of courtesy so her shoptalk wouldn't spoil my grilled swordfish. It wasn't until the coffee came that Katie pulled the autopsy report out of her black briefcase. I looked at it curiously.

“Never seen one before?” she said.

Never. The report was fairly thick. The front page said it was “an autopsy on the body of Michael Delmer by medical examiner Kathryn Granito.”

It also said, “In my opinion the cause of death was anoxic injury secondary to strangulation.”

The manner of death was homicide. There was one more piece of page one news: The body had “an absence of genitalia, mutilated after death.” At that bit of information, my swordfish did a flip-flop. The rest of the report explained
how Katie reached those conclusions. She gave me the highlights.

“A homicide detective was present for the autopsy, but he was an old hand, so I didn't have to worry about him passing out. He told me the victim had one arrest for prostitution and one for loitering, but nothing in the last two years.

“The victim was strangled and the genital area was mutilated after death. Both are usually signs that it was a sex killing. But I'll get into that later. On the gross examination I noticed gynecomastia,” Katie said, turning the pages in her report.

“What's that?”

“The guy was starting to grow tits. That's not such a big deal, no pun intended. Some textbooks say up to forty percent of normal men have palpable breast tissue…”

“What's that mean?” I interrupted again.

“You can feel it,” Katie said.

“I think those same figures are true for women,” I said.

“Certainly true for me,” she said. “Anyway, a number of things can cause enlarged breasts in men. It can be a deficiency in testosterone. An increase in estrogen. A number of drugs, legal or illegal. Marijuana can give men bazooms, did you know that? I like to tell guys that little side effect of the weed.”

“That's a reason for men to just say no. Might get women to say yes, though,” I said.

“The other causes aren't as much fun. Tumors, like some lung cancers, and hyperthyroid
problems can give men tits. Alcoholism can do it, too.

“Anyway, I did some checking on this guy to find out why he had breasts. The lungs, adrenals, and thyroid were normal. There was no evidence of marijuana use. The liver looked normal—no sign of cirrhosis.”

“He wasn't an alcoholic,” I said, brightly, like the A-student I used to be.

“Nope. When I did a tox screen I didn't find any drugs, but there were estrogen metabolites in the urine. Since there were no liver problems, adrenal disease, or tumors, and since the victim was dressed in women's clothes, it's real possible the guy was a transsexual, taking estrogen in preparation for a sex change operation. Which is what the cops guessed when they found the body. But we aren't allowed to guess until we rule out the other possibilities first.

“I couldn't examine the penis and testicles because there wasn't much left of them. The victim had been stabbed in the genitals seventy-eight times—at least I think so. There were so many cuts, they were hard to count. That's what we call overkill.”

I nodded and watched the waiter pouring more coffee. I thought his hands shook. But maybe not.

“When someone is stabbed multiple times, it's either drugs, money, or sex. The assailant is frustrated: he can't get his drugs, he can't get sex, he can't get his money. There was no bruising or blood around the stabbing area, so the
mutilation was done after death. There were no defense wounds on the victim's hands and arms, which is another sign it was done after death. I guarantee if you go after a live guy's gonads, there will be defense wounds.”

“What was he stabbed with?”

“A small knife. A few of the marks seem to have been up to the hilt and running parallel to the blade marks. There are indentations of three millimeters on one side and seven on the other.”

Katie caught my blank look. “That means it was probably a pocket knife. I can tell you that, but I couldn't swear to it on the witness stand. It could also be a kitchen knife or a small hunting knife, but I did notice those two ridges on either side, where the other blades would come out on a pocket knife. So my educated guess is a pocket knife.

“There was no sperm on the victim, so it's probably not some weirdo getting his jollies—unless he used a condom. Because of the overkill, I'd say the mutilation was done in anger.

“The victim was strangled, and that often has a sexual motive, too. He was strangled with his own chiffon scarf.

“The assailant fractured the hyoid bone. That's the horseshoe-shaped bone in front of the larynx that protects it. There was hemorrhage and some bad bruises.

“Strangulation is not a way you want to go. The cop told me the victim was a pretty little blonde, but not when I saw him. His head
turned purple, his throat was bruised, and there were fingernail marks on his neck.”

“The killer scratched him?”

“The victim did that to himself, trying to claw the scarf off. I checked the fingernails for hairs and stuff, but I didn't come up with anything.”

“Could a small person strangle the victim?” I asked. At least I'd have some idea of the size of the killer.

“Easy. The guy only weighed a hundred pounds or so. Besides, if you get really mad—and whoever killed this guy was raging—you can strangle almost anyone. If you got mad enough, you could strangle a big guy like him,” Katie said, pointing to our waiter. He backed away from the table.

“I think that's the end of the coffee,” I said.

“Just as well, I have to get back to work,” said Katie.

“One last question. Who claimed the body?”

“His mother. Now there's a piece of work. I'd like to carve her up—and she's still alive. You wouldn't believe the scene she made when she identified the body. The whole place was talking about it. Kept yelling, ‘The shame! The shame!' At first everyone thought she was saying what a shame that her son died so young. Turns out she was ashamed of the way he died. He embarrassed his mother by getting strangled and thrown in a Dumpster.”

The mother of Michael Delmer, also known as Maria Callous, the Ass with Class, lived in the suburb of Florissant, which was the end of the
earth, as far as I was concerned. It took me forty-five minutes to drive to her house, and that's about the outer limit for a St. Louisan. I didn't have an appointment. I was pretty sure she wouldn't see me if I tried to make one. Maybe I'd get lucky and find her at home. Maybe I'd get luckier and find her gone.

The North County suburb started as an eighteenth-century French settlement. I liked the Old Town, with its ancient brick houses in mellowed soft shades of red. But most of Florissant was a sprawl of much newer ranch houses and split-levels, built in the sixties and seventies. Florissant had one other distinction: It was also the home of one of the newest Catholic saints, Philippine Duchesne.

Michael/Maria's mother lived in a newish ranch house off Shackelford Road. But she had plenty of old-time religion, too, and she proudly displayed it. The small front yard had a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary by the carport. The birdbath had a smaller St. Francis, with a concrete bird on his finger. A couple of pint-sized concrete angels perched in the gutters. I wasn't sure I'd want any angels of mine in the gutter.

The pale gray house with the black shutters had a wrought-iron eagle over the red front door, so I knew Mrs. Delmer was patriotic as well as devout. I rang the doorbell, and she answered. At least, I thought it was her. She was a small, trim, fiftyish woman in red stretch pants, a white turtleneck, and a red cardigan sweater. She wore enameled flag earrings and a red-white-and-blue
belt to complete the ensemble. Her hair was set in a Jackie Kennedy pouf.

“Mrs. Delmer?” I asked.

“Yes?” she said, inspecting me like the dubious package I was.

“I'm with the
City Gazette.
I wanted to ask you a few questions about your son.”

“Son?” she said, her voice shrill and hard. “I have no son.”

“Michael Delmer?”

“He was no son of mine,” she said. “I cast him out. He was an abomination.”

“Please, Mrs. Delmer. Could I come in for just a few minutes?”

She opened the door. I wasn't surprised. I figured she'd be one of those people who liked to complain about how much they suffered.

The door opened straight into a living room. The place was so clean you could have performed surgery on the coffee table. The white ruffled Priscilla curtains were starched till they crackled. The blue braided rug looked like it had never been walked on. The milk-glass lamps with the ruffled shades were dusted and gleaming. I sat down on a blue Early American couch. She took the Early American recliner.