Meet Me at the Morgue (8 page)

“Yes. What are you going to do about it, Howie?”

“Get a positive identification from Seifel, naturally. If he’s willing to make one.”

She took hold of my arm with both hands, looking up at my face through tears. “Please don’t tell him I told you.”

“Are you so crazy about him?”

“It’s terrible. I feel lonely all the time I’m not seeing him.”

“Even if he’s mixed up in this business?”

She pressed her face against my shoulder. “He is mixed up in it, I know he is. I realized it as soon as I saw that man in the back of the mortuary. It doesn’t seem to change my feeling.”

The fine tremor of her nerves passed through her hands to my arm. Her hair had disarrayed itself. I smoothed it with my free hand.

“You’re my good right arm, Ann. I don’t want you going to pieces.”

“I’m not.” She straightened up, refastening bobby pins, regrouping her forces.

“Go home and take a rest. Forget about Mrs. Johnson. She’s made of strong stuff, and doing perfectly well.”

“So am I.” She managed to smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll put on my public look. Actually, I’m better off with somebody else to think about.”

“Do you like her?”

“Of course I do. I think she’s a marvelous woman.” Ann had already put on her public look. “Don’t you?”

Helen Johnson’s face was suddenly in my mind. I realized that she was a beautiful woman. Her beauty wasn’t dazzling. It was simply there, something definite and solid that had never entirely left my mind from the moment I met her.

“Don’t you?” Ann repeated with her Mona Lisa smile.

I refused to answer on the grounds that my reply might tend to incriminate me. “Beat it now, Ann. Forest is waiting for you.”

“If I’m your good right arm, you won’t tell Larry, will you?”

“Not unless I have to. But he’ll know.”

“I can’t help that, can I?”

CHAPTER
10
:
      
Forest was sitting in Ann’s chair
with the typed report in his hand. He turned it face down on the desk and stood up:

“This man’s record is excellent, at least on the surface. You’re sure it’s complete? No missing years or anything like that?”

“Linebarge does a thorough job,” I said. “He used to be a cop, and he has to convince himself every time.”

“He’s convinced me. If this is the full story, unretouched, I can’t see Miner in the role of kidnapper. A man doesn’t often build up a solid record for twenty or thirty years, then turn around and commit a major crime. Of course there are exceptions: embezzlement, passional murder. But kidnapping for profit takes preparation. It doesn’t come naturally to a normal man. Well, Miss Devon? Are we ready?”

“Ready,” she answered with her best public smile.

“One thing occurred to me,” he said from the doorway. “This hit-and-run he pleaded guilty to—is there any possibility it wasn’t an accident? Murder by automobile is getting pretty common in these parts. Who was the victim?”

“Not identified, so far as I know.”

“The courthouse people call him Mr. Nobody,” Ann put in.

“Two of them, eh? This case has its puzzling aspects, all right.” Forest held the door for Ann and closed it sharply behind him.

I sat down in the chair he had been warming, and phoned Larry Seifel’s office. A secretarial voice told me with sweet impatience that he was busy.

“Tell him it’s Howard Cross, and I’m also busy.”

“Very well, Mr. Goss.”

His voice sounded higher and thinner over the wire. “Who is it speaking, please?”

“Cross. I’m in my office. I want to see you right away.”

“Can’t you come over here? I’m swamped with work, drawing up one of these complicated trusts. I lost the whole morning, you know.”

I cut him short: “I’ll expect you in twenty minutes, or less. On the way—do you know Watkins’s Mortuary?”

“It’s a block up from the courthouse, isn’t it?”

“Right. Cleat’s got a corpse there, in the back room. I
want you to look at it before you come here. Tell Cleat I sent you.”

“A corpse? Somebody I know?”

“You should be able to answer that question when you see him.” I hung up.

Turning the Miner report over, I began to glance through it idly, and then to read it in earnest. I hadn’t seen it since Linebarge submitted it for my approval the week before the hearing, and there were going to be questions about Fred Miner.

I skipped through the “Family Background” section, which reminded me that Frederick Andrew Miner had been born on an Ohio farm in 1916. His mother died two years after his birth and her place in his life was taken by his elder sister, Ella. Their father was a strict man, a member of the Mennonite sect whose motto was: “The Devil finds things for idle hands to do.” The boy’s hands were seldom idle. He worked full time on the farm in the spring and summer. In the winter he attended country school, and later a Union High School, where he specialized in “practical mechanics.”

   
According to the records of the High School
[the report went on]
Miner was a serious, plodding student with a good citizenship standing and great mechanical aptitude. He was, however, forced to leave school without being graduated, at the age of sixteen, and take a full-time job in a local garage. This shift was necessitated to a great extent by economic pressures. For a period of several years, while he was still in his teens, the boy was the mainstay of the family, his garage work providing the only regular cash-income the Miner family had. This was supplemented to some extent by Miner’s winnings as a stock-car racing-driver at various local meets and county fairs
.

   
When the Depression lifted somewhat, Miner was
enabled to borrow enough money, with his father’s backing, to open a small filling-station of his own. This prospered, and by 1940, when he enlisted in the armed services, Miner was the proprietor of a filling-station and an attached “service” garage
.

   
His initial desire, Miner states, was to become a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy. Being unable to meet the educational requirements, he elected instead to become a ground crewman in the Naval air service. After a period of boot training at Norfolk, Va., he served at various Naval air bases on the West Coast, and rose, through diligent work and regular study, to the rating of Aviation Motor Machinist’s Mate, First Class. While stationed at the Naval Air Station, San Diego, Miner met and married Amy Wolfe, daughter of a small businessman in San Diego, on Sept. 18, 1942. Their marriage, although childless, has been marked by steady and devoted companionship
.

   
In the summer of 1943, Miner was ordered to Bremerton, Wash., to join the crew of the
Eureka Bay,
an escort carrier then in the final stages of construction. Mrs. Miner followed her husband to Bremerton, and remained near him during the training and shakedown period. It was during this period, she states, that Miner “took his first drink,” and discovered that he was unable to “hold his liquor.” This fact is confirmed by Dr. Levinson, who describes Miner in his attached report as “a potential alcoholic, that is, a man who is psychologically and/or physiologically abnormally susceptible to the intoxicant and depressant effects of alcohol.
”

   
Miner’s first drinking episode, he frankly admits, was responsible for the only black mark on his Naval record. Failing to return aboard ship at the assigned time after a weekend pass, he was reduced to the rating of Aviation Motor Machinist’s mate, Second Class. Within a year, however
,
Miner had recovered his First Class rating, and before his Naval career ended, he achieved the rating of Chief Aviation Motor Machinist
.

   
Miner’s contribution to his country’s defense, a factor to which the community attaches some weight when the kind and degree of a man’s punishment for a crime is in the balance, is sufficiently attested to by the attached letters from Captain Angus Drew, C.O. of the
Eureka Bay,
1944–1945; Commander Julius Heckendorf, Executive Officer; and Lieutenant Elmer Morton, First Lieutenant and Damage Control Officer. “His diligence and devotion to duty,” Comdr. Heckendorf writes, “were remarkable even in a branch of the service where such qualities are a normal expectation. His work was an inspiration to the men under him, and a source of satisfaction to his superiors.” During Miner’s service aboard the
Eureka Bay,
the vessel participated in the Iwo Jima, Luzon, and Okinawa invasions
.

   
Towards the conclusion of the Okinawa campaign, Miner’s Naval career was terminated in what Lieutenant Morton calls “a burst of glory.” The
Eureka Bay
was struck by a Japanese “suicide” plane, which tore a hole in the flight deck and plunged through to the hangar deck. In the confusion that followed, Miner assumed responsibility for fighting the ensuing fire on the hangar deck, and the crew that he rallied was successful in bringing the blaze under control. Unfortunately, a bomb exploded in the wreckage of the “Kamikaze” throwing Miner against a bulkhead and fracturing his skull and spine. Flown to Guam and ultimately to the Naval Hospital in San Diego, Miner spent the greater part of the next year in a hospital bed. He was released from the service on a fifty-per-cent-disability pension in March 1946
.

   
Immediately upon his release, Miner was offered a
position as chauffeur with Mr. Abel Johnson, at that time the head of a San Diego real estate firm. He has been employed by Mr. Johnson since that time and has, to quote his employers words, “served us loyally and efficiently.” Mr. Johnson is willing, if the Court sees fit to grant probation, to continue Miner in his present position and to assume reasonable responsibility for his future good behavior (See memo. #8). Dr. Levinson is of opinion that: “Miner in particular, and the community in general, need have nothing to worry about if he will eschew alcoholic beverages in any and all forms. Apart from his potential alcoholism, a condition which is by no means rare among wounded war veterans in general and men who have lost their mothers at an early age in particular, Miner presents a sound psychological configuration.
”

   
Turning to the circumstances of the accident itself, we find certain mitigating circumstances. One is the fact that Miner admits his guilt, and is sincerely repentant. Another is the fact that he was “on holiday” when the accident occurred. While no excuse can be made for drunken driving as such, the fact is that Miner’s employers were both absent at the time, winter-vacationing at their desert establishment, so that Miner cannot be charged with “drinking on duty.” There is the further fact that, while Miner was found to be legally intoxicated at the time of his arrest, his victim was also under the influence of alcohol. The victim’s blood was found to have an alcoholic content of 157 mg., from which it is arguable that the victim may have been at least partly responsible for the accident. As for the second and perhaps more serious charge against Miner, that of leaving the scene of a fatal accident without reporting it to the proper authorities, Miner himself claims that he was totally unaware of the accident’s occurrence. Supporting his assertion, difficult as it is to believe
due to the damage to the automobile and the evidence of violent impact, is Dr. Levinson’s opinion that “a person of Miner’s susceptibility to alcohol, with over 200 mg. of it in his blood, might very conceivably have run over a man without knowing it.
”

   
Miner himself can only be described as a willing and hopeful prospect for probation. There are no other violations in his record, and he says with every appearance of sincerity: “I intend to observe all laws in future. My failure to observe the laws against drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident are a source of intense remorse to me. All I can say is that liquor was my downfall.” His wife, Amy Wolfe Miner, states: “If ever a man has learned from experience, Fred has learned. I am equally responsible with Fred for letting him buy that bottle. We are both resolved that there will be no more bottles, Fred is a teetotaler from here on in.
”

   
We conclude that with his wife’s support and that of his employers, Frederick A. Miner should be in a good position to rehabilitate himself under the guidance of the Probation Department. Such guidance should include a total ban on the consumption of alcoholic beverages, strict adherence to all laws in both letter and spirit, especially traffic laws, regular interviews with the probation authority, a course of indoctrination at the Alcoholism Center, and such other conditions as the Court may see fit to incorporate in its order
.

A
LEX
S. L
INEBARGE
           
Deputy Probation Officer

I put the report back in its folder and replaced it in the “M” file. Thorough as it was, it failed to answer some of the questions rising in my mind. The question Forest had asked, for instance: Could the involuntary manslaughter
have been voluntary homicide? Was there a connection between the first anonymous body and the second, between both and Fred? Most important of all, and most difficult: What sort of a man was Miner?

No human personality peeped out between the lines of Alex Linebarge’s unimaginative prose. To Alex, souls were either black or white. He had decided once and for all that Miner was white, and omitted those touches of tattletale gray that would have given reality to his sketch. There was a sense in which Miner, in spite of the laborious biographical data, was a third unidentified man, another Mr. Nobody.

I picked up the telephone and called the mortuary. Seifel had just left there. He was a fourth.

CHAPTER
11
:
      
I heard him taking the steps two
at a time, and opened the door. He was breathing hard, like a sprinter who had barely made it to the tape. His eyes had a glassy sheen and his face was loose, as if a heavy block of experience had fallen out of the California sky and struck him a dazing blow.