The Judgment (46 page)

“Yeah, I noticed.”

She sighed. “Well, I got through it.”

“Whatever works, Sue. You did fine.”

“At least we know now what kind of car the killer has.”

“Four-wheel drive.”

“Dark color, black or maybe brown. I wonder how many of those there are in the county.”

“Not an infinite number. It’s a place to start.”

“Oh, yes.”

My apartment building loomed ahead. Emotionally, rather than physically, I was exhausted. Perhaps, in a way, I felt even worse than I had that night on Clarion Road when little Catherine Quigley was found. But Í felt different. I had no wish to talk with Bob Williams about what it all meant, nor certainly with Sue Gillis. My problems with the Higher Power remained unsolved.

Something struck me just then. “Larry said something when you dropped him off. He said he didn’t envy you. What did he mean?”

“I have to go to the autopsy tomorrow morning,” she said, turning into my driveway. “It’s customary for an officer to be present. Since I’m heading the investigation now, it’s up to me.”

It wasn’t until later, when we were in bed and I was close to sleep, that she asked me to go with her to the autopsy.

“I don’t believe I was much help to you out there tonight,” I responded.

“Yes you were. Just having you there meant everything to me.”

Because she had to go to headquarters first, Sue left my apartment early the next morning. I was to meet her a little before nine at the entrance to the Kerry County Community Hospital. I was early, pacing before the doors of the place, and nervous, nervous, nervous. It wasn’t that I was afraid she’d be late or might not come—I would have been delighted if she hadn’t shown up. No, it was dissatisfaction with myself, annoyance that she had managed to persuade me to do something I certainly did not want to do, and fear of what lay ahead. If someone had come along and asked me what I felt right then and there, the only honest
answer I could have given would have been anger.

God knows I’m no wimp, in front of a judge and jury, I can breathe fire with the best of them. Yet when Sue began to plead over coffee, I found I simply couldn’t turn her down. I know now what the problem was. I couldn’t refuse her because I had made up my mind that we had to break up, that our romance had ended or that it would end when I sat down with her and explained why it was impossible. I felt certain she would be hurt by that, and so I had unconsciously decided to give her what she wanted until them As I look back, it seems that this all came about because I was determined to let her down easy.

I had even agreed to keep that Thanksgiving dinner date with her parents that afternoon following all this. She had obtusely and stubbornly insisted that nothing was changed, that the date still stood, that following the autopsy and her return visit to the crime scene with Larry Antonovich, we would set off for Southfield. It was over the meadow and through the woods, and let’s be sure to get there on time. The woman had a Thanksgiving obsession.

And so I paced angrily back and forth in front of the entrance to the hospital. It was chilly, rather than cold. Even, at this early hour the temperature had risen above freezing, and the bright sun had begun melting last night’s snowfall. By afternoon the streets and sidewalks would be a mess. By evening the snow would probably be gone entirely.

Sue appeared, walking swiftly from the hospital parking lot. I hadn’t noticed the big Caprice make its entrance. Maybe it was in some special corner reserved for the police. She clipped up the two steps and gave me a nod and a faint smile.

I opened the door for her.

As she passed through, she said, “We’ve got an ID on the boy now.”

“Who is it? Where’s he from?”

I caught up with her, and we hurried along to the reception
desk. She stopped there just long enough to inquire where the autopsy was to be held.

“In the operating theater on the third floor,” said the receptionist. “But that’s not open to the public.”

“I’m not the public,” said Sue, flashing her police ID.

“What about him?” Meaning me.

“He’s with me,” she called back. Already we were on our way to the elevator.

As we waited, it took her about a minute to tell me that the victim’s name was Richard Fauret. He was the youngest in a French-Canadian farming family from Copper Creek, an unincorporated area up in that empty northwest corner of the county. She said they were old-fashioned backwoods people who believed in taking care of their own problems, so they had searched for their Dickey, as they called him, for about three hours, maybe more, before they gave in and called the local police. The local police force in Clay ville, population just under a thousand, was comprised of three. There was some difficulty in communication because the father’s English was far from” perfect. Finally, the night-duty man decided that this just might have something to do with all those murders around Hub City, and he passed it on to the county police around midnight.

“But the Faurets have seen their son?” I asked. “Made a positive identification?”

“Yes, they were here about seven o’clock. I heard it was a pretty bad scene.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Sue rushed me off the elevator. She seemed to know her way around the hospital pretty well, far better than I did, anyway. We turned to the right and scurried to a door about halfway down the hall. She opened it and pushed me inside.

I was surprised to find it really was an operating theater. I expected something more on the order of what I had seen in my few brief visits to the morgue in Detroit—
cold-box storage drawers, a slab, running water, scales, little more than that.

This was something much grander.

The door through which we entered was raised above the operating room by a number of feet to accommodate two rows of benches that ran around the floor in three sides of a rectangle. It wasn’t until we descended a few steps and took our places on the nearest bench that I saw we were separated from the operating room by a glass panel, which ran all the way around the room.

Sue must have noticed my surprise at this elaborate setup, for she leaned toward me and whispered, “This hospital was built in the early Sixties by a surgeon who thought he was pretty hot stuff. He thought if he built a space like this, all southeastern Michigan would come and watch him perform.”

“And is that how it worked out?”

“No, he died.”

“So they use this for autopsies, too?”

“There aren’t that many needed in the county, Charley.”

“I suppose not.”

We didn’t have long to wait. The body of the boy was wheeled in on a gurney by an attendant. The medical examiner followed them in, wearing surgical pajamas, gloved but unmasked. He looked up and waved at Sue as the attendant pulled the sheet from the boy’s naked body and transferred him to the operating table. There was a tape recorder and a microphone on a smaller wheeled table next to the big one. The microphone was raised and bent in such a way that the medical examiner could speak into it easily while going about his business.

“All ready up there?” he asked. His voice came through speakers on both sides of us. Stereophonic sound.

Sue nodded.

“Now, when I switch on the tape recorder, everything I say will go on the tape, but you’ll be able to hear it, too. There’s no way for you to speak to me from where you
are, so all you can do is watch. If you have any questions, take notes, and see me afterward. Is all that understood?”

Sue nodded again. She fished out a notebook and a ballpoint pen from her purse.

“All right, here we go.”

He switched on the tape recorder and began speaking in a less casual, more authoritative manner, giving the date, the time, and the place. He identified himself.

“The subject,” he began, “is Richard Fauret. He is a Caucasian male, about seven years old. His height is”— here he used a tape measure—“forty and one half inches. He has been weighed at forty-two pounds. He appears to have been in good health. He has good muscular development and is of stocky physique. There are no exterior wounds or scars. Previous to being washed for this autopsy .procedure, the subject’s hands showed traces of dried mud and dirt.”

He paused at this point and looked across the operating table at the attendant.

“I will now make a butterfly incision around his thorax area.”

He picked up a scalpel and proceeded to do just that. The famous butterfly incision. I’d heard of it, of course, but had never seen it done. There was very little blood, just a red line that followed the path of the knife. Yet I hadn’t expected what came next. The instrument he chose then had a small hand-sized grip and at the end of it a circular saw blade about two inches in diameter. He switched it on, and the blade glinted in the light as it whirled.

I looked at Sue in panic. I found her leaning forward, quite absorbed in the action before us.

My hands began to tremble.

He dug the saw in the hollow at the bottom of the boy’s throat and proceeded downward, cutting through the sternum, attaching the two wings of the butterfly.

I looked on, not quite believing, as the medical examiner put aside the saw, and with the help of the attendant,
pulled open the boy’ cnese. Except for the glass between us, I was sure I would have heard the rip of flesh, the tearing of bones.

And there was little Richard Fauret, more than naked, exposed. It was almost as if his killer had planned this as the final insult. I’d seen the bagman for Detroit’s biggest dealer similarly violated, his intestines exposed, drooping down from his slit belly. I’d managed somehow to handle that, but this was different because Richard Fauret was innocent. Just as innocent as Catherine Quigley, or Lee Higgins, or Billy Bartkowski. What Bob Williams had said to me that night after my experience out on Clarion Road was true: It’s the destruction of the innocents that hurts the most, that calls our most deeply held beliefs to question.

What did I do? What could I do? I left there in full flight, actually running to get away. I knew I couldn’t stay to see the boy’s organs lifted out, examined, and weighed. I had to get out of there.

I went toward the elevator, then saw the sign that led me to the stairway. I must have gone down the stairs, because I remember getting out of the hospital without passing the reception desk, or going through the lobby. Finding myself out in the hospital parking lot, I looked around, feeling disoriented, lost, and needing a drink.

Oh, yes, needing a drink very badly.

After some difficulty, I found my car and drove straight to Jimmy Doyle’s. It was the only bar I knew of that was open at that hour of the morning.

A
bout what happened during the next three days, I don’t have much to say. That’s partly because I feel a certain guilt, even shame, about it all. After all, I’d gone years without a drink, and though I never lost sight of the fact that I was a recovering alcoholic, I had built up confidence that I could go years more without a drink. I thought I had the problem under control.

I didn’t.

At Jimmy Doyle’s I had three straight shots of bar Scotch, but they weren’t enough to erase those images from the autopsy from my mind. The two old geezers at the end of the bar watched me rather carefully; they seemed to know something was seriously wrong. When I called for a fourth shot, the bartender refused to serve me. I didn’t make a fuss; I couldn’t; he was right to cut me off. I paid up, remembering to tip him just to show there were no hard feelings, went out to my car, and vomited in the gutter. What a pretty picture.

That didn’t stop me, didn’t even slow me down. I got into the car and drove in that slow, extra-careful way that drunks do. Not directly home, but to a liquor store on the way. If I was going to do this, then I was going to do it right. I bought a half-gallon bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, my old brand of preference, assuring myself that the reason I’d thrown up was that I’d drunk bad Scotch. That
never happened when I drank Johnnie Walker. Then, as an afterthought, since I was obliged to keep office hours the next day, I bought a bottle of vodka. At some unspecified time later today, I would switch to vodka, and no one would know tomorrow that I’d been drinking. Sure.

Returning to my apartment, I made a vow not to answer the telephone—it was sure to be Sue, and I had no wish to speak to her—and settled down for some serious drinking. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it. The rich, golden liquid hit my tongue like so much nectar, yet there was enough bite to it to let me know that this was the real stuff, the right stuff. Oh yes, I remembered it well.

I started out drinking it on ice, more civilized that way, and settled in a living room chair with the television set switched on. I can’t say that I was watching it. But the changing flow of images on the screen gave me something on which to concentrate my vision, and the voices occupied some part of my mind. I heard, I saw, though I didn’t really listen or watch. I was in my old drinking mode, running on automatic pilot. The idea was not to think and not to remember. And for a while it was working pretty well. I eventually decided it wasn’t really necessary to put ice in the glass. No ice, more Scotch. Then I passed out, unconscious, a dreamless sleep.

The telephone woke me. Sue, of course, and the thought of her annoyed me—no, more than that, it made me angry. Or perhaps it was simply the persistent ringing that made me angry. In any case, I decided to do something about it. I slipped off the chair and crawled over to the telephone. Reaching up, I pulled the receiver off its cradle. Then I went into the next room and collapsed on the bed.

Some time later, Sue was at my door, banging, kicking, and yelling about Thanksgiving. She said she knew I was there because my car was in the parking lot. There were some other things, too, that I didn’t quite understand or don’t remember. I do recall, though, that I wished she wouldn’t make such a racket because it was a holiday—that much I knew, at least—and all the neighbors, such as
they were, would be around to hear her. I couldn’t call the cops because she was the cops.