Falsely Accused (28 page)

“Speaking of damaging material,” said Selig, “did you ever find out whether there was anything to that story about a D.A.'s investigation of the M.E.?” Karp didn't answer. “Butch?”

“Huh? Oh, right—no, that seems to have been a rumor …” He stopped talking, his face slack, his eyes staring at nothing. The Seligs shared a concerned look.

“Butch, is … something wrong? Need a Gelusil?”

Karp snapped to, showing intensity now. “No, I'm fine,” he said. “Look, Murray, I want you to come back to my place after court this afternoon. There's something I want you to take a look at.”

FOURTEEN

Karp and Marlene sat at their round dining room table and watched Murray Selig look at photographs of corpses. Marlene had turned the track lighting up to its highest setting and brought her halogen desk lamp in from her office, so that the cozy domestic space shone with the unforgiving light of the autopsy room. As Selig studied each picture with the aid of a hand lens, Karp studied Selig. The man was not happy. Oddly enough for someone who had been fired for purported deviations from procedure, Selig was in fact a procedural fanatic. He did not at all like being asked to view unofficially obtained autopsy snaps, and even before he sat down to look at them, he had argued vehemently against the possibility of coming to any valid conclusions from photos alone.

Forty minutes passed. Karp got up once to go to the bathroom, and Marlene went to her office to call her service and answer some calls. Business was brisk, although many of the calls were from women who wanted their exes beaten up on general principles or frightened into coming across with child support. Returning to the dining room after several unpleasant conversations with angry women, Marlene found that Selig had put his magnifier down and removed his glasses.

“Done?” she asked.

Selig rubbed his eyes and looked up at her bleakly. “As done as I'm going to get. Are you two going to tell me what this's about? I'll tell you right now, I don't like it at all.” In his mild way, he was quite angry.

Karp said, “Murray, first you have to tell us, is there anything fishy about the finding of suicide in these?”

“Fishy?” Selig looked away. Karp knew from past experience that Selig was extremely loath to contradict the findings of other pathologists, especially any who had worked for him in his former position.

“Yeah, fishy,” Karp pressed. “Did the two kids who supposedly hanged themselves really do it?”

Selig put his glasses back on and furrowed his brows. “It's really impossible to state authoritatively without an examination of the bodies,” he said sententiously, lifting the stack of photographs and letting them drop.

“Murray, damn it!” Karp said, his voice rising. “You're not in court on this. You were clucking like a mother hen looking through those pictures. Will you please for crying out loud tell us what you saw!”

“I don't see why—” Selig began huffily, but Karp cut him off with a look and a warning snarl.

“Okay. There was no reason for Dr. Rajiv to have noticed it, but seeing the Ortiz and Valenzuela shots together … look, here are the posterior photographs. It's the ankles.”

Both Karp and Marlene stared at the backs of two pairs of dead men's legs.

“What are we supposed to see?” asked Marlene.

“You can see them better with the lens. Notice the transverse bruising on the posterior surface of the Achilles tendon. The bruising runs around the foot just distal to the medial malleolus.”

They looked and agreed that there was a mark there, in the same place on both corpses.

“What does it mean?” asked Karp.

“Well, the funny thing is, the marks on the throats of the two men are just right. They were made by hanging: that is, their bodies, the neck tissues, that is, were pulled with their own weight, at least, against the suspending fabric. There's the characteristic inverted-V bruising. But the marks on the ankles are like mirror images, if you will, of the neck bruises. Which could suggest that, well, a rope was passed around the ankles and force applied in a direction opposite to that exerted at the neck.”

“Murray, in plain English,” said Karp, “are you suggesting that there might have been foul play here?”

“Let's say it's a plausible hypothesis,” said Selig carefully. “If you wanted to fake a suicide hanging, there are two ways you could do it. One is, you tie somebody up and actually hang them from a fixed point, like in an old-style execution. The other way is do the whole thing horizontally. You tie a rope around their neck, tie that to a solid object, tie a rope to their feet, and heave. You'd need considerable strength to do that, though, or some mechanical help. To get the neck bruises to look right you'd need to exert a force equal to the weight of the victim, in these cases in the hundred-and-thirty-pound range.”

“I don't understand,” said Marlene. “Why would anyone go through the trouble of killing someone that way?”

Selig shrugged. “Hell, I don't know. People do funny things to people. If you just showed me the picture cold, without knowing it was a prisoner, I would've said a sexual ritual gone wrong. Knowing it's a prisoner, I'd guess … torture? A little sadism? The killer wanted to be in control. The pulling part, I mean.” He cleared his throat and there was a moment of silence while they all thought.

“Gone wrong,” said Karp at last, almost to himself.

“Yeah,” said Selig. “And now that you've dragged me up here to show me this stuff and bullied me into speculation, would you mind telling me what this is all about?”

“One more question, Murray,” said Karp. “You didn't do these autopsies yourself. Why not? A prisoner death? Two prisoner deaths?”

“When did they occur?”

Marlene told him the dates.

Selig wrinkled his brow. “Oh, right. It's because in late April and early May I was laid up. I threw my back out playing tennis. I played two sets with no problems and then I reached down to pick up some balls and that was it. For about a month I couldn't take standing up to do an autopsy.”

“Uh-huh, they got lucky,” said Karp. “And by the time you got back, the M.E.'s office had declared them genuine suicides, and we know you hate to second-guess your people. But, even with photographs, just now, you spotted this … discrepancy. If a full-scale investigation had taken place about these deaths, and you reviewed this material, you
definitely
would have spotted it, right?”

“Of course. Why, what are you driving at?”

“How about your successor, Dr. Kloss?” asked Karp, ignoring the question. “Would he have spotted the phony hangings? From photos?”

“What? How should I know what he would or …”

“Come on, Murray! Would he have?”

Selig huffed a great breath and threw up his hands. “Honestly? The guy's a hick county pathologist, he doesn't have serious experience with the variety of situations that I've had. Besides which, between us, the guy's a
patzer.
So, no, he probably wouldn't have. And the point of all this is… ?”

“The point of all this, Murray,” Karp said with a wolfish smile, “is that he wouldn't and you did, and somebody
knew
you would, that you would have made it a
point
to do a jailhouse suicide autopsy, and that's why you got canned.”

Selig's face paled and he opened his mouth to speak, but nothing emerged. He made a helpless gesture with his hands and shook his head.

“Yeah, I know,” said Karp. “It's hard to believe that we're looking at a cover-up of a police murder. Murders. But it's the only thing that makes sense.”

“You're implying,” Selig said in a strained voice, “that Bloom was …
involved
in this?”

Karp nodded. “Right. For some reason he couldn't afford a finding of foul play in these cases, which he knew was a possibility as long as there was an independent M.E. on the job—you, in fact.” Karp sighed and rubbed his face.

“Meanwhile,” he continued, “now that we know this, we're in potentially deep trouble with respect to your civil case. I don't know exactly what violation we've all just committed here, examining illegally obtained forensic records, but until we have the whole story, this session is going to have to be kept dark. I just spent a whole afternoon convincing a jury that Murray Selig follows procedure to the letter, and now I've conspired with you to make an end run around strict legality.”

Selig frowned. “Then why—?”

“Obviously because I made the call that finding out about the genesis of this … plot was more important than keeping pure on minor procedure. That'll turn out to have been the right call once we get the whole thing pieced together. Then Bloom will have a lot bigger worry than winning a civil case. We can make up a plausible fairy tale for the judge about how you came to cast your eye over these pictures, but your sin will seem so tiny compared to Bloom's that it won't matter.”

“The whole thing,” said Marlene, quoting him. “You mean, why he'd cover up for a bad cop?”

“Exactly. He's certainly not doing it out of misguided loyalty. These cops must have something big on him, something worse than accessory after the fact to murder.”

“I can't believe this,” said Selig, stricken. “The D.A.? Look, surely there's somebody we can go to who could deal with this officially?”

“Like who?” Karp challenged. “I can just see it. The discredited medical examiner, fighting for his job, concocts a smear against his accuser with no evidence other than his own opinion that some illegally obtained photographs point to murder rather than suicide, an opinion his own staff rejected. Gorgeous! No, Doc, we're going to have to get a lot deeper into this and find the reason Bloom did something this dumb. And until we find out for sure what it is, none of this”—he picked up the autopsy photographs and dropped them on the table—“ever happened.”

“So, what did you find out? Did you get the records?” Stupenagel was sitting up in bed, sipping through a straw from a large pink plastic pitcher that Columbia-Presby Hospital had filled with ice water, and Marlene Ciampi, her visitor, had filled with a quart of daiquiri mix and a half pint of Bacardi. Stupenagel was a good deal perkier than she had been the week before. Much of the bandaging had been removed, revealing a face colored like a relief map of Nepal, with many amusing mauves and ochres, joined as by railroads with lines of black stitchery.

Marlene hesitated before answering. Her friend observed it. They had cut down her meds enough to restore the old gimlet eye. “What's the matter? Did you get it or not?”

“Yeah, well, I did, Stupe, but there's a situation here.”

“What kind of situation? Were they phony suicides or not?”

“Yeah, they were, apparently, but I can't really talk about it. It involves one of Butch's cases.”

Stupenagel put down her drink and fixed Marlene with her ghastly raccoon eyes. “Excuse me, there must be something wrong with my hearing. Did you just say that you're intending to cover up a couple of murders so that hubby can win a case?”

“Oh, for chrissake, Stupe, don't be dumb!”

“Okay, I'll be smart. Let's see how much brain damage I've suffered. A case, she says. What case could that be? Well, old Butch is suing the City because they fired what's-his-face, the medical examiner—no, don't tell me … Martin? no, Murray … Selig! So, we have a medical examiner and phonied autopsies. Let's say, Marlene gets these records from … somewhere—an old friend of hers, or Selig's maybe—and Marlene gets Selig to look at them, tell her what he thinks. But no, why should Selig do something faintly crooked just to help Marlene, who's just doing a favor for a poor, decrepit friend? And besides, hubby would never allow it, the last thing he wants is his client doing something naughty, and so …” She paused for effect. “That must mean that the murders of these kids have a
connection
with the case, that helps make the case that Selig was framed. Oooh, I'm getting goose bumps. This is even a better story than I thought. So what's the connection? The M.E. gets fired because … because somebody is afraid that an independent medical examiner will spill the beans on the gypsy cab murders, and they want a malleable schmuck in there. So who's the somebody? Two candidates: the Mayor and the D.A. How am I doing? Getting warm?”

“No comment,” said Marlene stiffly. Then, in a feeble attempt to change the subject, she asked brightly, “So, when're you getting out of here?”

“Marlene, don't be a jerk.”

“I bet you'll want to take a nice vacation back home in Ohio,” Marlene continued. “Say, a couple of months, spend the holidays with the folks, get some skiing in …”

“In Ohio? What is this message I'm receiving here, Champ? You don't want me to write this story? Mayor or D.A. covers for killer cops?”

“Not ‘don't write it,' but wait. The story isn't complete, and if it leaks halfway it's going to warn the bad guys, one, and two, not that you would care, but it'll screw up Butch's case, fuck a really decent guy, and put a big crimp in our extravagant income. Butch is hanging out on this case—his boss didn't want him to take it in the first place—”

“Why not?”

“Because he's tight with the Mayor. It was embarrassing to have one of his people sue the City and His Honor personally.”

“So the Mayor is running this cover-up?”

“No, Bloom,” said Marlene quickly.

Stupenagel raised an eyebrow, a disturbing sight with her face in the condition it was in. “Why Bloom?”

“Because,” Marlene began, and then stopped when she realized that it had never occurred to either her or Karp that it was anyone other than Bloom. “Because, ah, the Mayor has no real contact with the M.E.'s office. The D.A.'s office is involved with it every day.”