Goodnight, Irene (11 page)

W
E GOT OFF THE FREEWAY
and went down Gaffey. We wound our way around to the cliffs of Palos Verdes. The scenery was soon distracting me from my morbid thoughts of Hannah. He turned down a small road and pulled off to the side. We were high above the ocean, the harbor off to our left.

Frank turned and said, “This is it.”

I knew there weren’t any restaurants or other buildings out on these cliffs. Watching my face, he laughed, and got out of the car. He went around to the trunk and opened it. I got out and walked back to see him taking out a blanket and a large white paper sack. “Ever eat at the Galley?” he asked. “It’s a great deli down on Hermosa Avenue. I picked up a couple of ham on ryes. That okay?”

“Fine,” I said, still caught off guard. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

“All pleasant ones. Just thought you might need a little change of scenery.”

W
E WALKED ABOUT HALFWAY
out to the edge of one of the zigzagging cliffs and spread the blanket. Good thing I wear sensible shoes. He gave me a sandwich and then handed me a small carton of milk. “Hope it didn’t get too warm,” he said.

The milk was very warm. “Perfect,” I said. After all, who cared?

The Pacific spread out below us, whitecaps tossing in the wind. Sailboats glided effortlessly behind and beyond the breakwater, while huge ships made their way more cautiously. Who cared about anything but feeling the sun and the wind?

We sat there and ate a leisurely lunch. We didn’t say a word to one another, but enjoyed one of those rare companionships that are comfortable in silence.

W
E ARRIVED AT THE CAMPUS
at a little before one, and wound our way to the visitors’ parking lot. A student at the parking kiosk pointed us in the right direction, and we walked across a common to a tall brick building. As we walked, I was struck by how young the students looked to me. I stopped to calculate the number of years it had been since I got my bachelor’s, and realized why. To these people, the Beatles were what the Andrews Sisters had been to me — something your parents had danced to.

We found MacPherson’s office, but he wasn’t in. It was on the second floor of a building filled with labs and lecture rooms, with an occasional faculty office here or there. Between the rooms, the hallways were lined with lighted display cases. They were the old wooden-style cases, and they were all full of human jawbones and skulls. We started browsing among the displays while we waited.

There were little tags next to each set of bones and teeth, telling about conditions that could be found in them, as well as the gender and approximate age of the former owners. There were also some historical collections of dentures and an array of rather intimidating antique dental instruments. It made me glad I was born after Novocain was invented.

A tall, gray-haired gentleman in a tan corduroy sports jacket came walking past us, and put a key in the office door. He looked up at us as he let himself in.

“Miss Kelly?”

“Dr. MacPherson?”

We both nodded yes, and shook hands. He had a nice firm grip. I introduced him to Frank, and we went into the small cubicle of an office. He sat at his desk, the windows backlighting his hair, which was done up exactly like Albert Einstein’s. He looked like God had sent him.

“So, if you will excuse an old man for being particular, could I please see some identification, Detective Harriman?”

Frank obliged. Dr. MacPherson didn’t just glance at it; he could have written a dissertation on the subject if he had studied it much longer. He handed it back, saying, “Well, everything seems to be in order.”

“Dr. MacPherson,” Frank began, “I spoke with Dr. Carlos Hernandez of the Las Piernas Coroner’s Office earlier today.”

“Then you know how I came to be involved?”

“Yes. Dr. Hernandez told me that last month, he sent you the skull of a Jane Doe who has been unidentified since 1955. He said you might be able to learn if there was a condition called fluorosis in the teeth, and possibly to give his office information that would help to identify the woman.”

MacPherson slammed his open palm on the desktop, making us jump. “Exactly!” he said, as if we were students. He stood up and went over to a file cabinet. From the top of it, he gathered up a box and some loose papers. He sat down and leaned back in his chair, pulling on his left earlobe. He swiveled in the chair and looked out the window. Frank and I looked at one another and shrugged.

Suddenly he swiveled back toward us and slammed his hand on the desk again. You’d think we would have wised up, but he got us to jump the second time too. He was going to have to quit that.

“We begin with some background. According to the copy of the coroner’s report — by a Dr. Woolsey—” He spoke the coroner’s name with a disparaging tone. “Well, let’s just say you are quite fortunate to have Dr. Hernandez now.” He found this immensely funny, and we waited for him to get himself settled down again.

“Oh, forgive me. I just haven’t seen work this bad in years. To continue — according to the report, this is a pregnant female who was approximately twenty to twenty-five years of age. Now, the body was found — or, I should say, most of the body was found — in June 1955. That means this woman was most likely to have been born between 1930 and 1935. Most unfortunate. If she had been born just a few years later, her teeth might not have carried these stains.”

Here he pulled out the contents of the box, and there, grinning at us with brown teeth, was Hannah.

Although I had known what was in that box, it was still an unsettling sight. Her eye sockets staring out, areas around her nose and teeth obviously made up of fragments glued in place.

After the first shock of seeing her passed, I felt ashamed to be looking at her. Although I had just looked at cases full of skulls, I didn’t know anything at all about those people, while I had known at least one part of Hannah’s story. It dawned on me that nothing was private for a victim like her. Everything that could be, would be examined, studied, displayed, and written up by people she had never known.

“Just about the time she was born,” MacPherson went on, “a group of American dental researchers had figured out that high levels of fluoride in the water supplies caused this stain, but nothing was scientifically proven until about 1931, and it was sometime after that that the U.S. Public Health Service surveyed fluoride levels.

“As anyone who has waited for the tooth fairy knows, teeth are developed in childhood. The staining appears to occur partly from surface contact, but mainly from fluoride in the bloodstream. During the years of dental development — that is to say, in children under ten — those who ingest too much fluoride are likely to develop fluorosis. So your Jane Doe — I believe Mr. O’Connor called her Hannah — Hannah was most likely to have received these stains from the water she drank as a child.”

He stood up and paced the two or three steps he could pace in the area behind his desk. He gestured as he spoke, a natural showman.

“Fluoride occurs naturally in a great many substances. It occurs in varying levels in water supplies, generally low in most areas, especially in the Great Lakes region. There are primarily three regions of the country where the levels would be high enough to produce fluorosis.”

“So we might narrow down the areas she could come from by knowing she had this condition?” I asked.

“Precisely!”
Bang!
went the hand again. I won’t say we didn’t jump, but we were starting to brace ourselves whenever we saw him raise his hand near the desk.

“As I told Mr. O’Connor, your most likely candidates are three regions.” He counted them off on his hand. “They are: one, that part of the Midwest comprised of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois; two, the Rocky Mountain area, especially South Dakota and Colorado; and three, the Southwest — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona.”

I didn’t think this did much narrowing, although I supposed it was better than nothing. Dr. MacPherson must have noticed my disappointment.

“You give up too easily, my dear. Your friend Mr. O’Connor was not so easily dismayed. Now, within these regions, there are only so many places with fluoride levels that could produce fluorosis this severe. But setting that aside for the moment, I must tell you that your previous coroner really did not follow up on a great many clues to her identity.”

“Such as?” Frank asked.

“According to the autopsy report, her skin was fairly tanned. This makes the Southwest the most likely candidate of the three regions, although she could have been from a farm or worked outdoors in the others. But we have other evidence that she was from the Southwest.

“The autopsy report also indicates that the time of death was about seven
P.M.
the evening she was found. Her stomach contents showed she had been killed shortly after she ate her dinner. Guess what she had eaten?”

Frank and I shrugged.

“Tacos!” he shouted, slamming his hand on the desk again. It must be harder than hell to doze off in this guy’s classes.

“This blond woman ate tacos for dinner in southern California in 1955! Now, there were Mexican restaurants then, of course, but Mexican food was not available through big chain restaurants all over the country.

“This is just a hypothesis, of course, but I believe that this woman may have spent at least some of her childhood years in a sunny border state, somewhere with a considerable Hispanic population. It had to be an area where high fluoride content in the water stained the local children’s teeth. I would say that narrows the field to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.”

“Can we be certain that she didn’t get the stains from fluoride added to the water supply or by fluoride tablets from a dentist?” Frank asked.

“Certain? No, nothing is certain. Reasonably sure? Yes. Fluoride wasn’t added to water in the United States until the mid-1940s, and Hannah here probably would have been too old to receive these stains then. But the most compelling reason to doubt it is that fluoride additions to water supplies are done very carefully, and at low levels. I believe stains like hers would be from a source three to four times higher in fluoride than the highest fluoride addition.”

“Is there any kind of listing of communities that might fit that level of natural fluoridation?” Frank asked.

“Of course. I’ve had copies of a fluoridation survey of the Southwest prepared for you.”

He thumbed through the papers and handed over a few pages. “I gave a copy of this same report to Mr. O’Connor. I’ve highlighted the communities which are the most likely candidates for this degree of fluorosis.”

“Thank you, Dr. MacPherson,” said Frank, glancing at the report. I tried to read over his shoulder.

“Of course,” MacPherson said as we read, “you’ll also want her picture.”

“What!” we shouted in unison, both startled into looking up at the old man.

MacPherson couldn’t have been more pleased with himself.

“The picture is what took so long. Amazing what these computers can do. I sent copies of the photos from the autopsy and measurements of the skull to a fellow who is quite good at visual reconstructions.”

From his papers, he pulled out a computer-generated drawing that, across the desk, did not look unlike a photo.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “allow me to introduce Hannah.”

L
OOKING BACK AT US
from the photo was an attractive young woman with medium-length, curled blond hair and a tan complexion. She had high cheekbones and dark, arching brows over dark eyes. The computer artist had given her make-up and a hairstyle circa 1955, and, with an understanding of human frailties, a closed-mouth smile.

The professor had several other views, a couple with smiles showing the stained teeth; there were even some with slightly different noses.

“The nose suffered the most damage in the violence done to her face,” MacPherson explained. “Interestingly, the eyes weren’t touched. As I said, this case was, in my opinion, badly mishandled. Had the head been severed and removed from the scene with the hands and feet, then I could understand the lack of progress. But this type of battering is not impossible to reconstruct — indeed, someone did take the time to remove the flesh from the skull, to painstakingly glue her skull back together, but then, it seems, did not proceed from there. The photos from the autopsy wouldn’t be a pretty sight for the lay person, but to someone who works in a field which constantly exposes him to the very worst sorts of damage human beings can suffer, it would not be so bad.”

At this point, he pulled out one of the autopsy photos. I guess I’m still a lay person; to me it looked awful. Frank didn’t flinch, though, so I suppose the professor was right.

“I’ll let you take all of this,” MacPherson said, carefully replacing the skull in the box and gathering up the papers. “I will be happy to answer any questions which arise after you’ve had a chance to read the material. Would you please make sure that Hannah’s skull is safely returned to Dr. Hernandez?”

“Certainly,” Frank answered, taking the box. I was glad he had handed the box to Frank. I’m not especially squeamish, but the idea of riding back in the car with a skull in a box was enough to give me the willies.

“Dr. MacPherson,” I said, “I know this would have meant a great deal to Mr. O’Connor. You’ve undertaken a lot of work here on his behalf. We do appreciate it.”

“Not at all, not at all. Your friend had a way of piquing one’s curiosity. I am the luckiest of men. I find this type of work fascinating, and sometimes I’m even paid to do it. Please let me know what you learn.”

We all shook hands and Frank left his card, in case Dr. MacPherson had questions of his own later on. We started to leave, when Frank hesitated, then said, “One other thing, Dr. MacPherson. We have to advise anyone even remotely connected with Mr. O’Connor on this case to be very careful. Mr. O’Connor’s son has been critically injured. Shots have been taken at Miss Kelly’s home. We’re dealing with a very violent person here.”