The Traveller (22 page)

He hesitated before continuing.

‘I hate this, you see. I much prefer things to fit together with the scenario the homicide detectives arrive with. If you add into the picture this manual choking, well, where? When?’

‘Were you able to measure the distance between bruises?’

The medical examiner smiled.

‘Good question. You always ask good questions, Detective. Yes. But only one possible combination …’

He carefully slipped off his surgical gloves and approached Detective Barren. ‘The problem, medically, is finding the right finger-and-hand positioning …’ He put his hands around Detective Barren’s throat. The medical examiner was a small, slight man, with mousy features and eye-glasses perennially perched on the end of his nose. But Detective Barren started at the strength in his thin fingers as they closed theatrically around her throat. ‘Here is your classic, Hollywood-in-the-nineteen-thirties strangulation, face to face. But see, if I’m a little taller’ — he stood up on his tiptoes — ‘the angle changes. Or if you struggle, it

changes …’ The medical examiner kept moving his hands about Detective Barren’s throat as he spoke. She watched him like a man would watch a barber he didn’t quite trust shave him. ‘ … And what about from behind? Changes things, too.’

He dropped his hands.

‘Five and one-half inches.’

‘From where to where?’

‘My guess, and it is only a guess, I’d never, ever testify in court on this, is that the murderer’s hands had to be at least five and one-half inches from thumb to index finger.’

The medical examiner snorted.

‘I hate this,’ he said. ‘Really. Sometimes I get so frustrated with questions.’

‘Do you think Rhotzbadegh …’

He cut her off.

‘Of course I do.’ He stared at her. ‘Who else, tell me? The guy had desire. He was in the location. It pretty much followed his regular pattern. He killed her … that’s certain, really, I’m sure.’

‘But?’

‘But not exactly how they think it happened.’

‘Did you ever talk this over with them?’

The medical examiner snorted again.

‘Of course!’

He turned and walked back to the corpse on the examining table. He looked down into the body before him, then spoke up. ‘The trouble is, there’s no clear-cut indicator that it didn’t happen the way they believed it did. And, really, what difference does it make? He did it, just as sure as I’m standing here breathing, and this young fellow is lying there dead …” He poked the body several times with his finger, as if testing to be sure he was right.

‘But?’

‘But. But. But. But I’m a man who likes things in order. This is the way the body works: take something away, and voila! It no longer functions properly. Sprain the ankle and you’ll start to limp. Take a bullet in the heart and you’ll die. Things out of whack and out of line. Things twisted

and things obscured. Hate it, really. That’s why I like a good shooting. Dig around and bingo! There’s the bullet. No doubts about it. He’s dead. There’s the reason. Can’t stand loose ends …’

He hesitated again.

‘You see, it makes no difference. And I may be off my rocker completely. That’s what the prosecutor told me, anyway.’ He looked back over his shoulder at Detective Barren. ‘You know,’ he said with a touch of sadness, ‘that if you show two different medical examiners the same set of facts they will reach different conclusions? Every time. You can bet on it. We’re the most contentious, disagreeing bunch. Everyone likes to think that, because we deal with the dead instead of the quick, we’re not subject to the same vagaries of diagnosis, guesswork, what have you. We are.’

He took a deep breath.

‘Makes me sad.’

The medical examiner seemed to be staring into the open chest of his subject. Detective Barren waited an instant before speaking.

‘Five and one-half inches?’

‘Right. For what it’s worth.’

She turned and started to leave.

‘But it won’t prove anything,’ he said after her. As she walked through the doors to the operating theater, she turned and saw the man bend over the remains, lost again in his work.

In her apartment that night, Detective Barren poured herself a glass of red wine, remembering the words of the clerk in the liquor store who’d assured her this Californian Cabernet was the equal of those priced twice as high. She had not told him that she could barely taste the difference and liked to slip an ice cube into her glass as well. She had stripped off her clothes after the visit to the morgue and taken a long shower, scrubbing herself fiercely — pathologically, she joked to herself-to remove the lingering stench from the death room. You can’t really smell it, she told herself as she had stepped from the shower, and then she

had paused, sniffed the air, and finally said out loud, ‘Well, the hell you can’t.’

She stood in her room naked and sipped the wine, feeling the tinge of alcohol slide through her body. She breathed out deeply. For a moment she felt like staying naked, turning out all the lights and letting the darkness soothe her. The idea made her giggle and think that it had been a long time since she had done anything spontaneous and offbeat, anything that would remind herself that the world was not all murder and death. Then she shook her head and found a pair of shorts and an old Miami Dolphins tee-shirt from one of their Super Bowl years, which she slipped on.

She padded barefoot into the living room, carrying her wine glass and the bottle. She went to her bookcase and I picked out a leather-covered photo album, then retreated to an armchair and, perching the glass on her knee, opened the book of pictures. There was one in specific she was searching for.

She flipped past snapshots of herself, of Susan and her parents, lingering momentarily over a few, a picture of a birthday party here, a graduation there. She was suffused with the warmth of memories, comforted. Finally she found the picture she wanted.

It was a simple five-by-seven snapshot of Detective Barren at age twenty-one, standing between John Barren and her father. She thought: The summer before we were married, the summer Dad died. She looked at the background, an expanse of blue-green waves rolling steadily and benignly against the Jersey Shore. In the picture the three were all in bathing suits, and Detective Barren remembered how the two men had teased her mercilessly about her inability to swim, yet her constant attraction to the beach. She thought about how she would lie, hours on end, reading on the sand in the sun, peaceful, relaxed. When it became unbearably hot she would take a child’s red plastic water bucket down to the edge of the ocean and plop herself down in the damp sand, waiting for some slightly larger wave to send a small current of water

shooting up the beach toward her. The foamy clear cool liquid would rise about her toes, curl around her buttocks, and refresh her. If need be, she would take the bucket, fill it in the shallow water, and unceremoniously dump it over her head. John would laugh and point and plead again for her to learn to swim, but not seriously, for he knew she wouldn’t, regardless of how ridiculous she appeared.

She did not swim for the simplest of reasons.

She had been young, barely more than a baby at age five. She closed her eyes in the apartment and felt the familiar anxiety pass through her, just as it always did when this particular recollection came back. Her heart seemed to pick up its pace momentarily, the sweat on the back of her neck grow slightly clammy and uncomfortable, her stomach tense. She thought for an instant of the potency of fear, undiminished even as it traveled over the decades of memory. She had been sitting on the sand with her mother, her father had been in the surf, riding the waves in on the beach, then dashing out again with the little boy’s exuberance that he always displayed at the shore. Her mother had glanced at her and said, ‘Merce, darling, go get your father and tell him it is time to eat.’ It had been the meagerest of requests; even sitting in her apartment room, she thought it easy.

Detective Barren closed her eyes and with absolute sundrenched clarity remembered every step. She’d jumped up, and turned, and run down to the water, her eyes on her father as he turned and caught a large roller heading swiftly toward the beach. As she opened her mouth to call for him, she looked up, and in a frozen moment of utter terror realized that she had run right beneath a curling wave. The force of the water as it broke over her head knocked her on to her back, loosening all the air within her, stealing it from her little girl’s chest. The water suddenly seemed dark green, then black, and it was as if the world had been blotted out. She had struggled hard, searching for the surface, and then suddenly something great and heavy had landed on her, holding her down farther, blocking her from reaching the sunlight. She could still remember with an

expected uncomfortableness the sensation of sand scoring her back. Her mind had spun, her eyes clouded, her little lungs seared, her heart been clenched by darkness. She did not know really what death was, but thought in that incredibly brief, interminable moment, that it surrounded her.

And then, suddenly, she had been snatched from the blackness and lifted gasping into the sunlight.

It was her father.

His own ride had carried him directly over her. It had been he that held her down, he that raised her up.

She remembered a few tears, drying quickly in the hot afternoon. She had played safely on the sand that day. But at night, tucked into her bed, as the light had faded from the day and nighttime filled her room, she had cried bitterly and vowed never to trust herself to the waves, never to know the sensation of the ocean closing over her head, and never ever to go into the water again.

Stubborn, she thought. A stubborn little girl who kept her promise to herself.

She laughed. The little girl has not changed a whit in thirty-how-many years. And probably won’t.

She looked at the picture again. She smiled. John had a sleek, muscular body which glistened as the ocean water caught the sunlight. She thought of the way her father would tease him about his hairless chest, sticking out his own, v/ith its swatch of curly black hair, puffed up, mocking a beach body-builder.

They were such easy times, she thought.

She looked at her father’s face. Sunlight was causing him to squint, just barely, giving his face an elvish look. It made her laugh out loud.

‘What,’ she said to the man in the picture, ‘would you say about this case?’

Mathematics, her father would lecture in his best academic drone, prefers a steady procession of data to reach for an elusive conclusion. But this was not always the case: sometimes you could prove a theorem through an absence of contradictory information.

She suddenly felt a spasm of despair.

There would be no way to prove that Sadegh Rhotzbadegh didn’t commit the murder of her niece.

Proving a negative. Her father would shake his head and smile. Now, that, he would say, requires some real intellect, some pure mathematical reasoning.

She felt that she wanted to scream.

Then she took a deep breath and a sip of wine.

She thought angrily about the concept of proof. Legal proof. Proof that stands up and is counted in a courtroom. Proof that clears murder cases. Evidence coupled with opportunity equals supposition of guilt, and finally an absence of alternative hypotheses amounts to a verdict. The hypotenuse squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the two remaining sides. Logic, she thought, is insidious. All logic points to the Arab. We live in a world that insists on accommodation. For every action there is an equal opposite reaction.

All instinct points away.

What did she have? A murder that happens not exactly as the investigators would want. A suspect who fits almost perfectly into the niche required of him — save for one or two critical details.

Start at the source of the dilemma, her father would say.

That was easy enough, she thought. And she knew where she would drive in the morning. She felt a rush of excitement and drained the remainder of her wineglass. She stared a last time down at the picture in the album resting in her lap.

Two weeks after her mother snapped the picture, the summer had ended. They had piled blankets, towels, umbrellas, and all the other traveling paraphernalia into their old bedraggled station wagon. The Labor Day weekend traffic had been horrendous, bumper to bumper at sixty miles per hour. She remembered the way her father had gripped the wheel, cursing mildly, complaining as the other cars swerved and swooped about them. An invitation to slaughter, was what he said. He said it every year when they packed up after the holiday and headed home. No

wonder so many people die on the highway, he complained. They leave their brains at the beach. One hour slid into two, then three, and finally they turned up the street to their own home. She remembered her father adopting his best Charles Laughton accent and hunching over the wheel: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!’ he cried out as the exhausted family cheered. She stared again at the picture and in her mind’s eye saw them unloading the car and her mother turning to her father and saying, ‘Oh, there’s nothing in the house for dinner, just run down to the corner store and pick up some hamburgers.’ Her father had nodded, jumped back into the car, waving, be back in fifteen minutes.

But he wasn’t, she thought.

She and John had been on the front lawn, hauling the stuff inside, and they’d heard ambulance and police sirens in the distance, looked up, thought nothing, and lifted another load.

Two drunken teenagers had run a stop sign and broad-sided his car. He had been knocked clear across the seat and out and crushed as the vehicle rolled over him.

She smiled. He probably appreciated the irony of a mathematician becoming a statistic on Labor Day weekend fatalities. I still miss him, she thought. I still miss all of them. She looked again at the picture. She was standing between the two men in her life and they had each thrown an arm across her back. She remembered the moments before the snapshot had been taken: there had been a mock argument between boyfriend and father as to whose arm was going where on her back. They had loved each other, she thought, and I loved both of them. She felt a pleasurable rush of memory, as if she could feel the weight and pressure of those two arms draped across her shoulders and the warmth flowing from their bodies as she squeezed between them.