Chapter 31
I visited a secondhand bookstore in Richmond and bought three paperbacks by Agatha Christie, P. D. James, and Dorothy Sayers. I read them while trying to make sense of what I was doing at my word processor. Nothing good. I was frustrated and woefully uninformed.
While feeling this way, I had a very strange dream that I remember vividly to this day.
I was standing in a long line of people waiting to see someone sitting at a table far away.
The scene playing in my head was as graphic as a movie.
It was as if I were awake and asleep at the same time, Charlie next to me quietly snoring.
My eyes were shut, and I couldn’t move as the line crept forward while I wondered what I was doing in it.
I don’t like waiting in line for any reason, and then I realized I was at a book signing.
That was even more out of character. Those weren’t the sort of thing I went to either.
And the few signings I’d done for Ruth’s biography hadn’t drawn a crowd.
As I neared the table in my dream, I realized everyone was there to see Agatha Christie.
She was dressed in black, her face shadowed by a big black hat.
I could tell she was shy, not looking up as she signed her name again and again.
When I reached her, I said thank you as she autographed a book for me.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” I added, and she glanced up.
“You will take my place,” she said.
“Excuse me?” I looked around, assuming she must be talking to someone else.
“You will take my place.” She looked me in the eye, and I woke up.
I lay perfectly still for the longest time trying to figure out why I had dreamed something so ridiculous.
When I looked her up in an encyclopedia, her photograph was the woman in my dream.
I don’t recall knowing what she looked like prior to that.
The only thing of hers I’d read was that secondhand paperback, Sparkling Cyanide.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to take Agatha Christie’s place.
No one has or ever will, least of all me.
But the dream seemed like a nod from her, a visit from beyond meant to offer encouragement.
I should carry on. But how? The only approach I knew was that of a journalist. Unless I did research, I’d have no story and nothing to say.
While at The Charlotte Observer, I hadn’t been granted an interview with the local medical examiner, Dr. Hobart Wood.
He wasn’t the sort to get on the phone with reporters, and my powers of persuasion didn’t work with him.
He never returned my calls. I saw him only once and from a distance as he helped carry a dead man out of the woods.
I remember talking to Charlotte detectives after they’d attended the autopsy.
I noticed the foul odor as they told me about swiping Vicks VapoRub in their noses.
I didn’t know how I could write a proper murder mystery without learning more about what happened to the body after it was spirited away to some unknown facility.
When I’d show up at a homicide scene, once the body was driven away, I had no idea what happened next.
I’d never been to a morgue and needed to see one.
I wanted to ask questions. Charlie knew someone who was friends with Richmond’s deputy chief medical examiner, Marcella Fierro, described as brilliant, gruff, and a firebrand.
I made an appointment with her in the late summer of 1984 and was surprised by the idea of a woman forensic pathologist. That wouldn’t have occurred to me, and I was excited.
I had to make sure that my murder mystery was credible, approaching fiction the same way I did newspaper stories and Ruth’s biography.
Research. Showing up. Making no assumptions.
While working on The Stick Doll Murders I’d decided that a clever way to kill someone might be to poison a dart with digitalis derived from a foxglove plant.
I thought about my childhood walks through the woods with Miss Craig.
I remembered her pointing out poisonous plants like oleander, water hemlock, castor bean, pokeweed, devil’s trumpet, baneberry, bitter nightshade.
I set about to create the perfect weapon, painting a section of aluminum pipe matte black.
Sawing off the handle of a cane, I attached a bamboo skewer that could be used like an icepick to finish someone off if the digitalis didn’t do the trick.
The handle fit nicely into the aluminum pipe section, and I attached a rubber stopper to the other end.
The weapon was well disguised. I could have walked around with it in broad daylight, and no one would be the wiser.
I used bamboo kabob skewers to make darts that I imagined doped with digitalis.
Another idea was using bee venom if the intended victim was allergic.
I ordered some by mail from an apiary, making sure the killer could do the same.
I needed some type of fletching to help the dart reach its target.
I read that in Africa, pith wood was a substitute for feathers, and I liked the idea.
The lightweight pulp was commonly used to clean delicate gears, and I acquired pith wood buttons from a Richmond clock repair shop.
If I gave a good puff, my homemade blowgun could sail the dart a good twenty feet.
In August I had my first meeting with Marcella Fierro at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), its headquarters in Richmond.
The four-story precast building was located downtown at 9 North 14th Street, the top three floors the forensic labs.
I brought the weapon with me, getting curious glances from those wondering why I needed a cane.
A secretary led me into the conference room, and momentarily Marcella walked in wearing a lab coat.
She was short and looked like the sort who would take no prisoners.
I recognized right away that this was someone formidable, nothing creepy or peculiar about her.
She wasn’t at all what I imagined about a medical examiner.
Demonstrating my blowgun in her conference room, I puffed a dart into an anatomical poster.
Marcella tried next and was impressed. I explained that if the tip was poisoned with digitalis, it might appear the victim died naturally of cardiac arrest. If all else failed, the skewer attached to the handle could be stabbed into the heart.
She said such a ploy wouldn’t fool her if she did the autopsy. She’d find the puncture wound to the heart and explained that the pericardial sac would be filled with blood, causing cardiac tamponade. Digitalis would come up on the toxicology screen.
“You’d be caught,” she told me right off.
Then we sat down, and I started my tape recorder. We talked for the next few hours as I asked all sorts of na?ve questions. Did she wear a lab coat to crime scenes? (No.) Did she put Vicks up her nose? (No.) What did she do at the scene besides pronouncing the person dead?
“It’s not up to the medical examiner to pronounce someone dead,” she said. “We’re not the rescue squad.”
I began telling her about the crime scene in my novel, and now she was the one asking questions. Was the body warm? Was it cool and stiff? Was the victim killed during the day?
“Yes, around ten, eleven in the morning,” I replied.
“Is it sunny or shady.”
“It’s a little bit of both,” I explained.
“Okay that’s going to alter our time of death…”
We talked about deadly plants, and she suggested oleander. I asked, if someone was poisoned with it, would the pupils be dilated when the body was found? She patiently replied that everybody’s pupils are dilated after death because the eyes don’t react to light anymore.
All the while we were talking, both of us were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
As things progressed, she brought in a stack of autopsy photographs to give me a peek at what can kill you.
I remember her showing me a nude body that had a small cut in the upper thigh.
The man’s girlfriend had stabbed him, severing the femoral artery.
“That will drop you like a shot.” Marcella tapped an ash. “You’re going to bleed out in minutes.”
“You think she meant to kill him?”
“Probably not.”
When it got to be late afternoon, she gave me a tour of the autopsy suite on the ground floor. The tile floor recently had been mopped, the three stainless steel tables shining. She opened the cooler, a few pouched bodies inside on trays, toe tags attached to zippers, cold foul air blowing.
I asked her if there was anything new coming down the pike. She mentioned a technology called DNA, and lasers for finding trace evidence such as hairs, fibers, dirt, could be anything.
“What about seeing autopsies?” I asked. “I really need to if I’m going to get things right.”
“They’re not a spectator sport,” she replied.
I was enthralled, and wanted to know when I could come back.
“In a month,” she said to my disappointment.
Why so long? But I didn’t ask that. It seemed pushy and rude. We made the next appointment and would continue our conversations. She invited me to do research in their library, and I’d visit at every opportunity, scouring the same tomes that the forensic pathology residents used.
Toward the end of 1984, Marcella sat me down in the OCME library and inserted a video into the VCR. I could watch a teaching film of an autopsy, she said, and I did. That wasn’t good enough. I wanted to see the real thing, and she explained that I had no legitimacy for being in the morgue.
“If a commonwealth’s attorney or detective walked in, how would I explain you being present?” She made a good point.
“Then what can I do so there’s no problem?” I inquired.