Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
By Friday morning I had read Josephine’s portfolio three times and could have recited every dead end she’d hit, but I still didn’t know Dr. Henry Wainwright.
I knew the dates of his sister’s correspondence.
I knew the names of the private investigators who’d taken her money and given back nothing useful.
I knew the careful looping handwriting in which Josephine had labeled each tab.
But I didn’t know the man. I didn’t know what he sounded like at a dinner party, or how he handled a difficult patient, or what brand of bourbon he kept in his study.
A photograph and a sister’s loyalty weren’t enough to bring a dead man back to life on a murder board.
I let Chowder out before the sun was up, did my hair before the kettle had finished, and stood at my closet trying to dress for a day that would take me from the sheriff’s office to a doctor’s waiting room to a quiet drive through a quiet neighborhood.
I chose a cream linen shirtwaist dress, fitted through the bodice and full through the skirt, with a thin black belt at the waist. I added black leather kitten heels and pearl studs at my ears, and I pinned my hair back at the temples because the humidity had no respect for vintage waves.
Chowder waited at the top of the stairs in a tiny navy bow tie with thin white pinstripes. He’d selected it himself by sitting next to it in the basket where I kept his collection. Whether that constituted preference or simple proximity I had stopped trying to determine.
“We’re investigating today,” I told him as we descended. “Try to look like a detective, not a suspect.”
He snorted.
By seven thirty I was parking the Karmann Ghia outside the sheriff’s office and following behind Chowder as he led the way.
The building was the first thing past the bridge—a low-country white clapboard with moss-green shutters, raised up on brick with a deep front porch and a dark green metal roof.
Palm trees lined the walkway and the parks department had planted hydrangeas in the front beds.
The only thing that gave it away as municipal was the sign and the smattering of patrol cars in the side lot.
Deputy Harris was at the front desk. Dash had taken the rookie under his wing, mostly because after Milton’s tenure as sheriff he wasn’t sure who he could trust from the old guard.
There were deputies that had gone to prison with Milton, and Dash had been in the process of hiring new deputies since he’d been installed as sheriff.
“Morning, Mrs. McCoy,” Harris said, standing behind his desk. “The sheriff just got off a call. You can go on back.”
“How’s your mama?” I asked out of politeness.
“She’s doing okay. My sister is about to have her first baby so she’s in Charleston for a couple of weeks.”
“How exciting,” I said. “Is Adelaide out today?” Adelaide was the new admin for the department. She was a fifty-something woman with bottle-blond hair, an impressive typing speed, and a no-nonsense attitude, which was apparently what you had to have when dealing with cops and the public.
“At a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “She’s due back soon. Thank the Lord. This phone rings nonstop.”
Even as he said the words the phone started ringing. I gave him a wave and headed back to Dash’s office. It was in the middle of a long hallway and attached to a large room that tended to be where deputies congregated before and after shifts.
The door that led off the hallway was open, and I knocked on the frame before entering. I noticed he had the door closed to the attached room and the blinds behind his desk were open and showed a view of the river. It was a peaceful office.
He was at his desk in shirtsleeves and his mouth quirked in a smile.
“Mrs. McCoy,” he said. “Beautiful as always.”
“Now Sheriff,” I said coyly. “I bet you say that to all the taxpaying ladies.”
“Just the ones who drive me crazy with that red lipstick.” He looked down and said, “Good morning, Chowder. That’s a smart-looking bow tie.”
He woofed in response and jumped up into one of the leather chairs across from Dash’s desk.
“You’re earlier than I expected,” he said.
“I’ve been up since four thirty. The shop reopens tomorrow and my hands don’t know what to do with themselves.” I sat in the chair next to Chowder. “I came for the file.”
He pushed a folder across to me and I opened it.
A small stack of Polaroids was clipped to the inside of the cover. Five of them, the colors gone orange after twenty-five years in a manila file, but still graphic in death.
I made myself look.
The first was a wide shot of the study from a doorway. It showed a heavy mahogany desk, leather chair, a wall of bookshelves. Henry was slumped sideways out of the chair, his upper body angled toward the floor, his head fallen. I could see a small entry wound at the side of his temple.
The second Polaroid showed a close-up of the wound to his right temple. A spatter of blood crossed the desk blotter and whatever papers had been in front of him.
The third was the gun on the floor at his right side. A small semiautomatic similar to the one I kept in my nightstand drawer. A .22 by the looks of it.
The fourth was the bourbon glass on the desk. It looked untouched.
The fifth was a wider shot from the opposite angle, and in it you could see the front of the desk, Henry’s chest, and his left hand resting in his lap. The gold of his wedding band caught the flash.
His left hand. I looked at his desk again and noticed the placement of pens, his drink, and the angles of the papers. All indicative of a left-handed person.
I only knew what to look for because Josephine had told me the day before. I wasn’t sure my powers of investigation were strong enough yet to have come up with that on my own.
I set the photographs down on the desk and lined them up in order.
Behind the Polaroids was the paperwork. Two pages.
The first was a handwritten incident report, ten lines long, in Milton’s looping scrawl.
The address. The time. The position of the body.
Self-inflicted GSW to right temple. I recognized the responding deputy’s name with absolutely no surprise.
He’d retired the same year Milton went to prison and was now living in Boca Raton.
The second was a death certificate, signed by Dr. Vernon Keats. Cause of death listed as suicide. Manner of death listed as suicide. In the space for the medical examiner’s notes, Keats had written concur and his initials.
“Well…” I said. “This is certainly brief.”
“Just Milton doing what Milton did,” Dash agreed with a grimace. “Still blows my mind he was in charge of law and order for decades. How is this place not a completely corrupt cesspool?”
“Give it time,” I said. “You’ve only been on the job a few months. You might uncover all kinds of things.”
“Encouraging,” he said.
“Can you scan the photos and send them through email? I want to see if I can enhance them to see if there’s anything unusual about the scene.”
“I can do that,” he said. “Any theories from the photographs?”
“I get the feeling you saw something I didn’t see.”
“You typically see more than you think you do,” he said. “Look at the gun.”
I looked.
“Notice anything weird about it?”
“Not right off,” I said, but I was mostly talking my way through it. “If the gun is gripped in his right hand and he fires, what happens? What does the body reflexively do?”
“That’s the right question,” Dash said. “Generally the body relaxes after trauma to the brain like that, and the gun falls from their grasp in the general vicinity of where the shot was fired from.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding what he was getting at.
“So he fires into the right temple and his body slumps to the left like the picture shows. He’s almost completely out of the chair and almost on the floor.
But his hand didn’t relax and drop the gun.
Somehow when his head and body went left, his right arm kept gripping the gun and ended up away from the rest of his body and on the desk. ”
“Exactly,” he said.
“You think someone placed it there and put the gun in his hand after he was dead?”
“It’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Especially knowing Henry was left-handed.”
“Yeah, I noticed his desk setup. His pen is lying right there by the papers on the left side. Milton was a dummy.”
“Milton was a lot of things,” Dash said. “He generally knew what he was doing though. He just made bad choices. Now look at the entry wound.”
I grimaced but picked up the correct photograph.
His hair had gone gray at the temples. The wound was dark and ragged where the muzzle had pressed, and the skin around it was peppered with small dark flecks.
“The wound itself is consistent with self-inflicted,” Dash said.
“Contact. Those flecks around the entry are stippling. Powder burn from the muzzle pressed flush against the skin. You can see them even on a Polaroid this old.” He let me look another moment.
“Which is what made it easy for Milton to call. What we won’t know is if his right hand had powder burns because they didn’t do a gunshot residue test.”
“Is there an estimated time of death on the death certificate?” I asked.
“No.”
“We know he called Josephine around seven o’clock the night he died,” I said. “I can ask her how long their conversation was. But what if he had a guest that night?”
“There’s no second glass on the desk,” Dash said.
“No, but the bottle and an extra glass are on the shelf behind the desk,” I said, squinting at one of the Polaroids.”
“Now you’re starting to think like a detective,” he said. “So he had a late-night visitor, someone he was comfortable enough to let in his home and up to his office, poured two drinks, things got heated…” He paused.
“There’s no sign of struggle in these photographs. Everything looks fairly neat and tidy.”
“One of the chairs across from his desk is pushed back,” Dash said, “But that could have been done by medics or police once they were on scene. It’s impossible to know now.
But if someone was there and set the stage for his apparent suicide, the killer would have taken care to remove any trace of him and put things back in order. ”
“Henry could have been drugged,” I said, shrugging. “I keep trying to think how you can get a gun pressed to his temple without him struggling.”
“There’s no visible bruising around the gunshot wound, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t incapacitated in another way. Cheap shot to the back of the head with the butt of the gun would do it. We don’t know if there were any other wounds on the body since there was no autopsy.”
“The list of things we don’t know is getting longer.”
“That’s usually how it goes,” he said. “But you’re opening your mind to new theories. That’s the best way to start.”
He picked up a sealed manila envelope from his desk and handed it to me. “I made you copies, and I’ll email over the scanned photographs.”
“That’s very helpful,” I said. “I should probably get going. I’m sure you have a lot to do.”
“Want some coffee?” he asked.
I would rather drink dishwater, but I wasn’t quite ready to leave either, so I said, “Sure.”
He grinned, obviously reading the expression on my face, and went to the corner table where an ancient coffee maker sat blinking at us like it was offended to be alive.
He poured two mugs and doctored it just how I like it, and I felt myself sigh at the thoughtfulness, even though I knew it was still going to strip the lining from my stomach.
He handed me a mug and I took a shallow sip. I gave him a smile I hoped looked like gratitude.
He sat back down and watched me over the rim of his own mug, and his lips twitched as he watched me take another sip.
“So what’s next on your list?” he asked. “You always have a list.”
“I’m going to stop by Henry’s old practice on Broad Street.
I want to see the building and get a feel for things.
I want to get to know Henry. I figure I can pretend I need a new doctor and get a look around inside.
And people on this island have long memories.
Maybe someone will remember Henry enough to tell me about him. ”
“I worked a case like this once,” he said.
I waited. Over the few months I’d known Dash, he had shared very little information about himself, especially when it came to work.
He was a master at diverting conversations in a new direction when things were getting too personal.
I thought about the envelope I’d hidden in my kitchen drawer.
Bea had gathered information on him and handed me the contents, but I hadn’t opened it.
Not yet. I still had hope that Dash would tell me about whatever dirt Bea had managed to dig up himself.
“Hmm,” I said, not wanting to scare him off from finishing the story.
“Seattle. It was a suspected suicide. Dirty cop. Looked open and shut. He was facing prison and most people figured he didn’t have much to live for.”
“And the truth?”
“He was getting ready to flip. Cutting a deal with the DA. Going to give up the rest of the corrupt cops.” Dash set his mug on the corner of his desk. “Somebody walked into his house and made it look like he’d done it himself.”
“They killed him before he could talk.”
Dash nodded.
I let that sit. Whatever Henry had been about to make right, at least according to what Josephine said, must have made someone very angry.
“What gave it away in the end?” I asked.
“One of the men he was going to flip on got nervous. Came in to deal himself before the others could. Once he started talking, the rest of it came apart.”
He looked through the window at the river, and his gaze seemed lost in memory.
“Did you like Seattle?” I asked. I made it as light as I knew how. “I’m not sure I could handle that much rain.”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t like it.”
He looked at his watch. “Let me know how it goes at the clinic.”
I resisted the urge to sigh and roll my eyes. But I’d remember this bit of information and file it with the other bits I’d managed to gather over the last weeks.
“Come on, Chowder,” I said, and he hopped off the chair and stretched and made some very ungentlemanly sounds.
Dash walked me to the door, and at the threshold he caught my wrist, light, his thumb against my pulse for one short second.
“Be careful out there today.”
“We’re always careful.”
Chowder barked and looked at me accusingly, and then he trotted down the hall without me.
“Smart dog,” he said.
“Don’t call him a dog,” I whispered. “He has no idea.”