Clean Deaths

"Take them in order," said Leo. "That's how he laid them out."

I took them in order.

I should say, for the benefit of anyone who has never read a pathologist's private papers, that they are not what one expects. One expects horror. One expects gore, close-up color photographs, the stale glamour of the abattoir. What Magnus Kane had left in that folder was a work of extraordinary patience. Every page was ruled in pencil. Every diagram was annotated in a small, perfect hand. The photographs had been mounted at the corners with archival tape, and beside each, on a slip of squared paper, he had written the time, the temperature of the room, and the exact angle from which the picture had been taken, as if the dead had been sitters at a portrait studio and he their conscientious host.

It was, I thought, the loneliest thing I had ever read.

The first case was Arnold Kowalski, whom I had already begun to know. A loan shark, thirty-three, nicknamed Scar for the white ridge down his cheek. A large house in Chestnut Hill. A gate, a second gate, a dog, three layers of alarm. A bedroom on the second floor with a steel bolt that could only be thrown from inside.

On the night of the fourteenth of January he had gone to bed at eleven-ten, according to the cameras. At half past one in the morning his wife, asleep in the guest room down the hall, heard a sound she described as like someone trying to get out of a bag. She ran to the door and found it bolted. She called 911. The patrol officers who broke the lock at one-fifty found Kowalski on his back on the bed with his eyes open, dead, and the wall at the head of the bed ploughed with four deep gouges, where his fingernails had gone through the paint and into the plaster.

The report said: acute myocardial infarction. No signs of forced entry. No signs of struggle.

"No signs of struggle," I said.

"The cops figured he had a bad dream," said Leo. "Ran in his sleep, hit the wall."

"With the bolt shot on the inside."

"Yeah."

"And the dog?"

"Asleep in the kitchen."

I turned the page.

…

The second case was a woman named Daisy Mallory, who was thirty-three and called herself Mama Daisy in a certain narrow circle. She ran what her business card called a talent agency. It had an office in Ardmore with a glass door and a potted fern. What it did, according to an old vice squad report that Magnus had stapled to the back, was find girls of fifteen and sixteen who had left home, and offer them a warm room, a hot meal, a photographer, and a number of introductions to gentlemen who were not in a hurry. Nobody had ever been charged. The girls, when interviewed, said she had been kind to them.

She had been found in the bathtub of a room at the Ardmore Plaza Hotel on a Sunday morning in February. The water was cold. It stood at seven and three-quarter inches by the tide-mark on the porcelain. She was lying on her back, fully clothed, in a cocktail dress, with her hair floating around her face, and her head, resting on the enamel, was entirely out of the water to the level of the ears.

I read that line twice.

"Seven and three-quarter inches," I said.

"Yeah."

"If she were lying on her back."

"Yeah."

"Then she could not have drowned."

"She was found with water in her lungs," said Leo. "Magnus checked. A teaspoon, maybe. Enough for the ME to say drowning."

"But not enough to drown. Not for an adult, who can lift her head." I put down the page. "Captain, how does a healthy woman of thirty-three die in a pool of water that wouldn't cover her ears?"

"The ME said she slipped and hit her head."

"Was there a wound?"

"No."

"Was there any sign she'd been drinking?"

"Blood alcohol point oh-four."

"Then she was nearly sober, and unmarked, and lying on her back in a bathtub. And she died." I closed my eyes. "She could not move."

I saw, quite distinctly, in the darkness behind my lids, a woman's face. A broad painted face, with its mouth open and the eyes half rolled, and the water lapping very gently at her ears. She was awake. She was entirely awake. She could hear the faucet drip. She could feel the cold on her skin. And she was unable, for some reason, to lift her hand.

I opened my eyes.

"Go on," I said.

…

The third was Paul Hensley.

I will not say a great deal about Paul Hensley, because Magnus Kane did not, and I came to respect his silence on the subject. He was fifty. He had been a schoolteacher, at a private school in the Main Line, for twenty-two years, and at three different times in those years a girl had come to the headmaster's office with a story. Each time a settlement had been paid. Each time the girl's family had moved. Each time Mr. Hensley had been transferred to a different building, a different classroom, a different set of pupils who did not yet know. He was found at the foot of a derelict schoolhouse on the northern edge of Bucks County on a morning in March. He had fallen, or jumped, from a fourth-floor window. The ruling was suicide.

The file gave the coroner's finding in one line. Beneath it, Magnus had pasted a single photograph.

It was a close-up of the dead man's two hands, laid palm-down on a sheet of white paper. I looked at it for a long time.

Ten fingers. Ten nails, every one of them torn. Some had been ripped out at the root, some bent right back and snapped, and some had been peeled sideways from the bed, leaving the soft pink flesh beneath exposed and bleeding. In the wounds, packed so deep that Magnus had needed a probe, lay a dark-green substance, gritty, wet-looking. A fine gray powder was ground into the creases of the skin.

"Moss," said Leo. "And mortar. From the window ledge."

"I see."

"That's what you get when you go out a window."

"No." I shook my head slowly. "It isn't."

He stared at me.

"A man who means to jump does not hold on," I said. "He lets go. If he's hesitant, he may stand for a moment. He may weep. He may even change his mind and climb back. But he does not claw." I tapped the photograph. "These are not the hands of a man who wanted to fall. They are the hands of a man hanging on to the lip of a roof, with all ten fingers, for the span of perhaps ninety seconds, praying with every muscle in his body that he will not slip."

"He did slip."

"Eventually."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that every nail on this man's hands was torn off before he fell." I laid the photograph down. "And that something was making him hold on."

…

For a long time neither of us spoke.

Outside the window, the rain had stopped. The sun had come out, thin and white and rather shy, and was laying a long pale rectangle across the floor. Somebody in the corridor had put on a radio, and a woman was singing something about the Delaware. A truck backed up in the lot, beeping.

I sat with the three photographs in front of me and the sound of the ordinary world going on outside, and I felt the thing I had been feeling since the first page, and which I now identified. It was not horror. It was recognition. I had seen these deaths before, in a sense, though never the deaths themselves. I had seen the shape of them.

A bolted door. A shallow bath. A stone ledge.

A place where a man should be safe. And a body that could not believe it.

"They're not accidents," I said.

"Doc—"

"No." I raised a hand. "Let me finish, because I believe it. I'm not telling you that they're murders. I haven't the evidence, and neither had Magnus. But they are not what they appear. A man who feels safest in a locked bedroom dies in a locked bedroom, in a frenzy. A woman who has spent twenty years paralyzing other people's wills dies unable to lift her head. A coward who has hung off the edge of every responsibility in his life dies hanging off the edge of a roof. I have never in my career seen three accidents with a theme."

Leo said nothing. He took the cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, and put it back.

"Magnus knew," I said.

"He knew something."

"He thought somebody was doing this. He thought somebody was—" I stopped, because I did not have the word, and then I had it, and it was ugly. "Designing it."

"And then he crashed his car."

"Yes."

"Convenient."

"Very."

Leo took a long breath through his nose.

"I'll tell you what I think," he said. "And you can tell me I'm a barbarian."

"I would never."

"I think those three were dirt." He kept his eyes on the photographs. "I'm not saying that to be tough. I knew Kowalski. I put away two guys who worked for him and I couldn't touch him. I had a woman in my office, crying, whose mother he'd put out on the street. Mama Daisy, I could've told you stories. And Hensley—" He shut his mouth. "Cases like that, I used to go home and not sleep. You know what that's like?"

"Yes," I said, which was a lie. I do not go home and not sleep. I do not go home.

"Somebody did the city a favor," said Leo. He said it quietly, without pleasure, like a man reading a verdict. "I don't know who. I don't know how. I don't care. I put my twenty-six years in so that guys like that would get put away. And they didn't. And now they're gone. And I'm supposed to be the one who gets upset?"

I looked at him.

It is not a thing one should say aloud, but I believe that most of the honest people I have ever met would have agreed with him. That was what made it so dangerous. It was not a villain's argument. It was a tired decent man's. It had a kind of bleak authority, like the cold in a church.

I did not answer. I could not think of an answer that would not have been a lie.

…

"I'll tell you what," said Leo. He closed the folder halfway, not all the way, and let his big hand lie on the cover. "Yesterday we pulled a kid out of a hole. That's a good day. That's a week. Maybe that's enough. Maybe I ought not to hand this to you on top of it." He cleared his throat. "Or you can read the rest."

"The rest?"

"There's one more page. At the back. I haven't read it. I got halfway down the first line and I closed it." His mouth twisted. "I figured it was Magnus's goodbye."

I looked at the folder.

It lay between us on the blotter, soft and yellow and faintly smelling of old rooms. Its cover had been turned back, and under his fingers I could see the edge of the very last page: a narrow strip of pale paper, creased, stained at the corner. A few letters were visible. Red ink. A downstroke. An initial.

I felt my right hand begin to move.

I was aware of two things at once. The first was a very simple, very sensible voice, speaking in the cool dry tone of my own good sense. It said: You have been on this contract eleven weeks. You have just saved a child's life. The Commissioner has signed your badge. Three men and women of poor reputation have died of what the law insists are natural causes, and no one is asking you to pursue it. Close the folder. Let Leo lock it in the cabinet. Go home and sleep.

The second thing was a small, absurd, stubborn picture: a boy of nineteen with a pinboard, and a hope, which he had never mentioned to anyone, that some day a dead man would write to him.

My thumb touched the edge of the last page.

It was cold. Cold as a stone from a river.

I breathed in. I could smell cigar smoke and old paper and, very faintly, the sweet sharp tang of the red ink.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

The folder lies open on the desk. Captain Maddox is watching your thumb. The sun is on the floor and a child is alive in St. Christopher's, and every sensible instinct you have says that a small win is still a win.