I spotted the phone among the stuff on the cluttered nightstand, walked over, picked up the receiver, and only then allowed myself to look down at Miss Driscoll’s body.
She might have been the same woman in the photo hanging in the foyer, but I couldn’t be certain; at least fifty years separated the face in the picture from the one I was looking at now.
Staring down at her still form that looked more asleep than dead, I couldn’t help but wonder how she came to this, what led from point A to point B (and so on) to her cutting herself off from the rest of the world with only this grotesque hobby to fill her days.
Is that why you cried some nights? I wondered. Did you know or suspect that your life had become something ghoulish and ugly? Did you feel so powerless and alone and afraid that you couldn’t talk to someone about it? Did it hurt that much, knowing what you had become?
“Lady,” I whispered, “what the hell happened to you?”
I reached down with a shaking hand to punch in my lawyer’s phone number and accidentally hit the Redial button, freezing just long enough for the seven digits to complete their rapid-fire dialing and hear a voice on the other end say: “Cedar Hill Police Department, how may I direct your call?”
“Sorry, misdialed.” I hung up with too much force, just about tipping over the mostly empty glass of water next to the phone. Steadying the glass, I managed to knock one of the prescription containers from the nightstand. Sometimes I’m so graceful it’s a wonder I didn’t pursue a career in ballet.
Counting the one I’d knocked to the floor, there were seven empty prescription containers on the nightstand: painkillers, sedatives, blood pressure medication, muscle relaxants, anti-depressants, and two different kinds of sleeping pills. There was also a good-sized bowl with remnants of chocolate pudding clinging to its rim and to the spoon lying inside (having consumed more than my fair share of chocolate pudding and knowing how it looks when you fail to rinse out the bowl in a timely manner, I recognized this immediately, perceptive and clever fellow—not to mention tidy housekeeper—that I am). Mixed in with these remnants was a not-so-fine powdery substance.
Oh, shit.
I take in pill form a drug called Imitrex for my migraine headaches. The stuff works wonders most of the time, except on those nights I forget to carry some on me and end up at the ER getting a shot of Demerol so I can be arrested for DUI on my way home and be assigned community service that will lead me to be standing over the dead body of a seriously weird old lady, but I digress. If I do not take the Imitrex with food or milk, I will be vomiting within half an hour. Since it takes two pills to tackle one of my migraines, I break them up into several pieces and mix them in with applesauce or—drum-roll please—pudding.
I stared at the bowl, the empty prescription containers, and knew.
Miss Driscoll had committed suicide.
Now before you shake your head and let fly with one of those long, low-pitched, boy-has-he-lost-it whistles, consider: 1) This was an isolated and terribly lonely old woman who, 2) had a morbid hobby, 3) possessed enough prescription medications to kill herself three times over if she took them all at once, and whose, 4) last phone call had been to the non-emergency number of the police department.
It would have been simple enough; wait until you feel yourself starting to drift toward sleep, then make the calclass="underline" I’m sorry, this isn’t an emergency, it’s probably nothing, but I live over at The Maples on—oh, you know where that is? I was wondering if you could send some officers over to apartment 716 sometime tonight around, oh, 8:30 or 9? There’s a young man who’s been coming to my door at that time for the last couple of nights—I think he might be trying to sell something—and he will not leave me alone. He’s been very insistent, and he’s starting to frighten me a little. I was hoping the officers might have a word with him?
She’d probably invented a better reason, but my guess was it had been something along similar lines, some vague, borderline silly, old-lady reason to have a couple of officers drop by, nothing urgent, mind you, but allowing for enough time between the call and their visit to make sure she’d be dead when the police arrived.
I can’t say that I was pleased about realizing this—consider the circumstances—because if it was true, then it raised more questions than it answered: why was there no record of this downstairs? The police would have checked in with whomever worked the front desk. The door to the apartment hadn’t been forcibly opened, it had been unlocked by someone with a passkey (presumably the building manager or one of the security guards). How did the mayor come to be involved? And why would the coroner file a false report of “Natural Causes” when it must have been obvious to him that Miss Driscoll had taken her own life? (C’mon; if I could figure it out based on an almost-empty pudding bowl, someone with the coroner’s medical knowledge must have known it the moment he saw the body.)
Two things stopped me from deciding that I was full of shit and just letting my anxiety get the better of me; the first was something Dobbs had said on the way over here: “…this whole to-do was supposed to be handled by the book, but there ain’t been nothing about this has gone like it’s supposed to.”
The second thing was what I saw when I finally worked up enough nerve to test my theory and picked up the bowclass="underline" pieces of pills mixed in with the remaining glops of pudding.
Now what was I supposed to do?
First thing: put down the bowl.
The second thing was what I should have done in the first place—get the hell out of the room. I’d put in my CS time today, go home, and call my lawyer this evening. Whatever was going on here was out of my hands and none of my business.
Hell, yes, I felt bad for Miss Driscoll—you’d have to be a monster not to—but none of this was my responsibility. A lonely old lady offs herself and some city officials decide for whatever reason to cover it up. Fine. I was just here to transport her body so she could get some kind of decent burial. And like Dobbs had said, ultimately this wasn’t her, it was just something she used to walk around in. Wherever she was now (assuming there was a Wherever), she had better things to concern herself with.
“I see you’ve located the body,” said Dobbs from the doorway.
I looked over just in time to be half-blinded by the sudden flash of his camera.
“Oh, man, you ought to see the expression on your face. ” He started over, working his way around the tracks. “Take a gander.” He turned the camera’s display window toward me.
“All I can see right now are spots.”
“Oh, sorry about that. I couldn’t resist.”
If I was going to say anything about this, now was my chance. I pointed at the cluttered bedside table. “You notice anything odd?” Dobbs looked at the table. “She was a bit messy.” “Is that all?” He shrugged. “I dunno. What am I supposed to be seeing?” “Humor me. Take a good look at what’s on this table.”
Dobbs sighed, then leaned down to examine everything. He picked up the pudding bowl, stared at its contents, and made the Stroke Face again, so I knew he was concentrating. After several seconds, he said: “Gimme the clipboard.” I handed it over and he flipped through the official paperwork. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he whispered. “What?” He looked down at Miss Driscoll, then at me. “You first.” I shook my head. “Oh, no. No. Sorry but…no. I don’t want to get myself in any more trouble than I already am.” Dobbs stared at me, blinked, then nodded. “She died of natural causes like my ass chews gum.” “So…what do we do about it?”