It is an old contest. They can be friends, or acquaintances, or absolute strangers. After the festivities, we rate them on a scale of ten, the measurement being whether or not you’d be willing to spend a month on a small boat with them. We made a good Christmas bag, because there was a compulsion to have a good time. We unfastened all the umbilical devices affixing the Flush to her mooring space, and, with eighteen yuletide souls aboard, chugged down into the breadths of Biscayne Bay under clearing skies, edged the old girl as close as I could get her to good beach with good protection near Southwest Point, stayed the night in drink, argumentation, minimal sleep, beach walks, a touch of skinnydipping for those brave hearts who can stand the December waters, and came trundling back up to home base the next day.
Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, but this time it had jelled. There had been some good minds, outrageous opinions, furious squabbles, laugh-till-you-cry incidents, games and contests, confessions and accusations, tears and broad smiles. But no sloppy drunks, no broken crockery, or teeth. We aimed homeward tired and content and, for the- most part, friends. Waterborne group therapy, Meyer calls it. It restored Puss Killian. Late on Tuesday afternoon as we were scoring our recent boatmates, with Puss as arbiter when we disagreed, she said, “Does anyone else have the feeling that little jaunt lasted at least a week?”
“When they don’t seem to,” said Meyer, “they haven’t worked.” Which could be another one of Meyer’s Laws, but he says it is too close to aphorism to be significant.
Eight
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27th, before Puss and Janine and I had to catch the flight out of Miami to Milwaukee for Tush’s funeral the next day, I had a chance to talk with Dr. Mike Guardina at the lab. I left the gals with the car and told them I wouldn’t be long, so not to wander too far.
Mike took me into a small office and closed the door, and took a folder out of the locked file. He is thin, intent, strung on taut wires, totally intent on finding out why people die: He is qualified in about all the kinds of pathology they have.
“Trav, the first impression was of too much damage. Way too much to go with the way it was supposed to happen, from what we found on your roll of film once we made prints. So much damage that actually trying to locate any specific tissue damage or bone damage not likely to have been caused by the impact of that weight dropping on him would have been pretty iffy. About all we can say for certain is that there is a good chance he wasn’t shot in the head first, nor much of a chance that there was any blow that struck him from behind. Now you did want a cause of death to a reasonable medical certainty, but I gathered from your conversation over the phone with me that you want suicide ruled out if possible.”
“But if you can’t-”
“This is another approach. Take a look at these.” He put three 8 x 10 glossies on the desk top. He pointed with the eraser end of a yellow pencil. “This is a blowup of the central portion of one of your pictures, Trav, where you had that block cranked high and you aimed up at it. See these rusty hexagonal nuts along here, toward what we will call the rear end of the block? Look at this one in particular. Somebody apparently tried to knock it off with a cold chisel, and knocked off a third of it before they gave up. Now this next print is full frame, of the chest area of the subject. Note these three marks circled with a grease pencil, and marked A, B and C. This third print is actually a triptych, an enlargement of A, B and C. The area marked A shows a clear imprint or incised impression of that damaged nut. The encircled B area shows the same imprint exactly, and it is about four inches from the point marked A, in a lateral direction across the crushed chest, from right to left. Imprint C is, as you can see from the print of the whole chest area, another inch and a quarter or inch and a half further, going from right to left, from imprint B. But here, as it struck, or would seem to have struck a previously damaged area, we do not have as obvious an identical match. However, if you want me to project the thirty-five millimeter color slides we took of points A, B and C, I think you will see that it is reasonable to suppose that impact area C represents the same deformed nut.”
“In simply lousy English,” I said, “you are certain that the engine block was dropped onto him twice, and you can make a case that it could have been dropped, cranked up, dropped again, cranked up, and dropped the third time.”
“Yes,” said Mike. “It wouldn’t be consistent with suicide.”
Long ago and far away I could see Tush Bannon under the needle spray in the long shower room that smelled of old socks, soap and disinfectant, rubbing up a suds on that barrel chest and bawling, off-key, “… and this is my storrrreeee, as you can plainly see. Never let a sailor put his hand above your kneeeeeeee.”
“Spare me the slides, Mike: Can I have dupes of these?”
“Got them right here for you. Smaller. Five by sevens. OW.”
“Fine. And what about a grand jury? Will it make you nervous if we don’t do a thing?”
“What could you do with it? Somebody got clumsy. They found him crushed under that thing and so they cranked it up and it slipped and fell on him again and they cranked it up again and locked it. He was obviously dead, so why make a big statement about the crank slipping? We can’t prove the third drop, even though I feel certain it happened. You understand what I’m saying, Trav. In a court of law any neophyte defense attorney could set up an area of reasonable doubt you could take a truck convoy through.”
“But if there ever comes a time for affidavits?”
“Me and Harry Bayder, and the tape going as we worked, and a resident in pathology taking notes. Time and place, and an accurate identification of the body, and signed statements in the file from all three of us. Just in case. If and when you ever get something else to go with it.”
“You are a good man, Guardina.”
“Beyond compare, surely. Keep in touch, hombre.”
All I could tell Janine, or wanted to tell Janine, was that any last faint possibility of suicide was long long gone. I told her on the way out to the airport. She didn’t say a thing. I had my hands on the wheel at ten of and ten after. She reached up and put her long fingers on the ten after wrist. At the chapel in Milwaukee, when we bowed our heads in prayer, I looked down at the underside of my right wrist and saw the four dark-blue half moon marks where her nails had bitten deep. Her parents thought she should have brought her three young sons to the services. They thought Tush should have been shipped sooner and buried earlier. They thought she should come home with the boys and stay. They thought her tailored navy-blue suit was not proper attire for a widow. They thought it odd she had brought along this McGee person and this Killian woman when there were so many old friends who were-or should have been-so much closer in a time of need. They resented not knowing Connie Alvarez. They had remembered that she had been at Janine’s wedding, but they let it be known she had struck them as a rather coarse and peculiar person, not at all the ladylike type their daughter should cultivate. They made it clear that it was an affront to them that poor Janine should go back immediately to Florida with these… these strangers.
On the flight back we had three side by side. Janine was in the middle. She said, turning her face from Puss to me and back, “I’m sorry. They just… they aren’t…”
Puss hugged her and said, “Honey, if you put the knock on them you’ll feel like a traitor. Everybody has people, and their people don’t want to let them go or admit they’re gone when they’re gone. They love you. That’s good enough. Right?”
“Should I have brought the boys? That’s what I keep wondering.”
“Ask each one of them when he gets to be twentyone, dear. Ask them if they felt as if they had been left out of anything,” Puss said.