“What do you say, Bernie?”
“What have we got?” Bernie asked as they shook hands.
“Looks like a simple OD, Bernie. Caucasian female, early twenties, whose father happens to own Nesfoods.”
“Nice house,” Bernie said. “I didn’t think these people were on public assistance. Where the body?”
“In the dining room.”
“What are you guys still doing here?” Bernie asked the Fire Department EMT on the patio. It was simple curiosity, not a reprimand.
The EMT looked uncomfortable.
“Like I told you,” Captain O’Connor answered for him, “the father owns Nesfoods International.” And then he looked down the drive at a new Ford coming up. “And here comes, I think, Chief Coughlin.”
“Equal justice under the law, right?” Bernie asked.
“There’s a doctor, a lady doctor, in there,” the EMT said, “said she wanted to be called when you came.”
“What does she want?” Bernie asked.
The EMT shrugged.
Chief Coughlin got out of his car and walked up.
“Good morning, Chief,” Tom O’Connor said.
Coughlin shook his hand and then Bernie Potter’s.
“Long time no see, Bernie,” he said. “You pronounce yet?”
“Haven’t seen the body.”
“The quicker we can get this over, the better. You call for a wagon, Tom?”
“I didn’t. I don’t like to get in the way of my people.”
“Check and see. If he hasn’t called for one, get one here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’s the body?”
“In the dining room,” the EMT said.
“I heard it was on the patio here.”
“The lady doctor made us move it,” the EMT said.
“Let’s go have a look at it,” Coughlin said. “I know where the dining room is. Tom, you make sure about the wagon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Coughlin led the way to the dining room.
“How did it get on the stretcher?” Bernie asked.
“What I hear is that the father carried it downstairs,” the EMT said. “When we got here, he was sitting outside on one of them metal chairs, couches, holding it in his arms. We took it from him.”
A look of pain, or compassion, flashed briefly over Chief Coughlin’s face.
“Where did they find it?” Bernie asked.
Dr. Amelia Payne entered the dining room.
“In her bedroom,” she answered the question. “In an erect position, with a syringe in her left arm.”
“Dr. Payne, this is Mr. Potter, an investigator of the Medical Examiner’s Office.”
“How do you do?” Amy said. “Death was apparently instantaneous, or nearly so,” she went on. “There is a frothy liquid in the nostrils, often encountered in cases of heroin poisoning. The decedent was a known narcotic-substance abuser. In my opinion-”
“Doctor,” Bernie interrupted her uncomfortably, “I don’t mean to sound hard-nosed, but you don’t have any status here. This is the M.E.’s business.”
“I am a licensed physician, Mr. Potter,” Amy said. “The decedent was my patient, and she died in her home in not-unexpected circumstances. Under those circumstances, I am authorized to pronounce, and to conduct, if in my judgment it is necessary, any postmortem examination.”
“Amy, honey,” Chief Coughlin said gently.
“Yes?” She turned to him.
“I know where you’re coming from, Amy. But let me tell you how it is. You may be right. You probably are. But while you’re fighting the M.E. taking Penny’s body, think what’s going to happen: It’s going to take time, maybe a couple of days, before even your father can get an injunction. Until he gets a judge to issue an order to release it to you, the M.E.’ll hold the body. Let’s get it over with, as quickly and painlessly as possible. I already talked to the M.E. He’s going to do the autopsy himself, as soon as the body gets there. It can be in the hands of the funeral home in two, three hours.”
She didn’t respond.
“Grace Detweiler’s going to need you,” Coughlin went on. “And Matt. That’s what’s important.”
Amy looked at Bernie.
“There’s no need for a postmortem,” she said. “Everybody in this room knows how this girl killed herself.”
“It’s the law, Doctor,” Bernie said sympathetically.
Amy turned to Dennis Coughlin.
“What about Matt? Does he know?”
“Peter Wohl’s waiting for him on North Broad Street. He’ll tell him. Unless…”
“No,” Amy said. “I think Peter’s the best one. They have a sibling relationship. And Peter obviously has more experience than my father. You think Matt will come here?”
“I would suppose so.”
She turned to Bernie Potter.
“OK, Mr. Potter,” she said. “She is pronounced at nine twenty-five A.M. ” She turned back to Chief Coughlin. “Thank you, Uncle Denny.”
She walked out of the dining room.
Chief Coughlin turned to the EMT.
“The wagon’s on the way. Wait in here until it gets here.”
The EMT nodded.
“I’m going to have to see the bedroom, Chief,” Bernie Potter said.
“I’ll show you where it is,” Chief Coughlin said. “You through here?”
“I haven’t seen the body,” Potter said.
He squatted beside the stretcher and pulled the blanket off. He looked closely at the eyes and then closed them. He examined the nostrils.
“Yeah,” he said, as if to himself. Then, “Give me a hand rolling her over.”
The EMT helped him turn the body on its stomach. Bernie Potter tugged and pulled at Penelope Alice Detweiler’s nightdress until it was up around her neck.
There was evidence of livor. The lower back and buttocks and the back of her legs were a dark purple color. Gravity drains blood in a corpse to the body’s lowest point.
“OK,” he said. “No signs of trauma on the back. Now let’s turn her the other way.”
There was more evidence of livor when the body was again on its back. The abdominal area and groin were a deep purple color.
“No trauma here, either,” Bernie Potter said. He picked up the left arm.
“It looks like a needle could have been in here,” he said. “It’s discolored.”
“The maid said there was a syringe in her arm,” Captain O’Connor said. “And the district sergeant saw one, and some rubber tubing, on the floor in the corridor upstairs. He put chairs over them.”
Bernie Potter nodded. Then he put Penelope’s arm back beside her body, tugged at the nightgown so that it covered the body again, replaced the blanket, and stood up.
“OK,” he said. “Now let’s go see the bedroom. And the needle.”
Chief Coughlin led the procession upstairs.
“There it is,” Tom O’Connor said when they came to the chairs in the middle of the upstairs corridor. He carefully picked up the chairs Officer Wells had placed over the plastic hypodermic syringe and the surgical rubber tubing and put them against the wall.
Bernie Potter went into his bag and took two plastic bags from it. Then, using a forceps, he picked up the syringe and the tubing from the carpet and carefully placed them into the plastic bags.
Coughlin then led him to Penelope’s bedroom. Potter first took several photographs of the bed and the bedside tables, then took another, larger plastic bag from his bag and, using the forceps, moved the spoon, the candle, the cotton ball, and the glassine bag containing a white crystalline substance from Penelope’s bedside table into it.
“OK,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need. Let me use a telephone and I’m on my way.”
“I’ll show you, Bernie,” Chief Coughlin said. “There’s one by the door downstairs.”
As they went down the stairs, the door to the dining room opened and two uniformed police officers came through it, carrying Penelope’s body on a stretcher. It was covered with a blanket, but her arm hung down from the side.
“The arm!” Chief Coughlin said.
One of the Fire Department EMTs, who was holding the door open, went quickly and put the arm onto the stretcher.
The policemen carried the stretcher outside and down the stairs from the patio and slid it through the already open doors of a Police Department wagon.