“Trauma.”
“Yeah. Any trauma?”
“None,” the doctor says. “Not a scratch, madam, I give you my woid. Your brother died from drowning. Dere was no need to cut—oh goodness, no need for a complete autopsy procedure.”
“You saw nothing at all unusual?” I ask. “You did get him out of his wetsuit at least?”
Dr. Sawyer squints in fierce concentration, moving his mottled lips like a cow. Then he explodes in a jolly boom: “Haw! Now I know what this mon be gettin’ at! The tattoo. The snake tattoo! Oh goodness, I never see anyting like dat before, not in eighty-seven years! Gawd, please!”
The doctor is wheezing, he’s laughing so hard. Pretty soon Janet cracks up, too. Then I join in. How could anyone not like the old guy?
“That tattoo, wheeeee, it’s like a woik of art,” Dr. Sawyer is saying. “Tell you trute, I’m glad I didn’t have to mess dat up. Woulda made me plenty sad to do such a ting! Who was the pretty lady with dat snake, if I may ast?”
“Some stripper Jimmy was dating,” Janet says, giggling at the memory. “In real life she had a terrible overbite.”
“Dat’s okay. I hear da same ’bout Mona Lisa.”
As the doctor cordially leads us to the door, I tell him I’ve got one more question.
“Anyting, sir,” he says.
“I was wondering if you’ve had any formal forensic training?”
“Certainly, sir.” He tilts his wizened head and peers at me like an ancient turtle. “I woiked as a pathologist right here on New Providence. Nassau Town.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen… well, let me tink. Forty-two it was.”
“And part of ’43. Before I took up da practice of obstetrics.” Dr. Sawyer beams. “I’ve delivered more babies than any other poysin in the commonwealth!”
The seaplane is late. Janet and I wait on a peeling wooden bench in the broken shade of some coconut palms. She lets me skim through the police report—I was hoping for some notation that might trip up Cleo Rio, but there’s not much there. The Bahamians kept it simple.
I find myself asking Janet when her father died.
“Nine years ago,” she says.
“How old was he?”
“Fifty-two.”
“Wow,” I say. The same age as Harry Nilsson.
“Too young,” Janet adds.
“Does it worry you?”
She eyes me curiously. “No, Jack. It makes me sad. I loved my old man.”
“Of course you did. What I meant was, doesn’t it make you wonder about your own… timetable?”
The question is unforgivably insensitive, which I realize the instant it leaves my lips. This is one aspect of my obsession that aggravates not only my mother but my friends as well.
But Janet’s look dissolves into one of understanding. “Oh,” she says. “Sure. Dying young and all.”
“Not just dying young,” I slog on, “but dying at the exact same age as a parent or a friend or even a famous person you admire.”
“You mean, like, fate? Don’t tell me you believe in fate?”
“Not fate. Black irony. That’s what I believe in.”
Janet whistles. “Ever thought about changing jobs?”
“Can I ask what happened to your father?”
“He was screwing one of his students when her boyfriend showed up. It was, like, her nineteenth birthday. My father jumped out the dormitory window to get away, but six stories is a long way down. Too bad he taught English lit and not physics.” Janet smiles ruefully. “That’s why I’m not too worried about checking out at fifty-two.”
“Gotcha,” I say.
“I mean there’s fate, Jack, and then there’s just plain stupidity.”
10
Midnight.
The old days, a newsroom at this hour reeked of coffee and cigarettes and stale pizza. You’d hear the wire machines chittering and the police scanners gabbling and the pasteup guys snorting at dirty jokes.
But like most papers, the Union-Register switched to early deadlines to cut costs, so there’s hardly a soul around at this late hour. If a plane goes down or the mayor has another coronary, come daybreak we’re sucking hind tit to the TV stations.
These days we buy the loyalty of readers with giveaways and grocery coupons, not content. This makes for less clutter, so our newsroom is as spiffy as a downtown Allstate agency, complete with earth-tone carpeting. Every editor and reporter has a personal cubicle with padded pressboard walls and a computer station and a file drawer and a phone with a headset. Some days, we might as well be selling term life.