“Oh, sorry. Of course. This is Vicky with the Chamber of Commerce. I’m addressing invitations for the annual
Board of Supervisors dinner and I need your name, if you’d be so kind.”
There was a dainty silence. “Rowena Feldstaff,” she said, spelling it out for me carefully.
“Thank you.”
I dialed Texas again. The phone on the other end rang four times while two women in teeny, tiny voices laughed about conditions in the Inky Void. Someone picked up.
“Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local Three-Five-Three. This is Mary Jane. Can I he’p you?” She had a soft voice and a mild Texas accent. She sounded like she was about twenty.
“You sure can, Mary Jane,” I said. “This is Rowena Feldstaff in Santa Teresa, California. I’m the administra-tive assistant for Bartenders Local Four-Ninety-eight and I’m trying to do a status check on Lyda Case. That’s C-A-S-E . . .”Then I rattled out her date of birth and her Social Security number, as though from records of my own.
“Can I have a number so I can call you back?” said the ever-cautious Mary Jane.
“Sure,” I said and gave her my home phone.
Within minutes, my phone rang again. I answered as Bartenders Local 498, and Mary Jane very kindly gave me Lyda Case’s current place of employment, along with the address and phone number. She was working at one of the cocktail lounges at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.
I called the bar and one of the waitresses told me Lyda would be there at 3:00 Dallas time, which was 1:00 where I was.
At 1:00, I called back and lost another couple of deci-bels’ worth of hearing. Whoo, that lady was quick. I’d have to walk around with a horn sticking out of my ear at this rate.
If I’d been working off an expense account, I’d have hied myself out to the Santa Teresa airport and jumped on a plane for Dallas. I can be pretty cavalier with someone else’s money. My own, I think about first, as I’m very cheap.
I hopped in my car and drove over to the police sta-tion. Jonah Robb, my usual source of illicit information, was out of town. Sergeant Schiffman, sitting in for him, was not all that swift and didn’t really like to bend the rules, so I bypassed him and went straight to Emerald, the black clerk in Records and Identification. Technically she’s not supposed to give out the kind of information I needed, but she’s usually willing to help if no one’s around to catch her.
I leaned on the counter in the reception area, waiting while she finished typing a department memo. She took her time getting to me, probably sensing that I was up to no good. She’s in her forties, with a medium complexion about the color of a cigar. Her hair is cut very short and it curls tensely around her head, a glistening, wet-looking black with gray frizz at the tips. She’s probably fifty pounds overweight and it’s all solidly packed into her waist, her belly, and her rump.
“Uh-uhn,” she said to me as she approached. Her voice is higher than one would imagine for a woman her size, and it has a nasal cast to it, with just the faintest suggestion of a lisp. “What do you want? I’m almost afraid to ask.”
She was wearing a regulation uniform, a navy-blue skirt and a white short-sleeved blouse that looked very stark and clean against the tobacco brown of her arms. The patch on her sleeve said Santa Teresa Police Department, but she’s actually a civilian clerk.
“Hello, Emerald. How are you?”
“Busy. You better cut right down to what you want,” she said.
“I need you to look something up for me.”
“Again? I’m gonna get myself fired one of these days because of you. What is it?” Her tone was offset by a sly smile that touched off dimples in her cheeks.
“A suicide, two years back,” I said. “The guy’s name was Hugh Case.”
She stared at me.
Uh-oh, I thought. “You know who I’m talking about?”
“Sure, I know. I’m surprised you don’t.”
“What’s the deal? I assume it wasn’t routine.”
She laughed at that. “Oh, honey, no way. No way. Uh-un. Lieutenant Dolan still gets mad when he hears the name.”
“How come?”
“How come? Because the evidence disappeared, that’s how come. I know two people at St. Terry’s got fired over that.”
Santa Teresa Hospital, St. Terry’s, is where the hospi-tal morgue is located.
“What evidence came up missing?” I asked.
“Blood, urine, tissue samples, the works. His weren’t the only specimens disappeared. The courier picked ’em up that day and took ’em out to County and that’s the last anybody ever saw of the whole business.”
“Jesus. What about the body? Why couldn’t they just redo the work?”
Emerald shook her head. “Mr. Case’d been cremated by the time they found out the specimens were missing. Mrs. Case had the ashes what-do-you-call-’em . . . scat-tered at sea.”
“Oh, shit, you’re kidding.”
“No ma’am. Autopsy’d been done and Dr. Yee already released the body to the mortuary. Mrs. Case didn’t want any kind of funeral, so she gave the order to have him cremated. He was gone. People had a fit. Dr. Yee turned St. Terry’s upside down. Nothing ever did show. Lieutenant Dolan was beside himself. Now I hear they got this whole new policy. Security’s real tight.”
“But what was the assumption? Was it an actual theft?”
“Don’t ask me. Like I said, lot of other stuff disap-peared at the same time so the hospital couldn’t say what went on. It could have been a mistake. Somebody might have thrown all that stuff out by accident and then didn’t want to admit it.”
“Why was Dolan involved? I thought it was a suicide.”
“You know nobody will make a determination on the manner and cause of death until the reports come back.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I just wondered if the lieutenant had any initial doubts.”
“Lieutenant always has doubts. He’ll have some more he catches you sniffin’ around. Now I got work to do. And don’t you tell nobody I told you this stuff.”
I drove over to the Pathology Department at St. Terry’s, where I had a quick chat with one of the lab techs I’d dealt with before. She confirmed what Emerald had told me, adding a few details about the mechanics of the epi-sode. From what she said, a courier from the coroner’s office did a daily run in a blood-transport vehicle, making a sweep of labs and law-enforcement agencies. Specimens to be picked up were sealed, labeled and placed in insulated cold packs, like picnic supplies. The “hamper” itself was stored in the lab refrigerator until the driver showed up. The lab tech would fetch the hamper. The courier would sign for the evidence and away he’d go. The Hugh Case “material,” as she so fastidiously referred to it, was never seen again once it left the hospital lab. Whether it disap-peared en route or after it was delivered to the coroner’s lab, no one ever knew. The clerk at St. Terry’s swore she gave it to the driver and she had a signed receipt to show for it. She assumed the hamper reached its destination as it had every day for years. The courier remembered putting it in the vehicle and assumed it was among the items deliv-ered at the end of his run. It was only after some days had passed and Dr. Yee began to press for lab results on the toxicological tests that the disappearance came to light. By then, of course, as Emerald had indicated, Hugh Case’s remains had been reduced to ashes and flung to the far winds.
I used one of the pay phones in the hospital lobby to call my travel agent and inquire about the next flight to Dallas. There was one seat left on the 3:00 shuttle from Santa Teresa to Los Angeles, arriving at LAX at 3:35. With a two-hour layover, I could pick up a United flight that would get me into Dallas that night at 10:35, CST. If Lyda clocked into the bar at 3:00 and worked an eight-hour shift, she should be getting off at 11:00. A delay at any point in the journey would get me there too late to connect with her. I couldn’t get a flight back to Santa Teresa until morn-ing anyway, because the airport here shuts down at 11 P.M. I was going to end up spending a night in Dallas in any event. The air fare itself was nearly two hundred bucks, and the notion of paying for a hotel room on top of that made me nearly giddy with anxiety. Of course, I could always sleep listing sideways in one of those molded-plastic airport chairs, but I didn’t relish the idea. Also, I wasn’t quite sure how I could contrive to eat on the ten bucks in cash I had on me. I probably couldn’t even afford to re-trieve my VW from the long-term parking lot when I got home again.