mean?”
“She was an old woman who was tired of living.”
“Are you telling me that this was a suicide?”
His eyes sparked hard for a moment. “No, that is not what I am telling you.” He withdrew his hand; the skin was transparent, and I watched as the blue and red protruded in the fists at his lap. “I think she was tired and gave up.”
“You knew her pretty well?”
“She was my patient for more than half a century.”
I took a sip of the tea out of habit and immediately regretted it. “What can you tell me about the scars?” He looked at me blankly. “The ones on her back?”
He raised his head and nodded. “She was involved in an automobile accident a number of years ago.”
“An automobile accident?”
“Yes.”
“The scars couldn’t have been the result of some form of abuse?”
He turned and looked at me again, the picture of questioning disbelief. “What would lead you to think that?”
“The Yellowstone County Medical Examiner.”
His eyes widened. “You sent her to Billings?”
“No, he’s here. His name is Bill McDermott, and he’s over at Memorial.”
“Walter, it was Mrs. Baroja’s expressed desire that there be nothing done to her remains other than what was legally required.”
“Well, it’s gotten a little complicated.”
“Who did you say was doing the autopsy?”
I sat the tea down on the magazines stacked at the table behind me. “New fellow by the name of Bill McDermott. He’s a licensed ME.” I waited for a moment. “So, you and Mrs. Baroja discussed the possibility of her death?”
He seemed less excitable now. “I discuss the possibility with all my patients. I try to be truthful with them, no matter what the circumstance.”
I leaned in. “Isaac, it sounds like you had a lot more responsibilities than that of family practitioner. Is there something you want to say to me?”
I waited as he took a deep breath and noticed, not for the first time, how small the man was. “I lied to you just now.”
“Yep, I know.” He looked at me again. “It’s something I’m pretty good at spotting.”
“You realize, of course, that due to the physician/patient privilege I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“Yes.” We listened as the little pumps bubbled fresh oxygen into the fish tank; Handel joined the minuet. “You want to tell me about the scars first?”
He sighed. “Charlie Nurburn, her husband.”
I nodded and then stopped. “I don’t know him.”
“He was from the southern part of the county, near Four Brothers.”
“Middle fork of the Powder; not much out there.”
“Used to be a few little homesteads and an old coal mine.” I looked at the thick yellow nails as his fingers tightened at his kneecaps. “I used to run a clinic down in Powder once a week, Saturday mornings, back in the late forties, early fifties.”
I leaned back in the overstuffed chair and unbuttoned my sheepskin coat. “She was one of your patients then?”
“Yes. I delivered her two children and…”
“Three children?”
He paused for a moment. “Yes, I always forget about David, but I didn’t deliver him. I wasn’t practicing yet.” I waited. “She didn’t come in about the beatings.”
“What then?”
“Latent syphilis.”
I rubbed my hands across my face. “This guy sounds like a real charmer. How long were they married?”
“Long enough.”
“Jesus.” I looked at Isaac again. “Where is he?”
“Gone.”
It seemed like there was more. “Dead?”
“I’m not sure. Just gone.”
“When?”
“Years ago.” He waited for a moment, and his eyes stayed steady with mine. “It’s probably better that way, don’t you think?” I didn’t say anything. “You can understand my being circumspect concerning her situation.”
“Yes.” I wondered about all the individuals wandering around out there who were in serious need of the administration of a dreadful ass-kicking and weren’t likely to get it. “Why the response to the autopsy?”
“I thought she’d been through enough, and it was her expressed wish that her body not be disturbed any more than it already had. She was very religious.” It was a sad smile this time. “What does Mr. McDermott have to say about cause of death?”
I waited a moment and looked at Isaac, allowing myself the blurred vision of the living hell that he had endured. Lucian said that he had been one of three survivors of Nordhausen, a subcamp of Dora-Mittelbau for inmates too sick or weak to work in the tunnels of Dora. Nordhausen was a Vernichtungslager or extermination camp where starvation was the simple but effective measure. To make matters worse, on April 3, 1945, it was bombed by our air force. Since it was installed in concrete hangers, we thought it was a German munitions depot. A great number of the prisoners were burned alive; a week and a half later, when the 104 ^ th Infantry Division liberated Nordhausen, they found three thousand rotting corpses and three survivors. One of them was Isaac Bloomfield, and he weighed fifty-seven pounds.
I always thought that there was a reason why the old man was able to keep going; maybe it was because, as long as he was alive, he was a reminder. “Cardiac arrest. Any history of heart problems in the family?”
He chuckled to himself with a wistful quality. “Oh, Walter, there are nothing but problems of the heart in families such as this.” He continued to smile. “I suppose cardiac complications due to prolonged exposure to syphilitic infection; that, and I believe that Mrs. Baroja took solace in a number of lifelong vices that did nothing to prolong her existence.”
“So there isn’t anything suspicious about her death that you can think of?”
“I don’t think so.” He studied me a little longer than I was comfortable with. “Is this disappointing to you?”
I wondered how much he knew about Mari Baroja and Lucian and suspected that it was more than he was willing to admit. “No, that’s the one odd thing about this job. You’re always willing to turn work away.” I looked down at my uniform, the badge, and the. 45 at my hip. It didn’t take much imagination to see the distance that they put between myself and most people, let alone Isaac. Nice people with uniforms, badges, and guns had once told him they were doing things for his own good, his own safety, and his own welfare. Next thing he knew he was being carried out of a reinforced hanger with three thousand dead people. If I were Isaac, I wouldn’t let me in the same room as me. “What do you know about the children?”
“Everything. Carol, Kay, and David.”
“I’m assuming David is dead?” I thought back to the sad-eyed lieutenant in the photograph in her room. “Vietnam?”
“Yes.” His eyes softened a little. “That was your war, wasn’t it, Walter?”
“Don’t blame me, I didn’t start it.” I allowed my mind to play over the photograph again. “I’m trying to think if I knew him.”
“He was quiet.” He said it like I wasn’t. “Mari had a cousin, a priest, I believe.”
“Here in town?”
“He was not a priest here, but I think he retired here… If he’s still alive.”
The priest in the family photograph; this would take a little following up. I thought of the picture of the little
