more questions for me, it’s time for me to go and face the music.”
We both stood up and shook hands. And then I took a seat again, and watched him leave. Even now I thought of Miller as a basset hound. He carried his sensitivity-and sadness-with him.
I sipped my iced tea and looked around the open space. Years ago there had been a reunion of the Munchkins. They had returned to the Culver Hotel and reminisced about their time making the movie. The little people had said tales of their debauchery were exaggerated, and that they were too tired from working fourteen- hour days to party to excess.
Still, there were persistent stories of many of the Munchkins getting drunk night after night and belting out the tune “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead.” According to the stories, though, the little people preferred substituting the word “bitch.”
Right now my cases had me feeling like the Scarecrow. I wasn’t ready for my close-up, but I was ready for the refrain, “If I only had a brain.”
The witch wasn’t dead, but Paul Klein and baby Rose were.
Maybe Munchkinville wasn’t the idyllic place it was made out to be. There had been a Munchkin coroner in
Finally they came to me and I said, “As coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. And she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.”
I finished the iced tea. It was time to get back to the sincerely dead and those that had made them that way. That was a job that fell to cops, or maybe the Lollipop Guild.
“Refill?” the server asked.
“No thanks.”
Toto was waiting, I thought. Outside I watched palm trees bending to a strong gust of wind. At least I didn’t see any flying monkeys.
CHAPTER 10:
You know you’re leading a strange life when you find yourself looking forward to a visit to the morgue. In the morning I had fallen back to sleep after my burning, lulled by the image of Lisbet Keane and the aroma of pumpkin bread. Somewhere in my subconscious I had remembered my three-thirty meeting with the coroner, Lisbet, and Rose.
When you are working multiple cases, one invariably takes precedence. Because the Klein crucifixion was high-profile, I’d been forced to put the investigation of baby Rose on the back-burner, but her death had continued to play on my mind.
As far as I know there isn’t any official name for the spot where I was cooling my heels, but everybody calls it the body pickup zone. It’s a spot where you usually find mortuary employees or cemetery drivers waiting for bodies to be released by the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, so it’s not somewhere that most people want to linger. I tried not to breathe through my nose while pacing around the outer room that served as a waiting area, but even the open-mouth trick wasn’t helping.
It would have been worse had I been inside watching the autopsy. That’s what I should have been doing, but I had convinced myself that my being a witness wasn’t important to the case. The truth of the matter is that I just couldn’t stomach the thought of watching another baby being cut open. I had been there for baby Moses; once was enough.
In LA, the coroner’s department is charged with looking into and determining the cause of all violent, sudden, or unusual deaths occurring within the county. On average, they investigate about twenty thousand deaths a year, with 10 percent of those deemed potential homicides. That results in around twenty autopsies every day; today baby Rose had been among that number. The pathologist had told me he would have the results by three o’clock, but I knew that I wasn’t the only one in on the death loop.
Lisbet Keane-aka the Saint-entered the body pickup zone, and when I saw her I forgot about the escaping odors of death that were causing my stomach to do loop-the-loops. Lisbet’s pale complexion set off her dark hair and wide-spaced eyes. She carried a smile a little fuller than Mona Lisa’s, but not that much fuller. When Lisbet saw me, her enigmatic smile deepened. Hours earlier, in the aftermath of my burning, I’d seen her appear looking just the same as she did now. All day I’d been looking forward to seeing her.
“Detective Gideon,” she said.
I was glad she remembered my name, but her memory might have been helped because we had talked on the phone earlier in the week about Rose.
“It’s nice to see you, Ms. Keane.”
As far as I can determine, Lisbet isn’t judgmental. I have never heard her condemn the mothers that abandoned their babies to such tragic circumstances; her emphasis is always on the babies themselves. Still, she seems to understand that LAPD has a job to do.
“I was afraid I was going to be late,” she said.
I refrained from telling her that Rose wasn’t going anywhere and instead said, “Dr. Chen’s running a little behind today.”
I positioned my head so that my left side was facing her. That’s my good side that doesn’t show the scarring. I rarely bother to do that, but then usually I’m not trying to impress anyone.
“How is Sirius?” she asked.
This proud father smiled. Most people shy away from police dogs, but that wasn’t the case with Lisbet. We had met during my investigation of baby Moses, the newborn that had drowned in the LA Aqueduct. Lisbet had invited me to attend Moses’s memorial service, and to my surprise I had agreed to do so. It had been a hot day, and the cemetery where Lisbet’s charges are buried is more than an hour’s drive outside of LA in the desert community of Calimesa. Because it was an outdoor ceremony, I positioned the car so that Sirius could see what was going on. Lisbet noticed him pacing in the backseat and told me it would be all right if I freed him to attend the service. Afterward Lisbet had praised his behavior, and Sirius had almost turned into a lapdog in his efforts to please her further.
“He’s out in the car getting some shut-eye. Most of his hair has grown back since the last time you saw him, so he’s getting to be his old, vain self again. He was a little more humble when he had all of those bald patches.”
She smiled at my words, and I had to remind myself that trying to make time with a woman there to attend to a dead baby might not be the best of ideas.
“He’s a sweetie,” she said.
“Yeah, he’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing.”
“I grew up with dogs. I wish I could have one, but my apartment doesn’t allow animals. I was considering moving into this complex that allows dogs, but then I learned they have to weigh less than ten pounds. That doesn’t sound like a dog to me.”
“I saw one of those miniature things last week. A woman was walking down Rodeo Drive carrying this designer dog in her designer bag. The thing looked like a rat with a bouffant.”
“I think I saw that same rat.”
We shared a little laugh, but it must have sounded as wrong to her ears as it did to mine for we both stopped abruptly. Being there for Rose made any laughter out of place. The silence between us grew until Lisbet bridged it with a question.
“How is your investigation going, Detective?”
I shook my head, not telling her that Paul Klein was taking up most of my time. “The race is not always to the swift.”
“Nor the battle to the strong.”
I shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t remember the next line.”
