Lee’s face was nearly beatific. There was a clean, almost surreal wholesomeness, unblemished by sorrow, or anxiety, or greed, or any other petty emotional ailment. It was the face of someone who’d had a happy childhood, loving parents, no riveting insecurities or life-shattering failures. I found myself liking him. And it gave me an insight into his mother and his father, because nobody gets a face like that who wasn’t embalmed in love nearly from the moment of conception.
I also found myself not liking Thomas Whitehall very much, for murdering and despoiling this cold cadaver on the table. He’d stolen this boy’s life and robbed his parents of a cherished jewel.
“All done,” Bridges announced from the corner.
“Huh?” I asked, surprised that I’d lost track of everything around me. I’m not ordinarily the sentimental type, so this wasn’t good. If a brief look at Lee No Tae had that unsettling effect on me, just imagine how a court- martial board was going to feel after a voluble, able prosecutor spent a few hours leading them through Lee’s life, his promise, and the thoroughly putrid things done to him.
Bridges, holding up the folder, walked over. “It’s a really awful thing, isn’t it?”
“It really is,” I mumbled. It was a damned good thing he’d stopped with the bad jokes. If he’d tossed another one my way at that moment, I might’ve popped him in the nose.
“Not good,” he said, tapping the autopsy folder with a finger. “His blood-alcohol level was.051 at the time of death. He was legally sober. He’s got some fairly hard contusions and abrasions on his stomach, his shins, his feet tops, his hands, and his forearms. Look at his stomach particularly,” he said, pointing at each part of the anatomy.
I saw several large bruises and swellings on Lee’s stomach.
Bridges continued. “It took some very hard blows to cause those contusions to his midsection. Really just short of sledgehammers. The tissue damage is extreme and there are several shattered ribs. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The purple welt around his neck was made by a thin, flexible object, and the bruising striations, which you can’t see with the naked eye, indicate the object was roughly textured, like a cloth Army-issue belt. Judging by the contusions and broken blood vessels, it was pulled back with great force.”
“How about the sex stuff?” I asked.
“There was fairly serious enlargement of his anus. That’s highly unusual. We sometimes get cases here, men and women, who’ve engaged in anal sex and get something lodged inside. Typically, the muscle and tissue recover and return to normal size within ten minutes.”
“But his didn’t?”
“No. They measured it, and it was open nearly a full half-inch. There’s only one way that could happen. He had to be dead the last time he was penetrated. His blood flow had stopped and the muscles lost their ability to retract.”
We stared at each other a long moment, because this was a fairly disgusting topic, even for a doctor, much less a lawyer.
“You’d rule out any chance he was strangled while they were doing it? Like maybe one of those perverts who gets off being asphyxiated at the moment of climax?”
He stared again at the corpse. “First of all, the recipient in homosexual sex generally doesn’t climax. Second, even if Whitehall was penetrating him at the moment of death, the muscles would still have enough elasticity to retract. Unless that is, Whitehall remained inside for at least ten minutes after death. That’s possible, of course. And from a technical standpoint, that’s still necrophilia.”
“But you wouldn’t rule out that maybe they were playing around and doing that asphyxiation thing, and maybe got a little carried away?”
“I might, except for those bruises,” he said. “Those get in the way of that theory. He put up a fierce struggle.”
“I guess,” I morosely admitted. I’d ascertained that the autopsy results were apparently valid. They could be used to support every charge being leveled at Whitehall. I’d also ascertained that I didn’t like Thomas Whitehall very much.
In the process, I’d put myself in the worst mood I could remember.
I thanked Bridges for his help. I went to the hotel and headed straight to the bar. It was five o’clock and I felt I’d earned a good stiff drink. And who should I discover in there but Katherine herself, seated in a dark corner, wedged in behind the jukebox, which was belting out some melancholy song about where all the cowboys went.
I told the bartender to send over two glasses of scotch and then walked in her direction.
“You look like hell,” she said when she looked up and saw me.
She didn’t look so great herself, but a real gentleman would never, ever reciprocate and acknowledge that observation.
“That right, Moonbeam? Look who’s talking,” I spitefully said.
She hiked up her long skirt and used a foot to shove out a chair for me. I couldn’t help stealing a peek at that bare leg, since I couldn’t ever remember seeing her when she wasn’t wearing pants or a skirt that went all the way down to her ankles. For all I knew, she didn’t really have any legs, only two stout poles she hobbled around on.
But she did have legs, I quickly discovered. At least one leg, anyway. And it was the real good kind of leg, too; slender, and quite nicely sculpted. What a shame to waste that artillery on a gay woman, I thought.
“You drinking?” I asked.
“Only a beer for me,” she answered. “I can’t handle the hard stuff.”
“One beer,” I yelled across the room to the bartender, who was putting the finishing touches on my scotch. To Katherine I sourly remarked, “I guess they didn’t drink much in that commune you grew up in.”
She shot me this irritated look, because it was pretty damned transparent what I was thinking about her parents’ drug of choice.
“Have you ever been on a commune?” she asked.
“I saw some in Israel,” I admitted. “Not the flower-power kind.”
“You think the whole thing’s pretty asinine, don’t you?”
“Asinine… stupid – yeah, that sums it up.”
The bartender appeared with our glasses, and I called a truce long enough to take the first long sip from my scotch. It burned the whole way down my windpipe.
“What’s got a burr up your ass?” she asked, her eyes glued to my glass, which was now only half full.
“Try that you’re the one who dragged me into this, and I just came back from the morgue, where I spent twenty minutes with someone who looked like he used to be a real nice kid. Only he’s not breathing anymore. And our client seems to be the cause of it.”
“Did you review the autopsy results?”
“Yeah.”
She picked up her beer with both hands, took a long sip, then stared at me over the lip. “And what did you think?”
“What I think is our client’s going to end up strapped to a chair in a dark room in Leavenworth with a few thousand volts coursing through his limbs to teach him a lesson. He’ll deserve it, too.”
She put her elbow on the table and took a smaller, more ladylike sip from her beer. “Unless he was framed,” she finally said.
“Come on, Katherine, even you can’t really believe that crap.”
“Give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment,” she said. “You keep ordering me to listen, now give me a turn.”
“All right,” I said, with an expression designed specifically to let her know she was being humored. Nothing pissed off Katherine Carlson more than the suspicion somebody was humoring her.
She somehow ignored it. “Say, for the sake of argument, Thomas was so drunk he became virtually comatose. Say he was sound asleep when Lee was murdered, and the body was placed there to make it look like he did it.”
“Ah, come on,” I said.
“Suspend your disbelief for a moment.”
“Okay,” I said, “then you got two suspects. Moran or Jackson.”
