That turned him on me again. The tie suffered another hitch to port. “Pour a cupful up your nose, son,” he advised. His voice was quiet and humorless. “I’d enjoy working on you.”
“Thanks,” and I was securely put in my place. I shut up and glanced at the nurse. She was bending over the notebook. The liquid in a vial she held was slowly turning color.
Doc returned to the body and I looked at my feet while Thompson counted whitewashed bricks.
Pretty soon Burbee began a sentence that was really an afterthought of a previous one.
“But I don’t think this one did,” he stated.
Thompson whirled around, found himself looking at something upsetting and just as quickly whirled away again.
“No?” he asked in a strangled whisper.
“No,” Burbee echoed. “Tell you more about it in a moment.”
He worked on the girl’s throat and chest for several moments, the scalpel glimmering in the brilliant overhead lights. Some of those moments I watched him in fascination and some I held my teeth tightly clenched and stared at my feet.
Finally he said, “No. Definitely.”
The nurse looked up, interested. She held the pencil poised over the notebook, expectant. I squinted at the body, found I could take it, and opened both eyes.
I watched the doctor insert a small pair of tweezers into the throat and come up with a burnt match. He laid it in a shallow dish on the workbench. We bent to inspect it.
There were indentations made by the tweezers near the blackened head, and just below that another, single dent probably made by a sharp thumb nail as the spent match was being flicked away. That was all. Some of these paper matches carry a minute-sized printed line to indicate their origin; this one was gray and soggy and blank.
“Strangulation,” Doc Burbee said to the nurse. “Paper match, used. Inhaled through the mouth while under water. Lodged in windpipe. Moisture in lungs secondary.”
To Donny Thompson he continued in the same breath, “Take your choice son, either would have been fatal.”
That worthy replied abstractedly, “We ought to make them clean that lake.”
“By all means!” The old sting had come back into Burbee’s voice. “She probably would have lived a couple of heartbeats longer if it hadn’t been for that match.”
“Is this sort of thing usual in drowning cases?” I asked.
He shook his head and hefted his tie in a new direction.
“I once heard of a small fish being found in the mouth, but it did not contribute to the death. This is my first experience with such an occurrence.” He stepped back a pace and wiped his hands.
The State’s Attorney stamped out another cigarette. “I ought to be getting along,” he murmured, but he stayed right where he was, counting bricks.
I wondered what the coroner would do next and looked to find him doing it. He was running deft, examining fingers lightly up and down one nude leg. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he got a buzz out of that, but I thought better of it.
He placed his hand under the arch of the foot.
“Well developed,” he commented. “Strong muscles.”
“Lousy skater,” I offered for no reason.
“That right?” He lifted the girl’s right leg shoulder high and beginning at the heel, fingered it up to the body. “I’d have thought differently. Muscles indicate constant use.”
“Maybe she rode a bicycle.”
He shook his head and would have grabbed his tie if he had a third hand. “Lungs don’t indicate such. That makes for lung power.”
It was then that I opened my mouth once too often.
“She wasn’t doing so well when I saw her last night.”
All three of them stared at me in varying degrees of interest. I was probably staring at myself in consternation.
The State’s Attorney ripped out, “When did you see her?” But he meant when, where, why and how I saw her.
So I inserted a lie between two truths. You are probably familiar with that dodge of mine, Louise.
“I came past the lake on my way into town. I had a few drinks, sure, but I wasn’t seeing dragons. She was skating around the lake and doing a pretty bad job of it. I could have done better.”
“At what time last night?” came the next lash.
“I don’t know. I was downtown by midnight.”
“Alone?” still sharp.
“Who? Me or her?”
“Her. She, the skater.”
“Sure. At least, no one else was in sight. And say, you can’t count too heavily on what I saw. I wasn’t close enough to be sure it was
“It was. We’ve already established the time of the accident as between midnight and three A.M.”
“Well... it does fit.”
And the subject seemed to be closed.
Doc Burbee turned back to the corpse to lay the flat of his hand on the abdomen. He picked up the scalpel and tapped the blade against one rubber-encased finger. Donny Thompson whirled back to his bricks; I turned my attention to the voiceless wonder seated at the workbench.
The nurse had just completed a test of some sort with a pair of vials and was thoughtfully staring at the contents of one of them.
Some time later Burbee broke the silence, “Bit of water in the stomach. Small ulcer, too.”
