The M.E. had found a scorched wallet in the dead man’s pants pocket. The clothing covering his upper torso had been completely burned away, but tatters of fabric still clung to his legs. The M.E. handed the wallet to O’Neil, who immediately tagged it for identification and then went through it. The only things he found were twenty dollars in fives and singles and a browned but still partially legible driver’s license. O’Neil read it, and then said, “Arthur J. Wylie.”
“Let me see that,” Coop said.
We looked at it together. The driver’s license had been issued a year ago August, and would not expire for two years yet. The address on the license was 574 Waverly Street. The M.E. was removing a signet ring from the dead man’s right hand. He told O’Neil which finger on which hand the ring had been taken from, and then handed it to him. The initials on the ring were AJW. O’Neil slipped it into an evidence envelope. From the dead man’s left hand, the M.E. removed a wedding band. Again he identified the finger and the hand, and then passed the ring on to O’Neil. On the inside of the band the names Arthur and Helene were engraved, and immediately following them, the date 8/8/54
I looked down at the body. The face, the hands, and the front of the trunk had suffered the worst of the fire. Almost all of the head hair had been burned away, but several blond patches had escaped the inferno. The face was unrecognizable, a charred and shapeless mass of cooked meat. The burned and blackened fingers were hooked like claws. The stench was intolerable. A Police Department truck was inching its way down the embankment. The body was brightly illuminated for just a moment until the headlights turned away. Coop turned away, too.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Fourth-degree burns,” the M.E. said. “You can put that down as your cause of death.”
The driver of the truck cut the engine. He came out of the cab and walked over to where they were standing. “Who’s in charge?” he asked tonelessly.
“I am,” O’Neil said.
“You want the bus lifted, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, we’ll get the winch on it,” he said.
“I’m finished here,” the M.E. said. “Let’s tell the ambulance crew.”
As we climbed the embankment, I fell in beside the medical examiner. He was a portly little man, and he was puffing hard against the grade.
“How are the teeth?” I said.
“The teeth?”
“The corpse’s teeth. Did the fire damage them?”
“They’re charred,” he said, “but they’re still in his head.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Below us, the men from the truck were shouting to each other as they attached their cable to the bus. When we got back to the road again, O’Neil was waiting for the M.E.
“What do you figure happened, Doc?” he asked.
The M.E. wasn’t paid to make guesses, but he made one now. “Tank probably exploded on impact,” he said. “The burns are typical. With explosions of this sort, the parts nearest to the blast are the ones that get most severely burned. In addition, he’d probably been cooking inside the bus for some time before the fire was extinguished. The dermis is contracted and brittle—did you notice those wide elliptic cracks? And the hair’s all but gone, of course, cornea of the eyes opaque.” The M.E. shrugged. “That’s about it,” he said.
O’Neil went over to tell the ambulance crew they could take the body. Some ten feet away, the police photographer was snapping pictures of the smashed sawhorses and the tire tracks in the mud. A reporter from the city’s morning tabloid was on the scene. He asked Coop what had happened.
“No comment,” Coop said.
“Hey, come on, Captain,” the reporter complained.
“The area’s restricted,” Coop said. “I suggest you leave it.”
The reporter put his hands on his hips and glared at Coop as he went down the embankment again. The winch had lifted the Volkswagen, and it was resting on all four wheels now. O’Neil had walked over to the motorized patrolmen who’d discovered the burning bus. Both of them were drinking coffee from cardboard containers. He was talking to the driver of the car when I approached.
“... got on the scene,” he said, “what’d the fire look like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which part of the bus was burning?”
“The front end. You know where the driver’s seat is? That’s what was burning.”
“And you ran down there with an extinguisher, huh?”
“My partner did. Freddie?” he said, and turned to him.
“Yeah,” Freddie said, “I tried to squirt it through the windshield. The windshield was busted, and flames were leaping out of it, and all I could think of was the poor bastard behind the wheel. I guess I was trying to save him, you know what I mean? Though, prolly, he was already dead. Anyway, the extinguisher wasn’t worth a shit against that kind of fire.”
“Then what happened?” O’Neil asked.
“The extinguisher ran out, and I was afraid the tank might blow. So I took a quick look at the license plate and ran back up the hill.”
“When
“Right after I got back to the car here. Ain’t that right?” he asked his partner.
“Couldn’t’ve been more than two or three minutes.”