The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  Cowper wolfed some curly fries in the lull, and then continued his account of Etta Place’s travels.

  “Right after their pleasant tryst at the Invalid Hotel, she and Sundance boarded the SS Herminius for Argentina. And there, the cold trail of Etta Place freezes solid. We think she returned at least three times because she was homesick or needed medical attention, maybe an abortion. For every fact, we have a dozen rumors and two dozen myths.”

  “Like what?”

  “One is that she was carrying a child — not Sundance’s — and she came back to the States to give birth. Another is that she and Butch had a daughter in 1903. Personally, I think she just vanished after Sundance brought her back to Denver in 1908.”

  “Where?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here with you and the Dixie Chicks tonight. Nobody knows for sure. Some think she went to New York, some Texas. Maybe she went back to South America. And there’s a lot of territory in between … and a lot of stories.”

  “For instance … ?”

  “Well, one historian claims she died with Butch and Sundance in the 1908 shootout in Bolivia. A Pinkerton agent swears he inspected the corpses of Butch, Sundance and Etta after a botched bank robbery down there in 1911. Some people say she committed suicide in the States in 1924, and others claim they can prove Etta, Butch and Sundance all fought with Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution. And then there’s Laddie.”

  “So, just between us, what’s your gut say?”

  “My gut is pissed that I haven’t eaten this burger because I’m talking too much,” Cowper joked. “But we can’t rule her out. We’re still pulling together all the public records we can find. There’s just not much out there. Not unusual for cases in that time period, especially for a woman in the West. Nobody really kept good records.”

  “So digging up Laddie is the beginning, not the end?”

  “We had to move fast when the county decided to relocate the grave. Your county officials gave us a very small window of opportunity, so there are still lots of loose ends. We won’t be doing a full autopsy. We’ll open the casket, shoot some film with Kreskin, our portable X-ray machine. One of our people will inventory and photograph personal effects buried with Laddie, like jewelry and clothing. Then we’ll take a few tissue samples like hair and skin, maybe some bone, quickly examine her body and do some measurements, then move Laddie to her next rest stop on the highway to Heaven.”

  “Then?”

  “Then we go back to try to make sense of it. Maybe we’ll never know, but at least we’ll have evidence to prove our ignorance.”

  Morgan sat back in his honky-tonk chair, his green beer bottle stripped of its label.

  “Gotta tell you, Shawn, this is the biggest thing to happen to a corpse in this town since Carter McWayne got drunk and rolled his hearse.”

  Cowper nearly passed a curly fry through his nose.

  The lonesome cowboy gulped the piddling remnants of his beer and willed his loose-jointed knees toward the door. He slapped the leather cell-phone case on his belt, high noon at last call. Morgan briefly thought about excusing himself to drive the old boy home, but maybe the night air would be better for him. The rheumy-eyed cowboy pushed the tavern door wide and disappeared into the friendless night.

  “What about Butch and Sundance?” Morgan asked, wondering what becomes of old men when they vanish into the dark. “Do you think they really survived and came home?”

  Dr. Cowper turned his green beer bottle as if he were screwing it into the wooden tabletop.

  “Oh, that’s another project, my friend. Another dream.”

  “Why do you do this?”

  “Are you kidding? We wouldn’t have invented history if we didn’t want to know what happened before us. But sometimes, history needs a little help. That’s my job.”

  “You seem to enjoy it.”

  Dr. Cowper grew wistful.

  “When I was a kid, I read Malory’s King Arthur. The romance and the chivalry fascinated me, but I got this crazy idea that I could go to Avalon someday and find Arthur’s bones, like it would prove the existence of Camelot and all it stood for.”

  Morgan recalled his own youthful visions, and even pondered Etta Place as a latter-day Guinevere, sharing her passions with two men. He lifted his beer bottle in a toast to dreams and to Dr. Cowper, who waved him off self-consciously.

  “No, no,” he said. “I think there’s something perverse about a twelve-year-old kid contemplating a life of grave-robbing.”

  Morgan lifted his glass to Cowper, and they drank anyway.

  “You have a family?”

  Cowper shrugged. He studied the greasy burger between his long fingers for a long moment, as if looking for some clues to the life of the cow.

  “My family is dead.”

  Morgan turned suddenly somber.

  “I’m so sorry …”

  “No, no, I’m just goofing around. My ‘family’ is a bunch of ghosts and dried-out cadavers. I married my obsession. My children are old bones and computers. I spend all my holidays and weekends with them. The only bad thing is, I always have to visit them. They never travel.”

  A scientist with a sense of humor, Morgan thought. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so rare among men and women who spent their days with customers who never laughed.

  “Besides,” Cowper continued, “what wife could compete with Etta Place?”

  Laddie Granbouche’s casket lid was already loose. Rather than lift it out of the vault, Cowper asked it be left where it was originally laid. He lifted the hefty top, blocking Morgan’s view as he reeled off several photographs.

  Flanked by several team members, surgical masks in place and cameras clicking, the young anthropologist visually examined whatever remained of Laddie Granbouche’s mortal coil. From where he stood, Morgan couldn’t see inside the casket, only Cowper’s eyes as they methodically scanned the length of the box for a full minute.

  Then, with a surgeon’s grace and equanimity, Cowper gently closed the lid.

  “Fellas,” he said, stripping off his rubber gloves and mask, “we have a little problem.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sheriff Highlander Goldsmith lingered around Laddie Granbouche’s closed casket like a jumpy kid with a jack-in-the-box. The thick smear of Vicks Vapo-Rub on his upper lip, a cop’s precaution against the stench of decaying flesh, looked silly.

  Dr. Cowper lifted the lid, and Goldsmith leaned forward from a safe distance, as if ready to run. His nose was pinched like an earwig’s tail and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his scrawny neck as he craned to peek inside. The weight of his own badge threatened to unbalance him.

  Morgan squelched the morbid urge to holler, “Boo!”

  The sheriff was still examining the contents of Laddie’s coffin when Carter McWayne, coroner by virtue of being Perry County’s only mortician, jostled over the speed bump at the Pine Lawn Cemetery gate. His sleek black hearse throbbed with an old Three Dog Night song, “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” and his tubby head bobbled to the cranked-up beat. Until that moment, it had never occurred to Morgan that a hearse would have — or need — a bass-boosted, Dolby-filtered stereo system.

  “Yep, she looks dead to me,” Goldsmith said, pulling a notepad and pencil from his neatly pressed uniform blouse.

  Dr. Cowper glanced at Morgan, the shadow of a conspiratorial smile in his eyes.

  “Mummification is a dead giveaway, Sheriff,” Cowper said. “That, and the lack of a head.”

  Goldsmith nodded and made some notes as Coroner McWayne stepped out of his hearse. He clicked his key ring as he waddled up, and the hearse’s door locks chirped. Who locked a hearse? Morgan thought. What’s to steal?

  Carter McWayne locked a hearse. He was only a mortician, but he considered himself a medical professional, and he ornamented his life accordingly with expensive possessions and habits. He even spoke expensively, always preferring clinical pedantry to much simpler expression, ten-dollar lexicology where penny words
would do. His customers weren’t just dead, they were deceased of myocardial infarctions (heart attacks), cerebral vascular accidents (strokes), metastatic and malignant neoplasms (cancers), acute inadvertent misadventures (accidental deaths) and multiple fatal transportational traumas (McWayne’s own neologism for car-crash injuries).

  Coroner McWayne’s appetites were ambitious and legendary, especially for food. Only in his mid-40s, he was as fat and bug-eyed as his late mortician father, Derealous McWayne, so fat that the underarms of his short-sleeved white shirt were sopped with half-moons of sweat just from his short drive to the cemetery. His surplus flesh cascaded down his body like a fat-flavored ice cream cone. He was a walking billboard for atherosclerosis (clogged arteries).

  “My dad told Laddie this lawn crypt memorialization wasn’t a good idea. Folks around here prefer earth interment. And sandstone just isn’t a good mausoleal stone. But Laddie was dead-set on a crypt. She always said, ‘Every day I spend above ground is a good day.’“

  But the architecture of Laddie’s eternity was less momentous than Dr. Cowper’s next news about the corpse in Laddie’s casket.

  “No apparent wounds other than the missing head, but it’s a pretty good chance this is a murder victim,” Dr. Cowper told the two local officials who were now in charge of this new mystery.

  Goldsmith sighed. Murders were more troublesome than speed traps. Besides, he’d never handled a murder investigation in his six years as the law in Perry County, and he liked it that way.

  “Great,” he said, almost disappointed. “You sure she was murdered?”

  “No, but somebody went to a lot of trouble here. This body was moved here from someplace else after the head was removed. People don’t generally lose their heads over a natural death, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  Goldsmith made another note.

  “She’s all dried up. How can you tell?”

  “Unless I miss my guess, Sheriff, this isn’t a ‘she.’ It’s a white male, possibly forty to sixty years old, dead at least a year. In my business, we call him ‘desiccated,’ but you’d just call him a mummy.”

  “Him?” Goldsmith asked. The normally verbose McWayne gandered down into the coffin and cocked his head sideways to study the headless corpse inside. The fleshy folds of the coroner’s neck unfurled to reveal sweaty white pleats where the sun seldom shone. He breathed through his mouth, and the air droned in him like wasps in a wet-vac. He didn’t even remove his wrap-around sunglasses, maybe because it required too much exertion.

  “Yes, Sheriff,” Dr. Cowper said. “This sure isn’t Laddie Granbouche. No doubt in my mind.”

  Goldsmith lifted the bill of his official chocolate-brown, one-size-fits-all Perry County Sheriff’s Office baseball cap and scratched his thin hairline. A fleck of Vapo-Rub clung to the tip of his beak-like nose.

  “How do you figure?”

  Dr. Cowper slipped a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket and kneeled beside the grim box. The sheriff and the coroner bent over for an anatomy lesson from one of America’s most brilliant forensic anthropologists. Even Morgan leaned closer.

  “Gentlemen,” Dr. Cowper said, directing their rapt attention to a leathery flap near the corpse’s pelvis, “this is a penis.”

  Dr. Cowper’s handpicked forensic team became post-graduate pallbearers, hoisting the entire coffin onto Carter McWayne’s morgue gurney and wheeling it to the hearse. Moving the fragile body itself would be too risky and might destroy clues.

  Dr. Cowper himself checked the seals before closing the hearse’s rear doors, then slapped the hot black roof twice. McWayne eased his wagon back onto the path and, for the first time in his life, carried a customer away from the cemetery.

  Sheriff Goldsmith said his goodbyes and followed the coroner through the wrought-iron gates of Heaven toward McWayne and Sons Mortuary, only two blocks away. For good measure, he flipped on his red-and-blue vector lights, just so folks knew he had serious business.

  “Think they’ll ever find that head?” Dr. Cowper asked facetiously.

  “Doc, those two guys couldn’t find each other’s asses with both hands,” Morgan replied.

  “Well, I can stay a day or two to help them find their asses, and maybe a few more things. We can use some of this portable equipment, and I can take some samples back to Florida for further testing. If nothing else, it will be good real-world practice for some of my interns.”

  The two of them stood silently at Laddie Granbouche’s dismantled tomb for a moment while the team packed its gear back into its two green-and-yellow University of South Florida vans. A breeze rustled in the old cottonwoods overhead, but the hum of scientific machinery and anticipation was gone.

  “Will you be able to identify him?” Morgan asked.

  “Maybe,” Dr. Cowper said. “We still have a few tricks. I’ll help in any way I can, but it will take some time. All is not lost for your John Doe … not yet anyway.”

  John Doe. Morgan thought of the drunken cowboy in the Buckhorn the night before. Anonymous. Alone. Unmissed.

  Then Morgan asked what neither the coroner nor the sheriff had asked, nor perhaps even cared about. But he knew it was on Dr. Cowper’s mind, which thrived on mysteries.

  “Where do you think the ol’ gal is?” the newspaperman asked as he snapped a photograph of the empty grave.

  Dr. Cowper rubbed his tanned chin. His eyes were fixed on the empty vault where Laddie Granbouche should have been. Even if she was not the legendary lover of the Sundance Kid, another chapter in the enigmatic saga of Etta Place had been written. And if she was Etta Place, well, like her outlaw companions, she’d been larger than life; now, she might have outgrown death, too.

  “Same place she always was,” he said.

  “Where’s that?”

  Dr. Cowper tapped his fingers on his chest and smiled.

  The morning deejays at KROK-FM, Curtis and The Bug, were up to their usual ribaldry as Morgan drove back to the newspaper office. These clowns started their suggestive shtick at dawn and giggled at their own juvenile jokes until noon. They made Beavis and Butthead sound like Nobel laureates. Morgan imagined families all over town sitting down to their breakfast tables, tuned in to the farm report, the news (usually just headlines from the latest edition of The Bullet) or the school-lunch menus: “Please pass the corn flakes,” Father would say. “Uh, honey, did The Bug just say ‘tit’?”

  Morgan hated KROK, but the heart of the cassette player in his old Escort was sclerotic from eating too many tapes and KROK was Winchester’s only radio station, a glorified garage with an Erector-Set tower on the edge of town. Its mix was eclectic, depending on the dee-jay; some days, it was country, some days heavy metal, some days Christian. Once, the afternoon jock locked himself in the booth with a pizza and a fifth of Wild Turkey, and played Frankie Yankovic’s greatest accordion hits without commercial interruption — for sixteen hours. Inexplicably, Frankie Yankovic was the most popular artist on KROK’s request line for the next two months.

  “We’ve got a new Garth Brooks CD and an all-expense paid weekend with Brenda, our skanky but bodacious receptionist, for the ninth caller this morning,” Curtis announced in a pukey impression of a real dee-jay. The Bug giggled in the background as they spun a Tracy Chapman song for the second time since their shift started.

  “All Tracy Chapman, all the time,” Morgan muttered to himself. Goddam small-town radio. He still missed Chicago’s teeming airwaves, ripe with rock, talk and Cubs games. So he turned off the radio as he pulled into the Griddle’s parking lot for a cup of real coffee, nothing more. Headless corpses tended to dampen his appetite.

  A few ranchers bellied up to the Griddle’s breakfast counter, the regulars. The radio was on in the kitchen, still thrumming with Tracy Chapman. Morgan plunked down next to Ray Pittman, a fourth-generation cattleman from up in the Black Thunder River breaks.

  Ray Pittman believed state road signs bore secret codes to tell New World Order tank squadrons who owned guns. He
believed jet contrails in the sky were secret government plots to control population and inoculate Americans against their wills with anthrax and other strange diseases. He believed, because he’d once heard it on Art Bell’s late-night radio talk show, that Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger were the same person, although he’d never read either author’s books.

  And every fencepost on his ranch was crowned with an old boot, but he didn’t believe there was any good reason. He just liked the look.

  “Hey, Ray,” Morgan said.

  “Hey,” said Ray.

  “What brings you to town?” Morgan asked.

  “Boredom,” the old cowboy said. “And dog food. Damned mutt eats like a horse, ‘cept even a horse don’t eat as much. I’d shoot the big, dumb fucker if he wasn’t less valuable than a bullet.”

  Ranchers’ casual attitudes about death always mystified Morgan. Unwanted kittens were piled in a burlap sack and tossed in the irrigation ditch. When beef prices were down, some thought killing the herd was better than selling it at a loss or allowing it to eat any more costly feed. City folk thought broken limbs were fixable, but a ranch horse with a broken leg was shot as useless.

  Morgan had built a career, in part, by poking his nose into death, but not over breakfast. He changed the subject.

  “I gotta a pair of old Tony Lamas I’ve been saving for you,” Morgan said. “I should bring ‘em out someday.”

  “Lamas look good on a post, yessirree.”

  Without asking, Suzie the waitress set a coffee-cup full of pink sweetener packets in front of Morgan, then poured hot coffee in a tall go-cup. She knew better than to put the plastic lid on it until Morgan had dumped four sugars in it.

  “I heard on the radio where a body’s chemistry turns that stuff into formaldehyde in your system and turns your skin gray like an embalmed corpse,” she warned him.

  “There goes your tip.”

  In truth, Morgan liked his coffee extra sweet. And his tea. And his oatmeal. Saccharin was merely the means to an end. He could quit any time, he told himself. Among his vices, it ranked among the most benign.