CHAPTER FOURTEEN
6:00 pm Monday, June 26th, 1922
City Morgue
Julia had her speech ready that the morgue was not a hotel and could not indefinitely hold onto Mr. Landswell's body, when a telephone call informed her 'they' had finally located someone to give an official identification. Julia had Jack get Mr. Landswell out of the cooler before she told him to go home for the day. So, she was alone in the morgue when the delegation from Station House No. 4 presented themselves.
'They' turned out to be Detective Murdoch, Constable Higgins and a dour woman who looked none too pleased about the task being asked of her. Julia couldn't say she blamed her.
"Are you prepared, Miss Virgil?" Julia asked.
"As I'll ever be," the woman replied and flinched upon seeing the body before quickly recovering.
Julia carefully folded the sheet back, revealing the deceased's face.
"Yes, it's him. Conrad Landswell. Is that all?" she whispered, looking at Detective Murdoch.
Julia saw the Detective glance her way, silently asking if there was anything else. She shook her head at him.
"No, Miss Virgil," he told the woman. "That is all. We will release his remains to Rosar-Morrison Funeral Home on Sherbourne Street immediately. Constable Higgins will see you home," he explained. Miss Virgil allowed the young constable to escort her out of the building. But the detective stayed put, looking uncomfortable now. After witnessing the interrogation he conducted, she found it odd he ever lost his poise.
Julia turned her back on him, washing her tools in the sink. She'd hidden them under a towel so as not to upset Miss Virgil and hurried to get back to them if she was ever going to leave the morgue to get home at a decent hour. She still had more paperwork to finish as it was.
"You'll have to excuse me, Detective, my dance card is quite full…" she gestured to the rows of gurneys she had to deal with. She needed the undertaker right away to pick up Mr. Landswell, just to give her room for the anonymous woman whose body arrived this morning. The detective did not move. She let him stew for a minute, giving him her back.
He opened with: "I wish to apologize for my choice of words yesterday."
Julia was surprised how softly he spoke. "But you're not sorry you said them."
"No. You are new and do not yet comprehend the political nature of the city coroner's position."
"Is that why you drove the last coroner out? His politics?" It was amazing how infuriating this man could be. She whirled to face him. "Well?"
Instead of being abashed, he only blinked. He just stood there with pursed lips; stood there so long she thought she might have left him speechless. Which felt so good. Unfortunately, he spoiled it by opening his mouth.
"No. Not his politics," he said, squaring his shoulders. "I apologize because I should have been gentler in my approach. You let the Inspector press you into saying something you were not yet ready to say. You must never do that. I apologize because my approach to you was not appropriate for a gentleman towards a lady."
"A lady?" Julia gave him her back again, twisted the water taps off, wiping her hands dry and throwing the towel down. "I stopped carrying smelling salts long ago," she quipped. "I am here as a pathologist. We are colleagues, Detective. I take your point though about equivocating...I shall have to remember for the future."
"Do you know anything else? About any of my cases?" he asked, giving her a level gaze.
She ignored that - being annoyed helped her feel bold. "Detective, since we're being candid with one another, may I pose the next question? Do you treat me any differently from previous coroners because I'm a woman? You don't have to, you know. I can take it," she challenged him.
"No. I do not. I treat you as one who is performing capably so far, as Dr. McDaniels did before you. You are inexperienced, yet your instincts appear quite good. And you have joined the coroner's office at an extraordinarily busy time."
He appeared so grave and sincere...
She almost laughed at him. Against her will, she decided she believed him. "I must add, Detective, I'm already starting to see why you call coroners to the scene. It would have been immensely helpful in this poor thing's case." She gestured at the sheet-covered form of her anonymous woman from this morning.
"Another poisoning?" Detective Murdoch's lips pinched, clearly both annoyed and worried.
"Detective Pearce's case. I promise I will have information for you when I get supplies."
He gave her a wan smile. "I do appreciate it. Until tomorrow, then." He put his hat back on and tipped it, turning sharply on his heel to head for the door.
"Oh, Detective!" Julia called after him. "The Jacksons...I have determined their cause of death is cyanide, not carbon monoxide."
"Have you?" He stopped at the top of the ramp. "Thank you for the confirmation. I believe you will find it was calcium cyanide, commonly found in pest fumigation products."
This time she saw it: he flashed her the briefest grin on his way out. "Brazen bastard!" she hissed at his back. It took a long minute for her to go from infuriated to amused.
"How did he know that?" she asked the room, smiling at the puzzle.
Julia's lightened mood survived barely a quarter hour while she sat at her desk, leafing through the morgue's tiny library's sole legal reference, coming back to the paragraphs which she'd been worrying over all afternoon:
'To render cause of death as homicide, the medical examiner must reach his conclusion from direct autopsy results that the death was due to deliberate, human-caused violence. If the autopsy lacks sufficient evidence to show the death resulted from deliberate human action, even if there is evidence of possible homicide, this requires an "undetermined" ruling.'
The problem she was having is cause of death and manner of death doesn't just mean figuring out how a person died, it was also about understanding intent. Homicide, suicide and accidental all involve understanding the intent behind the death. In this case, she just didn't know whose intention it was.
She snicked the book shut and sighed out loud. "I may have taken firsts in anatomy, dissection and in chemistry, but they did not teach this part in medical school." She knew the woman died from a fall. With a little math she might even figure out the height of the fall. But who was she, and why did she fall?
Julia pulled her autopsy report to her and flipped it open to what she typed earlier: 'Victim was gravida X-1'. Then further down: 'Presence of large volume of motile semen in vagina and on cervix, indicating sexual relations prior to victim's death.' Julia noticed uncomfortable emotions edging into her awareness. Who was this woman? Who will claim her if all I have is the dress she wore, an approximate height and weight, hair colour and a guess at eye colour from one remaining eye? Worse - somewhere there might be a child who cried for his or her mother.
Then there was the sex act: was the sex consensual or was it rape? She'd seen no obvious signs of rape - no tearing or bruising, but she knew that did not necessarily mean much.
Julia set her gaze on the closed door of the cooler, seeing through the metal to one particular, small body among the several jammed side by side inside the space. "It might mean the last person to see you alive was whoever you had relations with. Who was it? A lover? A killer? Both?"
She caught herself talking out loud again and made a disgusted noise at her foolishness. Then started talking again anyways.
"How am I going to figure out what happened to you?"
7:00 pm, Monday June 26th, 1922
Station House No. 4
"Sir, it's been a long day. I...I'm headed home," Crabtree told him.
Murdoch glanced out his window in surprise. "Sorry. I forget daylight lasts longer in June."
Crabtree produced a small eye-roll and a tug at his collar. "Keeps things hot that way too. Why is your fan off? I'd be melting in here."
Murdoch had his office window open and his shirt sleeves rolled up for some air. "It kept blowing my papers around." His lips pinched, because it was unlikely the blizzard of papers on all the surfaces of his office looked organized in any way. "You are here past time. Go home. Brackenreid is serious about keeping costs contained. He'll take a stripe off of you if you have nothing to show for the extra hour."
"Nothing's changed there. Cap't Brackenreid always got more than he paid for." Crabtree grinned. He came forward with a folder in his hand. "I typed up the report of your interview with Miss Virgil plus her official statement identifying Mr. Landswell's remains, which I...I arranged to be removed from the morgue to the funeral home and out of Dr. Ogden's, er...hair."
He gave Crabtree a sharp look - was he making a comment about the doctor's haircut, or was it merely a turn of phrase? Seeing the lopsided grin on his face, Murdoch took it for both. He arched his own eyebrows in response, but he wasn't going to be pulled into the jest. He wasn't going to be one to undermine her, even privately with his friend, considering her work and his investigation were now, for better or worse, inextricably bound up.
"Thank you. I have nearly completed my own official police report on Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. You did well to make those observations about pesticides, and you'll be glad to know you are mentioned in the report."
"Thank you, sir, much obliged. Will it go to court do you think?"
"Do you wish to testify? Or are you trying to avoid it?" he said, half-jokingly.
"Not sure...not sure. Well, good night, sir. See you in the morning," Crabtree replied and made to leave.
"Wait." Murdoch called after him. "Regarding Mr. Landswell. If it is not Miss Virgil or the red-haired girl, if she exists, then who poisoned him? Perhaps a client gave him the cognac."
"And if the red-haired girl does not exist, that is a point against Miss Virgil."
He nodded - Crabtree had guessed correctly. "Just because we found no poison connected to Miss Virgil does not negate the fact that she might have used it then disposed of it. Tomorrow, I am going to see if her alibi holds up. First thing in the morning, you go over Landswell's datebook; work backwards and forwards from Friday June 16th through to Friday the 23rd and pin down who came and went from his place of business. Find who brought the cognac bottle and find that red-haired farm-girl Miss Edwina Virgil says she saw with Landswell. Then go through the boxes of business mail Higgins brought in, look for any correspondence which might be interpreted as a threat and match it up with that bottle of cognac appearing. Or perhaps it was a 'peace offering' after a disagreement, which wasn't so peaceful."
"Or congratulations for a contract signed. As in a bribe? I understand." Crabtree eyed the chalk board and narrowed his gaze. "The lads and I will come up with something. What about all the other poor souls?"
Standing carefully so none of his papers were displaced, Murdoch stood next to Crabtree to get the same vantage point. The chalk board looked like something in a train station listing arrivals and departures, but all jumbled up. He had almost an excess of information and at the same time not nearly enough. "Brackenreid thinks the key to it all is through Howard Knox. So, while you head up investigating Mr. Landswell tomorrow, the rest of us will take on the illegal bootlegging side of things. You have the photographs of all the deceased developed?"
"Yes. On my desk."
"Excellent. I'll take a copy of each. We'll use them to track everyone's whereabouts."
"A...a fishing expedition, isn't it sir?"
"Precisely. The little fish should lead us to the distribution network as it were, and we see where it leads, to figure out where to strike to get the big fish, in this case, Rocco Perri."
George Crabtree gave him a sober regard. "Careful sir. When I was a lad in Newfoundland, I once saw a great big eagle get his claws into an equally big salmon, and the salmon just pulled him under. Never saw that bird again."