The Bohemian Murders (8 page)

“Who’re you?” growled the male nurse or attendant or whatever he was. He looked like a pugilist in pajamas, one who has lost a few too many fights. And he challenged: “What’re you doing in here?”

“Waiting for Dr. Bright,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

“Come to watch the autopsy?” he asked over his shoulder as he maneuvered the gurney alongside the metal table.

“Perhaps,” I said noncommittally.

“You don’t look like a doctor,” the huge fellow remarked, folding his arms in a belligerent stance.

I raised my chin. “Women are entering the medical profession now. Haven’t you heard?” Without giving him a chance to reply I went right on: “If you would be so good as to direct me to Dr. Bright’s office, I would be most grateful.”

Perhaps to test my mettle, he whisked the sheet off the dead body before deigning to frame a reply. The body was male, either fat or bloated, with jaundiced skin. I didn’t even blink but my stomach climbed several inches up my backbone.

“Doc Bright’s office is the first door on the right. His name’s not on it. He likes to pretend like he’s not here, but he’s in there. Just knock.”

“Thank you,” I said, and left without looking back. A moment later I was tapping on that first door, behind which I’d heard no sound earlier. Still hearing nothing, I tapped again. Harder.

Aha! At last, the sound of uneven footsteps—I recalled the hitch in Bright’s stride. The door jerked open and we stood nose to nose.

“Well, well, well!” he said, those jittery eyeballs rolling. “What have we here? Do I remember you? I think I do. Yes, I do! You’re the young lady took over for Hettie Houck at the lighthouse.”

“Yes.” I smiled and extended my hand. “I’m Fremont Jones. I would be grateful for a few minutes of your time. I understand you have an autopsy to do. I won’t keep you long.”

“There’s lots of good things about having dead folks for your patients,” he said, pumping my hand and doing his best to twinkle. “For one thing, they don’t talk back. For another, they don’t mix up their medicines. And for another, they don’t get all hot and bothered if you keep ’em waiting! Heh, heh, heh!”

“I never thought of it that way,” I admitted, following him into one of the strangest offices I had ever seen in my life. There were bones and specimens in various forms—floating in liquid, desiccated like dried flowers, pressed
under glass—everywhere one looked. And books, piles and piles of them. And papers, scattered willy-nilly. But it smelled of pipe tobacco, which was a big improvement over that other smell.

“Come to visit an old man in his lair, Miss Jones? What’s on your mind?”

I took the only chair unoccupied by books. “I am sure you must have done an autopsy on the woman I sighted from the lighthouse.”

“The Jane Doe. Yeah, um-hm. That was an interesting one.” He picked up a paper knife and scratched the back of his head with it. “She didn’t drown.”

“Didn’t drown?” Somehow that did not surprise me.

“No water in the lungs. Death probably caused by a blow to the head. Skull was fractured on the side where the flesh was eaten away. Other bruises too.”

“Other bruises,” I said flatly, as I have discovered that repeating a person’s words back without inflection often keeps them talking.

“Head and neck. Twisted left ankle.”

“Left ankle.” If I remembered correctly, that would have been the foot missing the shoe.

“You any relation to Hettie?” he asked abruptly, surprising me.

“Not at all. Why do you ask?”

“Because Hettie’s as nosy as you are. Or vice versa.” He grinned.

I felt my lips curve, but my mind was working too rapidly for much grinning. I sensed that Dr. Bright was about to clam up. “Hettie and I do seem to have certain character traits in common, but we are only recent friends. I am curious to know if the woman has been identified.”

He shrugged, playing with the paper knife, turning it end to end. “I have no idea. That part’s up to the police. Missing persons, you know. In my report I told them the death could either have been an accident or homicide. I lean toward accident. She’s out walking by herself on the rocks—not a good idea, by the way—”

“I know.”

“Anyhow, she twists her ankle, falls, you get that first
leg bruise. Tries to get up, a big wave takes her, cracks her head open. Other bruises would be from battering on the rocks.”

“I see,” I said, rising. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Thank Hettie. She got me accustomed to satisfying her curiosity. But you keep what I told you to yourself, just the same as she would. And come see me again sometime. Always glad to have a pretty woman in the place.”

“You’re most kind, Dr. Bright.” I smiled, winningly, I hoped. “There is just one more thing. Where is the morgue? It does not appear to be here in the pathology suite.”

“Morgue? What do you want to know that for?” He frowned, and I feared I’d gone too far. But I had to know.

There was nothing for it but to lie. “I met someone recently who may be able to identify her, but he is one of those people who feels an inordinate amount of caution about the police. So I thought I might serve as a go-between. I feel some responsibility to help, you see, since I was the one who first sighted the body.”

“Oh.” He rubbed the tip of his nose, then seemed to make up his mind. “We don’t have much of a facility for holding on to unclaimed bodies in Monterey County. I stashed Jane Doe at Mapson’s Mortuary. They’ll let you in if you say I sent you. If your friend can identify our Jane Doe, now mind, he’ll have to talk to the police.”

I thanked Frederick Bright again, profusely, and left the hospital—none too soon for I saw by the clock in the main lobby that it was nearly noon. I would be late to my office, but I thought it scarcely mattered as I have so few clients anyway. My mind was positively seething with questions. Did Jane Doe (I could no longer call her the Poor Drowned Woman, since she hadn’t drowned) die as a result of her own carelessness? Or did some unknown person hit her on the head hard enough to kill her, and throw her into the sea? Who was she? Why weren’t the police doing anything? Or if they were, why was there nothing in the newspaper? And most
important of all, how could I find the answers to any of these questions?

Thus occupied in my mind, I hopped off the streetcar at the corner of Lighthouse and Grand and did not even see the person waiting on the sidewalk outside my office until I was practically upon her.

“I must say, it’s
about
time!”

That voice made my toes curl. The waiting woman was Artemisia Vaughn.

S
he was dressed all in shades of purple, from head to foot. Where she got such clothes I could not imagine, but I did have to admit (to myself—never to her, or God forbid to Misha!) that they looked good on her. She seemed to be swathed in layers of veils. Like me, Artemisia does not wear a corset. Unlike me, she is so generously endowed that one cannot help noticing she does not wear one.

“I apologize for being late,” I said, as sincerely as possible while unlocking the door, “but I had some business in Monterey and it took longer than I’d thought it would.” I gritted my teeth and uttered the expected: “How nice to see you again, Artemisia.”

She flowed gracefully through the door. “Likewise, Fremont. Misha assures me you are absolutely
the
perfect person to whom I should entrust my manuscript, which I have brought with me. Oh, what a
darling
office! I adore these yellow chairs.”

It was the cushions, not the chairs, that were yellow; but to say so would be nitpicking. Grudgingly I noticed that the lavender and purple of her dress presented quite a pretty picture against the yellow cushion, like a patch of spring crocus.

No sooner had she sat than she bounced up again. Very sprightly for a woman of thirty-some-odd. Her hair was down in the way I myself prefer, and intertwined with narrow purple ribbons. “Is this the typewriting machine? It’s very handsome, isn’t it? You know, Fremont, what you need is a few pictures on these walls. I always think a blank wall looks so
naked,
don’t you?”

“My budget does not extend to paintings,” I said dryly.

Artemisia whirled around, and I saw that her ensemble was not made of veils after all. There was actually a dress under there of solid fabric in a medium-purple shade, and over it several top layers, each of a different cut and different shade, in a thin material such as georgette. “Oh, I’ll get some together for you. We’ll all contribute one or two. Myself, Tom, Dick, and Harry, Khalid—”.

I said without thinking, “Khalid is the Burnoose Boy?”

She laughed: the gold-shower-of-coins effect. “Exactly!”

Her laugh was so infectious that I laughed, too. Then I recovered myself. “I couldn’t possibly allow you to do that. You see, I can’t afford insurance either, and original artwork—”

She interrupted me, laughing again. “You are living in some other world, Fremont.
Insurance?
Do you think any of us could possibly care about something so
mundane?
Of course I do sell my paintings, and so does Khalid but only to Irma’s friends, and Tom, Dick, and Harry can’t
give
theirs away but I’ll sort through them and find some that aren’t too bad.”

“Artemisia, are Tom, Dick, and Harry their real names?”

“I doubt it.” She plopped down again and all her
layers subsided with a little
poof.
“Just between us girls, I call them the Twangy Boys.”

“Twangy Boys? Oh, I see. At least, I think I do.” In spite of myself, I giggled. “All three of them? Together?”

Artemisia giggled, too. If her laugh was like a shower of golden coins, her giggle was like pixie dust. “They are a ménage à trois of a different kind!”

We both whooped. I hadn’t laughed so hard in months. For the moment I didn’t care that I was laughing with the enemy. “Y-you must understand,” I gasped, “it is not their—uh—preferences I’m laughing at, but your powers of description.”

“Oh, quite,” she replied, which for no reason at all set us both off again.

“Well, to business,” Artemisia said, wiping her eyes—carefully, for she wore something to blacken her lashes. Instantly she was sober as a judge, reaching down beside her chair where she had placed a large, flat leather bag. “Here is my latest creation. You must guard it with your
life,
Fremont. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. With words, that is.”

Her handwriting was a careless scrawl, but legible. The title of her book was
The Merchant of Dreams.
I flipped to the last page, which was numbered one hundred and fifty.

“It’s a novella,” she explained. “It’s going to be a terrific sensation. You’ll see why when you type it. My publisher will be so pleased to get a manuscript that is typewritten. Did you know they are beginning to prefer it? I predict the day will come when they no longer accept manuscripts done by hand.”

“That can only be good for me! I charge ten cents a page, Artemisia. And since I am only typing part-time, it’s difficult for me to say exactly how long it will take.”

“Well, no matter. As long as it doesn’t take forever. I’ll stay in touch.” She folded her hands on top of her bag and cocked her head to one side, considering. “Why haven’t you been back to Carmel? Did we in some way offend you? I, at any rate, thought we would be seeing you on a regular basis. Actually I assumed you were
going to rent the cottage Misha arranged for you. But he told me you’d changed your mind.”

I felt my face begin to flush, so before answering I pretended to have dropped something under the desk and bent down to retrieve it. When I straightened up again the flush was conquered. “Sorry,” I said, “where were we? Oh yes, the cottage. After getting the lay of the land, so to speak, on the Monterey Peninsula, I decided that my typewriting service would do better in this location. And then I met Mrs. Henrietta Houck, the keeper of the light at Point Pinos, and she asked me to take over for six months so that she could have time off for personal reasons. Between the two, I haven’t much time to go visiting.”

Artemisia looked at me for what seemed an excruciatingly long time, her large, dark eyes gleaming and teeming with thoughts I would have given almost anything to read. Finally she said, “You are a serious, hardworking woman, I see.”

I sat tall. “I have my moments of levity, but I’ve chosen to earn my own way—if that is what you mean.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You think Misha has become a playboy.”

It was a statement, not a question. I did not respond.

She waited.

I waited. Until I began to feel like an elementary schoolchild in a staring contest, and then my devilish sense of humor rose to the occasion. “As long as he hasn’t become twangy,” I said.

Try as I might, I could not get away from my office the next day to go to Mapson’s Mortuary. Not that I’d look a gift horse in the mouth, but there is a certain perversity
in the way one can sit for days, bored to bits with nothing much to do, and then the work comes all in a clump.