Dead Girl Blues Read online

  Then there was a day spent reading what I’d written, something I’d previously avoided doing, and apparently for good cause. It left me in an anxious state, so I wrote nothing that day. Or the day after, when I sat down, opened the file to where I’d left off, wrote and rewrote a sentence only to erase it. When I ultimately gave up, the document—or whatever I might want to call this collection of pixels—was as I’d found it hours earlier.

  And as I find it now, but for the addition of these italicized paragraphs, which are not writing so much as they’re writing about writing.

  It’s not hard to fathom why I don’t want to go on.

  We were happy then, and it seems to me that what I’ve written does a good job of conveying that happiness. Why mar it with intimations of what’s to come?

  Because in truth we’re happy now. The four of us—or five, really, because why leave out the dog? Chester, part of our family for close to three years now, a good-sized dog of undetermined ancestry who’d followed Kristin home from school one day.

  No tags, no collar, nothing to indicate where he’d come from or who might miss him. His tail never stopped wagging, as if to dismiss out of hand any notion of taking him to the pound. A vet pronounced him free of any identifying chips or tags, and free too of any disqualifying ailments. “Around three years old, John. He won’t get any larger, although he might fill out some if you feed him right. As for who his parents might be, well, I think I can see some shepherd in there, but beyond that I’d say your guess is as good as mine.”

  We ran an ad—DOG FOUND—but pulled it after two days when we realized how anxious we all got whenever the phone rang. Whoever had lost him—or, more likely, abandoned him—either never saw the ad or felt no compulsion to respond to it.

  So we bought him a proper collar and a leash and dog dish and a drinking bowl, and the vet fitted him with an ID microchip, and Louella filled out a form and paid his license fee.

  He already had a name. Kristin, who’d brought him home, had taken to calling him Chester. No one knew why, but no one had objected, least of all the dog himself. His ears perked up whenever he heard his name, and he came trotting over to get his head patted.

  If there were ever any question that we were a family, Chester settled it. He was indisputably a family dog, and how could you have a family dog if you weren’t a family?

  He was also the beginning of the end, although you couldn’t really blame him for it.

  “DAD, I WAS THINKING.”

  “A hazardous occupation,” I said. “But not without its occasional rewards.”

  “Huh? Oh, right. No, what I was thinking about was college. And like after.”

  “Oh?”

  “Like, you know, what do I want to do with my life.”

  “Deep thoughts.”

  He nodded, made air quotes. “Deep thoughts. And what part of me wants to do is four years in Athens at OU and then come back to Thompson Dawes.”

  He’d been helping out after school, working in the stockroom, waiting on customers, making himself generally useful. I’d always had it in mind that he or his sister would most likely take over the business when I was ready to let it go.

  I said, “Part of you. And what about the other part?”

  “Well, I was thinking.”

  This time I was the one who made air quotes.

  “Right,” he said. “Deep thoughts. What I was thinking, I was thinking about becoming a vet.”

  My first thought was he wanted to enlist in the service, because how else did you become a veteran? Then he said something about how he’d been getting to know Ralph Debenthal, from taking Chester in for booster shots and general maintenance, and—

  “Oh, for God’s sake. A veterinarian.”

  “You think it’s a bad idea?”

  “I think it’s a lot better idea than the infantry. You said ‘vet’ and I figured you were all set to enlist in the army.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, it wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  “God, I hope not. No, I thought it might be good to do what Doctor Ralph does.”

  “A vet rather than—”

  “A people doctor, but there must be a better word for it. A physician?”

  “That’s the word.”

  “I thought of that. When Mom was sick.”

  Breast cancer, caught in its early stages, well in advance of metastasis. She’d had a lumpectomy and a brief course of radiation, and was now cancer-free. And there was no reason to fear a recurrence.

  Except, of course, that there always is. There is, in this swamp of human existence, an unending abundance of crocodiles.

  “But med school’s such a slog,” he said. “That’s what everybody says. It’s tough to get in and tough to get through it, and then you’re an intern and they work you like twenty hours a day.”

  “It does require a commitment.”

  “And that might even be okay, if I had my heart set on it, but it’s easier for me to see myself giving rabies shots than telling people Grandma’s not going to get better so start planning the funeral. I told Sukie I was thinking about vet school, and she said why not med school, and I said I like animals better than people.”

  “And well you might.”

  “I was just being, you know, I guess the word is glib.”

  “But there’s some truth in it.”

  “Yeah, there is. They don’t judge you or sue you for malpractice. Although I guess their owners might.”

  “Not that often.”

  “No. Anyway, it’s nothing I need to decide, but—”

  I said, “You might want to think about shadowing Ralph.”

  “What, like a detective? Skulking around?”

  NOT LIKE A detective, and not furtively. He told Ralph Debenthal of his interest, and they agreed he could come in two days a week after school, running errands and performing menial tasks while seeing what Ralph did and how he did it. The man himself was reserved and laconic, and it was not hard to believe that he felt more comfortable with animals than human beings, but he got used to Alden’s company and increasingly opened up to him.

  Then one evening just before dinner, Alden called Chester to his side, ordered him to sit, and placed a hand on top of the dog’s head. “Ah, I’m picking up information,” he announced. “About your ancestry, Chester.” He scanned the room, eyed each of us in turn. “A shepherd mix,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’ve been telling ourselves?”

  Kristin asked him what he was talking about.

  “I’m talking about Chester,” he said, “who is indeed about a quarter shepherd, but Belgian shepherd, not German. But what old Chester is more than anything else is Rottweiler. He’s fifty percent Rottie, so the odds are pretty good that either his mother or his father was a purebred Rottweiler.”

  And how did he know this? “Oh, I have my ways,” he said, and waited to be coaxed into a full explanation—how there was this company in Fort Smith, Arkansas, that offered a full genetic profile of your dog for under a hundred dollars. What you did, you sent them a check—or in his case a money order, purchased with his own funds at the branch post office on Elizabeth Street. They mailed you a kit, and you took each of the two oversized Q-tips and swabbed the inside of your dog’s cheek. You put them in individual plastic tubes, used the company’s pre-addressed mailer, and sent it all back. And then you sat around waiting, and by the time you’d pretty much forgotten the whole thing, they sent you a letter with the results.

  And those results, which he’d just received that afternoon, were pretty clear-cut. Half Rottweiler, around a quarter Belgian shepherd, and the remainder a little harder to pin down.

  He beamed. Chester wagged his tail.

  IN NOVEMBER OF 1942, two years and four months before I was born, Winston Churchill delivered a speech at a luncheon at London’s Mansion House. In Egypt, Generals Alexander and Montgomery had routed Rommel’s forces at El Alamein, providing Churchill for the first time with a victory to
celebrate.

  “Now this is not the end,” he said. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

  I’d come across this once, years ago, but looked it up now to get it right. I typed “Churchill the end of the beginning” and Google supplied the precise quotation, along with more information on the occasion than I needed to know. I found it interesting enough to read in full, perhaps to keep my mind from going where it would have to go next.

  The end of the beginning.

  NONE OF THAT occurred to me at the time. I was at least as proud of Alden as he was of himself—that he’d thought of investigating the dog’s ancestry, and that he’d carried it off without dropping a hint until he had the results in hand. I was probably less surprised by his resourcefulness than by Chester’s heritage; the name Rottweiler conjured up images of a heavily-built, powerful beast, its jaws fastened in a death grip on any perceived threat to the family it was there to protect. That seemed a stretch for our Chester, who was more an affable clown, but they do say blood will tell, and I suppose so will DNA.

  Ah yes. DNA.

  THE MOLECULE NOW known as DNA was first identified in the 1860s by a Swiss chemist called Johann Friedrich Miescher. You probably didn’t know that, and neither did I until I Googled my way to it a few minutes ago.

  It was almost a century later, in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and in the decades that followed the world has been working out what to make of it—and what to do with it.

  It took a mere fifteen years to get to 1968, that pivotal year in which death came to a remarkable roster of people whose names you’ll know. John Steinbeck, Helen Keller, Yuri Gagarin. Tallulah Bankhead, Edna Ferber. Upton Sinclair. Norman Thomas. Martin Luther King.

  Let’s not forget Bobby Kennedy. And, linked to him in my mind if in no one else’s, Cindy Raschmann.

  IN 1968 A MAN walked into a bar, and while he must have heard the iconic initials of deoxyribonucleic acid they’d made no impression upon him. The man in the Buddy shirt paid little attention to the news in general and less to that of scientific advances and Nobel prizes.

  Indeed, I’d have needed to be more than attentive to attach much significance to DNA. Uncommon prescience would have been required for me or anyone else to realize the eventual implications of Watson and Crick’s discovery.

  Had I been gifted with that sort of foresight, I might have put on a condom before I took my pleasure with the late Cindy Raschmann.

  But why? There were at that time just two reasons to don that sheer armor, and neither led me even to consider so doing. The prevention of conception was one, protection from disease the other.

  I hadn’t needed to be concerned about birth control, as no man, however virile, was likely to get a dead girl pregnant. I suppose one might as readily pick up syphilis or gonorrhea from a dead partner as a living one, but I never gave a thought to VD back then. It was reputed to be no worse than a bad cold, and more fun to catch, and one simple shot of penicillin cured it, and you wouldn’t wear a raincoat in the shower, would you? Or wash your feet with your socks on?

  Now, of course, nobody says VD. It’s STD now. I’m not sure why Sexually Transmitted Disease should better characterize those complaints we used to categorize as Venereal Disease, but then I’ve never been able to work out why the phrase person of color is preferable to colored person.

  For whatever reason, STD is all you hear nowadays. And there seem to be more of them than there used to, and many have become largely resistant to penicillin and its cousins. Some are a good deal worse than a bad cold; for a decade or two, one of them—AIDS—killed everyone who came down with it. It’s still incurable, but its victims are now able to go on living with it, year after year, and perhaps they tell each other it’s no worse than the heartbreak of psoriasis. And, I suppose, more fun to catch.

  So easy for me to go on like this. So effortless to let one’s fingers on the keys record the wandering of one’s mind. Such satisfaction in highlighting a word that’s almost right and replacing it with one that’s better.

  So much easier than pushing aside the trivial and getting on with it.

  The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line

  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

  I wouldn’t punctuate it that way, or single out those seven words for capitalization, and indeed I wasted a quarter of an hour nattering on about the subject before I used the Delete key for its intended purpose.

  Cut the crap, Buddy. Get on with it.

  I DON’T KNOW when some forensic trailblazer thought of using DNA as a forensic tool, nor could I tell you when I first became aware of it. But it became increasingly evident that the substance could snare you if you were guilty or exonerate you if you were innocent. Prison cell doors sprang open, abruptly releasing men who’d long since given up all hope of ever walking free. And then these doors slammed shut again, confining for the rest of their lives men who’d come to take their continuing freedom for granted.

  Men whose circumstances were not unlike those of that Ohio shopkeeper known as John James Thompson.

  I had gotten away with what I’d done to Cindy Raschmann. By the time I walked into that bar, I’d lived my life without drawing any attention from the police, outside of a couple of traffic stops. I’d never been arrested, never been fingerprinted. I couldn’t see how I might have left fingerprints at the crime scene, but even if I had, and even if some enterprising crime scene investigator succeeded in raising them, they wouldn’t lead anywhere.

  But I’d pumped her full of DNA, hadn’t I? I’d left genetic fingerprints, and with the passage of time and the refinement of technology, I began to see what that might mean.

  Of course, it might mean nothing at all. Who was to say how extensive Cindy’s post-mortem examination might have been, or what they might have kept of what they’d found? She’d never had a chance to claw at me, so there’d be none of my DNA under her fingernails, but if they’d retained what they found of my semen, and if it hadn’t been lost over the years, or degraded to be rendered forensically useless, then it might be enough to let them catch up with me.

  If I somehow became a suspect. If I drew their attention. If they picked me up, and swabbed my cheek, and extracted the telltale DNA from my epithelial cells—if that happened, they’d have hard scientific evidence that would stand up in court, where some acknowledged expert could estimate the odds of another person’s DNA matching mine at one in a billion or a trillion or a quadrillion.

  But first they had to arrest me before they could swab my cheek, and before that they’d have to suspect me, and why should they even know of the existence of J. J. Thompson, the mild-mannered proprietor of Thompson Dawes? Why should my new life call me to their attention?

  I was still very much in the clear, wasn’t I?

  WELL, LESS SO as time passed. The establishment of a DNA data bank came to mean that anyone who’d been arrested and cheek-swabbed was to be found in that system. If I walked into another bar, in Ohio or California or anywhere else in the country, and if I did what I’d once done to Cindy Raschmann, and if I were caught in the act or tracked down after it, some cold case investigator in Bakersfield could find a match for the sample he’d had in storage all these years.

  If they’d had it to begin with, and hadn’t lost it, or—

  Never mind. Technology marched on, and from a certain distance I found myself keeping up with it. I didn’t watch the original CSI, the one set in Las Vegas, because it aired on my bowling night, but it came up enough in dinner-table conversation for me to be aware of it. And when they put on the spinoff shows, set in Miami and New York, Louella and I would watch, joined as often as not by Alden.

  Even before that, if we were home on a Saturday night we were apt to be watching America’s Most Wanted. Early on I’d
catch myself on edge at the prospect that Cindy Raschmann’s 1968 death would turn up on the screen. Some passing motorist might come forward years later, recalling a partial license plate. A roadhouse patron might happen to remember a man in work clothes, the embroidery on his shirt identifying him as Buddy.

  And then one Saturday her picture flashed on the screen.

  I doubt I’d have recognized it if they hadn’t said her name. It must have been her high school yearbook photograph, and she’d lived some years and had some hard mileage on her by the time our paths crossed. I had time to note that she looked oddly familiar, and then I heard her name, and half-expected to hear mine coupled with it. My original name, that is to say. They wouldn’t be likely to know the Thompson name.

  If they did, there’d have already been a knock on my door.

  But what they had didn’t lead to me, and didn’t really lead to Cindy Raschmann, either. Here’s what they had: A bespectacled middle-aged man who’d sold used cars all over the Pacific seaboard, and who looked for all the world like an accountant, had been in a bar in Eugene, Oregon, when a fight broke out, and the police dragged everybody down to the stationhouse.

  I forget what the evidentiary link was, even as I forget the fellow’s name, but he broke down under questioning and admitted to the recent rape of a college student, and went on to confess to several more rapes, a couple of which had ended in the victim’s death.

  So now police departments throughout the region were looking at him as a suspect in whatever cold cases matched his profile. Cindy Raschmann’s murder was one such case, and her name and picture one that made it to the broadcast. Bakersfield police had been optimistic he’d turn out to be their guy, we were told, but the timeline didn’t work. And, they added, there was physical evidence that excluded him.