City of Dark Corners

“Would you mind if I looked, Chief?”

He didn’t welcome me inside without an explanation of what brought us there the day before. I gave him the short version of Carrie’s murder, without all the details.

“Well.” he stamped his feet. “Would’ve been nice professional courtesy for you to check in with the local police.”

“I’m sorry about that, sir,” I said. I could be deferential, but I couldn’t change the fact that I was a head taller than him. “It was a routine death notification…”

“Nothing routine about a murder,” he snapped.

“No, sir. We should have contacted you when we got to town.”

That seemed to mollify him somewhat, but he looked Victoria over.

“Miss Vasquez is a police photographer who’s been involved in this case,” I said.

“I’d be happy to retrieve my camera and take photos here if you’d like,” she said. “For your departmental records.”

“Looks cut and dried to me, forgive my pun.” Was he flirting? But then he seemed to change his mind, deciding it was proper to add to his departmental records, such as they were. “That’d be real nice, Miss.”

Victoria gave me a sardonic look and started off.

“Wait, Miss,” the chief said. “I’ll have Officer Gibbons give you a ride downtown and bring you back.”

After they slid off down the snowy street, he turned and let me follow him inside.

As I suspected, the fire was dead and the sto

ve cold. It felt chillier inside than outside, but maybe that was imagination. My bleak anticipation for what I would find.

Ezra Dell was seated in the same stuffed chair as the day before, but far beyond the comfort of his liquor. His throat was slit, a seeming bucketful of blood down the front of his shirt and pants, and into the upholstery. His head was lolled back, eyes glassy. In his right hand was a straight razor.

“See,” the Chief said. “Suicide, like I said. Looks very straightforward.”

It looked all wrong to me.

“How did you find him, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Got a call, check on him. Assumed it was a neighbor who didn’t want to deal directly with Ezra, who could be nasty. When Gibbons got here, the door was unlocked and he walked in and found him just like this.”

He pulled out a cigar, bit off the tip, and lit it. “Not the first suicide here since the hard times set in. I’m not at all surprised with Ezra, poor bastard. He was a conductor on the Santa Fe, you know. But the drink cost him his job. He really went downhill after his wife passed away. I knew him well in those days, a decent man. I’m surprised he didn’t kill himself earlier with the booze he made in his home still. Then, the news about his daughter, well, that obviously pushed him over the edge.”

I studied the wound, ear to ear. “That’s a very precise cut for somebody with as shaky hands as Ezra had.”

“Maybe. Hadn’t really thought about it.”

Having investigated many suicides, I knew that slitting one’s throat was exceedingly rare, much less being done with such exactness and going all the way across. One suicide I remembered was characterized by a cut that barely made it halfway. Once the man hit his carotid artery and it started gushing blood, he dropped the razor and, in a moment of regret, tried to stanch the bleeding. Too late, of course, but that was a normal involuntary reflex. Only someone with the greatest discipline and steely determination could replicate the scene before me on his own, and I’d never seen it. A straight razor was a poor weapon with the danger it would fold back on the user’s hand. That didn’t keep it from being used in many a fight in Paris Alley and Darktown. I kept these observations to myself for the moment.

I thought about Ezra’s actions the day before. “Wasn’t he left-handed, Chief?”

The chief looked at the straight razor in the man’s right hand and bit into his cigar. His his face turned red. After a long pause: “Yes, yes, he was. Goddamn.”

I pointed to the wound. “Look at the steady cut all the way across, including to the end on the right side of his neck. I’ve never seen anyone cut his throat and be able to complete it that way.” Going to the back side of the chair, I pantomimed how a killer would hold Ezra’s head up and neatly slice his throat open, hitting the carotids on both sides. “This is what happened.”

“Well, shit. It’s a homicide.”

“Yes, sir.” I asked him about Carrie. Once again, I heard how wonderful she was. “Prettiest girl in Prescott. You knew she was going places. What a terrible thing. Only child. Now the entire family snuffed out.”

I asked if his people had checked the rest of the house.