The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

There was a chorus of “Yes, sir.”

[FOUR]

5550 Ridgewood Street, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 9:35 A.M.

There were three official emergency vehicles parked at the curb in front of the Bazelon’s row house, all with various doors open and the red-and-blue light bars on their roofs flashing. Two were white Chevy Impala squad cars assigned to the Twelfth District, and the third was a somewhat battered white Ford panel van that had a blue-and-gold stripe running the length of the vehicle and blue block lettering that spelled out MEDICAL EXAMINER.

On the wooden front porch of the row house, two Philadelphia Police Department blue shirts were on either side of a rocking chair, one a male standing and writing notes and the other a female down on one knee. The young woman cop was speaking softly to eighteen-year-old Sasha Bazelon, who sat in the rocker, her face in her hands, her body visibly shaking as she sobbed.

Standing nearby on the sidewalk was a small crowd of fifteen people, mostly adult men and women holding Bibles, all watching with looks of deep sadness or abject helplessness. A couple of the women were dabbing at their cheeks with white cotton handkerchiefs. They wore what Mrs. Joelle Bazelon would have said was their Sunday Go-to-Meeting Clothing.

Any other week, Joelle Bazelon also would have been in her church clothes, usually a dark-colored billowing cotton dress, joining the group as it made the regular walk to worship at the Church of Christ three blocks over, at Warrington and South Fifty-sixth Street.

This morning, however, the sixty-two-year-old widow’s cold dead body, clad in a rumpled housecoat, was about to be removed from her living room couch and placed inside a heavy-duty vinyl bag by two technicians from the Medical Examiner’s Office.

The techs were dressed alike in black jeans, white knit polos, and stained, well-worn white lab coats that were thigh-length with two big patch pockets on the front. They had transparent blue plastic booties covering their black athletic shoes. Their hands wore tan-colored synthetic polymer gloves.

The body bag was on a heavy-duty, metal-framed gurney that had been positioned alongside the couch, its oversize rubber wheels locked to prevent it from rolling.

The tech who was lifting the body by holding the lower legs—just above the swollen and bruised ankles—was Kim Soo. A small-bodied man with short spiked black hair and puffy round facial features, he’d been born in Philly twenty-eight years earlier to parents from South Korea who became naturalized Americans.

Soo had spent the last two hours carefully photographing the row house with a big, bulky, professional-level Nikon digital camera, its body badly scratched and dinged. He’d moved through the residence fluidly with the camera, documenting the scene. The strobe had been so intense that its pulsing flashes were easily seen by the small crowd on the sidewalk.

Soo’s face was stonelike as he looked at the lead technician, Javier Iglesia. Soo had known Iglesia going back to South Philly High, where Kim had been two grades behind him.

Iglesia, a beefy but fit thirty-year-old of Puerto Rican ancestry, was normally a very talkative sort, always ready with an opinion on anything. Now, however, holding the body at the shoulders, Iglesia was being unusually quiet.

Finally, Iglesia said, “I knew being a tech for the ME wasn’t going to be all glory, Kim. But days like this, when it gets personal, I honest to God genuinely hate this damned job.”

Iglesia looked at Soo, who said, “I know.”

After getting a stronger grip on the housecoat, Iglesia said, “Ready? On three. One, two, three . . .”

The lifting took considerable exertion, and they both grunted with effort as the body began to budge. The “lift” was actually more of a slide off the couch, then a slight drop to the black vinyl body bag that was positioned on the gurney.

The big-boned, obese body made for a fairly tight fit in the body bag. It also made the bag more or less droop over the gurney’s tubular frame.

“Principal Bazelon was a good and decent woman,”

Javier said then. “I remember the year before she retired—it was my first year at Shaw Middle School. This woman was so strict, but also so kind.”

Soo nodded, his face looking sympathetic.

“I’ll tell you,” he went on, “she was a major influence on me back then. And so many others. She taught me a lot. ‘A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ That’s Shakespeare. She got me reading him.”

He looked down at the body in the bag. “And now this?”

“I’ll tell you something,” Iglesia said, then glanced around to see if anyone could be listening. He went on in a softer voice: “What I think is, she didn’t just die in her sleep, is what I think.” He paused. “No, I know she didn’t. Just look at her wrists and ankles. Bruised and swollen from something. Tied with something, some rope, something that’s been taken off. And that’s called tampering with evidence.” He paused again, then nodded as he added, “Mitchell will make it. He misses nothing.”

The medical examiner, their boss, was Dr. Howard H. Mitchell, a very busy bald man with a dark sense of humor. He was usually found in a well-worn rumpled suit and tie, either performing an autopsy or dealing with the paperwork of a place that had to deal with an average of a murder a day, plus the questionable deaths, such as that of Mrs. Joelle Bazelon.

Iglesia shook his head, then closed the top flap and began working the web straps over the bag that would secure the load to the gurney.

That done, he and Soo grabbed the tubular handles at each end of the height-adjustable gurney and lifted, once again grunting under the weight. They raised the top of the gurney to about the level of their waists. They wanted it high enough to have better control while wheeling it, but not so high that the center of gravity could cause the gurney to become ungainly and top-heavy and dump onto its side.

Kim Soo unlocked the rubber wheels, and he pushed as Javier Iglesia began pulling the gurney toward the open front door.

As they went, Javier shook his head and quietly said, “I was there when they threw Principal Bazelon’s big retirement go-away thing. It was a big deal, it was. She was a big deal. And whatever happened to her, this just isn’t right. What I think is that girl of hers isn’t saying what really happened.”