James Hall - Miami Noir

“Hated him?” Sheldon squinted. “Why?”

“We had a disagreement about some research. He took a lot of collaborative material and published it under his own name. Then he slept with my wife. Does that about sum it up?”

“Your wife, huh? Listen, you saw him last night.” Sheldon pointed to the flattened patch of grass with his chin. “Did he seem depressed to you? Any irrational behavior, that kind of thing?”

“He was acting rather cranky,” Vernon said. “And he drank a lot last night.” As he said it he wondered if the ghost of last night’s beers lingered on his own breath.

Sheldon nodded, hands behind his back. He wasn’t even writing anything down.

Vernon waited a long moment. “So, what do you think happened?”

Sheldon rubbed his chin. Vernon noticed a small cut from the morning’s hasty shaving. “He came down here because he didn’t like his job up north. Acted cranky. Had a fight with a former colleague,” a nod to Vernon, “in public. Spent the evening drinking cheap beer.” Sheldon walked toward the police tape and Vernon followed. “Wandered out here, saw the futility of his life.” Sheldon turned to Vernon and lowered his voice. “You’d be surprised how many people kill themselves on moonless nights. I don’t know what it is, something about the stars. The immensity of the universe.”

“He killed himself?”

“Without a doubt,” Sheldon said.

Vernon shook his head at the absurdity of the scene — two men in full suits sweating in the subtropical sun. And the world atlatl champion impaling himself on one of his own darts.

“I want to help you, detective. When you recover the tip of the dart, the stone point, bring it to me. An expert can look at it and tell you who the craftsman was.”

Sheldon nodded. “I’ll make a note of it,” he said. But he didn’t. “How exactly do these things work, anyway?”

Vernon arranged to meet Sheldon that evening for an atlatl demonstration — enough time for Sheldon to get the stone point from the pathologist. Maybe enough time for Vernon to figure out a plausible theory for what happened to Eustace Green. Sheldon didn’t seem to be working on one.

Vernon sat at the plastic table in his underwear, surrounded by charts of the crime scene he’d drawn. His motel room smelled vaguely of mildew and sweat. Thin blades of burning sunlight pierced the drawn curtain and illuminated the unmade bed, the rumpled clothing, the pages he pored

Several hours after their morning meeting, Sheldon had knocked on the door and showed him an onyx point in a plastic bag.

Vernon examined it, rubbed the stone through the thin plastic. “That is definitely Eustace’s work,” he said. “He liked to serrate the edges of his stone points like that. Don’t know why, it’s really tough to do.”

Sheldon nodded. “That’s what Dr. Mackenzie says. Do you think somebody could take one of these darts and just,” he mimed an overhand toss, “throw it?”

Vernon shook his head. “Not enough mass. It’d be like hitting someone with a wadded-up piece of paper covering a pebble — nothing but a nasty cut. You really need an atlatl to throw it with enough force to hurt anything.”

Sheldon gave a brief shrug, barely more than a hitch of his shoulders.

“You still think it’s suicide?” Vernon said.

Sheldon crossed his arms. “For a minute there I was starting to think you did it.”

Vernon’s heart stopped.

Sheldon said, “But you couldn’t kill him with his own dart. Mackenzie said he treated his tools like they were his children.”

Vernon nodded.

“The other competitors couldn’t. It’s just Oscar’s Razor — he must’ve killed himself. But why not use his flint knife, cut his wrists? He still had it on him when we found the body.”

“And he had a gun somewhere, right?” Vernon asked

“A Charter Arms Undercover,” Sheldon said. “Loaded. How’d you know that?”

“He waved it at me once, when he came to pick up my wife’s clothes. But stabbing himself with a dart?” Vernon shook his head. “You’d have to be an anatomist to get that right. Who would take that chance? He could’ve just lay there bleeding.”

Sheldon held up the stone point again. “Look at this thing. Three inches long, sharp as broken glass. The pathologist cut himself on it. It’s more than enough to kill someone.” He tucked the arrowhead into his breast pocket. “Anyway, according to the blood tests, he was seriously drunk. Alcohol thins the blood, you know. He wouldn’t have just laid there bleeding for long.”

Vernon had watched Green consume at least a dozen cans of beer and pitch the empties into the bonfire. “I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t make any sense. He had women all around him, he’d just won the contest, coming to Florida for a new job — then he kills himself in suicidal despair? I mean, despite the moonless night...”

“There’s something else you need to understand, doc,” Sheldon said. He hitched his jacket back with one hand and Vernon caught a glimpse of the holster on his belt. “This isn’t exactly the crime of the century. You read the paper? Two nights ago a guy tried to rob a Burger King, shot three people. Still at large. Understand, doc? We’ve got to prioritize.”

“You can’t just close the case because you’re busy,” Vernon said.

“Be realistic. A guy from out of town gets drunk and depressed and kills himself. People do stupid things all the time, even when they’re not playing cowboys and Indians. A closed case is a good case.”

But there are no closed cases in archaeology. How tidy detective work must be, with its filing cabinets full of closed cases. Vernon felt a momentary pang of jealousy.

“Give me till 6 o’clock to come up with something. We’re still on for 6, right?” Vernon asked.

Sheldon held out his hands, palms up. “What’s the point?”

“If Mackenzie sees me demonstrating the atlatl to you, it might put his mind at ease,” Vernon said. “He’ll be there too.”

After a moment, Sheldon nodded. “All right. But keep it quick.”

Only a few wisps of hay clinging to the grass indicated there’d ever been a target range here. Vernon found a scrap of the bright police tape. He found a suitable branch and forced it into the ground, took the wooden clothes hanger from the hotel and arranged his suit coat into a makeshift scarecrow. He examined his own Nanticoke atlatl and two four-foot darts, one aluminum and one of fine-grained ash.

He stood about where Eustace Green had, his back to the targets, and waited for Mackenzie and Detective Sheldon. Fifty feet away, a shadowed line of cabbage palms and twisted sea grape had born mute witness to the death. At this range, in daylight, Eustace would’ve been able to knock a squirrel off a branch. But he’d been drunk.

Vernon walked to where Green’s atlatl had lay. According to Sheldon, drunk, depressed, lonely Green had walked out into perfect nighttime solitude, dropped his spear-thrower here, then walked over here. Turned around. Faced — what? The moonless sky? And then Green had yanked his dart with its glittering obsidian point through his sternum and into his heart, fell backward. Vernon sprawled on the grass, acting out the scene. His arms instinctively spread. But Green’s hands had been on the dart’s shaft. Was he trying to press it in further? Or pull it out? The pain must’ve been punishing. Everything he deserved. How long had he lived? Four minutes until brain death, his heart trying to beat around the black razor edges while he attempted to tug the barbs of the dart from his sternum.

“You’ll catch cold, rolling on the ground like that,” Sheldon said from the shadows.

Vernon jumped, even though he’d been expecting him. He managed to modulate his scream into a mere howl of greeting.