Donald Moffitt - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2012

Auburn was finding it hard to preserve a cordial manner toward this dowdy, outspoken citizen. “May I ask why you brought this to Mr. Stamaty instead of to the police?”

She blinked hard. “I guess because I work for the county. That’s how I knew about the autopsy results as soon as the hospital pathologist phoned them to the coroner’s office this morning.”

She stood up to terminate the interview. “If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment in just a few minutes out on Whitney Avenue.”

Auburn and Stamaty, who had both been properly reared, also stood up, and Stamaty thanked her for coming in.

“What do you think?” asked Auburn after she had left the office. “Are you going to investigate this one?”

Instead of answering, Stamaty picked up the phone. “Art, this is Nick... Oh, real good. Yourself?... Listen, Art, this Howard Rentz you posted this morning... I know, subdural hematoma. But we’re calling it a coroner’s case... Nothing definite, just some questionable circumstances we need to look into. Don’t release that body to the family’s funeral director. Our guys will be there to transfer it to the county mortuary just as soon as I find out which pool hall they’re smashing up this afternoon.”

Stamaty made two further calls while Auburn touched base with headquarters on his cell phone.

“Are you in on this one, Cy?”

“Provisionally. Where do you plan to start?”

“I’d like to see Rentz’s private physician first, a Dr. Lamprecht. We can’t do much else till we have control of the remains.”

Since Stamaty was nominally in charge of the inquiry, they traveled in the white van from the coroner’s department. “How much can Dr. Valentine find by examining a body that’s already been autopsied?” asked Auburn as they left the parking lot behind the courthouse.

“Only so much,” said Stamaty. “What I mainly want to do is make sure we get samples of Rentz’s blood before some embalmer drains every drop of it into a hazardous waste container.”

“Can you still get good blood samples from somebody who’s been dead this long?”

“You can’t say that anymore,” said Stamaty, with a severe shake of his head.

Auburn glanced at him in bewilderment. “Can’t say what anymore?”

“What you just said Rentz was.”

“I said he was dead—”

Stamaty jumped as if he had been shot. “I told you, Cy, you can’t say that anymore. It’s not politically correct.”

“So what do we call it nowadays?” asked Auburn, finally realizing that he was being put on.

“Vitally challenged. A person who is no longer living is said to be vitally challenged. According to my son Basil.”

“Is he the one who’s going into sports medicine?”

“No, that’s Elena. Basil wants to be a race car driver.”

“Well, I hope he doesn’t get vitally challenged before he has a chance to get chronologically disadvantaged.”

Stamaty parked the van around the corner from Dr. Myron Lamprecht’s office to spare the doctor any embarrassment. The waiting room was full of disconsolate-looking oldsters and harried moms with blubbering babes in arms.

“Maybe we should have called ahead,” suggested Auburn in a murmur as they stood waiting near the reception desk.

“Not my style,” Stamaty murmured back.

At length, they were admitted to a small, tidy office where a plastic heart and a real skull sat side by side on the windowsill. Dr. Lamprecht, a heavy man with a bald crown and a monkey fringe of reddish beard streaked with gray, joined them almost immediately.

Before saying a word, he examined their credentials through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses clamped firmly on his squashed fig of a nose. His hands shook slightly as he sat behind his desk and opened Howard Rentz’s medical record. An official inquiry into the death of a patient can be a prelude to a malpractice suit, not to mention criminal charges.

“All I have here are his office records and lab reports,” he said. “I don’t have anything from the hospital yet, and the final autopsy protocol won’t be available for a week or so. Dr. Noguchi was his neurosurgeon, but Mr. Rentz was gone before they could get him set up for a craniotomy.”

Stamaty asked, “How long had he been on an anticoagulant?”

“About three years.”

“Any recent change in dosage?”

“Not for more than a year.”

“How closely was the blood thinning monitored?”

Lamprecht handed Stamaty a thick bundle of slips held together with a spring clamp. “He went to the lab on Santa Cruz Boulevard every two weeks for a prothrombin time. As you can see, his results were consistently within the therapeutic range. That includes the last one, done a week ago Friday.”

“What other medicines was he taking?”

“A coronary vasodilator, a beta blocker—” He consulted a tabular medication record inside the cover of the chart. “—a mild tranquilizer, bedtime sleep medicine as needed. No recent changes in any of those.”

“You’re aware that his pro-time at the hospital was off the charts? How do you think that happened?”

“Frankly, I think it’s a lab error.” Lamprecht leaned back in his chair, palpably more at ease now that the worst seemed to be over. “Howard Rentz’s coronaries might have been full of sludge, but his mind was as sharp as a college kid’s. He would have had to swallow a month’s supply of pills at one gulp to stretch out his pro-time that far. And he was too much of an egotist to take a deliberate overdose.”

“But he did die of a subdural hemorrhage,” Stamaty reminded him.

“Did he suffer a hemorrhage and fall?” asked Lamprecht rhetorically. “Or did he fall and suffer a hemorrhage? It’s an age-old question, a recurring question. We’ll never know.”

To his present audience the doctor’s studied pose of mature wisdom and boundless benevolence carried no more conviction than that of an out-of-work actor in a white coat touting joint cream in a television commercial. They thanked him and returned to the van.

As expected, they found Howard Rentz’s house locked and uninhabited. Stamaty took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, donned rubber gloves, and began sorting through the contents of a forty-gallon galvanized steel garbage can at the end of the driveway.

“If Public Safety gets involved in this case,” Auburn told him, “you’re going to incur the wrath of a certain forensic lab director for tampering with evidence.”

“How terrifying!” replied Stamaty, whose repeated clashes with Sergeant Kestrel, the police evidence technician, sometimes assumed Homeric proportions. “Thing is, the garbage collectors might get here before Kestrel does, and then where will the evidence be?”

Auburn couldn’t fault his reasoning, but chose not to participate in the search.

“Newspapers, cardboard cartons, pop cans,” reported Stamaty. “Apparently Mr. Rentz didn’t believe in recycling.”

They walked around to the back and climbed the steps to the deck. Here Stamaty attacked a plastic trash bucket containing what could only have been the remnants of the birthday party. “This is more like it.”

“Any traces of chocolate pie garnished with little pink pills?” asked Auburn.

“Not so far. I’ve got paper plates and paper napkins, plastic forks and plastic spoons, cake going stale and melted ice cream going sour.”

“Are you looking for evidence, or are you just trying to ruin my appetite for dinner?”

“Aha! An earlier stratum. Traces of burgers, fries, and sodas for two.”

The sound of male voices raised in friendly dispute, punctuated by occasional brisk snips with a pair of pruning shears, reached them from the other side of a hedge. Whereas Rentz’s backyard was little better than a weed patch, the neighbors on either side had formal gardens, now largely running to seed. Approaching with no attempt at secrecy, they came up behind two elderly men, one of whom was hacking at the hedge in seemingly random fashion, somewhat like a painter putting the final touches on a canvas.