Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Page 13

  Sometimes in the South we ride our horses and on occasion, our horses ride us.

  My car splashed through mud holes before I eventually parked and was met by several members of the local police department. They’d been standing about in amazement at the scene. All 110 pounds of the perpetrator sat now safely subdued in the back of a patrol car. That slight weight, it should be noted, also included her bleached-blonde mass of hair with its six-inch black roots. Her friend, Sonya, who had witnessed the night’s events, sat quietly in the back of another patrol car close by.

  Apparently, the perpetrator—we’ll call her Misty—and her dearly departed young male victim—henceforth known as Ricky—lived happily together beneath the overpass in what appeared to have been a previously white single-wide trailer balanced on cinder blocks. Evidence of Ricky’s manly strength was present all over the dirt “yard” in the form of crushed aluminum beer cans. Folding lawn chairs, some with their nylon seats torn to tatters, stood unoccupied next to the trailer’s concrete steps. In this fêted location beneath Airline Highway, with its mixture of jet exhaust and the constant cast-offs from the road above, this palace on wheels had taken on a thick, grimy luster.

  Sonya told us that as the malt liquor had flowed that night, so did the hateful words between Misty and Ricky. Ricky’s manhood had been questioned. The screaming had turned into hitting, with Ricky landing most of the punches while also professing to Misty that she sure as hell wasn’t gonna live without him.

  Ricky lay in the dirt now almost stereotypically shirtless, clad only in boot-cut Levi’s. He had stumbled out their front screen door, calling Misty a good-for-nothing whore. He had evidently crashed about the yard like a tornado while Misty quietly appeared at the screen door, bruised and bloodied. For a moment Ricky might have thought she was giving in, that he had proven his rule over their trailer realm. But then he must have seen Misty’s small nicotine-stained hand holding a .25-caliber Raven automatic, which of course only added fuel to his already blistering fire.

  “Go ahead! I’m a man, bitch,” he reportedly said. “I can take it!” Sonya claimed it was about the fourth time that night he’d made this statement.

  Misty simply raised the Raven and, in mid-sentence, shot Ricky through the screen. What made the shot so remarkable was not only that she had fired through an intermediate target, the screen, but that the round had traveled through Ricky’s open mouth, over his beer-soaked tongue, and lodged perfectly in his brain stem. Ricky had likely fallen to the ground like the spent engine block of a 1975 Nova Super Sport.

  By their very nature, trailers intimate a lack of permanence. People choose to live in them when they are just starting out in life. Or when they are down on their luck. Or at the end of a long life, when the company of other blue-hairs living together in a collection of simple trailer homes, perhaps in the heavy heat of Florida, is a welcome retirement option. They come equipped with a sense of uncertainty about the future. And they silently remind the occupant, You should have done better.

  Near the end of my tenure in Atlanta, I was summoned to a trailer park in College Park on a Memorial Day. Since it was a holiday, I was the only investigator on duty. I was in no mood to hang around. I found the officer who had summoned me waiting outside a very old single-wide in a large trailer park well known for its whores and drugs. A taxi was parked outside the trailer and its driver leaned against one of the quarter panels sporting puffy, red eyes and an unshaved face. The man turned out to be the son of the deceased. He’d been working all night, ferrying people about the dirty streets of inner-city Atlanta in his taxi, and at the end of his shift he’d dropped by his mother’s trailer to check on her, as was his custom. But when he’d walked in, he’d found her reclining on her sofa, dressed in her light-blue nightgown with her hands folded across her abdomen, quite dead.

  The officer on site related that the woman had a history of heart problems and that her death was not necessarily unexpected, but every death investigator is taught to treat each death initially as a homicide. To my shame, I did not.

  As soon as he had said the words “natural death,” I had joked around with him, bemoaning the fact that he and I had to work on a day when everyone else was enjoying a barbeque and drinking a beer. I went through the motions. I took photos. I prepared to examine her body. She was peaceful-looking; her face looked as still as a mountain lake. Her thick gray head of hair was gathered up into a neat bun. Her skin was like parchment, delicate and fragile, telling the story of her life with its lines and age spots. When I finished photographing her body and began my examination, I remarked to the officer how she looked as if she had just drifted off to sleep.

  I began at her head, looking for signs that she had been bludgeoned or strangled. Absent that, I moved down the body. The neck reveled no trauma. Unfolding her hands, having to “break” the rigor mortis that had set in, I still saw no obvious trauma. Then I lifted her gown.

  For anyone who has watched TV programs that portray some detective uncovering a major clue that unlocks the entire mystery (which of course is conveniently embellished with a flourish of dramatic music), this was one of those moments. Though the only sound that accompanied my discovery was the pounding of my heart in my ears. Thoughts briefly flashed of me being fired from my position or arrested for malfeasance. I’d made the biggest blunder of my career.

  Despite my initial inaccurate assumptions, we soon discovered that this woman had been the victim of a drug-addicted pimp and his equally crack-addicted whore. The common perception by many—especially those addled by drugs and desperate for a hit—is that the elderly always hide all their wealth somewhere in their homes. “Yeah, man, that old woman gots to have some money and I’m gonna get all up in it.” Hallucinations of mountains of cash must plague these sorts all too often.

  Upon entering her aluminum house on wheels, these two must have been disappointed to find only the trinkets of a woman’s long life: her wedding pictures, images of her children as babies, cheap jewelry given to her by her son forty years earlier (which was as valuable as a sack of diamonds but only to her), and her family Bible. There was no money. She probably hadn’t understood why these misfires of humanity had buried one of her kitchen knives into the side of her frail chest three times. She now lay on the floor, her life gone for no reason at all.

  After slaughtering this woman, the miscreants had decided to pick her frail body up off the floor, undress her, wipe away the blood, and redress her. As if they could have wiped away her death. She was then laid on her sofa, hands folded across her abdomen. There she’d been found, robbed of what few items and moments she’d had left, awaiting my arrival.

  A trailer is the hobgoblin of a Southerner’s existence. They are a redneck’s oracle, warning of a bleak future, though no one discerns this fate until it’s too late to do much about it. Babies born to their inhabitants never receive a warning. No matter who we are each born to, only fate can determine whether you end up with someone who gives a shit about you.

  I came to know several ill-fated children in my time. One was found unresponsive in his crib and was subsequently transferred to a hospital emergency room, where he was pronounced dead. As is a death investigator’s usual practice, I made a mandatory trip to the home of the child after his death in order to observe the living conditions. Later that day I arrived at the family’s single-wide, rooted in the largest trailer park in South Atlanta, and found the baby’s older siblings playing outside. What I saw sickened me.

  Their home was positioned immediately adjacent to four trash dumpsters used by all the residents in that portion of the trailer park. The trailer itself stood in a naturally occurring depression in the terrain, and heaps of garbage—primarily discarded foodstuff—had spilled from the dumpsters onto the surrounding ground. A pool of water at least two feet deep had formed in the depression where the trailer stood and where the fluids from spoiling garbage mixed with it. And it was in this fetid swill that the diapered children left behi
nd now played. As if they were splashing about in a crystal-clear spring in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  As I entered the trailer, my own childhood rushed back to me—the confined space, the sights and smells of a kitchen always in view, the ever-present grime on the windows, the cut-rate furniture. The only thing missing was my drunken, Vietnam-vet father swinging his Western-style belt over his head and looking to blister my young ass to the strains of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.”

  As these memories thankfully faded, I noticed an overwhelming smell of Pine-Sol. As it turned out, the family of the child had assigned friends and neighbors the task of cleaning the trailer before any authorities arrived to inspect it. They had done an excellent job. Dirty clothing had been jammed into every available cubbyhole, and the beds were made, including the crib, in which the EMTs had initially reported seeing a plastic bag. The crib was now as neat as a pin and absent any possible dangers. The pathologist ended up ruling the case a natural death, but I still wonder if that was an accurate conclusion.

  I wonder too, now and then, what happened to my childhood pal Freddie. We had been each other’s refuge. Did a trailer shelter him still, as a grown man? Or had he reached for more? I like to think providence smiled and he was now living the high life, but I don’t necessarily believe it.

  I am still at war with my trailer-home roots, hoping to avoid a destiny of impermanence in my life, but that fate actually haunts us all, doesn’t it? My work has taught me at least that much. Nothing is truly permanent, except of course death.

  EVENTUALLY

  THE SUN WILL SHINE

  ON EVERY DOG’S ASS

  WITHIN THE DNA CODE of all Southern males, the sport of hunting is inevitably found. As boys we wander the woods with our Daisy BB guns or wrist-rocket slingshots searching for something to bag. Of course just because we send some little creature to the great beyond doesn’t mean we will use its carcass to sustain ourselves. Compassion and practicality just don’t measure into it.

  All of this held true for me too. My first kill was a blue jay, my second a squirrel—both taken with a Crossman pump-action pellet gun my grandfather had bought me at the local feed store. One less inclined toward the ways of hunting might ask why. After a while, so did I. Then I drifted toward fishing. This was an option my grandfather never would have understood. For Papaw, hunting deer and trading horses defined him and validated his manhood.

  For as far back as I can remember, when deer season came around, my grandfather would trailer his horse and, along with his two faithful hunting dogs, Bernice and Clyde, drive just across the state line into Drew County, Arkansas. These two dogs possessed a rich well of understanding and devotion when it came to Papaw. They both were fine examples of Catahoula Curs, or Catahoula Leopard Hounds as they are also known, spotted gray and tan with piercing gold eyes. These dogs were true hunters, descendants of a breed that had arrived in Louisiana with Hernando de Soto in the sixteenth century.

  In Monticello, Arkansas, Papaw met up with his four brothers and numerous cousins (who had all brought along their own horses and dogs) at the dilapidated Morgan family home. To call these Morgan men rough as a cob is to make a grand understatement. To a man, they were dyed-in-the-wool Dixiecrats who loved their bourbon and shared a hatred for anything not either Southern or rural. They would sit in the evenings around a potbelly stove in cane-bottom chairs swapping tales of their lies and lives away from the hunting camp, while their dogs lay about on the weathered pine floors around them, as if they too were reunited relations just happy to be together.

  It would still be pitch-black the next morning when the Morgan men saddled their horses and placed their rifles in saddle scabbards. All Morgan men came tall and dark, descending from a combination of Welsh and Choctaw stock. Mounted on their horses they looked like a posse from some spaghetti-Western movie. In addition to their weapons and their flasks of whiskey, each brother carried a hunting bugle made from the horn of a bull.

  They spaced themselves out along the outer edge of an adjacent pine thicket. Then, on their command, the dogs ran off into the woods to root out any deer. One of two possible scenarios would always occur: either the dogs scared up prey and chased it away, at which time one of the brothers would blow his bugle to call the dogs back, or the dogs managed to scare the deer toward the waiting hunters. When that deer, running as fast as shit through a goose, was within range, a predetermined member of the family would fire off the first shot; however, if he missed, it was a land rush. Everyone wheeled their horses and fired, spurring their rides in the same general direction. They were all either hung over from the night before or still intoxicated, so with large-caliber rifle shots ricocheting around in the pines, they seemed more like a clan of mental patients deprived of their meds wheeling around on fifteen hundred pounds of marginally controlled horseflesh. Bullets whizzed past their heads, fired from their own kin, but one of them would eventually down the deer and all the brothers would bugle in concert, not only to celebrate their kill but to call home their beloved dogs.

  My grandfather adored his dogs. What always struck me as odd about their relationship, though, was that Papaw never fed them. It was my grandmother who handled that task, setting out a combination of table scraps and Purina. Plus, I rarely witnessed my grandfather interacting with his dogs other than to occasionally scratch their heads. But whenever Papaw started up his truck to head out somewhere, he walked over to their running line, unhooked them from their leads, and slapped a thigh. “Truck!” he’d say and off they would sprint, hopping into the bed of the ancient Chevy pickup.

  The Morgan boys. They loved their horses, dogs, hunting and whiskey. Uncle Herman, pictured at the far left, served time in Leavenworth Military prison for shooting German prisoners in the back that he had “allowed” to escape during World War II. Pictured from left to right: Herman, Roy, Howard (grandfather), Erastus. Circa 1952.

  I too responded just like Bernice and Clyde. All my grandfather had to do was call my name and off I would run, happy to be with him. Hunting or dropping by a sale barn on a Saturday morning to look at horses, it was just him and me. Like the dogs with their pack leader, it was more than enough, especially to a little boy without a father.

  We moved away eventually, and I didn’t see my Papaw again until he was already dying of brain cancer. When I visited, at the awkward age of eighteen, I found my grandparents’ home even more rundown than I’d remembered it, and the dogs were absent from their running line. Papaw had used two fifty-gallon oil drums as doghouses for Bernice and Clyde, and those drums remained rusting away with moldy hay inside of them. After I had sat for a time with my Papaw, now bedridden and skeletal, I asked my weary grandmother what had become of the two beloved dogs. My grandmother looked at me then with an expression a Baptist preacher might admonish you with if you had let loose a loud word of profanity during his sermon. She explained that shortly before he had gotten sick, “your Papaw put both of them down.”

  He knew his end was near. And he was sure no other person would have need of the dogs. He probably thought no one else would take them. Maybe like an ancient pharaoh, Papaw had believed the two hounds would heel at his side on the other side. Perhaps they are indeed there with him now, chasing through the pines with him bearing down after them on horseback, digging in his spurs and drawing his rifle from its scabbard, smiling.

  One lesson I’d learned from my Papaw was borne out in my practice as a death investigator: The relationship a person has with a pet is often better than any relationship they have with another human. While investigating deaths I have been chased and bitten by protective animals, but I have also seen creatures so forlorn I just wanted to take them home with me. That hollowness in a dog’s eyes after the death of its owner is considerable and haunting.

  In 1990 I was summoned to a neighborhood in Metairie, just outside of New Orleans, regarding a suicide. When I arrived, I found that the police had secured the scene and were waiting on me. The death had occurre
d in an alley between two ranch-style homes. As I walked toward the detectives there, one patrolman shouted, “It’s messy!” He was right.

  The detectives stood around in this narrow passageway adjacent to a side entrance to the decedent’s home. Their backs were up against a tall wooden fence.

  “It’s going to be tight working in here,” they said.

  The fence was illuminated by bright security lights along with the glow of lights coming from the house next door. The planks of fencing beside the door and even as high as the house’s eaves had been splattered with brain matter and blood. I remember thinking, What did he do? Place a lit stick of dynamite in his mouth? No, but close.

  A .44 Magnum revolver reflected the beams of the outdoor lights in blue steel. It also shined with blood. The victim had wrapped his lips around its muzzle and disintegrated his head. All that remained were his lower jaw and his tongue, which hung loosely where the corner of his mouth had once been. I slipped on pieces of his brain. As one of the detectives stood beneath the eave of the roof, a large chunk of brain detached and landed on his shoulder. There is something quite comical about hearing a policeman scream. To heighten the fun, he danced around trying to get the taint of it off his uniform. I approached him slowly, not wanting to get struck by either him or by any more falling brain matter, and plucked the piece off.

  “Trash the uniform when you get home,” I told him.