An Accidental Corpse Read online

  He glanced at Nita, grinned, and shook his head. She knew what he was feeling; she felt it herself. Stepping close, she put her arm around his neck and drew him to her. As they kissed, a round of applause came from the bar’s porch, where a few locals were getting a breath of fresh air.

  Startled, they broke apart, then laughed and waved good night as they drove off down Fort Pond Boulevard toward Fireplace Road.

  Eight.

  “Damn, this road is dark,” observed Fitz. The night was clear, but with hardly any moon. “It’s black as your hat out there. Once you get away from the bar’s lights, there’s nothing. Not even house lights, all the good Christians must be in bed. I’m glad both headlights are working, and we know where we’re going.”

  They turned right off Fort Pond Road and headed south on Fireplace Road, passing Pollock’s house and Ashawagh Hall, with no lights on at either place.

  “When I mentioned to Mr. Bayley that we were driving to Springs for dinner, he told me to watch out for deer on the road after dark,” said Nita. “They can do a lot of damage to a car, he said.”

  “Keep your eyes peeled, then,” Fitz replied. “Can’t be too careful, and there’s no rush to get back. TJ is sound asleep.”

  As they passed the Gardiner Avenue intersection and headed toward the road’s major curve, they saw headlights approaching, well to their left but coming up fast. “Looks like he’s not worried about hitting a deer,” said Fitz.

  Suddenly the oncoming car veered sharply into their lane, cut across in front of them, careened into the woods on their right, and flipped end over end.

  His heart in his mouth, Fitz slammed on the brakes as Nita braced herself against the dashboard and TJ rolled off the backseat and onto the floor behind her. As they came to a stop, their lights showed the other car lying upside down among the trees, its horn blaring. It was a green convertible, an Oldsmobile Rocket 88.

  “Jesus Christ,” blurted Fitz. “That’s Pollock’s car!”

  Fitz pulled off the road, and he and Nita jumped out. TJ, wide-awake now, followed them. The body of a woman lay by the roadside, and as they approached they could hear her moaning. Nita crouched down beside her, looking for apparent injuries, ready to apply first aid.

  Fitz got between the women and his son, blocking his view. He was a protective father, but also a seasoned policeman who knew how to take charge of a situation. After nearly two decades on the force, he was no stranger to accident scenes. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the wrecked car’s horn.

  “TJ, I want you to go across the street quickly and wake up the people in that house over there. Be careful, look both ways before you cross, just like in the city. Tell the folks to call the police, and an ambulance.”

  Just then a light went on in the house. “That horn could wake the dead,” said Fitz. “Go on now. Tell them there’s at least one injured person, probably more. Get them to make those calls right away.”

  Stifling his curiosity, TJ did as he was told. As soon as he was safely away from the scene, Fitz turned his attention to the wreck. He assumed that the driver was Pollock, not the injured woman, whom he vaguely recognized. When the car had passed them that morning, he had glimpsed her and a companion in the backseat. As they rushed by, she’d turned to look back toward Ashawagh Hall, her dark curls billowing around a pretty young face. He thought he had seen that face again while they were having lunch at the fair.

  His headlights now showed it caked with dirt and scraped along one cheek, where the woman’s head had apparently hit the pavement. Nita had rolled up her sweater as a pillow, but cautioned Fitz as he knelt beside her.

  “Best not to try to move her, she may have internal injuries. I’ve been trying to get her to talk, give me her name, but she’s only semiconscious. I hope the ambulance gets here soon.”

  Fitz stood up. “I’d better have a look around for the driver. Hope to God he was thrown clear, too.” He moved off the road and into the woods.

  The Oldsmobile’s headlights cut a path of visibility through the undergrowth. Fitz’s first impulse was to try to silence the horn by turning off the engine, but that would also douse the lights. He decided to do it anyway, to relieve the mechanical scream that made the accident scene all the more macabre. The windshield was crushed, but the space between the door and the driver’s seat allowed enough room for him to get his arm under the wheel. Groping blindly at the dashboard, he found the ignition key and turned it, killing the engine. Abruptly the woods were plunged into darkness and silence.

  With the horn’s echo still in his ears, Fitz returned to his own car and positioned its headlights toward the scene. They picked out a human form a few yards in front of the Olds, off to one side, sprawled at the base of an oak tree.

  As Fitz approached, he detected no movement, heard no sound other than his own footsteps rustling through the leaves. He saw that it was a man—Pollock, he presumed—lying on his right side with his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open, as if he were asleep. Fitz bent down and pressed his fingertips against the neck, just under the jaw, and felt no pulse.

  There was nothing more to be done, so he decided to leave any further examination to the local authorities. He returned to where Nita was standing watch over the injured woman.

  “I found the driver,” he told her, “he’s dead. Looks like he was thrown out when the car flipped. Probably broke his neck when he hit the ground. Looks like this gal had better luck.”

  Just then a patrol car pulled up and out climbed Officer Finch.

  “The Bennetts phoned it in,” he told them. “Your boy gave them the information. I live just around the corner on Gardiner, and I got the radio call.”

  “What about an ambulance?” asked Nita. “This woman is injured, though I don’t know how badly. She needs immediate medical attention.”

  “Doc Abel will be here soon. The ambulance will take a while, has to come from Southampton, but the doc will see to her.”

  “There’s a dead man in the woods,” said Fitz. “Must be Jackson Pollock. That’s his car, the one you pointed out to us this morning.”

  “Let’s go take a look,” said Finch, and the two men headed past the overturned car to where the body lay. Finch pulled out a flashlight and focused it on the face. “Sure enough, that’s him all right. Can’t say I’m surprised. He’s been asking for it for a long time.”

  They walked back toward the Oldsmobile. “Car’s pretty well totaled,” observed Finch, playing his flashlight over the wreck. Suddenly he stopped, and trained the light on the passenger side. A bare arm, nearly covered by leaves, protruded from behind the seat.

  “Hold it, there’s somebody in there! Looks like another woman.”

  While Finch held the light, Fitz dropped to his knees and felt the wrist for a pulse. Nothing. “I think she’s dead, too, but I can’t be sure. Should we try to get her out, or wait for the doc?”

  By this time a couple more cars had pulled up, and several onlookers were standing at the roadside. “Hey, bub!” shouted Finch, “you there, Dick Talmage, come give us a hand.” The burly plumber advanced toward the Olds, and Finch explained the situation. “You and me are gonna push this thing over toward the driver’s side, and our friend Fitz here’ll try to pull her out from under.”

  Talmage motioned back toward the road, and another volunteer appeared. With three men pushing, the Olds rolled over enough for Fitz to get hold of the woman under the arms and drag her free of the car. As her body emerged, covered with dirt and leaves, her head flopped back alarmingly and a pair of vacant blue eyes stared up at Fitz.

  “She’s done for,” he told the men. “Pollock took her with him.”

  Nine.

  When William G. Abel, M.D., finished examining the injured woman, he told Officer Finch, “We’ll have to take her to Southampton Hospital in the patrol car. We’ve had two other auto accidents tonight,
and both ambulances are out. I don’t detect any broken bones, but she’s badly shaken up. Might be bleeding internally, probably has a concussion. I want to get her into X-ray right away. I can stabilize her head and neck.”

  From his car trunk, Abel retrieved a plywood backboard and two small sandbags. Gently, he pushed the board under the victim’s head and shoulders, and laid the sandbags on either side of her head. He and Finch lifted her onto the patrol car’s backseat. The doctor leveled the backboard with his medical bag and slipped onto the seat beside his patient, holding her legs in his lap.

  Finch took Fitz and Nita aside. “I’d be obliged if you’d wait until the coroner gets here,” he said. The couple assured him they would. “You’re important witnesses, and he’ll be wanting to take your particulars. A formal statement can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Let’s get moving, but not too fast, I don’t want her jostled,” called out Abel. “Turn on the siren.” Finch did as instructed, and the car backed out onto Fireplace Road and turned toward Montauk Highway and the hospital, seventeen miles to the west.

  It was a quarter past eleven when Dr. John Nugent, the Suffolk County coroner, arrived. By that time a substantial crowd had gathered, and the Fitzgeralds were eager to get their son to bed. TJ had returned just in time to see Finch’s car leaving—the Bennetts had kept him safely inside with milk and cookies while traffic around the crash site was at its worst. Nita had collected him with thanks, and now had him bundled in the backseat of the Fitzgerald family car, out of sight of the corpses.

  An ambulance and two more police officers had also arrived. One directed traffic, while the other helped Nugent with his examinations. Both Pollock and the unidentified female passenger were pronounced dead at the scene, and the coroner ordered the bodies removed to the funeral parlor in East Hampton village.

  “I understand you saw it happen,” said Nugent to Fitz, who explained that they’d been on their way back to the Sea Spray cottage when Pollock’s car had cut them off and swerved into the woods. “He was going pretty fast,” Fitz told him. “Looked to me like he lost control on that curve, where the concrete road ends and the blacktop begins.”

  Nugent jotted down the funeral parlor’s address on the back of his card and handed it to Fitz. “You and the missus come to Yardley and Williams tomorrow morning, say around eleven. I can get all the details then. Sorry your boy had to see this. From what the neighbors tell me, Pollock was a menace. Too many like him on the roads out here.”

  Nugent was familiar with the scenario, although this particular weekend would prove to be exceptional. He would soon examine eight more fatalities from the area, all of them involving drunk driving.

  Ten.

  Sunday, August 12

  Assuming they’d be going to mass on Sunday, Nugent had given them a late morning appointment, but the Fitzgeralds were not churchgoers. Both Nita and Fitz had lapsed long ago, and they believed it was hypocritical to send theit son to services they didn’t attend themselves. So they spent the morning relaxing on the cottage porch, reading the Sunday paper supplied by the inn, enjoying the sea breeze, and thanking the God they didn’t worship that Pollock’s car had swerved when it did.

  When it was time to leave, Emily Green, the Sea Spray’s housekeeper, agreed to look after TJ while his parents reported to the coroner. “But I’m a witness, too!” he protested.

  “You were asleep in the backseat,” said Nita.

  TJ was persistent. “I saw the lady lying in the road, the one you were helping.”

  “She’s not what they want to talk to us about,” said Fitz rather sternly, dismayed at his son’s morbid desire to visit the funeral parlor that doubled as the local morgue. “They want to know about the circumstances. Anyway, it’s just for routine formal statements. It’s boring, but necessary. We do it all the time, your mother and I, but on the receiving end.”

  Yardley and Williams catered to the deceased in a charming old frame house on Newtown Lane. Carolyn Williams greeted Fitz and Nita at the door, keeping her voice low. “Dr. Cooper is expecting you,” she whispered as she led the way down a carpeted hall lined with upholstered seats and occasional tables laden with tasteful flower arrangements.

  “The coroner, Dr. Nugent, is handling a case of multiple accident deaths in Southampton,” she continued sotto voce, “so he asked Francis Cooper, one of our best local men, to fill in.” Nita wondered why she spoke so softly, considering that her clients wouldn’t know the difference if she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  As if on cue, Mrs. Williams explained, “We have a viewing in progress, just a small family gathering in the blue chapel.” The faint sound of canned organ music could be heard coming from behind a closed door on the right. Of course, said Nita to herself, the living are here as well as the dead.

  A door at the end of the hallway led to a staircase that took them to the basement, where the décor was strictly utilitarian. A double outside door, opening to a ramp where ambulances and hearses could load and unload out of sight, dominated one wall of an anteroom, where a faint chemical odor hung in the air. A plain wooden desk and chair stood in a corner, next to a smaller door that led to the embalming room. A few hooks on the door held lab coats and Dr. Cooper’s seersucker jacket. A bench and several chairs were ranged around the walls.

  From behind the desk, Cooper rose as they entered. He was a small, rather fastidious-looking man, wearing a white shirt and bow tie. They assumed he had come straight from church to attend to this sad business at the coroner’s behest. He drew a couple of chairs up to the desk, and politely asked them to sit.

  “Earl Finch tells me that you’re both New York City police officers,” he began. “I’m glad to know that, makes my job a lot easier.” He leaned toward them. “And it’s going to be helpful with the investigation.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Fitz.

  “There’s a complication,” said Cooper. “I autopsied the young woman this morning. She has a broken neck, sustained in the accident, but that’s not what killed her. That injury occurred postmortem. She died of asphyxiation.”

  Nita and Fitz looked at the doctor, and then at each other, in amazement. Nita broke the silence. “You mean she was already dead when the car crashed?”

  “That’s right. Her fatal injuries weren’t apparent until we got her cleaned up. There’s bruising on both sides of her throat, and her trachea is compressed.” He looked at them with a steady gaze.

  “Someone strangled her.”

  Eleven.

  “There’s another problem,” Cooper continued. “We don’t know who she is. There was no identification on her. She’s not a local girl, and I have no idea how she came to be in the car with Pollock and the other girl, also unidentified—she’s still unconscious. Do you happen to know anything about them?”

  “I thought I recognized the injured girl,” said Fitz. “I think she was in the car with Pollock when he passed us on Fireplace Road yesterday morning. We were on our way to the Fishermen’s Fair and stopped to talk to Officer Finch when Pollock drove by, going way too fast, and she was in the backseat. Then I saw her again later, walking around the fair. I didn’t see the other girl’s face, but there were two of them in the car when it went by us.”

  Just then the hall door opened and three people came down the stairs with Mrs. Williams. “These folks are here about the accident,” she explained.

  A distinguished-looking dark-haired man, casually dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt but with an air of elegance about him, stepped forward, shook Cooper’s hand, and nodded politely to the Fitzgeralds. Nita pegged him as Hispanic, but when he spoke it was with an English accent. He gave his name, a Spanish one.

  “I am Alfonso Ossorio, a close friend of Jackson Pollock, as are Jim and Charlotte Brooks here.” He gestured to his companions, fellow artists who had known Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, for years. “I hosted a privat
e concert at my home in Georgica last night. Jackson was supposed to be there, but he never arrived.” He paused, obviously distressed, then pulled himself together.

  “We are here to help in any way we can. I’ve told Carolyn Williams that I’ll be responsible for the funeral expenses.”

  Cooper thanked him, and introduced Nita and Fitz.

  “These folks saw the accident happen. Pollock’s car cut right in front of them on Fireplace Road and crashed into the woods. I was just getting ready to take their formal statements, so if you and your friends will be good enough to wait upstairs I’ll be with you shortly.”

  “Certainly, Doctor,” said Ossorio as he turned toward the stairs. “Oh, by the way, Jackson told me he’d be bringing two young ladies who were visiting him for the weekend. I understand they were with him in the car, and that one of them was also killed.”

  Cooper was suddenly very interested. “Do you know who they were?”

  “We do,” said Charlotte Brooks. “They came out to our cottage in Montauk late yesterday afternoon. Jackson was acting very strange, didn’t even introduce the girls, just brought them in, sat them in the living room with me, and hustled Jim out the door, said he wanted to see his new work.”

  “I had to remind him that our studios were destroyed by the hurricane two years ago,” said her husband, “so I had nothing out here to show him. All the paintings I’ve done since then are in the city. Charlotte’s too. He had completely forgotten that. He seemed disoriented, sort of lost. I’m sure he’d been drinking, and I try to avoid him when he’s in that condition. But he said he wanted to talk, so we sat on the beach for a while. He didn’t say anything, just stared out over the water, and all of a sudden I saw tears rolling down his cheeks. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there and waited for him to move. Eventually he got up and walked back to the cottage, piled the girls into the car and left.”