The Clayton Chronicles

Chapter One-3

He parked the car in front of the Tremains' driveway, got out and opened the door on Danny's side. He walked along with Danny until both met the kid's mom and then commended Mrs. Tremain for having raised such a well-behaved kid, so self-conscious of his civil duties.

Clay left it at that and returned to the police cruiser without any further elaboration; he'd let Danny sort that out on his own. He had a more important meeting to keep with Leonard Hamilton, the local coroner examiner.

While he drove away, Clayton briefly glanced at the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of Danny and his mom, silently standing in front of their driveway. There was a startled and puzzled look on the lady's face.

* * *

Ten minutes later, Sheriff Clayton Harris was back in the knot's end of Elm Street and the semi-industrial area it represented. Hector Lozano's junkyard was exactly as he had left it; locked up and with an air of forlorn abandon. Leonard Hamilton's black hearse was parked in front.

Leo was a short and pudgy man with closely cropped curly hair, dark as deep night, who wore thin wire spectacles. He complemented his chin with a finely groomed padlock goatee. He was casually dressed, with a fresh short-sleeved cotton shirt and jeans, looking as if he was more ready to play a hand of cribbage than to perform the very grim duty he was about to do. And sneakers; Leo always favored his blessed sneakers. He was patiently sitting on top of his black hearse's hood smoking that smelly pipe of his. Herman Marcus, a scrawny and tall young man barely out of his teens, also accompanied him.

Herman was a high school dropout and his father, the renowned Dr. John Marcus, had decided that it would do the lad good to face some of life's hardships, since the young man seemed so disinterested in improving his school grades. So Dr. Marcus had asked Leonard Hamilton to take the kid under his wing. And since Leo was desperate to have an assistant, he accepted Herman under his tutelage.

Clayton got out of his police cruiser and approached the man.

“Hello, Clayton,” the chubby man said from around the stem of his pipe.

“Hello, Leo.”

“What have you got for me this fine afternoon, my dear fellow?” Leonard said with a faint trace of irony permeating his voice. He was a good-natured man, always on the brink of telling a joke. Clayton had never seen this jolly guy in a downcast or blue mood, as far as he could remember. To him, Leonard Hamilton had that bent look of a kid ready to pull a prank or two the moment you took your eyes away.

Clay nodded to the farthest end of Lozano's Junkyard chain link fence. “It's in the small stream that runs along the greenbelt, Leo,” he said.

Leonard made a silent nod, suddenly gaining a deadly serious and business-like attitude that Clay felt was terribly out of character. Thankfully, this jovial fellow was very professional in his day job as a coroner. I wish all my deputies were the same, the sheriff thought. Leonard Hamilton jumped off his car's hood, went to its back door and opened it.

From the car's back he pulled out two heavy rubber work boots, a doctor's black bag, a two-man stretcher and a body bag. Meanwhile, the coroner chatted amiably.

“You know, Clay,” he said while he sat on the rear bumper of the hearse. The vehicle's rear end lowered noticeably. Sheriff Harris watched while Leo removed his sneakers and replaced them with the rubber boots. “When your deputy called me, I was on my way to Halloway's Eat-Shack—about to take the monthly water samples that the law says is my obligation. As you're aware, it'd be a great personal pleasure for me to finally close down that scumbag diner spot, so I hope you have something very good for me—something that makes that long-time expected joy pale by comparison.”

Clayton grinned, oh, ever so slightly. “It is, Leo. It certainly is.”

* * *

Both adult males retraced the same road the kid and the sheriff had walked earlier that day. The afternoon's heat had grown more oppressive and Clayton Harris was more than relieved to finally reach the shady greenbelt. Rivulets of sweat were running down his temples. The young Herman Marcus, who was stumbling along encumbered with the stretcher, the body bag and Leo's handbag, closely followed them.

Amazingly, considering his sizeable bulk, Leonard Hamilton waded through the small brook, which was little more than a feeble stream this late in the summer. In a couple of weeks it'll be dry as a bone, for sure, Harris thought. The normally crystal clear current became obliterated in the spots where Leonard's rubber boots hit squarely, sinking deep, sloshing and creating small muddy puddles as the man advanced along the stream.

Finally, they reached the area where Sheriff Clayton had seen the body of the unknown stranger. For some strange reason of his own, Clay felt a certain relief in finding the corpse in the same position he had left it. Silly me, he thought. What did you expect? That Mr. John Doe may have felt a bit peckish and decided to walk away to have a bite at Betsy's Luncheon?

And yet still…

Leonard crouched by the body and asked young Marcus for his medical bag. He opened it, extracted two elbow-long black latex gloves and donned them. Clayton took a furtive peek into the bag and noticed a few odds and ends inside it. He half expected to have seen the familiar sight of a stethoscope, but that was the kind of equipment that definitely wasn't required in Hamilton's specialty branch. What he saw inside was a battered Polaroid camera, a carefully folded black leather apron, a vast array of tweezers, both small and big, a magnifying glass and some whatnots he didn't recognize.

The coroner stared long at the corpse's head, his brows clouding a little, and Clayton was immediately aware of what Leo was doing: he was playing 'Place the Face', exactly as he had done less than half an hour ago. Then Leonard pulled out the magnifying glass and started to thoroughly examine the body with the lens, without touching it at all.

The chubby man spent nearly ten minutes in this fashion, occasionally plucking small bits of threads, hair and grass off the body with a set of tweezers, and placing them in small plastic bags. Meanwhile, Clay cast a quick look at young Marcus, who was still holding the stretcher upright. The young man looked bored. At last, Leo finished his initial inspection and replaced the sealed plastic bags and the tweezers back in the doctor's bag. There was a satisfied and smug expression on his face. He then pulled out the old Polaroid camera and took a few snapshots of the body. He handed the developing photos to the Marcus kid and ordered him to rub on them that smelly gunk the Polaroid company provided to stop the pictures from becoming overdeveloped and curled up.

“Ok, now the basics of documenting the body's position are done,” Leo said. “Come here when you're finished rubbing that stuff and help me roll this dude over, Herman.”

As soon as Herman finished the task at hand, he drew closer to the cadaver. There was a grimace of disgust on the young man's features, Clayton noticed. He also noticed a small detail on the dead guy's neck was missing, as both men turned him over after Leo had unclasped the belt of the deceased gentleman's pants, but he didn't mention it. He really didn't want to make a fool of himself in front of the local coroner.

Leo pulled the man's pants and undies down, exposing the pale and dead buttocks. The coroner frowned at this morbid sight and then after a while he rummaged through the contents of his bag and extracted a red alcohol thermometer. Young Marcus tried to avert his eyes, knowing what was coming next.

Leonard Hamilton inserted the thermometer into the dead guy's anus. “Five or six minutes is more than enough to determine the body's temperature—that's the basic charm of using alky thermometers,” Leo said, rising to his feet. While they waited, he looked over the snapshots he had taken a few minutes earlier. There was a look of approval in his eyes. “You did a good job this time, Herman,” he added, appraising the resulting images. “The last time you applied the stop solution too early.”

Young Herman didn't react at all to the praise; he truly didn't enjoy this job. Clayton smiled inwardly, knowing that he was in the presence of a young man that would either rejoin high school next year, doubling his efforts to excel in his studies, or find a road out of town and away from his overbearing father.

While he waited the necessary five or six minutes, Leonard dedicated himself to telling the shocking story of a confused nurse who had mixed a batch of rectal and oral thermometers, but he seemed fated to botch the punchline.

After the specified time interval was past, Leonard leaned over to pull out the thermometer. It made a funny sounding poit! sound when it exited. Leo stared at it intently and twisted his mouth in disappointment.

“Too bad we're not indoors for the notion to apply,” he said, glancing at the surrounding bushes and ferns, “but our stranger here is at room temperature.”

He sighed. “I hoped to determine his time of death by calculating it, based on the temperature differential, but seems our fellow here has been lying in this place for more than forty-eight hours. I guess the histological decay exam after I get some tissue samples is still in order.”

Leo signaled Herman to come closer and the boy spread the body bag next to the corpse. Leo grabbed the dead man's body by its shoulders while Herman took hold of both feet. They placed the body inside the black leather bag. While young Herman was busy zipping it up and rounding up all the equipment that had been strewn around the examination area, Harris took Leonard aside to a spot where the kid couldn't overhear them.

“That guy seems familiar to me, Leo,” the sheriff said. “But for the life of me I can't place that face. Did you?”

“Yeah, it took me a while but I finally recognized the fellow.”

Sheriff Harris's head c****d in a questioning pose.

“He's Harold Callahan's father,” Leo explained, “Lawrence Callahan. Disagreeable fellow—a nasty summufabitch if you care to ask me. There were reports of wife beating and child abuse.” Here the coroner paused, thinking about the most tactful way—if any—to disclose what followed. “Probably there was a buggering case lurking beneath that. You failed to locate that face only because all that happened long ago before your time, Sheriff. Almost twenty years ago—your predecessor, Irving Wallace, was the one responsible for driving that nasty scumbag out of town.”

Clay nodded, now recalling the incident. Of course, at the time he had been eighteen, and was more interested in graduating and scoring with cheerleaders than the dubious local background history.

“I also noted your frown when you examined that man's butt and hips, Leo,” Clay said in a confidential tone, casting a furtive glance at Herman, who was almost finished with arranging the body bag and its content over the carrying stretcher. “Lemme guess, no livid spots at the lower parts of the body. There ought to be a big spread of congealed blood all along the side of that body, where it has lain for the past two days or so—shouldn't there?”

Leonard Hamilton cast him a sharp glance. Then, the usually jolly chubby man took a grave tone that Sheriff Harris didn't like at all.