By Ed Staskus
Vera Nyberg was in the middle of a zigzagging dream when her cell phone rang. She kept it on the nightstand when sleeping. She let it ring, gathering her senses. Laying on her back she finally pawed for it and held it up over her head so she wouldn’t have to move her head. She saw it was 5:45 in the morning. It was the department. She took the call.
“It’s my day off,” she said. “This better be good.”
“Look out your front window,” the man on the other end of the line said. It was Dave Campbell. He was the boss of the Criminal Investigations Unit. He was her boss.
Her back bedroom window faced onto Crest Ln., which was more-or-less an alley. Her front bedroom, which was empty since she hadn’t done anything to it since moving in except paint it, faced onto Riverside Dr. The street overlooked the Rocky River valley.
Vera got up and trudged to the front bedroom. One of her cats had been sleeping with her. The other one was sleeping in the front bedroom on one of the windowsills. She went to the open window and looked down. The cat yawned, stretched, and jumped away. What she saw was the street blocked in both directions by Ford Explorer Police Interceptors. Red and blue lights were flashing. There were an ambulance, a rescue truck, and a utility truck, as well. The utility truck had probably come from Station No. 1 on Madison Ave, but the other two vehicles, she thought, must have come from Station No. 2, which was around the corner on Detroit Rd. She had slept through whatever was going on.
There are more than 12,000 houses and buildings in Lakewood’s five-square mile footprint on the south shore of Lake Erie. The Fire Department has three stations. The lay of the land means their response times are very good. Vera hadn’t heard any sirens. She had gone out with a friend to the Alley Cat Oyster Bar in the Flats and been the worse for wear when she finally fell into bed. She swam downstream all the night.
She couldn’t tell what the excitement was about. There were no civilian cars in the street. It couldn’t have been an accident. If it had been an accident she wasn’t likely to be involved, anyway. There wasn’t anybody sprawled out and oozing blood on the asphalt. Two police officers were leaning over the safety railing on top of the Jersey barrier that bordered the valley side of the street from where Riverway Ave. dead ended to the corner of West Clifton Blvd. Maybe somebody had fallen into the valley. It was a long way down the cliffside, more than a hundred and fifty feet down.
“Did somebody fall into the valley?”
“Go take a look at what we’ve got and get back to me.”
“All right,” she said, perplexed, She pulled on sweatpants and a light sweater. It was unseasonably cool for the first week of July. She slipped her identification card into her pocket, just in case. She stepped out her front door.
When she walked into the street sunrise was in full swing. A police officer taking field notes looked her up and down.
“Rough night Vera?” he asked.
“It was a very good night,” she said. “It’s a rough morning.”
“What there is to see is right over there,” the police officer said, leading her to the safety railing.
She saw a rope tied to the safety railing. When she looked over the railing she saw a man hanging by the neck at the other end of the rope. He was wearing tan cargo shorts and a Cowboy Carter t-shirt. He wasn’t wearing shoes. There wasn’t much else to see. There wasn’t a sign of life to him.
“The medical examiner should be here in about half an hour,” the police officer said.
“Who called this in?”
“Your neighbor one house over.”
Tim Doyle lived in a cottage-style house with his wife. They shared their house with two shaggy dogs. He was a professional photographer. He wore his graying hair long and tied back in a ponytail. His wife Colleen was a fine gardener and his business manager. Tim was an early riser.
“I went across the street to get some shots of the fog on the river,” he said. “I like the half-light early in the morning. I didn’t notice the hanging man at first. I was standing there at the barrier when a turkey buzzard flew over me.” The birds nested in the cliffside. “They’re ugly birds but beautiful in flight. I got a good shot of him. He dove and was coming back up when I saw the man hanging there. I couldn’t see his face too well, but I think I recognize the t-shirt.”
“We’re going to get him up and wait for the medical examiner,” Vera said. “Are you willing to take a look at him then?”
“I’ll be on my front porch. I need a cup of coffee.”
The hanged man was less than three feet down from the edge, although the rope looked longer. Vera saw it wasn’t taut and wondered why. Two firemen began pulling him up by his armpits but stopped. “He’s stuck on something,” one of them said. Vera saw the back of the man’s belt was caught on a small stump jutting out from the cliffside. One of the firemen carefully stretched down and freed the belt from the stump They pulled him up and laid him down in the street. Vera borrowed a pair of nitrile gloves and began looking the man over. The heels of his bare feet were scuffed and bloody. He was fit but thick around the middle. There was still some color in his face. She thought whatever happened must have happened just before sunrise. There wasn’t anything in his pockets.
The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner arrived in twenty minutes. He was in his late 30s, like her, but lanky and tall. He was six and a half feet tall. Vera was five and a half feet tall. She was always looking up at the underside of his bony chin. His name was Isaac but every time she saw him she thought of Ichabod Crane. She called him Ichabod, but only out of the man’s earshot.
He began by crouching over the hanged man and examining his neck. After a minute he frowned. He looked up at Vera.
“He didn’t die by hanging,” he said. “Ligature marks from hanging typically appear as a groove or furrow encircling the neck, obliquely positioned above the thyroid cartilage and discontinuous at the point of suspension. There are almost no ligature marks and there is no groove.”
Vera got the gist, ignoring the jargon.
“So what did he die of?”
“I’ll show you what I think killed him.”
He reached into his evidence bag and pulled out a pair of tweezers. He pushed the tweezers up one of the man’s nostrils and extracted a crumb of green fabric.
“I think he was smothered, probably by a green shaggy pillow,” he said, probing the other nostril. He was still probing it when the man sneezed. Vera jumped back like she had stepped on a snake and the medical examiner almost fell over.
“What’s going on?” the man groaned.
“He’s not dead,” Vera said.
“Apparently not,” the medical examiner said, recovering his poise and checking the man’s vital signs. He checked his pulse. He checked his respiratory rate. He checked his doll’s eye reflex, moving his head gently back and forth and observing his eye movements.
“He’s definitely alive and seems to be all right, but let’s get him to Fairview as soon as possible,” he said. The Cleveland Clinic Hospital in Fairview Park was five minutes away.
“Wait,” Vera said.
She waved across the street at Tim Doyle, who put his coffee cup down and joined them. He looked at the man.
“That’s Bill,” he said. “He lives in that house there.” He pointed to a large house next to another large house on the opposite corner. Both houses faced the valley. “He lives with a partner. His name is Walter, although I call him Wally. He doesn’t like it, but that’s what I call him. He and Bill haven’t been getting along lately.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve heard the fights in their backyard the past two months. All the neighbors have. Wally’s been in a foul mood lately.”
“Keep him right here,” Vera said to the medical examiner, pointing at Bill. “When you see me coming back put something over his face.”
“He needs to go to Fairview the sooner the better.”
“I’ll be back in five minutes.”
Vera crossed Franklin Ave., walked to the second house down, and went up the front steps. The house had an old-fashioned slate roof. It had recently been spruced up with shiplap siding. An oak tree kept the house shaded. There were two large, glazed pots of scarlet geraniums flanking the front door. One of them was knocked over. Loose flower petals on the ground looked like spots of dried blood. The blinds in every window were drawn. She rang the doorbell. A man dressed like Jimmy Buffett answered the door. There were two suitcases and a carry-on next to him. What she could see of the indoors looked dim and gloomy.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.”
“Where to?” Vera asked.
“The airport.”
“I’m not your Uber,” Vera said, showing him her identification card. “Are you Wally?”
“I’m Walter,” the man said.
“Before you leave for the airport, I wonder if you would come with me for a minute.” It wasn’t a request. A police officer had come with her. He was standing behind her.
“I’m already running late for my flight.”
“This will only take a minute.”
They went down the steps when Vera suddenly said, “I forgot something, be right back.” She made a sign the police officer understood and beelined up the steps and into the living room. In the living room she saw two green shaggy pillows on a sofa. Back outside they walked to where Bill was. The medical examiner had covered him with an evidence sheet. He quickly peeked under the sheet and put a forefinger to his lips, signaling Bill to be quiet.
When they got to the evidence sheet Vera said to Walter, “We discovered a man hanging from the safety rail this morning and we’ve been made aware he lived in the house you also occupy. Would you mind taking a look at the man and see if you can identify him.”
“Is he dead?” Walter asked.
Vera didn’t answer. The medical examiner uncovered the face of the man. Walter looked at him and said, “My God, it’s Bill, what happened to him?”
Bill opened his eyes and said, “You’re what happened to me.”
Walter was dumbstruck. His face went white. His eyes got big as a tree frog’s. “You can’t be alive. I killed you twice.”
“I’m not dead enough for you?” Bill asked. “Why did you do it?”
Walter’s face changed. It got dark. “I loved you for twenty years but you were dumping me for a younger man,” he said. “Where was I going to live? How was I going to live? I took all your money I could get my hands on and I was going somewhere warm and sunny where nobody would ever find me. I hate you. I wish I could kill you again.”
Vera stepped in front of Walter, told him he was being arrested for attempted murder, and began reading him his rights. Halfway through her recital Walter bolted, dodged two police officers, and ran down Riverside Dr. towards West Clifton Blvd.
“Oh, for God’s sake, he’s got the brains of a paper cup,” Vera said. “Go get him before he hurts himself.”
While she waited for Walter to be caught and brought back, the ambulance took Bill to the Cleveland Clinic, the rescue and utility trucks drove off, and all but one of the Police Interceptors left. The medical examiner came over and stood next to Vera, looked down at the top of her head, and said, “Next time make sure they’re dead for real before calling me first thing in the morning.”
“That’s on me,” Vera said.
“And stop calling me Ichabod,” he said. “I use bone saws on headless horsemen, not the other way around.”
Image by Joan Miro.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus
“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books
Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It soon gets personal.
A Crying of Lot 49 Publication
Made in Cleveland 