West of the Rotunda

I don’t learn well about myself.  Do you?

Memorization.  Lists of things, formulas, I find I can commit lots of these things to memory if I can give them some meaning, some relationship to my life.  But my own mistakes and shortcomings, maybe they are forever hidden.  They just keep reemerging into my flawed consciousness like a hammer blow to a thumb.

 For instance, I write this story in the City Library at San Luis Obispo in California, far from my Idaho home and duties.  My daughter is in a soccer camp for four days.  I drove her down here the 1500 miles and now have these 4 days to kill while she sharpens her football skills. 

What to do?  No friends to stay with.  Do I rent a hotel room?  It’s expensive.  I have a sleeping bag…  Why not just sleep out on the ground tonight?  Save some money.  Besides it will be fun… 

Yeah.  Dirt, stiff joints…  Fun.  But I am by nature and by many years of upbringing a cheapskate. I don’t know if that will ever change.

We have our natures, our personal shortcomings. These shouldn’t afflict us in public service. But they can.

But this story should not be about me. 

It’s about a dead old man in his basement.  It was one of the early years I had doing this coroner job.  It was still very perplexing, and I felt very alone.  No one to call for advice.  Further, I was working with a sheriff that hated me and wanted me to look bad so he could get his friend elected coroner. This may all sound like excuses to you, but it helps me to make sense of my thinking at the time, since, looking back now, the decisions seem so wrong. And then, there was the dead guy.

The call came on a late fall evening at a reasonable hour, maybe seven o’clock.  The dispatcher told me of a dead body found in a home in Potlatch. The deputy was requesting me to come to the scene.  I called the deputy at the deceased’s home phone.  It’s always interesting how they will answer.  “Mr. so-and-so’s residence,” is often it since they don’t want to give away his death to a casual or mistaken caller.  They are standing there with a dead body in a delicate situation, etiquette– wise.  If they pick up a ringing phone and answer with their own name or rank, “Deputy Jack M. Hoff” the caller may wonder what the sheriff’s deputy is doing there.  No, they will wonder. They may just be polite enough not to ask. 

The deputy doesn’t want to go telling who ever might happen to call about the death, you know, all those messy questions.  Best to let that come out in an official manner. 

But they want me to call them at the residence over a land- line since the sheriff radios get picked up on scanners and they know people are listening in. The nice dispatch lady gave me the home landline number.

The deputy I’m calling answered this time, “Uh, hello” after the fourth ring.  He sounded a bit nervous.  I asked if this is the residence of Mr. Thompson.  I’m letting him know he could’ve answered the phone this way. But this question seems to puzzle him a bit, no answer right away. I figure he’s confused about the tense.  Is versus was.  I can hear his confusion. Kind of a stammer-pause, awkward sort of thing, like you hear in class when the kid doesn’t know how to get past the teacher.  So, I interrupt,” Is this deputy Smith?  This is the coroner.”

“Oh, Hi,” he says.  So, I’m getting the picture of a low-watt appliance here.  I ask the setting, where the body is, any sign of a struggle.  Can’t we just call it natural and save me the drive to the small town?  But he says, “Doc, I think you better come out here.”

“So, you think there might have been a crime?”

“Well, I don’t think so,” he offers.

I still don’t want to make the drive.  “So why don’t we say he died of a heart attack and have the funeral home pick him up?”

“I really think you ought to come out here.”

“Has the Sheriff assigned any detectives?”

“No.”

I give him a big sigh, “Oh, all right.  I’ll be 30 minutes or so to get there.  Give me the directions…”

No traffic, no snow, but I still drive by it two times before I find the house.  No real house

numbers or mailboxes in his little old mill town. 

The sheriff’s deputy car is down in the lower part of the driveway, and this is my clue on

the second pass. It wasn’t easy to see from the road and I missed it the first time around. 

I knock on the front door and a younger man opens it.  The deputy is standing in the living

room behind him. 

They want me to go right down to the basement and look at the body. 

I get them to slow down a bit and set the scene for me. 

The young man is the neighbor.  He checks on the elderly Mr. Thompson every day or so. 

The neighbor saw him Saturday but didn’t check on him Sunday.  Weekend and all and he

took his kids hunting, a family activity in this part of the state.

After work tonight he came over to check on him. Today’s paper was still on the front

porch from this morning but not the Sunday one.  The door was locked like usual, but he

had a key and let himself in as usual. 

It was common for the front door to be locked. 

The neighbor also picked up the mail and the paper and brought them in dropping them all

in an easy chair in the living room on the way into the kitchen. 

As he tells this he’s a little agitated and wants me to go look at the body right away.  I need

to get him to concentrate so he tells me all the details in order, carefully. 

I ask about the old man’s habits. 

The neighbor, a short, lumberjack- dressed guy in a clean flannel shirt and clean work

pants and Romeo slippers obviously showered after work before coming over. He seems

bright and observant but sort of pressured. He obviously thinks the answer is in the

basement, what’s with all these questions?

However, he answers the best he could.

 “Oh, he was real regular, nothing special.”  It sounds like there’s no family nearby, he had a wife, but she died quite a while ago. 

Had he seemed despondent, sad?  Was he in poor health?  Any changes in his usual ways? 

Did he drink?

 The neighbor, frowning, shakes his head.  He’s paying good attention.  But he has no clues

for me.  And I can tell he’s feeling bad about not being able to help me.

So, I look at the little table in the kitchen.  The whole kitchen is just neat as a pin.  Coffee cup rinsed and tipped up in the strainer.  Oatmeal bowl rinsed and tipped next to cup and saucer.  Spoon standing up.  At his place was a lined stationery pad with four lines of pencil verse, oddly sad with the general melancholy of the Scots.

            A time to remember is now past

            my heart once younger now breaks

            the love of mine heart did not last

            my soul wanders wherever the Lord takes.

I offer a wry smile.  “Look at this”, I note to the neighbor.  “It looks almost like a suicide note.”  The neighbor stands over it.   He’s frowning at the verse.  I figure he finds it too dense, but he says, “Nah Doc, he was always writing stuff like that.  Look.” 

And he points to the wall above the little table. Sure enough, similar four-, six- or eight-line verses are torn from the same lined pad and scotch taped to the wall.  They all seem as melancholy and vague.  And the yellow of the tape lets you know some of them are not recent.  Some more are on the kitchen cabinets. Regular Robbie Burns fan, I guess.

Dead end, so to speak, the suicide note idea.

They want to rush me down the stairs, but I go to the old man’s bathroom first.  Regular stuff, some high blood pressure medications, no antidepressants. No pain medications.  Nothing exciting.  I did get the name of his doctor. I’ll give him a call in the morning and review the medical record.

Now it’s time to go down the stairs.

The basement is well lit and neat like the rest of the house.  Laundry in one section with a washer and dryer.  There was a load in the washer, clean but wet.  Nothing in the dryer.  There was a plastic clothes basket overturned at the bottom of the stairs and there were dry, clean clothes, some folded, strewn down the steps and onto the cement floor.  The deceased was lying on his side near the center of the room.  In the center of the basement was a small wood stove backed to a brick flue. It was cool.

The dead man was cool and stiff, probably dead now at least a day, maybe a day and a half.  The cement floor was cool.  He had fixed, full body rigor, but the fingers were loosening.  The lividity was fixed.  It showed no movement of the body since death. This put his death about Sunday morning, after breakfast but before afternoon. 

The clean, worn Levi’s he wore were unbuckled and unzipped and pulled down to mid-thigh.  He was lying on his left side with his left arm underneath him.  The right arm was out, extended.  His underwear were still up and urine-soaked.  But his forehead was injured.  There was a significant pre-morbid contusion, laceration with dried blood going down the nose and dried blood on the forehead.  Some was on his lips and on the teeth.  There were no injuries to his mouth.

Geez

I looked up at the neighbor.  He was pretty nervous.  “You got anything further here?”  I asked him.  He shakes his head and I look at the deputy.  I ask him if he needs anything from him.  Then I send him off home.  I turned to the deputy. 

“Has a detective been called?”

“Um, no sir.”

“Can you call one?”

He shook his head. “I suggested that earlier to dispatch and the sheriff said to call you.”

I looked down at the cement floor next to the dead body and shook my head. So, this is how it is going to play, no cooperation.

I try to work with what I’ve got. “What do you think happened?” I ask the deputy. I do this, trying to get folks to rise to the situation.

“I’m not sure.”

So, I go on. “If you look at these clothes all over the floor here it looks like he dragged himself around some.  These clothes kinda hooked on him and got pulled this direction.  You take any pictures of this?”  The deputy shakes his head.  “Nope Doc.  I’m no detective.”

Usually, the sheriff’s office does these investigations since their budget is a thousand times mine. Plus, they have all the camera equipment and record keeping.

But this guy and me aren’t getting along. I’m pondering what to do as I’m looking down at the smooth cement floor and I notice a blood spatter. 

There are regular spatters, about 3 inches in diameter in the line I think he drug himself around.  The blood marks are like he’s hitting his forehead against the floor as he tries to drag himself forward.  There are splatters outward from the circular smear, like he hit his head downward with pretty good force.  Hard enough to split the skin and splatter droplets of blood a foot or two outwards. 

He’s kinda made a circle in the floor starting near the base of the stairs and coming clockwise around the central wood stove.  He’s now lying facing the washer and dryer across from the foot of the steps.  He’s perpendicular to the steps, a bit to the right of them and a little behind where they came into the room. 

At the landing on the stairs a 2×4 railing had pulled loose. We’d missed this on the first trip down the stairs.  Then the clothes are scattered down the steps from the landing to the floor.  There is no blood at the bottom of the stairs. It’s just in the last three to 4 ft. of what I presume was his path dragging himself across the floor.

Foul play?  Did somebody shove him down the stairs in a struggle, then pound his head on the floor?  Why the pants down?  No evidence of sexual assault.

I stood looking at this for a long time with the deputy watching me.  I wasn’t sure whether to ask him for help or tell him to go away.  Finally, the way I put it together was that the old man had a stroke, or broken hip, or some sudden injury on the landing.  He’d stumbled and fell to the basement floor, letting the clean folded clothes in the basket go flying.  As he falls to the basement floor, he can’t get himself up.  He can’t arise because of either the hip fracture or paralyzing stroke, which I am favoring because of the difficulty pulling down the pants.  As the bleeding in his brain worsens and he realizes he will not be getting up the stairs to call for help he tries to end himself, do himself in with the only tool at hand, a hard concrete floor.  He also realizes he needs to urinate but cannot do this with one hand.  He cannot fully get his pants down.  Imagine the shame and indignity for this neat, tidy, poetic man.

 Or at least so I put it together.  I ran the scenario by the deputy.  He nodded about wasn’t enthusiastic.

“You going to get an autopsy?”  He asks.  They always want an autopsy.

“I’ll tell you what….”  I’m now arguing with my cheapskate self and the Sheriff who is not in the room. 

The deputy just wants an answer to a very interesting question.  Kind of like the folks who say, “What does this pain in my stomach mean, Doc?”  A pain they know well but haven’t the context in which to place it. No meaning to a memorized fact. I struggle with the range of diagnostic tests available.  The tests have a quite fallible ability to answer the question of the pain. Expensive, uncomfortable, imperfect tests.  And I also ponder the likelihood of this pain making any difference in the long run to this poor suffering student’s mortality or morbidity.  In other words, I think of it in terms of how to best spend their resources to answer this question.  I usually frame my answer in these cases based on my impression of whether this pain is minor, self-limiting, like most pains we suffer are, or if it is related to a bigger more problematic situation needing intervention.  This is also how I am thinking about the expensive autopsy test we are considering, me and Mr. Deputy on the cement floor next to Mr. Thompson now a day and a half dead.

Plus, I consider I am over budget for autopsies this year.

I decide I would try to take a shortcut and do an x-ray of the hip in the morning. Maybe I could save the taxpayers a couple thousand dollars.  If the x-ray is positive, then a broken hip led to his death.  I’m trying to pinch the taxpayers’ pennies.  Nothing is missing from the house, no money, no goods, and there was no forced entry.  It does not look like there was a struggle, at least I don’t think so.  So, the manner of death is most likely “natural” or at the worst accidental.  Why all the expense?

But the x-ray was negative: no broken hip.

His doc had nothing to help me. Just a little high blood pressure in a guy in his late seventies who hated doctors. My kind of patient.

By morning, even with the negative x-ray I managed to convince myself I could call it a stroke. I signed off the manner of death as natural, cause of death stroke.

Then, a year later, in the same little community, an elderly woman disappears.  There is a new sheriff now.  The careful detective’s investigation finds blood on the walls of her bedroom (only traces) and her skull is found two years later.  Her cause of death was a homicide. No forced entry. Nothing missing from her home except her body. And this has not been solved to this day. So now, at this advanced stage of my career, after years of pondering and reflection, I order more autopsies. I have learned a little bit about my skin flint self, and I have made some adjustments.

But writing this story has taken a long time, and I need to get going.  I’ve decided to get a campground spot.  I’ll sleep in the chill and the fog on the hard ground in my inadequate sleeping bag.  Stiff bones in the morning.

Cause of death: Stroke

Manner of death: Natural

For some reason I passed up the family invitation to the fireworks.  I usually love fireworks, but my hip was real sore, and I didn’t want the pain of sitting on a grassy hill despite the pleasure of explosions and showers of color.  So, I stayed home, and they were all gone.  The house was empty except for me and computer solitaire when this coroner call came.  Dispatch gave me the address and name and requested me to come to the scene.  The dispatcher wouldn’t elaborate but it sounded like there may be some question about the manner of death.

I recognized the guy’s name and checked the medical record.  I had admitted him to the hospital just a month earlier for a partner of mine. He had painless jaundice and unexplained weight loss.  Both my partner and I, when discussing it were sure he had pancreatic cancer. These are the hallmark symptoms taught in medical school. The abdominal CT had supported this with their usual vague description of a mass in the head of the pancreas. It looked like they had tried to obtain a biopsy, tissue diagnosis.  You cannot treat without a tissue diagnosis. 

This is one of the basic rules of medicine.  We cannot treat until we know exactly what we are treating. 

I recall an incident when that was almost accidental, but quite fortuitous.  I’m now wandering off the coroner work into the doctor work. But you should have figured out by now, that’s just how it was.

One pre-Christmas December I was called to see a man who came to the emergency room with a first-time seizure.  His CT scan was up on the reading room boxes in the radiology department when I got to the hospital. The radiologist in his darkened room gloomily pointed to the mass in the brain and said, “Most likely glioblastoma, could be an astrocytoma,” both brain cancers.  Then he looked at me and said, “Looks like a young man.  Not good news you’ll be giving him this Christmas.”  As he was packing up the films in their large manila envelope he added as an aside “It could be an abscess I suppose but I doubt it.”  Then he headed out to his $45,000 car.  He had just earned more in 10 minutes of reading that film than I would in the next two hours with this family. 

I’ve never given this news to a man of his age.  I didn’t know him. I’d met his wife and young children in the office for sports physicals or their colds and sprains.  They were a friendly and loving family, not unlike my own.  As I climbed the stairs to the third floor of our small hospital I practiced the words, the speech that I would need to give. 

But you really can’t practice. You just still your heart and empty your mind.  You try for stillness and calm in the face of the unknown.  The immense and deep unknown of death we all will face if we only pause to realize.

I entered the room where the wife sat quietly in a chair next to his bed.  He was groggy from the seizure medication he’d been given in the ER.  He looked not much older than me.  I introduced myself and then asked them to tell the story of the seizure.  The family was getting ready to go to a Christmas party when he felt the seizure start.  His right arm jerked and stiffened uncontrollably then it marched to his leg and then generalized to his whole body.  He remembered only a little of this, so his wife told most of the story softly and calmly. 

It was a classic description of what I had learned in medical school as a Jacksonian seizure.  This is usually indicative of a brain lesion, something that didn’t belong, a brain lesion like we had seen on his CT scan, the horrible growth that had been glowing in the radiologist’s darkened room.  I did a cursory physical examination and then softly closed the door to the hall.

“I’ve spoken with the radiologist about your CT scan.”  I remembered looking at his face.  He was calm, open and waiting, listening.  I also looked at his wife’s darkened face in the corner.  “There is a mass in your brain.  This is what has caused her seizure.  The radiologist feels it is most likely a brain tumor.”

At this point I paused.  He was looking at me with his head on the pillow.  “Well, I guess that’s it then, isn’t it?”  He said.  I looked to his wife.  I don’t know what my face said, but hers was melting into shock, grief, despair, anguish.  Tears rolled.  Sobs shook.  His face was stolid and still.  She got up and walked over to him to hold his head. She buried her tears in his shoulder and sobbed.  He looked up at me.  “I guess that’s it, huh?”  He repeated.

I spoke to him of a tissue diagnosis.  One always wants to know for certain I said. We would arrange for consultation, a neurosurgical evaluation for their recommendations. I expected they would recommend surgery, at least a biopsy. “But that’s pretty messy isn’t it?  I don’t know as I’d want all that.”  He said.

I cautioned against fatalism.  “There is the possibility of an abscess, a lingering small area of infection.  Or some other cause possibly.  But yes, it does look like a malignancy, cancer, at this point.”

We arranged for the consultation.  The family dealt with the news.  And two weeks later, in our regional hospital the surgeons prepared to cut out his brain cancer, saving as much of the important tissue as they could for this active vital husband, father and professor. 

But they found that it was an abscess.  It was a pocket of infection that was drained and after weeks and months of IV antibiotics he recovered fully.  So, we always, whenever possible, press for a tissue diagnosis.

Why am I digressing into these doctor stories? Why can’t I just stick to the coroner story line? My mind just blends them. It was the work I did.

I remembered another case that didn’t go so smoothly. An elderly woman with a hysterectomy years before came to me with episodes of vaginal bleeding. She was overweight. On pelvic examination I could feel no mass or see a source for the bleeding, but imaging studies showed a growth in her pelvis suggestive of a malignancy. The surgeon and I suspected an ovarian cancer that had infiltrated the vagina as the cause for intermittent vaginal bleeding. He opened her abdomen to prove the diagnosis. As he looked around, he saw abnormal tissue growths everywhere. He assumed it was cancer and did extensive dissection. Specimens were sent to pathology. The extensive surgery required a week in the ICU and months of healing for recovery. The pathology report four days after the surgery described the tissue as endometriosis.

This is uterine tissue that has migrated out of the uterus and is growing in other parts of the abdomen. She had been on post menopausal estrogen replacement. All we had to do was stop her hormones and the endometrial tissue would dissolve. It did. But a timely tissue diagnosis during the surgery would have saved her from the four-hour operation and prolonged recovery. We don’t always get it right.

But this elderly dead man that is not the fireworks had gone to a specialist and the procedure for the diagnosis had been difficult and fruitless.  He had suffered two endoscopies and an attempted needle biopsy through his abdomen.  Neither could obtain tissue to prove the diagnosis.

The pancreas can be hard to reach.

However, given his condition and presumed diagnosis treatment had been started.  Chemotherapy poisons had begun, and their chemical insults were affecting him even more than the undiagnosed illness. 

He was an elderly bachelor and had lived at home, alone by himself outside of town. But now the effects of the chemotherapy had required him to be in a nursing home for a few days stretching into weeks because of his nausea and weakness. 

But he was still his own man.  He walked the halls and with permission of his physician went out of the care center on passes in his old pickup.  And now he was dead at his home 10 miles out of town. And I was going to look at him.

When I drove out there the sky was darkening. You could see the occasional skyrocket from the private backyard, illegal celebrations of this holiday. Impatient children cannot wait for the late darkness in these northern latitudes at this time of year.

There were two sheriffs’ cars in the driveway. The sheriff himself came up to me in the gravel. I didn’t usually run into him on these calls. He must have taken the holiday shift this year. “He’s out here in the back,” he said leading the way.  I followed and told him I knew the man and some of his medical history.

“Is it a suicide?”  I asked.

“Well, it looks like it, gunshot wound to the head, but we haven’t found the weapon.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“Well, maybe.  They say he was a man of few words and there’s a note by the front door that says Jimmy, that’s his nephew, is to get his .44 caliber pistol.  He has a lot of guns and I guess he wanted to make sure that this kid got that specific one.  I guess it was the kid’s favorite or something.”  He was standing over the crumpled body of the old man.  It lay parallel to the back concrete porch.  There was a sliding glass basement door behind us. The hills and timber rose to the north.  A barn stood 100 yards off to the east.  There was still some glow, but the sky was darkening by the minute; near time for the fireworks show to start.

“No weapon huh?”  I asked.  There was tall grass from the concrete porch down to a seasonal creek behind the house.  I assumed they’d looked hard before calling me.

“Not that we could find, but we haven’t moved his body yet.  We were waiting for you.” 

I stood over the head.  Entrance wound above the right temple; exit wound must be down below. He was lying on his left side facing north, his back to the house.  His cap and glasses were off in the tall grass a couple yards to the east.  I picked up the hat. There was a bullet hole on the left side of the crown.  “There’s your exit wound.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s roll him over.”  I checked and he was cool with a little rigor.  “Who last saw him?”

“A neighbor drove by and saw him in the yard around one o’clock. He checked out of the care center this morning on a pass. His son came out and found him here about five o’clock.  That’s when we got the call.”

I bent to pull on his downside arm and roll him onto his back. He was a small, withered old man. My eyes moved over him, and I saw the revolver. It lay down by his ankles in the darkening wet grass.  The deputy and sheriff photographed and inspected the weapon.  38 caliber Smith & Wesson.  Two shells, both spent.

“That’s typical, one test shot then the real one.”

With him on his back we could see the exit wound.  It was large and gaping on the left side of his skull.  Instant. 

We three, the sheriff, the deputy and I, stood over the body and tried to make the scene come back together.  His cap and glasses had flown off to the east, but his right hand had been to his temple.  Was he facing the house?  How had he stood as he shot himself?  These sorts of questions were going through our heads.  We were trying to get an answer to the last minute of this man’s life, looking for the final diagnosis.  It made no sense that this man would die looking into his basement windows with those beautiful rolling hills calling for his last attention.

“Look, if he stood here and was looking out at the barn and the trees, maybe a little to the east and shot with his right hand, the hat would come off over there where it landed. Then he must have spun almost all the way around before he fell down.”

“Yeah,” the sheriff said.  “That must have been it.  I don’t think he was looking at the house.  He must have been facing northeast, up that way; looking at the hills, the trees, and the barn.  And then the gun fell right to his feet.  And he spun around as he fell.”  We were trying to come up with an understanding, even though we knew it didn’t really matter; making out all the details, so that it would make sense. There was nothing here we could treat, maybe, except ourselves.

“Can’t blame him really, what he’s gone through.  What he’s facing.”

“No.”  The sheriff, the deputy, and I looked at the ground.  It seemed we understood the cause.  We were just doing our little study of the details to make our jobs more meaningful.  Put some order or sense to what we knew.

I drove home wondering if we made any difference. There were more skyrockets in the blackened sky.

Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head

Manner of death: suicide

No dead bodies in this story. Though I felt like one at times. But I’m not dead yet.

I got a call, a message to the clinic where I was a daily, struggling family doctor in our small town. The prosecuting attorney wants me to come visit him.

I quickly racked my brain about my recent coroner cases. None I thought might be under consideration for prosecution. Had I missed something? Big gulp. Maybe a big oops here. I let his office know I’d be up to visit this late afternoon, after my last patient.

The courthouse is up on a tall hill overlooking our town. It has 1970’s architecture, so it is low, not tall and imposing. But there is the hill.

Close to the end of the day for county workers, so there was a spot in the parking lot. I slid the rusty Hilux in between a couple 4WD pickups.

The Prosecuting Attorney’s office is on the main floor. The secretary asked me to wait so I sat down. It was past five, so she must be getting overtime, I thought. Or maybe she did four tens. Maybe they didn’t come in until 9AM so they weren’t due to be off the clock. My mind jumps around like this when I’m nervous.

There was a picture of a barn on the wall.

James came out to get me. Big smile and handshake. He was in his second term in this elected position. I had just been appointed three years back. Both he and I would be on the ballot this coming fall. We all need to know our places. He brought me into his office, and I sat down. So did he. Behind the big desk.

There was some chit chat, then he got down to it. “I’m your attorney. As a county elected official, I represent your interests. So, I need to speak with you about your job as coroner and its obligations, your duties.”

“Yes?” Finally. Somebody is going to explain just what the heck I should be doing. I felt some relief.

He adopted a lecturing tone that seemed pretty natural for him. “Idaho code requires that you cooperate with other investigating agencies as part of your duties.”

Maybe I rolled my eyes. I hope I didn’t. I could see where this was headed. “I haven’t been cooperative?”

James looked down and shifted his elbows onto the desk. His voice was now softer. “I have heard from our sheriff that you aren’t always eager to investigate deaths that are brought to your attention.” Here he paused.

“If this is about his idiotic call to me about the landslide down in Juliaetta, yeah, that was bullshit. He calls me out with no information, no instructions to bypass roadblocks, and then when I get down there, there are no dead bodies, nothing to investigate. He called me out on a late Sunday evening on a wild goose chase. What part of me going to that bullshit scene does he call noncooperative?”

James shifted a bit.

“Or is there some other dereliction I have committed? If you ask me, he’s the one not cooperating. He isn’t sending detectives to scenes of unexplained deaths. Did he mention the one out past Bovill? Look, he’s got the budget. He’s got the personnel and the resources to investigate and document, keep evidence. He’s the one should be leading on these, not me. I got squat.”

James looked me in the eye. “This is all news to me. He said you weren’t cooperating, so I said I’d speak with you.”

I just shook my head. Not cooperating.

James did the big sigh and spread his hands wide. “I know you are busy. You run your practice and all. But maybe this would be better if you and him had a talk. Make some time and you sit down with him. It is indeed in the Idaho law that you should cooperate in your investigations. But relationships take time.” He beamed, the peacemaker.

I reflected. My spat with our sheriff down on the Potlatch River blow-out was the only time I had any direct contact with our fellow elected officer. The people put us here. “You’re probably right. I’ll meet with him.”

James beamed. “It would be best that way, since you outrank him and all.”

“What do you mean?”

James chuckled. “I guess you don’t read all the statutes about your duties. You are the only one who can arrest the sheriff. And if for some reason he is incapacitated, absconds, or is arrested, you become the acting sheriff.” He was goddam grinning at me.

“No way.”

“Yes way. It’s the law.”

He chatted me out. With his hand on my shoulder he offered, “I’ll have my clerk look up the sections of Idaho Code that pertain to your office and duties. You should be familiar with these statutes. We’ll get those to you. This will save you all the searching around.” He almost winked.

Did he know there was some ambiguity here? Did he know the depth of my ignorance? Probably both. I chatted on out. I had met the prosecuting attorney and left feeling a fool. But that is my nature. The Hilux awaited.

The folder of photocopied Idaho Code came to me in a couple days. I read the Articles and Sections and Chapters. Could they possibly make it more confusing? From my reading it seems nobody in an elected position wants me, the county coroner, to know how I’m supposed to do my job, at least in the twisted, arcane laws they write.

Maybe they think I should know my responsibilities since the people elected me. If so, I’m beginning to lose some faith in our democratic institutions, from the perspective of an appointed county coroner who has now learned I can arrest the sheriff. But the voters will decide soon. Maybe I am unfit. Would they know?

In the meantime, I asked to meet with our sheriff. I had said I would, so I did. It took some back and forth and I had to cancel a couple patient appointments, money out of my pocket. He’s on the taxpayer’s dime. But I guess he was pretty busy. He fit me in.

The sheriff’s office is in same the county courthouse as the prosecutors. I knew the place well, since I was also the doctor for the jail, which was in the basement below the courtrooms and the sheriff’s office. I had been there many times. Getting that job is another story. I’m sure our sheriff knew this since the county sent me a meager monthly check for my oversight. I was cheap. Maybe he saw that as a weakness. I’m jumping around in my mind as I nervously wait.

 I sat in the reception area as requested by the uniformed female deputy. She was attractive. My thoughts again bounced around to too many places as I took my seat. No magazines, some wanted posters on the far wall, it was before smart phones, so I just sat there and looked around. A few desks with just the pretty deputy right here in front of me. And then the door to the sheriff’s office behind. Walls covered with metal file drawers on all sides. Back in the far southern corner was a door to the detective’s room. I had been there once to talk with Earl. I didn’t see him, nor many coming and going. It was pretty quiet.

The sheriff came out to get me. He greeted me warmly with a handshake, but I could see a tall deputy in his office. I was invited to enter. The tall guy was the same asshole from the Juliaetta mudslide. He stood with his broad shoulders and erect posture at the east window. I went to introduce myself and shake his hand, but he dropped both hands to assume the position of attention and looked off into the not real distance. Like he wasn’t to be acknowledged.

“I just asked Deputy Dobbin to join us as an observer.” The sheriff offered. Observer?

“So, Coroner Hawthorne, what brings you to our humble office?”

Lob. “I thought it would be best if we met in person, not at a scene, to improve our sense of cooperation.” Lob with spin.

“Yes.” He folded his hands and looked down at his very big desk between us. “And how could we cooperate better?” Deputy Dobbin rested his attention pose a bit, though he didn’t assume parade rest.

No point further dancing. “Sheriff, you have all the resources, detectives and equipment and evidence security to investigate suspicious deaths. I got nothing. So, when a death is suspicious you should be assigning your resources. If you want just the coroner to be investigating suspicious deaths in this county, I’m afraid we could miss something. We are required to cooperate in Idaho Code. I am here to ask for your cooperation in death investigations.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You are suggesting I spend taxpayer money on cases that you should be investigating. How does that serve the public?”

I hope I didn’t roll my eyes, but I might have. “Deaths sometimes need investigation. I’m very comfortable with my role. But sometimes, having a sheriff’s detective involved really helps. Can’t you see that?”

He shook his small balding head again and smiled down at his huge desk. “I’m hearing here that you just don’t want to do your job.” Here he looked at me directly. Deputy Dobbin came to his full height off to the east.

So, cooperation might just be off the table I assumed at this point. “I’ll do my job, if you’ll just do yours.”

Deputy Dobbin interjected his commanding tone I had heard down in the canyon. “The Sheriff is clearly doing an excellent job.”

But I was looking at the small balding man behind the big desk. He was moving his fingers around in a circle on the clean desktop. “I serve the county taxpayers. If we spend their tax dollars on death investigations that are your responsibility, then we have less money to protect them from the bad guys. If you’d do your job, we’d all be better served.”

“Can you give me an example of when I should have investigated a death that I didn’t?”

Here he smiled and looked at me directly. “I’m not here to criticize your performance. And I don’t believe you are here to criticize mine either. You said cooperation was the goal. So, let’s cooperate. You do your job and I’ll do mine.”

He wasn’t dismissing me, but almost. So, I took what I expected was my last shot. “Sheriff, you have the resources for good investigations. I don’t. If a death needs that level of investigation, I would appreciate you authorizing those resources. I don’t want to be left out on my own. I’m afraid we could be doing the citizens a disservice.”

He was standing and coming around the big desk. Again, I was shocked that he was shorter than me. He was smiling, like he had won this duel. “I’m sure you will do your job, just as I have sworn to do mine.”

I left the office knowing this was not going to work out. I felt like a weak pissant to his authority. Welcome to this democratic institution. I knew I had failed to persuade.

Our cooperation was dead.

Manner of Death: ineptitude

Cause of Death: weakness