W Is for Wasted

many law-enforcement junkies, he was ill suited for a life of leisure, and he’d returned to the local coroner’s office some six months before.
    He was a man in his sixties with a softly receding hairline. The top of his head was covered with gray fluff, like the first feathering out of a baby bird. His ears were prominent, his cheekbones pronounced, and his smile created long creases that bracketed his mouth like a marionette’s. We stood in silence for a moment and then he checked my reaction. “You know him?”
    “I don’t. I take it he was homeless.”
    Aaron shrugged. “That’s my guess. A group of them have been congregating in that grassy patch across the street from the Santa Teresa Inn. Before that, they camped in the park adjacent to the municipal swimming pool.”
    “Who called it in?”
    He took off his glasses and polished one lens with the end of his tie. “Fellow named Cross. Seven o’clock this morning, he was out on the beach with a metal detector sweeping for coins. He had his eye on the sleeping bag, thinking it had been dumped. Something about it bothered him, so he went out to the street and flagged down the first black-and-white that came by.”
    “Was anyone else around?”
    “The usual posse of bums, but by the time the paramedics arrived, they’d all drifted away.” He checked his lenses for smears and then resettled the glasses on his nose, tucking a wire stem carefully behind each ear.
    “Any signs of foul play?”
    “Nothing obvious. Dr. Palchek’s on her way out. She has two autopsies on the books, which puts this guy at the end of the line, pending her assessment. Since Medicare went into effect, she doesn’t do a post on every body brought in.”
    “What do you think he died of? He looks jaundiced.”
    “Not to be flip about it, but what do any of these guys die of? It’s a hard life. We have one just like this every couple of months. Guy goes to sleep and he never wakes up. Could be hepatitis C, anemia, heart attack, alcohol poisoning. If we can ID the guy, I’ll canvas the local clinics in hopes he’s seen a doc sometime in the last twenty days.”
    “No ID at all?”
    Aaron shook his head. “Note with your name and phone number and that was it. I inked his fingers and faxed the ten-print card to the DOJ in Sacramento. Weekend’s coming up and those requests are going to sit there until somebody gets around to ’em. Might be the middle of next week.”
    “Meanwhile, what?”
    “I’ll check his description against missing-persons reports and see if there’s a match. With the homeless, their families sometimes don’t care enough to fill out the paperwork. Of course, it works the other way as well. Street people don’t always want to be located by their so-called loved ones.”
    “Anything else? Moles, tattoos?”
    He lifted the sheet to expose the man’s left leg, which was shorter than his right. The knee cap was misshapen, raised in a thick knot like a burl. The flesh along the fibula was laced with red ropes of scar tissue. At some point in the past, he’d suffered a devastating injury.
    “What happens if you never find out who he is?”
    “We’ll hold him for a time and then we’ll bury him.”
    “What about his effects?”
    “Clothes on his back, sleeping bag, and that’s it. If he had anything else, it’s gone now.”
    “Ripped off?”
    “That’s possible. In my experience, the beach bums are protective of one another, which is not to say they might not confiscate the stuff he had no further use for.”
    “What about the note he carried? Can I see it?”
    He reached for the clipboard at the bottom of the gurney and freed the clear plastic evidence bag in which the slip had been placed. There was a picket fence of torn paper along the top, the leaf apparently ripped from a spiral-bound pad. The note was written in ballpoint pen, the letters uniform and clean: MILLHONE INVESTIGATIONS with the address and phone. It was the sort of printing I’d emulated in the fourth grade, inspired by a teacher who used a mechanical pencil and the same neat hand.
    “That’s my office,” I remarked. “He must have looked me up in the yellow pages. My home number’s unlisted. Wonder what a homeless guy wanted with a PI?”
    “I guess they’ve got problems just like everyone else.”
    “Maybe he thought I’d come cheap since I’m a girl.”
    “How would he know that? Millhone Investigations is gender neutral.”
    “Good point,” I