One Husband Too Many

He was late. Jake had fallen asleep before setting his alarm for 6:15 a.m. When he woke to find himself slumped in the recliner with the TV still blaring, he didn’t feel much like going to work. He had less of a hangover than usual but still wished he had some ‘hair of the dog’ on hand. He’d started his report on last night’s murder, but quickly realized he didn’t have enough information to move any further on it. He’d have to make a few stops today to get what he needed.

By the time he sat down at his desk, he wanted nothing more than a drink and a decent night’s sleep in a comfortable bed.

“Pace yourself. You’ll get through the day. Again,” he muttered under his breath. He took off his rumpled jacket, once belonging to a good suit, the trousers of which no longer fit him. It was the paunch, the ‘beer belly’ Roy had poked more than a few times. The fact he’d gained a few pounds here and there didn’t bother him as much as looking older than his age. He no longer held himself tall and erect. Slouching was much easier and far more comfortable. The only time he’d stood up straight in the past few years was at the funeral of a fellow officer. “I’ll need a new suit to be ready for the next one. Or to be buried in it,” he thought ruefully.

After returning a few phone calls and shoving papers around his desk blankly, he’d had enough of the precinct and decided to get on with the various visits he’d have to make that day. The morgue would be the place to start. He knew the coroner fairly well. Andy McWhelan and he had gone to the same high school. Andy’s wife had stayed in touch with Shirley after she and Jake divorced. He had always thought Andy more than a bit dour and well-suited for the world of autopsies and pathology.

Andy wasn’t in the hospital morgue when Jake arrived. An assistant at the desk adjacent told him Andy would be back shortly. Jake hated the place. The smell still made him gag, and he liked to get out of there as soon as possible. Andy was a talker, though, and a depressing one at that. Jake figured Andy could be nothing but depressing, given his line of work. He’d listen politely as long as seemed appropriate, then grab his chance to leave when Andy began running out of steam.

“Jake, good morning,” Andy acknowledged him. “I’d ask what brings you here, but I’ve got a pretty good hunch about it.”

Jake noticed the cadaver on the table in the center of the mortuary. It was likely last night’s victim.

Pointing in the direction of the examination table, Jake asked, “So, what do we know so far?”

“It’s pretty cut and dried,” Andy said, “if you’ll pardon the pun.”

“OK, what do we have?”

“We have a male approximately 45 years old, in good shape except for the two puncture wounds in his chest, and the one in his abdomen. That was the one that killed him. It pierced his liver causing bleeding in his abdominal cavity. The two chest wounds missed his lungs and heart, so whether they came before or after the fatal stab is unknown. If after, it would seem to indicate a crime of passion.”

“Doesn’t much matter to the poor guy,” Jake remarked as he walked towards the table for a look. When he’d edged as close to the body as he could ever muster, something about the man’s face seemed oddly familiar.

Andy interrupted his thoughts. “The name is Greg…Gregory Dinas. Married, father of five. Wife’s name is Joy. You’ll need that.”

“Yeah,” Jake agreed. “I’m flying solo on this one. Evan has been off sick a few days. This should be fairly straightforward, though. I’ll head to see the widow now. This part is the worst.”

Andy nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that part of the job. Good luck.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Jake responded.

On his drive to the victim’s home, Jake played around in his head with the face he had just seen. Definitely familiar, but then it could just be a resemblance to someone else. Still, he made a mental note to figure it out. Where would he have known this guy from?

Joy Dinas was surprisingly composed for someone who had only hours ago received the news that her husband had been violently murdered. She let Jake in wordlessly when he showed her his badge, indicated the nearest armchair, then perched herself on the edge of a couch cushion as Jake took the seat assigned him.

“I’m sorry for your…, ” Jake began.

Joy interrupted, “Yes, my loss. You’re sorry for it. I’ve heard that more than a few times since last night.”

Jake began to run through the questions he had long ago learned as protocol.

She was tall and pale, this widow, he thought. Didn’t seem overwrought but, then, that could just be a façade to protect her true feelings. He encountered that regularly. No tears, terse responses and what often seemed like hostility, as if he were somehow responsible for the loss.

“You and Mr. Dinas were married for how long, Ma’am?”

“Joy,” she vaguely introduced herself. “Three years. It would have been our fourth anniversary in a month.”

“And kids?”

“Two. Twins. They’re three-years-old.”

Two? Andy had said five kids. Not a surprise though. Second, third marriages…accumulated offspring. Happened all the time.

Before querying her response, Jake looked past her shoulder to the framed family portrait on the end table beside her. They looked happy, he thought remorsefully. Despite his businesslike demeanor, Jake’s voice softened.

“When was that photo taken?” Jake nodded towards the end table.

“Two years ago, maybe,” she answered.

Something about the faces in the photo seemed odd. The two kids were dressed in matching outfits like twins sometimes are. They were each holding a stuffed animal. Jake wondered how hard it was to get them to share their toys. The woman in the photo had short brown hair, whereas the hair of the woman sitting across for him was blond. So who doesn’t color their hair nowadays, Jake thought, thinking of his own experience trying to mask the grey in his hair? The man in the photo looked to be just a regular guy, on the short side from what Jake could tell. It was him who most interested Jake. There was something about him that didn’t sit quite right.

The woman answered the remainder of the usual questions, and Jake stood up to leave. He wanted out of there as quickly as possible. These interviews didn’t seem to get any easier for him. He thought back to the young widow in his last murder case. That one had left him feeling empty. There were days he was sick of his job, of the sadness and cruelty. That woman had had the biggest impact on him since he was a rookie. She looked so forlorn and defeated. “Stop it.” Jake didn’t want to be nursing a soft spot for her. Emotions had to be kept in check if the job were to be done properly.

Leaving the Dinas home, Jake backed his car out of the driveway and on to the busy street. He would hate living right in the midst of so much traffic. The area had once been a showpiece, tucked away from the steel and concrete of mid-town. Large trees, planted maybe before he was born had spanned over the sleepy, two-lane street. Now it was an area Jake tried to avoid. The yawning boughs were long gone, as were the houses that once nestled quietly across the street from the house he’d just left. The road once home to families and shaded parks was now a four-lane thoroughfare for those who wanted to avoid the congested traffic and jams a drive though the hard core usually meant.

Two blocks away, Jake nearly made it through the intersection. “Damn,” he thought, wishing he still smoked. This red light was an especially long one. He picked up the notebook he used for recording evidence and witness statements. Sometimes, the leaf-eared pads would hold a clue, something related to a mystery he was trying to solve. He thought of it as his ‘write book’, having once thought the pun appropriately humorous. But, then, the facts and names his notebooks held were certainly not the stuff of levity.

As he waited for the pedestrian crossing sign to count down, he balanced the book on his lap and flipped through to the page he’d just completed. He’d neglected to record the widow’s name. “You’re slipping, man, he thought.”

“Joy Dinas.” Easy enough. He quickly clicked his pen open and scribbled the name. Husband’s name is Greg…was Greg. “I guess it’s still his name,” Jake noted. This was the thought pattern his brain followed with every case. He never forgot the names. In his 27 years on the force, he had filed all the victims’ and their families’ names somewhere in the tiny receptacle in his brain that churned around old facts and crimes, and names, even sometimes the clue to solve what had once been a mystery. His track record in finding the truth in the cases he investigated far excelled that of any co-workers. They looked to him as a trove of information and, often, would request his insight into their cases. No one would deny the “Jake Bake”. Roy had initiated the term to describe how successfully Jake could turn up the heat on suspects during an investigation. This particular quirk of Jake’s ability gave him an edge on any of his precinct colleagues.

He wondered if he were losing his touch. This latest case was pretty much a muddle in his mind. Talking to Joy today brought him back to his initial questioning of … her name is Elise … in his last case. That one had yet to be solved as the evidence had been tainted. He wondered idly how she and her kids were doing, how they were making out without the income her husband had contributed to their family. As emotionally devastated as she had been about losing her husband, she had to deal with the practical nuts and bolts of survival. He hoped the deceased – ‘Rick’, he remembered – had left some sort of life insurance provision to tide them over at least until she got back on her feet.

He thought back to the family room of that home, and how Elise had offered him coffee. Her mother lived with her and had just taken a batch of cookies out of the oven. He was offered those as well, but didn’t accept. Elise seemed to be a blank. Her answers, when they did come, were meandering and Jake was forced to redirect her train of thought. Her face was red, eyes swollen from the tears she'd been shedding, and she picked idly at a loose thread on the cuff of her sweater. It hadn’t completely sunk in yet, Rick’s death. That wasn’t unusual during the interview with next of kin who had only received the news a day or so before. Jake noted her pale complexion despite the makeup she was wearing. She reminded him of a princess in a story book like the one he’d read to his daughter so many years ago.

During a lull in their exchange, Jake noticed a family photo on a small end table near the door to what must have been the kitchen. Just a typical family at the beach. There was a girl, toddler size and a boy a few years older. Everyone looked so happy, as if nothing could steal their joy from them. Elise, in a striped bikini, looked sensational. The man in the photo was sandy-haired, obviously not too tall. His face was deeply tanned and he had the build of an athlete. There was another framed photo on the wall behind Elise, this time with three kids. Elise was holding the baby and the other two children had settled on a large rock beside her. Jake didn’t look too carefully at the man in the photo. He was entranced with how beautiful Elise looked, her hair dappled where the sun caressed her head.

That interview had been one of the very few Jake didn’t want to end after the routine questions were asked and answered. He had to fight the urge to get up from his chair and envelop the woman in a tight embrace. Perhaps too abruptly he stood up and thanked her, adding that he was sorry for her loss. She had a beautiful smile when she managed to look at him, through tears that had started again. He regarded her for a moment, suddenly unsure of what to say and, after a quick goodbye, headed out to his car.

As he was pulling out of the driveway, he noticed a large rock on the lawn. It was obviously there for ornamental purposes and, Jake was fairly certain, it was the rock on which the kids in the second photo were sitting. His mind swept over the images of Elise in the photos, but he had forced them out and turned his attention to the road and traffic.

That had been roughly six months ago. He had hoped he might see her again when he went out of his way to do his grocery shopping at the store near her house. Stupid, he knew, but there was something about her. He pictured her sitting on the couch in the family room where he’d interviewed her, his thoughts lingering on how beautiful she was in what had been her despair. He thought about the sandy-haired man, her dead husband, and wondered again if there had been a life insurance policy. His mind wandered back to the photo he’d just seen at the Dinas home. Two families shattered.

As he was eating lunch at the diner down the street from the precinct, Jake flipped through the morning’s newspaper. Nothing more about the murder. It had been a page three report the day before. It was crazy, he thought, how life just goes on, having left people and families devastated in its wake. On the back page of the paper, there was a photo of what looked to be a family of six that reminded him of the framed pictures he’d seen, two where he’d interviewed Elise and the second of the Dinas family just this morning.

Jake read the caption under the photo in the newspaper, then folded it and stood up. It had been a family. He was right. They looked so happy. Why not? They’d just won a million dollar lottery. Again Jake contemplated the unfairness of life, wondering why and how it picked the people it treated well and those it selected for pain and loss.

He got into his car, the photo fresh in his mind. Jake was just about to turn the ignition key when it suddenly came together. He knew where he’d seen the murdered man in the morgue before.