Tallulah Bankhead.”
“Someone with money trying to be glamorous,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense if no one knows she’s missing.”
“Someone knows. The person who dumped her in the bay does.” I begin going over the buttons with a hand lens.
fifteen
TARNISHED BRASS WITH A HINT OF GILT, EACH BUTTON has some type of eagle design and an iron shank at the back that has been sewn onto the jacket’s front with heavy dark thread.
“Civil War. The genuine article. Around the same date as the coin in her ring.” Marino leans close, peering through his reading glasses. “Holy shit, these are something.”
I return to the stretcher, and the putrid smell gets stronger as I begin unbuttoning the blouse. Decomposition is darkly swarming in like a plague of invisible insects as we work and time slips away, moving her closer to putrefaction as I move closer to being held in contempt of court.
“Probably not from a regular foot soldier. Probably officers’ buttons.” Marino reaches for a hand lens, judgment creeping into his tone. “Most people who collect old buttons don’t sew them on clothes. No normal person would do that.”
“It does seem a bit out of the ordinary,” I remark. “Wearing antique or estate jewelry and so on is one thing, but sewing it on clothing would be another, I suppose.”
“You got that right, and button collectors don’t.”
His voice is flinty with disapproval, as if he’s made a sudden decision about the dead woman’s character.
“They display them, put them in picture frames, swap them, sell them, maybe donate them to museums, depending on what they are,” Marino says. “I’ve seen buttons like these go for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.”
He studies the three buttons closely with the lens, nudging each one with a gloved finger.
“If you look at them from the side”—he shows me—“they’re not dented in at all, are in really great shape, which adds to the value. You’d never sew something like this on a jacket. Who the hell does that?”
“Well, she did, or someone did,” I reply.
Removing her wet blouse, I decide it’s purple, not burgundy. The tag at the back of the collar is Audrey Marybeth, size six.
“Maybe she was involved in antiques,” I add. “Maybe she collected or was a dealer, or the buttons belonged to someone in her family.”
The bra underneath is loose around her chest, the cups several sizes too big, and I estimate the body has lost at least twenty percent of its weight due to dehydration. She dried out while concealed someplace freezing or near-freezing, cold enough to prevent bacteria from colonizing and causing the decomposition that is beginning with a vengeance now. Minute by minute her odor is stronger, and I’m asking for trouble. I imagine Judge Conry calling lawyers to the bench, wanting to know where I am, discreet at first, and then demanding.
“Plenty of people collect in this part of the world.” Marino has a hard look on his face, his mood turned sour. “You go in some of these junk shops and can buy vintage buttons, almost anything you can think of. Police, fire department, railroad, military. But you don’t sew them on clothes, not even nickel-plated ones that go for five bucks apiece. Not even ones in really shitty shape you can buy in bulk.”
“Since when are you an expert in vintage buttons?” I spread the blouse open next to the blazer.
“You really don’t care.” He’s looking at the clock, and it’s exactly two.
“What I care about most right this minute is getting what we need while there’s still a chance.”
Mostly I’m thinking about DNA. I’ve had cases where semen could still be recovered after a remarkably long time inside orifices, the stomach, the airway, deep inside the vaginal vault, and I’m not going to assume it’s too late to get anything from this body, no matter how long she’s been dead. The enemy of DNA is bacteria, and she’s invisibly beginning to teem with it, and it literally will eat her to the bone.
I can gauge the breaking down of her tissue by the way she smells, insidiously foul at first and then much stronger and fast becoming a bristling stench from organisms that originated in her bowels but were dormant while she was kept dry and very cold or frozen. As she has warmed by degrees in the bay, in the boat and van, and now inside this room, the bacteria that cause putrefaction are having their way with her. They have begun a process I might