Obituary Writer (9780547691732) by Porter Shreve Page B

Anything. That night I had to go to a crime scene.

    The call came around eleven o'clock: two cars needed at the riverbank north of downtown. One wounded for sure. I grabbed my ID on my way out of the apartment to the Gremlin, not bothering to wait for the next wave of information.
    I expected to find the victim along one of the cobbled lanes of Laclede's Landing, the bar and club district just north of the Gateway Arch. He'd be sitting up against one of the old-fashioned streetlamps holding his wounded arm and answering questions. Three policemen would have a suspect pinned against a nearby wall. The guy would be slurring something like, "He had it coming." And that would be that. My first crime scene.
    But the map didn't lead me to Laclede's Landing. It took me farther north, up Memorial Drive past the Adams Mark and the bars on Wharf Street, up the river along the eastern edges of The Ville, where Tina Turner had sung in the choir and Chuck Berry learned to duckwalk, where Annie Malone made her first million. It took me far from the city, down a dark street that dead-ended near the riverbank. I pulled the Gremlin up to the levee and turned off my headlights. Forty yards downriver, lit by a high three-quarter moon, stood a half-dozen figures circling a white bundle. From the car, it looked like a nativity scene.
    I got out, quietly shut the door, and took a few cautious steps forward. A police cruiser had pulled up ahead of me, cutting his lights, and an officer jumped out to join the huddle. Moving closer, I noticed that all of the figures were police officers. They stood around as if waiting for something, talking casually among themselves, laughing, shifting their heaviness from foot to foot.
    Off to the right, hidden by the long shadow of the McKinley Bridge, were three more figures, somber and removed, looking on in silence. I approached the first one, a big-bellied guy, glowering in his Army jacket and Budweiser cap. He had a permanent lean to the left.
    "I'm with the
Independent
," I said. "Can you tell me what happened here?"
    "You're what?" he spat.
    "I'm a reporter," I said, feeling my chest tighten. "I want to know what happened."
    His upper lip was curled over broken teeth.
    "I'm with the
Independent
," I repeated, taking a step backward, as if doing so would rewind and start the scene again, this time with me in charge, the way I had always imagined it.
    One of the men standing behind him stepped around and introduced himself. "Dr. Osborn." He held out his hand and smiled. "We've got a shooting victim. No suspects," he said. "The sheet's mine. I always keep a few in the trunk."
    "What branch of law enforcement are you with?" I asked.
    He shrugged. "No branch. But I come when they call."
    He was thickset and jowly and looked out of place in his yellow sweater and tartan pants. A pair of half-spectacles hung from his neck on a helical chain.
    "So, what did the victim look like?" I asked, thinking I'd need a physical description for my write-up.
    "Black male, late teens, same as always," he said, lowering his chin, holding my stare under his pale brow. "They shot him execution style, probably knocked him off his bicycle first. It's over there." He pointed up the levee beyond the white bundle where the bicycle lay on its side.
    It occurred to me that this was all my mother's fault, that she had driven me to coming here. How would she feel, I wondered, if she could see me alone in this place, with these treacherous people, the police joking about a dead body at their feet?
    "Who shot him?" I asked. A bloodstain in the shape of a kidney was spreading near the top of the white bundle.
    "Like I said, no suspects." Dr. Osborn shrugged.
    The third figure stepped up, mousy and squint-eyed. He said he had taken some pictures. "You're with the newspaper, right?" His voice was staccato. "You probably want what I got."
    I looked down at his crazy, matted hair, his rough face, as he lifted the camera off his neck.
    "See, I took