ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
Joseph Klipple
The news stunned Clancy when he heard it on his car radio while driving home from work: “Sheriff’s deputies are dragging Jenkins Reservoir for the body of Vera Huddleston who apparently drowned after falling from the bass boat of her former husband, retired firefighter Sam Huddleston. The woman is said to be a resident of Wilmington, Delaware. The much-decorated Huddleston has operated an aquarium manufacturing firm here since he retired from the fire department on disability in 1992....” The announcement took Clancy back thirty years to when he was first married and the Huddlestons lived down the block.
“You’ve heard?” Millicent asked when he walked in the door.
“Just the radio bulletin. What was she doing around here?”
“I asked Beth. She said she thought Vera was making overtures. Wanted to get back with Sam.”
Clancy couldn’t imagine that. The two men were never more than acquaintances, but he admired Sam greatly and thought what a shame it was for him to have an albatross like Vera. No man would volunteer for the same torture a second time, not even a genuine hero like Sam who had saved three lives in fires.
“Why would he give her the time of day?”
“Probably couldn’t avoid her. Beth said she showed up at the fish show, the one they hold every year to benefit some children’s disease. Sam’s always an exhibitor.” Millicent never liked Vera--mostly because she was an incessant talker who was always ready with an unkind word--but Beth, who lived next door in those early days, worked hard to be everyone’s friend. When Vera moved to Wilmington after the divorce, Beth kept in touch.
“What were they doing out at Jenkins?” he asked. “I thought she hated fishing, always bitching that he liked bass better than he liked her.”
“Maybe she was trying to show him she had changed,” Millicent said. “It’s something a desperate woman would do. She probably wore out her welcome at Wilmington and didn’t have anywhere else to turn.”
After dinner, Clancy sat for a while in front of his own aquarium, watching the guppies warily on guard against the red wagtails from the safety of the water weeds. He thought about the times he had spent in Sam’s showroom admiring the huge multileveled and grottoed tanks which were trademarked Huddleston designs and which had become such a rage among affluent yuppy fish fanciers. Huddleston’s own home was said to have a two-storied tank encircled by a stairway. Clancy knew, of course, that it wasn’t something he’d ever buy for himself. Millicent the collector couldn’t spare the space. She already had too many cabinets filled with figurines. He cut the musing short, deciding he needed a good night’s sleep. As the medical examiner, he’d be required to do an autopsy when they found the body, and he wanted to be well rested for that chore.
They brought her in the next afternoon. Aside from a few abrasions caused by the grappling hooks, Vera looked like the usual drowning victim that hadn’t been too long in the water. She was wearing one of Sam’s old fire department sweatshirts and a pair of what were probably his jeans which had been rolled up at the cuffs. Clancy noticed with more curiosity than emotion that she had aged considerably since he’d seen her last and had put on enough weight so that Sam’s jeans were almost snug around her waist.Broderick, the deputy who had brought the body in, was eager to give Clancy the details. Huddleston hadn’t left the scene once during the search.
“He was very distressed, blaming himself over and over for not insisting she wear a life vest,” Broderick said. “She apparently refused and I gather she was a hard woman to make do much of anything.”
Clancy nodded at the truth of that. Millicent had guessed right about why they were at the lake. “Huddleston said he hadn’t seen her in years when she showed up, begging him to take her back,” Broderick said. “He told us that wasn’t in the cards, even though she was acting nicer than he could ever remember. He took her to his house because she didn’t have any money or any place to stay.
“He said she was the one who suggested they go fishing, as a way of showing how she’d changed. I gather she never cared for it before. They headed out straight-aways, so they could be on the water at first light, and he was attaching a lure to his rod when he heard a splash. She was gone when he looked around. Doesn’t think she ever surfaced.
“He tried to find her, of course,” the officer said. “He’s still as brave as they make ‘em, but he had no luck, so he called us.”
Clancy’s examination established drowning as the cause of death. He walked his report over to the office of Sheriff Grasskopf. The sheriff wondered if Vera could have jumped from the boat intentionally, perhaps confident that her ex-husband would rescue her. Or was she desperate enough to end her life in a way that would forever torment Huddleston? Clancy told the sheriff there was nothing in the evidence to support either scenario.
They had agreed to declare the drowning accidental when young Renfrow, a gung-ho officer who drove everybody up the wall, burst into the sheriff’s office and made the flat-out assertion that Huddleston had killed his ex on purpose.
Renfrow had been a good uniform deputy, but making detective went to his head. Clancy was a little sorry for the fellow. He knew the sheriff’s feelings bordered on contempt.
“You’re claiming that Sam held her head under water out there in the lake?” the sheriff asked.
“Not there,” Renfrow said. “In that big tower of a fish tank in his house.”
“Come off it,” said the sheriff. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard. That tank’s got a top on it. I’ve been there and seen it.”
“Sure,” Renfrow said, “but the lid comes off for cleaning, which Huddleston seems to have been doing that night.”
“You questioned him?”
“Learned that from his cleaning lady.”
“Oh?”
“I had a hunch, so I check out the neighborhood and learned of the scream the woman next door heard after midnight. She thought it came from a party the college kids were having across the street. They get boisterous on Friday nights. I looked into that. The party ran late. One fellow remembers seeing Huddleston leave with the boat sometime after three. He said he thought Huddleston was alone. It was dark, of course, and the fellow wasn’t exactly sober.”
“More’n likely drunk as hell,” the sheriff said.
“So I rang Huddleston’s door chime” Renfrow said. “Mabel, his cleaning lady, answered. She was using a wet vacuum to soak up water from the carpet on the second floor landing at the top of the tank. Real squishy.”
“Hold on,” the sheriff said. “Did you identify yourself as a deputy?”
“No need to. She’s known me for years.”
“And you just moseyed on inside? Without asking permission or saying why you were there?”
“No need for that, either. She’d heard the news, but decided to go to work anyway, since it was her regular day. Has her own key. She said Huddleston must have been cleaning the tank. I asked if that ever caused spills. She said sometimes, but this was worse than usual. There was something that looked like seaweed on the carpet, and a little dead fish like a guppy.”
Clancy felt sympathy for the woman, having mopped up his own tank-cleaning messes several times.
“I climbed the stairway and noticed the water seemed to be about a foot below the top of the tank,” Renfrow said. “I asked about that and Mabel said sometimes Huddleston removed water to mix in chemicals. I wondered if he usually left the job unfinished. She said he must have been interrupted.
“Then I found Vera’s clothing laid out on a chair in the bedroom. They were dry.”
“And why shouldn’t they be?” Clancy heard exasperation in the sheriff’s voice.
“I think they got wet when he drowned her, and he dried them in the clothes dryer. We should get a search warrant and check out the lint trap.”
“A search warrant?” the sheriff exploded. “Where’s your probable cause? All you got is suspicions based on an unauthorized search.”
“There’s the scream,” Renfrow objected, “and what the student saw.”
“And that would have been the time to ask for a warrant. Not after you stomped around illegally in your presumed crime scene. Didn’t you ever hear of the Fourth Amendment?”
“We could at least bring him in for questioning.”
“About what? You want me to humiliate one of the finest, bravest men any of us have ever known by asking him if he lured his former wife up to where he was pretending to clean his fish tank so he could grab her by surprise, up-end her and hold her under water until her breathing stopped. Giving her time for only one scream which more than likely came from a drunk coed. Give me a break.”
The sheriff swallowed hard. “Renfrow, this is an order. Back off. If you ever had a case, which you don’t, you messed it up with your unprofessional shenanigan. We’re settling this matter the way it should be. Accidental drowning.”
As soon as he left the sheriff’s office, Clancy wondered if he should have said something. He thought that he might have, had it been someone other than the cocky Renfrow making the case, and if the entire affair hadn’t been so clouded by memories of the old times and his personal feelings about the people involved.
Then, too, he didn’t have enough scientific knowledge of tropical fish to know if any of them might survive in Carolina waters. Aquarium owners were always dumping fish they no longer wanted in lakes and streams. He supposed some of the fish adapted, so you couldn’t say for sure where a particular one came from. He hadn’t thought it significant enough to include in the autopsy report.
There was really only one thing for him to do. When he got back to his office, he removed a small plastic bag from the refrigerator, carried it to the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet, flushing away the little blonde guppy he had removed from Vera’s trachea.
