Ironside

This was Carettei’s first month, she was still adjusting. A tough day in homicide is like the flu, it hits the young and the old the hardest. Seeing death every day is not how most of us live. In Ironside’s experience, the adaptation takes three cases.

First comes the shock. Then the revulsion and the doubt. Finally the cold acceptance that someone has to investigate these crimes, and it might as well be you. The final transformation, from a ‘normal person’ to an old dog who sees death as just another job takes decades. That’s what scares you the most, when you look at a twenty seven year old woman, choked by a length of rubber tubing tied to a microwave handle as an inconvenience. A pile of paperwork dressed in pajamas. That’s where Ironside was this evening from, as always, the seated vantage of his wheelchair.

But first, there was Carettei to deal with. “Go.” was all he said, but it did the trick, she was out of the room before the crime seen technicians could return to their studious ignorance of the detective drama they thrive on. The coroner filled in the gap: “She died the way it looks. Cord up to the handle, down to her neck. Pull her out of her chair, and it’s done.” He included the standard-issue wheelchair sitting vacant at the woman’s side in his gestures. The chair was smaller than Ironside’s, as women’s often are, but otherwise indistinguishable.

“What killed her?” Ironside asked.

“Probably the cord, I don’t see anything else,” he said, referring to her lack of other bodily injuries, “but I’ll know more when she’s on the table.”

Caretti was back, faster than he had expected, her face and backbone straight. She wanted to be involved.

“What sort of rope is this?” she asked. Ironside already knew, but the coroner responded: “It’s a foley catheter.”

“Killing someone like that, she was helpless, someone should have protected her.” Caretti was in her own world and Ironside ignored it. There was no struggle, no blood, this girl killed herself. And that meant there was nothing for the police to do.

“Why?” came out of his mouth before he could think better of voicing it.

Caretti thought he was replying to her. She looked at him like he was a crazy man.

“Why should she have been protected? Because she needed it. She couldn’t protect herself.”

The woman still didn’t know what she was looking at.

“Why did she kill herself?” he finished for her benefit. It took Carettei long enough to process that revelation that Ironside was left to himself for a moment.

She was in a chair, and now she’s on the ground. She was in pain, and now she’s at peace, and the price of it was her life. Peace was not something Ironside knew well, but he knew pain. Pain will make you do crazy things. If it’s bad enough you’ll do anything to escape it.

“It’s a suicide” he said, ignoring Carettei’s remaining questions. “Let’s go” he added, spinning his chair towards the door and the bar.

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