In the Land of Long Fingernails by Charles Wilkins

Author:Charles Wilkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2011-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

WAS RADIO ELECTROCUTION ACCIDENT Or MURDER?

CROWN ASKS THAT BODY BE EXHUMED

By way of explanation, a thirty-eight-year-old man, Albert “Sprocket” Bowness, is being tried for the murder of his ex-wife, “Gus,” who a year ago was found in the bathtub of her Scarborough apartment, apparently electrocuted by a plug-in radio that had fallen into the tub while she was bathing. Murder charges were not laid at the time, largely because the door to the apartment had been bolted from the inside, indicating that no one had come into the place or left it. However, the Crown now contends that Sprocket was indeed there, and either pushed the radio into the tub or drowned his ex-wife and then dumped in the radio to mislead police. Or that he attempted to electrocute her with the radio, failed and so drowned her . . . and then slipped out over the balcony, leaving the chain on the apartment door.

Sprocket, whose clothing for the trial is reported to include a “studded leather jacket,” a “hoop earring” and “motorcycle boots”—shrewdly chosen effects, observes Luccio, certain to camouflage him as just another law-abiding suburb-dweller—is said by the Star to have “wept openly” while relating to the court how he had warned Gus about the danger of placing electrical appliances on the tub.

The trial (to quote the political pundits) “has sparked heated debate” among my coworkers. Was it murder? Suicide? An accident?

“Why would anybody with half a whack try to electrocute somebody with a radio?” demands Peter. “He’s a biker fer krisakes! If he wanted her dead, he’d’a snapped her neck. Or taken her out and capped her.”

For today, at least, our interest in the case is rather sharply focused on Gus’s unmarked grave within yards of the outermost fence of the Garden of the Holy Blessed Angels, one of the plainest and cheapest sections of the cemetery. Peter recalls that the young woman’s burial nearly a year ago was a disorderly affair at which her relatives attempted a modicum of Christian dignity while, within yards of the gravesite, the young woman’s biker pals danced to old Jerry Lee Lewis tunes, eventually circling the grave and, in biker tradition, pouring beer over the coffin as it was lowered into place.

Peter is restless about the specifics of attempting to exhume the remains from a part of the cemetery where, after a day of heavy rain, the water table has undoubtedly risen to within a few feet of the surface. “It’s gonna stink like fucking hell,” he says to no one in particular. He is equally disturbed over a vague recollection that Gus’s coffin was “a cracker box,” a low-priced casket constructed of little more than cardboard on a wood frame, the whole thing covered in gray brocade or felt. While I have never seen such a coffin exhumed (I have never seen any coffin exhumed), I am led to understand that this particular model exhibits approximately the integrity of wet pastry when disturbed underground, and that most likely coffin

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