Now I Lay Me Down

My name is Roy Winder. I’m a homicide detective. I investigate suspicious deaths, collect evidence, and work to solve cases. My job is putting two and two together. But two and two don’t always add up to a solve a mystery, as in my last case.

When the call came, I drove over to Grace church over on Fourth street. The minister met me and led me over to the body. It was lying face up at the bottom of the baptismal tank. My first impression was that there didn’t seem to be foul play involved. I didn’t see any blood or signs of a fight or an instrument of death. Only a large man with large hands resting on his chest in a large tub.

I asked the minister if he knew the man. He said he didn’t.

The guy didn’t look street homeless. He had a few days growth of beard but didn’t look dirty and haggard. The man at the bottom of the tank looked like he had enough to eat.

The guy was wearing a wet blue mechanics coverall jumpsuit. Above a chest pocket holding a tire pressure gauge was a red-bordered oval name patch with the name “Sam.”

Twenty years on the force – I’ve seen all kinds of things. And I have smelled the unwashed and the dead. And “Sam”, unwashed or not, was certainly dead. The flies knew it too. We shewed them away and covered our noses.

The minister said that a small group of who people stayed overnight in the church smelled something awful during the Maundy Thursday Vigil. They called me.

I asked him about the vigil.

“The Maundy Thursday service extends into an all-night prayer vigil. Some folks sign up to stay every hour of the night to commemorate Jesus’ request that his disciples stay up praying with him in the Garden of Gethsemane before his arrest. Anyway, when I got here this morning at 7 AM I went looking for the smell and found this poor soul in our baptistry.”

I asked for the names of those who were there overnight. But they might not have seen the man. The smell and the bloated body told me that “this poor soul” likely died at least forty-eight hours ago. Had he been in the tank since Tuesday?

I asked the pastor about any recent baptisms. He said there would be baptisms this Easter Sunday.

“Maybe “this poor soul” couldn’t wait till Sunday.”

“Well, the thing is,” the minister explained, “we are an Anglican church. Baptisms are done with sprinkled water and not dunking. We rent this building. It had been a Baptist church but that congregation moved on to another building. The baptistry had been closed off and never used.”

I asked how got in.

“The church is typically left open to access the office and parishioners can come into the sanctuary to pray.”

After the three-hundred-pound body was lifted out of the tank and put on a stretcher, I searched the body for an ID and phone. I found a wallet but no phone on Samuel J. Muckle, age 63. There was black residue on the grooves and cracks of his hands, almost like fingerprint dust. Sam was then taken to the morgue for an autopsy.

I wanted to know the cause of death. I wanted to know why he was in the church’s baptismal tank. I needed to find out who would be missing him. I began my inquiry back at the station.

I searched through the missing person’s database. With no matching descriptions and no missing person calls of late, I gave a copy of Sam’s driver’s license photo to a local news station. Someone had to know him.

When the autopsy report came to my desk the next day, there was no fingerprint match to anyone in our system. He wasn’t wanted by the law. DNA matching would take a bit longer.

The coroner’s report said that there were no signs of violence. Sam died of natural causes. A pulmonary embolism likely brought on by obesity did him in. The coroner thought that he may have gone into the tank and then tried to lift himself out and that struggle may have caused cardiac arrest. A large contusion on the back of the head suggested that Sam may have fallen backward, hit his head and laid there trying to recover. Time of death was estimated around 8 o’clock Tuesday evening.

Sam’s photo on TV last night produced results. The first to recognize him was a coworker named Jake. He came into the station and I interviewed him.

According to Jake, Sam hadn’t shown up for work the last few days. They work together as auto mechanics. That explained the oil-stained hands. Jake asked about Sam and I told him the sorry truth. He was shaken.

Jake worked with Sam for several years. When Sam needed a smaller pair of hands to reach something in a tight space under the hood, he asked Jake. When Jake needed help with a truck’s transmission, he asked Sam.

I asked him where Sam lived and for a phone number. He told me where Sam lived and that when he called the number, the phone rang in Sam’s locker at the shop.

“Was Sam married?”

“Sam was married but he never spoke about his wife Midge. He only talked about his kids and sport cars.”

“Was Sam a church-going man?”

Jake said that he’d been invited to Sam’s daughter’s wedding several years ago but that’s the only time he saw Sam in church.

“Where was the wedding?”

“Some Baptist church over on fourth street.”

I walked Jake out and told him that I’d come over to shop to go through Sam’s locker and pick up the phone. Mr. Muckle’s daughter Kerri was in the lobby waiting to talk to me. She looked up at me with the watery searching eyes that every homicide detective has seen.

Kerri said that her ex-husband had called her when he saw her father on the news. She was frantic. She wanted to know if her father was OK.

I brought her to an interview room for a private conversation. I told her that her father had passed. She burst into tears so I put a box of tissues in front of her. I told her that her father was found in the baptismal tank of the church over on fourth street. This had her asking me why. I had no answer only that there didn’t seem to any foul play involved.

“Where is your mother? Is she home? Did you call her?”

“Yes. I called her. She’s been staying with my two aunts. They’re investigating a pastor about some allegations of misconduct and abuse.”

“Investigating a pastor?”

“My aunts call themselves the “snoop sisters.” They like to dig up dirt on people they call “holy rollers.”

“Is she coming home? I need to talk to her.”

“She’ll be here this afternoon.”

“Did your father and mother get along?”

“They didn’t fight. But they didn’t talk much either. Mom cooked, did laundry, and managed us kid. Dad ate, went to work, fixed things, and watched stock car races and old westerns on TV. After us kids moved out, they had separate bedrooms. Maybe they made things work because of us kids. They were married but not so much. Know what I mean? “

I didn’t know what she meant. I’m happily married to my best girl, a blue-eyed blond who likes a man who serves and protects.

“The coroner thinks that your father may have died from a pulmonary embolism caused by the effects of obesity.”

“My mother called him ‘Chub.’”

“Chub?”

“Yeah. That’s the nickname she gave him. Dinner’s ready “Chub,” she’d say. “Chub” get Todd to mow the law. “Chub” my car needs fixing. “Chub” this and that.

“Was your father depressed?”

“I don’t think so. He was a quiet gentle soul. He let things bounce off of him. But maybe not. He did overeat.”

“Do you know why your father would want to be in the baptistry?”

“No. I mean. I attended there. I was married there and that is the only link to my father and that church.”

Your father wasn’t a church going man?

“Only for weddings.”

“What about baptisms? Sprinklings?”

“Yeah, and those times too.”

“Is there anything else I should know about your father?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll walk you out.”

Alan, Kerri’s ex-husband and Sam’s former son-in law, was in the lobby waiting to talk to me. Kerri walked past him without a word. I brought him to an interview room.

Alan said that he recognized the photo and wanted to know about his former father-in-law – if he was missing, if there was any foul play. I gave him the sorry news and told him where I found the body.

“I figured obesity would take him but in a baptistry?”

I asked Alan how long he had known his father-in-law.

“I’d been married to Kerri for seven years. I was around my father-in-law at a few get togethers.

I asked Alan if he thought Sam was depressed.

“I would be if I lived with that woman.”

Alan described his mother-in-law as disagreeable and without an ounce of grace. She had a habit of calling her husband “chub.” He didn’t know if this was a term of endearment or a belittling remark that his father-in-law just accepted.

“She didn’t find things amusing except when she found fault with someone. There was one family gathering where she and her sisters where gossiping about someone and the situation they talked about resolved itself in a funny unexpected way. I said God must have a sense of humor. She snapped back at me saying that God had no sense of humor.”

Could a disagreeable woman without a sense of humor cause a man to eat himself to death and end up in a baptistry?

That afternoon Sam’s wife Midge showed up at the station. She wanted to see the body, so I drove her over to the morgue. She looked at Sam’s face and said “That’s Him. That’s Chub.”

Driving back to the station, I asked Midge if things were OK back at home.

“Things were as they always were.”

“He was found in a baptistry. Do you know why?”

“Maybe he thought it was a spa. I don’t know.”

“You investigate people.”

“I find out people’s secrets and put them in their place. Isn’t that what you cops do?”

“We investigate who put them in their place, as in baptistries. You don’t wonder why your husband was found dead in a baptistry?”

“Why should I? There was no funny business was there?”

“Not that I could see.”

“Well, then.”

I wasn’t getting much out of Midge. She volunteered nothing. Her investigation into her husband’s death had ended.

On Sunday, a day off without a homicide call, I went to Grace church over on Fourth street. It was Easter Sunday with talk of resurrection -the other side of death that homicide detectives don’t get calls for.

On my way out after the service, rector Philbee greeted me.

“Sam’s daughter contacted me. The family will have the funeral service here this week. You are invited. Did you find out why Sam came here?”

“I interviewed the family and nothing adds up.”

“Well, detective, as you know, people do all kinds of violence to get what they want. And there are some who desperately want the kingdom of God and do violence to themselves to get ahold of it. I wonder if that was what was going on with Sam.”

On Monday I closed the case. What did I have? Sam’s was no suspicious death. But it was a mystery of location, location, location.

Putting two and two together, I had a husband, father and friend who died of natural causes in an unused baptistry. And, I had no clear motive for Sam going out of his way to be in that exact place. I had no idea of what he hoped to find there. Maybe the padre was right.

The funeral for Samuel J. Muckle was a few days after Easter Sunday at Grace church. I attended and sat in the back row. I wanted to see “this poor soul” laid to rest. Around the casket were dozens of white trumpet-looking lilies. They gave off a sweet and fragrant scent.