SEE ~ I TOLD YOU SO

There are Floaters and there are Sinkers, it's just a matter of timing.

I had just finished a nice breakfast at my favorite diner when the dispatcher called me. 

“Body in a swimming pool at the Regal Health & Tennis Lodge”. 

Ah, the lovely Regal Health & Tennis Lodge.  It was a rundown motel on the seedy side of town.  In its day it was the kind of place families would stay while the went to the local tourist attractions.  But it had been neglected and was now home to a variety of drug dealers, prostitutes, nearly homeless down & outers and traveling highway construction crews.

When I arrived I saw a small cluster of onlookers standing near the pool.  Among them were the motel manager, his handyman, a white guy in his 30’s, and little girl about 8 or 9.  As I walked up I noted that the warmth of the water was sending little wisps of steam into the cool morning air.  The water looked like low-fat milk.  You couldn’t see the bottom of the pool and about the only thing you could see was a fleeting glimpse of what appeared to be red swim trunks.

I asked about the cloudy condition of the water and the manager, clearly concerned I would call the health department, insisted the water had been clear until the pool service put the wrong chemical into it yesterday.  They were installing a self cleaning pool sweeper called a creepy-crawly.  The system consisted of a hose with a vacuum head with wheels.  It randomly cleaned the entire bottom and sides of the pool. 

The told me that the body was a guest who worked as a dishwasher at a local restaurant and that he most likely drowned during the night.  Not likely I thought since the skin was already extensively degloving.  Something that takes a few more hours than ‘last night’ would account for.

I assigned an officer to canvass all the rooms as I tried to catch people who were walking around the complex or heading to their cars. The little girl I’d seen earlier had been following me around.  “I can tell you something” she said.  I needed her to wait until I got to talk to the others before I lost them.  Of course no one saw of knew anything.  She was patient.  I was finally able to pay her more attention.

My first thought was that the little girl should not be watching a dead body floating round in the pool.  I the manager where the girl’s parents were.  He pointed out a guy sitting in a patio chair watching the show.  I suggested to the dad that he take the girl back to their room.  Instead he pulled up another chair so she could watch the goings on.

She looked at me and said, "It’s a dead body isn’t it?”  She turned to her dad and the manager,  put her hand on her hip, cocked it to the side just a bit and said  in a rather snotty tone “See, I told you so”. 

Then she said, “I told my them two days ago there was a dead guy at the bottom of the pool”.

“I told that manager yesterday there was a dead guy in the bottom of the pool”. 

“I told everyone there was a dead guy in the bottom of the pool, I even told them he was wearing red shorts!”

“Nobody believed me, they kept saying I was wrong, that it was the creepy-crawly. I know the difference between a pool sweeper and a dead guy!” 

“I even checked yesterday to see if he was still there.”

“ See, I told you so!” she said with a smug grin to the manager.

good Lord, this little girl had been swimming around in that murky water for two days with a dead body bobbing around at the bottom and no one would believe her.  Amazing. O.K., I thought, so dad does not mind the kid seeing this.  What a genius.

When we got pool buoy out, he was already turning a riper shade of green.  They bagged him up for transport but the medical examiner’s office said they lacked the appropriate facility for a body in his state of decomposition.  They asked that he be transported directly to the funeral home due to the excellent refrigeration it offered.  So it was that we had a ‘field trip’ autopsy to attend.

In the meantime I located two of our local female impersonator prostitutes.  Otherwise known as he-shes.  They were staying in the room adjoining the floater.  They told me three of them had been drinking by the pool two nights earlier and that the three of them had been drunk.  The two he-shes, Marissa (Melvin Stokes) and Linda (Roger Washington) were drag queen divas who wore platform shoes and sequin cocktail dresses the way you would wear Nikes and Levis. 

Marissa and Linda were both saving up for ‘the surgery’.  I’ll tell you this, California’s got nothin’ on Florida when it comes to a fair share of unique people.  You have to love them though, they really were a hoot.

Anyway, they told me they had been pretty much in the bag,  pool boy having provided the bottle of liquor.  The lovelies not wanting to get their hair wet passed when he suggested a midnight dip.  So as he went back to the room to get his trunks on they headed out for the bottle club.  That’s the last anyone saw the guy alive.

The next day at the funeral home our floater's ripening had reached full fruition. So much for that excellent refrigeration.  By now he had doubled in size and turned a shade of green that would make an avocado jealous. 

Obviously the situation called for gas masks.  Those flimsy little gauze medical masks would be worthless.  This situation called for the mac-daddy gas mask we carry in our riot gear. Especially if the doc popped a couple of those bulging gas bubbles. 

I looked over at the detective who had been assigned the case for follow up.  His gas mask was on upside down.  He looked like Steve Martin’s character in Little Shop of Horrors wearing his nitrous oxide re-breather with little waggeling antennae.

I nodded at him since talking is way too difficult in the mask and pointed to the mask.  He thought I was saying hi and nodded back.  I decided it was his problem and restrained a giggle. Besides these guys were always dressed to the nines, working in their little cubicles, never getting dirty.  This was going to be good.

Usually the gas mask was for riot duty, when tear gas was deployed, but thankfully the only time I truly needed it was for training and stinky dead people.  Many medical examiners, veteran cops and firefighters say they get used to it and claim they don’t need protection from the smell.  I thought of a my favorite George Carlin album; “Martha, I know what bad breath smells like, but yours could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon!”.  Well, Martha, this guy would knock those buzzards into next week.

The doc did his job examining the corpse for signs of trauma, cuts, scrapes, subtle signs of bruises, etc.  No obvious sign of foul play.  Due to the chemical changes in blood during decomposition a test for blood alcohol is not possible.  But there is a way to determine the presence and amount of alcohol in the body. 

The intra-ocular fluid does not ferment like blood.  So the doc pulls out a humongous needle and poked it right in the guy’s eye.  He drew fluid from both actually, to make sure there was enough to get good reliable tests.   Now that was hard to watch, yuk.

After the autopsy the detective complained that his mask didn’t seem to work well and he was going to turn it in for a new one.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was probably fine and would have worked properly had he had it on ‘right side up’.