Death of a Doctor

A Sam Jenkins Mystery

by Wayne Zurl

Doctor Paul D’Amato’s sister found him slumped over his dining room table with a .38 caliber bullet hole in his right temple. The original investigation listed D’Amato’s death as accidental. Months later, insurance investigator Velma Barnett disagrees. She thinks it looks like a suicide, which would negate the half million-dollar death benefit D’Amato’s sister hoped to receive. Barnet petitions the Blount County sheriff to reopen the case and continue the investigation, which by anyone’s definition had been brief and inadequate. Sheriff Bettye Lambert asks middle-aged detectives Sam Jenkins and John Gallagher to re-investigate the closed case. It doesn’t take that pair long to determine that the semi-retired psychiatrist, most recently employed by the Veteran’s Administration, had either committed suicide or been murdered.

The case leads Jenkins and Gallagher into a quagmire of pornography, war veterans with non-physical wounds, a wealthy organized crime figure, a drug dealer looking to wiggle out of an arrest, and the reappearance of two former police officials who left a scar on the sheriff’s office that only time and short memories could erase.

As their investigation continues, Jenkins and Gallagher progress from what began as the death of a doctor to murder times four.


Excerpt

Chapter One

January 2012

 

I was sitting at my desk in the back office writing a diplomatically phrased report of my investigation on a candidate for deputy sheriff. Effectively, I’d be ruining the young man’s life and the chances of him ever getting a job at any police agency in Tennessee or elsewhere. I felt bad because he was a cop’s kid. But he was also a thief who, over several years, systematically glommed almost fifty thousand bucks’ worth of resalable equipment from the phone company who employed him. That’s life. He cast his fate. I only learned about his kleptomania through good investigative techniques and informed the appropriate people.

The door to the outer office opened and closed with a bang. Moments later, a pair of high heels click-clicked across the tile floor and became increasingly louder until they stopped at the threshold of my office door.

For a woman pushing fifty, she had a face years younger with loads of character. Her blonde hair ended an inch from her shoulders, creating the perfect frame for the aforementioned face. Unless she was a very careful shopper, the lavender dress under her pearl gray topcoat must have cost as much as a good late model used car and accentuated a figure any twenty-year-old woman would have been proud of. She hadn’t yet spoken, but her smile and a pair of sparkling hazel eyes lit up an otherwise dreary winter day.

“Hello, darlin’. You doin’ all right t’day?” Her soft Smoky Mountain accent made Scarlett O’Hara sound like an alcoholic bag lady with smoker’s cough.

I smiled back, projecting undying but platonic affection for my current employer. “Whaddaya say, Blondie? Since when does the county sheriff make a personal call to pick up the report I’m writing?”

“It’s not about that, Sammy. I’ve got another job for ya.”

“I’m not finished with this one. Don’t I get a day off?”

“Like you always said, Sugar, ‘Crime never sleeps.’”

“You’re a tough boss.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

She winked. “I know that.”

“So, what have you got for me…or us?”

“I’ve asked Lieutenant Joiner to oversee an administrative task force to review CID’s open or exceptionally cleared cases from the last five years. With Ryan Leary’s thumb on everything for so long, I don’t trust very much. I need you and John to take a look at something for me.”

Exceptionally cleared cases are those that required a formal investigation but were closed without an arrest being made. The circumstances surrounding those cases could vary. Recently defrocked Chief Deputy Ryan Leary, currently doing hard time in one of the Federal government’s country club slammers, left a scar on the Blount County Sheriff’s Office that only time and short memories would erase. Bettye Lambert, the new interim Sheriff and my former administrative sergeant at Prospect PD, didn’t have an easy job restoring public confidence in her department.

“Besides D.L. Joiner, who’s on your task force?”

“Bo Stallins is helping him coordinate things, and I got approval to hire four retired detectives who used to work for the National Accreditation Commission.”

“You don’t think Bo was one of the detectives who sloughed off or falsified cases, do you?”

“No. That’s why I asked him to work with D.L. on this.”

“Umm, Kemosabe, Bo heap good man. What you want from me?”

She sat in my guest chair and crossed one lovely leg over another, right over left. “First, I want you to stop the Injun act. Then I’d like you and John to re-investigate a shooting death written off as an accident. It’s not that old, and the insurance company’s investigator seems to think it looks more like a suicide.”

I raised my eyebrows. “And suicide negates the death benefit?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Who did the initial investigation?”

“Leo Turner.”

“One of Ryan Leary’s handpicked henchmen.”

“He was.”

“And since he’s been disgraced and forced to retire, you’re assuming he’ll tell you to go jump rope rather than offer assistance.”

She shrugged. “Be my guess.”

“Well then, I guess the elite team of Jenkins and Gallagher, private cops, had better dust off our official Special Investigator badges once again.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“If this gets complicated, how about picking up Terri Donnellson’s paycheck, too?”

“If you need her. But keep the hours to a minimum, please.”

“Pfui. You can’t get a good investigation if we go home every day at five o’clock.”

She made a production out of sighing. What an actress. “Oh, all right.”

I smiled. “Since you’re in such an agreeable mood, how about a raise? We’ve been giving you almost sixty years of investigative experience at bargain basement rates.”

“Darlin’, have you started usin’ hallucinogens since you left Prospect PD?”

 

* * *

 

Six months earlier, June 20th to be exact, a Doctor Paul D’Amato died from a .38 Special to the right temple. An estimated three days elapsed before his sister, Angela, found him slumped over the dining room table in his Maryville home. A target revolver and cleaning kit lay on the table along with a pool of congealed blood. Angela called 9-1-1.

After a deputy and his road supervisor responded to the house, they called the duty detective—Leo Turner—to conduct an investigation. Leo, in turn, called a police surgeon for a death pronouncement.

A police surgeon is not a medical examiner—not a forensic pathologist. He simply states for the record that a person is in fact dead when a family physician doesn’t wish to sign the certificate and state the probable cause of death. It’s not a difficult call when there’s a hole in the victim’s head that allowed a pint or more of blood to escape. At that point, it’s up to the attending detective to take the investigation further.

In New York, where John Gallagher and I worked for many years, any unattended death under those circumstances would have been considered reason for an autopsy—the law said so. The medical examiner would be charged with conducting a post mortem examination, and the detective would begin an investigation to determine if the deceased might have committed suicide, been murdered, or was just unlucky and accidentally killed himself.

In Tennessee, an autopsy isn’t mandatory. It’s the detective’s call, in this case Leo Turner’s call. In this case, and without further ado, Leo summarily ruled the shooting accidental. Easy peasy. No more troublesome work. No more bother. And as it turns out, D’Amato’s sister Angela Scarano would not only inherit the doctor’s home and his estate, but a half million dollar insurance policy where she had been named beneficiary after her brother’s second divorce three years earlier.

Since an investigator for Lone Star Mutual Insurance questioned Turner’s opinion, I thought interviewing this investigator while John Gallagher ran a complete background check on the victim was a reasonable way to begin. Getting to know a little about her before we met was only prudent.

 

* * *

 

Janetta Galloway, our office manager, accountant, secretary and all-around assistant, buzzed my phone. “Boss, I’ve got a Ms. Barnett from Lone Star Insurance to see you.”

“Don’t call me boss. It’ll make John feel bad.”

“She says she’s a little early. May I send her back now?”

“Does she seem friendly?”

“No sir, there is nothing else on your calendar.”

“Are we having the same conversation? By the way, what’s she look like?”

“Very good, sir. I’ll tell her.”

“Jeez.”

I didn’t hear the pitter-patter of high heels from this female visitor. In less than thirty seconds, a middle-aged brunette wearing a black pantsuit, dark gray button-down shirt and soft-soled loafers stepped up to my desk.

“Hello, I’m Velma Barnett.”

She was medium height—five-five, five-six or so—with a pair of broad shoulders. The snug suit jacket showed that her waist may have thickened with the years, but she didn’t look fat. The lines on her face and her dark suspicious eyes told me her career of investigating arsons for the Dallas Fire Department and more recently assorted and questionable insurance claims for Lone Star Mutual held more stressful moments than not. But after meeting Velma, no one would stretch their imagination to think that she wasn’t at one time woman of the month for Soldier of Fortune magazine. She might have appeared in the centerfold biting the head off a cobra.

I stood and offered her a professionally courteous smile and a hand to shake. “Hi, I’m Sam Jenkins. We’ve been retained by the Sheriff to re-investigate the death of Paul D’Amato.”

Velma’s handshake showed me that she didn’t want anyone to confuse her with a sissy. I pointed to the guest chair in front of my desk.

“Please sit.”

She did and got right down to business.

“Good idea to take it out of house,” she said, “since the first investigation was bullshit.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I’ve been told you think so.”

“I don’t think. I know so. That was no accidental discharge.”

“I haven’t gotten that far into it yet. Tell me why you say that.”

“Easy. The dick who caught the case didn’t do jack squat. No neighborhood canvas. No background on the deceased. No forensics. No work at all. He just kissed it off. And in doing so stuck my company with a half million dollar pay off.”

“What recently happened to Leo Turner is public record, so I don’t feel like I’m telling you tales out of school when I say he wasn’t the best detective Blount County ever had. He’s recently been forced to retire for questionable conduct.”

Velma nodded. “I know. I checked him out.”

“He put himself into quite a jackpot.”

“He did. And I also know it was you who cleaned up that entire mess—and got screwed for your troubles. I checked on you, too.”

Turner, Leary and a third detective were caught in a cover-up of a brutality case, and Leary’s problems went much further onto the dark side.

“I’m flattered. I guess.”

“Don’t be. I wouldn’t be worth my salary if I didn’t do a complete job. I didn’t want to waste my time if you were just another hack like Leo Turner. I ran your partner, Gallagher, too. You’re both clean far as I’m concerned.”

“Wow. Can I get a discount on an insurance policy now?”

She frowned.

I smiled again. “Just kidding.”

She didn’t smile. “Sure.”

 

"A Leprechaun's Lament" by Wayne Zurl

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