by Micheal Holmes
Spokane Community College
**Published in Legends Magazine, 1996.
Her name was Pearl Danielle Smith and she shot herself at 9:27 a.m. on Wednesday, July
16, 1976, in Browns Mills, New Jersey. I was the first police officer on the scene. I
didn't know her name when I first rolled up in the patrol car, or even that she'd
committed suicide. All I had was an "Unknown Trouble, Possible Shot Fired" call
from the police dispatcher.
It wasn't my area, either, but I happened to be cruising along just over the invisible
line that the police department used to divide the Township into patrol areas. The
neighborhood was white, lower, middle-class and the house was a green split-level rancher.
Several people were standing on the concrete steps leading up to the front door, which was
partially open. As usual, they all started talking at once, as I walked up.
"She's in there, but..."
"I heard the shot, I was watering the lawn..."
"Her folks are at the mall and I don't know when..."
I had only been a cop about eighteen months and was still impatient with this kind of
babble. "Okay, okay," I said harshly, "fine. Now, who's in there?"
With the direct question everybody stopped talking and looked at each other.
Then a thin lady in a green dress that almost matched the paint on the house shrugged
her shoulders, looked at me and said, " Her name is Pearl Smith. She lives here with
her mother and stepfather. They're gone right now. She's here alone. We heard a
shot."
"How do you know she's alone?" I said, unsnapping the leather strap across my
.357 magnum revolver.
"Well, uh," said a short guy, "somebody opened the door and hollered
inside. Nobody answered back." He was scuffing his shoe on the concrete step and
staring down at its toe. I could see a bald spot on top of his head.
"Groovy," I said, as I pulled my pistol, bringing the barrel up to point
skyward and rest against my right shoulder. Everybody froze when they saw the gun.
"Get back," I said, flipping left hand back toward the lawn, "get off
porch." As they moved back I moved forward, pushing the door the rest of the way open
with my right foot and stepping inside. It was suddenly very quiet.
I stood at the bottom of one staircase and the top of another. To my right a set of
stairs ran down to a kind of rumpus room. I could see the back of a couch and the frayed
edge of a large throw rug. The stairs to my front led up to the living room on the main
floor. No sound. Silence.
Then I heard the couch creak upstairs and then I heard something else. The hair on my
forearms stood straight up. It was sound I hadn't heard since Vietnam: a kind of choking
gurgle wrapped around a gasp. A death rattle. Just above me a human being was dying.
Pearl Danielle Smith was still alive when I got up there but not for long. She was on
her back on the wide couch, slender white arms and legs sprawled carelessly across the
cushions. Her long blonde hair was spread beneath her in a pale halo and the thick blood
bubbling from her mouth shrieked bright red against the ashen whiteness of her face. Her
eyes were closed. She wore a gray sweater and brown skirt. The skirt was hiked up above
her knees and it made her look so vulnerable that I put my gun away so I could lift her
legs and tug it back down into place.
Scattered all around her on the couch were dozens of multicolored pills. It was
confusing because an overdose of pills wouldn't have brought that shiny river of blood out
of her mouth.
"Can you hear me?" I said, looking down at her. "What happened to
you?"
She gasped and choked again. It was a desperate sound, an urgent signal that something
far beyond my power to control was about to happen. All I could give her was a final human
touch, so I went down on one knee beside her and reached to cradle her my arms. As my left
hand slid under her back, I felt a small lump of metal just under her skin. As my right
hand tugged her sweater straight I saw bullet hole, black with powder burns, just above
her left breast. And, as her body shifted with my movements, I saw the handle of what
proved to be a .22 piston sticking up between two sofa cushions.
Pearl Danielle Smith, age 21, had choked down a double handful of sleeping pills, then
held the barrel of a gun against her chest and pulled the trigger. The lump I felt was the
bullet. It had nicked the heart, torn through the left lung and ripped onward, spreading
massive shock waves of trauma through her upper body before plowing to a stop just under
the skin, slightly to the right of her left shoulder blade.
"Ah, damn," I said when I saw the bullet hole and realized what the lump was.
"Ah, hell."
Then Pearl Danielle Smith stiffened and for an instant went rigid as a board. In that
instant her eyes fluttered opened and her stare was traveling up toward me. It hit my
eyes, pushing my head back slightly. I felt it flow through my eyes, through my head, out
the top of the house, into the clouds, and far, far beyond, soaring skyward toward a light
only she could see and a music only she could hear.
A tiny breath of air puffed from her nose and her eyelids drifted shut. Her head fell
against my upper arm. Her body relaxed. She died.
I had been the house for exactly ninety-three seconds.
Within twenty minutes I had plenty of company. My backup officer, Bobby Willits, was
guarding the downstairs door. Several detectives were bagging the pills and a suicide note
that described a pregnancy, an abortion, and an older married guy who'd told her to get
lost.
My supervisor, Sgt. C. J. Kelly, was supervising the scene by leaning against a wall
with his arms folded. A couple of ambulance guys were standing out on the front lawn
smoking cigarettes and waiting with their body bag and stretcher for the coroner to
arrive. A little knot of neighbors were clustered on the sidewalk talking in low voices.
The men had their hands in their pockets and the women crossed their arms under their
breasts.
Pearl Danielle Smith was still lying on the upstairs couch but I was now sitting on the
downstairs sofa with her mother who had driven up alone about ten minutes previous. Pearl
Danielle Smith's mother was s short, slender woman of about forty with pale hair and
wrinkled skin. She puffed on a Pall Mall with quick, bird like movements. Her kinetic
manner appeared natural and unconnected to what was going on. In fact, she seemed more
concerned with all the people trampling around her house than with her daughter's body
upstairs. Reluctantly, she led me through a brief background of Pearl Danielle Smith's
life.
"So well, I did what I could. We moved a few times but stayed around here. Pearl
went to a few different schools. Then my present husband came along when she was about
ten. They never got along. They fought. He'd hit her and she'd leave. I don't know where
to but she'd always come back. Then she left high school but didn't go back to that."
"Anything else?" I said. "Any boyfriends?"
Her mother snorted. "A few," she said, "and two abortions. Then she went
to work for the married guy at his motel and before too long it was time for another
one."
"The married guy?" I asked, "You mean ..."
"Yeah," she nodded, "The married guy she wrote the note to."
"Did your daughter ever attempt suicide before this?"
"Not that I know of," she said, "Oh, she might cry and scream and
threaten things, but I never believed her."
"Did you have any indication this time that she was suicidal?"
"Yeah, this time I did," Pearl Danielle Smith's mother said, "In fact, I
told my husband that the way she way actin' we better get some insurance on her."
I got up then. I didn't say anything, I just got up and walked upstairs and on outside
and went over to my patrol car. Then I just got in and drove away. I never saw her mother
again, but I did meet Pearl Danielle Smith one more time.
"Officer Holmes," Sgt. Kelly said later that same day at the station,
"have you ever been to an autopsy?"
"No, and I don't want to either."
Kelly didn't even blink. But he did grin, "Well, you're going to one tomorrow. As
first officer on the scene, you gotta go watch Dr. Halverson make a canoe outa the Smith
chick. It was an unattended death an you hafta be able to testify to recovery and chain of
evidence on whatever the doctor finds."
"I don't want to go," I said. "I already attended her death."
"Well, you're not done attending it yet. And take Officer Willitts with you."
At 9:30 the next morning Bobby Willitts and I walked into the coroner's office just off
the morgue. The office was a big, bright room with huge diplomas on the wall. Dr.
Halverson was a big blonde smiling guy who looked exactly like the blonde smiling children
standing next to the blonde smiling woman inside the silver picture frame on his desk.
"Hey, guys," he said, "want some coffee?"
Bobby did but I didn't. I drank some anyway. Dr. Halverson asked a few questions about
Pearl Danielle Smith and we drank our coffee. Then it was time to go into the autopsy
room. A little cluster of student nurses followed us through the green swinging doors. I
remember that next hour only in flashes.
Pearl Danielle Smith lying naked and still on a gleaming metal table. Her skin was
white and her lips were blue.
Dr. Halverson picking up something shiny and sharp that sliced into Pearl Danielle
Smith with a quiet whisper.
An oozing red "T" sliced into her torso that ran vertically from the center
of her chest down to her pubic bone, crossed at the top by a horizontal line carved under
her breasts.
Those same breasts flipped casually backwards as Dr. Halverson prepared to widen the
incision.
"Oh," said one of the student nurses quietly, "Oh."
A coppery taste in my mouth and the sharp smell of medical alcohol. An abrupt, putrid
odor as Pearl Danielle Smith's stomach was sliced open.
The high whine of an electric saw as it cut off the top of her head. The top lifted up
and her face peeled down. Her brain lifted out through the opening. The dull thud of a
cold chisel knocking her pituitary gland loose.
Bright splashes of red and pale oozing of green. Gurgles. Hisses. chopping noises.
Dr. Halverson discussing a Philadelphia Phillies game with his assistant -- "You
gotta love these guys" -- and the head nurse pointing out various organs as they
appeared. -- "That is a human heart" --.
The bullet snipped out inside a circle of skin and dropped into a jar of clear liquid.
Other pieces of Pearl Danielle Smith dropped into other jars of clear liquid to float
there soundlessly.
Dr. Halverson's assistant, a middle-aged black guy, fitting the top of her head back on
lid a child replacing the lid of a cookie jar. Her face pulled back up like a rubbery
Halloween mask.
The bloody, gutted shell that had held a human soul being sewn back together with a
huge hooked needle and thick black thread.
Signing some papers, walking out of the hospital with Bobby Willitts and sitting there
in the patrol car. Just sitting there. I was horrified beyond my capacity to deny.
Bobby punched me lightly on the shoulder. "Hey man, she didn't feel
anything."
But I did.
I felt that the universe was a vast, cold place, abandoned by God; its great dark
reaches filled with nothing but mocking laughter and an limitless indifference. An
indifference her mother shared because she didn't care and Dr. Halverson shared because he
couldn't. An indifference the married guy who'd gotten her pregnant threw in my face when
I talked to him on the telephone the next morning.
"Hey, look," he impatiently said, "The crazy broad is dead. I'm glad
she's finally off my back, but I didn't do it. So what do you want from me?"
That cut through my numbness and the rage gushed out like toxic pus, "Listen to me
you son of a bitch. I'll tell you what I want. I want you in my office tomorrow morning to
talk about this or I'll get a warrant and come down to your office and drag you out in the
front of God and everybody!"
A dispatcher across the squad room glanced over at me. My voice was rising and the part
about the warrant was a lie.
"Hey," the married guy said," C'mon, she was just a little..."
I was almost out of control. If he'd been in front of me I would've kicked him right in
the mouth. "TOMORROW MORNING!" I howled in the mouthpiece.
"Yeah, yeah, okay." Then he hung up.
About an hour later I got a call from a Detective Sable in a nearby police department.
He told me he was a friend of the married guy. He told me the married guy had just called
him. His voice was calm.
"Hey, I know how he must have sounded to you. But actually, he's pretty torn up
about this."
"So.'s she."
"Huh? Look, she was a wacko, buddy. A pillhead. If it hadn't been this, it
would've ..."
"I was holding her."
"What?"
"When she died. I was holding her."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Then at the autopsy she was just lying there naked..."
"They usually are."
"And I was looking at her face and remembering how she had looked up at me. And
then the doctor just grabbed her face and peeled it right down to her chin. Just like
you'd peel a banana. and later he stuffed Kleenex into her head where her brain used to
be."
"Hey, Mike, uh, how long you been a cop?"
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"Nothing. Look, I'm gonna come in with the guy tomorrow, okay?"
They showed up about 9:00 a.m., and we went into an empty sergeant's office with cups
of coffee. I sat down behind the desk and they took chairs facing me. Detective Sable was
medium-sized with round shoulder and a bowling ball stomach. The married guy was short,
balding and middle-aged with a starburst of red capillaries across his nose. They sat and
stared at me silently with blank faces that might have been painted on a couple of
balloons. It occurred to me that each guy's head ought to have been floating on the end of
a string.
I had no idea what to say to them. But I tried. Attention must be paid. So I talked to
the married guy. "Day before yesterday. Pearl Danielle Smith took a double handful of
pill and then shot herself just above the left breast with a .22 caliber pistol."
I paused and took a sip of coffee. It was cooling rapidly. "she wrote a suicide
note just before she did it. It was to you. Tell my why she did it."
"How the hell should I know why she did it. She was crazy. Always buggin' me.
Always on my back."
"On your back to marry her, right? After you got her pregnant?"
He didn't say anything.
"Did you care about her?" I asked her, "Or was she just a good lay? Some
young stuff?"
Detective Sable leaned forward, "Uh, Officer Holmes, did you know Pearl?"
"I was holding her when she died."
"Yeah, you told me that yesterday. But what I don't get is your stake in all of
this. Why are you doing this? What the hell do care?"
I didn't answer that because I couldn't. Not because I didn't know but because he
didn't understand. Because I had called the married guy in as a police officer although I
was trying to reach him as a human being. And it wasn't working. So I pitched my voice low
and spoke to the married guy in a clipped, official cadence.
"As an investigating officer in the death of Pearl Danielle Smith, I am satisfied
that your involvement was neither instigative nor critical. You can go."
He looked at me in disbelief and slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand,
"For chrissake, you mean I came all the way out here for..."
Detective Sable grabbed his buddy's arm and pulled him to his feet. "We're outa
here." They were gone.
I sat there silently, leaning forward on the desk with both hands wrapped around my
cold coffee cup. I thought about why I cared. I cared because she'd been a beautiful young
woman when I held her on the couch and meat when I left her in the morgue. Because what
should have been a chorus of horrified cries from those closest to her was actually a
collective sigh of relief.
And because human beings are frightened creatures huddled in shivering clusters around
a tiny campfire we call hope, glancing fearfully over our shoulders out into the infinite
blackness. Out there where the great evil of indifference crouches just beyond the feeble
flicker of light.
All of which means we are all we have, and that we must all tend to one another.
But no one had tended to Pearl Danielle Smith. Her life, like her death was unattended.
And so she stepped out into the dark, and so our tiny circle was pulled a little tighter.
And so the darkness moved a little closer.
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