Had she ever looked at Eddie Cochran that way?

JOHN STROUT made his personal policy very clear in the first month of his tenure as San Francisco ’s coroner. The responsibility of that position, according to U.S. Government Code 27491, is to determine the “cause, circumstances and manner of death” of individuals dying within a particular jurisdiction. And under “manner of death,” there are only four possibilities: natural causes, accident, suicide, or death at the hands of another.

In the course of doing that job, however, other elements, many of them political, have an opportunity to come into play. Strout, a tall, soft-spoken gentleman originally from Atlanta, wasn’t about to let anybody or anything affect his judgment on causes of death, and so he decided early on to send a message to those who would prefer a quick and sloppy verdict over a slow and correct one.

The victim in the case had been the cousin of the mayor and- not the greatest coincidence in the world, given the size of the city-brother-in-law to one of the supervisors. Strout came in to work that morning and found the morgue overrun with media people as well as with members of both the mayor’s and supervisor’s staffs.

Strout glanced at the body before going to his office, where he was hounded to issue some statement. He figured it was as good a time as any to get the word out.

A reporter for the Chronicle finally asked him point-blank, and rather insultingly, if he planned to make any decision at all in the foreseeable future. Strout had stood up to his full height behind his desk. “Seeing as this victim was stabbed twice and shot five times”-he said in his most syrupy drawl-“I’m very close, and you can print this, very close…”-he paused and smiled at the assemblage-“very close indeed to rulin’ out suicide.”

Strout wasn’t about to hurry and be wrong. After eleven years as coroner, it was gospel that once Strout gave a verdict, you could take it to the bank.

Now Carl Griffin and Vince Giometti sat in the air-conditioned visitors’ room at the San Francisco morgue. It was not a decorator’s paradise. The long yellow couch was too low, the commercial prints on the walls were ugly and hung too high. The only living plant by the one window to the right of the couch was no greener or prettier than the three plastic floral arrangements that graced, respectively, the center table (too short for the couch), the blue plastic end table, and the pitted mahogany sideboard.

Griffin and Giometti sat on either end of the couch. Between them, in an almost-new cardboard briefcase, was the file on the Cochran case. Giometti, a new father, had just finished saying something that made Griffin explode.

“Do I gotta hear this right after lunch? You think this is interesting? You believe anybody cares what your baby’s bowel movements look like, whether it’s hard or soft or runny or whether the goddamn corn gets digested on its way through?” Griffin jumped up, unable to sit still. “Christ!”

“If you had a kid, you’d know how important it was.”

“Why do you think I never had a kid? You think that was just dumb luck? You may not believe this, but I thought about it at one time, and you know what decided it for me?” He went down on one knee in front of his rookie partner. “I asked myself this question: I said, ‘Think about the reality of babyhood, and what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?’ ”

Giometti started to answer, but Griffin put up a hand.

“No, let me finish. The first thing that came to my mind was shit. Rivers of it every day for like a couple of years. Then I asked myself another question: Is there anything I like about shit? I mean, its smell, texture, various colors? Do I look at it the way Eskimos look at snow, with nuances and a hundred different names? No, shit is shit. And I am not interested in any of it- your kid’s, my own, any of it, okay?” He stood up. “So from today on can we do without the daily bm moment, please?”

He turned away and walked over to the window, breathing hard. He rubbed a leaf of the plant between thumb and forefinger.

“It’s a natural function, Carl,” Giometti said. “You shouldn’t be so uptight about it.”

Griffin thought he’d leave a thumbprint on the leaf, he squeezed it so hard.

He heard the door open. Strout was shaking Vince’s hand, coming over to him. It wasn’t exactly how he’d wanted it. He would have preferred to be calm and dispassionate, and now, if he knew Strout at all and he did, his mood might affect Strout’s decision. Well, if he played it right, maybe it could work to his advantage.

“So, boys,” Strout said after he’d sat in a straight-back chair he’d pulled up to the too-short table, “what have you got here?”

Giometti opened the briefcase and took out the file. Griffin thought it would be wiser, also good experience for the kid, to let his partner talk until he’d calmed down, and he loitered again over by the window, hands in pockets.

“Well, sir, the deceased was having troubles at work. In fact, the job was about to come to an end.”

“Any medical corroboration of depression?”

“No, sir, not formal.”

“Informal?”

“The family, not his wife, but his family family.”

Griffin saw Strout’s face stretch slowly. “You mean the one he grew up with? We call that the nuclear family, officer.”

It went right by Giometti. “Yeah, well,” he said, “the nuclear family said he’d been on edge the last couple of weeks.”

Strout turned to Griffin. “Serious?”

“Couple of arguments with his father. Like that.”

“Did they say over what?”

Giometti took it again. “Something, he thought, about his work.”

Griffin: “We checked it out. The place is going bust. He was the manager.”

Strout was inclined to be skeptical. “He cared enough about it to kill himself?”

Griffin finally sat down. “It’s possible, sir. Guy was an over-achiever his whole life, was planning on going to business school down at Stanford this fall. Could’ve ruined his image of himself, running a company going down the tubes.”

Strout nodded, silent. “All right,” he said, “marital?”

“Okay, even good,” Giometti said.

Griffin added, “The wife spent the night of his death talking to his mother. Two-hour conversation. Phone records verify it.”

“Worried about him?”

“This and that, but generally that’s my conclusion,” Griffin said.

“Any mental history at all?”

Giometti shook his head. Griffin said, “How ’bout you, sir? You find something?”

Strout leaned forward, putting his weight on his elbows, his elbows on his knees. Griffin noticed that the man’s eyebrows were so bushy they tangled in his lashes when he opened his eyes wide.

“I find a healthy young man,” Strout began, “with a good marriage. Good family. No history of mental illness. He’s got powder burns on his left hand and a hole in the half of his head that’s left.”

Giometti spoke up. “Oh, the gun was fired twice, you know.”

“The gun was fired twice. So what? Only one slug went in.” Strout’s lashes kissed his brows, looking at Griffin.

“Happens a lot,” Griffin said. “And while we’re at it, the gun was unregistered.”

Strout nodded. “Of course.”

Giometti butted in. “While we’re at things, nobody seems to want to talk about the note.”

“The fuckin’ note…” Griffin said.

“It was a note,” Giometti insisted.

“It was a piece of crumpled paper,” Griffin answered, not wanting to get drawn into anything in front of Strout.

But it was too late. “Are you telling me we have a suicide note, officer?” Strout rolled his eyes up, up, out of his head. “Are we wasting our time here?”

“It’s not exactly the Rosetta Stone of suicide notes,” Griffin said.

“It’s a note next to a body lying by a gun, though…”