“Suicide, came in about five thirty this morning. We haven’t even cleaned him up yet. But it’s not too bad. Small caliber under the chin. He’s in one piece.” Her left eyebrow tilted up. “Mostly …”
Jesus, I thought, I hope I don’t pass out on her.
“C’mon,” she grinned. “At least this one hasn’t got a steering column through his chest.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”
She pulled the heavy metal latch on the cooler door, and we walked into the refrigerated room. Unlike in the movies and on television, this morgue didn’t have a bunch of neat shiny drawers, each with a sterile body laying there in repose. This was just a big refrigerator, with a bunch of gurneys scattered in loose rows all over the place. On one to our right, a young man was spread out barefooted, worn jeans, blue work shirt pulled open and splattered with a surprisingly small amount of blood. And below his chin, a dark ugly hole lined with burn marks.
Toe tags, the latest fashion for today’s teen.
Farther in and to our left, Conrad Fletcher was on another gurney. I hesitated for a second, drawing in a deep breath, steeling myself. Even from eight or ten feet away, I could see the ugly Y-shaped cut of the autopsy surgeon’s knife, the one that started at each shoulder, met at the center of the torso, then continued down. I’d never seen an autopsy performed, but I knew how one worked. And I knew the body lying over on that table was empty of guts and of brain. Whatever made Conrad Fletcher Conrad Fletcher was long gone, and the stiff blue- gray slab on the table was just residue. I told myself that as I stood there, a feebleminded attempt to distance myself from the awfulness that I knew the corpse represented.
“You okay?” Marsha asked.
“Yeah, I just needed a second. I never could get used to this.”
“C’mon, Harry, this one really isn’t that bad. You’ve seen worse.”
“I know. Just been awhile.”
She walked over to the table. There was a small sheet draped roughly over his crotch, but modesty was something that was neither called for nor particularly appreciated here. No neat white sheet covering him over head to toe. Just something thrown over his privates, almost as an afterthought.
She crossed around the gurney and stood, arms folded over the file in front of her. I ambled over and stood on the other side facing her. Conrad was between us, unaware that he was the topic of the day. I studied his face. It was a little sunken, his eyelids pulled down. His color was all wrong; the embalmer hadn’t had a chance to pretty him up. I was grateful that he had enough hair to cover the scalp incision, the one that’s made from ear to ear across the head, the one that Marsha had cut to remove his skullcap, and then his brain.
It was a strain to imagine her in this line of work.
“This wasn’t real hard to figure out,” she said, unfolding her arms and opening the file. “A first-year intern could have gotten most of it.”
I felt a sudden wave of dizziness pass over me as I stood there staring down at the huge stitches across Conrad’s chest.
“How do you do this stuff?” I asked, woozy.
“Should’ve seen him before I sewed him back up,” she said offhandedly.
I looked up at her. She was staring down at her notes. “So what killed him?” I asked.
“All the classic symptoms: blue mottling of the brain tissue. Paralysis of the musculature of the esophagus, larynx. Diminished ventilation of the pulmonary alveoli. Chronic and progressive congestion of the bronchial tract.” She looked up at me as if she expected me to understand what she was talking about.
“Okay,” I commented.
“Mucus in the lungs,” she continued. “Textbook anoxia. Acute respiratory paralysis.”
“So what’s that mean in English, Marsh?”
“Harry, dear,” she said, cocking an eye toward me, “the man drowned in his own snot.”
I was trying to keep my brain working, trying to understand all this, mostly to keep from heaving.
“What, you mean somebody smothered him?” I thought of Spellman’s comment about the pillow.
“Nobody smothered him,” Marsha said. “He was poisoned.”
“Poisoned?”
“Your acute respiratory paralysis …”
I stared down at Conrad, cold and dead and poisoned. For the first time, I felt sorry for the poor bastard.
“What kind of poison?”
She walked around to the foot of the gurney, then stuck her thin hand inside the right pocket of the lab coat. “Tox screen’ll take a week or so. Samples went off to the T.B.I, lab this morning. My guess is, especially given that this went down in a hospital, that it was one of the anesthetics. Pavulon, maybe. More likely succinylcholine or protocurarine-”
“What in the hell is succin …”I stumbled. “And protocurarine?”
“Powerful anesthetic. Synthetic curares. Used for patients who are allergic to everything else. Paralyzes the respiratory system in large doses. It fits. Again, though, we’ll have to wait for the lab.”
“Synthetic curare. Poison-tipped arrow?”
“Try twenty-gauge needle,” she said, pulling a magnifying glass out of the lab coat pocket.
“You serious?”
Marsha laid the file folder across Conrad’s hairy legs. She moved her hand up his leg, above his right knee to the top of his thigh. She searched around for a second, then looked up at me.
“See? Right there.”
I bent down and looked through the magnifying glass as she held it. I moved my head up and down to focus and then saw it. An unmistakable, tiny hole in the skin, with just the faintest trace of a bulge around it.
“There’s a hole in his pants, too. A match.”
I stood up and looked her straight in the eye, for the first time that day without any lascivious thoughts. “Why would a doctor lie there and let somebody jab a twenty-gauge needle into him-and through his pants?”
“You tell me.”
“Somebody knock him out?”
“Not a mark on him. Not even a scalp abrasion. He fell back on the bed.”
“Stun device?”
“I don’t know. I’m no expert on that. But every one I’ve seen leaves either burn marks or pinpricks.”
We left the cooler and its two inhabitants behind, then walked slowly back to Marsha’s office. In the hall, I remembered something I hadn’t thought of before.
“You know, I think he was still breathing when I first saw him.”
“Probably,” she said as we entered her office. “The stuff doesn’t kill you immediately.”
She walked behind her desk, tossed the folder onto the ever-present pile. “Want to hear a good one?”
“Sure,” I said. The smile on her face was a wicked, naughty one.
“He’d just had sex,” she said, almost with a note of triumph in her voice. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes before he died.”
My jaw dropped. “How can you tell?”
She raised her right index finger, her voice a bad imitation of Major Strasser telling Victor Laszlo he wasn’t going
“We haff ways of makink you talk.”
“Marsh, that’s not funny.”
“Hey,” she continued, “the guy went out in a blaze of glory. Besides, you know what they taught us in stiff school, don’t you?”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite.”
“Rigor mortis,” she said, grinning from ear to ear, “is just an all-over hard-on.”
8
