house is built three feet above sea level. Inside were vats and bottles and the odds and ends used to make the home brew Granny gave away to neighboring fishermen. Two old air-conditioning units were turned on full blast and water dripped down the walls.
I suggested we cut first, eat breakfast later. I couldn't imagine doing the job on a full stomach. Charlie said he understood, then grabbed an old brown satchel from the cab of the truck. He unbuckled the worn leather straps and looked lovingly at half a dozen scalpels glinting in the light of the midday sun.
14
'The skin is macerated and there's mold on the face, but all things considered, not bad, not bad at all,' Charlie Riggs said. He was washing off the body with a hose. The remains of Philip Corrigan were spread out on an old work table in Granny's beer cellar. 'Before we do any cutting, let's examine the body.'
He slipped on surgical gloves and started poking and pinching various parts of the corpse, squinting hard through his half-glasses. In formal tones he continued, 'The subject is a well-developed white male, age indeterminate due to deterioration of the face. The head and neck appear to be symmetrical and exhibit no masses. The chest is symmetrical and the abdomen flat. The body is in an excellent state of preservation due to the embalming and a nearly dry tomb. There is evidence of two surgical procedures in close proximity to death, unhealed wounds from both back and abdominal surgery.'
He went on that way for a while, as if the tape recorder with the microphone swinging from the ceiling was still there, as if he was still the medical examiner and as if homicide detectives still waited outside for his findings. A little sad, a man retired before his time, maybe a different kind of death.
Charlie brought a lamp closer to the body, illuminating a small area of skin at a time. 'Now for a closer look.' He started with the arms and worked down. I helped him flip the body onto its stomach. 'Hullo! What's this, Jake? Right buttock, upper quadrant.'
'Looks like a freckle.'
'Come closer, my boy. Mortui non mordent, dead men don't bite.'
'No, they smell.' I moved close but it still looked like a freckle.
'A puncture wound,' Charlie said triumphantly. 'Pretty large gauge hypodermic, too.'
'You sure?'
He didn't say yes and he didn't say no. He picked up a scalpel and swiftly dissected a piece of meat that used to be Philip Corrigan's flabby ass. In a moment Charlie held a cross section of the buttock, down through the fat, all the way into the muscle.
'There it is,' he announced. I looked at a red streak, maybe three inches long. 'That's the needle track, just as fresh as when it was made. Had to be done in articulo mortis, or there'd be evidence of healing.'
I wasn't convinced. 'It could have been a routine injection in connection with the laminectomy or the emergency abdominal surgery.'
'Could have been,' Charlie said, 'but it's not on the charts. No doctor or nurse recorded it.'
'Maybe the puncture was made after death. Something the undertaker did, I don't know.'
'No way. See the little trail alongside the track, that's the hemorrhage. He had to be alive when the needle was injected.'
'Dead men don't bleed,' I said.
'You're catching on, Jake.'
'Okay, so somebody injected something into Philip Corrigan. Hard to make a case of that. What next?'
He wrinkled his forehead. 'The tissues will have to be checked for succinic acid and choline. Your granny doesn't have a GCMS on the premises, I suppose.'
'Not unless it's used for bonefishing or bootlegging.'
Charlie held the slice of Corrigan's flesh up to the light. 'Gas chromatographic spectrometer. Test for toxic substances. We'll need some brain and liver tissue, but first I'm going to do the work-up in the usual way.'
The usual way. Like it was something he did every day. Which it was. Every working day for over thirty years. Thousands of bodies. So he did it without pausing, opening the neck just below the ear, making a long, smooth incision to the top of the chest and then to the other ear. He pulled up the flap of skin and exposed the inside of the neck. He deftly carved a slice straight down the chest over the sternum, avoiding the navel. He showed me where the embalming fluid had gone in, the spot being hard to miss, a thumb screw in the chest where the mortician inserted the trocar.
He peeled the skin flaps down over the chest, like pulling on an undersized sweater, exposing bright yellow fatty tissue and purple organs. He snapped the sternum in two with rib shears that looked like hedge clippers, probed into the abdomen, and made a dissection of the aorta. The punctured aneurysm was in the front, right where he had testified it was. He hummed under his breath as he worked. It sounded like 'Born Free.'
'Let's open the aorta and look for chalky deposits,' he said brightly. 'Give me some light over here, Jake.'
I did what I was told and Charlie went about his business. Happy to be in control, to be taking things apart and figuring them out. Alive again. 'Some evidence of sclerosis, but nothing unusual in a man of his age. Not enough to block the blood flow. Probably not enough to cause the aneurysm.'
'So you hoodwinked the jury with that arteriosclerosis stuff.'
'Didn't mean to. I figured the sclerosis was worse.'
'So what killed him?' I asked.
'Something that caused the aneurysm, and if Roger Salisbury didn't do it and the sclerotic changes didn't do it, there's got to be something else.'
I was confused. 'What about the drug?'
He smiled, and his eyes crinkled, and behind them his computer was whirring, a lifetime of experience filtering the information. 'It doesn't add up, not yet. Even if the tests are positive for the succinylcholine, the fact remains that he died of the aneurysm.'
'I don't get it. If we find traces of the drug, that means Roger injected Corrigan-or somebody did-trying to kill him. If Corrigan was still alive when he was injected, which you say he had to be, it would have killed him. But you're saying he had the aneurysm after the injection. So what killed him and who killed him?'
Charlie caught himself before he stroked his beard with a gunked-up hand. 'It's a puzzle, Jake, and we don't have enough pieces yet. But if we find the what, it'll lead us to the who. So if you'll stop talking and stand back, I'll finish the autopsy in the usual way.'
The usual way again. He unpacked a portable scale, removed the heart, weighed it-four hundred fifty grams- poked around in more blood vessels, snipped here and clipped there, examining organs I didn't know existed. I was okay so far. I was okay when he cracked the ribs to get underneath. I was okay when he sliced off a piece of the liver and slipped it into a plastic lunch bag. I was okay when the band saw bit into the skull. But when he pulled the brain out, tut-tutting because it was shrunken and dehydrated, I wasn't okay. Things went a little gray, the beer cellar listed like a dinghy in rough chop, and the next thing I knew, Granny Lassiter was saying something and squeezing an am-monia-soaked rag under my nose.
I coughed and sputtered and got to my feet with Susan Corrigan's help and found I was on the front porch. Granny laughed and handed me a mason jar filled with home brew. 'Drink this, Jacob. It'll put hair on your chest.'
'I'm okay, I'm okay.' I dusted myself off. Nothing like having two women fussing over your fallen body.
Susan Corrigan had on a funny half-smile and was holding on to my arm, propping me up. 'I kind of like you this way. None of your macho bullshit.'
'Great, I'll faint every chance I get. Promise you won't take advantage of me when I'm out?'
'No promises. Now just hush up. You need something to eat. Granny's making conch omelets with salsa.'
In a few minutes Charlie joined us in the kitchen. He washed up and wrapped both hands around a mug of
