to believe her.
Believe me. Please believe me.
She told the oh-so-politic female police officer that her husband didn’t go to bars or wander off. He wasn’t having a little memory problem or a little affair. He always came right back like a Boy Scout, and if he’d gotten “adventurous” and “ornery,” he would have called Shrew.
And simply told me to fuck off, that he’d be home when he got around to it, just like he’d done last time he’d gotten goddamn adventurous and ornery,Shrew had said to the politic police officer, who’d sounded like she was chewing gum.
Nobody was in a panic except Shrew.
Nobody cared.
The detective, yet someone else in the landmass of the NYPD, who finally called with the news was regretful.
Ma’am, I’m very sorry to inform you . . . At around four p.m. I responded to a scene. . . .
The policeman was polite but quite busy and said he was sorry several times, but didn’t offer to escort her to the morgue the way a well-behaved nephew might escort his stricken aunt to a wake or a church.
The morgue? Where?
Near Bellevue.
Which Bellevue?
Ma’am, there’s only one Bellevue.
There most certainly isn’t. There’s the old one. And then there’s the new one. What Bellevue is the morgue near?
She could go there at eight a.m. and identify the body, and she was given the address, lest she confuse the location of one Bellevue with the other, and she was given the name of the medical examiner:
Dr. Lenora Lester, LL.B., M.D.
Such an unfriendly, unpleasant woman for all her education, and how unfeeling she was when she hurried Shrew into that little room and drew back the drape.
His eyes were closed, and he was covered up to his chin with a papery blue sheet.
No sign of any injury, not a scratch, not a bruise, and for an instant Shrew hadn’t believed anything had happened.
There’s nothing broken. What happened? What really happened? He can’t be dead. There’s nothing wrong with him. He looks fine. Just pale. He’s so pale, and I’ll be the first to agree he doesn’t look well. But he can’t be dead.
Dr. Lester was a stuffed dove under glass and her mouth didn’t move as she explained, very briefly, that he was a textbook pedestrian fatality.
Hit from behind while upright.
Thrown over the hood of the taxi.
Struck the back of his head on the windshield.
He had massive fractures of the cervical vertebrae, the doctor’s stiff white face had said.
The severity of the impact had fractured both of his lower extremities, the stiff white face had said.
Extremities.
Her beloved’s legs that wore socks and shoes, and on this cruel April afternoon, corduroy slacks almost the same tawny brown as his recliner and the couch. Slacks that she had picked out for him at Saks.
The stiff white face said in that small room: He looks pretty good because his most profoundly mutilating injuries are to the lower extremities.
Which were covered—the lower extremities, his lower extremities—by the papery blue sheet.
Shrew left the morgue, and she left her mailing address, and later she wrote the check and got a copy of Dr. Lester’s final report after it had been pended for about five months, awaiting toxicology. The official autopsy results were still sealed inside their official envelope, in a bottom drawer of her desk, under a box of her husband’s favorite cigars that she’d sealed in a freezer bag because she didn’t want to smell them, yet she couldn’t bring herself to toss them out.
She put another glass of bourbon next to the computer and sat down, working later than usual and not wanting to go to bed anytime soon or ever again. It occurred to her that all had been bearable until she’d opened that Marilyn Monroe photograph earlier today.
She thought of a punishing God as she envisioned the man with the mutton-chop sideburns and flashy jewelry, and his offer of a free dachshund or a shih tzu or a springer spaniel puppy, and then the ride home. He was trying to silence her through the bribery of a kindness that hinted what it would be like if he weren’t inclined to be kind at all. She’d caught him red-handed, and they both knew it, and he wanted her to feel friendly toward him. For their own good.
She went on the Internet and searched until she found a story that had run in the Times just three weeks ago, the very same week that the Boss had written such nice things about Tell-Tail Hearts’s main pet shop on Lexington Avenue. The article was accompanied by a photograph of the white-haired man with the big sideburns and dissipated face.
His name was Jake Loudin.
This past October, he had been charged with eight counts of animal cruelty after one of the pet shops he owned in the Bronx was raided, but several weeks ago, in early December, he’d gotten off scot-free:
CHARGES AGAINST PUPPY MILL KING DROPPED
The New York County District Attorney’s office has dropped eight counts of aggravated animal cruelty against a Missouri businessman who animal-rights activists call “The Puppy Pol Pot,” comparing Jake Loudin to the Khmer Rouge leader responsible for the slaughter of millions of Cambodians.
Loudin could have received up to sixteen years in prison had he been convicted and given the maximum sentence for all eight felony counts. “But there just wasn’t a way to prove the eight deceased animals discovered in the pet store’s freezer were alive when placed there,” said Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger, whose recently formed animal-cruelty task force raided the shop last October. She added that the judge didn’t feel the police had supplied sufficient evidence to prove a lack of justification for the euthanization of these same eight companion animals, all of them puppies ranging from three to six months in age.
Berger said it is commonly known that some pet shops “eliminate” dogs, cats, and other pets if they can’t sell them, or if for some reason they become a commercial liability.
“A sick puppy, or one that’s three or four months old, loses its ‘doggie in the window’ appeal,” she said. “And far too many of these stores are notoriously negligent in supplying medical care or even the most basic necessities such as warm, clean cages and sufficient water and food. One of the reasons I started this task force is because the people of New York have had enough, and I am making it my mission to bury some of these offenders under the jailhouse.” . . .
It was the second time tonight Shrew called 911.
Only she was drunker and more unraveled now.
“Murderers,” she said to the operator, repeating the Lexington address. “The little ones being locked in there—”
“Ma’am?”
“He forced me into his car after the event, and my heart was under my feet. . . . He had a red sullen face and a frosty silence.”
“Ma’am?”
“You’ve tried to put him in jail before, for the same thing! Hitler! Yes, Pol Pot! But he got away. Tell Ms. Berger. Please. Right away. Please.”
“Ma’am? Would you like an officer to respond to your residence?”
“Someone from Ms. Berger’s dog squad, please. Oh, please. I’m not crazy. I promise I’m not. I took a picture of him and the freezer with my cell phone.”
She hadn’t.
“They were moving!” she cried. “They were still moving!”
