of identification. I read it and re-read the name—Joanne Walters. They had mislabeled her.
I raced into his office. “Kevin, the hospital mislabeled her! Maybe the real Mrs. Walters is still at the hospital morgue.”
He stared at me with his beady eyes. Behind his desk he looked like a big red toad, all puffed up and furious.
“I’m serious. The bracelet says—” I trailed off feebly.
Kevin got up, glaring at me, and stalked out of his office.
I went to follow but he held up a pudgy finger indicating for me to wait. A few seconds later, after what seemed like an eternity, Kevin came back chuckling. “That’s her, all right,” he said.
“What?” I said, confused. “I thought you said she’s white.”
“She is white.”
“Huh?”
“Jaundice. It can sometimes give the skin a tint like that.”
“Like that?” I was relieved and flabbergasted.
“You know how jaundice turns the skin yellow?” Kevin said, still laughing.
“Yeah.”
“Well, sometimes the embalming fluid will react with the chemical that causes the jaundice and turn the skin other colors.”
“Oh jeez, you nearly gave me a heart attack a minute ago,” I said.
“You? What about the heart attack you nearly gave me!”
“I didn’t mean to,” I protested.
He laughed. “Rookie mistake. Hell, McCullough, get out of here. Go home and pour yourself a stiff drink. We’ll chalk this one up to inexperience… and I won’t tell the boys,” he said, referring to the other men.
“Thanks,” I said, really meaning it. “I don’t think I’d ever live this one down.”
“They were rookies at one point. We all were.”
Though Kevin was trying to be nice, I was still mad at myself. A magician’s sleight of hand involves using psychology to direct your eye one way while she or he manipulates the trick elsewhere. I performed a sleight of hand on myself; right before my own eyes, without realizing it, so engrossed was I with the less-fair sex.
The dead can’t tell you who they are. That’s my job: to know, to make sure, to double check, and to triple check. That day was an important lesson in doing my job. No matter what the job, do it right, and do it right the first time. No excuses.
Southies don’t make excuses.
CHAPTER 8
Ousting the Coroner
I used to contract with the county to do body removals for the coroner’s office. When a death occurs outside of a normal setting like a hospital, convalescent home, or home hospice care, the coroner is called to investigate. His investigation of the scene determined where I took the body. If the coroner believed the death to be anything other than natural (or sometimes, accidental), I took the body back to his laboratory for an autopsy by a pathologist. If he ruled it to be a natural death, then I would take the body back to my funeral home, or another funeral home of the family’s choosing, and things would proceed from there. The money was terrible, but it kept my fledgling business afloat through some rough patches in the early years.
Before the state allocated money for an official county coroner’s building, the autopsies used to be performed at my funeral home. To my relief, the state later coughed up enough money so we no longer have to deal with our morgue being commandeered as a quasi-government facility. The pathologist always left a mess.
It can be a raw job at times—doing removals for the coroner. I’ve been summoned at all hours of the night, to all kinds of places, and seen bodies in all kinds of conditions, in all types of weather. The coroner doesn’t get called if some sweet, old lady dies of heart failure at home under hospice care. No, the coroner gets called when there’s a mess to be cleaned up. When he got called, I got called.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called to the scene of a car wreck and lined the body bags up along the shoulder of the road while deputies and firemen collected the body parts, or been called to a homicide so recent that the blood hasn’t had time to congeal—the sweet smell of iron hanging heavy in the air. The suicides made me introspective and the freak accidents made me believe in Existentialism, but they all made me just a little bit more jaded. I had the contract with the county for seven years before the strain of the work became too much and I called it quits. The tragedy of all those shattered human beings drained me emotionally and physically.
These days I’m happy to sit in my big-cheese office, in my fine suits, and go about my business in a relaxed fashion while some other hungry upstart funeral director deals with the dirty job of doing removals for the coroner’s office. I saw a lot of things during those seven years, but the removal that I remember most happened the first year I held the contract.
My funeral home wasn’t doing very many calls a year. One weekday morning I was drinking coffee and reading the sports scores when the phone rang. It was the coroner’s office; a body had been found in the foothills. I took the location from the woman, thanked her, and hung up. I called a part-time guy, Paul, who helped me do removals, and he agreed to me meet me at the funeral home.
We piled into the run-out old Chevy station wagon and drove out to the site. I live near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The weather fronts that blow off the Pacific Ocean hit the mountains and have nowhere to go, so they dump their precipitation. It’s usually raining in my neck of the woods. This day was no exception. It was more like a heavy mist than an actual rain, but combined with the chilly air, it was a certifiable foul day. One of the sheriff’s deputies recognized my vehicle as we pulled up to the scene and waved us through the cones he had set up on the lonely mountain road.
I stepped out of the wagon and turned my collar up. It was no use; the wind still cut right through the fabric. The area where the body had been found was on a bend of a secondary road leading up towards the mountains. Old-growth forest towered over the road on one side, and on the other, an embankment dropped away from the road. I walked over to the guardrail where the coroner was staring down the hill intently.
“Hey, Joe,” I said, fumbling for my cigarettes in my pocket with frozen fingers.
He glanced at me, grunted, cigar clamped between his lips, and then looked back down the hill.
I pulled out a cigarette and inserted it between my lips. “Nasty fall, huh?” I said, following his gaze down the steep embankment to where I could see two deputies picking their way through the brush around the little stream at the bottom of the ravine.
Joe grunted again, and pulled his cigar from his lips with his thick fingers.
I tried lighting a match but the moisture just made it crumble. I tried several before I gave up and flicked my unlit cigarette down the hill in disgust. “So, what’s the story?”
Joe sneered. “What does it look like?” he said. “Asshole fell. Got what he deserved for walking around here at night. No street-lights out here in the boondocks.”
I stared down the muddy embankment to the little creek that had formed at the bottom of the ravine and wished I hadn’t worn one of my few suits. I knew this wouldn’t be a tidy job.
“Hey fellas! Find anything down there?” Joe yelled.
The deputies at the bottom of the ravine looked up and shook their heads. Not that they were really looking any too hard for clues. They were pussyfooting around in the tall grass, trying to steer clear of the mud and water.
“Well, Toules, looks like we have an obvious accident on our hands.” Joe pushed up off the guardrail where he had been resting his foot, using his knee as a leaning post.
“You going to go down and look for yourself?” I asked, incredulous. Joe was lazy and had the kind of stupidity combined with cunning intellect that could get you in trouble if you crossed him. He had been elected into office eons ago, and just kept getting re-elected. It was almost like he got recycled in spite of himself. The more he got re-elected the lazier he got.
