Judy foraged in her leather backpack for a ballpoint pen and her little black Filofax. She found both, evidence of her karma returning, and flipped through the onion-thin pages of the Filofax until she found a blank one. The cabdriver clucked at the Filofax, but Judy didn’t apologize for it. At least it wasn’t a PalmPilot. “Go ahead,” she said, and jotted down the address and directions, then flipped the Filofax closed as the cab turned the corner on Thirty- eighth Street. They were only blocks away. Her stomach tightened. “Frank, listen, I have to go. I’m calling you from the cell.”
“Where are you?”
“You don’t want to know.” She looked out the window as the cab climbed University Avenue. The modern building, of low-slung red brick, squatted directly ahead, incongruous against the cheery blue sky.
“Okay, well, stay outta trouble. Don’t embarrass me like you did yesterday at the courthouse. Your jab needs work.”
Judy laughed, her face flushing warmly. She flipped the Star-TAC closed and tossed it into her backpack. “Pull up in front of that brick building on the right, please,” she said to the cabbie, who glanced back at her.
“But that’s the—”
“I know,” she said grimly, and the cabbie’s eyes met hers in the rearview mirror with a new respect.
Filofax 1, Dope 0.
Although Judy had impressed the cabbie, she had never been to the city morgue before, much less to an autopsy, and she concentrated on concealing that fact from the district attorney next to her, who had introduced himself as Jeff Gold, and Detective Sam Wilkins, the thin cop from the Roundhouse. They seemed undaunted by the glistening stainless-steel table they stood before, with raised edges all around, surprisingly long because it had a drain in one end and a stainless-steel sink. Judy’s gaze ran down the slant in the table toward the drain, and she realized that it wasn’t for water but for blood. Her stomach flip-flopped. She would have had to paint forever to get centered enough for this experience. She summoned up images of mountains, rocks, and forest streams from her landscapes, but nothing helped. Autopsy 1, Art 0.
A stainless-steel organ scale was suspended near Judy’s face and a huge operating room lamp poised over the table, casting a calcium-white brightness on a lineup of medical instruments on a stand at its head. Shiny scalpels, large scissors with a mysterious bulb at one end, and a tool that looked like a wire cutter gleamed in the light. Next to them rested a hammer with an odd hook on one side, a stubby handsaw with a handle like a gun, and an electric tool with a chubby chrome barrel and a rotating blade.
The assistant medical examiner, who had introduced himself as Dr. Patel, stood aside as two assistants, both young African-American men in blue scrubs, wheeled over a gurney containing a black body bag. They lifted it from the gurney and placed it on the stainless-steel table with a dull thud that echoed in the quiet morgue. Dr. Patel and an assistant wordlessly positioned the body bag on the table, while the other assistant disappeared with the empty gurney. Judy concentrated on the coroner, not the body bag.
An Indian who spoke with an English accent, Dr. Patel was a middle-aged man with a permanent half smile and steel-framed glasses over brown eyes. He was dressed in blue scrubs and a blue puffy hat with a drawstring, and he wore two pairs of latex gloves. A little gold bump on one finger betrayed a wedding band. His hand rested protectively atop the body bag, which couldn’t be denied any longer. The black nylon bag was surprisingly short, with a puff at the end where the head would be and a mound where the feet would be. It smelled of new, cheap synthetics and carried with it the faint chill of refrigeration. Judy’s head felt light.
“Are you okay?” Dr. Patel asked her, and though it was kind, she was getting tired of being asked that question. Judy was supposed to be tough. She took boxing lessons. She climbed rocks for sport. She was a lieutenant colonel’s daughter.
“I’m fine,” she answered, hoping it sounded professional, but knowing it sounded like WATCH OUT, I’M GONNA RALPH! The district attorney and Detective Wilkins looked over. She wanted to run away. “I love it here,” she said, and the coroner smiled.
“This is your first time.”
No shit. “Yes.”
“I understand.” Dr. Patel’s eyes softened. “Perhaps if I explain as I go along, you can understand what you are seeing and it will diminish your fear.”
“Fine. We will begin the external examination.” With the help of an assistant, Dr. Patel unzipped the body bag, making a metallic chattering sound. The zipper opened from the top to the bottom and the widening opening at the top showed a V-slit of a gray human mask. The coroner and his assistant made quick work of slipping the body out of the bag and repositioning it on the table, then quickly covering its privates with a white sheet. Judy’s nausea surged at the sight. It was the dead body of Angelo Coluzzi.
“This is the case of Angelo Coluzzi,” Dr. Patel said, pronouncing the Italian name perfectly as he read it and a case number from a large yellow tag that hung from the body’s big toe. The coroner projected his voice in the direction of a black microphone that hung from the ceiling over the body. “Subject was brought into the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office on April seventeenth. Subject is an eighty-year-old male Caucasian.”
Judy was about to look away again but stopped. She may have been an artist at heart, but she was a lawyer by profession. She had to understand everything about the facts to build her defense. There was a dead body at the crux of every murder case; it couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be avoided. Especially when this dead body was her client’s handiwork. The thought struck her that maybe that was part of the problem, which was also as it should be. It was easier to confront her art than her profession, but she was responsible for both. She told herself,
His face was bone-white in places and gray in the hollow of his cheeks and around his eyes, which were closed so tightly they seemed glued shut. Sparse gray hair sprung haphazardly from his scalp, which was as bald as Pigeon Tony’s. His nose protruded from gaunt cheeks, a bulbous shape with a breach at the bridge; it looked as if it had been broken long ago. His lips, flat in death, looked thin. Although Angelo Coluzzi’s head rested roughly in line with his backbone, even Judy’s untrained eye could see that its location was tenuous. His head wasn’t firmly attached to anything; only skin and muscle held it to the body. Judy realized that a broken neck was essentially a beheading. She closed her eyes briefly. How could one human being do this to another? How could Pigeon Tony do this to anyone?
“The first step in the external examination is easy,” Dr. Patel was saying. “The body must be measured and those measurements recorded for the case file.” He selected a common yardstick from the table of medical instruments and began measuring various parts of Angelo Coluzzi’s body, dictating the findings into the microphone. Judy barely listened, except to hear that the body weighed only 155 pounds and measured a mere 67 inches.
As the coroner read his other measurements, Judy’s horrified gaze traveled down Angelo Coluzzi’s body, which was skinny, his chest almost wasted and his upper arms withered with age. His hands had been bagged in clear plastic with a loose rubber band, but Judy could see they were arthritic. His hips jutted from above the discreet white sheet, and his legs rested slightly open, their calf muscles slack. Blood had collected along the backside of Angelo Coluzzi’s body, drawn by gravity once his heart had stopped, making a grim outline around his frail form.
Judy hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected any of it. She had imagined that Angelo Coluzzi would be a tall, strong man. A big bully, a brute. But in death he took up only a little over half of the tray table. His were the remains of a bony old man. The body of a frail victim.
“Now we will note for the record the external abnormalities in the body,” Dr. Patel was saying, for Judy’s benefit. She watched as he gestured to Coluzzi’s broken neck. “There is slight bruising in the neck region, and the neck is at a distinctly abnormal angle in relation to the spine.”
Judy blinked, sickened, but the district attorney opened a fresh legal pad. “Wasn’t he strangled?” he asked, his pen poised for a note. “Looks like he could’ve been strangled, with the bruising on the neck and all.”
