“I think not. Let me explain. Here, see.” Dr. Patel turned to an oversize manila folder on the side table, slid a large, dark X ray from it, and with a loud rustling noise tucked the X ray under the clamp on a light box on the near wall. Judy shakily retrieved a pen and a legal pad from her backpack as Dr. Patel switched on the light box. The box illuminated the X ray, a close-up of the miraculous tongue-in-groove vertebrae of the human backbone. But you didn’t have to be a doctor to know that something was terribly wrong with this backbone. It was disconnected at the base of a shadowy skull. Dr. Patel pointed calmly to the film. “We took these X rays when he first came in, the same time as the photos. You can see the fracture to the spinal column, at C3. A fracture that high up, death would have been instantaneous.”
“But he could have been strangled, couldn’t he? I mean, the bruises to the neck look like it was squeezed,” the district attorney asked again, but Dr. Patel shook his head, apparently willing only to state facts the science would support.
“No, the neck wasn’t squeezed. The bleeding you see is internal. The victim was not strangled to death. In the cases of strangulation, or asphyxia, one always sees petechial hemorrhages on the conjunctiva.” Dr. Patel turned back to the body and with a gloved thumb suddenly opened wide the eye of Angelo Coluzzi. Judy startled at the odd sight of the one-eyed corpse, his brown cornea clouded. Dr. Patel was pointing to the flap of the eyelid. “See? There is no blood clotting on the membrane lining the eye, not at all. So there was no loss of oxygen that resulted in death. We are getting ahead of ourselves here”—at this he gave an uncomfortable laugh—“but my initial conclusion is that the cause of death was the fracture to the neck. Death would have been instantaneous. This man did not suffer.”
Judy realized where the D.A. was going, and it wasn’t concern over the man’s suffering. He wanted to prove that the murder was premeditated. The law in Pennsylvania was that premeditation wasn’t a question of time, as in weeks or days in advance, but could occur in an instant, as long as death was the intended result. Strangulation was a slam-dunk for premeditation. Judy didn’t know if she was allowed to ask questions at an autopsy, but figured if the D.A. could, she could, too. And she had more than a legal reason for asking this one. “Dr. Patel, you said the victim’s neck was broken. Is that difficult to do?”
The district attorney snorted. “You can’t know that, can you, Doctor?” he asked, while the detective beside him listened impassively. “That’s not a pathology question.”
Dr. Patel blinked round-eyed behind his glasses, making him look owlish. “Perhaps not, but I am a doctor, sir, and it pertains here. The neck of a man this age would break without difficulty. One forceful snap would be enough. This man’s neck was essentially severed by the force.” Judy fell into an appalled silence, and Dr. Patel rested a hand on the body’s shoulder. “Now. Please, everyone, while I appreciate your interest, allow me to proceed in order, if you would. I must follow our department procedures.”
The district attorney made another note, and Judy was having the same trouble the jury would have.
“I move next to determine if there are other abnormalities on the body.” Dr. Patel took his time reviewing every inch of Angelo Coluzzi’s corpse, running his gloved fingers slowly over the skin, bending closer, and recording every scar, mole, and skin lesion. He even described a tattoo on Coluzzi’s arm, a crucifix encircled by a blurry crown of thorns and under it a ribbon banner reading ITALY , which Dr. Patel’s English accent made sound classy. It made Judy think about Pigeon Tony’s tattoo, also of a crucifix.
Judy mulled it over. Angelo Coluzzi and Pigeon Tony were two men, contemporaries, both immigrants from the same country. According to Frank they had grown up not ten miles apart. They both raced homing pigeons. They liked the same tattoos. They loved the same woman. They had more in common than most friends; yet they were enemies. Two little old men, and one had killed the other. Pigeon Tony had killed Angelo Coluzzi, the old man on the table, whose hands were now being slid from sealed evidence bags.
Judy’s thoughts churned away as she watched Dr. Patel separate Angelo Coluzzi’s stiff fingers and then scrape under each fingernail one by one, bagging carefully each line of dirt. Judy knew Dr. Patel would send them to the crime lab, where common dirt would reveal DNA from Pigeon Tony’s skin and fibers from the clothes he was wearing. Angelo Coluzzi’s body might even yield up Pigeon Tony’s fingerprints from its skin; the lab could do that, too, Judy recalled. The Commonwealth’s evidence against Pigeon Tony would be both substantial and solid, because he did it. He
“Now we will begin the internal examination of the body,” Dr. Patel was saying. He turned to the instrument tray and picked up a large, shiny scalpel. “I will make a Y, or primary incision, into the trunk, cutting from shoulder to shoulder, crossing down over the breast. Then from the xyphoid process, or the lower tip, of the sternum, I will make a midline cut down the abdomen to the pubis.” Scalpel poised in the air, Dr. Patel peered uncertainly at Judy. “Are you feeling okay? You look unwell.”
But she couldn’t answer, because she felt her gorge rising and had to run for the nearest bathroom.
Chapter 14
After the morgue, Judy had planned to go back to the office, but that would have to wait. It had taken her only a minute to decide to blow off work at the office and another half hour to retrieve her car, a new VW Beetle. She had more important things on her mind than antitrust articles. She floored the gas pedal, and warm air blasted through the open window. She was going to talk to her client, the one who could twist another man’s neck off and think that was just fine.
The bright green Bug zoomed down the Schuylkill Expressway out of Philadelphia, faster than any cartoon insect should. Judy adored her car but today it gave her no pleasure. Its black vinyl interior reminded her of the nylon body bag. The new-car smell was too close to formaldehyde. The fresh daisy she kept in the glass bottle on the console had wilted. She tasted bile on her teeth and it wasn’t nausea, it was anger. At Pigeon Tony for what he had done, and at herself, for being so clueless. She was defending a guilty man. That she could have doubted it scared her. What was she thinking? That he was a cute little guy? That he had a handsome grandson?
What kind of a lawyer was she? The kind who represented guilty people as innocent. The kind who lied to themselves and to the jury. The kind everybody hated, who starred in countless lawyer jokes: How do you stop a lawyer from drowning? You shoot him. What do lawyers use for birth control? Their personalities. What do you call forty skydiving lawyers? Skeet. What’s the difference between a woman lawyer and a pit bull? Lipstick.
What’s the trouble with lawyer jokes? Lawyers don’t think they’re funny and nobody else thinks they’re jokes.
Despite the punch lines, Judy couldn’t laugh. She hated that the public made jokes about lawyers, hated that they didn’t understand the nobility of the profession, or of the law itself. Now she had become a lawyer joke. She hit the gas.
The Beetle flew west toward Chester County, where Frank had said he’d be with Pigeon Tony. She had intended to go there after finishing her antitrust article, but she still had Sunday and the weekend gave her a reprieve on returning the GC’s phone calls. She left the city skyline behind and switched lanes again, impatient even in light traffic. The directions Frank had given her, written in her open Filofax on the passenger seat, fluttered in the wind as the VW accelerated. She’d go out 202 South and west from there. It would take over an hour. Too damn long.
But still not long enough to cool down.
Judy could smell the wetness that chilled the air blowing in the VW’s window; though it was sunny outside now, it must have rained west of the city earlier in the morning, and it wasn’t only the weather that was drastically different. She glanced around as she steered the car down a winding gravel road flanked by pasturelands. Out here it was country. She checked the directions but she was going to the right place.
A blue sky chased dawdling gray clouds to the horizon, which extended to an expanse of grassy hills so immense she could hardly believe she was still in Pennsylvania. The hills rolled into an unmowed meadow rippling in a gentle, still-damp breeze, and swallows and blue jays sailed above, swooping low to catch bugs the rainstorm had stirred up. Chirping and singing filled the meadow and its overgrown grasses, browning at the top, swaying with chrome-yellow bursts of dandelions, blue dots of forget-me-nots, and clusters of wild honeysuckle. The wildflowers sweetened the air, but Judy rolled up the window. The landscape inspired the painter in her, but a lawyer was in the driver’s seat.
