Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues (9 page)

“We got him in here just after midnight. I grabbed a couple hours’ sleep, then came in at five to do the autopsy. He’s in the cooler now. The mortician’s supposed to pick him up around two. You ready for this?”

“Who else you got in there?”

“Suicide, came in about five thirty this morning. We haven’t even cleaned him up yet. But it’s not too bad. Small caliber under the chin. He’s in one piece.” Her left eyebrow tilted up. “Mostly …”

Jesus, I thought, I hope I don’t pass out on her.

“C’mon,” she grinned. “At least this one hasn’t got a steering column through his chest.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”

She pulled the heavy metal latch on the cooler door, and we walked into the refrigerated room. Unlike in the movies and on television, this morgue didn’t have a bunch of neat shiny drawers, each with a sterile body laying there in repose. This was just a big refrigerator, with a bunch of gurneys scattered in loose rows all over the place. On one to our right, a young man was spread out barefooted, worn jeans, blue work shirt pulled open and splattered with a surprisingly small amount of blood. And below his chin, a dark ugly hole lined with burn marks.

Toe tags, the latest fashion for today’s teen.

Farther in and to our left, Conrad Fletcher was on another gurney. I hesitated for a second, drawing in a deep breath, steeling myself. Even from eight or ten feet away, I could see the ugly Y-shaped cut of the autopsy surgeon’s knife, the one that started at each shoulder, met at the center of the torso, then continued down. I’d never seen an autopsy performed, but I knew how one worked. And I knew the body lying over on that table was empty of guts and of brain. Whatever made Conrad Fletcher Conrad Fletcher was long gone, and the stiff blue-gray slab on the table was just residue. I told myself that as I stood there, a feebleminded attempt to distance myself from the awfulness that I knew the corpse represented.

“You okay?” Marsha asked.

“Yeah, I just needed a second. I never could get used to this.”

“C’mon, Harry, this one really isn’t that bad. You’ve seen worse.”

“I know. Just been awhile.”

She walked over to the table. There was a small sheet draped roughly over his crotch, but modesty was something that was neither called for nor particularly appreciated here. No neat white sheet covering him over head to toe. Just something thrown over his privates, almost as an afterthought.

She crossed around the gurney and stood, arms folded over the file in front of her. I ambled over and stood on the other side facing her. Conrad was between us, unaware that he was the topic of the day. I studied his face. It was a little sunken, his eyelids pulled down. His color was all wrong; the embalmer hadn’t had a chance to pretty him up. I was grateful that he had enough hair to cover the scalp incision, the one that’s made from ear to ear across the head, the one that Marsha had cut to remove his skullcap, and then his brain.

It was a strain to imagine her in this line of work.

“This wasn’t real hard to figure out,” she said, unfolding her arms and opening the file. “A first-year intern could have gotten most of it.”

I felt a sudden wave of dizziness pass over me as I stood there staring down at the huge stitches across Conrad’s chest.

“How do you do this stuff?” I asked, woozy.

“Should’ve seen him before I sewed him back up,” she said offhandedly.

I looked up at her. She was staring down at her notes. “So what killed him?” I asked.

“All the classic symptoms: blue mottling of the brain tissue. Paralysis of the musculature of the esophagus, larynx. Diminished ventilation of the pulmonary alveoli. Chronic and progressive congestion of the bronchial tract.” She
looked up at me as if she expected me to understand what she was talking about.

“Okay,” I commented.

“Mucus in the lungs,” she continued. “Textbook anoxia. Acute respiratory paralysis.”

“So what’s that mean in English, Marsh?”

“Harry, dear,” she said, cocking an eye toward me, “the man drowned in his own snot.”

I was trying to keep my brain working, trying to understand all this, mostly to keep from heaving.

“What, you mean somebody smothered him?” I thought of Spellman’s comment about the pillow.

“Nobody smothered him,” Marsha said. “He was poisoned.”

“Poisoned?”

“Your acute respiratory paralysis …”

I stared down at Conrad, cold and dead and poisoned. For the first time, I felt sorry for the poor bastard.

“What kind of poison?”

She walked around to the foot of the gurney, then stuck her thin hand inside the right pocket of the lab coat. “Tox screen’ll take a week or so. Samples went off to the T.B.I, lab this morning. My guess is, especially given that this went down in a hospital, that it was one of the anesthetics. Pavulon, maybe. More likely succinylcholine or protocurarine—”

“What in the hell is succin …”I stumbled. “And protocurarine?”

“Powerful anesthetic. Synthetic curares. Used for patients who are allergic to everything else. Paralyzes the respiratory system in large doses. It fits. Again, though, we’ll have to wait for the lab.”

“Synthetic curare. Poison-tipped arrow?”

“Try twenty-gauge needle,” she said, pulling a magnifying glass out of the lab coat pocket.

“You serious?”

Marsha laid the file folder across Conrad’s hairy legs. She moved her hand up his leg, above his right knee to the top
of his thigh. She searched around for a second, then looked up at me.

“See? Right there.”

I bent down and looked through the magnifying glass as she held it. I moved my head up and down to focus and then saw it. An unmistakable, tiny hole in the skin, with just the faintest trace of a bulge around it.

“There’s a hole in his pants, too. A match.”

I stood up and looked her straight in the eye, for the first time that day without any lascivious thoughts. “Why would a doctor lie there and let somebody jab a twenty-gauge needle into him—and through his pants?”

“You tell me.”

“Somebody knock him out?”

“Not a mark on him. Not even a scalp abrasion. He fell back on the bed.”

“Stun device?”

“I don’t know. I’m no expert on that. But every one I’ve seen leaves either burn marks or pinpricks.”

We left the cooler and its two inhabitants behind, then walked slowly back to Marsha’s office. In the hall, I remembered something I hadn’t thought of before.

“You know, I think he was still breathing when I first saw him.”

“Probably,” she said as we entered her office. “The stuff doesn’t kill you immediately.”

She walked behind her desk, tossed the folder onto the ever-present pile. “Want to hear a good one?”

“Sure,” I said. The smile on her face was a wicked, naughty one.

“He’d just had sex,” she said, almost with a note of triumph in her voice. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes before he died.”

My jaw dropped. “How can you tell?”

She raised her right index finger, her voice a bad imitation of Major Strasser telling Victor Laszlo he wasn’t going
anywhere
.

“We haff ways of makink you talk.”

“Marsh, that’s not funny.”

“Hey,” she continued, “the guy went out in a blaze of glory. Besides, you know what they taught us in stiff school, don’t you?”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite.”

“Rigor mortis,” she said, grinning from ear to ear, “is just an all-over hard-on.”

I knew I should head out to Green Hills and see Rachel. She sounded desperate on the answering machine. But I wasn’t ready.

Besides, I was starving. The heat seemed even more intense after leaving the icy cold morgue. Between the temperature and my empty insides, a full-tilt blood sugar crash was on its way.

I crossed the river and snaked my way over to Main Street. The city changed complexion almost immediately. Downtown Nashville could be any urban city in America: skyscrapers, government buildings, plazas, bus transfer points. But cross the river, less than a mile, and you’re in the middle of instant funky. That’s my side of the river now, the working class, blue collar, slowly gentrifying side. No
cluster homes
, a great euphemism for ghettoes for the rich, no $80,000 condos, no upscale shopping malls. Just old homes, neighborhood bars and restaurants, and people who chug beer out of cans on their front porches. It was a daily and endless source of fascination to me.

Quite a change from my married days out in yuppie, upscale Green Hills. Personally speaking, it’s no great loss. Besides, the smoking Ford would have been dreadfully out of place among the Mercedes-Benzes and the Jags.

Around the bend in front of East High School, Main Street becomes Gallatin Road. A couple of miles farther out, there’s a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant with the best damn Szechuan chicken that’s ever cleared this boy’s sinuses. I pulled into the parking lot next to a twenty-year-old rusted
out pickup truck with a pair of pit bulls chained in the back. They looked at me with either curiosity or hunger; I didn’t get close enough to check which.

I’d pulled my jacket off by now, rolled up my sleeves, and decided to live with the drenching sweats soaking through my white shirt. My stomach rumbled at the aroma floating gently toward the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“Why doan you twy somepeen else?” Mrs. Lee barked as I smiled across the counter at her. I hadn’t even ordered yet, but she knew.

“And pass up the best Szechuan chicken this side of Shanghai?” I said. “No way.”

“You wooden know Shanghai if it came up behind you and bit you on da butt!” She scraped a hand across her sweaty forehead, then whipped the green ticket behind to her daughter, a midteens Asian beauty that I’d been lusting after ever since I moved to this part of town. Hmmmm, maybe it’s not the chicken I keep coming back for.…

She must have signaled to her husband to fix my order Extra Fierce. Maybe she wanted to wean me from my predictability. But as soon as I bit into the chicken, my whole face started sweating like the textbook throes of passion. I could feel the epidermis at the roof of my mouth coming loose. Every breath drawn in through my nose came from a flamethrower. It was exquisite. I took a couple of the fatter pieces of chicken, dipped them in a glass of water to get most of the pepper off, then wrapped them in a napkin and stuck them in my pocket. I wolfed down the rest of the food, drank my diet soda, then carried my plate back up to the counter.

“Almost got me that time,” I said.

“What you talkeen about?” she demanded. Mrs. Lee was as genuinely fussy and ill-dispositioned as they came.

“It was delicious,” I said, reaching across the counter and patting her hand. “See you later.”

The sweltering air outside seemed normal now. I pulled my tie down another notch and opened the door to the Ford. The pits were gone now; the parking lot was safe for humanity. I settled in carefully on the hot vinyl car seat, and after
a few deep-throated rumbles that made the Escort sound like an Alfa, I pulled back out into traffic.

I headed up Gallatin Road toward Inglewood. This part of town has more junk stores, salvage warehouses, cheap liquor stores, and pawn shops per capita than any other place I’ve ever seen. Off to my right, Riverside Drive ran parallel a mile or so away, changed names, then curved left and intersected Gallatin Road just ahead of me. I stopped short of the light, turned left onto some side street I never could remember the name of, and meandered back into a really seedy part of town.

Maybe it’s not all
that
seedy; it’s just that I’ve never gotten accustomed to being surrounded by junkyards, body shops, illegal dumpsites, and motorcycle gang headquarters. Down the road, on the left, next to a concrete block building that housed Billy and Sam’s Expert Auto Maintenance on one side and the Death Ranger’s clubhouse on the other side, sat a faded, old mobile home in the middle of a desolate, closed junkyard. An eight-foot-tall chain link fence surrounded the lot, which was littered with the rusting hulks of generations’ worth of automotive dreams and overgrown with weeds and brush.

I pulled up in front of the gate and parked. I walked up, shook the gate to make a little noise, and waited for Shadow to emerge from wherever she’d been hiding out from the sun. Shadow, an aging black female German Shepherd trotted around from behind the trailer, ears at attention, a slight tilt to the left that came from age and the genetic hip displacement that seems to plague shepherds so badly.

She was slow, laid back, but I knew that was because I was on this side of the fence. If I crossed to the other side without either permission or recognition, she’d tear my throat out.

“Shadow,” I said, holding a hand, palm out, against the gate. “Hey, babe, what’s happening?”

She stopped about six feet away, sniffing, focusing. Then she approached slowly and ran her huge, wet, black nose up the chain link fencing to my hand. She sniffed a couple more
times, then the tail started bouncing around like a clock unwinding. She whimpered a little, then backed away so I could open the gate. I lifted the chain off the hook, pressed the gate open a foot or two, and stepped inside the lot. Shadow was on my shoulders in a second, licking my face and nuzzling me. I reached inside my pocket, pulled out the napkin and unwrapped the chicken.