"You all right?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah. 11 The stench slammed into us like a storm front.
"Shit!" he complained as I opened the sheets shrouding the body. "Goddamn-fucking-son-of-a-bitch!"
There were times when a body was in such horrific shape it became a surreal miasma of unnatural colors and textures and odors that could distort and disorient and drop someone to the floor. Marino fled to the counter, getting as far away from the gurney as he could, and it was all I could do not to laugh.
He looked perfectly ridiculous in surgical garb. When he wore shoe covers he tended to skate across the floor, and because the cap couldn't get much of a purchase on his balding head, it tended to pucker up like a cupcake paper. I gave him another fifteen minutes before he snatched it off as he always did.
"He can't help the condition he's in;" I reminded Marino.
He was busy stuffing a Vicks inhaler up each nostril.
"Now that's a little hypocritical," I commented as the doors slid open again and Chuck Ruffin walked in with X rays.
"It's not a good idea to escort someone in here and just disappear," I let Ruffin know with far more reserve than I felt. "Especially a rookie detective."
"I didn't know she was a rookie;' Ruffin replied.
"Whad'd you think she was?" Marino said. "She's never been down here before and looks about thirteen."
"Damn sure is flat-chested. Not the way I like 'em, let me tell you." Ruffin's words swaggered. "Lesbo alert! RWIRR-RWIRR-RWIRR!" He imitated a siren, flashing his hands like emergency lights.
"We don't leave unauthorized people alone with unexamined bodies. That includes cops. Experienced or not." I wanted to fire him on the spot.
"I know." He tried to be cute. "O. J. and the planted leather glove again."
Ruffin was a tall, slender young man with sleepy brown eyes and undisciplined blond hair that seemed to grow in many different directions, giving him a tousled, just-outof-bed look that women seemed to find irresistible. He could not charm me and no longer tried.
"What time did Detective Anderson show up this morning?" I asked him.
His answer was to go around flipping on light boxes. They glowed blankly along the upper walls.
"Sorry I'm late. I was on the phone. My wife's sick," he went on.
He had used his wife as an excuse so many times by now that she was chronically ill or a hypochondriac, had Munchausen syndrome, or was almost dead.
"I guess Rene decided not to stay…" he said, referring to Anderson.
"Rene?" Marino interrupted him. "Didn't know the two of you was close."
Ruffin began slipping films out of their big manila envelopes.
"Chuck, what time did Anderson get here?" I tried again.
"To be exact?" He thought for a moment. "I guess she got here about quarter after."
"After eight," I said.
..Yup;,
"And you let her in the morgue when you knew everybody would be in staff meeting?" I said as he slapped films on the light boxes. "When you knew the morgue would be deserted. Paperwork, personal effects and bodies all over the place."
"She'd never seen all of it, so I gave her the quick tour..: ' He talked on. "Plus, I was here. Trying to catch up on-counting pills."
He referred to the endless supply of prescription drugs that came in with most of our cases. Ruffin had the tedious chore of counting pills and disposing of them down the sink.
"Wow, look at that," he said.
X rays of different angles of the skull showed metal sutures in the left side of the jaw. They were as vivid as the stitches in a baseball.
"The Container Man's got a busted jaw," Ruffin said. "That right there's enough to I.D. him, isn't it, Dr. Scar"If we can ever get hold of his old films," I replied.
"That's always the big if," Ruffin said, and he was doing all he could to distract me because he knew he was in trouble.
I scanned the radio-opaque shadows and shapes of sinus and bone and saw no other fractures, no deformities or oddities. However, when I cleaned off the teeth, there was an accessory cusp of the Carabelli. All molars have four cusps, or protrusions. This one had had five.
"What's a Carabelli?" Marino wanted to know.
"Some person. I don't know who." I pointed out the tooth in question. "Upper maxilla. Lingual and mesial or towards the tongue and forward."
"I guess that's good," Marino said. "Not that I have a friggin' clue what you just said."
"An unusual feature," I said. "Not to mention his sinus configuration, fractured jaw. We got enough to I.D. him about half a dozen times if we find something premortem for comparison."
"We say that all the time, Doc," Marino reminded me. "Hell, you've had people in here with glass eyes, artificial legs, plates in their heads, signet rings, braces on their teeth, you name it, and we still never figure out who the hell they are because they're never reported missing. Or maybe they were and the case got lost in space. Or else eve couldn't find a single damn X ray or medical record."
"Dental restorations here and here," I said, pointing to several metal fillings that showed up brilliant white on the opaque shapes of two molars. "Looks like he had pretty good dental care. Fingernails neatly trimmed. Let's get him on the table. We need to move along. He's only getting worse."
12
Eyes bulged froglike, and the scalp and beard were sloughing off with the outer layer of darkening skin. His head lolled and he leaked what little fluid was left in him as I grabbed him around the knees and Ruffin got him under the arms. We struggled to lift him onto the portable table as Marino steadied the gurney.
"The whole point of these new tables," I gasped, "is so we don't have to do this!"
Not all removal services and funeral homes had caught on yet. They still clattered in with their stretchers and transferred the body to whatever old gurney they found instead of one of the new autopsy tables that we could roll right up to the sink. So far, my efforts to save our backs hadn't amounted to much.
"Yo, Chuckie-boy;" Marino said. "I hear you want to sign on with us."
"Who says?" Ruffin was clearly startled and instantly on the defensive.
The body thudded on stainless steel.
"That's the word on the street," Marino said.
Ruffin didn't reply as he hosed off the gurney. He mopped it dry with a towel, then covered it and a countertop with clean sheets while I took photographs.
"Well, let me just tell you," Marino said, "it ain't all it's cut out to be."
"Chuck," I said. "We need some more Polaroid film."
"Coming up."
"Reality's always a little different," Marino went on in his condescending tone. "It's driving around all night with nothing going on, bored out of your friggin' mind. It's being spat at, cussed, unappreciated, driving piece-of-shit cars while little assholes play politics and kiss ass and get nice offices and play golf with the brass."
Air blew, water drummed and flowed. I sketched the metal sutures and accessory cusp and wished the heaviness inside me would lift. Despite all I knew about how the body worked, I didn't understand-not really-how grief could begin in the brain and spread through the body like a systemic infection, eroding and throbbing, inflaming and numbing, and ultimately destroying careers and families, or in some sad cases, a person's physical life.
"Nice threads," Ruffin was saying. "Ar-man-i. Never seen it up close before."
"His crocodile shoes and belt alone probably cost a thousand dollars," I said.
"No shit?" Marino commented. "That's probably what killed him. His wife buys it for his birthday, he finds out what it cost and has a heart attack. You care if I light up in here, Doc?"
"Yes, I do. What about the temperature in Antwerp when the ship left? Did you ask Shaw about that?"
"Low of forty-nine, high of sixty-eight," Marino answered. "Same weird warm weather everybody else's been having. May as well spend Christmas with Lucy in Miami if the weather stays like- this. Either that or put up a palm tree in my living room."