“He’s out of town?” I asked, surprised.
“Seminar. Won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“So you guys haven’t autopsied Fletcher yet?”
“Dr. Marsha did it. Dr. Henry’ll sign off on it when he gets back.”
“You think she’ll talk to me?”
“I’ll check, Harry. Best I can do.”
Kay walked back to Marsha’s office, which was one of two smaller offices occupied by the forensic pathologists. Off to another side was an office shared by the three forensic investigators.
Kay walked back in a moment, a wicked grin on her face. “Yeah, go on back there. But be prepared.”
I had a feeling I knew what she was talking about. Tune was when Marsha and I had done a fair amount of flirting, back before I got my divorce. Still under the delusion that I had a marriage, I backed off. Stupid me …
I smiled at Kay, thanked her, and limped on back.
“You know,” she said behind me, “you need a vacation. You look like hell.”
I turned to her. “People keep telling me that.”
“You should listen.”
Marsha sat behind her cluttered desk. Behind her, on a windowsill beneath another pane of bullet-proof glass, sat a dozen or so tiny pill bottles, each marked with a black felt tip pen, each holding a bullet that had been pulled out of one of her customers. Grim work, I thought, but these people seem to thrive on it. In fact, Marsha’s office was filled with other souvenirs: a human skull, a large specimen bottle with a human fetus preserved in formaldehyde, framed color pictures of gruesome murder scenes.
“Who does your decorating?” I asked. “The Addams Family?”
She smiled at me, revealing a mouth full of perfect white teeth. Marsha Helms was even prettier than I’d remembered; maybe it was because I’d been in the middle of a long, dry spell. Maybe she just was, and it took me this long to notice.
“Hello, Harry.” She stood up, and up, and up, and up. God, she was tall. She stuck out a hand, which I took gratefully and shook gently. “Good to see you, again.”
“Good to see you, Marsh. How’s it going?”
“Busy. Long hot summer. The murder rate’s up fourteen percent this year over last, and we aren’t even through the worst part of the summer yet.”
And now I’d been a party, however inadvertently, to making it a notch worse.
“So I’ve heard.” I sat in a scuffed, city-issue office chair across from her.
“You’re limping,” she said. “What happened?”
“Nothing much. Compound fracture. I just had ’em stuff the bone back in and wrap it.”
“Heard you got bopped on the head. Stitches?”
“Coupla hundred. But it’ll be okay.”
We stared at each other for a moment, a thankfully non-pregnant pause. “Such a tough guy,” she chided. “I guess it comes with being a private … dick.”
“So you heard?”
“Yeah. What happened at the newspaper?” Marsha crossed her legs and leaned back in her office chair. She was wearing a long black skirt that peeked out beneath her white lab coat. Great legs, I thought, distracted for a moment. Sorry, can’t help it.
“I hacked off the wrong people. Attitude problem, I guess.”
“I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did. I heard about you and Lanie, too.”
“Yeah,” I said, uncomfortable. I don’t like reopening old wounds-the new ones are bad enough. What the hell, it’s all in the past, anyway. Letting go of things is tough, but hanging on’s even tougher. “I’m glad it’s over.”
“Pretty rough?”
“In places.”
She looked down at her desk. “You should’ve called me. Somebody to talk to. Shoulder to cry on, maybe.”
I thought for a moment. This was encouraging news, especially for a person in my situation. Wonder if my landlady would mind my having company some evening? I’d never asked her; it simply hadn’t occurred to me.
“Why don’t I do that sometime?”
She looked back at me, smile gone from her face. “But that’s not why you’re here now?”
“No, Marsh. You did Fletcher, right?”
“I was there. I was the one who did the on-scene. You were already gone by then.”
“They took me down to E.R.”
“So what do you want to know?”
“What killed him, Marsh? What killed Conrad Fletcher?”
“You know how much trouble I’d get in for divulging that?”
I leaned forward in the chair, a self-conscious attempt to convey sincerity with body language. I’m never able to pull off that sort of thing, but I keep trying.
“Marsha, I just want to know because, well, I’m involved. It’ll be a matter of public record eventually, anyway. Let me know what I’m up against. Whatever you tell me doesn’t go any further than this office.”
She stood up, thumbed through a stack of file folders, and pulled out one near the top. “C’mon. I’m only doing this because Dr. Henry’s out of the office and Charlie’s out running a D.O.A. car wreck.”
She walked past me quickly, her lab coat brushing against my arm. I followed her out of the office, past Kay Delacorte’s desk, and through the door into the autopsy room. Two tilting tables with bright overhead lights sat shiny, cold, and clean. Off to the left were the tool kits laid out on white towels, the brutal Stryker saw on its side, on a shelf by itself. Marsha’s heels clicked sharply on the tile floor as we walked out of the autopsy room into the receiving room.
“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.