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.”
8
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.