If only Marjie had told me.
I imagined the terror of those veiled girls being led past the plush parlors of the funeral home through the service door and into the cold, clinical embalming room. The heavy chemical odors. The sinks and the drains. Being ordered to disrobe and to climb upon the same table where hundreds of corpses had been shed of their lifeblood. The curt orders and the pain and fright when one’s own red fluid started to flow.
Jerry squeezed my hand and smiled. Mick was talking again.
It might never have come to light, he said, if it weren’t for some newfangled equipment Bishop installed. I cringed as I recalled his boasting and Foster’s animated questions; obviously embalming gear wasn’t all he was buying with Littmann’s generous bank loan.
“Don’t forget, most of the girls made it out okay,” Mick added. “Between them, Bishop and Foster had the anatomical know-how; the other three supplied the patients. The vast majority of women were in and out with no problems.”
Then things started going sour. Grace wasn’t the first but she was the closest. Theresa, who shared a room with her sister and had noticed her bouts of nausea, figured out the scheme and confronted the undertaker.
“She had a couple of hypo marks on her arm and neck,” Mick said. “It wouldn’t take much embalming fluid to put her out. And of course he had the perfect setup for hiding unwanted corpses.”
Detectives yearned to dig up every casket Bishop had closed for the past couple of years, to find out how many carried an extra occupant. They had found Theresa in with an elderly woman way over at Mt. Olivet, and poor Marjie stuffed beside a middle-aged man right up the avenue in Grand Lawn.
But Bishop’s mortuary helper, Stan, realizing he could face a murder rap or ten, was likely to turn state’s evidence, Mick said.
“At least it’ll help us narrow things down,” said the cop, waving to the waitress for the check. “But there are going to be a lot of gravediggers busy between now and the trial.”
The scandal was keeping me hopping too. In the weeks since the news broke, complete with grainy newspaper photos of the manacled businessmen, Grand River and Greenfield had become a regular tourist attraction.
The new pharmacist, a white-tuniced Wayne State grad, was appalled but had to admit it was great for business. Everyone wanted to see Bishop’s lair, light a candle at Holy Cross, and stop for Coke or a tube of toothpaste at Cunningham’s infamous drugstore.
Gawkers edged out the regulars at my counter, prying for details between bites of tuna or grilled cheese. I obliged as best I could and my uniform pockets bulged with extra-big tips from grateful curiosity-seekers. But I tried not to glance out the window to my right, where Marjie’s storefront booth was dim and empty.
A lot of my quarter tips found their way out to St. Hedwig’s Cemetery in the form of a wreath of pink roses, which I carried one day to my friend’s shiny new gravestone. I sat for a while and talked to her about the usual — the fall fashion’s at Hudson’s, and the new show Jerry was taking me to one night, and how nice it was to get a break from the heat. Somewhere down there she was lying still, wearing her grandmother’s pearl cross and the new nylon stockings she was saving for good.
Snow angel
by E.J. Olsen
Grand Circus Park
In late December, Mrs. Rose Erwell passed away slightly ahead of schedule. She’d been diagnosed with Stage IV bone cancer back in August, and the only thing they could do for her was increase the painkiller dosage in the IV drip every week. Palliative care, it’s called, and it usually means keeping the patient too stoned to care about the terrible pain. The way her doctor told it later, Mrs. Erwell’s condition “had not yet progressed to its terminus,” and she was scheduled for a few more months of suffering before the motor shut down. He backed it up with a bunch of statistics.
In the previous three months, seven terminally ill people in Detroit died before they were supposed to. Being of sound mind and failing body, these seven folks elected not to wait for their respective conditions to reach the ultimate conclusion and ended their lives with very strong narcotics. Not street poison, but clean, prescription-grade pharmaceuticals. End of suffering. They simply floated away on a pink cloud of dope. In all seven cases, the friends and relations of the patient were sympathetic to the decedent’s wishes, but ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. In all seven cases, the cause of death was a combination of drugs other than what was prescribed for the patient. In all seven, the last visitor these people had was a man who wore a Roman collar; a man who called himself Father David.
We were double-parked at Downtown Coney Island. My partner, Tucker, was outside in the unmarked while I was accepting an illegal bribe from the proprietor in the form of lunch. Gus Manos loved to see cops in his joint. All that blue was good insurance. In the sixty-odd years he’d been open he’d never been robbed. An absolute miracle in Detroit. An ancient, grease-spattered Philco was tuned to WJR, and it told us that the Pistons dropped another game to Cleveland. Gus shook his head and shrugged. I shrugged back, and thanked him for the food. As I reached for the door, my partner’s immense frame blocked out the dull winter daylight.
Tucker was a man of few words. He was tall and wide, like a human vehicle. He wore his hair very short, but it didn’t look paramilitary like so many of the rookies these days. He was quick and light on his feet, and in all the time I’d ridden with him, I never heard him curse or even raise his voice. In fact, he hardly talked at all. It was kind of like working with the Buddha.
He held up his cell. “Priest.”
Tucker drove. We hit I-375 and had the Coneys gone by the time we took the McNichols exit. The address was on Dequindre above Seven Mile. The neighborhood was mostly ranches. Aside from the bars on all the windows and doors, it could have been a suburb anywhere. Not so remarkable if it wasn’t a pocket surrounded by the urban prairie that was reclaiming the city. The areas just a few blocks west of Mrs. Erwell’s trim little beige home were filled with pheasant and possum, most of the homes long since demolished or fallen in. All that was left was a grid of streets, sidewalks, and light poles squaring off fields of weeds as tall as a man. It was spooky to see how fast all traces of us disappear.
We pulled up behind the van marked WAYNE COUNTY CORONER and headed up the walk. The infamous Jack Kevorkian certainly had his detractors back in his day, but the “right-to-die” pathologist also had his supporters. Tucker and I met one in the person of Mrs. Nora Combs, sister of Mrs. Erwell. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and cranked up before were we halfway to the door.
“My sister was ill and sufferin’. No earthly reason to make a lovely human being go through all that pain. No earthly reason.”
We stepped onto the porch and flipped our badges.
“I knew you were police. Why else would a white man and a …” she looked Tucker up and down, “dumptruck be coming to visit Rose?”
The corner of Tucker’s mouth tightened. I’d worked with him long enough to know that this passed for a smile. I gestured at Tucker, then myself.
“Sergeant Tucker, Sergeant—”
She waved me off. “Come on. They’re back this way.” She disappeared inside the house.
We followed and stepped into a neat living room. A floral-patterned couch with matching recliner faced the picture window. Both pieces wore plastic slipcovers and looked showroom new. In the corner opposite the recliner a wooden TV table held an old nineteen-inch Zenith complete with rabbit ears. We heard Ms. Combs’s voice calling us from a hallway off the living room and headed that way.