“Tell the boss I also want to thank him for that other favor he did me. He’ll know what I mean.”
He closed the doors without a sound.
The Sultan watched rather curiously while I slipped the cartridges into the chamber. The motor was still running.
“Downtown bud?”
“Right. We — wait a minute.” I pointed across the lake. “What the hell’s going on over there?”
The ice-cutting operations had ceased. One of the men stood on the bank to one side, holding the team of now skittish horses.
A commercial ambulance, one belonging to Boone’s leading undertaking establishment, was pulling away from the lake edge. A motionless knot of men stood staring after it. The ambulance picked its way leisurely across the park, reached the rutted lane and finally the highway. It turned towards town, still taking its time. At the intersection where the lane met the highway two cars had pulled up in mute deference to it, but as it continued its slow pace they soon picked up speed and passed it.
“The poor guy’ll croak before that wagongetsthere,” the Sultan complained half aloud.
“The poor guy is already dead,” I contradicted him. “There’s no reason to hurry — now. Come on, let’s go.”
We trailed the ambulance as far as the first drugstore and a pay phone. I got out to call the sergeant.
“I know,” he complained, “it’s you again. Are you trying to make the phone company rich?”
“Sergeant, the wagon just passed me, coming in from the lake. Who was it?”
His answer took all the wind out of me.
It was a long time before I could mumble, “What’s the coroner’s verdict? How’d it happen?” But I knew the answers to both questions.
“You sound sort of funny, Horne. How should I know? The Doc is probably coming in with the wagon. Some kids found the body in a hole in the ice. They’re sick.”
So was I.
I hung up and walked back to the cab. My little Chinese doll would never, ever smile across the breakfast table at anyone. Not any more.
The Sultan looked at me: “Sick atyourstummick?”
“Yeah. And sick at heart. Shut up and drive.”
The doctor-coroner straightened up from the operating table, tugged feebly at his bow tie, and said to nobody in particular, “There’s very little water here.”
I grunted. “Huh?”
He stared at me as if I were an intruder. Which I was. His tired, constantly overworked eyes burned into mine. With the load he carried, I’d be snappish, too.
The desk sergeant, no doubt deeply touched over the loss of my license, with a word and a wave of his hand had provided me with a front seat ticket to the autopsy of the drowned girl. Not that these things are unduly private.
I remembered the coroner’s sarcastic words when I had walked in. His name is Burbee; everybody calls him just “Doc.” He is addicted to gaily colored bow ties of large dimensions and is forever nagging them as though they were tight around his neck.
In this county we usually elect a doctor to the Coroner’s office. Maybe we save money this way or maybe the medical profession is in solid with the political machine, I don’t know. Burbee is a good doctor and had been in the office for two or three terms running.
When I walked into the basement room Burbee had silently watched me look at the girl — it was an identification I had to make for myself — and bit out, “This is by far the most popular autopsy I’ve yet conducted. How many more are there behind you? I might charge admissions.”
My grin was hollow and I looked to see who had preceded me. There was only one other visitor, the young State’s Attorney named Donny Thompson. He had, I thought then, little spine and less crime to prosecute.
And there was an attractive woman in that basement room, a live one, a nurse, I suspected, although she wore no uniform. She turned gray eyes and a warm smile on me to take the sting from the doctor’s words. I returned the smile and looked to see what she was doing there.
She was seated at a workbench near the foot of the operating table; the bench held a rack and the rack held small vials of plain and colored liquids. It was her job to make various chemical tests on certain parts of the body. She also had a notebook with the uppermost page partly filled, and a long, yellow pencil parked in her hair.
This was my first autopsy; perhaps it would have been wiser to have stayed away. I knew in a general way what went on at these affairs — or rather, what must go on to produce the results announced later — but somehow I didn’t expect it to be as cold-blooded as this.
The larger cities of course have their own morgues, usually attached to the police department. Small towns in stick counties like this one use a hospital, or an undertaker’s spare room, or sometimes the victim’s bedroom. It all depends upon the circumstances and how the guy died. This basement room was the undertaker’s business department. The long stone slab having the shallow crevices running the length and breadth of it wasn’t there for artistic purposes.
The room itself suggested something unhealthy to an outsider like me. I saw that it affected Thompson too. The floor was a dull gray painted cement with rubber strips here and there, and sewer drains spotting it. The walls were whitewashed brick, having small ventilating windows high up, just about the outside ground level. Huge and powerful lights hung from the ceiling.
The doll’s body lay under the lights.
“Very little water in the lungs,” the probing doctor repeated with a glare at me. The nurse jotted something down and went on with her vials.
“Enough to drown her?” the State’s Attorney asked.
He was nervous, and watching him with some amusement helped me to overcome my feelings. He carefully kept his back turned to the table. Thompson seldom attended these things.
Doc straightened up again and gave the bow tie another brief tug. He stared at the Attorney’s back.
“One can drown in a teacup of water.”
“If you’re a midget,” I added.
That turned him on me again. The tie suffered another hitch to port. “Pour a cupful up your nose, son,” he advised. His voice was quiet and humorless. “I’d enjoy working on you.”
“Thanks,” and I was securely put in my place. I shut up and glanced at the nurse. She was bending over the notebook. The liquid in a vial she held was slowly turning color.
Doc returned to the body and I looked at my feet while Thompson counted whitewashed bricks.
Pretty soon Burbee began a sentence that was really an afterthought of a previous one.
“But I don’t think this one did,” he stated.
Thompson whirled around, found himself looking at something upsetting and just as quickly whirled away again.
“No?” he asked in a strangled whisper.
“No,” Burbee echoed. “Tell you more about it in a moment.”
He worked on the girl’s throat and chest for several moments, the scalpel glimmering in the brilliant overhead lights. Some of those moments I watched him in fascination and some I held my teeth tightly clenched and stared at my feet.
Finally he said, “No. Definitely.”
The nurse looked up, interested. She held the pencil poised over the notebook, expectant. I squinted at the body, found I could take it, and opened both eyes.
I watched the doctor insert a small pair of tweezers into the throat and come up with a burnt match. He laid it in a shallow dish on the workbench. We bent to inspect it.
There were indentations made by the tweezers near the blackened head, and just below that another, single dent probably made by a sharp thumb nail as the spent match was being flicked away. That was all. Some of these paper matches carry a minute-sized printed line to indicate their origin; this one was gray and soggy and blank.