"Okay. Thanks."
On the way to the medical examiner's office in Brooklyn I made a side stop at Jay's apartment, keeping my gloves on. This would be my last chance, I suspected, and I would take it. Inside I closed the door softly and turned on the light. Everything was as before. I had a plastic bag with me and removed sixteen unsent letters from Jay to Sally Cowles, including a few more I found in the oxygen chamber. But I knew there was more I should find. I took my time, I opened drawers, and the trunks under the bed. I found thirty-six different pieces of paper with references to his daughter. Plus some photos. Plus some more school schedules. Plus the handout from the recital. Plus his camera, which had exposed film in it that I removed. I also found a spare set of keys, both to Jay's truck and to the Reade Street property. The truck was gone now into bureaucratic infinity, eventually to be sold at auction. I slipped the Reade Street keys off their chain, checked around the apartment once more, set the door to lock, and pulled it shut behind me. Then I locked it from the outside as well. The whole operation took an extra twenty-five minutes. On the subway I stepped off at the Atlantic Avenue station, found a trash can that needed emptying, dropped everything but Jay's letters to Sally Cowles into it, then boarded the next train. I didn't want to have the letters on me in the presence of a police officer, so I stopped in a post office, bought an envelope, and mailed them to myself at home.
I met McComber in the hallway of the medical examiner's office. He was a small, tidy man. I shook his hand.
"You were his lawyer?"
"For one real estate transaction."
"How'd you meet?"
"We met and got to talking," I said, wanting to keep Allison out of it, if only for my sake. "I needed the work, so I said yes."
"Why'd he buy the building?"
I said it was a standard commercial investment but that the question was still a good one.
"Why is it a good question?" the detective responded.
"Because he was pretty sick."
"He was?"
"He had terrible breathing problems. Very bad."
McComber sucked at his cheeks, held my gaze. Of course, he had seen the autopsy report, which, I supposed, revealed the damaged lung tissue. "What do you mean?"
"He grew up on a potato farm on the North Fork of Long Island and was nearly killed in a herbicide accident."
"When was this?"
"I'm guessing fifteen years ago. It was degenerative. It caused a slow fibrosis in his lungs."
"How do you know all this?"
"He told me, but also I could see it. He had real difficulty sometimes."
"You guys got to know each other pretty well, I see."
"He told me a few things."
"But how well did you get to know each other, is what I'm really asking," pressed McComber.
"Not like that," I said.
"You're not married."
"Divorced."
"Children?"
"I have a son, yeah."
This relaxed him. "All right, so go on."
"He just had trouble breathing."
"You know where he lived?"
All the oxygen equipment, the black-market steroids and inhalers and bottles of pills were there, to be found by the police. "Here it is," I said, giving him the address. Seem to be helpful, I told myself, be the good citizen. "Can I also give you my work number in case anything turns up?"
"Yeah, yeah."
"Anything else?" I asked.
"Did he go to a doctor?"
"I don't think so, never mentioned it."
"He was sick but didn't go to the doctor?"
I said nothing, appearing reticent.
"Come on," McComber prompted. "We got a dead guy here, we're trying to figure it out."
"Okay," I said. "I got the impression Jay sort of experimented with his medications. He said his condition was only getting worse. He used to measure his lung capacity a lot. He was very worried about it. He always had pills and medicines for his lungs with him. Basically I think he treated himself."
The detective nodded, and I sensed a tick of judgment and dismissal. Lonely guy, sick, played with his drugs, knew he was going to die.
Ten minutes later an assistant medical examiner pulled out the long refrigerated drawer three feet, and there was Jay Rainey, his head and wide chest, his skin a pearled gray, looking shrunken into the drawer, a long suture-tightened incision running from the bottom of his neck to his belly button. The medical examiner had cut him open, gutted him. It was goddamn sickening. I caught the bile in my throat, took a moment to swallow. As I slid closer I could see that his hair lay salt-thickened by the ocean, more salt dried in starry spots across his cheeks. His eyes were open but the eyes themselves were gone and I found myself remembering the heroic Roman sculptures in which the marble eyes are darkly hollowed, creating the strange sense of visionary blindness. Jay seemed similarly afflicted. You could look at him but he didn't see you. The attendant had stuffed some cotton wadding in his nostrils. Jay's mouth had fallen open, as if getting one last great breath, and I noticed that he was missing a number of back teeth, the effect, I supposed, of not having money for proper dentistry during all his lean years. His face was stubbled and he looked both younger and ancient.
"That him?"
I nodded. "Yes."
"You're sure."
"Positive."
"You'll sign the form?"
"Yes."
"No doubt?"
"None."
"You happen to know if he had a dentist?"
"I think he did, yes. But I'm positive this is Jay."
"Occasionally people make mistakes."
Yes, of course that was true. "Pull him all the way out," I said.
"Why?"
"Look at his calves."
"Why? He have a tattoo?"
"No."
"What?"
"Immensely muscled. Enormous calves."
The attendant pulled the drawer all the way out. It rolled smoothly, though I could see that the weight of Jay Rainey made the long drawer tilt ever so slightly. He was naked. Laid out, he looked larger, his true size. His chest hair was thick and tapered into an arrow toward his groin. His penis fell to one side. Jay Rainey's thick calves bulged inward toward each other from the pressure of the drawer bottom. The attendant nodded. Then he pulled out a tape measure. "Hmm."
"Yes, right?"
"Twenty-one inches. You usually maybe see that on someone who is grotesquely obese, but not someone with low body fat."
"Can I have a minute more?" I asked. "He was a friend of mine."
"That's fine. Just a minute."
Then I moved up to Jay Rainey's head and touched his ear, the left one, the one that matched Sally Cowles's. The distinct horn of cartilage was there, as before, except cold this time. Somehow it made me think of my son, how much I missed him, how I was still bound to him.
I let the palm of my hand rest on Jay's forehead for a moment, but of course that was for me, not for him.
"Okay," came the attendant's voice.
I stepped away from the drawer. The attendant handed me a clipboard. It was a declaration of identification. Under penalty of perjury, I swore that the human remains shown to me by the… yes. I signed.
"That's it," the attendant said. "You're free to go, thanks."
"No, he's not," came the detective's voice.
"No?"
"Don't you want somebody to claim the remains?" the detective asked the attendant.
"Sooner the better."
"You," McComber said. "You're going to claim the remains here. I got no family. But I got a lawyer."
"Wait, wait-"
"Nothing to it." McComber handed me a business card of a funeral home. "These guys are three blocks away, they'll take the body and keep it or embalm it or whatever. We need to clear the space. This is Brooklyn. People keep dying around here."
"All right," I said. "Fine."
"You'll call today?"
"Sure."
"Good. Then I can release the effects now."