Death Locked In

by Douglas G. Greene (ed)

  Murder Makes the Morgue Go

  I HAD no premonition of horror to come. When I reported to work that evening I had not the faintest inkling that I faced anything more startling than another quiet night on a snap job.

  It was seven o’clock, just getting dark outside, when I went into the coroner’s office. I stood looking out the window into the gray dusk for a few minutes.

  Out there, I could see all the tall buildings of the college, and right across the way was Kane Dormitory, where Jerry Grant was supposed to sleep. The same Grant being myself.

  Yes, “supposed to” is right. I was working my way through the last year of an ethnology course by holding down a night job for the city, and I hadn’t slept more than a five-hour stretch for weeks.

  But that night shift in the coroner’s department was a snap, all right. A few hours’ easy work, and the rest of the time left over for study and work on my thesis. I owed my chance to finish out that final year and get my doctor’s degree despite the fact that Dad had died, to the fact that I’d been able to get that job.

  Behind me, I could hear Dr. Dwight Skibbine, the coroner, opening and closing drawers of his desk, getting ready to leave. I heard his swivel chair squeak as he shoved it back to stand up.

  “Don’t forget you’re going to straighten out that card file tonight, Jerry,” he said. “It’s in a mess.”

  I turned away from the window and nodded. “Any customers around tonight?” I asked.

  “Just one. In the display case, but I don’t think you’ll have anybody coming in to look at him. Keep an eye on that refrigeration unit, though. It’s been acting up a bit.”

  “Thirty-two?” I asked just to make conversation, I guess, because we always keep the case at thirty-two degrees.

  He nodded. “I’m going to be back later, for a little while. If Paton gets here before I get back tell him to wait.”

  He went out, and I went over to the card file and started to straighten it out. It was a simple enough file—just a record of possessions found on bodies that were brought into the morgue, and their disposal after the body was either identified and claimed, or buried in potter’s field—but the clerks on the day shift managed to get the file tangled up periodically.

  It took me a little while to dope out what had gummed it up this time. Before I finished it, I decided to go downstairs to the basement—the morgue proper—and be sure the refrigerating unit was still holding down Old Man Fahrenheit.

  It was. The thermometer in the showcase read thirty-two degrees on the head. The body in the case was that of a man of about forty, a heavy-set, ugly-looking customer. Even as dead as a doornail and under glass, he looked mean.

  Maybe you don’t know exactly how morgues are run. It’s simple, if they are all handled the way the Springdale one was. We had accommodations for seven customers, and six of them were compartments built back into the walls, for all the world like the sliding drawers of a file cabinet. Those compartments were arranged for refrigeration.

  But the showcase was where we put unidentified bodies, so they could be shown easily and quickly to anybody who came in to look at them for identification purposes. It was like a big coffin mounted on a bier, except that it was made of glass on all sides except the bottom.

  That made it easy to show the body to prospective identifiers, especially as we could click a switch that threw on lights right inside the display case itself, focused on the face of the corpse.

  Everything was okay, so I went back upstairs. I decided I would study a while before I resumed work on the file. The night went more quickly and I got more studying done if I alternated the two. I could have had all my routine work over within three hours and had the rest of the night to study, but it had never worked as well that way.

  I used the coroner’s secretary’s desk for studying and had just got some books and papers spread out when Mr. Paton came in. Harold Paton is superintendent of the zoological gardens, although you would never guess it to look at him. He looked like a man who would be unemployed eleven months of the year because department store Santa Clauses were hired for only one month out of twelve. True, he would need a little padding and a beard, but not a spot of make-up otherwise.

  “Hello Jerry,” he said. “Dwight say when he was coming back?”

  “Not exactly, Mr. Paton. Just said for you to wait.”

  The zoo director sighed and sat down.

  “We’re playing off the tie tonight,” he said, “and I’m going to take him.”

  He was talking about chess, of course. Dr. Skibbine and Mr. Paton were both chess addicts of the first water, and about twice a week the coroner phoned his wife that he was going to be held up at the office and the two men would play a game that sometimes lasted well after midnight.

  I picked up a volume of The Golden Bough and started to open it to my bookmark. I was interested in it, because The Golden Bough is the most complete account of the superstitions and early customs of mankind that has ever been compiled.

  Mr. Paton’s eyes twinkled a little as they took in the title of the volume in my hand.

  “That part of the course you’re taking?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m picking up data for my thesis from it. But I do think it ought to be in a course on ethnology.”

  “Jerry, Jerry,” he said, “you take that thesis too seriously. Ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves. If you ever find any, bring them around, and I’ll have special cages built for them at the zoo. Or could you keep a werewolf in a cage?”

  You couldn’t get mad at Mr. Paton, no matter how he kidded you. That thesis was a bit of a sore point with me. I had taken considerable kidding because I had chosen as my subject, “The Origin and Partial Justification of Superstitions.” When some people razzed me about it, I wanted to take a poke at them. But I grinned at Mr. Paton.

  “You shouldn’t have mentioned vampires in that category,” I told him. “You’ve got them already. I saw a cageful the last time I was there.”

  “What? Oh, you mean the vampire bats.”

  “Sure, and you’ve got a unicorn too, or didn’t you know that a rhinoceros is really a unicorn? Except that the medieval artists who drew pictures of it had never seen one and were guessing what it looked like.”

  “Of course, but—”

  There were footsteps in the hallway, and he stopped talking as Dr. Skibbine came in.

  “Hullo, Harold,” he said to Mr. Paton, and to me: “Heard part of what you were saying, Jerry, and you’re right. Don’t let Paton kid you out of that thesis of yours.”

  He went over to his desk and got the chessmen out of the bottom drawer.

  “I can’t outtalk the two of you,” Mr. Paton said, “But say, Jerry, how about ghouls? This ought to be a good place to catch them if there are any running loose around Springdale. Or is that one superstition you’re not justifying?”

  “Superstition?” I said. “What makes you think that’s—”

  Then the phone rang, and I went to answer it without finishing what I was going to say.

  When I came away from the phone, the two men had the chess pieces set up. Dr. Skibbine had the whites and moved the pawn to king’s fourth opening.

  “Who was it, Jerry?” he asked.

  “Just a man who wanted to know if he could come in to look at the body that was brought in this afternoon. His brother’s late getting home.”

  Dr. Skibbine nodded and moved his king’s knight in answer to Mr. Paton’s opening move. Already both of them were completely lost in the game. Obviously, Mr. Paton had forgotten what he had asked me about ghouls, so I didn’t butt in to finish what I had started to say.

  I let The Golden Bough go, too, and went to look up the file folder on the unidentified body downstairs. If somebody was coming in to look at it, I wanted to have all the facts about it in mind.

  There wasn’t much in the folder. The man had been a tramp, judging from his clothes and the lack of money in his pockets and from the nature
of the things he did have with him. There wasn’t anything at all to indicate identification.

  He had been killed on the Mill Road, presumably by a hit-run driver. A Mr. George Considine had found the body and he had also seen another car driving away. The other car had been too distant for him to get the license number or any description worth mentioning.

  Of course, I thought, that car might or might not have been the car that had hit the man. Possibly the driver had seen and deliberately passed up the body, thinking it was a drunk.

  But the former theory seemed more likely, because there was little traffic on the Mill Road. One end of it was blocked off for repairs, so the only people who used it were the few who lived along there, and there were not many of them. Probably only a few cars a day came along that particular stretch of the road.

  Mr. Considine had got out of his car and found that the man was dead. He had driven on to the next house, half a mile beyond, and phoned the police from there, at four o’clock.

  That’s all there was in the files.

  I had just finished reading it when Bill Drager came in. Bill is a lieutenant on the police force, and he and I had become pretty friendly during the time I had worked for the coroner. He was a pretty good friend of Dr. Skibbine too.

  “Sorry to interrupt your game, Doc,” he said, “but I just wanted to ask something.”

  “What, Bill?”

  “Look—the stiff you got in today. You’ve examined it already?”

  “Of course, why?”

  “Just wondering. I don’t know what makes me think so, but—well, I’m not satisfied all the way. Was it just an auto accident?”

  Why the Dead Man Crossed the Road

  Dr. Skibbine had a bishop in his hand, ready to move it, but he put it down on the side of the board instead.

  “Just a minute, Harold,” he said to Mr. Paton, then turned his chair around to stare at Bill Drager. “Not an auto accident?” he inquired. “The car wheels ran across the man’s neck, Bill. What more do you want?”

  “I don’t know. Was that the sole cause of death, or were there some other marks?”

  Dr. Skibbine leaned back in the swivel chair.

  “I don’t think being hit was the cause of death, exactly. His forehead struck the road when he fell, and he was probably dead when the wheels ran over him. It could have been, for that matter, that he fell when there wasn’t even a car around and the car ran over him later.”

  “In broad daylight?”

  “Um—yes, that does sound unlikely. But he could have fallen into the path of the car. He had been drinking plenty. He reeked of liquor.”

  “Suppose he was hit by a car,” Bill said. “How would you reconstruct it? How he fell, I mean, and stuff like that.”

  “Let’s see. I’d say he fell first and was down when the car first touched him. Say he started across the road in front of the car. Horn honked and he tried to turn around and fell flat instead, and the motorist couldn’t stop in time and ran over him.”

  I had not said anything yet, but I put in a protest at that. “If the man was as obviously drunk as that,” I said, “why would the motorist have kept on going? He couldn’t have thought he would be blamed if a drunk staggered in front of his car and fell, even before he was hit.”

  Drager shrugged. “That could happen, Jerry,” he said. “For one thing, he may not have any witnesses to prove that it happened that way. And some guys get panicky when they hit a pedestrian, even if the pedestrian is to blame. And then again, the driver of the car might have had a drink or two himself and been afraid to stop because of that.”

  Dr. Skibbine’s swivel chair creaked.

  “Sure,” he said, “or he might have been afraid because he had a reckless driving count against him already. But, Bill, the cause of death was the blow he got on the forehead when he hit the road. Not that the tires going over his neck wouldn’t have finished him if the fall hadn’t.”

  “We had a case like that here five years ago. Remember?” Dr. Skibbine grunted. “I wasn’t here five years ago. Remember?”

  “Yes, I forgot that,” said Bill Drager.

  I had forgotten it, too. Dr. Skibbine was a Springdale man, but he had spent several years in South American countries doing research work on tropical diseases. Then he had come back and had been elected coroner. Coroner was an easy job in Springdale and gave a man more time for things like research and chess than a private practice would.

  “Go on down and look at him, if you want,” Dr. Skibbine told Bill. “Jerry’ll take you down. It will get his mind off ghouls and goblins.”

  I took Bill Drager downstairs and flicked on the lights in the display case.

  “I can take off the end and slide him out of there if you want me to,” I said.

  “I guess not,” Drager said and leaned on the glass top to look closer at the body. The face was all you could see, of course, because a sheet covered the body up to the neck, and this time the sheet had been pulled a little higher than usual, probably to hide the unpleasant damage to the neck.

  The face was bad enough. There was a big, ugly bruise on the forehead, and the lower part of the face was cut up a bit.

  “The car ran over the back of his neck after he fell on his face, apparently,” Bill Drager said. “Ground his face into the road a bit and took off skin. But—”

  “But what?” I prompted when he lapsed into silence.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was mostly wondering why he would have tried to cross the road at all out there. Right at that place there’s nothing on one side of the road that isn’t on the other.”

  He straightened up, and I switched off the showcase lights.

  “Maybe you’re just imagining things. Bill,” I said. “How do you know he tried to cross at all? Doc said he’d been drinking, and maybe he just staggered from the edge of the road out toward the middle without any idea of crossing over.”

  “Yeah, there’s that, of course. Come to think of it, you’re probably right. When I got to wondering, I didn’t know about the drinking part. Well, let’s go back up.”

  We did, and I shut and locked the door at the head of the stairs. It is the only entrance to the morgue, and I don’t know why it has to be kept locked, because it opens right into the coroner’s office where I sit all night, and the key stays in the lock.

  Anybody who could get past me could unlock it himself. But it is just one of those rules. Those stairs, incidentally, are absolutely the only way you can get down into the morgue which is walled off from the rest of the basement of the Municipal Building.

  “Satisfied?” Dr. Skibbine asked Bill Drager, as we walked into the office.

  “Guess so,” said Drager. “Say, the guy looks vaguely familiar. I can’t place him, but I think I’ve seen him somewhere. Nobody identified him yet?”

  “Nope,” said Doc. “But if he’s a local resident, somebody will. We’ll have a lot of curiosity seekers in here tomorrow. Always get them after a violent death.

  Bill Drager said he was going home and went out. His shift was over. He had just dropped in on his own time.

  I stood around and watched the chess game for a few minutes. Mr. Paton was getting licked this time. He was two pieces down and on the defensive. Only a miracle could save him.

  Then Doc moved a knight and said, “Check, “ and it was all over but the shouting. Mr. Paton could move out of check all right, but the knight had forked his king and queen, and with the queen gone, as it would be after the next move, the situation was hopeless.

  “You got me, Dwight,” he said. “I’ll resign. My mind must be fuzzy tonight. Didn’t see that knight coming.”

  “Shall we start another game? It’s early.”

  “You’d beat me. Let’s bowl a quick game, instead, and get home early.”

  After they left, I finished up my work on the card file and then did my trigonometry. It was almost midnight then. I remembered the man who had phoned that he was coming in and decided he
had changed his mind. Probably his brother had arrived home safely, after all.

  I went downstairs to be sure the refrigerating unit was okay. Finding that it was, I came back up and locked the door again. Then I went out into the hall and locked the outer door. It’s supposed to be kept locked, too, and I really should have locked it earlier.

  After that, I read The Golden Bough, with a notebook in front of me so I could jot down anything I found that would fit into my thesis.

  I must have become deeply engrossed in my reading because when the night bell rang, I jumped inches out of my chair. I looked at the clock and saw it was two in the morning.

  Ordinarily, I don’t mind the place where I work at all. Being near dead bodies gives some people the willies, but not me. There isn’t any nicer, quieter place for studying and reading than a morgue at night.

  But I had a touch of the creeps then. I do get them once in a while. This time it was the result of being startled by the sudden ringing of that bell when I was so interested in something that I had forgotten where I was and why I was there.

  I put down the book and went out into the long dark hallway. When I had put on the hall light, I felt a little better. I could see somebody standing outside the glass-paned door at the end of the hall. A tall thin man whom I didn’t know. He wore glasses and was carrying a gold-headed cane.

  “My name is Burke, Roger Burke,” he said when I opened the door. “I phoned early this evening about my brother being missing. Uh—may I—”

  “Of course,” I told him. “Come this way. When you didn’t come for so long, I thought you had located your brother.”

  “I thought I had,” he said hesitantly. “A friend said he had seen him this evening, and I quit worrying for a while. But when it got after one o’clock and he wasn’t home, I—”