Inheritance

by Joe McKinney

  Anderson parked his car as close to the front doors as he could get, which was about three rows back. Sundays were usually dead around the morgue, but not so today. He figured they had brought in most of their off-duty personnel to handle the extra workload the killings at the Morgan Rollins Factory had created. He looked at the cars and the sickly looking shrubs lining the walk that led to the morgue’s front doors and he told himself he was ready to do this thing.

  But he didn’t get out of the car right away. He sat there and watched the heat shimmers rising off the black asphalt and thought about John, his youngest son, thought about what it had been like to show up here with his arm around Margie’s shoulder and wait in the waiting room until somebody recognized him for who he was and brought him back to the back where an investigator came over and told them about the results of the autopsy on his sixteen year old son.

  And then at once he was back in those days, feeling the rage and frustration and helplessness as he fought with his youngest son nearly every single day, trying to get the kid back on the right path. Margie had found some pot in his room over the summer. That by itself wasn’t so bad. Anderson dismissed it as a phase, something kids did and then left behind when their real life got started. After all, his grades were good, he got his stuff done.

  But that next school year, things got way out of hand. It was like John boarded a rocket-sled headed downhill, and nothing they could do could stop him. He started skipping school. He started drinking—or, as was more likely, had been drinking for some time already and simply stopped trying to hide it. He snuck out all the time.

  And then, one night in October, the lieutenant in charge of the Traffic Investigations Detail showed up at his house and told them about the crash—how John was ejected from the front passenger seat of a friend’s car that rolled off the freeway at a high rate of speed and into a field of cedar trees.

  At the Medical Examiner’s Office, the investigator told them John’s blood alcohol level was a .331, more than four times the legal limit.

  Margie said, “What does that mean?” and looked from the investigator to her husband.

  The investigator hung his head.

  Anderson wrung his hands together in his lap. He hadn’t heard the boy sneak out, and he was beating himself up for that now. It didn’t have to happen. It shouldn’t have happened. If only he’d heard the boy sneaking out.

  “What does that mean?” Margie said again.

  “It means he didn’t suffer,” Anderson said, and prayed to God that was true.

  And then that moment was gone and he was looking again at the plain tan-colored brick building that housed the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office. He swallowed the lump in his throat, then touched his fingers to his lips and pressed them against John’s photograph that covered the speedometer.

  “Love you,” he said. “I miss you.”

  He grabbed his sweater, his Mr. Rogers sweater, and went inside. It was cold down there with the dead, and he was going to be spending quite a lot of time with them.

  ***

  He met Dr. Allison Mise down in the chill chest. She was an athletically built black woman in her late forties who tied her graying black hair into a tight ponytail. Her face was thin, with high, pronounced cheek bones and a smallish mouth with pale, wrinkled lips that reminded Anderson of a country preacher. He had never seen her wearing makeup.

  Today she wore a white smock, which was standard for all the doctors and technicians in the morgue, and a plain white blouse under that and tan slacks without a belt and leather Birkenstock sandals on her feet. Her assistants all wore thick black rubber wading boots that went up to their knees.

  She said, “Kind of tight quarters around here, huh?” and shook his hand.

  Her grip was firm, solid, almost mannish.

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to force himself to relax, as he did every time he came down here and found himself suddenly in the presence of the dead. “Looks like you got your hands full around here.”

  “Max capacity is supposed to be sixty, but we’re way over that now. You should see the coolers. We’ve got them stacked like cord wood against the back wall.”

  The look he gave her must have said volumes.

  “A joke,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “But seriously,” she said, “you should see it in there. We don’t have a single gurney left. We’ve had to store them on the floor.”

  They were filled to capacity, no question about it. He had never seen the place like this. Several years before, the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood had been involved in an all-out war, and hardly a day had gone by when a body didn’t turn up in some farmer’s cow pasture down in the southern part of the county. But even back in the wildest of those days the morgue had never looked this crowded.

  Anderson buttoned his sweater. It was cold down here, but that wasn’t the first thing you noticed. It wasn’t even the smell, which was bad, but not that bad. What you noticed when you rode the elevator down from the main floor, where you wouldn’t have been able to tell the place apart from any one of a thousand doctor’s waiting rooms or law offices, to the basement, where the bodies were kept, was the grunginess of the place. All the lighting down here was done with fluorescents, and that gave everything a bluish tint. The accumulated grime that blackened the caulk between the tiles and balled in the corners seemed to almost shine under it. This was a filth that had moved in to stay, like in a prison, where the janitor’s mop does little more than push it from one side of the hallway to the other.

  And it was small. Or maybe, he thought, that was just because there were so many dead bodies crammed into it. He was less than five feet away from a little wrinkled old man whose jaw had set into a teeth-baring grimace that made it look like he was trying to push out a bowel movement. The man was nude, and his sunken chest and frail-looking arms and jutting collar bones and waxy yellow skin reminded Anderson, with all the force of a cement block thrown at his head, that the dead are denied their pride.

  Fortunately, he thought, they feel no shame.

  Six more gurneys, really nothing more than white-colored plastic tables that could tilt down at the feet to allow the blood to run into the sinks along the back wall, were on the other side of the old man.

  All of them had bodies on them.

  Some of the bodies were rolled up in bloody white sheets, others were uncovered, staring with dead, glassy eyes up at the ceiling.

  Off in the far corner, two of Dr. Mise’s assistants were putting the finishing touches on a body. One held a garbage bag open while the other poured organs into the bag from what looked like a plastic iced tea pitcher. When the last of the slop was in, the assistant holding the bag, a tall, lanky kid with sunken, sleep-deprived eyes, tied it off and crammed it into the open chest cavity of the body on the table. He went to work suturing up the chest while the other, a short, muscular Hispanic guy in his early thirties, went over to the sink and washed off his gloves.

  Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman to Me” played on a radio along the back wall. Anderson probably wouldn’t have even noticed it had the short, Hispanic guy not suddenly said, “Jesus, I hate this fucking song,” and went over and fiddled with the dial until he came up with the opening drums of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.”

  “There you go,” he said, and smiled at Anderson as he bopped his head to the beat. He turned it up a notch.

  Allison Mise said, “You ready to get started, Keith?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Xavier,” she said to the shorter guy. “Let’s set up the table.”

  “Sure thing, Doc.”

  Xavier hustled over to the empty table next to Anderson and spread a white sheet over it. Then he took a blank evidence card from the desk and put it in one corner of the table. Mise put a hand on Keith’s shoulder, something he hated her to do while she was down here, and guided him to one side so Xavier could do his thing. It wasn’t until she m
oved that Anderson realized the body on the table behind her was Bobby Cantrell.

  Anderson sucked in a breath, and when he looked away, Xavier was writing Robert Bradley Cantrell on the evidence card in the corner of the table.

  ***

  Ram was wearing a blue t-shirt that had curled up on his right side to show a wide swath of his hairy belly. His empty holster had shifted so that it was partially curled over the belt and the top of his jeans and was digging into his flesh. He had pale, cream-colored dirt on his pants and his right shoulder and in his black hair. There were paper sacks over his hands, secured at the wrists with string. The sacks had been put there by the evidence technicians at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works Factory in order to preserve any evidence that might show up in a Gun Shot Residue test. Anderson’s eyes drifted from his best friend’s bagged hands and over the jagged, ugly hole in his chest to the blood that had splattered up into the nape of his neck and dusted his goatee. The blood made him look like he was wearing a bib.

  Xavier walked around the body, taking pictures of the injuries as he made little screeching noises that, Anderson guessed, were supposed to mirror what Jimmy Page was doing with his guitar.

  “Got what you need, man?” he said to Anderson.

  Anderson said, “Huh?” and looked at him, and it was only then that he remembered he was supposed to be writing his observations down in his steno book.

  Anderson shook himself and said, “Yeah, I got it. Go ahead.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure,” Anderson said.

  “Cool.”

  While the bags were being removed from Cantrell’s hands, Led Zeppelin faded out and Three Dog Night’s “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog” started up.

  Xavier said, “Ah man, change that shit,” to the tall, sunken-eyed kid across the room.

  From behind Anderson, Mise said, “Billy, don’t you dare. It’s about time we had some decent music in here.”

  Anderson looked back at her.

  She was whistling to herself as she wrote out her notes on a clipboard, her pale, wrinkled mouth not quite warped into a smile. Anderson liked Mise, respected her, but it didn’t change his opinion that you had to be a weird duck to work in this place.

  A loud thud from the autopsy table made him turn around.

  “Fuck,” Xavier said, panting, “he’s a heavy bastard. Hey, Billy, come here and give me a hand.”

  Xavier pushed Ram over on his side so that his face was smashed up against the lip of the table. Billy came over, and the two of them rolled him over far enough that they could get a wooden block under the body’s shoulder blades.

  “Yeah, that’ll do it,” Xavier said. Then he started taking off Ram’s jewelry and bringing it over to the table, where he laid it out and photographed it.

  Anderson turned to Mise and said, “Allison, his wedding ring, I need it.”

  She looked up at him, still humming to the music, and said, “Huh?”

  “His wedding ring. His wife and my wife are over at his house right now. She called me this morning and wanted me to get the ring.”

  He could tell she was right about to quote chapter and verse of the Bexar County policy that said he couldn’t take personal property out of the morgue, but she stopped herself.

  Then she nodded.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  There was another loud thud from the table as Xavier dropped one of Ram’s arms onto the plastic bin.

  “Jesus,” he said. “This guy’s huge, man. Must weigh a fucking ton.”

  Anderson winced.

  “Xavier!” Mise said sharply, and shook her head at him meaningfully when he gave her a what did I do? look. To Anderson she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours. This must be terrible for you.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  She nodded.

  She walked over to the body and looked at Bobby’s right arm. Anderson watched her lift it, turn it over, and feel down the length of the ulna and radius. It looked like she was trying to squeeze the last bit of toothpaste from the tube.

  “He saw it coming,” she said. “That’s for sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at his arm,” she said. She held it up, and he could tell that the bone was busted up inside. “That is a Grade Four comminuted fracture,” she said ominously. Then, by way of further explanation, “A spiral break.”

  He had a blank expression on his face that said she had left him at the starting line.

  “We usually see fractures like this in skiing accidents,” she said. “The foot gets planted and rooted in one direction by the blade of the ski, but when a sudden force twists the rest of the body you apply torsion, like this.” She made a motion with her hands like she was twisting a towel into a snake. “You end up corkscrewing the bone. You see?”

  Sort of, Anderson thought. “It looks like it hurt.”

  “I’ll say,” Mise answered. “Now look at this.” She held up Bobby’s arm to his face, so that it looked like he was shielding his eyes from the sun or trying to block a blow. “He had his arm up like this. You see?”

  “I think so. What? He got grabbed, where, by the wrist?”

  “Looks like it from the bruising. And the arm was twisted to cause this break.”

  “Okay,” he said, and felt like he was supposed to be understanding something that he wasn’t even aware of yet.

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  “Do you have any idea how much torsion it takes to break a bone?”

  “A lot?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said, and snorted. “A whole freakin’ lot. It’s not something you just do—” she snapped her fingers “—like that.” She said, “A skiing accident I can understand. A full grown man breaking a baby’s arm...yeah, I’ve seen that, too. But look at your friend here. He’s a huge guy. You have any idea how strong you’d have to be to do this to a man his size?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Good point.”

  ***

  Anderson’s feet started to hurt midway through the autopsy. He watched with mounting irritation and restlessness as Ram was stripped and poked and prodded and photographed and washed off and cut open and washed off again.

  Jimmy Buffet was on the radio now singing “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” one of Anderson’s favorites, and one he never heard on the radio. But not even the wistful contentment that Buffet’s music usually brought him could penetrate the malaise that had formed in his mind.

  It all seemed so disgusting, so cheap. He watched as they flipped Ram’s nude corpse over and stuck a thing that looked like a T-square over him, one end over the head, the long end wedged into the crack of his butt. Then they flipped him over again and worked at the rib cage to open it further than whoever had killed him already had.

  Xavier hummed to himself as he reached into the chest with a ladle and started scooping out organs into a plastic iced tea pitcher, stopping every so often to ask permission from Dr. Mise to continue.

  Anderson closed his eyes and waited for it to be over.

  “Hey, Doc,” Xavier said.

  Anderson opened his eyes.

  Mise crossed the tiled floor and stood next to Xavier, the two of them looking into the open flesh canoe that was Bobby Cantrell like two boys who have just found a coral snake in the bottom of a hollowed out tree stump.

  “What is that?” Xavier said. “It feels gritty.”

  “It’s the same stuff he had on the outside of him, too.”

  “What is it?” Anderson said, coming closer, standing just behind them.

  “It looks like transfer, don’t you think?” Xavier said.

  “Has to be,” Mise said.

  “What is it?” Anderson said again.

  Mise moved to one side. “Here look,” she said, and grabbed the flap of Cantrell’s chest wall and pulled it down so Anderson could have a look. “See here, around the heart? All that black stuff. It’s th
e same stuff he had on the outside.”

  Anderson thought of the junkie in the interview room, the black, waxy stuff he had spent a long time washing off into the sink.

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Mise answered. “Carbon soot maybe, mixed with some kind of wax.”

  “How did it get there?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and then stopped. She leaned forward and said, “Oh my God.” She ran her finger around the bulge of the heart. “Oh my God.”

  “What?” Anderson said.

  Mise looked at Xavier. “You didn’t notice this?” The heat in her tone was unmistakable.

  “What?” Xavier said. And then he looked, and for a moment he didn’t see what she was talking about. And then he did and his eyes bulged.

  “What is it?” Anderson said.

  Mise reached in and wrapped her hand around the heart and scooped it out. She held it up and said, “I can’t believe this.”

  “What?” Anderson said. “Tell me.”

  “This is not a human heart.”

  That stopped him. He looked at the heart in her hands and then at her. She looked back at him.

  “How can you tell it’s not human?”

  “Here,” she said, and put the heart down on a cutting board that rested across the sink at Bobby Cantrell’s feet. She led him to one of the other tables, where the tall, sunken-eyed kid named Billy was cutting into a fat white woman with tattoos all over her arms and neck. Billy stepped aside and Allison Mise reached into the chest cavity and pulled out the heart. “See this beard of fat that’s hanging on here?”

  He did. It looked like yellow candle wax.