Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense

by Lee Goldberg

  "Haven't you ever seen a dead body before?" the fire fighter asked.

  "Too many times," I said. I didn't think I'd ever get used to the death. It was an inescapable part of my job and I saw it every day.

  It wasn't the corpse that frightened me. It was something else. But what?

  "Do you know who she is?" I asked.

  The firefighter shook his head. "The police are looking for her purse along the riverbank. All we found in her pockets were these."

  He showed me a compact, a lipstick applicator, and a shiny new key all by itself on a rabbit-foot chain.

  Dan looked at the belongings, too. "We've made a major discovery here today, Mark."

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "A rabbit's foot definitely doesn't bring good luck," he said and walked away.

  I glanced back at the dead woman one last time and felt the oddest tingle. It wasn't fear. And it wasn't a physical sensation either. Something was flitting across my consciousness, tickling my mind. It was like a burst of static on a television screen, only I felt it rather than saw it.

  Back then, I didn't know what the feeling meant, so I simply ignored it. I've learned never to ignore it now.

  Alice brought over two orderlies, and they draped a blanket over the woman's corpse and wheeled it down to the morgue in the basement.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I went to the cafeteria for lunch, where I was served the "doctor's special," which was chopped beef, mashed potatoes, cubed carrots, a cup of chocolate pudding, and a tiny carton of cold milk. It made me long for the gourmet pleasures of a TV dinner.

  Dr. Bart Spicer was sitting alone at a table, smoking a cigarette and leafing through an issue of Life magazine with astronaut John Glenn on the cover, wearing a space helmet. The cover read: THE MAKING OF A BRAVE MAN.

  I took a seat across from Bart, who acknowledged me with a nod and a perfect smoke ring. "I was just reading about John Glenn. They call him 'A Man Marked to Do Great Things.' They say it was clear from the day he was born. What do you think of that?"

  "It takes guts to fly into space and attempt to orbit the earth," I said.

  "It takes guts just to get out of bed in the morning." He snubbed out his cigarette in the remains of his mashed potatoes. "You want to know who's a great man?"

  "Sure," I said.

  Bart opened up the magazine to an advertisement for the Admiral Multiplex FM stereophonic radio and high fidelity phonograph in a French provincial cabinet. "The guy who has to sell four of five of these a week or he loses his job. But you're never gonna see that guy's mug on the cover of Life magazine."

  "Probably not," I said.

  I liked Bart. Having lunch with him was like listening to the radio. He had opinions about everything and liked to express them. You could participate in the conversation as much or as little as you wanted. He'd simply go on talking without you.

  Bart was a farm boy from Kansas, the first in his family to go to medical school. Actually, the first to go anywhere after high school except back to the plow. He and his wife, Mary, lived on our street and had a baby girl only a few months older than Steve.

  "I'm going to be on the cover of Life magazine," Bart said casually.

  "For orbiting the earth or selling radios?" I asked.

  "It's not actually going to be my face that you see," he said. "It's going to be all the beautiful people I make more beautiful with my scalpel. You know why John Glenn is wearing a helmet in this picture?"

  "Because he's an astronaut?"

  "To distract people from his face. If I had that mug, I'd be wearing a mask," Bart said. "He should've come to see me."

  "You aren't a plastic surgeon yet," I said.

  Bart shrugged. "He couldn't look worse than he does now."

  He looked past me and broke into a broad grin. "It's raining outside, but here comes a ray of sunshine."

  I turned to see which nurse he was flirting with and saw Katherine coming in, carrying Steve. It was a wonderful surprise. I got up and gave them both a kiss, taking Steve from her arms. She sat down at the table.

  "Bart, you are an awful flirt," she said.

  "How's my big boy?" I said, tossing Steve up into the air and catching him again. It always made Katherine nervous, but I was a good catch and Steve loved it, shrieking with glee.

  "What brings you here, honey?" I asked her.

  "Me, of course," Bart said, kissing her cheek.

  Katherine smiled. "Isn't this chopped-beef-and-mashed-potato day? We couldn't miss that. And we certainly can't go a whole day without seeing Mark."

  "Now you've hurt my feelings," Bart said.

  "I'm glad you came. I have some news. Dr. Whittington has invited us to a party on Saturday." I showed Katherine the invitation and gave Steve another toss in the air. "We need to find a babysitter quick."

  "No problem," Bart said. "We've already lined one up. You can drop Steve at our place and the four of us can go to the party together."

  "Are you sure Mary won't mind?" Katherine asked.

  "Why should she?" Bart replied. "As long as she's out of the house having a good time, I could bring a walrus home and she wouldn't mind."

  I held Steve up high and smiled at him. "Are you a walrus? Is that what you are?"

  He giggled uproariously and then vomited all over me. My shirt and lab coat were covered. Bart burst out laughing and Katherine joined him. Even Steve thought it was funny, giggling so much I thought he might vomit on me again just for the fun of it. I was the only one not laughing because I was the only one who knew I was wearing my last clean shirt and lab coat.

  I handed Steve back to Katherine, picked up a napkin, and began the hopeless task of cleaning myself off.

  "That will teach you to call Steve a walrus," Katherine said. "He's very sensitive."

  "So I've discovered." I went over to Katherine. "Thank you so much for coming."

  "Do you really mean it?"

  "Of course I do," I said.

  "Even after what Steve did?" she said.

  "A small price to pay for the chance to spend some time with you," I said.

  Katherine glanced at Bart. "You're a good influence on him."

  "I'm a good influence on everybody," he said.

  "I better go clean up before Dr. Whittington sees me," I leaned down to kiss Katherine. I could still smell the faintest hint of fresh flowers.

  Suddenly I felt a jolt of fear, the same flutter in my chest I'd experienced when I saw the dead woman who was pulled from the Los Angeles River.

  "What is it?" Katherine asked, studying my face. "What's wrong?"

  The fear passed quickly, but that nagging sensation, that mental itch, returned. I sniffed Katherine again.

  "What is that smell?" I asked.

  "Vomit," she said.

  "I mean on you," I said. "The flowers?"

  "It's probably my bath oil," she said. "Why?"

  I thought back to the dead woman, but the image that came to me wasn't her entire body laid out on the gurney. It wasn't even her face. It was little, seemingly inconsequential details. The tan line around her wrist. Her pierced ears. The seam of her stockings. I was remembering things I didn't realize I'd even seen.

  I knew why I was jerked back when I saw the dead woman.

  She smelled like my wife.

  I was beginning to understand what that nagging feeling meant and why I'd felt afraid. But there was only one way to find out if I was right.

  I reassured Katherine that everything was fine, then hurried to the locker room, washed up, and changed into a pair of surgical scrubs before making my way down to the morgue.

  The woman's body was on a gurney in the cold room with a dozen other corpses, patients of all ages who had died of all kinds of ailments. Most of the bodies had been stripped and cleaned and were ready to be picked up by morticians. But the woman from the river was exactly as we had left her, still in her muddy clothes, waiting to be claimed by the medical examiner for her autopsy.
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br />   I wheeled her out of the cold room and into the light of the pathology lab.

  She wasn't a corpse anymore. She was a puzzle.

  I put on a pair of gloves and sniffed her. Although she was covered with mud, the smell of bath oil was strong. Her blouse must have been soaked with it; the river water hadn't managed to overcome the scent.

  She was tan and fit, with perfect proportions, long legs, and an even tan. She spent a lot of time outdoors, probably at the beach. She was a true California girl, though I couldn't figure out why she'd chosen to dye her hair red instead of blond.

  I looked at her wrists, her fingers, and her ears.

  I lifted her skirt and examined the garter belt, the straps stretched over her panties to her nylon stockings, the seams running up the sides of her legs from her heels to the middle of her thighs.

  I knew at that moment with chilling certainty what it all meant, what my subconscious had been trying to tell me. And yet it only intensified my curiosity.

  I rolled her on her side, pulled her blouse up to her shoulders, and was in the midst of scrutinizing her bra when someone walked in.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" the man demanded.

  I turned and got my first look at Dr. Jay Barbette, the medical examiner, standing in the doorway in his lab coat, flanked by two of his morgue attendants.

  Barbette was a tall man in his sixties with a bushy gray mustache, tousled hair, and a tiny pair of glasses that seemed far too small for his bulbous nose and his round face, which, at that moment, was flushed with outrage.

  "I'm Dr. Mark Sloan," I said. "She was one of my patients."

  "Before or after she drowned in the LA River?"

  "That's a difficult question to answer," I said.

  "Why is that?"

  "Because I never saw her before today," I said. "And she didn't drown in the river."

  "Didn't the firefighters find her in the river?"

  "Yes, they did," I said.

  Barbette came over, stood beside me, and looked at the body. "She definitely drowned. I can see that already."

  "I agree," I said.

  "I'm so relieved to hear that," he said, rubbing his temples. "Son, you're giving me a headache. You better make your point and make it quick, or I'm going to ask my friends here to drag you out and restrain you until the police can get here."

  I smiled at Dr. Barbette's two brawny assistants. "That won't be necessary."

  "I'll be the judge of that," Barbette said.

  "I believe she drowned in her bathtub and her body was dumped in the river."

  He looked at me incredulously. "You do."

  "She smells like fresh flowers," I said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Sniff her," I said.

  "Are you some kind of pervert?"

  "Her blouse is soaked in bath oil," I said. "It's like she put her clothes on without drying off first."

  "You're saying she drowned in her bathtub simply because she didn't adequately towel herself this morning?"

  "That's not all, Dr. Barbette. Her ears are pierced and she has tan lines where she usually wears a watch and several rings," I said. "But she isn't wearing any jewelry."

  "She fell into a raging river," he said. "Didn't it occur to you that her jewelry might have been swept away in the current?"

  "Yes, but that doesn't explain the seams on her stockings."

  "The seams?" he asked.

  "They should be going up the back of her legs," I said, pointing it out with my finger. "And the garter belt straps are on top of her panties, not underneath them."

  "What does that have to do with where she drowned?" he said, his voice rising with impatience.

  "No woman would go out in public with the seams showing in front, and she certainly wouldn't put the straps over her panties. That's how garter belts are modeled, but that's not how real women wear them."

  "I suppose you're an expert on 'real' women," he said.

  "I'm married to one," I said. "I know if my wife had to go to the bathroom, she wouldn't want to have to take off her garter belt and stockings to do it."

  Barbette turned and studied the dead woman again, then glanced back at me. When he spoke, the impatience in his voice was gone.

  "But someone dressing her might make that mistake," he said. "Someone in a hurry."

  "A man," I said. "A woman would know better." Barbette nodded, a thoughtful expression on his face, then turned to his two attendants. "Gentlemen, why don't you go get us a couple cups of coffee? Hot as possible, please. How do you take yours, Doctor...?"

  "Sloan," I said. "Mark Sloan. Black, with two spoonfuls of sugar."

  "Same for me," Barbette said.

  The two attendants seemed confused by the sudden turn of events, but no more so than me. They left. As soon as they were gone, Barbette gestured to the woman again.

  "Why were you turning her on her side when I came in?" he asked.

  "I was looking at her bra. It's too tight." I pointed to the clasps. "See these two loops? They're scuffed and worn. This is where she usually hooked the clasps, not where they are now. Whoever dressed her didn't know that either. He wasn't worried about her comfort, and she wasn't alive to tell him it hurt."

  Barbette adjusted his glasses and scratched his head, mulling something over before he spoke.

  "Have you ever observed a forensic autopsy before, Dr. Sloan?"

  "No," I said.

  "I'd like you to come downtown with me and observe this one," he said.

  I was thrilled by the invitation, of course, but I couldn't possibly accept—not unless I wanted to get fired.

  "I wish I could," I said, "but I'm on call. In fact, I'd better get back to the ER before Dr. Whittington notices I'm not there."

  "You let me handle Whittington," Barbette said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Whatever Dr. Barbette told Dr. Whittington, it worked. I accompanied Dr. Barbette downtown to the county morgue, where I didn't just watch the autopsy; he actually let me assist.

  I didn't know it then, but it was the first of many autopsies I would help him perform over the years. He took me on as an unofficial apprentice, teaching me everything he knew about forensics and the secrets a corpse could share. I knew he was grooming me to take his place one day, but I couldn't give up treating patients. I wanted to use medicine to make people's lives better, not simply as a tool to solve the mysteries of the dead. As it turned out, I ended up finding a way to do both.

  But on that rainy day more than forty years ago, it was all new to me. I watched closely as he went about his work, dissecting the body, removing the vital organs, and collecting fluid, tissue, and blood samples.

  As he did it all, he talked me through every step in the process. He also explained, in detail, exactly how a person drowns in a river.

  You can't hold your breath forever. Reflexively, you will inhale, drawing water and whatever particles it contains deep into your sinuses and lungs, causing you to cough.

  The coughing triggers another inhalation reflex, which sucks even more water and mud into your lungs. The struggle to survive, and the loss of air supply, rapidly consumes the oxygen in your blood. Within a minute or two, you lose consciousness and your life.

  If a person is dead before entering the water, dirt and debris will fill the mouth and pharynx, but it won't enter the lungs for several days, drawn into the vacancy created by the gradual escape of air from the body.

  The woman who was pulled from the Los Angeles River wasn't in the water, in Barbette's opinion, for more than an hour or two. Her mouth was full of mud, but there wasn't any debris in her lungs.

  Her lungs were filled with water, however.

  Bathwater. With a heavy concentration of soap and hair dye.

  "This woman was murdered," Barbette declared, taking off his glasses and wiping them clean with a towel.

  I'd come to the same conclusion on my own before Dr. Barbette walked in on me at Community General, but hearing
him say it made it real.

  I should have been saddened by this woman's death. I should have been horrified by the way in which she died. I should have been afraid of the man who'd done it.

  I did feel those things. But I also felt something else. Something stronger. There isn't a word for it. I can only describe the sensation.

  When you're fishing, there's a tingle you get when you feel that first little hit on your line.

  Hello.

  A charge goes through your whole body. All your attention focuses on the tip of your pole and the tension on the line as you wait for another tap.

  At that instant, there's nothing else except you and whatever is down there in the dark depths, waiting to be caught. You can almost feel the fish, sense him swimming around your baited hook, waiting to strike.

  It's exciting. It's exhilarating. And it's addictive.

  Well, that's what I felt. Only much, much stronger. I felt the presence of her killer. I couldn't see him, but I knew he was out there in the storm, hidden in the shadows.

  I'd felt his tap.

  "Her killer dressed her and dumped her body in the LA River in the middle of a downpour to make it look like an accident," Dr. Barbette said with a frown. "Damn near got away with it, too."

  "You would have caught him," I said.

  Barbette shook his head and put on his glasses. "No, Dr. Sloan, I wouldn't have. The facts surrounding this woman's death seemed obvious. I hate to admit this, but I wouldn't have investigated any further. No one would ever have known she was murdered if not for you."

  "It was just dumb luck on my part," I said.

  "It's more than that," Barbette said. "It's instinct. You're a born detective. It's a gift. You should embrace it."

  I thought about what Dr. Barbette said, and it troubled me as I drove back to Community General in the pouring rain.

  You 're a born detective.

  It was a legacy I'd been running from since I was ten years old, since the morning my father, a homicide detective, went to work and decided never to come home again. A few months later, he sent us a postcard from New York. All it said was "I'm sorry."