Remains Silent mm-1

by Michael Baden

  “How long till they find him?”

  He gave her a small smile. She hoped it was meant to be charming.

  “Actually-”

  She knew what was coming next.

  MANNY HAD NEVER been to a live autopsy. It was the fitting end for a day in which she was dressed to kill. She was head-to-toe Chanel, even her scarf. The outfit was so chic Coco herself would die for it- again. She had never considered herself a “girlie” girl. Since her parents had only one child, her Italian father had raised her like a son. She had learned to fish, throw dice and a football, and fix her own electrical outlets. She liked martial arts, James Bond, and Saturday afternoon monster flicks. When she was little, her father had taught her to play in the sandbox with the boys; now she competed in a rather larger arena.

  “Theresa Alessis’s daughter found Theresa lying dead on the kitchen floor and called an ambulance,” Jake explained. “The paramedics tried CPR. Useless. They telecommunicated with the emergency-room doctor, who pronounced her dead, and brought the body here. Nobody’s touched her since. If this were the city, the diener would’ve taken her out of the body bag, removed her clothes, and prepared her for autopsy. Here, she’s still in the body bag. Since we don’t know what happened to her, we have to do the examination carefully.”

  He led her through the morgue door, which swung shut behind them.

  “Oh my God!”

  The autopsy room was far smaller than the one Jake was used to, but it had the same look. A metal table stood in its center, the foot end over a sink and a black body bag on top of it, one that was clearly inhabited. Two white body bags, equally occupied, lay on stretchers against the wall.

  “What’s the matter?” Jake asked.

  “There are dead people in those bags, just lying around.”

  He gave her a look. “It’s a morgue.”

  “And that smell!”

  “Formaldehyde used to preserve biological specimens.”

  “It’s awful. Is it safe?”

  “Some people think it can cause cancer. I’ve been breathing it for twenty years, and it hasn’t done me any harm yet.”

  “But have you tried to have children?”

  Another look. “Very funny. Let’s check on the body.” He grasped the zipper pull of the black body bag, which bore a heavy paper tag that read ALESSIS, THERESA, along with an identification number. “Right corpse. Time for us to get changed.”

  “How come those other bodies are in white bags?” Manny asked.

  “White’s used in hospitals up here. The bodies are probably waiting to be shipped to a funeral home. They won’t be autopsied. Come with me.”

  They left the room and went a few doors down the hall to a small locker room, where he handed her a set of green surgical scrubs. “Put these on. We can change behind the lockers. I won’t peek if you won’t.”

  She eyed them, shapeless things that looked like pajamas from a prison camp. “No way.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be glad you did.”

  “Can’t I just put something over my suit, like an apron?”

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want to do.” Petulant. Unbecoming. Who cares? Anything to delay going back into that room.

  “Fine.” He handed her what looked like a white plastic kimono, with cropped sleeves and a hem that went to her ankles. “One size fits all,” he said.

  She rolled up her $2,000 sleeves so they wouldn’t appear beneath the plastic and then donned her armor. He wound the plastic belt around her waist, tying it snugly at the back. The gesture felt oddly intimate.

  “Manny, are you there?” He waved his hand in front of her face. “You’re supposed to faint when we cut the body open, not before.”

  “Sorry. I was thinking about-” She stopped in the nick of time.

  He gave her a pair of blue paper booties. “Wear these, unless you don’t mind having those shoes spattered with blood and other body fluids.”

  Blood? Body fluids? Her slingbacks- twin four-inch-high works of art in multicolored red suede with contrasting purple and red-checked pony-skin heels- deserved better.

  “You don’t want to go tramping blood and bacteria over your living room rug,” he added, eyes twinkling. The son of a bitch is having fun. He’s enjoying himself. I hate him! Her stomach acted up. The tiramisu that had tasted so delicious going down was on the verge of coming up.

  He changed into scrubs and she followed him back into the autopsy room, girding for the moment when he exposed the corpse. Apparently, though, he had some setting up to do. He pulled over a small metal table holding a square of brown corkboard and arranged an assortment of instruments: clamps, knives, forceps, oddly shaped scissors, scalpels, extra blades, rulers, and a soup ladle.

  “That looks like a steak knife,” she said, pointing to an instrument with a wooden handle and a six-inch blade.

  Jake grinned. “I had a colleague who gave two of them he took from an autopsy room to his wife as an anniversary present.”

  “How romantic. Didn’t he ever hear of Tiffany’s- little blue box, pretty white ribbon?”

  He handed her a pair of latex gloves. “Put these on. And this.” It was a paper face mask. Goodbye, makeup. His gloves and mask were already in place.

  “Isn’t this primitive for you?” she asked. “You must be used to all sorts of fancy equipment in the city.”

  “It’s not much different in the city. MEs have been using the same instruments for a hundred and fifty years, ever since autopsies were made legal. And I’d rather work in a place like this than in a modern building, where you can’t see a darn thing. Somehow the ceiling lights are never over the autopsy tables.”

  He strode to the table and unzipped the body bag. Manny took a step back. The corpse wore floral pajamas. Jake gently removed the clothing intact. Manny felt gooseflesh on her arms. Theresa Alessis lay completely naked now. Her mouth was ajar, her skin drying. Not a body that had been prettied with makeup and posed in a facsimile of sleep, as in a funeral home.

  Manny felt a wave of sadness. Mrs. Alessis seemed pathetic, a hunk of sagging skin. No one in her right mind would ever want to be so diminished, so exposed. I’d best die in my sleep, she thought. No autopsy, please. She made a mental note to go back to the gym. “My God,” she said. “The smell!”

  “It gets to everybody at first,” Jake said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “It’s like rotten eggs, only worse.”

  “Decomposition; the human body breaking down. Corpses emit intestinal gases such as hydrogen sulfide. It’s a natural process- from ashes to ashes. God’s way of recycling.”

  “Very comforting. I’m a lawyer, Dr. Rosen. I’m supposed to be lawyering. I do not belong in this morgue. I want to go home!”

  He was smiling. Enjoy yourself. Have a good time. Torture Manny. What fun. She expected a lecture on why she should have changed into scrubs, but all he said, very politely, was, “If you want, I’ll put some VapoRub inside your mask. It’ll cover the smell. Ever since The Silence of the Lambs, when Jodie Foster used it, half the cops and DAs slather it under their noses at postmortems. I think the effect’s more psychological than physical.”

  “No. Thanks. If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit for a minute.”

  “Sure.” He indicated a chair. Meanwhile, he pulled a metal stool next to the autopsy table and used it as a step to haul himself up so he stood straddling the corpse. Then he took a camera and began shooting photos of the body. “When I attended my first autopsy, the ME had a cup of coffee in one hand and was poking through the decedent’s organs with the other. Disgusting! I couldn’t understand how someone could be so callous and insensitive. A half-dozen autopsies later, I was doing the same thing.”

  “That’s a charming story,” she said. “Thank you for sharing.”

  “I was trying to make you feel better.” He got down, turned the body over, and climbed back for another round of pictures. “I’ll ne
ed your help now.”

  She rose wobbily to her feet. “At your service.” You monster.

  He retrieved a long wooden stick from the corner of the room and handed it to her. “Align the bottom to the heel, then measure the height at the top of the head.” He picked up a notebook and pen. “What’s the measurement?”

  She stood with the ruler and tried not to look at the body. “Um… sixty-four inches.”

  “Weight?”

  “God knows. Am I supposed to guess?”

  “That’s how it’s done. If there’s no body scale, we estimate.”

  “That’s crazy. Okay… I’d say one hundred sixty-five and a half pounds.”

  “Very good. My thought exactly, though it’s hard to tell about that half pound. Maybe it’s the Krispy Kreme she had for breakfast. When we open the stomach-”

  “Please!” Sadist. “Do you get the weight wrong a lot of the time?”

  “We do, for various reasons. But the most disputed statistic is height. Family members read an autopsy report and swear it isn’t their relative. Know why?”

  “Because people lie about how tall they are?”

  “Right. Studies of drivers’ licenses show people- especially short people- often add inches to their height.” He handed her the pad and pen. “Now, a sample of the vitreous humor of the eye.” He picked up a syringe.

  “Wait!” Manny screamed. “You’re going to stick that thing into her eye?”

  “You bet. The fluid in the white part of the eye can tell us time of death as well as toxicology. We’ll take some from both eyes and put it in two separate test tubes. Notice that the eyes are jaundiced.”

  She turned her back. “Tell me when you’re done.”

  “Finished,” he said, half a minute later. “Next, the external examination. To a forensic pathologist, the skin is the body’s most important organ.” He ran his fingers over the body. “We look for signs of injury- gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blunt trauma. In the case of Mrs. Alessis, none. There’s no apparent bruising, no injury to the neck that could indicate strangulation. Write that down, please.”

  She realized Jake was easing her discomfort by teaching her as he worked, but her feeling of gratitude disappeared with his next words.

  “Help me turn her onto her side and hold her steady.”

  “Me?”

  He looked around the room. “I don’t see another diener.”

  I’ll diener you. Manny put down her notebook. The woman’s skin felt icy, even through the latex gloves. Although she knew logically that dead flesh would be cold, she had unconsciously expected it to feel like living tissue. But it feels like death itself. She was only able to hold on by fixing her gaze on the big institutional clock on the morgue wall. One-thirty. Mycroft and I should be in bed.

  “Lividity along the back and the backs of the legs and neck shows that the red blood cells settled while she was lying on her back after she collapsed,” he said, demonstrating by pressing on the skin as he spoke. “Lividity is nonblanching. It’s not really an issue here, but it indicates she died more than eight to ten hours ago.”

  “Nonblanching?”

  “If you press on it, the maroon color doesn’t fade.” He reached for her hand. “I’ll show you.”

  She looked away. “I believe you.”

  “There’s an old autopsy adage: ‘You watch one, you do one, then you teach one.’ ”

  “There’s another old saying, one you should be familiar with: ‘Not over my dead body.’ ”

  He didn’t laugh. No sense of humor. “Let her down now, very gently. Thank you.”

  She eased the body onto its back again, thankful for the gloves- not much, but better than nothing.

  “Keep writing,” he told her. “Shame I couldn’t find a tape recorder. She has a lot of dark hair on her arms and legs. I want to check for puncture wounds from a needle, make sure a new suitor didn’t kill her by injection.” He put a new blade on the scalpel handle and shaved the hair from the underside of her forearms, particularly near the bend of the elbows. Then he moved to her legs, her varicose veins revealed as the hair fell away.

  He handles the scalpel masterfully. Not a nick. What would it feel like if he shaved my legs? She hoped he didn’t see her blush. Temporary insanity due to chemical intoxication. Let’s not take this any further.

  “Not a pinprick,” Jake said. “We move to the internal examination.”

  Goody.

  He put a new blade on the handle. “We must evaluate the internal organs. That means taking them out.” He reached for the body, hesitated. “You can step out for a moment if you need some air. Sometimes first-timers faint, but it’s always the men, never the women.”

  She thought of the sandbox. Damned if I’ll be the first. “I’m fine.” She knew how unconvincing she sounded. Even the corpse doesn’t believe me. “Go ahead.”

  With the slightest pressure, he cut across the upper left chest and shoulders, curved the scalpel under the breasts to the right shoulder, and continued down to the lower abdomen just to the left of the belly button.

  “It’s called a Y-incision.”

  “I’d never have guessed.”

  The thin cut widened almost instantly as the skin pulled apart, revealing a ravine of flesh and fat. Manny forced herself to watch, trying not to hyperventilate as Jake’s scalpel sliced through layers of pale skin, glistening yellow fat, and pink muscle. He’s peeling poor Mrs. Alessis open like an orange. A few small rivulets of blood ran down the sides of the corpse into the holes in the autopsy table.

  “Some people believe that dead bodies don’t bleed,” Jake explained. “But when we die our vessels are filled with blood and will leak if they’re cut, just like a garden hose leaks water.”

  He pulled out a handheld electric saw and turned it on.

  “Yikes!” The sound was like a dentist drill magnified a thousand times.

  Jake, though, seemed unperturbed as he cut through the breastplate to get at the internal cavities. He looked up as he cracked the breastplate away from the skin incisions. “Are you all right?”

  She knew she had gone pale. Her uncovered shoes were dotted with blood. “I think I’ll take that VapoRub now.”

  He motioned to the jar, and she took off her gloves to wipe a glob under her nose. “Put on new gloves,” he said. She obeyed.

  Jake was holding Mrs. Alessis’s heart in his hands, raising it for her to see. “The heart is just a muscle,” he said. “It’s a pump. The lungs are the bellows. The kidneys are the plumbing. The skeleton is the scaffolding. The stomach and small intestines are the furnace, turning fuel- food and water- into energy. The liver, gallbladder, urinary bladder, kidneys, and large intestines are the sanitation department; they get rid of waste. And the brain- ah, the wonder of it!- is a high-powered computer so sophisticated that other brains don’t begin to understand it.”

  “Fascinating,” she croaked. Don’t faint. Don’t vomit. Pretend you’re paying attention.

  “I’ve never been a religious man,” he went on, “especially considering the horrors I see, day in, day out: the dead children, the victims of violence, the awful waste of life. But when I look inside the human body, I can understand why people believe in a grand design. It’s an awesome machine, don’t you think?”

  “You are so right.”

  “Heart’s of normal size.” He took a blood sample to be sent to toxicology. “Lungs pink and healthy. She wasn’t a smoker.” Jake removed the organs from the body and weighed them, the quickest way, he said, to tell if they were normal. The image of the bloody organs hanging from the scale prompted another round of nausea. I’m never going inside a butcher shop again.

  “Next, the head,” he said cheerfully.

  Uh-oh.

  He sliced the scalp from ear to ear and peeled the skin forward over the face. Then he fired up the electric saw, cut open the skull plate, and loudly cracked it back to reveal the brain, which he pulled out and sliced into cutlet-sized pieces. />
  “They say lawyers don’t have brains,” Manny managed. And without question, medical examiners have no hearts.

  ***

  Two hours later, the autopsy was over. Washed and doused with perfume but still feeling sick, Manny ventured outside. This is what paradise feels like, she thought, and filled her lungs with the nectar of the night. In her mind she retained the vision of Jake opening Mrs. Alessis’s stomach and ladling- yes, ladling!- its soupy contents into a plastic container. She reminded herself that he was simply trying to determine the cause of the woman’s death, to give her family some peace of mind. But how could a man spend his life routinely cutting up corpses? She’d never witnessed anything so barbaric. If he ever touched me, I’d remember the ladle and the heart. I’ll bet he’s still a virgin.

  Jake joined her, still wearing his scrubs. “There you are!” he said. “I have to go to the pathology lab. Want to come with me or stay out here?” He brandished a glass jar.

  She pointed to it. “What’s in that thing?”

  “Part of Mrs. Alessis’s liver.” His tone was serious, his expression troubled. “It’s wrinkled and underweight. Important, given the yellowish color of her eyes.”

  “For the record,” Manny said, “I’m sorry I asked.”

  “So you coming with me or not?”

  She listened to the sounds of the night. The crickets were out in full force, and she thought she heard an owl. Creepy. “With you.”

  She followed him to the pathology lab, where he headed to a machine the size of a microwave and switched it on. “It’s for making frozen sections. Works in a matter of minutes. During surgery, for example, you use it to make sure you’ve removed enough of a cancerous organ. Normally, I’d wait for the permanent slides made from the paraffin blocks, but that takes a couple of days and I want to look at this tonight.”

  Something was bothering him. His demeanor was grim, perplexed. “Why?”

  “I think the cause of death is related to the liver. There’s her jaundice, the fact that the liver’s wrinkled and underweight- a thousand grams instead of the normal twelve hundred fifty or so. But the only way to pinpoint the cause is to look at the liver under a microscope, and I want to do it before we leave.” Jake inserted the liver section in the machine.