Remains Silent mm-1

by Michael Baden

  Gruen, who represented both Baxter County and its hospital- a blatant conflict of interest, Manny told herself- tried to dismiss the suit as frivolous and a nuisance, “designed to cost the county taxpayers their hard-earned pay in these economically troubled times” and to “smear with false charges an institution that was the pride of Turner Township for more than a century.”

  He hadn’t done his homework; thanks to Kenneth, Manny had. Judge Bradford, who had evidently listened to Gruen too many times, allowed her the first order ever granted in the State of New York to preserve four skeletons, dirt, the results of toxicological testing, X-rays if any, autopsy reports, medical examiner’s notes and files, photos, police officers’ reports and notes, clothing, medical records, paraffin blocks, formal-fixed tissues, microscopic slides, “and a whole lot of other stuff- anything you need.”

  Euphoric, Manny skipped out of the courtroom, ignoring Gruen, who had approached the bench to ask for a meeting in judge’s chambers.

  “That was fast,” Kenneth said. “After we serve the order on the hospital, we’ll be home by supper.”

  “I don’t think so. As long as we’re here and finished so early, I thought we might take a little side trip on Patrice’s behalf. See if I can rouse some ghosts.”

  It took Jake three hours to complete his morning autopsies, and he still hadn’t started on the paperwork. Pederson’ll ream me a new one if I don’t get it done, he thought, though the words swam before his eyes. Under Harrigan, Pederson’s predecessor, there were far fewer forms with far fewer necessary signatures, and a doctor could get home at a decent hour. He had about decided that rest was worth a tongue-lashing when the phone rang.

  “Dr. Rosen?” A man’s voice, oozing honey. Bad news.

  “Speaking.”

  “My firm represents R. Seward Reynolds, the developer of the Turner Mall.”

  “And your name is…?”

  “Michael Thompson of Javalovich, Custer, Thompson and Warbler. We understand that your representative is in Baxter County trying to preserve the skeletons and close up the area where they were found, and that you yourself have been espousing preposterous theories that could cause our client financial harm.”

  Manny’s work. Good girl! And wouldn’t she love it if she knew he called her my “representative.” “Who told you that?”

  “We don’t reveal client confidences. We simply wanted to tell you, as a courtesy, that our client is prepared to litigate for any monies lost as a result of your or your representative’s actions. To put it plainly: Stick to your own job.”

  Jake usually responded with great cool, but he had a few trigger points. Threats were high on his short list. Anger flooded his bloodstream like a serum. “Mr. Thompson, are you threatening me? You tell your client that if he tries to stop me or my representative, I’ll bury his bones next to those of Mr. Lyons and personally build a shopping center over them.” He slammed down the phone, surprised at the vehemence of his loathing.

  The phone rang again.

  “Look, you, if you ever-”

  “Dr. Rosen,” said a woman’s breathless voice, “thank God you’re there! You’ve got to help us. Something awful’s happened.”

  Jake rubbed at the vein throbbing in his temple. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Paula Koros, Theresa Alessis’s daughter.”

  His breathing slowed. “Of course Ms. Koros. Forgive me for shouting. I was just about to call you. I’ve completed the autopsy of your mother’s body.” How best to break it to her?

  She didn’t give him a chance. “I’m at the funeral home. The whole family’s here. Dr. Rosen, the body in the coffin- it’s not my mother. It’s a different woman altogether.”

  ***

  He knew the body he’d worked on was Mrs. Alessis; he had seen her alive a few days before. But there were two other bodies at the morgue. Was it possible…?

  He called Baxter Community Hospital and got the morgue attendant, a man who sounded not much older than eighteen.

  “Last night I performed an autopsy on a woman named Theresa Alessis. She was to be transported this morning to the Fairview Funeral Home, only the wrong body went to that funeral parlor. I need to know what other female bodies were in the morgue last night.”

  “I’m not sure I’m authorized to give out that information.”

  “This is urgent! Tell me now!” Jake ordered.

  The answer came back quickly. “There were two other bodies in the morgue: one female, one male. Female was Brigit Reilly, seventy-five. Husband deceased. No children. The death certificate says Alzheimer’s. File says she lived at Sweetbrook.”

  “A nursing home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And where was Mrs. Reilly’s body sent for preparation?”

  “Shady Briar. It’s like forty minutes away. Only it’s kinda weird.” He paused.

  Jake sighed in frustration. “What’s weird?”

  “The van for the county cemetery came here late this morning, looking for Mrs. Reilly. I told them she was gone, that we had received instructions to send her to Shady Briar for private internment.”

  The throbbing grew worse. “Mrs. Reilly was initially supposed to be buried in a pauper’s grave?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Only the body now seems to be at a third place, Fairview?”

  “Seems so.” Jake could visualize the shrug.

  The mix-up was too coincidental. It felt ominous to Jake. Pete’s murder. The stolen bottle. Thompson’s call about the bones. The trashing of Pete’s house. And now a missing body. “Let me have the numbers for Sweetbrook and Shady Briar. I tell you, young man, if this is a hospital error…” But it isn’t. It’s something more.

  ***

  At Sweetbrook, a nurse from the Alzheimer’s wing agreed to go to the Fairview Funeral Home to look at the body and to call Jake on his pager once she had. An hour later, his suspicion was verified: The body that lay before Theresa Alessis’s grieving family was, in fact, Brigit Reilly.

  He called Shady Briar. “My name is Dr. Jake Rosen and I’m trying to locate a body that was delivered to your funeral home this morning,” he told the director.

  “We’re not strictly a funeral home,” the man said. “We’re a mausoleum, for the interment of remains. As well as a crematorium, of course.”

  A curlicue of dread snaked toward his heart. “The body is cremated?”

  “Indeed. At the request of her son.”

  “She didn’t have any children! That wasn’t Mrs. Reilly. Mrs. Reilly is lying in a casket at the Fairview Funeral Home in Turner.”

  “Impossible,” the director said. “You’re mistaken, Dr. Rosen. We received instructions from Mrs. Reilly’s son early this morning; my service rang me around six. He told me his mother had expired at Baxter Community Hospital and he wanted her cremated as soon as possible. We picked her up- her name was clearly present on the tag on the body bag. I met him myself. A polite man. Very clean. He paid for our services in cash. And we honor our commitments, doctor.”

  The dread struck. He felt dizzy. “What did the son look like?”

  “Hard to say. I’m not good at describing people when they’re perpendicular.” He chuckled. “Average build, brown hair, in his forties.”

  “Did he mention picking up the ashes or make any arrangements for a remains mausoleum?”

  “Not as of now.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “Not at all. Remains sometimes go unclaimed for years, regardless of the original intention. People don’t know what to do with them. That’s why we offer eternal storage in our peaceful-”

  “Hold on to those ashes. Don’t release them to anyone unless you personally deliver them to the Alessis family at Fairview.”

  “The Alessis family? Whatever for?”

  “I don’t think you heard me. You cremated the wrong woman. That ‘son’ hired you to get rid of evidence.”

  A beat. “Evidence?”

  “Mrs.
Alessis was murdered.”

  “Heavenly God!”

  “God,” said Jake, “had nothing to do with it.”

  Edward Dyson, the administrator of Baxter Community Hospital, was smarm incarnate. “You didn’t have to bring the papers personally,” he told Manny in his office. “Judge Bradford called me himself. Too late, though,” he said as he gnawed on a jelly bean from the jar on his desk.

  The breath went out of her; she felt she’d been punched in the chest. “Too late?”

  Instead of answering, Dyson pressed a button by his phone. In moments, a thin man, appearing only old enough to have just graduated high school, arrived at the office door. “Tommy,” the administrator said, “this is Ms. Manfreda. Tell her what you told me.”

  “Mr. Dyson said we gotta hang on to those skeletons from the mental bin. But I told him they already got sent away.”

  Manny stood. “When?”

  “This morning.” He cowered like a frightened puppy. “Don’t tell me I did another thing wrong. First I release bodies to the wrong funeral homes, and now bones are missing.”

  Calm down. Deep breath. “You were on duty when the four skeletons were released?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I need to know about the man who picked them up.”

  “Wasn’t no man. It was a lady.” He sounded victorious, as though he’d won a game of gin rummy.

  “Okay, a lady. Describe her.”

  “Old.”

  “How old?”

  “Fortyish.” Manny chuckled to herself. “Don’t know what color hair. Wore a scarf.” His brow creased in concentration. “Wore one of those shapeless dresses, sounds like a cow.”

  “A muumuu?”

  “That’s it. I didn’t pay much attention to her. She had the release papers with her.”

  Dyson proffered a few sheets of bright yellow paper. “This was a proper transfer,” he said. “Look. Tommy did just right.”

  Manny glanced at the first page. “The bones were transferred to the New York City morgue? And the X-rays? And the files? Care of Dr. Jacob Rosen?”

  “Yup. The woman said she was from his office. Dr. Rosen himself called me later around noon, but it was about something different. About a body, not bones. Doc Harrigan had the bones laid out in the drawers. I put them in body bags and gave them to the lady.”

  Manny felt a wash of relief, pissed as she was that Jake hadn’t told her. The New York City morgue was probably the safest place in the world for the bones to be. I’ll call him. Give him a hard time about wasted effort. He can tell me about the body. Maybe we should meet, discuss the advantages of teamwork. She smiled to herself. That would be nice.

  She turned to Dyson. “Can I have a photocopy of this release?”

  He barely glanced at her. “Of course. My secretary will make one for you on your way out.”

  ***

  Jake had just gotten off the phone with Paula Koros, who took the news about her mother’s body with a defeated resignation that would, he guessed, later turn to rage. A new client for Manny, he thought.

  His phone rang: the lawyer herself. “Want to hear the Italian word for jackass?” she asked.

  “Not particularly. In what context?”

  “In the context that Kenneth and I killed ourselves to convince a judge to preserve the Turner skeletons. Mission accomplished. Why didn’t you tell me you were transferring them to New York?”

  He felt a stab of pain in his eyes. “I wasn’t.”

  “I’m talking Skeletons One, Two, Three, and Four and all the other ‘stuff,’ to use Judge Bradford’s elegant terminology.”

  “I didn’t have them transferred.” He heard her gasp.

  “You must have. I’m holding a transfer order with your signature on it.”

  “It can’t be my signature because I never signed a transfer. Whoever authorized those remains to be picked up, it wasn’t me. And the bones aren’t in the city morgue, that I can guarantee you.”

  Despair engulfed her. Without the bones, she couldn’t use them as evidence against whoever killed Harrigan and Mrs. Alessis, help Patrice, team up with Jake. She felt empty, drained of spirit, spent.

  “We’re being outthought, outmaneuvered,” she said.

  “There’s more to it than that,” he agreed. “The bones and the poison are part of a single puzzle. We’re up against someone who’ll kill to keep it from being put together.”

  THERE WAS ONE more place to look. Slowly, methodically, Manny drove with Kenneth to the Turner Psychiatric Institute.

  They arrived at five o’clock. She insisted that Kenneth wait in the Porsche. She’d need him as a getaway driver, she said, if she had to leave in a hurry- she was, after all, planning on breaking and entering. She reached into the glove compartment for a flashlight.

  “But the hospital’s defunct,” Kenneth said. “Died like its patients. You won’t find anything here.”

  “There may still be records, stuff that was overlooked. We’ve lost all the evidence, Kenneth. If I don’t find anything, this case is defunct.”

  He settled back in the seat. “This may be a bad way of putting it, sister. But it’s your funeral.”

  ***

  Now Manny stood before a huge dilapidated gray building that stood at the crest of a hill like a medieval castle. Its lights were out, its door locked. She’d studied the architectural plans and knew this was Serenity Hall, once the hospital’s only structure, with offices on the ground floor and patients’ rooms above. Manny counted six stories. She noted that the windows on the higher floors were exceedingly narrow, probably so that suicidal patients couldn’t hurl themselves out. ADMINISTRATION read a sign on the front door. This must be where they kept their files, even when the hospital expanded. If they wanted to hide a file, not send it to Poughkeepsie, it’d still be here. She tried the door. Locked. A side door was also locked, as was another at the back. The windows were shut, and when she peered through the filthy panes, she saw they fronted wire mesh; she’d have to break the glass and cut the wires if she wanted to get inside.

  She was suddenly struck by the futility of her task. Break in and search through six floors and a basement? Are you out of your mind?

  She stepped back. They had driven up a steep road to get to the virtually deserted parking lot by the entrance; in the distance she could see the field in which the bones had been found. The sun was low in the sky, casting shadows of outlying buildings across grass that seemed almost black, and the air was rapidly growing colder. Maybe there’s somebody somewhere. She could make out a light down the hill, and though she had no idea whether the building was even on the hospital grounds, she started for it. Another building, completely dark, loomed to her right, appearing suddenly in the gloom as though it had just arrived. Startled, Manny approached it. A barely legible sign over the door read PROMISE HOUSE. She recognized the name. When Turner Psychiatric was in operation, this was the residence of patients who needed the least care. It too was locked. She rubbed a hole in the coating of grime on a corner window, shone her flashlight, and was rewarded with a view of a rusty bed frame tipped over onto a mattress covered in green mold, walls stained with water damage, the shredded pages of old magazines, and the body of a dead rat. The promise had been broken.

  Jesus God! A squirrel dashed between her legs, raising gooseflesh on every part of her body. She let out a yelp, then stifled it, not wanting to be discovered. Some sign of human life would be nice, though. Gathering clouds and a chill wind promised rain.

  To her left stood a brick building, the front of which was a glass sunroom. Most of the panes had been smashed; inside was a shambles of rocks, bricks, broken beer bottles, glass shards, dead pigeons. The dining hall, Manny knew; patients would eat in the sunlight in summer. She began to see the facility as she had seen it in photographs of its heyday: an elegant manicured home to women with “nervous conditions” and men with drinking problems who could afford the prices. In later years it had faced the same obsta
cles as any large mental institution: inadequate staff, patients drugged out of their gourds, only enough money to feed them gruel and Jell-O. There’s something terrible about a place that used to house so many people, even crazy people, broken down like this. It feels wrong, like a summer camp in winter. Or like a prison. She felt a wave of pity for Lieutenant James A. Lyons.

  She moved on, though she realized the light she was heading for was still too far away to be part of the property. A little farther down the path was a small squat building, maybe eight feet long and ten feet high, its one small window almost at the top. With a stab of anguish, Manny knew what it was: the Seclusion Room, where the most troubled patients were sent. “It is a spiritual sanctuary,” a brochure for the Turner Mental Hospital had proclaimed, “a place where the troubled can regain peace.” Bullshit, had been Manny’s reaction when she’d read that, and bullshit was her reaction now. It was a confinement cell, not a sanctuary. If you wanted to use it to discipline a patient or break his will, you could do it here, away from the attention of other patients and nonessential staff.

  Manny tried the door. It opened. Like a spelunker, she aimed her flashlight at the interior. Padded walls, she realized with a shiver. The room contained a cot and tattered mattress, a sink, and a toilet; nothing else. Although she knew there were no records to be found here, she stepped inside, her mind alive with fantasies born of a dozen horror movies. By now it was almost pitch-dark outside; her flashlight provided the only illumination.

  On the left wall, a portion of the padding had been torn aside, revealing a white stucco wall, scribbled over with dark ink. Writing? Yes! Manny bent to investigate. The hole was at the level of her waist. The writing on the stucco might have been a child’s, or a grown person’s writing from his knees. She got on her knees and concentrated the light on the writing. The message sprang into clarity: