Dead Folks' blues d-1

by Steven Womack

  Lonnie Smith, my repo buddy, was next: “Got one in Shelbyville, man, you interested? Trans Am, T-tops, should be a fun ride. I’ll bring the truck back. You can drive the Pontiac. Call me, dude.”

  Great, I’m in the middle of a murder, and now Lonnie wants me to swipe a car as well.

  There was a box on the front page of the morning paper, a short bulletin about Conrad’s death. Apparently it all happened too late to get full treatment. I suspected the story would be all over the afternoon paper, though. I also figured my answering machine at work would be overloaded with reporter calls as well, which is why I decided to stay away from my office for a while.

  I decided to take a chance and go see Dr. Marsha. I met Marsha Helms about five years ago, when I was covering a murder for the paper. I’d just been moved off the Lifestyles section onto Cityside, and it was my first real chance to get involved with the law enforcement bureaucracy in this town. Marsha helped me appreciably-gave me a lot of inside information, details I probably wasn’t supposed to know.

  Marsha’s tall, maybe an inch or two taller than me, and striking. Jet-black hair, red-frame glasses, a nose as sharp and well defined as a wasp’s sting. But not what you’d call classically beautiful. Attractive, though, and with a personality that could best-and diplomatically-be described as off the wall.

  What else would you expect from a lady who cuts open dead bodies for a living?

  I crossed over the river on the Memorial Bridge, through the dense lunchtime traffic, past the police station, then maneuvered my way around to First Avenue. The partly cobblestone street runs down behind all the old buildings on Second Avenue, the ones that were feed stores and blacksmith shops a hundred years ago, beautifully renovated restaurants, bars, and dance clubs now. Cities get gentrified all the time, but seldom with the class of this town. People flowed freely, happily. Tourists mixed in with suited business people, street singers, and city workers in a buzz saw of activity. I drove past the replica of Fort Nashborough, past Riverfront Park, on out First Avenue until it changes into Hermitage Avenue. One of the things that make this city so wonderful is that you can get lost forever if you don’t grasp the concept of street names changing mid-block-and that Old Hickory Boulevard has no beginning and no end. It’s just kind of everywhere.

  Around the bend, just past the building that’s a different Oriental restaurant, with a different owner every six weeks, is Metro General Hospital. It’s a nineteenth-century facility overloaded with twenty-first century stresses: eleven-year-old girls pregnant by their fathers, their younger brothers, or cousins; junkies; alcoholics; AIDS patients who never heard of health insurance, even if they could afford it. The knifings, stabbings, car wrecks, plane crashes-they all go to General.

  I made a left turn just past the main entrance of the hospital into an unidentified parking lot. Up a short hill, behind a rise that blocks the building from the road, sits the Forensic Science Center.

  Strange place, the Nashville morgue. I don’t know if morgues are like this all over, but this city’s is more of a bunker than anything else. The doors are heavy, armor-plated, and the few windows in the place are bulletproof. Inside, the staff’s got the makings of a pretty good arsenal, and they all know where the bullets go.

  Go figure. I mean, who’d want to blast their way into a morgue? God help anybody who tries, though.

  Kay Delacorte sat at her desk, eyeing me through the thick glass. She made a face kind of like a kid biting into a sour ball and pushed a button on a wall next to her desk.

  “What do you want?”

  I looked at her through the glass, gave her my best lost boy look. “C’mon, Kay. Can I come in?”

  She giggled, her laugh coming through the speaker as static. Kay’s bright, funny, with a real M*A*S*H sense of humor. Guess that’s what it takes. At forty something, she’s the oldest staffer at the morgue, a combination earth mother-social director for the employees.

  “What for?”

  “I want to talk to Doc Marsha.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.” Kay was messing with me now. All part of the game.

  “C’mon, Kay, you’re not careful here, you’re going to make me think of my ex-wife.”

  “Oh, God forbid …” she yelled, laughing as she pushed another button. The door buzzer wailed. I grabbed the handle and pulled. The front door to the morgue is so heavy you’ve got to grasp it with both hands and plant your feet solid or you’ll never make it.

  The bunker door swung open, and I stepped into the heavily air-conditioned building. I shivered slightly after being outside in the hot sun. Every time I’ve ever been in this building, it’s as cold as a meat locker. So to speak.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve, showing your face around here after all this time.” Kay was teasing me now, or at least I hoped that’s what she was doing. Tough to tell with her.

  “I know it’s been a long time, babe. But since I got canned at the paper, I don’t have much chance to get down here.”

  She stood up, motioned for me. I stepped over to her desk and leaned in. She gave me a quick hug, a peck on the cheek.

  “I saw your name in the paper,” she said. “You okay?”

  “Little tired. Little sore. Nothing heavy. I guess you know why I’m here.”

  “Yeah, and it’s a good thing Dr. Henry’s up in East Tennessee.”

  Dr. Henry Krohlmeyer, all the right credentials including Stanford Medical School, was the head meat cutter, the official city medical examiner. He also probably would’ve thrown me out, given the circumstances. My being here was most improper, and I knew it.

  “He’s out of town?” I asked, surprised.

  “Seminar. Won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  “So you guys haven’t autopsied Fletcher yet?”

  “Dr. Marsha did it. Dr. Henry’ll sign off on it when he gets back.”

  “You think she’ll talk to me?”

  “I’ll check, Harry. Best I can do.”

  Kay walked back to Marsha’s office, which was one of two smaller offices occupied by the forensic pathologists. Off to another side was an office shared by the three forensic investigators.

  Kay walked back in a moment, a wicked grin on her face. “Yeah, go on back there. But be prepared.”

  I had a feeling I knew what she was talking about. Tune was when Marsha and I had done a fair amount of flirting, back before I got my divorce. Still under the delusion that I had a marriage, I backed off. Stupid me …

  I smiled at Kay, thanked her, and limped on back.

  “You know,” she said behind me, “you need a vacation. You look like hell.”

  I turned to her. “People keep telling me that.”

  “You should listen.”

  Marsha sat behind her cluttered desk. Behind her, on a windowsill beneath another pane of bullet-proof glass, sat a dozen or so tiny pill bottles, each marked with a black felt tip pen, each holding a bullet that had been pulled out of one of her customers. Grim work, I thought, but these people seem to thrive on it. In fact, Marsha’s office was filled with other souvenirs: a human skull, a large specimen bottle with a human fetus preserved in formaldehyde, framed color pictures of gruesome murder scenes.

  “Who does your decorating?” I asked. “The Addams Family?”

  She smiled at me, revealing a mouth full of perfect white teeth. Marsha Helms was even prettier than I’d remembered; maybe it was because I’d been in the middle of a long, dry spell. Maybe she just was, and it took me this long to notice.

  “Hello, Harry.” She stood up, and up, and up, and up. God, she was tall. She stuck out a hand, which I took gratefully and shook gently. “Good to see you, again.”

  “Good to see you, Marsh. How’s it going?”

  “Busy. Long hot summer. The murder rate’s up fourteen percent this year over last, and we aren’t even through the worst part of the summer yet.”

  And now I’d been a party, however inadvertently, to making it a notch worse. />
  “So I’ve heard.” I sat in a scuffed, city-issue office chair across from her.

  “You’re limping,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing much. Compound fracture. I just had ’em stuff the bone back in and wrap it.”

  “Heard you got bopped on the head. Stitches?”

  “Coupla hundred. But it’ll be okay.”

  We stared at each other for a moment, a thankfully non-pregnant pause. “Such a tough guy,” she chided. “I guess it comes with being a private … dick.”

  “So you heard?”

  “Yeah. What happened at the newspaper?” Marsha crossed her legs and leaned back in her office chair. She was wearing a long black skirt that peeked out beneath her white lab coat. Great legs, I thought, distracted for a moment. Sorry, can’t help it.

  “I hacked off the wrong people. Attitude problem, I guess.”

  “I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did. I heard about you and Lanie, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said, uncomfortable. I don’t like reopening old wounds-the new ones are bad enough. What the hell, it’s all in the past, anyway. Letting go of things is tough, but hanging on’s even tougher. “I’m glad it’s over.”

  “Pretty rough?”

  “In places.”

  She looked down at her desk. “You should’ve called me. Somebody to talk to. Shoulder to cry on, maybe.”

  I thought for a moment. This was encouraging news, especially for a person in my situation. Wonder if my landlady would mind my having company some evening? I’d never asked her; it simply hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Why don’t I do that sometime?”

  She looked back at me, smile gone from her face. “But that’s not why you’re here now?”

  “No, Marsh. You did Fletcher, right?”

  “I was there. I was the one who did the on-scene. You were already gone by then.”

  “They took me down to E.R.”

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “What killed him, Marsh? What killed Conrad Fletcher?”

  “You know how much trouble I’d get in for divulging that?”

  I leaned forward in the chair, a self-conscious attempt to convey sincerity with body language. I’m never able to pull off that sort of thing, but I keep trying.

  “Marsha, I just want to know because, well, I’m involved. It’ll be a matter of public record eventually, anyway. Let me know what I’m up against. Whatever you tell me doesn’t go any further than this office.”

  She stood up, thumbed through a stack of file folders, and pulled out one near the top. “C’mon. I’m only doing this because Dr. Henry’s out of the office and Charlie’s out running a D.O.A. car wreck.”

  She walked past me quickly, her lab coat brushing against my arm. I followed her out of the office, past Kay Delacorte’s desk, and through the door into the autopsy room. Two tilting tables with bright overhead lights sat shiny, cold, and clean. Off to the left were the tool kits laid out on white towels, the brutal Stryker saw on its side, on a shelf by itself. Marsha’s heels clicked sharply on the tile floor as we walked out of the autopsy room into the receiving room.

  “We got him in here just after midnight. I grabbed a couple hours’ sleep, then came in at five to do the autopsy. He’s in the cooler now. The mortician’s supposed to pick him up around two. You ready for this?”

  “Who else you got in there?”

  “Suicide, came in about five thirty this morning. We haven’t even cleaned him up yet. But it’s not too bad. Small caliber under the chin. He’s in one piece.” Her left eyebrow tilted up. “Mostly …”

  Jesus, I thought, I hope I don’t pass out on her.

  “C’mon,” she grinned. “At least this one hasn’t got a steering column through his chest.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”

  She pulled the heavy metal latch on the cooler door, and we walked into the refrigerated room. Unlike in the movies and on television, this morgue didn’t have a bunch of neat shiny drawers, each with a sterile body laying there in repose. This was just a big refrigerator, with a bunch of gurneys scattered in loose rows all over the place. On one to our right, a young man was spread out barefooted, worn jeans, blue work shirt pulled open and splattered with a surprisingly small amount of blood. And below his chin, a dark ugly hole lined with burn marks.

  Toe tags, the latest fashion for today’s teen.

  Farther in and to our left, Conrad Fletcher was on another gurney. I hesitated for a second, drawing in a deep breath, steeling myself. Even from eight or ten feet away, I could see the ugly Y-shaped cut of the autopsy surgeon’s knife, the one that started at each shoulder, met at the center of the torso, then continued down. I’d never seen an autopsy performed, but I knew how one worked. And I knew the body lying over on that table was empty of guts and of brain. Whatever made Conrad Fletcher Conrad Fletcher was long gone, and the stiff blue-gray slab on the table was just residue. I told myself that as I stood there, a feebleminded attempt to distance myself from the awfulness that I knew the corpse represented.

  “You okay?” Marsha asked.

  “Yeah, I just needed a second. I never could get used to this.”

  “C’mon, Harry, this one really isn’t that bad. You’ve seen worse.”

  “I know. Just been awhile.”

  She walked over to the table. There was a small sheet draped roughly over his crotch, but modesty was something that was neither called for nor particularly appreciated here. No neat white sheet covering him over head to toe. Just something thrown over his privates, almost as an afterthought.

  She crossed around the gurney and stood, arms folded over the file in front of her. I ambled over and stood on the other side facing her. Conrad was between us, unaware that he was the topic of the day. I studied his face. It was a little sunken, his eyelids pulled down. His color was all wrong; the embalmer hadn’t had a chance to pretty him up. I was grateful that he had enough hair to cover the scalp incision, the one that’s made from ear to ear across the head, the one that Marsha had cut to remove his skullcap, and then his brain.

  It was a strain to imagine her in this line of work.

  “This wasn’t real hard to figure out,” she said, unfolding her arms and opening the file. “A first-year intern could have gotten most of it.”

  I felt a sudden wave of dizziness pass over me as I stood there staring down at the huge stitches across Conrad’s chest.

  “How do you do this stuff?” I asked, woozy.

  “Should’ve seen him before I sewed him back up,” she said offhandedly.

  I looked up at her. She was staring down at her notes. “So what killed him?” I asked.

  “All the classic symptoms: blue mottling of the brain tissue. Paralysis of the musculature of the esophagus, larynx. Diminished ventilation of the pulmonary alveoli. Chronic and progressive congestion of the bronchial tract.” She looked up at me as if she expected me to understand what she was talking about.

  “Okay,” I commented.

  “Mucus in the lungs,” she continued. “Textbook anoxia. Acute respiratory paralysis.”

  “So what’s that mean in English, Marsh?”

  “Harry, dear,” she said, cocking an eye toward me, “the man drowned in his own snot.”

  I was trying to keep my brain working, trying to understand all this, mostly to keep from heaving.

  “What, you mean somebody smothered him?” I thought of Spellman’s comment about the pillow.

  “Nobody smothered him,” Marsha said. “He was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?”

  “Your acute respiratory paralysis …”

  I stared down at Conrad, cold and dead and poisoned. For the first time, I felt sorry for the poor bastard.

  “What kind of poison?”

  She walked around to the foot of the gurney, then stuck her thin hand inside the right pocket of the lab coat. “Tox screen’ll take a week or so. Samples went off to the T.B.I, la
b this morning. My guess is, especially given that this went down in a hospital, that it was one of the anesthetics. Pavulon, maybe. More likely succinylcholine or protocurarine-”

  “What in the hell is succin …”I stumbled. “And protocurarine?”

  “Powerful anesthetic. Synthetic curares. Used for patients who are allergic to everything else. Paralyzes the respiratory system in large doses. It fits. Again, though, we’ll have to wait for the lab.”

  “Synthetic curare. Poison-tipped arrow?”

  “Try twenty-gauge needle,” she said, pulling a magnifying glass out of the lab coat pocket.

  “You serious?”

  Marsha laid the file folder across Conrad’s hairy legs. She moved her hand up his leg, above his right knee to the top of his thigh. She searched around for a second, then looked up at me.

  “See? Right there.”

  I bent down and looked through the magnifying glass as she held it. I moved my head up and down to focus and then saw it. An unmistakable, tiny hole in the skin, with just the faintest trace of a bulge around it.

  “There’s a hole in his pants, too. A match.”

  I stood up and looked her straight in the eye, for the first time that day without any lascivious thoughts. “Why would a doctor lie there and let somebody jab a twenty-gauge needle into him-and through his pants?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Somebody knock him out?”

  “Not a mark on him. Not even a scalp abrasion. He fell back on the bed.”

  “Stun device?”

  “I don’t know. I’m no expert on that. But every one I’ve seen leaves either burn marks or pinpricks.”

  We left the cooler and its two inhabitants behind, then walked slowly back to Marsha’s office. In the hall, I remembered something I hadn’t thought of before.

  “You know, I think he was still breathing when I first saw him.”

  “Probably,” she said as we entered her office. “The stuff doesn’t kill you immediately.”

  She walked behind her desk, tossed the folder onto the ever-present pile. “Want to hear a good one?”