by Jim Beard
***
The great city’s morgue lay deep in the municipal section of Hubtown, surrounded by several other buildings, but itself of a significantly older vintage. It was not so easily found; many preferred it that way.
Though many knew of it, of course, few outside those honorable servants of the city were aware that the sprawling metropolis lay claim to two such depositories for the dead, one for “decent people,” and the other, tucked even tighter away from the public eye, for the “great unwashed.” In other words, those nameless victims of tragedy and those far beneath the interest of more active investigation.
Lane Danner entered that second morgue with his hat down tight upon his head and his face turned in such a way so as to not attract attention. A year earlier and he would have walked into the building with little to no thought of who might see him, but as the city’s disgraced ex-District Attorney, he didn’t care to answer any questions as to his purpose there.
Descending a concrete stairwell into the depths of the Morgue, he paused midway and took stock of his thoughts. A slight tremor in his hand upon the old iron banister also figured into his momentary halt.
The encounter with Louisa Battle had shaken him a bit more than he cared to acknowledge. Her words had hit too close to home for comfort – he was at fault for his fall from his lofty position and nothing could ever change that. He’d stepped over the line one too many times while the D.A. and Henry Wildenburg had run him into the ground during the election for it.
Still, what was done was done. He had a new purpose in life, a new way to protect the city. He continued down the stairs, pushing the sweet, lovely face of Louisa Battle from his mind.
At the bottom of the steps he opened a metal door and once through it entered a brick corridor with weak light. The area was damp and musty, an artifact from the previous century. Danner resisted the urge to cough and moved along.
A door opened on the far end of the corridor. A man came through it, one he recognized instantly.
Same old Doc Cooler, Danner opined inwardly. Dirty lab coat, horn rim glasses hanging off his long nose, hair sticking out like he’s just been shocked. Some things never change.
Looking toward the floor and pulling his hat down even farther over his face, he hurried past the city’s Coroner, praying the man would be as self absorbed as always and not recognize him.
Seconds later, he was past the doctor and through the far door, wondering what Cooler’s business was in the older, less popular morgue. Not really his beat, thought Danner.
The room he’d entered was roughly square, with a low ceiling, the same bad lighting as in the corridor, and its walls lined with a multitude of small iron doors. When he was the D.A., his fellow city workers jokingly referred to them as the “meat lockers.”
The smell in the room seemed more severe than usual to him. Sour and salty, it got up into Danner’s nostrils and sat there. Shaking it off, he began to walk the length of the room, glancing at tags on the rusty old locker doors and peering through the tiny glass windows set into them. Finally, he stopped and re-read the tag sticking halfway out of a door’s frame.
Faces came to him out of the darkness, out of the nearly obscured mists of time. Markie St. Joseph, his friend on the force; Chief Douglas Fram, another good friend; and Helen Jonquil, toast of Broadstreet and someone between a friend and a lover.
Gone; all gone. Victims of November and all with which that it forever stained the city.
Inside the locker lay the corpse.
Danner had to give the metal pallet it rested upon a good lurch before it would roll out from the cavity within the wall. As he did so, he watched as the body was exposed to him inch by inch. When the pallet had reached its full extension, the ex-D.A. took a step back and gazed down at the lifeless figure with a mixture of cold interest and healthy disgust.
Male and of average height, the corpse was still dressed in the tattered tuxedo in which it was found the day before. Had it been an upstanding citizen, it would already have been divested of its garments, cleaned, and most likely already autopsied. The body before him, he guessed, was no different than when it had been fished out of the river.
The puckered grey-purple skin held all the hallmarks of a body that sat in water for far too long. Much of its muscle mass was absent, strangely enough thought Danner, and at several points along the frame, bones were sticking out at strange angles.
The face was even more startling.
The nose sported a large breakage and the ears were small and shrunken, almost invisible. The lips had peeled back, exposing nearly black gums and a piano keyboard of missing teeth. The cheeks were sunken and one actually hosted a hole punched completely through the skin.
The corpse’s eyes – those made Lane Danner whistle in amazement.
Neither eyeball remained in the skull. He leaned over to look straight down into the sockets, which appeared deep and cavernous. There were no signs of the organs being removed by animals or natural forces. It was clear to anyone, even someone with no real experience in anatomy or medical procedure that both eyes had been excised with deliberate care and with fine skill.
Danner looked up at the ceiling, then shut his own eyes. There was no doubt, no doubt whatsoever in his mind, that the missing eyes and the mode of dress meant one thing only: the corpse was meant to be Patrick J. Battle.
He felt fear and concern for his former friend; the emotions came over him suddenly and he did not immediately chase them away. Whatever water had gone under the bridge of their former friendship, he harbored no ill will toward Battle. In fact, his every impulse was to go the Mayor and warn him, to plead with him to take the message seriously.
And knowing Battle as he did, he knew the man was probably already ahead of him on that score.
The strong, sour odor of the corpse crossed a line with Danner, one he had hoped would remain uncrossed, so he grasped the pallet and began to roll it back into the wall. Just as he was about to shut the iron door on it, he noticed something on the bottom of one of the patent leather pumps that the body wore: a shiny metal object, driven deep into the shoe’s heel.
Danner took out a pocketknife and dug the object out of the shoe. Walking over to one of the room’s ceiling lights, he lifted it up to get a better look.
The object looked to be the remnants of a thick iron nail. He recognized it instantly.
A few years before, Danner had presided over a trial that involved a lengthy presentation on nails, one of the odder varieties resembling the one he now held in his hand. He chuckled to himself; few people on the face of the earth knew as many types of nails as he did, he reasoned.
There were only two places in the city where that kind of nail could be found, he reminded himself: the large lumberyard on the west side and the immense train yard in Bayside, to the south of Hubtown.
The body was pulled out of the East River, he remembered. That’s what Totty said. The train yard’s near the river – the lumberyard is not.
It felt right. He did not feel as if he had made some sort of impossible leap in logic. The District Attorney part of his brain, only minutely atrophied, awakened to tell him he was most likely on to something. He’d investigate the train yard, and if that didn’t pan out, he’d focus on the lumberyard.
It just felt right.
Leaving the morgue, Lane Danner felt another stirring, that of his sense of right and wrong, and of the law. Yet he’d already stepped outside the boundaries of the law, even before taking on the identity of The Red Judge, and so his conscience did not fray further for it.
He’d passed that marker before. He was now free to pursue justice as he saw fit, as his sense of right and wrong saw fit, not bespoken to the law.
He’d already played Judge and Jury. Now, he was ready to play Executioner, if necessary to protect the city.
The gaily colored banners proclaiming the upcoming Spring Festival waved slightly in the breeze from Danner’s swift passing.
