Eureka

CHAPTER 17

I t was 7:15 when the phone woke me up. I don’t know how long it had been ringing. I rolled over to reach for it and I felt a hot wire slash across my stomach.

“Oww!” I yelped. Rosie jerked awake as I reached across him and picked up the receiver.

“Yeah,” I moaned.

“That you, Zeke?” I heard Bones say on the other end of the line.

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s the matter, you sound all in. Have a rough night?”

“You’ll never know just how rough,” I groaned.

“Want to stop by the morgue on your way in? I got the post-mortem ready for you.”

“Right. Thirty minutes.”

“No hurry,” he said gleefully. “None of my patients is going anywhere.”

“Cute,” I said, and hung up. I called Ski and told him I was running a little late, and to call the precinct and tell Ozzie, who handled the radio, that we had to stop off at the morgue on the way in.

“How’d it go up there?” he asked.

“I’ll give you a report when I see you,” I said, and hung up.

I struggled out of bed and went into the kitchen to let the dog out, then realized I had left the back door open all night. Rosie was in the yard, watering the trees and shrubs. I went into the bathroom and turned the hot water as high as I could take it and let it wash over me for about ten minutes. Then I shaved; dressed in my tweed jacket, dark gray flannels, a dark blue shirt, and black tie; set out Rosie’s food and water for him; and left to pick up Ski.

“What happened to the window?” was the first thing he said when he got in the car. Then he took a closer look at me and added, “What happened to you? You’re as pale as white bread.”

“I met Captain Culhane,” I said.

“What’d he do, hit you with a sledgehammer?”

“That’s about right,” I said, and gave him a quick report as we headed downtown.

“It’s a bust,” I finished. “We can forget Verna Wilensky. Nobody up there is going to help, and legally we haven’t a case for a subpoena.”

“You going to let him get away with rocking you like that?” he said angrily, the blood rising to his face.

“Oh, I did my share,” I said, and told him how the fight had ended, and about putting the gun and badge in the bag.

“The old man’s gonna want to do something about this,” Ski said. “He’ll be mighty pissed off that a cop did that to another cop, especially to one of his.”

“I made my point,” I answered. “I don’t want to hear the name Culhane or San Pietro or anything like it for the rest of my life.”

“We could go back up there and make life miserable for him,” the big man said.

“Ah, we’d be outnumbered. Of course, it seems like he only hires the handicapped. On the other hand, the one-eyed guy didn’t need both eyes to damn near break me in half.”

“I’d like to have a piece of the son of a bitch,” Ski said. “You shoulda taken me with you, partner.”

“You probably would have killed one of them. The last thing we’d want to do is spend twenty years in that place.”

You can add morgues to a high place on the list of things I hate. Perhaps it’s the smell of formaldehyde, blood, and alcohol that permeates the sterile confines of what Bones calls “the coolest place in town.”

The room was white-tiled, with a bright light hanging from the ceiling over each of the tables, and a butcher’s scale hanging from the ceiling beside the lamp. Each table had a ridge running all the way around it, and a sink at the foot into which water, blood, and any other unwanted material was channeled. A spigot hissed aerated water into the sink. The mixed odors of alcohol, blood, disinfectant, and death permeated the cold air in the room. There were half a dozen stretchers, elevated at the head and sloping down to the foot. Beside the table, a stenographer wearing a face mask sat at a wheeled desk, equipped with a shorthand writer. In the corner, almost inaudibly, a record player was providing something by Bach.

A large woman’s corpse lay on its back on one of the tables, her dark hair showering over the raised end of the table. The body was the color of spoiled meat, and was split open from chin to Venus mound. Bones, in a white butcher’s apron and wearing yellow gloves, was leaning over the corpse, digging around in the cavity, and dictating to the stenographer. He looked over the top of his glasses when I stuck my head through the swinging doors of the examination room.

“Zeke, m’boy,” he said cheerily. “Want to take a look? See what cyanide does to the innards?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

He stopped what he was doing and told the steno, whose name was Judith, to take a break. She stood primly, straightened her skirt, and left the room through a door on the far side. Bones peeled off the gloves, turned off the light over the table, and pulled off his gown. He dropped gown and gloves in a large trash bin near the door.

“Feelin’ any better? You look like hell,” he said.

“I sprung a couple of ribs,” I said.

“She must’ve been quite the athlete,” he said wryly.

“Don’t I wish.”

“Where’s it hurt?”

He stopped and reached out with both hands, feeling the bottom of my rib cage.

“Right there,” I said.

His nimble fingers worked around my sides and back again.

“Nothing broken. You’ll probably be sore for a couple of days. Let’s see what Mrs. Wilensky gave up.” He led me to his office, which was adjacent to the laboratory: a cubicle of a room large enough for a desk, a couple of file cabinets, three chairs, and a table that held a coffeemaker, a couple of mugs, a tall sugar shaker, and a bedpan full of ice, in which a bottle of milk rested. There was a calendar on the wall, displaying a drawing of the human form with all the vital parts identified on it. The motto on the bottom read topfer’s surgical instruments in large letters, and under that stainless steel precision tools for every occasion.

Ski was sitting in one of the chairs, staring stoically at the calendar. Ski could look at body parts all day long, but the aroma of death in all its incarnations really got to him.

I sat down next to Ski and Bones sat at his desk, which was piled with papers, books, a phone, and a human skull, which had an ashtray wedged inside it, just behind the gaping mouth. He rooted around in a desk drawer, ultimately coming up with a file folder, and proceeded to read from his report.

“Could you just reduce that to simple English?” Ski said after a moment or two.

Bones smiled, retrieved his cigarette, and leaned back in his chair.

“I make her closer to forty than forty-seven. Bleached blonde. In simple English, both lungs were full of water and traces of lye and other ingredients consistent with soap.”

“In other words, she drowned, as we suspected,” I said.

“Yes and no,” he said.

“Now what does that mean?”

“She drowned all right, but remember what I told you about electrocution?”

“Yeah, it’s the big freeze,” Ski said. “Everything stops on a dime.”

“Very good. So…?”

“So what?” Ski said.

“So how’d all that water get in her lungs?” He grinned like a man holding four aces.

It took a minute to sink in.

Ski said, “Uh-oh.”

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him.

“In simple terms, boys, the lady was dead before the radio fell in the tub with her. You got yourself a nice, sweet homicide here. And a murder one unless the killer just happened to be strolling past Wilensky’s bathroom on his way home and decided to hold her underwater for four or five minutes. She broke a toe thrashing around and there’s some skin under a couple of her fingernails.”

“Please don’t say ‘I told you so,’ ” Ski said to me.

What had been conjecture on my part was now a reality. The assurance that Verna Wilensky was murdered in cold blood didn’t make me feel good. It streaked through me like a cold wind had sneaked through my pores. It chilled my heart. And with that came the realization that perhaps Culhane knew the truth and was simply toying with me, safe in the belief that somebody had beat murder.

“My guess is that whoever killed her knocked that radio in as an afterthought,” Bones said. “As most killers would, he probably thought he’d committed the perfect crime.”

We both sat there and stared at him.

“Homicide,” he said gleefully, and snapped his fingers. “Did I make your day or what?”