Black Notice

11

0ne of the more heartless aspects of my work was that unknown remains became "I'he Torso" or "The Trunk Lady" or "The Superman Man:' They were appellations that robbed the person of his identity and all he'd been or done on earth as surely as his death had.

I considered it a painful personal defeat when I could not bring about the identification of someone who came under my care. I packed bones in bankers' boxes and stored them in the skeleton closet, in hopes they might tell me who they were someday. I kept intact bodies or their parts in freezers for months and years, and would not give them up to a pauper's grave until there was no more hope or space. We didn't have room enough to keep anyone forever.

This morning's case had been christened "The Container Man." He was in very grim shape, and I hoped I would not have to hold him long. When decomposition was this advanced, even refrigeration couldn't stop it.

"Sometimes I don't know how you stand it," Marino grumbled.

We were in the changing room next to the morgue, and no locked door or concrete wall could completely block the smell.

"You don't have to be here," I reminded him.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world."

We suited up in double gowns, gloves, sleeve. protectors, shoe covers, surgical caps and masks with shields. We didn't hhve air packs because I didn't believe in them, and I'd better never catch one of my doctors sneaking Vicks up his nose, although cops did it all the time. If a medical examiner can't handle the unpleasantriйs of the job, he should do something else.

More to the point, odors are important. They have their own story to tell. A sweet smell might point at ethchlorvynol, while chloral hydrate smells like pears. Both might make me wonder about an overdose of hypnotics, while a hint of garlic might point at arsenic. Phenols and nitrobenzene bring to mind ether and shoe polish respectively, and ethylene glycol smells exactly like antifreeze because that's exactly what it is. Isolating potentially significant smells from the awful stench of dirty bodies and rotting flesh is rather much like archaeology. You focus on what you are there to find and not on the miserable conditions around it.

The decomposed room, as we called it, was a miniature version of the autopsy suite. It had its own cooler and ventilation system and a single table I could roll up and attach to a big sink. Everything, including cabinets and doors, was stainless steel. Walls and the floors were coated with a non-absorbent acrylic that could withstand the most brutal washes with disinfectants and bleach. Automatic doors were opened by steel buttons that were big enough to push with elbows instead of hands.

When the doors slid shut behind Marino and me, I was startled to find Anderson leaning against a countertop, the gurney bearing the pouched body parked in the middle of the floor. The body is evidence. I never left an investigator alone with an unexamined body, certainly not since the badly botched O. J. Simpson trial, when it became the vogue for everyone except the defendant to be impeached in court.

"What are you doing here and where's Chuck?" I asked Anderson.

Chuck Ruffin was my morgue supervisor and should have been here some time ago inspecting surgical instruments, labeling test tubes and making sure I had all of the necessary paperwork.

"He let me in and went off somewhere."

"He let you in here and just left you? How long ago was that?"

"Maybe twenty minutes ago," Anderson replied.

Her eyes were warily on Marino.

"Do I detect a little Vicks up the nose?" Marino sweetly inquired.

The petroleum jelly shone on Anderson's upper lip.

"See that industrial-size deodorizer up there?" Marino nodded his head to the special ventilation system- in the ceiling. "Guess what, Anderson? Нt ain't gonna do a goddamn bit of good when this bag's unzipped."

"I'm not planning on staying;" she replied.

That was obvious. She hadn't even put on a pair of surgical gloves.

"You shouldn't be in here at all without protective wear," I said to her.

"I just wanted to let you know I'll be out talking to witnesses and want you to page me when you have information on what happened to him," she said.

"What witnesses? Bray sending you over to Belgium?" Marino asked, his breath fogging up his shield.

I didn't believe for a minute that she had come into this unpleasant place to tell me anything. Anderson had shown up with some agenda other than this case. I looked at the dark red body pouch to see if it might have been disturbed in any way, as cool fingers of paranoia touched my brain. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was almost nine.

"Call me," Anderson said to me as if it were an order.

The doors sucked shut in her wake. I picked up the intercom phone and buzzed Rose.

"Where the hell's Chuck?" I asked.

"God only knows," Rose said, making no attempt to hide the disdain she felt for the young man.

"Please find him and tell him to get here now," I said. "He's making me crazy. And make a note of this phone call, as usual. Document everything."

"I always do:"

"I'm going to fire him one of these days," I said to Marino when I hung up. "As soon as I get enough on him. He's lazy and completely irresponsible, and he didn't used to be."

"He's more lazy and irresponsible than he used to be," Marino replied. "That guy ain't connecting the dots right, Doc. He's up to something, and just so you know, he's been trying to get on with the police department."

"Good," I said. "You guys can have him:"

"One of these wannabes who jacks off over uniforms, guns and flashing lights," he said as I began to unzip the pouch.

Marino's voice was losing its bluster. He was doing his best to be stoical.

"You all right?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. 11 The stench slammed into us like a storm front.

"Shit!" he complained as I opened the sheets shrouding the body. "Goddamn-fucking-son-of-a-bitch!"

There were times when a body was in such horrific shape it became a surreal miasma of unnatural colors and textures and odors that could distort and disorient and drop someone to the floor. Marino fled to the counter, getting as far away from the gurney as he could, and it was all I could do not to laugh.

He looked perfectly ridiculous in surgical garb. When he wore shoe covers he tended to skate across the floor, and because the cap couldn't get much of a purchase on his balding head, it tended to pucker up like a cupcake paper. I gave him another fifteen minutes before he snatched it off as he always did.

"He can't help the condition he's in;" I reminded Marino.

He was busy stuffing a Vicks inhaler up each nostril.

"Now that's a little hypocritical," I commented as the doors slid open again and Chuck Ruffin walked in with X rays.

"It's not a good idea to escort someone in here and just disappear," I let Ruffin know with far more reserve than I felt. "Especially a rookie detective."

"I didn't know she was a rookie;' Ruffin replied.

"Whad'd you think she was?" Marino said. "She's never been down here before and looks about thirteen."

"Damn sure is flat-chested. Not the way I like 'em, let me tell you." Ruffin's words swaggered. "Lesbo alert! RWIRR-RWIRR-RWIRR!" He imitated a siren, flashing his hands like emergency lights.

"We don't leave unauthorized people alone with unexamined bodies. That includes cops. Experienced or not." I wanted to fire him on the spot.

"I know." He tried to be cute. "O. J. and the planted leather glove again."

Ruffin was a tall, slender young man with sleepy brown eyes and undisciplined blond hair that seemed to grow in many different directions, giving him a tousled, just-outof-bed look that women seemed to find irresistible. He could not charm me and no longer tried.

"What time did Detective Anderson show up this morning?" I asked him.

His answer was to go around flipping on light boxes. They glowed blankly along the upper walls.

"Sorry I'm late. I was on the phone. My wife's sick," he went on.

He had used his wife as an excuse so many times by now that she was chronically ill or a hypochondriac, had Munchausen syndrome, or was almost dead.

"I guess Rene decided not to stay…" he said, referring to Anderson.

"Rene?" Marino interrupted him. "Didn't know the two of you was close."

Ruffin began slipping films out of their big manila envelopes.

"Chuck, what time did Anderson get here?" I tried again.

"To be exact?" He thought for a moment. "I guess she got here about quarter after."

"After eight," I said.

..Yup;,

"And you let her in the morgue when you knew everybody would be in staff meeting?" I said as he slapped films on the light boxes. "When you knew the morgue would be deserted. Paperwork, personal effects and bodies all over the place."

"She'd never seen all of it, so I gave her the quick tour..: ' He talked on. "Plus, I was here. Trying to catch up on-counting pills."

He referred to the endless supply of prescription drugs that came in with most of our cases. Ruffin had the tedious chore of counting pills and disposing of them down the sink.

"Wow, look at that," he said.

X rays of different angles of the skull showed metal sutures in the left side of the jaw. They were as vivid as the stitches in a baseball.

"The Container Man's got a busted jaw," Ruffin said. "That right there's enough to I.D. him, isn't it, Dr. Scar"If we can ever get hold of his old films," I replied.

"That's always the big if," Ruffin said, and he was doing all he could to distract me because he knew he was in trouble.

I scanned the radio-opaque shadows and shapes of sinus and bone and saw no other fractures, no deformities or oddities. However, when I cleaned off the teeth, there was an accessory cusp of the Carabelli. All molars have four cusps, or protrusions. This one had had five.

"What's a Carabelli?" Marino wanted to know.

"Some person. I don't know who." I pointed out the tooth in question. "Upper maxilla. Lingual and mesial or towards the tongue and forward."

"I guess that's good," Marino said. "Not that I have a friggin' clue what you just said."

"An unusual feature," I said. "Not to mention his sinus configuration, fractured jaw. We got enough to I.D. him about half a dozen times if we find something premortem for comparison."

"We say that all the time, Doc," Marino reminded me. "Hell, you've had people in here with glass eyes, artificial legs, plates in their heads, signet rings, braces on their teeth, you name it, and we still never figure out who the hell they are because they're never reported missing. Or maybe they were and the case got lost in space. Or else eve couldn't find a single damn X ray or medical record."

"Dental restorations here and here," I said, pointing to several metal fillings that showed up brilliant white on the opaque shapes of two molars. "Looks like he had pretty good dental care. Fingernails neatly trimmed. Let's get him on the table. We need to move along. He's only getting worse."