Black Notice

12

Eyes bulged froglike, and the scalp and beard were sloughing off with the outer layer of darkening skin. His head lolled and he leaked what little fluid was left in him as I grabbed him around the knees and Ruffin got him under the arms. We struggled to lift him onto the portable table as Marino steadied the gurney.

"The whole point of these new tables," I gasped, "is so we don't have to do this!"

Not all removal services and funeral homes had caught on yet. They still clattered in with their stretchers and transferred the body to whatever old gurney they found instead of one of the new autopsy tables that we could roll right up to the sink. So far, my efforts to save our backs hadn't amounted to much.

"Yo, Chuckie-boy;" Marino said. "I hear you want to sign on with us."

"Who says?" Ruffin was clearly startled and instantly on the defensive.

The body thudded on stainless steel.

"That's the word on the street," Marino said.

Ruffin didn't reply as he hosed off the gurney. He mopped it dry with a towel, then covered it and a countertop with clean sheets while I took photographs.

"Well, let me just tell you," Marino said, "it ain't all it's cut out to be."

"Chuck," I said. "We need some more Polaroid film."

"Coming up."

"Reality's always a little different," Marino went on in his condescending tone. "It's driving around all night with nothing going on, bored out of your friggin' mind. It's being spat at, cussed, unappreciated, driving piece-of-shit cars while little assholes play politics and kiss ass and get nice offices and play golf with the brass."

Air blew, water drummed and flowed. I sketched the metal sutures and accessory cusp and wished the heaviness inside me would lift. Despite all I knew about how the body worked, I didn't understand-not really-how grief could begin in the brain and spread through the body like a systemic infection, eroding and throbbing, inflaming and numbing, and ultimately destroying careers and families, or in some sad cases, a person's physical life.

"Nice threads," Ruffin was saying. "Ar-man-i. Never seen it up close before."

"His crocodile shoes and belt alone probably cost a thousand dollars," I said.

"No shit?" Marino commented. "That's probably what killed him. His wife buys it for his birthday, he finds out what it cost and has a heart attack. You care if I light up in here, Doc?"

"Yes, I do. What about the temperature in Antwerp when the ship left? Did you ask Shaw about that?"

"Low of forty-nine, high of sixty-eight," Marino answered. "Same weird warm weather everybody else's been having. May as well spend Christmas with Lucy in Miami if the weather stays like- this. Either that or put up a palm tree in my living room."

The mention of Lucy's name squeezed my heart with a hard, cold hand. She had always been difficult and complicated. Very few people knew her, even if they thought they did. Crouched behind her bunker of intelligence, overachievement and risk-taking was a furious, wounded child who went after dragons the rest of us feared. She was terrified of abandonment, imagined or not. Lucy always did the rejecting first.

"You ever notice how most people don't seem to be dressed very nice when they die," Chuck said. "Wonder why that is."

"Look, I'll put on clean gloves and stand in the corner," Marino said. "I need a cigarette bad."

"Except last spring when those kids got killed on their way home from the prom," Chuck went on. "The guy's in this blue tux and comes in with the flower in his lapel."

The waistband of the jeans was wrinkled inside the belt.

"Pants are too big in the waist," I said, sketching it on a form. "Maybe by a size or two. He may have been heavier at some point."

"Hard to tell what the hell size he was," Marino said. "Right now he's got a gut bigger than mine."

"He's full of gas," I said.

"Too bad that's not your excuse."' Ruffin was getting bolder.

"Sixty-eight inches and weighs one hundred pounds, meaning, when you consider fluid loss, he was probably one-forty, one-fifty in life;' I calculated. "An average-sized man who, as I just said, may have been heavier at some earlier point, based on his clothing. He's got weird hair on his clothes. Six, seven inches long, very pale yellow.".

I turned the jeans' left pocket inside out and found more hair and a sterling silver cigar clipper and lighter. I set them on a clean sheet of white paper, careful not to ruin potential fingerprints. In the right pocket were two fivefranc coins, an English pound and a lot уf folded foreign cash that I was not familiar with.

"No wallet, no passport, no jewelry," I said.

"Definitely looks like robbery," Marino said. "Except for the stuff in his pockets. That doesn't make much sense. You'd think if he was robbed, the person would've taken that, too:' "Chuck, have you called Dr. Boatwright yet?" I asked.

He was one of the odontologists, or forensic dentists, we routinely borrowed from the Medical College of Virginia.

"Just gonna do that:'

He peeled off his gloves and went to the phone. I heard him opening drawers and cabinets.

"You seen the phone sheet?" he asked.

"You're the one who's supposed to keep up with things like that," I said testily.

"I'll be right back." Ruffin couldn't wait to disappear somewhere yet one more time.

He trotted off, and Marino followed him with his eyes.

"Dumb as a bag of hammers;" he said.

"I don't know what to do about him," I commented. "Because he really isn't dumb, Marino. That's part of the problem."

"You tried asking him what the shit's going on? Like is he having memory lapses, attention disorder or something? Maybe he hit his head on something or's been playing with himself too much."

"I haven't asked him those things specifically."

"Don't forget last month when he lost a bullet down the sink, Doc. Then he acted like it was your fault, which was the bullshit of all time. I mean, I was standing right there."

I was struggling with the dead man's wet, slimy jeans, trying to work them down his hips and thighs.

"You want to give me a hand?" I asked.

We carefully pulled the jeans over the knees and feet. We pulled tiff black briefs, socks and the T-shirt, and I placed them on the sheet-covered gurney. I examined them carefully for tears or holes or any obvious trace evidence. I noted that the back of the trousers, especially the seat of them, was much dirtier than the front. The backs of the shoes were scuffed.

"Jeans, black briefs and T-shirt are Armani and Versace. The briefs are inside out," I continued taking inventory. "Shoes, belt, socks are Armani. See the dirt and scuffing?" I pointed them out. "Could be consistent with him being dragged from behind, if someone had him under the arms."

"That's what I'm thinking," Marino said.

Some fifteen minutes later, the doors slid open and Ruffin walked in, a phone sheet in hand. He taped it up on a cabinet door.

"I miss anything?" he cheerfully asked.

"We'll take a look at the clothes with the Luma-Light, then let them dry and trace can do their thing with them," I instructed Ruffin in an unfriendly tone. "Let his other personal effects air-dry, then bag them."

He yanked on gloves.

"Ten-four," he said with an edge.

"Looks like you're already studying to get into the academy." Marino picked on him some more. "Good for you, kid."