Blood Innocents

11

After leaving Laura Murray Reardon went to the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital. He wanted to see the bodies of Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky once again and to see the pathologist’s report.

He found Jake Simpson, a morgue attendant he’d known for years, reading a paperback novel at his desk. Years of menial labor at the command of other men vastly better educated and better paid had done a job on Simpson, grinding him down to a fine edge of resentment.

“What can I do for you?” Simpson asked glumly, putting his novel facedown on his desk. The crooked cigarette dangling from his mouth made him look like an aging pool hustler.

“I’d like to take a look at the report on the women in the Village, McDonald and Ortovsky.”

Jake struggled to his feet. “I’ll get them.” He went to a gray metal file cabinet and extracted two manila envelopes from one of the drawers. “Here they are,” he said. “Just came in.”

“Thanks,” Reardon said. He took the envelopes and pulled out a chair at an empty desk. “Okay if I sit here?”

“Who gives a shit,” said Simpson, who had gone back to his paperback novel.

Reardon sat down and opened an envelope.

Jake peered up from the book. “She took a dump, you know.”

Reardon looked over at him. “What are you talking about?”

“The one that got her throat cut,” Jake said. “She took a terrible shit. Rothman said he’d never seen so much crap.”

“Karen?”

“The one in the closet. Crapped her pants.”

“She was scared out of her goddamn mind,” Reardon said, feeling the heat of his anger rise in his face.

“Must of been,” Jake said. He smiled. “Not that unusual, you know. Rothman’s kind of new around here. Don’t know his ass from a hole in the wall.” He went back to his book.

Reardon turned to the first page of the pathologist’s report on Lee McDonald. It was the usual, the same sterile language. Each of Lee’s major organs had been cut out of her body and weighed in grams: heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, everything. The lacerations received by each organ were recorded in centimeters. The contents of her stomach and intestines were recorded in cubic centimeters, with references to texture and color. The consistency of her feces was described as part fluid, part pulpy.

Reardon winced but continued reading. Even the arid language of the report suggested that her body had been cut to ribbons. But Mathesson had been right: Lee McDonald had not been sexually abused. There was no residue of semen in or around either the vagina or the anus.

Then he saw it. The definite connection. Lee McDonald had been stabbed fifty-seven times. These were direct, purposeful blows, deep and wide, not the numerous scratches and cuts any victim receives while fending off a blade with bare arms.

Quickly Reardon turned through the report on Karen Ortovsky. She had been stabbed only once.

The pathologist’s report made the MO complete. Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky had been slaughtered exactly like the fallow deer.

Reardon walked back over to Jake’s desk and handed him the report. “I’d like to see the bodies,” he said.

“Didn’t you see them down in the Village?” Jake asked.

“Yeah, but I want to check something.”

“Sure you just don’t have a taste for dead flesh?” Jake asked with a grin.

“Where are they?” Reardon said sharply.

Jake stood up. “Feeling kind of humorless today, huh? They caught one of them in Brooklyn, you know. Somebody in the morgue, I mean. Fucking a dead body.”

“Where are they?” Reardon repeated.

Jake’s face turned sour. “Follow me.” He led Reardon into the morgue room and pointed down the corridor. “In there. Units 87 and 88. I’ll be out at the desk if you need anything. ”

Reardon slowly made his way into the morgue room. It seemed unearthly, fastidiously clean, all scrubbed tile and stainless steel, not at all like a murder room. The bodies were kept in refrigerated vaults that hazily reflected the fluorescent lighting overhead. Unit 87 bore a single identification, a small printed label inserted in a square of aluminum on the door:

City of New York

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

MORTUARY COMPARTMENT CARD

Compartment Number… 87

Name… Patricia Lee McDonald

Age… 25 Color… White

Date of Death… 11/20/77

Received from… New York City Police Dept

Date Received… 11/20/77

Place of Death… 12 W. 12th St.

Reardon placed his hand on the steel handle of the freezer, but he did not open it. He did not want to open it. In all his years on the force he had visited the morgue only once before. Visiting the dead here, in their cold, awesome vulnerability, had always seemed to him like an intolerable violation of that final right to dignity.

The one other time he had been here, five years ago, he had come to see the only human being he had ever put here. He had come late at night and been ushered into the same bright room with its antiseptic smell and garish lighting. His eyes had searched out a different number and a different name:

City of New York

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

MORTUARY COMPARTMENT CARD

Compartment Number… 93

Name… Thomas Frederick Wilson

Age… 29 Color… White

Date of Death… 7/22/72

Received from… New York City Police Dept

Date received… 7/22/72

Place of Death… 274 E. 4th St.

When he had died at twenty-nine, Thomas Frederick Wilson had already assembled a long criminal record. He had turned relatively late to murder. But when he had, Reardon remembered, it was with abandon, killing five people in as many months. His plan had been to leave no witnesses to his robberies.

Wilson had had two problems, Reardon recalled. He had a big mouth and a buddy who liked to listen. In the end Wilson’s friend had gone to the local precinct house and told Reardon everything.

That afternoon he and Mathesson had let themselves into Wilson’s apartment and were in the midst of searching it when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Reardon retreated behind some of the clothes hanging in the closet and Mathesson ducked behind the sofa. Silently they listened as the sound of footsteps grew more distinct.

When the door opened and Wilson stepped into the apartment, Reardon saw that he was carrying a pistol in his right hand. For a moment Wilson did not move.

Then Mathesson shot up from behind the sofa. “Police!” he shouted. “Don’t move!”

Over the barrel of his own gun Reardon saw Wilson level his pistol toward Mathesson and fire and Mathesson’s body jerk to the left, tumbling across the edge of the bureau to the floor.

Then Reardon had fired. And for every day of the rest of his life he had recalled the thunderousness of his gun’s report, which had seemed to deafen everything, plunging the world into a heavy, mourning silence. Wilson’s chest had seemed to explode from below his skin, a bloom of crimson opening across his chest like the petals of a rose. He staggered backward, his face frozen in a look of childlike amazement, and it was the look on that face that had haunted Reardon forever afterward; he had never been able to describe it to anyone, not even to Millie, but he knew it would stay in his mind, like an unanswerable riddle, until the day he died.

It was the chill of the handle on his fingers that brought Reardon’s mind back now. He looked at the nameplate on the door. Patricia Lee McDonald. He released the handle and slid his hand deep into the pocket of his overcoat. Patricia Lee McDonald had been violated enough for one life, he thought, and the fallow deer too, and all the others. He turned and left the morgue.