Everything but the Squeal

4

Morgues are even colder than you'd think they'd be. It was the next morning. I had a headache, and I was blowing on my hands as Hammond led me down a long linoleum stairway, our feet scuffing against steps that somehow managed to look as though they'd been washed every fifteen minutes since the tile was laid but were still gray. It was a gray that didn't have anything to do with dirt. If grief were a color, that was the gray it would be.

Hammond had his hands stuffed into his pockets. He heard me huffing and puffing away behind him, and said, “Brisk, isn't it?”

“Brisk?” I said. “An oyster could get chilblains.”

“No oyster with any sense would be caught dead in here,” he said with a flash of the wit that makes cops welcome additions to cocktail parties the world around. “Jesus, it's ten a.m. I usually try not to visit the morgue until after lunch.”

“Notsoon after lunch.”

“No,” he said, puffing on his cigar. “And not too close to dinner, either.”

Hammond's cigar smoke, for once, smelled good. It momentarily elbowed aside an odor that suggested that all the frogs ever dissected by all the high-school kids in history had decided to hold a convention.

“I could get my ass in a sling for this,” Hammond grumbled fragrantly, trailing a cloud of smoke. “You got no official status here, you know? You're just some dork from off the streets.”

“Somehow,” I said, “I don't think most of the folks here will care very much.”

“The folks down here don't write reports,” he said. “Not the majority of them, at least. But the guy you're going to meet does. What's the guy supposed to write?”

“That you assisted someone in an identification, and that that someone was assisting the police,” I said patiently. It was all part of dealing with Hammond. If he didn't make a big production out of it, I might not share his view of how much I owed him.

“And are you going to assist the police? I mean, are you planning to talk to a cop at some point, or is this just between you and I?” We'd reached a corridor about twenty feet below street level. It was lighted by sickly fluorescent tubes, and emergency lines painted in different colors competed lividly with each other on the floor. There were no windows, which was just as well, since they would have opened onto dirt.

“I mean,” Hammond said, without a pause, “I'm just a cop with a reason to be here, escorting someone with no reason to be here, and worrying about my future. What I'm getting at, in my uneducated way, is what're you going to say? That you're a relative of the deceased?” He slid a plastic card into a slot to the right of a metal door. “Just be careful what you say to the guy, huh?”

“Al,” I said, “I'll be careful. If I'm not, just step on my foot.”

“I'll fucking eat it for dinner,” Hammond said as the door slid open. “Just be careful what you say to the guy.”

The guy who stood behind the open door was a slightly overweight Asian female in her middle thirties whose hairdo looked like a cosmetic-surgery transplant; it had been teased and tossed and curled and back-combed and sprayed, shellacked and, probably, deep-fried. Somehow, it lifted my spirits. It was clearly the hairdo of someone who planned to leave the morgue and go someplace really important later. In a morgue, it looked pretty good.

“Hi,” I said involuntarily.

“Hi, yourself,” said the woman beneath the hairdo, which, despite all the teasing, didn't even come up to Hammond's red bow tie. “Hi, both of you, in fact. I'm Yoshino. Who are you?”

“Hammond,” Hammond said, jabbing himself in the chest with a thumb to help her follow the conversation. “I called last night.” He was doing his best to deal with the guy as though she were a real person.

“Lieutenant Hammond,” she said neutrally. “You're visiting two-oh-eight, right? You look just like your voice.”

“Is that a compliment?” Hammond asked.

Yoshino shrugged. “I guess it is, if you like hulking, oversize, red-faced, supermasculine men who smoke.” She gave his cigar a glance that packed enough venom to stun a cobra. “It was two-oh-eight, wasn't it?”

“I'm not sure,” Hammond said, yanking his cigar out of his mouth and holding it behind him. His ears turned bright red. “I haven't got the paper. She's about twelve.”

“You haven't got the paper,” Yoshino said. She'd heard it before. “Who's your boyfriend?”

“He represents the family.”

“If it is the family,” I added, moving the nearer of my feet away from Hammond's heavy shoes.

“Honey,” Yoshino said to me, “for their sake let's hope it isn't. You a lawyer?”

“Something like that,” Hammond said.

Yoshino took a step back and surveyed us. Her hairdo didn't even jiggle. “If she turns out to be the right one,” she said, “you'll have to do better than that. We need something official, remember?”

“We both hope she won't be,” I said.

“You don't know how much you hope it,” Yoshino said.

She turned her back on us and led us into a large room with a bare cement floor with metallic drains in the center, and stacks of large file drawers, about three feet by two feet, set into the north-south walls. The tiny tips of Yoshino's black spike heels clacked on the floor. The gray gave way here to stark white, with a slightly bluish-green tint because of the fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead. It couldn't have been more than sixty degrees. The smell was stronger.

“Two-oh-eight, two-oh-eight, two-oh-eight,” Yoshino said, reading little cards set into the file drawers. “Here we are.” She slid the drawer open, tugged a white sheet halfway down, and stepped away.

My first reaction was surprise that the drawers had no sides. The dead were sharing the space on the other side of the wall, lying there next to each other on their metal tables, a little community in the cold. Hammond grunted inquisitively, and I looked down at the person on the table.

She was tiny. I hadn't been prepared for how tiny and still she would be. She was pathetically thin, and her skin was mottled, bruised and discolored. One hand clenched nothing. A red tag had been fastened with a twist of wire to the big toe on her right foot. It said Juvenile Jane Doe.

Juvenile Jane Doe's eyes were open and startled-looking, and brown curls clustered around her head. Small perfect teeth gleamed below a slightly inverted upper lip. She must have had an enchanting smile. Twenty-four hours ago she had been pretty.

Hammond gave me a blank look. Yoshino was staring at the body as if sizing up the work that remained to be done on it, her face impassive under the hairdo.

“She's not the one,” I said. My pulse was pounding in my ears.

Hammond made an abrupt gesture, and Yoshino began to cover her up. Without thinking, I put my hand on her wrist and stopped her. She snapped her head up at me, her eyes boring into mine with so much contained energy that Hammond took a step back and ashes tumbled from his cigar onto the sheet. Looking down, Yoshino brushed them away immediately, as though the girl on the slab might feel them.

“What happened?” I said. My voice could not have been more constricted if concrete had been poured into my throat.

“What happened? Or what killed her?” Yoshino said. She was back to being the perfect professional; all the rage or loathing, whatever it had been that had driven Hammond backward, was bottled up once more.

“Both.”

She started to pass a hand through her hair, thought better of it, and threw Hammond a look. Hammond nodded.

“What happened was that she was given a massive injection of a painkiller called Demerol. It would have made her fuzzy about what was happening, screwed with her memory later. Demerol will do all those things. The world being what it is, God help us, Demerol is a very big drug right now.” She toyed with a corner of the sheet that lay across the girl's rib cage. “Then she was used sexually, front and back. Probably in her mouth too, but he didn't get to finish there for reasons that will become apparent.”

She looked up at both of us. Hammond had his cop face on, but my expression made her falter. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

A kind of cold front dropped down behind her eyes. “Why?”

“He's okay,” Hammond said. “He's looking for one this age that hung out in some of the same places.”

“Up to you, Lieutenant. Whatever you say. Where were we?” She looked down at the little body. “At some point while she was alive her hands were tied behind her. There's still some lividity where the ropes pressed into the flesh. Look, you can see the way the rope was twisted. Here's where the knot was.” She lifted the clenched hand to show us the wrist.

I didn't look. Hammond didn't either.

Yoshino put the hand back down gently. “What killed her was a sudden pressure on the neck. Broke it like a wishbone. Probably accidental.” She swallowed. “This is really the shits, you know? God in heaven, I have a daughter.”

“Why accidental?” I asked.

“The Demerol,” she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “What else? The way it happened, it looks like he had his hand behind her head, gripping the base of her neck, like he was forcing her to go down on him. Jesus, she was a baby. Anyway, the break is simple and clean, like she jerked backward with so much force-that would have been the Demerol, numbing her, hiding the pain from her-and when he shoved down, the bones went and it was all over. The Demerol says it was probably accidental. If he'd planned to kill her, he wouldn't have given her the Demerol. It was to make the whole thing tougher to remember.”

“Maybe the Demerol was supposed to dull the pain.”

“Oh, no,” Yoshino said in an entirely new tone of voice. “He wanted her to feel the pain. You haven't seen this.” She pulled the sheet down to the girl's hips. There was a raw circular discoloration in the center of her abdomen.

“Look,” she said tightly. “Before the Demerol, he put his cigar out in her navel.”

Nobody looked. Hammond stared at the opposite wall, and Yoshino gazed at the two of us. I looked at a mental image of Aimee Sorrell, captured in a Polaroid with an angry burn where her belly button should have been.

“She's not the one,” I said again.

“Well,” Yoshino said, “whoever she was, I hope someone shoots him between the eyes before he gets to those fizzwits on the California Supreme Court.”

She covered the girl again and slid the drawer closed before she led us to the sliding door and let us out.

“Where you going tonight, Yoshino?” I asked before the door could close.

“Out with my husband,” she said. “It's our fifteenth anniversary.” She looked from Hammond to me. “How’d you know I was going out?”

“Your hair,” I said. “It looks terrific.”

“No kidding?” Yoshino said, raising her hand to give it a proprietary pat. “I hope so. It took decades.”

“It was worth it,” I said. Hammond gave a snort and headed down the hallway.

I put my hand on the sliding door, and she looked up at me inquiringly.

“Call me if there's another one who's been burned that way,” I said, slipping a card into her hand. “Anyone with a burned belly button.”

“I only do official work,” she said, sliding the door sharply closed. I barely got my fingers out in time.

Hammond was waiting for me halfway down the hall.

“What about my hair?” he asked, all tough guy again.

“The Red Dog tonight,” I said. “Nine o'clock. Your hair will look perfect. You want me to talk to the cops? Bring me the right cop to talk to.”

His mouth twisted. “That one's not so easy,” he said.

“Do it, Al,” I said. “Otherwise, I'm on my own.”