Telling Lies

Chapter Twenty-One

A giant plastic wreath hanging on the Boyle Heights Holiday Inn was the only color showing against the night sky as we drove along the wrecking yards on Mission Road. It was a bleak landscape, leftover land among the railway tracks at the edge of the city.

“The best thing to do when you first go inside is to take a deep breath,” Mike said. “Get used to the smell in a hurry.”

“Is it bad?” I asked. I was past having second thoughts and was well into the acceptance of the idiocy of bravado.

“It’s not so much bad. I mean, things in your refrigerator can smell worse if you leave them too long. This is just different, and you won’t ever forget it.”

“Good to know.” I rolled down my window a few inches to let in some air.

“And don’t expect things tidy like Quincy. Not sheet-covered bodies with toe tags sticking out.”

“No toe tags?” I asked.

“Toe tags, yes. No sheets.”

“Gross.”

“I told you it wouldn’t be nice,” he said gruffly. “But you’re so damn determined to see for yourself. So you have to walk down highway one between the deep freeze and the autopsy rooms. There’s no way to detour around the cadavers waiting to be processed.”

“Listen, Mike,” I said, turning in the seat to face him. “If the body taken from the wreckage is my brother, Marc, then this time I’m going to have a good look at him before he’s sealed up in his box. So stop trying to scare me.”

“I am not trying to scare you,” he snapped. “But you have to be prepared for what you’re going to see in the morgue. Forewarned is forearmed, right?”

“I’m a big girl. Remember me, the correspondent from the front lines in El Salvador?”

His laugh was smug. “How many bodies did you see?”

“Plenty.” Two, actually, not counting livestock. I was not about to tell him that.

Mike had slid into his tough-cop shtick during the short drive from downtown. “There are more bodies picked up every week-end on the streets of Los Angeles than most G.I.‘s saw during their entire tours in Vietnam.”

“And you personally pick up every body, right?”

“Damn right.” He reached across the seat and took my hand. “Why are you mad at me?”

“No one else is available.”

“I can live with that.”

He pulled into the parking lot beyond the delivery entrance of the county morgue. “Last chance. I can back right out of here and take you home.”

“Let’s just get on with this.”

The morgue sits on a downslope corner of the vast campus of the L.A. County-USC Medical Center Hospital, tucked among the oldest, occasionally condemned, buildings of the facility. All around the morgue corner, it was very dark, except for the green-tinged lights of the loading bay. We got out of the car and walked past technicians garbed in rubber aprons, boots, and gloves who were hosing down battered fiberglass gurneys and washing the residue into a sump hole. A coroner’s van with its doors open was parked in the cargo bay. In sum, it was a proper entrance for a charnel house.

“Maggie, there’s a little office up front here. The pathologist can bring you pictures and talk to you there.”

“Mike, pictures aren’t good enough.”

“It’s not a pretty cadaver.”

I know that,” I said. “I was there, remember? I saw the fire. Quit fussing.”

“Any time you want to change your mind

“I’ll let you know.” If he had shut up, I probably would have backed out. He had to make an issue, so I had to prove something. Now I was fated to take a look at a corpse that had been both exploded and charred. The closer I got, the worse I knew it would be. Some things have to be done.

The box that came home from Vietnam with Marc’s name on it had been put into the ground without anyone looking inside to make damn sure Marc was in there. There were health and esthetic reasons why we were not to break the seals. It was a mistake I still had difficulty living with.

I never knew exactly how Marc had died. No one would talk to me about it. Not knowing fed many fantasies. Now and then, Marc still comes into my dreams. At first, I’m always glad to see him. Many nights I drift away from my dream reassured, happy to have spoken to him again, simply to have seen him. But there are other, darker nights when Marc comes to me in his sealed coffin. He begs me to open the box and let him out. I wake up in a hot sweat, afraid to sleep again for days.

I have always known that unless I found some way to see inside the box, I would dream about Marc for the rest of my life. It was a long shot, but as I walked into the morgue, I felt this might be my only chance to put him, finally, to rest.

Mike opened a side door and we went into a small, unadorned lobby. He clipped his photo ID to his lapel and signed us in.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes.”

When he opened the inner door, I took a handful of his elbow and filled my lungs. The air was cold and heavy with an odor that was at the same time sweet and repulsive. It seemed to lodge at the back of my throat so I smelled it even when I breathed through my mouth.

Naked dead on gurneys lined the hallway on both sides. Their skin was often paler than the beige-painted walls, so anything with color, pubic mound, the red-staining of morbid lividity, bruises, vivid holes, stood out. I found it difficult to look at their faces and quit looking altogether when I saw that the gurney closest to the first autopsy room held a body with no face at all.

The first autopsy room was a hive of green-gowned workers. Mike had been right-it wasn’t Quincy. There was no clinical gleam. The tools were pruning shears and soup ladles, electric saws and meat scales. Debris of towels and tools and pans littered the floor. There were four cadavers in various stages of processing: tops of skulls removed and the brains gone, the torsos sliced in long and wide cruciforms and laid open from pubis to throat, until they look like anatomical kits disassembled. When I thought about what was happening in there, I felt some-thing rise in my throat. There wasn’t much left at that point that seemed obviously human.

The hall angled right and there was a second autopsy room. Here the bodies were waiting three deep, heaped like discarded rag dolls rather than laid out on their gurneys. There were so many, we had to walk single-file past them. I was worried that the people walking ahead of us might come back and try to squeeze past us. There wouldn’t be room for them to go by me without forcing me against a gurney. I was afraid to touch anything.

The man lying on my right was young, uncircumcised, well-muscled. He had a good haircut, and a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. I couldn’t look anymore. I scooted closer to Mike’s shoulder and studied the weave of his tweed jacket until we came to the room at the end of the hall.

“Is there a short-cut out?” I asked.

“No, sorry. Seems to be a full house tonight. Everyone’s working overtime.”

“Where are we going?”

“Right here.” Mike led me into a small side room.

Everything I had seen to this point looked like a public health clinic whose massive client load had been left waiting too long. But upon entering this room we seemed to have moved into something more exclusive, more private. There was one cadaver: a blackened, grotesquely contorted figure.

Mike leaned his face close to mine. “Okay?”

“I’m all right.” I lied.

A woman in green surgical drapes shuffled over to us in her paper booties. She was beyond middle-age, somewhere approaching Hallmark’s version of grandmotherly. It bothered me that I couldn’t see her eyes behind the protective goggles. She held an X-ray film in her left hand.

“Are you Miss MacGowen?” she asked.

“Yes.” I didn’t offer my hand because hers were encased in soiled rubber gloves. “This is Detective Flint.”

“I know.” She nodded. “Hi, Mike. Glad you made it.”

“I could have passed on this one, Winnie,” he said. “What do you know?”

Winnie, whoever she was, chucked the X ray into a light frame. I could see the crushed bones in the pelvis, a grossly fractured femur.

Winnie looked from the X ray to the subject on the table.

“Male,” she said, beginning with the obvious. “Between mid-thirties and late-forties, five-ten to maybe six-one, Caucasian, fair complexion, well-nourished, upper income brackets but nouveau riche, complete asshole.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You lost me on the last two.”

“They were the easiest characteristics to determine,” she said, gesturing me closer to the corpse. With a stainless probe she retracted what was left of the top lip and tapped the front teeth.

“Fused by the fire,” she said, “Good quality enamel caps. He had thousands of dollars of dental work in his mouth to correct problems that should have been taken care of when he was a kid.”

Then she lifted his pinkie finger. It had somehow escaped massive damage. She looked at me and smiled expectantly, but I didn’t see what seemed obvious to her. I shrugged.

“He had a manicure,” she grinned. “Did you ever know a man with capped teeth and a manicure who wasn’t a complete asshole?”

“Never,” I said. “Winnie, I didn’t get the rest of your name.”

“Kasababian,” she said. “Senior pathologist. I was told you might give us some help identifying our friend here.”

The corpse was an abomination. It was a feat of some sort for me to even be in the same room with him. The face looked something like King Tut’s mummy, with its seared skin stretched tight across the skull bones, little tufts of frizzled hair over the ear holes.

Marc and Emily had always been very thin. Their skin seemed tailored to their bones with great precision, nothing loose, nothing left over. I had thought I would be able to recognize their naked skeletons. I could not see anything familiar in one single feature of this dead man.

“How tall did you say?” I asked Winnie.

“The forensic anthropologist will come closer, but my best estimate is five-ten to six-one.”

“My brother was at least six-four,” I said. “Could you stretch your estimate that far?”

“That would be a stretch,” she said. “Wait and see what the anthropologist says.”

She had gone back over to the X ray. Her goggles hung around her neck as she peered closely at it. “We’re considering the possibility this is your brother?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We’ll ask you for the names of the family physician and dentist, but in the meantime, do you remember your brother having any broken bones?”

I thought for a minute. We all take lumps as kids because of the stupid things we do. Marc had been a daredevil par excellence. He had also been a superb athlete, graceful and agile like a cat. And with the same inner gyroscope.

I shook my head. “Sorry. I can’t remember Marc breaking anything.”

“No legs? No elbows?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Winnie smiled. She touched her probe to the right shin of the X-ray subject. “Youthful fracture of the tibia. Well-healed. Heavy calcification. Ditto the elbow. Probably was beginning to cause some pain.”

Em, Marc and I all went to different summer camps, and now and then away by ourselves to friends and relatives for a few weeks, maybe a month or two at a time. One break might have gotten by me. But not two.

“Where were the dogtags found?” I asked.

“In the pelvis,” she said, “mixed with some melted coins and the remains of a seatbelt buckle. I’m not an explosives expert. I don’t know much about debris patterns, and so on. But if you asked my opinion, I would say the dogtags were in the victim’s right front trouser pocket.”

“Not around his neck?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not at the time of the explosion.”

I went over to Mike and put my hand on his shoulder. “He isn’t Marc.”

“What about the dogtags?” he asked.

I think I remember that they were sent home from Vietnam with some of Marc’s personal effects. They used to hang on a statue of the Virgin in my mother’s bedroom. But I haven’t seen them for years.”

“Remember what I told you this afternoon?” Mike asked. “This character we pulled out of the Volvo is someone you knew. Any ideas?”

I went through Winnie Kasababian’s descriptive parameters again. Sort of tall, but not very, not very old, not exactly young. Could fit a lot of candidates.

I have some ideas,” I said. I need more information to make them fit.”