To speak for the dead

14

"The skin is macerated and there's mold on the face, but all things considered, not bad, not bad at all," Charlie Riggs said. He was washing off the body with a hose. The remains of Philip Corrigan were spread out on an old work table in Granny's beer cellar. "Before we do any cutting, let's examine the body."

He slipped on surgical gloves and started poking and pinching various parts of the corpse, squinting hard through his half-glasses. In formal tones he continued, "The subject is a well-developed white male, age indeterminate due to deterioration of the face. The head and neck appear to be symmetrical and exhibit no masses. The chest is symmetrical and the abdomen flat. The body is in an excellent state of preservation due to the embalming and a nearly dry tomb. There is evidence of two surgical procedures in close proximity to death, unhealed wounds from both back and abdominal surgery."

He went on that way for a while, as if the tape recorder with the microphone swinging from the ceiling was still there, as if he was still the medical examiner and as if homicide detectives still waited outside for his findings. A little sad, a man retired before his time, maybe a different kind of death.

Charlie brought a lamp closer to the body, illuminating a small area of skin at a time. "Now for a closer look." He started with the arms and worked down. I helped him flip the body onto its stomach. "Hullo! What's this, Jake? Right buttock, upper quadrant."

"Looks like a freckle."

"Come closer, my boy. Mortui non mordent, dead men don't bite."

"No, they smell." I moved close but it still looked like a freckle.

"A puncture wound," Charlie said triumphantly. "Pretty large gauge hypodermic, too."

"You sure?"

He didn't say yes and he didn't say no. He picked up a scalpel and swiftly dissected a piece of meat that used to be Philip Corrigan's flabby ass. In a moment Charlie held a cross section of the buttock, down through the fat, all the way into the muscle.

"There it is," he announced. I looked at a red streak, maybe three inches long. "That's the needle track, just as fresh as when it was made. Had to be done in articulo mortis, or there'd be evidence of healing."

I wasn't convinced. "It could have been a routine injection in connection with the laminectomy or the emergency abdominal surgery."

"Could have been," Charlie said, "but it's not on the charts. No doctor or nurse recorded it."

"Maybe the puncture was made after death. Something the undertaker did, I don't know."

"No way. See the little trail alongside the track, that's the hemorrhage. He had to be alive when the needle was injected."

"Dead men don't bleed," I said.

"You're catching on, Jake."

"Okay, so somebody injected something into Philip Corrigan. Hard to make a case of that. What next?"

He wrinkled his forehead. "The tissues will have to be checked for succinic acid and choline. Your granny doesn't have a GCMS on the premises, I suppose."

"Not unless it's used for bonefishing or bootlegging."

Charlie held the slice of Corrigan's flesh up to the light. "Gas chromatographic spectrometer. Test for toxic substances. We'll need some brain and liver tissue, but first I'm going to do the work-up in the usual way."

The usual way. Like it was something he did every day. Which it was. Every working day for over thirty years. Thousands of bodies. So he did it without pausing, opening the neck just below the ear, making a long, smooth incision to the top of the chest and then to the other ear. He pulled up the flap of skin and exposed the inside of the neck. He deftly carved a slice straight down the chest over the sternum, avoiding the navel. He showed me where the embalming fluid had gone in, the spot being hard to miss, a thumb screw in the chest where the mortician inserted the trocar.

He peeled the skin flaps down over the chest, like pulling on an undersized sweater, exposing bright yellow fatty tissue and purple organs. He snapped the sternum in two with rib shears that looked like hedge clippers, probed into the abdomen, and made a dissection of the aorta. The punctured aneurysm was in the front, right where he had testified it was. He hummed under his breath as he worked. It sounded like "Born Free."

"Let's open the aorta and look for chalky deposits," he said brightly. "Give me some light over here, Jake."

I did what I was told and Charlie went about his business. Happy to be in control, to be taking things apart and figuring them out. Alive again. "Some evidence of sclerosis, but nothing unusual in a man of his age. Not enough to block the blood flow. Probably not enough to cause the aneurysm."

"So you hoodwinked the jury with that arteriosclerosis stuff."

"Didn't mean to. I figured the sclerosis was worse."

"So what killed him?" I asked.

"Something that caused the aneurysm, and if Roger Salisbury didn't do it and the sclerotic changes didn't do it, there's got to be something else."

I was confused. "What about the drug?"

He smiled, and his eyes crinkled, and behind them his computer was whirring, a lifetime of experience filtering the information. "It doesn't add up, not yet. Even if the tests are positive for the succinylcholine, the fact remains that he died of the aneurysm."

"I don't get it. If we find traces of the drug, that means Roger injected Corrigan-or somebody did-trying to kill him. If Corrigan was still alive when he was injected, which you say he had to be, it would have killed him. But you're saying he had the aneurysm after the injection. So what killed him and who killed him?"

Charlie caught himself before he stroked his beard with a gunked-up hand. "It's a puzzle, Jake, and we don't have enough pieces yet. But if we find the what, it'll lead us to the who. So if you'll stop talking and stand back, I'll finish the autopsy in the usual way."

The usual way again. He unpacked a portable scale, removed the heart, weighed it-four hundred fifty grams- poked around in more blood vessels, snipped here and clipped there, examining organs I didn't know existed. I was okay so far. I was okay when he cracked the ribs to get underneath. I was okay when he sliced off a piece of the liver and slipped it into a plastic lunch bag. I was okay when the band saw bit into the skull. But when he pulled the brain out, tut-tutting because it was shrunken and dehydrated, I wasn't okay. Things went a little gray, the beer cellar listed like a dinghy in rough chop, and the next thing I knew, Granny Lassiter was saying something and squeezing an am-monia-soaked rag under my nose.

I coughed and sputtered and got to my feet with Susan Corrigan's help and found I was on the front porch. Granny laughed and handed me a mason jar filled with home brew. "Drink this, Jacob. It'll put hair on your chest."

"I'm okay, I'm okay." I dusted myself off. Nothing like having two women fussing over your fallen body.

Susan Corrigan had on a funny half-smile and was holding on to my arm, propping me up. "I kind of like you this way. None of your macho bullshit."

"Great, I'll faint every chance I get. Promise you won't take advantage of me when I'm out?"

"No promises. Now just hush up. You need something to eat. Granny's making conch omelets with salsa."

In a few minutes Charlie joined us in the kitchen. He washed up and wrapped both hands around a mug of coffee, letting the steam rise through a steeple of fingers. After a while he briefed us. I watched Susan's face as Charlie talked about the puncture in the buttocks. It seemed to be what she wanted to hear, but she frowned when Charlie said there was nothing conclusive. Had to test the tissues and still figure out where the aneurysm fit in.

"The doctor and that bitch did it," Susan declared abruptly. "I just know it."

"We'll find out," Charlie promised. "I still have a couple friends on the toxicology staff at the ME's office. I can sneak in after-hours and use the equipment."

"Why not just bring Dr. MacKenzie in on it?" I suggested.

Charlie snorted. "That prick, excuse my English, wouldn't piss on me if I was on fire. I didn't recommend him for the ME's job when I retired, and now that he's got it, the Ivy League twit won't forgive me. Loves his computers and statistics and that damn new building with its creature comforts. Hell, they got air fresheners in the morgue now, you can't use your nose anymore to smell stomach contents. You know one time I opened a John Doe, smelled a familiar barbecue sauce. Full of vinegar, a touch of beer. Knew right away it was that ribs place on South Dixie. Homicide went down there, a waiter remembered the decedent and the guy he was with. Got a confession when they tracked the guy down."

Charlie went on like that for a while, unhappy with Dr. Hilton MacKenzie, the new ME who didn't like getting his hands dirty. "They built him a new building, state-of-the-art morgue, full of offices, as many administrators as the Department of Public Works, a lobby looks like a Hyatt. I remember our first morgue, just an abandoned garage. Hell, we did twenty-five hundred autopsies a year in the little building on Northwest Nineteenth Street. Then, after the boatlift, between the Marielitos knifing everybody and the Colombian cowboys machine-gunning each other, we ran out of cooler space. No place to put the stiffs."

"What'd you do?" Susan asked, always the inquisitive journalist.

"Rented a Burger King refrigerated truck," Charlie said. "Talk about a meat wagon. We stacked the bodies inside, put the truck in a parking lot by Jackson Memorial. Next thing you know, somebody hijacks it. Probably thought there was forty grand worth of burgers inside. Would have loved to see their faces when they busted open the trailer."

Charlie Riggs was into his storytelling. Finally, as the day wore on, the activities of last night caught up with all of us. Charlie took a nap, dozing on the front porch, mouth open, wheezing like an old Chevy. I curled up on a couch in the Florida room. A cool breeze from the Gulf whispered through open shutters. Granny tucked me in with a homemade quilt, just like the old days. Maybe later she'd drive me to Little League practice. I was halfway to dreamland when a second body joined me under the quilt.

"I'm too tired to race you to the goal line," I murmured.

"No hurry," Susan Corrigan said. "Take your time."

She kissed me very gently and then rubbed my chin with her fingertips. "You need a shave," she said. She stroked the stubble against the grain and kissed my neck. She pulled up my polo shirt and started kissing my chest. Wait a second. When I grew up, it was the guy who did the tussling with the clothes, the discovering of body parts. But I was not about to object. It would have been overruled. And I was enjoying the attention. When I tried to take the offensive, she gently pushed me down, gave me a just relax order with her eyes, and went about her business.

I was on my back, my clothes on the floor when she slipped out of her things, her small breasts tracing circles on my chest. From nowhere she produced a condom, as indispensable as lipstick to the modern woman. She slipped it on me without either snapping it like a slingshot or gouging me with a fingernail. Then, strong legs astride me, she eased downward, taking me in, tightening onto me. She exhaled deep surging breaths, all the time raising and lowering herself like a lifter doing squats.

I was liking it, liking her. But all the time watching her, and not just the curve of the hips. Watching her face, thinking about her and Roger Salisbury and Melanie Corrigan. And very rich, very dead Philip Corrigan. And who did what to whom.

Always thinking, damn it! Instead of just feeling. Thinking about the hacked up body a few feet away. Why not just enjoy the thrusting and the swampy heat rising from amidships? Damn it to hell, Lassiter.

I slept some more and when I awoke it was dark in the little house. Susan Corrigan purred next to me, stretched a leg until the calf muscle peaked, then curled up again. I thought about her. Smart and sassy. Part of the new breed. Toughing it out in a man's world. Elbowing past male reporters to get the best quotes in a locker room. Ignoring the wiseguys-what happened to sportswriters who pissed standing up?-dishing it out as well as taking it. This was the Susan Corrigan I knew. Which only made me realize I didn't know her very well at all.

I got up without disturbing her and poked around in the dark. No sign of Charlie or Granny. I found some smoked mackerel in the refrigerator and, still disoriented, tried to remember if this was dinner or a late snack. The house was quiet, the only sounds the palm fronds outside, slapping against each other in the breeze from the Gulf. I padded around to Granny's bedroom. The door was open a crack, a hurricane lamp burning by the night table. I should check on her. As she checked on me a thousand nights. She was there, under her own tufted quilt, sleeping peacefully, breathing steadily, her arms wrapped around the happy, slumbering hulk of Charles W. Riggs, M.D.