Trace

17

He remembers that time she came down to talk to his boss, meaning whatever she had on her mind was important enough for her to ride the freight elevator, and what a ghastly contraption that was.

It was iron and rusty and the doors shut not from the sides like a normal elevator but from top and bottom, meeting in the middle like a closed jaw. Of course, there were stairs. Fire codes meant there were always stairs in state buildings, but no one took the stairs to the Anatomical Division, certainly not Edgar Allan Pogue. When he needed to go up and down between the morgue and where he worked below ground, he felt eaten alive like Jonah when he slammed shut those iron elevator doors with a yank of the long iron lever inside. Its floor was corrugated steel and covered with dust, the dust of human ashes and bones, and usually there was a gurney parked inside that claustrophobic old iron elevator because who cared what Pogue left in there?

Well, she did. Unfortunately, she did.

So on the particular morning that Pogue has in mind as he sits in his lawn chair in his Hollywood apartment, polishing his tee-ball bat with a handkerchief, she came off the service elevator, a long white lab coat over her teal green scrubs, and he'll never forget how quietly she moved across the brown tile floor in the subterranean windowless world where he spent his days and later some of his nights. She wore rubber-soled shoes, probably because they didn't slip and were easy on her back when she stood long hours in the autopsy suite cutting up people. Funny how her cutting up people is respectable because'she is a doctor and Pogue isn't anything. He didn't finish high school, although his resume states he did, and that lie among others has never been questioned.

"We need to stop leaving the gurney in the elevator," she said to Pogue's supervisor, Dave, a strange, slouching man with bruised smudges under his dark eyes, his dyed black hair wild and stiff with cowlicks. "Apparently the body tray is one you're using in the crematorium, which is why the elevator is filled with dust, and that just isn't good form. Probably not healthy, either."

"Yes, ma'am," Dave replied, and he was working the overhead chains and pulleys, hoisting the naked pink body out of a floor vat of pink formalin, a big sturdy iron hook in each of her ears because that was the way they lifted people out of the vats when Edgar Allan Pogue worked there. "But it's not in the elevator." Dave made a point of looking at the gurney. Scratched and dented, and rusting at the joints, it was parked in the middle of the floor, a translucent plastic shroud balled up on top of it.

"I'm just reminding you while I think about it. The elevator may not be used by most people in this building, but we still need to keep it clean and inoffensive," said she.

Right then Pogue knew she thought his job was offensive. How else was he supposed to interpret a comment like that? Yet the irony is, without those bodies donated to science, medical students wouldn't have cadavers to dissect, and without a cadaver, where would Kay Scarpetta be? Just where might she be without one of Edgar Allan Pogue's bodies, although she literally didn't become acquainted with one of his bodies when she was in medical school. That was before his time and not in Virginia. She went to medical school in Baltimore, not Virginia, and is older than Pogue by about ten years.

She did not speak to him on that occasion, although he can't accuse her of being uppity. She did make a point of saying hello Edgar Allan and good morning Edgar Allan and where is Dave, Edgar Allan, whenever she dropped by the Anatomical Division with one purpose or another on her mind. But she didn't speak to him on this occasion when she walked fast across the brown floor, her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, and maybe she didn't speak to Pogue because she didn't see him. She didn't look for him, either. Had she looked, she would have found him back by his hearth like Cinderella, sweeping up ashes and bits of bone he had just crushed with his favorite tee ball bat.

But what matters is she did not look. No, she did not. He, on the other hand, had the advantage of the dim concrete alcove where the oven was, and had a direct view into the main room where Dave had the pink old woman on hooks, and the motorized pulleys and chain were bumping along smoothly, and she was moving pinkly through the air, her arms and knees hitched up as if she were still sitting in the vat, and the overhead fluorescent lights flashed on the steel identification tag dangling from her left ear.

Pogue watched her progress and couldn't help but feel a touch of pride until Scarpetta said, "In the new building we're not going to do it like this anymore, Dave. We're going to stack them on trays in a cooler just like we do the other bodies. This is an indignity, something from the Dark Ages. It isn't right."

"Yes, ma'am. A cooler would be fine. We can fit more in the vats, though," Dave said, and he hit a switch and the chain came to a dead halt, and the pink old woman swayed as if she were riding a chair lift that suddenly came to a dead halt.

"Assuming I can finagle the space. You know how that goes, and they're taking every square foot away from me that they can. Everything depends on space," Scarpetta said, touching a finger to her chin, looking around, surveying her kingdom.

Edgar Allan Pogue remembers thinking at the time, All right then, this brown floor with the vats, the oven, and the embalming room are your kingdom at this minute. But when you aren't here, which is ninety-nine percent of the time, this kingdom is mine. And the people who roll in and are drained and sit in the vats and go up in flames and drift out the chimney are my subjects and friends.

"I was hoping for someone who hasn't been embalmed," Scarpetta said to Dave as the drawn-tip pink old woman swayed from the chain overhead. "Maybe I should cancel the demo."

"Edgar Allan was too quick. Embalmed her and put her in the vat before I had a chance to tell him you needed one this morning," Dave said. "Don't have anyone fresh at the moment."

"She unclaimed?" Scarpetta looks at the body pinkly swaying.

"Edgar Allan?" Dave called out. "This one's unclaimed, isn't she?"

Edgar lied and said she was, knowing Scarpetta wouldn't use a claimed body because that wouldn't be in the spirit of what the person wanted when he donated his body to science. But Pogue knew this pink old woman wouldn't have cared. Not a bit. All she wanted was to pay God back for a few injustices, that was it.

"I guess it will be all right," Scarpetta decided. "I hate to cancel. So it will work out."

"I sure am sorry," Dave said. "I know it's not ideal to do a demo autopsy with an embalmed one."

"Don't worry about it." Scarpetta patted Dave's arm. "Wouldn't you know there aren't any cases today. The one day we don't have any, I happen to have the police academy coming through. Well, send her up."

"You betcha. I'm doing you a favor," Dave said with a wink, and sometimes he flirted with Scarpetta. "Donations are on the lean side."

"Just be grateful the general public doesn't see where they'd end up or you wouldn't get any donations at all," she replied, heading back to the elevator. "We got to work on those specs for the new building, Dave. Soon."

So Pogue helped Dave unhook their most recent donation, and they placed her on the same dusty gurney Scarpetta had been complaining about minutes earlier. Pogue wheeled the pink old lady across brown tile and onto the rusting service elevator and they rode up together and he pushed her out on the first floor, thinking that this was a ride the old woman never planned to take. No, she certainly didn't envision this detour, now did she? And he should know. He talked to her enough, didn't he? Even before she was dead, didn't he? The plastic shroud he had draped over her rustled as he rolled her through the heavy, deodorized air, and wheels clattered along white tile as he guided her toward the open double doors that led into the autopsy suite.

"And that, Mother Dear, is what happened to Mrs. Arnette," Edgar Allan Pogue says, sitting up on the lawn chair, photographs of the blue haired Mrs. Arnette spread out on the yellow and white webbing between his naked, hairy thighs. "Oh I know, it sounds unfair and dreadful, doesn't it? But it really wasn't. I knew she'd rather have an audience of young policemen than to be carved on by some ungrateful medical student. It's a nice story, isn't it, Mother? A very nice story."