Walkers

Chapter 8

The air in the elevator grew rapidly cooler as Dr. Hovde rode down to the basement of the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. The car came to a stop, the doors slid noiselessly open on oiled rollers. The doctor shivered when he stepped out into the tiled hallway. Powerful fluorescent lights gave the scene a harsh, blue-white clarity.

Dr. Hovde walked quickly past a row of heavy drawers set into the wall. One of the drawers was rolled out. The outlines of a body could be seen under a green sheet. One naked black foot protruded from under the sheet. A cardboard tag was attached to the big toe.

Hovde continued to the end of the hall and through a door with Pathology Lab lettered on frosted glass. Inside, the smell of disinfectant was sharp in his nostrils. There were four tables spaced across the room. The tops of the tables were metal grillwork with troughs underneath to catch the spilled body fluids. At one end of each table was a stainless-steel sink, at the other a hanging scale for weighing organs as they were removed from the cadaver. Three of the tables were empty. On the fourth lay the naked body of Mrs. Yvonne Carlson.

Dr. Kermit Breedlove, the chief pathologist, a lanky man with an unruly shock of black hair, stood over the body with his arms folded. A wooden toothpick danced from one side of his mouth to the other. Dr. Hovde had always thought he would look more at home playing the piano in a saloon than cutting up dead bodies.

"Hello, Warren," Breedlove said. "What brings you down to the icebox? Things slow upstairs?"

"For the moment." Hovde walked over and stood next to the pathologist, looking down on Mrs. Carlson's body. "I'm a little curious about this one."

Breedlove shrugged. "What you see is what you get. Female Caucasian, middle to late fifties. Old appendectomy, more recent gall bladder."

"Will you be doing an autopsy?"

"Got to," said Breedlove. "According to the sheet, there was no doctor in attendance at the time of death."

"I know. She died in a traffic accident."

"That so? Doesn't look very banged up."

"It was her heart or something."

"We'll find out for sure when we go into her," said Breedlove.

"Doesn't the coroner usually handle these?"

"Normally, yes, but they're crying short-handed downtown. Proposition 13, you know. As long as we've got the time and the facilities, I don't mind helping them out now and then."

Dr. Hovde remembered the manila folder under his arm. He took it out and passed it to Breedlove. "Here's the police report."

"Thanks." The pathologist scanned the two typewritten pages and shook his head, making a disgusted sound.

"What's the matter?" Hovde asked.

"Just another L.A.P.D. fuck-up. Nothing out of the ordinary."

"What do you mean?"

"This here report doesn't go with this here cadaver, that's all."

Dr. Hovde felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. "Why do you say that, Kermit?"

The pathologist gave the folder a contemptuous slap with the back of his hand. "According to this, the dead woman here was driving a car in Westwood"- he looked up at the electric wall clock-"just a little over an hour ago."

"So?"

"So, the woman here on the. table has been dead at least twelve and possibly twenty-four hours."

"Are you sure?"

"This is my specialty, Warren, remember? I'll be able to tell more when I cut her open, but just by looking at her I can assure you she wasn't up and around this afternoon. Feel the epidermis."

Dr. Hovde touched the woman's pale forearm. The flesh was rubbery-firm and cold.

"Under normal conditions," said Breedlove, "a body will retain some of its heat, especially when the weather is warm like today and the body is clothed like this one was, for six to twelve hours. This one is cold as a mackerel." He used his thumb to peel back an eyelid. "Take a look at that."

The woman's eye was dry and lusterless, with a cloudy film over the cornea.

"If it was only an hour after her death, the fluids would still cover the eyeball, making it glisten," Breedlove said.

"Aren't there other conditions that could account for these things?"

"Maybe. Like I said, I won't know everything until I go into her. I'll tell you another funny thing about this one. Look at her feet."

Dr. Hovde followed the pathologist's pointing finger and saw that Yvonne Carlson's feet and lower legs were discolored a dark purplish-red. Breedlove slipped both hands under the body and expertly flipped it over onto the stomach.

"Now look at her back."

The woman's flesh was unnaturally pale from the neck all the way down to the midpoint of the calves, where the discoloration began.

"She is supposed to have died in a supine position, according to the police report," said Breedlove.

"That's right. She got out of the car after it stalled, took a couple of steps, and fell. Nobody moved her, and she lay there on her back until the ambulance came."

"And in the ambulance they'd have her strapped down, again on her back."

"That's the procedure."

"And when you saw her she was on her back, likewise when she came down here."

"What are you getting at?"

"If that was the way it really happened, the blood, when the heart stopped and circulation ceased, would have settled into the lowest part of the body. With the body in the supine position, that would be the subcutaneous vessels of the back of the neck first, then the shoulders and the rest of the back. The shoulder blades and buttocks, where the skin was compressed by the supporting surface, would have remained free of blood and pale. The stagnant blood would congeal there, giving us the characteristic discoloration. As you can see, the woman's back has no sign of postmortem lividity, but there is advanced lividity in the feet and lower legs."

"Thanks for the lecture," Hovde said drily, "but what does it mean?"

The pathologist ticked off one finger. "It could mean she died by hanging, but as there are no abrasions or discolorations at the throat, and none of the usual signs of asphyxiation, we can eliminate that"

"We know she didn't die by hanging," Hovde said impatiently.

Breedlove ticked off the second finger. "Then we go to another possibility." His eyes twinkled mischievously.

"Get to it, Kermit."

"This woman was walking around for some hours after she was dead."

The pathologist's laughter rang in the tile-walled laboratory. Dr. Hovde stared at him.

"Just having my little joke," Breedlove said.

"Oh, that's funny. That's very funny."

"Look, Warren, if you're going to come down with a case of sensibilities, go on back upstairs and patch up your emergencies. Down here, without some kind of a sense of humor a man would go crazy in a hurry."

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry. When are you doing the autopsy?"

"As soon as the husband comes in to I.D. her. Hey, this wasn't somebody you knew, was it?"

"No. I think it might involve somebody I know, though. I'd like to hear what results you get."

"Sure. Give me a call."

Dr. Hovde left the laboratory and walked back up the hall past the refrigerated drawers. They were all closed now. He rode back up in the elevator, and as the temperature warmed he felt as though he were returning to the land of the living.

Things were still quiet in the emergency ward. The young resident was removing a splinter from the foot of a little girl who stared at him with huge adoring eyes.

Dr. Hovde washed his hands and dropped a quarter into the machine for a cup of bitter coffee. He carried it back into the office cubicle and sat down at the desk to think about Mrs. Yvonne Carlson, lying dead on an autopsy table downstairs, and young Joana Raitt, nearly hit by a car seemingly driven by this woman many hours after she died.

Hovde lit a cigarette, holding it down below the window out of habit so no one could look in and see him smoking. He tried to relate the strange automobile accident to the story Joana had told him this morning about the hallucinations she experienced after her near-drowning. Hallucinations, or whatever the hell they were. Was there a connection? He concentrated, trying to remember exactly what Joana had told him.

His thoughts were shattered by the ringing of the alarm bell. Two ambulances wailed up to the door with victims of a gasoline-tank-truck explosion on the San Diego Freeway. In the frenzied activity of the next several hours Dr. Hovde put out of his mind the puzzle of Joana Raitt and the dead woman downstairs.