Yes, there’s evidence, desiccated pizza crusts scattered on the counters, greasy buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, plastic deli containers, Styrofoam cups with puddles of coffee in them, soda and beer cans—eating’s a regular activity in the morgue. A pair of chopsticks on an empty autopsy table! Corky’s head spins.
Corky thinks, A mistake to come here.
Corky thinks, Yes but you can’t turn back.
Jesus, what if he faints? throws up? Which is what Wiegler’s expecting? Memories not only of the disfigured corpses of Cormac Farley and Hock Corcoran but of Tim Corcoran, handsome in Death, a rosary twined through his fingers, sweep over Corky. And Theresa too. In a sudden panic Corky glances about. There wouldn’t be a female body here, would there?
There are just two corpses in sight, so far as Corky can tell, and both are male. The young black and a white man, in fact suety-colored, with a hairless dented skull, on the autopsy table to which Wiegler’s headed with his lunch. This corpse, hefty as a side of beef, is sprawled gracelessly on the tilted, grooved table, flabby arms and legs outspread. His genitals too look swollen and raw, like something skinned. The head has lolled to one side, bruised eyes open, and the jaws hang slack. For a terrible moment the dead man appears to be one of Corky’s old Jesuit teachers!
Christ, no: DeLucca’s been dead for years. Corky’s sure.
Wiegler’s been doing something to this corpse, taking swabs with Q-Tips, making slide specimens. Corky sees test tubes, a caliper, a tweezers, a cruel pick-like thing that looks like a dentist’s instrument, a miniature flashlight, a pair of badly stained yellow rubber gloves. A lab report sheet on a clipboard propped against the dead man’s naked feet.
Corky’s swallowing to fight panic. Trying to breathe deeply and regularly as he’d been taught by his high school coach but at the same time, the air’s so foul, trying not to breathe at all. Tasting bile at the back of his mouth. But he isn’t going to give in to nausea and he isn’t going to turn back. Not with Wolf Wiegler watching him the way he is, grinning and chewing but his eyes behind his glasses shrewdly cold, assessing.
Wiegler says, “Never been in our sanctorum before, eh, Jerome my man?” settling in on the edge of the autopsy table, nudging the dead man’s buttocks. You get the idea Wiegler sits like this often, he’s right at home. Even sets the can of diet chocolate soda on the poor bastard’s chest between his flaccid nipples. All the while devouring his cold pizza slices with unrestrained appetite and washing mouthfuls down with hearty swigs of soda. What a swine!—it isn’t just eating here, it’s the combination of cheese, pepperoni, pizza dough and diet “chocolate” that turns Corky’s stomach. Corky says, to set things straight, “Sure I’ve been down here before. More than once. You didn’t grow up in Irish Hill and not get acquainted with the morgue.”
“You’re looking a little pale, though, man. The smell getting to you? We don’t smell it, we’re immune.” Making a little joke, his mouth full, nodding toward the corpse. “Lately it’s fresh air that bothers me, you know? God-damned wind off the lake gets me coughing.”
“No,” says Corky, “—I’m fine. I won’t be staying long, though—”
“Hell, Jerome, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” Wiegler says, almost jeering. “What’d you want to know?—about the colored girl? That shithead Steadman’s girlfriend?”
“Marilee Plummer wasn’t Steadman’s girlfriend,” Corky says, “—I think you’ve got that wrong. She—”
“Whose girlfriend was she, then? Yours?”
Wiegler’s so blunt, so brash, yet friendly-seeming, all grins and winks and tics, Corky doesn’t know how to read him. An asshole like this, he can be underestimated. Corky’s known of weirdly nasty cops and a guy or two even in the D.A.’s office who gets in a position of power so his sickness, you could call it his evil, can really come out. At the same time, Wolf Wiegler is maybe just a joker?—pulling Corky’s leg ’cause he’s jealous of him?—his connections around town?
“No,” says Corky, as evenly as he can manage, “—Marilee Plummer was not my girlfriend. I don’t go out with girls that—”
“—color?”
“—I was going to say young.”
Wiegler laughs explosively, derisively. So enjoying himself, the attendants glance over at him with smiles and Corky half-expects the dead men are going to glance up, too. Everybody loves a laugh. Wiegler says, mock apologetic, “Man, I must’ve confused you with somebody else. Hot brown sugartits and cunt is very popular in Union City, and we likes ’em young.”
Wolf Wiegler’s the kind of guy so obviously a bachelor, even if queer he wouldn’t have a clue; the kind of guy prissy and celibate as a nun. So what’s this heavy sarcasm? What’s he getting at? Corky says, fuming, “Fuck that ‘we,’ count me out. My interest in Marilee Plummer is just—” and here Corky falters a little, for what is it? He’s reluctant to bring in Thalia. “—wanting to know. Wanting justice.”
“Well, Jerome,” Wiegler says, grinning as if there’s an understanding, a covert joke between them that Corky’s too dense to get, or to allow himself to get, “—there I’m on your side. We all are.”
Before Corky can proceed, Wiegler adroitly changes the subject, and the tone. Suddenly he’s serious. Schoolboy-earnest. Like he’s giving Corky some slack, now Corky’s swallowed his lure. Play with him a little, is that it? A son of a bitch to figure out. And Corky’s worried about that queasy churning sensation in his gut. Yesterday, a bad attack of diarrhea, he hopes to hell that won’t happen again. He’s weak-kneed leaning unobtrusively against a table piled with hacksaws, used swab sticks, chemical beakers, carelessly folded green plastic sheets like the material used for garbage bags, discarded rubber gloves, empty cardboard containers from Gino’s Pizzeria and House of Huang. Wiegler says, “—What I was saying out there, about the Slattery fund-raiser on Memorial Day?—I didn’t mean, I was just shooting my mouth. Hell, I’d love to be included. If I could afford it. If I moved in those circles. Union City elite. Black tie, eh? You own your own tux, I suppose, Jerome?”
Must be bullshitting Corky, but Corky just nods, or is it a shrug. In fact he owns two tuxes, and hopes to hell the larger still fits. The last time, the waistband left red marks in his skin.
Weddings, wakes. Fund-raisers, funerals. Dress-up occasions where, out of boredom, or anxiety, or both, you stuff your face and get tanked.
Wiegler’s continuing, “What I mean is, Slattery’s my man, too. I’ll give to his campaign. I gave in the past, and I’ve given to the old man, it’s the least you can do on the city payroll. Vic will be a U.S. Senator in a few years, maybe? Maybe, who knows, President someday? He’s decent, and he’s not too dumb. I’m solidly behind him so tell the Mayor should he ask.” Wiegler laughs, all twitches and tics, the notion’s so far-fetched. “The Mayor’s sure to ask, man, right?”
“Is he?”
Wiegler ignores this, pushing on. He is serious. “What I also meant, Jerome, about the Last Supper, etcetera, I wouldn’t pay a dime because I’m not a believer. Not in Christ, or any of that crap. I used to be, I was baptized Presbyterian, but I’m not, now. You do your first five hundred cadavers, that’s it, man,”—snapping his fingers, “—for the ‘spiritual life.’” And he sniggers and winks at Corky as if he’s said something daring. Corky can’t believe this. “What you get truly to admire, I mean it truly blows your mind, is the physical apparatus, the machinery of brain, body: Homo sapiens,” fondly rapping his knuckles against the head of the dead man beside him, so Corky flinches. Wiegler’s saying expansively, “The more you know about it, the less. That’s my personal definition of the divine. Fuck God, eh?—now it’s the Big Bang. And the human brain, that can encompass it. Mirabile visu! Well, I’m a worshiper. No false pride. Think of it, man: Darwinian evolution could’ve taken any number of turns but it turned toward us. A rummy like this guy here, he’s shit, the ‘person’ inside the machinery, but the machinery, wow. That’s God.”
Corky s
ays quick without thinking, like he’s been personally insulted, “Why’s he ‘shit’? Maybe he wasn’t always a rummy, maybe—”
“Nah, we’re all shit, man, I mean we’re flyspecks, the ‘persons’ inside the brain, the asshole ‘personalities’ we think so much of. Not a one of us—and I include myself, with my Cornell med school training—could invent the bodies we inhabit, let alone the brains. We’re like Cro-Magnons occupying one of those hundred-million-dollar high-rises downtown without a clue how they even got there. Don’t tell me!” waving excitedly at Corky who wasn’t about to say a word, “—I know. I truly know. I’m a witness to the wonder of physical creation, even with a shit-job like this in this dead-end Rust Belt city, man don’t tell me.” Corky listens amazed as Wiegler, heated as a kid in a high school debate, one of those high-IQ kids even the Jesuits were wary of, not only are they geniuses primed to trip you up but they’re wild cards in the deck, never know when they might crack, starts in yammering about the human brain, and Darwinian evolution, and the Earth, and the Universe, the works—some of Corky’s favorite subjects in fact, except this is all too fast and too intense, he can’t keep up. He feels like a drowning man. That sick swampy sensation in his gut, starting to rise.
“Homo sapiens, the masterwork of evolution thus far,” Wiegler continues, in a passion, “—only just arrived a few minutes ago, comparatively speaking. Galactically speaking—an infinitesimal crumb of a nanosecond ago. We’re not the end, we’re only the beginning, maybe? And space is so empty, like the atom, mostly emptiness. Black matter, invisible. Like Pascal said, centuries ago—’The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.’ Nobody’s ever said it better. And he was Catholic.” Wiegler laughs hoarsely, wetly, his eyes showing white. Then falls to coughing, and hawks up some greeny phlegm into a paper napkin with a sunny Gino’s face stamped on it.
Jesus Mary and Joseph, thinks Corky. He’s close to being sick trying now not to breathe at all.
How long Wiegler talks in his fierce sputtering headlong way, about the Universe, and Time, and the “exquisite machinery” of Homo sapiens, Corky scarcely knows. Probably it’s only minutes but it feels like an hour. He figures this is a strategy to steer him away from the subject of Marilee Plummer but that’s only part of it. Nobody could be so fierce and lunatic, nobody’d care so much, you can’t fake it. Even an evil customer like Marcus Steadman can’t fake one hundred percent, he’s got to care.
Wiegler moves on to hard-fact statistics, pulling figures out of the air, must have a photographic memory, one of those idiot savants?—light-years and equations and percentages and neurons and ganglia and how Homo sapiens is composed of primeval matter exploded out of and flying from the Big Bang, and Corky’s impressed, you’d think this guy was a Jew except he’d said Presbyterian.
It’s an irony not lost on Corky Corcoran in even this shaky state that, given his layman’s knowledge of certain subjects, outclassing most college graduates he runs into, he should be at such a disadvantage now. He knows, or should know, some of the things Wiegler’s so charged up talking about. Doesn’t he read himself to sleep or oblivion most nights, greedily devouring paperback books, magazines, the other night till four in the morning trying to make sense of certain consecutive sentences in A Brief History of Time, Christ if he could just remember some of that fancy crap if he wasn’t in such a shaky state fighting nausea blinking to clear his vision Is that dead man breathing? listening? trying to keep in mind his purpose in being here Wanting to know! wanting justice this nightmare place that’s a butcher shop you must never wind up in: better cremation: better oblivion but Corky can’t even think of that in his rising panic and this pounding headache at the base of his skull he’s thinking of the Memorial Day banquet, the Chateauguay Country Club where he’s going to give a brief tribute to Vic Slattery no more than eight minutes but Corky Corcoran will really be on the spot in front of people he’s yearning to impress it’s his golden opportunity to impress aligning himself with Vic Slattery in so public a way and at such a crucial time God damn it everything has to happen at once like an avalanche—Christina betraying him, and Thalia fucking things up in her usual style, and those cocksuckers the IRS suing Corcoran, Inc., for $400,000 in back taxes he can’t pay, Christ he’s on the verge of bankruptcy with those limited-partnership deals caving in—him, Corky Corcoran, one of the shrewdest guys in Union City, on the verge of fucking bankruptcy! And at Chateauguay he’ll have to come across as completely in control, winning and appealing and smiling and sincere, a politician’s nothing if he can’t come across as sincere. For maybe Corky will be elected president of the City Council and maybe Oscar Slattery will designate him the next Mayor maybe yes? maybe no? and what if Christina Kavanaugh is there Monday night? with her husband? And what if Christina Kavanaugh isn’t there? these thoughts bombarding Corky’s dazed brain like a million trillion neutrinos per second or is it a trillion million?—fuck it, that’s the problem, God damn that’s where Corky inevitably fails himself, his own self-expectations, can’t retain ninety-nine percent of what he reads so avidly as if his life depended upon it, can’t fucking keep it straight is the Earth 4.5 billion years old or 4.5 million years old, how far is the sun from the Earth and when’s it going to self-destruct, in 5 million or 5 billion years? Corky’s read such statistics a thousand times but fuck it if he can keep any of it straight, the age of the Solar System, the size of the Milky Way, what’s a galactic year exactly, how far away and how old are quasars, what is Omega, if you keep going long enough traveling through the Universe would you wind up where you began, or—where? And what was there before the Big Bang? How the fuck could something come from nothing? That’s what Corky wants to know, is that too much to ask?
Wiegler’s speaking of the heat-death of the sun and the future annihilation of the Earth, winding down some, sort of sad-resigned, philosophical, for the “wonder of wonders, the human brain” is doomed to annihilation too, and Corky says, like a man lighting a match in the dark, a man you didn’t expect to have a match, nor the strength to light it, “Yes, a star’s history is over in a millisecond, but—where there’s quantum theory there’s hope. Right?”
Wiegler stares at him so startled, eyes enlarged like an insect’s inside his thick glasses, Corky repeats, defiantly, “Where there’s quantum theory there’s hope. Right?”
Beyond this point, Corky begins to lose his concentration altogether. Acceleration near the point of impact. Sucked into a black hole.
He’ll recall that Wiegler, roused from his trance of mystical wonderment, turns mean, shrewd. Wraps the conversation up—literally he’s gathering up the remains of his lunch from the dead man’s chest, tosses it flamboyantly, in mimicry of a basketball play, into a trash bin, “Well, man: what you want to know, about the Ne-gress, I don’t know, it’s got nothing to do with me. Brophy’s report says suicide. We process thousands of cases through here a year, and they’re all in one category: DOA.”
Wiegler’s annoyed, or nervous. Or maybe just eager to return to work. Saying, in a rapid professional voice, “Go to your buddies over at headquarters and ask them. Suicide’s no problem to diagnose when you have a subject dead in her car, car’s been running and out of gas, garage is filled with exhaust, carbon monoxide and some tranquilizer in her blood and no signs of force, coercion on her body—not even any semen in her cunt.” Sneering, impatient. “If Marcus Steadman forced her to it, that’s for somebody else to prove. Our work stops here.”
Corky says, persisting, “But Marilee Plummer didn’t leave any suicide note behind? You’d expect, if—”
“Shit, man, who knows? You know? What you read in the papers? So what, no suicide note’s reported?” Wiegler speaks disdainfully, as if Corky’s being willfully obtuse. “Cases like this, somebody might receive a note or a letter, or a telephone call, before the suicide, or there’s been a conversation, but the other party doesn’t report it. Why should they? Dead’s dead. I wouldn’t get involved.”
“But
the family might want to know. For Christ’s sake, when a person does something so extreme, so despairing, as kill herself—we should want to know why. It’s a matter of—”
"‘Justice’—?” Wiegler says mockingly.
“Well, why the hell not? What’s wrong with that?” Corky protests. In weakened states he tends to speak from the heart, like a real greenhorn. “What’s wrong with justice? Not the crappy idea of it, but the real thing? Applied to real people?”
Wiegler fixes Corky with a disbelieving smile. All the while he’s methodically wiping his hands on his soiled lab coat and brushing crumbs off his trousers. A hulking bulky guy, like there’s uneven padding inside his clothes, though he’s not much taller than Corky. His trousers are baggy gray polyester and his shoes are oxblood moccasins with tassels. When he moves his head in a certain dipping-twitchy way, as if there’s a crick in his neck he can’t quite undo, his pink scalp’s visible through his crewcut. Corky gets a picture of Wolf Wiegler not only a bachelor and celibate but living with an elderly arthritic blind mother.
“Shit, Jerome, I thought you were one of Slattery’s City Hall cronies, tight with old Oscar like two fingers up the ass,” Wiegler says, laughing. “What’s this ‘justice’ crap you’re handing me?”
“Crap? Why’s it crap?” Corky’s more perplexed than angry. He doesn’t get this guy grinning and winking at him, nor the hostility beneath. “I take this seriously, Wolf. It isn’t bullshitting, believe me.”
“Then why isn’t it? What’s it to you man?—if you weren’t fucking the Ne-gress, like you said,” Eyeing Corky to see how this goes over, if he’s pushing too far.
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