“I should just call it and place the order,” he says playfully. “I should just do it, shouldn’t I, Mother?” He teases her as if he has a phone and can call right this minute. “Oh, you’d like it, would you?” He touches the picture of the urn. “You’d like Edgar Allan’s urn, would you? Well, tell you what, not until there’s something to celebrate, and right now my work isn’t going as planned, Mother. Oh yes, you heard me. A little setback, I’m afraid.”
Thin soup, that’s what you are.
“No, Mother Dear. It’s not about thin soup.” He shakes his head, flipping through the magazine. “Now let’s not start that again. We’re in Hollywood. Isn’t it pleasant?”
He thinks of the salmon-colored stucco mansion on the water not too far north of here and is overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions. He found the mansion as planned. He was inside the mansion as planned. And everything went wrong and now there is nothing to celebrate.
“Faulty thinking, faulty thinking.” He flicks his forehead with two fingers, the way his mother used to flick him. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. What to do, what to do. The little fish that got away.” He swims his fingers through the air. “Leaving the Big Fish.” He swims both arms through the air. “The little fish went somewhere, I don’t know where, but I don’t care, no I do not. Because the Big Fish is still there, and I ran off the little fish and the Big Fish can’t be happy about that. Can not. Soon there will be something to celebrate.”
Got away? How stupid was that? You didn’t catch the little fish and think you’ll catch the big one? You’re such thin soup. How can you be my son?
“Don’t talk that way, Mother. It’s so impolite,” he says with his head bent over the magazine for funeral directors.
She gives him a stare that could nail a sign to a tree; his father had a label for her infamous stare. The hairy eyeball, that was what he called it. Edgar Allan Pogue has never figured out why a stare as scary as his mother’s is called a hairy eyeball. Eyeballs do not have hair. He has never seen or heard of one that does, and he would know. There isn’t much he doesn’t know. He drops the magazine to the floor and gets up from the yellow and white lawn chair and fetches his tee ball bat from the corner where he keeps it propped. Closed venetian blinds blot out sunlight from the living room’s one window, casting him into a comfortable gloom barely pushed back by a lonely lamp on the floor.
“Let’s see. What should we do today?” he continues, mumbling around the pencil, talking out loud to a cookie tin beneath the lawn chair and gripping the bat, checking its red, white, and blue stars and stripes that he has touched up, let’s see, exactly one hundred and eleven times. He lovingly polishes the bat with a white handkerchief, and rubs his hands with the handkerchief, rubs and rubs them. “We should do something special today. I believe an outing is in order.”
Drifting to a wall, he removes the pencil from his mouth and holds it in one hand, the bat in the other, cocking his head, squinting at the early stages of a large sketch on the dingy, beige-painted sheetrock. Gently, he touches the blunt lead tip to a large staring eye and thickens the lashes. The pencil is wet and pitted between the tips of his index finger and thumb as he draws.
“There.” He steps back, cocking his head again, admiring the big, staring eye and the curve of a cheek, the tee ball bat twitching in his other hand.
“Did I happen to mention how especially pretty you look today? Such a nice color you’ll soon have in your cheeks, very flushed and rosy, as if you’ve been out in the sun.”
He tucks the pencil behind an ear and holds his hand in front of his face, splaying his fingers, tilting and turning, looking at every joint, crease, scar, and line, and at the delicate ridges in his small, rounded nails. He massages the air, watching fine muscles roll as he imagines rubbing cold skin, working cold, sluggish blood out of subcutaneous tissue, kneading flesh as he flushes out death and pumps in a nice rosy glow. The bat twitches in his other hand and he imagines swinging the bat. He misses rubbing chalky dust in his palms and swinging the bat, and he twitches with a desire to smash the bat through the eye on the wall, but he doesn’t, he can’t, he mustn’t, and he walks around, his heart flying inside his chest, and he is frustrated. So frustrated by the mess.
The apartment is bare but a mess, the countertop in the kitchenette scattered with paper napkins and plastic plates and utensils, and canned foods and bags of macaroni and pasta that Pogue hasn’t bothered to store inside the kitchenette’s one cupboard. A pot and a frying pan soak in a sink full of cold, greasy water. Strewn about on the stained blue carpet are duffel bags, clothing and books, pencils, and cheap white paper. Pogue’s living quarters are beginning to take on the stale aroma of his cooking and cigars, and his own musky, sweaty scent. It is very warm in here and he is naked.
“I believe we should check on Mrs. Arnette. She’s not been well, after all,” he says to his mother without looking at her. “Would you like to have a visitor today? I suppose I should ask you that first. But it might make both of us feel better. I’m a bit out of sorts, I must confess.” He thinks of the little fish that got away and he looks around at the mess. “A visit might be just the thing, what do you think?”
That would be nice.
“Oh, it would, would it?” His baritone voice rises and falls, as if he is addressing a child or a pet. “You would like to have a visitor? Well, then! How splendid.”
His bare feet pad across the carpet and he squats by a cardboard box filled with videotapes and cigar boxes and envelopes of photographs, all of them labeled in his own small, neat handwriting. Near the bottom of the box, he finds Mrs. Arnette’s cigar box and the envelope of Polaroid photographs.
“Mother, Mrs. Arnette is here to see you,” he says with a contented sigh as he opens the cigar box and sets it on the lawn chair. He looks through the photographs and picks out his favorite. “You remember her, don’t you? You’ve met before. A true-blue old woman. See her hair? It really is blue.”
Why, it sure enough is.
“Whyyyit-shorrre-nuffffis,” he echoes his mother’s deep drawl and the slow, thick way she swims through her words when she’s in the vodka bottle, way deep inside the vodka bottle.
“Do you like her new box?” he asks, dipping his finger inside the cigar box and blowing a puff of white dust into the air. “Now don’t be jealous, but she’s lost weight since you saw her last. I wonder what her secret is,” he teases, and he dips in his finger again and blows more white dust into the air for his enormously fat mother’s benefit, to make his disgustingly fat mother jealous, and he wipes his hands on the white handkerchief. “I think our dear friend Mrs. Arnette looks wonderful, divine really.”
He peers closely at the photograph of Mrs. Arnette, her hair a blue-tinted aura around her pink dead face. The only reason he knows her mouth is sutured shut is because he remembers doing it. Otherwise, his expert surgery is impossible to discern, and the uninitiated would never detect that the round contour of her eyes is due to the caps beneath the lids, and he remembers gently setting the caps in place over the sunken eyeballs and overlapping the lids and sticking them together with dabs of Vaseline.
“Now be sweet and ask Mrs. Arnette how she’s feeling,” he says to the cookie tin beneath the lawn chair. “She had cancer. So many of them did.”
3.
DR. JOEL MARCUS gives her a stiff smile, and she shakes his dry, small-boned hand. She feels she might despise him given a chance, but other than that premonition, which she pushes down into a dark part of her heart, she feels nothing.
About four months ago, she found out about him the same way she has found out about most things that have to do with her past life in Virginia. It was an accident, a coincidence. She happened to be on a plane reading USA Today, and happened to notice a news brief about Virginia that read, “Governor appoints new chief medical examiner after long search…” Finally, after years of no chief or acting chiefs, Virginia got a new chief. Scarpetta’s opinion and guidance wer
e not requested during the endless ordeal of a search. Her endorsement was not necessary when Dr. Marcus became a candidate for her former position.
Had she been asked, she would have confessed that she had never heard of him. This would have been followed by her diplomatic suggestion that she must have run into him at a national meeting or two and just didn’t recall his name. Certainly he is a forensic pathologist of note, she would have offered, otherwise he would not have been recruited to head the most prominent statewide medical examiner system in the United States.
But as she shakes Dr. Marcus’s hand and looks into his small cold eyes, she realizes he is a complete stranger. Clearly, he has been on no committees of significance, nor has he lectured at any pathology or medico-legal or forensic science meetings she has attended, or she would remember him. She may forget names, but rarely a face.
“Kay, at last we meet,” he says, offending her again, only now it is worse because he is offending her in person.
What her intuition was reluctant to pick up over the phone is unavoidable now that she is in his presence inside the lobby of the building called Biotech II where she last worked as chief. Dr. Marcus is a small thin man with a small thin face and a small thin stripe of dirty gray hair on the back of his small head, as if nature has been trifling with him. He wears an outdated narrow tie, shapeless gray trousers and loafers. A sleeveless undershirt is visible beneath a cheap white dress shirt that sags around his thin neck, the inside of the collar dingy and rough with cotton picks.
“Let’s go in,” he says. “I’m afraid we’ve got a full house this morning.”
She is about to inform him that she isn’t alone when Marino emerges from the men’s room, hitching up his black cargo pants, the LAPD cap pulled low over his eyes. Scarpetta is polite but all business as she makes introductions, explaining Marino, as much as he can be explained.
“He used to be with the Richmond Police Department and is a very experienced investigator,” she says as Dr. Marcus’s face hardens.
“You didn’t mention you were bringing anyone,” he says curtly in her former spacious lobby of granite and glass blocks, where she has signed in, where she has stood for twenty minutes, feeling as conspicuous as a statue in a rotunda, while she waited for Dr. Marcus, or someone, to come get her. “I thought I made it clear this is a very sensitive situation.”
“Hey, not to worry. I’m a real sensitive guy,” Marino says loudly.
Dr. Marcus doesn’t seem to hear him, but he bristles. Scarpetta can almost hear his anger displace air.
“My senior superlative in high school was Most Likely to Be Sensitive,” Marino adds loudly. “Yo, Bruce!” he yells to a uniformed guard who is at least thirty feet away, having just stepped out of the evidence room and into the lobby. “What’cha know, man? Still bowling on that sorry team The Pin Heads?”
“I didn’t mention it?” Scarpetta is saying. “I apologize.” She didn’t mention it, and she isn’t sorry. When she is called into a case, she’ll bring who and whatever she wants, and she can’t forgive Dr. Marcus for calling her Kay.
Bruce the guard looks puzzled, then amazed. “Marino! Holy smoke, that you? Talk about a ghost from the past.”
“No, you didn’t,” Dr. Marcus reiterates to Scarpetta, momentarily off balance, his confusion palpable, like the flapping of startled birds.
“The one and only, and I ain’t no ghost,” Marino says as obnoxiously as possible.
“I’m not sure I can allow it. This hasn’t been cleared,” Dr. Marcus says, flustered and inadvertently exposing the ugly fact that someone he answers to not only knows Scarpetta is here but may indeed be the reason she is here.
“How long you in town?” The yelling between old friends goes on.
Scarpetta’s inner voice warned her and she didn’t listen. She is walking into something.
“Long as it takes, man.”
This was a mistake, a bad one, she thinks. I should have gone to Aspen.
“When you get a minute, stop by.”
“You got it, buddy.”
“That’s enough, please,” Dr. Marcus snaps. “This is not a beer hall.”
He wears a master key to the kingdom on a lanyard around his neck, and he stoops to hold the magnetic card close to an infrared scanner next to an opaque glass door. On the other side is the chief medical examiner’s wing. Scarpetta’s mouth is dry. She is sweating under the arms and her stomach feels hollow as she walks into the chief medical examiner’s section of the handsome building she helped design and find funding for and moved into before she was fired. The dark blue couch and matching chair, the wooden coffee table, and the painting of a farm scene hanging on the wall are the same. The reception area hasn’t changed, except there used to be two corn plants and several hibiscus. She was enthusiastic about her plants, watering them herself, picking off the dead leaves, rearranging them as the light changed with the seasons.
“I’m afraid you can’t bring a guest,” Dr. Marcus makes a decision as they pause before another locked door, this one leading into administrative offices and the morgue, the inner sanctum that once was hers rightfully and completely.
His magnetic card does its magic again and the lock clicks free. He goes first, walking fast, his small wire-rimmed glasses catching fluorescent light. “I got caught in traffic, so I’m running late, and we have a full house. Eight cases,” he continues, directing his comments to her as if Marino doesn’t exist. “I have to go straight into a staff meeting. Probably the best thing is for you, Kay, to get coffee. I may be a while. Julie?” he calls out to a clerk who is invisible inside a cubicle, her fingers tapping like castanets on a computer keyboard. “If you could show our guest where to get coffee.” This to Scarpetta, “If you’ll just make yourself comfortable in the library. I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”
At the very least, as a matter of professional courtesy, a visiting forensic pathologist would be welcomed at a staff meeting and in the morgue, especially if she is providing expertise pro bono to the medical examiner’s office that she once headed. Dr. Marcus could not have insulted Scarpetta more had he asked her to drop off his dry cleaning or wait in the parking lot.
“I’m afraid your guest really can’t be in here.” Dr. Marcus makes that clear once again as he looks around impatiently. “Julie, can you show this gentleman back out to the lobby?”
“He’s not my guest and he’s not waiting in the lobby,” Scarpetta says quietly.
“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Marcus’s small thin face looks at her.
“We’re together,” she says.
“Perhaps you don’t understand the situation,” Dr. Marcus replies in a tight voice.
“Perhaps I don’t. Let’s talk.” It is not a request.
He almost flinches, his reluctance is so acute. “Very well,” he acquiesces. “We’ll duck into the library for a minute.”
“Will you excuse us?” She smiles at Marino.
“No problem.” He walks inside Julie’s cubicle and picks up a stack of autopsy photographs and starts going through them like playing cards. He snaps one out between forefinger and thumb like a blackjack dealer. “Know why drug dealers got less body fat than let’s say you and me?” He drops the photograph on her keyboard.
Julie, who can’t be more than twenty-five and is attractive but a bit plump, stares at a photograph of a muscular young black male, as naked as the day he was born. He is on top of an autopsy table, chest cut open wide, hollowed out, organs gone except for one very conspicuously large organ, probably his most vital organ, at least to him, at least when he was alive enough to care about it. “What?” Julie asks. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“I’m serious as a heart attack.” Marino pulls up a chair and sits next to her, very close. “See, darling, body fat directly correlates to the weight of the brain. Witness you and me. Always a struggle, ain’t it?”
“No kidding. You really think smarter people get fat?”
“A fact of lif
e. People like you and me gotta work extra hard.”
“Don’t tell me you’re on one of those eat-all-you-want-except-white-stuff diets.”
“You got it, babe. Nothing white for me except women. Now me? If I was a drug dealer, I wouldn’t give a shit. Eat whatever the hell I wanted. Twinkies, Moon Pies, white bread and jelly. But that’s because I wouldn’t have a brain, right? See, all these dead drug dealers are dead because they’re stupid, and that’s why they ain’t got body fat and can eat all the white shit they want.”
Their voices and laughter fade as Scarpetta follows a corridor so familiar she remembers the brush of the gray carpet beneath her shoes, the exact feel of the firm low-pile carpet she picked out when she designed her part of the building.
“He really is most inappropriate,” Dr. Marcus is saying. “One thing I do require in this place is proper decorum.”
Walls are scuffed, and the Norman Rockwell prints she bought and framed herself are cockeyed and two are missing. She stares inside the open doorways of offices they pass, noticing sloppy mounds of paperwork and microscopic slide folders and compound microscopes perched like big tired gray birds on overwhelmed desks. Every sight and sound reaches out to her like needy hands, and deep down she feels what has been lost and it hurts much more than she ever thought it could.
“Now I’m making the connection, regrettably. The infamous Peter Marano. Yes indeed. Quite a reputation that man has,” Dr. Marcus says.
“Marino,” she corrects him.
A right turn and they do not pause at the coffee station but Dr. Marcus opens a solid wooden door that leads into the library, and she is greeted by medical books abandoned on long tables and other reference books tilted and upended on shelves like drunks. The huge horseshoe-shaped table is a landfill of journals, scraps of paper, dirty coffee cups, even a Krispy Kreme doughnut box. Her heart pounds as she looks around. She designed this generous space and was proud of the way she budgeted her funds because medical and scientific textbooks and a library to hold them are exorbitantly expensive and beyond what the state considers necessary for an office whose patients are dead. Her attention hovers over sets of Greenfield’s Neuropathology and law reviews that she donated from her own collection. The volumes are out of order. One of them is upside down. Her anger spikes.
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