Are you all right? Are you all right, Edgar Allan? Scarpetta asked through the shut door, but she didn't come in.
He has replayed what she said, replayed it so many times he is no longer certain he has her voice right, that he has remembered it right, exactly right.
Are you all right, Edgar Allan?
Yes, ma'am. I'm just washing up.
When Pogue finally emerged from the bathroom, Lucy's gurney go cart was abandoned in the middle of the floor and she was gone and Scarpetta was gone. Dave was gone. Only Pogue was there, and he was going to die because of a single drop of formaldehyde that he could feel exploding and burning into his lungs like red-hot sparks, and nobody was there but him.
So you see, I know all about it, he later explained to Mrs. Arnette when he was lining up six bottles of pink embalming fluid on the cart next to her stainless-steel table. Sometimes you have to suffer in order to feel the suffering of others, he told Mrs. Arnette as he cut off sections of string from a roll on the cart. I know you remember how much time I spent with you when we talked about your paperwork and your intentions and what would happen to you if you went to MCV or UVA. You said you love Charlottesville, and I promised you I'd make sure you went to UVA since you love Charlottesville. I listened to you for hours in your house, didn't I? I came by whenever you called, at first because of the paperwork, then because you needed someone to listen and were afraid your family would overrule you.
They can't, I told you. This paperwork is a legal document. It's your last wishes, Mrs. Arnette. If you want your body to go to science and later to be cremated by me, your family can't do a thing about it.
Pogue fingers six brass-and-lead.38 caliber cartridges deep in his pocket as he sits in the sun inside the white Buick, and he remembers feeling the most powerful he'd ever felt in his life when he was with Mrs. Arnette. He was God when he was with her. He was the law when he was with her.
I'm a miserable old woman and nothing works anymore, Edgar Allan, she said the last time they were together. My doctor lives on the other side of the fence, and he can't be bothered'to check on me anymore, Edgar Allan. Don't ever get this old.
I won't, Pogue promised.
They're strange people on the other side of the fence, she told him with a wicked laugh, a laugh that implied something. His wife is such a trashy thing, that one. Have you met her?
No, ma'am. Don't believe I have.
Don't. She shook her head and her eyes implied something. Don't ever meet her.
I won't, Mrs. Arnette. That's terrible your doctor can't be bothered. He shouldn't get away with that.
People like him get what they deserve, she said from her pillow on the bed in the back room of the house. Take my word for it, Edgar Allan, people get what they dish out. I've known him for many a year and he can't be bothered. Don't count on him signing me out.
What do you mean? Pogue asked her, and she was so small and feeble in her bed, and covered up with many layers of sheets and quilts because she said she couldn't get warm anymore.
Well, I reckon when you go on, somebody has to sign you out, don't they?
Yes, they do. Your attending doctor signs your death certificate. One thing Pogue knew was how death worked.
He'll be too busy. You mark my words. Then what? God throws me back? She laughed harshly, a laugh that wasn't funny. He would, you know. Me and God don't get along.
I can certainly understand that, Pogue assured her. But don't you worry, he added, knowing fully that he was God at that moment. God wasn't God. Pogue was. If that doctor on the other side of your fence won't sign you out, Mrs. Arnette, you can trust I'll take care of it.
How?
There are ways.
You are the dearest boy I've ever known, she said from her pillow. Oh how lucky your mother was.
She didn't think so.
Then she was a wicked woman.
I'll sign you out myself, Pogue promised her. I see those certificates every day and half of them are signed by doctors who don't care.
Nobody cares, Edgar Allan.
I'll forge a signature if I have to. Don't you waste a minute worrying.
You are such a love. What would you like of mine? It's in my will, you know, that they can't sell this house. I fixed them but good. You can live in my house, just don't let them know, and you can just take my car, course I haven't driven it in so long, the battery's probably dead. The time is coming, you and I know it. What do you want? Just tell me. I wish I had a son like you.
Your magazines, he told her. Those Hollywood magazines.
Oh Lordy. Those things on my coffee table? I ever tell you about the times I spent at the Beverly Hills Hotel and all those movie stars I'd see in the Polo Lounge and out around the bungalows?
Tell me again. I love Hollywood more than anything.
That scoundrel husband of mine at least took me to Beverly Hills, I'll give him that, and we had us some real times out there. I love the movies, Edgar Allan. I hope you watch movies. There's nothing like a good movie.
Yes, ma'am. There's nothing like it. Someday I'm going to Hollywood.
Well, you should. If I weren't so old and worthless, I'd take you to Hollywood. Oh what fun.
You're not old and worthless, Mrs. Arnette. Would you like to meet my mother? I'll bring her over sometime.
We'll have us a little gin and tonic and some of those bite-size sausage quiches I make.
She's in a box, he told her.
Now that's a strange thing to say.
She passed on but I have her in a box.
Oh! Her ashes, you mean.
Yes, ma'am. I wouldn't part with them.
What a sweet thing. Nobody would give a damn about my ashes, I'll icll you. You know what I want done with my ashes, Edgar Allan?
No, ma'am.
Sprinkle them right over there on the other side of that goddamn fence. She laughed her harsh laugh. Let Dr. Paulsson put that in his pipe and smoke it! He couldn't be bothered and I'll fertilize his lawn.
Oh no, ma'am. I couldn't disrespect you like that.
You do it, I'll make it worth your while. Go in the living room and fetch my purse.
She wrote him a check for five hundred dollars, money in advance for carrying out her wishes. After he cashed the check, he bought her a rose and wiped his hands on his handkerchief and was sweet with her, talking and wiping his hands.
Why do you wipe your hands like that, Edgar Allan? she asked from the bed. We need to take the plastic off that lovely rose and put it in a vase. Now why are you putting it in a drawer? she asked.
So you can keep it forever, he replied. Now I need you to turn over for a minute.
What?
Just do it, he said. You'll see.
He helped her turn over and she couldn't have weighed anything, and he sat on her back and tucked his white handkerchief in her mouth so she would be quiet.
You talk too much, he said to her. Now is not the time to talk, he told her.
You should never have talked so much, he kept saying as he held her hands on the bed, and he can still feel her jerk her head and weakly struggle beneath his weight as he took her breath away. When she went still, he let go of her hands and gently took his white handkerchief out of her mouth, and he sat on top of her when she was all quiet like that, making sure she stayed quiet and didn't breathe while he talked to her the same way he did the girl, the doctor's daughter, the pretty little girl whose father did things in that house. Things Pogue should never have seen.
He jumps and gasps as something sharp raps on his window. His eyes fly open and he coughs dryly, strangling. A big grinning black man is on the other side of the car window, rapping the glass with his ring and holding up a big box of M amp;M's.
"Five dollars," the man says loudly through the glass. "It's for my church."
Pogue cranks the engine and shoves the white Buick into reverse.
52
Dr. Stanley Philpott's office in the Fan is in a white brick r
ow house on Main Street. He is a general practitioner and was very gracious when Scarpetta reached him on the phone late yesterday and asked if he would talk to her about Edgar Allan Pogue.
"You know I can't do that," he said at first.
"The police can get a warrant," she replied. "Would that make you more comfortable?"
"Not really."
"I need to talk to you about him. Could I come by your office first thing in the morning?" she said. "I'm afraid the police are going to talk to you about him one way or another."
Dr. Philpott doesn't want to see the police. He doesn't want their cars near his office and he doesn't want police showing up in his waiting room and scaring his patients. A gentle-looking man with bright white hair and a graceful way of carrying himself, he is quite polite when his secretary lets Scarpetta in through the back door and shows her into the tiny kitchen where he is waiting for her.
"I've heard you speak several times," Dr. Philpott says, pouring coffee from a drip coffeemaker on the counter. "Once at the Richmond Academy of Medicine, another time at the Commonwealth Club. You'd have no reason to remember me. What do you take?"
"Black, please. Thank you," she says from a table by a window that overlooks a cobblestone alleyway. "Thai was a long time ago, the Commonwealth Club."
He sets the coffees on the table and pulls out a chair, his back to the window. Light breaking through clouds shines on his neatly combed thick white hair and starchy white lab coat. The stethoscope is loosely forgotten around his neck, his hands big and steady. "You told some rather entertaining stories, as I recall," he says thoughtfully. "All in good taste. I remember thinking at the time that you were a brave woman. Back then not too many women were invited to the Commonwealth Club. Still aren't, really. You know, it actually crossed my mind that maybe I should sign up as a medical examiner. That's how inspirational you were."
"It's not too late," she replies with a smile. "I understand they have quite a shortage, more than a hundred short, which is a significant problem since they're the ones who sign out most deaths and respond to scenes and decide if a case needs to come in for an autopsy, especially out in the hinterlands. When I was here, we had about five hundred docs statewide who volunteered as medical examiners. The troops, I called them. I don't know what I would have done without them."
"Doctors don't want to volunteer their time for much of anything anymore," Dr. Philpott says, cradling the coffee mug in both hands.
"Especially the young ones. I'm afraid the world's become a very selfish
i " place.
"I try not to think that or I get depressed."
"That's probably a good philosophy. What can I help you with exactly?" His light blue eyes are touched by sadness. "I know you're not here to give me happy news. What has Edgar Allan done?"
"Murder, it appears. Attempted murder. Making bombs. Malicious wounding," Scarpetta replies. "The fourteen-year-old girl who died several weeks ago, not far from here. I'm sure you've heard about it on the news." She doesn't want to be any more specific.
"Oh God," he says, shaking his head, staring down into his coffee. "Dear God."
"How long has he been your patient, Dr. Philpott?"
"Forever," he says. "Since he was a boy.' I saw his mother too."
"Is she still alive?"
"She died, I want to say ten years ago. A rather imperious woman, a difficult woman. Edgar Allan is the only child.'
"What about his father?"
"An alcoholic who committed suicide quite a long time ago. Maybe twenty years ago. Let me tell you right off that I don't know Edgar Allan well. He's come in from time to time for routine problems, mainly for flu and pneumococcal pneumonia vaccines. The vaccines he's done as regular as clockwork every September."
"Including this past September?" Scarpetta asks.
"As a matter of fact, no. I went over his chart right before you got here. He came in on October fourteenth, got a pneumonia vaccine but not the flu shot. I'm afraid I was out of influenza vaccine. You know, there's been a shortage. I ran out. So he just got the one vaccine for pneumonia and left."
"What do you remember about that?"
"He came in, said hello. I asked how he was doing with his bad lungs. He has a pretty significant case of pulmonary interstitial fibrosis from chronic exposure to embalming fluid. Apparently he worked in a funeral home once."
"Not quite," she replies. "He worked for me."
"Well, I'll be darned," he says, surprised. "Now that I didn't know. I wonder why he… Well, he said he worked in a funeral home, was an assistant director or something."
"He didn't. He worked in the Anatomical Division, was there when I became chief back in the late eighties. Then he retired on disability in ninety-seven, right before we moved into our new building on East Fourth Street. What story did he give you about how he got his lung disease? Chronic exposure?" "He said he got splashed one day and inhaled formaldehyde. It's in his chart. He had a rather grotesque story about it. Edgar Allan's a bit strange, I'll give you that. I've always known that. According to him, he was working in the funeral home and embalming a body and he forgot to stuff something in the mouth, this is according to him, and embalming fluid started bubbling out of the mouth because the rate of flow was too fast, or something grotesque like that, and a hose blew. He can be quite dramatic. Well, why am I telling you? If he worked for you, you know more than I do. I really don't need to repeat his fanciful tales."
"I've never heard that story before," she says. "All I remember is the chronic exposure part and that he did have fibrosis, or I should say he does have pulmonary fibrosis."
"There's no question about that. He has scarring of the interstitial tissue, significant damage to the lung tissue as evidenced by biopsy. He isn't faking."
"We're trying to find him," Scarpetta says. "Is there anything you can tell me that might give us a lead as to where to look?"
"I don't mean to state the obvious. But what about people he worked with?"
"The police are checking all of that. I'm not hopeful. When he worked for me he was a loner," she replies. "I know his prescription for prednisone is due to be renewed within days. Is he religious about doing that?"
"It's been my experience he goes through phases with his meds. He'll be fastidious for a year, then maybe he backs off from the stuff for months because it makes him gain weight."
"Is he overweight?"
"Last time I saw him, he was very overweight."
"How tall is he and how much did he weigh?"
"He's maybe five-eight. When I saw him in October, he looked like he weighed in excess of two hundred pounds and I told him that just put more of a strain on his breathing, not to mention his heart. I've gone back and forth with him about the corticosteroids because of the weight problem, and he can get very paranoid when he's on his meds."
"You worry about steroid psychosis?"
"Always worry about that with anyone. If you've ever seen steroid psychosis, you worry. But I've never decided if Edgar Allan is off when he's on his meds or just oft. How did he do it, if you don't mind my asking? How did he kill the girl, the Paulsson girl?"
"You've heard of Burke and Hare? Early nineteenth-century Scotland, the two men who killed people and sold their bodies for medical dissection? There was quite a scarcity of bodies for dissection and in fact the only way some medical students could learn anatomy was from robbing fresh graves or getting bodies in other illicit ways."
"Body snatching," Dr. Philpott says. "I know a little about Burking, as it's called. Can't say I've ever heard of a modern case. The Resurrectionists, I believe those men were called back then, the ones who robbed graves and procured bodies for dissection."
"These days we're not talking about killing someone and selling the body. But Burking happens. It's so difficult to detect, we don't know just how often it happens."
"Suffocation or arsenic or what?"
"In forensic pathology, Burking refers to homicide by mechanical asph
yxia. Burke's MO, legend has it, was to select someone feeble, usually an old person, a child, someone sick, and sit on the chest and cover the nose and mouth."
"That's what happened to that poor girl?" Dr. Philpott asks, his face deeply lined with distress. "That's what he did to the Paulsson girl?"
"As you know, sometimes a diagnosis is made based on the lack of a diagnosis. A process of elimination," Scarpetta replies. "She has no findings except what appear to be fresh bruises that certainly would be consistent with someone sitting on her chest, her hands pinned. She had a nosebleed." She doesn't want to say much more about it. "Obviously, this is extremely confidential."
"I have no idea where he might be," Dr. Philpott grimly says. "If he calls in for any reason, I'll tell you right away."
"Let me give you Pete Marino's number." She starts writing it down.
"Edgar Allan's really not someone I know much about. I never did like him, truth be told. He's a strange one, gave me a creepy feeling, and while his mother was alive, she always came with him to his appointments. I'm talking about when he was a grown man, right up until she died."
"What did she die of?"
"That worries me, now that we're talking about this," he says, his face grim. "She was obese and took terrible care of herself. One winter she got the flu and died at home. There was nothing suspicious about it at the time. Now I wonder."
"Might I look at his medical record? And hers, if you still have it?" Scarpetta asks.
"Now, I wouldn't have hers easily accessible since she died so long ago. But I can let you look at his. You can sit right here and do it. I have it out on my desk." He gets up from his chair and leaves the kitchen, and he moves more slowly and seems tireder than he did earlier.
Scarpetta looks out the window at a blue jay robbing the bird feeder dangling from the bare branch of an oak tree. The jay is a flurry of blue aggression, and seeds fly as it pillages the feeder, bounces off in a feathery blue spurt, and is gone. Edgar Allan Pogue may get away with it. Fingerprints don't prove much, and the cause and manner of death will be debated. There is no telling how many people he has killed, she thinks, and now she has to worry about what he was doing when he worked for her. What was he doing down there belowground? She sees him down there in scrubs. He was pale and thin back then, and she remembers his white face looking at her, stealing shy glances at her when she got off that awful service elevator and showed up to talk to Dave, who didn't like Edgar Allan much either and probably wouldn't have a clue where he is.
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