"They're all strange," Haydon said. "They're all routine and they're all strange."
"A little philosophy," Vanstraten said, grinning.
"Yes, exactly." Haydon looked at the pathologist.
Vanstraten laughed, and the doors to the X-ray room swung open as Hull and the radiologist wheeled the body back in place under the bright lights. Mooney and Finn came over from where they had been talking about Houston's high percentage of available office space, and the autopsy began.
Pressing the floor switch to the microphone, Vanstraten began a monotonous statistical recitation: date, autopsy number, John Doe number, and persons present at the autopsy. The data of his external examination: height, weight, skin condition, body development, fat distribution, color of eyes, hair, condition of ears, mouth, neck, genitalia, damage to the hands, discolored areas around the lower abdomen, below the left nipple, below either kidney, and on the genitalia.
With his scalpel, Vanstraten quickly made a large incision down the man's chest in the shape of a Y, the upper branches of which started at the front of each shoulder, crossed below the nipples, joined at the bottom of the sternum, and continued down the middle of the abdomen, and around the navel to the pubis.
Assisted by the docile Hull, Vanstraten cut the skin away from the ribs so that it could be folded back on either side, exposing not only the ribs themselves, but the abdominal cavity as well. With long-handled shears that looked like snub-nosed branch trimmers, Vanstraten began cutting the ribs, starting at the bottom and working upward in an outward curve to the clavicle. When this had been done on each side, he lifted out the entire section, including the breastbone, and set it aside, revealing the contents of the chest cavity. At this point the entire inner workings of the dead man, from throat to pubis, were ready for Vanstraten to examine.
"Now is the time to be philosophical, Stuart," Vanstraten said, smiling at Haydon. He gestured at the cadaver. "This is what we are. Rich and poor alike, we each possess this marvelously complex system that makes even the most sophisticated computer, with all its dazzling microchip capabilities, look like a child's toy. The human intellect is not capable of constructing so delicate a system . . . not in a million years."
It was true, Haydon thought, not in a million years. And yet, what man could not achieve by force of intellect, he could cause by simple brute passion. Any pair of grunting fools could play God. He looked steadily at the cadaver, hoping he could manage somehow to see it differently. But in the end, he thought, they are only playing. They have no idea ... no idea at all, what they really have done in those brief, greedy moments. It seemed quite absurd.
He watched as Vanstraten began what would become an exhaustive investigation. It occurred to him that in one sense, they would learn more about this man in the next hour than the man had ever known about himself. Like an ancient seer, Vanstraten would search the coils of the body as if he were reading the entrails of a sacrificial lamb, as if each organ had a voice, and each voice a tale, and the sum of their tales a confession. And yet, in another sense, they would remain forever ignorant. Of this man's true essence they would learn nothing, nor could they ever hope to. They would never see in his face the animating spirit, never hear the sound of his voice or his laughter, never sense in him the subtle changes of embarrassment or grief. That unscientific thing that is life had already escaped them.
The autopsy was a long one. Vanstraten knew that when Haydon requested his personal attention to a particular cadaver it was only because Haydon himself found it to be one of more than routine interest, and desired more than a routine explanation during the process. Therefore, the pathologist's narration was deliberate and detailed, with numerous parenthetical elaborations that would not appear in the formal report.
When the time came for Vanstraten to dissect the cranium and remove the brain, Haydon turned away and walked out of the room and into the hall. It was long and white and empty. The years of having to watch autopsies had disciplined him. He was seldom disturbed by them, only with children and some women. But during the past five or six months something had begun to happen during the cranials. He first noticed it as a vague uneasiness that he thought was a temporary quirky reaction to a routine he had gotten used to many years before. But it didn't go away. Instead he became increasingly agitated by this process to the point that he would perspire and his heart rate would skyrocket. Once he thought he was going to faint. Now he simply refused to watch them; they had become unbearable. It was not nausea that affected him, but something more. It was, he thought, something like fear, though he knew that made no sense. Still, it was something like that.
He could hear Vanstraten's narration through the door. When the pathologist began his instructions to the secretary who would be typing the report, Haydon knew he was through. He took a deep breath and went back into the room.
"That's it," Vanstraten said, looking at Haydon, who did not approach the autopsy table again but lingered near the door. "Let me wash up and I'll give you an overview. Come."
Haydon nodded, and followed Vanstraten toward his office. Behind them Hull had sealed the plastic bag of organs and placed them into the now empty body cavity. He began folding the body skin back over it in preparation for the final suturing, which he had already begun.
When Vanstraten returned to his office from an adjoining scrub room he was already lighting a Dunhill. He was meticulously dressed in one of his famous three-piece suits with their hint of an older European cut. French cuffs in place, with cobalt porcelain links. Vanstraten had dressed in exactly this manner and style since Haydon had first met him, never succumbing to the trendy whims of popular designers. He didn't own a blow dryer and his hair had never touched the top of his ears. Sometimes Haydon thought he looked as if he had stepped out of a time warp, the close-clipped and stiff-shirted days of prewar Germany. His hair was freshly combed.
"You'll have the typed report in a day or so," Vanstraten said, sitting down in his chair behind his desk. "He was beaten to smithereens, Stuart. It's that simple. He died instantly from the trauma to the heart. But he suffered a lot before that came along. Almost all of the other damage was antemortem. The heel to the sternum was the coup de grace. The nail was hammered in a good while after he had died, most likely."
"How long had he been dead?"
"Guessing, I'd say he died four or five hours before he was found. The rectal temperature at the scene was normal, and was just a few tenths off that when we began autopsy. Under normal conditions a person who dies will retain normal body temperature for the first four or five hours after death. Then it will begin to fall off at a fairly predictable rate. Under normal conditions."
Haydon looked out the window of Vanstraten's office. Mooney and Finn were nowhere around. Hull had finished the suturing, and was now sponging off the body.
"I think ... it seems to me that he was beaten by very experienced people, Stuart," Vanstraten added, putting out his cigarette. "In a street fight, a brawl, the head receives a huge amount of punishment. People like to kick their adversaries in the head, pound it on the pavement, against a wall. But aside from the nail, this man's head didn't have a mark on it. Also the marks on the epidermis were few, considering the kinds of injuries he received internally. Someone knew his business very well."
"And the hands?"
"Deliberate torture. I saw the X-rays while I was back there." Vanstraten held up his hands for illustration. "The first one or two digits on several fingers of each hand have been smashed to the texture of coffee grounds. His wrists are dislocated and deeply cut by ligatures. I would guess he was hanged by his wrists and beaten for part of his ordeal."
Haydon didn't say anything.
Outside, the autopsy room was empty except for the naked dead man on the shiny aluminum table.
Both Haydon and Vanstraten had chosen professions that turned upon riddles. They knew that method and detail and persistence were the instruments of their craft, but that often intuition was the ke
y to discovery. Vanstraten had just employed the first three. Haydon eventually would come to rely upon the fourth.
Chapter 5
WHEN Haydon came out of Vanstraten's office, Mooney and Finn were waiting by the reception desk talking about the best place to get barbecue.
"Jimbo's going over to Lockwood's for lunch," Mooney said, hitching up his pants. "Wanna grab a bite with him?" It was pretty clear Mooney had already answered that question for himself.
Haydon looked at his watch. "I'd like to go back to Chicon and talk to that barber first," Haydon said. The truth was, it would have been impossible for him to have swallowed anything at this point. To that extent, his loss of detachment was debilitating. "I can stop by there and pick you up on my way back."
Mooney glanced at Haydon out of the corner of his eye. "Naw, I'll go over there with you. We'll eat later."
"Hell, look, you guys," Finn said, clinching his new teeth with a death's-head grimace. "Let's just meet over there when you're through. We'll have a late lunch. I ain't starvin'. What time? An hour?"
Mooney looked at Haydon.
"That's good, Finn," Haydon said. He didn't care. "We'll see you at one o'clock."
Haydon drove as they pulled onto Old Spanish Trail and headed east in a sunlight so bright it made your eyes water. Mooney began taking off his suit coat, groaning, getting caught in his own sleeves, getting frustrated, jerking his arm out, and piling the wadded coat wrong side out on the seat beside him. Then he started fiddling with the air-conditioner levers, shoving them on high, jacking around with the vents on his side of the dash until they were all focused on his pink face, which always looked overheated.
"I shoulda been a Mountie," he said, slapping down his sun visor. "Work in cold country, ride a lazy horse, wear a red jacket to match my face. Sam Browne belt." He snorted. " 'Member that Mountie came down here, testified on that Cammarata business? All those wiretap tapes. Slick." A chuckle. "Thought our bail system was shit paper. Couldn't figure it. Let 'em all get away, he said. Arrest 'em, and let 'em go, he said. What's that? Said no wonder we got all this scum on the streets. Actually got hot about it." Mooney touched a vent to fine-tune it. "A damn good point."
Haydon didn't say anything, and they rode in silence for a while, passing MacGregor Park, crossing Brays Bayou, under the Gulf Freeway overpass. Haydon could tell Mooney wanted to say something, and finally he did.
"That autopsy get to you today?" He didn't look at Haydon, but fine-tuned another vent as if the question were of secondary interest, incidental. "I noticed you ducked out."
"I've seen enough autopsies," Haydon said. It seemed noncom-mital enough.
"I don't like it when they do the heads, either," Mooney said. This time he adjusted the sun visor.
Haydon was surprised. Mooney had noticed. He wondered how many cranials he had walked out on before Mooney first spotted what he was doing. Not many, he guessed; Mooney had been watching him for a good while.
"This been bothering you awhile, huh?"
Haydon didn't want to go any farther with it. "Not really," he
lied.
Even with Nina, Haydon wasn't the kind of man who allowed himself to be examined at close range. Mooney knew this, of course, and Haydon knew he knew it. That's why he was interested in Mooney's fumbling approach. Had his own behavior been so uncustomary that Mooney would go against the grain of things to draw him out?
"You see something enough, something outta the ordinary like that, it gets to you," Mooney said. "No matter who you are. Seems like people go through phases, or something." Mooney thought a minute. "We've known each other, what, twenty years, now?"
Fifteen, Haydon thought. Mooney always exaggerated. Nothing had ever been good enough for him just the way it was.
"But I bet I never told you about Patty Sherrill."
"I don't think so," Haydon said. He was now going to hear about Patty Sherrill.
"Used to be a matron in vice. Retired now. Worked there forever. We used to go out for a drink once in a while after the shift. She was ten, twelve years older than me. Had lots of stories." An attribute worthy of great esteem in Mooney's books. He slipped his feet out of his shoes. "Jesus, that feels good. Patty had the dubious pleasure of frisking the gals we brought in. She told me one time she must've frisked two thousand of them over the years. Not a pleasant job, considering the kind who come in there. You know, you just do it, ignoring the damn thing. Just do it, and get it over with.
"Well, one long summer it just happened that all these gals were handling tons of drugs. Naturally, it was necessary for Patty to go over these baby dolls to see what they'd stuffed in their gashes. Seems that was a favorite place. She frisked so many that she began to have this funny feeling about it. She sort of got the heebie-jeebies when she had to do it. Couldn't really figure out what was happening to her, like she was going to freak out every time. She couldn't close her mind to it anymore. Started doing just the opposite, paying attention to these things, close attention, like she was studying them. Shape, size, texture. She got gynecological about it.
"Then one week she had this dream."
Mooney looked out the window. "Goddam, look at that." He pointed down the street at several men pushing a car along the shoulder to a gasoline station a block away. "Mexicans." He shook his head. "Stuart, you been driving around this city, what, all your life. How many times you see Mexicans pushing some old junker to a gas station? You can't count 'em. I don't know. I mean, if they've got the money to put gas in it when it runs out, why the shit don't they just put gas in it before it runs out? These guys probably passed that station fifteen minutes ago. I don't know. Like to push cars, only thing I can figure. It's a cultural ritual."
As they drove by, Mooney got close to the window so they could see him, and shook his head at them in an elaborate display of disgust. One of the men threw his head back and cursed him, then shot him the finger. Mooney laughed, satisfied, and sat back.
"Patty had this dream," he said, picking up the thread of his story. "A twat nightmare. She had it every night for a week. Same dream. She chased twats. That's what was strange about it. Seems like they should have been chasing her, but they didn't, was the other way around. All colors of hair on these things, all kinds. She told me about 'em, had a whole detailed catalogue of different types. Hell, she'd been scrutinizing the things all summer. They had these little legs, a whole flock of them running from her, jigging jerky fast, like in the old silent films, their hair streaming in the breeze, and every so often one would turn around, still running, and snap at her. Some of them were snapping without even turning around. Said she could hear this clatter of snapping. She said in her dream she wore a surgical glove on her head like a shower cap, all the fingers sticking up and waggling like a rooster's comb. She was terrified one of those twats was going to turn around and go for her, but they never did, and she kept chasing 'em. Seven nights straight."
Mooney shook his head, "Mondo bizarro. Then one night she didn't have the dream, and she never had it again. That was it. Never did feel funny about the job anymore. Just put the whole thing out of her mind. Cured. I asked her, Patty, what the hell you chasing 'em for? She said she didn't know, but she thought maybe it was something Freudian. After that she went on frisking twats for another six years until she retired."
Over the years, Haydon had heard hundreds of Mooney's baroque tales, but never this one. Everything reminded Mooney of a story. But Haydon couldn't ignore the fact that it seemed to be didactic, a modern morality tale for Haydon, who in Mooney's psychoanalytic assessment, it seemed, suffered from the same type of job-related disorder as Patty the Matron. The healing moral seemed to be that if Haydon just hung in there, nature would run its course, and he would eventually be "cured." People went through phases, or something.
Mooney remained curiously quiet after this offering, but the story gave Haydon something to think about until they reached Chicon. The sun was a few degrees off the meridian and the asphalt o
f the street was getting soft as Haydon parked the tan department car next to the curb and turned off the motor. He and Mooney immediately rolled down their windows. You had to understand Chicon to appreciate it. It ran through the center of one of the barrios near the shipping channel, and like most of the city, it had an abundance of trees, which gave it the quiet attractiveness associated with shady places everywhere. And there were times, if you were not too much of a realist, when it was even beautiful: when it rained and the fog rolled in from the coast and you saw the street through a gauze that obscured the details, and at night when the darkness rounded off the rough edges, and the streetlights made magic of common things, and glittery signs in beer-joint windows lied.
But in midday Chicon was more rough edges than anything else. It had two lanes with room for cars to parallel-park along the crumbling curbs. The asphalt was crazed and the dotted yellow line that marked the center of the street had almost paled to invisibility. Both sides of the street were lined with chunky telephone poles from which draped a ropy confusion of heavy black cables that were strung back and forth across the street as if every other one were an afterthought. The signs on Chicon were consumer-targeted: "Salem que frescura!" "Que pareja, Canadian Club!"
Across the street to his left was the graffiti-covered wall that protected like a shell the dead kernel of the old house. A grocery stood on the corner in the next block, and beyond that a store with a sign above its door that said "Ropas Usada." Beside that was Tres Marias lounge. The two blocks in front of him contained a small dry-cleaning shop, a shoe shop, Los Cuates lounge, an auto-parts store, a bakery, La Perla lounge, and the barbershop.
The lounges, more accurately cantinas, were the unrepressible bane of the neighborhoods. There were as many as three to the block in this barrio around Chicon, and they were consistently the sites of many of the city's homicides. They were usually small, dank little places, often a converted house that sold only beer and wine. A large number of their customers were young undocumented workers from Mexico and El Salvador who had already fulfilled their number-one dream in the land of opportunity: to own a gun. It was a necessary thing, to defend their machismo and to protect the money they had earned to send home—but were afraid to deposit in banks—until they could get to the Western Union office on Friday night. In the glare of the noon heat these lounges seemed deserted, but Haydon knew that if he paused in their opened doorways and looked into their damp shadows he would see the lonely daytimers sitting in kitchenette chairs at wooden tables, sweating like their brown bottles that left dark rings on the wood.
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