Cages & Those Who Hold the Keys

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Why all the questions?” I asked him as we re-entered the parking garage.

  “You mean about Miss Driscoll?” He shrugged. “I dunno, it’s just something I do on jobs like this. Seems like, since I’m gonna be the last human contact their bodies will ever know outside of a funeral home, I ought to know a little something about them. It’s a terrible thing, to have your last human contact be with a total stranger. Just seems right somehow, knowing a few things.” Another shrug. “Or maybe I’m just a nib-shit.”

  I laughed, but not too loudly.

  Dobbs inserted and turned the key, pressed the button, and the freight elevator doors opened. We maneuvered the gurney into the too-wide, too-deep, too brightly-lit compartment and Dobbs pressed 7. The doors closed with a thump! that seemed so loud I actually started.

  “Easy there, Rambo,” said Dobbs. “This ain’t the time to get a case of the willies. You just follow my lead once we’re up there, okay? Let me do the talking with the officer, and once we get inside, don’t do a thing unless I say so, okay?”

  “Okay.” I sounded just as anxious as I felt.

  “Hey, look at me. The first time I had to go along on one of these, I was so scared I thought I was either gonna piss my pants or throw up. I surprised myself by doing both.”

  “If that was meant to make me feel better, it needs a little work.”

  “I’m just saying that it’s okay to be nervous. Do yourself a favor and don’t fight it. Fighting it’s what makes it worse. If it’ll help, just pretend that you’re moving a piece of antique furniture. I know that sounds cold-hearted as all get-out, but if you can put yourself into that frame of mind—that you’re moving a thing, not a person—it’ll go easier. Besides, when you get right down to it, that is all we’re doing, moving a thing. It’s not really a person, it’s just something they once walked around in.”

  “Then why bother asking all those questions like you did?”

  “We’re not talking about me, Einstein, we’re talking about how you can handle this. I’ve been doing this a helluva lot longer, and asking questions is how I deal with it so I can get to sleep at night and not feel so soul-sick and sad when I wake up the next morning that I can’t get out of bed.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you, Fred.”

  “I know. And I apologize if my tone was a bit harsh. But that’s my advice for you; if worse comes to worst, just think of them as being a piece of furniture, got it?”

  I swallowed—a bit too loudly for my nerves—and nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Look, on an average month the Coroner’s office only gets maybe one or two calls like this. Mostly what you and me will be doing is hauling bodies from the morgue to whatever funeral home they’re going to. We might have to maybe drive a body over to another county, or go to another county to bring a body back here, but mostly what we do is fill out paperwork and sit around waiting for Doc to call us with a job.”

  “Filling out paperwork sounds delightful right about now.”

  Dobbs reached across and patted my arm. “You’ll be fine. Just do me a favor—you feel anything coming up or your bladder starting to do the Watusi, you make a beeline for the toilet. Oh, I forgot to mention—the first two things you locate once we’re inside are, 1) the body, and, 2) the toilet. Long as you know where both of them are at all times, you should be okay.”

  The elevator came to a groaning stop and the doors opened. We rolled everything out into a concrete corridor, following the signs past custodian closets and storage rooms until we came to a set of heavy swinging metal doors that led into another warmly-lighted hallway with gold carpeting. Its design and decor was an almost exact replica of the lobby.

  According to the wall-mounted signs, 716 (Miss Driscoll’s room) was to our left. We rounded the corner (making almost no noise whatsoever; Dobbs was right, this gurney was quiet) and the police officer sitting watch outside the room rose from her chair and gave us a nod.

  “Been waiting long?” asked Dobbs when we got there.

  “About forty-five minutes,” said the officer, whose nametag identified her as Carol Seiler. She pushed some blonde hair back from her almost-cherubic face (the only thing marring the “cherubic” image being the heat she was packing) and said, “I guess I have to earn my salary now and ask you if you’ve got some official-type paperwork to show me.”

  Dobbs handed her the forms. She looked them over, nodded, initialed the bottom of each, took her copies, then gave back everything else.

  “You’ve got quite the show waiting for you in there,” she said.

  Dobbs looked at me with an expression that was, for him, wide-eyed: Maybe we’re gonna need the sci-fi gear, after all?

  “Is it bad?” he asked.

  “The body is fine, but the rest of it is…well, a little strange.”

  “‘A little strange’?” said Dobbs. “I don’t like starting my Mondays with ‘strange’. Doc didn’t say anything to me about ‘strange.’ But then, he didn’t say much of anything to me. Don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on this ‘strange’?”

  Officer Seiler shook her head. “And ruin the surprise?”

  By now, I was getting a serious case of the jitters; maybe these two dealt with stuff like this frequently enough that they could afford to be flippant, but my composure was just about at the breaking point.

  “Could you just tell us, please?” I said, a bit more loudly than was probably called for.

  Officer Seiler looked at me, then back at Dobbs. “Let me guess, your new CS sidekick?”

  “He’s a bit uneasy.”

  “Think maybe he’s wound too tight?”

  “Could be, but he seems like an okay guy.”

  Don’t you just love having people talk about you like you’re not there? Does wonders for the old self-esteem.

  The two of them continued chatting about this and that—how the department was still trying to track down family members, the weather, the accident in Columbus that was all over the news, the recent budget cuts (Damn the budget cuts!)—so I turned around to lean against the wall and nearly jumped out of my shorts when I found myself face to face with a small, slightly hunched, bespectacled man who immediately reminded me of the drawings of Mole from The Wind and the Willows.

  “She was an odd’n,” he said, nodding toward room 716.

  “Hello,” I said, nothing if not quick on my feet.

  “I’ll not speak ill of the dead,” said Mole, “but I have to tell you, I’m not going to miss the power outages.”

  I looked toward 716, then back at him. “Okay…?”

  He gave out with one of those exasperated sighs that suggests the listener should have been able to figure out the rest for themselves already, if they had half a brain and were paying attention, which obviously I had not been so he was going to explain it to me very slowly, taking pity on my lack of common sense. “Them packages she was always getting. Every time she got a delivery, you could count on the power on this floor going out sometime that night. Got so bad that the management company had the custodians install a breaker box down by the laundry room so they wouldn’t have to keep going to the basement. Thought it was damned considerate of them, myself. Power goes out, one of us’d just grab a flashlight, go down to the laundry room, flip a switch. Still, you couldn’t stay mad at her, not hearing the way she cried some nights.”

  I didn’t want to know this. One of my greatest fears is that I’ll end up old, sick, alone, and forgotten, living out the remainder of my shabby days in some dim little room with no one to talk to or care whether or not I wake every day to the promise of more loneliness, feeling like my whole life has meant nothing.

  Just spreading my sunshine. Hence the daily doses of Zoloft.

  I was about to go into this woman’s home and remove her body. The last goddamn thing I needed to hear was that she kept some of her neighbors awake because she cried every night. It was just too much.

  “Yeah,” said Mole when I made no response,
“that old gal could caterwaul with the best of ‘em, I swear. I mean, some nights, she’d wail like nobody’s business.” He stopped talking for a moment, something having just occurred to him. “Huh. You know, now that I think of it, it seems like the worst nights were those right after she got a big delivery.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking hard, then nodded his head. “Yes sir, that’d be right. Anytime she got a big package delivered to her, you could count on two things: the power going out, and her crying up a storm. Like I said, she was an odd’n. You got any idea if someone from her family’s gonna be dropping by for her stuff? Don’t mean to sound morbid, but I’d sure like to get a look at whatever it was she had going on in there.” This last said in a tone suggesting Miss Driscoll had some kind of juicy, dirty little secret that he was just dying to be the first to know about.

  I felt even more nervous now. “I, uh…as far as I know, they’re still trying to track down her family.”

  “Damn shame. Don’t think I ever saw a visitor come to her door, aside from the delivery people.”

  “That’s what I heard.” I wanted him to go away. I was trying to think of a tactful way to tell him as much when Officer Seiler stepped in to serve and protect.

  “Come on, Mr. Boyle,” she said, gently taking his arm. “Let’s stay out of their way so these two gentleman can do their jobs.”

  “Damn shame,” he said again as she led him away.

  “It sure is,” she replied, casting a quick glance over her shoulder and winking at me. Even packing heat, she looked so gorgeous right then I wanted to bear all of her children.

  “You ready?” asked Dobbs, opening the door.

  “No.”

  “Good answer.”

  We righted the gurney and rolled it into the apartment, closing the door behind us should any curious eyes decide to sneak a peek. I found myself hoping that Officer Seiler hadn’t actually left, that she’d stick around long enough to make sure no crowd formed in the hallway, that maybe she’d thought it over and decided I was just the guy to carry her offspring.

  The apartment had a small foyer with a polished wood coat rack, telephone stand, and single chair for callers to use. A framed photograph on the wall over the phone showed a very striking woman surrounded by what looked like dozens of children, all of them smiling the type of forced, could-you-hurry-up-and-take-the-picture-puh-leeeeze smile that we’ve all plastered on our faces at one time or another as suited the occasion. I wondered if Miss Driscoll had been a grade-school teacher at some point in her life, because all of the children in the photo looked to be between the ages of 7 and 12. The glass covering the photo was cracked, the break running down the center of the woman’s face. I wondered why Miss Driscoll had never bothered replacing the glass.

  “All right,” said Dobbs, letting go of his end of the gurney and walking into the living room, “let me make sure we’ve got a clear path before we…”

  “Before we what?” I asked, trying to squeeze around the gurney to join him.

  “…hol-ee shit…”

  “What is it?”

  “You are not going to believe this.”

  You heard it here first.

  I honestly don’t know what I was expecting to see—a room filled with stuffed animals, or priceless antiques, maybe porcelain figurines of angels or those little statues of children with those really big eyes that are supposed to warm your heart but personally give me the creeps; whatever it was, it’d be something lonely-old-lady-like, that was for certain—

  —I’d sure like to get a look at whatever it was she had going on in there—

  —but I think even Mole a.k.a. Mr. Boyle would have started at the sight of what took up a full eighty percent of this old woman’s living room.

  Table-mounted HO slot-car racing tracks.

  It wasn’t just the sheer amount of track—though that in itself was enough to drop your jaw (lay all the individual pieces end to end, and my guess is you’d easily have a quarter-mile or more of the stuff)—but the configurations. These tracks weren’t arranged in anything so banal as circles or ovals or figure eights, but in complex, looping, multi-layered patterns, complete with overpasses, off-ramps, and even rest areas. Model buildings were placed at various points along and around these tracks (there were a half-dozen tracks set up throughout the spacious living room) depicting small townships and bigger cities, including HO-scale trees and human figures.

  “Good Christ,” said Dobbs, looking around the room. “There must be about three or four thousand dollars’ worth of track and…stuff.”

  “At least,” I replied, still trying to absorb all of it. Then thought: No wonder the power was always going out.

  The biggest track—a four-lane job—was wired for individually powered lanes, with power taps located at three different points around the track, all of the wires running underneath the table to a variable 20-amp power supply that was mounted to a small metal shelf running between two of the table’s legs.

  I used to be a slot-car racing fool when I was a kid, and I knew damn well that you can only run a power supply for so long before it starts to really heat up, and if you push your luck (like I always did) you were apt to blow a fuse before you were done.

  And if for some reason you had several tracks and power supplies running at the same time…you could blow out the electricity to the entire floor of an apartment building.

  I was so caught up in my own amazement that I didn’t even realize Dobbs had left the living room until he came back in and said, “Oh, man, you gotta see the rest of this place! She’s got tracks mounted everywhere—in her bedroom, the guest room, the kitchen…hell, she’s even got a little one set up in the bathroom!”

  “We’re never going to get the gurney through here,” I said. “There’s barely room to walk around.”

  Dobbs nodded his head. “Yeah, I already figured that out. We’re gonna have to move a couple of these tables. But not just yet.” He squeezed past me, pressing the clipboard into my hands, heading for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You just stay here, all right? Miss Driscoll’s laid out in the bedroom, so you wait and take a look around. I don’t think she’s gonna mind.” He stopped, then turned to face me. “I got a digital camera in my bag down in the wagon. I have got take some pictures of this place. My wife’ll never believe me.”

  I stared at him, blinked, then asked: “Why would anyone working a job like this carry a camera with them?”

  He grinned. “Because every once in a while I come across something really weird, and my wife requires proof.”

  “Do you lie to her that much?”

  “I don’t like to think of it as lying. I…embellish. I embroider. I exaggerate.”

  “You lie.”

  “I lie. Just to keep her guessing, mind you. Believe me, after 32 years of marriage, nothing I do surprises her anymore, so I gotta do something to make it interesting for the old gal.”

  “So you carry a digital camera to work in case something weird comes up.”

  “That’s it. Don’t you ever fib to your wife?”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “Oh, sorry. Well, didn’t you ever fib to her when you were married?”

  “Probably.”

  I was tempted to ask him what other weird things he’d encountered that required him to take pictures so his wife would believe him, then decided that some things were better left as mysteries.

  “I’d rather not stay here by myself, Fred. Okay if I come along?”

  “Sorry, my friend, but once we’re on the premises, at least one of us has to be with the body at all times. Them’s the rules.”

  “Then let me go and get the camera.”

  “Oh, no, sorry. I paid a pretty penny for that thing and nobody but me handles it. Look, you’ll be fine. Back in a couple of minutes. Take a look around, it’s pretty interesting.”

  And with that, he left me alone with a dead body, several thousand dollars’ worth of cu
stom-made slot-car racing track, and what felt like a solid rod of iron running from the top of my throat to the bottom of my stomach.

  2

  Okay, confession time: this was not the first instance of my being in a situation like this.

  Back in the Neolithic Period, when I was a senior at Cedar Hill High School and working part-time for the same janitorial company I still worked for, a guy in my class by the name of Andy Leonard flipped out one Fourth of July and killed a bunch of people, including most of his family. The man who owned the company at the time—a Vietnam vet named Jackson Davies—was hired by the city to go in and clean up the Leonard house after the police were finished with it. No one who worked for him wanted to help, so he wound up offering me and a couple of other guys—Mark Sieber and Russell Brennert—300 dollars each to go in with him. Brennert had been Leonard’s best friend. Mark and I gave Brennert a pretty hard time that night; hell, everyone in town was still upset and sick about the murders, and I guess we were looking for a scapegoat. Things were pretty bad in Cedar Hill for a long time after that particular July Fourth.

  I will never forget what that house felt like; even from the street, you could sense the death that had soaked into its walls and floors. And once inside, that death got on your own skin, as well.

  And it was so cold. I don’t think I’ve ever been that cold in my life. I couldn’t stop shaking the whole time we were in there.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to put into words how it feels to mop up a puddle of blood and tissue that used to be a human being. Sometimes I still have nightmares about it.

  Brennert wound up going into the nuthouse for a few weeks after that night. After we graduated, he kept on working for Davies until Davies decided to retire to Florida. Brennert bought the company from him. It said an awful lot about Brennert’s character that he hired me right on the spot when I came looking for work after both college and my marriage (in that order) didn’t work out. We never talk about that night. I guess we can still smell that cold, cold death on each other. Like I could smell it now. Hence the rod of iron inside me.