A Cast of Killers

by Gallagher Gray

  Auntie Lil unpinned the contraption and gave it a rumble seat of its own.

  "That's a lovely hat, Lillian," Lilah lied smoothly. "Wherever did you get it?"

  "My friend, Herbert Wong, brought it back from Pago Pago," she answered.

  "Your friend Herbert Wong?" T.S. said. "He was my friend first." She was always absconding with his friends. She didn't mean to, she was just so enthusiastic about new companions that, before T.S. knew what was happening, his former buddies would be out getting drunk with Auntie Lil while he stayed home alone and watched television.

  "He was your employee," Auntie Lil pointed out. "He's my friend."

  Lilah winked at T.S. in secret sympathy and he decided that he didn't give a hoot about Herbert Wong one way or the other. "Where is this place?" he asked cheerfully.

  "On First Avenue. Grady knows the address." Lilah waved a hand toward the driver. He was a handsome, burly man with the map of Ireland printed all over his broad face. His reddish brown hair topped a massive head and, as they soon discovered, he retained a thick Irish brogue.

  "Bit of traffic ahead, ma'am," he called back to Lilah, rather unnecessarily as they had moved ahead little more than three inches in the last half minute. But instead of being annoyed, a curious sensation flowed through T.S. They were stalled near Times Square and all around them, neon lights blinked, it seemed, in time to the music. People flowed around the car, parting and coming back together, trying without luck to peer inside to see if anyone famous rode within. Groups of kids laughed and grabbed at one another, caught up in the joy and sheer energy of New York, while well-dressed adults huddled together in groups, suppressing their childlike merriment at the suspense of waiting for the nightlife to begin. It was an ideal position for someone like T.S.—to be so surrounded by life, yet made invisible and, thus, all-powerful by the anonymous security of the limousine's tinted windows. T.S. suddenly felt like an integral part of this excitement, as if he stood at the center of a large wheel and these lovely people, this wonderful multitude of different faces—all colors and sizes and shapes and expressions included—all belonged to him, every last one of them, and were all a part of him, flowing outward from the center of his benign goodwill like revelers circling a beribboned Maypole.

  "Why, Theodore," he heard Lilah say through a cacophony of honking horns, the shouts of religious fanatics and the chatter of at least six different languages. "What an interesting smile just crossed your face. I don't think I've ever actually seen you smile that way before. What in the world were you thinking of just now?"

  Glad that Auntie Lil and Grady were occupied in a discussion about whether disco was coming back, T.S. shook his head happily. "I don't really know," he confessed. "I just had the strangest feeling. I really felt alive."

  Lilah reached over and patted his hand. Her touch was warm and far too fleeting. "Retirement must agree with you. I've never seen you look so handsome."

  Handsome? He preened very casually in the mirrored bar surface. Things were looking up, indeed.

  Frustrated by the slow going, Auntie Lil grew increasingly more excited and was bouncing up and down impatiently in her seat by the time they reached the medical examiner's office.

  "Have you got the film?" she asked T.S., eyeing his camera dubiously.

  "Of course. I'm not an idiot." He checked the back of the camera just in case, though he'd double-checked it twice before leaving the house. He climbed quickly out of the car in response to Auntie Lil's impatient push from behind. "Are you sure you don't want to accompany us?" he asked Lilah politely through her open window, when she made no move to leave the limousine.

  "Thank you, I believe I'll just stay here with Grady and come back in for the dinner portion of the evening. Ask for Rodriquez at the door. He knows what to do." Lilah gave a fluttering half-wave just as the tinted window rolled back up, obscuring her face.

  Auntie Lil tugged on his arm, admonishing him to hurry. The entrance doors were locked and they rang a bell as instructed. Upon hearing a sharp buzz, they pushed through the front doors and found themselves in a dark and empty reception room, the employees having fled hours before. Auntie Lil looked around for an inner door or second buzzer and was just peeking under the front desk when a small, darkish man with thinning hair and suspicious eyes burst through a rear door. He gripped a clipboard against his chest like a shield, stared at Auntie Lil crouched beneath the receptionist's desk, then scrutinized T.S. with almost comical mistrust.

  "What do you two want?" he asked, delving right to the heart of the matter.

  "You must be Rodriquez," T.S. deflected politely, extending his hand for his heartiest handshake.

  Rodriquez ignored the gesture and wrapped his lab coat a little more tightly around his protruding middle. "What if I am?" he demanded truculently.

  Auntie Lil rose to her not very impressive height and looked him straight in the eye. "Lilah Cheswick said to ask for you," she explained evenly, a hint of steel underlying her words. "She said it had all been arranged," she added with mysterious inflection, managing to make it sound as if they were there to rob, not photograph, bodies.

  Rodriquez looked at them with even greater distaste. "Oh, yeah. You two are the kooks who want to take a picture of a corpse or something." His expression changed to one of mild interest, as if he'd run up against all kinds of weirdos before and they represented a new, slightly intriguing species.

  Good grief, T.S. realized. The creep thought they were on some sort of perverse pleasure trip. Time to nip that notion in the bud. "We're here to photograph a specific woman who died yesterday," T.S. explained with stiff dignity. "We are attempting to secure her true identification from someone in the vicinity of her neighborhood."

  "Sure." Rodriquez nodded slowly, unconvinced. But he checked his clipboard and motioned them to follow. "Suit yourself," he said. "It takes all kinds."

  Ignoring his jibe, they walked down a long hallway, turned the corner and pushed past a set of swinging doors that led them into a narrow, white hospital-like corridor. Double sets of small square doors about the size and shape of bus terminal lockers lined the walls on each side for as far as they could see. Everything was white. It looked like the storage area of a futuristic stopping point for intergalactic travelers.

  "Are all of these full?" Auntie Lil asked spryly. She eyed the doors in great curiosity. "How many of them would you say were victims of violent crime?" she inquired, without waiting for an answer to her first question. "I bet many of them have been shot. Were any of them stabbed?"

  "Let's just confine ourselves to the one body, shall we?" T.S. suggested, dragging her away from the wall before she started pulling open drawers and examining the bodies for signs of foul play.

  "Here she is," Rodriquez announced with a bit of flair. "Number 433."

  They gathered around the small door and T.S. could have sworn that Rodriquez deliberately took his time undoing the latch just to heighten the suspense. "Now, don't faint on us, ma'am," he warned Auntie Lil in an experienced voice.

  She flapped a gloved hand impatiently and Rodriquez opened the door, smoothly sliding out a gurney on a steel track. It rolled into view and stretched across the breadth of the hallway, gleaming with stainless steel emptiness beneath the glare of the fluorescent lights above.

  "There's no one here!" Auntie Lil cried. "What have you done with the poor woman?"

  "Done with her? We've done nothing with her at all." Though confused, Rodriquez was still quite capable of automatically heading off blame before it could be assigned to him. He frantically scanned his clipboard list. "You say she died yesterday? West Side. Right?"

  "Right," Auntie Lil echoed. "How many old ladies with no known name or address kicked off yesterday afternoon, anyway?"

  Rodriquez paused to glare at her briefly, then shook his head and scratched at a small insect bite that had swelled on one of his cheeks. "Hmmm. You wait here."

  He turned abruptly and left them staring at the empty locker. Bu
t not for long. For different reasons, neither Auntie Lil nor T.S. had any inclination to wait in the hall of the dead while he poked around in search of the missing body. The moment Rodriquez disappeared through another set of swinging doors, both of them went scurrying after him. They were just in time to see him stick his head through a small door set off another, shorter corridor.

  With the unerring instincts of a middle linebacker who smells a quarterback sack, Auntie Lil went barreling down the short hall and chose the most efficient route to success. She pushed Rodriquez through the door into the room and crowded in behind him, with T.S. hot on her heels.

  They'd found Emily all right. She was lying naked on a smooth steel table that included slanted gutters on all four sides. A thin stream of water trickled through the gutters and ran into a narrow sink that hugged one wall of the room. A tiny man, nearly as gnarled and short as a gnome, was peering intently into Emily's eyes with the aid of a highly focused penlight. His thick eyeglasses shone eerily with reflected glare and he was issuing a constant patter of noise that sounded—at least from where T.S. and Auntie Lil stood—like indignant mice arguing among themselves. A slim Asian woman stared over his shoulder and was listening raptly to his lecture.

  The little man's squeaky voice rose in volume as he reached his conclusion. "Look again," he commanded. "Notice the breakage around the cornea. Curiously enough, this is symptomatic of either…" Rodriquez coughed loudly and the little man abruptly stopped his speech, having finally noticed the company. He was quite unperturbed.

  "Hello, what's this?" he asked cheerfully, eyeing Auntie Lil up and down with professional detachment. Auntie Lil responded by straightening her back and opening her eyes wide, as if to prove that she, thank you, was quite alive.

  "These people are here to take a photo of this dead lady," Rodriquez explained, cocking his thumb toward the corpse. "I wouldn't have burst in on you like that, but this old one here, she pushed me from behind like some kind of maniac." He glared at Auntie Lil, but she was far too busy staring at Emily to notice his resentment.

  A jagged V-shaped scar tapered down from the dead woman's shoulders across her breasts, coming together several inches above the navel before snaking angrily down over the shrunken tissues and protruding bones of her pelvis. Her skin was puckered and hairless, the body impossibly small. T.S. stared down at his shoes. It looked like the freeze-dried body of an eleven-year-old girl.

  The tiny doctor scurried to Emily's feet and pulled a white plastic sheet over her form. "Please excuse the informality. If I'd known she was having company, I'd have dressed her for the occasion." He cackled at his own joke and T.S. suppressed a groan. The old man was just the kind of weirdo Auntie Lil loved to collect. No doubt they'd be dining across the table from one another soon.

  "Don't mind my macabre humor," the little man protested, stopping any potential giggles with an upraised palm, although no one had either laughed or had the slightest inclination to do so. "I was simply showing Cheryl here the ins and outs of being a pathologist," he giggled. "Giving her the inside scoop, you might say." He laughed again with a wheezy kind of snuffling sound and gestured toward a neat row of glass jars on a nearby shelf.

  The jars held floating masses of tissue suspended in clear solution, some pinkish lumps and others grayish slabs. Yellow and white dangly ropes circled some of the organs, stretching out like tentacles from a body. It was impossible not to stare and still more impossible not to shift that stare to the long scar on the dead woman's torso. The doctor, noting their stunned dismay, rearranged his smile into a more sober expression.

  "So sorry. So sorry. I forget that my humor may be a bit much for the layman. You're not relatives, are you?" He gazed anxiously at Auntie Lil. "I thought she was a Jane Doe. I mean, they told me they had no family or name. I was just seizing the rare chance for hands-on education for my new assistant. Not that Cheryl isn't fully qualified, but I have certain procedures that I like followed and…"

  "Not at all. Not at all," Auntie Lil interrupted. "We're not relatives." She gave a dainty gulp and regained her composure. "My fault entirely for bursting in on you like this. Please carry on as if we weren't even here. We simply want to snap a few photographs to take back to her neighborhood to see if we could find out her true identity."

  "How kind of you." His voice sounded as if he meant it, but his look was a bit skeptical.

  "Please don't let us intrude," Auntie Lil repeated. "Do carry on with your… cutting or whatever." Her curiosity was starting to gain ground. She inched toward the body.

  "You don't mean it?" The little doctor was delighted and looked at his assistant euphorically, as if not quite believing his luck. "Don't tell me you're one of the rare human beings who's not been conditioned to blanch at the sight of a little flesh and blood." He rubbed his hands together with anticipatory glee and stared at Emily's body. He looked, T.S. felt strongly, like a rabid raccoon eyeing a disabled fish.

  "Well, that depends." Auntie Lil hastened to explain. "To a point, certainly, it can be… quite fascinating." T.S., meanwhile, was inching backwards toward the door. He had no desire to do anything but return to the limousine and look at Lilah.

  The doctor froze suddenly and stared at them intently. "Say, wait a minute. You're the two people that Lilah Cheswick called me about." He thumped his bald pate in exasperation. "Of course. Now I remember."

  T.S. halted his escape and stared back at the doctor. This was who Lilah knew at the medical examiner's office? No wonder she'd waited in the car.

  "And how is Lilah?" the little doctor asked anxiously. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and peered at Auntie Lil. "I've been meaning to call her ever since my dear wife died. We'd be a perfect pair, what with us both being left so tragically alone. But I've been so wrapped up in my work, I haven't seen her at all. Her phone call was a total surprise. But a welcome one, of course."

  "She's fine," Auntie Lil answered carefully. "As lovely and gracious as ever."

  The little doctor's face brightened as if he'd forgotten Lilah's beauty. "But, of course. She is such a lovely woman." He put a hand on his chin and thought carefully. "Say, would you give her my regards when you see her? Perhaps she could give me a call again? Socially. I'm Dr. Millerton, by the way. Milton Millerton."

  "We'd be glad to," Auntie Lil murmured sweetly.

  T.S. would be damned if he'd let the little worm at Lilah for one second. In fact, he'd not even mention his silly name and would forbid Auntie Lil to do the same. So the good doctor's wife had died, had she? And just who had done the autopsy on her?

  "Well, enough of the living," the little doctor decided, rubbing his tiny hands together with great relish. "Let's get back to the dead." He turned to his silent pupil, who was quite nonplussed at her boss's behavior. "You're just in time for the cranial exploration," he called over his shoulder cheerfully. "It's Cheryl's favorite part."

  "You mean the skull?" Auntie Lil looked back at T.S. in alarm. "Perhaps we'd better take our photos first."

  "Good idea," T.S. said. "Then we can leave." Without waiting for permission, he gingerly took one corner of the plastic sheet and peeled it down to Emily's shoulders. Poor woman. Her already frail body had caved in upon death and the skin lay over her facial bones like useless, dried out parchment.

  "I've found that 400 film on 60 speed is quite sufficient in this bright light," Dr. Millerton told T.S. helpfully.

  T.S. ignored him, but surreptitiously adjusted the speed setting. Old bugger. How would he know? What kind of pictures was he snapping around here, anyway?

  The next few minutes were for T.S. perhaps the most annoying of his life. Dr. Millerton issued instructions from his left side while Auntie Lil hovered on the right, ordering him to take a shot of this part of Emily's face, and then the other. Rodriquez and the assistant pathologist retreated to one corner, far from the fray, when Auntie Lil began demanding close-ups of the dead woman's teeth.

  "What on earth for?" T.S. asked in irritation,
but got no reply. Auntie Lil was too busy peeking under the plastic sheet that now covered Emily's body.

  "What are you doing?" T.S. lowered his camera and stared at his aunt.

  "Looking for distinguishing marks," she explained primly. "Haven't you any imagination?"

  "Yes. Far too much to be poking around in here much longer."

  "No distinguishing marks," the doctor assured her. "The only distinguishing thing Cheryl says she found was a small amount of a brown, muddy substance in her stomach that gave off a very sharp odor. Possibly toxic. It had a caustic effect on the stomach lining. I've recommended she have it analyzed in the lab."

  "No need," T.S. said with great satisfaction. "That was Auntie Lil's chili."

  "That's nothing to joke about, Theodore," she complained hotly. "My chili was perfectly good and it did not give off a sharp odor. It's probably not even chili."

  "One way to find out," the doctor said, holding up a hand as if to ward off an argument between them. There was a distinctly ghoulish twinkle in his myopic eyes. "Cheryl—the specimen jar please." He bowed and held out a hand grandly as if he had just demanded the envelope furnishing the winner's name of a particularly coveted Academy Award.

  Cheryl obediently fetched the jar from a small table against the wall and handed it to Dr. Millerton. "Approximately one-third of a cup was present in the stomach proper," she explained in a Yonkers accent that clashed severely with her Flower Drum Song exterior. "I removed one-third of that amount for analysis."

  "Very good," he assured his pupil. "Now let's see what we have here." He held the jar up to the light and twisted it slowly until he'd examined each angle. He was drawing out the process and clearly enjoying this teasing of Auntie Lil and T.S.. "It does look like chili to me," he finally announced, winking at T.S. "Although it seems a particularly virulent color." He hee-heed loudly and unscrewed the top. "Let's see if it smells like chili."