by Peter Quinn
“‘Fearful Jesuit’? Spare me the epithets of that apostate, James Joyce.”
“I speak from experience. Those pious sophists spent four years at Fordham trying to stuff my head with their Thomistic gibberish.”
“‘Gibberish’? No philosopher has ever surpassed the intellectual achievement of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dante based his opus on Aquinas.”
“Medieval claptrap. Superstition over science. Do you think our friend here …” He reached for the tag attached to the corpse’s big toe and read from it: “Do you think Mr. Gene Halloway is dead because his ‘quiddity’ has gone elsewhere?”
“His soul has left his body, yes.”
Rolling down the sheet, Rossiter exposed the corpse’s genitals. He lifted the limp penis with the scalpel. “Well, here’s his ‘dity.’ I’ll bet a bunch of ripe bananas that while Mr. Halloway was enjoying the floor show at the Black Hat Café, said dity was stiff and standing, and he was aiming to stick it in somebody else’s girlfriend or wife, which is what led him to his untimely demise at the hands of ‘assailant or assailants unknown.’ Where his ‘quid’ went after that is anybody’s guess.”
He leaned over the body, pressing down the fiercely sharpened blade like a floor layer with a linoleum knife, and made a long central cut from the top of the rib cage to just beneath the belly button. Crow turned away. As he folded back the flaps of flesh to expose the chest cavity, Rossiter raised his head. The deep, intense blueness of his eyes was accented by the isolating whiteness of cap and mask. “Doesn’t bother you, Dunne?”
“Seen worse.”
“War?”
Dunne nodded.
“Which?”
“Both.” First time: in the Argonne, jagged metal panel from an exploded caisson tore open the sergeant atop the trench, toppled him back. His insides spilled across the wooden walkway, a vivid outpouring instantly trampled and kicked aside by desperate, frightened soldiers, slipping and sliding in the gore as they hurtled for cover.
“Three years as a Navy doctor in the Pacific. Once you work wholesale, you barely notice the retail.” Rossiter went back to work, barking out anatomical data that the male assistant copied on a chart. The nurse/pathologist brought over a bowl that fit into a holder on the side of the table. He lifted out the heart and lungs and placed them in it. He stood back. “Nurse, where’s the saw?” His irritation was unmistakable.
“I didn’t think a cranial was called for …”
“Didn’t think! The two most fatal words in the medical profession!”
His bull-like bellowing sent her scurrying to the other side of the room. Rossiter pulled down his mask. “Feel free to take yours off, too. Its only purpose is to provide our hack commissioner and his imbecilic, rule-crazed toadies the opportunity to hand down yet another utterly inane regulation, as if I might give our friend here my cold. But that’s what administrators do, isn’t it? Add unnecessary rules? How else to justify their entirely unnecessary existence?”
He took the saw she brought him. She slipped a tray under the corpse’s head and raised a brace that pressed against the cheek bones. “You won’t report me, will you, nurse?”
“Rules are rules.” Her lush black lashes rolled slowly up and down. She didn’t remove her mask. “And I’m not your nurse.”
“Don’t tell me you were educated by the Jesuits?”
“Ursuline nuns.”
“Worse.” He turned to his male assistant. “Please note for any Jesuits or Ursuline nuns who might inquire that, in Mr. Halloway’s case, as in all that have preceded it, I once more failed to find any evidence of a soul.” He laid the fine blade of the saw across the top of the cadaver’s forehead. “And get a trocar in the abdomen and start draining. For Pete’s sake, that should have been done already.” The male assistant, who Dunne guessed was a medical student or intern, put down his notes and quickly returned with a slim-headed tube attached to a large opaque glass container.
Crow stood staring down into the cadaver’s empty chest.
Drawing the saw back and forth with long, steady strokes, Rossiter worked nonstop for several minutes. Despite the room’s dank chill, a bead of sweat skied down the side of his nose. “I pity the patients of tomorrow. The medical schools are turning out a uniformly timid crew. So afraid of making mistakes, they won’t do anything on their own and live in fear of taking risks. How the hell can anyone practice medicine if he’s afraid of making mistakes?” He put down the saw. “So, Dunne, what’s the urgent business brought you to this shambles?”
“He’s on a case.” Crow was still staring.
“I figured that out by myself.” Rossiter stopped sawing and wiped his face with his sleeve. The blade of the saw was at the rear of the skull. The nurse/assistant pathologist stepped forward and carefully removed the severed top. He rested the saw on the tray, dug into the pocket of his gown and took out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. “Nurse, here’s another mortal sin to report to the Ursulines.” She was conferring with the male assistant about an annotation he’d made in the file and paid no attention.
He offered the pack to Dunne, who declined. “Homicide, I presume.”
Dunne removed his mask. “Probably. But still listed as a Missing Persons.”
“How recent?”
“Wait’ll you hear.” Crow transferred his gaze from chest to skull.
“Joseph Force Crater,” Dunne said.
The sudden, unexpected clap of Rossiter’s thunderous laughter made his female assistant’s eyes dilate with surprise.
“Little early for April Fool’s, don’t you think, Dunne?”
“Exactly what I told him,” Crow said. “A fool’s errand.”
“A job. Nothing more.” Or maybe something more. Memory of Nan Renard returning from the ladies’ room with a rhythmic sway of hips.
The nurse/assistant pathologist handed Rossiter a shallow metal bowl to use as an ashtray. “Yours is not to reason why. Yours is but to do and get paid. An admirable sentiment. But whoever hired you needs a psychiatrist, not a dick. Crater long ago became the cynosure of cranks and crazies, the kind who report being abducted by Martians. In fact, that’s what you say: Crater’s holed up on Mars. Then cash the check and blow.”
“Crow tells me you were part of the investigation.”
“A cameo. I was fresh out of medical school.”
Crow hooked his mask with a forefinger and pulled it down. “Doc Rossiter is a nephew of Doc Cropsey.”
“Was. Doc Cropsey passed into the void thirteen years ago. Good man and a great coroner. Cut up more corpses than you could put a number on.”
“He was a friend. I was at his funeral.” St. Agnes’s church on 43rd Street, a solemn high requiem mass, three priests in black chasubles, choir chanting the Dies Irae. The crowd that packed the church included the health and police commissioners. No recollection of meeting Cropsey’s nephew.
“I was already on my way to vanquish Tojo and the Japs.” Rossiter took a voracious drag on his cigarette, tapped the ash into the bowl. “Doc Cropsey was too clever to get embroiled in the Crater case. From the start, it stunk of politics and behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Don’t solve it, you’re an idiot or part of a cover-up; do, it’s a frame-up. Political cases were like polio, he said. Safest course is to keep your distance.”
“But he stuck you in the middle.” Crow had lost interest in the cadaver. “You couldn’t have been happy about that.”
“What you have to remember is when the case broke, the reporters outnumbered the cops ten to one. There was one cop assigned to check out the reports of Crater’s body being found, and let me tell you, it was like tulip time in Holland, bodies blooming everywhere, especially in New Jersey where we had three reports a day of Crater’s body being dug out of a dump, fished out of a river, or found in somebody’s basement. The police commissioner had been warned by the mayor that if the press scooped the cops on this story, his head would be the first to roll. Right away, the commissioner asked that a coron
er be assigned to travel with the cops—or, as it turned out, the cop—and give an immediate opinion about the probability of the corpse being Crater’s.
“Sure that his political connections would brand him a tool of Tammany, Doc Cropsey knew exactly what he was doing when he picked me for the job. I was a medical tyro. Yes, I was his nephew, but the press didn’t have to know that, and given their innate laziness and the urgency of the case, they’d probably never find out. Even if they did, he was sure they’d have so much invested in me as the fair-haired boy, a young Doctor Kildare, they wouldn’t let that relationship get in the way of a good story.
“Doc believed it likely Crater was done in by professionals and would never be found. Yet if by some remote chance one of these claims proved true and Crater’s body was found, the reporters would do everything in their power to shaft the cops and anoint me as the idealist doctor and boy sleuth who put the flatfoots in their place. As it turned out, after several weeks of false alarms, the merry band of scribblers lost interest, and Detective Billy Moon and I spent several months traipsing from Jerksberg to Moronsville. Moon got cockeyed drunk every night and hired the occasional harlot. I stayed in my room and read Darwin.”
“Never turned up anyone who remotely resembled Crater?” Crow asked.
“I thought Dunne is the one interested in this case?”
“Crow’s asking the same questions I would.”
“Turned up plenty. A banner year for dead men in their early forties. Good many suicides. Several corpses were half-rotted or chewed up by animals or badly burned. Often the whole town had a stake in it being Crater. The reward offered by the Standard, added to what the city put up, made the body like a lottery ticket. Individually and collectively, with the Depression settling over the land, the desire to claim that money was desperate.”
“Nobody did, did they?”
Rossiter extinguished the cigarette against the side of the bowl and immediately lit another. “Tried as hard they could, but I had a simple test. Crater had all his teeth removed and been fitted with false ones. It was right there in the police circular, but that didn’t stop people from believing otherwise. The desire to believe is the strongest desire of all, especially when money’s involved. Ask the Jesuits. There are none better at exploiting that desire. First thing I did was pry open the mouth. Not a single one of the cadavers fitting Crater’s general description passed that test.”
“Got a best guess about the case?” Crow continued to ask the questions.
“It’s been a long time since I gave it any thought. The Roosevelt haters always whispered he was behind it because he was afraid his presidential run would be scuttled if Crater confessed to paying for his judgeship. But the Republicans were implicated as often as the Democrats. You don’t think those upstate judges weren’t paying Republican bosses for their jobs? If F.D.R. was interested in a cover-up, he’d have to make ninetenths of the judges in the state disappear. No, I say it was sex. Crater was a notorious bladesman, and to paraphrase the Galilean, he who lives by his blade stands a good chance of perishing because of it.”
Rossiter picked up the scalpel and touched the corpse’s penis. “Like our friend here, Mr. Halloway, Crater’s blade was probably too sharp for his own good.”
Dunne took out his pocket-sized, wrote down his room number and the general exchange of the Savoy Plaza. He ripped out the page. “Anything else comes to mind, here’s where you can reach me. I’ll leave it out at the desk.”
“Funny thing, Dunne, but by one of those small coincidences that lead the gullible to discern the hand of fate, I was at Missing Persons the day the case broke. We did a good deal of business and that day I was delivering papers for somebody or other’s signature. The first reaction in the office was that a woman was involved. Most times when a middle-aged man went missing, that was the case. Only one cop disagreed, said it was the wife up in Maine did it. He was adamant.”
“Remember his name?”
“At this point, I’m lucky I remember my own. Anyway, he was assigned somewhere else. He was there, like me, on some other business.”
“Been generous with your time, doc,” Crow said. “Now it’s me owes you.”
“My pleasure, Crow. But before you go, one favor.” He stood behind the corpse and crouched, palms on thighs, face almost level with the topless skull. “Come here.”
Hesitantly, Crow went over to Rossiter.
“Take a peek in there.”
“Where?”
“In Mr. Halloway’s skull.”
Crow crouched next to Rossiter. “What am I looking for?”
“I was hoping you’d spot his soul. Never been able to find one.” As Rossiter straightened up and let out a single loud laugh, the assistant pathologist threw down her file on the instrument tray. This time, it was his turn to be startled.
“I’ve had just about enough of you having fun at the expense of the dead. You’re worse than unprofessional. You’re a disgrace.” She took off her mask. Except for the cap covering her hair, her full lips and white teeth completed her lovely Mediterranean face. “Your behavior is indecent. I won’t report you only because it would be useless. Nothing would happen. But maybe, this once, you might find it in that shriveled soul of yours to put aside your arrogance and examine your conscience.”
“Nun talk.”
“No, shocking as it may be to hear, this is the way human beings talk. Do yourself a favor and try it some time, if only for the sheer novelty.” She walked out of the room.
Rossiter pulled off his cap. “That girl, Linda DeMarco, is one hell of a pathologist. Best I’ve ever worked with. She’s the one figured out how that doctor in Inwood killed his wife by poisoning her with curare. Fooled everybody but her. Poisons are her specialty. Probably learned that from the Ursulines, too. Or maybe from the Dominicans. Official poisoners to the Vatican. But she’s too sensitive to survive in a profession like this, where all the egos are bloated and stilettos double as elbows. I’ll fix that. When I’m finished, she’ll be tough enough to overcome whatever she comes up against. Mark my words, both of you.”
Crow gave Dunne a lift back to his hotel, resuming his careful cop watch on the streets as Dunne continued to prod him on the Crater case. When he brought up Mrs. Crater’s account and the tale of the detective who visited her in Maine, Crow cut him short. “Typical newspaper crap.” He went off about the garbage they printed and the trouble they caused, a complaint that wended its way, predictably, to Dante, for though there weren’t newspapers in his day, he knew the type, those who prostitute words and language, feasting on scandal, corrupting the public mind with myths and lies, and smoothing the way to the final abyss, where truth and trust can’t exist. “He sticks them in the Eighth Circle, in a pit where they’re covered in shit. Just imagine what he’d make of television.”
“Somehow I was left feeling Mrs. Crater didn’t make it up. Seemed so real.”
“The whole story is far-fetched. A person shows up in her house claiming to be a detective from New York and she doesn’t even ask his name. Give me a break. Besides, there’s no record of a cop from New York within 300 miles of Lake Belvedere at the time she claims. We showed her pictures of any detective who had even a remote possibility of having made the trip. She couldn’t identify anybody. The woman’s totally delusional. She marries a sex fiend she imagines is a cross between St. Francis and Sir Lancelot. Soon as she tells her fantasy to Wilkes’s scriveners, they write it up like a scene in a Faith Baldwin novel.”
Wilkes name was dropped casually enough that Dunne was sure Crow attached no special significance to it. He asked Crow about the telegrams Crater received in Lake Belvedere. Weren’t there copies on file in the local office or some record of who sent them? Crow shook his head. The record-keeping up there was a mess. The Methuselah in charge had been at it since the last century. Got fired as a result and lost his pension. Another victim of the Crater curse. Sadder still, his successor located the log book. The telegrams w
ere sent by “John Jones, New York City.”
Crow parked in front of the side entrance to the Savoy Plaza, on 58th Street, flashing his badge at an officious doorman who blew his whistle and signaled him to move. The sleet had resumed. He got out with Dunne but declined to come in for a drink. They stood beneath the steady wap, wap of icy rain on the canopy. “You got a reputation for having been a good cop, and that counts for a lot with me. It’s also been widely advertised you can be a pain in the ass.”
“Two go together, don’t you think?”
“I’ll give you what help I can, Fin, but you heard Rossiter. He agrees. You’re wasting your time.”
“I guess I’ve got it to waste.”
“Then be careful what you waste it on.” He took off on another commentary on The Divine Comedy, how Dante put Ulysses in the Eighth Circle of Hell, a decision that horrified admirers of the great hero of The Odyssey. But in Dante’s eyes, when Ulysses tired of retirement in Ithaca and left to seek what lay beyond the Gates of Hercules, where he and his crew meet their end, he committed a great sin. “The Greeks had a name for it,” Crow concluded. “Pleonexia.”
Dunne nodded. Crow and his eccentricities. Play by his rules or don’t play. “Sounds like a skin disease.”
“A disease, all right, but of the soul, not the skin.”
The doorman repeated his attempt to get Crow to move, this time as plea rather than command. “I beg you, please stand aside. You’re making it difficult for guests to enter or leave.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Crow said but didn’t move. “Ulysses’ sin is the vanity that drives him to overreach, wandering the world ‘all human worth and wickedness to prove,’ rather than staying at home to fulfill his debt of love to Penelope.”
“I’m looking for a missing person. Isn’t that what you get paid to do?”
“Far as Crater’s concerned, that check was cashed a long time ago.”
“Crater can’t be found, no harm done. But if by some wild chance he can, Missing Persons has one less person to look for.”
“The chances of solving it are zero or below.”