You brought me a black guy? Bennet imagined him saying.
Bennet looked at him, then turned away. The room was hot and the sun was pouring in rays through a high window so you could see dust particles floating.
“I need a blood sample,” Bennet said.
The attorney told Kimbell to sit down and hold out his arm.
—
“I need you to explain this phenomenon of American Negro racism to me,” Bennet said to Father Carmen one morning in the convent kitchen after morning mass.
“In twenty-five words or less,” Father Carmen said.
“I’m serious.”
“I know—”
“People don’t like me,” Bennet said. “Or they’re afraid of me.”
“I don’t think that’s true at all,” Father Carmen said. “Or if they act like that it’s not personal.”
“That’s the whole point,” Bennet said.
“I see.”
“I’m trying to save a guy’s life,” Bennet said. “And it was like he wanted to spit at me. Like he would rather die from lethal injection than have a black guy help him.”
“I can’t imagine what that was like for you,” Father Carmen said. “I cannot imagine.”
“Well, I’m going to win the case,” Bennet said. He leaned back, folded his arms behind his head, gazed out the window at the maple tree just forming buds.
Kimbell had tested positive for hemophilia A. People with hemophilia bruise easily, have massive bruises following trivial blunt force impact or other trauma. And Kimbell had had not one mark on him in the photographs.
“That guy sitting in jail for six years had nothing to do with those murders,” Bennet said. “He couldn’t have. I’m going to prove it.”
“Why didn’t they know about his hemophilia in the first trial?” Father Carmen asked.
Bennet shrugged. “They also never questioned the victim’s husband,” he said. “That guy had cuts all over his hands. I found a picture.”
—
The Kimbell trial began in April 2002. In a pretrial hearing the prosecutor argued that Bennet should not be allowed to testify. The prosecutor had his own expert forensic pathologist, a dapper guy in wire-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. The team made the point that there was no scientific way that a forensic pathologist could offer, all these years later, any evidence to refute a guilty verdict.
“Yeah, there is,” Bennet said, in so many words. “I’m the way.”
He enjoyed practicing Wecht-style arrogance on the wire-rimmed-glasses man, whom he thought appeared visibly agitated. He enjoyed the showmanship in the courtroom the next day. Kimbell had hemophilia A, he told the court; there was no way he committed these murders. He would have had open wounds and he would have bled out.
So if Kimbell didn’t do it, who did? Bennet was ready with the answer. He revealed the picture he found. He had had it blown up poster-sized.
“Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is!” How he loved delivering that line. “These are not the hands of Thomas Kimbell!”
The hands were those of the victim’s husband. At the first trial, that photo had escaped notice, and now here it was, larger than life—and so was Bennet.
That picture was so powerful. And I remember I said it again: “Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is!” I had learnt well from Dr. Wecht that it was as much about the showmanship as it was the content of what you had to say. On the stand I was like a miniature Dr. Wecht. At some point it seemed like a spectator sport. The audience in the courthouse said uncountable “oohs” and “aahs.” The judge reminded people about the etiquette of the courtroom. The DA was upset and exasperated. He was visibly angry. My direct examination ended just before noon. By now, the media were waiting outside itching to get hold of me. As I walked by Mr. Kimbell, he was in tears, he stood up, opened up his arms, and gave me a very big and tight hug. He was sobbing. He kept on whispering in my ears, in between his sobs, “Thank you so much, I am so, so sorry.” I was sneaked out through the back door of the courthouse to avoid the media. I drove back to Pittsburgh with so much peace in my heart. I believed I gave it my very best. The next day, the attorney called me on the phone just before noon, and what came out of his mouth was: “Congratulations! You did it, you did it! He is free! He is free! The jury believed everything you said.”
Later that day, Dr. Wecht called me to tell me that the attorney called him to thank him for recommending me to them. Guess what, Dr. Wecht had forgotten about the case entirely. He asked me to come to his office to tell him what the case was about. I looked so brilliant in his office that afternoon. I was proud of myself. That was the very first time in my life I felt so proud.
—
“I heard the news,” Father Carmen said to Bennet when he showed up for mass at the convent after the trial. “Congratulations. I heard you won!”
“Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is,” Bennet said, explaining his strategy. “You have to admit that was a good line.”
“That was Johnnie Cochran,” Father Carmen said.
“Wecht,” Bennet said. “Pure Wecht.”
“Is he going to pay you this time?”
Bennet sighed. That was a buzz-kill question. “I don’t know,” he said. “He didn’t really remember what case I was even talking about when I told him I won.”
“He didn’t remember?”
“He’s a busy man. He has many cases.”
“Bennet.”
“I know—”
“I think he uses you, Bennet.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The radiator made a clunking sound and Father Carmen put his hand on it to see if it was putting out any heat at all.
“Hey, did Yinka tell you about the group she’s starting?” Father Carmen asked.
“The group?” Bennet said. “She said you were starting it.”
Yinka was maybe fifty, from Nigeria, another powerhouse parishioner. Father Carmen had an idea to create a nonprofit, to expand his outreach to new African immigrants in a more formal way, not just as a way of getting people to join the church, but as a way of helping them with the transition to America. Specifically, an influx of refugees from southern Sudan who were being resettled through Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. “They have no idea how to shop for food, use the bank, let alone how to find jobs,” Father Carmen said. “We’ll be the welcome wagon. We’re going to call it ‘Ajapo.’ Yinka said it means ‘linkage.’ ”
“That’s not Igbo,” Bennet said.
“Yoruba,” Father Carmen said.
“Okay.”
“Will you help?”
“Of course, of course,” Bennet said. “It’s more like what I expected to find when I came to America, honestly.”
“It’s complicated,” Father Carmen said.
“Everything is so complicated,” Bennet said. He stood up, poured more coffee. “Did Yinka tell you about the woman she introduced me to?”
“A woman?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Who is it?”
“No one.”
CHAPTER 6
THE MORGUE
T here was an autopsy I did on a forty-four-year-old woman. Her name was Felicia. She had suffered traumatic brain injury from an assault by her husband and went into a chronic persistent vegetative state and died four years later. I did the autopsy and examined her brain. Surprisingly, I saw Alzheimer’s disease (AD) changes in her brain—at the age of forty-four years old! By then I had read that brain trauma could result in AD changes in the brain, but seeing it personally in a case of mine was an eye-opener. I spent so much time with the slides, just studying them at home. I would say that case prepared me for what was to come.
It was weird the way people in Pittsburgh loved their morgue. Everyone you met had some childhood memory of it. Their brother had been to the morgue, or their cousin, or they themselves. “My d
ad took me to the morgue!” “Our baseball team went to the morgue.” “She dared me to go to the morgue!” “I went to the morgue on my sixteenth birthday.” “After prom we all went to the morgue.”
For years it was open to the public, an imposing structure—a three-story jagged granite fortress sitting there like something out of The Flintstones. There was a theater on the first floor, behind glass, where they displayed the bodies so you could come in and identify your loved one. Anyone off the street could come in and look at the bodies before they were autopsied. Then there was a chapel on the top floor with stained glass windows and a barrel vault ceiling and pews where you could sit and cry after you identified your loved one. A full-service morgue, state of the art when it was built in 1902.
Probably the most exciting thing that ever happened at the morgue happened in 1929. City planners decided that they had put it in the wrong place. They decided to move the morgue, the whole thing, a hundred yards down the street to make way for a county office building. People from everywhere came to watch “the men from the Balkan tribe,” as they came to be known, mysterious men who specialized in heave-hoing and moving huge buildings. They came from overseas to move the morgue. One hundred men with jacks and ropes and cables and horses. They brought in heavy timbers and they built a railway and they had a whistle. They had to lift the six-thousand-ton building, every ounce and inch of it, to the same height at the same moment; every time the boss blew the whistle the men would breathe in giant gulps of air and grit their teeth and give a quarter-turn on their mighty jacks, until the morgue was twenty-seven feet in the air. It took three months for the men and horses to pull the building, inch by inch, and deposit it in its new foundation at 542 Fourth Avenue. During those three months, without missing a beat, work inside the morgue continued, coroners and doctors and corpses, people identifying bodies and praying, everybody in and out of the moving building, as if nothing was happening, as if that morgue were not on a slow journey south.
—
They should tear that old morgue down, Bennet thought. He did not like old things. He liked new and modern things. A lot of Pittsburgh should be torn down, he thought. Remnants of the heyday of the steel industry were everywhere, red and orange skeletons, massive remains of mills lying along the riversides. They should clean all that up, he thought. Like when he feels sad, he dresses up. Puts that suit on. Gets himself physically out of his shell. Come on, Pittsburgh. Perk up.
He was learning to manage his own depression; that’s how he had come to regard it, a chronic condition you had to manage, like heart disease. You couldn’t wish it away, and getting angry at it was only going to make it worse. The trick was to surrender to the fact of it, and that’s what he was working on.
I engaged in deep-seated meditation, psychoanalysis, and so many therapies. I read books and tried to understand. The moment the healing began was when I realized that I could not determine the exact origin of my problems. This was an irrational disease that cannot be rationalized. I had to relearn how to believe in myself without understanding why I was suffering. I let go of understanding, and that was when the healing began.
Now he was in his car, his freshly washed and vacuumed silver E350, on a steel-gray September Saturday in 2002. He was wearing a pin-striped suit and a couple of splashes of Yves Saint Laurent Kouros cologne, and he was pulling into the lot behind the morgue. Most people did not dress up like this to work at the morgue.
He rode up the freight elevator, walked briskly past stray gurneys, wove through the labyrinth of tired, disheveled desks and into his office. The entire place, the entire building, smelled of a hundred years’ worth of dead bodies. A couple of window air-conditioning units blew and coughed as if trying to help, and a spider plant exploding with babies wagged in the stale breeze. Bennet took off his suit, hung it up, and put on a clean set of scrubs.
The autopsy room was dingy, yellow tiles, yellow light, four steel tables ready for what might come. A burly morgue tech was smiling when Bennet walked in. That was odd. That guy never smiled. At least not when Bennet was around. He had seemed to dislike Bennet from the get-go, and mostly Bennet tried to ignore him.
“Looks like you’re the winner,” the tech said, hands on his hips. He did not have a waist. He had a handlebar mustache and looked as if he belonged outdoors, on an oil rig or something.
“What did I get?” Bennet asked, walking past him.
“Mike Webster,” the tech said, handing him a file.
“Who?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
He laughed so hard at me. He said I was so fucked up. I laughed, too, and said, why? He told me that I could not live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and not know who Mike Webster was. He was one of the greatest football players in the history of the game. That was the moment it struck a chord in my mind. I asked him if Mike Webster was the guy everyone was talking about on TV. He said yes. Oh my gosh!
I had seen it on the TV that morning. I had woken up relatively late, at about 7:00 A.M.. I was tired. I had gone out the night before to a club. Clubbing was something I did frequently to help me relax. I loved the loud music and the intoxicating environment of a club. So I was relatively tired, since I typically woke up around 5:00 A.M. every day to go to mass. I fixed myself a cup of coffee. I lived alone in the condominium. I sat down on a couch and flipped through the channels. First I went to CNN and the item on the news was the death of this great football player, Mike Webster. They said he was one of the greatest centers who ever played. I did not know what that meant since I knew nothing about football, absolutely nothing. I did not know what a center was. I turned to another channel and it was the same thing: Mike Webster. Everyone was talking about this guy, how well he played on the field, but how badly he lived after football when he retired. He was derogated on TV, demeaned, and made fun of. I heard things like, retired football players do not save their money and they make very poor business decisions. That they ought to be doing better than they were doing.
I was flustered by what I heard. In fact I may have become angry at some point. I thought that the guy, whatever his name was—I did not bother to even remember his name, honestly—was not being treated fairly. I thought he was rather a victim of the game and not of himself. I thought that he had been exploited and dumped. If he had played a game whereby they wore large amounts of protective gear including a helmet, that meant that the game was dangerous. Having seen this game played on satellite TV on a few occasions in Africa, all I knew was the players ran into one another a whole lot and banged their heads repeatedly like guinea pigs running around.
Football. Now, football was one aspect of American life that Bennet had not keyed into particularly. What an odd and inelegant game, he thought, to the extent that he ever thought about it at all. Guinea pigs bashing. All that padding. If it hurts so much that you have to bubble-wrap your body, maybe you should play something different. That was about the extent of his football analysis. But, okay, football. Pittsburgh sure loved its football. Black and gold, black and gold, signs on cars and on front yards and black and gold cupcakes in bakeries. You would expect bored guys with beer bellies, guys like the morgue tech, to be engaged in watching that sporting event, but in Pittsburgh it was more than that. It was old ladies on stoops, teenagers, infants in Steelers outfits, Father Carmen and Cyril Wecht and Sigrid, too. The whole town. Season tickets passed through generations, were listed in people’s wills; divorced couples fighting over custody did so not just for children, but for season Steelers tickets, too.
Football, for Pittsburgh, was a self-esteem issue. Football had come to the rescue during the darkest days in the 1970s, when the once mighty steel town sank like a tank from the twelfth-largest city in the nation to the twenty-fourth. Everybody leaving. All those gray mornings, the city smothered in clouds, no sun, no money, no jobs, no more steel, no more smoke pumping out of the Hazelwood stacks, no more hot metal pouring out of the J&L, no more guys rolling out from the night shift at dawn,
guys heading down to Jack’s for a shot-and-a-beer breakfast. All of that: done. Everything you grew up knowing your daddy did, and your grandpa did, no, it would not be for you. What would you do? Where would you go? How would you feed a family? No answers. Pull the covers over your head because there were no answers.
But then came Sunday, then came one o’clock on Sunday, the black and the gold. Sellout crowds. The black and the gold. Here were the warriors coming out to fight for your vindication. The Steelers clobbered the Minnesota Vikings in the 1975 Super Bowl, the Dallas Cowboys in 1976 and again in 1979, the Los Angeles Rams in 1980. Four championships in six years. Thank God for football. You lived in Steeler Nation now, not some shithole Pittsburgh. And all those people leaving, they were part of Steeler Nation, too. Pockets of black and gold all over the country. Steeler Nation was an identity, dignity you could never lose because no one could take those rings away—and you had four of them. You!
So Mike Webster dying, that was significant. Iron Mike. Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. Four Super Bowl rings. He had played center for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.
And now here he was in the morgue, dead at fifty.
“Fifty?” Bennet said, scanning the file. “Fifty is young.”
“Heart attack,” the tech said.
“On TV, they were saying he went crazy,” Bennet said. “Why did he go crazy?”
The tech said nothing. How the hell did he know why Webster went crazy?
Concussion Page 8