“No,” I said. I threw the sheet at the body. “I’m all right. We keep going.”
“Buried under dead people, Pen. Some guy swearing his guts at me and you want . . .” I didn’t hear the rest. I’d already opened the cooling room door and looked both ways down the hall. A warm hall, and I smelled rain and dirt and old tar, the way it always smells in LA when it rains. In the hall I could breathe and move arms and legs, my own arms and legs, past Posting Room Three, Posting Rooms Two and One, and I saw Whitey’s desk at the end of the hall in front of the file room. Joe caught up when I turned the file room knob. Locked.
“For God’s sake, use a glove. Put your hand in your sleeve. Wipe the knob off.”
“It’s locked.” I felt in my hair, found a pin, and tugged it out. I pushed the pin flat and then shoved it into the lock.
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Ever live in a dorm? Push the tumbler for me. I can’t get it.”
He did, and I heard the bolt roll into the door. I stuck my hand in my sleeve and turned the knob.
“Fast,” Joe said. He pressed on the light button and closed the door. “Faster than fast. Where’s her file?”
The inside was as long as the cooling room, with wood file cabinets instead of frozen crypts. “B for Brown,” I said.
“When I make the hat squad, I’m finding that guy. I hate that guy. I don’t see B for Brown.”
“You’re afraid of snakes but you don’t mind dead bodies.”
“I never said I was afraid of snakes.”
“It’s funny,” I said.
“B for Brown. I don’t see it.”
I looked for B, then I looked for A, C, D, the entire alphabet. Whitey hadn’t learned the alphabet. Her filing system used numbers, with one letter at the beginning: N39203, N40051, like that, with numbers typed on neat little cards slid into frames on the drawers.
“We can’t go through all these,” Joe said.
“What do they mean?” I tapped a card: S40001-S40039. “Come on, Joe. You’re a cop. You use numbers, right?”
“Not these. What? You think I know all these codes? Tonight’s the first time I’ve been in this room. I wouldn’t be here now except for you.”
“We’ve got thirty-nine and forty. The first part must be a year. If it’s the year, then we’re counting within that year.”
“I hear something,” Joe said.
“No, you don’t. Say thirty-nine’s the year, then it counts up. The letters are—what? H could only be homicide. S has to be suicide. What’s N? They’re filed by type of death, year, then number. If we count from January, from the first homicide each year, the number goes up.”
“Shh, someone’s coming.” He closed his eyes.
Shoes on linoleum, boots, more than one pair. I ran on tiptoes to the file room door. The boots echoed in the hallway, booming echoes, walking our way, toward the end of the hall. Only two doors sat at the end of the hall: the coroner’s office and the file room. The coroner had gone, and it was the middle of a rainy night, no reason to use that office. The boots headed toward us, our room, the file room.
I grabbed the flat hairpin from Joe. My hand shook. I picked it up with two fingers, then dropped it. I heard the boots stop. The pin slid on the floor in front of me. I tried picking it up, but my fingers kept pushing it around. I took both hands and scooped the pin, then stood and reached my hand to the door. I saw the knob turn. I stuck the pin in the lock, same time. Joe pushed my hand out of the way and twisted the pin. The bolt slid.
The doorknob rattled on our side. Joe and I stood next to each other and watched the knob. What happens when you’ve broken into a coroner’s file room, and it’s rainy and late at night and the room is more like a hall that stretches down, cabinets on each side? And the rain slams through those cabinets and walls, on the outside of the building, where it pounds sideways because it’s raining thick and fast. What happens when the file room door locks, and you’re stuck in that room with cabinets full of stories, homicide, accident, suicide, pending?
Joe reached for my hand. The doorknob rattled, and outside the door I heard the voice from the cooling room: “Who’s got the key? Well, where is it?” Yelling loud down the hall. “Find that beat cop. I don’t care, find him. His unit’s in the lot. I got to do everything?” The voice, the boots, the echoing hallway got smaller, tiny, and disappeared.
“Get your file. Now.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“He’s coming back with a key.”
“I can do this. A year, right?”
“Look for H40,” Joe said.
“H. H. Where?” My eyes shook, same as my hands, and I couldn’t read the file cards right. They blurred in front of me. Joe read the cabinets on one side, and I tried to read the other, fast. Rain thumped the whole Hall of Justice.
“It’ll be recent. High numbers,” he said. “Where’s the last file drawer?”
“Here,” I said. “Don’t—don’t open it with your fingers. Wipe it off.”
No time to wipe it. The drawer slid out and I rifled the folders.
“Start at the back,” Joe said. “The most recent.”
October. I had to lift each file and rifle through. Head wounds, arm cut off, something with poison, and then Rosemary Brown. I held her thick folder in my hands.
“You can’t take the whole thing,” Joe said.
“Why not? I need it all.”
“And we need a file here when someone comes looking. They will look, Pen. It’s a homicide. Grab part of the file. Grab one thing. Grab it, and let’s go.”
I squeezed the file together: at least a quarter inch of stuff. I didn’t know what the file held. In my mind it held events that couldn’t actually be there, about grade school and high school, about Aunt Lou, their move to Pomona, Hollywood, and me holding her cut hand, her blood tacky on my fingers. Silly. No file holds all that. Still, my arm shook. I couldn’t choose. I slapped the file against Joe’s chest.
“Lots of carbons in here.” He slid out some sheets. “Put the file back.”
Joe wiped off the drawer. He stuffed the sheets in his jacket. He unlocked the door with my hairpin and creaked it a little ways, then stuck out his head. He opened it full, and we ran through the hall, Posting Rooms One, Two, Three, to the hearse entrance. I jumped from the dock. I landed against Joe, and he knocked his body on a dark car that must have belonged to the voice from the cooling room. It wasn’t a hearse.
We didn’t see the guy who sat inside. Joe ran past the car, and I followed him. I saw the driver’s side window roll down, and a hand stuck into the rain. “You two see my partner? Hey!”
Joe reached his squad car first and unlocked the passenger side. He yelled to me through rain, “I didn’t close the file room door. I didn’t wipe off the doorknobs.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. Joe was already running to his side, unlocking his door, and we met on the front seat. I was soaked. Water slid off Joe’s cap.
“What did we get?”
“Hold on,” Joe said. “Let’s get out of the lot.” He pushed the ignition, the car roared, and he drove us to the street, then a block down to an office building. He parked at the curb. “We’re lucky. You know that? We run out and some guy’s in his car. We run by him. He won’t see who we were through this rain. We’re the damn luckiest people in town. Except for the file door. And he saw my car number.”
“What did we get?”
“You’re shivering.”
“I’m shaking,” I said. “There’s a difference.” I wiped my face with wet hands.
Joe pressed the ignition again and turned up the heat. He pulled soggy sheets from his jacket. “Carbons of something. Where’s my flash? Hold it pointed down.”
“You hold the flash,” I said. I wanted to hold the carbons. We didn’t get the autopsy report. We’d stolen the word-for-word autopsy transcripts instead.
CHAPTER 31
Fay Wray comes forth with this pointer: A
lways hold the hands in an upward position and they’ll turn into lily-white attributes.
—Photoplay, November 1940
Office of the Coroner Los Angeles County
Death Number specify (A)ccident (H)omicide (S)uicide (N)atural or (P)ending: #H40205 Rosemary Brown
Autopsy Notes Transcribed By: F. White
Date of Death: Found 12 Nov 1940
Identification confirmed: Miss Barbara Stanwyck (friend)
Conducted at: LA Co Morgue
Autopsy Surgeon: A. F. Wagner MD, Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office
Dr. Wagner: All right it is two p.m. at the Los Angeles County Morgue Posting Room Three. Dr. A. F. Wagner, Autopsy Surgeon, attended by Donald Olsen, Morgue Assistant. Observing are Detective Louis Conejos, Los Angeles Police Department Hollywood Division, and Miss Barbara Stanwyck.
Miss Stanwyck: Also Hollywood Division.
Dr. Wagner: Miss Frances White transcribing. All right. We have a female, weight 118 pounds, well nourished with blond hair. Outward appearance, areas of discoloration on face, neck, chest, and arms. Small lacerations on face, neck, arms, and legs. Amputated pollex.
Detective Conejos: Dr. Wagner.
Dr. Wagner: Sorry. I mean thumb. Don, help me turn her over. Livor mortis on back and thighs set and quite pronounced. Thank you. Let us put her face up.
Miss Stanwyck: What is that at her neck by the cut?
Dr. Wagner: Decomposition. The body eats itself after death. What you are seeing is normal. All right. Incised neck wound transsects right and left carotid arteries through epiglottis and hypopharynx. Left and right internal jugular vein. This is easy. Primary cause of death, transsection of right and left carotid arteries. Contributing cause, neck wound.
Miss Stanwyck: What is that inside her neck?
Dr. Wagner: The larynx.
Detective Conejos: What was she cut with?
Dr. Wagner: Don, give me that ruler. No, I will stick my pencil in. Yes. This is not a knife wound. Knife cuts in general are shallow on one side, deep on the other. Depending on left or right hand preference. Whichever hand holds the knife. In this case, it looks like someone stood behind her with a garrote.
Detective Conejos: What kind?
Dr. Wagner: I’d say thin and flexible, like a wire, probably. Had to be thin. Compression cut. But these lacerations on her arms are sharp and rough.
Detective Conejos: What about her thumb? What happened to the thumb?
Miss Stanwyck: I want to see inside her chest.
Dr. Wagner: Don. Pollex is in that tray. I mean thumb. In the tray. Thank you. I see two, no, three lacerations to the thumb. First, a deep, transverse cut, smooth edges made with a sharp, smooth-edged knife or other sharp, smooth object. Then we have jagged lacerations almost like skin is torn. Let me see her hand. All right. Here we go. Here we go. Contusions to both wrists.
Discoloration. Thumb missing from right hand. Lacerations.
Detective Conejos: You are ahead of me, Doc.
Dr. Wagner: Somebody tied her wrists together. Thin contusion line. Could be wire on her wrists, and ankles, too. Look at her wrists. She had this long transverse cut first. The thumb. Bruising and clotting at wound site. It looks like she had that laceration a while.
Miss Stanwyck: And?
Dr. Wagner: Lacerations on her hand. Wrist to hand. She struggled.
Miss Stanwyck: And?
Detective Conejos: Slow down, doctor.
Dr. Wagner: I need to see her mouth. Don, grab her jaw. Hold it, will you? My God.
Miss Stanwyck: What, what?
Dr. Wagner: She chewed off her own thumb.
Detective Conejos: What the.
Miss Stanwyck: Chewed.
Detective Conejos: What the hell.
Dr. Wagner: Look, she has bone and skin in her teeth.
“No,” Joe said. He grabbed at the carbons.
“I’m not done. There’s more.”
“I’ve read enough.”
“What does it mean?”
“You don’t know? Pen.” He switched off the flash. I couldn’t see him.
“What?”
“Someone tied her up. Her wrists.”
“Yeah, must be whoever she met after she left the hospital.”
“She couldn’t get loose.”
“Right.”
“Pen, stop it. Think. If you were tied up, if you had a cut thumb and your wrists tied together, you’d need to escape. Your thumb’s already cut to the bone. Think hard, what would you do?”
“No knife? Nothing to cut me free?”
“The sharpest you’ve got is your teeth.”
I thought. Teeth. Mine crowded my mouth. They knocked against each other. My face went hot, my hands too. I dropped the carbons on my knees.
“You understand?”
I did. My feet bounced the autopsy report to the floor. It stuck, wet, to my legs. I hummed.
“Wait a minute,” Joe said. “What do you mean, she left the hospital? What do you know about a hospital?”
“Don’t—don’t touch me. You take it back inside. Pick it up, it’s touching my feet.”
“We don’t need to return it. The thing’s a carbon.”
“Get it out of here.”
“Let me—I’ve got it.”
“Get it out.”
He swung open the car door and disappeared in the rain. I disappeared, too, in my head. I pretended I never saw the transcript. Rose never sat tied up and scared, and she never, ever ground her teeth through her own bone to tear off her thumb and slip from whatever tied her hands. None of that happened, not when I disappeared. I couldn’t go far—to Buena Park, for a moment, a few years before Daisy, with Will and Dad and Rose and me in the living room and the radio blaring Eddie Cantor, funny. And Mom brings in a plate: Who wants lace cookies?
“I tore it up,” Joe said. The rain soaked him, and he looked at me through the driver’s side window. He talked through the open vent. “Pen? Did you hear me? I tore it and threw all the scraps in a storm drain. The rain washes clear to the ocean.”
“I heard you. The ocean.”
He got in the car and sat there, dripping. “What now? Talk to me.”
I shook my head.
He punched the ignition and the car’s engine mixed with rain sounds.
“Take me home, okay?”
Joe wiped fog off the inside windshield. He drove me through downtown to Hollywood, to the dorm, without making me talk. Nobody else was out that late in a downpour. A silver world of rain and traffic lights. We skidded a little—deep puddles and hard stops—and the car got smaller the more Joe drove. Rosemary sat with bound hands beside me. She raised her fists to her mouth and bit down.
CHAPTER 32
Suddenly Carole Lombard was rushed to the hospital, so the picture was postponed, and the wedding day set.
—Photoplay, November 1939
Last fall, when I still lived in Buena Park, Teddy asked me out to a movie. Afterward, he said we should eat.
“Just coffee and maybe a pancake special,” he said. I said okay. He was my brother’s best friend, I’d known him for years, and he was a deputy sheriff. Our first grown-up date.
He didn’t hold my hand as we walked past Godding’s and Sanitary Laundry. He said, “I saw George Brent in a better show. I’d give fifty bucks to see that Bette Davis close up. Here, I’ll hold that door.”
“I liked the picture.”
“If you like shows where every girl in the audience cries.”
Silly talk. We sat and drank coffee, and I felt nothing for him, and everything he said sounded stuffed together. “Then we stop at that old ranch out Coyote Hills and the geez doesn’t know his own dog’s been shot and the dog, he’s on the front porch breeding flies and panting with his mouth like this, huh huh huh, and I say a sheep’s missing next door and I can see sheep fuzz in the dog’s mouth panting, you want a refill?”
I might have seen him again. I might have dined out if he’d asked m
e. We stood by the sheriff’s station at the corner of Grand and Manchester, and he looked in the front window, slow and careful, then he pushed me around the corner and unlocked a side door to a private office. The room had a window and a desk and a smeary old wall lit by the streetlamps outside, hung with cheap prints of Christ and fishes, Christ in a boat, Christ leaning over a dead woman. Teddy pushed me into the room.
He swung his forearm at my breasts. I hit the stucco wall and Christ scattered, and then I hit nails. They cut into my back. I couldn’t move, and my breath left. I heard Teddy unzip, and far off, someone’s dog barked, and I thought, sheep fuzz, and he kicked me between my legs so I yelled, but I yelled in his mouth while he kissed me hard. Nobody heard. And if they heard, so what? He wore his cop shirt, cop pants, hat sliding off his head, hitting my head, one bounce, hitting linoleum, and my skirt up. Cop on a date.
It wasn’t enough to throw me against the nails, tear my panties, pinch my inside thigh so hard his hand rose up bloody. It wasn’t enough to shove whatever he could of himself inside me. He took one hand from my shoulder and pulled his gun from his belt. He lifted the gun and pressed it flat on my cheek. My ear was close; the loud pop when he cocked the gun; behind that, the slow talk and phone ringing in the station lobby, and on the framed sidewalk outside the window, an old man holding his wife’s hand and swinging it as they walked. They didn’t notice a girl pinned in the room. We would have looked like a dark cave to them. I remember the man’s hat, how it tilted forward, and I was afraid it would fall and they’d have to stop and his wife would let his hand go, and it was important to me that she held on to her husband’s hand, not drop it, and the cold gun rubbed up my cheek, from my chin to forehead. The cocked gun on my cheek. If I cried, so what? Nobody heard that, either.
The Glamorous Dead Page 18