Morgue Drawer Four md-1

by Jutta Profijt

  Luckily Gregor glanced at his watch just then. “Unfortunately I’ve got to get going. Do you want to grab a beer again sometime? Tomorrow, or the day after?”

  Martin nodded, stepped out of his way, and exhaled as his friend jogged down the front steps.

  “Can you manage OK by yourself from here?” Martin asked me, and I said yes. The sense of relief spreading through him overwhelmed me like a big, warm wave. That relief included his certain expectation that the natural place for me to sojourn would be here in the basement of this institute and that he would be freed from my presence once he left.

  I let him persist in this belief for the time being.

  My night was totally boring once again, the way nights do tend to be when you’re surrounded by nothing but soulless corpses lying around. What, you didn’t know? Eh, you haven’t missed much. I tried to lure other wandering ghosts up and out, but I couldn’t find any clues that other spirits were present. The question why I in particular was stranded here occupied me only briefly. I’ve never had much left over for philosophical crap, and so I preferred moldering around a little instead of seeking answers to the important questions of life and death.

  Why the hell weren’t there any TV sets down here, actually? Fine, the answer was admittedly obvious, because corpses stored in refrigerated morgue drawers typically do not require any diversion of that type. But now I found myself in a special situation, and I actually wouldn’t have objected at all to having the constant, mind-numbing stream of the boob tube on for company, because sleep was out of the question. Sleepless in Morgue Drawer Four, I thought, trying to imagine how a romantic comedy could arise from this material, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I think sawed-up corpses may not really make good stars for romantic comedies. As you can see, my thoughts were getting more and more idiotic, and just hanging out was getting more and more boring, so I went in search of a television. I found one in a conference room, but it was turned all the way off. So off that even the standby light wasn’t on. Since I no longer possessed any fingers I might have used to depress the power button, I spent a while cooing around the beautifully designed appliance, but I soon had to concede this wasn’t going to get my any further, and so I left the conference room. I had better luck in another room. There was a TV on standby. I tried to switch the set on with my electromagnetic waves—because I had heard about things like that at some point. Pulses of thought are really electromagnetic waves, or something along those lines. And things like cell phones, computers, and maybe, with just a little luck, televisions have something to do with those waves, too. So I focused my thoughts on switching the TV on. I don’t want to bore you, so I’ll briefly summarize the result of my efforts: it didn’t work. Still, I’d killed some time (funny way to word that, don’t you think?), and so now I didn’t have to wait so long for the return of my noble forensic pathologist/knight.

  —•—

  At the start of the work day, Martin came into the basement and asked in his thoughts, Everything OK with you? And he then apologized that he had a ton of work to do and didn’t have time for me just now. I felt his relief when I said that wasn’t a problem, he shouldn’t give any thought to me, just get his important work done. He trotted out, and I after him. Of course I should have left him in peace, but I already had a totally boring night behind me, and I wanted some action! I firmly resolved not to put him in any embarrassing situations, and I followed him without making myself noticed. And that ended up working out really well.

  I’ve written hardly a positive word about Martin so far, and back at the moment when I started tailing him to escape my boredom I hadn’t really anticipated feeling the need to do so, either. But now, since I’ve not only brought Martin’s life to the brink of catastrophe but also put him right in the thick of things, I feel compelled to clear a few things up.

  I’m sure you’ve had the experience of seeing someone you’ve never met before and just knowing at a glance if they’re a cheerful or grumpy type. Martin is one of the cheerful ones. His face tells you right away that he likes to laugh, and the way his colleagues said hi to him on this morning showed me that people like him. A guy named Jochen came over to Martin’s desk and laid an old, handled-to-death city map onto the desk, and he said he’d brought it back for Martin from his trip out of town over the weekend. Martin picked up the map, unfolded it, studied it, and thanked Jochen effusively.

  “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  “At the flea market,” Jochen explained, his chest puffed out with pride.

  (Yes, we’re talking here about an old city map—a thing that shows streets and train lines and buildings and all that.)

  “It’s a true rarity,” Martin said enthusiastically.

  Jochen patted him on the shoulder again, assuring Martin that the pleasure was entirely his, and he accepted Martin’s repeated thanks with a grin. If I still had a mouth, then it’d have been gaping so wide open you could shove an entire XXL Burger Value Meal sideways into it. With fries. And dessert. But I pulled myself together; I didn’t want to irritate him, which was exactly why I had undertaken not to let him sense my presence, so I kept my trap shut. But it was hard, let me tell you.

  The day had nothing interesting to offer; Martin wrote reports—or, more accurately: he dictated them. I had never seen something like that before, so I stayed with him for quite a while watching. His computer has a program that recognizes speech. Because I’ve learned what that means since then, obviously, I can quickly explain it to you now: you speak into the microphone attached to your headset, which is also connected to the computer, and then the computer types what you say all by itself. Crazy, right? Imagine a typing pool in an office, like at a lawyer’s office or something. In the olden days the typists would all be putting their special finger skills to the test, but nowadays the women are all sitting there wearing headsets that ruin their hair, hands resting lazily in their laps, and they just mutter out their letters, memos, and reports, which the computers type. INSANE!

  Anyways, Martin was prattling out his endless reports, and the computer was diligently taking everything down. Impressive technology. Of course, a proper soccer match would’ve held my attention more, and longer, but no one seemed to be using a computer for anything even remotely interesting in this office building. No softcore porn on the Internet, no hot chats with anonymous representatives of large religious communities, and no gambling. Not even harmless things like flight simulators or car racing. Just reports, reports, reports. So I soon lost interest and started cruising around the offices aimlessly, wiling away the time and finding my passive existence somewhat bleak. Sure, I was able to take a look around in the women’s bathroom and stare at the women’s panties without them noticing anything. I practiced going through the wall a bit and was happy about the slight tickle I felt when I whooshed through the wall into the break room and landed in the microwave. But I couldn’t get a cup of coffee for myself—which, due to the tight spatial situation in front of the coffee machine, could’ve been pretty interesting at times. Specifically, if some piece of skirt were standing in this corner of the break room, there would basically be no way to avoid a full body check. The break room’s interior designer must have been a pretty clever guy. Anyways, I’d have enjoyed squeezing past some lab coat booty in front of the coffee machine, but then I remembered: no body, no check. No luck!

  Slowly the offices emptied out, and I peeked in on Martin again; at some point he also powered down his computer, grabbed his duffle coat, and made his way to the basement. With me quickly in tow. After we got downstairs I pretended I’d spent the whole day like a good boy in my morgue drawer and I was now extremely happy that someone had finally come to visit me. Martin fell for it.

  “Martin,” I said in a tone I hoped sounded trustworthy and serious, the way the news anchors on public television like to come off. “Now, finally, we really have to get cracking with our investigation, otherwise all our leads will be cold, and the truth about my mu
rder will never come out.”

  I was proud of the seriousness of my statements and my absolutely professional diction. Of course, I was also just as proud of my self-control, because I’d actually spent a long time coming up with that until phrases such as “lazy pigs,” “boil-ridden, rat-assed murderers,” and the like stopped occurring to me.

  Martin hemmed and hawed, writhing like an earthworm in between the blades of someone’s garden shears.

  “I’m not entirely certain whether…” His nicely pre-formulated sentence construction ended there, but since I could read the pulses from his brain clearly, I detected the rest of what he had wanted to say among the unraveling streams of thought: he didn’t believe a single word in my entire story.

  “Martin, where’s the problem?” I asked, still under self-control and proud of it. I even used his name—did you notice?—because whenever you address someone by name, then you establish a certain connection with him. I learned that from a movie once.

  “All investigations point toward your death being an accident. No one saw anyone push you.”

  “Martin,” I said again. “Whether or not someone sees something doesn’t matter. Look, if I weren’t such a thorough person I wouldn’t have seen the body in the trunk, either.”

  “What body?” Martin asked. “In what trunk?”

  Now I totally wasn’t expecting that. In my mind’s eye—the only eye I still have—I quickly ran back through our previous conversations and realized I hadn’t told Martin anything at all about stealing the car or the body in the trunk! I remedied that now as fast as I could.

  Martin seemed totally distraught.

  “OK, you see,” I said, trying to get him back on track, “I discovered this body in the trunk only by accident.”

  Martin just couldn’t grasp what I was trying to tell him. Oh my God, sometimes academics are really slow on the uptake.

  I explained it again, enunciating clearly. “The body was in the trunk. I happened to look in there and find her. But the body would still have been in there if I hadn’t checked. Then no one would have seen her, but she would still have been there.”

  Now I thought I had expressed myself quite clearly, but Martin was still hemming and hawing: “But if there was in fact a body, it would have had to turn up at some point here at the Institute.”

  I don’t know what was wrong with Martin, but apparently he enjoyed having brain farts the minute anything even remotely had to do with me. I tried to explain it to him in simpler words.

  “If your mother died, would you pack her into your trunk?” I asked.

  “Of course not. She wouldn’t even fit in there,” he replied.

  “But you wouldn’t try to, either, right?” I asked with the patience of a saint (finally I know where that expression comes from—if only I still had adrenalin in my arteries…).

  “No.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Call the mortuary.”

  “AH HA!” We were slowly getting somewhere.

  “So what do you think?” I continued, choosing my words carefully. “What might the reason be for someone to stash a body in the trunk of a car?”

  “Her death hasn’t been reported,” he said after thinking a bit.

  “Exactly!” I was relieved. He had managed to get there on his own. “And for what purpose does one stick an unreported dead body into the trunk of an automobile?”

  “To take her somewhere and bury her in a shallow grave,” Martin whispered.

  Unfathomable. The man deals with unnatural deaths day in and day out, sees bodies that would make any other normal person’s stomach and whatever else turn, but when it comes to imagining why such bodies end up on his autopsy table in the first place, he goes all wobbly-kneed.

  “Exactly,” I said, praising him. “The body may never turn up; that is exactly why the whole trunk procedure is used.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Also interesting is the question of where the car ended up.”

  “The car?”

  We could have easily turned this conversation into a sitcom. Guaranteed to be a hit.

  “That kind of car costs a half million euros. If it gets stolen, you report it to the insurance company, right?”

  “I would certainly assume so.”

  Ah ha, we were again achieving complete sentences. Good.

  “So, find out whether anyone has reported that kind of car stolen,” I suggested.

  “And if not?” Martin asked.

  “Then it’s because it had a body in the trunk, and people prefer to avoid mentioning that kind of thing on the incident report forms for the insurance.”

  He was not a hundred percent convinced, but I was sure he would look into it. And then he would finally start helping me solve my murder with a bit more conviction and verve. At least, I hoped so.

  I considered riding home with him, but I decided to stay and try my luck with the TVs again. I’d hung out during the day for a while in the conference room while they were playing a video presentation, and I thought I could sense some of those waves. Maybe I could figure out how to get the TV to turn on. I accompanied Martin to the door and then made my way upstairs.

  THREE

  I’d hardly started making my way toward the TV when I heard a distant shriek for help. OK, fine—at first I wasn’t sure if it really was a shriek for help or if some wave rushing through the area had upset my thoughts. After all, if you believe the people wearing aluminum-foil helmets, there are millions of radio, television, and of course cell phone signals flitting through the air all the time, so the likelihood that I might fly through one of those waves at some point and be able to interpret it was more than probable. At least, I thought so. Science wasn’t really my kind of thing in school, but I had always liked the experiments with loud bangs, big whooshes, or bad smells. Although ultimately the question of why the bangs, whooshes, or smells occur always really irritated me.

  Anyways, I focused my attention on what I thought I had heard, and in fact I heard the shriek again. Clearly a shriek for help. From Martin. Uh-oh, foul mischance!

  I raced to the door that he had disappeared through and flashed through it as well without even looking for the crack or keyhole first. An ice-cold hurricane-force wind was whistling through the front courtyard—at least that’s how it seemed to me. I was afraid. Afraid that the wind would just sweep me away somewhere I’d be all alone. Afraid I might even be blown apart and no longer exist—just like that, poof, Pascha’s gone. Afraid of losing the rest of my wretched existence. I clung to my life, although it wasn’t a real one anymore.

  Martin was apparently also afraid, because although I couldn’t hear him anymore I was receiving signals from him, and they were sheer terror. I whizzed in the direction I was getting the signals from, to the shoulder of the road where only a single wannabe car was parked: Martin’s ugly little trash can. The lighting here wasn’t the best; behind me was the Institute for Forensic Medicine and right next to that was Melaten Cemetery, a gruesome setting that might have sent a shiver down my spine if I had still had a back. Instead I focused on keeping all the molecules or whatever I was made of together and not letting myself be blown apart or away so I could make it to Martin, who was being pressed onto his car by a not very tall but extremely obese man.

  “I’ll cut your ugly pig ears off if you show up at my woman’s place again asking stupid questions about that little chicken shit, got it?” the guy was just telling Martin.

  Of course, it wasn’t a real yes/no question—no one in that situation would answer no, and Martin didn’t, either. He just nodded.

  “Good. Then let’s have a nice little chat, man to man, about what kind of shit you were trying to pull off at her place.”

  The guy was still leaning on the trash can car, and Martin was wedged in between it and him. He didn’t look like he wanted to have a nice, man-to-man chat; he looked more like he really wanted to smash in the face of someone he considered cowardly and weaker
than him, but I kept that observation to myself.

  “I’m here,” I said. “Stay cool, he’s not going to do anything to you.”

  “Ha ha,” Martin countered. “So he’s just playing around?”

  I was impressed. Having a sense of humor in a situation like this was evidence of a certain toughness that Martin otherwise seemed to totally lack. But maybe he was just slowly cracking up.

  “If he’d wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead,” I said to console him, but Martin’s brain waves weren’t calming down. To the contrary. Maybe I shouldn’t have said the D-word out loud.

  “What were you doing at my little lady’s place?” the guy asked. His voice was so hoarse I was certain he’d expire from lung cancer long before his statistical life expectancy, but we didn’t have time to wait for that.

  “Bend his ears in your finest medical-doctorese and make clear to him that you were at Nina’s as part of an official visit,” I suggested. “Once he realizes you’re a cop, he’ll piss himself.”

  “I performed the postmortem on the body of Sascha Lerchenberg and in doing so was not able to resolve a few questions sufficiently,” Martin began with all the authority he could muster. It was already quite a show; I was amazed. The response by the fat jellyfish was direct and unambiguous. He stood up straight, thereby releasing Martin’s constrained body, and even took a step backward. Martin straightened his shoulders, which did not really look all that impressive in a duffle coat, and raised his chin.

  “Body butchers don’t do investigations,” the jellyfish said in a tone I knew well. He was going to the trouble to sound self-confident and superior, but there was doubt there. I could hear it in him. Still, I was amazed that Nina had apparently noted both Martin’s name and his mention of the Institute for Forensic Medicine, and the jellyfish seemed stupefied that the name and profession weren’t a bluff. He tried not to let on about his surprise and accordingly kept jabbing his finger into Martin’s chest when he spoke. But Martin pushed his hand away.