Morgue Drawer Four md-1

by Jutta Profijt

  Now I’d had enough. I hadn’t suffered as much as I had today for a very long time. If this was the road to paradise, then to hell with it.

  “Martin,” I yelled, and he winced as expected. “Can we please talk about continuing my investigation now?”

  He mumbled “excuse me” to the others and hastily left the break room. I followed him but not without quickly blowing Katrin one more imaginary kiss.

  We had hardly stepped out of the break room when I asked, “Who killed her?” Martin was moving toward his office.

  “No one,” he said, rushing down the corridor. I don’t know why he was in such a hurry, but I had no problem following him.

  “Are you trying to bullshit me?” I asked less than obligingly, but I apologized immediately to avoid putting Martin’s willingness to cooperate to too hard a test.

  “She died of anaphylactic shock.”

  “I see.” My basic understanding of medicine consists of a fairly narrow list of topics. Colds, headaches, the runs, withdrawal, things like that. “Anaphylactic shock” doesn’t rank among them, as I’m sure you’ve already surmised. Martin apparently couldn’t conceive of someone having so large a knowledge gap because only after multiple inquiries did he deign to tell me the woman had kicked the bucket from an allergy. Up to that point I had always thought people with allergies were posers. They’re not actually sick, properly speaking, but they have a totally exaggerated response to things that to normal people are just normal things. Like pollen. Or hazelnuts, as in the case of the body under discussion here. It was news to me that someone could die from such a made-up-sounding story. It was presumably news to that woman, too, although her advance in knowledge couldn’t have lasted long since it was interrupted—indeed, ended—by her abrupt death. Shit happens, you might now say, and that would describe her manner of death quite aptly. However, the cause of her early demise did pose one compelling question.

  “Why in the hell does someone try to get rid of a body that died from a hazelnut?”

  Martin shrugged.

  “Are you sure someone didn’t actually coax her along?” I probed.

  “Of course, the chemical toxicology results have not come in yet.”

  For once I understood his answer right away—and was somehow proud of that.

  “But, by and large, I am sure, yes.”

  Neither of us said anything for a little while. Martin stared at his screen.

  “OK, don’t make me squeeze every word out individually,” I said, repeating the exact words my mother used to say to piss me off.

  “She is approximately in her mid-twenties, height one hundred fifty-two centimeters, and weight forty-two kilograms. At the time of her death she was fairly healthy, apart from a slight cold. She had taken a nonprescription over-the-counter medicine for the cold. In addition, her last meal consisted of cookies with hazelnuts.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Her teeth had been subject to dental efforts that fall short of German standards.”

  My God, sometimes he expressed himself in such a ridiculously complicated way.

  “And shortly before her death she had sexual intercourse.” Ah ha, now we were getting to the interesting bits.

  “Who with?” I immediately asked, naturally, since that is one of the most important sex-related questions. Who did it with who?

  “No idea,” Martin answered.

  “No DNA?” I replied, because of course any kid knows that they can convict sex offenders nowadays using the DNA evidence they leave behind. You know, sperm and all that.

  “There is also DNA evidence,” Martin lectured. “But it has not been evaluated yet.”

  We didn’t say anything for a while again.

  “There is pubic hair that did not originate from her. Dermal abrasions on her heels, which were presumably sustained while being carried to the vehicle. Further abrasions dorsally, presumably caused by the carpeting in the trunk. Some abrasions at sites where she was presumably touched by the perpetrator as she was packed into the vehicle. And a whole list of additional fibers and all kinds of marks that stem from the location where the body was discarded.”

  “Where was that actually?” I asked. “Where did they find her?”

  “At the sewage plant.”

  I sensed Martin wondering whether it had mattered to her at all to have been in such a place. Right after these thoughts unintentionally whizzed through his brain came this next thought: That’s complete nonsense. The woman is dead; she couldn’t have been aware of where they discarded her. And then: But Pascha is aware of everything. Martin resisted these thoughts, but they could not be driven out; they came crashing in on him, pestering him, I could sense it exactly. He shook his head, but that didn’t help, of course. Good old Martin was well on his way toward an authentic, full-on breakdown.

  “Have you, um, are you able to…sense anything with her?” he stammered.

  “No, man, the woman’s dead as a doornail,” I said, hoping my clear language would make him feel better. It didn’t work. He winced as though someone had made an unseemly comment about a third party, only to find that person had overheard the whole thing.

  “Have you ever given any thought to something like that before?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Martin replied.

  “All right then,” I said. “So you should leave it at that. I’m just some kind of cosmic accident, and all the others are dead, all right?”

  He nodded but didn’t seem convinced.

  “I think I’ll head back home then,” he said.

  I sighed. I had actually been hoping he would still come up with another couple of interesting findings today, but Martin was definitely in no position to be formulating even one more lucid thought or listening to me lay out my still-incomplete, although brilliant, theories.

  “Do you think you could turn on the TV in Conference Room Two for me?” I asked. He nodded, grabbed his coat, turned on the TV, and drove home.

  —•—

  “A condom was not used. But lubricant was,” Martin reported the next morning.

  A hooker. Holy hang-gliding whores, that woman was a pro! And, holy crowing cocks, Martin was like a new man this morning. He’d already taken his coat off and swung open the door to the conference room so vigorously it almost damaged the wall. I winced, as I sat in front of a morning talk show.

  “Are you here?” he asked carefully. “You’re not saying anything.”

  “I’m here and can tell you what the current national weather conditions are right now, what today’s forecast is, and how many calories a butter croissant without butter has.”

  He didn’t seem to know what to do with that answer for a second. Then he stared at the screen. The repugnantly upbeat talking head with the artificially tousled hair and a smile paralyzed by too much cosmetic surgery was just explaining what should be part of a really healthy breakfast: muesli, minus the sugar, soaked in hot water and then rinsed down with a glass of freshly squeezed fruit juice. Personally, if I had still had the choice, I wouldn’t chase pap like that with a glass of juice; instead, I’d blast it down the pipes with a high-energy surge from the toilet tank, but on this point tastes do indeed diverge just a bit.

  “Good. The report is complete; should we go through it once?” Martin suggested a bit abruptly.

  The gentleman was offering me his cooperation on a silver tray? Yes; so what was the deal with him today? Had he resorted to taking drugs? Smoking, swallowing, shooting up? I resolved not to inquire further but just play along.

  “I’d love to, Martin. Great.”

  I sounded like a social worker reciting a standard de-escalation script in response to insults or death threats, as blasé as if I’d been asked what time it was. Outwardly casual and friendly, but artificial like a Christmas tree in Abu Dhabi.

  “There is still no clue to her identity,” Martin lectured, “apart from the quality of the dental work, which presumably points to Eastern Europe.”

  “I s
ee,” I said.

  They call that “active listening” when you keep mumbling things like “hmm” and “uh-huh” and “you don’t say” now and again. I learned that on TV, at five forty-five, when they run the “Be Your Own Ghostwriter” segment on effective communication in today’s world.

  “Her overall health status was fairly good, but she was perhaps a bit underweight.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  An irreproachable effective-communication strategy: I swallowed my objection that she was unable to benefit from good health anymore as she now, unfortunately, and despite an excellent constitution, was dead, because Martin might have taken that as a provocation. So, I just said “uh-huh.”

  “There were some fibers under her fingernails that could have come from an expensive wool carpet.”

  “Hmm.”

  At the next rhetorical pause I would have to start over with “I see” to keep applying my effective-communication skills, but it didn’t come to that.

  “Overall we can say that the woman died a natural death, which the person who intended the body to disappear either did not realize or did realize, but nevertheless did not wish to follow the prescribed procedure for reporting a death, with the issuance of an official death certificate.”

  “What conclusion can we draw from this?” I asked carefully, using the word “we” intentionally to solidify Martin’s sudden engagement and to clearly signal solidarity on my end.

  “She was not murdered, so there is no murderer.”

  “How does that help us?” I asked, since I couldn’t really follow Martin’s train of thought.

  “Since there is no murderer who killed the young woman, there is also no reason to kill you, because you did not discover a murder when you saw the woman in the trunk.”

  My standard rhetorical script stuck in my throat. So that’s why Martin was in such a good mood. He had discovered that the guy he thought was the woman’s murderer wasn’t a murderer at all, and so all was right with the world again. There was just one snag.

  “But someone did kill me, Martin!”

  The self-control I had laboriously drilled into myself was now down the tubes; my response to this unbelievably stupid finding by my only possible earthbound assistant was no longer informed by morning television for the rhetorically self-righteous but instead by the action flicks I had taken in between ten last night and two this morning.

  “Somebody, whether it was the guy who stowed that chick in the trunk or somebody else, KILLED me! I couldn’t care less if some underweight babe kicked it because she ate some nut or a blue bean, for that matter.”

  Martin gasped for air, but I wasn’t done yet.

  “Maybe the guy who put her in the trunk didn’t kill her, but we still totally know for absolutely sure that he didn’t want to be connected to the dead Jane Doe. So he wanted to get rid of her. So he might not have been particularly happy that somebody, namely the guy who stole his car, suddenly found out that he had a dead woman in his trunk. So, it may have occurred to him to push the little car thief off the bridge.”

  Martin was getting paler and paler, and now he looked just as unhappy as he had last night.

  “But you don’t know whose car you stole, do you?”

  “No,” I replied. “But the other guy doesn’t know that, either.”

  Martin collapsed into one of the conference chairs, completely exhausted. “So what do we do now?” he asked.

  “We’ve got to find out who the b…” I quickly swallowed the word “bitch” and continued, “…who the body is.”

  Martin looked at me admonishingly, maybe he sensed the word before I changed my phrasing.

  “The police are responsible for that,” he said.

  “The police won’t be able to figure anything out, the way things work in their world,” I said.

  “In ‘their’ world?” Martin asked.

  Ugh, again with the slow uptake that keeps pissing me off. “OK, the woman has been dead for eight days, right?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “And she hasn’t been reported missing yet, right?”

  Nodding.

  “And she’s got Eastern European choppers and is presumably a pro?”

  More nodding.

  “Do you think she’s been staying in Germany legally?” Now he’d finally gotten it!

  “But…” he began. But I definitively refused to entertain any further protest.

  “People in the real world do not think you’re a cop,” I said. The mere idea that Mr. Roly-Poly Blunderhead here could be a member of a law enforcement agency was a complete joke. “You’ve got a chance to find out her identity.”

  “But what should I say about why I’m looking for her?”

  If I’d had eyes, I’d have rolled them up so high they spun through my head twice.

  “Just say that you fell in love with her,” I joked.

  Martin took the suggestion seriously. “But then I would need to know her name,” he objected.

  “You could have seen her waiting in line at the grocery store and immediately fallen head over heels for her,” I said, spinning the web tighter. Just like in those romantic comedies they run on cable between three and five in the morning for the sentimental and sleepless. Even though I was making fun of him, I recognized it was a terrific idea. Martin would play the unhappy-in-love guy with absolute credibility. He came off as harmless and inspired pity. If he couldn’t get any information about the woman using that whole shtick, then nothing and no one could uncover her identity. Bingo!

  In his thoughts he was still coming up with objections, such as the fact that the police were surely still looking into her identity, and he didn’t want to get in those guys’ way, but he didn’t protest anymore. After all, it’d also occurred to him that the cops didn’t have the slightest inkling where to starting looking for the woman’s identity. They also didn’t know she’d been stuck into the car, which they also didn’t even know I had stolen. And, again, Martin couldn’t just clue all his detective buddies in on these facts, since then he’d have to explain how he came to know it all…Instead he completely gave up his mental protests and accepted that the search for the woman’s identity would have to depend on him.

  However, another small problem just occurred to me. If the guy who fell for the hottie at the grocery store checkout were now to go running around with a photo of her dead body, then our oh-so-sappy story might have a tiny credibility problem. But Martin just thought:

  “No problem. For cases like this we use some software that generates a drawing from a photo.”

  Well then, that should do.

  After a night of television terror and morning of grueling discussion, I wanted to enjoy a few quiet hours to myself, so I floated down to the autopsy section, fluttered past the autopsy room without looking inside, and slid into Morgue Drawer Four.

  —•—

  I noticed it right away: something was not right. I didn’t feel at home. I felt like I was in a grave. I felt defiled, in a really disgusting way. I was surprised at myself. One’s own body shouldn’t actually trigger feelings of disgust, especially since it had been washed clean—which during my lifetime had not always been the case. But, anyways, I was strangely affected by myself and considered what I would do when the drawer pulled open. A lightbulb flashed on, and then came the blow: there was a strange body in Morgue Drawer Four! And specifically a rather, no, not rather, but a very, very disgusting one! I’ll spare you the details, but the body wasn’t that fresh anymore, if you get my drift. It was swollen up, discolored, and featured an injury to the skull that was presumably caused by an ax or log-splitting maul. I’m quoting the autopsy report here, which was to be dictated at the then-pending postmortem, so at least I don’t have to describe the grizzly zombie face in my own words. And to think I was lying on top of a body like that. Laid myself to rest. At first I felt really sick to my stomach, although without a stomach and the accompanying neurons that was no longer possible, but i
f I could have, I would have puked the whole morgue drawer full. Just like that. Virtually.

  But next I was hit by something else, namely this realization: my body was gone! It had been lying in Morgue Drawer Four since I had been pushed off the overpass bridge, and now it was gone. Where was I?

  I raced over to Martin, ambushed him from out of the darkness and yelled, “Where is my body?”

  Martin winced, gathered his thoughts that had been immersed in a report, and absently mumbled, “The district attorney’s office released it, and it was subsequently picked up by a mortician.”

  “A mortician?” I asked as though I didn’t know what that is.

  “Yes, by a mortician. To prepare it for the burial.”

  The word floored me. Burial. My body was being taken away from me. My morgue drawer. My home. My last known address: Institute for Forensic Medicine, Morgue Drawer 4. I was homeless.

  I was speechless. Martin had dived with his thoughts deep back into his report and wasn’t paying attention to me at all. And so it begins, I thought to myself. You’re losing your home, you’re hardly perceptible, and at some point you’ll be all gone. No one will remember you anymore, no one will talk to you anymore. I disappeared off into the break room, perched on top of the coffee machine, and even among all of these people coming and going and drinking coffee I felt lonely and sorry for myself.

  —•—

  The closer it got to quitting time, the more nervous Martin got. Initially it seemed like he was having trouble with his stupid headset; he kept joggling it around and taking it off to massage the spot over his left ear where the earpiece had already pressed an authentic dent into his skull, and he kept repositioning the cord connecting the headset to his computer about a thousand times a minute. I didn’t want to harp on him about it, but if he could just type the report like a normal person he’d probably have had an easier time. Anyways, it may well be that his imminent deployment as a lovesick grocery store customer was also notching up his nervousness. Then when I asked if he’d had the photograph converted, his self-control fizzled like a fart on fire.