Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  His toneless voice held as little apparent emotion as that of the room’s low, persistent mechanical hum. “The subject,” he said as he moved slowly toward the top of the table, “has a bag that appears to be brown burlap over its head. This bag is tightly cinched at the deceased’s neck by means of a length of rope. One end of this rope is loosely grasped in the deceased’s left hand.” The pathologist paused, reached into the breast pocket of his lab coat and extracted a pair of tweezers with which he cautiously lifted the rope end, studied it, squeezed it gently, then replaced it. “The rope is a pliable, one-quarter-inch-diameter, gray-and-beige woven braid of the type used to decorate upholstered furniture.”

  Beneath the table, the reels of the tape recorder spun when the pathologist talked and stopped when he didn’t. I was captivated by this advanced technology, but I forced my eyes back to the cadaver. Gleason’s eyes never seemed to leave the body. He looked thoroughly shocked, his face pale, his eyes sunken. Shock was not an emotion I usually associated with him. His habitual demeanor was contemptuous and insouciant, as if he were convinced he knew more than everybody else but was indifferent to their ignorance.

  From somewhere I didn’t see, the pathologist procured a measuring tape and extended it from the top of the bag to the foot of the corpse. “The subject is a slender, tall female, seventy and two-thirds inches long,” he intoned.

  My eyes followed the line of the tape and back again. The clothes of the corpse were simple, but old and cheap. On her feet, she wore low-heeled pumps of scuffed black leather. One of her dark beige stockings sported a wide run that extended from the arch of her foot to the hem of her plain, gray-wool skirt. Beneath the rent in the stocking, the skin of her leg shone pale and hairless. Her blouse, with its Peter Pan collar and row of pearl buttons down the front, had seen enough washings to render it a slightly less than respectable shade of yellow. The light wool cardigan was pilled and unraveled at the edges of the sleeves. I wished that I could see her face, for her body filled me with a sense of the vulnerability of the living and the dead. I was curious from a human, as well as from a legal, perspective. A young woman so abruptly removed from life and we were not permitted to see her face.

  “The subject’s clothing is not in disarray,” the patholo-gist observed. “Her ears and fingers are devoid of jewelry. On her right wrist she wears a Timex watch.” He leaned closer to the table. “The crystal is cracked but intact. The hands are stopped at five minutes after twelve.”

  I had as yet no idea of the significance of anything I saw, but already I knew every minute detail had to be recorded, analyzed, reported. I’d been a law student since the middle of the previous September. How many hours had I spent in Criminal Law and Procedure listening to the professors’ tales of cases won or lost on the strength of a single small detail convincingly remembered?

  “A cursory examination of the clothed cadaver exhibits no bruising or discoloration of the skin—” The pathologist suddenly stopped as if he realized he’d made an error or had noticed something he’d failed to see before. He bent close to the neck of the body, his face near where the edge of the burlap met the discolored nylon of the dead woman’s blouse. For an eerie instant, it looked as though he were kissing the corpse. I stepped back. Gleason sucked in his breath. But Dr. Slater seemed to have forgotten that we were in the room. After a moment’s further observation, he stood upright and pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of a pouch suspended on the overhead rail. He tugged them on, then with his right hand, reached for the throat of the deceased. “Gentlemen,” he finally said, “observe . . .”

  Gleason and I moved closer. For the first time I noticed the dead body emitted a peculiar odor and I fought the urge to gag. I could detect a hint of the meat smell I’d earlier noticed in the room of drawers, each of which, I now realized, must hold a body. I could smell stale perspiration mixed with some sort of deodorant. I could smell Yard-ley’s English Lavender. And I could detect an indefinable musky scent that was vaguely familiar, though I had no idea why.

  I expected—feared—to see some unusual bruise or laceration, so I was disappointed to discover that all the pathologist wanted us to look at was a thin gold chain around the neck of the dead woman. With fingers made awkward by the thick yellow gloves, he reached for the chain, but it eluded his grasp. In the first show of emotion he’d allowed himself, he angrily yanked off the glove and grabbed the narrow thread of gold with his bare hand.

  But the chain did not yield to his tug. He paused, then fumbled with the tiny pearl buttons of the yellowed blouse and unfastened the top few. Gleason and I leaned farther forward. All of us were surprised to see that the chain was attached to a small cloth packet about one and one-half inches square and that this mysterious item was pinned to the strap of the slip the woman wore over her brassiere.

  Wordlessly, the pathologist located a pair of long-nose scissors on the overhead rack and snipped off the corner to free the little packet. Using his tweezers, he held it up. As we studied it, I expected him to set the tape reels spinning with his description of the object, but he said nothing, just laid the small bundle in a glass dish on a nearby white enamel table. Gleason’s eyes followed the movements of the pathologist’s hand. His interest was clearly evident. So was his disappointment that his curiosity as to its contents was not about to be immediately satisfied.

  Again donning the yellow rubber gloves, Slater announced, “I am now about to remove the clothing of the deceased.” He took the largest of the scissors that hung over his head and lifted the wool fabric of the gray skirt. He slipped the bottom blade between the deceased’s legs. I suppressed a gasp at this violation. I had never seen clothing cut away from a body, and the process seemed an obscene invasion of the privacy of the dead.

  But just as steel touched cloth, the phone rang. The brash sound of it echoing in the white room seemed to startle the pathologist. He jumped and the scissors flew out of his hand and landed with a sharp crack on the tile at Gleason’s feet. Gleason realized how close he’d come to being stabbed and he laughed. Nothing delighted Gleason more than an opportunity to cheat fate.

  The phone sat on a counter near the door, and its black bulk stood in contrast to both the white surface it rested on and the yellow-gloved hand that held the receiver. It disgusted me that the pathologist would be so careless as to touch the corpse with a bare hand, then touch the telephone with a gloved hand, but I said nothing lest Gleason call me an “old lady,” his favorite insult for me among the many in his considerable collection.

  After a short, hushed conversation, the pathologist hung up and signaled to us to approach the door. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I’ve been asked to attend upstairs. I can’t leave you alone with the deceased, but I’ll return shortly to proceed with the autopsy. My instructions are to ask you to wait outside the building until I return.”

  “Yeah, great,” Gleason said. “I can use the air.”

  The pathologist ushered us back out into the hallway, locked the door of the lab, then gave the door handle a strong shake to ensure that it was secure. We followed his white back down the dimly lit hall until we passed through the wire-mesh gate and the wooden door in front of it.

  “What’s this all about, Gleason? What are you up to?” I was genuinely curious.

  “Nothing good, old lady, what else? Let’s get out of here. I need a cig.”

  We stepped out into the night. It seemed to have become warmer in the short time since I’d left the house on Clinton Street. There was no possibility of snow now. The street lamps on Lombard created hazy circles of light in the mist-filled air. Across the shiny black pavement, the red neon sign announcing “Auto-Rite Collision—auto-body repairs” flashed on and off. Next door to it, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario liquor store was closed up tight, though the cheerful sound of slightly inebriated voices was faintly audible from the door of the Scottish Club, conveniently located in the same building.

  Gleason pulled out a slim silver case and lit up.
He lounged against the morgue’s stone door frame and let the smoke from his cigarette mingle with the mist. “Somebody sure did a job on that one,” he remarked. I waited for the irreverent comment that I was sure would follow, but my friend was strangely reticent. Perhaps the sight of the body had shaken him. Not something I would have expected, given that he was always unflappable. “But I suppose even a case like this one wouldn’t be good enough for you,” he finally added.

  I didn’t take the bait. I was sick of arguing with him about the law school projects we had regrettably been thrust into. Both of us had four-year pre-law degrees, which, though prestigious, had put us behind the two-year students now taking the same first-year law classes. Because of this, Gleason and I had been offered the opportunity to accelerate by participating in a special summer program. We could work independently or as a two-man team, but to qualify, we needed a strong proposal. And our time was extremely limited. The more senior students had already secured their assignments. Competition for the few remaining slots was stiff.

  I didn’t want to work with Gleason. I assumed he would use the contacts of his influential father to find him an assignment in banking or real estate law. I, on the other hand, was far more interested in my own project: to get Magistrate Sheldrake Tuppin to take me on as his judicial intern. Everyone, including my academic mentor, Professor Kavin, told me I was crazy. It was unprecedented for a first-year student to serve as anyone’s intern, let alone Tuppin’s, who always refused to take on an intern. Nevertheless, I was convinced that I could change the magistrate’s mind. I’d been scouring the law library, the archives, even the daily papers for a case unusual enough to get Tuppin interested in me. Gleason’s escapade was interrupting me in this task. An uncomfortable thought hit me. Was this gruesome cadaver part of his project? Was this visit to the morgue Gleason’s way of roping me into helping him?

  I pushed that thought aside for the moment. “What could have happened to the woman?” I asked. “She didn’t have a mark on her. Do you suppose somebody ambushed her and tossed that bag over her head before she could even turn around?”

  Gleason shrugged. “Speculation is a poor substitute for knowledge, Portal,” he retorted in one of those law school clichés that hook themselves into a lawyer’s language and remain there for the duration. “Who knows what happened? Who needs to ask? When Dr. Death comes back downstairs, he’ll figure it all out, talk it into that machine of his and give us all we need for our project. You can write it down and hand it in.”

  “Maybe you work that way, Adams. I don’t.” Here was Gleason patronizing me as usual and making me get angry, which was exactly what he intended. We’d known each other for a long time, long enough for him to realize that if he baited me until I lost my temper, he could then manipulate me through my guilt over having relinquished control of myself.

  “Everything’s simple,” he said, studying the glowing red end of his cigarette, “as long as you can get someone else to do it for you.”

  I wanted to punch him. Instead, I left him silently smoking and took a short stroll down the street. The grimness of the evening seemed appropriate to the fate of the dead. Even the stolid, civically responsible Victorian mass of the firehouse seemed to be mourning. It took me a few minutes to walk there and turn back. When I returned to the morgue, Gleason was lighting up a second cigarette. “Do you think he forgot that we’re out here?” I asked.

  “Let’s find out,” Gleason replied. He turned the handle of the main door. It sprang open without resistance. I expected a guard to jump out to stop us, but there was no one on the other side of the door. Even the wire-mesh gate was unlocked and unattended. I walked close behind Gleason as he made his way down the corridor, the smoke from his cigarette masking all other smells.

  Almost at once we could see that the door to laboratory C was ajar, because a narrow band of light spilled out into the hall and faintly illumined the closed door to the room opposite where the dead lay in their tidy rows of drawers.

  Gleason tossed down his cigarette and ground it out on the linoleum floor. Then he gave the lab door a strong push. It flew open and the bright white light assaulted my dark-adapted eyes. I heard Gleason utter, “Damn it to hell.” When my vision adjusted itself, I saw why.

  The room was empty. The corpse was gone. The examination table with its complex rigging had disappeared. There were no hoses, no cylinders, no reel-to-reel voice-activated tape recorder. The small enamel table had vanished, along with the glass dish that had been atop it. The floor was as clean as if someone had washed all contaminants down the drain in the middle of the room.

  That look of shock passed across Gleason’s face again, but his fair, handsome features immediately hardened. “Oh, well,” he said, “there goes our little homicide project, or so it seems.”

  I didn’t answer. I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t wait for Gleason. I left the lab almost at a run.

  He didn’t catch up to me until I was on the sidewalk not far from where he had parked the Jag. “Slow down, old lady, slow down.” He leapt ahead of me and stood in my way. “Take it easy. The bogeyman isn’t going to get you. Don’t be so concerned about what happened here. It’s probably just a typical night at the morgue.”

  He didn’t believe his own words and I knew it. I pushed past him, heading for the subway. My fear had turned to rage, but I couldn’t say why. The image of the dead woman, her cheap clothes, her torn stocking, her sad and untimely end flashed through my mind with a vividness that had the uncanny effect of making me wonder if this seemed so real because it was just a dream.

  Gleason caught up to me again. “Relax, Portal,” he said. “I know this isn’t the sort of case you want to deal with, but look at it from my point of view. Rosen’s high profile. We did get in tonight. That means strings were pulled. Somebody up there likes us.”

  I stopped and stared at him. I really didn’t want to hear about his fine family’s sterling connections. My family had connections of its own, so to speak. Gleason was smiling now as if nothing we’d seen could touch him for long. In that moment, I hated him for his arrogance and callousness. If he sensed my hatred, it didn’t bother him. His smile widened. “Come back to the car,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride home to Eye-talian town.”

  I gave up and got in. Before he started the car, Gleason studied me for a moment. “Who do you think that dead broad was, Portal?”

  “Some unfortunate, Adams. Someone unused to privilege. Someone with no rich relatives. Someone, I suspect, whose death is being used by Rosen in some political way. What else would explain what happened tonight?”

  “Obviously it’s a murder case. Our murder case.” “What?” I said, feeling my anger rise again.

  “Murder explains it all. Homicide. And we’ve got a clue.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Gleason, grow up! This isn’t Perry Mason.”

  “Look!”

  Reluctantly, I watched as he opened his hand.

  In the light from the street lamp outside the car, I could see the little cloth packet from the dead woman’s chain in his palm.

  Chapter 2

  “I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it for us to look at while we were waiting.”

  “Even that’s tampering with evidence,” I said. “How could you? Do you know what will happen to us if it becomes known that we stole evidence in a homicide investigation? We’ll get thrown out of school!”

  “Good,” Gleason said with a maddening smile. “I don’t dig it anymore. I’ve never been more bored in my whole life.”

  “Well,” I replied with indignation, “I’d appreciate it if in your quest to alleviate your boredom, you would count me out. I don’t want to have anything to do with stealing evidence.”

  “I meant to return it when we got back into the lab. How did I know the body was going to disappear like that?”

  I turned to look at him. Profiled against the lights of the city night, his perfect face with the aristocratic high cheekbone
s was almost stern, his jaw clenched. “Gleason,” I said, “I want you to tell me what we were doing in there. I want you to explain why Rosen let us see that body, then whisked it away. That’s the only thing that could have happened. He’s the only one with the authority to stop an autopsy that was already in progress.”

  “It’s not an autopsy until skin has been cut,” Gleason answered.

  “That’s a meaningless technicality and you know it.”

  He steered the Jag around a sharp corner. The tires slid sideways slightly on the wet pavement and I flinched. Of course Gleason saw the gesture out of the corner of his eye. Of course he laughed. “What’s the matter, old lady? Don’t you have the stomach for using a homicide as your law project?”

  “Look, Gleason, I’ve got my own project. And I can’t waste any more time. Besides, there’s no way I want to deal with tainted evidence. I—”

  “This would be a great project,” he interrupted, some of his earlier intensity returning. “I don’t want to waste time, either.”

  “This is criminal law, Gleason,” I answered. “Dirty stuff. The bottom of the heap. Can you imagine what it would be like day after day working on messes like this? Women like her are not your kind of people.”

  “Don’t you patronize me,” Gleason retorted. I was amazed at his vehemence. “Just because you look at being a lawyer as a method of clawing your way out of the ghetto doesn’t mean I have to worry about such ambition. I can be any kind of lawyer I damn well please. And I don’t need you or anybody else to tell me what law project I will or will not take on.”

  “Fine, Gleason, fine,” I said with annoyance. “But that’s just my point.”

  When we reached Clinton Street, he braked so viciously in front of my house that I lurched forward and nearly smashed my head into the windshield. Such behavior saved me from feeling obliged to invite him in. Which I really didn’t want to do, anyway. “I’ll see you in class tomorrow, Gleason, by which time I’m sure you will have figured out how to return what you took. Otherwise, you’re going to end up being disbarred before you’re even admitted.”