“The whole body relaxes,” Gleason answered, wrinkling his nose at the implications of that.
“I wish we could have seen under that bag. If only they’d left us alone there.”
“Now who’s talking about tampering with evidence, Portal? Anyway, forget it. We have to go with the rings. It’s all we’ve got.” He bounced them in his hands like coins. The clinking sound made me cringe. My whole future was literally in the hands of this troubled and troubling companion. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?” I asked in alarm.
“Unless we can get to that pathologist,” Gleason answered. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he went on. “Maybe Slater was just doing his job. He seemed pretty cool before he disappeared. Remember, Portal, it’s really two bodies that are unaccounted for, the dead one of the woman and the one still presumably alive.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Let’s take this prima facie. On the face of it, the pathologist is following normal procedure. He gets a phone call. He leaves the autopsy room. He goes upstairs and they tell him they know he’s in the wrong lab and to get the body out of there pronto. He does. Next door he finishes the job. Learns the cause of death. Files his report. Case closed.”
“No,” I said after a minute’s thought. “That makes no sense at all. Either he brought us into the wrong lab by accident, in which case he would have realized his error the minute he saw the corpse, or else he did it on purpose—and against the wishes of his boss. If that’s what happened, why not just get rid of us?”
“Portal, that’s what they tried to do.”
“I’m not so sure. The pathologist didn’t intend for us to be ejected. He said he’d be back. Only, as we know, that was the last we saw of him. Where does that leave us?” I asked.
“If they’re on the level, it leaves us with a coroner’s report that’s public record, plus—” he raised his fist and jingled the rings again “—a nice souvenir of our friendly visit to the city morgue.”
A thought struck me. “At what time did you know our meeting was on?”
“What?”
I cast my mind back to the evening in question. “When you called me, Gleason, you sounded rushed. You said you had a meeting at the morgue, an appointment to discuss your law project. What I want to know is when did you set up that meeting at the morgue?”
“I don’t know,” he answered offhandedly. “I guess it was the same day we went there. I read an article in the Daily World that morning. It said the attorney general and the chief coroner had had an argument. They’d almost come to blows at some luncheon they’d both attended. I thought that meant things at the morgue might get pretty interesting.” Gleason’s eyes were firmly fixed on the carpet, fully incapable, it seemed, of meeting mine. Since when had he ever followed news stories related to our field? This was the second time he’d mentioned the news.
“It’s true, Portal,” he went on. “Remember that discussion we had in Kavin’s class? The A-G doesn’t like that the chief coroner won’t toe the political line. And he’s not happy that the number of autopsies and inquiries has skyrocketed because the chief insists on paying attention to the questionable deaths of people previously ignored, like drunks who die in the street. Chief Coroner Rosen’s got the notion that the public should be more involved in inquests.”
I applauded Rosen’s position, but I didn’t see how it would further his cause to allow two green law students to view a possibly controversial and, I supposed, complicated autopsy. “I don’t get it,” I said. “If Rosen wanted observers who were representative of the public, why choose two innocuous law students? More to the point, why allow us in and then kick us out?”
Gleason continued to study the carpet with its muted colors and complex design, as if the pattern were some sort of code that might reveal the answers to our questions. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “It wasn’t Rosen who let us in, it was Dr. Slater. Don’t you think we ought to find that doctor and talk to him?” He opened his hand and stared at the rings that lay on his palm. “And we have to find out who made these rings. Because whoever made them is likely to know the people who wore them.”
“Look, Gleason,” I finally said, “I’ve told you before, I’m not into this. I’m not getting sucked into any sort of joint law project and I’m not taking the risk of getting into trouble over stolen evidence. You do what you want. I dis-avow any and all involvement.”
“You’re a coward, old lady. That’s what you are, nothing but a lousy coward!” Gleason stood up and darted toward me. Startled by his sudden, uncharacteristic fury, I stepped sharply to the side. The back of my knee grazed a tiny table, and behind me I could hear some object teeter, then hit the carpet with a soft thud. I turned. A heavy ceramic jar lay on the floor. To my consternation, there was a huge chip visible at its base. How could I have chipped it when all it had hit was the rug? I bent down to pick it up.
“Don’t touch that!” Gleason said.
I sprang back, expecting him to retrieve the object, but he left it. He came close to me, almost spitting in my face. “You’ll never be anything but the son of a construction worker, you know that, Portal? You want to be somebody’s honest little legal lackey, some hero to the seamstresses and the pipefitters and the greengrocers? Fine. You do that. You love to follow successful people around like a pudgy puppy, but you don’t have what it takes to be top dog yourself and you never will. If you don’t take chances, if you’re afraid of risk, if you’re too much of a chicken to take the leap, you can count on getting absolutely nowhere as a lawyer. You can look forward to a fine life of writing wills for people who leave a pittance or getting them off drunk charges or signing their passport applications so they can go back where they came from!”
“Gleason, you’ll always be a snob, and you’re crazy, besides!” I backed away from him.
“You have to help me find out what happened to that woman,” he persisted, as if he hadn’t insulted me or heard a word of my protest. “If it’s a murder and I solve it, I’m made.”
He was delirious. He had to be. In the hierarchy of lawyers, it’s hard to imagine a lower rung than that occupied by criminal counsel prosecuting—or worse, defending—the desperate killers of desperate people.
“Gleason,” I said, moving toward him again, but avoiding touching him, “you may not realize it, but the discovery of your brother’s body has affected you profoundly. I think you need some rest. Forget about your project. Maybe I can keep Kavin off your back. I’m working on something that you might be able to help me with.”
He shook his head but didn’t argue. He sat down and put his head in his hands. Despite the condescension he had just shown me—always shown me—there was something about Gleason that aroused my sympathy. I took the chair next to him. “Listen,” I said, “if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll check around about the rings. And I’ll see if that pathologist will talk to me. In the meantime you find a way to give the rings back. You’ve seen them. You don’t need them. If worse comes to worst, you can write some note about how you accidentally found them in your possession and mail it with the rings back to the morgue.”
Gleason didn’t respond. I liked his silence even less than his hysteria. “Leave the matter with me for a day or two, okay?” I suggested. “But get rid of those rings now.”
“Okay,” he finally answered, but I had my doubts. Nonetheless, when he summoned the maid with my coat, he seemed composed, and I left Whitney Square, hopeful that either I’d handle whatever was bothering Gleason or that his grief over his brother would run its course.
As for my promise to him, I thought maybe I’d make a drawing of the rings and show it to a jeweler in our neighborhood. I also thought I’d look at obituaries in the paper, maybe even check out some funeral homes to see if arrangements had been made for anyone fitting the description of the dead woman.
It wasn’t until later that I thought about the slimy pawn-brokers on Church Street and the shady
embalmers known to my uncle Salvatore.
But before I delved into any of that, I needed to deal with something Gleason had said. If the autopsy of the dead woman had indeed been completed, he’d reminded me, there would be a coroner’s report that was a matter of public record. I decided there was still time that afternoon to look it up.
It was ten to five when I turned onto Lombard Street, and a minute or two later I ran up the stone steps and pushed open the door of the morgue. I could tell by the distant clacking of a typewriter that I wasn’t too late. I pushed open a second door, this a frosted-glass one with a gold-stenciled sign that read “Office,” and stood before a waist-high counter. The only other person present was a small, pretty woman bashing away at a large black Remington. Perfect.
“I’m looking for a recent coroner’s report,” I explained. “For an autopsy that was performed last Monday—three days ago.”
“Yes, sir.” The young woman rose and came to the counter. I hadn’t noticed, but there was a hinge in it and she lifted a section of counter, stepped out and pointed to a six-foot-high black filing cabinet near the door.
“The reports are always ready by the next afternoon,” she told me proudly. “They’re filed by date. There are carbon copies behind the original. The public is free to take those, but please don’t take my original or I’ll have to type the report all over again.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I told her with a grin. She gave me a sunny smile in return. This was a far cry from our dark and difficult reception at the morgue three nights before, and she was certainly more accessible than the shadowy figures that seemed to haunt the place at night.
The reports for the current week were in a middle drawer and right in front, too, so it didn’t take me long to find the folder for the past Monday night. Each report in it was typed in clear dark letters on sturdy cream-colored paper with a narrow double red line on the left and the right to keep the tidy little typist from straying out into the wide margins. Behind each original, five onion-skin carbon copies were ranged in ascending order of blurriness.
My fingers raced through the pages. I was fairly sure the office would close at five and I didn’t want the helpful clerk to have to stay late at work because of me.
I found three reports for that Monday. All the deceased had died of natural causes. All were male. I thumbed through the reports for the previous day and the one following, too. Then I sweet-talked the young woman into rechecking for me, in case I was looking in the wrong place. When she found nothing, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind checking the file containing the notes from which she usually typed the reports.
In the end, concerning a female deceased, age about thirty, dead of strangulation, asphyxiation, or unknown causes, I found nothing. No autopsy results. No patholo-gist’s notes. No coroner’s report. No record at all.
Chapter 6
“The Russians walked in outer space today,” my mother informed me, “but they won’t let their people watch this show.” She gestured at the TV occupying one corner of the room that served as our dining room on Sundays and holidays and was a multipurpose room the rest of the time. “They think if people see how good we live, they’ll make big trouble.” On the eleven-inch screen a house-maid named Hazel was staring indecisively at the contents of a large refrigerator. Maybe her refrigerator, like my mother’s, was stocked with more food than an army needed.
“You see that?” my mother said. “Everybody in Russia is going to want a refrigerator as big as that one.”
“If they don’t have refrigerators, Ma,” I asked her, “why do you believe they have TV sets?”
She shrugged. “Everybody around here is so smart.”
“Why are you dressed like that?” I asked her. She wore a tidy housedress with a small collar, long sleeves and a narrow belt around her still-trim waist. But on her shoulders sat what looked like one of the blue cotton tablecloths she always took along on summer picnics, and on her head, a smaller tablecloth in white linen was arranged like a stiff veil. Beside her was a pile of linens from the closet in the hall: a stack of white pillowcases, a dish towel or two, a dresser scarf edged in lace. “And what’s all this stuff? What are you doing?”
“It’s for the Passion Play at church,” she answered. Everybody has to make their own costume plus one of the . . . uh, the things people carry in the play. The . . .”
“The props?”
“Yeah. And mine is Veronica’s veil. I have to make a Virgin Mary outfit and one Veronica’s veil.” She laughed at the way that sounded, but I was sure she took the task itself with the utmost seriousness.
I picked up one of the pillowcases and shook it free of folds. It still smelled of the fresh air in which it had hung to dry. Of course it was more closely woven than the burlap bag that had covered the head of the corpse, but it gave me an idea. I opened the case and made a move to put it over my head. I just wanted to see how hard it would be to breathe with the cloth covering my mouth.
But before I got the pillowslip past my eyes, I felt a sharp tug on the fabric and it was yanked away.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
It was not my mother, as I’d at first thought, but my father who had put an abrupt end to my little experiment.
“Just something for school,” I answered, but careful not to show my displeasure. I wasn’t sure why he’d been acting so surly lately, but I didn’t want to find out.
“Go in the kitchen and eat,” my mother commanded. “I saved you a nice big bowl of pasta and beans.”
“Thanks, Ma,” I muttered, but I didn’t go near the kitchen. I had taken the precaution of consuming a large steak-and-onion sub on my way home from the morgue.
There were three small bedrooms on the second floor of the house on Clinton Street. From one of the rooms came the annoying whine of a song about money and love. Arletta was conscientious about doing her homework every night, but she couldn’t seem to handle silence in any significant way.
Nor could Michele. From his room, which was also my room, came the sound of the radio. My brother was listening to the news. I heard him whoop with glee when the announcer said, “Today Negro voters won the legal right to march the fifty miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.” I had no idea what that meant, since as far as I knew, the marchers had already been at it all week. But Michele seemed overjoyed and that meant I’d have to hear all about it if I went into the bedroom.
Of course my parents’ room was off-limits. None of us ever went in there.
Which left me with the only place in the house where a person could get any privacy. I slipped down the hall and into the bathroom. I took off my shoes, and after arranging my books and papers within easy reach of the side of the bathtub, I climbed in and got to work on my studies. The indignity of this, plus the embarrassment of being a twenty-three-year-old man living off his uncle and his parents, didn’t escape me. I had offered to work on construction with my father, but he had refused. My spending money I picked up by tutoring my mother’s friends in English. Once I got the internship with Magistrate Tuppin, things would be different for sure, but for now I had no choice.
I cracked open another book from the Law Faculty library. I must admit that as my eye fell on the first disgusting photograph, I felt the tug of old injunctions I’d long ago consciously dismissed. It is a sin to have impure thoughts. It is a sin to provide “marital pleasures” for oneself. It is a sin to have guilty knowledge of sinful things. It is also a sin to look at dirty pictures behind closed doors. The person in the photo had suffered the fate that Michele and I, along with countless other Catholic boys, had been warned would happen if we engaged in hidden and forbidden acts of masturbation. The man in the picture had died in flagrante delicto, alone and on the path straight to hell.
The man’s tongue protruded and so did his eyes. Even in black and white the icy pallor of the skin of the dead person was immediately obvious. Around the neck of this pathetic creature, who appeared to have died
in the prime of life, was a metal collar attached by a long silver chain to the big toe of his right foot. The caption said that the man had died because he’d miscalculated the amount of pressure on the collar and had accidentally strangled himself instead of achieving the semiconscious state he was seeking for the purpose of increasing his erotic pleasure.
I felt flushed and sick, but I kept looking at pictures, hoping to find something that would help me understand what had happened to that woman at the morgue. But there were no women in this book. Could it really be that females never engaged in such shocking practices? I was mulling over that question when the inevitable happened—someone knocked on the bathroom door.
“I need to get in there!” my father yelled. Quickly I hid the book among some others and let him in. If he had been disturbed by my putting a pillowcase over my head, I could just imagine how he’d feel about the book I was studying.
While I was waiting in the hallway, Michele came to the door of our room. “Angelo,” he said, “I talked to Billy Johnson. He’s so happy you’re going to help him. He keeps getting these ridiculous letters from the Selective Service.” Michele shook his curly head. “I guess you’ll have to figure out a way to show that Billy Johnson is an Indian and therefore not subject to the draft.”
“I’ve been thinking about this, Michele,” I said, “and I don’t get it. Unless Billy Johnson is an American citizen, why would he worry about being drafted?”
Michele gave me a look I would one day know very well, the look of a client who has withheld some major fact and is now sheepishly about to disclose it. “He was born in Buffalo, New York, so maybe he does like have a problem.”
“Maybe he, like, does,” I answered in exasperation.
“Look, Angelo,” Michele said. “I know you could do something different with your time. If you went to Bay Street and advised stockbrokers or went to one of the corporate firms with bankers and real estate developers for clients, you’d be as rich as Uncle Salvatore in a few years. But that’s not the type of person you are. And that’s not what you really want, is it? To get rich by helping the establishment stab poor people in the back?”
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