Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  Unexpectedly, Kavin laughed. “Nothing deters the determined, though, does it, Portal?”

  “Sir?”

  “You might take up a criminal practice and indeed become another Perry Mason. You have a rare combination of qualities, Portal. You can think on your feet. You’re a fast, effective researcher. You aren’t afraid to take on tasks that may put you under considerable pressure. You also seem to be a compassionate man. What other kind would stay friends with Gleason Adams?”

  I squirmed, uncomfortable in the glare of so much praise.

  “Of course,” Kavin added, “I must also say I’ve noted hints of the requisite hubris.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Pride, Portal. Arrogance. A man who distinguishes himself by robbing the state of its opportunity to pin murder on a man usually has fairly high notions of his own worth. Take our friend, Mr. Knightsbridge, for example.”

  “Pardon?”

  Kavin smiled. “Knightsbridge is the top criminal lawyer in this town. It’s been said that Counselor Knightsbridge and the Queen found themselves in the same room together. When the time came to leave, an argument ensued as to who would back away from the presence of whom. It’s said that that is how Elizabeth Regina learned to walk backwards in high heels!”

  I HAD WRITTEN down all six of the funeral directors Uncle Salvatore had mentioned and found their addresses, but I didn’t want to visit any of them before I called and I didn’t want to call them from the house, fearing to alarm my mother or enrage my father. From a phone booth on campus, I called the first three. They each refused to see me or even to give me basic information over the phone. The fourth time, I mentioned Uncle Salvatore’s name before I even said who I was and what I wanted to know. The funeral director, Spardini, agreed to give me a tour. I didn’t bother calling the last two names on the list. One funeral home was about all I was willing to experience in my attempt to discover the final resting place, so to speak, of the body we’d seen at the morgue.

  Spardini’s parlor was on Danforth Avenue, a street of retail shops, small businesses and ethnic restaurants on the eastern edge of the city. Statues, urns, pillars and fountains guarded this portal to the world beyond.

  “So you’re Sal Portalese’s nephew?” Spardini himself asked me when his shapely receptionist showed me into his office, which, behind the flashy casket showroom, looked like the office of a truck dispatcher. Invoices, funeral announcements, the gilded and beautifully tinted holy cards Italians use to commemorate a funeral, black-and-white photos and even a pinup or two graced the dingy walls of the little room. “The law school boy, am I right? Well, I can show you a thing or two that even a lawyer don’t know about.”

  As if to make good his word in the least amount of time possible, Spardini led me directly to the basement. As we descended the creaky wooden steps, I remembered Uncle Salvatore’s vague reference to extra bodies in the cellars of Italian funeral homes.

  As if reading my mind, Spardini said, “I want you to understand right off that nothing underhanded goes on here. Every one of these here bereaved is accounted for. You got that?”

  “Certainly, I—”

  “We got lists listing lists. Records. Lots of records. We got a list even of every body that goes into or comes out of this country.”

  “Why would that be?” I asked, curious to see that list.

  “Board of Health. You got some foreigner coming in here with a disease, we keep him out. Even if he’s already dead.”

  “Could I have a look at the list?”

  “Yeah, sure, later. Take a look at this first.”

  He flicked a switch on the wall of the stair landing and I found myself staring down at a double row of dormitory cots. Mercifully, only four of the cots were occupied. The naked, lifeless bodies of dead men and one woman looked so similar to the white plaster statues outside that I almost laughed.

  Spardini made the sign of the cross and asked God to have mercy on his customers. “The embalmer came and went already, so I can’t show you that. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I choked out.

  “The bereaved like to have funerals on Saturday. These ones died on time. Want a closer look?”

  Remembering the raw-meat odor of the morgue, I held my breath and followed Spardini to the nearest cot. The woman who lay on it was about seventy years old. I noticed that her pubic hair was snow white. In reaction, I involuntarily sucked in a huge breath of air. It smelled not of flesh but of formaldehyde, like the dead frogs we’d cut up in high school.

  “Seventy-six and not a mark on her,” Spardini said with as much pride as if he’d created the woman rather than just laid her out.

  “What did she die of?” I asked.

  “These four,” Spardini said, “they’re all natural causes. We get way worse than this, let me tell you.”

  “Do you ever get any with bags over their heads?”

  I was amazed I had the nerve to ask the question. Spardini gave me a thoughtful glance, as though there was hope for the law-school boy yet. “Glad to see you’re interested,” he said. “Yeah, we get ’em like that once in a while. Why do you want to know?”

  “For school,” I answered automatically. I hoped nobody was keeping track of the absurd information I was claiming to need for my legal education.

  “We get ’em now and then. Suicides, I mean. They hang themselves, they drink a lot of wine and then jump off a bridge, they drive their car into a wall. Closed-casket cases, all of ’em. I don’t gotta tell you we get a bit of a problem when the priest starts asking questions. But I get all mine into a Catholic cemetery. Guaranteed.”

  “I’ll remember that, Mr. Spardini,” I said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

  “But nothing shady,” he emphasized. “Don’t get me wrong.”

  “Have you ever had to work on a murder victim?” I asked, feigning nonchalance.

  Spardini neglected to respond. He glanced over the four corpses as if to make sure none had moved, then shook his head in one of those meaningless gestures I was used to in my elders, walked back toward the stairs and turned off the light. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you that list you wanted to see.”

  Back in his office, he dug through an in-box jammed with papers and finally found what he was looking for, a mimeographed document consisting of a couple of legal-size pages. “This here gets signed by the coroner and the chairman of the Board of Health. We get it every two weeks. The first page is bodies coming into the country. The second page is bodies going out.”

  Pure curiosity, not an expectation of learning anything, was my motive for reading the list, so I wasn’t surprised to see no familiar name on the first page.

  “Them lists is proof that nothing shady goes on here,” Spardini reiterated.

  As he spoke, I idly flipped to the second page of the list. My eye fell on the name at once: Everett Allan Adams, Gleason’s father. He was listed as leaving the country accompanied by his spouse and by the cadaver of his deceased son. I reckoned back the days. The date beside the names was the same date Gleason had told me that his parents had gone to Switzerland.

  “I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in these lists, Mr. Spardini,” I said. “I see a mistake on this one.”

  “What? What mistake?” He yanked the list out of my hand.

  “I know this family,” I said, pointing. “They didn’t take a body out of the country. Just the opposite. They went to Switzerland to pick up a body. They’re on the wrong page. The date’s probably right, though,” I added reassuringly.

  Spardini studied the list. Then, in disgust, he threw it back on top of the pile of papers in his in-box. “Damn Board of Health,” he said. “You can’t trust ’em. In fact, you can’t trust a person living on this earth. That’s why I like working with dead people.”

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, a week after I’d visited the market with my mother, it was Michele’s turn to take her. Which meant another week had gone by without my yet having met Billy Johnson
. I was beginning to be afraid that Michele, for reasons known only to him, was now trying to keep Billy and me apart with the same enthusiasm he had originally shown at putting us together. That notion was dispelled, however, when, as he left the house, my brother gave me Billy’s address. He even offered to come with me, but knowing that should I present this to Tuppin, the judge would require client confidentiality, I told Michele I would have to go on my own. I also had to accomplish an extremely important mission before I descended into the neighborhood in which Billy lived. Gleason had summoned me to Whitney Square, and I was going.

  I needed to know for sure that Gleason had given back the rings to the proper authorities. His behavior had become incomprehensible by now. After I had seen him in Kavin’s office, he had insisted he needed to work on the “murder” for his project, but he’d stopped showing up for class, never went to the library, was never seen on campus.

  Thin sun spilled across the square as I walked up from Bloor Street and made my way to Gleason’s door, which was answered by the same maid I’d seen before, a pretty blonde with a nice figure and a little smile of recognition.

  Distracted by her, I at first missed the sound of voices coming from the parlor where Gleason’s brother’s portrait hung. The maid disappeared, presumably to get my host, but after several minutes had passed and no one had come for me, I headed toward the voices.

  I did not immediately recognize the man who was seated so close to Gleason that his short brown hair almost touched the longer blond locks of my friend. The two men seemed to be in earnest conversation, each sitting on the edge of a spindly-legged chair. I cleared my throat to announce my presence. The brown-haired man glanced up in alarm. It was then that I realized with surprise who he was: Dr. Slater, the pathologist we’d met at the morgue, the man who’d disappeared along with the missing body.

  Without his lab coat, he looked younger, thinner, and more like a fellow law student than a scientist. Like Gleason, he was rather formally dressed—cream-colored slacks and a dark blazer. I felt embarrassed to be wearing blue jeans and a University of Toronto sweatshirt, but not as embarrassed as I’d feel dressed in a suit when meeting Billy Johnson.

  “Portal. Good. You remembered.” Gleason jumped up and shook my hand. I was surprised by the gesture, confused by his welcoming politeness. Was he trying to impress the pathologist by this display of manners or was he just nervous for some reason? “You remember Dr. John Slater . . .”

  The pathologist rose and extended his hand. In front of me flashed an image of what that hand had touched. I hesitated for a fleeting second before I shook it. I thought the pathologist noticed that tiny delay. Or perhaps I only imagined the pained expression that crossed his face.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Gleason told us both, grabbing another spindly chair for me, then sitting himself. “Portal, John has a lot to tell us. I’ll let him give you the gist of it.”

  Showing little of the professional detachment with which he’d spoken in the lab, the pathologist began his story, keeping his eyes glued to the portrait on the wall of one of Gleason’s ancestors. Absent the toneless inflection of scientific reporting, his voice was soft, his words whispery and rushed. I found myself leaning closer to hear him. “That poor creature you saw the other night,” he began, “was only the second or third instance of suspected auto-asphyxiation I’ve seen in the five years I’ve worked on Lombard Street.”

  I remembered the grisly photos in the book I’d kept from the eyes of my father. “Auto-asphyxiation?”

  “I believe so,” Dr. Slater answered. “The victims of auto-asphyxiation sometimes cover the head, perhaps believing that it assists the asphyxiation. In reality, what it does mainly is hide the shame of suicide.” He glanced at Gleason, who looked away. “Assisted by drugs and/or alcohol,” Dr. Slater continued, “the suicide pulls a previously rigged-up rope until a state of semiconsciousness is achieved. Sometimes the victim passes out, which causes relaxation of the hand. In a case like that, the would-be suicide comes to. I think many more people attempt this act of self-destruction than actually achieve it because coming that close to death might well convince a person that life is worth living after all.”

  He paused as if expecting comments or questions. I waited for Gleason to utter some smart remark, but he was uncharacteristically silent. So I asked the first question that came to mind. “Are you saying that the woman whose body we saw at the morgue continued past the awakening and actually proceeded to strangle herself?”

  I assumed that Dr. Slater, like us, had only seen the body for a few minutes, but had by now certainly come to his own conclusions on the matter. So I was surprised that it took him so long to answer my question. He removed his eyes from the portrait, studied his hands, the rug, the curve of Gleason’s back as my friend sat with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. “I suppose,” the pathologist finally said, “that a person might have the strength of will, and of hand, to actually strangle himself to death. More commonly, in my opinion, when the victim becomes semiconscious, the head bends forward with the chin on the chest, effectively cutting off the air passages. Such a constriction also happens to a person who nods to sleep in a chair. But unless dulled by drink, drugs or in some cases illness, the sleeper experiences a “startle” effect when the air passage is threatened and reflexively raises his head to clear the obstruction and resume breathing. You’ve undoubtedly experienced this yourself if you’ve dropped off to sleep, then found yourself jerking awake with an abrupt, involuntary lifting of your chin.”

  I recognized what he was describing, but for me his explanation left more questions than it answered. “So was this woman a suicide or not?” I asked.

  Dr. Slater shook his head slowly. “I have no opinion,” he said. “I was not allowed to examine the body.”

  “Why?” I persisted. I expected Gleason to be, if anything, even more interested in this than I was. After all, he was the one proposing to build his project around it. But he just sat there, as if his mind were elsewhere. Presumably he’d already heard the story, but still . . .

  “The chief coroner was reluctant to let me do an autopsy in front of you and Mr. Adams,” Dr. Slater responded. “Obviously a death that looks as dramatic as this one is capable of attracting a good deal of public curiosity, regardless of how mundane the actual details might be—not that I, we, consider the demise of any citizen to be mundane,” he added nobly.

  Gleason looked up then and smiled. If there was mockery in that smile, I didn’t see it.

  “Dr. Rosen had had a hard day,” Slater went on. “He’d already had to deal with the press that afternoon concerning the battle he’s engaged in with the attorney general. Dr. Rosen demanded to know why you were in the building. For a man who sees his job as serving an informed public, his attitude was surprising. I told him that you were law students working on a project. He suggested, strongly, that I give you both a short tour of an empty lab and then get you out of the building as quickly as possible.” The pathologist paused as though to make sure his facts were correct. I admired his carefulness. By Gleason’s continuing silence, I judged that he admired it, too. “I told Dr. Rosen that shunting you out would make it look like we were hiding something. Finally he agreed that I could show you an autopsy already in progress in a lab adjoining the one in which the suicide was awaiting examination. But when I got downstairs, I found that the autopsy in the approved lab had already been concluded.”

  “So you took us into the forbidden lab,” Gleason interjected dramatically, giving the story a horror-movie slant. I frowned at him.

  Surprisingly, however, Dr. Slater smiled. “Yes. The forbidden lab.”

  “And now you’ve come to tell us you’re in trouble because of what you showed us?” I offered.

  Slater studied me for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “No, I’m not in trouble.” He hesitated. “In fact,” he continued, “I think this all might be easier if I were in trouble. Then I could defend myself and a
lot of questions could be answered. Instead, what happened is that the body disappeared from my view as completely as it did from yours. I was called upstairs on “a routine matter,” asked to fill out a number of forms to record your visit. Chief Coroner Rosen said these were necessary in case the family of the deceased asked about outsiders viewing the body of their loved one. I thought this was extremely unusual. We work in the morgue, not a funeral parlor. And I’d never seen these forms before. They seemed to just ask for the same information over and over again in different ways and took a long time to complete. When I finished and got back downstairs, you had left. So had the deceased! When I went back up to Dr. Rosen’s office, he was gone, too. I didn’t know what to do. I sat out my shift. There were no more drop-offs that night. Nothing to work on. I thought about it all the next day, but when I went back to work late that afternoon, everybody acted as though nothing unusual had happened the night before. I saw no alternative but to act in the same manner myself.”

  “Has this ever happened before?” I asked. “I mean, has a body ever disappeared?”

  Dr. Slater appeared to give the matter some thought. “In all the time I’ve worked at the morgue,” he said, “I’ve never seen a questionable occurrence. Of course, most of the autopsies we perform are on the cadavers of people who died in questionable circumstances. Such deaths are, after all, our mandate. But never have I seen our protocols and procedures ignored as they were in this case.”