A World the Color of Salt (7 page)

Glancing at the sign-in sheet, I saw a long list of names. I said, “Who are all these?”

“Student tour,” she said, smiling. “You know how Jack tells them, ‘Don't faint. Anyone faints, we put 'em on a tray'? This girl excuses herself right then. She left out the door looking green, I mean seriously.”

I pictured the student, sitting in her car in the parking lot, trying to get up the courage to come back in. They usually do, embarrassment or curiosity bringing them back. Once when I was witnessing an autopsy of a man who seemed to die of nothing, a student tour came through. The coroner's clerk walks the line of students each time, intoning, “Don't stare, don't lock your knees. Don't stare, don't lock your knees,” until they get used to the sight of the bodies in whatever stage of the procedure they might be in at the time, some already split open, some with the scalp pushed down over the face so the techs can get at the brain. One student didn't take the advice. He fainted three times, kicking a metal-utensil cart into the middle of the room, on which lay the shears and turkey baster used for gathering urine. At least the techs don't have to worry about sterilizing the instruments here.

I must admit I wonder about the people who work here. Cops, at least, have moments when they know they
have
protected and served, and rarer moments still when victims and bystanders actually express gratitude. But here, these processors of flesh are another breed. Some seem flat-out ghoulish. It's not the jokes that bother me—humor keeps us all sane. It's something weirder I have not figured out yet; something that delights in the repellent. I'll say to Joe that this one or that one is a creep. He says, Hey, the guy has found his niche, don't knock it. Then there are the students, and the doctors from foreign countries who can't find other placement yet; the English majors who couldn't either. As in all workplaces, the good, the bad, the indifferent.

Janetta's high heels croaked over the tile floor, ending with a sound like a little
sput;
I marveled at how well waxed all our floors are, wavy or not, as if to say, Death doesn't happen here, no siree. We chatted awhile. She asked how I was doing. She asked if my operation was painful, screwing up her face; then backed up and showed me a fist-sized bruise she picked up on her shin from an open drawer.

“Dangerous place,” I said. “You could probably find dead people here if you looked hard enough.”

She laughed a rich sound, rolled her head as if she had a kink in her shoulder, and said, “Geez, it's cold in here, isn't it?”

I requested the Dwyer file, and she went to the back of the room and lifted up folders in a wire basket near the door that leads into the lab. “You know, I think that's still in the back. You want to go in, Smokey? I think it's in Dr. Schafer-White's.”

She buzzed me in the door at the side.

“Ask Barney for it, will you?”

“Sure.”

“And sign for it, okay, before you take a copy?”

A few of the laser techies were fussing around with the bench laser in the back, trying to get it to work. I didn't say anything to them, didn't want to bother them. I passed through one lab area looking for Barney, feeling a little strange, as though coming into an old grammar-school classroom. Six weeks off the job could be a decade. The smell of formalin, which is formaldehyde gas mixed with water, was strong today. There were two nude bodies on trays in the hallway, having been wheeled in from hose-down outside. I looked in at one of the workrooms and noticed, probably for the first time, that the wooden bar stools at the workbenches were orange. The cabinets orange too, an old color, chosen no doubt when Orange County had real groves. In that early enthusiasm, city fathers decided to paint street signs orange with white letters, virtually ensuring no one would be able to read them after a year of sun-baking, and in the city of Orange they remain to this day. As if for the first time too, I saw the clean yellow Formica countertops, rubbed nearly white in the centers. And I felt out of place, not sure of where I belonged, but maybe not here.

A big healthy girl with blushing cheeks and brown hair to her shoulders came through the back door, a McDonald's lunch sack in her hand. The smell of French fries wafted in with her. She told me through a mouthful that Barney was outside. I walked by the big floor scale—orange, of course—where the corpse and cart are weighed together, the cart's weight subtracted. On the wall in red crayon were the words
HEAD HERE
, with an arrow pointing down.

As I approached the automatic doors, the yellow reflective sheeting on them squinched my figure into flat waves. Outside, there's a three-sided shower stall for washing off corpses
after autopsy—or staff, if they've gotten something especially contaminating on them. Vagrants used to take showers there until management fenced it off at the driveway.

Barney was tipped back on an orange stool by the shower wall, face laid to the sun. His lab coat covered a green knit shirt and rock-washed blue jeans. Rubber beach shoes rested on the concrete apron beside him. “Barney,” I said. “You don't hear about the bad things sun does to you?”

He squinted over at me and rocked the stool down. “Hiya, stranger, how ya been?”

“Oh, good, good. Listen, not to disturb, but Janetta said I could sweet-talk you into getting me a file.”

“You can get it yourself. Nobody's around. Just sign for it.” Ordinarily, the charts go directly up front, but sometimes they land in a pathologist's basket for a while.

“I wouldn't think of pulling you away from the rays,” I said, smiling, but wishing he'd seen some of the young patients I had seen when Bill was in the hospital, one guy just twenty-seven with holes in his shoulders and neck where cancers were plugged out, and a continual look of fear in his eyes.

I did what I was supposed to, signed for it, then took it up front to Janetta. On the way up, I glanced in the autopsy room at students lined up more or less against the wall. One held a Kleenex over her mouth and nose. Another leaned her head on a male companion's shoulder. They tucked their hands under their arms or into their pockets, or fingered their own faces. These people would one day be cops: The first time they have to pull a body out of a crushed car or out of a burned bathtub, they'd better be able to take it, but I was glad to be reminded of an almost palpable compassion people feel when they first see the dead so helpless.

Out front, a busload of light-custody inmates were waiting to spend the day picking up trash along the freeways. Some of the prisoners looked at me as I passed, their faces, what I could see of them, noncommittal. But I felt for them, maybe some of them dying to whistle, to inject some fun and normality back in their lives; some of them thinking of families and bosses and how those people would handle it all, thinking of what screw-ups they'd been and how if they ever get out of this they'll never mess with so-and-so or such-and-such again;
some of them saying to themselves, Fuck this noise, I'm doing it right next time, no goofs. Because most of them, like it or not, were there for reasons serious enough that they couldn't escape even the cite-and-release program the sheriff had in place, and most of them, whether the average citizen wants to recognize it or not, had been jerks for a long time.

Another bus waited just beyond the sliding white-iron gate at the Intake/Release Center, the gate topped with rolled razor wire, and the bus no doubt destined for a return trip to outlying housing facilities after the prisoners' day in court. Business as usual.

My car was out away from the buses, deep into the packed parking lot, so I could sit there a moment, the folder in my lap. The sun on the seats felt good on the back of my thighs, the small of my back.

I looked at the label. “JEROME ALPHONSUS DWYER,” it said, and the case number beneath. I sat in my car a long time before I opened it.

“We got a party at Bob and Dollie's tonight you want to come,” Raymond told me. I'd called Raymond from my car phone, one of the first times I'd used it. I was able to do this because his hot-shit Saleen got installed with cellular. Most coppers just have the radio. He asked me if that's how I spent my disability money, on my new phone.

“Now, don't you be calling me every half hour, Raymond. It costs me money incoming as well as outgoing.”

“Then what fun is that?”

“You're good at harassing. You a cop?”

“Listen, come on to the party, I'll buy you a beer.”

“I need a party.”

“Sure you do.” It was good to hear his mellow voice. Voices get me. His is brandy-nice. Why wasn't I in love with him?

This conversation was taking place while I was on the Costa Mesa Freeway, the 55, headed home after an afternoon spent going over and over again the details of the autopsy report. The smaller-caliber bullet caught Jerry in the mouth; rolled apart the tissue like the Red Sea, then lodged in the meaty part at the back. That would account for the torrents of blood.
He'd be choking on it; yes, and slipping—failing in his desperate effort to keep the killers out.

When I returned to my desk after retrieving the report, I tried to work on old paper, go through all the bulletins to read and toss that had piled up while I was gone, all the med-plan updates you never know what to do with and end up putting in a binder, unpunched, so they fall out the next time you pick it up.

At lunch I walked down to one of the nice restaurants on Santa Ana Boulevard, trying to get the pictures out of my head. Lawyers sit at cozy tables at this certain restaurant, talking lawyer stuff. I could tune them out. I pretended interest in the abstract paper sculptures framed on the walls in mauve and green, and made a good deal of small talk with the waitress, who'd heard you can still get homestead land in Alaska.

But I couldn't get Jerry out of my head. Walking back to the office I thought of that last time I saw him alive, how he waved and said, “So long. Take care now.” And as I thought these things, the silica in the sidewalk swam together through my sunglasses, and I was finally actually glad to be back in the office doing routine things again.

Afternoon went better. Then getting on the freeway at fourteen miles an hour at the end of the workday kind of screwed things up again. The drivers were doing things deliberately just to piss me off, and yes, by God, I needed a party, please.

A man in a white Ford veered from his lane into mine and nearly clipped my right front fender. I didn't even beep. I said to Raymond, “Whoa, some guy just cut me off. Did not see me at all.”

“Has he got his Old Fart plates?”

I laughed because yes, he was an old guy in white shirtsleeves, staring straight ahead through thick glasses. Some of the Leisure World types are out of it, but a lot of them are as aggressive as any gang member out there. They push ahead in lines as if they don't see you, stomp on your foot and never bat an eye; I guess they figure they lived this long, they got privileges.

Back on the subject of the party, I asked, “You coming with Yolanda?”

There was silence a moment because though Ray flirts with any woman as if it were his job, Yolanda's his steady, more like a live-in. But they fight. She's Mexican too and jealous of anyone he knows who isn't, and he uses that to tell her why she's not worthy of him. Relationships are way too much work, I think.

“Hey, Ray?”

“What?”

“Can I bring my friend Patricia?”

“Sure. You been telling me about her long enough.”

“You won't like her.”

“So why?”

“Too tall.” Raymond was sensitive about those things. “She's six feet.”

“Oh, well, as long as she doesn't
have
six feet.”

“No, Raymond.”

“Has she got two big, you know, eyes?”

“I haven't counted. Three, I think.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Calm yourself.”

There was silence a minute. “You readin' your
Playboy
? Raymond. Hey.”

“No, listen. I'm looking for . . . I forgot to tell you . . . oh, here it is. Robbins and Delco deposited two creeps in lockup about three-thirty. I meant to tell you. Two brothers. They do stop-and-robs. Name of Dugdale. Phillip and—”

“You shittin' me, Raymond?” I could feel the tension leaving my forehead.

“And, let's see . . . how much for the other one?”

“What?”

“One teeny-weeny kiss tonight, huh, under the table?”

“Come on, Raymond. This is costing me money.”

“Oh, money is it? Oh-ho-ho. All right, here it is: Phillip G. and Roland G. Dugdale. Both
G
's. Um, looks like they been in a whole rack o' shit from robberies to . . . assault. Some possession—the Roland guy.”

“You've got a copy of their sheet?”

“Right here in front of me. On my MTV.” He meant his MDT: mobile data terminal, a computer he can use to tie into the county database. His substation was chosen for the user
test base. “The stuff's old,” he said. “Looks like six years, the last. I'm surprised it comes up even. Oh—possession, no, it's like eighteen months.”