Morgue Drawer Four (12 page)

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 if 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.

“That’s actually really hard for me to get done as long as my colleagues can tell on the system that I’m online,” he snarled at me.

“How so? You can just say that it’s for your collection of hot-babe photos,” I replied, and he gasped for air. Martin was opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish, and he was turning bright red to boot. The colleague seated across looked up at him in alarm.

“Are you choking?” he asked.

Martin nodded, coughed, breathed frantically, and suddenly stood up waving his colleague off when he wanted to follow Martin and help, and then he headed to the bathroom. I slowly followed, even though I wasn’t really able to help. I started getting worried. How was my sweet Little Goose going to start an investigation among illegal immigrants, drug dealers, and hookers if he suffered respiratory arrest from even a tiny, harmless bit of fun? Would an undocumented Eastern European deign give him mouth-to-mouth if that happened to him right in the middle of a Russian nightclub? And in that case, would that person then infect Martin with an active case of pulmonary tuberculosis? I’d heard a few things along those lines in the last few days.

Martin calmed back down, and the color of his face had returned to its usual office grey, and after seizing the moment and taking a piss, he leaned against the wall breathing heavily.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

He just nodded.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I added.

“It’s fine,” he squeezed out. “I just have to get used to the fact that you are unfamiliar with either compassion or good manners. You claim that I’m the one with a perverse profession, yet you show absolutely no respect for the dead.”

I wanted to answer, but he waved me away and opened the door.

“Nor for the living.”

Strong exit. Or at least, it would have been, if he had zipped up his pants again.

We had apparently signed some kind of armistice as we got on our way. Where exactly we were going I don’t want to explain in further detail here, because I am respecting the desire for anonymity so cherished by the group we intended to question, for obvious reasons. Nicely phrased, right?

I didn’t make any more jokes and didn’t mention his open fly, and he didn’t actually say anything at all. Anyways, he’d fed the head shot of the dead girl through the drawing program without being caught; he touched it up a bit and ended up with a pretty good, alive-seeming sketch of her.

We climbed into the trash can, whose side window was still broken, and left the well-lit streets of the middle-class areas of town behind us. Martin carefully locked up the car, and I kept my trap shut. He looked around, unsure, feeling not at all at ease in his skin, checked one more time that he had the paper with the drawing of the woman in his pocket, and set out. I stayed in the vicinity of his left shoulder, but I kept looking in all directions.

“So far so good,” I whispered to calm him down.

He approached a group of six boys who were standing together smoking, gawking up and down the street.

“Excuse me, um, good evening,” Martin said. The six of them were now gawking at him.

“I have a question for you,” Martin said politely.

Still no reaction. I looked around, everything quiet.

“I’m looking for a woman,” he said, fumbling in his pocket for the drawing.

“To fuck,” one of the boys said, and the others laughed.

“No, no,” Martin quickly corrected himself. “I met her and would like to see her again.”

“But not fuck her?” the guy asked again. “What else is a woman for?”

Martin had unfolded the drawing and was showing it to them. One of the boys grabbed his balls when he saw the drawing and moaned loudly. The others laughed again.

“Do you happen to know her name?” Martin politely asked.

“You met her and don’t know her name?” the spokesman said. “What did the two of you do, then?”

The roars were growing louder. Counter to my fears, Martin stayed pretty cool. He was pretending the sleazy comments weren’t even reaching him, although I could sense the waves of disgust emanating from his direction. If he found my little jokes disrespectful, then he must be pretty close to puking here.

“I’ll take you to her,” the ringleader said. “Give me a hundred, and I’ll take you to her right away.”

I didn’t need to make a sound; the red warning light in Martin’s brain had started flashing all on its own.

“Is she here right now?” Martin asked after a millisecond, during which I was afraid he’d start screaming out loud.

“Of course.”

Somehow the situation was slowly getting absurd. We were looking for a woman we knew was in the freezer at the Institute, and this guy is telling us he’ll take us to her. Now how to explain we knew he was bullshitting us when you weren’t allowed to say what you knew? But Martin had a great idea.