The Florentine Deception (17 page)

Clarence approached the door and then flipped open the crumpled notebook to the last page, angling it to catch the dim light of the adjoining hallway.

“Damn conservationists.”

“Want me to turn on the light? Where's the switch?”

“Nah, I've got it.” He tucked the book into his pocket and punched the four keys, again demonstrating dexterity befitting someone twenty years his junior. The keypad, still in lockdown, wholly ignored Clarence's key-presses. Clarence anxiously reentered the combination a second time with the same result, then withdrew his notebook, consulted the last page, and repeated the ritual—again with the same result.

“Dammit.”

“What's wrong?”

“The damn keypad is busted. I'm going to have to get someone down here to fix it.”

“This guy's going to start stinking soon,” I suggested innocently.

“Dammit. One second.”

Clarence approached the other keypad and without hesitation entered the four digits, his memory obviously jogged by the “Andrea's Birthday” hint that earlier stumped me. True to form, the lock clicked, prompting Clarence to grab the cold steel handle.

“Throw him in there for now.”

“Yes sir.”

I rotated Papa's cart lengthwise and, with a pair of thumps, wheeled it over the rubberized threshold into the frigid cadaver farm and against the right-hand wall. Papa certainly wouldn't be lonely during my absence; dozens of cadavers, or rather their sheet-covered forms, filled the vast refrigerator.

“I'll be back in five or ten minutes,” I whispered to the sheet. “Open the door when I knock.” With a quick snap of my foot I engaged the gurney's wheel lock and left the room.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.” Clarence secured the door and yanked on the handle, just to make sure. “I've got to go. I want to see this guy's paperwork on my desk when I get back.”

I nodded. Clarence stared intently at my face, as if waiting for a verbal confirmation.

“Yes sir,” I complied, and a second later, he disappeared around the corner.

I waited a good thirty seconds after hearing the last, distant scrape of Clarence's leather-soled shoes before knocking on the door. Nothing. I counted off another twenty seconds and then rapped again.

“Papa?” God forbid he'd fallen asleep. “
Paahpuuuh!
” I bellowed with my hands cupped up against the steel door. I took a step back and began pounding on the imposing door with both hands. Mid-strike, the door edged open and a whoosh of cold air poured through the crack. Papa stood hunched behind the door, barefoot and shivering, haphazardly bundled in the hospital sheet that moments ago had enshrouded his body. This certainly wasn't going to work. I flipped on a light switch, flooding the room with cold white light.

“Get your shoes on.” Papa gave me a confused look. I gently took his arm and led him to the gurney.

“Sit,” I said, and helped him up. A second later, I had the tag removed and his shoes on.

“Okay, do you think you can make it back up to the lobby by yourself?”

“I, I, I'm st, st, staying with you,” he stammered.

“You're going to freeze to death.”

Papa stared resolutely.

“One second.” Using my wallet as a wedge to prop the door open, I dashed back to Clarence's storeroom, snatched a thick stack of hospital sheets, and sprinted back. In several minutes, I had Papa swaddled from head to ankle in six layers of hospital sheeting. I also wrapped a few layers around myself—an LA native, I was a lightweight and it was at most a few degrees above zero.

“Okay?” I asked, my words taking physical form via a whitish vapor in the refrigerated air. “Think you can last about fifteen or twenty minutes until I find the body?”

Papa nodded uncomfortably. At least now I could search without any risk of getting caught—that was, until Clarence returned from his break.

“Just do me one favor,” said Papa.

“What's that?”

“Promise me you won't open the door to the, to the …” he screwed up his face in thought, “safe house without me.” He meant the panic room, of course; it was an easy enough request.

“I promise,” I said, “now give me a few minutes and we'll be out of here.”

Free from immediate danger, nosy seventy-year-olds, and mischievous grandparents (Papa wasn't going anywhere), I surveyed the room. Unexpectedly, its contents were in disarray. Dozens of steel-framed gurneys and their enshrouded passengers were haphazardly strewn across the Olympic pool-sized room. Metal-grated drains, probably designed to collect biological effluent in the event of an accidental thaw, dotted the antiseptic white, inch-square tiles at regular intervals, and a floor-to-ceiling grid of brushed steel refrigeration shelves lined the two opposite walls down the length of the room. Overhead, banks of harsh fluorescent tubes gave an ashen tinge to the plastic-wrapped inhabitants. An acrid mélange of disinfectant and formaldehyde completed the effect.

I approached the nearest cadaver. Like each of his cohorts, he was wrapped in a form-fitting muslin cloth, soaked no doubt in embalming fluid, and covered with a thick discolored plastic sheet to keep things nice and moist. The cadaver's feet—and the toe-tag I'd need to identify Richard's body—were tucked beneath the two layers but clearly discernable; I'd need to unwrap the lot to find my golden ticket—like a morbid version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
.

Gently, I grabbed hold of a crimp in the plastic and drew it from its tucked position beneath the feet, then unwrapped the damp fabric—which had a stiffness reminiscent of a used rag—from the right foot. There was no need to look at the tag; the yellowed, veined appendage was obviously a woman's. A quick poke, more out of curiosity than anything, gave the impression of a balloon filled with dense putty. After a quick wrap and tuck I proceeded to the next body. One down. Fifty-some more to go. A few more awkward attempts were enough to perfect the procedure, and soon I had each evaluation down to thirty seconds.

Alas, none of our fifty-four companions proved to be Richard; nor was he hiding in any of the wall units. Papa looked up as I walked over.

“Get what you need?” he asked, oblivious to the glum look on my face.

“No. He's not in here. We've got one more place to look,” I said, pointing at the service elevator set into the far wall of the room, “and then I'm giving up. I think that goes up to the dissection room. Do you want to wait here or come with me?”

Papa signaled his response by grabbing the side of the gurney with both hands and shimmying his buttocks over to the edge; I grabbed his arm and helped him back onto his feet.

“If we run into anyone, you let me do the talking.”

A brief ride in the elevator deposited us at the far end of the student morgue, two floors above. As the doors parted, the elevator's overhead lighting revealed a room about the size of a large dorm room, just as cold and sullen as the main morgue. I groped along the right wall for the switch. The room's lighting flickered briefly and then dimly illuminated nine additional corpses. Most appeared hastily covered and, happily, all but one's feet and tags were directly visible through the plastic sheeting.

“Give me a sec, Pop.”

It took just a minute to survey the remaining nine bodies—and to dash my hopes. Richard wasn't among the dead.

“Shit,” I whispered. “Let's get out of here. He's not here.”

I motioned Papa toward a door opposite the elevator and, upon reaching it myself, flicked off the light and quietly eased the door open. The room beyond, as I'd guessed, housed the dissection lab. What I hadn't guessed was that there'd be med students working overtime on a corpse; the body's chest cavity had been cracked open and peeled back into a gruesome maw. Two scalpel-wielding co-eds hovered over the remains.

I nudged the door a hair more to get a better view.

“Look. The guy had a small tumor.” Student number one, a redhead with Pippi Longstocking freckles, pointed inside the cadaver's abdomen.

“I've seen enough tumors. I'll be right back, I've gotta pee,” responded the second co-ed dismissively.

“How old are you? Five?”

“
Whatevah
.” The brunette exited stage right, revealing the corpse's pain-stricken face.

Richard's face.

Chapter 27

I eased the door shut, temporarily plunging the two of us into frigid, inky blackness.

“He's outside,” I whispered excitedly, “holy shit!” I flipped the lights back on.

“Who … who's outside?” asked Papa, shivering. I realized he hadn't also been peeking through the crack and explained.

“The corpse—our cadaver is on an exam table outside.”

“Well then let's go already,” Papa emoted, just a bit too loudly. I put my finger to my mouth and flashed the universal quiet sign.

“We can't. There're two girls in the room with him.”

“Shit. Let's just go out, take a look, and leave already.” There it was; he was finally getting antsy. But I had to admit, two hours thus far, some of it in near-zero temperatures without a single complaint, was a new North American record. Usually a half hour at the Reseda Denny's was sufficient.

“No, we'll get caught.” I eased my back against the wall and slid down onto the floor. “We're not supposed to be in here. We'll be arrested if we go out. We've got to wait until they finish, and then we can take a look.” I lowered my head to my knees and covered my eyes with my palms, creating a cathartic suction between them and my face. I pumped my palms in and out several times to repeat the effect. “It'll just be a few minutes. Let's go hide in—”

Before I could utter “the elevator,” the door swept open with a whoosh of air. Caught—caught, after getting so close. A flood of adrenaline, and with it, a rush of feeble excuses raced into my mind, each less plausible than the last. I paused a beat, took a deep breath, and uncovered my now blurry eyes and directed them up at the students.

But there were no students in the doorway. What I did see increased my terror—if that was possible. Papa had thrown open the door and was clopping at a full geriatric gallop into the lab, with what purpose I had no idea. Despite the intense desire to yell, no words came from my mouth, and despite my masochistic desire to view the impending calamity, my muscles refused to cooperate. So I sat on the floor, blurry and stunned.

“I'm not dead. They put me in the freezer but I'm not dead,” croaked Papa. “Help me.”

“How did you … what?” replied the redhead's stupefied voice.

“I didn't die. I'm not dead.” He delivered a theatrical pause. “
Aaaugh
, I think I'm having a heart attack.”

“Oh God. Oh God. One second.”

The telltale clopping of Papa's coffee loafers filled a beat of silence.

“Where are you going?” I heard another door open.

“Where's my daughter?” He coughed. “I want to go home. I'm not dead.” A second later, the door clicked shut.

“Oh fuck.” This time it was the brunette. After a dash of footsteps, the out-of-view door again creaked open and a second later, it clicked shut. Holy Jesus.

Jolted to my senses, I staggered to my feet and dashed through the open door straight toward Richard's chopped-up corpse. Finally face-to-face with my anthropomorphic treasure map, I hesitated just a moment out of disgust before grasping Richard's bloodless lower lip and tugging downward. The flesh gave like a piece of rubbery leather, and, to my delight, revealed the six missing digits, tattooed backward in blue ink. Sans mirror, it took me a few seconds to reverse the digits in my head: seven, six, nine, five, four, two—I checked twice, and then grabbed a ballpoint pen from an instrument tray and jotted the numbers on my left palm. After an obsessive third check, I ducked back into the mini-morgue and rode the elevator to the basement—Papa would have to fend for himself for a few minutes. Fortunately, Clarence was either still on break or hiding within his alcove, for I didn't encounter a soul on my way back to the main elevator.

Back at my Subaru, I waited five minutes before dialing the main hospital line and asking to be transferred to the ER, the most likely place they'd take Papa after his miraculous resurrection—either there or the psych ward.

A Filipina woman answered the phone on the third ring.

“Emergency Room—how can I direct your call?”

“Melvin Stover, please.”

“One second.” I heard the requisite clicking on the keyboard. “I'm sorry, can you spell that?”

I did.

“No, we definitely don't have anyone by that name in the ER. Would you like me to transfer you to the main operator?”

I didn't have a chance to answer; someone was call-waiting my cell.

“One second.” I tapped the switch-calls button.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hi, can you please connect me to the front desk?”

“Dad? It's Alex.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“Alex? Isn't this … I thought I dialed the hospital. I must be losing my mind.” He sounded half-asleep.

“What's wrong?” I played dumb.

“Your grandfather is over at UCLA Medical Center.”

“What happened? Is everything okay?”

“The nurse says he came running out of the morgue screaming that someone mistook him for a cadaver and threw him in.”

“What? How?” I barely contained myself.

“Lord only knows, but knowing your grandfather, it's not that surprising. I'm just glad your mother's not here. She'd die of humiliation. I don't know how he gets into these messes.”

“It runs in the family,” I joked uneasily.

“Well, fortunately your mother seemed to turn out fine. Anyway, I need to go pick him up. Get some sleep, I'm sorry I woke you.”