Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (169 page)

#

We wait.

Minutes tick away like hours.

l decide to kill some of the time by pressing Roger for more info.

“Those two rednecks I mentioned before. The ones who threatened me. They really work for you?”

He nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “Mostly they do maintenance around the house. Mow the lawns, do the shopping, things like that. Sometimes they try and act like my bodyguards even though the only fighting they’ve ever done is on
Nintendo
. I let them do it anyway. Gets them off. Makes them feel important.”

Once more I tell him about the third man who popped his head up inside the cab. How I
swear to God
I saw a third bald-headed man when I was speeding away from the pickup truck. Saw his reflection in the rearview mirror.

“No fucking way,” Roger insists from down on the van floor. “Those guys always work together and alone together. They’re retarded like that. Maybe even queer. Not a chance anyone else would be with them. Especially some asshole who’s hiding.”

“It could have been the Russian who wants the money back. Alexander Stalin. The one who wants you to write his book, make him famous.”

“No way,” Roger repeats. “Those dumb rednecks aren’t even aware of the existence of those Russian freaks. And vise-versa.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” Suzanne says in my stead.

“I still don’t believe it,” demands Roger.

I would argue further with him, but that's when I hear the doors to the morgue open back up, and the sound of a heavy gurney being wheeled out.

#

One of the van’s back-bay doors opens. Standing outside it is Georgie. He’s positioned at the front end of a gurney that’s got a black body bag set upon it. The body bag is filled with a body. Presumably Sissy’s. At the foot of the gurney is a young African American male dressed in the button-down shirt and pants of a morgue orderly. Now I know the reason for the two hundred dollars. Those orderlies make squat while expected to clean up after the dead. Literally. Georgie, who is both Pathologist Emeritus at the AMC and a former carjacker in another life, knows precisely who to grease on the inside and who not to grease.

“Shift over everyone,” he insists.

We do it.

Georgie takes a quick step back while the black man pushes the body forward into the empty space on the van bay floor. My stomach turns at the thought of the dead Sissy Walls now pressed up against me in that cold body bag.

The bay door slams shut.

The gurney is wheeled back through the morgue doors while Georgie repositions himself behind the wheel of the van. Turning the engine over, he shifts the transmission into drive and pulls out, heading back in the direction from which we came.

Impossible bodysnatching mission accomplished.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

BACK OUT ON THE open road, I sit up and breathe a silent sigh of relief. But then, I also half-expect a cop to pull up on our tail, hit the flashers and sirens. I can hear the headlines broadcast over the airwaves now:

“Murder Suspect Also Charged in Body Snatching. Details at Eleven.”

“How on earth did you manage to grab Sissy’s body?” Suzanne asks Georgie while she snakes herself back into the front passenger side seat.

“It’s not all that difficult,” Georgie says while pulling onto Madison Avenue which will take us up to the street where his townhouse is located. “If you have full authorized access to every nook and cranny of the hospital including the morgue, you can pretty much take what you want. So long as you return it in a reasonable amount of time. How do you think it was possible President Kennedy’s brain went missing during his autopsy in ’63? In Sissy’s case here, she was already bagged and stored inside the cooler. She’d even been assigned her own gurney. It was just a matter of wheeling her back outside and into the van.”

“Isn’t she scheduled for an autopsy soon?”

“Tomorrow afternoon at three to be exact. Says so on the charts and on her toe tags.”

“What if the schedule changes and somebody shows up to find that there’s no body?”

“That’s where luck comes in. Plus, my examination won’t take all that long, and we’ll have her back in place in the morgue cooler in a matter of three hours. Maybe less.”

Georgie turns onto his street. It’s then, inside the relative silence of the van, that I hear it. Crying.

I turn and see that Roger is lying beside the body-bagged Sissy. He’s hugging her, his face jammed into the nape of her neck, tears streaming down his round white-bearded face and onto the black poly.

“I can’t believe it,” Suzanne whispers after a time. “All she did was screw around on him, tell him to his face how sorry she was for marrying him. How she had zero feelings for him.”

“Love works in mysterious ways,” I say.

“So does grief,” adds Georgie pulling up to his townhouse, thumbing the button on the overhead garage door opener. When it’s opened all the way, he slowly pulls the van inside and closes the garage door. Killing the engine, he slips on out of the van.

“Okay, people,” he says, coming around to the back of the vehicle, where he opens the back bay door. “Time to find out what happened to Sissy.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

GEORGIE AND I OCCUPY his basement laboratory while Suzanne and an upset Roger elect to hang out upstairs in the living room. The work Georgie is about to do is not pretty, but then it’s not the least bit unusual for Georgie or me. I grew up with this stuff. Dead bodies were an everyday sight for me. Some of the bodies that came my dad’s way were not very pretty. Car accidents. Gunshot wounds. Stabbings. Facial mutilations, contusions, and crushings from head-on collisions.

Once—and I remember this like it happened three minutes ago—we received a decapitated body that belonged to a construction worker who’d fallen from a high scaffolding tower and onto a metal fence. Imagine a nine-year-old boy waking up in the morning in his Batman and Robin pajamas only to head on down to his dad’s embalming room where a badly bruised and battered headless body was lying on the gurney while its head rested on a stainless steel tray on the counter beside it. Meanwhile, my dad feasted on his morning ham and egg sandwich, a tall
Dunkin’ Donuts
coffee set directly beside the head, the wall-mounted television tuned into
Good Morning America
and some recipe they were trying out for a low-calorie Sloppy Joe.

“Morning son,” my dad barked in his usual Moonlight Funeral Home cheer. Then, while taking a bite of his sandwich and aiming his thumb over his right shoulder. “Do me a favor and hand me that, would you, kid?”

I remember taking a few steps toward the head, my pre-adolescent stature just the right height for me to stare the head directly in the eyes. Which were wide open and dark brown. The expression on the face was pure shock, like the head knew that it had been detached from its better half just before it died. The face was round and sported a three or four day growth like lots of construction workers who don’t care what they look like on the job. The hair was thick and black, mussed up and caked with dried blood. I raised up my hands and, not knowing where to take hold of the head, grabbed hold of both ears.

That’s when my dad nearly scared the pajamas off of me by issuing a loud belly laugh.

“Not that!” he exclaimed, his mouth full of ham and egg. “My coffee!”

The body lying on the gurney in front of me now couldn’t be more different from that mutilated construction worker from forty years past. The naked Sissy Walls looked just as beautiful and sexy as she did when I shared a bed with her less than twenty four hours ago. Only difference now was that her skin was cold and pale, with some marbleization having taken effect, mostly in the legs. SOP for the newly dead, especially for women whose skin is somewhat thinner than a man’s.

I watch while Georgie makes a cursory examination of her body, careful not to make any lasting marks on her skin while he pokes and prods at her flesh with an extended index finger covered in a blue latex glove.

“So let me get this straight,” he says after a time. “You had sex with her, and you did a few lines and had some drinks. She had already been partying?”

“I’m guessing that, much like her husband, she is the type to never stop. Only when she passes out and can’t help but take a break.”

“What’s that they say about opposites attracting, Moon?”

“Clearly not in this case. Only reason she still looks so good is because she’s young.”

He pokes and prods her scalp with one hand while pulling back sections of her long red hair with the other. When he’s finished, he stands upright.

“I gotta be honest,” he says, pulling off the rubber gloves, tossing them into the medical waste bin beside the stainless steel table. “I ain’t seeing anything here that tells me somebody messed with her other than herself. No bruises. No scrapes. No scratches. No cuts or lacerations of any kind. Not even in the scalp.”

“Evidence of an injection?”

Shaking his head.

“Not that I can see. And I would most definitely see the familiar target-shaped, round purple bruise and black pin-prick center on a girl whose skin is as light as hers.”

“So what do we do?”

“I guess it’s possible someone forced her to somehow ingest a whole lot of drugs. But then, from what you tell me, she was already doing this?”

“What if someone poisoned her?”

“Takes tox exam to figure that one out, and I most definitely cannot do that here.”

My eyes glance at her neatly groomed sex.

“Can you clean her up for me?”

“Yah,” he says, nodding gently. “I can get rid of anything that proves you were the last to be with her within hours of her death. But you probably don’t want to hang around to watch.”

“I don’t.”

“Why don’t you head upstairs and catch the local real-time news on the computer. See if your face shows up. Then we can figure out your next move and make plans for getting Sissy back to the hospital.”

“You’re a good pal, Georgie.”

“Don’t mention it. Just another little adventure in illegal pathological examinations in a long list of illegal examinations.”

“Naturally.”

I go for the stairs that lead up to the living room.

“Moon,” Georgie calls out, as I take the first stair.

“What is it?”

“Those two train wrecks upstairs. Bonchance and Walls. You really trust them? They telling you everything?”

I exhale, then breathe in the odor of disinfectant and alcohol.

“Look who we’re dealing with here, Georgie. A man who makes shit up for a living and a woman who sells all those lies for big money.”

“Enough said,” Georgie frowns.

“No truer words…” I say, and head back up the stairs.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

UPSTAIRS IN THE LIVING room, I check my cell. Two calls from Detective Miller at the APD. Two messages too. I decide not to listen to them yet while I head for Georgie’s laptop computer which is set up on the same long table where he stores his 1970s-era Yamaha stereo-cassette system and turntable.