2

 

 

“I want to ask you about this autopsy report,” Benek said from the doorway. The large office was well stocked with plants, clearly belonging to a man who had made something pleasant of his workplace.

The overweight, balding coroner did not look up from his desk. “You can want all you want, but my open door does not mean you don’t have to knock. Who are you?”

“Sorry,” Benek said as he came forward and put the report on the man’s neatly arranged desk. “Detective Benek, homicide, 6th Precinct, annex A.”

“Annex A?” He smiled to himself, as if the annex address had a special meaning.

“Yes,” Benek said.

The coroner glanced at the file and sighed. “It’s exactly as I put it down, Detective Benek.”

Benek said, “I’d like more on this one.”

“More of what?” the man said softly.

In the week since the report had arrived on Benek’s desk, no one at the precinct, including Captain Reddy, had shown the slightest curiosity about the odd details. So Benek had decided to use some of the initiative that Reddy was always prattling about. If something smells, Reddy would say, then follow it up—but try not to waste the city’s money.

The coroner looked up finally, obviously irritated. “What do you want from me?” His blue eyes were youthful, and seemed happier than the rest of his face, as if he were living somewhere else. “Why complicate your life and mine with this nonsense?”

“What’s your opinion?” Benek asked, trying to sound polite.

The coroner smiled. “Don’t waste any more of our time on what’s obviously a medical student’s prank.”

“But your report seems to rule that out.”

The coroner sighed again and put his work aside. “Sit down, Detective.” The look of living somewhere else faded from his eyes and he seemed resigned to the here and now.

Benek lowered himself into the wooden chair. It creaked under him.

The coroner asked, “How long have you been with homicide?”

“Three years.”

“And before?”

“I was a sergeant.”

“Married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

Benek didn’t answer. He had always been suspicious of the game between the sexes, whatever that meant. Men were the predators, sex an invasive physical act, pleasure the reward for the mere attempt to reproduce, with no guarantees. About as much fun as picking flowers. The players had no choice about playing the game, whose rewards shone in the short term, and the difficulties were revealed when it was too late to back out. Good looks made men and women mad and stupid, ill with each other, as Aristotle put it, and to see through the game left you with nothing to see in your wise unhappiness.

“If you were married, or had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t worry about things like this. You’d do your job and go home, eat, and get laid. Must have taken you at least half an hour to get down here. Think of the crooks you might have stopped in that time.”

“I’m on my lunch hour,” Benek said, then leaned forward and asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

The coroner sighed even more impatiently and replied, “No, I haven’t, ever—but so what? Have you?”

“Then how was the skull emptied without being opened?”

“You don’t read very well,” the coroner said with a wave of his hand. “I didn’t say it wasn’t opened.”

Benek sat back. The wooden chair creaked now as if it were going to break. The man was obviously a fan of fine, oracular distinctions. “You didn’t say anything,” Benek said. “Or rather, you didn’t write anything down about it.”

The coroner gazed at him sternly. “The brain could have been sucked out through the nostrils, like raw eggs through a small hole in the shell. The ancient Egyptians had a way of doing it as part of

their embalming process. It’s nothing new.”

“But was there any sign of that kind of… emptying?”

“No.”

“So what do you conclude?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“The procedure might not have left marks. A fluid might have been injected into the head to ease the extraction. Or they might have used another method entirely.”

“Did you test for foreign fluids?” Benek demanded.

“I won’t waste city money on a hoax. It wasn’t a homicide. No signs of violence anywhere on the body. Can’t tell what actually killed him, before the brain was removed.”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Benek said. “Was it a murder?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what?”

“You have my sympathy for being so curious,” the coroner replied, “but don’t ask me to speculate. How it was done would probably turn out to be foolishly obvious. I have no idea and I don’t care. And you shouldn’t care. For all I know, you’re pulling a gag on me and plan to sell the story to some junky rag to supplement your pay.”

Benek smiled at him. “Now you don’t really think I would be doing that?”

The coroner glanced at him. “No, I suppose not. But you seem ready to suppose much too much.”

“Did you examine the body yourself?” Benek asked.

“Briefly. Johansen and his assistant did the actual autopsy.”

“Were they surprised?”

The coroner shrugged. “I really don’t know.” He sat back and looked bored. “Each case barely gets the attention it seems to deserve and no more. We’re too busy to look beyond what it seems to be unless it reaches out and bites us.”

“And this has no… bite?”

“None.”

Benek said, “I want to see the findings for myself.”

“Some coffee?” the coroner asked, taking out a fat thermos from his desk drawer. “Maybe it’ll make you less persistent. Funny, you don’t seem the overly nervous type.”

“No.” Benek stared as the man poured, not knowing what else to say. “They dragged me out too early when they found the body. Made me feel I owed him something.”

“Okay, Detective,” the coroner said after taking a sip. “Because you’re a fine human being we’ll go look at the stiff together, and I’ll bet you a closer look will show us how it was done. The skull was probably opened and crazy-glued back shut. Don’t laugh. I once did that with a deep flesh cut on my thumb. Worked fine, with no stitches to remove. Went to a dress-up dinner without even a Band-Aid.” He shook his head and took another sip. “I’ll grant you, who would have expected an empty skull?” He smiled. “What about fingerprints?”

“Not on file,” Benek said.

“And no one’s missing a body?”

“Not yet. We’re checking addresses and phone numbers from his clothes.”

The coroner emptied his cup. “Has to be med students, so you’ll never find out the details. File the paperwork and forget it is my best advice.”

Benek felt foolish. “You’re probably right.”

The coroner put away his thermos and smiled again, then put his hand out across the desk. “I’m Frank Gibney.”

Benek reached out and said, “William Benek.”

“Is it Bill?”

“Sure, why not.” There hadn’t been anyone around for a long time who wanted to use his first name. His co-workers were not the kind of people who would call anyone William, and he had never encouraged the use of his nickname, so everyone just used his last name.

Gibney stood up to his less than average height. “Let’s go look before we eat lunch. Better to risk killing your appetite now instead of losing your lunch later.”

“I’m not… overly squeamish.” Benek got up, retrieved the autopsy file from the desk, and followed the coroner out the door and down the long, green-tiled hallway to cold storage.

“You know,” Gibney said as he fell back and walked next to him, “you’re a pretty good dresser compared to the dicks out your way,” and Benek remembered how his mother had always yelled at him to be neat. “Even got a tie.”

“My dead mother’s idea,” Benek said, wondering at his admission to a vague credential.

Gibney turned left through an open door into a small room and stopped before a desk. “There should be an attendant here,” he said.

“What’s the file say?”

Benek looked inside hastily. “Drawer 104.”

Gibney went past the desk and pushed through a swinging door. Benek followed him into a large, brightly lit room, and they crossed the white floor tiles to the far wall. Gibney located 104 at waist level, and pulled it out. “Ready?” he asked without looking up at Benek.

“Go ahead,” Benek said, and Gibney unzipped the bag. The head was taped shut. Slowly, Gibney removed the adhesive strip

and lifted the cutaway portion of the skull. Benek, feeling slightly queasy, peered into the bloody hollow, then flipped through the autopsy report.

“What now?” Gibney asked.

Benek found the notation. “Says here the skull was filled with blood when opened.”

Gibney scowled and looked surprised. “I didn’t record every detail myself.” He took the report and checked the entry. “That just can’t be. A medical cadaver’s head just wouldn’t be filled with blood. It had to have been pumped in later—but why, even for a gag?”

“Maybe to confuse us,” Benek said.

Gibney nodded. “Bet you it was watered blood, maybe even red dye. I’ll check our samples. If it’s blood I’ll bet you there’s two types. That would indicate it’s part of some gag.” Then he shook his head. “Still a waste of time, ours and their effort. File the paperwork and get back to cases you can solve. It’s just plain stupid to chase after something like this. All you’ll find is a lot of ingenuity. No crime has been committed.”

“Then you rule out murder?”

“Murder! There’s not one sign that he was anything but dead from natural causes, long before someone sat him down on that bench.”

“But you can’t say when he died.”

“No,” Gibney said, “but that’s not strange with a body that’s been on ice for a while, and brainless. I don’t know. It’s the damnedest thing. All I can say is that the evidence of what killed this man, or how long he’s been dead, is too old to trust, so unless we find out who he was, we’ll just never know. And, as I said, what we would find out, if we could and did, wouldn’t be worth the work. You’d have better luck staking out bicycle thieves.”

“That’s been done, successfully, on occasion.”

“Yeah, and my dog almost said a recognizable word to me, once, a long time ago.”

As Benek watched Gibney zip up the bag and slide the drawer shut, it occurred to him that the hoax might easily have been set up right here, with Gibney in on it all the way, including everything he had just said.

“I know, I know,” Gibney said, “but I assure you we had nothing to do with this. Consider for a moment that maybe our autopsy destroyed the signs of a previous brain removal. Johansen had not been instructed to be especially careful about the signs, after all. There was nothing exceptional about the body.”

“Sounds plausible,” Benek said as they left the area. “Then why was an autopsy done at all?”

“Johansen’s new at it. He needed the practice.”

“That’s all?” Benek asked.

“That’s it,” Gibney said. “We should have left well enough alone.”

“Lucky we didn’t,” Benek said.

“You like to be confused?”

Benek told himself that finding questions that were not easily answered was good practice.

In the hallway Gibney said, “When you think of all the human dead, with so many standing behind all of us alive today, you’d think that one of them might have risen from the dead, come back as… a statistical fluctuation of some kind and told us what it was all about.” He smiled. “Have some coffee before you leave?”

“No, thanks,” Benek said.

“I’ll check the blood type,” Gibney said. “Bet you it’s two different types.”

Benek wanted to say that different types would make it too easy, too good to be true, and found himself wishing for the impossible to invade his life.