CHAPTER 41

Buckle to! Though you don’t want to, you must!

Martin Luther

The Kellys’ driveway was at its worst. In the month of March it was sometimes a skating rink and sometimes a rutted track. The car wallowed off the road and Homer had to gun the engine through a thicket of fern and blueberry to find his way back.

Was it worth it, living here at the end of a mile-long dirt road? No, by God, it wasn’t. Paradise it might be, but one day he would plunge out of control down the embankment beside the house and crash through the ice on the Sudbury River and the car would fill up with freezing water and his drowned body would be hauled out with a boat hook. Serve him right.

He left the car at the top of the steep incline above the house and slid down the hill on the seat of his pants, his briefcase skidding ahead of him, landing in a snowbank.

Mary met him at the door. “Yes, it is too worth it,” she said before he could complain, handing him a drink.

“No it isn’t.” Homer hauled off his heavy parka and collapsed into a chair with his whiskey. “Oh, God, I’m tired.”

Mary sat down too, and leaned forward eagerly. “Homer, I’ve been thinking.”

“Always a mistake.” Homer sat up and looked at his wife appreciatively. Today she was wearing a monkish garment with a rope around the middle. “Your outfit,” he said, “it’s charming. You’d never see Mrs. Frederick walking around in a thing like that.”

“Oh, thank you, Homer. Now listen, it’s about the burned body in the car. If it wasn’t Rosalind Hall, who was it? It had to be somebody. Somebody with a name, somebody who was missing afterward.”

“Oh, God,” said Homer, taking a swig of whiskey, “I don’t want to think about women being burned alive in cars. Not now.”

“But maybe the body was already dead. The question is, suppose you wanted to get hold of a dead body, so you could burn it up in somebody else’s car, what would you do?”

“Well, you could practice self-reliance,” said Homer sourly, “and kill somebody yourself.”

“Or you could steal one that was lying around. The point is, there must be a record somewhere of all the people who died around the thirteenth of January.”

“So we should be finding out about missing cadavers? Hmmm, a funeral parlor, perhaps, from which a stiff has been purloined.” Homer groaned and tried to change the subject. “Look, this is deeply distressing to a man of my sensitivity and taste. Let’s talk about noble ladies with poppies in their hair—Pulchritude! Youth! Sacrifice! Glory! Victory!—not gruesome repulsive swollen blackened bodies in somebody’s burned-up car.”

“Homer, what are you talking about? Look, we should be finding out whether a body turned up missing about that time. Because it certainly wouldn’t go unnoticed, if it disappeared. Deceased people have relatives with strong feelings about their nearest and dearest. They want coffins and cemetery plots and tombstones.”

Homer was feeling better. The whiskey had gone straight to his head. “That’s true. The family mortician doesn’t just flap his hands and say, ‘Whoops, I’m terribly worry, but Aunt Dolly seems to have flown the coop. We were trundling stiffs here and there yesterday and somehow we lost track.’ No, that wouldn’t do at all.”

“But suppose the person didn’t have any relatives? So that nobody missed her? What about that?”

Homer set his glass down with a bang. “Okay, suppose it was a prostitute. Dangerous life, especially for the ones who are in business for themselves, so to speak.”

“So what happens then? The anonymous body goes to a funeral home and somebody just helps himself to it?”

“It wouldn’t be a funeral home, it would be a morgue. That’s where they end up, the derelicts, in a morgue.” Homer stood up to pour himself another drink. “The trouble is, they’ve got a system. You can’t just walk off with a corpse. They keep track of every decomposing bit of protoplasm that comes their way. Tell you what, I’ll talk to a pathologist in Boston. Dead derelicts would probably turn up in Boston. I’ll try Mass General tomorrow.”

Massachusetts General Hospital was one of the great medical institutions of the Western world, but it was a pain to get to. All the parking lots were full. The automobile civilization, decided Homer, had reached its peak and was now on the decline, and a moment was approaching when all the cars in the United States would collide in a giant smashup causing earthquakes throughout the world and a mountain of wrecked cars as high as the moon. Well, at least Boozer Brown would be happy.

He left his car in a doubtful spot and found his way to the office of the Chief of Pathology.

The pathologist didn’t look the way Homer had expected. He didn’t have long narrow fingers reeking of formaldehyde and a pale ivory complexion. He was tanned and healthy, as if he had just been on vacation in the Caribbean. Sweat pants showed beneath his green pajama top, and his feet were encased in huge athletic shoes.

“Absolutely not,” he said, shaking his head. “We couldn’t possibly lose track of a body. No way. You want a list? The names of all the cadavers that have come through here in the last six months? To whom they were assigned?”

“Oh, yes, thank you. But what about unidentified bodies? Derelicts, people like that? Anonymous people, nobody knows who they are? They haven’t got any identification and nobody comes looking for them?”

“Boston City Hospital. We pass them along to Boston City. That’s where the medical examiner’s office is. He keeps them until they’re identified.”

“How long?”

The pathologist shrugged. “A year. Two years.”

“In their—uh—deep freeze? Suppose nobody ever comes to identify them? Do they just stay there forever?”

The pathologist shook his head and moved to the door, eager to get back to extracting organs from some expired person—brain, liver, heart, stomach, spleen, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, adrenal glands, testicles and bladder, and then go out to a jolly lunch with fellow pathologists and gnaw on barbecued pork ribs, his fingers dripping with sticky sauce. Nodding at Homer, he dodged out of the room.

Homer jumped up and followed him as he swung down the foul-smelling corridor. “Well, suppose somebody came along and said, ‘Hey, wait, that’s my sister Madeline.’ Could he take her away?”

“It would have to be an undertaker with a release form, everything signed out. If the cause of death was violent or uncertain, there’d be an autopsy and all the records would be available.” The pathologist swung left into an open elevator. As the doors began to close he was still talking about microscope slides and fragments of tissue. The last words Homer heard through the crack were faint and far away, “Boston City Hospital, Mallory Institute of Pathology.” Then the doors came together softly and the healthy young man was gone.

Homer went back to the parking lot, to find an outraged motorist backing and filling as he struggled to squeeze past his car. “You’re damned lucky I didn’t just sideswipe your goddamned automobile, you goddamned bastard,” hollered the driver.

“You’re absolutely right,” said Homer humbly. “I agree with you completely. I’m all apology.” Fuming, the man drove away, and Homer set off to find Boston City Hospital.

It was easier said than done. He spent the next half hour getting lost, cursing at the traffic, waiting at red lights, getting lost again, then coming upon the hospital at last by a miraculous accident.

The Mallory Institute of Pathology had a building to itself. It had once been grander than it was now. There were gold sphinxes in the lobby, but the place exuded an air of seediness and melancholy, as though every kind of human sorrow and degradation came here to a bitter end. Homer wandered without direction. One floor was sickening with the same smell that wafted gruesomely up and down the corridor of the Pathology Department at MGH. There were swinging doors with a sign, THESE DOORS MUST REMAIN CLOSED. Another floor was neat and well lit, lined with offices and a handsome library.

Homer poked his head into one of the offices, and a young black woman looked up inquiringly. “May I speak to a pathologist?” said Homer. “I’m from the office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County.” As usual he neglected to say how long he had been trading on this defunct connection.

But the Boston City pathologist was just as discouraging as the man at MGH. “Impossible,” he said. “Utterly impossible. The system is absolutely airtight.”

Homer gave up and went home and complained to his wife. “They were so firm about it. It always puts my back up. Somebody says no way, and I always think there must be a chink somewhere. The human mind will think of something. The snake will crawl over the wall until it finds a hole, then slither through.”

“It’s that inquisitiveness of yours, Homer. You’ve got the longest nose in Massachusetts.”

“I do?” Homer felt his nose. “It’s not the longest, maybe, just the biggest.”

Mary gave it a kiss. “Well, anyway, it’s a splendid example of the human proboscis on a monumental scale.”