I got to work and told Eli he could leave and that I would sign him out at his normal time, like always. He told me about our over-nighters: two simply got too old, and the other was an overdose. He left the paperwork out for me. Then he left.
I should have slept another hour. This was a waste of my time. The old people with their pale raisin wrinkled skin and brittle bones and the drug addict with his pale bruised skin and near-atrophied muscles did not interest me. I wanted my dead bodies the way I wanted my women: meaty. It could be muscle or fat, so long as it was substantial. Substantial, but not obese. The very fat and very skinny seemed equally weak to me. It was strength I was after.
Just the same, I gave the corpses a look. I would have given them a physical exam, too, if it wasn't like looking at three skeletons, either exhumed or discovered frozen in an iceberg. Nothing to prod. Nothing to poke.
So I put them away in much the same way I would also put their files into their respective drawers.
I managed to get the bodies put away without dropping any of them to the floor, but I can't say the same about their files. I dropped them all. On their way down, they opened, and their innards spilled all over the floor and under the desk.
I scraped the mess that was out in the open into a quick pile and stuck the upper half of my body in the space made for your knees. I got my right hand on the last few sheets and used my left to steady myself against the bottom of the drawer above me, where I found a key stuck to the desk with a magnet.
We're curious, people. We can't help ourselves. Look at Adam and Eve. Look at Socrates. We all want to know. Sometimes you better your life and the lives of others, and sometimes you fuck it up for everyone. It can go either way. But whichever way it does go, at least now you know.
I knew this key unlocked Dick's office. I knew I had almost an hour before anyone else came in. I knew I was bored.
Other than a box of cigarettes and a bird clock, I didn't know what Dick kept in his office. I didn't know much about Dick.
I couldn't help myself. I went to his office and stood in the middle of the room, looking around for what I wanted to molest first. Filing cabinets, bookshelves, end-table drawers, a closet. So many choices. I settled on the desk. People are always hiding things in their desks – liquor or little black books, pistols or records of dirty deeds.
Everyone who has a desk has something to hide in that desk. Everyone except for Richard Pearson. The most exciting thing I found in any of the four drawers was a novelty pen. When you turned it upside down, the upside down woman in her underwear turned right side up, and her underwear fell to her feet. I got the sense that this would not be a productive exploration.
Disappointed, I leafed through the stack of papers sitting neatly on the polished oak. (It was quite a desk to have in a coroner's office. It could have belonged to the CEO of some huge, money-grubbing corporation.) Nothing interesting there, either. Just the autopsy reports of all the unclaimed bodies we'd had in the last two weeks.
I grabbed a pencil from the golf bag, held by a six-inch caddy, on the desk. I started doodling on a pad of blue post-it notes and noticed indentations on the paper. I shaded lightly over the entire square, like they do in detective movies, and found a note now written in the dead space.
Six for Saturday the tenth. Call W tomorrow.
This wasn’t much more interesting than the nudie pen. I peeled the note from the pad, folded it in half so the glue was inside, stuck it in my wallet, locked the door on my way out, and put the key back.
I wondered if Dave knew his uncle was the most boring man in the world.