Читать книгу Mortuary Confidential - Kenneth McKenzie - Страница 19

Contributed by a college basketball fan

I used to contract with the county to do body removals for the coroner’s office. When a death occurs outside of a normal setting like a hospital, convalescent home, or home hospice care, the coroner is called to investigate. His investigation of the scene determined where I took the body. If the coroner believed the death to be anything other than natural (or sometimes, accidental), I took the body back to his laboratory for an autopsy by a pathologist. If he ruled it to be a natural death, then I would take the body back to my funeral home, or another funeral home of the family’s choosing, and things would proceed from there. The money was terrible, but it kept my fledgling business afloat through some rough patches in the early years.

Before the state allocated money for an official county coroner’s building, the autopsies used to be performed at my funeral home. To my relief, the state later coughed up enough money so we no longer have to deal with our morgue being commandeered as a quasi-government facility. The pathologist always left a mess.

It can be a raw job at times—doing removals for the coroner. I’ve been summoned at all hours of the night, to all kinds of places, and seen bodies in all kinds of conditions, in all types of weather. The coroner doesn’t get called if some sweet, old lady dies of heart failure at home under hospice care. No, the coroner gets called when there’s a mess to be cleaned up. When he got called, I got called.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called to the scene of a car wreck and lined the body bags up along the shoulder of the road while deputies and firemen collected the body parts, or been called to a homicide so recent that the blood hasn’t had time to congeal—the sweet smell of iron hanging heavy in the air. The suicides made me introspective and the freak accidents made me believe in Existentialism, but they all made me just a little bit more jaded. I had the contract with the county for seven years before the strain of the work became too much and I called it quits. The tragedy of all those shattered human beings drained me emotionally and physically.

These days I’m happy to sit in my big-cheese office, in my fine suits, and go about my business in a relaxed fashion while some other hungry upstart funeral director deals with the dirty job of doing removals for the coroner’s office. I saw a lot of things during those seven years, but the removal that I remember most happened the first year I held the contract.

My funeral home wasn’t doing very many calls a year. One weekday morning I was drinking coffee and reading the sports scores when the phone rang. It was the coroner’s office; a body had been found in the foothills. I took the location from the woman, thanked her, and hung up. I called a part-time guy, Paul, who helped me do removals, and he agreed to me meet me at the funeral home.

We piled into the run-out old Chevy station wagon and drove out to the site. I live near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The weather fronts that blow off the Pacific Ocean hit the mountains and have nowhere to go, so they dump their precipitation. It’s usually raining in my neck of the woods. This day was no exception. It was more like a heavy mist than an actual rain, but combined with the chilly air, it was a certifiable foul day. One of the sheriff’s deputies recognized my vehicle as we pulled up to the scene and waved us through the cones he had set up on the lonely mountain road.

I stepped out of the wagon and turned my collar up. It was no use; the wind still cut right through the fabric. The area where the body had been found was on a bend of a secondary road leading up towards the mountains. Old-growth forest towered over the road on one side, and on the other, an embankment dropped away from the road. I walked over to the guardrail where the coroner was staring down the hill intently.

“Hey, Joe,” I said, fumbling for my cigarettes in my pocket with frozen fingers.

He glanced at me, grunted, cigar clamped between his lips, and then looked back down the hill.

I pulled out a cigarette and inserted it between my lips. “Nasty fall, huh?” I said, following his gaze down the steep embankment to where I could see two deputies picking their way through the brush around the little stream at the bottom of the ravine.

Joe grunted again, and pulled his cigar from his lips with his thick fingers.

I tried lighting a match but the moisture just made it crumble. I tried several before I gave up and flicked my unlit cigarette down the hill in disgust. “So, what’s the story?”

Joe sneered. “What does it look like?” he said. “Asshole fell. Got what he deserved for walking around here at night. No street-lights out here in the boondocks.”

I stared down the muddy embankment to the little creek that had formed at the bottom of the ravine and wished I hadn’t worn one of my few suits. I knew this wouldn’t be a tidy job.

“Hey fellas! Find anything down there?” Joe yelled.

The deputies at the bottom of the ravine looked up and shook their heads. Not that they were really looking any too hard for clues. They were pussyfooting around in the tall grass, trying to steer clear of the mud and water.

“Well, Toules, looks like we have an obvious accident on our hands.” Joe pushed up off the guardrail where he had been resting his foot, using his knee as a leaning post.

“You going to go down and look for yourself?” I asked, incredulous. Joe was lazy and had the kind of stupidity combined with cunning intellect that could get you in trouble if you crossed him. He had been elected into office eons ago, and just kept getting re-elected. It was almost like he got recycled in spite of himself. The more he got re-elected the lazier he got.

“I can see just fine from up here what happened. Obvious accident.”

I squinted down into the ravine. “You sure?” I asked dubiously.

“Fell.”

“He fell over the guardrail?”

Joe took the stub out of his mouth and flicked it at my feet. “What? You want to play coroner today, Toules? My job here is done. You and your corpse-humping friend get your asses down there and drag that body out of that water, and try not to get your nice shoes wet.” He pounded me on the back and laughed meanly. “I’ll stop over later to make an ID,” he called over his shoulder.

Asshole, I thought, as Joe got into his government-issue sedan and took off with a squeal of tires.

“Does he do anything?” Paul asked as I returned to the wagon.

“No, except stuff his face at Smiley’s Diner.”

We both laughed.

“Lets get this over with,” I said and sighed.

“Bad?” Paul asked.

“It’s going to be messy.”

I put on a pair of rubbers to protect my good shoes and donned a pair of large yellow kitchen gloves, the kind that go nearly up to your elbow. We used them for coroner-related work because we never knew what kind of mess we’d find, and they afforded a little more protection than regular latex gloves. Paul pulled the cot out onto the pavement and collapsed it to the ground. I got out a black body bag and a coil of rope. Handing the coil of rope to my partner, I hopped over the guardrail and wind-milled my arms as I slid down the muddy slope. Thankfully, I made it to the bottom without falling. Paul wasn’t so lucky.

I found myself standing in sixteen inches of muddy water and him sitting in it. We turned the air blue with our language as we got to work. I unfolded the thick vinyl body bag on the tall grass of the stream’s embankment parallel to the facedown man.

We both stood in the stream. I grabbed the arms, Paul took the legs, and we hoisted him right out of the stream and into the bag. I zipped it up, and we flipped the body bag over so we didn’t drag the man facedown. Paul looped the rope through one of the sturdy nylon handles and climbed the ravine hill. He slipped a couple of times, and each time a loud cuss word cut through the silent mountain air like the report of a gunshot. When Paul made it to the top of the embankment, he looped the rope around the guardrail. Then he pulled on the rope as I grabbed a handle and helped drag the body bag back across the stream and up the muddy hill.

Paul and I loaded the body bag onto the cot and put it in the back of the station wagon. We waved to the deputies and sped off.

Hours later, after I had time to change out of my ruined suit, shoes, and raincoat, Paul and I stood in the morgue and placed the body bag on the porcelain embalming table. Since the zipper was on the underside of the man, I took a pair of shears and cut the bag down the center.

We stepped back in surprise, and I think Paul captured both our feelings with two words. He covered his mouth with his gloved hand and whispered, “Oh, shit!”

The man lay on the table, staring up at us with surprised, vacant eyes. A ten-inch piece of chrome bumper stuck out from his torso. Clearly, he had been the victim of a hit-and-run.

I was on the phone to the state within minutes. Coroner Joe offered his resignation less than a week later.