I didn’t have far to go to find the morgue; it’s in the basement of the courthouse.
They try to disguise it as much as possible.
There’s a nice-looking middle-aged receptionist. There’s a waiting area with a plump, comfortable wine-colored couch; a table filled with current issues of magazines; and a coffeepot that’s always percolating.
Doc Novotony is a distant relative of Cliffie, Sr., and as such his credentials have been questioned a few times. Exactly what is the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics, anyway? And exactly where is the Thayer Medinomics Hospital where he interned? The state medical board wouldn’t give
Novotony his license until he battled them all the way to our state supreme court, which decided, begrudgingly, that Novotony was more or less qualified to practice medicine here. But it was a split decision, with the minority report being pretty scathing.
Cliffie, Sr., installed Novotony as the county medical examiner. Novotony then proceeded to shock everybody by being a pretty decent M.E. with but two failings-anytime Cliffie, Sr., wanted results to come out a certain way, that was exactly how those results came out.
And then there’s the matter of how he dresses.
Iowa isn’t the equal of Texas in its football fervor but for some folks around here, it comes damned close. Doc Novotony, all 260 pounds and five-foot-six of him, is a good example. No matter what the occasion, and I include funerals here, you almost always see him in his black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeye football jersey and his black-and-gold cap and his black slacks with the thin gold piping down the side. He gets kidded a lot, but apparently not enough to change his clothes.
He came out to greet me after Rita, his secretary, had walked back to tell him I was here. He has psoriasis on one side of his face. It has spread over his hands. He has obligingly dispensed with handshaking. He smelled of death, or those morgue chemicals that I associated with death. They smell the same in the places where they put animals to sleep. I took a cat in once and followed the vet back to his special death room. I wished I hadn’t.
“Hear you had a little trouble last night, McCain,” he said. Then smiled. “Little skinny-dipping with that pretty Mary Travers, huh?”
Rita shook her head and rolled her eyes.
She always looked embarrassed by her boss.
“Too bad you got the eye for Pamela Forrest, McCain,” Doc Novotony said.
“That Mary’s a good-lookin’ gal. Plus she’s got some nice wheels on her, if you know what I mean.”
Rita did some more eye-rolling.
“I just said that to get Rita’s goat,” he laughed. “Got to liven this place up a little bit.” He picked up Rita’s package of Chesterfield’s and lit one. “I owe you one.”
“You owe me a carton,” Rita said. This time she shook her head, but I sensed genuine amusement with her boorish boss. He wore you down and won you over. Like professional wrestling: you watched despite all your best judgment.
“I’m here about the girl in the canoe.”
“You want to see her?”
“Not especially.”
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot you’ve got a queasy stomach.” He looked over at Rita.
“He shoulda been here to see that guy that fell into that corn grinder last week. Now, there was a mess for you.”
“Maybe you could let me borrow some photos sometime,” I said.
He grinned. “I don’t know why Cliff hates you so much. I think you’re pretty funny, McCain. And Rita’s always tellin’ me how cute you are.”
“I’ve never said that in my life, McCain,”
Rita said.
“I was just teasin’ her again. Hard as hell to get her goat, you ever noticed that, McCain?”
Then, he nodded to the back and said, “C’mon.”
“I actually do think you’re cute,
McCain,” Rita said as we were leaving. “It’s just that I’ve never said it to the doc here. I like short guys.”
“Does that include me?” the esteemed graduate of the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, “you just get me all hot and bothered.”
“I should fire her someday, don’t you think, McCain?”
“Actually,” Rita said, “there are two guys in this town I can count on, the Doc here being one of them. And the other one being my cousin. He’s never let me down.”
The morgue wasn’t big. There were six body drawers and two tables. There was a new tile floor and a desk and two military-green filing cabinets. The shades were drawn. Everything was shadowy. Only one of the tables had a body on it, concealed beneath a sheet. I thought of that great scene in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, my favorite movie, where the man sees his duplicate laid out on a pool table – and suddenly pulling the sheet back. Ever since then, Kevin McCarthy has been my favorite actor. And Dana Wynter, his costar, became my favorite actress, gorgeous and elegant beyond compare.
Doc had remarked about my queasy stomach. I guess he figured something was wrong with me for not liking to look at dead people. Or smell them.
When he drew back the sheet, and I got a look at her, all of her, I said, “My God, what did they do to her?”
“Abortion. Bad one. Some butcher.”
“Son of a bitch.” I was thinking of my sister.
“Cliff, Jr., called the sheriff over in the next county. This is the missing girl. They finally Id’d her because of a long surgical scar on her back. This is her. Sixteen. Melinda Carnes. Her dad’s a dairy farmer near Alburnett.”
“What the hell did he do to her?” This time, I didn’t get sick. I got angry.
“You never know about these amateurs,” he said, covering her up again. “They use all kinds of instruments when they try and abort these girls.
Some of them know what they’re doing, some don’t.
The worst thing’s usually infection. It can kill a girl a few days down the line. But you see a butcher job like this and you wonder.”
“About what?”
“About if it was on purpose.” He took his Hawkeye cap off and scratched his head.
“Why the hell would somebody do this on purpose?”
His eyes narrowed as he looked up at me.
“Maybe he hates women. Or maybe he hates sinners. You know, one of those religious types, figures a girl’s got it coming for sleeping around before she’s married, and he decides he’s gonna help God out a little and punish her right here on earth. So he cuts her up.”
“But could this have been an accident?”
“Oh, sure. That’s the hell of it. One of these amateurs gets lucky a few times and he thinks he’s a doc. But then his luck runs out and he gets frustrated and he panics a little, and boom, the girl hemorrhages and dies. Most cases like this, the cutter gets scared and runs off and it takes the girl a while to die. Only thing that could save her is somebody passing by and gettin’ her to a hospital on time. This gal didn’t have that kind of luck, unfortunately.”
He put his Hawkeye cap back on. “Her parents are on their way over to identify her for sure. I’m only gonna show them her face.
Figure that’s the humane thing to do.”
He clipped off the light. We walked back through the cool and shadowy room to the reception area.
Rita was on the phone. Everything still smelled of death. I wanted to leave.
“I’m earnin’ my money this week, I’ll tell you that,” he said as he walked me out into the hallway. “First, Kenny Whitney and his wife and now this.”
I thought of what Judge Whitney had said, that somehow the two cases were related. That still didn’t make any sense to me.
The doc smiled at me. “I don’t know why the judge wanted you to come down here, McCain.”
He winked at me. “She probably knows somethin’ we don’t.”
“She didn’t want me to come over here,” I lied.
“Right. You came down here because you like dead people so much.” Before I could say anything, “And tell her that as a newly eligible bachelor, I’d love to take her to the Valentine’s Ball the Jaycees are puttin’ on this year.” He was currently separated from wife number three.
“I’ll give her the message,” I said.
I’d give her the message. And then she’d give me the response, and it’d be one that the doc sure wouldn’t want to hear.
I automatically started to shake hands and then I remembered the psoriasis and how he spent his time handling corpses. I just gave him a little wave and got out of there, taking the steps two at a time.