“You remember how to get back on Sixty-four from here?” I asked.
“Hang a left at the fork straight ahead. Shit.”
He cracked the window and got out his cigarettes. “Nothing like driving in a closed-up car with decomposed bodies.”
Thirty miles later I unlocked the back door to the OCME and pushed a red button on the wall inside. The bay door made a loud grating noise as it opened, light spilling onto the wet tarmac. Backing in the wagon, I opened the tailgate. We slid out the stretchers and wheeled them inside the morgue as several forensic scientists got off the elevator and smiled at us without giving our cargo more than a glance. Body-shaped mounds on stretchers and gurneys were as common as the cinderblock walls. Blood drips on the floor and foul odors were unpleasantnesses you learned to step around and quietly hurry past.
Producing another key, I opened the padlock on the refrigerator’s stainless-steel door, then went to see about toe tags and signing in the bodies before we transferred them to a double-decker gurney and left them for the night.
“You mind if I stop by tomorrow to see what you figure out about these two?”
Marino asked.
“That would be fine.”
“It’s them,” he said. “Gotta be.”
“I’m afraid that’s the way it looks, Marino. What happened to Wesley?”
“On his way back to Quantico, where he can prop his Florsheim shoes on top of his big desk and get the results over the phone.”
“I thought you two were friends,” I said warily.
“Yeah, well, life’s funny like that, Doc. It’s like when I’m supposed to go fishing. All the weather reports predict clear skies, and the minute I put the boat in the water it begins to friggin’ rain.”
“Are you on evening shift this weekend?”
“Not last I heard.”
“Sunday night – how about coming over for dinner? Six, six-thirty?”
“Yeah, I could probably manage that,” he said, looking away, but not before I caught the pain in his eyes.
1 had heard his wife supposedly had moved back to New Jersey before Thanksgiving to take care of her dying mother. Since then I had had dinner with Marino several times, but he had been unwilling to talk about his personal life.
Letting myself into the autopsy suite, I headed for the locker room, where I always kept personal necessities and a change of clothes for what I considered hygienic emergencies. I was filthy, the stench of death clinging to my clothing, skin, and hair. I quickly stuffed my scene clothes inside a plastic garbage bag and taped a note to it instructing the morgue supervisor to drop it by the cleaners first thing in the morning. Then I got into the shower, where I stayed for a very long time.
One of many things Anna had advised me to do after Mark moved to Denver was to make an effort to counteract the damage I routinely inflicted upon my body.
“Exercise.”
She had said that frightful word. “The endorphins relieve depression. You will eat better, sleep better, feel so much better. I think you should take up tennis again.”
Following her suggestion had proved a humbling experience. I had scarcely touched a racket since I was a teenager, and though my backhand had never been good, over the decades it ceased to exist at all. Once a week I took a lesson late at night, when I was less likely to be subjected to the curious stares of the cocktail and happy hour crowd lounging in the observation gallery of Westwood Racquet Club’s indoor facility.
After leaving the office, I had just enough time to drive to the club, dash into the ladies’ locker room, and change into tennis clothes. Retrieving my racket from my locker, I was out on the court with two minutes to spare, muscles, straining as I fell into leg stretches and bravely tried to touch my toes. My blood began to move sluggishly.
Ted, the pro, appeared from behind the green curtain shouldering two baskets of balls.
“After hearing the news, I didn’t think I’d be seeing you-tonight,” he said, setting the baskets on the court and slipping out of his warm-up jacket. Ted, perennially tan and a joy to look at, usually greeted me with a smile and a wisecrack. But he was subdued tonight.