“How are you going to sign him out?” Marino asked.
“Acute seasickness.” Ruffin popped a towel at a fly.
“You know, you’re really beginning to get on my nerves;” Marino warned him.
“Cause of death undetermined,” I said. “Manner, homicide. This isn’t some poor dockworker who accidentally got locked inside a container. Chuck, I need a surgical pan. Leave it right here on the counter, and before the day is out, you and I need to talk:’
His eyes darted away from me like minnows. I pulled off my gloves and called Rose.
“Would you mind going into archives and finding one of my old cork cutting boards?” I asked her.
OSHA had decided that all cutting boards had to be Teflon-coated because porous ones were susceptible to contamination. That was appropriate if one worked around live patients or was making bread. I complied, but it didn’t mean I threw anything away.
“I also need wig pins,” I went on. “There should be a little plastic box of them in the right top drawer of my desk. Unless someone stole those, too.”
“Not a problem,” Rose said.
“I think the boards are on a bottom shelf in the back of storage, next to the boxes of old medical examiner handbooks:’
“Anything else?”
“I don’t guess Lucy’s called,” I said.
“Not yet. If she does, I’ll find you.”
I thought for a minute. It was past one o’clock. She was off the plane by now and could have called. Depression and fear rolled over me again.
“Send flowers to her office,” I said. “With a note that says, `Thanks for the visit, love, Aunt Kay.’ ”
Silence.
“Are you still there?” I asked my secretary.
“You sure that’s what you want to say?” she asked.
I hesitated.
“Tell her I love her and I’m sorry,” I said.
14
0rdinarily, I would have used a permanent marker to outline the area of skin I needed to excise from a dead body, but in this case, no marker was going to show up on skin in such bad condition.
I did the best I could with a six-inch plastic ruler, measuring from the right base of the neck to the shoulder, and down to the bottom of the shoulder blade and back up.
“Eight and a half by seven by two by four,” I dictated to Ruffin.
Skin is elastic. Once it is excised, it will contract, and it was important when I pinned it to the corkboard that I stretched it back to its original dimensions or any images that might be tattooed on the skin would be distorted.
Marino had left, and my staff was busy in their offices or the autopsy suite. Every now and then the closed-circuit TV showed a car pulling into the bay to bring a body or take one away. Ruffin and I were alone behind the closed steel doors of the decomposed room. I was going to hold him to a conversation.
“If you’d like to go with the police department,” I said, “fine.”
Glass clacked as he placed clean blood tubes in a rack.
“But if you’re going to stay here, Chuck, you’re going to have to be present, accountable and respectful:”
I retrieved a scalpel and a pair of forceps from the surgical table, and glanced at him. He seemed to be expecting what I said and had already thought about how he was going to reply.
“I may not be perfect, but I’m accountable,” he said.
“Not these days. I need more clamps.”
“There’s a lot going on,” he said as he retrieved them from a tray and set them within my reach. “In my personal life, I mean. The wife, the house we bought. You wouldn’t believe all the problems with it.”
“I’m sorry for your difficulties, but I have an entire state system to run. I frankly don’t have time for excuses. If you don’t carry your load, we have big problems. Don’t make me walk into the morgue and find you haven’t set up first. Don’t make me look for you one more time.”
“We already have big problems,” he said as if this were the shot he’d been waiting to fire.