“Huh,” Marino said with a shrug in his voice. “So what? How many people are gonna check what friggin’ time their mail was opened?”
I didn’t answer him as I began to go into Chuck’s mail. Maybe I should have felt frightened by what I was doing, but I was too angry. Four of the e-mails were from his wife, who had many instructions for him about domestic matters that made Marino laugh.
“She’s got his balls in a box on top of the fireplace,” he gleefully said.
The address of the fifth message was MAYFLR, who simply said, “Need to talk.”
“That’s interesting,” I commented to Marino. “Let’s check out mail he might have sent to whoever this Mayflower is.”
I went into the mail-sent menu and discovered Chuck
had been sending e-mail to this person almost daily for the past two weeks. I quickly scanned through the notes, Marino looking on, and it became obvious in no time that my morgue supervisor was having rendezvous with this person, possibly an affair.
“I wonder who the hell she is?” Marino said. “That’d be a nice little bit of leverage to hold over the son of a bitch.” “Not going to be easy to find out;” I said.
I quickly signed off, feeling as if I were escaping from a house I’d just burglarized.
“Let’s try Chatplanet” I said.
The only reason I was familiar with chat rooms was that on occasion colleagues of mine from around the world used them to meet and ask for help in particularly difficult cases or share information that we might find useful. I signed on and downloaded the program and selected a box that made it possible for me to be in the chat room withou~ anybody’s seeing me.
I scanned the list of chat rooms and clicked on one called Dear Chief Kay Dr. Kay herself was in the midst of moderating a chat session with sixty-three people.
“Oh, shit. Give me a cigarette, Marino,” I tensely said:
He shook one out óf the pack and pulled up a chair, sitting next to me while we eavesdropped.
Dear Chief Kay, is it true Elvis died on the toilet and that many people die on the toilet? I’m a plumber, so you can see why I’m wondering. Thanks, Interested in Illinois
Dear Interested in Illinois, yes, I’m sorry to say that Elvis did die on the toilet and that this isn’t uncommon because people strain and strain and their heart can’t take it. Elvis’s many years of bad eating and pills, I’m sorry to say, finally caught up with him, and he died of cardiac arrest in his luxurious bathroom in Graceland. And this should be a lesson to all of us.
Dear Chief Kay, why did you decide you’d rather work with dead patients instead of living ones? Morbid in Montana
Dear Morbid in Montana, I don’t have much of a bedside manner and don’t have to worry how my patient is feeling. I found out during my medical school days that living patients are a pain in the ass.
“Holy motherfucking shit,” Marino said.
I was incensed and there was nothing I could do about it. “You know,” Marino said with indignation, “I wish people would leave Elvis alone. I’m tired of hearing about him dying on the toilet.”
“Be quiet, Marino,” I said. “Please. I’m trying to think.” The session went on and on, all of it awful. I was tempted to butt into the conversations to tell everyone Dear Chief Kay wasn’t me.
“Any way to find out who Dear Chief Kay really is?” Marino asked.
“If this person is the moderator of the chat room, the answer’s no. He or she can know who everybody else is but not the other way around.”
Dear Chief Kay, since you know everything there is about anatomy, does that make you more aware of pleasure points, if you know what I mean? My boyfriend seems bored in bed and sometimes he even falls asleep in the middle of itl Wanna Be Sexy
Dear Wanna Be Sexy, is he on any kind of medications that might make him sleepy? If not, sexy lingerie’s not a bad idea. Women don’t do enough anymore to make their men feel important and in charge.